I made a slow turn to the left, then to the right, seeing nothing but bushes and trees. Finally I spun around. The road behind me was empty. I told myself the sun was making my skin sensitive. But I knew better.
I walked on, slowly, measuring the intensity of my reaction with every step. Gradually my skin calmed again. Whatever had been watching me had moved on.
After the gate, the dirt path to the house curved to the right, and Grace bounded down to meet me. We came around the final curve and there stood the house, only its front limestone wall intact. A savory smell came from the kitchen, one of my mother’s astonishing soups—garlic, cucumbers, basil, and tomatoes, as well as red wine vinegar and lashings of Sangfroid crystals and the tonic that kept us from drinking human blood.
Yes, we still had the urge to drink blood. I couldn’t tell you which appetite was stronger, which one propelled me home.
At lunch I handed my mother the pages I’d printed. Only the two of us sat at the table. Her friend Dashay, who co-owned the property, and Dashay’s boyfriend, Bennett, were in Jamaica to attend a funeral. They’d be back in a week.
“So much speculation,” she said, after she’d read them. She said she’d called the state agricultural office a few minutes before I’d come home, and left a message on their voice mail.
I told Mãe about the girls I’d met at the post office.
“What are their last names?” she asked.
I didn’t remember.
“What do their parents do?”
“That never came up,” I said. Did she think I cared about such things?
I was going to tell her about the man in the van when she pushed her chair back from the table. Her shirt was stained (with tomato juice or tonic?), her auburn hair had fallen down completely, and her eyes had the worried cast that made them seem darker. But her skin glowed as if it were made of pearl dust. She was as beautiful as ever.
She smiled, as if she appreciated the compliment. “I’m glad you found some friends,” she said. “It’s lonely without Dashay and the horses.” And the bees. And Raphael, she thought.
Yes, I missed Dashay. And I missed the bees, and the horses, too. They’d stay at a friend’s farm in Kissimmee until our own stables were rebuilt.
And yes, I missed Raphael. I missed my father most of all.
Some voices have undernotes of rusty hinges. Others hint of water gurgling down slow drains. But most vampires’ speech is melodic, measured, sometimes as lyrical as a song. I guess it’s because our sense of hearing is so acute. We can hear our own voices, and most mortals don’t pay attention to their own.
After lunch I’d taken a nap. I must have been asleep for hours, because when I opened my eyes, the light in the room had turned blue-gray. The wrinkled ceiling overhead reminded me of the underbelly of an ocean floor. From outside, voices drifted in, fluid and fluent as music. My mother’s voice counterpointed that of her best friend, Dashay.
I pushed my hair away from my face and sat up. Their voices floated through my open window.
They sat outside in what remained of the moon garden. Once, pale night-blooming flowers had filled the circular borders behind the benches. But the hurricane left bare roots, broken stems, and piles of leaves and debris. The benches, upended against the house during the storm, now were set face to face. The sun must have just slipped beneath the horizon, because the sky had turned indigo—not blue, not quite violet, but a color in between. The color of secrets, I thought.
My mother, facing me, sat slumped in her chair, listening.
Is it wrong to eavesdrop? Of course. But if you’d seen the unhappiness on my mother’s face, you wouldn’t have been able to resist. I did resist listening to their thoughts.
Dashay’s words poured out in clusters so fast that they ran into each other, and she spoke with an accent and lilt I’d heard only hints of before.
“Then I told them, I told them no, how can you be so quick to judge, but they do not listen, they are all against me, they tell me to go, and then I look for Bennett, I go after him, I look all through the trees, but he’s not there, he’s not there.” Her shoulders were shaking.
I didn’t want to hear any more. Bennett had been Dashay’s true love, or so I’d thought. He was a tall man with broad shoulders and a beautiful smile. I’d watched them dance one moonlit night in our garden, turning and dipping, their hands clasped, and I’d thought, Someday, I want to have what they have.
I didn’t want to hear any more, but I couldn’t stay away. From the house’s west side, still unfinished and open, I could see Dashay’s face.
She was crying. I’d read the expression that tears “well,” but I’d never seen it happen before; tears continually reached the lower brims of her eyes and overflowed, streamed down her face. Her white skirt was streaked gray with tears. And she said words I didn’t understand: “Duppy get the blame, but man feel the pain.”
My mother left her bench and bent over Dashay, wrapped her arms around her, pulled her out of the chair. They stood, holding each other in the ruined garden. The sky turned from indigo to midnight blue to black.
I turned away, surprised (but not for the first time) that I felt jealous of their friendship.
The next morning, I awoke with the sense that everything was normal. The blue plastic ceiling seemed to breathe with the wind, the air smelled of sawdust, and the tapping of hammers broke the rhythm of “Iron Man,” a song the radio played at least once every day.
But when I looked outside, I noticed something new. In the moon garden, all around the chair where Dashay had sat, bloomed tiny white flowers. Her tears had been their seeds.
Chapter Two
After breakfast my mother led me outside, handed me a hammer, and introduced me to Leon, a member of the framing crew, who showed me where to put the nails.
We were nailing plywood to two-by-fours, don’t ask me why. I’m sure Leon would have told me if I’d asked. My mind wasn’t on what we were building. I wanted to be inside. Dashay would be getting up soon, and she and Mãe would be talking. I wanted to hear the details.
But no, I had to help rebuild the house. It felt like being outside a movie theater or a playhouse; all the drama was on the inside, and I was left to imagine the plot.
Leon offered me some of the lemonade in his thermos. He was a muscular man with a deep suntan, dark eyes, and multicolored tattoos of knives and roses along his arms and neck. The rest—I just knew he had more—were covered by his T-shirt and jeans.
“How old are you?” he asked me abruptly.
“Fourteen.”
“Fourteen going on thirty.”
My father had told me that. Some days (usually when I felt tired), I looked much older than others.
The lemonade tasted tart yet sweet. I watched blisters on my right palm raise and almost at once fade away, but I quickly closed my hand so that Leon wouldn’t see. I figured he didn’t know we were vampires, and Mãe had taught me not to flaunt the fact.
The radio played a song called “Love Bites.” Leon said, “Ain’t that the truth.”
Quitting time was at five. I ran into the house and almost collided with Dashay. She wore a saffron-colored caftan and her long hair was wrapped in a green silk scarf. She looked aloof and regal. But she gave me a hug—not nearly as emphatic as her usual hugs—and a strained smile.
“I missed you,” I said.
Tears appeared in her caramel-colored eyes.
“Enough crying.” Mãe’s voice was brisk. She wore a dark blue dress and a string of lemon-colored beads. “Hurry and change, Ariella. Put on a dress. We girls are going to town.”
Happy hour at Flo’s Place wasn’t happy that night.
The regulars sat at the bar and in the booths, glasses of red wine and Picardo in their hands. But not everyone drank the red stuff. Here and there you could spot a glass of beer or white wine, mostly in the hands of mortals.
No one at our table was talking. Mãe and Dashay looked like beautiful statues.
So it came as a relief when the door to Flo’s was flung open and Mysty and Autumn strutted inside. They walked in short steps, leading with their bellies, prominent thanks to low-slung jeans and abbreviated, tight tops. I adjusted a strap of my cotton sundress and thought I must look about ten.
Autumn and Mysty had done something to enlarge their hair. Their sunglasses were pushed back on their heads, and their eyes were lined and lashed and shadowed. Autumn glanced at me, gave me a nod and a wave. But they didn’t come over. They headed straight for the bar.
Mãe and Dashay didn’t notice them at first, but I watched as the girls tried to order beer.
After some exchanges with the bartender, Autumn said, “Ain’t our money good here?” in a high-pitched voice that cut through Johnny Cash singing “Ring of Fire.” Everyone in the place stopped talking.
“This ID is fake. I can’t serve you.” The bartender, whose name was Logan, was tall and good looking, with dark red hair. He was one of us. “We’d lose our license,” he said.
Autumn turned and looked directly at me. “Well, you served her.”
A half-full glass of Picardo sat innocently before me on the table.
“Who are they?” Dashay said.
Mãe said to me, “Those are the girls you met the other day?”
I nodded. Autumn kept staring at me, waiting for me to say something, to come to their defense. But what could I say?
Logan laughed, and some of the tension went out of the room. “She’s drinking Picardo. There’s no alcohol in that. You want to try some?”
He poured an inch of Picardo into a shot glass and handed the glass to Mysty. She looked at it dubiously, then raised the glass and shot the bright red liquid down her throat. Almost immediately she made a gagging sound and spat it onto the floor. “Gross!” she said.
“It’s an acquired taste,” I said. A few of the regulars smiled at me.
“You girls don’t want to be hanging around a dump like this,” Logan said. “You’d be more at home over at Murray’s.”
Without another word they left the bar, Autumn throwing me a look of contempt as they went.
Logan said something under his breath, and everyone close to the bar laughed.
“I always thought there was alcohol in Picardo,” I said. “There is.” Dashay took a long sip from her glass. “Plenty.”
My mother took Logan to task for lying to Mysty and Autumn. “You could lose your license for giving them Picardo,” she said, leaning her elbows on the bar.
Logan poured us another round. He grinned at Mãe. “I know. But the girl wanted a taste. Now she knows what bitter is.”
I wondered why we could drink so much Picardo and never get drunk. Mãe and Logan both began to speak at once: “Because we’re not—” They laughed. Mãe finished the sentence: “—susceptible to alcohol.”
I helped her carry the glasses back to our booth.