Kiss at Midnight (The Shades of Northwood 4)

  - into sound and colour and chaos.

  The club lights blew out in a dozen golden fireworks, sending coloured glass tinkling to the floor. Katie expected to be plunged into the pitch black and even drew in a breath to scream, but the darkness didn’t come, replaced by a dizzying swirl of a million colours around her. Everything, from the bar to the stools to the DJ equipment, was overlaid with a faint glow that spiked into an almost blinding brightness every few seconds. It was as disorienting as seeing nothing at all would have been. She closed her eyes but the vivid patterns still flashed behind her lids, a painful red saw, biting its way through every defence and into the depths of her subconscious. Katie took a breath (do I really need oxygen?) and opened her eyes slowly, trying to let in just enough maddening light that she didn’t go all head-spinny and fall over. Which was made doubly hard when she noticed the screaming. It was agonised and desperate and everywhere. It was a drill, driving through her brain and out the other side, cutting a path of pain and indignation behind it.

  Should have been

  Could have been

  Should have been

  Could have been

  It went on for ever and Katie could feel it echoing into eternity. The voices were so loud and so sweet that all she wanted to do was follow the visible burnt gold wisps of light back, back through the club and towards the opening onto the corridor where the threads of sounds seemed brighter. Almost painfully so.

  Instead, she simply stood there. Frozen to the spot with an odd excitement mixed with dread. She dropped to her knees faster than she thought she could and squinted. It was hard to see Shimma through the colours. But as soon as she saw him, Katie decided she had to grab his hand and never let go. Because these things were pulling her, sucking her, enveloping her and - and why was he getting further away with each step she took? Vortexes of pearlescent and transparent colours filled the air between them; endless chanting drowned out any attempts to scream his name. And then there was the bar, just sneaking into view before it too disappeared under the multicoloured energies of the people who used it night after night. Everything had energy. Obviously, inanimate objects didn’t have their own energy like moving, mechanical things but they held traces of the energies of the people who had used it. And each person had an energy around them that changed in intensity with every action. She could see it, could feel it, pawing at her phantom skin like a baby feels for his mother just to make sure she was still there. Invisible fingers – insistent in their touch, gently prodding her towards their source. And that was… actually, it was okay. They weren’t hurting her. They weren’t shouting or angry. They just called and held her, careful as though she was something fragile.

  Should have been

  Could have been

  It was endless and beautiful. Katie turned and blinked at the sight before her. She was barely a foot away from an invisible curtain, pulsing with vibrant black, silver, red, blue and every shade in between. It was vast and wonderful and it was death. Too much, too soon and death, dying just to escape. How many have you killed? Katie wondered, taking a step towards it. Maybe it would tell her the answers if she could only touch it…

  “KATIE!” came a roar from behind her. “NO!”

  Something like a physical blow to her chest made her stumble back a few steps and only the dark hands around her kept her on her feet.

  Always save you, they promised.

  Every muscle in her was limp and aching with the effort of standing up under the pressure of so many hands on her. They were welcoming and if she went to them, nothing and no-one could ever hurt her again.

  “KATIE!” that same voice yelled again and, while she heard it like a driving alarm through her ears, it did little good. But underneath the harsh panic was another voice. A familiar one, almost pleading in two little words: Lady Katie.

  Jack?

  Lady Katie. Nine letters and an image of Jack formed in her mind – a boy of sixteen with hair of sand and eyes like the seas. A back of scars from a whip and a head of memories, dreams and regret - because how many of those dreams would he realise now? But he was telling her to do something. This, this he could do. What did Jack want? He wanted – no, needed – her to…

  With tears stinging her eyes, Katie forced herself to blink and clear the dust from her eyes, and look again at the thing before her. It was hypnotic in its random patterns and rippling curtain of a thousand souls pressing at the barrier. And it was fine. They didn’t want anything but to save her.

  From what? She wondered again. A dark memory pulled at her. Some-one… some-one was after Katie.

  A hand, burning hot and very, very real wrapped itself around her left wrist and yanked Katie back and out of the comforting embrace of death and darkness. They only wanted to make this over, to make her suffering end and take her away from the danger. Why? Why wouldn’t this sizzling hand let them take her away? Before she got her thoughts together enough to question who had been able to touch her, she tugged her arm away and cradled it in her right hand, sure she would have received flash burns at least, but too afraid to look in case she was developing scar tissue to match the mess her hand already was. Great. A glove of burns and blisters. No girl should be without one. It was a bitter thought but one that had a certain resonance. What teenage girl needed to be thinking about being scarred for life? Well, at least in my present state, I don’t need to worry about anyone seeing. Katie frowned, suddenly recalling the hot and extremely solid feel of a hand on her arm. The only other person in the room was Shimma. She whipped her head around and looked for him, barely able to see anything now that wasn’t the mad whirl of colours and noise and sensation. Had Shimma somehow touched her? How was that even possible? Or was it just the combined pressure of all those souls trying to get a piece of her?

  Should have been

  Could have been

  Never was

  Always save you

  “From what?” Katie shouted into the sucking curtain of energy, distantly afraid by their words. And yet, she trusted them. “What are you going to save me from?” But, as she spoke, her gaze was captured by a bright white light – so bright it was making everything else seem dull in comparison. Underneath that light was just the faintest outline of a man. Katie forgot the burning in her wrist and sank to her knees, shielding her eyes. This form of light and glitter… it was beautiful, more beautiful than anything she had ever seen. Worshipping before this creature was the only logical thing to do. It raised a hand and lines of silver shot up, connecting to ceiling. No, not to the ceiling – through the ceiling, through the roof and out into the night. Those threads of energy might be touching the stars. A second hand began to move and Katie swayed as she watched, hypnotised.

  Go go go save you have to save you

  The fingers holding her up from a dead faint pushed her towards the light but just as she began to stretch up for it, Katie remembered a warning Jack had given her the first time she had seen this light. Don’t touch it… like wrappin’ your hand around a live wire. Hesitations cost everything in this town.

  And in that moment of confusion, something rushed through the corridor, dark and dangerous, and grabbed her by the shoulders. It pulled her to her feet and pushed her towards the pulsing barrier of energy. Fire door. It used to be a fire door. The mantra, if repeated enough times, would make it real once again. It’s only an emergency exit. And it wasn’t making any difference. Even with her feet planted firmly on the floor, Katie could feel herself being dragged nearer and nearer to that portal. She knew though, without even a shadow of doubt, that if she let herself be taken through there would be no coming back. It would all be over. Really and truly over. And while she was still here, while she still lingered in the world, there was hope – a tiny part of her would always be alive. And Katie – for all that she tired and spent and God, didn’t the kid deserve a rest? – aside from that, she was not about
to let that sliver of life go.

  WILL!!! A menacing voiced roared the word in her head. Katie was sure it had been loud enough to shake the walls. Plaster dust was drifting down from the ceiling.

  Holding her hands over her face, Katie froze. This touch… it wasn’t like the others. Although she could see where this was coming from, it did not feel safe. It felt – like it wanted to hurt her. It felt like somebody had held her this way before, some-one who had pinned her immobile against the ground and taken her to bad places. And she had felt terrified and helpless. The tears had not come till after, when she was alone and wondering if the bad man would come back and hurt her again, just like he hurt her every night in her dreams. But the bad man had come back and the tears would never come and

  “I AM NOT ALONE!” Katie fought free of the grip and pushed a cold body away from her. The body hovered just a few inches above the ground, looking as if it had been frozen mid-jump.

  You, she sent out, the thought almost pointed with accusation. Who are you? What do you want from me? But she made the mistake of looking up. Any eyes were hidden beneath a writhing mass of shadow and suffering. It tilted the place where its head would be and Katie knew who it was. This, this was Shadow Boy. And he wanted nothing but to send her back through the portal and into the End Place. You can’t make me go back there. You just can’t.

  It is where you belong. You should be there now. Would be… if not for him.

  Shadow Boy looked pointedly at Shimma and Katie, once more, found herself thinking his words. She didn’t know what to do. Okay, that was pretty freaking obvious. If she had ever had any clue as to what she was doing, Katie wouldn’t be dead now would she? There were two choices – cling to this pretence of life, spend her days essentially lonely and alone, watching everyone she loved cry and endure an agony of emotions and never be able to help. Or follow the shadowy figure into a world of dead souls and relinquish every tie she had to the mortal plane for the chance of finding Jack and never fighting again. Couldn’t she have this moment? Wasn’t she allowed to be selfish just this once?

  “I won’t go,” was practically a whisper but it was enough to steel Katie for the frankly insane thing she was about to do. She reached up and forced her hand into the shadows and pushed the darkness back like a hood to stare into a face she almost recognised. And then she tore her hands away, wishing she could wipe the residue of deceit off. “You can’t have me!” And she thrust her left hand into the laser bright fire burning around Shimma beside her.

  “Will.” Shadow Boy whispered it into her ear, way down low. He vanished. No puff of smoke, no gradual fade away, he just was gone. So was all the light and all the sensation. A single word replaced the constant calling of a thousands souls from the other side.

  Will will will

  Will? Something will happen? I will do something? What? But there was no time to stress over the questions as Katie realised her hand was starting to tingle from being left in the white fire that had been too bright to look at. She saw now though. Saw a glow fading and the human Shimma, the mortal Shimma come forth, more real than the light. It did not fade away entirely though and, only now, Katie realised it had always been there. It was just that there was always so much to worry about that she had never noticed it before. Brown eyes met with- were they really silver? If eyes were the window to the soul then somebody had thrown a rock at his, cracking shatter-proof glass and bouncing off. So why did Katie feel responsible?

  “You’re not…. you’re different.”

  “Yeah.” Well, at least he wasn’t denying it. Which was good. Because she had been starting to think seeing colours and being a ghost and being fought over by invisible spirits were all figments of her imagination. Like maybe she had fallen into one mother of a coma at some point and these were just constructs of her personal reality. “I’m a Keeper.”

  It took a few seconds for the weight of his words to sink in and then Katie wrenched her hand away and launched herself at the farthest corner. Miraculously, she managed to wedge herself between the wall and fire door without falling through either. It was only when she flinched away from his out-stretched hand that she began to question why Shimma had been able to touch her at all. “Don’t touch me! Why can you touch me anyhow? I mean… I’m not solid here but… you held my hand like it was real. This is so messed up.”

  “Here. You said here. Have you been somewhere else today?”

  “I spent some time in the Dead World with Jack,” she shrugged. “He said things worked differently over there so he could hold me and we could….” Katie tailed off, cussing herself out for being so immature. Bite the bullet, girl. “He kissed me. Nothing happened. I remember everything.”

  “Damn it!” he muttered.

  “Shimma, did we do something wrong?”

  “No. No, nothing. You went where your heart took you, did what it told you to. I just didn’t think. I forgot you were a teenager.”

  “Okay, I’m getting stressed out now. I need to leave for a while. This is going to take some time to process.”

  That was what he had done this for. This exact moment – the instant when a shitload of information had just emptied into her brain, more than would send a lesser person running for the nearest cave and she just refused to move. Even though she had said she wanted time and space, her eyes blazed with anger. That was okay – he could deal with her nebulous fury. It meant Katie was still there, was still human enough to demand answers before she moved an inch. “Katie, I’m a-“

  “A Keeper. Heard you the first time. That’s why you keep all those weapons and stuff. You’re… Keeping them.”

  “I Keep a lot of things, Katie.”

  A door behind Shimma opened silently and out stepped a rumpled Marcie, rubbing her eyes sleepily. “Katie? Shimma, she’s not here.” Then she got a look at him, still washed with a faint white glow. “Your skin.”

  Metal music had been blasting out of the opposite room in fits and starts for the past few hours. It was three in the morning. On Wednesdays, Jaye liked to go to the pool and get in a few laps before classes. It wasn’t going to happen. She threw herself onto her back and pulled the plain black duvet up to her chin. She was in a black mood today – and not just from lack of sleep. In the bed opposite, Dina was sitting up with familiar white wires leading up to the mess of a black bob, flicking feverishly through a book on calligraphy, unable to concentrate on anything for more than a blink. Apart from the noise from next door the house was too quiet. It didn’t feel lived in any more; not bursting with life just waiting to wake up but filled with driving bass and drums just to cover up the missing part of home. And it just made it worse.

  Getting out of bed and cracking open the door were, probably, the hardest movements she had ever made. But once she was moving, Jaye was fine. Knew she had to keep going. She crossed the hall and banged a tiny fist on the door facing her. It opened and a tired, unshaven face peered out.

  “Have you any idea what the time is?”

  Leo pressed a button in his watch and the display lit his face in an eerie green glow in the general gloom. “Oh,” he grunted, “late.”

  “Yeah. Oh. I’m meant to be up and at the pool in four hours to train. You think I’m gonna sleep on the diving board or something?”

  A sudden look of panic flashed in his dark blue eyes. “You’re not going, are you?”

  Jaye looked down at herself. All she wore was her black and red spotted PJs and she didn’t make a habit of swimming in her nightwear. “Not for the foreseeable future.” The boy visibly relaxed but he was still tense and gripping the edge of the door like he might fall down if he didn’t have the support.

  “What’s going on down there?” Leo jerked his head towards the stairs where the faintest of yellow glows was coming from the kitchen. Every few minutes would bring the shuffling sounds of Lainy and Adam – the pseudo parents of
this house – moving around. “Whenever I look, the lights are still on.”

  Jaye didn’t bother mentioning the irony. Leo seemed to be perfectly aware of it.

  They both knew what was going on in that room. The older couple were discussing Katie or, more specifically, which of them should call her parents and what they should say… What could they say really? “Hi Mr and Mrs Cartwright. You know you sent your teenage daughter to us to get a good education? Yeah, she died because this evil old dude who killed her boyfriend 150 years ago, hunted her down and beat her practically to death. She did the rest on her own.”

  “That’ll go down well.”

  “What?”

  “Hm. Nothing. You know, we should kill a kid more often, it blunts your general hateful bastard-ness.” But there was nothing behind her words – they were mechanical and easy. No meaning to them, just habit. “Jesus.”

  Leo frowned slightly at her and then his face softened. Up until now he had always yelled at Jaye for treating religion with disdain but if ever there was a time to take the holy names in vain it was now. Only… what could the father, the son and the holy ghost do? He angled a slim remote over his shoulder and turned the music off, even though the jarring melodies had dulled into background music for the hurt and the lonely. Without the sounds of Slipknot filling the house, the hush was creepy, crushing. Rubbing his exhausted face with a grimy white t-shirt, Leo disappeared into his room, not waiting to see if she would follow. When she sat on the bed opposite the bean bag that had moulded exactly to his shape, Jaye did not even know what to say. Instead, they strained to hear the conversation going on below this room. It was just an indefinable murmur. It was so low and full of pauses that a stilted argument was clearly being thrashed out. It wasn’t just about the Cartwrights. It made Jaye sad to think that Katie wasn’t the only thing on their minds. If she could just… If they only knew what she did then...

  Then what? What good could it possibly do to tell her friends that Katie was still around? Or had been. She’d pulled a Road Runner this evening and run so far she might never come back – and Jaye couldn’t blame her. No, it would only hurt more if anyone else knew. Hurt that Katie was in the mortal realm against her wishes; hurt than she had run away before they could see her; hurt that a ghost of a girl was all she could ever be. Hurt that that there was nothing left, nothing but a room full of furniture and unfinished things. No, they couldn’t know.

  There were other crises going down though. Tensions had been building over the past few weeks and it was stretched so tight that the atmosphere was ready to shatter. Jaye suspected that she was going to go downstairs one morning and find it had shattered all over the living room. She smiled. Learning how Shades express their anger had come as quite a shock when she and Katie had found out together. Something about dying gifted people with a long fuse and a (literally) destructive temper. At a guess, it was down to suddenly understanding life was too short to be angry all the time – it was just a shame it had taken dying at nineteen to teach her that. When Jaye had been choked up with confusing emotion a handful of weeks ago, when Dina had slashed her wrists, nearly died, and spent a week in a near-unbreakable coma, a tornado had erupted out of her – almost as if there was no more room in her body for feelings. So they spilled out into the immediate area around her. That time, it had been in Katie’s room and had resulted in a floor full of clothes and papers and a broken window. It could have been worse; it could have been in the living room where Lainy had let go of her anger. Busted up furniture, ripped cushions and a smashed television. The house still wasn’t quite back to being fully furnished. And now, it was going to happen. Stress levels were as high as planes, under such tight control that no-one dared speak too loudly.

  “Can’t sleep?” Leo asked.

  “A sloth couldn’t sleep through your racket.”

  He nodded at her healed arm and scratched at his own bandage. “You can get rid of that right? If you wanted to.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I wish I could. Every time I touch it, I think of her. How we should have saved her.” No question of who the her was.

  “Stop touching it then.” If only the answers could always be that simple. “Katie didn’t want that.” But, really, did that even matter? A kid given a choice between a painless, numb eternity and a short life of tears and chaos was only ever going to choose the former. Jaye should have been prepared for that and pumped life into her anyway. “Katie was raped. She ever tell you that?”

  “No,” he lied. How could he forget all the times he had accused Jack of raping her by taking tiny pieces of her soul every time he took human form? The frightened look on her slack face when she’d been barely conscious in his arms as he raced to the hospital with her after Dina had slipped her Rohypnol. It haunted his dreams still: haunted and taunted that there was nothing he could do to protect her.

  “She begged me not to tell but it probably doesn’t matter now. She was terrified of her old city, thought the man who hurt her was still out there and if she saw him…it might happen again. Yeah yeah, shut it, I know the statistics but she was afraid. So she moved here. I guess nobody told her it was more dangerous. And there was Adam, trying to cop a feel in her first week, and you being all shit-scary and looking intimidating. And the attacks on her kept on coming – I don’t even know half of what she went through. Every one of those was like being raped again, I think. Like the faces were different but the violations were the same. I don’t blame her for thinking death was the only place the bad things couldn’t get her.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do I know what it felt like? I was possessed once.” Her body had been taken over by some type of Death Dealer, her soul squashed into an unused corner by a being known only as She, a being older than names. She had forced Jaye to do terrible things – like shooting her young friend and trying to throw Dina over the cliff in the End Place. And it was made a million times worse because she remembered every second of it. Being out of control, being forced into doing something that was so repulsive but that had you had no choice over. “I guess it feels like that but over and over again.”

  “No, I meant how do you know she didn’t want us to bring her back?”

  Because she told me so. Because she used the last of her mortal strength to thread me into the mind link she shares with Jack and whispered her request. And I obeyed. Luckily, she didn’t have to worry about thinking of an answer because, at that moment, Dina staggered in to the room with a book in one hand and a furiously vibrating phone in the other.

  “Hey babe, come join the party.”

  Dina held out the BlackBerry and threw her book on the bed. “This has been buzzing for the last fifteen minutes. I thought you might be interested.”

  Jaye took the phone and clicked the power button until it fell still. “Chris,” she informed them. She had been dating a frankly ridiculously tall boy called Chris Falstaff for the past week or so, although she got the impression he was more interested in his running career than in her. Didn’t stop them having a little fun though. “I think he needs somebody to talk to. He doesn’t really understand what went on yesterday.”

  “Who does?”

  “Nobody explained to him.”

  “So? He’s a big boy, he can work out that we only wasted our time.”

  “We didn’t waste anything!” Except our last chance, Dina thought. “What do we do now?” It was the question they were all thinking but none of them had any answers. There was nothing to fight and nothing to fight for. Life just seemed so empty – so quiet and empty. Dina shuffled her feet and glanced at the door. There was a faint longing inside to get out of there. That yearning had been tugging at her since this last summer and had come to a head a couple of months ago when she had smashed the bathroom mirror and slashed her wrists just so she could not be here for a while. Psychically speaking, she had ended u
p somewhere much worse than Northwood. The End Place - where all the souls of Northwood went when they died, or had killed the only part of themselves that thought life was worth living. They stayed there until She, a being of hunger and darkness, walked along the cliff edge where those lost souls gathered and pushed them off, choosing her victims with terrifying randomness. More than anything, Dina remembered a bone-deep dread and a fear that the thousands had shared. Because that’s what it was. Fear. Unshakeable. Sudden. Shocking. Once in the End Place, they all realised that they didn’t want to be dead, didn’t want to spend eons just waiting, wondering if you might be next. So they did everything they could to help people like… people like Katie. Once they knew how dangerous their choices were, they were not prepared to let anyone else make the same mistake. “I’m not back at the Academy yet. Maybe I should go see her family. They don’t deserve to hear it over the phone.”

  “Bitch, please.”

  “What did you call me?”

  “You don’t want to see them face to face. They get angry, lash out, you get hurt. You really want more scars?” But Leo had to wonder. Did those kinds of wounds ever really heal? They left scars but that just meant the cut had closed, formed a fragile protective tissue, and faded into silvery lines.

  “He’s right.” A cool draft blew through the cracked open window. Jaye shuddered and ignored it, not even thinking about it. She crossed her legs and wriggled herself into a more comfortable position. “You didn’t meet them. I did. It’ll be easier coming from me, babe.”

  Ouch. Low blow.

  Dina batted the remark away. “Maybe not. There’s a reason doctors keep a professional distance.”

  “You’re not a doctor,” Leo pointed out. “And you’re not going.” With two sets of eyebrows arrowed at him, he went on, “Look, you put Rohypnol in her drink and you put a damn bullet in her brain – I’m-” The next words died on his lips before even the anticipated storm of indignation.

  “Jaye, is something the matter? You’re shivering. And sweating.” Dina scooted closer and put the back of her hand to her friends’ forehead. As ever, she was neither especially hot or cold but there was an odd clammy feel to her skin. For some reason, that rang wrong. “Maybe you’re sick. Leo, get a blanket.”

  The hard edge of a bad attitude drained out of his face as he saw Jaye’s trembling form, barely able to sit upright without leaning on Dina for support. Jaye might be an abhorration to humanity; the antithesis of everything he had ever believed in, his religion, his entire world-view, but he was developing the first shadows of respect for this five foot nothing energy bomb. They’d fought together. That earned her the crumpled duvet he rescued from the floor-monsters. “I thought Shades didn’t get ill.”

  “We don’t. We shouldn’t,” Jaye chattered and let Dina continue.

  “Normally, they can fight off infection before it takes hold. Viruses need oxygenated cells to breed and Shades don’t have any… not necessary like it is for us. Germs can’t exist and multiply in a body with no life of its own and nothing to sustain any. No fuel.”

  “That’s messed up, you know that.”

  “Sitting right here.” As much as Jaye hated to admit it, Leo was right. Again. The situation was off the scale messed up. “I’m so cold. I never get cold. Do I have a fever? I feel like I have a fever.”

  Dina shook her head but Leo pushed past to perform the same hand-on-head assessment. “No. No fever.” It was a bad sign in Jaye’s book. When any of her seven younger siblings had been ill, they had always checked for a fever, believing it was the body’s first fight against infection. But the Stafford children had always seemed to catch the worst dose of every disease going. It didn’t seem right to feel so yucky and not be running a temperature. It didn’t seem fair. “Maybe we should get Lainy up here,” Leo suggested but that only earned him glares of the are you a total dick variety – one glassy and unfocused, the other dark with worry. He held up his hands in mock defence. “Just a thought, weren’t it? Suffer, then, if it makes you happy. But don’t puke. Clean sheets.”

  “You don’t think she’s got enough to worry about right now?”

  “Frankly?”

  “Oh God, I‘m gonna regret this but carry on.” Dina made a sweep of her hands and waited. It didn’t take Leo long to find the words to say.

  “Honestly, no.” He knew straight away that he had said it wrong. “She needs the distraction. Everything going on now is all emotions and girly crap but I seen it when it just pops its top. This is a simple problem with a simple answer.”

  “I’m not simple.” Jaye wiped her face with trembling hands and then turned her hands over before her eyes, inspecting them as if she expected to see something other than pale skin and the ghosts of blue veins. “Something’s wrong, D. Really wrong.”

  “Lainy’s a nurse. This is medical.”

  “She’s dead, Leo! Her body doesn’t work like ours any more.”

  “So, make it work.”

  “It’s not that simple. You think you can click your fingers and everything is magically alright?”

  No. No, he didn’t think that. There was never a cure. He’d never thought there was, but Christianity had been his saviour when times had been hard as a kid, it gave you a reason for all the wrong in the world. God, Jesus, the angels – they tore things apart just so humans could fix them. So they could put things back together and make them better than before. Otherwise, why not just leave everything perfect and untouched? “This is getting us nowhere.” Leo rubbed the square of bandage on his right arm. Blood was seeping out of the edges, the soft scab breaking open were he kept pawing at his skin. “She,” he pointed at Jaye, “is ill. She needs help.”

  “Fuck it, you need help.”

  “D. Something’s wrong.” The duvet didn’t seem to be doing much to keep Jaye warm – she was still cold. It wasn’t the chill she remembered from her childhood doses of flu. This was something else, something different. “I really don’t feel well.”

  “We know, hun. We’ll figure it out.” Dina hoped she sounded more confident that than she felt. Truth was, she didn’t have a clue what was wrong with her friend, or how to fix it. All her knowledge of Shades was from watching Jaye and Lainy go about their lives and nothing like this had ever happened before. Becoming one of them was an inevitability, Dina knew that and hated it with every inch of her will, but there was nothing she could do to stop it. It didn’t mean she thought about it more than was strictly necessary though. “Come on, let’s get you to bed. You should rest.”

  “Genius idea,” Leo muttered. “Sick people need R and R. Praise the revolution.”

  “Shut up and help.”

  He moved over and took Jayes’ right arm, glancing down. The thin pink scar was shimmering in and out of existence. Her skin was slick with sweat and she started to slip out of his grasp, slowly crumpling up. He could easily have picked her up and carried her back into her own double room but it didn’t look as though Jaye would appreciate the gesture. “No.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t think moving her is a good idea.” He eased her back on to his bed and covered her up. Jaye was asleep before Leo even said his next words. “You said it yourself – we don’t know her physiology. Lainy does. I’m not losing anyone else because I don’t know the right things to do.”

  “Is this your twisted, fucked up way of saying you care?”

  He snorted, not even bothering to dignify that with a response. “I’ll take Katie’s room tonight.”

  “We need to work fast, Leo,” Dina said, brushing stray black hairs behind Jaye’s ears. “Something just isn’t… I don’t know if it’s wrong, but it scares me. If Shades can suddenly get sick then everything I thought I knew is wrong. I can barely get my head around this as it is.”

  “Chill, suicide girl. We’ll fix it.” He grabbed some clothes and his bag, p
ulled the bedroom door almost shut behind them and stopped at Katie’s door. “We just need to know what the problem is first.”

  Dina watched him pick up his things and – is he going to college tomorrow? Today? – wondered if she shouldn’t speak to Jaye when she woke up. If anyone knew anything, Jaye was the only one qualified to tell her how she felt. She reached out to touch the trickles of blood she noticed seeping beneath his bandaged arm. There was something… It was dark and thick and it whispered dark promises. If she could only touch it… What might happen if she gave in to that impulse? Would her life be boring but safe as it had before her18th birthday? Would the current state of thrilling danger carry on? Perhaps the world would end? Maybe, just maybe, it would be something different. Blood. It was so vital, so necessary. And somehow, and to some question she didn’t even know, it promised all the answers. But, the moment the heat from her skin touched his, Leo turned on her, attitude and aggression firmly back in place. Why was he so uncomfortable with letting the real man show through? But one look in his flashing, dark blue eyes prevented Dina asking the question. She was still looking for the right words as Katie’s door slammed in her face.

  Chapter six