Mere mortals, p.20
Mere Mortals, page 20
“Do you want to see it?” Lina asked quietly.
Reg and I both leaned toward her. “What do you mean?” I asked.
Lina did not answer, but instantly, a scene filled my vision, and I could tell by the way Reg slammed back in his seat that he was seeing it too.
“How are you doing this?” I cried in wonder. “Without venom?”
“Some Ancients can touch minds without using venom.” She then assured us, “I cannot take your memories. I can only share my own.”
In front of me, I saw both the dark road through the windshield and also a different night, a different landscape—one of barren, rocky hills and a star-filled sky. Switching between the two visions was like shifting focus from something close to something far.
“This memory is not mine,” Lina said. “It is one that has been passed to me by others, to ensure it was not lost when the Elder Seat decided to bury the story.”
She went quiet then, and the volume in her memory seemed to turn up. I heard wind sweeping over the hills and a scrape of loose rock as feet climbed the hill. A woman came into view, her hair long and black, her body wrapped in furs. She carried a wooden spear in one hand and a bag fashioned out of some kind of animal pelt in the other. One moment she was alone, and the next, she was surrounded.
Six vampires circled, not attacking right away but toying with her, terrifying her.
“What poor form,” Reg criticized from the back seat.
Finally, one of the vampires lunged, his movements almost too quick to see, and a second later, he was gone, the end of the woman’s spear and a circle of smoke where his chest had been. The woman’s face lit up in alarm, but she did not stop moving, driving her spear through another vampire, then another, turning them each to smoke.
Exhausted by her efforts, she dropped her spear and collapsed to her knees, ready to succumb to the remaining three vampires. When the first vampire approached, she actually hugged him—just as Sal had described. But as her arms folded around him, he collapsed, his strength and speed gone. He rolled to the side, clutching his chest, and I knew exactly what he was feeling, that first pounding of a newly beating heart. Color appeared in his cheeks, and he breathed heavily in and out. The last two vampires watched in horror as their companion turned human, and the woman stared at her hands, knowing she had done it without knowing how.
The awe in her expression shifted quickly to a ferocious determination, and she stood, all exhaustion seemingly gone. She had only to reach for the two remaining vampires, and they were running away in fear.
The image faded, but the memory stayed, now belonging to me and Reg, just as it belonged to Lina, even though none of us had seen it with our own eyes.
“It was self-defense,” I observed. “That’s how her slayer powers emerged.”
Lina’s smile was grim. “Imagine if immortals knew the true origin of slayers. It makes them look like victims-turned-heroes, instead of the villainous vampire killers our kind make them out to be.”
“True,” I said. “But covering it up seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to keep vampires from going soft on slayers.”
“It’s politics,” Reg said, and Lina nodded.
“The Elder Seat has worked hard to send the message to vampire-kind that we are not monsters but merely a superior species, top of the food chain. The truth I’ve just shown you complicates that narrative.”
“You would almost think the Elders themselves would want to forget,” Reg said. “Let the town grow and develop, bury this moment forever.”
“It’s a reminder that we are not invincible and that there is a punishment worse than true death,” Lina said. “But I think your point is well made, Reg. It’s not exactly a proud moment for immortals, which is why I believe vampires don’t personally inhabit the area.”
“Present company excluded,” Reg said.
Lina conceded that with a smile.
“The Elders built a few homesteads to lend legitimacy to their land claims in the early days,” she said. “When they started using slayers for mortal punishments, the homesteads became a convenient location for new humans to adjust. Eventually, it turned into a little village, and the Elders named it Nowhere. They thought the place was so insignificant it was almost invisible, so I guess they thought the name was funny.”
“Well, joke’s on them,” I pointed out. “It may be small by today’s standards, but it’s not invisible.”
“And that is precisely the problem. They worry it’s already too large, so they’re looking to take it back. They’ll forge whatever documents and perform any memory fades needed to take ownership of all the land in and around the town, so there won’t be any place left for humans.”
I groaned. “And then they’re just going to hand it to the Bloods. What a waste.”
“The Blood Clan is coming,” Lina said. “You can help with the migration and let the Elders clear the village before they get here, or you can refuse and watch what happens when the Bloods arrive. I promise you, this way is more humane.”
“The Elders promised no lives would be taken,” Reg said. “You don’t trust them?”
“I trust the council to do as they promise on Halloween. I don’t trust what comes after—that they can control a village full of Blood vampires.”
“The Bloods,” I grumbled. “Can’t we just run them all through Sal’s fence and see how they like being human?”
Lina laughed. “Now that is something I would like to see!”
Two hours later, with a thin dawn light creeping over the fields, Lina’s car rolled to a stop outside that very fence. The soft pop of gravel under her tires and Reg’s soft snore were the only sounds left of the endless night.
“What will you tell Sal?” Lina said.
I sighed. “As little as possible.”
The tricky part wouldn’t be keeping a secret from the slayer but figuring out how to get him to play his part. It was the final promise we’d made to the Elders—to keep the slayer home on Halloween.
That particular deception turned my stomach in knots, but, of course, it was the only option. He may have been a loner, but this was still his home, and he’d die before seeing it overrun with vampires, especially the Blood Clan.
“Sal would do anything to protect Nowhere,” I said.
“He’d do anything to protect you.”
“From what? Eternal life?”
“He doesn’t see it that way.”
Lina’s head dropped back in the seat, her face turned toward the cottage with a faraway expression.
“You still love him,” I said.
“Worse. I miss him.” She pointed to the cottage. “He’s right there, and I miss him.”
“You can see him anytime you want. He says the fence probably won’t even work on you. Or I could bring him to All Hours . . .”
“No!” She snapped. She took a steadying breath, just like a human would, and it looked so natural I almost believed she needed the oxygen. “It’s hard to see him. Watching him age is painful. Every day, every year, closer to an end—a real end.”
“He’s a stubborn ass for not letting you turn him,” I said.
“I’ll give you stubborn ass, but you have to understand that he made me an offer too. We both refused.”
“But his offer isn’t fair,” I protested. “Turning mortal on purpose is like . . . like committing suicide!”
“Some days I want to take him up on the offer,” Lina confided. “At least then we would pass the days and years together. The more he ages, the further away from me he gets, and one day, it will be too late.”
I tried to imagine Dexter growing older without me, becoming an adult, a husband, a dad and, eventually, an old man like Sal.
My voice came out in a hush. “And when that day comes, the day when it’s too late to change your mind . . . what then?”
Lina cast one more wistful gaze at the cottage, as if she could see right through the walls to the man sleeping inside.
“It took three thousand years to find him. It will take an eternity to forget him.”
The way she said it, like she would spend that eternity drowning in sadness, almost made immortality sound unpleasant.
I unbuckled my seat belt, reaching around to shake Reg awake. A thin line of drool had escaped his mouth, and I added drooling while sleeping to my growing list of the worst things about being human. It was certainly one of the grossest bits.
We said good night to Lina and stepped out into the cool gray light of morning. She kept the car idling to make sure we got safely inside, putting it in gear only when the front door opened to reveal Sal on the threshold. I stood on the front porch, watching Sal watching Lina, until the sun broke fully over the cornfields, flooding the whole sad scene in a blaze of light.
And so the night ended as it had begun, with the slayer refusing to come out and the vampire refusing to come in. I supposed this was how it had always been and how it would always be—two worlds, sun and shadow, destined to stand on opposite ends of an eternal battlefield, lined with wooden stakes.
And in the middle were me and Reg, mere mortals tasked with gathering up humans for slaughter. To be fair, it was the nondeadly kind, but it still felt like a slaughter. Something would definitely die in the days to come, and it would be at least partially our fault. But as long as human lives were spared, then wasn’t the death of a place called Nowhere a fair price to pay for immortality?
Gravel crunched under the tires as Lina’s car finally pulled away, steering into the sunrise. I watched it go until it was swallowed up in a cloud of dust.
We couldn’t stop what was coming. All we could do was pick a side, and with no good options, the best side to pick was our own. In the fight between immortal and mortal, eternal life versus inescapable death . . . I chose life.
I chose vampire.
Thirty
The Twilight Between
The decision seemed easy there on the cottage porch, at the end of the night I’d been awaiting for months—ever since we’d been stranded in Nowhere, Iowa. But the next day, surrounded by humans in the bright hallways of Hope High, what had been so clear was suddenly a little cloudy. I was deliberately late to school Monday morning, to avoid our daily gathering at Poe’s locker; I feigned illness to get out of gym class with the twins; I silenced my phone so I wouldn’t see Dex’s texts; and I squirmed all through French as I tried to picture Madame Bissett in some other classroom, some other school, some other town.
I had to remind myself over and over that we didn’t have a choice in what happened to Nowhere; our only choice was whether we played a part. The futures of Dex and Syd and Soph and Poe, of all our teachers and classmates, were inevitable. Our own destinies, though, still hung in the balance. Our actions might not make a difference for Nowhere, but they would mean life or death for me and Reg.
Still, I managed to avoid eye contact with anyone at all for the entire day.
But after school came the moment I could not avoid. Halloween was less than a week away, and I needed to move fast to make good on our promise to the Elders. All I had to do was push the party past dark and get as much of the crowd inside as possible. I had one meeting to convince the committee to make a few small changes.
“I know it’s last-minute, but I just think a Halloween party that ends when it gets dark is kind of lame,” I said. “I’m only suggesting an extra hour or two.”
“You couldn’t have thought of this before we printed the flyers?” Mark muttered.
The committee was spread out across an empty classroom, some perched on desks and others slumped into chairs. Sydney had propped herself up on a windowsill, the sunlight behind her turning her hair an electric shade of pink, her jaw working on a wad of gum, as always.
“It does seem more Halloween-y,” she said.
“But what about families?” Sophia countered from across the room, clipboard in hand. “Kids will want to get home for trick-or-treating.”
“I hadn’t thought about that,” I admitted.
Mark scoffed. “Of course not.”
I ignored him and paced the room, tracing a line between Sydney and Sophia, the only two votes on the committee that really mattered. “But I’m only talking about an extra hour. Plenty of time left for trick-or-treating. And I was also thinking we should move the awards at the end of the night into the gym.”
“What about the after-party dance?!” cried a red-haired girl whose name I’d never bothered to learn.
“We can still do that,” I said. “After the announcements. But everyone will be able to see and hear better in the gym, and we can make a big deal about the winners, let them walk up the risers to get their prizes, maybe drop some balloons or shoot some confetti. . . .”
“So now we have to buy confetti?” Mark complained.
I made a mental note to push him in front of the first Elder I saw on Halloween. They wanted Nowhere? They could start with Mark.
“That could get pretty tight,” Sophia pointed out, ever practical. “The gym is big, but it will be packed with the whole town in there.”
“Exactly,” I said. “It will look so much bigger inside!”
Sydney popped her gum. “I see what you mean.”
She did?
“It’s the fiftieth anniversary, and we’re just doing the same old thing.”
I seized on that. “Right! We need to make a splash. If we’re running the show, it needs to be the biggest one this town has ever seen. It’s all about the body count . . . I mean . . .” I cast around for a different phrase. “I’m just saying, bigger is better.”
“Longer hours could help raise a little more money,” Sophia relented. “Extra time for raffle-ticket sales and other fundraising booths. But only if people are willing to stay.”
“They’ll definitely stay if we keep the prizes until the end,” Sydney said. “Everyone’s always dying to see who wins.”
Her words sent a tiny chill down my body. No one would be dying, I reminded myself.
Sophia tapped a pen against her clipboard. “What if one more hour puts us over the top?” she mused. “Record-breaking fundraiser for charity would look pretty good on a college application.”
Always with the college dreaming. See? In Nowhere, everyone was trying to get somewhere. I was just the pied piper helping them along.
“Okay, fine,” the redhead said. “But only if we agree that after the awards, we kick out the senior citizen set and still have an after-party.”
Everyone voiced their agreement while I chewed on a nail and pretended to notice something interesting on the floor. They would all have plenty of school dances in their future . . . somewhere else.
Sophia called for a vote, and then the committee got to work creating social media posts and updating the flyer. It had all been so much easier than I’d expected, with everyone just falling in line. That was the power of a queen bee. Too bad all my bees would soon forget I existed.
Reg reacted to my success with worse than his usual indifference. When I filled him in on the committee meeting, he grunted, “Great. Guess that’s that, then,” with a giant scowl. I didn’t get a chance to ask what was eating him before Sal interrupted and put us to work helping with dinner.
Later, we sat at the kitchen table, enjoying Sal’s famous chili for possibly the last time, and I waited to poke Reg until Sal took one of his “constitutionals” (a colorful term he used for taking a little too long in the bathroom that did nothing to tame the visual).
“You know we don’t have a choice,” I reminded Reg. I kept my voice to a whisper, even though Sal could never hear us over the bathroom fan.
“I know.”
“And you know our friends will be taken care of.”
“I know.”
“Including Poe.”
“Whatever.”
“Okay, what’s the problem?”
It wasn’t like Reg to be this surly, and I worried he wasn’t fully on board with our Halloween plan. Admittedly, I wasn’t fully on board with it myself, but it was us or everyone else. I hoped Reg could see we didn’t have any other options.
Sal returned then, and I jerked a thumb in his direction as he sat back down to his bowl of chili. “You’re as grouchy as this guy.”
“Hey!” Sal feigned offense, grasping his chest as if he’d been wounded. Then he dropped the show and nodded at Reg. “She’s got a point though. Something’s been eatin’ you since Minnesota.”
All Sal knew about our trip was that we had gained approval to return to immortality but not the when or the how, and he definitely didn’t know the price to be paid. He didn’t ask a lot of questions, but he made it clear that he blamed Lina for the whole thing. He seemed to think she had pulled some strings on our behalf.
Reg pushed his bowl away. “I apologize for my foul mood. I’m brooding over some recent disappointments.”
“Such as?” Sal asked.
I shot Reg a look. He’d better not reveal more than we discussed with Sal.
“Such as acquiring only an understudy role in Mr. Shakespeare’s comedy. Such as failing to bring home a trophy for the debate team.” He sighed. “I’ve always wanted a trophy.”
I stared at him, thunderstruck. That was what was bugging him? His failure to achieve human high school glory?
“Tough breaks,” Sal said. “But character building.”
Reg rolled his neck, shook out his limbs, and flopped back in his chair. It was the most teen he’d ever looked. “I know, you’re right. And Poe was right too. He probably would be better at debate than me.”
“Better than I,” I said, smirking at Reg as he looked up. But even a grammar joke couldn’t get him to crack a smile, so I added gently, “To be fair, Poe said he would be good at debate, not better.”
“He would be though,” Reg said. “Better at debate, better at theater, better at charming the teachers, better even in some of our coursework . . .”
I leaned forward, elbows on the table. “I’m not a relationship expert or anything, but it seems like you shouldn’t be in competition with your boyfriend.”
What I really wanted to say was that it seemed like he was pushing Poe away now to avoid a painful goodbye later, but I didn’t dare voice that in front of Sal.
