Silence reigned. Darling glared at Jewel, and kept Dove behind her, guarded, as if Jewel’s mere words were a deadly threat.
“Well?” Damon prompted, but still no one answered. I glanced at Adonis, but he only looked at the floor.
“Just a little difference of opinion,” I said at last, since someone had to say something. “It’s a stressful time for everybody.”
“All the more reason to keep it together.” Damon rubbed his face, smearing blood-spatter. “Dove, Darling, you look like you could use a break. Go cool down somewhere. Be back in an hour or two.”
“Yes, sir,” they chorused. It was hard to say who herded whom out the front door.
“You all right?” Damon said, looking me up and down for signs of distress or damage.
“I’m fine,” I said, and he and Jewel went back upstairs.
Adonis sighed, half-collapsing into a chair at the table. “I’m sorry about that. I started it. I shouldn’t have brought it up, not here and now.”
I rubbed my arms, trying to convince my adrenaline level that the danger was over. “Do you really think Darling did it?”
Another heavy sigh. “I… Everything I said was true. I don’t know… I think she’s our best bet. But then again, it could be Paris, or… or anyone.”
It could. Or it could be Darling. The image of her sharp-toothed lunge at Jewel was pretty compelling. It was all too easy to imagine a helpless, if unpleasant, human on the end of that toothy leap.
Adonis and I winced as a fresh crop of screams burst out overhead.
“I should get back up there soon,” Adonis said wearily. “Audrey’s my roommate. I have to look after her.”
“Co-ed rooms? Very progressive,” I said, eager to pursue a less dangerous subject.
“Well, since Wes and Teya have been together forever, ditto Dove and Darling, and Paris only tolerates Jewel because she’s his favorite, I mostly got paired with Audrey by default. But we hit it off. We look after each other.” He regarded a cracker broodily, set his jaw. “At least that snake Martin is dead. He can’t ever hurt her again.”
My eyebrows lifted. “Because she’s not hurting at all now.”
“She’s still better off. May not look like it now, but she is. She’ll see.” The cracker snapped in his hand.
“So who’s Damon’s roommate?” I said quickly.
“He doesn’t have one, really. We only have so many rooms. He keeps his stuff in Westley and Galatea’s room, but when he’s here he sleeps on the couch.”
Huh. We did have something in common. “When he’s here? Where else would he be?”
“Oh, he’s all over the place. His parents’ house. Formyndari headquarters. Keeping an eye on the hunting pairs that don’t live here. Recruiting, like that rally in Miami that we mentioned before.”
“Recruiting? Who else could you possibly fit in this house?”
“Oh, not recruiting for the Orphanage, recruiting for the lifestyle. Hunting pairs, the buddy system. It’s the most — the only — reliable way to keep kathairna from killing when they hunt. Most of us have good intentions, but that’s… not always enough.” He looked away, and I wondered how long he had been on his own before finding his way to the Orphanage.
Upstairs, another scream, and a startled shout of pain from a different, masculine voice. Adonis shuddered, and may have glanced longingly at the front door.
“We look after each other,” he murmured, not for my apparent benefit. “No one’s looked after me in a long time. And I’m going to take care of her, whatever the consequences.” Without looking at me, he turned and headed up the stairs, back to Audrey.
Westley passed him coming down the stairs, and glanced uneasily at his retreating back. “Are they giving you trouble down here, Naomi?”
“What did he mean? About taking care of Audrey, whatever the consequences?”
Westley stepped past me to pull some medical tape out of a drawer. Dark blood was seeping through a handkerchief wound around his hand. “Adonis might be better served to make a run for it, before the Formyndari realize Martin’s dead. But that would mean leaving Audrey.”
“Why would he run for it?”
“He threatened — repeatedly — to tear Martin’s throat out if he ever touched Audrey again.”
“…Ah.”
Westley didn’t remove the bloody handkerchief, merely wrapped the tape around it. “He was also a serious suspect in the death of Liberty’s first victim, had no alibi for the second… Things were tense, for Adonis, for a bit there. Damon and I had to more-or-less break him out of Formyndari headquarters and let heads cool before anyone did anything… irrevocable.”
“Um…” I eyed the wound on his hand. “Weird as it feels to be saying these words, shouldn’t you just drink some blood?”
He shook his head. “I’ll hunt later. Audrey will need everything we have handy, and heaven help us if Damon’s link chooses now to fail…”
“Yeah, about that. He was expecting it hours ago, I thought.”
“It’s not a predictable thing. It could be another two days and still be within normal range.”
“What?”
“Or it could be any minute. Naomi, have you thought about what I said?”
“He doesn’t want it, Westley.”
“I don’t bloody care what he wants. If I’m stuck here, so is he.”
“Stuck?”
He didn’t reply, his attention apparently arrested by a scattering of photographs half-hidden under some papers on the table. “Naomi,” he said after a long silence, “do you believe in hell? That there’s a place of eternal torment, where God sends sinners to burn?”
I rearranged the crackers on the plate. “If heaven exists, so must hell. But God doesn’t send people there, just like professors don’t flunk students. Students flunk themselves. People choose their own paths.”
“Some orphans believe we’ll all go to hell,” Westley said. “Others say we’re already there.”
Audrey started screaming again, and Westley took wearily to the stairs.
.
After a few hours, Darling’s barbiturates finally eased Audrey into a fretful sleep; she tugged feebly against her straps, whined and moaned, but Damon and Westley were able to wean her blood intake from a flood to a trickle. Which was good, because the refrigerator stockpile was becoming more of a stockmolehill. Shortly after nine p.m., she fought her way free of the drugs long enough to have a seizure, which broke the restraints. The noise drew everyone upstairs, but afterward she collapsed into an unconsciousness rather deeper than before. I wondered if she would have brain damage.
“Go rest, Damon,” Westley said, looking grim and tired and not highly argue-with-able. “Before you fall over.”
Damon raised an eyebrow, but relented with a dry, “As you wish.”
I said, “Do change clothes first, if you would be so kind.” He was blood-spattered from head to toe.
He rolled his eyes but left the room.
Westley pulled me into the hallway, leaving a wet scarlet handprint on my arm. “Don’t let him breach. Please, Naomi, don’t make him go through this again.”
I wanted to tear my hair. “What do you expect me to do?”
Westley pointed through the doorway at Audrey, hissed in my ear, “Do you see that? That half-mad, half-dead creature that only hours ago was an intelligent person? That will be Damon, any minute. Unless you act. Blood to blood, that’s all it takes. Please. I can’t lose him, too.”
Damon came into the hallway, clean-clothed and drying his face with a towel. “All right, let’s go. And you.” He snatched up Westley’s still-bleeding hand. “Do something about this before you pass out?”
Westley rolled his eyes, pulling his hand away. “Aye, captain.”
He held my gaze, glaring, pleading, as we shaded out.
.
For once, Damon didn’t immediately step back from me as if I were Typhoid Mary. Instead he stood with his face in my hair unti
l I wondered if he’d fallen asleep. Which worked for me; it gave me time to think. Not an easy thing with him smelling all ginger-smokey and huggable.
“Is Audrey going to die?” I asked softly.
“She’s made it this far.” I waited for further encouragement. It didn’t come.
“Is that…” I swallowed. “Is that what you have to look forward to?”
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said. I could tell he was lying. For my sake, or to himself? “And Audrey was befasted, that makes it worse. Where’s your roommate?”
“It’s Saturday night. There’s no telling.”
“I think she left a note for you.”
I turned around. Sure enough, there was a torn sheet of notebook paper on the table, weighted down with a dog-eared romance novel.
“N — Gone home for a few days to scare off Mom’s new fiancé,” I read aloud. “I want these dishes done when I get back, lazybutt. You can have the bed if you change the sheets. –C.”
“Which means I can have the couch,” Damon said. “Sounds good.”
Carmen would be out of town while Damon was breaching. It was sort of like getting a furlough from prison to be with your dying mother.
“I’m going to get ready for bed,” I said. It wasn’t even nine thirty, but pregnant women are always tired, and I could barely feel my feet anymore. I caught myself muttering about cold, numb mackerel attached to my ankles as I left the room.
I considered deferring the shower until morning, but changed my mind when I found Westley’s bloody handprint on my arm. What would a CSI team say about that? There was dried spatter, too, and it was a toss-up whether that had come from one of Audrey’s bags or from the poor, mad creature Damon had offed at the food court. Maybe I should be thinking X-Files instead of CSI…
I stood in the shower until my feet screamed for mercy, trying not to think about Damon, strapped to a bed, screaming without dignity or reserve, in too much pain to care. It wasn’t hypothetical. It had actually happened. And it was going to happen again.
Unless I did something to stop it.
I got out of the shower. Put on my pajamas. Brushed my teeth. Washed my face. Put lotion on my elbows and my itchy stretchy belly. Took my vitamins. Anything to delay going back into the living room.
When I finally stepped out of the bathroom, Damon was asleep on the couch. The cut on his forehead was still trickling blood into his hairline, one slow drop at a time. He’d taken a swig of blood from one of Audrey’s bags, somewhere along the way, but apparently it hadn’t been quite enough.
I stood over him, a swirl of voices in my head.
Westley. ‘If you befast him, he’s yours forever, and he’ll hate us both until the end of time but he’ll live… Blood to blood, that’s all it takes.’
Dr. DiNovi. ‘That’s the important part, the mingling of blood. Everything else is ceremonial.’
And my own voice, too. Think about what you’re doing, girl. This is not little. This is not temporary. And he is not going to like it. Do you actually want him around for the rest of your life? How many times has he scared the crap out of you in the last three days? Your last long-term relationship didn’t exactly come up roses. You can’t make up your mind to commit to your own child. Think about what you’re getting into!
But all I could think about was Audrey’s back arching as she screamed.
‘Some orphans believe we’ll all go to hell. Others say we’re already there.’
I don’t know if my shaking knees could have carried me to the kitchen and back, but Carmen had left her dishes by the couch. I picked up the knife she’d used to cut her microwave salisbury steak, and wiped it off on my hem. I took a deep breath.
Another deep breath.
Then I sliced open my fingertip and laid it against the bleeding cut on his forehead.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Endless Stupid Angst
NAOMI
I was braced, I thought, for his reaction. I expected screaming and hurling about of things. I half-expected him to beat the tar out of me and breach anyhow. I was braced for that.
His eyes hurt to look at, like claws ripped across my face, but I couldn’t look away. He didn’t speak, or even breathe, only a choking gasp. His every muscle seized up like a fist, flinching away from my hand as if it burned, or was filthy beyond toleration.
He choked again, an attempt to inhale that came out as a scream, or the beginning of one, but he dissolved into shadow and was gone before it could finish. I staggered at the sudden cold cut-off silence, as if I’d been plunged into water, deep cold dark silent.
I started crying. Because I wanted him to stay. Even if he shouted and threw things, even if he snarled and fought and hated me, I wanted him to stay. He was supposed to be with me. I could tell by the way my bones and my skin and everything in between them were screaming for him as loud as they could.
He would hate me now, I understood that. It was only fair. I’d hate me, too, if I’d done this to me without permission. Because befasting was a shock, apparently. Like a static spark as big as your body. Like having a lens zoom in on you until it sees all the way through you. Like being cut open for everyone to see your insides.
For people like Joy and Duncan, who were ready for it, wanted it, it was probably an intimate bonding experience.
It. Freaked. Me. Out.
That deep water I’d fallen into, it wasn’t cold but blood-hot, and it was the deep end of Damon, Damon-colored, Damon-flavored, filling up my head like a dream I couldn’t quite remember, and I knew he didn’t want me there. But I didn’t know how to get out. I was drowning and he was supposed to be there with me and he wasn’t.
I was curled up on the couch with Sunny Bunny, crying so hard I couldn’t breathe, when my phone rang. I would never have ever answered the thing if it hadn’t occurred to me that it might be Damon. Which was really, really dumb because he didn’t even know my phone number. But I fumbled the phone out of my purse.
“Damon?”
“Sis? Are you okay?” It was Jonathan. He sounded alarmed. “Naomi, answer me!”
“I’m — I’m okay.” I tried to choke down my sobs. Unseal my throat. Unclog my brain.
“Is it the baby? Are you hurt?”
“No. I’m sorry. I’m just…” I swallowed again. “I, um, I had a fight with a friend.”
“What friend? Carmen?”
“No. She’s not here.” Thank God. “Another… friend.” As if he — as if we — were something normal. I burst into tears again.
Jonathan waited it out until I could talk again, then spoke to me calmly and gently, like he talked to the cat when we took her to the vet. “Naomi, are you in trouble?”
‘In trouble’ was sometimes code for ‘pregnant out of wedlock.’ I giggled, only a little hysterically. “No. I’m okay.”
“Do you need help? I can be there in an hour and a half.”
“Not going the speed limit, you can’t.” I took a deep breath. “I’m okay, honest. I was just upset because we had a big fight and he hates me now. But that’s okay.”
“Back up. Who is this guy?”
Before I knew it I was spilling a non-vampiric version of the last few days, made mostly incoherent by my frantic on-the-spot editing.
“And he needed my help but he didn’t want me to help him, but I didn’t want him to die so I did it anyway and now he hates me,” I finished.
“Um, let me get this straight,” Jonathan said. “You saved his life, and he hates you for it?”
“Well, he says he would have been fine, but I saw what he would have to go through and it would not have been fine, and I just couldn’t let him do that but he’s probably going to do it anyway, all he has to do—” I cut myself off before I could finish the sentence. All he has to do is hit me. I could hardly think of anything that would get Jonathan a speeding ticket faster than that phrase.
I wondered how hard he’d have to hit me to trigger a breach.
“What
exactly are we talking about here? You saved this guy how?” I could hear my brother’s eyes narrowing.
“It’s… complicated.”
“I can tell. Sis, I gotta be honest with you, this guy sounds like bad news.”
You should have met his friend Peter. “He’s a little rough around the edges. But he’s a good guy. He… he tries so hard to take care of everybody. Even me.”
“Uh-huh.” He sounded less than convinced.
“Shouldn’t you be asleep? What time is it?” I’d left my watch somewhere… the bathroom, the Orphanage, Cuba…
“Way past my bedtime,” Jonathan admitted. “I just wanted to check on you.”
“Well, I’m fine. Go to bed before you get in trouble.”
“Listen, you call me if you need anything. Don’t even worry about me getting in trouble, just call me. Do you understand?”
“I understand, little brother.” I understand and I disregard. “Bye now. Love you.”
“Love you, too, Sis.” He sighed and hung up.
I dropped the phone back into my purse and let the tears come back — not bone-wracking sobs anymore, just a silent non-stop flow. I didn’t feel quite so awful now. In fact, I gradually realized that in some bizarre, schizophrenic way, I felt… happy. Sunshine-and-dandelions happy. Barefoot-on-the-Tilt-a-Whirl happy. A fierce, dizzy, dazzling happy that made no sense at all because I had nothing to be happy about. In fact, I was quite miserable, and the emotions competing against each other were starting to make me feel ill. It had to be a befasting side effect. I wondered if Damon was as freakishly happy as I was, and if it was making him as uncomfortable.
Are you kidding? He’s probably about to claw his own face off.
And blaming me for it. Natural enough, since it is my fault.
Would he yell at me, when he came back? Or would he ever come back? He’d need me to touch his food, wouldn’t he? I could leave it on the doorstep for him, like an Irish housewife putting out milk for the fairies. I might never have to see him again unless he wanted me to. Hurray.
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