Dark Star

by Bethany Frenette

  One corner of her mouth tilted up. “I’m still waiting.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you,” I said. “And I’m sorry about what I said.”

  Something passed over my mother’s face, a brief expression swiftly banished. Something she didn’t want me to see.

  “Mom?”

  She shook her head, her gaze sliding from mine. “I understand you’re interested in the Kin, and I’ll try to be more open about it, but putting yourself in danger isn’t something I will ever be okay with. We’re going to need to come to an agreement about this.”

  It was an evasion. She’d kept her tone steady, flat, but I’d heard what she meant to hide. A low ache, a dull sort of pain, and something akin to guilt.

  “You need to tell me what’s wrong,” I said, panic prickling along my skin.

  She still wouldn’t meet my eyes. She busied herself fixing her bun, then retrieved her hoodie from where it had fallen. When she spoke, her voice was firm, but she sounded distant. “I know you meant well. And you probably even did the right thing. I didn’t want to tell you this. Audrey, Anna Berkeley is dead.”

  27

  Friday morning brought with it another storm and another snow day.

  That was a small relief: I didn’t think I could handle school. I hadn’t slept well. I’d spent the night in a hazy, half-waking dream, where demons crept forth from black holes and wrapped their talons around slender throats while skyscrapers toppled in pillars of flame. A Harrower wearing a familiar face whispered that I was bound to him, and a distant voice cried out in pain. Nightmares, not Knowings, I told myself—but somewhere in that fog I’d glimpsed Anna Berkeley’s face.

  I thought she had Kin protection, I’d said.

  She did, Mom told me. Two Guardians. Both had been killed. And I’d been stupid enough to think I’d saved her. Gideon called not long after I’d managed to drag myself out of bed, asking what my plans for the day were. I told him I wasn’t feeling well and didn’t think I’d be up to hanging out, but something in my voice must have alarmed him. He badgered me into a trip to the Belmonte house, threatening to invade and inflict all three of his sisters on me if I didn’t submit. That made me smile, but as I moved through the house, my limbs felt weighted. There was a tightness in my chest, heaviness in my lungs. My thoughts slid down dark paths: Anna Berkeley, blood and talons, sharp red teeth. I wondered if she’d screamed.

  Shaking myself, I pulled on a heavy turtleneck sweater to cover the bandage on my neck. My winter coat had been ruined, so I stole one of Mom’s from the front closet before heading out the door.

  I picked my way slowly down the street, where the sidewalks were covered with fresh snow, and tufts of white weighted the branches of all the trees. Gideon was outside his house, shoveling while he waited. Two of his sisters stood near a snowman and gave a cheery greeting. I responded with a halfhearted wave before following Gideon inside. We headed to the basement, where I kicked off my boots and flopped down on the bed.

  “Weren’t you wearing that yesterday?” he asked.

  I glanced up. “So? It doesn’t smell.” And it was the only turtleneck I owned.

  He shook his head at me.

  I sighed, staring up at his ceiling. In fourth grade, he’d stuck about two dozen glow-in-the-dark stars there. Even though he’d removed them years ago, I could still see faded yellow outlines against the paint, and I remembered the countless hours we’d spent here watching movies and playing video games. From above, I caught the sound of low voices, the homey scent of his mother’s crockpot. Familiar things. Routines I knew. Upstairs, his parents would be reading the paper and drinking tea; his grandmother would be playing solitaire. In a way, the Belmontes had adopted me just as they’d adopted Gideon—but I no longer felt a part of it.

  Seated at his desk, Gideon grabbed the baseball he kept there and bounced it between his hands. “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

  I rolled to my side, looking away from him. “I’m just not feeling well.”

  “If you’re going to lie, you could at least try a little harder.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Seriously, what’s going on?” His voice went quiet. “You’ve been acting weird for weeks. Your face is all puffy and your eyes are red. Either you’ve been crying all night—”

  “Or I just walked several blocks through a blizzard?”

  “—or you’ve been taking something.”

  I sat up, turning to gape at him. He was earnest, I realized, his face anxious, his brown eyes troubled. “I’m not on drugs,” I said, scowling. “God.”

  “Then what aren’t you telling me?”

  For a moment I just glared at him. Finally, I said: “Demons are running loose in the city streets.”

  He snorted. “Uh-huh. Demons.”

  “You wanted to know,” I answered, crossing my arms.

  “I want to know why my best friend seems to have gotten a personality transplant.”

  “I told you I wanted to be left alone,” I snapped. My throat felt thick. “And then you bullied me into coming over here!”

  He looked stricken.

  I opened my mouth to apologize—then started crying instead.

  To Gideon’s credit, he didn’t flee the room. He came to sit beside me, saying, “Hey, hey, hey, it’s all right.” And, “Audrey, I can’t help if you won’t talk to me.”

  Uncertainty roiled within me. I did want to tell him. I wasn’t accustomed to keeping things from Gideon, and I didn’t like the way it felt. He’d always been a part of our secrets. Once he knew about Mom, there hadn’t been much point in keeping the rest from him.

  But this—

  Mom’s warning felt too close to home. Humans who get mixed up with Harrowers have a tendency to end up dead, she’d told me. Her father had been one of them. And it was so much more than that. It was Anna and Kelly and Tricia and those nameless girls I’d never seen. It was the dread I’d felt when the demons surrounded me, that certainty that I would die, the feel of claws at my throat. Nothing felt safe anymore, and I needed Gideon to be safe.

  But if I couldn’t tell him the whole truth, I could at least tell him part of it. “I learned some things about my father,” I said. “About—his family. And why he left.”

  “And that’s what’s upsetting you?”

  I nodded. “But I really don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

  He was silent for a long time. I wasn’t certain if he believed me. Gideon was normally easy to read, but my senses were in chaos. Eventually, he shrugged, walked across the room to fetch a box of tissues, and handed it to me.

  “Sorry for the meltdown,” I sniffed.

  He smiled and looked as though he were about to speak, but I was saved from any further questions by his phone ringing. He glanced down at it, let out a long-suffering sigh, and said, “It’s the other one.”

  Gideon had various friends that demanded his attention, but only one other person pestered him as much as I did. He could only mean Tink.

  “Answer it,” I said. “Crisis finished, I swear.” I headed to the bathroom to wash my face.

  “She wants us to come pick her up,” he told me, after he’d hung up. Tink had a license and a perfectly serviceable (though undeniably ugly) car, but she refused to drive if it even started flurrying. “She says she’s trapped at home with nothing but ramen and ice cubes to eat. Do we rescue her?”

  Tink would put an end to any Kin talk. If I so much as spoke the word, she pretended not to hear me.

  “Yes, we absolutely rescue her,” I said, with one final sniff. “I can’t be responsible for that girl getting any skinnier. She’s basically see-through as it is.”

  Then I grabbed my boots and headed for the door, not waiting to see if he followed.

  ***

  Spending the day with Tink and Gideon calmed me. Tink refused to let me be morose. She didn’t ask what was wrong, but I sensed she knew. We spent the afternoon playing board games and wa
tching terrible movies while the snow piled up. By evening, I felt somewhat better, if still anxious.

  When I arrived home, Mr. Alvarez was once again in the parlor, arguing with my mother. I didn’t need to hear the beginning of the conversation to catch the topic: Mom was tired of waiting.

  Mr. Alvarez disagreed. “You’ve said yourself you don’t think Tigue is the real threat,” he was saying. He didn’t have his leather jacket with him, but his hair was spiked up again. I wondered how my mother took him seriously.

  She glanced at me when I entered the room and told me to head upstairs, but since I caught a trace of blood on her shirt, I chose to ignore her. I grabbed a first-aid kit. Instead of shooing me away as I fussed over the scratch on her arm, she kept her attention on Mr. Alvarez.

  “This goes on much longer,” she said, “it won’t matter who’s behind it.”

  “It does matter. If we don’t take out the source, we’ll go through this again next year. And the next year. And the year after that—until there are no Kin children left to bleed.”

  Mom’s voice went deathly cool, sending goosebumps up and down my skin. “Then I guess I just keep killing Harrowers until it stops.”

  “That’s the spirit, Luce. If you can’t solve a problem, beat the shit out of it until it goes away.”

  “It’s better than sitting on my hands, which is all I’ve seen you doing,” Mom shot back. I wondered how difficult it would be to scrape math teacher out of the carpet.

  “Not all of us are Morning Star.” I couldn’t tell if that was meant to be sarcasm or not. Mr. Alvarez was strangely unreadable. Not that I’d ever really cared to try before, but standing there, I only got a sense of what I couldn’t see, like staring into dark water. “We’re on the same side here,” he continued. “I don’t like this any more than you do, but our options are limited. We don’t just need to stop the bleedings, we need to stop the hunt. We can’t allow them to find the Remnant, and right now, Tigue is the only link we have. We take him out, we’re out of leads.”

  “So we do nothing, and in the meantime, innocent girls die.”

  “And if the Harrowers find the Remnant, even more will die.”

  “Oh, spare me. I know your reasoning. I just disagree.” She sighed, rubbing her forehead with one hand. She’d finally grown tired of my attempts to plaster her with Band-aids, and shook me away. Turning back to Mr. Alvarez, she asked, “You get anything out of Shane?”

  He snorted. “About as much as you’d expect. He said he foresees bright futures for all of us—and that the greater Harrower community leaves him out of their fiendish schemes.” “You believe him?”

  “I believe he’s more scared of you than he is of them. And I don’t think he wants a Harrowing any more than we do.”

  Mom made a noise of frustration “We’ll keep playing it your way—fornow.”

  That answer didn’t seem to satisfy Mr. Alvarez. Even with the spiked-up hair, he looked the sternest I’d ever seen him. “And how long will that last?”

  Her eyes were dark, her voice cool. “That depends on Tigue.”

  Once Mr. Alvarez left, Mom ran to the basement to fetch a new hoodie. Her previous one was torn—though the wound, she explained, was human and not Harrower in origin. She’d interrupted a knife fight. I wasn’t certain why she expected this information to make me feel better.

  After changing her top, she went to the kitchen for a quick dinner of leftover mac and cheese. “You know,” I said, following her, “if you killed Mr. Alvarez, I’d probably get out of a math test.”

  “He has a good heart,” she said. Then, after a moment, she added, “Don’t tell him I said that.”

  I laughed, then chewed my lower lip. “How do you know Tigue isn’t acting alone? I know you said he’s not doing the bleedings himself, but couldn’t he be . . . organizing other demons?”

  Mom hesitated. “I’ve fought a lot of Harrowers. More than I can count or even remember. Few of them are any sort of threat to me. Tigue is strong, the strongest we’ve seen since Verrick—that’s why we’ve been focusing on him, even without solid evidence. But this . . . this is beyond him. I’ve watched him for months now. I know his capabilities. We still don’t know how the Harrowers are locating their targets, but I’m certain he’s not the one doing it—on his own, he simply wouldn’t have that power. Unfortunately, that means Ryan is right. We don’t just have to stop Tigue. We need to stop whoever he’s working with.” Carrying her bowl with her, she crossed the kitchen and perched on the edge of the counter.

  A thought had been troubling me ever since my vision. I swallowed thickly. “Could . . . could Verrick be his accomplice?”

  “Verrick is dead, honey.”

  Images of the Harrower flashed before me. Light pooling at his feet, the scent of blood, the hate that burned inside him. I’m bound to you, he’d said. Bound to the daughter that sleeps beneath your heart. She carries her father’s blood.

  Kill me and we’ ll meet again.

  “Are you sure?” I asked shakily.

  Mom lifted her eyes to mine. She was silent a long moment before she spoke. “It’s not Verrick. Supposing he were alive . . . he wouldn’t ally himself with Tigue. Or anyone. He hated other Harrowers nearly as much as he hated us. He worked alone.”

  Sighing, I leaned back against the counter beside Mom. “That’s good, I guess. But you still need to find Tigue’s accomplice, then.”

  She held a hand up in front of me. “Stop. Stop right there. Stop what you’re thinking. I’m not letting you anywhere near him.”

  I started to protest that I hadn’t been thinking anything, but didn’t finish. I had been thinking. It wasn’t any sort of concrete plan, just the smallest glimmer of an idea. If they found Tigue’s partner, they could stop the bleedings. No more search for the Remnant. No more threat of Harrowings. No more alleys and ankles troubling my dreams.

  No more death.

  “Audrey,” Mom said.

  “I know, I heard you,” I said.

  But I didn’t stop thinking.

  ***

  It was Elspeth who gave me the way to get near Tigue.

  She showed up at my house Saturday afternoon to ask for a reading, with a quick apology for not calling first. I’d spent the morning online, searching the internet for old newspaper articles and gossip magazines, following obscure information and vague references—reading everything I could find on Patrick Tigue. There had to be something everyone had overlooked, I reasoned. Some hidden clue, another Harrower disguised as a human, hiding within the Cities. Esther had told me that Verrick’s human form and alibi had been without flaw; there could be others like him. I just needed to find who Tigue was connected with.

  Most of what I found, I’d already known. Tigue had come to the metro area a little over three years ago, and mostly kept a low profile. He hadn’t been romantically linked to anyone since his arrival—which was a comfort, because, ew, really—and he hadn’t been the subject of any scandals. Interest in him had declined in the past year or so, though his name popped up at fundraisers and charity events. He donated money to hospitals, to children’s programs, to homeless shelters, to the arts. Just like Leon had said: a model citizen.

  Except for the part about murdering teenage girls. I kept digging.

  When Elspeth showed up, she interrupted my research, so I explained what I’d been doing. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find anything on my own, I told her, but I wanted to try. And I couldn’t do a reading. My Knowing wouldn’t be strong enough without him close by.

  “Well, if you want to get near him,” Elspeth said, “just make Grandmother take you to the charity banquet on Wednesday. I have rehearsal that night, so I’m not going, but—”

  “Tigue will be there?” My eyes snapped to hers. We were in my room, seated on the floor while I readied my cards.

  She nodded. “He’ll be there. He always attends those sorts of things. Though you probably shouldn’t just go up to him and ask if he’s been
bleeding kids around the Cities.”

  I thought back. Esther had asked me to attend the banquet— as a proud member of the St. Croix family, she’d put it—but I’d managed to wriggle out of it by saying I had too much homework. She might get suspicious if I changed my mind, but I was willing to take the chance.

  I didn’t want Elspeth to know just how intent on my plan I was, however, so I focused on the reading.

  “What exactly are we looking for?” I asked.

  She hesitated. Her long hair, normally loose about her shoulders, had been pulled back in a ponytail. It made her look younger. “I’ve had some things on my mind. I just want to know what you see.”

  Elspeth was always easy to read, and now I could almost see the worry that hung about her, tinting the air. I gave her a slow nod as I began shuffling. I focused my Knowing on her: her usual lilting laughter and the frown she now wore; the memory of a glow in her veins; her favorite color—the blue-black of crow wings—and her love of buzzing bees.

  Then I laid out the cards.

  My card, followed by The Garden and The Desert. Iris and Elspeth, inversions of one another. But I didn’t need the cards to tell me that. I focused on the next three: Year of Famine. The Cutpurse. The Siren.

  Elspeth was troubled, all right—but I wasn’t certain why. The images I saw were from years ago: The accident that had killed her parents. The screech of tires. A road turned silver by the rain.

  “You were in the car?” I asked. “When your parents died?”

  “Iris and I were,” she said.

  Two more cards. The Blind Man. The Beggar. I saw the accident in a series of flashes. The wheels turned and skidded across the rain-slick road. Then the collision: Metal bending and shrieking, glass and bone shattering. Elspeth’s choking screams. Then Iris, blood on her forehead, her vision cut off.

  And—something else watched.

  I pressed the last card to the floor, then looked up at Elspeth. “Was a Harrower involved?”

  She shook her head. “No . . . it was just an accident. I don’t remember a lot, but I think someone ran a red light.”