“Ely?” she whispered.
“Yeah?” he asked, his voice sleepy.
“Did Carter tell you about my sister?” She had tried not to think about Mel and that damn gene, but this was her reality now. She couldn’t hide from it anymore.
“Mel? The autistic one?”
Back in the Before, it had annoyed her when people narrowed their description of Mel to that one adjective. Now, hearing her described as autistic seemed better than what she was now:
“Yeah, sure.” Ely sounded more alert now. Almost cautious. “He mentioned her.”
“He told you what happened? With Sebastian?”
She heard the nearby rustling of Ely stretching and sitting up again. “Yeah. Sebastian turned her.”
“Right.” She swallowed, because it felt like her heart was going to pound its way up through her throat. And that pounding heart hid something other than fear. Shame, maybe. Dread, certainly. She spoke fast while she had the courage to. “The fact that he exposed her and she turned, it means she has the regenerative gene. She and I are twins. Identical. So I have it, too. That means if—”
“I thought you didn’t believe in the pity kill.”
“This is different,” she said.
“Got it.”
“If I get bit by a—”
“That’s not gonna happen,” he said, but there was no conviction in his voice. Only resignation. He knew as well as she did that he was making groundless reassurances.
“But—”
“If it does, you don’t have to worry.” She heard him sigh. When he spoke, his voice was serious and for the first time, she felt like she could actually trust him. “I’ll do the right thing. I’ll go for the pity kill.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Mel
Things change after the night with abalone sky. Sebastian decided to teach me to hunt Ticks. I don’t fight him anymore. I hardly need to talk—Sebastian talks enough for the both of us. He lets me keep my rhymes. Perhaps he knows how I need them.
However much I don’t want to rely on him, I must. He is the kaleidoscope through which I must see the world. The view is fractured and confusing enough. Without him, I’d have no hope of making sense of it.
There is no cloud cover tonight. The abalone shell has been flipped over to reveal a sky so black it might have been painted in Indian ink, the stars just pricked in afterward like a child’s art project. The icy air nips playfully at my skin. Used to be that I never felt the cold. Now I’m cold all the time.
I long to go back to the house. To curl up on the sofa in front of the TV that doesn’t work. To stare at the blank screen. But he won’t let me. Besides, the gravy train is gone. He won’t feed me again and I must hunt or starve.
“What do you see?” he asks.
Everything.
Of course, I’ve always seen everything. In my Before, I saw so much more than anyone else. Dead screen pixels, freckles on the back of Ian Milan’s neck, a cow’s pores impressed in leather. Every split end in my hair. Every dot in the acoustical tiles in the classroom ceilings. I saw it all. Do I remember them so clearly because I heard them all, or did I hear them all because I saw them?
Now, I see more but hear less. Nothing sings now. Nothing even breathes. Except me and Sebastian. His music is louder every day. I never heard it when I was moping, but now it rings in my ears, almost making up for so much other silence. I had expected something darkly complex, a never-ending Beethoven symphony. The seventh, maybe. With layers and movements and emotional connotations I barely understand. With passion and depth. Instead, he is an ancient tribal beat and I find myself dancing to his rhythm.
Even now. Even when I don’t want to. Even when I resist, I dance.
“What do you see?” he asks again.
I make myself look again. It’s not what I see; it’s what I should be looking at.
We are outside of town now. Which town, I don’t know. The houses are small and thin here. More Baltic Avenue purple than Boardwalk blue.
This house, the door is ripped off and dangling. The frame splintered, not just at the dead bolt, but like a cartoon doorway a monster forced its way through. The weedy green has been trampled—not all over, but from the woods behind the house to the door. Like the path the neighbor’s dog wore in their lawn from food bowl to doghouse.
I look at Sebastian. “Birds of a feather nest together?”
He looks exasperated for only a second before smiling. “Yes. I think so, Melly. They’re out now, but they’ll be back. We can wait here for them or go out and hunt them. You choose.”
Mel the girl would never choose to hunt anything. Mel the girl couldn’t kill a cockroach because she couldn’t stand the crunch or the tinny sound of its death.
But excitement dances along my nerves and I nod. “Hunt.”
Sebastian’s tribal beat picks up and he smiles. “Good girl.”
I am already trotting off into the woods after them when he stops me.
“Not yet. First, how many are there?”
I look at the house. The yard. The dog path. Then the house again. I move toward the house, but he stops me.
“No. Don’t go look in there for clues. Actually finding a nest like this—that was lucky. You won’t be lucky next time. You can’t rely on that. Figure it out on your own.”
I’m supposed to just guess?
“Don’t frown at me like that,” he chides. “I’m not asking you to just pick a number at random. You should be able to tell, to sense it. What did Carter always call it?”
I hum a few bars of “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” to help him out.
He nods. “That’s right. My spidey sense. You have one, too. So use it.”
This I don’t believe at all. I’m not known for my sense. Common sense. Number sense, book sense. Sense of humor, least of all. Spidey sense seems too far-fetched for me to be fetching Ticks.
But I try.
I close my eyes and reach out through the moist, heavy air. Through the scent of honeysuckle and the musty, mold scent of decaying leaves in the underbrush. I wait for a new smell. A musky whiff of pheromones. Of the dogs that wore the path through the grass. It doesn’t come.
I open my eyes growling in frustration.
He only laughs. “Giving up so soon? Poor, Kitten.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“Of course you don’t. All your life people have done things for you. Now that something requires you to actually work, you’re baffled.”
His words sting, so I sting back. “You are useless as a teacher. This must be the real reason you don’t turn vampires.”
For an instant, his gaze hardens. Then he smiles, a grating smirk. “Very well, I’ll talk you through it. I’ve told you before that vampires are territorial, yes? We can sense when we are near one another. Indeed, we cannot ignore it. We feel one another’s presence. It’s rather . . . annoying.”
“Like you?” I ask.
He makes a low growling sound in his throat and his voice is suddenly serious. “No, Kitten, not merely like me. Like a berserker rage. Like a force so primal it takes every ounce of energy not to kill everything in sight.”
