A Dark-Adapted Eye

by Crews, Heather

  I threw my arms behind my back. “God! He didn’t do that! It was a vampire. And now it’s dead.”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  I hadn’t even told Les everything about last night, but Criseyde was my best friend and the words tumbled out. “I sneaked out to see Rade after telling Les I would be right back. We went to Witcher Park because he said he wanted to show me something, but he was really meeting this other vampire so she could try to kill me. Somehow I ended up killing her instead. And Rade, he . . . he asked me to kill him.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Excuse me?”

  “I know.”

  “Okay.” She held her hands out in front of her, eyes wide. “Okay. So you killed a vampire. No big deal. That’s what Les and Ivory do all the time. Besides, it was self-defense. So, are you going to kill Rade, too? I would. That bastard.”

  “I didn’t answer him. I was just . . . I couldn’t think.” I mustered a smile that felt brittle. “Let’s not talk about it anymore, at least not right now. Tell me how it went at the party. I saw you talking to Rhys.”

  Criseyde smiled, accepting the change of subject. “Yes, I admit it, I was talking to the jailbait. Hey, do you remember tall, dark, and preppy guy?”

  “Yeah, I saw him there. His name’s Ethan.”

  “He’s Rhys’s older brother. But I think I may have underestimated jailbait boy. He’s kind of cute.” She pointed a warning finger at me before I could say a word. “Let me just tell you why. He didn’t talk about my looks, or where he wanted to take me to dinner, or how much money he wanted to spend on me. Well, he probably doesn’t have much money, but still.”

  I frowned. “Is that what guys normally say to you?”

  “Sometimes. Ethan was like that when I met him at the café. And it’s annoying. Rhys actually asked questions about me, and was interested in my answers. So I decided to give him a chance.”

  “Good for you,” I said.

  She glanced at the clock on the stove. “I go back to work tomorrow, and I’ve got some stuff to do today. Like get some breakfast, for starters. Want to come with?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got stuff of my own.”

  “All right. See you later!”

  “Yep.” I smiled again as she left. It felt more authentic this time, but it was such an effort.

  “Hey, Les.”

  Surprised, I turned to see Cris slipping past Les, who stood at the kitchen entrance. How long had he been there? Had he heard me tell Cris what Rade wanted me to do? It wasn’t something I wanted to keep from him forever, but he would react much more strongly than Cris had and I wasn’t entirely ready to deal with the issue.

  “Hi,” I said to him softly, blushing.

  My heart melted at the subtle curve of his lips and the affectionate gleam in his eyes. I looped my arms around his neck as he hoisted me onto the edge of the counter for a long, deep kiss. It was easy to get lost in him. It was too easy to forget about anyone else but the two of us.

  “How are we ever going to get anything done?” I asked when our lips parted.

  “I don’t know.” He took my hands and I hopped off the counter. “There’s only one thing I want to do right now. Maybe two.”

  I blinked at him, liquid with longing. “I can’t wait . . .” To tear your clothes off, I thought, and promptly grew red with embarrassment. “To be, um, to do . . .”

  He knew what I was trying to say and a pleased grin crawled onto his face. “Ah, well, we can do that any time, you know . . .”

  “But,” I continued regretfully, “I need to go to the library this morning. There are some things I want to research. And things we should talk about. Will you come with me?”

  “I have to meet the glass people at the house at one,” he said, looking almost laughably crestfallen that we wouldn’t have time to ourselves beforehand.

  “We’ll be done in time for that. And after . . .”—I grinned mischievously—“I’m all yours.”

  ~

  I want you to kill me.

  Rade wanted to die for the pain he’d caused in others. But why did he want me to end his life, such as it was? It hadn’t occurred to me to ask. I supposed it didn’t matter who he wanted to end his life, just that he wanted it done at all.

  Leaving him last night, I’d started to feel upset at his request. I’d run to the car without waiting for Aleskie, tugging on the locked door impatiently. It wasn’t every day a girl got asked for death, yet that wasn’t what troubled me exactly. I couldn’t pinpoint why I’d reacted so strongly to Rade’s request. I blamed it on shock and fear and a general proclivity for life. I blamed my trembling hands on the death they’d caused and a fear of the dark.

  I’d been so optimistic in the days following Ivory’s abduction. I’d ignored any doubts and setbacks. I’d known we would get him back.

  Now, walking up to the library, I felt anxious and desolate. The haunting words Rade had spoken before Jordana’s attack tormented me. It wasn’t likely anything in the library would help me solve the mystery of a vampire prophecy, but at the least I wanted to look up everything I could about lunar eclipses. Just before Ivory’s kidnapping, he had told me not to go out on the night of the eclipse. At the time I’d thought he was simply being protective, but now that Rade had mentioned a blood eclipse, I knew there had to be a connection. Something big was going to happen during the lunar eclipse, and Ivory had known it.

  It seemed fairly obvious to me Aleskie had revealed to him some big vampire secret. They’d spent hours talking in his room before our ill-fated mission to Stars. I would ask her about the so-called prophecy tonight, I decided, when Les and I could listen to her together. It hadn’t even occurred to me to ask her before.

  Inside the library, I pointed Les toward an empty table and set about gathering books. I didn’t know where to begin, so I grabbed everything I could find that mentioned eclipses. My arms were full when I finished and the books spilled across the table.

  “What’s all this?” Les asked.

  “Research.”

  “For what?”

  I took the seat across from him. “Rade told me this prophecy that’s supposed to explain what vampires are doing here. Their god or whoever—Pater Luna—is supposed to return to kill us. Or make us slaves. I can’t remember exactly how it went. He said something about blood.”

  “Maybe Aleskie knows.”

  “I’m going to ask her later. Whatever it means, I’m sure something bad is going to happen tomorrow night.”

  “That’s when the eclipse is happening?”

  “Yep. I marked it on my calendar a while ago.”

  “I don’t think we can have Ivory back by then, Ash. If at all.”

  Lowering my eyes, I pulled the nearest book out of the stack. “I know. But if something is happening and he’s still alive, he’s going to be there. He knows whatever the vampires have planned, and they knew he did, and that’s why they took him.”

  Without another word, I began looking through the books, occasionally making notes in the little book I used to record astronomical observations. Most of the information was the scientific facts of lunar eclipses, like dust in the atmosphere causing the deep orange color on the moon, or how there were at least two of them each year. Total eclipses, like the one happening tomorrow night, were much rarer.

  The rest of the information was less scientific. The word “lunar” came from the late Latin lunaticus, I learned, and I added moon-struck, moon-sick, and periodic insanity to my vocabulary. Sex during a lunar eclipse apparently resulted in children filled with demons. There were tales of animals and demons swallowing the moon, people banging pots and sticks and lighting fireworks to scare them away. Bad omens. There shall be blood on the moon.

  None of the information really had anything to do with vampires, unless they were the demons in question. But I hadn’t expected much. I closed the last book and sat back with a sigh.

  “I think we shouldn’t lose hope,” I said.

 
“Why’s that?” Les asked.

  “Well, I was thinking about apparent brightness and absolute brightness. The first is how bright something appears, and the second is the measure of the true brightness. Here, in Las Secas . . . it doesn’t seem very bright right now, you know? But in spite of all this dark stuff, we are bright. We deserve brightness. It’s out there. We just have to get out of the dark to find it.”

  Reaching for my notebook, I looked up to see Les watching me, one arm slung over the back of his chair.

  “That’s not really absolute brightness works,” I said. “I was just . . .”

  “It was nice,” he said. “And you’re smart.”

  “Oh.” I felt flustered. “Thanks. But this is nothing. I just wanted to learn a few things about lunar eclipses, just for myself . . .”

  “Did you ever think about going to college some day?”

  I shrugged. “Sometimes. Sometimes I think about studying in Paris. That’s where Criseyde wants to live some day, and she always talked like we’d go together.” I laughed. “I think she wants to shop at expensive stores and drink espresso and become some artist’s muse. Or a spy.”

  “Paris would be nice,” he said. “Anywhere would, really.”

  I looked at him shyly. “Do you . . . think about the future much?”

  He shrugged. “I never really did, except in a general way. Until I started hunting vampires, I was kind of directionless. The past few years I’ve been pretty busy thinking about what I’d like to do if we ever get to leave here. But it’s hard to figure your life out when you don’t know if you’ll ever have options. I still don’t know what I want, not really, but every time I see myself doing something, somewhere away from here, I see you with me.”

  “I see that too,” I said softly.

  “So . . . I’m ‘the bright one of the sword,’ huh?”

  “What?”

  “My star. Nair al Saif. Otherwise known as Iota Orionis. That’s what it means. I looked it up while you were taking notes.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I fiddled nervously with my notebook. “When I started reading about stars, I learned that their names have different meanings, and it was kind of fun to assign them to people. I picked that one for you because you like to use a knife, and the star is in the Orion constellation, so . . .”

  “The hunter.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which one are you?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. I never thought about it. I was too busy giving stars to everyone else, I guess.”

  “How about Al Nair?”

  “There are like, three stars with that name.”

  “But they all mean the same thing.”

  “You think I’m bright?”

  “The brightest.”

  “Then that would make me the sun. Unless we’re still talking about absolute brightness. In that case I’m some star in the LMC.” He gave me an amused and slightly uncomprehending look. “We’ll just stick with Al Nair,” I said.

  Les helped me put the books back before we headed to the house to meet the glass people. While they worked, he moved the two broken pieces of the table down to the curb and I righted the table lamp and scrubbed at the stain on the couch. There was nothing to be done for the holes in the walls until we could get to the hardware store. They didn’t really matter anyway if something bad was happening tomorrow night.

  In a couple hours the workers were done replacing the windows and vacuuming glass out of the carpet. Les signed some papers and took a receipt, and we were alone. I followed him into the kitchen, where he leaned easily against the counter.

  “We got sidetracked at the library,” I said. “I meant to tell you this thing about vampires. Apparently they have personal preferences about blood and can taste certain flavors that aren’t even really flavors, actually. But anyway, the reason Rade came for me when I was nine is because he likes the taste of loneliness. And I was lonely then.”

  “Ash . . .”

  “I’m safe from him now, because I’m not lonely. Because I have you and Criseyde, and I had Ivory, too.”

  “But you’re not safe from other vampires,” he pointed out. “Someone else might like what you are now.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But those times I was out with Rade, I knew he wouldn’t let anything happen to me.”

  “Except for last night, when he tried to have you killed.”

  “He didn’t want me killed,” I said, a trace of defensiveness in my voice. “I was supposed to kill her all along. But I just wanted to help. That’s the only reason I did any of this. The only reason anything happened to me.”

  “I know.”

  My hands clenched into fists. “No, you don’t! You keep saying that, but you don’t know everything! You don’t know everything about me! And you can’t protect me from everything, so stop acting like you can. I’m not going to pretend to be some weak little girl for you. It doesn’t matter how much I love you!”

  He pushed off the counter and took a step in my direction, half an incongruous smile on his lips. “You love me?”

  It felt as if my heart stuttered to a stop for a moment. My throat was tight. I hadn’t meant to tell him that. Not yet anyway. I hadn’t meant . . . I blinked at him, thinking suddenly of how he’d helped Ivory nurse me back to health after Rade’s bite, how he’d raged and driven off my alcoholic father. The time he’d complimented my pink hair. The times he’d looked at me and refused to look at me.

  “Yes,” I replied defiantly. “I do.”

  His grin widened and he took another step toward me. “I knew that.”

  “I’m not surprised. You think you know everything.”

  “And what do you know?” I shrugged and he said, “Then you probably don’t know I love you, too.”

  I held my breath for a moment, feeling exquisitely overwhelmed. He had said them at last. The words I’d longed to hear.

  My elation quickly transformed into exasperation no less powerful. I cried, “Why didn’t you tell me? How would I know that? It’s not like you make anything obvious with that—that closed-off face of yours!”

  “I guess I don’t. But I want to now. Or I want to try.”

  “You can’t tell me what to do,” I declared, placing a hand on his chest as he started to come closer. “You can’t stop me from doing anything. You can’t be jealous. You can’t act like I’m not your equal.”

  He smiled at my words, wide and white, all teeth and creased cheeks and crinkled glinting eyes. It was a killer smile, and not one I’d seen very often. There was something slightly rakish about it, something electric. It had the power to undo me.

  “Asha,” he said through that smile, “I won’t do anything you don’t want me to.”

  “Good.” I lowered my hand.

  “But you can’t tell me what to do. You can’t lie to me. You can’t act like I’m not your equal.”

  I pressed my lips together to keep from smiling. “So you forgive me?”

  “Always.” His arms came around me then, as if he’d been anxious to touch me. I pressed my face into his shoulder, weak for the scent of him.

  “We just told each other what to do,” I said.

  “Oh. We’ll just spend the rest of the day begging each other’s forgiveness.” I giggled against his shoulder and he tightened his arms. “I know you’re not weak,” he said, “and you don’t have to pretend to be. I hate that you keep running off right into the middle of the danger, but I also kind of like it. I like that you’re willing to do it, I mean.”

  “You’re sick.”

  “Probably. Definitely.”

  “We’re a good match, then.”

  I shimmied out of his arms, intending for him to come after me, and he did. We bantered back and forth for a while and teased each other until we couldn’t wait. The hours slipped away from us. I felt silly with lightheartedness.

  But later, after we’d made plans to retrieve our stuff from Les’s dad’s house, I felt sunk with regret. Because I was
enjoying myself and in certain moments conveniently forgot important obligations. Things that had driven me and brought me to this point. Ivory was still out there, somewhere. I hoped.

  It had been days. We had no leads. I had failed.

  No. Not my fault.

  I loved my brother and wanted him back. But Ivory was gone, dead or not dead, and I was still here. Les was still here. My life wouldn’t stop for my brother or anyone else. It would go on and I had to go with it. No wasting time revisiting the unchangeable past. New dawns were coming, new days, and I was going to see them. I was going to live.

  ~

  “What does it mean?”

  Aleskie looked uncomfortable at the question. “Just what I told you already. Pater Luna is supposed to return.”

  “Tomorrow night, during the lunar eclipse,” I said. “That’s what you told Ivory, isn’t it? That’s why he warned me not to go outside.”

  She nodded. “He shouldn’t have let on that he knew anything in front of the vampires. That’s why they took him, to keep him silent. Not that it matters, because no one’s going to try to stop them. No one can.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” I demanded.

  Her eyes were slightly reproachful. “I didn’t want you guys to do anything stupid, that’s why. You could get killed.”

  “We could get killed any time. We could have been killed like fifteen times since yesterday.”

  “That’s not the point—”

  “What are they going to do?” Les interrupted.

  Aleskie sighed. “All the vampires are going to gather in the desert outside the city to witness Pater Luna’s return.”

  I frowned. “That sounds . . . cultish.”

  “Exactly. I’m afraid of what they’re going to do when nothing happens.”

  “You don’t believe in Pater Luna?”

  “Of course not!” she cried. “It’s just some mythological crap made up so the vampires have something to look forward to, some purpose. People have been waiting for the end since the beginning, and these prophecies of the world ending and doors opening in the sky and whatever else never come true, and someone always ‘predicts’ something else happening on some other random date. But in this case, I’m sure vampires are going to be angry when their so-called father doesn’t appear. They’ve been promised endless blood and perfect dominion over humans, and no magical being is going to deliver that.”