by L. J. Smith
Ash reached the top of the winding road and stopped to admire the blazing point of light in the south. You really could see more from these isolated country towns. From here Jupiter, the king of the planets, looked like a UFO.
“Where have you been?” a voice nearby said. “I’ve been waiting for you for hours.”
Ash answered without turning around. “Where have I been? Where have you been? We were supposed to meet on that hill, Quinn.” Hands in his pockets, he pointed with an elbow.
“Wrong. It was this hill and I’ve been sitting right here waiting for you the entire time. But forget it. Are they here or aren’t they?”
Ash turned and walked unhurriedly to the open convertible that was parked just beside the road, its lights off. He leaned one elbow on the door, looking down. “They’re here. I told you they would be. It was the only place for them to go.”
“All three of them?”
“Of course, all three of them. My sisters always stick together.”
Quinn’s lip curled. “Lamia are so wonderfully family oriented.”
“And made vampires are so wonderfully…short,” Ash said serenely, looking at the sky again.
Quinn gave him a look like black ice. His small compact body was utterly still inside the car. “Well now, I never got to finish growing, did I?” he said very softly. “One of your ancestors took care of that.”
Ash boosted himself to sit on the hood of the car, long legs dangling. “I think I may stop aging this year myself,” he said blandly, still looking down the slope. “Eighteen’s not such a bad age.”
“Maybe not if you have a choice,” Quinn said, his voice still as soft as dead leaves falling. “Try being eighteen for four centuries—with no end in sight.”
Ash turned to smile at him again. “Sorry. On my family’s behalf.”
“And I’m sorry for your family. The Redferns have been having a little trouble lately, haven’t they? Let’s see if I’ve got it right. First your uncle Hodge breaks Night World law and is appropriately punished—”
“My great-uncle by marriage,” Ash interrupted in polite tones, holding one finger up. “He was a Burdock, not a Redfern. And that was over ten years ago.”
“And then your aunt Opal—”
“My great-aunt Opal—”
“Disappears completely. Breaks off all contact with the Night World. Apparently because she prefers living in the middle of nowhere with humans.”
Ash shrugged, eyes fixed on the southern horizon. “It must be good hunting in the middle of nowhere with humans. No competition. And no Night World enforcement—no Elders putting a limit on how many you can bag.”
“And no supervision,” Quinn said sourly. “It doesn’t matter so much that she’s been living here, but she’s obviously been encouraging your sisters to join her. You should have informed on them when you found out they were writing to each other secretly.”
Ash shrugged, uncomfortable. “It wasn’t against the law. I didn’t know what they had in mind.”
“It’s not just them,” Quinn said in his disturbingly soft voice. “You know there are rumors about that cousin of yours—James Rasmussen. People are saying that he fell in love with a human girl. That she was dying and he decided to change her without permission….”
Ash slid off the hood and straightened. “I never listen to rumors,” he said, briskly and untruthfully. “Besides, that’s not the problem right now, is it?”
“No. The problem is your sisters and the mess they’re in. And whether you can really do what’s necessary to clean it up.”
“Don’t worry, Quinn. I can handle it.”
“But I do worry, Ash. I don’t know how I let you talk me into this.”
“You didn’t. You lost that game of poker.”
“And you cheated.” Quinn was looking off into a middle distance, his dark eyes narrowed, his mouth a straight line. “I still think we should tell the Elders,” he said abruptly. “It’s the only way to guarantee a really thorough investigation.”
“I don’t see why it needs to be so thorough. They’ve only been here a few hours.”
“Your sisters have only been here a few hours. Your aunt has been here—how long? Ten years?”
“What have you got against my aunt, Quinn?”
“Her husband was a traitor. She’s a traitor now for encouraging those girls to run away. And who knows what she’s been doing here in the last ten years? Who knows how many humans she’s told about the Night World?”
Ash shrugged, examining his nails. “Maybe she hasn’t told any.”
“And maybe she’s told the whole town.”
“Quinn,” Ash said patiently, speaking as if to a very young child, “if my aunt has broken the laws of the Night World, she has to die. For the family honor. Any blotch on that reflects on me.”
“That’s one thing I can count on,” Quinn said half under his breath. “Your self-interest. You always look after Number One, don’t you?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Not everybody is quite so blatant about it.” There was a pause, then Quinn said, “And what about your sisters?”
“What about them?”
“Can you kill them if it’s necessary?”
Ash didn’t blink. “Of course. If it’s necessary. For the family honor.”
“If they’ve let something slip about the Night World—”
“They’re not stupid.”
“They’re innocent. They might get tricked. That’s what happens when you live on an island completely isolated from normal humans. You never learn how cunning vermin can be.”
“Well, we know how cunning they can be,” Ash said, smiling. “And what to do about them.”
For the first time Quinn himself smiled, a charming, almost dreamy smile. “Yes, I know your views on that. All right. I’ll leave you here to take care of it. I don’t need to tell you to check out every human those girls have had contact with. Do a good job and maybe you can save your family honor.”
“Not to mention the embarrassment of a public trial.”
“I’ll come back in a week. And if you haven’t got things under control, I go to the Elders. I don’t mean your Redfern family Elders, either. I’m taking it all the way up to the joint Council.”
“Oh, fine,” Ash said. “You know, you really ought to get a hobby, Quinn. Go hunting yourself. You’re too repressed.”
Quinn ignored that and said shortly, “Do you know where to start?”
“Sure. The girls are right…down…there.” Ash turned east. With one eye shut, he zeroed in with his finger on a patch of light in the valley below. “At Burdock Farm. I’ll check things out in town, then I’ll go look up the nearest vermin.”
CHAPTER 4
What a difference a day made.
Somehow, in the hot, hazy August sunlight the next morning, Mary-Lynnette couldn’t get serious about checking on whether Mrs. Burdock was dead. It was just too ridiculous. Besides, she had a lot to do—school started in just over two weeks. At the beginning of June she had been sure summer would last forever, sure that she would never say, “Wow, this summer has gone by so fast.” And now here she stood in mid-August, and she was saying, “Wow, it’s gone by so fast.”
I need clothes, Mary-Lynnette thought. And a new backpack, and notebooks, and some of those little purple felt-tip pens. And I need to make Mark get all those things, too, because he won’t do it by himself and Claudine will never make him.
Claudine was their stepmother. She was Belgian and very pretty, with curly dark hair and sparkling dark eyes. She was only ten years older than Mary-Lynnette, and she looked even younger. She’d been the family’s housecleaning helper when Mary-Lynnette’s mom first got sick five years ago. Mary-Lynnette liked her, but she was hopeless as a substitute mother, and Mary-Lynnette usually ended up taking charge of Mark.
So I don’t have time to go over to Mrs. B.’s.
She spent the day shopping. It wasn’t until afte
r dinner that she thought about Mrs. Burdock again.
She was helping to clear dishes out of the family room, where dinner was traditionally eaten in front of the TV, when her father said, “I heard something today about Todd Akers and Vic Kimble.”
“Those losers,” Mark muttered.
Mary-Lynnette said, “What?”
“They had some kind of accident over on Chiloquin Road—over between Hazel Green Creek and Beavercreek.”
“A car accident?” Mary-Lynnette said.
“Well, this is the thing,” her father said. “Apparently there wasn’t any damage to their car, but they both thought they’d been in an accident. They showed up at home after midnight and said that something had happened to them out there—but they didn’t know what. They were missing a few hours.” He looked at Mark and Mary-Lynnette. “How about that, guys?”
“It’s the UFOs!” Mark shouted immediately, dropping into discus-throwing position and wiggling his plate.
“UFOs are a crock,” Mary-Lynnette said. “Do you know how far the little green men would have to travel—and there’s no such thing as warp speed. Why do people have to make things up when the universe is just—just blazing with incredible things that are real—” She stopped. Her family was looking at her oddly.
“Actually Todd and Vic probably just got smashed,” she said, and put her plate and glass in the sink. Her father grimaced slightly. Claudine pursed her lips. Mark grinned.
“In a very real and literal sense,” he said. “We hope.”
It was as Mary-Lynnette was walking back to the family room that a thought struck her.
Chiloquin Road was right off Kahneta, the road her own house was on. The road Mrs. B.’s house was on. It was only two miles from Burdock Farm to Chiloquin.
There couldn’t be any connection. Unless the girls were burying the little green man who’d abducted Vic and Todd.
But it bothered her. Two really strange things happening in the same night, in the same area. In a tiny, sleepy area that never saw any kind of excitement.
I know, I’ll call Mrs. B. And she’ll be fine, and that’ll prove everything’s okay, and I’ll be able to laugh about all this.
But nobody answered at the Burdock house. The phone rang and rang. Nobody picked it up and the answering machine never came on. Mary-Lynnette hung up feeling grim but oddly calm. She knew what she had to do now.
She snagged Mark as he was going up the stairs.
“I need to talk to you.”
“Look, if this is about your Walkman—”
“Huh? It’s about something we have to do tonight.” Mary-Lynnette looked at him. “What about my Walkman?”
“Uh, nothing. Nothing at all.”
Mary-Lynnette groaned but let it go. “Listen, I need you to help me out. Last night I saw something weird when I was on the hill….” She explained as succinctly as possible. “And now more weird stuff with Todd and Vic,” she said.
Mark was shaking his head, looking at her in something like pity. “Mare, Mare,” he said kindly. “You really are crazy, you know.”
“Yes,” Mary-Lynnette said. “It doesn’t matter. I’m still going over there tonight.”
“To do what?”
“To check things out. I just want to see Mrs. B. If I can talk to her, I’ll feel better. And if I can find out what’s buried in that garden, I’ll feel a whole lot better.”
“Maybe they were burying Sasquatch. That government study in the Klamaths never did find him, you know.”
“Mark, you owe me for the Walkman. For whatever happened to the Walkman.”
“Uh…” Mark sighed, then muttered resignedly. “Okay, I owe you. But I’m telling you right now, I’m not going to talk to those girls.”
“You don’t have to talk to them. You don’t even have to see them. There’s something else I want you to do.”
The sun was just setting. They’d walked this road a hundred times to get to Mary-Lynnette’s hill—the only difference tonight was that Mark was carrying a pair of pruning shears and Mary-Lynnette had pulled the Rubylith filter off her flashlight.
“You don’t really think they offed the old lady.”
“No,” Mary-Lynnette said candidly. “I just want to put the world back where it belongs.”
“You want what?”
“You know how you have a view of the way the world is, but every so often you wonder, ‘Oh, my God, what if it’s really different?’ Like, ‘What if I’m really adopted and the people I think are my parents aren’t my parents at all?’ And if it were true, it would change everything, and for a minute you don’t know what’s real. Well, that’s how I feel right now, and I want to get rid of it. I want my old world back.”
“You know what’s scary?” Mark said. “I think I understand.”
By the time they got to Burdock Farm, it was full dark. Ahead of them, in the west, the star Arcturus seemed to hang over the farmhouse, glittering faintly red.
Mary-Lynnette didn’t bother trying to deal with the rickety gate. She went to the place behind the blackberry bushes where the picket fence had fallen flat.
The farmhouse was like her own family’s, but with lots of Victorian-style gingerbread added. Mary-Lynnette thought the spindles and scallops and fretwork gave it a whimsical air—eccentric, like Mrs. Burdock. Just now, as she was looking at one of the second-story windows, the shadow of a moving figure fell on the roller blind.
Good, Mary-Lynnette thought. At least I know somebody’s home.
Mark began hanging back as they walked down the weedy path to the house.
“You said I could hide.”
“Okay. Right. Look, why don’t you take those shears and sort of go around back—”
“And look at the Sasquatch grave while I’m there? Maybe do a little digging? I don’t think so.”
“Fine,” Mary-Lynnette said calmly. “Then hide somewhere out here and hope they don’t see you when they come to the door. At least with the shears you have an excuse to be in the back.”
Mark threw her a bitter glance and she knew she’d won. As he started off, Mary-Lynnette said suddenly, “Mark, be careful.”
Mark just waved a dismissive hand at her without turning around.
When he was out of sight, Mary-Lynnette knocked on the front door. Then she rang the doorbell—it wasn’t a button but an actual bellpull. She could hear chimes inside, but nobody answered.
She knocked and rang with greater authority. Every minute she kept expecting the door to open to reveal Mrs. B., petite, gravelly-voiced, blue-haired, dressed in an old cotton housedress. But it didn’t happen. Nobody came.
Mary-Lynnette stopped being polite and began knocking with one hand and ringing with the other. It was somewhere in the middle of this frenzy of knocks and rings that she realized she was frightened.
Really frightened. Her world view was wobbling. Mrs. Burdock hardly ever left the house. She always answered the door. And Mary-Lynnette had seen with her own eyes that somebody was home here.
So why weren’t they answering?
Mary-Lynnette’s heart was beating very hard. She had an uncomfortable falling sensation in her stomach.
I should get out of here and call Sheriff Akers. It’s his job to know what to do about things like this. But it was hard to work up any feeling of confidence in Todd’s father. She took her alarm and frustration out on the door.
Which opened. Suddenly. Mary-Lynnette’s fist hit air and for an instant she felt sheer panic, fear of the unknown.
“What can I do for you?”
The voice was soft and beautifully modulated. The girl was just plain beautiful. What Mary-Lynnette hadn’t been able to see from the top of her hill was that the brown hair was aglow with rich chestnut highlights, the features were classically molded, the tall figure was graceful and willowy.
“You’re Rowan,” she said.
“How did you know?”
You couldn’t be anything else; I’ve never seen anybody
who looked so much like a tree spirit. “Your aunt told me about you. I’m Mary-Lynnette Carter; I live just up Kahneta Road. You probably saw my house on your way here.”
Rowan looked noncommittal. She had such a sweet, grave face—and skin that looked like white orchid petals, Mary-Lynnette thought abstractedly. She said, “So, I just wanted to welcome you to the neighborhood, say hello, see if there’s anything you need.”
Rowan looked less grave; she almost smiled and her brown eyes grew warm. “How nice of you. Really. I almost wish we did need something…but actually we’re fine.”
Mary-Lynnette realized that, with the utmost civility and good manners, Rowan was winding up the conversation. Hastily she threw a new subject into the pool. “There are three of you girls, right? Are you going to school here?”
“My sisters are.”
“That’s great. I can help show them around. I’ll be a senior this year.” Another subject, quick, Mary-Lynnette thought. “So, how do you like Briar Creek? It’s probably quieter than you’re used to.”
“Oh, it was pretty quiet where we came from,” Rowan said. “But we love it here; it’s such a wonderful place. The trees, the little animals…” She broke off.
“Yeah, those cute little animals,” Mary-Lynnette said. Get to the point, her inner voices were telling her. Her tongue and the roof of her mouth felt like Velcro. Finally she blurted, “So—so, um, how is your aunt right now?”
“She’s—fine.”
That instant’s hesitation was all Mary-Lynnette needed. Her old suspicions, her old panic, surged up immediately. Making her feel bright and cold, like a knife made of ice.
She found herself saying in a confident, almost chirpy voice, “Well, could I just talk to her for a minute? Would you mind? It’s just that I have something sort of important to tell her….” She made a move as if to step over the threshold.
Rowan kept on blocking the door. “Oh, I’m so sorry. But—well, that’s not really possible right now.”
“Oh, is it one of her headaches? I’ve seen her in bed before.” Mary-Lynnette gave a little tinkly laugh.
“No, it’s not a headache.” Rowan spoke gently, deliberately. “The truth is that she’s gone for a few days.”
