Companions of the Night

by Vivian Vande Velde

  "Okay," Kerry said. "I follow so far."

  "That's if the two of us walk in together."

  "This is the throwing-me-to-the-wolves part, isn't it?" she asked, trying to make light of it.

  Ethan gave her a grin that was rather wolfish itself. "If you go in by yourself, he's not going to do any of that, because even if you burn up in front of everyone's eyes he's blown everything to get you. But he hasn't laid a finger on me. I don't think he's going to be satisfied with that."

  "And you can't go in alone, instead of me, because...?"

  "Well, I could say because I suspect he doesn't really believe you're a vampire, that he's used you to get to me and that he doesn't care one way or the other what becomes of you.

  Kerry returned his patently insincere smile. "Or you could say...?"

  "Because I personally am not willing to risk it. Take your pick."

  "I like the first better," Kerry said.

  "So do I," Ethan agreed cheerfully.

  "Assuming we—I—find him, then what?"

  "You convince him that you escaped from me. You can tell him that I fed on you. I could leave a mark." He reached across the table faster than she had time to react to and brushed the back of his fingers across her neck. She jerked away instinctively, even though she knew he could have stopped her if he wanted "Or not," he added with his vampire smile. "But: you hate me, I do despicable things, I've forced you to watch me feed on babies, I've raped you, I'm planning on overthrowing the government. I'm sure you can think of some reason."

  They stared at each other across the table, him daring her to admit it. Or deny it. The more she thought about it, the less sure she was. "I tell him I hate you...," she prompted.

  He smiled at her equivocal answer. "And ask him to help you get me. He will, of course, tell you all manner of lies."

  "Unlike you."

  "He might say he never kidnapped your family, that the vampires did that."

  It had crossed her mind. She hadn't met Ethan till after eight-thirty, which would have given him four unaccounted-for hours between rising and running into her at the store.

  He was watching her as though trying to gauge her response. "Or he might say that he talked to your father and convinced him of the danger you ran by associating with me. Your father agreed to help, and he and your brother are perfectly safe and in hiding. Hiding from me, Satan's demon spawn. Or he might say that he took them but then let them go Out of the goodness of his heart, one presumes. He has a good heart: he never intended to cause the bus accident, but a vampire drove him off the road and the next thing he knew he'd accidentally hit the bus."

  "It was in the afternoon," Kerry reminded him.

  "Maybe it was a bee, then. In any case, he will try very hard to turn you against me, and I'm sure he'll be very convincing."

  "I find him," Kerry summarized, "tell him I hate you, listen to his lies but don't let them sway me from my purpose.... I do have a purpose, don't I?" I could get killed, she reminded herself, despite Ethan's assurances. But what chance did any of them have if she was too frightened to act?

  Ethan said, "Our purpose is to get him out of his public hiding place." Before she could ask How? he said, "Tell him that you overpowered me."

  "Yeah, like he's going to believe that.

  "I tied you up before dawn, but you got loose while I was still asleep in my coffin, and you secured the lid shut so I couldn't get out—"

  "Do you sleep in a coffin?" Kerry asked.

  "No. —and you've been looking for him ever since. Which, you tell him, was what I planned to do tonight. So you've gone to him, first to warn him, second because he's the one person in the world who'll believe you about me, third to have him do your dirty work for you."

  "Meaning, to kill you." Obviously. "And where will you be all this time?"

  "My house, which is where you'll tell him I am. Except that I won't be in the helpless heap he anticipates."

  "Will you kill him?" Even though she knew that Marsala might well have injured or killed her family, that went against everything she had ever believed in.

  "My God, Kerry," Ethan said, "that can't be a surprise."

  "No," she admitted.

  "As it can't be a surprise that, given the chance, he'd kill me. And no matter what he tells you tonight, he'll be planning to kill you, too."

  Ethan looked so calm, so matter-of-fact. Of course, she told herself, this was nothing new to him. She might even ask him, And you aren't planning to kill me? But she didn't.

  "I won't ask for your help," he told her. "You get him in the house, and that's the last I'll ask. But it might help you to remind yourself that he's not just a danger to vampires; he's so intent on getting at us that he's a danger to your kind, too. No matter what, keep reminding yourself of that school bus tumbling into the ditch."

  "All right," she said.

  "Plus your father, your brother, anybody who gets in his way."

  "All right," she repeated more emphatically. "I'll do it. It's not a very good plan, you know. Too many loopholes, too many places where he might not believe me, where things might go wrong."

  Ethan spread his hands in an I'm-open-to-suggestions gesture.

  She didn't have any.

  He watched her intently, gauging, not liking—she was sure—that his life would be in her hands. There must be other vampires, Kerry thought. If he didn't have to protect them, surely Ethan would just move on—to a different identity, in a different place. As he'd obviously had experience doing before. But finally he nodded. He handed her the keys to the new Monte Carlo. "Then it begins," he said "And, Kerry, need I mention? If you can't have him back here by six-thirty, don't bring him at all."

  "Sunrise isn't until after seven."

  "If you aren't here by six-thirty," he repeated, "I won't be either Which means if you bring him here after six-thirty—"

  "I'll be on my own," she finished for him So he didn't trust her, not completely. "How about," she suggested, "if I don't find him by six, I'll come back here alone and we can look again tomorrow?"

  He considered, then inclined his head in agreement. "Fine."

  "What if I find him but he won't come until after sunrise?"

  Ethan smiled at her. "Then I hope you can come up with a convincing reason for him why I'm not here. And"—again he threw her own words back at her—"you will be on your own. And so will your father and brother. Vampires are by nature a conservative and cautious lot. Unlike the young, we know exactly how much we have to lose. You don't want me nervous about your intentions."

  "You don't need to threaten me," she said.

  He just sat there looking at her, with his eyes cool and distant, an unspoken reminder that—should he decide she'd let him down—he had all the time in the world to plot revenge.

  Chapter Sixteen

  KERRY RECOGNIZED THE first flaw in the plan as soon as she pulled the Monte Carlo away from the curb There was no way she could go to the supermarket to see if Professor Marsala was there because that was the one place she was bound to be recognized.

  Doesn't matter, she told herself. Surely if the professor planned to spend the greater part of the night in one place, it wouldn't be there, where somebody was sure to notice after the first two or three hours that he was lurking in the frozen-foods aisle. Restaurants and bars made much more sense.

  The first place she looked was the Student Union at the college, since that was the place where the professor was most likely to find people he knew, people who were most apt to intervene if strangers with long, sharp teeth tried to drag him out. The place was incredibly noisy, with music and talking and a whole crowd of people out to have a good time on a Saturday night. It also wasn't very well lit, so that Kerry had to wander in among the tables, staring. No sign of the man whose picture she'd seen on the piano.

  Next she started going to the restaurants. "I'm supposed to be meeting someone," she'd tell the host or hostess. "May I look to see if he's here yet?"

&n
bsp; He never was.

  The bars were worse. When she went into the first one, the bartender called out to her, "Proof."

  "Excuse me?" Kerry wasn't trying to order something—all she'd done was walk into the place. Maybe she hadn't heard right. She had the impression everyone was staring at her, thinking how dumb she was.

  "Proof of age," the bartender said. "Got to be twenty-one to be legal in New York State."

  "I'm not twenty-one," Kerry stammered.

  "No kidding. You can't be in here, then."

  "I'm looking for"—she realized what it would sound like if she said someone—"my father."

  "He's not here," the bartender said. "Please leave before I have to have you escorted out."

  "How do you know he's not here?" she demanded.

  "No fatherly types at all." The bartender signaled to someone, and Kerry said, "I'm going, I'm going."

  She turned around in the doorway for a last look. No sign of Marsala, but the bouncer that the bartender had summoned was closing in fast.

  Kerry left. Even if the professor was there, he'd have to leave eventually—she checked her watch—soon, before the place shut down for the night.

  The second bar was bad, too, though in a different way.

  A woman—she must have been the manager—came bustling over as soon as Kerry stepped across the threshold. "I'm looking for my father," Kerry said before the woman could start in on her. "Please." She heard the desperation in her voice, and apparently the manager did, too.

  Her face softened. "Oh, you poor dearie," she said.

  Kerry tried to look more like a poor dearie.

  The woman escorted her from room to room—the place was a converted house—and even offered to call the police for her.

  "No, no," Kerry said. "Don't bother. He always comes home eventually."

  The woman patted her hand sympathetically and said, "Oh, you poor dearie," again.

  Kerry even checked the other supermarket, the one where she didn't work. Not likely, she knew, but it was only two o'clock, which gave her another four and a half hours.

  After that, she drove back to the college and started all over again. Her search was shorter this time, since several of the places had closed, and in those places that were still open there was less of a crowd.

  The third time she went to the Student Union she found him.

  About twenty people were left from the night's earlier crowd, spread out in two main groups, one was clustered around a TV set, watching The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, those in the smaller group were arguing because they wanted to start an alternative campus newspaper but couldn't agree on a name for it. A lone girl was reciting sad poetry about bad men, accompanying herself on guitar; and a couple sat holding hands, the girl crying, the boy speaking softly but earnestly. The cashier, who looked like a student himself, sat on a stool, smoking despite the No smoking sign and playing some sort of hand-held electronic game that sporadically beeped or played music.

  Seated in what Kerry would have been willing to bet was the exact center of the room was Professor Gilbert Marsala. He was thinner than he'd been at the time the picture was taken, his hairline farther back, but there was never any doubt in her mind who it was. He was drinking from a mug and reading a book, though he looked up every few seconds, glancing all around nervously. He spotted Kerry as soon as she started toward him, and she saw his gaze flick around the room as he tried to decide who best to approach for help.

  She held her hands out—fronts, then backs—to demonstrate she carried no weapons, and she gestured behind her, which was meant to draw his attention to the fact that she was alone.

  Marsala looked tense, but at least he didn't bolt.

  "I'm all alone," Kerry said as soon as she was within range and could say it softly, so as not to attract attention. "Please, can we talk? Here is fine." He didn't look like she'd expected. Somehow she'd thought he'd have a twitch, or some manic gleam in his eye, something that would mark him as a man with inner demons. Someone fanatic enough to run over anyone who got in his way and steal people's fathers and little boys from their homes.

  Kerry sat down, placing her hands on the table where he could see them. "Where are my father and brother?" she asked.

  "I don't know." For a second she thought he was going to deny knowing what she was talking about, but then he added, "Home by now, I guess. Or still in the hospital. Or maybe the police have them. I let them go, you know."

  She'd seen they weren't home and she wasn't sure whether to believe the other possibilities, but any note of hope was good to hear anyway. "I'm not a vampire," she said. She could see the thought Sure, you're not travel through his brain. "Any test," she assured him, 'anything you can think of, I'll do it."

  He sat looking at her. "You were with them."

  "Yes." There was certainly no use denying it. "Regina and Ethan. I never met them before Thursday night. I didn't know what they were."

  "They killed my friends—Phil and George, Ken, Danny, and Marcia."

  "I know," she said. That sounded worse than it was. "I mean, I didn't know until after."

  "I was watching," Marsala said, and for an awful moment she thought he meant he'd seen his friends die. "I saw him drive up with you, introduce you to her" And she realized he must have been somewhere near Ethan's house. "I saw him clean the blood out of the car, and then I saw them drive you home. Like a damned escort service."

  "It was his blood," Kerry said, not sure how Marsala was interpreting what he'd seen. Did he think Ethan had fed on her in her father's car, making her a vampire that very night, or that it was Marsala's friends' blood and that she had helped kill them? "Ethan's blood. His own. Your friends were going to kill him. I came into it in the middle of things. I didn't understand. I thought they were crazy and they were going to kill some poor innocent guy."

  "He's no innocent," Marsala said.

  "I know that now." Kerry nodded for emphasis. She couldn't bring herself to say any of the things Ethan had suggested. She just said, "I do know it."

  "Did they drink your blood?" He reached to push the loose strands of hair away from her neck but stopped, perhaps thinking touching her was inappropriate, or maybe realizing the marks would have gone away by now in any case.

  She swept the hair clear anyway. "No," she said firmly.

  "She drank Joey's blood."

  There was no answer for that.

  "I watched him change into one of them."

  Kerry wasn't sure she'd heard that right. "You ... watched ...?"

  "It took a while. Four, five months from the time he first met her."

  "No," Kerry said, but before she could explain that it only took seconds, he continued, "At first we didn't know There were all those rehearsals, twice a week, then three times; every night by the last two weeks. Ridiculous schedule for a school production, like the play was more important than the school-work. But then it was finally over. Except that it wasn't over. 'I'm going out,' he said. Every night. Just like that. 'I'm going out.' He led us to believe it was one of the girls from the play, but then Patty, my wife, and I found out it was that Regina woman, the director. 'She's older than I am,' Patty said. He didn't care. She'd bitten him by then."

  "I'm not sure what you're saying," Kerry admitted.

  "She encouraged him to lie to us. She taught him to smoke marijuana, and she provided him with liquor even though he was underage. He'd never done any of those things before. His marks ... He'd been a straight-A student in high school, dean's list every semester. But suddenly he was failing and taking incompletes. Dropped his old friends, dropped his old interests. Stayed up all night, partying, didn't want to get up in the morning. Talked back to his mother, sassed me. We had no idea then, but it was the vampire's bite. He was changing into one of them right before our very eyes, and we didn't know it. Then I started following her. Then I saw."

  Kerry shook her head. "That's not—"

  Marsala pointed a finger at her. "I didn't know how
to stop it." He nodded slowly. "I do now."

  He'd stopped it with Regina.

  "Professor Marsala," Kerry said. She didn't dare say, Your son was growing up and he made bad decisions, or That's called rebellion, not vampirism. His story was an awful mishmash combining truth and speculation and, she supposed, a father's grief and guilt. She said, "It isn't like that. Either someone's a vampire or not; it doesn't take months."

  "That what one of them told you?"

  She nodded.

  "Do you believe everything they tell you?"

  "No," she said. "Of course not. But—"

  "Don't believe anything," Marsala said. "I don't know what they promised him. But then, when they'd strung him out long enough, when they were done laughing at him, they killed him. The police thought it was a car accident."

  She remembered Ethan saying that he and Regina had arranged the deaths of Marsala's friends to look like part of a struggle between opposing drug factions. Of course they wouldn't discard drained bodies carelessly. The vampires couldn't afford to have people speculating in that direction. And as Ethan had admitted, unexplained disappearances raised too many questions.

  Marsala was nodding, as though to encourage her to believe. "He'd been drinking. Car hit a tree. But I knew. That woman was evil. She turned our son against us. I started tracking her, and I found out what she was; then I kept on tracking her because I knew there couldn't be just one. 'Wait long enough and she'll lead us to more,' I said. Even Patty didn't believe me. She couldn't face it and she ran away. But I knew. The sunlight proved me right."

  An image of what had been left of Regina flashed through her mind. Although she wasn't aware of it, it must have shown on her face, for Marsala said, "You saw her? You saw what the sunlight did? Don't feel sorry for her. Do you know why sunlight destroys them?"

  Kerry shook her head.

  "Because God won't permit such evil to exist under the sun.