Darkest Fear (15 page)

“Maybe he came for me,” I said, slumping against my tall bed. I pulled the cotton blanket around me more tightly.

“Why would he be after you?” Aly asked. “Were your parents—did they know something? Does he think you know it too? I can't figure out why your family would be targeted.”

“I can't either,” I said tiredly, and then a thought drifted into my brain. “You know, that was my birthday, my eighteenth birthday.
My dad started to say something about a family book that I would get now that I was eighteen. But he never finished telling me what it was. Could it have had some sort of dangerous information in it?”

“Well, the oldest kid in every family gets the family book when they turn eighteen,” Matéo said. “I have mine.”

“My brother has ours,” Aly added. “It's partly haguari history, and partly my family's history. Like a practical jaguar handbook.”

“I looked everywhere for mine, but didn't find it,” I said.

Matéo rubbed his forehead. “You know, I can't even think straight right now. It's almost three o'clock. Let's talk about it tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'm totally wiped out.”

“We'll lock everything up tight. I'm sure that guy won't be back tonight, especially with most of us here.” Moving to my window, he pulled the outside wooden shutters closed and slid their metal bar through the hasp. The window itself, miraculously, hadn't been broken, so now he pulled it down and latched it.

With the power still out it made the room seem extra dark, and I thought about how clearly I had seen in the darkness as a jaguar. The room felt hot and stuffy, and the smell of blood seemed to overpower everything else. As I stood there, trembling and vulnerably human, the electricity came back on, flooding the room with unwelcome light. I saw the broken mirror, the furniture shoved aside, the gouges in the wood, Tink's blood . . .

“Oh, jeez,” I said in dismay. The AC hummed on, and cool, dry air flowed over us.

Dana reappeared in my doorway, holding a broom and dustpan.
“We'll clean this up better tomorrow,” she said, throwing a towel over Tink's blood. Quickly she swept the mirror glass up, clearing a path between my bed and the bathroom. “There. That'll get you through the night.”

“Thank you,” I croaked. With the blanket still wrapped around me, I climbed into my tall bed. Matéo tugged the bedspread over me. Aly gave my foot a last pat through the covers. My head felt like it weighed a hundred pounds, and it sank deeply into the pillow. I heard them leave my room as I pulled my parents' sheet to me and inhaled its scent.

Exhaustion came over me like a wave of ether, and I plunged into a dreamless sleep.

I'D LIVED ALONE IN MY
house in Sugar Beach for a month before I came to New Orleans. In that time, I'd been hysterical with grief, furious at fate, kind of nuts, numb, sad, depressed . . . I'd been a bunch of different emotions, but I'd never been scared until that very last night. It had felt strange being alone, but strange and scared are two different things, and I hadn't felt scared, hadn't even realized that maybe I should, until I'd heard glass breaking in the kitchen. Until then, I hadn't once thought that whoever had killed my parents was going to come kill me. Their deaths had seemed . . . random, though I saw now how stupid that was. One haguaro killing other haguari? Not random.

Coming to New Orleans, putting so many miles between me and Sugar Beach, had felt safer. Finding Matéo and hearing that his parents' hearts had been taken also—it had been creepy, though we weren't 100 percent sure that their deaths had been caused by a haguari, as my parents' had been. It could have been something about the older generation, or even something related
to whatever falling-out my mother and her sister had had.

But now the net was wider and seemed to include all of us. The jaguar had climbed the tree to get to me and/or Tink. The nightmare wasn't over.

I slept heavily, as if my dreams had fled in fright, and woke the next afternoon feeling like I'd been flattened by a steamroller. A shower and four ibuprofen helped, and once I was in clean clothes I felt better. The towel had sopped up all of Tink's blood on my floor, and I tossed it into my laundry hamper with a grimace, then swept up the rest of the broken mirror. When I bent down to scoop it into the dustpan, I saw my face, fractured and splintered among the shards.

“Very poetic,” I muttered, and threw it all into the trash.

Aly was in the kitchen, reading the newspaper. “Hey, how are you feeling?”

“Okay. Sore.” I glanced at the clock. It was almost two. I poured my own coffee. I'd become addicted to it and looked forward to it every morning. Maybe Ro's needed to use CDM coffee for the regular-Joe cup of coffee instead of the fancy Italian stuff they had. Perhaps I should bring this topic up with my boss, Mr. Stunning. Because after only one day, I had worthwhile ideas about how he could better his business.

“How's Tink?” I asked, holding my bowl in both hands and inhaling the scent.

Aly wrinkled her nose. “His side was pretty messed up. But we heal quickly. He'll be okay in a few days.”

Of course, I'd been pondering every second of what had happened the night before, including the surprising ending. Since our polite conversation had been taken care of, I opened my mouth to ask about the stuff Dana had shot up my nose—but just then a slender girl with bright red hair came into the kitchen, wearing nothing but a large New Orleans Jazz Festival T-shirt.

“Hey, Charlotte,” Aly said. “Haven't seen you in a while. This is Téo's cousin, Vivi.”

At last, the elusive Charlotte!

The red-haired girl smiled at me. “Hi. I'm Charlotte, Coco's girlfriend. Is there coffee, by any chance?”

Aly pointed. Charlotte got two mugs, added sugar and milk, and filled them up. “Nice to meet you,” she said, heading back upstairs.

“You too.”

Matéo passed her on his way into the kitchen. “Hey, Charlotte.” In the kitchen, he opened the fridge, then looked at me. “You doing okay?”

I nodded, thinking that “okay” had been radically redefined in the last three months.

“Have you had any ideas about who that could have been last night?”

“No,” I said. “I wouldn't recognize any of my parents' friends in their other forms. But that guy just wanted to attack anyone he got to, starting with Tink. Tink isn't in our family, so this guy is collecting haguari hearts. But is it just one person? Or a human-haguari partnership?”

“I don't know,” Matéo said. “I can't figure out the why, you know? It's not like we have buried treasure or know valuable secrets. He seems to just . . . want hearts.”

I shivered, my own heart feeling heavy.

“Should we start asking around?” Aly asked Matéo. “I mean, more than we did when your parents . . .”

“I don't know.” Matéo looked frustrated and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Tia Juliana did the same thing sometimes. “I'm not sure what to do. If we ask people, will that alert whoever's doing it and make us even more of a target? I mean, the whole thing is crazy.”

For a few minutes we were all quiet, weighing our thoughts. Like Matéo, I didn't know what to do, or what we should do. I decided to ask a question they could actually answer.

“So what was that drug Dana gave me?”

“Cuva rojo,” said Aly. “That's one name for it. It's from a plant usually found in the Amazon rain forest.”

I vaguely remembered Dana saying that.

“How does it work?”

Matéo shook his head. “No one knows. For obvious reasons, it hasn't been tested in science labs. But our people using it is depicted in the earliest Olmec records. Pretty much everyone in our culture knows the plant, knows how to make the serum. It's considered a bit of a crutch, so we do want you to learn to change by yourself without it.”

I started to say that I didn't want to learn, and then realized that even if I didn't plan on changing on purpose—and I didn't—it had
been scary last night when I hadn't been able to control changing, and then didn't know how to become human again. “I'll think about it. In the meantime, do you think we should look through your families' books? See if there's any clue to what's going on?”

“Yeah,” said Matéo. “Good idea. Right now I have to make a delivery—I'll be back around five.”

“I'll be heading to work then,” I said.

“I'll ask my brother to bring ours, the next time he comes,” said Aly. “And we can compare notes later. What's neat is that when Téo and I get married, it will show up in both of our families' books, in the family tree section.”

It was almost shocking to hear her speak about marriage so easily—she was only three years older than me.

“When do you think you'll get married?”

“We haven't set a date—we're not even officially engaged yet!” She laughed. “But we've talked about having kids sooner rather than later, like when we're twenty-five or so. So I guess we'll get married sometime before then.”

It was hard to wrap my mind around—I still felt like such a kid in some ways. But my parents' deaths had aged me a lot too.

Later, heading off to my normal job at a normal coffee shop was a bizarre juxtaposition: Last night we'd been attacked by a strange haguari and I'd ended up in my jaguar form, unable to change back. I'd gotten some ancient rain-forest drug shot up my nose, which had somehow managed to transform my entire physical being. It was the stuff of a science-fiction movie. Now I was a barista. I
remembered Tink saying it had been like finding out he was a superhero, and I gave a wry smile.

“Hey,” said Hayley, when I came in the front door of Ro's. Today she had on a short black skirt, black-and-purple-striped stockings, and a shredded white T-shirt that said
MY OTHER CAR IS A BROOM.
Her hair was spiked all over her head in purple and black, and her eyes were outlined in heavy black Egyptian lines.

“Hi,” I said. I was wearing my own clothes and felt boring and frumpy next to her. “How's your day been going?”

“Busy this morning, bit of a lull, then busy, now lulling. Weekend mornings are always crowded, but weekend afternoons and evenings are usually lighter. How did your night go? Exciting?”

I almost startled, wondering how in the world she knew what I'd gone through, then realized that of course she was talking about my first night at work. That had been yesterday. I let out a breath and tied on an apron.

“It was fine. Talia's great. Both of you have been great at explaining things and being patient with me.”

“No prob,” said Hayley. “You want to catch up on the dishes first?”

“Sure,” I said. I grabbed the full busing bin and carried it through to the kitchen to the professional dishwasher, hoping I remembered how it worked. The kitchen had the big fridge and storage shelves, boxes of supplies, and this great dishwasher that could do a load every two minutes. I studied the controls again, started the first load, and looked around.

There was a really cool Wolf range and a set of professional double ovens. They were both dusty. I wished I could have them for Matéo's house. I could be a baking fool.

Aly had been right about the job. It had only been one day, but it was fun to have something to look forward to, a place I needed to go. Structure. Now, seeing these great ovens, I thought maybe it was time to start baking more. It always cheered me up. My tons of baking supplies were back at home, but I could use what Matéo's mom had had. My aunt. It was still an odd thought—my mystery aunt.

Ten minutes later I brought a heavy bin full of washed and dried china out front and started filling up the shelves beneath the counter. Glancing out into the room I saw that there were maybe eight customers, and again it seemed peaceful and wonderfully ordinary after the awful scare of last night. I'd just straightened up to get more milk from the back when I saw the side wall.

“Whoa.” The front of the coffee shop and the right-hand wall were large glass windows. The left-hand wall was solid and plain, separating this shop from the antique store next door. Hayley had told me that in addition to whatever Rafael was working on, they often showcased local artists' work. Yesterday there had been a row of moody black-and-white photographs of flowers. Today the wall was covered with large sketches from the floor to the twelve-foot ceiling. I'd walked right by them without noticing. They were just rough images lightly done in charcoal, but I could make out tropical flowers two feet across, twining vines, a bird of paradise, several tiny animals peeping out from leaves near the floor.

“Awesome, right?” Hayley said, untying her apron.

“Did Rafael do this?” I asked, walking out from behind the counter so I could look at the sketches more closely.

Hayley nodded. “Yep. Fabulous, huh?”

“Yeah, it's awesome,” I said, trying to imagine the details.

“It'll be better once it's all painted in,” Rafael said from behind me, and I almost jumped. I'd only seen him sitting down yesterday; now I saw that he was taller than I'd expected, maybe three whole inches taller than me, and more heavily built than I'd thought. Stubble the color of coal made a precise mask over the bottom of his face, and he looked even more dangerous, even more fallen, even more attractive than he had yesterday.

“It's going to be amazing,” I told him, trying not to fall into his arms. He nodded almost absently, not smiling. He was not a smiley guy. “How long do you think it will take you?”

“I don't know. I have to do it in my spare time.” Again I noticed his straight-arrow nose and large, icy-green eyes. He was tough-looking, really guy-looking—not at all feminine, despite the almost sculptural fineness of his features.