“Good,” she says. “I wish I could give you something to tell you it’s all worth it, but I can’t,” she says. “I know they haven’t been caught yet, so there’s that.”
I back off the adjustment screw a tad, as she tightens another and moves on to the last one.
“Would you know?” I ask.
“There’s a vampire in the Fersiu clan I know that lives out in Wisconsin. Not much happens with the Negre that she doesn’t know about. But seriously, Carl. Keep yourself ignorant on that count, alright? The less we know the less we can let slip. Now get your mind back on the task at hand.”
For the last bolt, I have to keep actively adjusting the timing while Grandma tightens it down. It is almost impossible to adjust the timing by yourself because of this, which tells me she was expecting me to come by right about when I did. Knowing that she can predict me like that frustrates me, and I keep on overcompensating with the screwdriver. Grandma, at least, doesn’t get on me about that. She just patiently backs the bolt off every time I mess up and we start again.
Once we’ve finally get that last bolt taken care of, I grab the couple sockets she’d dropped earlier and wheel out from underneath the truck. She gives me a damp towel to wipe my face and hair off with. “It’s getting warm,” she says, handing me my beer and leading me to the slop sink in the garage, where we both wash up properly.
I stick around for dinner, just for something to do instead of fret at home. It’s hard for Grandma and me to not talk about Ivy in the house she lives in, that is full of her stuff, but we somehow manage. I spend some time talking with Grandma about Kate and the wolf. It’s not a problem she has, but she at least understands. Being one of the few pinkies that knows about both us werewolves and the zombies, she has spent most of her life keeping secrets from people she’d rather not lie to. The one time we drift into talking about Ivy is when she needs to unload a bit about how hard it was for her to not tell her exactly why she was so against her getting involved with Ben.
At the end of the night, I drive home, happy that I’ll be able to sleep in my own bed instead of raging in the basement. Sharing a burden always lightens it. Even if Grandma and I each had to take some weight from the other, the fact that we each had the chance to unload a bit makes the total load between us lighter and easier to carry.
Unfortunately, I wake up the next morning feeling on edge again. I don’t immediately know why, but there’s something nagging at the back of my mind. When I get to school, I can see that Kate and Nathan are off as well. We sit down on the stairs in our usual spot, and none of us speak for a while. Kate leans in a bit toward me, but that scent on her neck isn’t as strong. I try to make a bit of small talk, but it goes nowhere.
Finally, Nathan breaks it. “I can’t believe she’s throwing so much away!”
“She’s got ten minutes to prove she isn’t,” Kate says.
That’s when it hits me. For the past couple of days, both of them have been trying not to mention Ivy as they prepared for their Honors Literature midterm. Ivy is in the running for a major scholarship if she can get an A in her Honors Lit class. If she fails the midterm or takes an incomplete for truancy, there’s no way she can get better than a low B for the course, even if she gets perfect marks on everything else.
The fact that she is not sitting on the steps with us, that her car is still not in the parking lot, makes it clear that she’s almost certainly not going to be in her seat in first period for the exam.
“Why didn’t you just smack him right on out of town that day?” Kate asks me. “I guarantee you, every one of us would say he started it if you had.”
That’s not what I need to hear right then. “I guess the one time I let my better nature guide my hand was the wrong time,” I say.
“If I ever see him again, I’ll tell you what will be guiding my hand,” Nathan says. “Are you sure we can’t go to Denver and knock on every single hotel room door until we find them?”
“If they’re even still in Denver,” I say.
“What?” Nathan and Kate ask in unison.
“Has she been in touch?” Nathan asks.
“I had dinner at the house last night.” It’s work to get the next words out. So many lies to protect that stupid zombie. “Grandma and she still share a credit card account. She says she’s not in Denver, but all of her spending looks kind of normal, whatever that means.”
“Where is she?” Kate asks.
“She wouldn’t tell me.”
“We’re going over after school tonight,” Kate says to Nathan and me. “We’re sitting her down and making her talk.”
“I can’t,” I say.
“You can skip work for this,” Nathan says.
“No, no,” I say. “It’s not about work. I just can’t. It was rough being at the house last night with her gone, and knowing who she’s with,” I say. “I just can’t go back tonight.”
Kate looks at me. “Still love her?” she asks, taking her fingers and gently pushing my gray lock of hair back behind my ear. It’s not an accusation she’s making. It’s driven by sympathy.
Nathan also reaches a hand out and puts it on my shoulder. I know he gets what I’m feeling.
I can’t speak at the moment. My throat is too tight. I just nod, very slightly.
“Well, if we manage to get it out of her, we’re recruiting you for the rescue party, alright?”
I nod again.
Kate runs a finger through my odd colored streak of hair again, and rests her hand on mine. “I understand,” she whispers, just for me. “Let’s both take our time, ok?” Her touch is extremely tender, I would say almost loving. And the erotic scent of desire is absent from the skin on her wrist.
The bell rings. Kate and Nathan shuffle to their Honors Lit exam. I vainly hope their concern for Ivy doesn’t cause them to do poorly. I don’t go inside right away. I call Grandma real quick to fill her in on my latest diversion in the hunt for Ivy and Ben, and to warn her that she’s going to have two furious people showing up at her house in about nine hours.
*****
Pushing the responsibility for Kate and Nathan off onto Grandma does very little to improve my mood, though. When I see them later in the day, they’re still horribly worried and upset. We have an awkward lunch together and they don’t say anything when I just start walking home at the end of the day.
When I get up to my house, I don’t even go inside to drop off my books, I just go right to my car. I sit there with the keys in the ignition, trying to talk myself out of what I’m about to do, but I fail. I have to sate at least a little bit of my curiosity. I remember the drive home from the movie with Nathan and Kate.
I had been too lost in thought on the drive to have marked how far out of town we were when I saw Ben skulking in the tree line. I started watching for landmarks right after that, though. Unfortunately, the darkness along that highway at night is pretty thirsty, and there are so many curves that none of them really stands out as significant.
I can at least guess which five mile stretch or so it was on, because I remember passing the intersection of the highway with Bela Lane a few minutes afterwards. It’s not much, but it’s a start. I drive up and down that stretch as slow as I can without being a traffic hazard, desperately looking for anything that seems familiar from the other night. I know that the easiest thing to do would be to park the car and let the wolf out to sniff around. But I’d never get it back on its leash if it caught scent of either zombie boy or Ivy. If the wolf gets close to Ben, one of us is done. Finished. I have a strong enough instinct for self-preservation that I choose not to start that fight, because if Ben is as good as I suspect he is, it’s not likely to go well for me.
I also love Ivy, still, way too much to put her through that. She doesn’t need to see it. A fight between a zombie and a wolf is a terrible thing to behold.
I allow myself one more slow drive down the stretch of highway where I think I saw Ben. I roll the window down, knowing there’s n
o way I’d be able to smell him in human form from a moving car, but it somehow makes me feel a little bit better.
I hit the end of the length of highway I’d targeted, based on a pair of white stones set near each other right off the road. They seemed to make a good marker for me to roughly guess where I should start looking for any sign of Ben’s hideout. A quarter mile later, I notice another pair of similar stones. This can’t be a coincidence.
I pull the car over at the next driveway and walk over to the nearest pair of stones. Each of them is big and heavy, about two feet square. Most of the rocks in this area are deep gray, so they stand out. They’re just bright enough that they’d even stand out at night.
Treading as lightly as I can, to not leave any tracks of my own, I start to examine the ground around them, looking for footprints or any other sign that the stones mark a path.
I find nothing, so if anybody is walking around here, they are at least as careful as I am with their steps.
One thing I do notice is that there’s a wrinkle in the land that runs downhill from where I’m standing, the kind you’d use if you want to walk around without drawing much attention to yourself.
I continue on to the other pair of stones, and sure enough, they are also not far from what looks like a game trail that runs along a fallen tree. I know the wolf wants to come out and test the air for me, but if I am where I think I am, nothing good will come of it.
I tell the wolf to back down and go back to my car. I’ve gotten close enough for now. If I feel I really need to go looking for Ben and Ivy now, I know where to start. It’s not much, but it’s enough for now.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ben Wake
“Good night, my love…”
That is my cue that Ivy will be asleep within a minute. I keep reading for two more, just to be sure, before I put the book down. I continue to hold onto her for a while, until I feel her breathing shift as she falls into a deeper level of sleep. Only then do I carefully slip my arm out from under her head and slip out of bed.
A cold front moved through today, bringing rain with it. It’s almost cold in the cabin. Something I barely notice, but she certainly has. Before I walk away from the bed, I pull the covers up to her chin and tuck her in. I stroke her hair one more time before I leave…
…And my sense shows me a moment in our lives. Ivy looking ill, pale. “I need you to turn me, Ben…”
I jerk my hand back, sudden enough to wake her.
“What?” she asks me.
“Sorry,” I say. “I slipped while trying to sneak out without waking you.”
“Really? And I wasn’t awake to see it?”
“Apparently not,” I say, puzzled.
“You’re elegant, Ben. I’ve never seen you be anything but graceful.”
I kiss her cheek. “Next time I stumble, I be sure it happens right in front of you.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t. Ruin my mental image of you…”
I kiss her again, letting it linger this time. She nestles into the covers a bit more. “I’ll put another log on before I leave the cabin,” I say, leaning forward to brush my cheek against hers.
“Love you,” she says, and drifts off again.
When she’s asleep, I touch her again the same way I did when I got the flash of my sense, but it does not return. It most likely will never come again. This is why it is so important for me to listen to what it says and to figure out the right course of action quickly.
I am so distracted by this that I barely remember to go outside and grab another log to put on the small fire in the bedroom. I keep a supply of very dry wood inside for when we need a fire during the day. The drier the wood, the less smoke it makes. At night, it’s not as much of a concern, so I can use the stuff that’s been outside in the damp.
Once I know Ivy is fully settled in and will be warm for a few hours, I start my first patrol of the night around the big stretch of land around our little hideout. It’s times like these that I envy the thropes. They could smell the passage of a vampire for hours afterwards. It made it hard to hunt them, because they could tell if you were closing in on them.
There are still ways, though. Not as reliable as a thrope’s nose, but they work most of the time. My first patrol takes me two full hours, as I make all of my checks, happily finding no evidence of any of my kind near the cabin. After that, I allow myself to sit out in a clearing a couple hundred yards upslope from the cabin and look up at the stars. The Lyrid meteor shower is happening tonight. It’s not as impressive as the ones in late summer and autumn, but it is beautiful nonetheless. Being out in the wooded valleys, not a single streetlight or house light visible at all, the light pollution of Denver hidden behind several mountains, even the warm would be able to see one shooting star after another. With my vampiric vision, I can see so many more than they can.
I find my thoughts drifting back to my sense, of Ivy asking me to turn her. As I replay the scene over and over in my mind, turn it over, examine every detail I can recall, I am more and more certain that it is not a warning, but an inevitability. I get up and walk, feeling the slope under me to find the right angle I recall, looking for a long, low, gray line of rock thrusting up through the soil and leaf litter. Once I catch sight of the rock and at about the right part of the slope, I sidestep right and left, rotating until I am in the exact place as in my sense.
I look around me, trying to figure out what might be important about this exact place. I’m just out of sight of the cabin. Nowhere near either road, still far from the property line. The bare rock shields one of the two escape routes up to the road above the cabin, but the sense didn’t have us on the route, no sense of urgency that we were fleeing.
One of the things I realize about the image is that the scene is just before full darkness, the hour that I am usually returning if I’ve made a quick run into town for supplies, to make sure I am back before she is at the greatest risk from any vampires coming onto the land. I wonder if that is significant, that she is meeting me as I come back from town, instead of staying safe inside the cabin like she is supposed to. Vampires cannot enter anybody else’s home unless invited, so I always impress upon her the importance of never, ever leaving the cabin when I am not on the land.
“I need you to turn me, Ben…”
What could possibly bring her out of the cabin to meet me here? She looked pale in the image, paler than she usually is. Will she be ill at the time? I get down on hands and knees, looking at the plants around this spot, but I have no knowledge of what they might be useful for. Ivy knows, but I have never had any reason to learn anything like that. Even plucking some of the leaves and sniffing them to see if any smell more astringent or medicinal than others, I can’t tell.
It also does not help that in the vision, we are standing very close to each other, embracing. I can only see her face, not the rest of her body. The sense does not give me any idea of what she will feel like at that moment. Will she be thin? Cold? Trembling? There will be a waver in her voice, but I don’t know if it will be emotional effort or physical weakness.
I spend another ten minutes with my thoughts and memory of the sense running circles around themselves and going nowhere when I finally force myself to give up, and take my next patrol for the night, the one that goes all the way out to the property lines and the roads.
A couple more hours of stalking silently through the woods, checking every little indicator I’ve set out, shows me that nothing larger than a big raccoon or a small coyote has been through. I check the hidden rope handles on the emergency boxes at the end of each of the escape runs. Nothing has disturbed the boxes at all.
There’s something that bothers me about one of the boxes at the road above the cabin. I carefully search the area around it again, looking close at the rope handle and the soil above the box lid. I can’t see any indication that anything has opened the box or even found the rope. I squat down between the stones. Exactly like somebody would if they had noticed two u
nusually white rocks set up by the roadside. I was smart enough to not place the emergency box right in the middle, for exactly this reason. I look down the slope, and see that for an eye trained to look for such things, the escape route is clear. I slowly walk toward it, eyes scanning the ground before me.
I find it. A single, partial footprint. Just the impression of a toe. It’s the kind of print left by somebody trained to move through woods quietly. To do that, you probe gently with the toe for any leaves or branches that might make noise before fully setting the foot down and shifting your weight onto it. But every so often, you overbalance a bit, or your other foot shifts unexpectedly, and the careful toe stomps down.
Somebody who is very good at hunting has been on the land.
I keep on walking, to the edge of the escape run. I stand for a minute taking it in. No vampire has gone down the run. So whoever was up there is either not a vampire, had turned back before taking the run, or had gone around it. I double check the land for a hundred yards on either side of the run, still finding no evidence a vampire has passed.
I don’t want to think about it, but there is one person who might be probing our hideout. I don’t want to admit to myself who I think it is. I recall the other sense I’ve had regarding Ivy, a thrope halfway transformed, limbs broken and arranged to tell me that he is leading them closer to Ivy. This incursion, though, doesn’t feel like it’s tied to that earlier sense. If the partial footprint I found did truly belong to the one I don’t want it to belong to, I’m sure I’d be remembering the sense more strongly than I do. But that memory is fading. I hope it means that danger is passing.
All of this leaves me terribly worried about Ivy. The worry that someone might find us, coupled with what my sense has shown drives me to return to the cabin, to make sure she is still well. I carefully detour around the space shown me in my sense, not wanting to freshly agitate myself before getting to the cabin. Once inside, I silently pad my way to the bedroom and look in on her. She’s curled up on her right side, one hand under her cheek, her long, dark hair braided up for sleep. It’s warm enough in the room now, even with the wood burned down to just glowing coals, that she’s let the blanket slip down from her shoulder. I want to sit on the bed beside her, but I can tell she’s wandered into a lighter sleep, and would likely wake up if I did so. Even though we’ve settled into a good rhythm in our days out here, I know that she worries constantly about her grandmother, and misses her friends terribly. It weighs on her constantly when she is awake. It is only when she sleeps that she stops worrying about them, and even then, I’m sure they are still in her dreams.
A Witch's Fate_A Reverse Harem Romance Page 19