“Well, I’ve finished work for today. I’m supposed to clean the apartment, but Carmen won’t care that much if I wait until tomorrow. I’m free to do whatever you want to do while we’re waiting.”
“Don’t you have a paper to work on?”
“Damon, you could die. I’m not sure you grasp that you could die.” I had to pause and gather myself a moment. “I’d rather do just about anything than work on a term paper today and I think your father will understand.”
“Why is everyone so convinced I’m going to die? I’ve done this once, I can do it again.”
“Look, yesterday we did what I wanted, and today it’s your turn.” I crossed my arms and tried to give him my best Babysitter’s Glare. “Damon, tell me what you want to do today.”
He leaned against the column, looking amused despite himself. “Anyplace I want to go I’ve pretty much been already.”
“Do you bowl? Skydive? Fish? Play board games?”
Damon looked bemused. “Well… I was Regional Scrabble Champ, as a teenager. In the baby-Shadow-homeschooling ring. I haven’t played Scrabble in… a long time.”
“Excellent. I’m awful at Scrabble. Sounds like fun.” I bit my lip. “I don’t think me or Carmen have a set. We’ll have to go buy one.” I stood and fished a ten dollar bill out of my pocket. “Do you think this will cover it?”
He waved it off. “Don’t be silly. I’ll pay for it.”
“No, no, I got paid today. Cashed it on the way home from work. It’s fine.” I caught his hand and tried to push the ten into it. He wouldn’t close his fingers around it. “How do you orphans support yourselves, anyway? It can’t be easy. Take it already.”
“I can afford the blasted board game.” He tried to give the money back. I tried to push it back to him. Our hands got all tangled together and the next thing I knew I could feel his breath on my neck and, unless I was very much mistaken, the sharp points of teeth.
“Damon, stop.” I could hardly hear myself over my own heartbeat. He had said once that if I told him to stop, he’d be able to stop. “Damon, stop.”
He stopped. He didn’t pull back, but he stopped. I could feel him trembling.
I pulled out my biggest, baddest Babysitter Voice. “Damon, you are not allowed to bite me. Do you understand?” The words shook a little. I hoped that wouldn’t ruin the effect.
“I understand.” I felt more than heard his reply.
“Step back. Now.”
He stepped back, hands pulling free of mine. I could see that his teeth were like Peter’s, all sharp and pointy, tiny white daggers filling his mouth. He closed his eyes and swallowed hard, and when he breathed again they were back to normal.
I ended up back on the bench, my knees having decided this would be a good time to take sick leave. When I looked up, Damon was gone.
I waited, my head spinning too much to even try to walk home, though I did manage to catch my ten-dollar bill before it blew too far away. The campus wasn’t quite deserted, even on a Saturday morning; a pair of Chinese exchange students walked down the opposite side of the quad under an orange parasol, and a grey-haired woman in a suit passed within reach of me, giving me a sideways glance as she walked by.
Was he coming back at all? Did I want him to?
Yes. I shivered, and did not try to explain or qualify the statement to myself.
Father in Heaven, please let him be okay. Where had he gone? What was he doing? Did he need help? What if he never came back? I remembered the scattering of dust that had been Peter, and started pacing around the bench.
It took me rather longer than it should have to realize that I was sitting in the open with a Lumi-shaped bulls-eye on my forehead. At least it was daylight, and there were people around. I would be okay. He would be back soon. He would be back soon.
Father in Heaven, please let me be okay.
I thought of going home, but if a vampire attacked me in the apartment while Carmen was there, I was pretty sure she would evict me.
A figure solidified out of the shadow of the nearest column, and I scrambled to my feet, but it was Damon.
“Maybe the Formyndari are right,” he murmured, turning a shrink-wrapped Scrabble box around and around in his hands. “Maybe we should all be put down.” He kept trying to look at me and failing.
“Damon.” Throwing my arms around him would be a monumentally stupid move right now, but I couldn’t help touching a tentative hand to his arm. “Are you okay?”
He didn’t reply, but one hand felt its way up my arm like a blind person’s, slowly drawing me to his chest. The game thumped against my back.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“I was worried about you,” I mumbled into his shirt.
“That makes two of us.” He hugged me tight, seeming helpless to stop it. As usual, our respective skins had their own ideas what our relationship should be. “I shouldn’t have left you alone, I can’t believe I left you alone, but I… don’t know what else I could have done.”
“It’s all right. I’m fine.”
He gave a bitter laugh. “No thanks to me. So much for the idea of me being stronger than most orphans. Although it doesn’t help that I’m so close to breach. I think my body knows that bad things are about to happen to it unless… unless we befast.”
“Would biting me work?”
“Not as such. But it would get you bleeding, which is halfway there.” He shuddered and stepped back from me. “You handled it well.”
I narrowed my eyes, looking for sarcasm, but didn’t find it. “Do you think that’s going to happen again?”
“No,” he said firmly. “Not now that I’m on guard against it. It ambushed me, that’s all.”
I nodded. “Well, then. There’s some tables down by the food court where we can set up the board.”
We didn’t speak again until we were sitting outside the back door of the food court, cement benches cold under our legs, with the new Scrabble board set up between us.
“So, what would have happened if you’d bitten me?” I asked, as he laid out all seven of his tiles. P-R-E-V-I-O-U-S. Fifty point bonus. I was so going to lose this game.
“You wouldn’t turn into a vampire, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“That’s reassuring,” I said dryly, “but actually I was wondering what… why… I mean, you said you need human blood to survive, but why? What does it do for you?” E-V-O-K-E. Take that, Regional Champ!
Damon fiddled with his tiles, rearranging them. “Remember how Shadows are made out of something different from humans? We can do a lot of cool things, but we can’t repair ourselves, not without our Lumi’s blood. It sort of… shows our bodies what to do. Gives an example to follow.” P-A-N-G. “Losing your Lumi is a wound, essentially, and it doesn’t heal. But human blood keeps us alive, at least. Holds us together.”
“What about animal blood?” S-W-E-E-T.
He grimaced. “I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work. Maybe a primate would be close enough, but cow, dog, chicken, and possum blood don’t do the trick.”
“Possum blood?”
His face reddened as he laid out tiles. L-O-R-E.
“Does it… taste good?”
“Possum blood?”
I rolled my eyes. “Blood, period.”
“Neither here nor there, really. But it’s… it makes the pain stop. That’s what makes us so dangerous. We don’t have to take that much. But the pain comes back as soon as you stop, so…” He wouldn’t look at me. “We use a buddy system. Your hunting partner’s job is to pull you off after three swallows, no matter how much you fight them. It’s your turn.”
“Oh. Yeah.” I tried to turn my attention to my tiles. “I’ve been wondering about all the legendary stuff. You know, immortality, garlic, stakes through the heart, turning into a bat, looking good in a cape, that sort of thing.”
He snorted. “I’ve met one or two convinced enough of their own damnation that they would recoil from a cross. The b
at thing is probably an attempt to explain our speed of travel. Stake through the heart? Maybe. Just about the only thing that can kill a kathair is to make them bleed out before they can bleed you out.”
“What, even chopping off your head wouldn’t do it?”
“We’re not so easy to chop up. Our bones and muscles are stronger than yours. Our skin, though, not so much. Thus the bleeding. Are you going to play, or not?”
I was halfway through setting out the tiles for E-D-E-N when the world tilted and spun and crashed into me. I half-expected to explode, considering my resemblance to a water balloon. My body stayed in one piece, though that piece seemed to consist of a single resounding Ouch, while I struggled against the weight holding me to the ground.
The weight was Damon. And he had already leaped away to crouch between me and a pale, wild-eyed thing with very sharp teeth.
I had managed to land on my head instead of my belly. I couldn’t seem to move quite right, but I managed to shuffle myself up under the poured-cement table and hunch there like I was in an air-raid drill. There were a lot of hissing and snarling and catfight noises going on. Big cats. Just like that night with Peter. Bad, bad, this is bad. My eyes were focusing again, so I dared a peek out from under the table.
Maybe my eyes weren’t focusing after all. No, everything else was clear. It was just the vampire that was blurry. Indistinct, undefined, like Pipsqueak. It might have been a slender, longish-haired man, or a broad-shouldered, inelegant sort of woman. Its clothes were tattered and dirty, not like a poor person, but like a feral person, someone who had forgotten what real clothes were. It turned toward me, torn and bleeding, and its eyes were bright with a harsh, feverish, unnatural light, like burning magnesium. I couldn’t move.
Damon could. He leaped like a lion onto a gazelle, and the two of them rolled out of my line of sight, leaving only a smear of blood on the concrete. I huddled deeper into the shadow of the table.
The dogfight noises stopped. For three breaths I waited for Damon to call the all-clear. When he didn’t, I craned my head out from under the table to look.
Just in time to see the vampire pull the knife from Damon’s limp hand and raise it above his chest.
“Over here!” I screamed, scrambling out from under the table. “Look! Look! I’m over here! Come and get it!”
The vampire whirled, knife falling from its hand, and began moving toward me. It didn’t walk, exactly — it seemed to glide, as though its nebulous body were no longer quite subject to the laws of physics. The desperate, animal gleam in its eyes had gotten stronger.
Babysitter Voice. Come on, Babysitter Voice. “Leave,” I croaked. Come on, Damon, get up, get up. “I’m ordering you to leave!”
The vampire drifted to a halt, looking confused.
“You heard me!” I shouted. “You do as you’re told and get out of here!”
It didn’t even have time to scream as Damon slashed its throat from behind.
I screamed, though. I screamed a lot.
I hadn’t been imagining things at the befasting, when I thought Joy’s blood was darker than Duncan’s, because the wave of spray from this vampire’s throat was the color of ink, blooming to scarlet as it spread from the body on the cement. It took only seconds for the body to crumble into silver-grey dust, lighter than ash, that scattered on the wind as fast as it could form. An armful of tattered clothes, somehow smaller than I expected, slumped to the ground and fluttered in the breeze.
DAMON
It took a minute for her to stop screaming, in thin panting bursts, her face buried in my chest. I couldn’t even try not to hold her, stroke her hair, tell her she was safe now with me. I needed that as much as she did, needed the steadying effect of a Lumi’s touch to a Shadow, the comfort of fulfilling my role. I hated it, but I needed it, and that was a much too familiar feeling.
Not that I had quite fulfilled my role anyway. A Shadow’s job was to protect his Lumi, not the other way around. Naomi had saved my life, and the thought sat like a lump of stone somewhere in my middle. Indigestible. Incomprehensible.
“Well,” Naomi said at last, breathless but calm, “looks like bodyguard detail wasn’t such a waste of time after all.”
“Good. It would have been a shame to not get to fight off another bloodthirsty psychopath.” It would have killed you. If it had come while I was off buying a blasted Scrabble board, it would have killed you. And your baby. And me. Because that is not how I wanted to breach.
“You’re bleeding,” she said, looking up at my face. I touched a hand to my forehead, belatedly noticing the cut trickling blood down my right temple.
“That would be where our friend clocked me with a rock.” I barely remembered it. No wonder I’d been stunned for a moment. I took quick stock of myself — a few scrapes and bruises, painful but hardly life-threatening. “I’m fine.”
“But you said you can’t heal—”
“I’ll grab a drink at the Orphanage, later. We’ve got a stockpile in the fridge.”
“Oh, yeah. Note to self: don’t eat or drink anything from Orphanage fridge.”
“What about you? You’re not hurt?”
“Banged my head a bit. Just a bump, no biggie.”
I brushed her hair aside to look, tried to focus on the little swollen place on her scalp, not the warm silky feel of her hair. “Doesn’t look bad. Be sure to tell me if you start seeing double, feeling faint, anything like that. You didn’t hit your stomach?”
“No.”
I slid to my knees to press an ear to her belly and listened. “Steady, strong heartbeat. I think he’s okay.”
Perhaps unconsciously, one of her hands brushed the top of my head, trailed through my hair. I stopped breathing, closed my eyes.
With a sharp breath, as if waking from a dream, she stepped back and said, “Oh, look at our poor Scrabble board.”
Sure enough, the game board had been a casualty of the fight, tumbled along the sidewalk and its tiles scattered in every direction. I stood, forced normalcy and cheer into my voice. “Well, it’s not broken or anything. I bet we can find all the pieces, and then we can resume your crushing defeat.”
“Yaaaaay.” She tried to bend over to pick up the nearest tile, and stopped with a wince.
“Sit still,” I said sternly. “I’ll do the bending around here—” I cut off the words ‘for the next few months.’ Where had that come from? I’d be surprised to still be here tomorrow.
Naomi settled obediently onto a bench, rubbing her stomach, whether to soothe the baby or herself was hard to say.
“You said something earlier about what fun it must be waiting for awful, unavoidable pain to hit,” I said. “Seems to me that pregnancy is kind of like that.” I dropped a handful of tiles into the Scrabble box.
She grimaced. “I’ve tried not to think about that too much. I had thought about another similarity in our situations, though.”
“What do you mean?”
She patted her belly. “I didn’t want this baby. Still don’t. But that’s not his fault, so I’m trying my best to take care of him. As long as we’re stuck together, he’s my responsibility.” More hesitantly, she added, “And despite myself I’ve grown, pardon the pun, a little attached to him.” Her cheeks pinked.
I couldn’t help it. I gave her a crooked smile and ruffled her hair. “Yeah, I have to admit, that does sound familiar.”
She bit her lip and went pinker. It shouldn’t be such a surprise to you for people to like you, love. You’re really not that bad. For the first time, it occurred to me that I could come back and see her after the breach, if I wanted to. There was nothing to say I couldn’t. How bizarre would it be to take your ex-Lumi to a movie?
Twelve hours ago I had been contemplating suicide as an alternative to spending another day in her company. Maybe I had finally slipped a gear. The question was, which viewpoint was the crazy one?
A figure staggered out of the shadow of the empty food court, and I stiffened, but it
was only Dove. She nearly fell at my feet, gasping out words I could hardly understand, her Cantonese accent amplified by agitation.
“You must come. Audrey is breach. Her Lumi die. Come now, come now!” She tugged me toward the building, and I barely had time to grab Naomi and follow.
I could hear screams before I was even finished shading. Naomi went pale and wide-eyed, and I knew what they must sound like to her — something between the cry of a wounded animal and the screech of metal at the breaking point. It sounded terrifying and inhuman, and it was. To me, it was also depressingly familiar. I hoped the neighbors wouldn’t call the police again.
I snatched a plastic bag of blood from the fridge and ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time. “Dove, stay with Naomi,” I shouted over my shoulder. “Wes!”
“In here!”
I skidded into the bedroom Audrey shared with Adonis. Audrey’s roommate, his perfect Greek-statue features twisted with distress, was holding down her arms while Westley tried to strap them into restraints. Jewel, dripping wet and wearing only a towel, stood wringing her hands just outside thrashing range.
“You’re going to be okay, Audrey. Really you are,” she called, voice tight with tears. “You can do this. Audrey, listen to me.”
Audrey wasn’t listening. She was barely recognizable, her face in a rictus of pain, streaked with dark blood where she had clawed herself, and red human blood from where they had tried to feed her. The burst bag lay in a puddle on the floor.
“Hold her,” I snapped. Westley and Adonis wrestled her arms into the restraints, and Westley held her head while Adonis joined Darling in holding down her legs and middle, which kept trying to arch up. Her outlines were getting blurry.
“Audrey!” I stared her in the eye, refusing to let her drop her gaze. “You will drink this. Understand? Drink!” I tore the bag open with my teeth and shoved it in her face.
Audrey attacked the bag as if she hadn’t just been fighting tooth and nail to get away from it, grabbing it with the hand we hadn't managed to buckle down yet. I let her take it. The screams died down to choked sobs, gasps, and swallows, and I took a moment to dash my own blood out of my eyes, still dribbling down from my forehead.
Secondhand Shadow Page 12
