Authors: Justine Larbalestier
Team Human (12 page)
T
he weather report had said it was going to be sunny, and for once the meteorologists had not lied. It was bright and the air was crisp: a nice day to be at the beach.
White Sands was by far the more popular beach, and this was the perfect time of year to visit: fall, when it was not so crowded. But for some reason Kit had insisted on Honeycomb Beach.
That was not helping my mood. Anna's parents had met on Honeycomb Beach, and so she'd always wanted to go here before this summer: I think she was hoping to meet a guy.
The beach didn't just suck because of Anna. It wasn't as pretty as White Sands, and the currents weren't as good for swimming, though at this time of year it wasn't a lot of fun going in the water.
There was one old man bravely swimming. He looked like an asphyxiating prune in a Speedo. The few people on the beach weren't looking at him. I doubted if they would look at him if he drowned.
Everyone on the beach was looking at us.
Cathy had brought a picnic blanket and a bottle of lemonade she'd made herself. Francis had brought his suit. He sat stiffly on the picnic blanket, the sun shining brightly on his helmet.
You might think I'd suggested the idea of a beach date with a vampire in the spirit of terrible, unholy mockery.
But no: That was just a bonus.
I wanted Cathy to see what she would be missing out on: a day in the sun, blue ocean, and silver sand. I wasn't letting the fact that it was fall get in the way. I may have also been hoping that a date with a sulky undead astronaut outside during the day would take some of the shine off her romance. But Cathy's attention was fixed with dreamy happiness on Francis's helmet, so I had obviouslyâonce againâunderestimated the strength of her delusions.
Speaking of romance, of course, there was my own date.
Kit wasn't really my date. I didn't want to date him, and I highly doubted he wanted to date me. I knew why he was here. His mom wanted him to spend time with humans. Possibly because she thought bringing up Kit was like bringing up a baby lion or something: Eventually, it had to be reintroduced to the wild and its own kind. You couldn't keep it forever. You didn't want to.
They'd called him Kitten. They didn't think of him as a person.
But Cathy had called it a date, which was making me feel a little awkward. I found myself glancing at him.
“Uncle Francis,” Kit said over Francis's muffled protest. He leaned forward and rapped on the side of Francis's helmet. “Uncle Francis.”
“What, Christopher?” Francis demanded, his helmet swinging away from his contemplation of Cathy.
“Knock knock.”
Francis turned back to Cathy. Kit grinned. He was able to look pleased with himself without also looking smug. It was kind of adorable. I'd steal a look and catch the grin or the cheekbones or the brown burst of curls.
Okay, so I hadn't been lying to Cathy. He was hot.
This mainly annoyed me. I was on a mission to save my best friend; I had no time for some weird guy to be hot.
My thoughts came to a sudden halt when a volleyball hit me in the back of the head.
I twisted on the picnic blanket, grabbed the ball, and stood up, coming face-to-face with the guy who had presumably thrown it. He saw my look and edged back toward the volleyball net. It was possible he could intuit from my eyes that I was not in the best of moods.
And I was armed.
“Heh, heh,” he said, putting his arms up defensively. “Do you wanna play?”
I threw the ball at him pretty hard; he caught it more with his stomach than with his hands, and made a sort of grunting sound.
I had to do something that would help me work off this prickly, furious feeling. I had no chance of convincing Cathy of anything unless I could be calm, and calmly refrain from doing things like punching her boyfriend in the helmet. Also I needed a chance to discuss this whole situation with Kit.
“Yeah, I wanna play,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at Kit. “Coming?”
Kit blinked, then grinned again. “Sure.”
“How about you, Francis?” I inquired, so Cathy could see I was including him.
Kit was getting up as I spoke, and our eyes met in a moment of perfect accord, sharing a mutual shining vision of Francis getting a volleyball to the helmet.
“I thank you, no,” Francis responded. “But Catherine, if you would like to play, please do. I would not want to mar your enjoyment of the day for an instant.”
“I'm very well content where I am,” Cathy said shyly.
Francis took her hand in his clumsy glove and lifted it to within an inch of the dark visor of his helmet. Kit, with his back to them, did a short silent impression of someone getting sick. It was my turn to grin.
I
was sort of riled up, and anyone in the fencing club will tell you I'm pretty competitive at the best of times. The sun was beating down on my head and my bare arms, I was kicking up clouds of sand every time I spiked the ball, and we were killing the team on the other side of the net.
I'd only had to yell, “Get back, I'll hit everything that comes close to the net!” once at Kit, which was pretty awesome. A lot of guys pull the “I've got that, little lady” routine. Though I'd taught Ty better, after a game of mixed doubles and a racket to the head.
I jumped up to slam the ball into the sand on the other side of the net. The guy who'd initially thrown the ball at me didn't even try to lob it back. He just gave a sort of damp squeak of sadness and defeat.
I stood, hands on hips, and laughed. “You guys want a break?”
“Oh, yes, please yes,” yelled a girl in a green bikini, and they began to trail toward their collection of folding chairs.
Covered in sweat and sand and feeling pretty great, I turned to Kit and grinned. “You're good at taking orders.”
“You're not bad at giving them,” said Kit easily, and gave me an extremely sandy high five. He grinned again, looking at his hand. “My first high five. I'm savoring the moment. Also my first volleyball game.”
“Beach volleyball.”
“I stand corrected. First beach volleyball game. A day of excellent firsts.”
I couldn't help smiling back at him. Then I looked across the stretch of sand and saw Cathy's blue picnic blanket, deserted, anchored only by a lemonade bottle. The edges of the blanket were flipping back and forth in the breeze, in a tiny distress call.
“Where are they?” I demanded.
My eyes tracked along the curve of the bay, back to the cliffs. None of the people walking by the sea were an astronaut vampire and his lady fair.
I headed for the cliff.
We followed the rough rock wall, the cliff walls curved by the wind into almost the same shape as the bay. I stumbled over loose rocks in the shadow of the cliffs and for a moment thought the opening of the cave was another shadow. Only it wasn't: the darkness had a blue tinge that suggested coolness and depth rather than the flat black of a shadow. I walked forward into the mouth of the cave and saw them.
Francis had taken his helmet off, his fair hair glowing in the dim light. His head was bent to Cathy's. They were a tableau in the shadows, storybook lovers with their mouths about to meet.
Obviously, I'd wildly underestimated the romantic potential of this date.
I turned and stamped away across rocks and sand back to the sunlight.
Kit followed me. I sent him a furious look over my shoulder. He was part of it, part of the world that wanted to swallow Cathy. I kicked my way down to the waves and stood there looking out to sea, not caring if the ice-cold water turned my feet blue. Kit stayed near, a mere step behind.
“Enjoying yourself?” I snapped, and then regretted it. This wasn't Kit's fault.
“Yeah,” Kit said eventually. “It's cool to see Honeycomb Beach. My mom talked about it.”
The bay's name did not match its history. Centuries ago it was the center of smuggling in this part of Maine. Boats used to come in from all over the country, and the rest of the world, full of slaves for vampires to feed on. Even when slavery was legal it was never legal, to sell to vampires. And yet it happened; hence the smuggling. Hard to know who was worseâthe vampires or the humans who sold to them.
I stared at Kit. I hadn't thought Camille was that old.
He raised his eyebrows. “When the English soldiers landed here during the War of Independence, and the people of the city, humans and vampires, were waiting for them? My mom was there.”
Did he hear himself? His mom was biting soldiers during the Revolutionary War. I wondered if Camille had eaten slaves too. Did she think of that time as the good old days? When vampires were a huge part of keeping the slave trade alive? Yet now she was a vampire cop arresting vampires who so much as nibbled on humans who weren't donors. Times change, huh?
I wondered how many vampires wished they didn't.
“It's great to finally see it,” Kit said.
“It's only a few miles from the city,” I said. “You could have come anytime.”
“Yeah,” said Kit. “But a day at the beach with my shade would be the least fun outing ever.” He looked around, and I saw with his eyes for a second, and then just saw his eyes, the color somewhere between sky and sea, taking it all in. “It's nice,” Kit told me. He sounded slightly wistful.
The knot of anger eased in my chest a little. “It's okay.”
“Spoiled is what you are,” Kit teased, and poked me in the ribs with sandy fingers. “Minty always said lavishing buckets of sunshine on children makes them uncontrollable.”
“Raised a lot of children, has she?”
Kit laughed. “No, just me, and not really. She says pretty much everything makes me uncontrollable.”
“Great choice of words.
Uncontrollable
? She sounds lovely.”
Kit poked me again. “She's not exactly my favorite. But no shade is perfect.”
“Is that one of your mom's sayings?”
He went to poke me again and I grabbed his hand. Fearing some sort of poking retaliation, he grabbed my other hand. And then we were standing there, the surf almost reaching our feet, with our hands linked.
“So, thanks for inviting me,” said Kit. I could feel his pulse racing, and I realized he might not know this wasn't actually a date after all.
Perhaps this was not a good time to tell him that I hadn't invited him.
Instead, I drew one hand free of his grasp, stood on my tiptoes, and pulled his head toward mine. The sun beat warm on my hair, and his mouth was warm against mine. All the energy from the game, all my misery and confusion over Cathy, poured out into the kiss and changed to something new and fierce.
Kit's lips pressed against mine as the kiss turned more certain, and my sandy palm reached for the back of his neck. His hand went to the small of my back and I stepped in, my body curving along the lines of his, our mouths locked, standing together hot and close and human.
Kit pulled back and murmured, “I don't want to have sex, okay?”
“What?”
“I know how humans are always up for it,” Kit said. “Which is totally fine! I'm not judging. It's just, you know, I'm not ready and my mom would have a fit andâ”
I shoved him so hard he stumbled into the surf.
I will now use a seaside metaphor. It was the emotional equivalent of being stung in the pride by a jellyfish.
“You know how humans are always up for it?” I repeated, my voice rising. (It was a bit like a seagull's cry, if we want to continue with the seaside theme.)
Kit rubbed the back of his neck and looked at me warily. “Well,” he began. “There are these guys and girls who hang around the Shade andâ”
“They are groupies, Kit!” I snarled. “They are vampire groupies. They are there because they want to have sex with vampires! They are not how all humans behave.”
“Oh,” Kit said. “Oh, right.”
He was beginning to go a bit red.
“Here is a lesson about how humans behave,” I said. “When a guy assumes a girl wants to have sex with him on the second occasion they meet, we humans generally regard him as an enormous jerk! In fact, that goes for any guy assuming a girl wants to have sex with him anytime before she says, âYes, sex sounds terrific!'”
My fists were clenched again. My mood was not improved by the realization that I'd just yelled “Sex sounds terrific” at a guy loud enough for everyone within shouting range to hear.
“Okay,” Kit said, sounding very serious. Which I already knew was rare for him. “Wow, I'm really sorry. I didn't know. I didn't mean to offend you or insult you or anything. I'm sorry.”
It served me right, didn't it, going on some kind of weird fake-maybe-real date with a guy who didn't even know how to be human and then stupidly kissing him.
Vampires were ruining my life!
“It was my first kiss with a human. Told you this was a day of firsts.”
I did not want to know about those other kisses. He meant vampires, didn't he? I suppressed a shudder. How could he live the way he lived? How was Cathy going to live like that?
Which reminded me that I needed an ally.
“Okay,” I said, mimicking the way Kit had said it. A brief grin flashed across Kit's face, not quite comfortable enough to stay. “You have, however, ruined the moment.” I paused. “Speaking of the momentâwhat do you think of this new Cathy-and-Francis development?”
“Those two crazy kids,” said Kit, still looking a little wary. “It does seem like they should wait to celebrate a month's anniversary at the very least before thinking about eternal life together. I've made this point, but Francis told me I was to go to my room for having no poetry in my soul. Camille told me to ignore him, which I did.”
“See,” I said, vindicated. I'd been right: He was on my side. “It's weird for him to be dating Cathy. They can't make it permanent.”
We both stepped farther up the beach as the tide moved in. “It seems like a bad idea to me, too,” Kit said. “But it's not really our business.”
“It's my business if Cathy's making a decision that will make her unhappy forever. Or kill her!”
“It's not like Francis is going to chain her down,” he said. “He's a good person, and he really cares about her. If the relationship doesn't work out, they can always break up.”
“She can't break up from being a vampire,” I snapped. “And she'll never be happy being one of those things!”
Kit went very still.
“Those things?” he repeated.
“No,” I said, scrambling. “Look, I'm sure Camilleâuh, your momâis really nice, butâ”
“Yes, my mom,” said Kit. “She is my mom, and you can stop saying it as if you're putting quotation marks around it.”
“I wasn't!” I protested.
“Yes, you were,” said Kit. “Let me tell you something about
those things
. Humans left me on a doorstep. Vampires took me in. If there's a choice to be made, I'd go with the vampires every time.”
“That would be a pretty dumb decision, as you don't know anything about humans!” I yelled.
“What more do I need to know?” Kit yelled back. “It doesn't matter. I'll know all I need to know in a couple of months, when I can forget all about humans and turn into one of
those things
!”
It was my turn to go still. I felt coldâas if the shadow of the cliffs had fallen on me, or a different shadow.
“What did you say?” I whispered.
“I'm going to become a vampire as soon as I turn eighteen,” Kit said, very coolly. “Of course.”