Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (8 page)

T
he blue-and-red flashing lights of the police cars parked outside filled the room even through the rain. Spenser choked on his beer before twisting to watch Mary talk to the police. The rain was pounding down; he couldn’t hear what they were saying. But he saw her go pale, until the only color in her face came from those dancing lights. He saw her clutch her chest, eyes wide and childlike and filled with a painful confusion.

He saw her sink to her knees on the floor and start to sob as lightning split the sky in two and the world was reduced to the sound of thunder.

That was when he realized that something was truly wrong, and rose from his chair to find out what that little brat had done now.

I
t had been the rain. It had fallen so hard and so suddenly that the ground hadn’t been prepared to absorb it all. There hadn’t been enough to shift the body of a thirteen-year-old girl, but there had been enough to wash her blood down the hillside in a crimson ribbon, one that held together despite all odds, until it swirled into
the gutter near a stopped police car. Even then, it might have been missed, had the junior of the two policemen not been returning to the vehicle after writing a speeding ticket for a woman who just wanted to get home, out of the storm.

He had stopped when he saw the blood, looking at it speculatively. Odds were that it belonged to some animal, a cat-killed bird or a rabbit with its leg in a snare. But the storm had been a vicious one, and odds weren’t enough to justify potentially leaving someone out there when they were hurt and in need of assistance. He had knocked on the police car window. He had shown his partner the blood. Together, the two of them had gone up the hillside, flashlights in hand, hoping that they wouldn’t find anything worth getting wet over.

They had found a little girl.

The world transforms when a child dies. As the officers attempted to comfort Lou’s sobbing mother, the coroners were removing her body from the hillside, where the rain had already washed away any forensic evidence—not that they were really thinking of this as a murder. The story was too easy to see, written in broken bone and shattered glass. A terrible accident, a terrible fall, the sort of thing that could happen to anyone, if they ran down the wrong hillside in the rain. She was very small. She would never get any bigger.

As Spenser demanded proof that the little girl they had found was his stepdaughter, Lou was being bundled into the back of an ambulance, which drove through town with its flashers off, obeying all the traffic laws. There was no need to use the siren. There was nothing there in need of saving.

As the officers handcuffed Spenser for taking a swing at them, Lou was being transferred into the freezer at the county morgue. She would be shown to her mother later, after one of the medical examiners had removed the larger pieces of glass from her chest. Just enough so that the
sheet would lie flat, and Mary wouldn’t have to confront the story told by those planes and angles, that impossible geometry of loss.

As Mary and Spenser were being loaded into separate police cars for the ride across town—one as grieving mother, the other as drunken assailant—Lou was alone.

Lou opened her eyes, and they were filled with firefly lightning.

Somewhere, thunder rolled.

“W
hat do you mean, you lost the body?” The officer tried to keep his voice low as he spoke with the medical examiner. He couldn’t keep himself from glancing back to where Mary sat on a hard plastic chair, folded nearly double in her grief. Spenser was elsewhere, being given a stern warning. They weren’t going to book the man. Not when his stepdaughter had just died; not when his wife needed him so badly.

And besides, there were other things to worry about.

“I’ve called the crew that brought her in; I’m sure they just put her in the wrong drawer.” The medical examiner held up her hands, expression baffled. “Don’t shoot the messenger. We’re looking for her now.”

“I have her parents waiting to identify the body,” snapped the officer. A little too loudly: Mary’s head came up, eyes questing in his direction. He hunched his shoulders, turning partially away. “We need to be sure. The ID was made from a library card in her pocket, and that’s not sufficient.”

“Look, we’re doing everything we can,” said the medical examiner. “You have to give us time to figure out where she is.”

“This is a little girl we’re talking about here,” he said. “Find her.”

“I will,” she said.

They didn’t.

By the time they sent Mary home—wrung out and exhausted from her crying, with Spenser standing like a sullen shadow by her
side—they had turned the entire building upside down repeatedly, only to find no trace of the thirteen-year-old girl who had been found on the hillside. Lou was, quite simply, gone.

T
he sky was bruised black and silent, unmoving. The rain had stopped somewhere between the cruiser’s leaving the police station and pulling up in front of Mary and Spenser’s home. The streets remained empty; no one wanted to risk being caught in another torrential downpour. Both of them had been silent for the entire drive, Mary sunk deep into confused grief that was beginning to mingle with denial, Spenser dwelling on the way he’d been treated. By the time the police dropped them off and drove away, he was a powder keg, ready to explode.

Mary dug for her keys as she stepped onto the porch. Spenser tried the doorknob. The door swung open. That was the spark that he’d been waiting for.

“Well, would you look at that,” he said in a wondering tone. He prodded the door with his finger. It swung open wider. “Some dumb bitch didn’t lock the door. Let’s go in and see what’s worth stealing, huh? I bet we can clean these dummies out before they get back. What do you think, Mary?”

“Please, Spenser, not right now,” she said, voice little more than a moan. “I’m sorry I didn’t lock it, but no one was out in this storm. No one except for . . . except for . . .” She began crying again. She stopped after shedding only a few tears. There just wasn’t that much moisture left inside of her.

“We don’t even know if those police were telling the truth,” scoffed Spenser. “It could have been someone else’s kid. It could have been a fucked-up prank. Who knows what these cops get up to when nobody’s keeping an eye on them? Crooks, the whole lot of them. We should sue the bastards.”

Mary stared at him, eyes wide and wet and uncomprehending.
“What are you saying?” she whispered. “Are you saying that they lied? They lied about my Louise?” Her daughter’s full name fit oddly in her mouth. She used it so rarely, usually when the girl was in trouble. Lou had been her name since the day she was born, and it should have been her name now, on the night she’d . . . that she had . . .

“I’m saying the police twist the truth to suit themselves,” said Spenser. He seemed oblivious to the fact that they were still standing on the porch, exposed to the night air: he had his teeth in something that would allow him to work off some of his aggression, and he wasn’t letting go. “She’s a pretty thing. Maybe they couldn’t find her because they’re the ones who snatched her, and she’ll show up in the morgue when she’s good and used—”

Her palm caught him across the cheek, rocking his head back more from surprise than from the actual pain of impact. Mary squealed and snatched her hand to her chest, cradling it there like an animal with an injured paw. Spenser’s eyes went wide. Then, slowly, his eyes narrowed, the color flaring up in his cheeks like a flame.

“Did you lay a hand on me, you little bitch?” The question was calm. The swing that accompanied it was not. His fist hit Mary in the eye, sending her crashing to the floor, where she huddled, sobbing. She was halfway inside the house, her feet still on the porch, her torso on the hallway floor.

“Cow,” he said, and kicked her casually as he stepped over her body and left her where she lay. Mary didn’t try to move. She stayed where she was, and cried, and waited for the long, dark night to end.

T
he mud squished between Lou’s toes as she walked, black and viscous and sticky. She looked down at it and frowned, trying to remember why it mattered. A piece of glass caught her eye, protruding from the left side of her chest. She grasped it firmly and yanked it out of her body with a wet sucking sound, very similar to what her feet made every time she took a step. The edges sliced her fingers,
creating long, bloodless cuts. She looked at the glass for a moment, dispassionately, before she threw it aside and kept on walking.

She had been walking for miles now. Hours, even, across the city and down the rain-soaked sidewalks until she had reached the edge of the fields that extended behind her housing development. Then she had left the sidewalks behind, understanding on some level—even if it was a blurred, distorted one, still tangled with the sound of distant thunder—that she didn’t want to answer any questions about where she was going, or why she wasn’t wearing shoes, or why there was so much blood on the front of her dress.

(Why
was
there so much blood? Why didn’t she bleed when she pulled the glass out of her body? Every time she’d cut herself before, there had been blood, but now there was only a faint tugging sensation and a momentary light, like one of the fireflies she’d lost in the storm was hiding somewhere in her skin.)

The clouds were starting to clear, and the stars were coming out. They looked like fireflies hanging up there in the black. Lou walked on. She was going home. She knew that much. No matter how confused she was, no matter what else was going on, she was going home. She just had to . . . she just had to make it home.

Fireflies began to drift up from the grass at her feet, swirling around her in a great, silent cloud. Lou stopped walking and held out her hands. The fireflies landed on her palms, covering them, until she could feel the weight of a thousand pinprick feet pushing down on her.

“Hello,” said Lou.

The fireflies took flight. They swirled around her, and it was like standing in the middle of a special effect, like something from a Disney movie, the moment where the servant girl becomes a princess or learns that she’s been a princess all along. Lou laughed out loud, and then gasped as the sound knocked something loose inside of her, some small, essential scab on her soul.

She remembered lightning splitting the sky.

She remembered the feeling of her ankle breaking.

She remembered—

“Who are you?” The man who appeared out of the cloud of fireflies was tall and thin and oddly pale, seeming to shine with the same soft, internal light as the fireflies. Most of them seemed to have vanished when he came; the few that remained alighted on his hair and shoulders, glowing dimly. “What are you doing out here, all alone? Where are your parents?”

“I’m Lou,” she said. Speaking made the glass in her chest tug oddly. She pulled out another shard. This one was longer than the others, and there was actual blood at the tip, gleaming when the light from the fireflies touched it. She threw it thoughtlessly aside. “I’m out here because out here is between me and where I live. My daddy’s dead. My mom’s at home. She’s probably real worried by now. I’m going home to her.”

The man leaned a little closer and sniffed at her. Lou blinked at him.

“I don’t smell bad,” she said.

“Child, you smell
dead
,” he replied. “Do you remember what happened to you?”

“I was catching fireflies and I fell down.”

The man sighed. It was a deep, hollow sound. “The adze choose who they will, and I have no recourse but to call you kin. You are my sister, child, and you are not going home, because home will no longer have you.”

Lou frowned. “I
am
going home. I promised.”

“And what will you do when you get there? Will you fly to your mother’s arms and cover her with kisses? You, whose breath smells of the grave and whose body will not bleed?” He leaned closer to her. “You will not be welcome there. You will not be welcome anywhere.”

“I’ll be welcome,” said Lou. “I have to go home.”

He sighed again. “Very well, then, sister. Let me show you the way.” He offered her his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, Lou took it.

The man exploded into fireflies.

So did she.

T
he flight across the fields was dizzyingly fast and filtered through a hundred pairs of eyes. It was like her entire body had learned to see and was looking at the world for the first time. Lou would have laughed with delight, but she no longer had lungs or a throat to laugh with; all the parts of her were strange, from her uncounted wings to her bristling legs. She flew, and the sky was hers, and no one was ever going to take it away from her again.

There were words in the sky, in the buzz of wings and the flash of glittering bodies.
The adze are older than this nation, if not older than this land; we came when the settlers came, nestled in the holds of their ships, hidden in the shapes of their slaves. You would not have known us, child, but you would have felt our touch all the same.

Memories then, memories that were not hers, or had not been until this moment, for the swarm was a single organism, and what the man knew, she knew also: what he had seen, she saw, broken and reassembled through so many swarms just like this one, over so many hot summer nights.

Saw the children who were found dead by their mothers, bloodless and unmoving.

Saw the women who were burned as witches while the adze walked free, indistinguishable from anyone else.

Saw the
bukwus
of this new world meeting the vampires the Europeans had brought with them, and later, the
jiangshi
of the Chinese and the
patasola
of the South Americans. The night was a bloodbath, and only the fact that creatures who did not breathe
moved slow and lived long kept the world from being washed red. Through all of this moved the adze, who reproduced only rarely and fed only when the summer sky was dark with storms and the trees were ripe with fireflies.

Saw herself running along the creek toward the place where the swarm had paused. Lou felt more than heard her new companion’s understanding: he had not realized before that she and the girl who had chased his component fireflies all through the summer were one and the same.