Vassa in the Night (16 page)

He smiles back and I stroke my swans; the conversation seems to disturb them a little. “My parents? I can tell you don't actually care.” He doesn't seem to mind that, though. “They're at home, on a sofa, being so well-adjusted that they can barely have a conversation. They've worked hard to give me an upbringing better than what these
ghetto
kids get, and I should show I appreciate that. Constantly. See why I'd rather hear about yours?”

I see too well, really. “Oh, like tourism? A visit to the far-off land of dysfunction? Seriously, don't you get enough of that with Lottery?”

I expect a burst of pissy defensiveness in response, but no. He smiles serenely. It occurs to me that he didn't ruffle much during the chaos last night, either. “Actual person actually talking about stuff that matters.
Not
what you get with Lottery. So which is the gone one? Parent, I mean.”

“You don't see fit to ask why I'm sitting in a pile of bandaged swans?” I say. “Just wanna cut straight to the gruesome biography?”

“Swans,” Tomin says, grinning outright now. “I noticed that. We
are
in the BY's parking lot, though, so it's kind of how things go. So about the parents?”

“Mom dead, dad gone,” I concede. “Unless you can think of other ways I might have come to misplace them. I'm totally open to suggestions.”

“Prison gone?” he asks. “Or girl gone?”

I feel confident that he does not really want the answer to that question, and I don't particularly want the story getting around, either. If my dad is still alive—and I've got no way of ever finding that out—then what is he doing tonight? Knocking over a garbage can, sniffing a poodle's ass? Lottery would probably find the whole business very entertaining indeed. “Absent gone. Long gone. Hey, ask about our bandaged swans! They're on special!”

He just tips his head and considers me; warm, but still serious. He seems a lot nicer now that he's away from his asinine friends. “I'm wondering what I'd have to do to give everyone total amnesia. I mean something bad enough that they'd forget me completely, and they'd even forget what I did to
make
them forget. Maybe they'd just barely know that there had been someone around with my name, but it would all be kind of vague.… That doesn't sound easy.”

“It's easier than you think,” I say, and there's a little spike of bitterness in my voice. “My dad left all of us highly motivated to erase him from our minds as thoroughly as possible.” I'm slipping, saying too much; in a night this deep and strange the boundaries start to blur. Something about the glimmering crimson blots and the relentless dark makes it hard to believe that either of us will remember a word of this conversation in the morning, and anyway I'll probably be dead before breakfast. That makes tonight pretty special, but even so we're overdue for a new subject. “What brings you to BY's, anyway? You're not going in there again, are you?”

He's still studying me, and since he's facing toward BY's the sweep of its windows lights up his gray-green eyes, luminous against his dark skin. Like a lot of girls I have a soft spot for the tousled hair, too. The snow around him glows neon blue. “I was planning to go in. Because that's where I thought you'd be. Even though … Was that as close as I think it was? With Lottery?”

“Lottery came within a hair of improving New York's gene pool,” I agree. “And if I'd known the crap your crew was going to pull with the money I absolutely would have let nature take its course. It would have been kinder in the long run, right?”

He doesn't take that up, but his mouth tenses like there's something he's not sure he should say. “I asked her about you.”

“Right.” Of course he did. “Why do I feel so confident that she didn't have anything good to report?” I'd like to ditch this subject, too, really. There are so many topics I'd rather avoid that sometimes it seems like I can't talk for more than five minutes with anyone—except for Erg, of course. And maybe Chelsea. I can never afford to make friends since they all have this awkward habit of asking questions. Should I be worried about that?

“Not much of it was good,” Tomin agrees politely. “She talked about what a klepto you are. And she said no one at your school likes you and that you ignore everybody anyway, because you're so stuck up. And that your mom was some kind of big-deal painter.” He delivers the last line cautiously, watching to see how I'll react. “Am I bugging you? Talking about this?”

Nice that he cares, I guess. Chelsea and Stephanie accepted ages ago that questions about Zinaida were strictly off-limits. That I might freak out and start yelling or crying if anyone even said her name where I could hear it.

But tonight might be my very last chance to talk about her, and maybe Tomin will remember just a little bit of who she was when I can't anymore. Whenever I manage to forget for a moment what's coming in the morning one of those corpse heads seems to float across my vision like a balloon for a baby demon. Talking is a welcome distraction. It almost stops me from noticing how truly scared I am.

“Zinaida,” I say aloud. It's the first time in years I've let that name escape my lips. Reckless and raucous and wasted and traffic-stopping Zinaida, who just barely got it together enough to give me a magic doll before she died. “That was her name. And I know my stepmom thought I was stuck-up after I moved in with her and my sisters, but that was really just culture shock. See, if there isn't someone in a pink velvet suit passed out in a pool of vomit, it just doesn't feel like home to me.” I'm trying to be funny but my voice is all wrong, strained and skittish. “She really wasn't that good of a painter, but she did get shows and stuff. I wonder why?”

“You mean she looked like you?” He's smiling again.

“Prettier. Art critics used to follow her around on their knees, salivating. And she was … like, charismatic. Made a lot of noise, knew everybody, kind of all over the place when she was talking. Full of ideas, wore crazy outfits. Rainbow-glitter eyelashes. Guys swooned.”

Zinaida is such a vivid presence, even in memory, that for an instant it feels like my words could become a current strong enough to sweep me away from here and back to the past.

Tomin nods, taking in my baggy, battered, blood-spattered clothes, the huge cargo pants and huger jacket, my snarled filthy mass of purple hair. “You don't actually like looking like you do, right? That's why you try to hide it.”

“Why
would
I like it? Both my parents were knockout gorgeous, and it was basically like they went around with death rays shooting off them. Their faces were totally a destructive force. They screwed other people up and they screwed themselves up. So even if I've only inherited a fraction of that, I mean, it still doesn't seem all that fabulous.” I'm talking too much, too fast, too angrily. It's as if even mentioning Zinaida makes me act a little like her. “I should probably only date blind guys. That way it wouldn't be an issue.”

I'd kind of forgotten about the motorcyclist, but now when he buzzes by I have the distinct impression that his orbit might be shrinking a little. His opaque visor reflects curls of BY's tangerine light. Pangolin called him the
blind watchman,
but I wasn't thinking of him, I swear it.

“Or, you know, you could give somebody credit,” Tomin suggests. It takes me a moment to remember what he's talking about. “For trying to see past the obvious shit.”

“No one does,” I say, a little bitchily. “Not just with me. I mean in general. It's like the obvious shit cancels out everything else. Why else does everyone put on such a big show of being
somebody
?”

“Is that what I'm doing?” he asks. “Putting on a show?”

“You were last night,” I snap. “The moon crackers? Remember? To prove how well you fit in with the most messed-up people from my school, and that you were just as much of a jerk as the rest of them? Good job. You had me totally convinced.”

For an instant he looks embarrassed, then in the next his face changes into a don't-go-there smirk. “Extreme Shopping. Not that many people are into it. It's dumb to try it alone, so when Lottery says they're going on an expedition I say I'm in.”

“Or you could just not do it at all,” I suggest, and nod toward a particular head hovering over us. “You see that kid up there? Joel Diallo? I knew him. I bet some asshole dared him to go in and buy something, and he was desperate to prove that he wasn't just a repressed geek after all. Because that was what was
obvious
about him, and who was going to bother, I don't know, actually finding out—”
who he was,
I'm going to say. But I don't, because Tomin hasn't even glanced toward Joel. He's staring down at his knees instead and his face is going greenish. “Um, Tomin?”

A truly nauseating idea bobs up into my mind: maybe the Extreme Shopping kids have some kind of initiation ritual. Lottery did say that they'd all done one solo run, and what else would that mean? Maybe Tomin was there. Maybe he was part of what happened. I suddenly picture him laughing with Lottery out in the parking lot, waiting for Joel to come back with his damned trophy. Until they heard him screaming, and ran home to pretend they'd had nothing to do with it.

God, and I'd almost started to like him. “Did you know Joel, too?” I ask, and the sick edge in my voice makes it really, really clear what I've been thinking.

“Vassa…” Tomin starts. Ooh, is it confession time? “Look, why are
you
here? You know the score. And don't tell me you need the money that bad.”

Ah. Changing the subject. My upper lip hikes. “I'm not here for money. It's kind of an unpaid internship.”

“At first I thought you just wanted to be, like, part of something magic. Even if it was dangerous. But that's not it, right?”

His tone is vulnerable, searching; it almost makes me think that my suspicions are horribly unfair. But I don't feel like explaining my situation, especially since it might become tricky to skirt the subject of my impending execution. My swans almost seem like they know what I'm thinking because two of them rear up from the drowsy huddle to wrap their long necks protectively around my shoulders, touch my lips with their bills. I look back at the feverish orange glow of BY's, dancing as always with brisk swaying steps. It seems like Pangolin has been in there for kind of a long time and I'm starting to get worried.

“I'm here because I have to be,” I tell him, pretty curtly. “And considering that you're all about having
actual conversations,
I can't help wondering why you haven't answered my question. About Joel. Or does he not count as
stuff that matters
?”

Tomin looks at me with widened eyes. His jaw is clenched, his knuckles pale and bulging. Through all the insanity last night he never once got this rattled.

If he didn't help kill Joel, then I'm pretty sure he knows who did.

Something roars past us, much too loudly: the motorcyclist is definitely circling in a much tighter loop than he was before.

“Joel counts,” Tomin says at last. “He mattered.”

“Yeah?” I say. “Care to elaborate? Or, you know what? I honestly don't expect to survive for too long myself. Why don't you go find a girl who has a life expectancy of at least a week? I mean, at a
minimum.
” Then I stop talking abruptly because I've spotted something disturbing. Just beyond the borders of my personal swan heap a trail of tiny oval dents leads away into the night.

Footprints. I feel for Erg automatically, even though I already know she's gone. I'll have to extricate myself from my swans and try to follow her.

Tomin's on his feet, looking in a different direction than the one where Erg disappeared. “Vassa!” he yells suddenly. “Watch out!”

I see his hand reaching down, trying to catch my arm. He doesn't manage it, though, because the swans are suddenly rising up in a buffeting cloud around me, their broad strong wings wheeling in all directions. Enormous pulses of air drum at my face and there's a noise like flags in a storm. I throw my arms over my head and try to stand, but I'm too wing-pummeled, white-blinded, disoriented by the thrash of their necks. Black webbed feet scrabble at my face and I hear Tomin shouting desperately over a growling blast, and then the swans sort of peel back and a seething wall of black takes over my vision. It's coming right at me and there's no time to run.

The motorcyclist. He's about to crash right into me.

 

INTERLUDE IN WOOD

WINTER, SIX YEARS EARLIER

“Maybe your daughter would be happier with the money?” the old woman suggested roughly. She turned a crude wooden cylinder in her hands. It was the heart of a cherry tree that once grew on a stillborn girl child's grave, then the wood had been boiled in her parents' tears until the salt blanched it to a pale gold. It was already imbued with tantalizing power, and she wondered how her visitor had gotten hold of it. “You invest your money in some nice stocks for the little one now, she grows up, and for a surety it comes in handy. She sees you were thinking of her. That's what a smart woman would be doing, Zinnie.”