“Look,” I whispered, transfixed.
“I’m looking,” Les said.
His voice brought me reluctantly out of my reverie. As I lowered my eyes, I noticed ours was not the only van to have carried humans to this spot in the middle of nowhere. There were three others parked in a line next to ours, and several cars. All around us the unidentifiable silhouettes of numerous vampires milled about in the darkness, awaiting the eclipse. They began to coalesce, faces turned up to the full moon.
The eclipse had begun. The moon wore a subtle penumbral shadow that would grow and deepen as the minutes passed, the orange color intensifying.
“We could run,” I said uncertainly.
“We could,” Les agreed.
I lifted our wrists. “The rope’s too short. One of us would have to walk backwards or both of us sideways.”
“It’s us. We’d make it.”
“But we can’t go. Not without Ivory.”
“No,” he said with a sad smile. “I’d never leave without him either.”
Someone walked up to us—Mercer, perhaps—and gave us both a shove. He steered us toward the clump of hundreds of faceless vampires, weaving us through them until we came to a gradual halt at some random spot in the midst of them all. No one spoke, no one moved, and the silence was eerie. A stray, chill breeze lifted my hair from my shoulders.
I heard Palefinger address his rapt audience. “Brothers. Sisters. It is nearly time.”
An eager murmur rippled through the crowd, giving me goosebumps.
“We have waited patiently and the return of Pater Luna is nigh,” Palefinger continued. “The blood eclipse signals his arrival. He will come to us from the sky to live among us and guide us in a new world of prosperity, respect, and fear. He will provide us with blood forevermore. The humans will do as we please. Too long have we lived with death and darkness. Pater Luna will be our life.”
His booming voice, normally so calm, rang out across the mass with unnerving zeal, rumbling like thunder. I edged closer to Les, hating the comforting deepness of it. I couldn’t see Palefinger but I pictured him standing at the front of the group, his congregation, delivering his deranged oration with the passion of someone who believed utterly in his cause.
“Friends,” he finished, “we will inherit the earth.”
There was movement in the crowd, excitement held in check. Countless pairs of hungry glittering eyes searched the sea of dark figures for vulnerable humans.
“Do not touch them!” Palefinger shouted. “It is for Pater Luna to determine their fate!”
This was why he’d killed Lucinda, I thought. So she’d stop murdering his offerings for sport.
But it was all right for him to sacrifice Ivory, apparently. I turned toward his voice with hatred in my veins. There was nothing Les or I could do. Judging by his tense body and twitchy fingers, he felt just as frustrated and helpless as I did.
“Behold,” Palefinger intoned ominously.
Les and I looked up at the moon along with everyone else. It moved into the umbra, the orange shadow creeping slowly across the surface. The color deepened as the eclipse neared totality, turning intensely crimson. The blood eclipse. Everyone on the night side of the earth could see this. Could they perceive this same unearthly color? Did they know what was happening here, to us?
When the middle of the eclipse arrived, the moon entirely scarlet, an eerie, bated silence was almost palpable.
“I will perform a sacrifice,” Palefinger decided. “The blood will draw Pater Luna more quickly to us.”
And here it came. The moment of my brother’s death. I surged toward the vampire’s resonant voice, heedless of the rope straining on my wrists. Les kept as little distance between us as he could. We pushed bodies roughly to the side, not caring if they were human or vampire, as we stumbled our way to the front. I felt like screaming.
Breaking through the front row of vampires, I saw Palefinger lift a young man from his knees. Without hesitation, the vampire put his mouth to the man’s throat and made savage animal noises. When he pulled back, his mouth was as red and messy as if he’d dived face first into a cherry pie. The young man was dead or close to it, his throat ripped wholly open and spilling blood to the dry barren ground.
“This blood symbolizes the distinction between our past and our brilliant future!”
Feeling slightly sick, I leaned against Les. The man’s hair was much too dark for him to be Ivory, but I didn’t feel any relief whatsoever. If the scattered shouts of praise were any indication, no vampire gave a shit about human life. Palefinger had taken this one so easily. That dead man, now discarded to the ground, could have been my brother or any one of us. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know him or the dead girl in the park. We would never be safe with them populating our cities as predators in the shadows. Whether or not Pater Luna was coming, they had to be stopped.
My hands jerked around as Les pulled his arms in to his waist to reach for something. His knife. I looked up at him, eyes questioning.
“Just go along with me,” he said. “I’ll need your help.”
I nodded.
We moved apart from the crowd, which had begun to shift restlessly, tension seeping into the air. They were expecting their god, their father, because he was what they had been promised. He was the reason they had traveled to Las Secas to stand on the cracked desert floor and stare at the moon on this very night. How Palefinger had duped so many into believing some space vampire was coming to lead them was beyond me.
“Another sacrifice!” someone called, the voice clear and distant in the huge silent night.
I saw Ivory kneeling on the crowd beside Palefinger. It was only chance that the vampire had killed the other guy instead of him. But I knew that if Les and I didn’t act, my brother would be next.
Palefinger’s eyes came to rest on us as we approached him. He didn’t seem afraid, only curious. He didn’t notice the knife Les held.
“Now,” Les said.
He thrust the knife up beneath the vampire’s sternum. I moved my arms with his, using the force of my wrists against the rope to give him the extra strength he needed to drive it deeper. Hot blood spilled onto our hands, soaking into the rope. He twisted the knife sharply, then pulled it out. Palefinger’s mouth hung open in surprise. One meaty arm swung up, but Les and I ducked somewhat clumsily behind him. We raised our arms again, this time using our combined strength to stab the knife into the base of the vampire’s skull.
It had been tougher than I’d expected. My wrists ached and burned so bad there were tears in my eyes. Palefinger fell before us, leaving us facing the massive black crowd of vampires. They grew unnaturally still.
“Shit,” I said.
But their eyes looked past us into the impenetrable dark of the desert. They turned their heads slightly, as if listening to some far-off, unknown sound. After a moment I heard it too, a staccato vibrating sound that vacillated widely between the mountains. I stared wildly into the dark sky, at the swollen bloody moon, and shrank against Les with fear.
Suddenly a blinding light blazed over the entire lakebed and the vampires reacted with violent aversion. For some reason I thought I was witnessing selenelion, where the sun and the eclipsed moon were visible in the sky together. But it was the wrong time of day and they would have been on opposite horizons. This inexplicable light wasn’t the sun and it was nowhere near the horizon.
Pater Luna.
The light brought everyone standing in the lakebed into stark relief for a brief moment before the washing whiteness grew unendurably brighter, erasing detail and forcing me to shut my eyes. I felt a stabbing pain behind them and pressed my face into Les’s shoulder. He buried his in my hair. Our binding made it impossible to hold each other, which was all I wanted to do now that the end had arrived.
There were loud sharp noises, growling explosions. Screams. Tears streamed down my cheeks and I trembled with fierce fear. I knew I would never become a vampire’s slave be
cause I was going to die instead. I hoped Les would die too, and Ivory, and every other human here, so none of them ever had to see the terrible deadly beast that Pater Luna surely was.
I became aware of a new sound. My name. My name whispered in my ear.
He knows me, I thought hysterically. He’s come.
“Asha!”
Forcing my eyes open, I saw Les’s frantic face, my name shaping his lips. It was a shout, not a whisper, only my ears were so clogged with a quiet fullness I couldn’t quite hear what he was trying to tell me.
Then I looked around us. The white light had moved further away and shone from above. Less blinding now, it moved in slow irregular circles over the scene. The vampires were no longer clustered together in expectation but scattered onto the dirt like dead crows. Clouds of dust wafted upward between the bodies surrounding us, hazily obscuring dark stains of blood that had soaked into the earth. Not everyone was dead—here and there someone twitched or cried or began to stand up with raised hands, eyes darting cautiously.
Humans, I realized. They were the only ones still alive.
And then I saw the soldiers. Dressed in fatigues, some wearing masks, all brandishing weapons, they moved purposefully among the hundreds of scattered bodies. Vampires who were not quite dead were shot. Any human found alive was given a blanket and escorted to a medic.
I could see them now, the big army vehicles that had driven up seemingly out of nowhere when the light had whitened everything. Fitted with powerful guns and cannons and I didn’t know what else, they were parked in a loose circle around where the vampires had congregated and fallen.
My ears were starting to clear and I recognized a choppy, whirring sound: the blades of the helicopter circling far overhead, its bright light moving lazily. Somewhere to the right, a mechanical voice spoke in garbled tones.
“I believed,” I told Les, astonished. “For a second there . . .”
“So did I,” he replied, his bewilderment and contained exuberance somehow comforting to me.
“You there! Hands up!”
Both of us turned in the direction of the shout and found a soldier approaching us at a light jog. I threw my hands up automatically at the sight of his gun and Les’s came up because he had no choice.
“Don’t shoot!” he called to the soldier.
“Human?” the soldier demanded as he reached us, lowering his gun and shining a flashlight into our eyes.
“Ow! Yes!” I cried.
He finally noticed the bloodied ropes on our wrists. “Let’s take care of that. I’m Sams.”
“Please,” I begged, tears springing into my eyes. I wanted Palefinger’s blood off me. I was tired of having limited use of my arms and Les and I dragging each other around whenever we tried to move. I was . . . tired.
Sams, satisfied of our humanity, led us to one of the trucks and got the ropes removed. The relief from pain was instant. I swung my arms to work the stiff muscles, the night breeze chilly on my raw, red wrists. Les’s looked the same.
“Medic,” Sams said efficiently.
Without us even noticing, the soldiers had erected a camp of sorts. Officers ran around productively. There were tents and tables and tall spotlights illuminating the area. I’d almost have thought it was daytime except for the wall of darkness at the edges. The helicopter whir, which had provided a constant background noise, now faded into the unseen distance.
We weren’t the only ones getting medical treatment. Several humans had survived the ordeal, in fact. Falling into a daze as an officer treated and bandaged my wrists, I pieced together what had happened by listening to their tentative whispers.
The military had sent in a helicopter equipped with a high-powered UV light and blasted the thing at full force. This had stunned the vampires enough to allow the trucks to come in with their weapons. It had been easy, apparently, to distinguish the humans among the vampires because we were the ones cowering in the light while the vamps had tried to get away, twisting in pain.
They’d killed so many in such a short period of time. Our city was free and safe, or would be soon. Things were going to change again, only this time they’d get better.
It was all because of Ivory, I realized. Aleskie had told him where the vampires would be tonight, and he had told somebody important. Someone who didn’t like the way things were in Las Secas and saw a way to change them.
My brother hadn’t been lying when he’d threatened Palefinger that soon everyone would know what the vampires were doing. If it wasn’t already, I was sure this would be on the news later—humans, crazed and elated because they’d almost died, would relate conflicting accounts of the prophecy and the events of the night and no one would know what to believe.
I was sitting there in mute astonishment long after my bandages were in place. Les stood up and walked toward me, his own bandages peeking out of the sleeves of his jacket. He lifted his shirt and showed me where they’d dressed the wound on his side. They’d cut away some fabric from his jeans and fixed up his gunshot wound, too.
“New scars, huh?”
“Yeah. I was lucky these weren’t any deeper.”
“I wonder if we’ll have scars on our wrists too.”
“Maybe. It was pretty bad. The marks will take a while to fade, at the very least.”
“Ivory did this,” I said after a moment, shivering. I’d been doing that for several minutes without even realizing it. “He made it happen.”
“What a do-gooder.” He swung the jacket off and settled it heavily over my shoulders. One of his shirt sleeves was missing.
“This is heavy. You wear this all the time?”
“Pretty much.”
For another minute or two we sat there in silence until my brain finally kicked in. “Ivory,” I said, wondering why I hadn’t thought of it before. Somehow we’d gotten separated when the soldiers had come in. “We have to find him! He’s here somewhere. He’s probably looking for us!”
It didn’t take long to find him. There were only about thirty or forty humans in all, which was surprising considering the multitude of vampires. The soldiers had divided us into two groups, and Ivory was in the second one. I saw him sitting cross-legged on the ground on the other side of the medic tent, a blanket thrown over his shoulders, and I couldn’t contain myself. I ran to him and threw my arms around his neck, my weight sending him off balance.
“Whoa,” he said, but then he was squeezing me too.
“You’re alive,” I sobbed into his neck. “What he said—and then that guy—”
“Hey. It’s over now. Or nearly.” Ivory’s voice was smooth with the calm acceptance that everything had turned out all right and he’d known it would all along. It was as if he’d never worried at all, never been afraid. “Hey, Les.”
“Hey, Ivory.”
I could hear the restrained joy in Les’s voice because it was the very thing I was feeling, only I didn’t bother with self-control. The whole of the night was crashing into me all at once, making me limp. I was laughing and crying at the same time, not even caring how that must have looked with my bruised eyes. All that mattered was that we were alive, the three of us, and we were together.
“Is it over?” I kept asking. “Are they really gone?”
“Every vampire here tonight is dead. I saw what you guys did to Palefinger. I couldn’t believe it.”
Shivering despite Les’s jacket, I felt a twist of fear. This was what we’d wanted—to get rid of vampires—but suddenly it wasn’t so simple. “What about the others? In the city? What about Aleskie?”
“I don’t know,” Ivory said quietly.
“She’ll be fine.” I punctuated my words with an optimistic nod.
“It’s Mercer,” Les said. His voice wasn’t angry or even snide. Instead he sounded almost pitying.
Ivory and I followed his gaze and saw Mercer sitting to our right, near the outer edge of the light. He was crouched into himself, staring into nothing, a cigarette burning in one hand.
Tears or sweat, long dried, had left streaks in his dirt-smudged face.
“Let’s just leave him alone.” My voice was soft. No one argued.
We lingered there contemplatively as military personnel bustled around us for what felt like hours. They took names and addresses and conducted informal interviews. At last they brought around a couple of buses to take everyone home.
Sams was standing by the door as we prepared to get on our bus. “You’ll be contacted for routine follow-up procedures,” he informed us.
“Routine?” I repeated with a giddy laugh. Les grinned.
I was feeling a little crazy when we boarded the bus. But as soon as I’d settled into a seat and made myself comfortable against Les, I started to wind down slowly. He wrapped an arm around me and rested his cheek on my head. I was tired to my bones and knew I’d sleep most of the way home.
As the bus pulled away, I looked out the window at the still-dark sky. The eclipse was long gone.
seventeen
escape velocity: the speed required for an object to escape the gravitational pull of a planet or other body
The bus had dropped everyone off as close to their homes as possible, so we’d ridden practically all over the city by the time we reached the east side. It was just before sunrise. The bus had deposited us near the grocery store where we usually shopped and the three of us walked with a bounce in our step. The walk was a familiar one that Ivory and I had made countless times to get frozen drinks and chili cheese nachos from the convenience store whenever our parents had left us home alone. Sometimes Les had come too.
We’d all slept on the bus and were feeling gleeful and careless, like children. No one else was out walking through the cool, lightening morning and we didn’t bother to be quiet about teasing each other and recounting with ecstatic disbelief the ordeals of the night. We were past the points of sadness and rage. Now we were just glad to be alive. We were covered in dust and bloodstains and bruises, our clothing ripped, our hair wild, and we didn’t care.
“The eclipse was the scariest, most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” I enthused, practically jumping up and down. “It was red. The blood eclipse.”
A Dark-Adapted Eye Page 21