She ran barefoot and naked without feeling the pavement beneath her feet. All she felt was the wind on her skin as she ran across town. Red tinted her sight again.
Somewhere in the glory of running, conscious thought crept back in. They’d be after her. Her Family. They’d chase her. She couldn’t run forever. At some point she’d have to run toward somewhere, instead of merely away.
She had to find a place to hide.
She knew one place where she could go, one place that her Family didn’t know about. Pearl switched direction and let the blood push her faster and farther. She didn’t think the Family could track her—they’d hosed her down specifically to erase all hint of her—but she wasn’t about to take the risk. She crossed through backyards, swam through swimming pools to confuse any scent, splashed through every stream and gutter puddle. She wove through the streets, ran over the rooftops, and climbed through the trees.
Only when she was sure that no one, not even a vampire, could track her did she let herself approach Evan’s house.
Chapter
NINETEEN
As fast as a speeding bullet (but without any shred of a cape), Pearl darted across the street and plunged into the bushes beside Evan’s house. Branches scraped her skin, and she felt blood rise to the surface. Quickly, she licked the scrapes, and the skin healed smooth. She checked the tips of the branches. She hadn’t left any traces. She was still safe.
Hidden in the bushes, she studied Evan’s house. She saw shadows through the blinds and curtains: the silhouette of a man, a woman, a teenage girl. She didn’t see Evan.
She crept into his backyard. She’d regained enough rational thought to realize that she could not walk naked up to his front door and ring the bell. She had to find Evan and convince him to invite her inside without anyone else noticing her. Once she was inside . . . then she could figure out the rest.
Up on the second floor, third window to the right, Pearl spotted him. He was hunched over a desk. She stared at his silhouette for a moment, unable to process the idea that anyone could do so mundane a task as homework on a night like this, but then she sprang into action. She ran across his yard. Moonlight reflected on her skin, but she was fast. Like a cat, she leaped silently onto the garage and then scurried across the roof. She then lay down and leaned over the side of the house so that she hung upside down by Evan’s window. She knocked lightly on the glass.
She saw his silhouette startle, and then the blinds opened. Pearl withdrew so that she was perched on the roof above him. She heard the window being raised. Evan poked his face out.
“Above you,” she whispered.
He twisted to look up. When he saw her, a series of emotions flickered across his face so fast that she couldn’t read any of them. “You’re on my roof again,” he whispered.
“I know,” she said.
He stuck his head farther out. “You’re naked.”
“I know,” she said. For the first time, she felt naked. She was conscious of the night wind licking her skin, and she felt the stolen blood rush into her cheeks in an almost-human blush.
For a millisecond he stared at her, and then he visibly forced himself to stare down at the lawn instead. “Would I be totally out of line if I asked what you’re doing here?”
She entertained several retorts but rejected all of them. She was exposed here in more ways than one, and she didn’t have time for games. Hating herself for what she was about to say, Pearl blurted out the words: “I need help.”
So softly that Pearl was certain she wasn’t meant to hear it, Evan whispered, “And lo, Hell freezes over.”
The night wind swirled over her back, and her hair tangled as it swept against her neck. She shivered. “Please,” she said. Saying the word made her feel as if she were cracking open bones inside of her. It hurt like a wound.
“Come in,” he said. He lifted the window higher and then turned his back as she lowered herself inside. She landed on his desk and climbed off it. He tossed her a shirt, and she slipped it on. It fell down to midthigh. The cotton felt rough on her scoured skin.
She noticed he was wearing boxers and a T-shirt, ready for bed. Automatically, her eyes slid over to his bed. Blue sheets were crisp and flat. He followed her gaze. “Um, I don’t . . . ,” he began, taking a step backward toward his door.
“I ran away,” Pearl said.
It was the simplest explanation, and it had the added benefit of being true.
“Naked?” he asked.
“They took my clothes,” Pearl said. Also true.
His eyes widened. “Are you . . . okay? Do you need a hospital?”
She shook her head. “I need . . .” She trailed off. She wasn’t sure what she needed. No one ran from the Family.
What had she done?
What was she going to do?
She kept picturing Brad, slumped on the table, as the vampires prepared to disguise his death. If she hadn’t lost control . . . What was wrong with her?
Evan caught her elbow as she sank onto the bed. The crisp sheets dented beneath her. Her muscles shook, and her thoughts felt as if they were chasing each other in tight circles. In a hollow voice, she said, “I think I made a very, very big mistake.”
It was a statement that she’d never uttered in her life and that she never thought she would utter to a human, but with that statement, Evan switched into hero mode. “You’ll be safe here. You did the right thing by leaving. Do you want to tell me what happened?”
She did not do the right thing by anyone’s definition of the word. “I didn’t mean to run away.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she knew they were true. She also knew that the Family would never believe her.
The rush of Brad’s blood was beginning to wear off, and the ramifications of what she’d done were beginning to sink in. She’d never committed such a major infraction. Killing someone when the Family was trying so hard to maintain a low profile and then fleeing punishment . . .
“You needed to leave,” Evan said with his usual certainty back in his voice. “You can stay here until we decide what to do. We’ll help you.” He rose. “Let me explain to my parents—”
Her hand shot out and seized his wrist. “Don’t. Please. I don’t . . . trust anyone else. I need tonight. I have to be safe for one night. To think.”
He held still, as if she were a skittish rabbit. “You trust me?”
“Yes,” she said simply.
Looking as if she’d knocked the air out of him, he sank down on the bed beside her. She released his wrist. “You continue to surprise me.” He fell silent, and she looked around at his room for the first time. His bedroom was as sparse as a modernist painting. His walls were white, and his furniture was sleek black. His dresser had a flat mirror on top of it with zero clutter around it. Bookshelves jutted out of the wall. Rows of books were sorted by height and alphabetized. His room looked like a photograph in a home-decor magazine. The only sign that anyone real lived here were the scattered papers on his desk. Seeing her looking at them, he jumped to his feet and shuffled them into his backpack. “Sorry for the mess.” She caught a glimpse of a page covered in short lines of words, like in a poem.
“You are a poet,” Pearl said.
He flashed her half a smile. “You know my deep, dark secret. Funny, you’re the only one who ever guessed.”
“I knew the day I met you.”
She couldn’t read his expression. Softly, he asked, “Pearl . . . your family . . . do they know you’re here? Does anyone?”
She shook her head.
“Could anyone have followed you?”
Again, she shook her head. She wondered what was happening at the Dairy Hut. By now Mother and Daddy must have torched it. Most likely, fire trucks and ambulances were arriving, and her relatives had disappeared into the night, assuming none of them had combusted from the flames. She wondered how many of them were searching for her. Oh, who was she kidding? All of them were searching for her.
“Yo
u don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Evan said. “But if you want to . . . Are you sure you don’t need a hospital? Or the police?”
“You call them, and I’ll run,” Pearl said. In truth, she would rip the phone out of his hands and crush it before the call was complete, but there was no need to say that.
“Can I call Bethany? She’ll want to know you’re here,” Evan said.
She considered it and then nodded.
He fetched his cell phone from his bedside table. He dialed. She heard the phone click and a faint hello from the other line. “Bethany? She’s here. You were right.”
Pearl heard silence on the other end and then Bethany unmistakably saying, “I can be there first thing in the morning. Can you handle it until then?”
His eyes were again fixed on Pearl’s face. “Sure.”
I shouldn’t be here, Pearl thought. If she returned right now and begged for forgiveness . . . Even as she had the thought, Pearl knew it was too late. She’d run. No amount of groveling could erase that.
Pearl heard footsteps in the hall. Her first thought was: They found me. She leaped to her feet, ready to bolt, but Evan held out his hands to calm her. A second later her brain caught up with her instincts. She’d known Evan wasn’t alone in the house.
“Evan, are you on the phone?” It was a girl’s voice. “You know what Mom said.”
“Bethany needed homework help,” Evan called back as he clicked off the phone.
The girl snorted, loud enough to be heard through the door. She sounded like a horse whinnying. “From you? Ha!”
“Can you tell Mom that Bethany will be here in the morning?” Evan asked.
“Tell her yourself. I’m not your message service. And don’t you have school tomorrow?”
“Lizzie, can’t you just . . .” He ran his hands through his hair. To Pearl, he said softly, “She’s right—I’m a terrible liar. I am improving, though. Practice makes perfect.”
The doorknob rattled. “Evan, do you have someone in there with you?”
“Naked girl climbed in my window.”
“Ha-ha,” Lizzie said. “You are full of wit tonight. Go to sleep.”
Pearl listened to her footsteps retreat.
“Sisters.” Evan tried to smile to lighten the mood.
Now that the threat was gone, Pearl felt as if every ounce of energy had sapped out of her. She sank back down on the bed.
He sat beside her. “Pearl . . . I’ll do whatever I can to help.” His eyes were intense and serious, and she found herself wanting to believe him. She also found herself wishing he’d put his arms around her so she could bury her face against him. The feeling was so strong and so unnatural that she recoiled from him. He added, “And I will never hurt you.”
But I might hurt you, Pearl thought. She was inside a student’s house, which had been the goal of her high school matriculation. She looked at Evan, the trusting boy who had invited in a vampire, and she pictured Brad’s blank eyes overlaid on Evan’s beautiful black eyes.
All of a sudden her stomach flipped. Pearl clenched her teeth tight as she felt the hot blood boil up into her throat. She swallowed hard, forcing it back down. For the first time ever, blood tasted as vile as battery acid.
“Pearl? Are you okay?” Evan asked.
She was very much not okay. She put her face in her hands and tried to push the nausea away. She’d seen death before. She’d helped cause death before. So why were her insides shaking and swirling? Why did the thought of drinking from Evan make her feel like spitting out every bit of blood inside her? She should be blood drunk, so full that all she could think about was blood and all she wanted was more blood. But she wasn’t, and she didn’t.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said. “I’m here. You’re not alone.”
Pearl shook her head. She was alone. None of the Family would forgive her for this. Even if she called her parents right now and offered up Evan’s entire household, it wouldn’t make up for what she’d done. She’d endangered the Fealty Ceremony by risking exposure. She’d shown a lack of control. She’d killed unintentionally. She hadn’t behaved like Family. Uncle Stefan would stake her as soon as Mother gave the word.
“What’s wrong with me?” Pearl asked. How would she ever undo what she’d done? She wanted to reverse time so badly that it felt like a stake inside her guts, twisting and twisting.
Evan touched her shoulder. “Maybe it’s not that there’s something wrong with you,” he said. “Maybe there’s something finally right.”
Lifting her head, she stared at him. There was nothing right about this, absolutely nothing right in the way that she didn’t want to bite him, absolutely nothing right in the way she wanted to lean against him and let him comfort her as if she were a human. Only a few weeks ago he’d been the tastiest morsel she’d ever seen. Her fangs had threatened to pop every time she was near him. But now she looked at him and saw comfort and safety and kindness and all sorts of other human bullshit that she wasn’t supposed to care about. It wasn’t him; he hadn’t changed. It was her. “There’s something wrong with me,” she said. “But I’ll fix it. I just need . . .”
“You need to rest,” Evan said firmly. “We’ll figure out what to do next in the morning, okay? Just . . . you should sleep. How long since you last slept?”
“I think I slept an hour or two on Thursday.”
“You take the bed; I’ll sleep on the floor.”
As Evan bustled around the room, establishing a nest for himself of spare pillows and sheets and sweatshirts, Pearl lay down on top of Evan’s bed. The sheets smelled like him. Wrapping her arms around his pillow, she breathed in his scent. It was almost as if he were holding her, and for an instant she felt oddly safe. But then she remembered Brad and she shuddered against the sheets.
“If you want to talk . . .”
“No,” she said.
“All right,” he said. He fell silent. She listened to him breathe. She wondered if she should say anything. She didn’t want comfort from a human. Or maybe she did, but she shouldn’t. I hunt humans, she reminded herself. I don’t hug them. Evan was nothing more than a friendly pet, keeping her company on an upsetting night. She shouldn’t want to have heartfelt conversations with him.
Evan asked, “Can I get you anything? Water? Snack? Spare toothbrush?”
“Nothing, thanks.” Except for a way to click undo. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to stop picturing Brad inside the gasoline-drenched Dairy Hut.
“Okay, then,” Evan said. “Hold on one sec.” He darted into the hall. When he returned, he handed Pearl a pair of girl’s underwear. They were red with a heart emblazoned on the back. “I liberated these from my sister’s dresser.”
“My hero,” she said. She’d intended it as a joke, but it came out serious. He met her eyes, and for a long moment neither of them spoke or moved. He broke the moment by looking away. Standing, she took the underwear. She slipped it on while he averted his eyes.
Returning to his bed, she slid in between the sheets. He switched off the lights. Lying in the dark, she listened to him breathe.
“Good night, Pearl.”
“Good night.”
She didn’t sleep for a long time.
She was very certain that he didn’t either.
Chapter
TWENTY
Pearl woke to a knock on the door. She lay still, momentarily unsure of where she was, and then it rushed back: Brad, blood, Evan’s roof, his bed. On the floor, Evan sprang to his feet.
“It’s me,” Bethany called through the door.
Evan leaped across the room and opened the door just wide enough for Bethany to scoot in. Bethany scurried to Pearl’s side. She plopped down on the bed and squeezed Pearl’s hands. “Are you okay?” she asked. “What do you need? How can we help? I’m so proud of you, Pearl. You did the right thing.”
Brad’s face flashed into Pearl’s mind. She couldn’t return Bethany’s smile. For one insanely long mi
llisecond, Pearl wanted to tell Bethany everything, and then the moment passed, like indigestion. She pried her hands out of Bethany’s.
“Evan!” Bethany said. “You should have told me to bring her some clothes.”
“My sisters have clothes,” Evan said. “She’s wearing Lizzie’s underwear.”
Bethany leveled a look at him. For someone normally so chipper, it was a surprisingly laser-beam-like look.
“I didn’t peek!” he said, a little too fast.
Bethany rolled her eyes. “Go borrow more clothes. And tell your parents we were right.” She may have had problems talking to her English teacher, but she certainly didn’t hesitate to boss Evan around.
Pearl asked, “Right about what?” She wondered if she should flee out the window. She’d run from her parents. She wasn’t all that keen to meet Evan’s.
Bethany squeezed her hand again. “That you need help! Don’t worry. We’re helping kind of people. Evan’s whole family is. They’re super nice. You’ll love them. Except don’t try to pet the cat. She’s evil.”
“She likes everyone but you,” Evan said.
“She’s evil and a poor judge of character.”
Evan hesitated in the doorway. “Are you two going to be okay? . . .”
“Go,” Bethany said. She shooed him with her hands. “The sooner we can get your family to welcome her, the sooner she’ll feel safe.”
He left the door cracked open. Pearl heard his footsteps retreat downstairs. Voices drifted up. Before she could distinguish the words, Bethany hopped up, crossed the room, and shut the door. The voices faded to a hum, and then they rose again as Evan and his parents began to shout. She heard a few scattered words—“reckless” and “responsibility”—and she heard Evan’s voice, louder than all of them, say, “Everything was fine the entire night!”
One of them hollered, “Lizzie!”
“Don’t worry,” Bethany said to Pearl. “I’m sure they’ll come around. They really are very nice people. They just don’t like surprises.”
Drink, Slay, Love Page 17