Darkest Fear

  It all happened so fast that most of it was a blur. Tink completely changed in about twenty seconds. The tree branch dipped, and the enormous jaguar jumped twelve feet onto my balcony. With an ugly roar, Tink reared up on his hind legs, and I saw that the two cats were matched in size, wide paws spread, crushing jaws opened. A huge crack of lightning illuminated the porch, making Tink and the stranger look like giant shadow puppets, frozen for a split-second snapshot. Somehow my legs moved, and with stupefied animal instinct I backed through my window and dove beneath my high bed, although I knew that would be no protection at all.

  Covering my ears against the horrible sounds outside, I squeezed my face up tightly as if that would block out the knowledge of what was happening. Would someone hear them over the lashing violence of the thunderstorm? Surely someone would call the police. Would that be good or bad? Beneath my bed, I pressed my back against my wall, my hands curled so tightly over my ears that my nails hurt my skin. My breaths came fast and shallow—the last time I’d heard sounds like this had been the worst day of my life.

  Porch furniture crashed. Heavy thumps landed against the outside wall, making me wince. My heart beat so fast it felt like beetle wings in my throat. That haguaro was going to kill Tink, and I wasn’t helping. I had run, just like with my parents. Lightning made crisp, fleeting shadows in my room; thunder rolled through me, vibrating in the floor and wall. I curled up tighter, feeling like such a coward, wishing I would just pass out.

  Screams of rage and attack shook a whimpering sound from me. Despite my covered ears, I could hear them loudly, and I knew which snarls were Tink’s and which were the unknown jaguar’s. If this had been a normal house break-in, I’d have run downstairs and called for help. But who could help in this situation? Only another haguari. Like me.

  When they crashed into my room, roaring and howling, it was like having a car drive through my window. My eyes flew open, but I stayed huddled under the bed as they rolled together on the floor, falling against my armoire, sending my long mirror crashing to the ground.

  Stop it, stop it, stop it, I whispered, but what came out . . . was a soft growl.

  My eyes open wider I smell dust

  Look I have a paw a wide paw with long deadly claws

  I am jaguar again why

  Furniture is breaking

  I am under a bed I begin to crawl out

  I yell Tink I’m coming it is a roar

  I feel my strong muscles I smell jaguar me I smell Tink jaguar I smell a stranger

  I roar the strange jaguar stares at me it has death in its golden eyes

  My chest feels hollow I roar so loudly I shake the windows

  I go closer and raise a paw with sharp claws out

  The floor vibrates lightly someone is coming human footsteps

  I will fight I roar again and swipe at the stranger talons out like a steel rake

  He swings back at me I duck my anger is overcoming my fear

  “What’s going on here?” Matéo is here I am so glad

  “Vivi!” That is Aly she will help she is strong “Where’s Vivi?”

  I’m here! I growl

  The strange jaguar breaks free away from Tink’s fierce strength

  He runs outside he jumps off the balcony

  He jumps into the tree

  After a long time of fear and ugly sounds now it’s quiet

  Except for the rain

  And Tink’s heavy panting he is breathing hard

  Lightning makes sharp dark shadows on the walls

  Thunder rumbles like my growl through my belly

  Matéo and Aly are here they smell like not jaguars

  They smell like family

  My room is broken

  I go to Tink I make no sound we push our heads against each other

  Rubbing our scent on each other

  Tink lies down it is still raining the smell of rain is in my nose the wetness the damp breeze in my room

  I smell blood Tink is bloody there is blood on the wooden floor

  Tink has long slashes on his side more footsteps Dana

  “What the hell happened?” Dana runs in

  Matéo kneels by Tink

  I want to change back I want hands what is wrong with Tink

  How do I get back I want to cry but these eyes can’t

  How do I change I am stuck I am stuck

  I drop to the ground by Tink and put my head on my paws

  I do not want to be a jaguar I can’t do anything I have no thumbs

  “Tink, man, you okay?” Matéo says “Change back so I can check your injuries, okay?”

  “Vivi?” Aly kneels next to me she rubs my back her hand on my fur is electric

  I want to cry but I can’t I look at Aly I can smell a hundred Aly scents

  How do I change back? Sort of a weird growl-yodel–quiet roar

  Tink is changing he is smaller he smells not jaguar he has no fur

  Matéo brings his clothes Tink groans he puts on his shorts he smells like Tink he is not family

  Dana has a box she sits by him

  “Okay, hold still.” Matéo dabs at blood on Tink

  “She doesn’t know how to change back.” Tink points at me

  “Yeah—I heard.” Aly “I’m trying to figure out how to explain it. Though you’re very beautiful, like this.” She pats my shoulder “There aren’t that many of us who are all black.”

  I look down at my paws I look at my flank she is right I am black like night shadows

  A black jaguar my rosettes show only under bright lightning

  “Okay.” Aly “You feel both jaguar and human, right? You can understand me, but you could understand Tink as a jaguar. Right?”

  I look at her

  “There’s a place between my eyes, on my forehead. When I need to become human again, I focus on it. Aly is there, in my brain right there, and I latch on to the idea of being a person, being the person named Aly, and I clutch it.”

  Words just words I have an itch I lick my arm my rough tongue feels good

  “Yeah.” Matéo is putting something on Tink’s side the smell stings my nose my nose wrinkles “You sort of latch on to your human part. It’s like a third eye, in your forehead. Didn’t your parents tell you this?”

  I don’t know I don’t remember where is my forehead

  Aly laughs “You should see your face! Your eyes practically crossed!”

  I raise one lip I show Aly my long, long fang she stops laughing I feel laughter in her

  I want to change back where is Vivi I don’t know how to change I am lost forever I am trapped

  “You can’t do it, can you?” Dana is talking at me “Weird.” She looks at Matéo “I have some cuva rojo.”

  Matéo looks at me he shrugs he pats human Tink “I guess that would be okay. I don’t know what else we can do.”

  “She’s gotta learn.” Aly

  Dana leaves I hear her feet

  “Maybe we should start with her as a human.” Aly

  Dana is back she has a box she opens it she has a small thing

  “I’ll do her nose.” Dana sits in front of me she shows me something I don’t know what it is

  “This is a drug that will forcibly change you back into your human form. It comes from a plant in the rain forest. Our people have used it for thousands of years. I’m going to blow the liquid up your nose. It will feel weird, and the change is kind of abrupt, but it will change you back. Do you want to do it?”

  Words words words I don’t know

  “Do you want to try again yourself?”

  I am so tired what a long day I close my eyes I rest my head on my arms I get comfortable

  “Okay, I guess you better. It’s okay, Vivi. Everything’s okay, you hear me?” Aly rubs my shoulder it feels good

  Something cold touches my nose my eyes pop open

  Dana’s face is right there her lips puff liquid in my nose in my nose

  It is icky it smells very strong it is someh
ow familiar it is cold it is uncomfortable

  I leap to my feet snorting

  I sneeze three times

  A cold wave comes over me I crumple in on myself

  In rapid succession I lost fur, muscle mass, and the vision, hearing, and taste of a big cat. Less than a minute later I was shaking, feeling the smooth hardness of the wooden floor against my naked, clammy skin. Aly was ready with the cotton blanket from my bed, and she covered me up even before I was completely human.

  “Holy shit,” I managed, my voice trembling.

  “I know, it’s kind of harsh,” said Aly, patting my shoulder under the blanket.

  “Oh, my gods,” I moaned, struggling to sit up. My muscles felt like I’d just gotten off the rack. I was sure I’d feel a hundred times worse tomorrow.

  “Did you know that guy,  Vivi?” Tink asked, carefully easing back into his polo shirt.

  “No,” I said. What had happened?

  “I didn’t either,” said Tink. “He just came out of the blue and attacked. Man, that was some fight. The weird thing is that he wasn’t trying to kill me. There were a couple times when he could have tried to get his jaws around my head. But he went for my side instead.”

  The thought came to me clearly. “He was trying to get your heart.” The slashes along Tink’s left side said as much. Had he been after me, but Tink had been in the way? My spine tensed and went cold.

  “Why not just kill me, then, and take it?” Tink asked.

  We were all silent for a moment; then it dawned on me, the horrible truth. “He wanted you alive,” I said slowly. “He wanted the heart still beating.” The devastating memories of my parents flooded back to me—the deep cuts in my mom’s side, my dad’s chest split open. Oh gods, Papi had been alive . . .

  Jumping up, I staggered into my lightless bathroom and barely made it to the toilet before I threw up convulsively, tears finally streaming down my cheeks. Papi had been alive when his heart was taken. I couldn’t bear that knowledge.

  When I was done, I didn’t have enough energy to stand up. The whole day had been too much. Finally Aly tapped on the bathroom door and came in.

  “We’ll talk more about all this tomorrow,” she said, helping me stand up, tucking the blanket more tightly around me. “Rinse out your mouth.”

  I nodded and went to the sink.

  “You okay, Viv?” Matéo asked, back in the room, and I nodded wearily.

  “I mean, not really,” I amended. “Matéo—was that the person who killed my parents? He was here. I feel like he came here for me, or maybe for you, and Tink got in the way.”

  Matéo and Aly stopped and looked at me, concern on both their faces.

  “Remember how that guy tried to break into my house, two nights before I came here?” I reminded them. “Has a strange haguaro ever attacked anyone here before? Is it just since I’ve come here?” My voice was rising and becoming tenser.

  “I don’t know,” Matéo said solemnly. “It would be weird for him to come after me now, after a year and a half.”

  “Maybe he came for me,” I said, slumping against my tall bed. I pulled the cotton blanket around me more tightly.

  “Why would he be after you?” Aly asked. “Were your parents—did they know something? Does he think you know it too? I can’t figure out why your family would be targeted.”

  “I can’t either,” I said tiredly, and then a thought drifted into my brain. “You know, that was my birthday, my eighteenth birthday. My dad started to say something about a family book that I would get now that I was eighteen. But he never finished telling me what it was. Could it have had some sort of dangerous information in it?”

  “Well, the oldest kid in every family gets the family book when they turn eighteen,” Matéo said. “I have mine.”

  “My brother has ours,” Aly added. “It’s partly haguari history, and partly my family’s history. Like a practical jaguar handbook.”

  “I looked everywhere for mine, but didn’t find it,” I said.

  Matéo rubbed his forehead. “You know, I can’t even think straight right now. It’s almost three o’clock. Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m totally wiped out.”

  “We’ll lock everything up tight. I’m sure that guy won’t be back tonight, especially with most of us here.” Moving to my window, he pulled the outside wooden shutters closed and slid their metal bar through the hasp. The window itself, miraculously, hadn’t been broken, so now he pulled it down and latched it.

  With the power still out it made the room seem extra dark, and I thought about how clearly I had seen in the darkness as a jaguar. The room felt hot and stuffy, and the smell of blood seemed to overpower everything else. As I stood there, trembling and vulnerably human, the electricity came back on, flooding the room with unwelcome light. I saw the broken mirror, the furniture shoved aside, the gouges in the wood, Tink’s blood . . .

  “Oh, jeez,” I said in dismay. The AC hummed on, and cool, dry air flowed over us.

  Dana reappeared in my doorway, holding a broom and dustpan. “We’ll clean this up better tomorrow,” she said, throwing a towel over Tink’s blood. Quickly she swept the mirror glass up, clearing a path between my bed and the bathroom. “There. That’ll get you through the night.”

  “Thank you,” I croaked. With the blanket still wrapped around me, I climbed into my tall bed. Matéo tugged the bedspread over me. Aly gave my foot a last pat through the covers. My head felt like it weighed a hundred pounds, and it sank deeply into the pillow. I heard them leave my room as I pulled my parents’ sheet to me and inhaled its scent.

  Exhaustion came over me like a wave of ether, and I plunged into a dreamless sleep.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I’D LIVED ALONE IN MY house in Sugar Beach for a month before I came to New Orleans. In that time, I’d been hysterical with grief, furious at fate, kind of nuts, numb, sad, depressed . . . I’d been a bunch of different emotions, but I’d never been scared until that very last night. It had felt strange being alone, but strange and scared are two different things, and I hadn’t felt scared, hadn’t even realized that maybe I should, until I’d heard glass breaking in the kitchen. Until then, I hadn’t once thought that whoever had killed my parents was going to come kill me. Their deaths had seemed . . . random, though I saw now how stupid that was. One haguaro killing other haguari? Not random.

  Coming to New Orleans, putting so many miles between me and Sugar Beach, had felt safer. Finding Matéo and hearing that his parents’ hearts had been taken also—it had been creepy, though we weren’t 100 percent sure that their deaths had been caused by a haguari, as my parents’ had been. It could have been something about the older generation, or even something related to whatever falling-out my mother and her sister had had.

  But now the net was wider and seemed to include all of us. The jaguar had climbed the tree to get to me and/or Tink. The nightmare wasn’t over.

  I slept heavily, as if my dreams had fled in fright, and woke the next afternoon feeling like I’d been flattened by a steamroller. A shower and four ibuprofen helped, and once I was in clean clothes I felt better. The towel had sopped up all of Tink’s blood on my floor, and I tossed it into my laundry hamper with a grimace, then swept up the rest of the broken mirror. When I bent down to scoop it into the dustpan, I saw my face, fractured and splintered among the shards.

  “Very poetic,” I muttered, and threw it all into the trash.

  Aly was in the kitchen, reading the newspaper. “Hey, how are you feeling?”

  “Okay. Sore.” I glanced at the clock. It was almost two. I poured my own coffee. I’d become addicted to it and looked forward to it every morning. Maybe Ro’s needed to use CDM coffee for the regular-Joe cup of coffee instead of the fancy Italian stuff they had. Perhaps I should bring this topic up with my boss, Mr. Stunning. Because after only one day, I had worthwhile ideas about how he could better his business.

  “How’s Tink?” I asked,
holding my bowl in both hands and inhaling the scent.

  Aly wrinkled her nose. “His side was pretty messed up. But we heal quickly. He’ll be okay in a few days.”

  Of course, I’d been pondering every second of what had happened the night before, including the surprising ending. Since our polite conversation had been taken care of, I opened my mouth to ask about the stuff Dana had shot up my nose—but just then a slender girl with bright red hair came into the kitchen, wearing nothing but a large New Orleans Jazz Festival T-shirt.

  “Hey, Charlotte,” Aly said. “Haven’t seen you in a while. This is Téo’s cousin, Vivi.”

  At last, the elusive Charlotte!

  The red-haired girl smiled at me. “Hi. I’m Charlotte, Coco’s girlfriend. Is there coffee, by any chance?”

  Aly pointed. Charlotte got two mugs, added sugar and milk, and filled them up. “Nice to meet you,” she said, heading back upstairs.

  “You too.”

  Matéo passed her on his way into the kitchen. “Hey, Charlotte.” In the kitchen, he opened the fridge, then looked at me. “You doing okay?”

  I nodded, thinking that “okay” had been radically redefined in the last three months.

  “Have you had any ideas about who that could have been last night?”

  “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t recognize any of my parents’ friends in their other forms. But that guy just wanted to attack anyone he got to, starting with Tink. Tink isn’t in our family, so this guy is collecting haguari hearts. But is it just one person? Or a human-haguari partnership?”

  “I don’t know,” Matéo said. “I can’t figure out the why, you know? It’s not like we have buried treasure or know valuable secrets. He seems to just . . . want hearts.”

  I shivered, my own heart feeling heavy.

  “Should we start asking around?” Aly asked Matéo. “I mean, more than we did when your parents . . .”

  “I don’t know.” Matéo looked frustrated and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Tia Juliana did the same thing sometimes. “I’m not sure what to do. If we ask people, will that alert whoever’s doing it and make us even more of a target? I mean, the whole thing is crazy.”