A Dark-Adapted Eye (25 page)

Pitying sorrow took root in my chest. I crouched in front of him as the sun rose in far-reaching stains of orange brilliance. The light on us was softer and more gradual than the sky’s blazes would suggest. But it was enough.

A pale yellow shroud fell gently over Rade’s back and caressed my face. He lifted his head as it rose higher, grew stronger, and surrounded us. He was still bleeding, growing weaker by the second. I saw a flash of agony in his eyes just before he opened his mouth in a silent scream. His fangs were long and sharp, gleaming whitely. They were terrifying.

I found I couldn’t stand his suffering, almost as if I felt it too, but the knife had already dropped from my hand into the dirt. Impulsively I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around his middle, holding him as he writhed. It was the first time I’d touched him of my own will. The only time.

At last he was still and limp in my arms. I pulled back, letting him slump gently to the ground. My shirt held a matching impression of the bloodstain on his. His blood had soaked into the left side of my hair. I could feel it drying on my face.

“Goodbye,” I whispered.

I left him there and took the trails back to the parking lot, heedless of my appearance. No one was around to see me anyway. The morning was brighter now and less hazy. Last night and the past few moments felt peculiarly like a dream. And I was light without the burden of my vampire. It wasn’t upsetting that he was gone. Only freeing.

The El Camino was the only car in the parking lot. I walked toward it to get my bike, glan
cing in the window as I passed. The keys were still in the ignition.

It looked like now I had my very own car.

I wondered what the others would say when I came home in it. My brother, my two best friends, and the guy I loved with a crushing fierceness, whose face I could see in my mind, who smiled for me, who loved me, who’d never give up on me. Then I realized it didn’t really matter. They could like it or not, but I was sure Rade had left the keys on purpose. This was my car now. I was keeping it.

Driving home with the cool morning wind in my blood-crusted hair and my eyes squinted against the sunlight, I couldn’t help but smile at how luminous the world seemed just then, how absolutely bright.

eighteen

one week later

radial velocity: the movement of an object either toward or away from a stationary observer

The driveway was cool and splashy beneath my bare feet, thanks to the sudsy hose water running down it and into the gutter. I grabbed my sponge out of the bucket and ran it across the dark blue hood of the new car. New to us, anyway. Ivory had traded in the pickup to get it. It was a smallish SUV, practical because it could seat seven people and still have room for luggage and stuff. The five of us—Criseyde, Ivory, Aleskie, Les and I—would be plenty comfortable when we left.

“Ivory and I went to see our dad earlier this week,” I told Criseyde.

“Oh, yeah? And how’d that go?”

“Eh. Not great. But at least Ivory didn’t kill him.”

“So it wasn’t a happy family reunion?” There was a note of sympathy in Cris’s voice as she swiped her sponge over the windows.

“No. But I didn’t really expect it to be. We met him at his room and then walked across the street to eat at that pancake house. He said it took him two years after he left to even start trying to get sober. Now he’s worked at the recycling center for about six months, which is probably the longest he ever held a job. I guess he’s doing all right.”

I laughed hollowly, without humor, unsure how I felt about the whole situation. The guy was my dad, but he’d hardly raised us and it had been so long since I’d seen him. My last memory of him until recently was a crappy one. It was still hard to feel anything for him.

“I mentioned my astronomy,” I continued, “and Ivory actually talked a little about hunting vampires. Dad was really impressed with that. But in the end, just . . .” I shrugged and felt something suspiciously like regret. “There wasn’t really much to say.”

“It’s okay. I mean, you went and saw him. That’s something. Probably more than he d
eserves. More than I would have done.”

“So you’re all done moving out of your apartment?” I asked, making my voice bright.

“Yep!” she replied happily. “And I’ve already put in my notice at work. I’m about to be a free agent.”

In the past week, she had sold her futon and various other items from her apartment. Now all her clothes were hanging in Ivory’s closet, just like we’d once joked about. We teased him me
rcilessly.

“I’m not sure any girl has ever seen the inside of your bedroom before,” I’d told him earlier that morning. “Now Criseyde’s clothes are in your closet and Aleskie is sleeping in your bed.”

“And you’re on the couch!” Cris had added, bursting with laughter. He’d muttered some gruff retort, his eyes flicking shyly to Aleskie.

“I can’t believe we’re leaving so soon,” I said now.

“I know! It’s exciting.”

The military was still stationed on the roads out of town, just as they had been for the past year, but it was just a formality now, not to keep people in or out. People could come and go whenever they wanted. And we were going. The new car, clean and shining, would take the five of us out of town to somewhere new.

We had plans, but not definite ones. We didn’t know
where
we were going. We didn’t know how long we’d be gone. And we didn’t really care.

Smiling to myself, I plopped my sponge in the bucket and grabbed the hose to start rinsing off the suds.

“You’re not doing it sexy enough,” Criseyde informed me. She was wearing a tight tank top and short shorts, which was a lot sexier than an old t-shirt of Les’s, the sleeves tucked up over my shoulders, and a pair of cutoffs.

I laughed good-naturedly at her. “I don’t want to be sexy. I’m
trying
to wash this car, which we somehow got stuck doing while everyone else sits around and drinks beer.”

She looked over at the guys, sitting several feet away on the half wall that separated our driveway from the neighbor’s. Ivory had invited Ethan and Rhys over to talk about vampire stuff—what was left, if anything, for us to do now that the government was involved. Or maybe they were just talking about regular guy stuff. My brother planned to grill hot dogs for everyone later.

“You don’t like beer,” Cris said.

“Well, no, but maybe we’ll go to the store after this and get daiquiri stuff. I like strawberry daiquiris.”

“Ooh, me too.” She grinned suddenly. “Hey. Watch this.”

She dipped her own sponge into the bucket with exaggerated movements and shook her hair over her shoulders. She squeezed the sponge over one of the tires, but purposely got most of the water on her legs. Rhys gaped at her. Ethan glanced up appreciatively, then punched his younger brother in the arm.

Cris giggled and dumped our buckets. With a smile, I met Les’s eyes and shrugged. He returned the gesture and then something in the street caught his attention. I looked over my shoulder just as a gold sedan pulled up to the curb in front of our house. Two men in khakis, one in a sport coat, got out and approached us. I twisted off the hose and watched as Ivory stood up to meet them.

Their names were Dave and Kevin and they were from Homeland Security. They were here to question us about vampires.

Though only three of us had witnessed the eclipse and the events of that night, everyone filed inside somewhat reluctantly and took positions in various places around the living room. The atmosphere was slightly strained, as none of us knew quite what to expect, yet surprisingly laid back. These guys were here because they wanted our account of the eclipse, not because they suspected us of anything. And we had nothing to hide anyway.

Almost nothing.

“We just need to find out what you know,” Kevin, the one in the coat, said. He was the one who meant business, while the other, Dave, just sat back and looked around easily at us. “What you’ve seen, what you saw the night of the lunar eclipse. What’s happening is that we’re trying to rid the city completely of vampires, so it’s safe for people like you again, and we can only do that with everyone’s cooperation.”

“Okay,” Ivory said, fully ready to cooperate.

Kevin took out a small notebook. “How did you end up in the desert that night?” he asked after he’d taken all our names.

“I was kidnapped,” my brother told them. He gestured to Les. “He and I hunted vampires for a few years. And one night while we were out hunting, this big vampire came out of nowhere and took me as his prisoner.”

“You
hunted
them.”

“Yeah. We killed a lot of them together. It started as a way to, you know, make money, but then we had to keep doing it after they all came here. We thought we could help make things safer for other people.”

“A lot of people in Las Secas have killed at least one vampire by now,” Ethan put in. “I have.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Kevin said. He looked back and forth beneath Les and me. “What about you two? How did you end up there?”

“We went to rescue my brother.”

“We spent a lot of time looking for him before we finally figured out where he was,” Les added.

He went on to explain how we’d come to discover that Ivory had been at the Market. Instead of telling the entire truth, however, he just said we’d looked in a few clubs before receiving an anonymous tip. He’d lied, I was sure, to keep my involvement with Rade a secret. But his story was close enough to the truth and I nodded my agreement.

“So the tip was just a way to lure you in?” Kevin asked.

“I guess so. I don’t know what was going through the vamps’ minds.”

“Have you had any contact with vampires since the eclipse?” Dave asked.

No one had. I couldn’t speak for Ethan and Rhys, but the rest of us were lying, of course. I shifted a little uncomfortably, but Les and Ivory looked innocently impassive. Criseyde crossed her legs and gave a bored smile.

Kevin and Dave asked a few more questions: if a vampire had ever bitten any one of us, if we knew of anyone who’d had contact with vamps in the past week, if we knew where any vamps were hiding. They told us that, thanks to the testimonies of several humans who’d been in thrall, the Guard had been able to uncover a couple of vampire hideouts. Nests, they called them. I shuddered at the word.

We didn’t have anything to tell them.

It wasn’t that I
wanted
to lie to government workers. I
wanted
vampires gone, out of my life. I wanted to walk around at night if I felt like it and look through my telescope without worrying that something would come after me. And I’d been able to, for the most part, since the eclipse. Vampires were lying low, leaving humans alone because they were trying not to get found and killed.

But I had to lie. I lied mostly for Aleskie, who hid back in Ivory’s room and didn’t deserve to be shot on sight. I lied a little for the doorman at Shiver, for some reason.

I lied because I had to wonder if there were others like Aleskie, who’d been forced to become vampires and who didn’t exactly embrace the bloodsucking lifestyle. Maybe there were humans who genuinely cared about vampires like that—family members, friends, lovers. I’d come across a lot more vampires who
weren’t
nice, of course, but maybe the other kind was out there. Somewhere.

It turned out even the vampire situation wasn’t as clear-cut as it seemed, and none of us trusted Kevin or Dave or anyone else working for the government to see that.

Finally the Homeland Security guys left and we were all able to relax. Ivory was running one hand repeatedly through his hair. I let out a long breath and Les gave my knee a little shake.
Oh my god
, I thought.
I just lied to the government.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Criseyde said. “I thought they were going to try to arrest us.”

“They’re not arresting people,” Ivory said. “They’re just trying to tie up all the loose ends where vampires are concerned.”

“But they
might
have arrested us if they knew about—” She broke off abruptly, her eyes flicking to Rhys and Ethan. “Er, if
we
knew anything about vampires and didn’t tell them. Like where one is hiding, for instance.”

“They would have,” Ivory said. “Except we
don’t
know where any vampires are hiding.” He stood up and stretched. “I’m hungry. Who wants hot dogs?”

“I want mine charred,” I told him. “Black and crispy.”

“You mean burnt?”

“Shut up.”

The guys went out back to stand around the grill. Cris twisted her hair up into a ponytail and looked at me excitedly.

“We can go? Now that they’ve interviewed us?”

“That’s what Ivory said.”

“I can’t wait!” she cried.

I couldn’t suppress a grin. “Neither can I.”

~

That night Les and I lay facing each other, our legs wrapped together. He had one arm across my waist, his fingers trailing lazily up and down my spine.

“What do you want?” I whispered. “Tell me and we’ll make it happen.”

“I want . . . to figure out what I’m good at. Something besides fighting.” He laughed a little, slightly embarrassed.

“That’s what we’ll do then. After we get Aleskie somewhere safe.”

“That’s a promise?” he teased.

“Yeah. We won’t rest until you’ve reached your moment of self-actualization.”

“That could take a while.”

“Whatever. I don’t care. As long as we’re together.”

And then the few inches between us disappeared and we were lost in each other’s warm lips. For several long moments I was absorbed in the sensations of hands raking through hair, bodies straining toward each other, whispered words, promises, and desires. I was never giving up on this. I was never letting go.

A loud knock interrupted us and we stirred reluctantly away from each other, grumbling with displeasure. “Hey, lovebirds,” Ivory called through the door, oblivious or just not caring. “It’s time to go.”

“Five more minutes,” I said to Les.

“Better make it ten.”

We were leaving at night because of Aleskie. It was our self-appointed mission to get her out of Las Secas without anyone knowing we were trying to smuggle a vampire beyond the city limits. They were killing vampires here, but not anywhere else in the country. She’d be safer somewhere else, somewhere the vampires were smart enough to hide themselves and not gather a cult following, and we could finally see some of the country.

After Ethan and Rhys had left that afternoon, we’d loaded up the car. Ivory had called utility companies to arrange cancellations. Les had thrown covers over his Shadow and the El Camino. Criseyde and I had organized musical selections for the road. Then we’d dispersed throughout the house to kill the hours until dark.

And now it was time.

As we headed out of the city, Aleskie lay down behind the back seat, camouflaged with our assortment of blankets, pillows, and duffel bags. It almost seemed silly concealing her like that, but we couldn’t risk that she’d be seen. Otherwise none of us was going anywhere.