“Oh, I… fell off my bike,” I said, pressing a hand to the wound. Before she could ask how me and the Wonder Tummy had managed to get on a bicycle — at least outside of a circus tent — I continued, “So how many befastings have you been to?”
“Oh, ten or twelve, by now. I enjoy the actual ceremony, it’s just the hobnobbing beforehand that gets a little nerve-wracking.” She shook her head. “My Lumi says it’s good for me to get out. I guess he’s right. What about you?”
“This is my first.” I gave an embarrassed smile. “I don’t know anyone except the DiNovis.”
“Oh, poor thing. What about the Craigs, don’t you know them? They’re right over there.”
I craned my head, trying to figure out who she was pointing at. “I don’t think so. Should I?”
“Briana Craig is a sort of relative of Dr. DiNovi’s, a cousin of his brother’s Shadow.”
“Wow. That’s not a family tree, it’s a family pasta.”
Martha laughed. “That’s how it tends to work, among the Lumilia families.”
“I didn’t even know Dr. DiNovi had a brother, much less a brother with a Shadow.”
“Oh.” She looked uncomfortable. “Well, I don’t like to gossip, but this is pretty common knowledge. Frank DiNovi’s brother and his Shadow were killed only a few days after their befasting, by a kathair. That’s why Frank became a Hunter.”
“Hunter?” I looked at her, baffled.
“I imagine that’s how he’s been able to protect his son — all those old Formyndari contacts. Such a sad case. Have you met him?”
“Damon?” I stammered.
“Is that his name now? I saw him once. He wasn’t nearly as… wild-eyed as I expected. You never know how much of the stories to believe.” She shivered.
I glanced at Helen, still deep in conversation with a couple dressed in deep Victorian goth. Finally, people who looked vampiric… but they weren’t.
“I hear different words,” I said hesitantly to Martha. “Vampire, orphan, kathair. Are they all the same thing?”
“They all mean a Shadow who’s breached — lost their Lumi, or at least lost the bond to their Lumi. ‘Orphan’ is a… kinder term, more polite. ‘Kathair’ implies that they’re out of control. And have to be put down.” She shivered again. “You won’t hear ‘vampire’ much, these days. That’s the Hollywood term.”
“What language is ‘kathair’ from? It can’t be English.”
“It’s Tenebrial.”
“Tenebrial?”
“The Shadow tongue.” She was looking at me a little oddly now, doubtless wondering how such an abyss of ignorance got invited to begin with. “Not really a language, just a smattering of phrases and words for… concepts that English doesn’t quite cover. It’s a mishmash, mostly of Greek and Latin. And Swedish. Mangled Swedish. Kathair means destroyer. Or one who has been destroyed, it’s nicely ambiguous.”
“Briana! How are you?” Helen’s voice caught my ear. I glanced up to see that a new couple had joined her conversation with the goths, surely the quasi-cousin Craigs that Martha had expected me to know.
They were neither one older than twelve.
“They’re the youngest pair in the region. It made some waves,” Martha murmured, waving at the little boy, who waved shyly back. “I think they’re adorable.”
They were adorable, holding hands like any fifth-grade sweethearts, the girl chattering to Helen about her science fair project while the boy just sort of basked in her glow. I suddenly missed Damon, missed him like I’d missed Grampa Charlie when he died, like I’d missed my friends and home and family and cat when I went away to college. He wasn’t far away. I would see him again in a few hours. It was ridiculous and unnecessary and it hurt like crap. I realized with horror that I was about to burst into tears.
“Excuse me, do you know where the bathroom is?” I croaked, and Martha, looking startled, pointed toward a hallway to our left. Blinking frantically, I fled the room.
Inevitably, I went through the wrong door, finding myself not in a bathroom but in a dining nook of some sort, undecorated and unlit, clearly not meant for company. Which was perfect, because I was looking to avoid company myself. I bypassed the shiny-black table with its hard, narrow chairs and sank onto a rose-colored windowseat, trying to keep my sobs as quiet as possible.
Okay, calm thoughts. Stress hormones, not a good thing for the Wonder Tummy. A lady at the pregnancy crisis center had tried to teach me relaxation techniques, but I was too scatterbrained for meditation, and yoga, inexplicably, gave me panic attacks. Like this one.
“Are you hurt?”
The voice was quiet and gentle and nearly made me fall off the windowseat. I turned to see a child in a little suit and tie crawling out from under the table, watching me with solemn concern.
The attack was passing off, but not before leaving a wake of Cosmetics Destruction in its path. I grabbed a napkin from the holder in the middle of the table and dabbed at my eyes. “No, I’m not hurt.”
“Then why are you crying?”
“Because…” I shrugged mentally and abandoned myself to the truth. “Because my friend isn’t here and I miss him.”
“Oh.” He continued to watch me solemnly, and I stared back with increasing unease. I couldn’t quite decide what the child looked like; everything about him was somehow indistinct, hazy. I could easily convince myself he had dark hair, or light hair, or none at all, as if he were some half-remembered figure from a dream while he was standing right in front of me. I thought of how Peter had blurred and softened, right before he disintegrated.
“Are you okay?” I asked, hesitant.
“Yeah,” he said with a huge sigh.
“Then why are you…” Never comment on a Shadow’s appearance. “…hiding under a table?”
“There’s so many people. I don’t like it.” His face clouded. Strangely, I could interpret his expression as easily as anyone’s — even though I could never have described his features.
“Shy, huh? I know how that feels,” I said. “I’ll leave you alone, I just need to fix my make-up.” I turned to a mirror above the table and surveyed the damage.
“You can stay if you want,” he said. “You’re all glowy, like a nightlight.”
“So I’m told.” He was definitely a Shadow, then. Not that he could be anything else. “My name’s Naomi.” Curiosity, and a powerful determination not to hurt the kid’s feelings, enabled me to hold out my hand.
He shook it. He felt perfectly normal, warm and solid and real. “Hi.”
“What’s your name?” I prompted.
“I don’t have one yet. I’m only this many.” He held up four fingers.
“You don’t have a name? What do people call you, then?”
“My mommy and daddy call me Son. Or Sonny. My sissy calls me Pipsqueak.” He smiled. “Are you having a baby?”
“Yes.”
He patted my tummy, and I couldn’t bring myself to mind. “A human baby?”
“Um, yes.” Unless Tyler was keeping secrets from me…
“Is it a boy or a girl?”
“I don’t know yet.” I hadn’t wanted to know.
“Are you going to name it?”
“Well, of course.” I had thought of leaving that to the adoptive parents, if I found any. I had also thought of crawling under the bed and staying there until the kid’s eighteenth birthday. Now, looking at this nameless, faceless little boy, it took all of a second for me to decide I was not throwing my baby into the world sans moniker. “If it’s a girl,” I said, “maybe Rachel or Elizabeth, or Lily or Amy… And for a boy… I don’t know.”
“Duncan is naming my sister Joy,” he said. “I think that’s pretty.”
“I think that’s pretty, too.”
The door opened and beautiful, blonde Gloria Downs stepped through. “There you two are! We’ve been looking everywhere.” She raised an eyebrow at the boy, who looked sheepish.
“Sorry, Mommy.”
/>
“Well, I’m glad you two have met, anyway. I had thought to seat you together, Miss Winters, if that’s all right.”
“Actually, that sounds like fun.” I stood and held out a hand to the boy. “Come on, Pipsqueak. Let’s go eat dinner.”
DAMON
“Status report,” I said, stepping from the shadow of the dish cabinet. Westley was bent over a paper at the kitchen table. He looked up and frowned.
“Where’s Naomi?” he asked.
“With my parents. At a befasting ceremony.”
Westley winced. “Your father has some strange ideas about propriety.”
“Status report? Today?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes, yes. Galatea’s playing her clarinet in New York somewhere, complete with hat for donations. Dove and Darling are hunting in Beijing, if that’s far enough afield for you. Jewel is working in the garden, Audrey’s getting some sleep at last, and Adonis is earning some cash helping one of the neighbors fix his roof.”
“Useful vampires. Excellent. How are they holding up? Is anyone fraying particularly at the seams?”
“No more than you’d expect, after Peter. They could all use a little more attention from ‘Daddy,’ though.”
“I know. I know they could, but there’s not much I can do about it right now. They’ll have to make do with ‘Mom.’” I bumped his shoulder, then realized what the paper on the table was — a job application. “What’s with this? You have a job.”
“Had,” Westley sighed. “They’re outsourcing.”
“Ouch.”
“I hate filling these things out.” He flicked a hand at the paper, overflowing with false dates, made-up names, and fictional references. Getting a job without benefit of a legal identity was never an easy proposition.
“Well, maybe it’s for the best. I’m going to be leaning on you awfully hard for the next few days.”
“I’ve already got a bit of a stockpile going.” He gestured toward the refrigerator. “Had Darling hit a couple of blood banks.”
“Good. We’ll need more.”
“Damon,” Westley said gently, “would you like to sit down?”
I realized I was pacing. I felt nervous, restless, edgy. Like any Shadow separated from his Lumi. With an effort, I settled into a chair at the table.
Westley continued, “I told Galatea to ask around with the New York homeless, see if she could get any donors.”
“I don’t want live humans anywhere near me. And that includes my father.”
“You barely got through it last time with his help.”
“I’m not putting him in danger.”
“He’s a grown man, Damon. Don’t you think—”
“Suppose I lose it and kill him. My mother will die, too.” I was pacing again. “The Formyndari will put me down as a killer, and probably you, too, for helping me. And how many of the others? Dying might not bother you very much, but what about Galatea, Jewel, Audrey—”
“Okay, I get it.” Westley shook his head. “If you die on me, Brother, your parents will kill me, which might not bother me very much, but then who’s going to look after the others?”
“I already told you, I’m going to try my best not to die.”
“How’s this for motivation?” He stood and grabbed my shirtfront as I paced by, forcing me to a stop. “You start fading, and I’m bringing in your father whether you like it or not.”
“Westley—”
“Shut up.”
I had never seen his eyes so hard. I frowned, and watched something else leak into his face, something I had seen in the faces of far too many orphans just before they faded. Something wide and dark and bottomless. I fought a surge of panic.
Westley’s not going to fade. He can’t. Emily’s deathbed extortion, Westley’s forced promise not to follow her, was excruciating for him — but downright reassuring for me. Westley, of all my orphans, could never leave me.
“Fine,” I said finally. “But don’t you dare let me kill him.”
“As you wish,” he said dryly.
“Good.” I rubbed my forehead and tried again to sit down. My skin was crawling with the need to be with Naomi. “Have we replaced the soft restraints?”
“Not yet. Top of the agenda.” He scribbled himself a note on a yellow sticky.
“Better hurry. It could be as early as tomorrow morning, though I wouldn’t expect it until late afternoon.” My mind flashed the image of Peter tearing his way through the restraints, screaming like he was burning alive. I shivered. Don’t think about the pain. It won’t help. It’ll come when it comes.
Westley put a hand on my shoulder. “We’re going to get you through this, bro.”
“I know. I know that.” I ran a hand through my hair, trying to ease the crawling-skin feeling. “Lousy timing on all this. I’m needed here and I can’t think straight long enough to… Have you heard from the nonres pairs? They should have reported in by now.”
“They have. A minor problem here and there, nothing that can’t wait.”
“How is Audrey doing? She seems okay to me, but I’ve only seen her for a few minutes at a time.”
“She’s doing as well as can be expected. Her Lumi keeps trying to Call her back.”
“Any more incidents with him and Adonis?” Audrey’s roommate had taken it upon himself to educate her violent Lumi in the error of his ways. Audrey and I had intervened before it went further than mutual threats and posturing.
“No, he seems focused on persuading Audrey to breach. He and Jewel keep telling her it’s better to get it over with, but she can’t quite make up her mind to it. I think part of her is still hoping Martin can change, that he’ll just magically stop beating her.” He rubbed his temples, as if he had a headache. “Haven’t seen Paris for days, but that’s not unusual.”
“It’s just as well if he stays away until… this is over. One less person to worry about. But if we haven’t heard from him in a week, we need to send someone to look for him.” I did not stand up. I did not pace. “Speaking of things I’ve neglected…” I did stand up, to pull a sheaf of maps, charts, and photographs from atop the china cabinet. “I know Liberty’s trail is pretty cold right now, but the Formyndari’s focus on Peter buys some unexpected time to look around without their interference. Not long — I imagine they’ll realize their mistake as soon as they interview anyone who knew Peter. Not to mention how obvious it will become when the murders don’t stop.”
“I guess we’re about due for another, aren’t we?” Westley’s face looked abruptly more drawn than usual.
The murders had come at a pretty steady rate of every four months. Did that stretch of time mean something? Was it just the longest that Liberty could restrain himself? I tapped my finger absently on each of the three red Xs on the map, each representing two deaths; three particularly monstrous Lumii and the respective Shadows they’d brutalized.
“The connections are so tenuous,” I said. “I wish I could believe it had nothing to do with us, but as they say, twice is coincidence, three times is evidence… We really can’t deny the pattern anymore.”
“What about the other theory? That there isn’t any one ‘Liberty,’ that the Shadows themselves are doing this? Not a serial killer, but a string of murder-suicides.”
“Committed by Shadows who never met or heard of each other, but who all chose to paint the same phrase on the wall?” I shook my head. “I’m not feeling it. Besides, a just-breached kathair is in no position, physically or mentally, to paint legible, coherent words on the wall. The lines aren’t even shaky.” I fanned out the crime scene photographs I’d secretly copied from the Formyndari, hoping that somehow, this time, they would tell me something besides People died horribly here.
Westley was, as always, drawn to the one photograph we had from the very first crime scene, back when the Formyndari thought it was indeed a murder-suicide, a Shadow beaten until she broke. At the edge of the photo — an overview of the blood-soaked bedroom where she and h
er Lumi had died — you could see the pile of gray ashes that had been Westley’s sister Kitty.
What was worse, for Westley? To believe his sister was murdered? Or to believe that she did this to herself?
“At least you’re off the hook,” I said. Westley’s late-night visit to his Lumi’s grave, the night his sister died, couldn’t actually be proven, and for a scary few days the Formyndari had looked very narrowly at the Shadow’s brother who had so vehemently urged her to breach. But in the end even they couldn’t call it proof, and his alibis for the other two murders were rock-solid. Unlike mine.
“Everyone has an alibi,” Westley said. “For at least one of them. And nobody has one for all three. It’s quicksand. What does an alibi even mean for a Shadow, who can cross a thousand miles in a blink?”
“Yeah,” I sighed, running my eyes down the alibi chart we’d put together, “but we only have so much to work with. Means? We all have teeth, we all have knives. Motive? None of us are fond of abusive Lumii. All we can trade on is opportunity.”
We both stared moodily down at the papers.
“The Lumii are no loss,” Westley said. “If the Shadows were surviving it, I’d…”
“You’d what? Condone murder? Listen to yourself, Westley. You know what a thin ledge of indulgence we live on. If the Formyndari ever heard you say it was okay to kill people, even people who treat Tenebrii like dirt, you’d bring them down on all of us.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“What’s with you lately?” I said, more thoughtful than angry. “You smoke, you say odd things, you… you give me orders. What’s going on?”
“Emily’s birthday, that’s all.” He wasn’t meeting my eyes.
“I’ve been with you through thirteen Emily’s birthdays. You’ve never acted like this.”
He stared down at his own hand, palm-up and empty, and I could hardly hear his voice. “Things change.”
In the space of a breath, the restless unease under my skin went from an irritation to a knee-buckling agony. Just as it had the night Peter attacked her.
Secondhand Shadow Page 10
