Deathless (15 page)

“
Tell her your other news, Mom,” Bradley said.

Leesa looked at her mom, who was positively beaming.

“
I’ve got a job,” Judy said proudly. “Can you believe it?”

In truth, Leesa could not believe it. Her mom had never held a job, at least not as far back as Leesa could remember. How could she, when she had refused to leave the house for more than ten years?

“
Mom, that’s totally awesome! Where are you working?”

“
At the bakery, for your uncle Ralph. He’s always extra busy during the holidays. I started last Saturday. I’m having so much fun, meeting so many people.”

Leesa gave her mom a quick hug. “Mom, I am sooo happy for you.”

“
After New Years,” Judy continued, “I’ll start looking for a real job. Your uncle said he’ll be my reference, and he’ll tell anyone who asks that I worked for him for a year. Isn’t that exciting?”

“
It sure is,” Leesa said, amazed at how quickly things were starting to become normal for her family. And normal was definitely not something they had much experience with.

Perhaps that explained her feeling that somewhere, somehow, another shoe was about to drop. She prayed it wasn’t going to drop on any of them.

19. SOLSTICE

L
eesa sat on the front steps of her aunt’s house, arms resting on her thighs, gazing off to the west. The sun hung low in a cloudless sky, a pale yellow orb that seemed almost to balance atop the rolling hills on the far horizon. No wonder it was so cold out here, she thought—the barely glowing disc seemed incapable of providing any real warmth.

She had bundled up against the cold, adding a black wool scarf around her neck to her usual winter garb of ski cap, parka, leather gloves and Ugg boots. She had been sitting out here for almost half an hour, thinking and watching the sun slowly sink lower and lower. Max was running around the front yard, occasionally coming back to the steps for a few moments of petting before racing out onto the lawn again and resuming his fun.

Today was the twenty-first of December—the winter solstice. The reason Rave was gone. Leesa was watching to see if she might notice anything different about the sun today, some slight change that could account for the volkaanes retreating to their New Hampshire sanctuary. If there was anything different, she could not detect it. It seemed like any other winter afternoon to her.

She had read up on the solstice on the internet. Today was the day the sun reached its farthest point south in the sky. Tomorrow it would begin its slow trip north. Today was also one of the shortest days of the year. She wondered if one of those two things had the power to influence
Destiratu
, or any other magical phenomenon, for that matter. Perhaps it was something else entirely, something unaccounted for in the astronomical models she had found in her research.

She knew she was being foolish, but she couldn’t help herself. Rave had said even the eldest and wisest among the volkaanes did not clearly understand the effects of the solstice on the supernatural world. They just knew it was potentially dangerous and had opted for caution. Still, it made her feel a little closer to Rave, watching the sinking sun and wondering what kind of pull it might be exerting on him.

Max bounded up on the steps again, and this time she grabbed his neck and gave him a vigorous chest rub. His tongue hung out and his tail wagged furiously as he reveled in the attention and affection. When she was done, Leesa pulled his head close to her face. What the heck, she thought.

“
I love you, Rave,” she whispered into Max’s furry ear.

Max gave three short barks and bobbed his head up and down. Leesa almost believed Max understood her words and was somehow sending her message across the miles to Rave. No, check that. She didn’t
almost
believe—she did believe. Suddenly she felt a little warmer, almost as if Rave were now sitting right beside her. A smile crept onto her face.

She waited outside another few minutes, until the sun disappeared and darkness began stealing across the sky. Finally, she got to her feet and turned toward the door.

“
C’mon, Max. Time to go inside.”

That night, Leesa dreamed again.

She stood in front of a dark, narrow opening cut into a rugged gray stone cliff. How she had come to be here, she had no idea. Cold, fetid air seeped from the cavern, assailing her nostrils and forcing her back a step. There was nothing here to draw her forward—indeed, the opening seemed to reek of danger. Yet something kept her from doing what she knew she should be doing—leaving this place as quickly as her feet could carry her. The sensible part of her brain screamed “get away!” but another part of her whispered “you must go on.” Strangely, the whisper felt more powerful than the scream.

She stepped into the narrow tunnel.

Goosebumps rose on her arms as the cold air wrapped itself around her, seeming to enfold her in its clutches. To minimize the dank, rotting stench, she forced herself to breathe through her mouth, hoping she was not inhaling anything that might turn out to be harmful. The walls of the cavern were rough, but the floor was strangely smooth and worn. Again, the sensible part of her brain told her this meant something, something she should be worried about, but the whisper drew her onward.

No light filtered into the deeper reaches of the cavern, yet somehow she could still see. Not clearly, but well enough to make out the stone walls a few feet from her face, allowing her to follow the winding passage without crashing into the rock when the tunnel turned.

I’m dreaming,
she told herself.
That’s why I can see in the dark. None of this is real.
She pressed her palm against the rough stone. It sure felt real.

Subtly, the “whisper” that enticed her to keep going changed. No longer was it an abstract feeling pulling her in—it now had the flavor of “help me, please.” She could almost hear the voice, but not quite. It was still a feeling in her head, not a voice coming to her ears.

She pressed on. Time seemed to have no meaning here.
It’s just a dream,
she reminded herself, puzzled that she could somehow know she was dreaming within the dream.
Time does not matter.

The plea for help grew steadily louder in her head.

Without noticing the change, she suddenly found herself standing in a large cavern. The smell was stronger here. It was the smell of death, she realized, but a kind of death she had never encountered before—a rotting, lingering death that promised no end. She stopped and slowly surveyed the chamber. Deep inside the mountain, where there should have been no light, she could still see.
Dreams sure can be strange,
she thought.

As her eyes swept slowly across the cavern, she almost missed it. She had to bring her gaze back a few feet to the left, directly opposite from where she stood, to make sure she hadn’t imagined the shadowy presence. But she had not. A pair of pale yellow eyes glowed faintly in the blackness, watching her. The sense of danger grew. She had to get out of here—get out of here now. She was about to turn when she heard it again. “Help me. Please, help me.” The voice sounded hauntingly familiar, but it took her a moment to recognize it. Bradley! The tone was so weak and tortured she could barely recognize her brother’s voice.

She forced herself slowly across the chamber.
I’m not limping
, she thought out of nowhere.
What’s that about?
She’d never had a dream where she hadn’t limped.

The pale eyes remained fixed on her, but otherwise there was no movement in the cavern but hers. As Leesa drew closer, she became aware of a second presence, pressed against the wall, behind the first. She knew this one was Bradley, chained to the wall. But who, or what, was the other?

“
The human is mine,” a female voice said. “You cannot save it.”

Leesa still could not see anything except the two yellow eyes, and perhaps a slight deepening of the blackness surrounding them. Somehow, she knew this apparition could not harm her—not here in her dream, at least—so she kept walking.

Suddenly, laughter cackled from the darkness. Below the eyes, Leesa could now see a pair of gleaming fangs. With no source of light here, the fangs should not have gleamed, but they did, almost as if they carried their own illumination inside them.

The shock of the laughter and the sudden appearance of the fangs stopped Leesa in her tracks. The blackness lessened slightly, enough for her to see that the figure against the wall was not her brother. She had been deceived. The captive was not even male. It was female. But who?

Leesa strained to pierce the darkness. She was certain she would recognize the girl, if she could just see a bit more clearly.

“
You cannot stop it,” the voice said. “You do not have the power.”

Leesa ignored the voice, concentrating on the captive instead. There was something distressingly familiar about her. Something much too familiar. Almost as if it was….

Leesa awoke with a start, fully alert. She cursed silently. She had been but an instant from recognizing the girl chained against the cavern wall when she woke. For some reason, this dream felt eerily similar to her zombie dream. Somehow, she sensed they both held important information, but she had no idea what or why. She closed her eyes and struggled to bring back the image of the girl in the cavern. She could picture everything clearly right up until the instant she awoke. Unfortunately, that was not enough. The girl’s identity still eluded her. And this time, she was pretty sure there would be no YouTube video to help her.

20. HUNGRY VAMPIRES

K
risti Brolen was glad to be home. This past semester, the first of her junior year at UConn, had been her most difficult by far. Upper level courses were much tougher than those she had taken her freshman and sophomore years. She had done okay, but it had required a lot of work. All she wanted to do now, at the beginning of her three week holiday break, was relax.

So that was exactly what she was doing, sitting and reading in the backyard of her parents’ Ledyard home. She had dragged one of the heavy, dark green Adirondack chairs close to the edge of the yard—not an easy task for the five-foot five-inch, blue-eyed brunette—onto a small cement patio her dad had built a few years back to hold their propane gas grill and a wooden picnic table. She could have read at the table, but the Adirondack was so much more comfortable.

She loved it back here. Every breath she drew was tinged with fresh pine fragrance from a row of slender Blue Spruce a few feet behind her. The trees separated the yard from the woods and hills that stretched for almost a mile behind the house. The yard was quiet and peaceful, especially compared to the inside of the house, where her nine-year old twin brothers romped and raced about the place with little regard for the sanity of the other members of the family.

Sure, it was cold out here, and growing steadily colder now that the sun had set, but her purple L.L Bean jacket and matching ski cap pulled down over her ears shielded her from the chill. A pair of gray knit gloves kept her hands warm, yet still allowed her to turn the pages of her book without trouble. The dark was not a problem, either. Kristi’s dad had run an electric cable to the patio last year so they could use it after dark. The covered brass lamp attached to a wooden pole behind her provided plenty of light to read by.

Kristi’s attention was riveted upon her book. She loved to read, but had spent so much time studying and doing homework the last few months she’d had almost no chance to read just for pure, mindless fun. Over the next few weeks, she planned to make up for that.
Breathless
had her off to a great start.

She had sworn off vampire books—they were all starting to feel too much the same—but her best friend had recommended this one so she had decided to give it a try. She was glad she had.
Breathless
was proving to be a fast-paced read with lots of new and interesting twists—and plenty of romance, too. She found it easy to escape into the story, which was exactly what she wanted after the long, difficult semester.

She was so immersed in the book that she almost missed the soft sound from behind the spruce trees the first time it happened. The noise registered in her consciousness just enough to pull her eyes from her reading. She looked quizzically around the yard. She was pretty sure she had heard something, but had absolutely no idea what it might have been. Putting her finger in the book to mark her place, she pushed herself up to the front edge of her chair and listened.