The Demon Hunter (12 page)

“Don't worry about us, Ollie,” Sebastian said. “I'll find your mother, and we'll keep looking for Bane. You just go to school and have a normal night.” He hurried off down the street.

“But I want to help!”

“You can't, Ollie. Just go.” Sebastian turned a corner and was gone.

“Great!” Oliver shouted. He turned, kicking violently at the litter and debris along the roadside, and stalked off. Yeah, right. His dad expected him to go and have a
normal
night? Since when were any of Oliver's nights normal? And it was because of Half-Light, and Bane, and his parents, and a prophecy, and
everyone
… and it just totally sucked.

As he walked, his anger and confusion only bubbled hotter. Why wouldn't his parents be marching straight to Half-Light and demanding an explanation after they'd heard Oliver's account?
Because they know something I don't, again. Something about Bane.
But what? And what had they
agreed
to?

By the time he reached school, Oliver's mood had darkened to black. He found a collection of his classmates racing around on the blacktop, playing Gargoyle Tag. The game was chaotic, and played using tiny, poisonous piedra geckoes, from the underground. Usually someone brought a mesh bag of thirty or more of the two-inch-long creatures, so there were enough for everyone.

There was only one rule in the game: Everyone who had a gecko was
it.
The goal was to squash your gecko against the small of another player's back, so that its insides soaked through the other player's shirt.

When the juices of the gecko seeped into skin, they would spread up and down the spine and through the entire skeletal system, turning the player's bones to stone—which hurt a
lot
—and freezing the player for about a minute, until the toxin wore off. The player's skin would take on a stony gray color, and a demonized face would appear over the player's normal face. Tiny horns might sprout, and scales, flared reptilian nostrils, or fangs might even appear. It looked like a mild version of the
vampyr
faces that Oliver had seen in his family's portraits in Morosia. After you froze someone, you could take their gecko and use it to freeze someone else.

Oliver stopped at the edge of the game, beside Seth. “Hey, Seth,” he said. Seth didn't reply, as he was currently turned to stone. His head was covered in spiky, spiraled horns, and his mouth twisted in annoyance.

The game was in full frenzy, a wild blur of excited faces and sloppy hair. The chase was intense, kids leaping high into the air to avoid one another, sometimes bounding on and off the brick school wall. For a rare moment, this school year's new social rules had been forgotten. There was Theo chasing Carly. There was Berthold sneaking up behind Kym. There was Suzyn turned to stone.

As Oliver watched his classmates, his father's words echoed in his head:
Have a normal night.
Well, here was his chance. Jump in on this game and maybe for a few minutes he could just be one of them.

But he didn't.

Why not?
He wondered, annoyed at himself.
Am I just going to make myself an exile again? That only makes it worse.
He scowled at the thought.
So what? Who even cares?
None of these kids had a prophecy and all that came with it, like fighting parents, a screwed-up brother, the weight of the human
and
vampire worlds on their shoulders. What did they know?

Deep in his thoughts, Oliver barely heard the footsteps behind him in time. He whirled around to find Theo only a step away, a squirming gecko in his hand.

“Ah, so close,” Theo said with a grin. “Your gargoyle face would probably be a crying little human girl.”

Oliver glared at him. “You're so cool.”

Theo smirked. “Nocturne, what do you know?” He darted back into the chaos of the game, bumping Oliver's shoulder as he passed.

Oliver watched him go, smoldering inside. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that Seth still had a gecko in his frozen hand. It writhed about, trying to get free of the stone-colored fingers.

Fine. I'll play.
Oliver reached over, bending Seth's thumb back. There was a sound like crunching stone as the thumb broke, but whatever, it would heal quickly enough, and Seth wouldn't even know who did it. Oliver took the tiny, slippery lizard, held it tight, and tore off into the game.

He dodged left and right, closing in on Theo, who had spotted Kym and was sneaking up on her. Oliver was almost within striking distance—

A large, chunky shoulder smashed into him, knocking him sideways and sending him sprawling to the pavement. Oliver looked up to see Maggots smiling down. “Gotcha,” he grunted and immediately turned and slammed his shoulder into another passing person. He didn't even have a gecko with him.

Theo spun around and grinned. “Ha! Nocturne, you're hilARious!”

Oliver glared at Theo, hating him so much, but Theo just darted away after Kym, who spotted him and leaped to the school wall. Oliver's eyes burned, his insides wrapping into a knot.
Stupid!
He couldn't stand it anymore. He just wanted to …

Maggots was still standing a few feet away, his back to Oliver, looking for his next shouldering victim. Oliver pushed himself into a crouch, and lunged.

He hit Maggots square in his beefy back and smashed the gecko against him.

“Whu—” Maggots toppled like an old tree, rolling onto his back just in time to shade to gray and freeze, his ears sprouting out long and batlike, and his forehead growing a bony crest.

Oliver leaped down onto him. “How's it feel to get knocked around?” he shouted and punched Maggots squarely in the nose. There was a hollow crack as the stone split. Oliver's hand exploded in pain, but whatever. “You like this game?” he snarled, hitting Maggots again.

“Oliver!” someone shouted, Oliver wasn't sure who, and didn't care. He thrust his fist downward again—but was knocked free. He landed hard on his backside, scrambled to his feet, and was about to jump onto Maggots again, hit him again, just—

But then he saw that the entire game had stopped. All his classmates were gaping at him. It was Berthold, of all kids, who had knocked him over.

Suzyn appeared, and looked at Oliver like he was some other being entirely. “What's wrong with you?”

Oliver stared at all the glaring faces and had no reply.
What did I just do? What is wrong with me?
That was the question that never seemed to go away.

“You're going down, foot rot,” Theo growled at him. “You're
so
going down.”

Oliver thought he might tear apart inside. He wanted to lunge at everyone, take a swing at all of them at once. But he also wanted to apologize, to explain that he had
no idea
what had gotten into him. His brother, his parents, his destiny, take your pick! But then he still wanted to yell at them, to scream that it was their fault for being so.…
So what?

So normal?

“Time for class,” called Rodrigo from a distance.

“Tsss,” Theo hissed. He and Jesper picked up the stone Maggots by the armpits and started dragging him toward the door.

Oliver stayed rooted in place, watching everyone head inside to start the school night. He felt everything shutting down inside, almost like he was turning to stone.

As the kids crowded at the door, Oliver turned away. He vaulted over the fence and stalked off into the night.

Chapter 9

Enchanted Blades

OLIVER HEADED ACROSS TOWN.
At some point, he started second-guessing his decision to skip school.
Why? Who cares about school right now?
That was the last place he could imagine being with everything that was going on.

It took him awhile to calm down, and once he did, Oliver found that he had nothing … no way to explain the way he'd freaked out and attacked Maggots like that. He didn't even know that he
could
act like that.

Nice one, bro
.… Oliver imagined that, of all people, Bane would have been proud of how he'd acted. It was probably the most vampirelike thing Oliver had ever done. And it didn't feel good in any way.

Soon, he reached Emalie's house. Most of the lights were on inside, so Oliver crept carefully around to the back and peered in the kitchen window.

Emalie and her dad, Cole, were sitting at their small table, eating. Oliver could see potatoes, the roasted ones that Emalie liked to make, and pork chops. Emalie's wide eyes were fixed on her dad, who was in the middle of a story.

“And so then Zeke tripped and dumped the whole case, like,
thousands
of bait fish.”

Emalie burst into laughter, her face getting red. Cole smiled and sipped his beer. He'd been working for a salmon boat fleet since the winter. Oliver had no idea what the story was about, but he knew that, not long ago, dinner between Emalie and her dad hadn't included much laughter.

Cole stood and said, “I need more of those excellent potatoes.” He rubbed Emalie's shoulder and walked to the stove. He started scraping the pan with a spatula, and called back over his shoulder, “Want some, Margie?”

Emalie's face crashed.

Her dad knew it. His own face contorted. “Emalie, ah, sorry …”

Her eyes widened, glistening half-moons of liquid growing on their bottom rims. It took forever for the first one to fall, but once it did, it was like a dam had broken. But Emalie stayed silent, her lips pursed tight, just the clicking of her blinking, as her face drained from red to white. Watching her, Oliver wondered what crying felt like. It looked so awful, like torture.

Cole was sitting back down. “So how's school been?” he asked tentatively.

“Fine,” Emalie muttered blankly, like she'd shut down inside. Oliver had seen her do this before. Dropping from the heights of happiness to the depths of sorrow. It seemed to happen more lately. Then again, the mention of her missing mom never put her in a good mood.

Oliver slipped away from the window and returned to the front of the house. Putting his hands against the wall, he felt for the forces, then scaled up to Emalie's window. She always left it slightly ajar, and he pushed it open and crawled inside, staying on the wall until he was beyond her bed. He dropped to the floor and sat against the wall beneath the collage of her photos. Most were cropped at wild angles, while a few were left in full size: the ones she was really proud of. One of them was a shot of the inside of the abandoned upstairs of Oliver's house. It showed the overturned dresser frosted in gray light through a broken window.

Emalie was still using cardboard boxes for a desk, but she had covered them with a tapestry. She still had a pillow for a desk chair.

On the ceiling, plastic stars glowed faintly. She'd been adding to her map of the constellations. In the center of the ceiling were Orion, Scorpio, and Cassiopeia, all in small yellow stars. As the map spread, the size and color of the stickers changed, but always the constellations were real ones, except for a smiley face in one corner. Oliver knew his constellations and noted Cygnus, the cross, and Ursa Major and Minor, the Big and Little Dipper. But he was surprised to see a few that he didn't recognize, directly over Emalie's bed. They were made of large, orange stickers. The shapes seemed only distantly familiar.

Light rain made a steady whispering sound on the roof. Plates clinked downstairs.

Oliver felt the calm that came over him in Emalie's room. Like he was safe. No other vampire could come here. Not his family, his schoolmates.

Soon, he heard footsteps trudging up the stairs. Oliver felt a flutter of nerves and remembered that he wasn't totally safe. He reached into his pocket, took out Bane's necklace, and slipped it around his neck. As he pushed it inside his shirt and the cold magnetite touched his skin, there was a faint tingling sensation, almost like he'd been sprayed with cool mist.

Emalie walked in, her two black cats, Amethyst and Jade, scurrying at her feet. She headed straight for her bed and threw herself on it. The cats peered at Oliver.

“Hey—” he began.

“Buh!” Emalie snapped up. She peered into the dark and didn't seem to see Oliver for a moment.

“Emalie, it's me.”

“How—” she started, looking at him, confused. “But, when did you get here?”

“A while ago. I skipped school.”

“Why?”

“It's Bane. Half-Light is framing him.”

“Why would they do that?” Emalie asked.

“I don't know. Because of whatever he's been up to, but it's weird because they lied to my parents. They said Bane was responsible for the killings and was going to need to be apprehended and maybe slain, but they didn't say they were framing him. And then my parents said all this weird stuff about the choices they made, and the dangers with Bane … before they started yelling at each other. It's almost like they knew this might happen …” Oliver trailed off. It felt good to be saying all this out loud, but it left him feeling confused.

Emalie squinted at him. “Okay …” She was trying to see something in the dark.

“What?” Oliver asked.

Emalie shook her head. “Nothing.” She flopped down on her back.

She just tried to read my thoughts,
Oliver thought to himself,
and the necklace worked.
“I heard your dad downstairs,” said Oliver quietly. “It was just a slipup.”

Emalie huffed. “Yeah, well.” She didn't say any more.

“What are those constellations above your bed?” Oliver finally asked.

“I don't know,” Emalie muttered.

“Did you make them up? They're cool shapes—”

“No, I didn't make them up,” Emalie snapped, like Oliver was an idiot for thinking such a thing. “I saw them, in my head. In a dream where I was with my mom, seeing out of her eyes, or whatever those stupid dreams are supposed to mean.”