Revenant (3 page)

“Okay, Scout, try again. You need to get your arm used to the tension. The glove helping at all?”

“It is,” I say as I draw back a second arrow. This one seems harder to pull back than the first. Perhaps my arms are already getting tired. I fight the urge to let go, and manage to draw the arrow back all the way. I’m about to release when my father steps in.

“Hang on. You’re aiming way too low. There. That’s a good height.

I release. I hear a satisfying
zing
but the arrow flies so fast, I blink and miss it.

“Very nice, Scout. But you only used two fingers that time. Use three with the next one.”

He hands me another arrow, and as I draw this one back I realize that’s what made the second shot seem harder: I had only used two fingers. This third one I can draw back and fire with ease. Something else comes out of it too. Confidence manifests in my brain and muscles. I feel the muscle memory forming and eagerly take a fourth arrow.

My father tells me to wait, and not to fire until he gets back. He leaves the basement. I’m not sure why. Only in the lonely silence of the basement does the bigger picture of this situation come to me. I’m essentially being raised to kill my best friend. Even if he doesn’t know about Dodger, if he ever found out, he would want me to put an arrow through her heart. I think to myself about how it felt a few hours ago when that man killed me. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I think about how he’s in a ditch somewhere now feeling the way I had felt and I pity him. I imagine killing Dodger, and the horror she’d be left in afterwords. The agony of being only able to think about betrayal for years and years until... well, until what? Until she rots? I shudder at the thought. I resolve to do two things: Learn what there is to learn about slaying for my own protection, and to never, no matter what, allow my parents to find out about Dodger.

A few minutes pass. My father returns with a wooden target tucked under his right arm. A simple, circular slab of wood painted over with white and red circles. He uses a bit of rope to hang it on the basement wall I’ve been shooting at.

“Okay, Scout. Let’s try it with targets now. Now, when- and if- you’re actually fighting a vampire, it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder than this. And you’re likely going to have only one shot. Still, you have to start somewhere. So, let me see how your aim is. Try to get the arrow in the center there.”

I aim, and suddenly all the mechanics of archery click. I feel like I
know
exactly how to use my muscles to make this arrow fly accurately. It’s as if someone just unlocked whatever section of the brain manages archery and all the information started flooding me. I let the shot fly, and there’s never a moment of doubt that it’s going to beeline right for the center.

My father’s too stunned to react, so I take my next arrow from him myself and aim again. I don’t even bother pulling out the first arrow. I draw, aim, fire, and this arrow ricochets directly off the first.

“Well, I’ll be damned.” he says. “You’re a natural.”

*****

It rained that night. By morning, Portland’s covered in puddle-lakes and miniature rivers, steeped in that distinctive smell of the ground after rain. It’s like nighttime, that smell. You can’t start to describe it, but you know exactly what it is and it smells beautiful. At least, it used to. Today, the smell of rain serves as a reminder of how incredibly bizarre a turn my life took yesterday. I feel in a very real way that I was in a second life. My old, childish, innocent one stolen away yesterday and replaced with this strangely fascinating one of monsters and hunters and peril.

Dodger and I eat lunch every day at the same table, usually with four or five other girls we were both friends with. Today, however, I meet with Dodger in the hallway before lunch so we can talk in relative privacy.

“How was your bus ride today?” Dodger asks. “Uneventful, I hope?”

“Yeah. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“You haven’t seen that man again, have you?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t get a good look at his face. I could’ve seen him somewhere and not recognized him.”

“That’s not good,” she says, chewing at the end of her finger as if it were her cigarette wand.

“So what are we going to do about this, Dodger? You think he’s dangerous?”

Dodger gives me a look that says
no shit, Sherlock.

“I mean, do you think he’s gonna care about who he kills? Or is he just going to attack whoever?“

“The latter, unfortunately. I have a bad feeling he’s new. If he’s new, he’s going to be hungry. I remember my first decade. I was so hungry, Scout. And I’d eat and eat and eat and I couldn’t slake my hunger...” she must’ve seen the horrified look in my eyes because she quickly clarified “I tried to eat animals at one point. I’d hunt down deer and raccoons trying to find a substitute. I tried everything, and nothing worked. I needed human blood, Scout... lots of it. At what time that period of hunger ends is hard to pin down, but if that really is the kind of vamp we’re dealing with here... I need to stop him.”

“How long did it last for you?”

“Ten or twelve years. The good news here would be the older a vamp, the stronger. So if he’s that new I could easily put him out of his misery.”

All these “I’s.” I’m starting to get annoyed at her, but then I realize she doesn’t know I’m a slayer. I haven’t made my mind up yet over how or if I should tell her. I just listen as she thinks aloud.

“I’m sure he’s new,” she continues. “And I’m pretty sure he wants to die. I had that moment too. You said he screamed ‘why won’t I die’ right? Yeah, I had that feeling. He tried to kill himself with that bus. I jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge when I first turned and all I managed to do was float in the Hudson for a few hours.”

“So, what all this means is that yes, he’s dangerous?”

“Most likely.”

I sigh. I had hoped it wouldn’t come down to this, but Dodger’s phrasing left little doubt about it. “So we’re gonna have to take care of him, then? Before he starts killing people.”

“
I
am going to see what I can do about this.
You
keep yourself safe.”

“Dodger, I can take care of myself.”

“Hate to rain on your parade, but I don’t think you can really take care of yourself against a vampire. I mean, you’re only human.”

I bite my lip. The words “I’m a slayer” form at the bottom of my throat and threaten to escape my lips but I fight them back. Dodger seems confident that she can handle this man. There lingered, however, another question.

“So if he’s new, then who turned him?” I ask.

“Are you saying it’s me?”

“No. No. Not at all. But would that mean another-” I stop. A teacher walks by. I pause until he’s out of sight before continuing the thought. “Would that mean there’s another vampire in Portland?”

Dodger’s voice is calm, but I can see a flash of fear in her eyes. “I don’t know.”

Awkward silence.

“So... stake through the heart, right?” I ask.

“Stake through the heart or burn them to a crisp. Can also tear their head off. They don’t really die, but it’s hard to be dangerous when you’re headless.” She chuckles, I only feel a little queasy. I get the image of Dodger, my best friend, the closest one I’ve ever had, ripping someone’s head off. It’s just wrong. I guess it shouldn’t be, because I saw her kill that man yesterday. But she was defending me. That whole series of events feels more like a dream than memory anyways.

“Can that be enough doom and gloom for the day, Scout?” Dodger says. “Let’s get lunch.”

I accompany her into the cafeteria, where food smells like its packaging and middle-aged, apathetic women in hairnets scoop portions onto your tray. There’s a bit of variety, as the school is mandated to offer at least two different kinds of fruits and vegetables. Luckily for them, pizza and the lettuce slices on burgers count as vegetables.

So we pass through the lunch line. I pick out a chocolate milk and bag of chips. My go-to “avoid the shitty cafeteria food yet still eat” strategy. All around us, there’s the buzz of conversation. The two kids in front of us gossip about someone sleeping with someone else. The two behind us make small talk about the latest episode of a TV show. It seems only Dodger and I are silent.

We exit the lunch line and make our way into the cafeteria, Dodger’s rain boots making the distinctive
squish
sound of water and rubber on linoleum. It suddenly feels two or three degrees colder, so I balance my lunch tray in one hand and zip up my hoodie in the other. We sit at our usual table with our usual circle of friends. They’re already in the middle of a conversation when we come in.

“Hello, all,” I say. I’m trying to sound like my normal self, but it’s feeling more like channelling an alter ego than being me.

“Hey Scout,” says Brianna, a freshman. “Did you see Secret Life last night?”

“Oh, nope. Must’ve missed it.”

“Missed Secret Life? Why?” she gasps. “Were you on a date?”

“What? No! No of course not. I just missed it.”

“But you never miss Secret Life!” she says.

“I did last night,” I say with the same conversation ending tone my mother takes with me. Brianna lets it go, and I lazily pop a chip in my mouth. The conversation at the table turns to something unfamiliar to me, which I’m thankful for. I really don’t feel like talking right now. I start to zone out, with the conversation at my table at the surrounding ones being reduced to simply a droning buzz that I drown out in my own tide of thoughts.

My mind finds its way to the feeling of my fingers on the bowstring last night. I think of how tough and awkward it felt at first, and how easy it became. I remember how it felt to see that arrow fly and how impressed my father seemed with me. My fingers have a thin red line spreading across them, perfectly in between the wrinkles marking two joints. I feel this deep longing to be back in that basement, bow in hand, drawing and shooting until that red line becomes a permanent mark. A testament to a skill.
Natural
had been the word my father used.
You’re a natural.

I’m yanked back into the real world by the sound of Dodger’s voice.

“Petrichor.”

“Huh?” says the table.

“The smell of the ground after rain. It’s called petrichor,” she says. She must’ve been jumping in on a conversation, but I don’t know for sure. I’m guessing she didn’t just blurt out a random fact, though truth be told if
any
of my friends would do a thing like that, it would be Dodger.

“Oh thanks, Dodger,” says Katie, a small girl with perfectly white, straight teeth and bright blue eyes. “There’s a word for that?”

“Yep.”

“Hm. Never knew that. Petrichor... it kinda sounds like rain haha.”

I don’t follow. No one else seems to, because Brianna and Dodger both ask “what?”

“Like, you ever notice how a word kinda sounds like its meaning? Like bubbles. Bubbles just sounds bubbly and silly. And death is a super dark sounding word...”

This was Katie in a nutshell. Trying to find these connections in things no one else saw. Her tangents are quite entertaining most days, but not this one. I turn my attention away from Katie and mindlessly roll my neck. Something pops there, and I wonder exactly what that noise is that happens whenever you crack your neck or knuckles. The thought is there for a moment and a moment only. The next, my eyes catch those of a boy sitting across the room.

I don’t know his name. He’s tall and strong with a crew cut and arms that look perpetually flexed. I’m pretty sure, but not certain, that he’s on the JV football team. It seems that he’s looking not quite at me, but at Dodger next to me.

“Hey, Dodger,” I say in a whisper. “I think that guy over there is checking you out.”

She looks. “Eh, I don’t like the jock type. ‘Sides, it’s you he’s eyeing.”

I don’t believe her initially, but a few minutes later the boy gets up and walks over to our table. He stops right beside me and lays his enormous hand on the table next to mine. He smells like body spray and has the demeanor and charm of a politician.

“Hey, Scout isn’t it?” he smiles. I’ll admit it, he has a nice smile.

“Yeah. Do I know you?” I don’t. At least I don’t think so. But he did seem somewhat familiar.

“Alex Fowler. Been to the games? You may have seen me play.”

“That might be it...” It’s a lie. I care for football as much as abstract art i.e., not at all.

“You see the game against West High? Caught the winning pass. Was kind of epic.”

“Okay...”

“Look. I’m just going to go for broke here and say I think you’re really pretty and I would
love
to treat you to... dinner? A movie? Coffee?”

“Yeah, sorry, totally booked.” I try to turn my back on him, but he stops me.

“I think you would
really
love to go to the movies with me this Saturday, don’t you?”

I don’t know what the hell came over me just then. An irresistible force came over me. Somehow, I found myself saying yes to his offer.