Goddess of the Night (2 page)

"For
goodness sake, Vanessa, what did you do with your shoes?" her
mother blurted out.

"The new
shoes hurt my feet," Vanessa started another lie and stopped.
Why did it seem like all conversations with her mother started or
ended with lies? "I forgot them at Planet Bang. I'll call and
see if someone found them."

"From now
on I'm going to pick you up. This is not going to happen again.
Ten-thirty is late enough for a school night. You should be in bed."

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"All
right." Vanessa stepped to the sink and poured herself a glass
of water.

"Did
anything happen tonight that you want to tell me about?" her
mother said, suspicion rising in her voice.

"Nothing."
Vanessa sipped the water. It tasted metallic and filled with
chlorine. She spit it out.

"Something's
wrong if you're drinking tap water," her mother said. "You'll
poison yourself." She poured a glass of water from the cooler in
the corner and handed it to Vanessa.

Vanessa
swallowed the cool water, then stared at her mother. She had never
thought of telling her mother the truth, but she had never felt so
close to being exposed before this. What would her mother do? Maybe
her mother had special powers of her own and had been waiting all
this time for Vanessa to bring it up.

"Mom, are
you . . ."

"What?"

"You know
... different? I mean, besides the clothes." Her mother dressed
on the cutting edge of fashion, wearing clothes before anyone even
knew they were in style. That was her job. But

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sometimes it
was embarrassing to have a mother so overly trendy. She had been
wearing high- waters and pedal pushers two years ago, when everyone
just thought her pants were too short.

"A psychic
once told me I didn't march to the beat of a different drummer,"
her mother explained. "She said I had a whole band marching
behind me."

"No, I
mean really different." Vanessa's chin began to quiver. "Like
in the freak category."

"Oh,
honey." Her mother embraced her. "It's perfectly normal to
feel like you don't fit in. It's part of growing up. You don't need
to worry. Look at how popular you are at school. You get lots of
telephone calls and invitations to parties."

If her mother
only knew how much of her real self she had to keep hidden. Maybe
kids at school liked her now, but what if they knew the truth?

"I have to
do a lot to fit in, Mom." It wasn't self-pity. It was fact.
"Kids aren't very accepting of someone who is really different."

"What's so
different about you? You're pretty. You get good grades."

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Did she dare
tell her? Did she have a choice? If her life was in danger, maybe her
mother could help. "Do you remember the night when I was a
little girl and I woke up crying from a nightmare?"

'Which night?
There were so many."

"The night
you thought I was playing a game of hide-and-seek?"

"Yes--I
found you sleeping in the bathroom and carried you back to bed."

"I wasn't
hiding."

"What were
you doing, then?"

"I was . .
." she stopped.

"Yes?"

She looked at
her mother. How could she tell her that she had been invisible?

"I was . .
. That was the night I found out...

That had been
the night she woke from a nightmare and couldn't see her body in the
pale glow of the night-light. She had been terrified, and afraid to
tell her mother. She had thought she had done something bad. Her
mother had heard her crying and ran into her room. She had lifted her

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arms to be
comforted, but her mother couldn't see her. That had frightened her
even more. While her mother was searching the house for her, her
molecules had come back together, but they had come back wrong. Her
face had looked different. She had locked herself in the bathroom
then, knowing her mother could never love her now. Sleep had finally
taken her, and when she woke in the morning back in her own bed, she
had looked normal.

"Vanessa,
what did you find out that night?"

"Nothing.
It's not important."

Her mother
lifted her chin and looked into her eyes. "You're shaking."

"I just
wish . . ."

"Tell me."

"I just
wish I could be like everyone else."

"Is that
all? Trust me, it's better to be an individual and to have your own
idiosyncrasies." Her mother sat back at the table. "There's
life after high school. Don't try too hard to blend in and be like
everyone else. Kids who do lose something important." Her mother
continued reciting what Vanessa called Standard Lecture No. 7.

18

She left her
mother talking to the wall and went upstairs to the bathroom. She
washed her feet. The water turned black and swirled down the drain.

Then she took a
bath, put on pajamas, and went to her bedroom. She loved her room.
She had window seats and shutters, flowered wallpaper, and a bed with
too many pillows. Her mother called the decor "romance and
drama," and said the room looked like it belonged to a fairy
princess.

She turned on
her computer and clicked on a program called Sky Show that she had
purchased through
Astronomy
magazine. A thin slice of moon
came on the screen. She looked at the date. According to the program,
today should have been the first crescent moon, a time when she
should have felt adventurous and filled with curiosity.

But the program
had made an error. It was the dark of the moon tonight. Those three
nights when the moon was completely dark and invisible from Earth had
always had a strange hold on her. She felt nervous then, as if some
part of her sensed danger. Catty's mother said superstitious people
believed the dark moon brought death and

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destruction,
and freed evil forces to roam the night.

A breeze
ruffled the curtains. She hadn't left her window open. Maybe her
mother had opened it. She shut the window and locked it, then sat on
her bed and stared at her computer.

The door to her
room opened. Her mother walked in.

"I came to
kiss you good night," her mother said. "Why does it feel so
cold in here?"

"My window
was open. You didn't open it?"

"No, but
that explains the draft I was feeling all night."

"My
program's messed up. Did you play around with my computer?"

"Computer?"

"Right."
Vanessa shook her head. "Silly idea."

Her mother
kissed her quickly and started to leave.

"Mom?"

"Yes?"

"Do you
know what this means?" She tried to repeat the sound of the
words she had spoken

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earlier.
"Oh,
Mah~tare Loon~ah, Re~gee-nah no-kis, Adyou~wo may noonk."

"That
sounds like Latin." Her mother smiled. "That's what you did
when you were a little girl."

"Speak
Latin?"

"No,"
her mother said. "Hold your moon amulet that way."

She glanced
down. After her father died, her nightmares had become stronger.
Always the same dream--black shadows covering the full moon and then,
like a specter, taking form and chasing her. She always woke
clutching the silver moon amulet she wore around her neck. She was
gripping it now.

"Good
night, sweetheart." Her mother kissed the top of her head and
left the room.

Vanessa stared
at the night outside her window. Where would she have learned Latin?
She knew it had to be connected to her power. If it weren't so late,
she'd call Catty. Now she'd have to wait until tomorrow to find out
if Catty had ever uttered words that she didn't understand.

She crawled
under the covers. The cotton

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sheets were
sun-dried and ironed and filled with the smell of sunshine. She
breathed in the fragrance and glanced back at her computer. For the
first time she noticed her alarm clock with the luminous hands. It
was turned toward the wall. She got up and turned it back to face
her. Then she noticed her wristwatch. It was turned facedown. Odd.
Maybe Catty had been playing around and left a calling card. She'd
have a serious talk with her tomorrow and tell her that this time her
jokes had gone too far.

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Chapter 3

PATTY AND
VANESSA sat at the counter inside the Johnny Rockets diner. The
smells of bacon and onions hung in the warm, thick air. Conversation
whirled around them in a mad tangle of laughs and squeals, but only
the thunder of motorcycles taking off outside was loud enough to
drown the loud sing-songy music from the fifties and sixties.

"I swear I
didn't go into your room last night." Catty's brown hair fell in
perfect spirals around her face. When she tilted her head, the curls
caught the sunlight pouring through the window.

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"Someone
turned my clock around," Vanessa said.

"Why would
I turn your clock around?"

"Just to
show me you had been there." Vanessa looked at her. "It
wouldn't be the first time you had done something like that."

"But I was
at Planet Bang with you." Catty had a slight smile that curled
on her lips even when she frowned.

"I thought
maybe you had tweaked time." She had hoped it had been Catty.
"Who was in my room if it wasn't you?"

"Maybe no
one," Catty pointed out. "Maybe you're creeping yourself
out. You could have been nervous while getting ready. So you knocked
over your clock and set it up facing the wall without noticing."

"Maybe,"
Vanessa agreed, but the nagging feeling that someone had been in her
room wouldn't leave her.

"I can't
believe you were so scared that you almost told your mother the truth
about . . . you know." Catty flipped through the song titles in
the Seeburg Wall-O-Matic. She picked up the

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nickels the
waiter had left for the vintage machine, dropped two in the coin
slot, and punched in a set of numbers. "Would you have told her
about me, too?"

"No,"
Vanessa said. "Just me."

Charlie Brown
boomed from the speakers, competing with the sizzle of hamburgers
frying on the grill. A crowd of bikers walked in and straddled red
seats at the counter.

"What
would she have done?" Catty asked. "It's not something a
mother expects to hear. 'Hey, Mom, did you know I can be as
see-through as a ghost? Wanna see? I mean, not see.'" Catty
laughed so hard the bikers turned and smiled at her.

Vanessa wiped
the drop of chocolate running over the Johnny Rockets red emblem on
the glass. "I'm not kidding, Catty, it wasn't just the dark of
the moon. Someone was following me."

"I know
one way we can check it out." Catty dug her spoon into the
whipped cream on top of the shake.

"No,"
Vanessa said firmly. "I told you. Never

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again. Not
after last time." The truth was, Vanessa found Catty's power
frightening.

"You
always say that, and then you end up changing your mind."

"I guess.
Want my tomatoes?"

"Last
night made you all messed up." Catty took the tomatoes and
tucked them into her burger.

Vanessa didn't
want to talk about last night anymore. It was better forgotten, like
a nightmare. "I looked for you at school today."

"I was
hopping time," Catty said. She picked up a French fry covered
with chili and cheese and pushed it into her mouth.

"You got
to stop doing that! You're missing too many tests."

"My mother
doesn't care."

"But you
should." Sometimes Vanessa felt jealous of Catty's relationship
with her mother. Catty's mother didn't care if she missed school,
because she knew Catty was different. She also wasn't Catty's
biological mother. She had found Catty walking along the side of the
road in the desert between Gila Bend and Yuma when Catty was six
years old. She'd planned to turn her over

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to the
authorities in Yuma, but when she saw Catty make time change, she
decided Catty was an extraterrestrial, separated from her parents,
like E.T., and that it was her duty to protect her from government
officials who would probably dissect her. She brought Catty to Los
Angeles, knowing that in a city where anything goes, a child from
another planet could fit in.

Catty had only
two memories of the time before she was six. One of a crash, the
other of a fire. Both were only flashes of memory and didn't reveal
much about her past. When her power was strong enough, Catty planned
to go back to the time before she was six.

Vanessa rolled
down the paper wrapper that swaddled the hamburger. She opened her
mouth wide and bit down. Mayonnaise, pickle juice, and mustard ran
down her chin.

The waiter came
back. "How's the hamburger?" he asked.

"Great,"
Catty said and let a piece of tomato fall from her mouth.

The waiter
laughed and picked up the tomato from the counter, then walked away.

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"You are
so gross!"

Catty punched
her playfully. "Vanessa, I'm just trying to get your mind off
last night. You probably had some dog running after you, or a
homeless person who likes to play games. Let's go back and see."

"No."

"Why not?"
Catty persisted, sipping her shake.

"You know
why. I'm too afraid we'll go back some time and get stuck."

"So what?
All you'd have to do is relive the time. It would be fun. We'd know
what was going to happen."

"You don't
know if that's how it really works."

"That's
because I've never gotten stuck," Catty pointed out.

When Catty had
first tried time traveling, it had only been in short bursts. Then
she had learned that if she concentrated she could make hops in time
up to twenty-four hours into the past or the future. Catty figured if
she lost her power and couldn't return to the present, she