Dark of Night

by T. F. Walsh

  “For what?”

  “You know, for never smiling, for never frowning, for never having anything but that broken, weird default-face.”

  “I think I’ve been given quite a set-down. In my whole life, I cannot think of anyone who dared called me anything but handsome.” That was true enough. No one would dare say anything else. All of his people feared him.

  “Oh, you’re handsome,” she said. “It’s just … did you know that you don’t even smile when you laugh? Even your laughs don’t look happy. They look, I don’t know, maniacal. Did you know that?” she asked, seeming earnest. When he said nothing, she smiled and said, “I’m telling you, as a friend, you should get it checked out.”

  He simply stared at her, baffled and a little dizzy after this exchange. She managed to look serious for a few minutes and then she laughed and turned away, a little embarrassed. “Ah, so you can be shamed into silence. I didn’t think it possible,” he said.

  “Oh, I can be shamed. I promise you.” She said it without bitterness, but she seemed quiet, more subdued.

  “So, you want a shot at this broken face of mine, do you?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, let’s see what we can see.”

  “Hey!” she said, apparently surprised that he remembered her comment from the first day they met. Little did she know he didn’t forget anything she told him. She was his mission. Nothing was too small to commit to memory. She was smiling, though, clearly pleased by what was, in all honesty, a byproduct of his plan to ruin her. It made him uncomfortable.

  • • •

  He was finally fighting her for real. Color her crazy, but she enjoyed that he now respected her enough to take her seriously. So few people in her pack ever had. Although they were still on different sides of the war, she felt they were working well together. It gave her hope for the future. Today, they exchanged blows; neither used full strength, but they both were honestly striking the other, and the speed of the sparring was close to the real thing. With this kind of help, she felt she might be ready for the first of events of trials next week. She hoped she was helping him in some way, too. If they could work together, they might manage to show both of their peoples how to do so.

  But first, she had to best him here. Fighting him, she understood that his techniques were very different from other vampires: he did not use weapons. He did carry a knife — she had seen it tucked inside his leather boot — but he never withdrew it, never used it in practice. He fought more in the style of the males of her kind, relying on strength and speed. Even so, fighting with him was a revelation. Her own skills with a weapon were probably not going to be enough in the trials. She was going to have to do something very unconventional, something no one in her pack, no one in her entire race, had ever tried to do. She was going to try to use her magic offensively, as a weapon.

  Caleb was almost looking directly at her. He knew she was there, hiding, but he couldn’t see her. She had managed to blend in well enough, hiding down wind, out of the light of the night sky, above his eye line. He didn’t expect her in the trees. He was crouching down, resting on his haunches trying to catch her scent. He kept lifting his head into the breeze. He could smell her on the wind, but he couldn’t identify her exact location because she had not touched the ground anywhere near here.

  If he would just stay still long enough for her to direct the spell toward him, she might win this. All she needed was just a little more time. Just a little more. Just. A. Little. Bit. More. There!

  • • •

  He felt a hot blast of something pass him, just behind his head. Turning, he saw something strange happening to the tree behind him. The tree, almost entirely bare of leaves, started to bloom again, growing dark leaves that he was sure would look brilliantly green in sunlight. As the tree flourished, it blossomed, flowers spreading out here and there on the branches. Fully bloomed for a mere moment, it next started to shed its sudden leaves. From the top, leaves started to pour down in a shower, deeply dark leaves dancing around him, rustling in the wind. The leaves were discarded in one long wave from the highest branches down into the base of the tree. As the leaves dropped, the limbs they rested on hardened, and whitened; the pall spread throughout the tree quickly. An ironic burning without fire, drying, all of the energy, all of the life simply tumbling out of the tree, until, finally, it creaked and swayed in the wind, even its roots too dried and decayed to bear its dead weight.

  Staring at this in horror, he yelled out, “Libby? Libby! What in the hell is that?”

  “Oops. I missed,” she hollered back, jumping from her position above him, and moving toward him, out into the open. She had a meek and embarrassed smile on her face. “I guess I won’t be winning this round, huh?”

  “You think I’m yelling because your aim was off? My God, woman. What did you do to that tree?”

  “Just a spell.”

  “‘Just a spell,’ she says. You killed the damn thing. And you were aiming at me? What would it have done if it had hit me?”

  “Kind of the same thing. Minus the leaves.”

  “That’s a hell of a lot more than a slap.”

  “It would have reversed. It’s just Maiden, Mother, Crone.”

  “And what in the blasted hell is that? Can’t you give me a straight answer?”

  “Basically, it’s an aging spell. If we want, we can do it backwards. I think it would be cute to see you as a baby. Don’t you?”

  “A baby?” he asked, though he could barely speak, his voice high-pitched and breathless. The females could do this? My God. His kind had always feared the males. In their wolf forms, the males were almost unbeatable. It might take ten vampire males, working together, to take down a strong alpha. But the women? The women?

  “Relax, will you? You’re making me a little freaked.”

  “I am freaking you?” he asked awkwardly.

  “Yeah. Look, it will reverse itself. See?” She pointed to the tree. “You can’t fool it for long. A living thing knows its own story.”

  Looking up, he saw a few brown and dry leaves were returning to the canopy, and, as the leaves reappeared, the branches were invigorated, the bark strengthening, browning. Health spread through the tree until, eventually, it looked as it had.

  “What did you call that spell again?”

  “It’s nothing, really. I told you. We’re just good at the in-betweens. The tree is on its way to old age. We can just kind of collapse the boundary. We connect the distance between the then and the now.”

  “What?” he almost yelled. Trying to speak more calmly, “You control time or something?”

  “No. Nothing like that. We just see what is and what will be. They are pretty much the same anyway. The tree has in it now all that will age it, all that will kill it. I just make the tree be all it will be at once.”

  “You make it seem simple. Obvious. But it isn’t. You said you weren’t a witch.”

  “You can call me one; the word’s not the issue. Like I said, even we use words like spell and magic, though they aren’t precisely true. I told you; whatever words we had before are gone. It’s just, if you think of us as witches, maybe you won’t see what we really are. We don’t brew potions or make people fall in love or make people lucky when they aren’t. That’s magic to me, making something out of nothing. I am just showing what is. I’m not adding anything that isn’t there. I speed the cycle — and, if I am strong enough, I can push the cycle back. But the cycle is already there.”

  “That’s a little too nice a distinction for my comfort. That tree shriveled away right in front of me. That wasn’t already there.”

  “It was. But, can’t you see, even the magic — if that’s what you want to call it — has a cycle? It turns and turns until it isn’t anymore. It waxes and wanes. It seems powerful, and it can be effective, but it wouldn�
�t have lasted forever. The tree would have returned to normal. Sometimes we don’t really know who we are. I would say that tree has a fair case of denial.” She laughed.

  “What else can you do?”

  “I don’t know. Lots of things,” she said, finally unwilling to tell the secrets of her people.

  “You don’t want to tell me?”

  “It’s not that exactly. It’s just … not even the males in our tribe are taught this. This is a female skill, and it is reserved for us only. The women of my people don’t believe men have the right to understand.”

  “How about a trade? I tell you one of our secrets, and you tell me about this.”

  “Look, this isn’t about peeking. I don’t need you to bait me. If you try, it will just feel more wrong, more like I am breaking the rules. How about this — if it applies and will help us win in the paired trials, I will tell you more, but before that, you don’t need to know, so you don’t get to know. Now, let’s get back to practice, Broken Face.”

  “That again.”

  “Yes, that again. Come on! Even with the tree dying in front of you, you stood there staring at it like nothing was happening. You know, I’m resolved to beat you just so I can see your expression change. If that doesn’t work … I guess I’ll blast you back into infancy for a sec and see if you were born with that mask on. What do you think about that, Caleb?” Without waiting for an answer, she launched into the recesses of the forest.

  And that, he thought, was that. They went back to practice.

  Chapter 4: A LITTLE STALKING GOES A LONG WAY

  Caleb was surprised. After two weeks of sparring with him and of battling beside him in pair competitions, Libby was still alive and well. Her suggestions had all worked. They had been able to practice, and they’d learned a lot about each other. He had discovered things trivial and profound. He had learned she was right-handed and favored her right side entirely too much, perhaps because her peripheral vision was incredibly weak on the left side. He had also learned that his kind did not know much about wolves.

  Libby had shared that the pack’s history was long-since forgotten and that the males could forget how to return to human form, as his people had conjectured in the last war, but had never actually proven. He had discovered the sorcery of the women, and he knew that Libby was quite skilled at it although she would not tell him much about it. Also, she either did not want to show him her shift or she could not perform one. He had heard that the females had lost the ability generations ago; it was probably that, like the other females, she could not transform. It seemed the pack heir had another strike against her. How could she fight if she could not shift? How could she lead werewolves if she was not truly one? But even this was not the biggest hindrance to her leadership. He had also learned perhaps the most detrimental problem with her assumption of pack leadership: she did not fear or hate vampires. She laughed at him, teased him; worse, she seemed to believe all the propaganda and PR that the wolves spewed about camaraderie. She really wanted to be his friend. Well, as far as reconnaissance went, that made his job easier. She was never suspicious of his presence, and she didn’t hide from him.

  Then again, the fact that she saw him as a friend rather than an enemy was its own special challenge. After all, if you didn’t think a vampire was your enemy, if you didn’t think he was hunting you, what conclusion would you draw when he followed you around? Would you ever begin to imagine that he was gathering information to destroy and your people? Well, what a normal wolf would say, he would not hazard to guess, but his wolf? She thought he was obsessed. Worse, she probably imagined him to be some desperately depressed, cosmically doomed suitor. It had taken a day or so for her to notice that he was following her. And at first, after she realized he was always lurking around her, she was appropriately afraid, but now — now, she actually smiled when she saw him. No, it was more than that, wasn’t it? She rather looked for him now. It almost seemed she was waiting for him, and when she smiled at him, he felt like shaking her and yelling, “I. Am. Not. A. Love. Crazed. Boy! This is reconnaissance. You know, the big ol’ R-word you’ve read about?” It was surveillance. Plain and simple.

  Well, perhaps it wasn’t entirely her fault. When she was around him, he — he couldn’t really explain what it was. It was like a thrumming through his entire body, a pulsing drum that felt similar to the adrenaline that pumped in thick beats through his nervous system when he fought or hunted. It felt like that, but wasn’t that, not exactly. It felt like focused panic, but he wasn’t afraid. He was anxious. Eager. He didn’t understand it.

  When they first met, she had calmed him. He wasn’t trying to deny that any longer. Looking back on it now, her presence had to have been the reason for the change in his beast. Somehow, she calmed the animal inside. So what was happening now? He saw her and immediately lost his calm. His breathing quickened, his body chilled, his attention narrowed to her, a single point of focus. What was this?

  Whatever it was, it had nearly ruined his mission. His reconnaissance had been seriously flawed. He hadn’t been hiding well. It was though he wanted her to find him. When she was near, he probably did look like some lovelorn pup.

  He was starting to worry that the creature inside was going through some kind of primitive heat. While that thought gave him pause, what struck him to the core was, well, that he — and not just the creature inside him — he actually liked that she was thinking about him. He tried to tell himself that his eagerness to see her meant nothing, that he was merely pleased with a purely providential bit of psychological warfare. But he was having a hard time believing it.

  She did annoy him. That much was true. Didn’t he get angry when she smiled at him? If he were drawn to her, why would he be angry to see her? Thoughts like this reassured him at least until he realized his frustration was actually a bad sign. He had concern for her. He wanted her to see that he was the enemy.

  Was it possible? Caleb, the vampire prince, developing a tendre for one of the pack? He liked irony as much as the next guy, but this was going rather too far. The carefully crafted child weapon of his people laid low because of puppy love. Beautiful. Just beautiful.

  Today, he was standing outside her home. He was a few hundred yards away, but her window was still easily visible to him. She had her window closed, which was a little odd. Normally at this time her bedroom was left open. He had noticed she had a preference for spending this part of the afternoon sitting in her room, reading or listening to music. She seemed to enjoy the outdoors, and she usually pushed her window and drapes wide open. Another wolf habit, he supposed. But today her window remained closed.

  Where was she? Had she been hurt? Was she having a meeting with her father? Had she told someone he was following her? Had she been told to hide from him?

  Hoping to get some answers, he climbed a tree near her window and decided to wait.

  • • •

  Caleb was always watching her. When she went for training, he was watching her. When she tutored the young in the afternoons, he was watching. When she walked to the shops to share ice cream with her friends and talk about the upcoming trials, he was waiting around the corner, watching. That was probably the worst moment because her friends had seen him, too, and teased her. His expressionless face was an almost constant presence everywhere she went. She was curious, flattered, and also a little worried. Time of day didn’t seem to affect him. She had been taught that vampires could not move about freely during daylight hours, yet he did.

  Was she being stalked? She could almost feel him behind her, even now. The other day, she swore she had felt him looking toward the windows of her bedroom, but when she finally got the courage to pull them open and look outside, there was no sign of him, which meant that either she was crazy or that he was trying to hide from her. Although she couldn’t guess why he followed her, she knew her father well enough to know that he would want
her to avoid Caleb, so she would simply stay away from him, unless they needed to practice, and she would keep her curtains closed.

  But her mind was full of him. He had been haunting her since she met him, but now, as her world narrowed, Caleb was all she thought about. In her dreams, he always looked as he had when she’d first seen him in the classroom. He seemed so empty, so tired. But his face, his eyes, his expression — at least in the dreams — were whispering some kind of promise to her. His face was a mask of quiet reserve, as though he were holding himself back in order to keep himself from shattering or exploding, but his eyes burned.

  She told herself to stop romanticizing and fantasizing. She reminded herself he was her enemy, but she kept thinking of his mouth, of his eyes. Instead of his current coldness and predatory gaze, she imagined him with his dark eyes open, trusting, and lit with laughter. That was her problem. She could imagine him changed and softened. Instead of the stark line of his lips, set hard in his face, she could see him cocking his head toward in her silent laughter, his mouth curving in a smile. She saw him ruffling his hand through his hair, grinning and almost, almost, laughing out loud at something she had said.

  His black eyes … she knew they had most often been cold and expressionless toward her. Still, while he had stared at her that day in the schoolroom, his eyes had seemed full of that promise, full of that kind of potential. She couldn’t explain it, but she had something real then, and her dreams were reminding her. Making certain that she couldn’t forget. Her father would yell at her if he knew: “Just like a little whelp, lying in the soot of the fireplace dreaming of chasing a rabbit!”

  The great songs of her people spoke of love at first sight. They believed that seeing the soulful and expressive eyes of your destined mate was a powerful thing. Even the humans had such myths — movie after movie, book after book told the same old tired stories. Humans were waiting for true love. Wolves were waiting for mating. Everyone was hoping for the “look.” Even her friends were. How many Saturday nights did she have to suffer the squeals of her friends as they went on and on about how dreamy and sexy Lukas’s “serious” eyes were? (What, exactly, were serious eyes, anyway?) How many Saturday nights had she rolled her eyes and crammed her pillow around her head to avoid their noisily childish and idealized infatuations? Well, would she roll her eyes now? God, before now, she hadn’t known the difference between eyes and serious eyes, but she was starting to know. And she didn’t like it.