But first she had to make sure her family was safe, so she made a quick circuit of the house, moving back far enough that she could see all of the windows and even the roof. She saw no sign of the wraith, but now it felt as though there were eyes upon her and she spun around and looked at the roofs of nearby houses and the branches of trees and the power lines that were strung along the street. Nothing.
But in the distance, above the twin spires of the church’s bell tower and city hall’s clock tower, the sky swirled inward and upward, as though the storm were draining into some upper level of the atmosphere. Amber froze, terrified of what she might find if she were to go downtown and approach the clock tower.
No, she told herself. I won’t be going there. Not for anything.
There could be no hiding from this now. The whole world knew that real evil existed, and that dark magic could destroy lives and poison whole peoples. But a small town like Hawthorne was used to its own tiny evils, its small bits of dark intention that sprang from human nature. Real evil, the sort that might tear down all of their hopes and dreams and steal their souls, destroy their lives, didn’t happen here. This was Hawthorne, Massachusetts. It just didn’t.
Yet now it had. And Amber knew things about it that she wasn’t sure anyone else knew. Her visions had to mean something, and that meant she had to act. But would people like the mayor and the police chief have admitted to themselves by now that what they faced was dark magic? Real evil? She wasn’t sure. She should call the police, or go to the station, but she realized that the first people with whom she needed to share her fears were her parents.
Skin stinging from the hot rain, she went back into the house and ran up to her room, pulled on a dry shirt, and spent a moment searching her closet for a raincoat, without luck.
Quiet as she had tried to be because of the early hour, she felt sure she had made enough noise to rouse her parents, but when she went to their room she found they had not stirred. Frowning, she approached their bed. Sometime during the night they had moved together, her father spooning her mother from behind, one arm thrown over her, his face nuzzled against the back of her neck. She had a moment to think of this image as sweetly romantic.
And then she narrowed her eyes and studied the arm that her father had around her mother. She had attributed its dark hue to the gloom of the stormy morning filtering through the curtains, but as she moved closer, she saw something that startled her so badly she froze on the spot. The arm had no hair on it. It had become thinner overnight. At the elbow was a visible joint, the skin clinging so tightly to the bone that it seemed more like a shell.
Like the carapace of an insect or a crustacean.
“Daddy?” Amber whispered, feeling like a little girl again . . . a little girl trapped in a nightmare from which her parents could not save her.
She inched closer. Her father’s forearm had turned so dark it was nearly black. And that bruise-black flesh had spread. She saw her mother’s bare foot sticking out from beneath the covers, and it had also changed. Amber’s breath came in tiny, ragged sips and she began to shake her head in denial. Yet she could not accept it, even then.
Not until she saw their faces in profile, and realized that all signs of age had gone away. Their skin had begun to smooth and harden and darken.
And they no longer had mouths.
Amber screamed and staggered away from the bed, turned and fled from the room and the house, thinking of the police. Chief Kramer. He and his cops—some of them people she had known her whole life—wouldn’t be able to do a fucking thing, but the chief would know what to do. Who to call. Dark magic had poisoned Hawthorne—it’s poisoned me!—and it had to be stopped before her parents had been transformed completely. That had to be what was happening to them, she knew. There could be no mistaking it—the thinning of the limbs, the coloring, the carapace—they were turning into wraiths, just like the one she had seen slithering on the outside of the house, and the one in the corridor the night before.
And then it struck her, hardest of all—that in her dream this morning, she had been one of those things. Amber thrust her hands out and stared at them, pushed up the sleeves of her jacket and felt her skin. She reached up to feel the contours of her face.
I’m still me, she thought. But for how long?
With a glance upstairs, she wondered how she could help Gran. Her parents were sleeping—her scream hadn’t woken them, so maybe they would keep sleeping until they had been completely changed—but how was she supposed to get Gran out of the house?
Then it struck her that Gran hadn’t woken either. She’d screamed so loud that there was no way the old woman hadn’t heard her, no way that it wouldn’t have roused her from her bed if she had been capable of getting up. Amber hadn’t gotten a good look at her skin beneath that bedspread, but a dreadful certainty filled her now, and she knew what she would find.
“Oh, no,” she whispered to herself, feeling more alone than ever.
She whipped out her cell phone and tried it, but couldn’t get a signal. Running to the kitchen, she picked up the house phone to find it dead, not so much as a busy signal. Just blunt nothingness.
There was nothing else she could do, except run. She tapped her pocket to make sure she had her keys. Her car was still parked back on campus. Ben was supposed to drive her back to pick it up, but she had a key to her father’s Jetta, and he sure as hell wouldn’t be using it today. She raced out into the hot, oily rain for a second time.
She slammed the door behind her, twisted it to make sure it had locked, and then turned to sprint to her father’s car, colliding with someone who grabbed at her as they fell in a tangle of arms and legs, hot breath on her neck. Amber screamed, thinking a wraith had come for her, but then she felt ordinary human skin and the touch of gentle hands, and she focused on the face above her.
“Amber,” Miles Varick said. “It’s all right. It’s me.”
His eyes were red from exhaustion or tears or both, but he was not a wraith. Not a monster. Just a man.
“Professor Varick,” she breathed. “Oh, thank God.”
“You’re okay,” he said, and it sounded like a promise. “But we need to talk.”
KEOMANY woke to feel a gentle hand brushing her hair away from her face, and a soft voice telling her it was time to get up. A purr of contentment rumbled in her chest and she nestled deeper under the covers for a moment, her subconscious chasing the strands of a dream that had been deliciously carnal. Then she heard another voice—a girl’s voice—and her brow furrowed.
“Kem, rise and shine,” the male voice said again, a pleasingly sexy rasp.
Coming further awake, she stiffened with recognition and opened her eyes. Peter Octavian sat on the edge of her bed, smiling the lopsided grin that always made something inside her give a little growl. Keomany didn’t have romantic feelings about Octavian—he was with Nikki, so there was no point—but he spent so much time under the weight of grim thoughts that when that grin appeared, it radiated warmth and charm and a swagger that was unmistakably sexual.
“I hate to wake you,” Octavian said, his gray eyes dark, the silver flecks swirling as though caught in a storm, “but we have a lot to catch up on, and a meeting with the chief of police in half an hour.”
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Just after seven.”
Keomany stretched, belatedly realizing she was barely covered. During the night she had kicked off the bedspread and the sheet now veiled only one leg, leaving the rest of her clad only in skimpy pink panties and a T-shirt that her nighttime squirming had twisted up around her.
“Oh, shit,” she said, laughing uneasily. “Sorry.”
As she yanked up the sheet to cover herself, she looked past Octavian toward the sliding glass door that led to the hotel room’s tiny balcony. Charlotte stood there, her clothes tattered and torn, the ruin of her top leaving very little to the imagination. Her bright red hair was dark against the dour gray morning beyond. The v
ampire girl watched her with a sliver of a smile, as though she suspected Keomany’s exposure had been no accident. Keomany wanted to protest the presumption, but knew that she would only draw Octavian’s attention to her discomfort, and did not want to do that.
Get a grip, woman, she thought. It’s Peter. He’s your friend. And so is Nikki.
That was true enough, but between the dream she’d just woken from, the overall absence of any physical intimacy in her life, and Octavian sitting there on the edge of her bed, she had to work to remind herself. Maybe it would have been easier for her to dispel the frisson of erotic tension with which she had woken if she had not caught Octavian, in that moment before she covered herself, casting an appreciative glance along her body.
“I need a shower,” she said.
Charlotte laughed, exposing her fangs. “I’ll say you do.”
Octavian shot her a hard look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Charlotte blinked, stung. “Nothing.”
Keomany arched an eyebrow, wondering if he was being coy or if he really didn’t understand the crack, couldn’t sense the strange dynamic he had created by rousing her from sleep. Men always missed that sort of thing, but Octavian had been born in the fifteenth century—surely he must have learned something about women in all that time. If not, all the better for Keomany. The last thing she wanted was for him to get the wrong idea and mistake her being flustered for some profound attraction.
“I’m just teasing her,” Charlotte added.
“Well, don’t,” Octavian said, standing and moving away from the bed. “If you’re with us in this thing, then you’re with us. Time is short, and there’s nothing funny about the night we just had, or the situation this town is in.”
He turned to Keomany. “How’s your hand?”
Her brow furrowed. She’d forgotten all about it. Flexing her fingers, she smiled.
“Right as rain,” she said.
Octavian nodded. “Excellent.”
Keomany rose from bed, wrapping the sheet around her waist. Again she studied Charlotte’s clothes and felt a twinge of jealousy as she wondered about the night Octavian and the vampire girl had spent together.
“Maybe you should tell me about last night,” she said. “How is it you ended up half naked?”
Charlotte nodded, but without a trace of a smile. She seemed to have taken Octavian’s instruction seriously. She crossed her arms and leaned against the wall next to the rainpattered window.
“More of those spooky black smoke dudes,” Charlotte said. “Plus all the dogs in town went rabid. Then half a dozen kids set their houses on fire, pretty much at the same instant, with their families inside. Kept us busy. The rain of toads didn’t help.”
Keomany gave her a withering look. “Rain of toads? Really?”
Octavian stood at the foot of the bed. “She’s not joking. I wish she were. They rotted down to almost nothing and were washed away by the rain, but the damage was significant. I’m just glad it happened at night.”
“Holy shit,” Keomany whispered.
“Yeah,” Charlotte said. “Long night. And don’t get me started on the wasps.”
“Wasps?”
“Roving swarms,” Octavian confirmed. “Although now that it’s morning, I haven’t seen any. There’s no sun to speak of out there, but it’s still there, behind the clouds. Hopefully the chaos will wane during the day.”
It’s still there, behind the clouds. The words made her think of Gaea, and the way she could feel the goddess in the distance, the purity of nature just out of her reach.
Troubled, Keomany cinched the bedsheet more tightly around her waist, gathering it up so she wouldn’t trip over it as she moved toward the bathroom.
“Look, let me take a quick shower. I’ll throw my hair in a ponytail and put some clothes on and we’ll go talk to the police. On the way you can explain how it is we’ve got a meeting with the chief, and what you’ve got planned.”
“Fair enough,” Octavian said.
“Actually,” Charlotte began, “I was sort of hoping you might have something I could wear.”
Keomany studied her ruined clothes.
“I’m sure I’ve got something,” she said.
The gratitude in Charlotte’s eyes was startling. Keomany went to her travel bag and rooted around, pulling out a fitted white T-shirt and a pair of dark brown jeans. She herself could wear the ones she’d had on the night before, which she had hung over a chair to dry. She tossed Charlotte the clothes and the vampire mumbled her thanks.
The girl had not been a vampire very long and retained most of what Keomany imagined must have been her human personality. She tried to be tough and sexy, all sharp edges and attitude, but within her was a girl who could feel awkward and lonely, and at last Keomany understood why Octavian had kept her with him all night. It wasn’t only that he wanted to keep track of her, to protect Hawthorne from a rogue vampire. He wanted to protect Charlotte, too, from the world, and from the savage hunger that she had confessed was gnawing at her.
That, too, seemed to have abated somewhat with the day.
“You’ve had blood,” Keomany said, staring at her.
Charlotte glanced away, embarrassed. “The dogs went crazy, killing people. We had to put them down.”
Keomany wished she hadn’t asked.
“Peter, why don’t you go back into your room?” she suggested. “We’ll be ready in just a few minutes, and then we’ll head to the police station.”
Octavian glanced back and forth between them, as if it worried him to think of leaving Keomany and Charlotte alone together. After a moment, he relented, and went through the connecting door into his own hotel room, closing it behind him.
Keomany headed for the bathroom, but stopped just inside and looked back out at Charlotte, who had already stripped off the torn remnants of her shirt.
“Those should fit,” Keomany said. “If you need a brush or anything—”
“I’m good,” Charlotte said, cutting her off. She stood in her bloodstained bra and pants, a strange look on her face, liked she’d just discovered something deeply unpleasant. “Thanks for the loan, but we’re not, like, girlfriends now or something.”
“Okay,” Keomany said. “Thanks for clearing that up.”
She started to close the bathroom door.
“And don’t worry,” Charlotte added. “If you want to jump the magician’s bones, I won’t get in the way. He’s way too old for me.”
As Charlotte pulled on the white T-shirt, Keomany froze, staring at her, wondering how much truth there was in the presumption. After a moment, she decided the answer was none at all.
“It isn’t like that. He’s a good man, and easy on the eyes. But he’s involved with someone else. We’re just friends,” Keomany insisted.
Charlotte sneered her doubt. “Yeah. Keep telling yourself that.”
“He’s your friend now, too,” Keomany said. “After the night you just had . . . trial by fire, right? That forges something between people.”
“I’m a vampire,” Charlotte said, as she slipped out of her ruined pants and reached for the clean brown jeans, steadfastly refusing to meet Keomany’s gaze. “That pretty much means I don’t have any friends.”
Keomany had liked Charlotte almost from the moment they’d met. This morning, she had found the girl’s sharpness irritating, but she saw the pain beneath the attitude, saw the girl who had turned nineteen only this year, before a vampire had ended her old life and transformed her into something new.
“That’s not true,” Keomany told her.
Charlotte rolled her eyes.
“Seriously, Charlotte. That kind of thinking comes from Cortez. The guy who murdered the old you. It’s what makes you a rogue. But you don’t have to stay a rogue. The truth is, if you don’t think it’s possible for you to have friends, you’re probably going to die again very soon. Forever, this time.”
Charlotte seemed like she might think that wasn’
t a terrible idea, and for a moment, Keomany thought she would say so. But then the vampire girl zipped and buttoned her pants and went to retrieve the sodden shoes she had slipped off before changing, and the moment had passed.
Keomany closed the door, turned the water on in the shower, and as it began to steam up the bathroom, she tried not to think about how easily a vampire with trust issues could get them all killed.
MILES Varick sat behind the wheel of his car and let Amber’s story sink in. In the passenger seat, the girl shuddered and fidgeted as though she wanted to run, not to get away from him but just to be running . . . to be doing something to escape the unnatural horror that was spreading through Hawthorne. But he knew she would not run—not with her parents and great-grandmother still in the house and somehow under the influence of the dark goddess from her visions.
There in the stillness of the car, windows veiled by the driving rain, which pounded on the roof and the hood with such force that the noise made him want to scream just to drown it out, they shared their terrors. Miles told his student about the black wraith-thing that had ripped the life from his mother, and Amber told her professor about seeing one of them inside her house, and another outside this morning. But what stunned Miles the most was her revelation about the transformation her parents seemed to be undergoing.
Sometime during this exchange of fears, they ceased being professor and student. Miles took a long breath and turned to study Amber. He had long since recognized the bond of friendship—a thing he had rarely felt for his students in the past. That was why he had been so concerned about her yesterday, and why she had called him last night. But now they were allies as well. Whatever happened next, they were in this together.
“So, what now, Professor?” Amber asked, emotion choking her voice. “We’ve got to do something. I can’t just . . . I can’t let this happen to my parents.”
Waking Nightmares Page 19
