The Den of Shadows Quartet (23 page)

“I didn’t mean to suggest you couldn’t,” Christopher responded smoothly. “You just shouldn’t have to bother. I’ve got biology next, anyway, so our classes are near each other.”

She examined his expression, but he appeared sincere. For whatever his reasons, he was honestly trying to play the part of a human teenage boy — an unusually polite one, but human nevertheless.

She didn’t want to make a scene, so she surrendered
her backpack, and Christopher carried it without effort, which did not surprise her. If she could lift 300 pounds, as a weak vampire he could probably bench-press a ten-wheeler with about as much effort.

“Thanks,” she forced out, glad the words sounded sincere.

Though her chemistry class was blessedly human, Christopher’s sister was in sculpture with Sarah for the third block of the day.

Sarah’s skills with clay were minimal; she had signed up for this class mainly so she could do something low stress without homework. She’d be lucky if she could make a ball. Nissa, on the other hand, had a great deal of talent, which helped Sarah place her in a way that the girl’s weak aura had not: Kendra’s line.

Kendra was the fourth fledgling of Siete, creator of all the vampires. Though Sarah had never met her, the woman was rumored to be stunning in form and fierce in temper. She was a lover of all the arts, as were almost all of her descendents. Kaleo, with whom Sarah had had her uncomfortable run-in the night before, was Kendra’s first fledgling.

All these thoughts passed through Sarah’s mind quickly as she watched Nissa craft a young man’s figure in the soft clay, humming quietly to herself as she worked. He sat upon a rustic bench, a violin perched on his shoulder. The bow was a fine coil of clay supported by a piece of wire at its neck.

Nissa looked up from her work and noticed Sarah watching.

“That’s really impressive,” Sarah offered, surprised to find her words completely sincere.

“Thanks.” Nissa smiled, looking back at the form. “But I can’t get the face quite right.” She indicated the shapeless globe where the features should be, surrounded by carefully etched hair.

“Better than mine.”

Nissa laughed lightly “Considering you just started today and you’re only working with your left hand, it’s not bad.”

The vampire carefully wrapped her figure in plastic so it would not dry, and then shifted over to offer suggestions on Sarah’s project, which was a sickly-looking clay dog. They worked together for the last ten minutes of class, during which Sarah almost forgot what she was talking to.

“You could put a wire in his tail so it wouldn’t fall like that. What kind of dog is it?” Nissa asked.

Sarah shrugged. “I don’t really know. My mother doesn’t like dogs, so I’ve never had one.”

In fact, Dominique hated dogs. She was very against animals and witches mixing; the Vida line was one of the few that had never used familiars in its magic.

“It could kind of look like a Lab, if you squared off the nose,” the girl suggested. Under Nissa’s expert assistance the smooth white clay turned into an almost-recognizable animal.

“What do you have next?” Nissa asked as they packed the dog in plastic.

“Lunch, I think.”

“Great! You’re with Christopher and me.” The girl’s
exuberance was infectious, but still Sarah hesitated at Nissa’s implied invitation. She could be sociable during class, but there were pages of laws in the Vida books detailing how far any relations with vampires could go. While the school cafeteria was not mentioned by name, Sarah was pretty sure it would be considered unnecessary association.

Still, Nissa walked with her through the halls, and even followed Sarah to her locker when she tried to use it as an excuse to drop the vampire.

Inside the locker, on the top shelf, Sarah noticed something she had not put there: a white piece of paper, on which a profile had been drawn carefully in pencil. She immediately recognized the figure as herself; her hair spilled over her shoulders and onto the desk as she wrote.

Nissa just shrugged when she saw the drawing and gave an understanding smile as Sarah read the initials signed in light script in the bottom corner.
CR
. It was from Christopher; he had probably drawn it while sitting right next to her in history class, when Sarah had been trying to ignore him.

N
ISSA LED THE WAY
to the table where she and her brother usually sat; Christopher was already there. Sarah thought again how lucky it was that neither Christopher nor Nissa was strong enough to read her aura.

Lucky …
yeah, right. If she had been lucky they would have recognized her and avoided her from the start. As it was, she was going to need to find some way to break off the friendship they were obviously attempting to form — preferably without broadcasting her heritage to two vampires she knew next to nothing about.

“Sarah, sit down,” Christopher called. “How was sculpture?”

“Much more interesting than Mr. Smith’s history lecture,” Sarah answered vaguely. She hesitated by the table’s side, but as Nissa tossed her backpack on one of the chairs, Sarah reluctantly grabbed a seat of her own.

“Hey Nissa …” A human boy approached Nissa,
but hesitated when he saw Sarah. She recognized him as Robert, the boy from her first class. The look he directed at her was anything but friendly. He turned back to Nissa. “I was wondering … if you’re going to the dance this weekend.”

Nissa looked from Robert to Sarah. “I’m going stag.”

“Oh, um …” He paused, then said something hurriedly that might have been, “See you there,” before he slipped back into the mass of students.

“What was that about?” Nissa asked as soon as the boy was gone. “Did you kill the boy’s baby sister or something? Robert usually goes after anything with legs,” she joked.

“I never met him before today” Sarah answered honestly, watching his sandy brown hair bob through the crowd.

Christopher shrugged. “Don’t worry you’re not missing much,” he said lightly “Robert has been hitting on Nissa ever since he first saw her, and he’s a royal pain.”

Sarah did not brush off the interaction as lightly as Christopher and Nissa, but she did allow them to change the subject, while her mind stayed focused on the incident.

Sarah was of average human height, and well shaped from a high metabolism and a vigorous exercise routine. Her fair blond hair was long, with enough body that it fell down her back in soft waves, and her sapphire eyes were stunning. To top it off, her aura was powerfully charismatic, and humans were drawn to it. Though she had heard about humans who were naturally anxious around vampires and humanity’s other predators, that was obviously not the case with Robert;
and while Sarah had received numerous phone numbers from strange boys, she had
never
met one who instinctively disliked her.

The only possibility she could think of was that Robert was somehow bonded to the vampires. Sarah would have sensed a blood bond, but maybe … the thought trailed off with disgust. There were humans who were addicted to vampires. They didn’t need to be blood bonded to one monster; they gave their blood willingly to any who would take it. Enough contact with the leeches, and he could have formed the same kind of instinctual aversion to witches that most humans had for strong vampires.

“Sarah?” Christopher’s voice pulled her back to the real world. In her mind she played back the conversation she had missed.

“Yeah, sure.” Then, “Wait, no. I can’t.”

They had asked if she was going to go to the dance the school was hosting on Saturday — the Halloween dance, which, according to Nissa, was the only school dance worth going to until the senior prom in the spring.

“Why not?” Christopher asked, obviously disappointed.

Nissa added, “If you’re worried about getting a costume, I’m sure we could find something for you, and they sell the tickets at the door.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just … I’ve got family coming over that weekend, and my mother would never let me go out.”

“Shame,” Christopher sighed, slightly wistful. “Nice family or wish-you-could-lose-them family?”

Actually, the “family” included many of the local witches — the rest of the Vida line, some of Caryn Smoke’s kin, and a few young men from the Marinitch line. Even human Wiccans celebrated Samhain, and for Sarah’s kind, it was one of the few holidays still left that they could celebrate without unnerving the human world. Dominique Vida hosted a circle on October 31 every year, open to every descendant of Macht — the immortal mother of Sarah’s kind.

“Some nice, some barely tolerable,” Sarah answered, thinking of the Smoke witches in the second group. The peaceful healers had a tendency to preach about peace and unity — an idea that would have been tolerable, had it not included vampires. Luckily, Caryn herself, along with many of the most offensive give-peace-a-chance callers, would celebrate at SingleEarth instead of spending the holiday with hunters.

Yet even as she thought with contempt of Caryn’s association with vampires, here she was speaking with two leeches who might or might not belong to the painfully overgrown SingleEarth.

She had to end this.
Some tolerant association is necessary to preserve human safety and forbearance, but friendship and love with such creatures as you hunt is impossible, dangerous, abhorrent, and as such, forbidden
. She could quote the Vida laws back to front, and that line stood out in bold in her memory. Going beyond the bonds of what was necessary to keep her cover in school could at best stain her reputation; other hunters would not trust someone who had befriended the monsters. At worst, Dominique could call her to trial, and that would be a disaster.

“I’ve got to go,” Sarah said abruptly.

The two vampires seemed startled, but they did not try to stop her. “See you later,” Christopher said amiably.

“Yeah … maybe.” She hoped not.

She ducked out of the cafeteria and swung into the girls’ bathroom, shuddering as she caught sight of herself in the mirror. What had she thought she was doing? She had dropped her guard around them. Already she thought about the pair with some affection — they were Christopher and Nissa, not two leeches she might one day have to kill.

That was dangerous. Knowing your prey can cause hesitation, and when one is a vampire hunter, hesitation ends in death.

Sarah managed to avoid them for the rest of the day. She had calculus with Christopher, but the only free seat was across the room from him, and for that she was grateful. She needed some time to decide on how she would deal with them before she had another chance to talk to them.

S
ARAH SLEPT POORLY
that night. With her broken arm, she felt like a caged leopard with too much energy and nothing to use it on. It was nearly three o’clock when she finally drifted into sleep, and even then she was restless, plagued by nightmares.

By the time she got to school, she felt less like a leopard and more like a slug. It was a pity that human drugs were neutralized by her system upon absorption, because she could have used some serious caffeine.

It took her two tries to get the combination to her locker right, and as she tossed in her coat, she managed to knock something down from the top shelf.

The vase shattered upon impact with the dirty school floor, scattering water, glass, and three white roses. The sound of breaking glass drove a shiver up Sarah’s spine, bringing back all too vividly her dream from the night before.

Memories of her father’s death often haunted her
sleep. Though she had tried to forget that day, to perfect her control the way Dominique and Adianna had, she wasn’t strong enough, and she never had been.

At seven years old, she had stumbled across her father’s body on the front step of the house. The vampires had caught the hunter and kept him for weeks, bleeding him a little each day. Bloody kisses marked his arms where the leeches had cut into his skin so they could lick the blood away.

Adianna had dealt with the news calmly, as had Dominique. Every hunter knew how dangerous his life was, and was prepared for death. But Sarah had been so young, and when she had stumbled over the cold body of her father, when his blood had coated her hand, she had lost control.

She had hit a window, demolishing it pane by pane until Dominique had dragged her away, horrified not by her husband’s death, but by her daughter’s reaction.

The death had become a lesson. Dominique had bound Sarah’s powers for a week afterward, both as a punishment and to teach her how to deal with pain. She had healed as slowly as a human, from three broken fingers and numerous lacerations on her hand and arm. In the meantime Dominique had her train with the older hunters, fighting until her hand throbbed and every muscle ached. Though binding her magic could not take away the years of training, her reflexes, or even most of her strength, the loss had left her shaken and her abilities meaningless. That weakness had terrified her ever since.

Shuddering from the memory, Sarah dragged herself
back to the present. Ignoring the glass, she carefully picked up the roses and the card that had been tied to the vase with a white ribbon.

The white blooms were beautiful, perfect, with the sweet scent that so many long-stemmed roses lacked. A picture done in professional charcoal accompanied them — a pair of eyes framed with the pale lashes Sarah saw every time she looked into a mirror.

She read the poem at least ten times before she even reached class, and finally resolved to speak to Christopher.

The words were beautiful — and truer than Christopher realized. If he had known even the slightest of Sarah’s secrets, he would never have spoken to her in the first place.

She had steeled herself to talk to him by the time she reached her history class, only to have Mr. Smith immediately divide them into groups for a project. Her group included two humans she had not met before, and the mysterious Robert, who was not hiding his hostility any better today.