Bleeding Violet (7 page)

She needed a keeper.

“I don’t care about Wyatt’s priorities,” I told her. “I don’t care about Wyatt.”

Shock cleared away Petra’s congestion. “You don’t?”

“No.”

“So you’re not gone go for him? At all?”

“I wouldn’t cross the street with that boy.” I hadn’t forgotten or forgiven the lap incident.

“Well …” Petra seemed surprised I hadn’t put up more of a fight. Surprised and relieved. “Good. Great! You’re too strong for him anyway.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” As an experiment I sidled away from her oppressive leaning, just to see if she’d stand on her own. She didn’t. She backed up against the dark blue lockers and leaned against them.

“It’s not bad. Must be nice to be strong.” Petra ducked her head, examining the delicate framework of papery skin and spidery bones that was her body. She sighed. “But if I was, I wouldn’t need Wyatt. And he’s the kind of boy who needs to be needed.”

“You need air. You need food. You don’t need some beastly boy.”

A spark lit within her waif’s eyes, like the gleam of a razor blade in a bowl of pudding. “Wyatt’s not just some boy, and he’s
not
beastly. He’s Mortmaine. An initiate, but a survivor. A real badass.”

“Mortmaine?”

“They’re a family. Not a blood family, but they all take the
name Mortmaine when they pass initiation. You have to be real special to join.” She took note of my blank face. “You must’ve seen ’em around. They dress all in green, drive green trucks, keep us all safe? Duh.”

I remembered the bossy woman all in green from the administration office my first day. “Safe from what?”

Petra’s eyes lost their spark. For the first time I understood what the dark peach girl had meant when she said you could always tell by the eyes who had seen something real and who hadn’t. Petra had seen something real—some
thing
that had burned itself into her retinas.

“I can’t even remember what it’s like to be that clueless,” she said, her voice low and awful. “I almost envy you.”

“Pet!”

Lecy stood near the stairwell, waving Petra over.

Petra grabbed my shoulders, leaning on me again, but this time so she could whisper in my ear. “Do yourself a favor and find someone tough, someone like Wyatt, who’ll look after you. You’ll thank me.” She let me go and rushed off to join Lecy.

Someone tough to look after me?

Petra seemed like a nice girl, not quite the bitch I’d been
expecting, but even if I’d wanted to be her friend, her attitude would drive me insane. Did she think this was the
fifties
? I didn’t need some guy to look after me. I could look after myself.

I hurried to administration to give Cowboy my medical records before the bell rang, but the office was empty. Even the statue had gone. I’d turned to leave, assuming the staff were in a meeting or something, when the long stretch of window on the other side of the counter began to rattle.

My first thought was that the wind must be high and hard, but the scene outside the window was placid; the trees across the street could have been sculpted, their pale yellow leaves motionless. The perennial East Texas cloud cover eased momentarily and allowed a shaft of sunlight to blaze forth. The light struck the windows. …

It was as though I were standing before a row of stained glass.

Reds and blues and yellows pinwheeled across the window. Colored light lasered into the office, falling across my dress, my skin.

A lone swirl of green flowed down the glass in a long, snaky line, dragging one of the pinwheels in its wake. At the
bottom of the window the line of green spilled out and thickened, hitting the tile floor with a sound like wet clay before it lengthened and darkened, stretching upward, shape-shifting into black boots. Blue jeans. Green shirt. Smooth brown neck. Dark, closely shaved hair.

It was Wyatt before me, his back to me. Wyatt had poured from the glass.

The clouds regrouped once more and swallowed the sun, and the pinwheels of color in the glass disappeared, except for the one Wyatt, arms straining, had pulled halfway from the window, forcing it to lose its flat, pinwheel shape and all its color so that he seemed to have hold of a trickling stream of water.

I must have made a noise, because Wyatt whipped his head around. Saw me. Gaped. “What’re you—?”

He lost his grip on the sparkling mass, which, like a rubber band, immediately snapped back to the window. Wyatt, catlike, grabbed it before it could be fully reabsorbed into the glass.

“Is that a lure?”

“Get outta here!” Wyatt yelled, pulling that long, sparkling strand—of light? of glass?—farther from the window.

I didn’t get out. My body didn’t seem inclined to take orders from either Wyatt or me. I was in the presence of the one person on Earth who was more of a freak than I was; I wouldn’t have left even if I’d been able to.

He tried to reach into his pocket, but the struggling lure—was it a lure?—whipped forward and pulled him off balance. Before Wyatt’s face could smack into the window, he got his booted foot up between him and the wall and used the leverage to push himself and the lure he’d captured away from the glass.

My head felt stuffed with cotton, not because of the earplugs I had taken to wearing in school like everyone else, but because I couldn’t take it all in, couldn’t focus on the existence of lure
and
a boy who could flow in and out of window glass at will. Not at the same time.

“Hanna!”

“I don’t have to go if I don’t want to.” Extremity had turned me into a five-year-old.

“I don’t want you to go,” said Wyatt, sweating and fighting to keep hold of the lure. “I want you to reach into my pocket and—Hanna! Are you listening?”

“Okay.”

“Get the red card from my right front pocket.”

I moved forward past the counter, super-slow, as though I were in a dream where the air was thick and spongy and hard to move through. Up close, a thin reflection of my face drifted across the glassine surface of the lure in Wyatt’s hands; I looked like a ghost.

“Hanna! The card!”

I stood within kissing distance of Wyatt, close enough to smell his sweat and the minty gum on his breath. Rummaging in the pants of a boy you intensely disliked had to be the most obnoxious chore in the world.

The pocket of Wyatt’s dark jeans was warm, but the cards I encountered were chill enough to numb the tips of my fingers. I pulled out the small deck, half the size of regular playing cards, and shuffled through them quickly, hating the feel of them, until I found a red card. It had a tissue-thin paper backing on one side; the other side was silky-slick and etched with curious black markings. I shoved the rest of the cards back into Wyatt’s pocket.

“Okay,” he said. “Pull the paper off the back of the card, and—Where’re you going?” He looked frantic, as though I were abandoning him.

I held up the tissue backing I’d removed. “I’m going to put this paper in the trash.”

“Never mind the goddamn trash! Put the sticky side of the card on the lure, but
don’t touch the lure!
”

I noticed then that Wyatt was wearing black rubber gloves, from which the color was fading even as I watched, fading only to reappear in thick black swirls within the struggling lure in his grip.

“Do it!”

I did it, and after I settled the card on the lure, Wyatt released it, and it immediately snapped back into the window, invisible except for the card stuck to it. But the lure didn’t remain invisible for long. The red rectangle quickly lost its shape, growing and altering, until it filled in the pinwheel shape of the lure, exposing it.

And the others.

The red color infesting Wyatt’s lure spread like licks of flame until the entire stretch of rattling glass was full of bloody-colored pinwheels throbbing like sick, misshapen hearts. The same inexplicable hallucination I’d seen before … but Wyatt could see it too.

He hustled me to the other side of the counter, and as soon
as he pulled me to the floor, a loud, jangling explosion blitzed the office.

Red shards of glass fell all around us like hellish rain.

I ignored the glass and watched Wyatt instead, panting and warm beside me; a trickle of sweat rolled past his ear, such a fantastically normal sight after what I’d just seen.

Normal until Wyatt turned and smashed his hands against the counter at our backs. The gloves encasing his hands had turned to glass and shattered easily against the wood, freeing his fingers.

He hopped to his feet and hurried to the other end of the room, where he banged on the frosted glass door of the principal’s office and let the staff hiding within know the coast was clear.

They all came out, Ms. Eldridge the principal in the lead, with Cowboy right behind her. They took in the destroyed windows, the glass glittering on every surface.

“You got them all?” Ms. Eldridge asked, the girlish hope sparkling in her eyes at odds with her black power suit.

“Every single one.”

Who knew that five grown-ups could make such a racket? Cowboy even danced a jig.

“I’m going to make an announcement right away,” Ms. Eldridge began happily.

“No,”
Wyatt snapped, as bossy as that green woman had been. “You know how the Mortmaine feel about me doing favors. The last thing I need is you crowing about what happened here. Like I’m dancing all over their rules.”

“Of course not,” said Ms. Eldridge, abashed. “Tell me what you want me to say.”

“Tell the kids they don’t need earplugs anymore; just don’t tell ’em why.”

I peered over the counter to see for myself that the pinwheeling lure were really gone. The only view that greeted my shell-shocked eyes was broken window and cloudy sky, so I stood and retrieved my records from the counter where I’d left them. Shook the red glass off. Handed them to Cowboy.

It was like my first day of school all over again, with everyone gawking at me.

“
She
was here?” Ms. Eldridge asked.

“The whole time?” Cowboy added.

“Unfortunately,” said Wyatt.

Obnoxious beast of a boy.

I kicked some red glass aside so I could close in on him.
“Unfortunately? Really? Because you’d never have defeated those lure without me, and you know it.”

Everyone turned to Wyatt for confirmation.

He swiped his hand over his face as though he had to manually wipe away his peevish expression. He looked much better for the effort, more like the high-minded person I’d initially taken him for.

“Don’t mind me,” he said. “My blood’s still up. Maybe it didn’t
totally
suck that you came barging in here.”

Worst apology ever, but it was enough validation for the grown-ups. This time when they cheered, they cheered for me.

By lunchtime news of my administration adventure had spread all over school like mono. I couldn’t breathe for all the kids pressed around me—Pet, Lecy, Carmin, and numerous others I mostly didn’t know—firing questions at me like nosy machine guns.

“So what was it like coming face-to-face with lure?”

“What kinda weapon did you use?”

“Weren’t you scared?”

“Where’d
you
learn to hunt?”

So much for Wyatt’s desire to fly under the radar. But I, unlike the principal, knew how to keep my mouth shut.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told them.

“Oh, come on,” said Lecy. She sat on my left, her black pigtails threaded with small pink hydrangea petals. “It’s the
Mortmaine
who aren’t supposed to know. Not
us
.”

“So did you really help kill the lure?”

“Yeah, tell us what happened.”

Eventually I caved under the pressure and told them everything … except for how Wyatt had come out of the window. I didn’t know how to
think
about that, let alone talk about it.

“Bad
ass
, new girl,” Carmin said when I’d finished talking. I’d progressed from transy to new girl—that was gold by itself.

“I just followed instructions,” I said, trying for modesty. “Wyatt did all the work.”

“But Wyatt trains with the Mortmaine,” said Lecy. “Going on dangerous hunts into the dark park, all that crazy stuff.”

“The dark park?” I said, but someone else was already talking over me.

“Yeah, Wyatt’s used to it. You’re not.”

“I hope you got the one that got me,” said a boy with orange braces named Casey.

“Got you?”

Petra said, “Duh, transy. Haven’t you noticed the glass people all over school?”

The statue in administration, the statue in the restroom. “Those were
people
?”

“Yeah,” Lecy said. “The lure call you to the window and suck out all your juices and organs, all the good stuff, and leave this glass shell behind.”

“Like me almost,” said Casey. “I fell asleep with my head against the window during study hall.” He brushed his hair away from his forehead and showed off the blood swishing through his capillaries, the blue veins at his temples. The odd, skinny cracks in his skull.

“Jesus.”

“I know, right?” Casey said, letting his hair flop forward. “It’s a lot better now, though. Mr. Fisher woke me up before the lure could really go to town. The feeling’s coming back. My eyesight. And you can hardly see through my head anymore. Pop took one look at me after it first happened and went straight to the Mortmaine for permission to hunt down the lure. Thank God he doesn’t have to worry about that shit anymore. I don’t know what he thought he could’ve done anyway since the lure live
inside
the windows.”

“
Lived
inside the windows,” Carmin said. “Past fucking tense.” Everyone laughed as Carmin pulled his earplugs from
his ears. “You believe we don’t have to wear these anymore?”

Suddenly the whole table was full of laughing kids tossing earplugs at one another.

“Hey!” Lecy shouted over the tumult. “Casey brought up a good point.” She peered at me. “Since the lure live—”

“Lived!” shouted the whole table.

She laughed. “Since the lure
lived
in the windows, how did Wyatt get to them?”