Night World 1 (31 page)

He stopped. That seemed to be the end of his confession:
but.
Of course, he didn't really need to say more. Mary-Lynnette, arms folded over her chest, stared at a curved piece of glass on the ground and tried to think of other phrases that started with
in.
Besides the obvious. She couldn't come up with any.

She resisted the impulse to nudge the glass with her foot. “I'm a bad influence on your sisters.”

“I said that to protect you. To try and protect you.”

“I can protect myself.”

“So I've noticed,” he said dryly. “Does that help?”

“You noticing? No, because you don't really believe it. You'll always think I'm weaker than you, softer…even if you didn't
say
it, I'd know you were thinking it.”

Ash suddenly looked crafty. His eyes were as green as hellebore flowers. “If you were a vampire, you wouldn't
be
weaker,” he said. “Also, you'd know what I was really thinking.” He held out his hand. “Want a sample?”

Mary-Lynnette said abruptly, “We'd better get back. They're going to think we've killed each other.”

“Let them,” Ash said, his hand still held out, but Mary-Lynnette just shook her head and walked away.

She was scared. Wherever she'd been going with Ash, she'd been getting in too deep. And she wondered how much of their conversation had been audible around front.

When she rounded the corner, her eyes immediately went to Jeremy. He was standing with Kestrel by the gas pump. They were close together, and for just an instant Mary-Lynnette felt something like startled dismay.

Then her inner voice asked, Are you
insane
? You can't be jealous over him while you're worrying whether he's jealous over
you,
and meanwhile worrying about what to do with your soulmate…. It's
good
if he and Kestrel like each other.

“I don't care; I can't wait anymore,” Jade was saying to Rowan on the sidewalk. “I've got to find him.”

“She thinks Tiggy's gone home,” Rowan said, seeing Mary-Lynnette. Ash went toward Rowan. Kestrel did, too. Somehow Mary-Lynnette was left beside Jeremy.

Once again, she didn't know the etiquette. She glanced at him—and stopped feeling awkward. He was watching her in his quiet, level way.

But then he startled her. He threw a look at the sidewalk and said, “Mary-Lynnette, be careful.”

“What?”

“Be
careful.
” It was the same tone he'd used when warning her about Todd and Vic. Mary-Lynnette followed his gaze…to Ash.

“It's all right,” Mary-Lynnette said. She didn't know how to explain. Even his own sisters hadn't believed Ash wouldn't hurt her.

Jeremy looked bleak. “I know guys like that. Sometimes they bring human girls to their clubs—and you don't want to know why. So just—just watch yourself, all right?”

It was a nasty shock. Rowan and the girls had said similar things, but coming from Jeremy it sank in, somehow. Ash had undoubtedly done things in his life that…well, that would make her want to kill him if she knew. Things you couldn't just forget about.

“I'll be careful,” she said. She realized her fists were clenched, and she said with a glimmer of humor, “I can handle him.”

Jeremy still looked bleak. His brown eyes were dark and his jaw was tight as he looked at Ash. Under his quietness, Mary-Lynnette could sense leashed power. Cold anger. Protectiveness. And the fact that he didn't like Ash
at all.

The others were coming back. “I'll be all right,” Mary-Lynnette whispered quickly.

Aloud, Jeremy said, “I'll keep thinking about the people around town. I'll tell you if I come up with something.”

Mary-Lynnette nodded. “Thanks, Jeremy.” She tried to give him a reassuring look as everybody got into the car.

He stood watching as she pulled out of the gas station. He didn't wave.

“Okay, so we go home,” Mark said. “And then what?”

Nobody answered. Mary-Lynnette realized that she had no idea what.

“I guess we'd better figure out if we still have any suspects,” she said at last.

“There's something else we've got to do, first,” Rowan said softly. “We vampires, I mean.”

Mary-Lynnette could tell just by the way she said it. But Mark asked, “What?”

“We need to feed,” Kestrel said with her most radiant smile.

They got back to Burdock Farm. There was no sign of the cat. The four vampires headed for the woods, Jade calling for Tiggy, and Mary-Lynnette headed for Mrs. B.'s rolltop desk. She got engraved stationery—only slightly mildewed at the edges—and a silver pen with a fussy Victorian pattern on it. “Now,” she said to Mark as she sat at the kitchen table. “We're going to play List the Suspects.”

“There's nothing in this house to eat you know,” Mark said. He had all the cupboards open. “Just things like instant coffee and green Jujyfruits. The ones everybody leaves.”

“What can I say, your girlfriend is undead. Come on. Sit down and concentrate.” Mark sat down and sighed. “Who have we got?”

“We should have gone to find out what the deal was with that horse,” Mark said.

Mary-Lynnette stopped with her pen poised over the stationery. “You're right, that must be connected. I forgot about it.” Which just goes to show you, detective work doesn't mix with l—with idle dawdling.

“All right,” she said grimly. “So let's assume that whoever killed the horse was the same person who killed Aunt Opal and the goat. And maybe the same person who broke the gas station window—that happened last night, too. Where does that get us?”

“I think it was Todd and Vic,” Mark said.

“You're not being helpful.”

“I'm serious. You know how Todd is always chewing on that toothpick. And there were toothpicks stuck in the goat.”

Toothpicks…now, what did
that
remind her of? No, not toothpicks, the bigger stakes. Why couldn't she
remember
?

She rubbed her forehead, giving up. “Okay…I'll put Todd and Vic, vampire hunters, with a question mark. Unless you think they're vampires themselves.”

“Nope,” Mark said, undeterred by her sarcasm. “I think Jade would've noticed
that
when she drank their blood.” He eyed her thoughtfully. “You're the smart one. Who do
you
think did it?”

“I have no idea.” Mark made a face at her, and she doodled a stake on the stationery. The doodle changed into a very small stake, more like a pencil, held by a feminine hand. She never could draw hands….

“Oh, my God.
Bunny.
”

“Bunny did it?” Mark asked ingenuously, prepared to be straight man for a joke.

But Mary-Lynnette said, “
Yes.
I mean—no, I don't know. But those stakes in the goat—the big ones—I've seen her
using
them. She uses them on her nails. They're cuticle sticks.”

“Well…” Mark looked dismayed. “But I mean…
Bunny.
C'mon. She can't kill a mosquito.”

Mary-Lynnette shook her head, agitated. “Rowan said she had a lamia name. And she said something strange to me—Bunny—the day I was looking for Todd and Vic.” It was all coming back now, a flood of memories that she didn't particularly want. “She said, ‘Good hunting.'”

“Mare, it's from
The Jungle Book.
”

“I know. It was still weird for her to say. And she's almost
too
sweet and scared—what if it's all an act?” When Mark didn't answer, she said, “Is it any more unlikely than Todd and Vic being vampire hunters?”

“So put her down, too.”

Mary-Lynnette did. Then she said, “You know, there's something I keep meaning to ask Rowan—about how they wrote to Mrs. B. from that island—” She broke off and tensed as the back door banged.

“Am I the first one back?”

It was Rowan, windblown and glowing, slightly breathless. Her hair was a tumbling chestnut cloud around her.

“Where's everybody else?” Mary-Lynnette asked.

“We separated early on. It's the only way, you know, with four of us in this small of an area.”

“Small!” Mark looked offended. “If Briar Creek has one good thing—and I'm not saying it does—it's space.”

Rowan smiled. “For a hunting range, it
is
small,” she said. “No offense. It's fine for us—we never got to hunt at all on the island. They brought our meals to us, tranquilized and completely passive.”

Mary-Lynnette pushed away the image this evoked. “Um, you want to register a guess on Whodunit?”

Rowan sat down in a kitchen chair, smoothing a wisp of brown hair off her forehead. “I don't know. I wonder if it's somebody we haven't even thought of yet.”

Mary-Lynnette remembered what she'd been talking about when the door banged. “Rowan, I always meant to ask you—you said that only Ash could have figured out where you were going when you ran away. But what about the guy who helped you smuggle letters off the island?
He
would know where your aunt lived, right? He could see the address on the letters.”

“Crane Linden.” Rowan smiled, a sad little smile. “No, he wouldn't know. He's…” She touched her temple lightly. “I don't know what you call it. His mind never developed completely. He can't read. But he's very kind.”

There were illiterate vampires? Well, why not? Aloud Mary-Lynnette said, “Oh. Well, I guess it's one more person we can eliminate.”

“Look, can we just brainstorm a minute?” Mark said. “This is probably crazy, but what if Jeremy's uncle isn't really dead? And what if—”

At that moment, there was a crash from the
front
porch.

No, a
tap-tap-crash,
Mary-Lynnette thought. Then she thought, Oh, God…
Tiggy.

T
iggy.

She was running. Throwing the door open. Visions of kittens impaled by tiny stakes in her mind.

It wasn't Tiggy on the front porch. It was Ash. He was lying flat in the purple twilight, little moths fluttering around him.

Mary-Lynnette felt a violent wrench in her chest. For a moment everything seemed suspended—and changed.

If Ash were dead—if Ash had been killed…

Things would never be all right.
She
would never be all right. It would be like the night with the moon and stars gone. Nothing that anybody could do would make up for it. Mary-Lynnette didn't know why—it didn't make any sense—but she suddenly knew it was true.

She couldn't breathe and her arms and legs felt strange. Floaty. Out of her control.

Then Ash moved. He lifted his head and pushed up with his arms and looked around.

Mary-Lynnette could breathe again, but she still felt dizzy. “Are you hurt?” she asked stupidly. She didn't dare touch him. In her present state one blast of electricity could fry her circuits forever. She'd melt like the Wicked Witch of the West.

“I fell in this
hole,
” he said. “What do you think?”

That's right, Mary-Lynnette thought; the footsteps
had
ended with more of a crash than a thud. Not like the footsteps of last night.

And that meant something…if only she could follow the thought to the end….

“Having problems, Ash?” Kestrel's voice said sweetly, and then Kestrel herself appeared out of the shadows, looking like an angel with her golden hair and her lovely clean features. Jade was behind her, holding Tiggy in her arms.

“He was up in a tree,” Jade said, kissing the kitten's head. “I had to talk him down.” Her eyes were emerald in the porch light, and she seemed to float rather than walk.

Ash was getting up, shaking himself. Like his sisters, he looked uncannily beautiful after a feeding, with a sort of weird moonlight glow in his eyes. Mary-Lynnette's thought was long gone.

“Come on in,” she said resignedly. “And help figure out who killed your aunt.”

Now that Ash was indisputably all right, she wanted to forget what she'd been feeling a minute ago. Or at least not to think about what it meant.

What it means, the little voice inside her head said sweetly, is that you're in
big
trouble, girl. Ha ha.

“So what's the story?” Kestrel said briskly as they all sat around the kitchen table.

“The story is that there is no story,” Mary-Lynnette said. She stared at her paper in frustration. “Look—what if we start at the beginning? We don't know who did it, but we do know some things about them. Right?”

Rowan nodded encouragingly. “Right.”

“First: the goat. Whoever killed the goat had to be strong, because poking those toothpicks through hide wouldn't have been easy. And whoever killed the goat had to know how your uncle Hodge was killed, because the goat was killed in the same way. And they had to have some reason for putting a black iris in the goat's mouth—either because they knew Ash belonged to the Black Iris Club, or because they belonged to the Black Iris Club themselves.”

“Or because they thought a black iris would represent all lamia, or all Night People,” Ash said. His voice was muffled—he was bent over, rubbing his ankle. “That's a common mistake Outsiders make.”

Very good, Mary-Lynnette thought in spite of herself. She said, “Okay. And they had access to two different kinds of small stakes—which isn't saying much, because you can buy both kinds in town.”

“And they must have had some reason to hate Mrs. B., or to hate vampires,” Mark said. “Otherwise, why kill her?”

Mary-Lynnette gave him a patient look. “I hadn't gotten to Mrs. B. yet. But we can do her now. First, whoever killed Mrs. B. obviously knew she was a vampire, because they staked her. And, second…um…second…” Her voice trailed off. She couldn't think of anything to go second.

“Second, they probably killed her on impulse,” Ash said, in a surprisingly calm and analytical voice. “You said she was stabbed with a picket from the fence, and if they'd been planning on doing it, they'd probably have brought their own stake.”

“
Very
good.” This time Mary-Lynnette said it out loud. She couldn't help it. She met Ash's eyes and saw something that startled her. He looked as if it mattered to him that she thought he was smart.

Well, she thought. Well, well. Here we are, probably for the first time, just talking to each other. Not arguing, not being sarcastic, just talking. It's nice.

It was
surprisingly
nice. And the strange thing was, she knew Ash thought so, too. They understood each other. Over the table, Ash gave her a barely perceptible nod.

They kept talking. Mary-Lynnette lost track of time as they sat and argued and brainstormed. Finally she looked up at the clock and realized with a shock that it was near midnight.

“Do we
have
to keep thinking?” Mark said pathetically. “I'm tired.” He was almost lying on the table. So was Jade.

I know how you feel, Mary-Lynnette thought. My brain is stalled. I feel…extremely stupid.

“Somehow, I don't think we're going to solve the murder tonight,” Kestrel said. Her eyes were closed.

She was right. The problem was that Mary-Lynnette didn't feel like going to bed, either. She didn't want to lie down and relax—there was a restlessness inside her.

I want…what do I want? she thought. I want…

“If there weren't a psychopathic goat killer lurking around here, I'd go out and look at the stars,” she said.

Ash said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, “I'll go with you.”

Kestrel and Jade looked at their brother in disbelief. Rowan bent her head, not quite hiding a smile.

Mary-Lynnette said, “Um…”

“Look,” Ash said. “I don't think the goat killer is lurking out there every
minute
looking for people to skewer. And if anything does happen, I can handle it.” He stopped, looked guilty, then bland. “I mean—
we
can handle it, because there'll be two of us.”

Close but no cigar, buddy, Mary-Lynnette thought. Still, there was a certain basic truth to what he was saying. He was strong and fast, and she had the feeling he knew how to fight dirty.

Even if she'd never seen him do it, she thought suddenly. All those times she'd gone after him, shining light in his eyes, kicking him in the shins—and he'd never once tried to retaliate. She didn't think it had even occurred to him.

She looked at him and said, “Okay.”

“Now,” Mark said. “Look…”

“We'll be fine,” Mary-Lynnette told him. “We won't go far.”

Mary-Lynnette drove. She didn't know exactly where she was going, only that she didn't want to go to her hill. Too many weird memories. Despite what she'd told Mark, she found herself taking the car farther and farther. Out to where Hazel Green Creek and Beavercreek almost came together and the land between them was a good imitation of a rain forest.

“Is this the best place to look at stars?” Ash said doubtfully when they got out of the station wagon.

“Well—if you're looking straight up,” Mary-Lynnette said. She faced eastward and tilted her head far back.

“See the brightest star up there? That's Vega, the queen star of summer.”

“Yeah. She's been higher in the sky every night this summer,” Ash said without emphasis.

Mary-Lynnette glanced at him.

He shrugged. “When you're out so much at night, you get to recognize the stars,” he said. “Even if you don't know their names.”

Mary-Lynnette looked back up at Vega. She swallowed. “Can you—can you see something small and bright below her—something ring-shaped?”

“The thing that looks like a ghost doughnut?”

Mary-Lynnette smiled, but only with her lips. “That's the Ring Nebula. I can see that—with my telescope.”

She could feel him looking at her, and she heard him take a breath as if he were going to say something. But then he let the breath out again and looked back up at the stars.

It was the perfect moment for him to mention something about how Vampires See It Better. And if he had, Mary-Lynnette would have turned on him and rejected him with righteous anger.

But since he
didn't,
she felt a different kind of anger welling up. A spring of contrariness, as if she were the Mary in the nursery rhyme. What, so you've decided I'm not good enough to be a vampire or something?

And what did I really bring you out here for, to the most isolated place I could find? Only for starwatching? I don't
think
so.

I don't even know who I am anymore, she remembered with a sort of fatalistic gloom. I have the feeling I'm about to surprise myself.

“Aren't you getting a crick in your neck?” Ash said.

Mary-Lynnette rolled her head from side to side slightly to limber the muscles. “Maybe.”

“I could rub it for you?” He made the offer from several feet away.

Mary-Lynnette snorted and gave him a look.

The moon, a waning crescent, was rising above the cedars to the east. Mary-Lynnette said, “You want to take a walk?”

“Huh? Sure.”

They walked and Mary-Lynnette thought. About how it would be to see the Ring Nebula with her own eyes, or the Veil Nebula without a filter. She could feel a longing for them so strong it was like a cable attached to her chest, pulling her upward.

Of course,
that
was nothing new. She'd felt it lots of times before, and usually she'd ended up buying another book on astronomy, another lens for her telescope. Anything to bring her closer to what she wanted.

But now I have a whole new temptation. Something bigger and scarier than I ever imagined.

What if I could be—more than I am now? The same person, but with sharper senses? A Mary-Lynnette who could
really
belong to the night?

She'd already discovered she wasn't exactly who she'd always thought. She was more violent—she'd kicked Ash, hadn't she? Repeatedly. And she'd admired the purity of Kestrel's fierceness. She'd seen the logic in the kill-or-be-killed philosophy. She'd dreamed about the joy of hunting.

What else did it take to be a Night Person?

“There's something I've been wanting to say to you,” Ash said.

“Hm.” Do I want to encourage him or not?

But what Ash said was “Can we stop fighting now?”

Mary-Lynnette thought and then said seriously, “I don't know.”

They kept walking. The cedars towered around them like pillars in a giant ruined temple. A dark temple. And underneath, the stillness was so enormous that Mary-Lynnette felt as if she were walking on the moon.

She bent and picked a ghostly wildflower that was growing out of the moss. Death camas. Ash bent and picked up a broken-off yew branch lying at the foot of a twisted tree. They didn't look at each other. They walked, with a few feet of space between them.

“You know, somebody told me this would happen,” Ash said, as if carrying on some entirely different conversation they'd been having.

“That you'd come to a hick town and chase a goat killer?”

“That someday I'd care for someone—and it would hurt.”

Mary-Lynnette kept on walking. She didn't slow or speed up. It was only her heart that was suddenly beating hard—in a mixture of dismay and exhilaration.

Oh, God—whatever was going to happen was happening.

“You're not like anybody I've ever met,” Ash said.

“Well,
that
feeling is mutual.”

Ash stripped some of the papery purple bark off his yew stick. “And, you see, it's difficult because what I've always thought about humans—what I was always raised to think…”

“I know what you've always thought,” Mary-Lynnette said sharply. Thinking,
vermin.

“But,” Ash continued doggedly, “the thing is—and I know this is going to sound strange—that I seem to love you sort of desperately.” He pulled more bark off his stick.

Mary-Lynnette didn't look at him. She couldn't speak.

“I've done everything I could to get rid of the feeling, but it just won't
go.
At first I thought if I left Briar Creek, I'd forget it. But now I know that was insane. Wherever I go, it's going
with
me. I can't kill it off. So I have to think of something else.”