The Sunlight Slayings (20 page)

All we know is that we're friends again, and we're all in danger, so we need to have each other's backs. Oliver's parents don't want him to see me, but that doesn't stop us from hanging out. Mostly we go to Dean's house, where everyone is welcome.

It's spring now here in Seattle, but only in secret. Green has returned, and we living beings feel better because it's not as dark. Emerald buds sprout up through the soil, pushing aside dead leaves and stalks. Kind of like my cousin. Back from the winter grave.

Things are better at home too. Dad's been working steadily all winter for my great-aunt Kathleen. Remember her? She's Orani, like me, like my mom.

She gave Dad a job and now we've been in this same house for six months—that's a record for the Watkins duo since Mom left. The other day we even unpacked the boxes with the photo albums. Whoa. You know you mean business when the photo albums with their fake leather spines go out on the shelves. Also 'cause those albums are where Mom lives. So seeing Dad put the albums on the shelf means that maybe he's got the shelves in his head sorted out a little better. I think he does.

But setting out the albums also points out all the places where Mom is not.

Like at the kitchen table reading her archaeology magazines, or adding up the mileage benefits from her job as a flight attendant and calculating all the cool places the three of us could go. “And once we're in Delhi, we can travel for less than ten dollars a day!” she would say, scribbling on maps.

Or, like, when she'd be on the couch, and she'd notice me when I walked by, and I'd huff at her 'cause she noticed me, 'cause it's like: Mom, leave me alone—

But now I'm like, no, wait. I never meant
really
leave me alone. You knew that, right, Mom?

Aunt Kathleen says she did. She says Mom never meant to be gone this long. She left on a quick trip to search for someone named Selene and didn't come back.

“I spoke with the Circle,” Aunt Kathleen says.

We are in the basement. She came over for dinner, then asked to see my latest photos. This is our code for getting down to Orani business. Once we are downstairs, I pull out Mom's old notebooks and we practice enchantments. We also try to figure out where Mom is. Most of what we know comes from the last page of the last notebook. It says:

It all leads back to Selene, but who is she? Where is she? Without her, there is no way to know for sure if the Endline has arrived … Have to find her. Kalea may know …

And that's it. Then, good-bye, Mom.

I run my finger over the words again, smudging the pencil a little. As that gray on my fingertip sinks into the ridges of my skin, I hope that a trace of the energy from Mom's hand, seeping through the pencil wood and into that very graphite, will touch me.

Aunt Kathleen rubs my shoulder. “They put me in touch with Kalea,” she says. She is talking about the Circle of Six. Those are the six oldest living Orani. They don't, like, actually get together in a circle or anything—in fact, they purposely stay apart, scattered in remote places across the world, staying connected through spirit channels. Well, and Facebook.

“Kalea is Orani?” I ask.

“Yes. A third cousin of Margaret's, as it turns out. Her real name is Violet.”

Aunt Kathleen's Orani name is Quella. I want an Orani name, but I'm not old enough yet. And before you are given a name, you must train for a rite of passage. Oliver and I have joked about this. What is it with these coming-of-age rites of passage? Like life isn't dramatic and uncertain enough without these freaky all-or-nothing events.

For Oliver, it's getting his demon and opening some gate; for me, it's something called the Precession. Its name comes from the wobble of a planet's orbit. On earth, this imperfection makes the stars seem to move backward in the sky. I have no idea how the Orani Precession works, or what it has to do with orbits and stars, and of course, Aunt Kathleen won't tell me that part, cause I'm … wait for it … not ready yet! Ugh.

But she does tell me other things. “Kalea lives in London,” she says. “Margaret visited her two days after she left Seattle. Your mother wanted to know where to find Selene. Kalea had done research. There are virtually no records of Selene—not even in the Orani archives—but Kalea heard that she might be in a town in Italy called Fortuna. She warned your mother against going there.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Your mother wasn't sure. But she went anyway. She told Kalea that Selene was the key to learning about something called the
Endline
.”

“She wrote that in her notes too,” I say. I start to feel the burn. The one that makes the walls bend and shrink in. “So, that's it. That's all we know.”

Aunt Kathleen rubs my shoulder again. I want to shove her hand away. “Only for now. School will be out for you in a couple months, and I have enough work to keep your father very busy …” I look up to find Kathleen smiling. “Sounds like the perfect time for an aunt-niece trip to Europe, don't you think?”

“No way,” I say, feeling a rush—the thought of trains, chocolates, ancient churches—but also a tremble. Mom always wanted to take me there. “Really?”

“We can go for a couple weeks, see the sights, and most importantly: First stop, Fortuna.”

I smile. “Sounds like a plan. But what do we do until then?”

“Well, what about the boy?”

I immediately think of Oliver, but then realize Aunt Kathleen means someone else. Horacio: the boy I saved from getting flattened by a truck back in January. He was thinking about finding Selene too. I've been looking for him since we first met.

“I'm getting closer,” I say. “Did the Six know who he was, or who was trying to kill him?”

“No. When I gave you the conduit charm, all we knew was that someone was in danger, and it seemed to be related to Selene and your mother's disappearance. There seems to be something important about him. And he knew about Oliver and his destiny. He may have information that can help us.”

“Stay with the vampire” was what Horacio had said to me, or it would be my fault if the world ended. No idea what that meant, either. “It's too bad the Six never have more specifics,” I say.

Aunt Kathleen sighs. “Yes, well, it's often that way. Predicting the future is a very inexact art. Have you been using the echo enchantment?”

“Yeah.” I pull the tiny ruby-colored scarab charm from around my neck, its silver chain playing between my fingers. It's a conduit for entering people's minds. Aunt Kathleen has taught me a new use for it.

“How's that going?” she asks.

“Okay,” I report. “I've gotten better at it. I've found traces of Horacio on Capitol Hill—sometimes at the Value Village, but mostly at a record store. I was going to try again tonight.”

Aunt Kathleen nods. “You're strong, Emalie. Every enchantment I teach you, you pick it up fast.”

“Thanks,” I say. I look up with a smile. Only Aunt Kathleen's smile is incomplete. I can see worry there too.

She leaves around 8:00 p.m., and I head upstairs to do homework. Only what I really do is drop right to sleep.

The “important doctor people” say that you should get eight hours of sleep. But they've had no experience being friends with a vampire and a zombie. I need to be both nocturnal and a normal kid. So, here's Emalie's magic do-it-all sleep equation:

4:00–7:00 a.m. (3 hrs)

+ math class (45 min)

+ 4:00–6:00 p.m. (2 hrs, before Dad gets home)

+ 7:00–9:00 p.m. (2 hrs, supposedly doing homework)

= 7 hrs 45 min of sleep

Only fifteen minutes short! Well, I'm two hours off tonight because of Aunt Kathleen's visit, but I can easily make up for it with a Red Bull when I wake up at 9:00 p.m., and then a double americano from Caffe Ladro on my way to catch the bus.

I've got three alarm clocks now, each set for one of my wake up times. The 9:00 p.m. one plays the radio station KBYT, vampires only, cause I gotta stay up on my friends' tastes. Oliver gave me a special clock with a subfrequency radio to tune it to. It's so cool, a tiny crystal rectangle. Runs on magnets or something.

So I'm up again, and after the Red Bull comes a shower. Then I dress for action, pack my bag, and appear in the living room …

Scene: Emalie enters.

Emalie: (Yawning) I'm so tired. Time for this soldier to go to bed.

Dad: All right, Em. Good night, kiddo—love ya.

Emalie smiles and trudges upstairs, yawning again as she goes …

Then I hop right out the window. I reach up to the eave and uncoil a rope that Oliver tied there. He did it by standing beneath the roof like a bat. He's so weird! The rope has easy-to-shimmy-down knots. I drop to the yard and I'm off into my nighttime world.

I take the bus downtown. We pass North Seattle Middle School, and I can see the faint glow of candlelight in the windows. Oliver is up there, in school right now. Dean has school tonight too. I feel a little wave of guilt. If they knew I was out, they'd want to be with me—especially if they knew what I was up to. Like I said, we have to have one another's backs. They'd want to help me find Horacio.

But the truth? I haven't actually told Oliver and Dean about Horacio. Is that weird? It feels weird. I don't know why I haven't. Would it bother Oliver? They would definitely be worried that it was dangerous. But Oliver has his prophecy, and Dean has his mystery master. This Horacio thing is what I have. And sometimes, I like just having my own story, and not having to always be part of someone else's.

I transfer busses and soon I'm up on Capitol Hill. I make my way to Everyday Music.

“Hey, Emalie.” The girl behind the counter is Beth. She's here most nights during the week. Her coffee-brown hair is in pink barrettes, keeping it off of her thick, black-framed glasses. She is wearing a lime-green vintage dress with a collar and strange embroidery. It looks so retro and cool and like the kind that I could oh-so-never find at the thrift stores. There is Orani magic, and then there is Beth-fashion-finding magic.

I know her because she commented on my camera, and how it was cool that it was old and used film. We got to talking. Turns out she writes for Three Imaginary Girls, which is my favorite music site.

“Hey,” I reply.

“Still working on that story?” Beth asks. She's flipping through a stack of CDs that someone is selling back. She holds up an Elton John album and scowls.

“Yeah,” I say. I told her I'm doing a story on independent record stores: how they're doing, which ones are cool.

Black-clothed kids flick through the CDs. I loiter over by the vinyl, where it smells like mold. Dad says vinyl sounds better because it sounds worse, or something. Who knows. What matters is that there's no one over here, and so I can get to work.

I pull a small black bag from my pocket. I let my hand fall casually by my side, and a light rain of rose-colored gypsum falls. My hand sways, creating a protective circle on the floor around me. Then, I pull the scarab from around my neck and hold it to my mouth.

So, Orani 101, the echo enchantment: I focus on my memory of Horacio. What he looked like, his emotional presence, how he seemed. I hold it in the front of my mind. It is all I'm thinking about. Next, using the conduit charm, the great Emalie will now attempt to leave her body and find other memories of Horacio among the people in this room. It's not likely that any of these people actually know him (I've asked Beth, and she doesn't), but it is possible that they've seen him. And even just a glimpse tells so much about a person. Thing is, most people don't pay attention to all that knowledge they're getting. Not the way an Orani can.

Breathing in deep, I close my eyes …

And detach. It's kind of like I'm pulling away from my senses, leaving my body. The room gets blurry, and the other people become these luminous things, with rainbow energy all around them. Oliver says those are the
forces
, the energy that mingles between our world and others
.

I've gotten better at seeing people's energy. Everyone has this presence that streams ahead and lingers behind. We think of ourselves as solid objects, our bodies these steel traps that we live inside of, but the Orani can feel that we're not. Really, we're these wrapped-up balls of energy with loose strands dangling forward and backward in time. When we're young, the energy mostly streams forward, like tentacles, reaching ahead, hoping for the next thing, dreaming of the future. As we get older, and some doors close, dreams don't work out, love turns into loss … the tendrils begin to stretch backward, streaming like the wake behind a boat, churning with regret, longing, guilt.

Everyone's tendrils are always mingling. We are affecting one another all the time, but we're aware of so little of it.

There are nine others in the store. The key is to float among their jellyfish tentacles of emotion without getting tangled. There's no avoiding the occasional sting. Back in January, when I left my body for the first time, I got sucked right into the most intense presences, the tentacles sucking me in. I've learned since then to keep my distance.

I float around, just touching each person's flowing energy, soft and waving like hair underwater, and each time, I whisper with my mind, “Horacio,” and imagine that boy as hard as I can. It's like a little thought magnet. If others in the room have ever seen Horacio, their memories of him will be drawn out.

Once I've suggested him to everyone, I return to my body. Feel the limits of skin and bone again. The moldy vinyl smell around me. The pain above my eye from a sinus full of snot—stupid spring allergies. In the store, the energy tentacles disappear and people stop glowing. Things look normal … except for him.

I look around the store and spy three pale figures, flickering like projections. They stand frozen as the world moves around them. These are memories of Horacio. Three people have seen him here recently. Two of the projections are bent over the CD racks. The third is standing at the counter. That must be Beth's memory. Horacio is standing there, fishing in his pocket for money. He has dyed black hair and is wearing that same frayed brown coat. This is the brightest memory of him I have seen. It is recent. Strong. He made an impression on Beth's subconscious, even though, if you asked her, she would have no memory of him.