i 13e44e81ff362920 (18 page)

She was dark-skinned and had beautiful green eyes. She couldn’t have been more than twelve—the same age as Eve.

“I don’t know you,” I said.

She smiled. “That’s not really the point.”

A dog slept at Mia’s feet, and I realized that it was Baron, who belonged to Miles. He opened one eye and stared lazily at me.

I looked past him, and saw both Derrick and Miles standing behind the girls. Derrick was wearing a beautiful black suit with a white silk tie, and Miles wore a pristine white suit with a black tie. A white hand-shape had been sewn into his tie, and I recognized it as the ASL sign for reverse.

Reverse of what?

Miles leaned close to Derrick, whispering something in his ear. Derrick grinned. He signed something rapidly to Miles, but the only word I recognized was tell.

Then they kissed. It was a slow, deliberate kiss. Miles laid his hand on the back of Derrick’s neck.

Derrick pulled him in closer, still smiling. He opened his eyes, then bit Miles gently on the bottom lip. Miles chuckled.

“A kiss to build a dream on,” he said.

But it was my father’s voice that I heard. A growl lingered just below its surface. A drop of blood appeared on Miles’s lip, hovering, tensile.

“Oh. Hold still. I can get that.” Mia left her meninas.

Both looked disappointed, but neither said a word. Mia was nearly as tall as Miles, so she didn’t have to strain to reach him. She dabbed at his mouth with the sleeve of her dress. The blood soaked through the fabric, spreading across it, until the gown was entirely red.

“I think it looks better this way,” Mia said.

I gestured to her cup. “What are you drinking?”

“Memories, mostly.” She smiled. “And some ginger ale, for my stomach. Derrick made it for me.

It’s called a desmemória.”

“It comes in pill form, too,” Derrick said, holding out his hand. Three Vicodin tablets lay in his palm.

I heard a knocking. My father let out an exasperated sigh, still holding his paintbrush. It was dripping on the floor.

“Somebody’s come late. Please let them in, Tessa.”

I looked at the open entrance. The necromancer from the park was standing there. His steel mask was broken in places, revealing patches of skin crusted with dried blood. He no longer had the Vorpal gauntlet. His eyes were fixed on me.

“Take your mask off,” I said.

He passed a hand over his face. The mask disappeared.

It was Lucian. He stared at me impassively.

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t you. Those weren’t your eyes.” I shook my head. “I would have recognized you. This is wrong.”

But was it? Would I really have recognized him in the heat of the moment? What had I ever really known about him?

“Was it you?” I asked.

He looked bemused. “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

“In the park. Was it you, Lucian?”

He put a hand over his heart. “Tu eres mi espejo, preciosa.”

I glared at him. “I’m your mirror? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Tessa! Come see it!” My father was gesturing maniacally with his paintbrush. “It’s nearly done!”

I walked over to where he was standing. He turned the canvas. He’d painted Luiz Ordeño, dead, his neck lacerated and covered in blood.

“It looks just like you,” he said.

I woke up with that image fresh in my mind.

It was hot in my bedroom. The digital clock on the nightstand read 6:35. No time for a shower. Fantastic.

My subconscious is either trying to kill me or get me fired. Maybe both.

I walked unsteadily into the en-suite bathroom. There was a dirty towel on the floor, and I could smell a patina of styling products, their various scents mingling into something nebulous and sweet.

I washed my hair in the sink. The blow-dryer was so hot that it burned, but I kept it on the highest setting. Pain meant that I was awake.

I pulled on a pair of jeans that were only slightly wrinkled. I needed to wash my bra, but that wasn’t about to happen in the next five minutes. Selena probably had twenty bras, all fitted and always freshly laundered. I felt like a barbarian.

Fifteen minutes of indecision later I emerged from the bedroom, still groggy, but now at least wearing a sharp tan sweater. Mostly its purpose was to hide the semi-clean blouse underneath. I’d been planning to do a load of laundry last night, but my detour to Lucian’s apartment had changed things.

Instead of washing whites, I’d ended up talking to Derrick about Picasso and Velázquez until three in the morning. He had the day off, but I wasn’t so lucky.

I walked past his bedroom and saw that the door was partially open. The room was immaculate, as always. His OSI textbooks were lined up on shelves, along with other novels and works of criticism. Derrick had always been a voracious reader. His DVDs were stacked neatly by the small television set. Probably alphabetized. Sometimes I had no idea why Derrick and Lucian weren’t good friends. They definitely shared a love for organizing.

I didn’t mean to look at the bed, but it was sort of impossible not to. Miles and Derrick lay in each other’s arms, only partially covered by the blanket. Derrick’s legs were wrapped around Miles’s, their feet touching. They both snored in unison.

I thought of how they’d appeared in my dream, wearing polarized suits. I almost wanted to look and see if Miles had blood on his mouth. But I didn’t dare.

My life would be a lot simpler if I could sleep like that.

I closed Derrick’s door lightly. Then I made my way into the kitchen. Mia was sitting at the table, studying. I couldn’t tell if it was the same textbook or not, but sometimes all of her textbooks looked the same to me, with their bright colors and strange geometric designs. Kind of like Picasso’s Las Meninas.

She didn’t look up. “There’s fresh coffee in the thing.”

“And by ‘thing,’ you mean coffeemaker?”

“Well, it’s not really a coffee maker, is it? I’m the one that makes the coffee.”

“I see your point.”

She underlined something in her notebook. “Derrick came home last night with the half-and-half, but I told him that you only liked the real coffee cream. So he had to go back.” She sipped from her mug. “He didn’t even argue.”

For a second, all I could do was stare at her. When I first saw Mia, she was short and skinny, with unruly brown hair and eyes that never missed a beat. She favored oversized painter jeans and etnies.

It had been only two years, but suddenly she seemed impossibly older. Her hair fell in soft curls across her face, and I’d wager that she’d actually combed some anti-frizz product into it. She wore jeans that fit and stylish black boots. Her red sweater had a neckline that, although not technically sloping, was definitely low enough to expose her neck and a bit of her shoulders. She wasn’t thirteen anymore. Strictly speaking, she wasn’t entirely human anymore, since the vampiric retrovirus was swimming through her bloodstream. But nobody else living here was 100 percent human either, so at least she was in like-minded company.

“Did you take your meds yet?” I asked.

Mia made a face. “I was going to after I finished this quiz. I hate doing it in the school bathroom.

It’s like a Turkish prison in there.”

“I can do it. They changed your dosage, and I want to make sure it’s okay.”

“Sure.” She sounded resigned. No teenager wanted to take daily injections. But, to her credit, she rarely complained. Derrick and I had explained to her that she may have to inject the antiviral medication for the rest of her life, or at least until they refined it into a transdermal patch.

I opened the fridge and withdrew a vial of the medication, which needed to be chilled so that the plasmid inhibitors didn’t separate. It was clear, like water.

“Where’s your pen?”

“In my bag.” She gestured to the chair. “Under my spare shoes, I think.”

I reached into the depths of her bag, rummaging around until I found the hard black case with the pen. It resembled a similar hypodermic pen for injecting insulin, and included separate ports for mixing two different chemicals.

“They just changed the short-acting antivirals,” I told her, refilling the pen. “The long-acting are still the same.”

I turned the knob on the end of the pen, adjusting the dosage to two units of antiplasmid. “Okay, lift up your shirt.”

“Wow. Just what every girl my age longs to hear.”

“I know you. The only words you long to hear right now are ‘early acceptance’ from Stanford and Brown.”

She chuckled, lifting up her blouse to expose her abdomen. “That’s true.”

“You’re whiter than me. Maybe we need to do some fake-and-bake tanning.”

“Ooh, and can we read Hello while we’re doing it?” She glared at me. “I don’t care how white I am.

Nothing’s going to get me into one of those cancer-pods just so I can look like I spent my weekend at Jericho Beach.”

“Fine. You don’t have to give me stink-eye.”

“That wasn’t stink-eye.”

“Oh, yeah?” I pinched her belly and swiftly injected the needle. She didn’t even have time to grimace. “Looked like stink-eye to me.” I counted to five silently, then withdrew the needle. “There.

Done. Make sure to keep using this setting, and if you feel any side effects, let me know so that I can adjust it.”

Mia smiled. “It never hurts as much when you do it.”

I replaced the pen and put the case back in her bag. “I’ve got magic.”

“We all do. That’s kind of the problem.”

I filled my coffee mug and sat down across from her. “Shouldn’t Patrick be getting ready as well?”

“It’s like seven. He won’t be awake for another half hour at least.”

“And when did you wake up?”

She sipped her coffee. “I’ve barely slept. I had two essays to finish, plus a photo assignment for yearbook. Most of the girls don’t actually know how to use their cameras, so only a few of us are actually doing any real work.”

“Does it have a theme? Our yearbooks always had a theme.”

“Mediocrity.”

“Ouch.”

She shrugged. “It’s not like I’m trying to be a bitch. It’s just—most of the kids I know aren’t exactly gunning for grad school.”

“You’re fifteen. I don’t think you should be gunning for grad school either.”

“But I have plans. They don’t.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

“You don’t go to school with these kids. I do.”

“But I went to school with kids just like them. And that was only ten years ago. No. Eleven.” I blinked. “Man. I guess eleven years is a long time. Does everyone still listen to Pearl Jam?”

She stared at me as if I’d just grown a second head. “Not really.”

I heard a thump on the floor above me, like a bowling ball or a dead body hitting the ground.

“Sounds like he’s awake.”

Mia shook her head, returning to the textbook. “He’s just getting up to go to the bathroom. He’ll go back to sleep for another twenty minutes at least.”

“As long as he gets to his classes on time.”

She rolled her eyes. “Right. Like it matters.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m pretty sure you mean something.”

“I’m pretty sure I don’t.”

“Mia.”

“Tess.”

“Don’t say my name like that.”

“Like what?”

“You know like what.”

Mia sighed, finally looking up from her book. “If you want to be a parent, then be a parent. Ask me whatever you’re going to ask me. But don’t try to be all friendly about it, like, stealth-parenting or something. Just ask.”

And . . . now we’d returned to our regularly scheduled teen programming. I was the bitch monster from hell, and she was the hapless victim, forced to put up with me. Had I really done this to my mother for eighteen years?

Of course, my mother had also performed psychic surgery on me without asking. So maybe we were even.

I exhaled. “Fine. What did you mean earlier, when you said it didn’t matter if Patrick made it to his classes on time?”

“It doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

She looked at me as if I were impenetrably stupid. “Because he’s failing.”

“Failing what?”

“Everything, as far as I can tell. Except for PE. He’s so strong and fast that the teacher’s probably scared to give him a bad mark.”

“But he’s flunking his other classes?” I suddenly felt like the mother who learns that her kid is doing drugs. How could this have happened? The truth was that Patrick could have been moonlighting as the school mascot, and I still wouldn’t have known anything about it. I couldn’t watch him 24/7.

I couldn’t even watch him 7.

“He stopped trying, like, three months ago,” she said. “He goes to that creepy vampire club every night, where they teach him, like, how to smell humans from a mile away or something. It’s way more interesting to him than calculus.”

“But he can’t possibly be failing everything.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. But it’s not like he’s studying.”

“I saw him studying math the other day.”

“Yeah? Did you see him writing anything down?” My stomach sank. “No.”

She nodded. “Uh-huh.”

I stared at my coffee cup. There was no online forum with tips on how to raise paranormal teenagers. I needed help. Derrick did everything he could, but we were both working long hours.

My mom stopped by often, but she was mostly focused on Mia. Patrick often fell beneath her radar.

Maybe intentionally. I suspected that, like me, she felt a bit uneasy around him.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said simply.

To my surprise, Mia looked directly at me, and her expression was one of sympathy rather than irritation. “Tess. You’re doing fine. It’s not like we’re the easiest kids to deal with. We’ve both got issues. But you’re doing the best you can, and we totally understand that.”

“If I was doing my best, I would have realized that Patrick was failing.” I shook my head. “He’s gone most of the night, and when he comes back, he looks like—”

“Like a vampire?”

We both stared at each other for a second.

“Yes,” I said. “Exactly like that.”

“And it’s scary.”

“Yeah. It is.”

Mia stared at her hands. “He’s kind of like my big brother. So it freaks me out, too. Because I don’t want him to change.”