Night World 1

by L. J. Smith

  “That’s funny,” Ash said. “I feel just the opposite.”

  Everyone laughed—except Mary-Lynnette. The big farm kitchen was warm and bright, but the windows were darkening. She couldn’t see anything in the gathering darkness—in the last two days the effects of her blood exchange had faded. Her senses were ordinary human senses again.

  “You’re sure you won’t get in trouble?” she asked Ash.

  “No. I’ll tell our dad the truth—mostly. That an outlaw werewolf killed Aunt Opal and that I killed the werewolf. And that the girls are better off here, hunting quietly and watching out for other rogues. There’s sure to be some record of the Lovett family…. Dad can check out the history all he wants.”

  “A whole family of outlaw werewolves,” Kestrel said musingly.

  “Of crazy werewolves,” Ash said. “They were as dangerous to the Night World as any vampire hunters could be. God knows how long they’ve been here—long enough for their land to get named Mad Dog Creek.”

  “And for people to mistake them for Sasquatch,” Mark said.

  Rowan’s brown eyes were troubled. “And it was my fault that you didn’t know,” she said to Mary-Lynnette. “I told you he couldn’t be the killer. I’m sorry.”

  Mary-Lynnette captured her gaze and held it. “Rowan, you are not going to feel guilty for this. You couldn’t have realized. He wasn’t killing for food like a normal werewolf. He was killing to protect his territory—and to scare us.”

  “And it might have worked,” Mark said. “Except that you guys didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

  Ash looked at Mark, then at his sisters. “I have a question. Is the territory around here going to be enough for you?”

  “Of course,” Rowan said, with gentle surprise.

  “We don’t always need to kill the animals,” Jade said. “We’re getting it down pat now. We can take a little here and a little there. Heck, we can even try the goat.”

  “I’d rather try Tiggy,” Kestrel said, and for a moment her golden eyes glimmered. Mary-Lynnette didn’t say it, but she wondered sometimes about Kestrel. If maybe, someday, Kestrel might need a bigger territory of her own. She was a lot like Jeremy in some ways.

  Beautiful, ruthless, single-minded. A true Night Person.

  “And what about you?” Ash said, looking at Mark.

  “Me? Uh…Well, when you get down to it, I’m kind of a hamburger guy….”

  “I tried to take him hunting last night,” Jade interpreted. “You know, just to show him. But he threw up.”

  “I didn’t actually—”

  “Yes, you did,” Jade said calmly and cheerfully. Mark looked away. Mary-Lynnette noticed they didn’t stop holding hands.

  “So I take it you’re not going to become a vampire,” Ash said to Mark.

  “Uh, let’s just say not any time soon.”

  Ash turned to Mary-Lynnette. “And what about the human end of things? Do we have that taken care of?”

  “Well, I know everything that’s going on in town—by which I mean that I talked with Bunny Marten this morning. I’m so glad she’s not a vampire, incidentally….”

  Mark said, “I always knew it.”

  “Anyway, here’s the quick version.” Mary-Lynnette held up a finger. “One, everybody knows that Jeremy is gone—his boss at the gas station missed him yesterday and went up to check the trailer. They found a lot of weird stuff there. But all they know is that he’s disappeared.”

  “Good,” Rowan said.

  Mary-Lynnette held up another finger. “Two, Dad is sorry but not surprised that the station wagon blew up. Claudine has been predicting it would for a year.”

  Another finger. “Three, Mr. Kimble doesn’t have any idea what killed his horse—but now he thinks it was an animal instead of a person. Vic Kimble thinks it was maybe Sasquatch. He and Todd are very spooked and want to get out of Briar Creek for good.”

  “And let’s have a moment of silence to show how we’ll miss them,” Mark said solemnly, and blew a raspberry.

  “Four,” Mary-Lynnette said, holding up a fourth finger, “you girls are eventually going to have to mention that your aunt hasn’t come back from her ‘vacation.’ But I think you can wait awhile. Nobody comes out here so nobody will notice she’s gone. And I think we can bury her and Jeremy safely. Even if somebody finds them, what have they got? A mummy that looks about a thousand years old and a wolf. They won’t be able to connect them to the missing people.”

  “Poor old Aunt Opal,” Jade said, still cheerful. “But she helped us in the end, didn’t she?”

  Mary-Lynnette looked at her. Yes, there it is, she thought. The silver in the eyes when you laugh about death. Jade is a true Night Person, too.

  “She did help. And I’m going to miss her,” she said out loud.

  Kestrel said, “So everything is taken care of.”

  “Seems like it.” Ash hesitated. “And Quinn is waiting down the road. I told him it would only take a couple hours to finish making arrangements and say goodbye.”

  There was a silence.

  “I’ll see you off,” Mary-Lynnette said at last.

  They went together to the front door. When they were outside in the twilight Ash shut the door behind them.

  “You still can come with me, you know.”

  “With you and Quinn?”

  “I’ll send him away. Or I’ll go and come back tomorrow and get you. Or I’ll come back and stay….”

  “You need to go tell your father about this. Make everything right with him, so it’s safe for your sisters. You know that.”

  “Well, I’ll come back after that,” Ash said, with an edge of desperation to his voice.

  Mary-Lynnette looked away. The sun was gone. Looking east, the sky was already the darkest purple imaginable. Almost black. Even as she watched, a star came out. Or—not a star. Jupiter.

  “I’m not ready yet. I wish I were.”

  “No, you don’t,” Ash said, and he was right, of course. She’d known ever since she sat there by the road, crying while her car burned. And although she’d thought and thought about it since then, sitting in her darkened room, there was nothing she could do to change her own mind.

  She would never be a vampire. She just wasn’t cut out for it. She couldn’t do the things vampires had to do—and stay sane. She wasn’t like Jade or Kestrel or even Rowan with her pale sinewy feet and her instinctive love of the hunt. She’d looked into the heart of the Night World…and she couldn’t join it.

  “I don’t want you to be like that,” Ash said. “I want you to be like you.”

  Without looking at him, Mary-Lynnette said, “But we’re not kids. We can’t be like Jade and Mark, and just hold hands and giggle and never think about the future.”

  “No, we’re only soulmates, that’s all. We’re only destined to be together forever….”

  “If we’ve got forever, then you can give me time,” Mary-Lynnette said. “Go back and wander a little. Take a look at the Night World and make sure you want to give it up—”

  “I know that already.”

  “Take a look at humans and make sure you want to be tied to one of them.”

  “And think about the things I’ve done to humans, maybe?”

  Mary-Lynnette looked at him directly. “Yes.”

  He looked away. “All right. I admit it. I’ve got a lot to make up for….”

  Mary-Lynnette knew it. He’d thought of humans as vermin—and food. The things she’d seen in his mind made her not want to picture more.

  “Then make up for what you can,” she said, although she didn’t dare really hope that he would. “Take time to do that. And give me time to finish growing up. I’m still in high school, Ash.”

  “You’ll be out in a year. I’ll come back then.”

  “It may be too soon.”

  “I know. I’ll come back anyway.” He smiled ironically. “And in the meantime I’ll fight dragons, just like any knight for his lady. I’ll prove mys
elf. You’ll be proud of me.”

  Mary-Lynnette’s throat hurt. Ash’s smile disappeared. They just stood looking at each other.

  It was the obvious time for a kiss. Instead, they just stood staring like hurt kids, and then one of them moved and they were holding on to each other. Mary-Lynnette held on tighter and tighter, her face buried in Ash’s shoulder. Ash, who seemed to have lost it altogether, was raining kisses on the back of her neck, saying, “I wish I were a human. I wish I were.”

  “No, you don’t,” Mary-Lynnette said, seriously unsteady because of the kisses.

  “I do. I do.”

  But it wouldn’t help, and Mary-Lynnette knew he knew it. The problem wasn’t simply what he was, it was what he’d done—and what he was going to do. He’d seen too much of the dark side of life to be a normal person. His nature was already formed, and she wasn’t sure he could fight it.

  “Believe in me,” he said, as if he could hear her.

  Mary-Lynnette couldn’t say yes or no. So she did the only thing she could do—she lifted her head. His lips were in the right place to meet hers. The electric sparks weren’t painful anymore, she discovered, and the pink haze could be quite wonderful. For a time everything was warm and sweet and strangely peaceful.

  And then, behind them, somebody knocked on the door. Mary-Lynnette and Ash jumped and separated. They looked at each other, startled, emotions still too raw, and then Mary-Lynnette realized where she was. She laughed and so did Ash.

  “Come out,” they said simultaneously.

  Mark and Jade came out. Rowan and Kestrel were behind them. They all stood on the porch—avoiding the hole. They all smiled at Ash and Mary-Lynnette in a way that made Mary-Lynnette blush.

  “Goodbye,” she said firmly to Ash.

  He looked at her for a long moment, then looked at the road behind him. Then he turned to go.

  Mary-Lynnette watched him, blinking away tears. She still couldn’t let herself believe in him. But there was no harm in hoping, was there? In wishing. Even if wishes almost never came true….

  Jade gasped. “Look!”

  They all saw it, and Mary-Lynnette felt her heart jump violently. A bolt of light was streaking across the darkness in the northeast. Not a little wimpy shooting star—a brilliant green meteor that crossed half the sky, showering sparks. It was right above Ash’s path, as if lighting his way.

  A late Perseid. The last of the summer meteors. But it seemed like a blessing.

  “Quick, quick, wish,” Mark was telling Jade eagerly. “A wish on that star you gotta get.”

  Mary-Lynnette glanced at his excited face, at the way his eyes shone with excitement. Beside him, Jade was clapping, her own eyes wide with delight.

  I’m so glad you’re happy, Mary-Lynnette thought. My wish for you came true. So now maybe I can wish for myself.

  I wish…I wish…

  Ash turned around and smiled at her. “See you next year,” he said. “With slain dragon!”

  He started down the weed-strewn path to the road. For a moment, in the deep violet twilight, he did look to Mary-Lynnette like a knight walking off on a quest. A knight-errant with shining blond hair and no weapons, going off into a very dark and dangerous wilderness. Then he turned around and walked backward, waving, which ruined the effect.

  Everyone shouted goodbyes.

  Mary-Lynnette could feel them around her, her brother and her three blood-sisters, all radiating warmth and support. Playful Jade. Fierce Kestrel. Wise and gentle Rowan. And Mark, who wasn’t sullen and solitary anymore. Tiggy wound himself around her ankles, purring amiably.

  “Even when we’re apart, we’ll be looking at the same sky!” Ash yelled.

  “What a line,” Mary-Lynnette called back. But he was right. The sky would be there for both of them. She’d always know he was out there somewhere, looking up at it in wonder. Just knowing that was important.

  And she was clear on who she was at last. She was Mary-Lynnette, and someday she’d discover a supernova or a comet or a black hole, but she’d do it as a human. And Ash would come back next year.

  And she would always love the night.

  Spellbinder

  For Maurice Ogden,

  with thanks

  CHAPTER 1

  Expelled.

  It was one of the scariest words a high school senior could think of, and it kept ringing in Thea Harman’s mind as her grandmother’s car approached the school building.

  “This,” Grandma Harman said from the front passenger seat, “is your last chance. You do realize that, don’t you?”

  As the driver pulled the car to the curb, she went on. “I don’t know why you got thrown out of the last school, and I don’t want to know. But if there’s one whiff of trouble at this school, I’m going to give up and send both of you to your Aunt Ursula’s. And you don’t want that, now, do you?”

  Thea shook her head vigorously.

  Aunt Ursula’s house was nicknamed the Convent, a gray fortress on a deserted mountaintop. Stone walls everywhere, an atmosphere of gloom—and Aunt Ursula watching every move with thin lips. Thea would rather die than go there.

  In the backseat next to her, Thea’s cousin Blaise was shaking her head, too—but Thea knew better than to hope she was listening.

  Thea herself could hardly concentrate. She felt dizzy and very untogether, as if half of her were still back in New Hampshire, in the last principal’s office. She kept seeing the look on his face that meant she and Blaise were about to be expelled—again.

  But this time had been the worst. She’d never forget the way the police car outside kept flashing red and blue through the windows, or the way the smoke kept rising from the charred remains of the music wing, or the way Randy Marik cried as the police led him off to jail.

  Or the way Blaise kept smiling. Triumphantly, as if it had all been a game.

  Thea glanced sideways at her cousin.

  Blaise looked beautiful and deadly, which wasn’t her fault. She always looked that way; it was part of having smoldering gray eyes and hair like stopped smoke. She was as different from Thea’s soft blondness as night from day and it was her beauty that kept getting them in trouble, but Thea couldn’t help loving her.

  After all, they’d been raised as sisters. And the sister bond was the strongest bond there was…to a witch.

  But we can’t get expelled again. We can’t. And I know you’re thinking right now that you can do it all over again and good old Thea will stick with you—but this time you’re wrong. This time I’ve got to stop you.

  “That’s all,” Gran said abruptly, finishing with her instructions. “Keep your noses clean until the end of October or you’ll be sorry. Now, get out.” She whacked the headrest of the driver’s seat with her stick. “Home, Tobias.”

  The driver, a college-age boy with curly hair who had the dazed and beaten expression all Grandma’s apprentices got after a few days, muttered, “Yes, High Lady,” and reached for the gearshift. Thea grabbed for the door handle and slid out of the car fast. Blaise was right behind her.

  The ancient Lincoln Continental sped off. Thea was left standing with Blaise under the warm Nevada sun, in front of the two-story adobe building complex. Lake Mead High School.

  Thea blinked once or twice, trying to kick-start her brain. Then she turned to her cousin.

  “Tell me,” she said grimly, “that you’re not going to do the same thing here.”

  Blaise laughed. “I never do the same thing twice.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Blaise pursed her lips and reached down to adjust the top of her boot. “I think Gran overdid it a little with the lecture, don’t you? I think there’s something she’s not telling us about. I mean, what was that bit about the end of the month?” She straightened, tossed back her mane of dark hair and smiled sweetly. “And shouldn’t we be going to the office to get our schedules?”

  “Are you going to answer my question?”

  “Did you ask a questi
on?”

  Thea shut her eyes. “Blaise, we are running out of relatives. If it happens again—well, do you want to go to the Convent?”

  For the first time, Blaise’s expression darkened. Then she shrugged, sending liquid ripples down her loose ruby-colored shirt. “Better hurry. We don’t want to be tardy.”

  “You go ahead,” Thea said tiredly. She watched as her cousin walked away, hips swaying in the trademark Blaise lilt.

  Thea took another breath, examining the buildings with their arched doorways and pink plaster walls. She knew the drill. Another year of living with them, of walking quietly through halls knowing that she was different from everybody around her, even while she was carefully, expertly pretending to be the same.

  It wasn’t hard. Humans weren’t very smart. But it took a certain amount of concentration.

  She had just started toward the office herself when she heard raised voices. A little knot of students had gathered at the edge of the parking lot.

  “Stay away from it.”

  “Kill it!”

  Thea joined the periphery of the group, being inconspicuous. But then she saw what was on the ground beyond the curb and she took three startled steps until she was looking right down at it.

  Oh…how beautiful. Long, strong body…broad head…and a string of rapidly vibrating horny rings on the tail. They were making a noise like steam escaping, or melon seeds being shaken.

  The snake was olive green, with wide diamonds down its back. The scales on the face looked shiny, almost wet. And its black tongue flickered so fast….

  A rock whizzed past her and hit the ground beside the snake. Dust puffed.

  Thea glanced up. A kid in cutoffs was backing away, looking scared and triumphant.

  “Don’t do that,” somebody said.

  “Get a stick,” somebody else said.

  “Keep away from it.”

  “Kill it.”

  Another rock flew.

  The faces around Thea weren’t vicious. Some were curious, some were alarmed, some were filled with a sort of fascinated disgust. But it was all going to end up the same for the snake.