Hourglass (16 page)

The vampire snarled, “What makes you think you could?”

Lucas tackled him, and they fell to the pavement. Those were bad odds for Lucas; short-range fighting always worked to a vampire’s advantage, because a vampire’s best weapons were his fangs. I ran forward, determined to help.

“You’re stronger”—the vampire gasped—“than a human.”

Lucas said, “I’m human enough.”

The vampire grinned at me, a smile that had nothing to do with the desperate situation he was in and was therefore even scarier. “I heard somebody was looking for one of our babies,” he crooned to Lucas. “One of the powerful ones in my tribe. Lady named Charity. Heard of her?”

Charity’s tribe.
A jolt of panic shivered through me.

“Yeah, I heard of Charity. In fact, I staked her,” Lucas said as he tried to twist the vampire’s hand around his back. He left out the part where Charity got away and was still after us. “Think I can’t stake you, too? You’re about to learn different.” Yet Lucas couldn’t gain the advantage. They were too evenly matched. He wasn’t even going to have a chance to go for his stakes. The
vampire could turn the tables on him at any second.

That meant it was up to me.

Can I really do this? Can I actually stake another vampire?
It seemed so impossible, so savage. But if that was the only way to save Lucas, I would have to find the courage.

My hand shook as I came closer to them. Sweat had slicked my palm and made my grasp on the stake more tenuous. If I could just get a clear mark, a way to strike the blow—

Fear and nervousness added to my earlier nausea, and the world tilted strangely. I didn’t pass out, but I stumbled and had to brace myself against the wall to keep from falling. The stake clattered down; I couldn’t keep my grip.

“Bianca?” Lucas’s eyes went wide with fear.

The vampire seized the opportunity and pushed Lucas away, so that he fell. Horrified, I lurched toward them; if the vampire was about to attack Lucas again, I’d find the strength to pull him away no matter what. But the vampire was smarter than that; he ran, leaving us alone in the alley.

Lucas crawled to my side. I was on my hands and knees, down there in the garbage, and all of it stank so badly I thought I might vomit. My head felt too heavy for me to lift. The ends of my hair trailed into a puddle of some liquid I really didn’t want to identify. “I’m okay,” I said weakly.

“Like hell you are.” Lucas pulled me toward him, so that I could lean against his shoulder. We were on our knees beneath the streetlamp. My heart seemed to flutter in my chest, like a trapped bird, scrabbling to free itself. “Bianca, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.” The harsh light of the streetlamp had turned everything into shades of gray, like we were in a black-and-white movie. “Do you think—do you think the vampire will leave the city?”

“Don’t worry about that right now. I’m going to take care of you.”

Lucas folded me against his chest. A cool spatter of rain on my cheek, then another on my calf, told me a summer storm had come. Neither of us moved as the rain quickened, wetting us both and plastering my hair to my head. It didn’t seem to matter to Lucas, and as for me—

I didn’t have the strength to move.

LUCAS FLUFFED THE PILLOWS BEHIND MY HEAD and drew the covers over me. “You sure you’re okay?” he said for about the eightieth time in the past two hours.

“I need to rest. That’s all.” I wanted him to stop worrying; he’d been half crazy with concern the whole way home, cradling me in his arms and stroking my hair as we took the bumpy bus ride back through the rain. Now the storm raged outside, rattling the wine bottles with thunder. “That vampire—he knows Charity. He’s going to tell her about us.”

“That’s why we’re never going on patrol in this city again.” He half turned as a lightning bolt crashed down nearby, and I could imagine him counting silently:
one Mississippi.
The storm was close.

I put one hand to my forehead; either it was warm or my hand was cold. My hair was still damp, which probably wouldn’t help.

“Did you not eat enough today?” He started rubbing my hands between his, trying to warm them up. It was like he
couldn’t rest, couldn’t even think straight, until he’d fixed whatever was wrong. “Or—oh, my God.”

Lucas’s face went as pale as a sheet. I knew exactly what he was thinking, and it was so incredibly obvious that I had to laugh despite everything. “I’m
not
having a baby.”

“Are you positive?” When I nodded, he sighed in relief.

“Well, that’s something, anyway.”

I didn’t have the strength to admit to myself that this might be something serious, much less to admit it to Lucas. “I’ll be fine after I get some sleep. Wait and see.”

“Do you need blood?” He squeezed my hands, sort of happy, like he was talking about surprising me with a box of chocolates. We’d come a long way from the time when my being a vampire used to freak him out.

“I ate earlier.” I couldn’t even think about blood right now. The idea of eating anything, especially blood, was sickening.

Lucas paused, and I knew he remained worried. He wanted to ask me more questions, and I didn’t want him to ask. I wanted to pretend that none of it had ever happened. I needed to pretend that, for just a little while.

I was relieved when he said only, “Okay,” and leaned forward to kiss me on the cheek. Closing my eyes, I made believe that I was well, that this wine cellar was a real house, and that we could stay here happily forever and ever.

Lucas didn’t keep worrying about my fainting spell the next day, but he insisted that I wait before filling out any more job
applications. “You’re exhausted,” he said. Something in his voice suggested that he’d made up his mind what was going on, and I thought I’d try to believe in it, too. “After the fire at Evernight and Black Cross—you’ve hardly had a chance to catch your breath.”

“You haven’t either,” I pointed out, “and you work hard at the garage.”

“Your life changed more than mine, and we both know it.” Lucas shrugged. “Seriously, you need a break. Take a break. I’ll take care of us for a couple weeks.”

The money he brought in from the garage wasn’t that great; Lucas worked hard, and for lots of hours on the days they called him in, but it was under the table, which meant they could pay him less than minimum wage. So far it was enough to buy our food and pay our bus fares, with a teeny bit extra, but we’d barely begun scraping together the money to repay Balthazar and Vic. I’d started looking in the newspapers for places we might rent after Vic’s family returned from Tuscany, but I couldn’t believe how expensive even the smallest apartments seemed to be. Even if Vic let us have the stuff from the attic, we’d need to buy extra furniture and more clothes and maybe a car someday. I didn’t know how we would ever manage.

But I saw the determination on Lucas’s face. He was so committed to making this work, to looking after us, that I loved him even more.

“Just a week,” I said. That would be enough time to get well, surely.

“Make it a week and a half. You wouldn’t want to start work next Monday, would you?”

That would be my eighteenth birthday. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten, but Lucas had remembered for us both.

So, for the next week, I was a lady of leisure. I mean, there was work to handle: dishes to clean, dirty clothes to bundle up, so we could haul them to the Laundromat on the weekend. But most of the days, while Lucas was at the garage, I was basically alone without anything much to do. This was the first time it had felt like summer vacation. I took it easy, just as Lucas and I had agreed. Although I sometimes went for a walk or something like that, I watched a bunch of the DVDs, read the eclectic group of books Vic had chosen for us, and took a lot of naps. By the time I’d gone four days without a dizzy spell, I felt like there was no more reason to worry.

But one day, during an afternoon catnap, a dream intruded.

“Do these dreams mean something?” I asked.

The wraith smiled. “You’re finally figuring that out, huh?”

We stood on the roof of Evernight Academy. It was an early morning, foggy and cool, and somehow I knew we weren’t alone, although she was the only one I could see. The sky above looked milky and gray, like the fog below; the only substantial thing in the world seemed to be the school’s stones jutting up dark and real. The gargoyles’ silhouettes snarled around us.

“So you’re really speaking to me,” I said, “through my dreams.”

She shook her head. “We’ll meet again soon. I don’t know anything about it yet, though.”

“How is that possible?”

“I’m not telling you our future,” the wraith replied. “You’re the one who sees it. Not me.”

I could tell the future? That didn’t seem very likely, given how many times I’d received nasty surprises. “I think these are only dreams. I don’t have to pay any attention to them.”

She floated upward, and at first I thought it was because she was trying to leave me behind. Then I realized that I was floating up with her. The roof was no longer beneath my feet, but it didn’t matter.

The wraith looked down at me, her face almost inexpressibly sad. “You’ll have to face the truth soon enough, Bianca. The lies can’t protect you much longer.”

She rose faster than I could, though I reached upward in a vain effort to speed my ascent. “Wait!” I cried. “Wait!”

I awoke on the sofa. For the first time, after one of the dreams of the wraith, I wasn’t frightened. If anything, I felt calmer than before.

Seeing the future—well, I clearly wasn’t psychic or anything like that. But some of the dreams I’d had before had sort of come to pass: the black flowers that later turned up on the brooch Lucas bought for me, or Charity helping to set Evernight Academy on fire. I’d have to think about that in-depth later, really ask myself what my dreams might be telling me about days to come.

But what I thought of most was the last thing the wraith had said to me:
The lies can’t protect you much longer.

“I feel stupid wearing this blindfold,” I said. “Is everyone on the bus looking at us like we’re crazy people?”

As I tried to pull the scarf away from my eyes, Lucas playfully caught my hands to prevent me. “Mostly they’re laughing, because they can tell I’m trying to surprise you.”

“I don’t need a surprise!” I protested only to make him insist. Really, I loved the fact that Lucas had thought up something special for my birthday.

“We’re almost there,” he insisted. “Hang tight.”

Finally, we reached our stop, and Lucas guided me off the bus and down the steps. Bright sunlight made the scarf slightly translucent, a soft turquoise shade that I thought I would always love because it would remind me of this day.

“Ready?” Lucas began untying the knot at the back of my head. I bounced on my heels in excitement as the scarf dropped. We were standing in front of a museum but not just any museum.

“The Franklin Institute,” I said. “The
planetarium
.”

He gave me a lopsided smile. “Thought you’d like that.”

“I love it!”

I’d lost my telescope when the school burned. Shuttling from city to city since then, I hadn’t had a chance to go stargazing in months, and I missed it desperately. This would be the next best thing. I loved that Lucas had thought of it; this really was the best present imaginable.

We went in and goofed around for a while before the next
show, climbing through an enormous model of a human heart that thump-thumped so loudly it made us laugh. But the best part was when we finally got to enter the planetarium itself.

I loved planetariums. They were big and cool and quiet, with high-domed ceilings; they reminded me of the presence of something really infinite, really beautiful. I always wondered if maybe that was what a cathedral felt like, for people who could enter churches.

Lucas and I took our seats. I was about to point out a funny T-shirt someone else in the crowd was wearing when Lucas said, “Better do this before it gets dark in here.”

“Do what?”

From his pocket he pulled out a beautiful bracelet of red coral. As I stared at it, he said, “You like it, right? I didn’t know what kind of thing you might want, so I figured this was kind of like the brooch.”

“It’s—
amazing
.” The carving on this bracelet was even more delicate than on the jet brooch. Chinese dragons rippled across the silver links that held together the ovals of coral. Although I desperately wanted to slip my hand into it, I had to say, “Lucas, I love it, so much, but—”

“I don’t want to hear anything about the money,” Lucas said. His face was set. “I’ll pay the guys back every cent, and I don’t care how long it takes me. But you’re my girl. You’re going to have a birthday present. Something you deserve.”

That was his pride at work again, but not only that. I couldn’t argue with him any longer. Instead I hugged him tightly.

He slid the bracelet around my wrist. “There you go,” he said, his voice rough. “Happy birthday.”

“I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

The lights dimmed around us, and the “sky” above blazed into a thousand glittering stars. Lucas and I settled back in our seats, his hand clasping mine, as the narrator began telling us about supernovas. The coral and silver of the bracelet laced around my wrist, cool and heavy. Already, it didn’t feel like some other possession I owned; it felt like a part of me. A talisman. A link between me and Lucas, just like the brooch.

He wants to take care of me
, I thought.
He wants to protect me, no matter what it costs.

The lies can’t protect you any longer.

It was wrong of me to keep looking for protection—to keep relying on Lucas to face so much of our hardships alone, or to depend on him to get my blood supply. And it was wrong for me to hide behind lies. Lucas deserved an equal partner in our fight to be together. That meant he deserved the truth.

Above us, the image zoomed closer to one star, a sluggish giant near the end of its life. It glowed red, darker than blood, and its gaseous surface rippled feverishly like the sea during a storm.

“Lucas,” I whispered, carefully pitching my voice so low that I wouldn’t disturb anyone nearby. “I have to tell you something.”

He half turned toward me. The dying star above silhouetted his face in crimson. “What?”

“When I fainted—on the hunt—it wasn’t the first time.”

The star went supernova, crashing outward into a spectacular blaze of white light. For a moment it was as bright as day, and I could see the confusion and worry on Lucas’s face as the crowd oohed and aahed around us. “Bianca, what are you telling me?”

“It started weeks ago. I’ve been having dizzy spells since shortly after I joined your Black Cross cell. They’re happening more frequently, and they’re getting worse, and I don’t really want to eat anymore. Or, well, drink. I know I should’ve told you before. I just—I didn’t want you to worry.”

Lucas opened his mouth to speak, but then he shut it again. I could see that he was balancing between being frightened and being angry. I didn’t blame him for either feeling, but that didn’t make it much easier to see.

Finally, he said only, “We’ll get through it.”

I nodded and leaned my head on his shoulder and looked up at the newborn nebula, which was opening above us like a pale blue flower. Although I knew I hadn’t solved the problem by sharing it, at least I didn’t have to carry the secret around any longer. Now I could celebrate my birthday the way Lucas had meant for me to, looking up at my stars.

When the show ended, and the lights came on, I led Lucas out of the planetarium as we both blinked. “That was really gorgeous,” I said. “Thanks for bringing me here.”

“Yeah.” Lucas looked distracted.

“You can’t really think about that right now, can you?” When he shook his head no, I sighed. “Come on. Let’s talk.”

We headed out into the early evening. Instead of going straight to the bus stop, we walked along the street. The neighborhood was a nice one, with lots of museums and big houses, and tall old trees with broad branches that swayed slowly in the breeze. Our path took us by the side of a park, where a few others strolled or walked their dogs.

The first thing Lucas said was, “Are you
sure
you’re not pregnant?”

“Positive.” He gave me a worried look, and I shook my head.

“Honestly, Lucas, I already told you that.”

“You cannot tell a guy you’re not pregnant too many times.”

“I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.”

“Thanks.” Lucas put his arm around my shoulders. “So, what do you think it is? Do you know?”

“I don’t know anything for sure, but—” I hesitated. It was hard to put this into words. “I keep remembering something my mother said to me once. The night after I bit you for the first time, actually.”

“What did she say?”

I glanced around to make sure nobody was standing too close to us. There were a few people walking a couple of steps behind, slightly wild in garish clothes and heavy makeup, but they were talking loudly among themselves and wouldn’t overhear. “She said that, once I’d first tasted human blood, I’d turned over the hourglass. That I couldn’t keep going forever as what I was—part human and part vampire. She said the vampire in me would grow stronger and that eventually, I’d have to—” I
wasn’t going to say
kill
out loud in public. “I’d have to complete the transition.”