Companions of the Night (19 page)

The third time she went to the Student Union she found him.

About twenty people were left from the night's earlier crowd, spread out in two main groups, one was clustered around a TV set, watching
The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes,
those in the smaller group were arguing because they wanted to start an alternative campus newspaper but couldn't agree on a name for it. A lone girl was reciting sad poetry about bad men, accompanying herself on guitar; and a couple sat holding hands, the girl crying, the boy speaking softly but earnestly. The cashier, who looked like a student himself, sat on a stool, smoking despite the No smoking sign and playing some sort of hand-held electronic game that sporadically beeped or played music.

Seated in what Kerry would have been willing to bet was the exact center of the room was Professor Gilbert Marsala. He was thinner than he'd been at the time the picture was taken, his hairline farther back, but there was never any doubt in her mind who it was. He was drinking from a mug and reading a book, though he looked up every few seconds, glancing all around nervously. He spotted Kerry as soon as she started toward him, and she saw his gaze flick around the room as he tried to decide who best to approach for help.

She held her hands out—fronts, then backs—to demonstrate she carried no weapons, and she gestured behind her, which was meant to draw his attention to the fact that she was alone.

Marsala looked tense, but at least he didn't bolt.

"I'm all alone," Kerry said as soon as she was within range and could say it softly, so as not to attract attention. "Please, can we talk? Here is fine." He didn't look like she'd expected. Somehow she'd thought he'd have a twitch, or some manic gleam in his eye, something that would mark him as a man with inner demons. Someone fanatic enough to run over anyone who got in his way and steal people's fathers and little boys from their homes.

Kerry sat down, placing her hands on the table where he could see them. "Where are my father and brother?" she asked.

"I don't know." For a second she thought he was going to deny knowing what she was talking about, but then he added, "Home by now, I guess. Or still in the hospital. Or maybe the police have them. I let them go, you know."

She'd seen they weren't home and she wasn't sure whether to believe the other possibilities, but any note of hope was good to hear anyway. "I'm not a vampire," she said. She could see the thought
Sure, you're not
travel through his brain. "Any test," she assured him, 'anything you can think of, I'll do it."

He sat looking at her. "You were with them."

"Yes." There was certainly no use denying it. "Regina and Ethan. I never met them before Thursday night. I didn't know what they were."

"They killed my friends—Phil and George, Ken, Danny, and Marcia."

"I know," she said. That sounded worse than it was. "I mean, I didn't know until after."

"I was watching," Marsala said, and for an awful moment she thought he meant he'd seen his friends die. "I saw him drive up with you, introduce you to her" And she realized he must have been somewhere near Ethan's house. "I saw him clean the blood out of the car, and then I saw them drive you home. Like a damned escort service."

"It was his blood," Kerry said, not sure how Marsala was interpreting what he'd seen. Did he think Ethan had fed on her in her father's car, making her a vampire that very night, or that it was Marsala's friends' blood and that she had helped kill them? "
Ethan's
blood. His own. Your friends were going to kill him. I came into it in the middle of things. I didn't understand. I thought they were crazy and they were going to kill some poor innocent guy."

"He's no innocent," Marsala said.

"I know that now." Kerry nodded for emphasis. She couldn't bring herself to say any of the things Ethan had suggested. She just said, "I do know it."

"Did they drink your blood?" He reached to push the loose strands of hair away from her neck but stopped, perhaps thinking touching her was inappropriate, or maybe realizing the marks would have gone away by now in any case.

She swept the hair clear anyway. "No," she said firmly.

"She drank Joey's blood."

There was no answer for that.

"I watched him change into one of them."

Kerry wasn't sure she'd heard that right. "You ...
watched
...?"

"It took a while. Four, five months from the time he first met her."

"No," Kerry said, but before she could explain that it only took seconds, he continued, "At first we didn't know There were all those rehearsals, twice a week, then three times; every night by the last two weeks. Ridiculous schedule for a school production, like the play was more important than the school-work. But then it was finally over. Except that it wasn't over. 'I'm going out,' he said. Every night. Just like that. 'I'm going out.' He led us to believe it was one of the girls from the play, but then Patty, my wife, and I found out it was that Regina woman, the director. 'She's older than
I
am,' Patty said. He didn't care. She'd bitten him by then."

"I'm not sure what you're saying," Kerry admitted.

"She encouraged him to lie to us. She taught him to smoke marijuana, and she provided him with liquor even though he was underage. He'd never done any of those things before. His marks ... He'd been a straight-A student in high school, dean's list every semester. But suddenly he was failing and taking incompletes. Dropped his old friends, dropped his old interests. Stayed up all night, partying, didn't want to get up in the morning. Talked back to his mother, sassed me. We had no idea then, but it was the vampire's bite. He was changing into one of them right before our very eyes, and we didn't know it. Then I started following her. Then I saw."

Kerry shook her head. "That's not—"

Marsala pointed a finger at her. "I didn't know how to stop it." He nodded slowly. "I do now."

He'd stopped it with Regina.

"Professor Marsala," Kerry said. She didn't dare say,
Your son was growing up and he made bad decisions,
or
That's called rebellion, not vampirism.
His story was an awful mishmash combining truth and speculation and, she supposed, a father's grief and guilt. She said, "It isn't like that. Either someone's a vampire or not; it doesn't take months."

"That what one of them told you?"

She nodded.

"Do you believe everything they tell you?"

"No," she said. "Of course not. But—"

"Don't believe anything," Marsala said. "I don't know what they promised him. But then, when they'd strung him out long enough, when they were done laughing at him, they killed him. The police thought it was a car accident."

She remembered Ethan saying that he and Regina had arranged the deaths of Marsala's friends to look like part of a struggle between opposing drug factions. Of course they wouldn't discard drained bodies carelessly. The vampires couldn't afford to have people speculating in that direction. And as Ethan had admitted, unexplained disappearances raised too many questions.

Marsala was nodding, as though to encourage her to believe. "He'd been drinking. Car hit a tree. But I knew. That woman was evil. She turned our son against us. I started tracking her, and I found out what she was; then I kept on tracking her because I knew there couldn't be just one. 'Wait long enough and she'll lead us to more,' I said. Even Patty didn't believe me. She couldn't face it and she ran away. But I knew. The sunlight proved me right."

An image of what had been left of Regina flashed through her mind. Although she wasn't aware of it, it must have shown on her face, for Marsala said, "You saw her? You saw what the sunlight did? Don't feel sorry for her. Do you know why sunlight destroys them?"

Kerry shook her head.

"Because God won't permit such evil to exist under the sun.

Kerry bit her lip to keep from asking why, then, God would permit such evil to exist under the moon.

"You"—Marsala pointed at her again—"you're an in-between case. Like Joey. Seduced by the glamor of evil."

The word
seduced
made her cheeks grow warm, which he no doubt saw.

He nodded, and she was sure he thought it was worse than it was. "Fight them," he said. "I know they've got their claws in you, but fight them."

"They
do not
have their claws in me," Kerry protested, "and at least they don't go around ramming school buses and kidnapping innocent people."

"I don't think you know half of what they do," Marsala said. Which was probably true. "How old is your young-looking friend? Fifty years? A hundred? Two hundred? Multiply that times three hundred sixty-five nights a year, and call
me
cold blooded."

"They don't kill every night."

"Something else they told you?"

Ethan hadn't killed last night, she thought. Or, at least, she was fairly certain he hadn't. On the other hand, the night before, he and Regina had killed four. And tonight he was planning on killing at least one.

She ran her hand through her hair. "I don't want to argue," she said "I didn't come here to defend them. But I'm not one of them. And I'm not one-of-them-in-training. I want some assurance that you haven't hurt my dad and my brother. If you can give me that, I'll tell you where Ethan is, and how you can get him."

Marsala sat back and looked at her as though evaluating. "Vampires don't lie?" he asked.

"I never said that. I just—"

"Do you lie?"

Kerry worked hard to look him right in the eyes. "No."

"Then you told your father exactly what happened Thursday night"

Kerry looked away. "I ... He didn't ask, and I didn't volunteer the information."

"Which is not the same as lying?" Marsala said.

There was no good answer to that.

"Then let me ask you this," Marsala continued. "How did your friend know who I was?"

"He recognized your picture in the paper."

"If he saw the paper"—Marsala gave a grim smile—"how is it you didn't know your father and your brother are safe?"

"What?"

"You didn't ask, and he didn't volunteer the information?"

"I don't understand what you're getting at."

"They were in the car," Marsala said. "In the trunk. If they're not home now, the police must have them in protective custody."

"You—" Kerry made a conscious effort to lower her voice. "You rammed into a school bus with my father and brother in the trunk of the car? You could have killed them. They could have suffocated."

"I admit I wasn't thinking straight," Marsala said. "I went to your house to get you. When I found you weren't home from school yet, I forced your family to get into the car, with no clear plan in mind. When I saw the bus ... It was stupid, I admit. I didn't think of those other children on the bus. I only thought of you, becoming what I had seen Joey becoming, feeding on people's blood, killing people, night after night after night for centuries. I didn't stop to think—about your family in the back or about your innocent classmates. But my point is, unlike the vampires,
I
didn't hurt anyone. The people on the school bus survived, and your family survived." Marsala waggled his finger at her "And your friend didn't tell you that. He figured he could use you better if you didn't know."

"He didn't know," Kerry started, then she changed that to "
I
don't know. You might have them buried in a shallow grave in your backyard, for all I know."

Marsala turned around in his seat and called out to the student cashier, "Max!"

"Yo," Max said, not quite diverting his attention from his game.

"Do you still have that newspaper? The one with the picture you thought looked like me?"

Max rapidly hit a few more buttons before reaching under the counter. He tossed the newspaper, and it almost made it to their table.

Marsala leaned over and picked it up, then folded it back to the front page. There was her school picture, and the diagram of the accident scene, and the composite drawing of Marsala. The professor tapped his finger on a paragraph in the first column. "... Stephen and Ian Nowicki," the article said, "found tied and gagged in the trunk of the car, shaken but unharmed." The following paragraphs described how a man wearing a ski mask and armed with a gun had forced his way into their house, demanding to know where sixteen-year-old Kerry Nowicki was. Told she was still at school, he'd tied them and gagged them. Then, after searching the house, he trashed the living room, after which he forced them into the trunk of their own car.

The article said that Stephen Nowicki felt the car swerve and hit something repeatedly, but at some point during the crash into the bus or the fire hydrant, he banged his head on the car's tire iron and lost consciousness. During the time the police and ambulance were at the scene, only four-year-old Ian Nowicki was conscious, and he had been warned by the intruder not to make a sound, "or else." So he dutifully remained quiet. By the time his father regained consciousness, the car had apparently been impounded by the police because no one heard his cries for help. The two weren't discovered until police investigating the bus incident opened the trunk at about nine o'clock in the evening.

Kerry looked up from the newspaper and met Marsala's triumphant smile. "He knew," she whispered.

"Apparently he didn't think it was important enough to mention," Marsala said.

Kerry couldn't think of how often they'd skirted the subject of her family this evening. Ethan knew how frightened she was for them. Over and over he'd had the chance to say,
They're all right. Marsala doesn't have them.
Relief and a sense of betrayal balanced so precariously she didn't know whether to laugh out loud or cry.

"They're treacherous," Marsala said. "You can't trust them. They don't think like we do. They don't even consider themselves human. They're like aliens; they're like vile and vicious animals." Marsala reached out and covered her hand with his. It was warm and slightly rough, as though chapped from the weather or from honest work. "Will you really help me stop him from killing other people's sons and daughters?" he asked. "Or are you here to defend him?"