Throat

by R. A. Nelson

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by R. A. Nelson

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A.

  Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nelson, R. A. (Russell A.)

  Throat / R. A. Nelson. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Seventeen-year-old Emma, having always felt cursed by her epilepsy, comes to realize that it is this very condition that saves her when she is mysteriously attacked and left with all the powers but none of the limitations of a vampire.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89731-3

  [1. Vampires—Fiction. 2. Epilepsy—Fiction. 3. Supernatural—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.N43586Th 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010027969

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and

  celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Charles Brian Nelson,

  who took us to the moon

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. THE CURSE

  2. CHANGES

  3. POWERS

  4. SICKNESS

  5. THE VISITOR

  6. RUNNING

  7. MY CASTLE

  8. DESPERATE

  9. SECRETS

  10. FIGHTING

  11. BURNING

  12. DARK KISS

  13. STONE HOUSE

  14. BLOOD HUNT

  15. THEIR WORLD

  16. ERUPTION

  17. ESCAPE

  18. MONSTERS

  19. CHANCES

  20. FALLING

  21. DISCOVERY

  22. THE GLADE

  23. HOSTILE

  24. THE FEEDING

  25. THE EYE

  26. DYING PLACE

  27. THE APARTMENT

  28. NIGHT VISION

  29. WHISTLE

  30. UNDER SIEGE

  31. GROUND

  32. THE LOSS

  33. BREATHE

  Acknowledgment

  About the Author

  When I was thirteen, I ran away from home because of a curse.

  Mom caught up with me miles out in the country, standing in front of an abandoned grain silo. The sky was full of what looked like baby tornadoes. I had just been examined pretty thoroughly by a three-legged dog. I was sweaty, thirsty, filthy with road dust, and my heart was completely fractured.

  Mom turned the car around and headed back to the apartment, yelling the whole way how badly I had frightened her. I turned my head to the window to shut her out. I just wasn’t up for it. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like fighting back. I was broken in too many places.

  Instead I thought about the curse, how crazy it had been to try to outrun it. How do you run away from something that’s inside you?

  But I had learned something from walking all that way. I had learned the world was an amazingly big and strange and unknown place. There could be anything out there. Anything at all.

  Four years later I was sitting in that same junky old car and we were headed east toward the north Georgia mountains. This time the sky was dotted with innocent-looking spring clouds. Mom was driving and my sister, Manda, was shrieking Disney Channel tunes in the backseat, helping me to get my game face on.

  After we crossed the state line, the landscape began to change. We passed through sagging towns that could have been renamed Foreclosureville, then nothing but red clay fields, mossy farms, and small, lonely houses clinging to rocky hillsides.

  In the last clear place before the mountains I saw a slash in the forest where brown and white horses were cropping grass. The horses made me ache. I’d always wanted to ride, but my neurologist, Dr. Peters, had convinced my mom it would be too dangerous. Because of the curse.

  When we got to the Appalachian foothills, the forest took over and the road began to rise. Mom’s old Kia labored and whined. A blue Mustang shot past us, honking, its emergency lights flashing. Three girls were hanging out the windows, laughing and screaming, hair blowing across their faces.

  I knew before I looked that Gretchen Roberts was driving. Gretchen had been my best friend in the eighth grade before the curse had changed my life forever. Now she was beautiful and had her own car and all the guys called her G-Girl. We didn’t talk a whole lot anymore unless we had to on the soccer field.

  Every time we traveled to a tournament, Gretchen played cat and mouse with us, knowing I was the only junior in our entire high school that didn’t have a license.

  I swore quietly and glanced at my mother. She was hunched over the steering wheel, long brown hair covering what I knew was a look of worried annoyance.

  In two more days it would be my hands on that wheel, my foot on the gas. Nothing in front of me but the open road. Forty-eight measly little hours and I would be officially seizure free for six consecutive months. Long enough to satisfy the Alabama Department of Motor Vehicles. For once, I would beat the curse.

  Now we were climbing long switchbacks into a shaggy forest. Tall trees hung over the road, and thick clumps of kudzu and poison ivy made the day seem darker.

  “I heard they filmed Deliverance around here,” Mom said, eyes cutting back and forth nervously. “That old movie where the redneck makes the city guy squeal like a pig?”

  I could believe it. I could only see a few yards into the gloom. But the feeling of mystery and danger made me hungry to go exploring. To escape.

  “How do you make somebody squeal like a pig?” Manda said. She was five and the main reason I remembered how to smile most days.

  “Like this,” I said, and reached back, going “Oink! Oink! Oink!” and tickling her stomach until she screamed.

  Now it was Mom’s turn to swear. “Stop it, Emma! You’re going to cause an accident! And put your seat belt back on!”

  We passed a historical marker that said SOUTH EDGE OF DAHLONEGA. That’s all I was able to catch. I knew Dahlonega was some kind of mine. Coal? Silver? Gold? I couldn’t remember.

  It would be useless asking her to stop. Mom didn’t even care about her own history, let alone anybody else’s. The last time I asked her about my dad, she told me to Google him. I did, and all I could find was a service that wanted $39.95 for a peek at his latest utility bill.

  I had already made up my mind: the first thing I was going to do after getting my license was take my mother on a long road trip and pull over at every marker. Read each word lovingly. I knew what she would say.

  “You have no sense of time, Emma.”

  Sure, Mom. As long as you don’t count the kind that’s measured in centuries. Or driver’s licenses. Two more days.

  * * *

  We made a wrong turn looking for the soccer fields, and eventually the pavement dead-ended in a shadowy clearing. In front of us sat an old gray building perched on stacks of flat river stones. Its windows were specked with mud, and an algae-coated stream crept along beside it.

  “Nice place for a murder,” I said.

  “Let’s get out!” Manda said, straining against her seat. “I want to se
e!”

  Mom cursed and jerked the wheel around crazily, throwing up gravel and road smoke. After we found the main road again, the forest magically opened up, revealing ten soccer fields smothered in sunshine and dozens of girls romping around in the most bizarre color combinations you ever saw.

  “Thank God,” Mom said.

  We got out and Manda hauled her to the concession stand for a shave ice while I joined my teammates under the main tent. I hated the sign-in stuff at tournaments. By the time the ref in the short yellow shorts quit tapping our shin guards, I was ready to knock down anything wearing cleats.

  I kicked streaks of shadow in the dewy grass as Gretchen waited for the ref to blow his whistle. She tapped the ball my way. Not because she wanted to, but Coach Kline would have killed her otherwise.

  I floated toward the ball casually, then exploded through it. The power of the kick caught the other team completely off guard. Two of their mids had already started forward to defend, and now they had to retreat, stumbling, the ball sailing over their heads.

  I blasted down the middle of the field after it, sideswiping two of their defenders along the way. A confession: I love hitting people. Maybe because the rest of my life has always been so safe. The only reason Dr. Peters let me play soccer at all was that my feet stayed on the ground. Well, most of the time.

  The ball bounced thirty yards in front of me, bounding so high, the keeper was backpedaling, only now realizing it was going over her head. That’s what I was counting on. I barreled past her and caught the ball coming out of its hop, pounded it straight into the net: 1–0 good guys.

  The rest of the half wasn’t much different. The Georgia girls were shell-shocked, 3–0. I had one yellow card pulled for trucking a forward who completely deserved it. The Georgia kids were finding out what my own league already knew: Emma Cooper will push it right up to the edge … and sometimes beyond. I could see them over there at halftime, muttering through their orange slices, talking and pointing. They hated me already. Good.

  We played three games that day, dominating our way through the tournament. So far none of the other teams had come within four points of us. By late in the evening, our last game, the Georgia players were so focused on me, the rest of my team was able to keep the ball on offense most of the time.

  This seemed to be okay with the Georgia kids. They crowded me, rushed me even when I didn’t have the ball, making me furious, and that’s what I wanted too. The angrier I got, the more aggressively I played. And then it happened.

  Gretchen nutmegged one of their defenders, kicking the ball between the other girl’s legs, and looped a shot at the goal. I rushed the keeper, saw the ball ricochet off the post, and sprang in the air leading with my skull. At the last possible moment, Gretchen cut across me. My head collided with her shoulder. Whack.

  It was already dark, but I saw the sun. Then nothing.

  * * *

  The first time it happened, I was in the eighth grade. His name was Lane Garner. He was standing across a volleyball net from me in his parents’ backyard. The afternoon sun blazed behind his head, framing his face with fire. I fell in love without even knowing the color of his eyes.

  Lane Garner slammed the ball off the top of my head. I blocked a couple of his spikes. By the end of the day we were sitting on the back porch chopping ice with an ice pick and trading turns cranking an old-fashioned wooden ice cream maker between our knees.

  After that he came over to my house every day. Shot basketball with me in my driveway. I couldn’t sleep for thinking about him … his long, muscular legs, lanky arms, the way the collar of his T-shirt always shifted toward his left shoulder. Lane Garner was the most beautiful human being I had ever seen.

  I have never taken drugs, other than prescription stuff, but those months must’ve been what an addict feels like. I wanted to be with Lane every second. Hold his hand for the rest of my life. More than that, I wanted to absorb him. Be absorbed.

  I covered my notebooks with his name. He gave me a fake gold necklace that said LANE. One night I rolled over and nearly choked to death in my sleep, but still I wore it.

  I was wearing the necklace in the Explorer Middle School gym one morning when a sick odor of overripe oranges came up into my nose and the world flashed off. When I woke up, everything was strangely round, as if I were looking at a reflection in a Christmas ornament. My nose was snuffling in a puddle of warm urine. A hundred of my not-so-closest friends were watching, including my soon-to-be-former BFF Gretchen Roberts … and Lane Garner.

  I never held his hand again. Never kissed him. Never got to watch him grow from a tiny dot at the end of my street into a boy who was the whole wide world to me. Game over. The curse was upon me.

  What they don’t tell you about epilepsy: there’s much more to it than the flopping and flailing stuff. The curse messes you up in all sorts of secret ways too. Especially girls. My metabolism was off the charts, but I still had to watch my weight. The only reason Mom let me play sports was so people would call me voluptuous rather than voluminous.

  Epilepsy can also wreck your period and give you a tendency to hirsutism. Wikipedia explains: “From Latin hirsutus = increased hair growth in women in locations where the occurrence of hair normally is minimal or absent.”

  Sweet.

  But yes, the worst is the tonic-clonic. A tonic-clonic is not a mixed drink you order at the Star Wars bar; it’s a kind of seizure my old-school neurologist, Dr. Peters, called a grand mal. An electrical storm in the brain.

  Sometimes you get a warning a big TC is coming on, called an aura. White spots. Numbness. A sense of dread. Unexpected smells. Tonic-clonics can be brought on by lots of things: chemical imbalances, malnutrition, lack of sleep, flashing lights, patterns, anxiety, antihistamines, etc. Or, as in my case that day on the Georgia soccer field, a violent blow to the skull.

  After the sun exploded inside my head, I disappeared inside myself for a little while. How long? I could never tell. Experiencing a tonic-clonic is not like dreaming. I never saw any images at all. There was no sense of the passage of time. I was just there and then I wasn’t. Then I was back again. I had to rely on what others said about what I did.

  Waking up from a big seizure is awful. They tell you a lot of mumbo jumbo about neurotransmitter depletion, postictal states, general amnesia. None of that describes just how disorienting it is to wake up from a storm inside your brain.

  When I came to that evening in Georgia, the ground curved upward to meet the bluish black of the twilight sky. Everything else in my field of view was curved too: lights, goalposts, legs, cleats, the clipped grass, trees against the darkening horizon. I didn’t know where I was or what had happened.

  The first thing I saw was a curved face with a mustache that hooked around both sides of a gourdlike nose. It was the ref in the yellow shorts. His mouth opened wide, becoming a gaping hole followed by a sound I can only describe as coffee-shaped, slow and sludgy. I couldn’t recognize the words.

  More faces and legs appeared. It took some time before all the parts of my body felt connected again. Then my mother was there, and when I saw Manda, saw her eyes, I finally understood and began to cry.

  At least twenty players from both teams were grouped around me by then. I finally was able to get to a sitting position. Several people were speaking at once. Someone brought water. They forced me to sip it while I tried to get hold of myself.

  Manda threw her arms around my neck and tried to coax me to my feet. Her hands were still sticky with blue shave ice.

  “Emma, Emma, Emma.”

  I mumbled a bunch of slurry words, head spinning. I dropped the water and went down on all fours. This seemed to help as I slowly padded back and forth on the grass on my hands and knees. I came to a soccer cleat and looked up.

  Everything began to flood back in as soon as I saw her face. Gretchen Roberts.

  My license. The license I had been cheated out of for nearly two years. There it went. Floating away on lit
tle electroencephalographic wings. Because of her.

  A hot stream of volcanic bile pulsed through me. I got to my knees wobbling, looking into Gretchen’s face. She had done it. It was all her fault. Somehow I was sure of that.

  “Oo,” I said, trying to jab my finger into her chest. “Oo. Oo.”

  The volcano gushed up to my head, filling my eyeballs with molten magma. She grinned at me. Grinned. I hit her. Hit Gretchen as hard as I could in the face. Felt something crack. She tumbled at my feet. I stood there swaying over her, a drunken, enraged monkey.

  Hands grabbed me from all sides and they led me away, stumbling, to a little bench behind the sign-in tent. I cried explosively. The only time I ever cried was right after a bad tonic-clonic. It was as if my head were full of pipes and some powerful force had blown the gunk out.

  Manda was clinging to my leg, crying too. My mother wouldn’t touch me but instead settled in front of me, legs crossed, like a model for a painting titled The Last Straw.

  “You. Broke. Her. Nose,” she said. “Her nose, Emma. The league … I don’t know what they’re going to do. This is the last time. You’re out of second chances, you know that.”

  The world was fuzzy through my tears. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Emma …,” Manda said.

  “Be quiet,” I said. “Please be quiet.”

  “Please don’t cry, Emma. It’s all right.”

  That made me cry harder. I couldn’t look at her. I pulled up my jersey to wipe my eyes, exposing my sports bra.

  The first thing I saw as my vision cleared was two tournament officials sitting with Gretchen at the first aid table, blood spurting from her nose down the front of her shirt, her dark eyes smoldering. Ms. Roberts stalked up to me. She was one of those people who were polite on the surface, but anything nice about her was just that, surface, and the cracks were constantly showing.

  “That’s the last time—so help me—the last time—you, you—!” She jabbed a fat finger in my face and dragged one of the officials over.

  “I want her off this team, I want her out of this league, and if you don’t do it immediately, I will press charges for assault. And I will hold you personally responsible. I’ll sue you! Do you hear me? I’ll sue you for all you’re worth. What has to happen to get you people to wake up? Maybe the next time, she’ll kill someone. Did you think of that? She’s a danger to the other players on the field.”