by L. J. Smith
I don’t want to be here, Phil thought.
James drove down the single lane road that curved around the cemetery and parked underneath a huge and ancient gingko tree.
“What if somebody sees us? Don’t they have a guard or something?”
“They have a night watchman. He’s asleep. I took care of it before I picked you up.” James got out and began unloading an amazing amount of equipment from the backseat of the Integra.
Two heavy duty flashlights. A crowbar. Some old boards. A couple of tarps. And two brand-new shovels.
“Help me carry this stuff.”
“What’s it all for?” But Phil helped. Gravel crunched under his feet as he followed James on one of the little winding paths. They went up some weathered wooden stairs and down the other side and then they were in Toyland.
That was what somebody at the funeral had called it. Phil had overheard two business friends of Cliff’s talking about it. It was a section of the cemetery where mostly kids were buried. You could tell without even looking at the headstones because there were teddy bears and things on the graves.
Poppy’s grave was right on the edge of Toyland. It didn’t have a headstone yet, of course. There was only a green plastic marker.
James dumped his armload on the grass and then knelt to examine the ground with a flashlight.
Phil stood silently, looking around the cemetery. He was still scared, partly with the normal fear that they’d get caught before they got finished, and partly with the supernatural fear that they wouldn’t. The only sounds were crickets and distant traffic. Tree branches and bushes moved gently in the wind.
“Okay,” James said. “First we’ve got to peel this sod off.”
“Huh?” Phil hadn’t even thought about why there was already grass on the new grave. But of course it was sod. James had found the edge of one strip and was rolling it up like a carpet.
Phil found another edge. The strips were about six feet long by one and a half feet wide. They were heavy, but it wasn’t too hard to roll them up and off the foot of the grave.
“Leave ’em there. We’ve got to put them on again afterward,” James grunted. “We don’t want it to look as if this place has been disturbed.”
A light went on for Phil. “That’s why the tarps and stuff.”
“Yeah. A little mess won’t be suspicious. But if we leave dirt scattered everywhere, somebody’s going to wonder.” James laid the boards around the perimeter of the grave, then spread the tarps on either side. Phil helped him straighten them.
What was left where the sod had been was fresh, loamy soil. Phil positioned a flashlight and picked up a shovel.
I don’t believe I’m doing this, he thought.
But he was doing it. And as long as all he thought about was the physical work, the job of digging a hole in the ground, he was okay. He concentrated on that and stepped on the shovel.
It went straight into the dirt, with no resistance. It was easy to spade up one shovelful of dirt and drop it onto the tarp. But by about the thirtieth shovelful, he was getting tired.
“This is insane. We need a backhoe,” he said, wiping his forehead.
“You can rest if you want,” James said coolly.
Phil understood. James was the backhoe. He was stronger than anyone Phil had ever seen. He pitched up shovelful after shovelful of dirt without even straining. He made it look like fun.
“Why don’t we have you on any of the teams at school?” Phil said, leaning heavily on his shovel.
“I prefer individual sports. Like wrestling,” James said and grinned, just for a moment, up at Phil. It was the kind of locker-room remark that couldn’t be misunderstood from one guy to another. He meant wrestling with, for instance, Jacklyn and Michaela.
And, just at that particular moment, Phil couldn’t help grinning back. He couldn’t summon up any righteous disapproval.
Even with James, it took a long time to dig the hole. It was wider than Phil would have thought necessary. When his shovel finally chunked on something solid, he found out why.
“It’s the vault,” James said.
“What vault?”
“The burial vault. They put the coffin inside it so it doesn’t get crushed if the ground collapses. Get out and hand me the crowbar.”
Phil climbed out of the hole and gave him the crowbar. He could see the vault now. It was made of unfinished concrete and he guessed that it was just a rectangular box with a lid. James was prying the lid off with the crowbar.
“There,” James said, with an explosive grunt as he lifted the lid and slid it, by degrees, behind the concrete box. That was why the hole was so wide, to accommodate the lid on one side and James on the other.
And now, looking straight down into the hole, Phil could see the casket. A huge spray of slightly crushed yellow roses was on top.
James was breathing hard, but Phil didn’t think it was with exertion. His own lungs felt as if they were being squeezed flat, and his heart was thudding hard enough to shake his body.
“Oh, God,” he said quietly and with no particular emphasis.
James looked up. “Yeah. This is it.” He pushed the roses down toward the foot of the casket. Then, in what seemed like slow motion to Phillip, he began unfastening latches on the casket’s side.
When they were unfastened, he paused for just an instant, both hands flat on the smooth surface of the casket. Then he lifted the upper panel, and Phillip could see what was inside.
CHAPTER 12
Poppy was lying there on the white velvet lining, eyes shut. She looked very pale and strangely beautiful—but was she dead?
“Wake up,” James said. He put his hand on hers. Phillip had the feeling that he was calling with his mind as well as his voice.
There was an agonizingly long minute while nothing happened. James put his other hand under Poppy’s neck, lifting her just slightly. “Poppy, it’s time. Wake up. Wake up.”
Poppy’s eyelashes fluttered.
Something jarred violently in Phillip. He wanted to give a yell of victory and pound the grass. He also wanted to run away. Finally he just collapsed by the graveside, his knees giving out altogether.
“Come on, Poppy. Get up. We have to go.” James was speaking in a gentle, insistent voice, as if he were talking to someone coming out of anesthesia.
Which was exactly how Poppy looked. As Phil watched with fascination and awe and dread, she blinked and rolled her head a little, then opened her eyes. She shut them again almost immediately, but James went on talking to her, and the next time she opened them they stayed open.
Then, with James urging her gently, she sat up.
“Poppy,” Phil said. An involuntary outburst. His chest was swelling, burning.
Poppy looked up, then squinted and turned immediately from the beam of the flashlight. She looked annoyed.
“Come on,” James said, helping her out of the open half of the casket. It wasn’t hard; Poppy was small. With James holding her arm, she stood on the closed half of the casket, and Phil reached into the hole and pulled her up.
Then, with something like a convulsion, he hugged her.
When he pulled back, she blinked at him. A slight frown puckered her forehead. She licked her index finger and drew the wet finger across his cheek.
“You’re filthy,” she said.
She could talk. She didn’t have red eyes and a chalky face. She was really alive.
Weak with relief, Phil hugged her again. “Oh, God, Poppy, you’re okay. You’re okay.”
He barely noticed that she wasn’t hugging him back.
James scrambled out of the hole. “How do you feel, Poppy?” he said. Not a politeness. A quiet, probing question.
Poppy looked at him, and then at Phillip. “I feel…fine.”
“That’s good,” James said, still watching her as if she were a six-hundred-pound schizophrenic gorilla.
“I feel…hungry,” Poppy said, in the same pleasant, musical voice she’d
used before.
Phil blinked.
“Why don’t you come over here, Phil?” James said, making a gesture behind him.
Phil was beginning to feel very uneasy. Poppy was…could she be smelling him? Not loud, wet sniffs, but the delicate little sniffs of a cat. She was nosing around his shoulder.
“Phil, I think you should come around over here,” James said, with more emphasis. But what happened next happened too quickly for Phil even to start moving.
Delicate hands clenched like steel around his biceps. Poppy smiled at him with very sharp teeth, then darted like a striking cobra for his throat.
I’m going to die, Phil thought with a curious calm. He couldn’t fight her. But her first strike missed. The sharp teeth grazed his throat like two burning pokers.
“No, you don’t,” James said. He looped an arm around Poppy’s waist, lifting her off Phil.
Poppy gave a disappointed wail. As Phil struggled to his feet, she watched him the way a cat watches an interesting insect. Never taking her eyes off him, not even when James spoke to her.
“That’s your brother, Phil. Your twin brother. Remember?”
Poppy just stared at Phil with hugely dilated pupils. Phil realized that she looked not only pale and beautiful but dazed and starving.
“My brother? One of our kind?” Poppy said, sounding puzzled. Her nostrils quivered and her lips parted. “He doesn’t smell like it.”
“No, he’s not one of our kind, but he’s not for biting, either. You’re going to have to wait just a little while to feed.” To Phillip, he said, “Let’s get this hole filled in, fast.”
Phillip couldn’t move at first. Poppy was still watching him in that dreamy but intense way. She stood there in the darkness in her best white dress, supple as a lily, with her hair falling around her face. And she looked at him with the eyes of a jaguar.
She wasn’t human anymore. She was something other. She’d said it herself, she and James were of one kind and Phil was something different. She belonged to the Night World now.
Oh, God, maybe we should just have let her die, Phil thought, and picked up a shovel with loose and trembling hands. James had already gotten the lid back on the vault. Phil shoveled dirt on it without looking at where it landed. His head wobbled as if his neck were a pipe cleaner.
“Don’t be an idiot,” a voice said, and hard fingers closed on Phil’s wrist briefly. Through a blur, Phil saw James.
“She’s not better off dead. She’s just confused right now. This is temporary, all right?”
The words were brusque, but Phil felt a tiny surge of comfort. Maybe James was right. Life was good, in whatever form. And Poppy had chosen this.
Still, she’d changed, and only time would tell how much.
One thing—Phil had made the mistake of thinking that vampires were like humans. He’d gotten so comfortable with James that he’d almost forgotten their differences.
He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Poppy felt wonderful—in almost every way.
She felt secret and strong. She felt poetic and full of possibility. She felt as if she’d sloughed off her old body like a snake shedding its skin, to reveal a fresh new body underneath.
And she knew, without being quite sure how she knew, that she didn’t have cancer.
It was gone, the terrible thing that had been running wild inside her. Her new body had killed it and absorbed it somehow. Or maybe it was just that every cell that made up Poppy North, every molecule, had changed.
However it was, she felt vibrant and healthy. Not just better than she had before she’d gotten the cancer, but better than she could remember feeling in her life. She was strangely aware of her own body, and her muscles and joints all seemed to be working in a way that was sweet and almost magical.
The only problem was that she was hungry. It was taking all her willpower not to pounce on the blond guy in the hole. Phillip. Her brother.
She knew he was her brother, but he was also human and she could sense the rich stuff, lush with life, that was coursing through his veins. The electrifying fluid she needed to survive.
So jump him, part of her mind whispered. Poppy frowned and tried to wiggle away from the thought. She felt something in her mouth nudging her lower lip, and she poked her thumb at it instinctively.
It was a tooth. A delicate curving tooth. Both her canine teeth were long and pointed and very sensitive.
How weird. She rubbed at the new teeth gently, then cautiously explored them with her tongue. She pressed them against her lip.
After a moment they shrank to normal size. If she thought about humans full of blood like berries, they grew again.
Hey, look what I can do!
But she didn’t bother the two grimy boys who were filling in the hole. She glanced around and tried to distract herself instead.
Strange—it didn’t really seem to be either day or night. Maybe there was an eclipse. It was too dim to be daytime, but far too bright for nighttime. She could see the leaves on the maple trees and the gray Spanish moss hanging from the oak trees. Tiny moths were fluttering around the moss, and she could see their pale wings.
When she looked at the sky, she got a shock. There was something floating there, a giant round thing that blazed with silvery light. Poppy thought of spaceships, of alien worlds, before she realized the truth.
It was the moon. Just an ordinary full moon. And the reason it looked so big and throbbing with light was that she had night vision. That was why she could see the moths, too.
All her senses were keen. Delicious smells wafted by her, the smells of small burrowing animals and fluttering dainty birds. On the wind came a tantalizing hint of rabbit.
And she could hear things. Once she whipped her head around as a dog barked right beside her. Then she realized that it was far away, outside the cemetery. It only sounded close.
I’ll bet I can run fast, too, she thought. Her legs felt tingly. She wanted to go running out into the lovely, gloriously-scented night, to be one with it. She was part of it now.
James, she said. And the strange thing was that she said it without saying it out loud. It was something she knew how to do without thinking.
James looked up from his shoveling. Hang on, he said the same way. We’re almost done, kiddo.
Then you’ll teach me to hunt?
He nodded, just slightly. His hair was falling over his forehead and he looked adorably grubby. Poppy felt as if she’d never really seen him before—because now she was seeing him with new senses. James wasn’t just silky brown hair and enigmatic gray eyes and a lithe-muscled body. He was the smell of winter rain and the sound of his predator’s heartbeat and the silvery aura of power she could feel around him. She could sense his mind, lean and tiger-tough but somehow gentle and almost wistful at the same time.
We’re hunting partners now, she told him eagerly, and he smiled an acknowledgment. But underneath she felt that he was worried. He was either sad or anxious about something, something he was keeping from her.
She couldn’t think about it. She didn’t feel hungry anymore…she felt strange. As if she was having trouble getting enough air.
James and Phillip were shaking out the tarps, unrolling strips of fresh sod to cover the grave. Her grave. Funny she hadn’t really thought about that before. She’d been lying in a grave—she ought to feel repulsed or scared.
She didn’t. She didn’t remember being in there at all—didn’t remember anything from the time she’d fallen asleep in her bedroom until she’d woken up with James calling her.
Except a dream…
“Okay,” James said. He was folding up a tarp. “We can go. How’re you feeling?”
“Ummm…a little weird. I can’t get a deep breath.”
“Neither can I,” Phil said. He was breathing hard and wiping his forehead. “I didn’t know grave digging was such hard work.”
James gave Poppy a searching look. “Do you think you can make it back to my
apartment?”
“Hmm? I guess.” Poppy didn’t actually know what he was talking about. Make it how? And why should going to his apartment help her to breathe?
“I’ve got a couple of safe donors there in the building,” James said. “I don’t really want you out on the streets, and I think you’ll make it there okay.”
Poppy didn’t ask what he meant. She was having trouble thinking clearly.
James wanted her to hide in the backseat of his car. Poppy refused. She needed to sit up front and to feel the night air on her face.
“Okay,” James said at last. “But at least sort of cover your face with your arm. I’ll drive on back roads. You can’t be seen, Poppy.”
There didn’t seem to be anyone on the streets to see her. The air whipping her cheeks was cool and good, but it didn’t help her breathing. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t seem to get a proper breath.
I’m hyperventilating, she thought. Her heart was racing, her lips and tongue felt parchment-dry. And still she had the feeling of being air-starved.
What’s happening to me?
Then the pain started.
Agonizing seizures in her muscles—like the cramps she used to get when she went out for track in junior high. Vaguely, through the pain, she remembered something the P.E. teacher had said. “The cramps come when your muscles don’t get enough blood. A charley horse is a clump of muscles starving to death.”
Oh, it hurt. It hurt. She couldn’t even call to James for help, now; all she could do was hang on to the car door and try to breathe. She was whooping and wheezing, but it wasn’t any good.
Cramps everywhere—and now she was so dizzy that she saw the world through sparkling lights.
She was dying. Something had gone terribly wrong. She felt as if she were underwater, trying desperately to claw her way to oxygen—only there was no oxygen.
And then she saw the way.
Or smelled it, actually. The car was stopped at a red light. Poppy’s head and shoulders were out the window by now—and suddenly she caught a whiff of life.