She rubbed her temples. “Go. Read. While I adjust to being lectured on credulity by a teleporting Nosferatu.”
I smiled and complied.
In the end we spent a surprisingly companionable evening with our respective tomes of great literature, our conversation superficial and moderately pleasant.
“Why’d you underline this bit here?”
“Ugh, I didn’t. I bought that secondhand. I would never desecrate a book.” She frowned at her laptop. “How do you spell ‘inconceivable’?”
“I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”
She gave that a better laugh than it deserved, perhaps out of surprise to hear such a quote out of my mouth. “Fine, I’ll consult spell-check.”
“The oracle of our time.”
She chuckled again, a marvelously, painfully appealing sound, and I tried to stay very still while the touch her touch her touch her eased off. I was abruptly aware of how small the apartment was. Small, and not very tidy, with two and a half people stuffed into it. The mess was sorted into piles, and I distracted myself trying to decipher the logic behind their organization. The overflowing suitcase by the television was obviously clean clothes, ringed with shoes. The equally overflowing mesh bag was assumedly dirty laundry. The pile of clothes next to the couch was less clear. The adjoining tower of books, papers, folders, notebooks and framed pictures was topped by a Minnie Mouse alarm clock and a ballerina figurine. A blanket, a pillow — and a fuzzy yellow bunny — stuffed under the end table by the couch confirmed my suspicion that the couch doubled as her bed.
Other than her scattered belongings, there was little trace of Naomi in the apartment. The posters on the wall were of felonious-looking Latino heartthrobs and kick-butt slogans in scratchy fonts, things that I could not imagine Naomi espousing, in any sense of the word. The furniture was sturdy and unimaginative, nothing like the pink buttons and lace I extrapolated from the ballerina figurine. Naomi felt like a guest here. One who had, perhaps, overstayed her welcome.
Not your problem. She’s a grown woman, she can take care of herself.
Of course, I didn’t fit in with pink buttons and lace, either. A human’s Shadow was their deepest-held dream come true, sometimes embarrassingly so. Naomi did not seem to find me that irresistible, hugs notwithstanding. How could she? I fit in better with the roommate’s rough-faced hunks than with anything Naomi could want. I could see her with some sweet, gawky farm boy, perhaps even a socially awkward Computer Science major — assuming that wasn’t redundant. I could not see her with me. I still looked like Claire’s dream-boy, and I supposed I always would.
What if the wish-fulfillment thing works backward the second time? It would explain the red hair.
I dug the nails of one hand into my palm until it threatened to bleed, and turned back to my book.
Around the time Bilbo was battling the giant spiders, Naomi absently kicked her shoes off. Only they didn’t budge. Wincing, she set the laptop aside and bent laboriously over to tug at her shoelaces.
“Let me,” I said. Her feet were so swollen, it took some minutes of patient work to coax the shoes off. Just looking at her puffy sausage toes made my stomach hurt. Telling myself I would do the same thing for Dove or Teya, I pulled a beanbag from a corner to sit on and started massaging her feet.
“Ack! What?” She sounded dazed, as if I’d woken her from a deep sleep. “You don’t… have to… oh…” She sagged deeper into the couch with a long sigh that was almost a whimper.
The door opened, and a sturdy-looking Hispanic girl, assumedly Carmen the Roommate, raised her eyebrows as she caught the end of the whimper.
“Well, don’t let me interrupt anything!” she sang, crossing her arms and leaning against the doorframe.
Naomi paled and began to flail about on the couch, trying to stand or turn around or both, and failing to accomplish either. “Carmen — I — He’s not — we’re not—”
“Hey, you don’t have to justify yourself to me!” Carmen looked thrilled, whether at Naomi’s discomfiture or her good fortune was hard to say. The balance clearly tipped toward good fortune when she saw me. “My, my, aren’t you an interesting-looking lad. I wouldn’t have pegged you for Naomi’s type. Carmen Rodriguez.”
“Damon DiNovi.”
She shook my hand a little longer than necessary — mostly, I judged, to get a rise out of Naomi. She succeeded.
“Aren’t you home early, Carmen?” She was probably unaware of the level of frost in her voice. And could not possibly know how gratifying a show of jealousy could be to a Shadow.
“No, but I can understand why you’d think so. Time does fly when you’re having fun.” Carmen’s smirk was deepening at precisely the same rate as Naomi’s blush. “Well, I’m just going to change clothes and go meet some friends at the club. You kids have fun!” She pranced through the bedroom door. We could hear her humming through the wall. I didn’t recognize the song, but apparently Naomi did. Her face got redder.
We sat in silence until Carmen, having traded in her white work uniform for something red and sparkly and strapless, bounced back to the front door. “Just remember, curfew is midnight!” she said, and waved her fingers at us before closing the door behind her.
“I would like to apologize for my roommate’s behavior,” Naomi said. “As you can see, she was raised by wolves and doesn’t understand normal human etiquette.”
“I like her,” I said, and grinned at her narrow-eyed glare. Yes, very gratifying. Which meant I needed to stop immediately. “How’s the paper coming?”
“I have an outline and three sources,” she said wearily. “And a headache.”
“Sounds like bedtime, then. It’s nearly eleven.”
She frowned. “Do you sleep?”
“A little. Three or four hours a night is plenty.” I gestured to the green recliner where my book straddled the arm. “I’ll just take a nap in the chair and do some more reading.”
“Um… you really can’t be here when Carmen gets back. That ‘midnight curfew’ thing? She was serious. It’s a house rule, no visitors after midnight.”
“Ah.”
“Can you stay in the shadows all night?” She sounded doubtful.
I was tempted to say yes and deal with the fallout later, but I had no right to get her in trouble with her roommate. Her situation was precarious enough. “If I fall asleep, I’ll… fall out of the shadow, you might say.”
“That could be awkward.”
“Unless I was in yours,” I added reluctantly.
“What?”
“In your shadow. I could stay there almost indefinitely. In fact, I know Shadows who… just sort of stay there all the time.” Generally those whose Lumii were married. Speaking of awkward.
“Oh. And you could sleep there?”
“Yes. You’ll, um… you’ll know I’m there, but it doesn’t hurt or anything.” Actually, it would be freakishly uncomfortable, but she’d be asleep anyway.
“Well… hop in, then, I guess.”
“I’ll wait until you’re changed.”
“Oh. Of course.” She pinked and stepped into the bedroom. She emerged moments later, not in the blood-stained pajamas I had half-expected, but in a white nightgown spangled with bananas in various neon colors. I bit my lip and tried not to laugh.
Then bit harder and tried not to gag. I had just remembered where I learned how good red hair and white nightgowns looked together.
“So I really do look like her, don’t I?”
I could only stare for a moment. We had not reached a level where she could pick up my thoughts, we had not. “Your coloring,” I said at last. “Red hair, blue eyes.” That milky, translucent skin peculiar to redheads, she had that, too…
“What was her name?”
“Claire.” The word didn’t want to come out. I couldn’t do this.
“What happened to her?”
“If Carmen won’t be home until midnight, I think I’ll do a little m
ore reading. You go on to bed.” I returned to the recliner and Bilbo Baggins, and did not look up until she was fast asleep.
CHAPTER FOUR
Thunderstorm in a Box
NAOMI
Bad dreams. That’s what comes of forgetting to say your prayers.
In the dream, I watched myself, standing in a room full of broken glass. Something was in my hand — a whip, a club, something — and I was using it to beat a dark creature curled up on the floor. A dog, or a boy, I wasn’t sure which. He kept trying to crawl away, but he was tied to my leg with a long red ribbon. And I was beating him and screaming that he was mine. Mine. Mine.
Things didn’t get a whole lot more normal when I woke up. Because somehow, on a couch that was barely big enough when Baby Mountain was a molehill, I had company.
My first instinct was to shove him off, but it didn’t work. I sat up, disoriented in the dark living room, and explored the area with my hands. There was no one in my lap, or on my chest, or in my hair.
He was in my head.
I had some kind of full-body spasm and came off the couch in a bundle of blankets and flailing limbs. Damon caught me before I fell.
“What’s wrong?”
“You — was that you?” I gasped. “In — in my head, like, like, I don’t know—”
“Shh. That was me. I should have warned you, but you were asleep.”
Still panting, I sank back onto the couch. “So that’s what it feels like, to have you in my shadow?”
“Yes.” He paused. “Was it that awful?”
I pulled Sunny Bunny into my lap and stroked his fur, thinking. “No,” I decided. “Just unexpected. It didn’t hurt or anything, it just — like you said, I could just feel that you were there. Like you were filling up my head, like water filling the spaces between rocks… What time is it?”
“Just after five.”
I cocked my head. “You can see the clock?” The only clock in the living room was the ticking variety. To make it light up you’d have to set it on fire.
“We have good night vision.”
“Of course you do.” I glanced toward the bedroom, where Carmen’s lava-lamp nightlight gleamed scarlet under the door. “Did Carmen see you?”
“No, although she was seeing two of everything else by the time she got home.”
“Good. She’ll be sleeping hard, then.” I switched on the lamp beside the couch.
He blinked as the pupils in his cat-green eyes tightened. “As you should be.”
“I do my best thinking when I’m tired. It slows my thoughts down so I can catch up with them. And I want to be able to show some progress on your dad’s term paper. It’s supposed to be due today.”
He looked as if he would argue for a moment, then shrugged and went back to The Hobbit.
Before I knew it, I was in the zone. Words spilled across the page like a wave of army ants, formed squads and platoons, and marched together toward an inevitable conclusion, burning and pillaging along the way. Stray punctuation marks fled in terror. The introduction needed disciplining, I realized. Pull your weight, semi-colon! Get those malingering adverbs out of my sight! Tighten up, you lily-livered transitions, or I’ll put every one of you in the past tense, if you know what I mean! And this — you call this a complete thought? Do you call this a complete thought?
I looked up two hours later, dazed as if I’d been dreaming again, jerked out of the reverie by the sound of Carmen’s alarm clock. She wouldn’t be up until she’d hit snooze at least three times, but still, I ought to tell Damon to hide.
He was reclined in the armchair, The Hobbit face-down on his chest, fast asleep.
He had turned his face away from the dim, buttery light of the lamp, but it still washed over one cheek and ear, and settled into the curves of his hair. I’d never seen him without his leather jacket before; it lay across the arm of the chair like a sleeping pet, leaving only a white T-shirt and jeans. With his eyes closed, the burning tension in his face eased, he looked younger and softer. He looked beautiful.
I hadn’t drawn anything, really drawn, in a long time. Not since before the divorce. And I knew before I started that I’d never be able to get it right. I’d be lucky if it was recognizably human — or whatever. But I eased my old sketchbook out of the pile of things by my bed, found a stub of pencil, and started drawing Damon.
Carmen’s alarm clock went off again, somewhere along the way, and again. I gasped when her bedroom door opened, having more or less forgotten she existed, and was prepared to panic when she saw Damon still here — but he wasn’t. His jacket was still in the chair, but Carmen didn’t seem to notice.
“Morning people,” she muttered, on seeing me awake, “should be exterminated.”
I remained prudently silent as she lurched past me into the kitchen.
There was no sign of Damon all morning, as Carmen and I wordlessly dodged each other in our separate routines of breakfast, shower and toiletries. She had a nine o’clock Chemistry lab on Fridays, not far from Dr. DiNovi’s class in the English building; I stepped into the humid spring morning only seconds after she did and could easily have caught up to her, but I wasn’t that stupid. There were some Friday mornings we walked together and chatted, but this was not destined to be one of them. When it came to homicidal monsters, vampires paled, so to speak, next to a roommate with a hangover.
Carmen was out of sight, leaving me to huff and puff my way up The Hill of Doom and Hatred, with the first outskirts of campus visible as a dorm to my right and the dining hall to the left, before Damon reappeared. Suddenly he was at my elbow as I passed through the shadow of a streetlight.
“Where have you been?” I said crossly. And breathlessly. “I could have been eaten by a half-dozen vampires by now.”
“Shadow-hopping. I was never far.”
He sounded as cross as I did. Well, I supposed it was unfair to expect a vampire to be a morning person. I let him keep his grumpy to himself for a while as we walked.
As we waited at a crosswalk, I yawned, a huge yawn that seemed to be trying to eat my face.
“I told you you needed more sleep,” he said when I was finished.
“I think I dithlocated my tongue!” I rubbed the underside of my chin. “It hurtth!”
“You’re going to fall asleep in Dad’s class, which he will consider a hilarious opportunity to do cruel things to you. Why didn’t you have any coffee this morning? Carmen had three cups.”
I tapped the Wonder Tummy, which was kicking my ribs. “Caffeine not good for baby. Last thing I need is Bladder Bouncer on thtimulants.”
He touched my elbow as we started across the crosswalk, but quickly dropped it again. “When are you due?”
“Late May. Thank God. I should just be able to graduate.” My tongue was feeling better now. “Assuming I pass all my classes, which is not what you’d call ‘in the bag’ at this point.” I felt a too-familiar cloud of panic start to gather in my chest. “I have to graduate. My scholarship won’t cover any more semesters, and paying for school is right out. My only hope for avoiding welfare is to graduate and get a really good job right away. Assuming there are any really good jobs you can get with an English degree. I don’t know why I let my parents talk me into that, I’m not convinced it’s really any more employable than an art degree…” I eyed him sideways. “You haven’t asked where the father is.”
“It’s not my business.”
“You don’t even want to know, do you? The less you know, the quicker you can forget me.”
He didn’t answer.
I crossed my arms and stopped walking. “I was married to a boy named Tyler Price for a grand total of five and a half months. I didn’t know about Wonder Tummy until — oh, why not confess — shortly before the divorce was finalized. Presumed conception date is shortly before I caught Tyler with his co-worker Tori, who has bleached hair and crooked teeth. My parents were horrified when Tyler and I eloped to Las Vegas, and even more horrified when I divorced hi
m after less than half a year. They wrote me off as twopenny white-trash who had made her own bed and could now sleep in it, or out of it, or under a bridge for all they cared. Let’s see, what else can I tell you? My favorite color is blue. I like cats, bunnies, and turtles. I once had a pet bat, that was memorable.”
“Stop it.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not going to forget you.”
He was standing very close, and looking me in the eye for once, and I couldn’t move. My skin felt like static electricity all over, and I wanted… I wasn’t sure what. Hazard a guess, sweetheart.
“Well, good,” I said, weak-voiced. “That’s settled, then.”
We walked the rest of the way to the English building in silence.
DAMON
If you cut through the skin, it won’t heal until you hunt again. Do you want to leave bloody handprints everywhere for the next few days? I eased my nails out of my palms before they punctured, and began clenching my teeth instead. My head immediately began to ache.
It wasn’t Naomi’s fault that she was proving harder to resist than any other human I’d come across. Any new Lumi, bright as a sun, precious and beautiful as a newborn child, attracted a Tenebri’s attention. It was easy, so easy for a kathair to believe that this one was different, special, this one’s blood could heal him, take away his pain not just for a moment, but forever. I was not immune to the effect, though I’d never fallen for it as heavily as some. Until now. Because I knew, every cell of me knew, that Naomi was different, was special, would heal me if I let her. Resisting that was a new and unusual agony; I had to keep reminding myself it wasn’t her fault.
It also wasn’t Naomi’s fault that she would be a gaping wound in my psyche for the rest of my life, that every moment I spent with her was a memory that would torture me later. It could have been much worse. Naomi was a good person. Scatterbrained and a little strange, but good. Kind.
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