by L. J. Smith
Mary-Lynnette remembered what she’d been talking about when the door banged. “Rowan, I always meant to ask you—you said that only Ash could have figured out where you were going when you ran away. But what about the guy who helped you smuggle letters off the island? He would know where your aunt lived, right? He could see the address on the letters.”
“Crane Linden.” Rowan smiled, a sad little smile. “No, he wouldn’t know. He’s…” She touched her temple lightly. “I don’t know what you call it. His mind never developed completely. He can’t read. But he’s very kind.”
There were illiterate vampires? Well, why not? Aloud Mary-Lynnette said, “Oh. Well, I guess it’s one more person we can eliminate.”
“Look, can we just brainstorm a minute?” Mark said. “This is probably crazy, but what if Jeremy’s uncle isn’t really dead? And what if—”
At that moment, there was a crash from the front porch.
No, a tap-tap-crash, Mary-Lynnette thought. Then she thought, Oh, God…Tiggy.
CHAPTER 15
Tiggy.
She was running. Throwing the door open. Visions of kittens impaled by tiny stakes in her mind.
It wasn’t Tiggy on the front porch. It was Ash. He was lying flat in the purple twilight, little moths fluttering around him.
Mary-Lynnette felt a violent wrench in her chest. For a moment everything seemed suspended—and changed.
If Ash were dead—if Ash had been killed…
Things would never be all right. She would never be all right. It would be like the night with the moon and stars gone. Nothing that anybody could do would make up for it. Mary-Lynnette didn’t know why—it didn’t make any sense—but she suddenly knew it was true.
She couldn’t breathe and her arms and legs felt strange. Floaty. Out of her control.
Then Ash moved. He lifted his head and pushed up with his arms and looked around.
Mary-Lynnette could breathe again, but she still felt dizzy. “Are you hurt?” she asked stupidly. She didn’t dare touch him. In her present state one blast of electricity could fry her circuits forever. She’d melt like the Wicked Witch of the West.
“I fell in this hole,” he said. “What do you think?”
That’s right, Mary-Lynnette thought; the footsteps had ended with more of a crash than a thud. Not like the footsteps of last night.
And that meant something…if only she could follow the thought to the end….
“Having problems, Ash?” Kestrel’s voice said sweetly, and then Kestrel herself appeared out of the shadows, looking like an angel with her golden hair and her lovely clean features. Jade was behind her, holding Tiggy in her arms.
“He was up in a tree,” Jade said, kissing the kitten’s head. “I had to talk him down.” Her eyes were emerald in the porch light, and she seemed to float rather than walk.
Ash was getting up, shaking himself. Like his sisters, he looked uncannily beautiful after a feeding, with a sort of weird moonlight glow in his eyes. Mary-Lynnette’s thought was long gone.
“Come on in,” she said resignedly. “And help figure out who killed your aunt.”
Now that Ash was indisputably all right, she wanted to forget what she’d been feeling a minute ago. Or at least not to think about what it meant.
What it means, the little voice inside her head said sweetly, is that you’re in big trouble, girl. Ha ha.
“So what’s the story?” Kestrel said briskly as they all sat around the kitchen table.
“The story is that there is no story,” Mary-Lynnette said. She stared at her paper in frustration. “Look—what if we start at the beginning? We don’t know who did it, but we do know some things about them. Right?”
Rowan nodded encouragingly. “Right.”
“First: the goat. Whoever killed the goat had to be strong, because poking those toothpicks through hide wouldn’t have been easy. And whoever killed the goat had to know how your uncle Hodge was killed, because the goat was killed in the same way. And they had to have some reason for putting a black iris in the goat’s mouth—either because they knew Ash belonged to the Black Iris Club, or because they belonged to the Black Iris Club themselves.”
“Or because they thought a black iris would represent all lamia, or all Night People,” Ash said. His voice was muffled—he was bent over, rubbing his ankle. “That’s a common mistake Outsiders make.”
Very good, Mary-Lynnette thought in spite of herself. She said, “Okay. And they had access to two different kinds of small stakes—which isn’t saying much, because you can buy both kinds in town.”
“And they must have had some reason to hate Mrs. B., or to hate vampires,” Mark said. “Otherwise, why kill her?”
Mary-Lynnette gave him a patient look. “I hadn’t gotten to Mrs. B. yet. But we can do her now. First, whoever killed Mrs. B. obviously knew she was a vampire, because they staked her. And, second…um…second…” Her voice trailed off. She couldn’t think of anything to go second.
“Second, they probably killed her on impulse,” Ash said, in a surprisingly calm and analytical voice. “You said she was stabbed with a picket from the fence, and if they’d been planning on doing it, they’d probably have brought their own stake.”
“Very good.” This time Mary-Lynnette said it out loud. She couldn’t help it. She met Ash’s eyes and saw something that startled her. He looked as if it mattered to him that she thought he was smart.
Well, she thought. Well, well. Here we are, probably for the first time, just talking to each other. Not arguing, not being sarcastic, just talking. It’s nice.
It was surprisingly nice. And the strange thing was, she knew Ash thought so, too. They understood each other. Over the table, Ash gave her a barely perceptible nod.
They kept talking. Mary-Lynnette lost track of time as they sat and argued and brainstormed. Finally she looked up at the clock and realized with a shock that it was near midnight.
“Do we have to keep thinking?” Mark said pathetically. “I’m tired.” He was almost lying on the table. So was Jade.
I know how you feel, Mary-Lynnette thought. My brain is stalled. I feel…extremely stupid.
“Somehow, I don’t think we’re going to solve the murder tonight,” Kestrel said. Her eyes were closed.
She was right. The problem was that Mary-Lynnette didn’t feel like going to bed, either. She didn’t want to lie down and relax—there was a restlessness inside her.
I want…what do I want? she thought. I want…
“If there weren’t a psychopathic goat killer lurking around here, I’d go out and look at the stars,” she said.
Ash said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, “I’ll go with you.”
Kestrel and Jade looked at their brother in disbelief. Rowan bent her head, not quite hiding a smile.
Mary-Lynnette said, “Um…”
“Look,” Ash said. “I don’t think the goat killer is lurking out there every minute looking for people to skewer. And if anything does happen, I can handle it.” He stopped, looked guilty, then bland. “I mean—we can handle it, because there’ll be two of us.”
Close but no cigar, buddy, Mary-Lynnette thought. Still, there was a certain basic truth to what he was saying. He was strong and fast, and she had the feeling he knew how to fight dirty.
Even if she’d never seen him do it, she thought suddenly. All those times she’d gone after him, shining light in his eyes, kicking him in the shins—and he’d never once tried to retaliate. She didn’t think it had even occurred to him.
She looked at him and said, “Okay.”
“Now,” Mark said. “Look…”
“We’ll be fine,” Mary-Lynnette told him. “We won’t go far.”
Mary-Lynnette drove. She didn’t know exactly where she was going, only that she didn’t want to go to her hill. Too many weird memories. Despite what she’d told Mark, she found herself taking the car farther and farther. Out to where Hazel Green Creek and Beavercreek alm
ost came together and the land between them was a good imitation of a rain forest.
“Is this the best place to look at stars?” Ash said doubtfully when they got out of the station wagon.
“Well—if you’re looking straight up,” Mary-Lynnette said. She faced eastward and tilted her head far back.
“See the brightest star up there? That’s Vega, the queen star of summer.”
“Yeah. She’s been higher in the sky every night this summer,” Ash said without emphasis.
Mary-Lynnette glanced at him.
He shrugged. “When you’re out so much at night, you get to recognize the stars,” he said. “Even if you don’t know their names.”
Mary-Lynnette looked back up at Vega. She swallowed. “Can you—can you see something small and bright below her—something ring-shaped?”
“The thing that looks like a ghost doughnut?”
Mary-Lynnette smiled, but only with her lips. “That’s the Ring Nebula. I can see that—with my telescope.”
She could feel him looking at her, and she heard him take a breath as if he were going to say something. But then he let the breath out again and looked back up at the stars.
It was the perfect moment for him to mention something about how Vampires See It Better. And if he had, Mary-Lynnette would have turned on him and rejected him with righteous anger.
But since he didn’t, she felt a different kind of anger welling up. A spring of contrariness, as if she were the Mary in the nursery rhyme. What, so you’ve decided I’m not good enough to be a vampire or something?
And what did I really bring you out here for, to the most isolated place I could find? Only for starwatching? I don’t think so.
I don’t even know who I am anymore, she remembered with a sort of fatalistic gloom. I have the feeling I’m about to surprise myself.
“Aren’t you getting a crick in your neck?” Ash said.
Mary-Lynnette rolled her head from side to side slightly to limber the muscles. “Maybe.”
“I could rub it for you?” He made the offer from several feet away.
Mary-Lynnette snorted and gave him a look.
The moon, a waning crescent, was rising above the cedars to the east. Mary-Lynnette said, “You want to take a walk?”
“Huh? Sure.”
They walked and Mary-Lynnette thought. About how it would be to see the Ring Nebula with her own eyes, or the Veil Nebula without a filter. She could feel a longing for them so strong it was like a cable attached to her chest, pulling her upward.
Of course, that was nothing new. She’d felt it lots of times before, and usually she’d ended up buying another book on astronomy, another lens for her telescope. Anything to bring her closer to what she wanted.
But now I have a whole new temptation. Something bigger and scarier than I ever imagined.
What if I could be—more than I am now? The same person, but with sharper senses? A Mary-Lynnette who could really belong to the night?
She’d already discovered she wasn’t exactly who she’d always thought. She was more violent—she’d kicked Ash, hadn’t she? Repeatedly. And she’d admired the purity of Kestrel’s fierceness. She’d seen the logic in the kill-or-be-killed philosophy. She’d dreamed about the joy of hunting.
What else did it take to be a Night Person?
“There’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you,” Ash said.
“Hm.” Do I want to encourage him or not?
But what Ash said was “Can we stop fighting now?”
Mary-Lynnette thought and then said seriously, “I don’t know.”
They kept walking. The cedars towered around them like pillars in a giant ruined temple. A dark temple. And underneath, the stillness was so enormous that Mary-Lynnette felt as if she were walking on the moon.
She bent and picked a ghostly wildflower that was growing out of the moss. Death camas. Ash bent and picked up a broken-off yew branch lying at the foot of a twisted tree. They didn’t look at each other. They walked, with a few feet of space between them.
“You know, somebody told me this would happen,” Ash said, as if carrying on some entirely different conversation they’d been having.
“That you’d come to a hick town and chase a goat killer?”
“That someday I’d care for someone—and it would hurt.”
Mary-Lynnette kept on walking. She didn’t slow or speed up. It was only her heart that was suddenly beating hard—in a mixture of dismay and exhilaration.
Oh, God—whatever was going to happen was happening.
“You’re not like anybody I’ve ever met,” Ash said.
“Well, that feeling is mutual.”
Ash stripped some of the papery purple bark off his yew stick. “And, you see, it’s difficult because what I’ve always thought about humans—what I was always raised to think…”
“I know what you’ve always thought,” Mary-Lynnette said sharply. Thinking, vermin.
“But,” Ash continued doggedly, “the thing is—and I know this is going to sound strange—that I seem to love you sort of desperately.” He pulled more bark off his stick.
Mary-Lynnette didn’t look at him. She couldn’t speak.
“I’ve done everything I could to get rid of the feeling, but it just won’t go. At first I thought if I left Briar Creek, I’d forget it. But now I know that was insane. Wherever I go, it’s going with me. I can’t kill it off. So I have to think of something else.”
Mary-Lynnette suddenly felt extremely contrary. “Sorry,” she said coldly. “But I’m afraid it’s not very flattering to have somebody tell you that they love you against their will, against their reason, and even—”
“Against their character,” Ash finished for her, bleakly. “Yeah, I know.”
Mary-Lynnette stopped walking. She stared at him. “You have not read Pride and Prejudice,” she said flatly.
“Why not?”
“Because Jane Austen was a human.”
He looked at her inscrutably and said, “How do you know?”
Good point. Scary point. How could she really know who in human history had been human? What about Galileo? Newton? Tycho Brahe?
“Well Jane Austen was a woman,” she said, retreating to safer ground. “And you’re a chauvinist pig”
“Yes, well, that I can’t argue.”
Mary-Lynnette started walking again. He followed.
“So now can I tell you how, um, ardently I love and admire you?”
Another quote. “I thought your sisters said you partied all the time.”
Ash understood. “I do,” he said defensively. “But the morning after partying you have to stay in bed. And if you’re in bed you might as well read something.”
They walked.
“After all, we are soulmates,” Ash said. “I can’t be completely stupid or I’d be completely wrong for you.”
Mary-Lynnette thought about that. And about the fact that Ash sounded almost—humble. Which he had certainly never sounded before.
She said, “Ash…I don’t know. I mean—we are wrong for each other. We’re just basically incompatible. Even if I were a vampire, we’d be basically incompatible.”
“Well.” Ash whacked at something with his yew branch. He spoke as if he half expected to be ignored. “Well, about that…I think I could possibly change your mind.”
“About what?”
“Being incompatible. I think we could be sort of fairly compatible if…”
“If?” Mary-Lynnette said as the silence dragged on.
“Well, if you could bring yourself to kiss me.”
“Kiss you?”
“Yeah, I know it’s a radical concept. I was pretty sure you wouldn’t go for it.” He whacked at another tree. “Of course humans have been doing it for thousands of years.”
Watching him sideways, Mary-Lynnette said, “Would you kiss a three-hundred-pound gorilla?”
He blinked twice. “Oh, thank you.”
“I didn�
�t mean you looked like one.”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess. I smell like one?”
Mary-Lynnette bit her lip on a grim smile. “I mean you’re that much stronger than I am. Would you kiss a female gorilla that could crush you with one squeeze? When you couldn’t do anything about it?”
He glanced at her sideways. “Well, you’re not exactly in that position, are you?”
Mary-Lynnette said, “Aren’t I? It looks to me as if I’d have to become a vampire just to deal with you on an equal level.”
Ash said, “Here.”
He was offering her the yew branch. Mary-Lynnette stared at him.
“You want to give me your stick.”
“It’s not a stick, it’s the way to deal with me on an equal level.” He put one end of the branch against the base of his throat, and Mary-Lynnette saw that it was sharp. She reached out to take the other end and found the stick was surprisingly hard and heavy.
Ash was looking straight at her. It was too dark to see what color his eyes were, but his expression was unexpectedly sober.
“One good push would do it,” he said. “First here and then in the heart. You could eliminate the problem of me from your life.”
Mary-Lynnette pushed, but gently. He took a step back. And another. She backed him up against a tree, holding the stick to his neck like a sword.
“I actually meant only if you were really serious,” Ash said as he came up short against the cedar’s bare trunk. But he didn’t make a move to defend himself. “And the truth is that you don’t even need a spear like that. A pencil in the right place would do it.”
Mary-Lynnette narrowed her eyes at him, swirling the yew stick over his body like a fencer getting the range.
Then she removed it. She dropped it to the ground.
“You really have changed,” she said.
Ash said simply, “I’ve changed so much in the last few days that I don’t even recognize myself in the mirror.”
“And you didn’t kill your aunt.”
“You’re just now figuring that out?”
“No. But I always wondered just a bit. All right, I’ll kiss you.”
It was a little awkward, lining up to get the position right. Mary-Lynnette had never kissed a boy before. But once she started she found it was simple.