Throat

by R. A. Nelson

  “Forgive me for saying,” Anton said, “you’re young, Mr. Sagan, but you’re not going to live two or three hundred more years, are you? So it’s likely you may be … gone … before the next Sonneneruption. It’s not possible for you to live that long, is it? So how could this help us?”

  Sagan grinned. “My great-grandfather is almost a hundred.”

  “Isn’t it better than what you have now?” I said. “Maybe … when the time comes … Sagan could turn it over to someone else, someone younger?”

  “Got me in the retirement village already, huh?” he said.

  “Anton is correct,” Lena said. “And besides, it is not fair to expect a lifetime commitment from anyone, no matter how well intentioned.”

  “But we could do it while we can,” I said, feeling the meeting slipping away, not going at all how I had imagined it would. “So you could live a better life in the meantime. And we could band together to fight the Verloren.”

  “So that’s why you got us out here,” Donne said. “You’re still looking for us to help, huh? Help spark a new war, worse than the last.”

  I bristled at her tone. “So you’d rather hide like rats in a hole?”

  “I’d rather live, thanks,” Donne said.

  “Hey, time-out,” Sagan said, raising his hand. “Why don’t we just do what we can do? And let the other stuff sort itself out? Nobody has to save the world tonight. But we could make things better for you, right? Emma has told me about your situation. I’m sure I could find something a lot better for you out here—there are plenty of empty spaces where you could—”

  Donne pounded her small fist on the table. “How do we know we can trust you?”

  “I don’t know,” Sagan said. “You’ve trusted me this far. Well, Emma, actually. I can only give you my word.”

  “That you won’t give us up?” Donne said.

  “Even if I wanted to, what would I say?” Sagan said. “Um, excuse me, Officer, but there are three vampires living up at the state park and—ouch!” I pinched his leg under the table.

  Donne got up from her chair, staring at me hotly. “You told him that too?”

  “Okay … yeah … Well, actually, I took him there and—”

  “Now what are we supposed to do? Move again?”

  “No, really! You don’t have to move. Sagan would never tell anybody.” I looked at Lena. “I’m sorry. I guess I screwed up. I should have asked first. It’s nothing sinister, it’s just—I have a tendency to jump the gun. And I didn’t show him exactly where you live. Nobody is going to storm your place or anything. Please trust me.”

  “Try living like this, dealing with the Verloren, for a hundred years … we’ll see how trusting you are,” Donne said. But at least she sat down again.

  “That’s the whole problem,” I said. “The Verloren are wrecking things for everybody. Somebody needs to get their attention.”

  I noticed Anton had been holding his hand up.

  “What?” I said.

  “Emma, I appreciate your feelings, okay?” he said. “But there’s nothing that can be done about the Verloren. They’re just too strong.”

  “I am afraid I must agree with Anton on this point,” Lena said. “There truly is no means of standing up to them at this time, not before the next Sonneneruption. The risk of provocation is too great.” She turned to Sagan. “And I understand if you do not want to help us in light of this decision.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, desperate to swing the mood in a different direction. “Sagan, maybe this is a good time to show off the observatory?”

  “Um … sure,” Sagan said.

  Everything felt a little somber as Sagan got set up, but things warmed a bit as he went into his routine. He gave the Sonnen the same basic tour he had given me. It was interesting to watch their faces and hear their gasps of astonishment. Some of their ideas about science and astronomy were pretty antiquated, and they seemed in awe of the technology, almost to the point of disbelief.

  “You are saying it is possible to know … how soon?” Lena said when Sagan was explaining about solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

  “From here we could have advance warning of as much as eighteen to twenty hours in most cases.”

  He pulled up the same information he had shown me about the Carrington Event. Even Donne seemed fascinated. Sagan and Anton got into a technical discussion of the Feld that—even as important as it was to my situation—ultimately bored me catatonic. I sat there yawning and not trying to hide it one bit.

  “Okay, I can take a hint,” Sagan said.

  Afterward we all sat down at the picnic tables outside. It felt so much better to be under the stars, where the darkness masked our differences.

  “I am Sicilian,” Anton was saying. “But by birth I am a good old USA boy. My grandpapa, he came to this country from Sicily. A barrel maker, okay? Can you imagine they used to have jobs like that?”

  Sagan was full of questions, most of them the same ones I had already asked. But he came up with a few new ones of his own.

  “Did you ever get to see them again? Your family, I mean?”

  “Once, yes. It was very sad,” Anton said. “My mama; she cried so much that I was missing, you know? I couldn’t take it. I had to leave.”

  “Do you ever … wonder what happened to them?”

  “Sure I do. I still do sometimes if I think about them too much.”

  “We could find out, go to something like Ancestry.com,” Sagan said. “I could show you how.”

  Anton grinned broadly. “Is this true? This is something we could really do?”

  “Sure. With a computer it’s pretty easy.”

  Anton’s eyes practically sparkled. “I have a sister—Rosa—I would really like to know what happened to her.”

  “Sure, we’ll do it.”

  Sagan then got really quiet. “Talking about … the Verloren. You say their numbers are increasing?”

  “Yes,” Lena said.

  “So is it dangerous? To be out alone at night? I mean, more than it used to be, say, like twenty years ago?”

  “Are you saying … what are the chances?” Anton said. “Of encountering Verloren?”

  Sagan nodded.

  “No worse than the odds for encountering a serial killer, I would say.”

  “Thanks, Anton,” I said.

  “No, you misunderstand, Emma. I just meant that the chances are really very small. It’s a big world out there, okay? But who can say when something is going to happen?” He pointed at one of the oak trees at the edge of the forest. “Who is to say this tree, it suddenly falls down on your head, Mr. Sagan, as you’re making your way up the sidewalk? Something terrible could happen, but most likely it wouldn’t.”

  “It’s just that … knowing you are … real, you know what I mean? It changes everything,” Sagan said. “I will never be able to be out at night, after dark, and not think about it after this.”

  “But you’re careful already, am I right?” Anton said. “Don’t go into bad places.”

  “What … what if one of my sisters … what if she were in your Strecke one night, completely by accident. And you … you took her.”

  “We wouldn’t take all of her,” Anton said, laughing, thinking he had just made a fabulous joke.

  Sagan remained serious. “What I’m saying is … I would feel funny if I saw her with some … unexplained cuts on her shoulder.”

  “Would it make you feel differently about us?” Lena said. “About helping us?”

  He took a couple of breaths. “I hope it wouldn’t. It would just seem … weird. A little scary.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you for feeling that way,” Lena said. “Do you think any one of us would not have felt the same?”

  “I know … it’s not your fault,” Sagan said. “You are what you are.”

  Donne smiled for the first time all evening. “I have an idea.”

  “What?” Sagan said.

  “Where do you live?�
��

  “I’m not sure it’s fair to my family,” Sagan said. “Not that I don’t trust you. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. But I signed up for this gig. They didn’t.”

  “But it’s only right, isn’t it?” Donne said. “You know where we live. If we’re going to trust you, then …”

  “Okay. Okay. One condition,” Sagan said. “I drive.”

  It took even more time coaxing to get Lena into the Jeep.

  “I have never been in … one like this before,” she said, eyeing us fearfully. “Couldn’t we just run alongside?”

  “I’ll keep it down to fifty or less; how about that?” Sagan said.

  Donne said she had been in cars plenty of times, and Anton was more excited than scared. The three of them finally piled into the small backseat, while me and Sagan got in front, and we zipped out the main gate headed west toward Sagan’s neighborhood.

  “Why, this is … exhilarating!” Lena said. “I can feel the wind …!”

  Sagan grinned. “I told you my baby would move. Got her up to forty-five.”

  I was proud of him. If he was nervous about where we were going, he wasn’t showing it. I was the nervous one.

  I glanced in the backseat. They were sandwiched in there, all right, their combined lavender glow in the low light filling up the small space.

  We turned off the main road and zigzagged through neighborhoods before finally coming to Sagan’s street. His house looked smaller in the dark. I was surprised to see so many lights on, and some of the upstairs windows didn’t even have curtains. Instead of pulling into the driveway, we stopped alongside the curb in front.

  Nobody got out or spoke. I didn’t know what Donne was after. Then I realized she was watching the tall second-floor windows. Pretty soon a blond head came bobbing down the hall; it was Sagan’s sister Bree. I licked my lips nervously, wondering what Bree would think about three vampires checking her out in her pajamas. She was followed by Jenna, bouncing along behind her, cute as a doll.

  “Let’s get out,” Donne said.

  She was sitting in the middle, but practically climbed over Lena. Soon all five of us were standing on Sagan’s front lawn in the moon shadow cast by a Bradford pear tree.

  “Aren’t you worried they might see us out here?” I said to Sagan.

  “Not this time of night,” Sagan said. “Everybody hits it pretty early.”

  “Hits it?” Lena said.

  “Goes to bed.”

  “Okay, so you’ve seen his place,” I said to Donne. “Satisfied?”

  “Not quite,” she said.

  Suddenly she was standing next to the front wall of the house, moving so fast that even with my eyes she was little more than a blur.

  “Oh no.” Sagan saw her now. Donne was climbing the side of his house. He swore and started to run across the grass.

  “What’s she doing!” I hissed at Lena, and we took off after him.

  Donne had already reached the first window. I had no idea what she was holding on to. Her limbs were splayed out around her like a four-legged spider.

  “Hey!” Sagan said, as loudly as he dared.

  I was already past him, moving up the wall in a single leap to land beside Donne. I grabbed one of the shutters and held on, hoping it was fastened securely.

  “What are you doing!” I said.

  “Watching,” Donne said. “How many are there?”

  “How many what?”

  “How many brothers and sisters does he have?”

  “Three sisters,” I said. “Now are you gonna get off of his house, or do I have to drag you down by your hair?”

  Donne didn’t say anything, just flowed back down the side of the house like mercury.

  I stopped her in the yard. “What were you doing up there? What’s this all about!”

  “Come on, let’s go,” she said. “Before one of them sees us.”

  She ran back to the Jeep with the rest of us following, and the three Sonnen all climbed back in.

  “Wait just a minute,” Sagan said, furious. “You better give me some kind of an explanation for what you just did or …”

  “Or you’ll … what?” Donne said. “Turn us in? And what’s to stop us from killing you first?”

  “Donne!” Lena said. She turned to Sagan. “I am so sorry; she does not mean what she says.”

  “Of course I don’t,” Donne said. “I just wanted to see.”

  “See what?” Sagan demanded, eyes blazing. Anton was holding him back.

  “I wanted to memorize their faces,” Donne said. “The faces of those we promise to never hurt.”

  The trip back was quiet. Sagan could tell I was pouting.

  “Don’t worry, I’m okay now,” he said, speaking softly.

  “I know.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Well … what happened just now, with Donne. It made me remember … something I saw. Something I didn’t want to tell you about. Because I didn’t want to scare you.”

  “What did you see?” Sagan said.

  “I was experimenting with the playing cards, putting myself into an absence seizure to test my powers on the Feld. I saw … I saw Wirtz kill someone. A woman in her kitchen. He’s out there somewhere right now. He’s hunting for me, but he’s killing people. It was horrible, Sagan. So horrible …”

  There was a tap on the back of my seat. “You realize we can hear every word you’re saying?” Donne said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So you visited Wirtz?”

  “Yeah.”

  “As a Wesentliche?”

  “Well, no,” I said. “That’s why it was weird. It was so different from what I had expected.”

  “How so?” Lena said.

  “I didn’t just visit him—I was inside him, you know? I had to go wherever he went, do whatever he did. But I was seeing through his eyes.… I followed this poor woman into her kitchen, carried her back to the bedroom, snapped her neck.… It felt like it was me who killed her. Not Wirtz. That’s why it was so—”

  “Stop the vehicle,” Anton said.

  “What?” Sagan said.

  “Stop the car. Now!”

  We were sitting on a bench in a Wendy’s parking lot. The Sonnen had asked Sagan to go inside. I could see him through the glass eating a Frosty. He gave me a worried little wave with his spoon.

  “She has to be,” Anton said. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “But there have been so few …,” Lena said.

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Donne said. “No pun intended.”

  “What?” I kept saying.

  “Anton thinks you’re an Auge,” Donne said, rolling her eyes.

  “What’s an Auge?”

  “See, Lena, she doesn’t even know herself!” Anton said.

  “An Auge, Emma, is an Eye,” Lena said. “Meaning, one who can see through the eyes of another.”

  “Is that good?” I said. “I figured all vampires—I mean, all of us—could do it. It’s just something I stumbled onto by accident. Another way of using the Feld, right?”

  “It’s the Feld, oh yeah,” Anton said. “The Feld is the medium for the sight. But not all of us have it. In fact, none of us do. I have never known an Eye personally, only what Lena has told us.”

  “It is an extraordinarily rare gift, Emma,” Lena said. “Putting your Wesentliche, your essence, out onto the Feld is one thing … but to go inside another … that is most rare of all. But the strongest power of an Eye is not the physical—it is the ability to see deeper than that. You are privy to the mind of the person you enter … his innermost motivations, judgments, secrets. A true Auge can look inside and see whether one is Verloren or Sonnen at heart.”

  “But I wasn’t just clued in to Wirtz’s thoughts,” I said. “It was more like I became his thoughts. His hunger, lust, cruelty. I wanted that woman he killed. I wanted her so much.” Her blood, her body. Her death.

  “Are you sure this is what you experienced?” Lena
said. “That it was not simply a dream or your imagination?”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve only been able to do it once, but it was no dream. It was completely real. Too real.” I had a terrible thought. “Wow. So … you’re telling me that Wirtz, the whole time he has been looking through my eyes—”

  “Oh no. He is not an Auge,” Lena said. “I would stake my life on it. He can communicate through his Wesentliche, but seeing through another’s eyes—that is beyond his ability. It is especially rare in Verloren. I do not know that I have ever heard of one.…”

  “Die Esserin,” Anton said. “Aren’t you forgetting about her?”

  “Yes, well, of course,” Lena said. “She is one. It is how she became their leader.”

  “It’s that rare, huh?” I said.

  “One comes along maybe only once every hundred years or so,” Anton said. “We sure could have used you during the war! They were always ahead of us, knew everything we were doing.”

  I looked at Lena. “So … does this mean I’m safer than I thought I was?”

  She shook her head. “I am afraid not, Emma. It is more dangerous for you than we imagined.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “The Eye is a two-edged sword,” Lena said. “Think of it this way. Which glows more brightly, is easier to find, a lighthouse on a hill or a lantern in the woods?”

  “So I’m the lighthouse in this scenario?” I said.

  “You are when viewed from the perspective of the Feld,” Lena said.

  “Which makes it easier for Wirtz to find you,” Anton said. “You stand out.”

  “Wait—so what am I supposed to do?” I said.

  “You’re the Eye,” Donne said. “What do you see?” There was an undeniable smirk in her voice.

  “There is a way,” Lena said quietly, “to know.”

  “You are sure you wish to do this?” Lena said.

  The three Sonnen were arranged in a small circle around me back at the Stone House Hotel. I was feeling a little claustrophobic. Sagan was sitting nearby, looking nervous.

  I felt for Lena’s bite marks on my neck. They were still there, but thanks to my vampiric healing abilities, the wounds were already shrinking.

  “Yeah,” I said, gulping a little.

  Lena nodded and looked at the others. “Her blood is … a powerful draw. It is so full of sunlight, even now. I cannot warn you enough about this. I hadn’t intended on feeding when I was teaching her about the Kehle, and yet …”