A Dark-Adapted Eye (6 page)

Tonight I turned my telescope toward Saturn, wanting to take a good look at the rings. But because of the girl and because I had let Rade back into my thoughts, I knew I wouldn’t be able to fully enjoy the view. I rolled up my towel and climbed back down the ladder. My bed called to me.

The rest of the evening I thought about Rade and what he’d done to me. A mess of startling emotions left me breathless. I felt frighteningly vulnerable. I hated having been a victim, having been used. I had been just a girl, a child. I was near to tears with anger and hate, my body crushed into my sheets as I tried to make sense of these unwelcome feelings. Rade and I might never have crossed paths but that day he had created a link between us. If not for that link, if I hadn't seen him again after ten years, I'd never have felt the need to go to him. I'd never have felt this betrayal.

five

predictability: the ability to predict the future behavior of a dynamical system on the basis of the present knowledge available on this system

By morning, I was feeling mostly all right with my world once more. Hungry for breakfast, I opened a bag of bagels I’d made a few days earlier. They’d tasted all right when fresh, but now I knocked one on the counter and it was so hard I could have sharpened it into a stake and gone on a vampire-killing spree. It looked like I would have to start breakfast from scratch, which was fine with me, since I had nothing but time.

Spreading my mom’s crusty old cookbook on the counter, I eventually found myself covered in flour as I made cinnamon rolls. I had started cooking a few months earlier as a way to pass the time during the day, since I didn’t have to work and didn’t go to the roof until nightfall.

Although I usually had fun cooking, it wasn’t enough to keep me occupied all the time. Over the past year I’d painted walls, rearranged furniture, planted herbs, and learned the basics of sewing. I always itched to learn something else, do something new.

The delicious smell of the cinnamon rolls didn’t draw the boys from their rooms, so I ate breakfast on my own while staring out the back door at the empty, dusty back patio. Before I’d found out about Rade, this was as exciting as my life ever got. Cinnamon rolls and more alone time than I’d ever wanted.

After putting away the leftovers, I grabbed the newspaper I’d picked up yesterday and leafed to the classifieds. There weren’t many employment opportunities that appealed to me, but I circled ads for a call center representative and a bakery employee. I probably needed more baking practice to even be considered for that job, and answering phones sounded boring.

I
wanted
to work, to not feel so idle, but Ivory was adamant that any job I got had to be during the day. Since everyone else wanted to work in the daytime too, it was hard to find anything. But we could get by without the part-time minimum wage income I’d bring in, unlike Criseyde, who needed her job and was always picking up extra shifts.

I pushed the newspaper away from me and decided to call her. “I have a potential suitor in mind for you,” I said teasingly.

“Who?”

“That boy from the café at Witcher Park.” I grimaced as the words left my mouth, wondering if I’d ever be able to go there again without thoughts of the dead girl haunting me. The murder had happened so close to home. Too close. “His name is Rhys.”

“I don’t really remember him. He must not have made much of an impression. But he was young, wasn’t he? I don’t want to date any jailbait.”

“He asked about you when I went there yesterday. So if you ever change your mind I’m sure he’d jump at the chance to go out with you.”

“I
won't
,” she insisted in a huffy voice. “That other guy gave me his number. Maybe I’ll go out with him instead.”

We talked pointlessly for a while longer until she had to get ready for work. Left to entertain myself, I read a bit of my constellation book and then checked the calendar on the back of my door, reminding myself of the lunar eclipse later this month. I circled the date in red to make sure I didn’t forget about it.

Later, after Ivory and Les had woken, I wandered out of my room and saw Ivory studying the paper I’d left open on the table. “You know you don’t have to get a job,” he said, turning to face me.

“I know. But I feel like I should contribute somehow.” I shrugged. “So I can be . . . useful.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I looked to Les for his opinion, but of course he was minding his own business, chomping down on one of the cinnamon rolls. I allowed myself to stare at him for a moment, taking in the morning silkiness of his mussed hair, the way his t-shirt curved against the contours of his lean frame, the vulnerable bareness of his long feet. I suppressed a wistful sigh.

“I’ll think about it some more. Oh, I meant to tell you,” I said eagerly. “Did you know there’s a total lunar eclipse coming up?”

Ivory smiled indulgently. “No, I did not.”

“I’ve never seen one before. The totality is going to last almost two hours.”

“Fascinating.”

Again I looked at Les and found him smiling faintly at me this time. My own lips twitched in response and I turned back to Ivory. “It’s going to be a
total
lunar eclipse,” I stressed. “Not partial, not penumbral. That means we’ll be able to see it, and the moon is going to be orange for a while. I’m going to watch the whole thing from the roof. It should take about three and a half hours altogether.”

My brother frowned. “But that’s at night.”

“Well, yeah. I’ve been on the roof a lot longer than that before.”

“You know I don’t like that.”

“Come on,” Les said. “Total lunar eclipses aren’t exactly common occurrences, right?”

“They’re not,” I agreed.

“We can watch it with her. I’d like to see it, myself.”

“I guess we could,” Ivory grumbled. He looked pointedly away from us and turned up the volume on the TV.

“It’ll be amazing,” I said. I turned to share a conspiratorial grin with Les, but he’d returned his attention to the news.

How could they not see something was troubling me? Was I hiding it so well?

“I saw a body,” I blurted. “A dead one.”

The TV instantly went off and Ivory turned to me, hazel eyes serious. “You saw a body.”

“In Witcher Park yesterday. I was riding Mom’s bike. The cops came and talked to me and said the girl had been killed by a vampire.”

“Why the hell didn’t you mention this before?”

“I don’t know. It was scary and weird. I’d never seen a dead person before.” I swallowed hard. “It—her legs—”

“Never mind,” Les said sharply.

Ivory turned him. “It could be her,” he said. “The same one that’s been killing girls all over town.”

“What girls?” I asked.

My heart thumped when Les’s pale green eyes came to rest on me. “There’ve been murders,” he said. “Girls your age. It’s clear a vampire did them, but there have been so many it’s just astounding. It’s all the police can do to contact families, let alone find out who’s doing it.”

“Not that they’re trying very hard,” Ivory muttered.

“And you two are trying to find the vampire who’s responsible.”

They both nodded.

“Are you all right?” Ivory asked.

“Yeah,” I said truthfully. “It’s just . . . I try not to think about it . . . I don’t really know what to do.”

“You can talk to us. Either of us. If you need to.”

“You’ll never forget it,” Les said. “Not completely. You just have to accept what you saw and move on. Accept that by calling the cops you did the only thing you could do. It’s behind you now. No use dwelling on it.”

“Remember, though, it could have been you. Or Criseyde.”

“Ivory!” I cried.

“Sorry. Would you like us to stay home tonight?”

“I think I’ll be better off without you, thanks,” I said dryly.

After the guys left that evening, I microwaved some popcorn for dinner and settled on the couch to watch a show about the secrets of the universe. This was one I had seen before, and though I had planned to try to look at Saturn again that night, it wasn’t long before the flickering of the screen lulled me to sleep.

I wasn’t sure how much time had passed when the lights flicked on harshly, forcing me out of slumber. The front door slammed as the guys thundered in. I blinked and sat up, wondering why they were making so much noise when usually they were quiet coming home. The bowl of popcorn fell off my lap onto the carpet, scattering the few remaining kernels. Scowling at the floor, I bent to pick them up.

“What are you doing?” I mumbled grumpily.

“Move, Asha,” Ivory huffed.

I looked up, squinting my eyes against the light, and only then did I realize something was terribly wrong. Ivory, holding some kind of bundle in his arms, nudged his way past me to the couch. He laid the bundle down gently.

It was a girl. I came to my feet, holding the bowl, and studied her with widened eyes while Ivory conferred quietly with Les. Her pale blonde hair was long, trailing off the couch to the ca
rpet. She was young, perhaps my age or a little older, with a delicate face and limbs that looked slightly too thin to be healthy.

And she was covered in blood.

“What happened?” I whispered.

No one answered me. Not that I’d really expected anyone to. Les had gone to get stuff to clean the girl up while Ivory set about examining her for serious injuries. If the blood was any indication, she had a lot of them. I backed into the kitchen, absently setting the bowl down on the counter. I didn’t want to get in the way, but somehow I couldn’t stop myself from watching.

I had never seen so much blood.

For the next hour or so, I drifted from the living room to my room and back again as Ivory and Les took care of the girl. She remained unconscious while they cleaned off most of the blood and when she woke, groggy and weak, she showered off the rest. Her hair was slicked back and braided neatly when she came out of the bathroom wearing one of Ivory’s t-shirts and a pair of his sweatpants, both rolled up several times over her short limbs. Her pale skin was riddled with bruises and cuts, but none of them looked serious enough to have warranted so much blood.

She curled up on the couch and stared wanly into a corner of the room with giant blue eyes. Ivory offered her a glass of water, but she shook her head.

“Is she all right?” I asked in a small voice. I was relieved to find she would live, but the blood had unnerved me.

“She’ll be fine,” Les said. “She’s a vampire.”

“What?”

“We found her in an alley, covered in blood.”

“But . . . how did you know she was a vampire?” I asked.

Ivory fixed me briefly with his cool blue gaze. “I’ve told you these things, Asha. How to spot a vampire is something everyone needs to know these days. See the lackluster quality of her skin and hair? How the fangs cause that slight protrusion of her upper lip? The fact that you can’t see the veins beneath her skin? The glitter of her eyes?”

“Oh.”

“You should really watch the news sometimes,” my brother continued. “You should know what’s actually happening out there, especially if you’re going to let Criseyde drag you to vampire clubs and go out after dark and generally put yourself in danger at every turn.” He sighed. “Excuse the sarcasm, but sometimes I don’t think you understand how vulnerable you are.”

I glared at him. “I guess what I meant to ask was why you brought her back here if you knew she was a vampire.”

“She was hurt. Some men jumped her. Humans.”

“Three of them,” the girl said darkly. I looked at her with muddled sympathy.

“What’s your name?” Les asked.

She steeled her lower jaw but didn’t answer.

“Aleskie,” Ivory supplied at last. We all looked at him and he explained, somewhat sheepishly, “I went to school with her. She was in a couple of my classes.”

“I don’t remember that,” the girl said stubbornly.

“What were you doing in that alley tonight, Aleskie?” Les asked.

She looked back and forth between the guys for a moment before she let out a resigned sigh. “I was just . . . I was trying to find someone so I could feed. I don’t drink blood very often—I don’t like doing it—but it’d been a long time and I was hungry. I saw someone near the back e
ntrance of a store and so I went up to him. Then the other guys came out of nowhere and just started . . .
beating
me.”

“A man,” Ivory said. “You were trying to attack a man?”

Aleskie frowned. “I wasn’t trying to
attack
him. But yes, it was a man.”

The boys shared a look. “It’s not her,” Les said.

“Who?”

“Some vampire is killing a bunch of girls,” I said, not really sure why I was getting involved. Ivory shot me a dark look.

“I know who did it,” Aleskie said. “I know who’s murdering those girls.”

When everyone turned to look at her, she seemed to shrink back into the couch cushions. “Well?” Ivory said.

“I mean, I
might
know. Probably. Her name is Lucinda. She has a taste for young women’s blood. She favors it.”

“What else do you know about Lucinda?” Les demanded.

“Not much,” Aleskie admitted. “She hangs out in clubs. Human clubs. I guess that’s where she gets her . . . um, prey.”

“How do you know that?”

She flinched at his harsh tone. “I heard it. You hear things from other vampires every so often . . . I’ve never seen her, but apparently she’s some kind of vampire celebrity, I don’t know. I don’t think I’d like to meet her. A lot of vamps would, though.”

“That’s valuable information.” Ivory appeared thoughtful for a moment. “Aleskie, I think you could be useful to us. If you don’t give us reason to kill you, that is.”