I wish I had a brother or sister, she thought. Someone to take charge. I don’t want to have to be responsible. I hate doing laundry. I hate having to remind Dad the phone bill’s due. Mom always looked after us. The old anger rose. She thumped her knee gently with her fist as if to subdue it. She thought she’d gotten over that. It’s not her fault, Zoë told herself. It’s stupid to think that. She’s not going away on purpose. But Dad’s going to be a vegetable. Who’s going to look after me?
A cold breeze swept through the park, and clouds blew across the early moon. Zoë pulled her denim jacket closer around her. It was time to get the heavier coats out from the storage closet upstairs. She shivered suddenly, as if ice trickled down her spine.
“It’s a beautiful night,” came a soft voice beside her.
She turned swiftly, heart pounding. A young man sat there. The lamplight outlined him against the dark bushes behind like a ring of frost around the moon. He smiled at her as a cat smiles, with secret humor. “You scared me,” she whispered fiercely. Who was this person invading her bench?
“I’m sorry,” he said, but he didn’t look it.
She recognized him then, from last night. As if he saw this he said, “We’re even now. You scared me.”
“Why should you be scared?” she demanded. “It’s you creeping up on people.”
“Why should you be?” he asked.
Zoë bristled defensively. “I don’t like evasive conversation.”
“Do you like any conversation?”
“No. I want to be alone.”
“I think you are alone.” He reached for her hand. She snatched it away and stood up. How dare he be right, then take advantage of it? He seemed surprised for a second, but then his smile deepened, and a dreamy look was on his face. “Please stay,” he said in tones soft as a lullaby. His eyes were huge, dark, and gentle. She hesitated for a moment. He seemed so understanding. Surely she could talk to him. Then her anger surfaced again. The manipulative jerk, she thought.
“I don’t know what you’re after,” she said, “but you can look for it somewhere else.” She turned and walked firmly away.
“It strikes me,” he called after her in a voice now with an edge to it, “that girls who sit alone in parks at night are the ones after something.”
She was so furious, she could have screamed. She almost turned, but no, she thought, that’s what he wants. She walked on. Her anger carried her home before she knew it. Strangely, it had made her hungry. She ate better than she had in weeks.
She hesitated once between mouthfuls with a feeling of dread. Was he weird? Would he have hurt her? No. He looked like an angel in a Renaissance painting. Could beauty hurt?
4
Simon
Simon watched the girl walk away, a cloud of anger around her. He was bemused. She had not responded correctly. He had started to moon-weave, and she had broken it. She had snapped it with anger. He was interested. He followed her.
He slipped gradually into a half state, nearer mist than form. It was easy—like dreaming, really—just let go of body and drift. His consciousness held molecules together with tendrils of thought. He blended with the shadows and became the air. She would never see. He flowed beneath trees, slid along walls, cut corners through dying autumn flowers. He always kept her in sight. She walked fast, shimmering the crisp air with her breath.
They usually came to him when his eyes softened with the moon, when he crushed his voice like velvet. They let him caress them. They tipped their heads back and drowned in the stars, while he stroked exposed throat and wallowed in conquest. Sometimes he let them go and allowed them to think it a dream. He left before they broke the spell of his eyes, to sit blinking and head-shaking in cold predawn wind. Sometimes the dark hunger awoke too strong to hold. He clenched them tight, sank fangs deep into yielding neck, and fed on the thick, hot soup of their life. He was lost in the throbbing ecstasy song of blood pumping, life spurting, until blood, horror, and life ebbed, and he abandoned the limp remnants to seek dark sleep.
He stood at the wooden gate, watching the girl enter a forest-green door with diamond windows. He trembled with desire. Lights came on in the house. He circled it, peering in windows—a peeping Tom, ecstasy denied. He inhaled details from the golden warmth he could never have: an Oriental carpet, an antique armoire, cream kitchen tiles, and a painting of bright, crazed, laughing girls. His eyes narrowed. The girls in the painting looked right at him. Just a painting, he chided, but he felt mocked, and an anger rumbled deep in his throat. The lights downstairs dimmed. A light came on above. She goes to sleep, he thought, and begrudged her rest when he had none.
He paced her garden with slinking gait, examining basement windows and garage doors. He could not enter unless invited, but he liked to know the ways in, and out, if needed. The animal was close to the surface tonight. It reminded him of when he first changed, when he roamed the woods like a beast for what seemed an eternity, mindless from shock. Threads of memory clung to him, though most was a blur. Images sparked bright at times; pictures frozen in the muted green light of the forest—savaged corpses of animals, or a gamekeeper crumpled and drained amid the fallen leaves, his head barely attached to his neck. Simon could not ever control it then, and his attack was fierce, made vicious by his own fear. It took a long time to regain the capacity to think. It took longer to leave the forest. But the forest had never left him. Tonight it echoed in him like owl cries, and pine needles rustling.
He marked his territory like a wolf, and urinated on the back-door steps. It helped a little. I know where you live, he thought.
He walked then. He walked long and far, beating the anger beneath his feet. The quiet, dream-laden suburbs gave way to the street life of the urban fringe. Here the streets pulsed with light from corner bars and pizza palaces, late-night video-game arcades, and record stores that seemed to never close. The hot boys stood on street corners, whispering promises of romance to girls in leather skirts who knew that they were lies. Groups of lonely people huddled together against the dark. He felt a kinship here. He was as separate as they amid the crowd. No one saw him. He was too much like the undernourished, ill-clad street waifs of this jangling street to catch an eye. A group of boys ran laughing down the sidewalk, one waving a shirt above his head, bare-chest drunk. Girls paraded bargain-store fashions, their bleached hair and bedroom eyes hiding the fear that they weren’t good enough. Soon the cold would force them inside, so they clutched at lost summer.
Simon drifted off the main road to the darker streets. He hummed pitch perfect a song he had gathered along the way. It was one of the angry songs he enjoyed. He beat out its driving rhythm on his thigh as he walked. Occasionally he’d sing a phrase, when he remembered the words.
He paced the uneven pavement in front of row houses with peeling paint but well-scrubbed steps. Through one uncurtained window at a corner house he saw a woman on a man’s lap in a shabby chair. They were laughing at a game show on TV. He could have stood there unnoticed for an hour. Suddenly he wanted to smash the window and scream, “Look at me!” He wanted to be noticed. He wanted people to see him. It was dangerous, this want. It was mad. But sometimes he was afraid that he didn’t exist. Now and again someone recognized what he was. They had to die. If they didn’t, well … It was foolish not to think of protecting himself. There was no one who knew him, no one to say his name.
He turned a corner and startled a dog. They cringed and growled at each other. The dog’s hackles spiked, then it whimpered and ran. Simon walked on and found a weed-choked vacant lot. Its only inhabitant was an abandoned car. He sat on a ruined wall and gazed at the moon.
“Hey, boy!” A call from the high brick wall next door. A leg was flung over, and then a scruffy youth of about sixteen pulled himself astride it.
Boy, Simon thought sarcastically. He smiled in anticipation.
“Yeah, you!” came a deeper voice. Another youth, perhaps a touch older, stepped out from behind the car. He was a big
lout in jeans and a flannel shirt like a lumberjack.
A sneering boy in a leather jacket followed him. “This is our lot,” he hissed. He carried a half-empty liquor bottle and swayed slightly. His right hand flashed silver. Simon saw he carried a knife. Simon didn’t like long pointy things. They made him nervous. He didn’t like being nervous.
A scuffling announced the descent of the wall straddler, a thud his landing. The boys spread out and converged on Simon. He rose slowly from his perch, muscles tightened. The boys advanced.
“Where you from?”
“You ain’t from here.”
“Nobody here knows you.”
“Yeah,” spoke the wall climber. “And if nobody knows you, you ain’t nobody.” He giggled, a high-pitched, nervous sound, and wiped his hands against a ragged Ozzie Osbourne T-shirt.
Nobody. Even this scum called him nobody. Simon stepped toward the danger, into their net. They’d caught shark this time. He smiled.
“Pretty tough, huh?” said the big one mockingly.
The boy with the leather jacket settled his bottle into the crotch of two bricks. “Pretty stupid, you mean.” He tossed his knife from hand to hand. “You a retard or somethin’?”
“Yeah. He’s too dumb to be scared.”
Simon turned his back on the third boy, the one who had said that. He was a sheep. The big one was a bully, but the leather-clad one was trouble. He was crazy. He didn’t smoke weed, he smoked green. Simon could smell it on him. It reeked like burning plastic and it killed the brain. It made people think they couldn’t die.
“This is our playground, buddy.”
“Yeah, wanna play?”
Simon finally spoke. “Is that what you said to your mother last night?”
“Son of a …” The big one charged him, swinging meaty fists.
Simon stepped aside, quick as thought. The boy stumbled, looked confused, then turned like an angry bear to attack again. Simon stepped aside once more. His opponent breathed heavily. Simon smiled. Get the biggest one, and the rest often run. But he kept the crazy one in his sight all the same. You didn’t know about dusters.
They danced a lopsided waltz on the waste ground, and the big youth’s fury grew and grew. Then Simon stood still. The boy grabbed. He expected to miss but, to his surprise, found that the quarry was his. He panted and grinned. He had Simon’s arm in a crushing hold, as he prepared a blow. And Simon, who didn’t come up to his chin, clutched the boy’s belt with his free hand and lifted him into the air. The boy waved his arms like an insect and gurgled with fear. The boy in the jacket spat an oath but was frozen, enthralled. The other boy trembled but couldn’t move either. Simon threw his opponent then, an impossible distance. The boy sailed the air for a moment, then crashed in a pile of debris. The sound broke the spell, and Simon heard the third boy run.
But the boy with the knife laughed. He slinked forward, steel flickering in the streetlight. He had seen a fight or two, Simon surmised, but probably won through sheer viciousness, not skill. Best to deal with him as a cat does a rat—no play, snap it fast.
The boy was expecting another dance, not for his victim to walk right up to him. He hesitated a second, confronted with craziness greater than his, then he saw something in Simon’s eyes that made him lunge. He slashed wildly in fear, but too late. His knife went flying. His arm, captured for a moment, went limp, and searing, and useless. He backed away.
It was Simon’s turn to laugh; a sound dark and cursed. The blow he landed snapped the boy back and smashed him against the car. The boy started to slide to the ground, but slim white hands reached for him delicately and slammed him once more against the car. The third blow rendered him unconscious and flooded Simon with the sweet warm pleasure of the kill.
“Call me nobody?” he whispered, and his fangs slid from their sheaths. “Call me nobody?” he screamed as if in pain. He hoisted his victim up and tore the boy’s wrist open with a savage scissoring of teeth. He raised the boy’s arm and, with the pulsing blood, wrote wavering letters on the dingy primer of the car’s roof, I AM.
The dark, raw smell of blood intoxicated. He found himself embracing the boy and pulling the damaged wrist up to his mouth. Faintly, somewhere, he felt disgust. A distant echo cried for him to stop. But the blood call was too strong. He had almost placed a reverent kiss upon the hand when sirens screamed too close.
He pushed the limp body from him, but it seemed to cling. For a moment he felt trapped. Then it slid to the ground. But in the midst of panic a perverse whim took hold. He began to strip the jacket from the huddled form, struggling with the boy’s inert bulk, bloodying the lining, ripping a seam until it pulled free. Black and glittering, he had his prize. He clutched it to him, leaving its owner his life.
Then he was running. He fled past his first assailant, now staring with white-faced rictus fear, through the rubble of lost homes, out into the night, on and on through the streets, until he arrived in the quiet yard of a house with a dark green door.
He wrapped the bloodstained jacket about his shoulders and sank down beneath an azalea bush. He stared at her window until dawn.
5
Zoë
Zoë froze in the doorway, her clenched fist to her mouth. Her teeth dug into her knuckles. Anne Sutcliff sprawled over the side of the chaotic hospital bed. Her shoulders heaved. The sounds were unmistakable.
“Dad.” Zoë turned and clutched her father’s arm. “She’s throwing up.” The disrupted IV regulator beeped furiously.
Mom’s friend Carol, who’d come with them, squeezed Zoë’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, hon. I’ll get a nurse.”
Zoë’s father pushed by her and raced the few strides that took him to his wife’s side. “It’s all right, baby. It’s all right.” He smoothed back the hair from her face rhythmically.
“I’m sorry,” she moaned between retches.
When her father reached impatiently for a button at the bedside, Zoë saw that a few strands of dark hair still clung to his fingers. He shook them into the trash can, which was half full with needle covers and stained gauze.
The smell of the room was overpowering. She backed out of the door, the bile rising in her own throat. Her heart pounded. She wanted to run to her mother, but she couldn’t bear to stay and see her that way. Mothers are supposed to be strong, she thought. She’s supposed to take care of me.
A nurse bustled by her.
Zoë knew the treatment made her mother sick, but she’d never seen her this bad, so weak she couldn’t even make it to the bathroom. Zoë felt awful, embarrassed, like she was spying on something private.
Carol tried to put an arm around her, but Zoë shook her off.
I should go to Mom, Zoë told herself. She needs me. But she couldn’t go back into the room and face that sick woman. She leaned against the wall of the corridor in a cold sweat, shaking. Carol hovered close by, looking hurt and anxious.
This is stupid, Zoë thought. You wanted to help, to prove you belonged. Here’s your chance. Her mind argued logically, but her body refused to move. Finally, she began to edge toward the door. I could hold her hand, at least, she thought, and comfort her. I owe it to her.
But before she got there, her father came back out. He put his arms around her. “She’s a bit better now,” he said. “She might be able to sleep.” He sounded drained. She hugged back, relieved that the decision had been taken away from her, hungry for comfort, but he pulled away too fast.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll drive you both home.”
“I’ll stay, Harry,” Carol said. “I want to stay.” She smiled tentatively at Zoë. “Zoë, hon. Call me, okay? If you need something. You know you can.”
Zoë nodded vaguely—Carol meant to be kind—then followed her father, eager to get away, and ashamed of it.
On the silent trip in the car she began to feel guilty. I could have helped her, she thought. He didn’t give me a chance to get myself together.
“Are you going back?” she asked. br />
He nodded.
“I thought so.” It was like he wanted to keep her all to himself. Carol got to stay. She slouched in the seat beside him and dug her hands deep into her pockets. I’m sulking, she thought. Then, I don’t care. But she was being silly, and she knew it. He’d always been a wonderful dad, and he loved her too. But we never do anything together now, she thought, not even be unhappy together. He makes decisions without asking me, like I’m a little child.
Her hand found a small object in her pocket. She had discovered it on the back steps this morning when she took the garbage out, lying there spiky and shiny. Zoë the bird, the magpie, had picked it up, attracted by its sparkle. But she was late for school, and had shoved it into her coat pocket while she ran to gather her books, then forgotten it. She pulled it out to look at it again, rolling it between her fingers. Little points jabbed her. It looked like a star, a sort of stud. Funny how things get around, she thought. Go on, ask me what it is, she dared her dad silently, but he didn’t notice, so she shoved it back into her pocket.
“Drop me at Lorraine’s, please,” she asked as they pulled into the neighborhood. She tossed her notebook into the backseat before she got out of the car. She hadn’t even had a chance to read anything to her mother today, and her mother was her truest critic. “I’ll get it later,” she said. “Bye.” He smiled vaguely and pulled away, his mind already back at the hospital.
Lorraine looked pleased to see Zoë. “Hi, Zo. Just in time. I was thinking of going out.”
Lorraine will understand, she thought, and that triggered the tears, because she wasn’t sure. She collapsed on the couch, and Lorraine crouched in front of her, one hand lightly on Zoë’s knee, waiting for her to stop crying. Zoë pulled herself together. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t help it.” She told Lorraine what had happened at the hospital, briefly, simply. She didn’t mention the embarrassment, or the shame of not being able to respond.