It didn’t sound funny at all.
“Kit!” said Camille.
“Okay, not literally probed.”
“You’re not in captivity!” Camille protested.
Kit’s attention went from me to her. He frowned in concern.
“Sorry, Mom. Just being dramatic.”
“He was studying us, too,” I volunteered helpfully, trying not to show how uneasy they were making me. If they’d captured Kit to study him, what would stop them from keeping me and Cathy? “But I think he gave up on us,” I added firmly. “We were useless to him. That’s us. Totally useless.”
“I think he only enrolled at your school because he decided I was too small a sample size for his magnum opus,” said Kit.
Cathy shook her head but didn’t say anything. Maybe she was still so focused on the Francis-writes-love-ballads revelation to think too deeply about what Francis’s magnum opus could be.
“That’s a big burden for you to carry,” I said to Kit. “Being a representative of all humanity.”
“That’s what I said! I also told him if he was so interested in humanity, he could start watching TV. A week’s worth of Real Schoolkids of Chicago or Celebrity Janitor would satisfy his curiosity forever. But Francis doesn’t hold with TV.”
“Or texting. Or voice mail. Or the internet. They’re all soulless machines for communication that are—”
“Destroying the delicate interplay of social intercourse,” Kit and Camille finished for me, in unison.
Apparently Camille joining in was the last straw. Cathy let out a low moan.
“I love him,” she said, “and all you can do is laugh at him!”
Which was the moment Francis chose to return home.
He stood on the threshold of the house, holding a bouquet of dead roses, staring at Cathy. She rose from her chair. Neither of them said a word. They were too busy staring at one another.
“You have a visitor,” Camille remarked dryly.
“We think she might be that Cathy you’ve mentioned once or twice,” Kit said.
I laughed. Kit beamed. Cathy swooned.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Lovers’ Meeting. Plus Tea.
“Does she do that a lot?” Camille asked as Francis held Cathy’s supine body in his arms and gently splashed water in her face.
“She hasn’t been eating,” I replied. “Because of her broken heart.” I really wanted Francis to put her down, but he was holding her so gently and looked so concerned.
“Make her food,” Camille commanded Kit. “Something reviving. I shall make more tea.”
Tea making seemed to be Camille’s favorite domestic task.
I hovered uselessly next to Cathy, wondering if I should call her mother and realizing that this would all be very difficult to explain. Please be okay, I begged her silently. I’d never seen Cathy faint before. She hardly ever got sick. She didn’t look it, but she was tough.
She’d always been tough. Until she’d met Francis.
Her eyelids fluttered. “Francis,” she murmured.
“Cathy,” he murmured back.
“Heathcliff,” muttered Kit, as he set about making sandwiches. I couldn’t help giggling again. Kit turned to me with a huge grin on his face. “She’ll be okay,” he whispered.
Kit seemed to be recovering. He’d looked badly startled when Cathy went down. I suppose if you’re used to living with invulnerable vampires, seeing someone topple would be pretty disconcerting.
Francis helped Cathy sit up. “Oh,” she said, putting her hand to her forehead. Then she seemed to realize that she was in Francis’s arms, and she blushed. “Oh,” she said again.
“You fainted,” I informed her.
“You caught me,” Cathy said, gazing up at Francis with admiration.
I wished that I could say he hadn’t. But he had. Francis had moved faster than I’d ever seen a vampire move before. He was holding her before she was halfway to the ground. It had been most impressive.
Kit held out a cheese-and-tomato sandwich on a chipped plate.
“You should eat, my darling,” Francis said, lifting her up effortlessly and depositing her on a chair.
“Oh, I couldn’t,” Cathy protested.
“We think that’s why you fainted,” I said. “How much have you eaten in the last few days?”
Cathy blushed.
“Have one bite,” I begged. “You’ll feel better.”
Kit held the plate closer to Cathy, waggling it encouragingly.
“Oh, no,” Cathy began.
“Please eat, darling,” Francis urged, taking the plate from Kit and placing it in front of Cathy. “For me?”
Cathy picked up the sandwich and took a bite. I tried not to feel wounded that she would eat for him but not for her best friend.
“It’s a very good sandwich,” she said, presumably to Kit, who had made it, though she was looking at Francis. She took another bite, and then another, and then ate the whole thing faster than I’d ever seen her eat before. Kit made her another sandwich, and Camille gave her a cup of tea.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry to be such a bother.”
“You could never be a bother,” Francis assured her.
“Yes, you could,” I protested. “When you weren’t eating or moving from your chair, you bothered me. I was bothered. Very.”
Cathy wasn’t listening. She was too busy eating her sandwich, sipping her tea, and staring at Francis.
They looked lost in each other’s eyes. Like I would need to make a tiny eye map for each of them to be able to find their way out, and even then they wouldn’t want to.
It was even worse than I’d thought. If Francis was also clinging to this delusion of being star-crossed lovers, and by the sound of things—love ballads!—he was, this whole thing was going to get even more drawn out and messy and painful for Cathy when it ended. I leaned back against the kitchen counter, very close to tears. I blinked and dug my fingernails into my palm. I was not going to cry.
“You’ll come back to school, won’t you?” Cathy asked.
“I—” Francis began.
“Yes, he will,” Camille interjected.
I felt so betrayed. Camille was a creepy vampire, who had leaped upon us with a jugular-tearing glint in her eye, but at least she had seemed sensible. A sensible vampire cop who made tea!
I guess she couldn’t take any more of the love ballads. But it seemed cruel to inflict Francis on us instead.
“I will,” Francis said.
“I’m glad,” Cathy murmured. She looked down at the floor and blushed.
Francis took Cathy’s hands into his. They resumed gazing into each other’s eyes.
“Really?” I said to Camille. “You want him to go back to school. Don’t you think that’s a bad idea?”
“Yes, Mom, I thought you wanted to, um”—Kit lowered his voice—“not encourage this madness. Your words, not mine.”
“Too late now,” Camille said, waving in the direction of the lovebirds. “Besides, I think the human school has been good for Francis. It got him out of our hair.”
“No, it didn’t. He was away during the day, when you’re all resting.”
“Yes, but he rested more at night. Not to mention that it got him out of your hair, Kit. Don’t you enjoy him not following you about asking questions all day?”
Kit, grabbing Cathy’s plate and their mugs, conceded that he did.
I tried to intervene at this point. As an uninvited guest, I felt the least I could do was wash the dishes. But Kit had plenty of reach on me, and he held the plate well over my head as I followed him over to the sink. I watched him carefully and managed to seize the plate out of his hands as soon as it was clean. His wet fingers slid against mine as I grabbed at it, and he started and then looked at me, eyes shocked-wide and blue.
He never had a chance of keeping his grip.
I dried the plate and put it back in the cupboard, which was about the emptiest kitchen cu
pboard I’d ever seen. I guess they didn’t have many dinner parties, what with only one person in the house eating.
“Hasn’t he been unbearable since he was separated from ‘star-kissed Cathy’?” Camille continued from the table.
“Star-kissed Cathy?”
Kit grimaced. “The ballad.”
“He only recovered from his last broken heart a few decades ago. And that was the girl he loved before he turned. Romantics,” Camille said, able to convey her derision with the faintest movement of one eyebrow.
Francis and Cathy seemed to have been rendered deaf by love.
I realized Cathy was never going to say it, even though she was always the polite one, so I offered belatedly, “Sorry about the break-in.”
“Not to worry,” Camille said, with another glance at the happy couple. “I can see that it wasn’t your idea.”
“Mom’s probably glad you broke in,” Kit said in a low voice, even though I was fairly certain Camille could still hear us. “She’s always going on about wanting me to hang out with other humans.”
I laughed again, but it wasn’t even a good fake laugh. All I could think of to say was “Moms, huh? And their crazy mom insistence that you interact with your own species! By the way, how exactly is she your mom?”
I didn’t say it.
At least he did know he wasn’t a vampire. Phew.
Kit could tell the laugh was fake. He did not beam. His eyebrow went up in a silent question as he washed Cathy’s teacup.
I didn’t answer the question. I wasn’t the mystery here.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Vampire Promenade
“Permit me to accompany you home,” Francis said.
“We’re cool,” I said.
“You’re so kind,” said Cathy.
Guess who Francis the Selectively Deaf paid attention to?
I cast an imploring look at Kit and Camille.
“I’m sure Francis has things to do around the house,” I said. “Like his chores? Maybe somebody needs to scrub the toilet?”
“Vampires don’t go to the bathroom,” Kit said gloomily. “So guess whose turn it always is to scrub the toilet.”
I was freaked out by the long-suffering way he said vampires, as if he was saying adults.
“The Shade is not entirely safe for human strangers at night,” Camille said, with an unreadable look at me that could have been an apology. “Better overcautious than missing a jugular vein, as the saying goes.”
That was a very morbid saying. Maybe only vampires said it.
Maybe only French vampires said it.
“I’ll walk with you guys and Uncle Francis,” Kit offered.
Cathy heard that. Possibly it was hearing someone name Francis so familiarly that woke her from her reverie. She gave Francis an inquiring look.
“Sometimes I call him that,” Kit said. “Because he’s an old person.”
“He has never called me that before in his life,” Francis remarked in a frozen voice.
“You probably don’t remember,” Kit told him. “That’s why it’s best that I go with you, Uncle Francis. You could have one of your senile fits and end up forgetting your way home. Think how we’d miss you. Think how we’d miss the lute playing.”
Kit’s eyes slid back to me to see if I was smiling.
I wasn’t. Kit might be making fun of Francis, an activity I approved of and enjoyed, but I didn’t do it in that easy, affectionate way. Inexplicable though it was, Kit was obviously fond of Francis.
Why were all the people I met drawn to vampires? You’d think they really did have hypnotic powers.
Francis, naturally, responded with all the warmth of an offended iceberg. “Kit, I beg of you not to display your usual insolence before guests. I dread to think what impressions Catherine has formed of our shade.”
“Oh no,” Cathy said. “Everyone’s been lovely.”
“I offered to walk them home,” Kit put in. “Always the perfect little gentleman, yours truly.”
“You are too kind,” Francis murmured to Cathy. “Shall we, my dear?”
Cathy glowed, slipping her hand into the proffered crook of his arm, and he led her out the front door. Camille stood at the threshold, still and dignified, the lady of the house.
“Thank you for having us,” I heard Cathy tell Camille earnestly.
“Come back anytime. Either of you.” It was sweet of her not mention the fact that we had broken in.
I hoped we wouldn’t be back. But given the way Cathy and Francis were looking at each other, it was a forlorn hope. I had a vision of incredibly awkward dinner parties, with half the table not eating. Of Ty and me chatting with Camille the vampire cop while Francis and Cathy sat on a sofa gazing into each other’s eyes. Francis’s feelings for her were obviously real. Sonnets? Ballads?
He couldn’t have known that she would ever hear about them. I couldn’t think of any reason for him to write them and torment his shade with lute playing unless he felt something for her.
Though who knew what vampires actually felt.
Even if it was real, it was still creepy.
“I need to get my bike,” I said, stomping down the front steps.
Kit kissed his mom on the cheek and then came down the porch steps to join me.
“Sorry about the petunia bed,” I mumbled as I picked up my bike and tried not to tread on the already trampled flowers.
“No problem,” he said. “Minty changes the whole garden every few months. Some vampires”—and he said the word that way again, as if they were the grown-ups—“get very bored. Landscape gardening. Redecorating. She’s probably ready for something new anyway.”
I wondered how it was possible to garden only at night. Or maybe she had a suit like Francis.
“Minty?” I repeated.
Kit grinned at me. When I grinned back, he looked startled. His smile spread wider.
“Her name’s Araminta. She hates it when I call her Minty. If you meet her, you probably shouldn’t call her that.”
“I probably won’t meet her.”
Kit stopped smiling.
Cathy and Francis were walking on up ahead, having, I imagined, a dreamy conversation about very little. “Oh, how I love you!” “Not so much as I love you!” I was glad I couldn’t hear it.
“Let me take your bike.”
“I’m fine,” I said firmly.
I didn’t know if the offer was Francis-trained chivalry or Kit reflecting on how puny human girls must be, but either way I didn’t like it.
There were a lot of vampires gliding past. I suppose after midnight was the ideal time for vampires to take an afternoon stroll.
Some of them were wearing what I assumed were the height of fashion when they turned. I saw bustles and crinolines, parasols, flapper dresses, and formal shorts. (Vampires don’t feel the cold.) Others were in more regular clothes, but somehow they still looked like they should be holding parasols and, indeed, some of them were. Added to that, they were strolling, but their stroll was almost as fast as I could run.
It was too, too weird. How could Kit stand it? Yet he seemed to like it.
Compared to the vampire women practically floating along on their escorts’ arms, Cathy looked like she was stumbling. I was almost grateful to Francis for matching his speed to hers.
On the other hand, if it wasn’t for Francis, neither of us would be here. I wouldn’t be walking beside the oddest guy I’d ever met, wheeling my bike, while moonlight reflected off the still faces of vampires passing by. It was quite easily the strangest night of my life.
A vampire girl sailed down the sidewalk and inclined her head as she did so.
“Hello, Kit,” she said, her voice very cultured and adult.
“Hello, Mrs. Appleby,” Kit said, and smiled at her.
She didn’t smile back, just kept sailing on.
“Mrs. Appleby?” I repeated. “She looks younger than us.”
“People got married at fourteen in the Midd
le Ages,” Kit answered. “She’s a nice old thing. She used to bring me candy when I was a kid.”
“Oh.”
I stared at Francis’s and Cathy’s backs and resolved not to be rude and ask about Kit’s strange life even though I was so curious I was about to burst.
“So you’ve lived in the Shade since you were little?” I asked, shamelessly breaking my resolution in under a second.
“I’ve lived here all my life,” Kit said, with a sidelong glance.
“I know I’m prying,” I said. “But a human, living with vampires! I’m dying to know.”
“You’re dying every minute, but you won’t die yet,” Kit said. I gave him a look and he muttered: “Something my mom says.”
I was silent. So was the world of the Shade. A vampire in jogging clothes zipped by, so fast his tracksuit was a blur, his running shoes barely stirring the grass.
“Vampires jog?” I couldn’t help asking. “They need to stay fit?”
“No,” Kit said. “He’s new. It’s a human habit. It will leave him soon enough.”
I tried not to shudder. How did Kit cope, living in this place?
“Someone left me on their doorstep, the day I was born,” Kit said abruptly.
“Someone—” I started. “But why would—”
It wasn’t like leaving a baby on the doorstep of a church or an orphanage. It was a vampires’ house. In the Shade.
“It’s something people do sometimes,” Kit said, his voice gentle. “If you have a baby you don’t want anyone to know about. Vampires can disappear it without a trace.”
“Oh.” I felt ill. He was talking about babies being murdered.
“Kind of like getting Chinese food delivered,” Kit said. “Except getting Chinese food delivered to the Shade is actually a huge pain. When I was six, I wouldn’t eat anything but potstickers for like two months, and Mom had to tip the delivery guy quadruple.”
I laughed and made a horrified face at the same time.
“But they chose the wrong doorstep for me,” Kit continued cheerfully. “Mom’s a cop. She wasn’t going to let anybody make me a delicious illegal snack. She said we had to hand me over to the human authorities, but Minty and Albert and June thought I was adorable and wanted to keep me, and Francis wanted to study me. He said I was a symbol of innocence they could all contemplate, and I think Marie-Therese was hoping that once the novelty wore off, they’d let her munch on me after all. They took a vote, and so I stayed.”
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