Nightmare (27 page)

Tex looks at the clock. “My parents won't be home for at least two hours. But if we're telling a juicy story, I think I need some coffee. And chips. I need chips.”

Tex shoos us into the living room. I wait until she's out of earshot before I hiss at Peter, “so? Are you going to fill me in?”

“In a moment.” He's stalling. I can't imagine why.

“Peter,” I say, sitting down on the couch and pulling him with me, “nothing you could have done would bother me. Nothing.”

“I wish that were true.” No, no, no. This is Dark Peter. I don't like him. He takes Smiling Peter and puts him away for a while. 

“I love you. Nothing changes that.” I grab his face, hard. My fingers want to melt against his skin. My lips crave his, but I resist. I need him to understand. He doesn't say anything. 

Instead, he takes me into his chest and my arms go all the way around him. The muscles in his back are so lovely. They remind me of a study on the male form. Not that I'm partial or anything. But when it comes to backs, Peter's is the best. 

“Okay, let's hear it,” Tex says, setting down the tray.

“It was a long time ago.” This sounds very much like, “once upon a time...”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Peter

The
Carpathia
, the ship that picked up survivors from the sinking, I'd boarded as only part human. Di had covered me with a tarp and an old coat to keep the sun off me. I was so pale, it was easy to convince the other passengers that I was ill. 

I'd emerged from the haze of pain and bone-crushing transformation the day we reached New York. She took me to an alley while she went and found someone for me. A drunk, wallowing in the gutter. He didn't even open his eyes when I slashed his throat apart and lapped the blood from his wounds. 

She brought me another. And another until there was a pile of bodies and we had to move on. Di stayed with me and I clung to her for a week. I had nothing else to hold onto. She took me to places where I could lie naked in the sun. Those days I needed as much as I could get or else I had trouble moving. My body was still adjusting to the change. Di rarely left my side, always stroking my face and calling me dear and saying she loved me. I barely heard any of it. I did almost nothing but feed and soak in sun. 

Two weeks later she brought me a street urchin. Up until then, she had brought me adults. Mostly male, mostly drunks she had fished from the street. People who didn't have a life to begin with. Who wouldn't be missed. 

But then she brought a little boy with a filthy face and sooty hands, perhaps from coal dust from one of the factories. His nose ran clear liquid that he didn't bother to wipe. The boy couldn't have been more than eight or nine, and he looked at Di as if she was an angel. She smiled at him and shoved him toward me. The boy looked scared for a moment and that was it. A memory came back to me. Of my sisters, being put in the lifeboat. Saying goodbye to my mother. I pushed him away, letting my wings rip from my back. The boy fell to the ground.

“Are you an angel?” He gazed up at me with an open face and clear blue eyes. I took one more look at him, but didn't answer.

I left Di then. Turned and walked away. She did not follow me as I expected her to.

Cal found me three days later, lying in a river in upstate New York, trying to drown myself.

“That is entirely useless, you know.” I opened my eyes to look at him through the water that made his form slide and shimmer. As if he wasn't real.

“Who are you?”

“You can call me Cal.” He lay down in the river beside me. I could feel the water, but I didn't know if it was cold or not. I couldn't remember cold.

“You can't die, you know.” Di had explained to me what I was. That I would live forever. But this wasn't living. This was an existence. And I didn't want it.

“I know.”

“What is your name?”

“Peter.”

“Nice to meet you.” He was cordial, at least. “How long has it been?”

“How long has what been?”

“Since you consumed human blood.”

“I don't know.” I had lost track of days. Lost track of sun and moon and sky. 

Lost, lost, lost.

“You look healthy enough. But I know a place, if you would like to come with me.”

I met his eyes, one a bright blue that was almost the color of the sky, the other a rich brown like fresh earth. “I want to die.”

“You already have.”

“I want to die again.”

“You can't.” He stood up, water dripping from the back of his perfectly-tailored suit. Someone I knew wore suits like that. My father. Yes, my father wore suits like that.

I stood up and went with him. I had no other place to go.

While we walked, he talked. He told me of the weather and the history of the area. Nothing about himself. Nothing about why he was here. Why he had found me. Why he was being nice to me. 

It didn't concern me enough to ask.

I wasn't aware that I should ask. My existence had narrowed to two things. 

My need for blood and sun. 

I'd lost everything else in the transition. Cal reminded me how to talk again. How to form words with my mouth and carry on a conversation. We walked for miles upon miles, never seeing a human. I started talking. The words were large and hard to hold onto at first. My mouth had forgotten how to be used for anything other than a weapon.

Slowly, Cal brought me back to myself. Not my human self, but he helped me find pieces and start to put myself together. It was not easy, crafting this new person. In some ways I was a newborn, able to walk and talk, but unable to discern what things were. He showed me the world again. 

Cal taught me about balance. About not interfering with humans. To take the ones society would not miss.

Di was never far from my thoughts. Her face was the only constant thing in my mind. I clung to the image of her as if it would float away and I would be lost. As much as I said I wanted to die, the actual thought of it did scare me. Perhaps not scared. I wasn't scared of anything anymore. 

It was more that I would continue on in this existence as a thing. A thing that didn't do anything but exist. If was going to live, I wanted it to mean something. Even then, I thought there must have been a purpose to what happened to me. A reason for me to become what I was. A higher plan. We had always gone to church, and I had prayed every night before I went to bed. 

The memories were thin, transparent things that slid from my grasp as I tried to catch hold of them. Cal told me not to worry. That they would return in time. 

Time passed and Cal and I made our way from New York to Canada and back down into Minnesota. We spent our days in the sun and our nights hunting. I grew better at it, grew to love the trill of chasing, catching, feeding. My whole existence centered on that. I didn't worry about killing.

I never took a child. Only adults. Mostly men who waiting in dark alleys for girls to come buy. Or people who lived alone.

Weeks passed. I thought about Di so much that it nearly drove me mad. I never mentioned her to Cal. We never talked about things like that. I didn't meet any other noctali.

It wasn't until we met up with Di in California that I started to think something was not right. She expressed her surprise at seeing me again and was delighted with Cal. She showed no concern that we hadn't seen one another in a while. She reminded me that she loved me. I told her that I loved her back. I did. Of that one thing, I was certain. It was not a passionate love, or a romantic love. It simply was and would always be. 

I started to wonder if that was it. If that would be my existence. Sun, blood and killing. Forever. One night while Di and Cal were finishing off some drifters from a railroad car, I watched from the shadows. I looked up at the sky, as if remembering it was there. My new vision made the stars so bright. One shot through the sky. A fallen star. 

One of the men Di had taken moaned before she ripped his throat out. I glanced back at them. And walked away.

They let me go. At first I wondered if they would follow me. Call me to come back. But they didn't. I wandered back to New York. I found my family.

They were still in our brownstone. My mother looked thinner, but not haggard. She could never look haggard. Her face was hollow with grief. My sisters were sullen. All except little Lucy, who clutched her doll and smiled at each one of them in turn, hoping for a smile in return. There weren't many. 

I put my palm to the glass, realizing that wasn't the only barrier that separated us. I could smell their blood, even though the cold windowpane. I tried to tell myself that I didn't want them, but I did. 

I wanted the blood that pulsed in their skin. If given the chance, I would take them. In a cruel twist, their blood called to me more so than any I had smelled yet. It stared me in the face and I had to blink. And turn away.

I went back once or twice. Watched my mother give piano lessons, her delicate fingers dancing across the keys like little birds. Tucking my sisters into bed at night and singing them a lullaby. The sweet notes of her voice reached out to me. Pulled the memories out. I remembered more in those few visits than I had wandering around on my own. I needed them as a connection to my past. A connection to who I was, even if I wasn't that person anymore.

It was outside of the house that Viktor found me. We recognized one another, even though we had never met. My mother would have said we were kindred spirits. I thought it was simply that we shared the same mother. 

He asked if they were my family. I said yes. He said that they were lovely, and that he missed his own family. His words were few, but he shared with me how difficult it was when he went back to see his own family after he had changed. 

“You cannot come back. You will hurt them.”

“I know.” I knew.

He took me away. Far away. We traveled everywhere, ending up in Paris. Then he met Adele and I was on my own again. I met my other brother, Ivan, but did not see Di or Cal. The longer I was on my own, the wilder I became. 

Soon, I had no qualms about killing anyone. What did it matter? Anyone who I killed had a family. Someone who would miss them. As long as my own family was safe from me, nothing else mattered. That lasted until the night of the incident with Josephine. Cal found me that time too, trying to end my existence again.

He was different this time. He was gaunt. I could tell he had not fed in a very long time. I didn't ask how he found me or how he knew. I didn't ask questions then.

“Come with me.” He took me to another river and had me lay down in it and close my eyes.

“Nothing you have done has any bearing on what you do now.” He pushed my head below the water. It was several feet deep, but clear as air. I opened my eyes and watched his liquid form above me. It was just like the first time we had met, but not quite.

“There is another way,” he said when I surfaced. The water had sloshed its way into my body. I opened my mouth and let it drain. “You do not have to kill.”

“Show me.” I did not want to kill anymore. I had lived for months not caring. I wanted to care. I was going to force myself to care. 

So he brought me people who he had drugged with a simple sleeping agent. He taught me how to judge the heartbeat, how to listen to the body tell me when I had taken enough. At first, I killed more often than not. But gradually, I learned until I was able to stop after taking very little blood. Then I struck out on my own and Cal started buying houses and fixing them up. I would stay with him sometimes, with Viktor sometimes, but mostly I was on my own. I saw Di every now and then. 

Always, always, she reminded me of the bind. I still loved her, but I thought of her less. She was like a little bit of light, stuck in the back of my mind. Most of the time I could forget it was there, but sometimes it would wink at me and remind me of its presence. Always there.

I told them all of it. Ava held my hand then entire time. I felt her grip tighten at certain parts. Texas covered her mouth, as if she was about to scream, but she was silent. I waited for someone to say something. For a while, the only sound was the breath and blood of the humans.

“Shut. The. Front. Door.” 

Texas could always be counted on.

Ava

I had to be honest, what Peter said had shocked me. How could it not? It was different hearing about the things he had done from his own mouth. He'd always been so vague with me, simply trusting that he could say that he'd killed someone and that would be enough to get me to stay away. Obviously, that hadn't worked. 

At least this time I knew he wasn't trying to shock me. Simply to show me another part of his life that I didn't know much about. How much more was there? I mean, I know that there were nearly a hundred years of him that I didn't know. That was a long time. A really long time. I knew he'd done a lot of reading, but there are a lot of hours in a day. For bloodsucking, apparently.

Tex looks horrified, but I don't think she's going to freak. I sincerely hope not. 

“Thank you for telling me.” I pull myself into him, because he won't move. He's doing that thing when he gets stiller-than-still, waiting for me to give him my reaction. I try my best not to let too much go through our connection. I know he felt a flare of shock. That's not something you can really hide. But I'm doing my best. It is what it is. 

I'm not going to condemn him. He's good. Much better than I am. I was the one who had kept secrets and lied and hidden things. And neglected my friends. And made my mother sick. He'd stayed away from his family to protect them. He'd given them up to save them. There wasn't anything more noble than that.

“I did not want to share it with you,” he says. There's a pause. I can feel it. “But I am glad I did.” He doesn't smile, but I don't need that. I feel him. I feel his relief that I didn't run screaming. That I know some of the worst parts of him. He already knows a lot of my worst parts. It's only fair that he shares.

“So we go see Cal.” I can't seem to get this version of Cal, Peter's version, to jive with the one I had met. But we need answers, and Peter believes Cal can get them. I had to trust him. Trust that he had a plan that I probably didn't know about. Just like last time.