by L. J. Smith
“I know. I’ll remember next time. I really will.” Jez said it as sincerely as possible, and in a tone she hoped would close the subject. She needed to get rid of these people and look at the boy under the blankets. He might be seriously hurt.
Aunt Nan was nodding. “You’d better. And you’d better take a shower before you do anything else. Throw your clothes in the laundry room; I’ll put them in the wash.” She made as if to kiss Jez on the cheek, but stopped, wrinkled her nose, and then just nodded again at her.
“And that’s it? That’s all?” Claire was looking at her mother in disbelief. “Mom, she’s up to something, can’t you see that? She comes in late, smelling like dead skunk and sewage and I don’t know what, and then she locks herself in and bangs around and lies, and all you’re going to say is ‘Don’t do it again’? She gets away with everything around here—”
“Claire, quit it. She said she was sorry. I’m sure she won’t let it happen again.”
“If I did something like that you’d skin me, but, no, if Jez does it, it must be okay. Well, I’ll tell you something else. She cut school today. She left before sixth period.”
“Is that true, Jez?” a new voice asked. Uncle Jim was standing in the doorway, pulling at his chin with long fingers. He looked sad.
It was true. Jez had left early to set up a trap for the vampire and shapeshifter. She looked at her uncle and made a regretful motion with her head and shoulders.
“Jez, you just can’t do that. I’m trying to be reasonable, but this is only the second week of school. You can’t start this kind of behavior again. It can’t be like last year.” He thought. “From now on, you leave your motorcycle at home. You drive to school and back with Claire, in the Audi.”
Jez nodded. “Okay, Uncle Jim,” she said out loud. Now go away, she added silently. Thin curls of anxiety were churning in her stomach.
“Thank you.” He smiled at her.
“See?” Claire jumped in, her voice hitting a note to shatter glass. “This is just what I’m talking about! You never yell at her, either! Is it because you’re afraid she’ll run away, like she did from her dad’s relatives? So everybody has to walk on eggshells around her because otherwise she’ll just take off—”
“Okay, that’s it. I’m not listening to any more of this.” Aunt Nan waved a hand at Claire, then turned around to shoo Uncle Jim out of her path. “I’m going to clean up the dinner table. If you two want to fight, do it quietly.”
“No, it’s better if they do their homework,” Uncle Jim said, moving slowly. “Both of you, do your homework, okay?” He looked at Jez in a way that was probably meant to be commanding, but came out wistful. “And tomorrow come home on time.”
Jez nodded. Then both adults were gone, but Claire was staring after them. Jez couldn’t be sure, but she thought there were tears in her eyes.
Jez felt a pang. Of course, Claire was dead-on about the leeway Aunt Nan and Uncle Jim gave her. And of course, it wasn’t fair to Claire.
I should say something to her. Poor little thing. She really feels bad….
But before she could open her mouth, Claire whirled around. The eyes that had been wet a moment ago were flashing.
“You just wait,” she said. “They don’t see through you, but I do. You’re up to something, and I’m going to find out what it is. And don’t think I can’t do it.”
She turned and stalked out the door.
Jez stood for an instant, speechless, then she blinked and closed the door. She locked it. And then for the first time since she’d seen the ghoul, she allowed herself to let out a long breath.
That had been close. And Claire was serious, which was going to be a problem. But Jez didn’t have time to think about it now.
She turned the clock radio on her nightstand to a rock station. A loud one. Then she flipped the covers off the foot of the bed and knelt.
The boy was lying facedown, with one arm stretched over his head. Jez couldn’t see any blood. She took his shoulder and carefully rolled him over.
And stopped breathing.
“Hugh.”
CHAPTER 5
The boy’s light hair was longish, falling over his forehead in disarray. He had a nice face, serious, but with an unexpected dimple in his chin that gave him a slightly mischievous look. His body was nicely muscled but compact; standing, Jez knew, he’d be no taller than she. There was a large bump coming up on his forehead, just under the falling hair. The ghoul had probably slammed him against something.
Jez jumped up and got a blue plastic cup full of water from her nightstand. She grabbed a clean T-shirt from the floor and dipped it into the water, then she gently brushed back the hair from the boy’s forehead.
It was silky under her fingers. Even softer than she would have thought. Jez kept her face expressionless and began to wipe his face with the damp cloth.
He didn’t stir. Jez’s heart, which was already thumping distinctly, speeded up. She took a deep breath and kept wiping.
Finally, although it probably didn’t have anything to do with the water, the boy’s dark eyelashes moved. He coughed, breathed, blinked, and looked at her.
Relief spread through Jez. “Don’t try to sit up yet.”
“That’s what they all say,” he agreed, and sat up. He put a hand to his head and groaned. Jez steadied him.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Just tell the room to stop moving.” He looked around the room, blinked again and suddenly seemed to focus. He grabbed her arm, his eyes wide. “Something followed me—”
“A ghoul. It’s dead.”
He let out his breath. Then he smiled wryly. “You saved my life.”
“And I don’t even charge,” Jez said, embarrassed.
“No, I mean it.” His smile faded and he looked straight at her. “Thank you.”
Jez could feel heat trying to rise to her face, and she had a hard time holding his gaze. His eyes were gray and so intense—fathomless. Her skin was tingling.
She looked away and said evenly, “We should get you to a hospital. You might have a concussion.”
“No. I’m okay. Let me just see if I can stand up.” When she opened her mouth to protest, he added, “Jez, you don’t know why I’m here. It can’t wait.”
He was right; Jez had been so intent on getting him conscious that she hadn’t even wondered what he was doing here. She looked at him for a moment, then nodded. She helped him up, and let go of his arm when she saw he could stand without falling over.
“See, I’m fine.” He took a few steps, then made a circuit of the room, loosening his muscles. Jez watched him narrowly, ready to grab him if he fell. But he walked steadily except for a slight limp.
And that wasn’t from his encounter with the ghoul tonight, Jez knew. He’d had the limp from childhood, from when the werewolves took his family.
How he’d been able to get over that and join Circle Daybreak, Jez would never know.
He’d lost his parents almost as young as she had. He’d lost his two sisters and his brother, too. His entire family had been on a camping trip at Lake Tahoe, when in the middle of the night they’d been attacked by a pack of werewolves. Renegade ’wolves, hunting illegally because Night World law wouldn’t let them kill as often as they liked.
Just like Jez’s old gang.
The ’wolves had ripped through the Davis family’s tents and killed the humans, one, two, three. Easy as that. The only one they left alive was seven-year-old Hugh, because he was too little to have much meat on his body. They had just settled down to eat the hearts and livers of their victims, when suddenly the one too little to be worth eating was dashing at them with a homemade torch constructed of kerosene-soaked underwear wrapped around a stick. He was also waving a silver cross on a chain the werewolves had torn from his sister’s neck.
Two things werewolves don’t like: silver and fire. The little boy was attacking with both. The ’wolves decided to kill him.
Slowly.
They alm
ost did it. They managed to chew one of his legs almost off before a park ranger arrived, attracted by the spreading fire from the dropped torch.
The ranger had a gun, and the fire was getting out of control. The ’wolves left.
Hugh almost died of blood loss on the way to the hospital.
But he was a tough kid. And a very smart one. He didn’t even try to explain to anybody what he’d been doing with the silver necklace. He knew they would never believe him if he said he’d suddenly remembered a bunch of past lives, including one where he’d seen a werewolf killed.
Hugh Davis was an Old Soul.
And a wakened Old Soul, which was even more rare. It scared Jez a little. He was human and she was from the Night World, but she didn’t pretend to understand the magic that brought some humans back again and again, reincarnating them in new bodies. Letting them remember all their past lifetimes, making them smarter and more clearheaded every time they were born.
In Hugh’s case, also gentler every time. In spite of the attack on his family, when he got out of the hospital the first thing he did was try to find some Night People. He knew they weren’t all bad. He knew some of them would help him stop the werewolves from hurting anyone else.
Fortunately, the first people he found were from Circle Daybreak.
Circles were witch organizations, but Circle Daybreak was for humans and vampires and shapeshifters and werewolves, too. It was an underground society, as secret within the Night World as the Night World was secret within the human world. It went against the most basic tenets of Night World law: that humans were not to be told about the Night World, and that Night People shouldn’t fall in love with humans. Circle Daybreak was fighting to unite everybody, to stop the killings, and to bring peace between the races.
Jez wished them luck.
She suddenly realized that Hugh had stopped walking and was looking at her. She blinked and focused, furious with herself for her slip in concentration. As a huntress—of vampires or anything else—you stayed alert all the time, or you were dead.
“You were miles away,” Hugh said softly. His gray eyes were calm but intense as always. That look Old Souls get when they’re reading you, Jez thought.
She said, “Sorry. Um, do you want some ice for that bump?”
“No, I like it. I’m thinking of getting one on the other side, to match.” He sat on the bed, serious again. “Really, I’ve got some stuff to explain to you, and it’s going to take a while.”
Jez didn’t sit. “Hugh, I think you need it. And I need to take a shower or my aunt will get suspicious about what I’m doing in here for so long. Besides, the smell is driving me crazy.” Although she couldn’t use her vampire powers without bringing on the bloodlust, her senses were still much more acute than a human’s.
“Eau de Ghoul? And I was just starting to enjoy it.” Hugh nodded at her, switching from gentle humor to gentle gravity as always. “You need to do what will keep your cover here. I shouldn’t be so impatient.”
Jez took the fastest shower of her life, then dressed in clean clothes she’d brought to the bathroom. As she returned carrying a glassful of ice from the kitchen and a washcloth, she saw that Claire’s bedroom door was ajar and Claire was watching her narrowly.
Jez raised the glass in a mock toast, and slipped into her own bedroom.
“Here.” She made an ice pack and handed it to Hugh. He accepted it docilely. “Now, what is it that’s so urgent? And how come you’re so popular with ghouls all of a sudden?”
Instead of answering, Hugh looked into a middle distance. He was bracing himself for something. Finally he lowered the ice pack and looked straight at her.
“You know I care about you. If anything happened to you, I don’t know what I’d do. And if anything happened because of me…” He shook his head.
Jez told her heart to get down where it belonged. It was pounding in her throat, choking her. She kept her voice flat as she said, “Thanks.”
Something like hurt flashed in his eyes and was gone instantly. “You don’t think I mean it.”
Jez still spoke flatly, in a clipped, hurried voice. She wasn’t good at talking about emotional stuff. “Hugh, look. You were my first human friend. When I came to live here, nobody at Circle Daybreak would have anything to do with me. I don’t blame them—not after the things my gang did to humans. But it was hard because they wouldn’t even talk to me, much less trust me, and they wouldn’t believe I wanted to help them. And then you showed up that day after school. And you did talk to me—”
“And I did trust you,” Hugh said. “And I still do.” He looked distant again. “I thought you were the saddest person I’d ever seen, and the most beautiful—and the bravest. I knew you wouldn’t betray Circle Daybreak.”
And that’s why I love you, Jez thought before she could stop herself. It was easier to live with if she didn’t put it into words.
Because it was hopeless, of course. You couldn’t hang on to an Old Soul. Nobody could—not unless they were one of those tiny fraction of people who were soulmates. Wakened Old Souls were too…old. They knew too much, had seen too much to get attached to any one person.
Much less a person who was tainted with vampire blood.
So all she said was “I know. That’s why I work with Circle Daybreak. Because you convinced them I wasn’t some kind of spy for the Night World. I owe you, Hugh. And—I believe you care about me.” Because you care about everybody, she added silently.
Hugh nodded, but he didn’t look any happier. “It’s about something dangerous. Something I don’t want to ask you to do.” He dug into his jeans pocket and came up with a thick packet of what looked like folded newspaper articles. He held it out to her.
Jez took it, frowned, then paged through the first few articles. Headlines jumped out at her.
“‘Four-year-old dies in coyote attack.’ ‘Record heatwave in Midwest; hundreds hospitalized.’ ‘Mother confesses: I killed my babies.’ ‘Mystery virus erupts in eastern U.S.: Scientists baffled.’”
There were lots more, but she didn’t look at them. She looked at Hugh, her eyebrows drawn together. “Thanks for sharing this. Am I supposed to fight the coyote or the virus?”
His lips smiled, but his eyes were bottomless and frighteningly sad. “Nobody can fight what’s happening—at least not in the ordinary way. And all that’s just the beginning.”
“Of what?” She loved Hugh, but sometimes she wanted to strangle him. Old Souls loved being mysterious.
“Have you noticed the weather lately? It’s either floods or droughts. Record cold days in winter, record heat in the summer. Record number of hurricanes and tornadoes. Record snowfall and hail. It just gets weirder and weirder every year.”
“Well—sure.” Jez shrugged. “They talk about it on TV all the time. But it doesn’t mean any—”
“And the earth’s being disturbed, too. Earthquakes. Volcanoes. Last year four dormant volcanoes erupted and there were dozens of major quakes.”
Jez narrowed her eyes. “Okay…”
“And there’s another weird thing, even though it’s not as obvious. You have to kind of dig a little to get to the statistics. There’s been an increase in animal attacks all over the world. All kinds of animals.” He tapped the pile of newspaper articles. “This coyote attack—a couple of years ago you never heard about coyotes killing kids. Just like you never heard of mountain lions attacking adults. But now it’s happening, and it’s happening everywhere.”
Prickles of unease were going up Jez’s arms. It was true, what Hugh was saying. Not that she’d paid much attention to the human news when she was a vampire—but it did seem as if animal attacks were getting more frequent.
“A bunch of elephants stomped their trainers last year,” she said slowly.
“Dog attacks are up four hundred percent,” Hugh said. “According to the California state police. In New Mexico there’s an epidemic of rabid bats. In Florida they’ve had seven tourists killed by alligato
rs since last January—and believe me, that information was hard to find. Nobody wanted to report it.”
“I bet.”
“Then there are the insects. We’re seeing more and more people get attacked by them. Killer bees. Fire ants. Tiger mosquitoes—and, no, I’m not joking. They’re for real, and they carry dengue fever, a really nasty disease.”
“Hugh…”
“Which brings me to diseases. You have to have noticed that. There are new diseases popping up all over. Ebola. Mad cow disease. That flesh-eating bacteria. Hanta viruses. Lassa. Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. You bleed from your ears and nose and mouth and into the whites of your eyes—”
Jez opened her mouth to say “Hugh” again, but he was racing on, his chest rising and falling quickly, his gray eyes almost feverish.
“And they’re resistant to antibiotics the same way that the insects are resistant to pesticides. They’re all mutating. Changing. Getting stronger and more deadly. And—”
“Hugh.” She got it in while he took a breath.
“—there’s a hole in the ozone.” He looked at her. “What?”
“What does it all mean?”
“It means that things are changing. Spiraling out of control. Heading for…” He stopped and looked at her. “Jez, it’s not those things themselves that are the problem. It’s what’s behind them.”
“And what is behind them?”
Hugh said simply, “The Old Powers are rising.”
Chills swept over Jez. The Old Powers. The Ancient Magic that had controlled the universe in the old days of the Night World. No one could see or know the Old Powers; they were forces of nature, not people. And they had been sleeping like giant dragons for thousands of years ever since humans had gained control of the world. If they were waking up again now…
If magic was coming back again, everything would change.
“It shows in different weird ways,” Hugh went on. “Night People are getting more powerful. Lots of them have noticed it. And they say the soulmate principle is back.”
