Goddess of the Night (10 page)

Tears started
to form in her eyes when

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someone grabbed
her from behind. Her molecules snapped together with a jolt of pain.

She shrieked,
mouth open, until air had drained from her lungs.

126

Chapter 12

WHEN DID YOU
become a screamer?" Catty asked. "It's such a girlie-girl
thing. I think you broke my eardrums." Catty hit the side of her
head like a swimmer trying to dislodge water.

"You
shouldn't sneak up on me, not with everything you know has been going
on," Vanessa snapped.

Sorry.

"It's not
your fault," Vanessa said, regretting her anger. "I started
to go invisible when Michael kissed me."

"So you're
not totally done with him?" Catty teased with a smug smile.

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"It's
over. How can it not be?"

"Do you
want it to be?"

"No."
Vanessa's emotions were a knot of confusion in her stomach. "But
what would he do if he opened his eyes and saw a ghost hanging on his
lips? He'd probably die right in front of me."

Catty laughed,
then bit her lip to stop. "Sorry," she said. "But if
you think about it, it does sound funny."

"Nothing's
funny about his kisses," Vanessa said. She felt herself go fuzzy
thinking about the dreamy way he made her feel. "What am I going
to do?"

"Kiss him
in a really dark room?"

"You're no
help."

"Maybe I
am," Catty insisted. "If we travel back to Saturday night,
I know I can make a pinpoint landing so we won't fall down the canyon
wall. I've been practicing all day, skipping back an hour at a time,
then forward a little, then back. My landings are perfect now. I
landed inside your house at the exact time you got home."

"That's
why the day seemed so incredibly long," Vanessa said, and
sprawled on the living

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room couch.
"How many skips did you make?"

"I don't
know, twenty." Catty grinned and slumped beside her. "All
right, thirty-two, but I wanted to get it right . . . the landings, I
mean."

"Next time
practice in the night when the rest of us are sleeping. Do you know
what it feels like to spend thirty-two hours in classes on a hot
day?"

"But you
don't have a memory of it."

"No,"
Vanessa argued, "but that explains why everyone was so dragged
out by the end of the day."

"No
doubt," Catty sniggered. "Next time I'll make sure you're
with me."

Vanessa shook
her head. She didn't think she had the energy for that either.

"So let's
go back to Saturday night."

"But now
it's too far in the past." Vanessa raked her hands through her
drooping hair. She needed a shower and a nap.

"I figured
that out, too."

Vanessa was
doubtful.

"I'll
leapfrog." Catty spoke rapidly. Her hands made semicircles to
demonstrate the leaps.

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"I'll go
back twenty-four hours, then another twenty-four hours, until we're
there."

"It must
consume a lot of energy."

"I'll rest
tonight. We'll do it tomorrow." Vanessa chewed the side of her
lip. Her real worry was the tunnel. She hated its rank musty smells
and the dizzy feeling it gave her. "Your mom said there was
probably a good reason why you couldn't go back more than twenty-four
hours."

"What does
she know?" Catty shrugged. "She's never time-traveled."

"Her
explanation made sense to me." Kendra thought there was some
natural law that stopped Catty from going too far into the past
because the farther she went into the past, the more likely something
small and seemingly insignificant could change the future in big
ways.

Catty shook her
head. "I've thought about it. Everyone thinks time is like a
river. But I don't think so. I think time occurs all at once. We just
experience it like a river because that's the way we've been taught
to think about it. Really, it's more like a huge lake, all time
existing at once. And my skips back and forth, that's all part of
it,

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too. So I'll
never do anything to change what has happened because if I were going
to, I already would have, so I'm not." Catty thought a moment.
"It's safe to go back."

"Maybe it
is safe, but I don't want to do it."

"Please.
Let's try." Catty jumped off the couch, animated again, and
nearly collided with the door as it opened. Vanessa's mother walked
in carrying three bolts of glittering blue silky material.

"Hi,
girls," she said. "Catty, I hope you can stay for dinner.
It's been such a wonderful day. I accomplished so much. Why can't
every day be like this one?" She walked through the living room
back to her worktable in the kitchen, her heels tapping on the wood
floors.

"See, some
people liked it." Catty grinned. "So how 'bout it? We'll
time it so we'll come up behind the person who was spying on you and
Michael." She made wild gestures like she was capturing the
person.

"Forget
it." Vanessa dismissed the idea. An uneasiness spread through
her. "And promise me you won't go back alone."

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"Sure,"
Catty said too easily.

"I mean
it. At least let me think about it for a couple days. I don't want
you to go alone." Maybe if she could make Catty wait and they
went far enough into the future, Catty wouldn't try her dangerous
leapfrog plan.

"I really
promise," Catty insisted, but her eyes glanced too quickly away.
"I've got to go anyway. I have homework to catch up on."

Catty left and
Vanessa went back to the kitchen. Her mother was cutting tissue
paper. She made patterns for the dresses she had sketched that were
hanging on the wall.

"Pretty."
Vanessa admired them.

"Where's
Catty?" her mother said, and snipped the tissue.

"She had
to go."

"Without
eating?" her mother asked. "Was she upset?"

"Homework,"
Vanessa explained. "Mom, you're not working tomorrow, are you?"

"I have
the day off. I'll be sewing, but gratefully at home. No more
measuring sweaty actresses."

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"I thought
maybe we could have the day together."

She put the
scissors down. "Sounds wonderful."

They ate mixed
green salads and poached salmon for dinner. Vanessa wasn't really
hungry. She felt like she'd eaten two dinners already. She wondered
if Catty was practicing again, or simply nudging time to give herself
an extra hour for homework.

Vanessa watched
her mother cut the salmon into perfect flakes and spear them into her
mouth. She loved her mother, but she wondered if her mother would
feel the same way about her if she knew the truth about her only
daughter. Would she still sit at the foot of her bed to keep the
nightmares away as she had done to comfort Vanessa after her father
had died, or would the truth fill her with a nightmare of her own?

"I love
you, Mom," Vanessa whispered.

Her mother
looked up, startled. "I love you, too, Nessy."

"Well,
good night, then," Vanessa said. She cleared her dish and put it
in the dishwasher.

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"Good
night," her mother called after her.

She took a bath
and decided to do her homework and go to bed early. By the time she
plopped on her bed, she was so tired she couldn't fall asleep. She
stared at the luminous hands on her clock. She must have drifted off,
because when she stirred again, her room was cold.

She rolled over
and snuggled deeper under the covers. As she started to fall asleep
she saw the curtains billowing gracefully out from her window. She
had locked the window, hadn't she? Maybe a Santa Ana had ripped down
from the desert and blown the windows open.

That's when she
saw the shadow in the chair next to her bed. It looked like a person.
This time, she was determined not to be scared. Finally to prove to
herself that no one was there, she reached her hand out from
underneath the warm covers to touch the shadow.

Cold fingers
grabbed her wrist.

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Chapter 13

VANESSA JERKED
HER hand back and sat bolt upright in bed, staring at the cloudy
shape of the intruder. A scream scrambled up her throat and died.

"Serena?"
Vanessa cried.

"Sorry,"
Serena said. Her tongue piercing clicked nervously against her teeth.
She moved her head, and in the dim light falling through the window,
with her hair spiked and her face shining, she looked like a
forgotten fairy from some arcane legend.

Vanessa caught
her breath and pushed the palm of her hand against her chest. Her
heart

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pounded as if
she had almost tripped over a precipice.

"I thought
you were sleeping." Serena's words were soft, like a lullaby. "I
was trying to figure out a way to wake you up without scaring you."

"If you
didn't want to scare me, why didn't you use the doorbell?"
Irritation wrapped in tight coils inside her.

"I had to
talk to you," Serena said. "It's really important, and I
didn't want your mother to know I was here."

Vanessa pulled
the covers tighter around her. "Couldn't you just call next
time, or talk to me at school?"

"I tried
at school, but I needed to talk to you privately."

"You
should have tried harder," Vanessa said, her heart still beating
rapidly. Maybe this was what Morgan had been talking about when she
said Serena was weird. "What's so important?"

Serena
hesitated as if she was trying to find a way to put her thoughts into
words. "I'm sorry if I upset you Sunday night."

Vanessa sighed
and shook her head. "Believe

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me, you could
have waited until school tomorrow to tell me that. How did you get in
here, anyway?"

"How?"
Serena seemed surprised. "Your window, of course." And then
she giggled in disbelief. "You mean you've never used your
window to sneak out?"

Vanessa thought
of the times she had left her room late at night under the steady
light of a full moon. If Serena ever saw her do that, the sight would
jam her giggles down her throat.

"You have
snuck out." Serena leaned close to her. "But there's
something different about the way you leave your room, Vanessa."

"What do
you mean?" Vanessa asked, and wondered how Serena could know
what she had been thinking. And then another panicked thought came to
her--had Serena seen her?

"Tell me.
It's really important. I need to know." Serena grabbed Vanessa's
arm, the fingers icy cold. "What is it about you, Vanessa, that
makes you so different from everyone else? I need to know more about
your secret."

A sudden fear
pushed into Vanessa's thoughts. How could Serena know there was

137

anything
different about her? Unless . . . the thought came as quickly as
lightning struck. "It was you. You've been following me. Why?
Don't you know how much you've been scaring me?"

"No."
The word hit in one staccato beat and hung in the air between them.
"It wasn't me," she added softly. "And stop calling me
weird. I hate that."

"I didn't
say the word."

"I know,"
Serena answered quickly, "but you were thinking it."

"You can't
know what I'm thinking," Vanessa said, more to herself than to
Serena.

"If I
prove to you I can, will you go with me?"

"Where?"

"Just
promise to go with me if I can prove to you that I can read your
thoughts."

"Sure, why
not? Like people can do that," Vanessa said sarcastically, and
thought,
A dog has brown spots.

Serena stared
at her. "This isn't fair. I can't do it if you're giving me
something that has no emotion attached to it. No content!"

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"All
right, here's another." Vanessa thought of the number seven.

"You're
trying to trick me." Serena seemed really frustrated now.

"I'm not!"
Vanessa said too loudly, and hoped she didn't wake her mother. She
stumbled from the bed and turned on the fluorescent lamp near her
computer. White light flooded the room with a buzzing sound. "I
don't want you sneaking into my room ever again, and I really think
we should wait and talk tomorrow. We could meet at Urth Caffe after
school, okay?"

Serena sat back
on the chair, green eyes reflective, and studied Vanessa like a cat.

A jolt of
energy suddenly filled Vanessa's head. The sensation confused her at
first. She tried to close her thoughts, make her mind blank.

Serena
squinted. The feeling stopped. Then Serena opened her eyes and the
feeling returned like the slap of a cold wave. It felt like Serena
was rampaging through her mind, examining stored memories.
Impossible. It had to be a headache, some strange flu, a virus. She
was beginning to feel dizzy and nauseated.

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"Stop!"

Serena seemed
to draw back, although no movement was perceptible.

Vanessa sat on
the edge of her bed and stared at her. "You can read minds."
But even as she said the words she started to disbelieve. People
can't do that, she thought. It's probably the cold and being awakened
with such a start. Or she hypnotized me. Why?

"Sorry."
Serena licked her lips. "I hope I didn't scare you too much. I
had to be sure. I needed to know you weren't a trap."

"Trap?"

"It
happens now and again. I get deceived," Serena explained.

Vanessa started
to speak again, but the way Serena was looking at her made her words
fall away.

"You're in
danger," Serena said.

The fine hairs
on the back of Vanessa's neck bristled.