“Get up, Dawn,” Augusta commanded mercilessly.
She and Leila pulled Dawn to her feet. Dawn held her side with one hand and reached for Leila with the other. It hurt to breathe. Her eyes found Tristan, his fangs bared, eyes full of seething hatred. Bloody and enraged, he gripped Jared’s shirtfront and slammed his head repeatedly into the ground, yelling at the same time.
“Get out,” Augusta said. “I’ll calm them down.”
Trying to ignore her pain, Dawn flew down the driveway with Leila in tow. She heard the gate closing behind them.
~
They’d passed out in the living room, each of them afraid to be alone, at least for a little while. Dawn dreamed of the pages of books, fragile pages covered in the words of dead languages. She dreamed she walked down a corridor, heading toward a pale blue emergency light. There was a door at the end and she pushed it open. Tristan sat alone in a bare room on the floor beside a window. Moonlight washed through the glass in a neat square, edging him in a silvery hue. He seemed sad, but perhaps that was only because he was sitting alone in the dark, staring out a window.
“I don’t hate you,” she told him.
“It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “I hate myself enough for both of us.”
She hovered at the edge of wakefulness. She’d bundled up blankets on the floor and left Leila with the couch. Her body was straight as a board. She clutched a tumbled tiger’s eye in one hand.
Jared hadn’t broken her nose. She’d cleaned up the blood on her face in front of the bathroom mirror, wincing, tears slipping from the outer corners of her eyes. She’d lifted her shirt to see the damage he’d done to her ribs and was aghast at the huge, blackish bruise forming on her side. It hurt like hell to move, to breathe. Maybe he’d broken a couple of ribs. She didn’t know how to tell. And she didn’t care. She only wanted to sleep, and forget.
Leila stirred on the couch. “Are you awake?”
“I can’t tell,” Dawn said.
“I know,” Leila whispered. “I can’t either.”
But evening light was streaming through the blinds and she could speak, and she could move, if barely, and so she dragged herself into the shower, keeping her bruised ribs angled away from the harsh spray of water. She allowed herself to worry for Tristan, although she doubted he would have cared if he knew.
Dawn had never been someone who went to parties or involved herself in school activities or campaigned for worthy causes. She was a loner, content with few friends and more quiet nights at home than not. She was an observer, not a participant. But for better or worse she’d been involved in this dangerous thing so far removed from her normal life, and the past week had made its mark upon her soul. She thought she might never leave the house again if this were how bereft she’d feel when something ended.
Bored and fidgety, she wandered over to her dresser. In summer, the light from her window bathed the entire top of the dresser in a generous yellow rectangle. Now, toward the end of September, it had weakened slightly and moved up the wall.
One by one she removed the crystals from the little bowls of sea salt and lined them up neatly. Chrysoprase to encourage positive feelings, orange calcite for the color, pyrite for vitality, and the tiny herkies that tingled in the palm of her hand for creativity.
How long had it been since the first night she’d seen Tristan at the bar? A week, maybe? And yet her life was barely recognizable.
Her thoughts turned again and again to the days spent with him, days on the road, days in motels. That time seemed less real than something she might have imagined or seen on TV. Suddenly she understood how much she had left to experience in the world. It frightened her to realize how little self-awareness she possessed, but she knew those days on the road had changed her, and now she had no idea who was staring back from the mirror.
What had Tristan done to her? What had Branek done? What had she done to herself?
A hot, panicked feeling overtook her as she stood there in her room, among the things she called her own. What have I done?
Her room—with its juvenile magazine collages of haircut ideas on the walls, the little boxes of unworn plastic jewelry, the painted frames with no pictures in them, the books rescued from Endpapers when Roy culled the shelves. It was the room of a girl, not a young woman. Dawn realized she had been someone who clung to childish ideals and dreamed of impossible things. Now she had no use for idealization, and she’d found out firsthand impossible things could happen easily, though with less than lovely consequences.
She discovered that getting rid of one’s belongings required a special kind of ruthlessness. There wasn’t any room for sentimentality or regret. She could live without most of this. Clothes, shoes, knickknacks, books. There was so much she used to cherish but for which she could no longer bring herself to care. Everything she tossed into cardboard boxes salvaged from the nearest dumpster represented the life she’d unwillingly forsaken when Tristan had taken her on the road. She knew she would never feel right slipping back into it as if nothing had happened.
Here I start anew.
She kept her sewing machine. She kept a painting Leila had done for her. And all her crystals. There were still some clothes, of course, her most basic and beloved pieces. Her laptop rested in one of the dresser drawers. But her room had been hollowed, and she felt it reflected her more accurately now.
Leila leaned in the open door. “Want to go to the Egg House?”
“God, yes,” Dawn said. “Let’s get out of here.”
The night city was bright and in motion, yet silent beyond the barrier of the car windows. Amber streetlights hopped over them and Blonde Redhead was on the stereo. The 24-hour restaurant was right up the street from their apartment. It was reasonably bright, which was comforting. Dawn played with the drink menu and jelly containers while waiting for their food. Leila drew on the plain white placemat with the crayons meant for children.
“I’ve fallen so far behind with my art,” she said. “I thought about dropping my classes and starting again next semester, but I decided not to. I’m just going to pull a lot of all-nighters in the lab until I get caught up. That way I won’t have to think about what happened and … he won’t have won. He won’t have stolen a chunk of my life from me.” She stared determinedly at the placemat and pressed the crayons so hard the wax flaked off.
“That sounds brave.”
“What are you doing about work?”
Dawn didn’t know. She felt the same way about going back to work at Endpapers as she did about the rest of her old life. It would be boring, it would never satisfy her, and she would come to resent it, if she could muster the energy to care that much. Besides, Roy might have already given her job away to someone else.
“Maybe …” she began hesitantly. She licked her lips thoughtfully. “Maybe I’ll find a new job.”
She picked at a tear in the dark red booth. She’d ordered a cup of coffee even though she didn’t like drinking it this late in the day. It reminded her of Tristan, which was stupid. He didn’t even drink coffee. Yet all she could think of was sitting across from him in a diner in another town, watching his hands move.
“What are you doing?” Leila asked.
“Oh … nothing.” Dawn gathered the empty creamers and sugar packets she’d been mindlessly emptying into the coffee.
Her eyes strayed outside and she thought she saw a dark figure standing at the far side of the parking lot, backlit by streetlights and traffic headlights. There was no reason to feel the stirrings of unease at the sight of a man’s silhouette, especially since there were people everywhere: at the gas station on the corner, the fast food place next door, waiting at the bus stop down the street. The man could have been anyone, but there was something about the slope of the broad shoulders, the confidence of the spread-legged stance, the tilt of the head …
Branek, Dawn thought with alarm.
“Did they take you, too?” Leila asked. “They took you from the bar that nigh
t?”
The question drew Dawn’s attention away from the window. She took a quick second look, but the man was gone.
“Tristan let me get away,” she said ruefully. “The next day I went to your school looking for someone who might have seen Jared, and I got your film developed in case there was a picture of him. I had to get a new phone, and I was going to call the police that night. But one of them found me and took me to that house.”
Everything would have been fine, she realized. Tristan had let her flee from the bar and they probably would never have seen each other again. If not for Jared taking Leila, everything would have been fine.
It wasn’t what Tristan had done to her that upset Dawn. It was what Jared had done to Leila. Dawn didn’t know the details and she wasn’t going to make Leila share them. But it was obvious something in her had been broken, at least temporarily.
Dawn was going to kill that bastard.
“Did you know Jared was a vampire?” she asked.
“Yes,” Leila said reluctantly. “Obviously I didn’t believe him at first, but … well, it’s kind of hard not to believe once you’ve had fangs in your neck.”
“I know.” Pressing her lips together, Dawn tried to articulate her thoughts. “I don’t know if I regret the things that happened. Does that make sense?”
“No.”
“I think it was different for me.”
“What, you fell in love with the guy?”
“No. But he was … we’re …” Dawn shook her head and tried again. “Do you know what it’s like when you feel a certain way about a person? Not love. I don’t know what. But you feel this way and you’ll go to these incredible lengths and do things you’d never do—dangerous things—all for this one person, and maybe you’ll die, and yeah, he’s a vampire, but it’s all right because of the way you feel. Do you know what that’s like?”
Leila sighed and lifted her crayon from the placemat. “I’ve felt that way about guys. It’s been a long time.”
“I should have left him sooner,” Dawn continued. “I shouldn’t have let myself believe things that aren’t even true. Can … can you forgive me, Leila?”
“For what?”
“For liking it.” A blush heated Dawn’s cheeks and she glanced away.
“It’s not your fault,” Leila said. “They can manipulate the shit out of you if they want. Jared did it to me. That’s probably what Tristan did to you.”
“Yeah. Probably. But I would have stayed with him, Leila, if it could have been just the two of us. I needed … I needed this experience.” Dawn felt the words were inadequate, but she didn’t know what else to say.
Leila just raised her eyebrows and looked down at her drawing. “That’s why he’s so bad for you.”
After they ate, Leila dropped Dawn off at the apartment and drove to school to work on her projects. To throw herself into them, so she’d forget. Alone, Dawn flopped down to read a book. She was glad to lose herself in it, eyes skimming over the lines without seeing them, because she was seeing in her mind the scenes they described. She turned the pages without thought because her body no longer existed and only the fictional world within the pages mattered.
She emerged from the book only when a knock on the door jarred her out of it. Her thoughts were still caught within the book and for a second she forgot where she was.
And then she blinked and began to recognize Leila’s art house movie posters, the cheap blinds, the brown nap of the couch beneath her. Reality was disappointing in a way it never had been before. Sudden tears pricked her eyes but she quickly blinked them back, remembering she had to answer the door.
As she peered carefully out the peephole, Dawn’s scalp tingled and her breath began to shorten. Had she really seen Branek outside the diner? She was suspicious of whoever would visit her this late, but it was only Zach. She flung the door open and stared at him, feeling unreasonably confused.
“Hey, babe,” he said.
“Uh … hey.”
Zach looked good. So good it kind of hurt. His dark hair was perfectly styled, he’d shaved, and his t-shirt was tight across his chest. He was wearing cologne, which she’d never known him to do. Obviously this visit was important to him.
“Is Leila all right?” he asked tentatively.
“Yeah. She’s back now.”
“Good.” He nodded pointlessly, looking off to one side. When his blue eyes shifted back, they were earnest. “I couldn’t get through when I called you.”
“My new phone broke too. Were you worried?”
“It’s been what, a week since we talked? I was, yeah.”
You’d be amazed what’s happened to me in that time.
“I was acting pretty dramatic when I broke up with you,” she said. “Sorry.”
He gazed at her for a second, chewing the inside of his cheek. “Can I come in?”
She started to say no. She hadn’t wanted to see him. She hadn’t even thought about him. But now he was here and she knew she didn’t really hate him, whatever insensitive things he’d said about Leila. It was hard to say whether she’d ever loved him, but she knew she’d liked him a lot. Their relationship might have gone pretty far if she’d let it. Maybe it still could. It would be wrong to use him, but maybe he could put her mind back in the right place.
“Okay,” she said.
He adopted a honeyed, contrite tone as he stepped inside. “I was hoping I could get you to change your mind about us.”
For a moment Dawn just considered his expectant pause. It felt off, somehow, that he wanted her more than she wanted him. What did he think she could offer him? She hardly knew a thing about herself, it turned out, and he knew even less. Anyway, she was sure the person he wanted no longer existed.
“Try to convince me,” she said.
They went back to her room. “Are you moving or something?” Zach asked, gazing around at the boxes.
“No. Just getting rid of some things.”
“Holy shit, what happened to you?” he said when she impatiently took off her shirt. He moved toward her, eyes on the bruise, one hand hovering over it.
She couldn’t answer without wanting to cry, so she just grabbed him and kissed him.
Being with him was the same as she remembered. He was very much concerned with himself—just thoughtless, really. It wasn’t unpleasant, but now she’d had something she wanted more. With Zach, Dawn tried to replicate her experience with Tristan, longing for his slight crudeness, for that hunger he’d made her feel. It didn’t work. She’d known it wouldn’t, yet she was disappointed in a way she hadn’t prepared herself for. They were two different guys, one with grease under his fingernails, the other with blood.
“I’m sorry,” she told him when they were done. “I don’t think I can change my mind after all.”
Zach kissed her softly, his fingers in her hair. “Yeah. I’m sorry, too.” He grabbed the red bandana from her dresser and left.
She couldn’t fall asleep that night until she heard Leila’s key in the door. She got up to make sure everything was okay and was satisfied with Leila’s exhausted smile and stack of prints.
Back in her room, Dawn wondered if she were doomed to live like this from now on, half in fear every waking minute, never able to shake this underlying malaise. Both Tristan and Branek knew where they lived. Probably Jared did, too. What was to stop them from coming to kidnap her and Leila all over again, and making them regret they’d ever escaped?
She was normally a cheerful person, even optimistic. If the vampires had stolen that from her, she’d hunt them all down and stake them in their unbeating hearts.
In the morning she felt frustrated and furious. She made her feelings known to the kitchen appliances as she fixed herself breakfast. Her hair was annoying, all tangles and flyaways. Trying to tame it in front of the mirror after she ate, she studied herself with a frown of dissatisfaction. Well, she’d always wanted to cut if off, just to try it.
She snatched up her keys and
drove to the nearest strip mall salon. It was a smoggy day. Gray haze circled the valley, sun shining ambiguously through misty clouds.
“Just a trim?” the stylist asked, playing with Dawn’s thick curls.
“No. I want to cut it all off. Like this.” Dawn showed her the magazine picture she’d torn from a collage on her bedroom wall.
The stylist, whose name was Adele, frowned, sensing the thoughtless impulse that had brought Dawn to this point. “Let’s get you shampooed, then we’ll talk.”
There was nothing to talk about, since Dawn wanted her hair gone and wasn’t leaving until most of it was on the floor. “We should find something better suited to your hair type,” Adele said anyway, combing out Dawn’s wet hair.
“It’s fine. This is what I want.”
With a sigh, Adele picked up her scissors. “You know, guys prefer long hair. They just don’t like short hair on a girl.”
“That’s not really my concern,” Dawn snapped, irritated.
Finally Adele stopped talking and snipped Dawn’s hair in silence. Dawn held her glasses in her lap, glad she didn’t have to see her reflection in the mirror. Sitting in a stylist’s chair and staring at a version of herself that looked ten times crappier than usual was utterly depressing.
When she slipped her glasses back on, she saw her hair was a sleek cap close to her skull with wispy, feminine bits here and there. Her brassy sunlights were gone, and her natural color was a little darker than she remembered. The cut would be a pain to grow out, but she didn’t care now. She loved it. She felt good. Her features stood out in a way that was startling. Had her chin always been that wide? Her nose that long? Maybe no one would recognize her.
By the time she arrived back at the apartment, she felt morose again. She wondered when that would change for good. She walked with slow steps toward the door, almost hoping she’d never reach it. A strange feeling grew in her, something dreadful and foreboding. The wind raked across her skull. Water leaked from her eyes when she didn’t blink. If she went inside, if she fell into bed, if she slept until it was dark, Tristan would be there beside her when she woke. She missed him with a fierce ache that angered her for feeling it.
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