Dark Star

by Bethany Frenette

  “How many have there been?”

  “You were the eighth,” Leon said, his mouth tightening. Mr. Alvarez had said that as well; I’d forgotten.

  Mom turned toward the window and tapped her fingers against the counter. “We might have known about it sooner if the girls had associated with the Kin, but most of them didn’t have a close connection, just a trace of Kin blood. We still don’t know how the Harrowers are finding them.”

  “They’re—detecting them somehow?” I swallowed. That wasn’t a comforting thought, but I did want to know.

  “Somehow,” Mom agreed. “On some level, Harrowers can always sense Kin, but this is stronger than that. More specific, more sophisticated. And we never know who they’ll target next.”

  I heard the frustration in her tone. My mother was powerful. She was strong, fast; she knew how to fight and how to protect. She wasn’t accustomed to being helpless. An image flashed through me: my mother, crouched near a hedge, the moonlight skimming off her hair. In the distance, a man hunkered low in a parked car. A shadow moved toward him.

  She’d been watching someone. Waiting.

  “Is that what you were doing tonight? Looking for one of their targets? You weren’t mugged.”

  Mom looked offended at the suggestion anyone could possibly have mugged her, but it was Leon who spoke.

  “We think Patrick Tigue has something to do with it.”

  I turned toward him. His voice was low and controlled, his blue eyes focused. There was no hint of playfulness now, or even of the stubborn, argumentative sidekick. This was Leon the Guardian.

  I frowned. Patrick Tigue again. I closed my eyes, thinking. I knew of him, peripherally. He’d moved to the Twin Cities a few years ago, among rumors that he would be financing a new stadium or trying to buy one of our sports teams. The papers had been full of tidbits about him: his wealth, his life in Los Angeles, his exploits in Europe, the time he’d dated a princess. I’d never been able to figure out why anyone who had spent time sailing islands in the Pacific would want to move to a state where it snowed half the year—but, then, I’d never been able to figure out why the rest of us stayed, either.

  Patrick Tigue, a young playboy, rich and idle and apparently up to no good. But what would a human be doing with Harrowers?

  A jolt ran through me. I remembered something Esther had said in one of our sessions, about how demons took the shape of humans. Took human names.

  “He’s a Harrower,” I said.

  “He’s old,” Leon answered. “And very powerful.”

  “If you think he’s behind it, why don’t you just twist him into a pretzel?”

  Mom shook her head. A lock of hair had come loose from her bun, curling near her jaw. “That’s not how it works. We suspect Tigue is involved, but we aren’t certain. He’s not doing the bleedings himself, so we can’t prove it.”

  “But . . . he’s a demon. Isn’t that sort of the main category of Things to Smite?”

  “Some Harrowers live as humans and coexist peacefully,” Leon said. “Until now, Tigue’s done his best to fit in with society. He’s a philanthropist. A model citizen.”

  That was news to me. No one had bothered to mention that aspect of demons.

  “And he’s high profile,” Mom said. “That lends him some protection. He’s lived as a human for a long time. He’s known. If I’m going to wind up charged with his murder, I’d rather not do it until I have concrete evidence.”

  I made a pffft sort of sound. Mom had been running around as Morning Star most of her adult life, and she hadn’t been caught yet.

  “But that’s not the main problem,” she was saying. “If he is involved, he’s not working alone. There’s someone else connected to this, someone with power, helping to organize other Harrowers. That’s why I’ve been watching him. I need to find his accomplice before I make my move, or the bleedings won’t stop.” She closed her eyes, letting out a long breath. “Unfortunately, he’s good. He’s got his own security—the human variety—and I always lose him when he goes Beneath.”

  I looked between Mom and Leon. Their faces were somber, their bodies tense.

  “What can we do?” I asked.

  “Continue to watch. Wait for him to make a move, which is what I was doing tonight when Detective Wyle interrupted me.” Her tone was just a little bit sour.

  I recalled her explanation. A mugging. And that image I’d had: the street dark and quiet, sudden motion in the stillness. “Detective Wyle saw you attacked?”

  Mom snorted. “The Harrower went after him. I intervened and caught its attention.” She paused, growing thoughtful. “I’m not sure if the attack was a ploy to get rid of me, or if Wyle’s getting too close.”

  “He doesn’t mean any harm,” I said. “I get a sense from him. He means well. He’s been after this a while.”

  “I didn’t lie for my own self-preservation. We keep the Kin secret because we have to. He can’t be involved, for his own protection.”

  She’d told me this before. It was the same reason she’d kept me in the dark. The same reason she insisted I never tell Gideon.

  “But some humans must know,” I objected. “What about your father? He wasn’t Kin. Did he know?”

  Mom hesitated, looking down at her hands. “My father was like Detective Wyle,” she began. “He was a good man with an earnest desire to help.”

  She lifted her eyes to mine. For one fleeting moment, I felt in her something I’d never felt before: the buoyant, unburdened girl she’d been before Morning Star—and the sudden, staggering weight of grief.

  “Yes,” she said. “He knew. That’s why he died.”

  19

  Tricia Morrow was found the first week of December.

  Or rather, her body was found, somewhere in a park not far from downtown, just off 94 East, where an early snowfall glazed the metal swing sets and the empty branches of maple trees. There was no mention of cuts on her ankles, but I knew. The Harrowers had taken her, tested her, and when they discovered she wasn’t the one, they’d let her bleed.

  That night, before Mom left for the evening, she paused by the front door to tell me not to worry. It wasn’t her usual, frowning evasiveness: she was trying to reassure me. She would stop the bleedings, she told me.

  But I wasn’t reassured. She still hadn’t been able to find who was working with Tigue.

  The following week arrived with a blizzard, eighteen inches of snow hurtling down upon the Twin Cities, closing schools and turning the roads into elaborate obstacle courses of snow plows and slush. The forecast had claimed the storm would miss us and head east into Wisconsin, but I woke to a world gone abruptly white, wind blowing drifts into the yard and burying cars along the avenue. Since my grounding had ended the previous week, I dug my winter boots out of the closet and trudged across the arctic waste to Gideon’s house. He and Tink were throwing me a belated prison-release party, and even though their idea of a party tended to include bad action movies and microwave egg rolls, I welcomed the distraction.

  “Someone wake me up when it’s spring,” Tink whined when I arrived. She’d come down with a cold and was using this as an excuse to hog Gideon’s bed. She sat huddled in the middle of it with all the blankets, a small blond lump with a pink nose.

  “Not happening,” I told her. “I need someone to share my misery.”

  “Oh, come on. Winter’s not that bad,” Gideon said.

  I made a face at him. “You bike in the snow and wear shorts when it’s twenty degrees out. Your opinion is invalid.”

  He just grinned. “Minnesota born and raised, baby!”

  “So am I,” I retorted. “Guess I just missed out on that extra dose of crazy.”

  Tink sniffed.

  Gideon shook his head in disgust. His entire family thought the snowstorm was fantastic. His sisters were stringing Christmas lights, his grandmother was searching online for eggnog recipes, and his father was actually out on the porch barbecuing.

  I asked
if this meant something new was on the menu.

  “You like egg rolls,” he replied.

  That was undeniable. It was really the microwave part I objected to. “I like them better without soggy middles and freezer burn,” I said.

  “We could maybe make an exception.” He paused to turn and give me a stern look. “But not if you keep trying to set me up with your cousin.”

  Gideon wasn’t a big fan of my St. Croix relatives. I’d dragged him Christmas shopping with my cousins recently, and at the end of it, he’d declared that Iris was creepy and Elspeth insane. He seemed to think this meant I was once again winning—or perhaps losing—the weird-family competition. I decided not to mention that his father was, at this moment, cooking steaks in a blizzard. Instead, I asked, “What’s wrong with Elspeth?”

  “She’s just so . . . cheerful,” he said. “She makes Tink look like a pessimist.”

  “Hey,” Tink said, then paused, as though uncertain whether or not this was meant as an insult. She settled for blowing her nose.

  I looked at Gideon. “You’re just worried that going out with someone would ruin your ability to pine tragically.”

  Brooke Oliver: the one subject guaranteed to make Gideon bring out his grumpy face. Or the closest thing to a grumpy face he could manage, which usually involved squinting. This time he threw in an insulted stare. “Remind me again why I put up with you?”

  “’Cause you sold me your soul for five bucks, and now you must submit to my will?” I still had the sheet of paper, written in his untidy fifth-grade scrawl. Gideon David Belmonte. One soul.

  The rest of our conversation was put on hold by Tink’s insistence that we start the movie already.

  I tried to relax and focus on the film. Tink had picked it out, which meant lots of hot guys, explosions, and hot guys dramatically walking away from explosions—plus a few half-naked girls, as a concession to Gideon—but I couldn’t seem to follow the plot, if it even had one. My mind was too busy.

  Gideon noticed my distraction and looked wounded that I wasn’t enjoying my party, but I assured him I was having a fabulous time, I was just a little tired. At least, I thought I assured him. Later that night, Tink called to inform me otherwise.

  “We have a problem,” she said. “Actually, you have a problem.” She had to repeat her words twice; she’d called me from work and was whispering into the phone while hidden in the employee bathroom.

  “Aren’t you sick?” I asked. She worked at the Caribou Coffee a few blocks from her apartment, and though a snowstorm wasn’t likely to deter the truly devoted coffee drinkers, I couldn’t imagine anyone wanted to see a barista with a runny nose.

  “Sick and miserable,” she affirmed. “But I like money. And that’s not what I called you about.” Someone knocked on the bathroom door, and she yelled at them to give her a minute. She lowered her voice even more, so that she was almost hissing into the phone. “Gideon asked if I thought something was going on with you. I think he’s smarter than we give him credit for.”

  I took a breath. “What did you tell him?” I asked.

  “I said it was probably PMS. That shut him up pretty fast.”

  I figured I deserved that one, after the anemia incident.

  I hesitated. Tink didn’t like to talk about Kin matters—but she was the one who had brought it up. “Do you know much about what’s going on? The attacks, I mean?”

  She let out an angry sigh. “No, and I don’t want to know. That’s the point of this conversation. You need to stop thinking about it.”

  “Because, clearly, that will make it all just go away.”

  “Worrying about it isn’t doing you any good, either.” She made a little noise—possibly of annoyance, possibly of frustration— then told me she would say no more.

  After she hung up, I sat on my bed, considering her words. It wasn’t as though I wanted to worry, but I didn’t see how ignoring the problem would help.

  Not that anything else I’d done had helped. Mom was finally being more open with me, but there was little I could do with the information. Earlier that week, I’d suggested I use my Knowing— maybe I could get some idea of who Tigue’s accomplice was, or definitively connect him to the bleedings. It hadn’t gone over well. Mom had given me a look of such severity, I was afraid she’d re-ground me purely on principle. I hadn’t brought it up again. And even if she’d agreed to my suggestion, I didn’t know where I’d start. I’d never met Tigue; I couldn’t do a reading on him. I told myself to take Tink’s advice, to just forget about it.

  But that night I lay awake thinking of girls lured out into the sweet night air, the darkness that awaited them, vanishing lights and a rising wind. Tricia and Kelly and those other nameless girls, bound to me by a shared ancestry and by the cuts above our heels. And when I slept, my dreams were filled with blood.

  20

  With Tink unwilling to discuss the Kin, and Gideon unable to, I found myself spending more time with Elspeth.

  She knew every last detail of Kin life, and she was always ready to talk, without trying to drill the information into my skull the way Esther did. Elspeth’s world revolved around being a Guardian— though, as she informed me one evening, she was considered too young to be fully involved in their day-to-day operations. She had a curfew to contend with, and Esther required that both she and Iris maintain straight As. That put a few restrictions on being a teenage superhero.

  “High school never really got in Mom’s way,” I mused. “She’s been Morning Star since she was barely sixteen.”

  “She’s Lucy,” Elspeth said, as though that were the only explanation required. “It doesn’t matter, though. I’m joining H&H as soon as I graduate, no matter what Grandmother says.”

  I could imagine what Esther would say. She probably already had Elspeth’s Ivy League school picked out.

  I took a sip of my cocoa. Elspeth had badgered me into doing more Christmas shopping, applying a heavy dose of guilt over Gideon’s rejection and following it up with a pleading look that almost, but not quite, rivaled Leon’s Hungry Puppy. After taking the bus to downtown Minneapolis, we’d spent an hour or so wandering around Nicollet Mall, then ventured to less crowded streets. We’d spotted a little café well away from the usual commotion of the city, and while I sat stirring the marshmallows around my cup of cocoa, Elspeth was on her second latte.

  She was also still stuck on Gideon.

  “I don’t see why he won’t go out with me,” she said, running a finger along the rim of her glass. She wore the most perfect pout I’d ever seen, but she sounded sincere, so I didn’t laugh.

  “He’s sort of a lost cause,” I told her. I refrained from mentioning the number of times he’d called her insane, or that he’d offered to set her up with Stanley, one of his friends from the baseball team. Though Stanley was cute, only mildly obnoxious, and arguably the best pitcher in school, I doubted Elspeth would find the suggestion flattering. “You wouldn’t rather go out with another Guardian?” Esther would doubtless prefer that—though, since Iris was already dating within the Kin, perhaps Elspeth was off the hook.

  “There aren’t many Guardians my age,” she said. “I’m the youngest. There’s this guy a year older than me, but he’s, well . . .” She grimaced. “And after that it’s Leon. And after that—”

  I laughed. “Okay, got it.” And then I steered her on to nonGideon topics.

  Though she didn’t yet work closely with the other Guardians, Elspeth knew a great deal about their business. She told me there hadn’t been any confirmed bleedings in the past few weeks—but that may have been due to Guardian vigilance. They still weren’t certain how the Harrowers were locating their targets, but they’d taken to patrolling in shifts, reporting any signs of demon activity, and they were trying to establish their own system for detecting potential victims.

  “Lucy’s sort of a loner,” Elspeth said, when I mentioned that Mom didn’t seem to work closely with the others. “Grandmother says that Morning S
tar always had to go her own way.”

  Except for having her very own sidekick, I supposed.

  Dusk had faded into a cool blue darkness by the time we headed back to the bus stop. The air was chilled, and my breath formed little puffs as we walked. The storm had spent itself two days earlier, and most of the roads were clear, but bits of ice clung to barren branches along the streets. We’d wandered farther than I realized. Though the lights of downtown were bright around us, the streets felt unnaturally deserted. Empty cars sat silent and dark. The biting wind sliced against me. Elspeth, being a Guardian, didn’t seem to notice the cold.

  “We should’ve asked Iris to pick us up,” I said, pulling my coat tight against me. Though she’d declined to come shopping with us, she did have a car.

  “I think she’s busy,” Elspeth said. There was a little catch in her voice. She was still taking Iris’s school transfer hard. I didn’t fully understand the dynamic between the pair, but I knew that, despite being the tall, gorgeous Guardian, Elspeth idolized her older sister.

  I gave her a smile. “Well, next time you drag me out somewhere, it had better be warm,” I said lightly. I was terrible at navigating the skyway, but as soon as we reached it, I intended to head directly indoors.

  Beside me, Elspeth had stopped. “Audrey, can we—”

  I didn’t hear the rest of her words. As I turned back toward her, I felt a sudden change in the air.

  It wasn’t like it had been at the Drought and Deluge, but it wasn’t precisely different, either. There was no noise, no whisper crawling along my skin. No urgent, unrelenting alarm that ran through my veins. But the air around us had altered. A hush had fallen across the empty street, and the glow of lights from the surrounding buildings appeared muted and distant. Even the drone of traffic seemed to come from far away. My heart pounded in my ears. I heard the wind blow.

  “Elspeth,” I said. “Something’s here.”