Balthazar
Page 11
Skye tucked a lock of her thick brown hair behind one ear as she said, “I’d forgotten you two used to go out.”
“That was never—Bianca was always with Lucas, really. Our relationship was more about hiding their romance.” And if he’d been fool enough to forget that for a while, he thought, he had no one but himself to blame.
“But you liked her, didn’t you?” This girl had seen right through him. “Do you still?”
“No. I mean—of course I care about Bianca. I always will. But she never wanted what I wanted. It took me a while to accept that, but I have.”
Why did it feel so strange, talking about that with Skye? It felt like … like talking about one girlfriend to another. Bad form. Though of course Bianca had never really been his girlfriend, and Skye—that couldn’t happen, for her sake.
They’d cleared the last remnants of ice from her bedroom, and he’d double-checked the entire first floor and fixed the locks—though Redgrave’s phobia of wraiths meant that the doors probably could be left wide open from now on without the tribe returning. Tonight’s crisis was taken care of: time to look toward the future.
“You’re going to take the bus to school in the morning, right?”
Skye gave him a look across her darkened bedroom. “Of course. I’m not going to walk along the road again by myself. But what do we do after that? If they came after me on one of the main streets in town, they’d come after me in school.”
“I’m working on that,” Balthazar said. He didn’t want to make any promises before he knew for sure. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Wait—you’re leaving?” She looked stricken.
“I promise you, they aren’t coming back tonight.”
“But you could still stay here. My parents wouldn’t see you.”
“There are a few things I need to take care of. If I did that here, I’d keep you up.”
“Like I could sleep after this.” Skye sighed, but more in tiredness than frustration. Balthazar disliked leaving her, but for the moment she was safe, and he had to think about protecting her in the long term.
“Just go to school tomorrow and trust me, okay?”
He tossed the words out lightly, a phrase and nothing more. But Skye’s expression became solemn as she said, “I trust you.”
She really meant it.
He hadn’t realized, until that moment, how badly he’d wanted to hear her say that.
That night, he returned to the cheap hotel room he’d rented on the edge of town, when he’d believed he would be here for only a handful of days. Obviously he’d need a longer-term solution, with Redgrave on the scene. The danger to Skye wouldn’t go away in a day, or a week. This required long-term thinking. This required commitment.
Balthazar went to bed around midnight. Though he, like most vampires, preferred to remain awake at night and rest during the day, he knew that behaving this way separated him too completely from human society. There were times he’d allowed himself to drift into a vampiric existence; those were the times when he’d looked up to see that a year or a decade had come and gone without his having had a single meaningful experience. No more, he’d decided.
Besides, if he wanted to help Skye, he’d need an early start.
And he did want to help her—more strongly than he could have imagined he would after only a couple of days—
Refusing to think about it anymore, Balthazar went to sleep.
And dreamed.
1988.
How long had he been out of synch? Five years? Closer to ten, maybe. Balthazar’s jeans and T-shirt weren’t quite right—everybody wore jeans washed out pale now, and the stripes on his shirt’s sleeves had gone from ubiquitous to unfamiliar. But he could pass. He could manage.
It wasn’t like he hadn’t left the house in Chicago for ten years. He’d made trips to the hospital blood banks and the butchers, to get the blood he needed. He’d walked to the nearest bars and walked back. Sometimes he went to the store for cigarettes. But depression hung a kind of veil over everything—clouding it, making it more distant than it really was.
Now that Balthazar was pushing himself out again, that veil was gone. In its place was a world transformed.
Like cars. When had cars become so dull? Everything was white or gray, boxy and boring.
Women’s fashions were interesting—sort of like the 1940s on acid. Big hair, big shoulder pads, brilliant neon colors: It would take some getting used to, but he’d give it points over the 1970s.
And the storefronts all seemed to have gone away. Maybe this was because of those “malls” he’d heard about. He’d have to see one.
“Look at this,” said Redgrave, falling into step beside him. “Balthazar’s revisiting his glory days.”
Balthazar stopped where he stood, staring at Redgrave, trying to understand how he could be here. It made no sense—he hadn’t seen Redgrave in at least—in at least—
“You tried to destroy my tribe. To destroy me.” How was Redgrave in his mind? Everything around them was changing now. The twilight Chicago street seemed to be shimmering—no, melting, not vanishing but melting the way candle wax did—taking on new shapes.
The shape of a dance club in the late 1970s.
He’d been here once. No. This was the first time. Balthazar’s confusion only increased as Redgrave became more and more gleeful, clapping his hands as he circled Balthazar. A haze of smoke from cigarettes—and other smoked substances—made the blinking lights around them seem almost eerie.
“I’ve only just begun finding ways to hurt you,” Redgrave said. “Take this dream, for example. I’d never have done anything so rude, if you would only mind your manners. But Charity says you haven’t minded yours at all.”
Charity. His baby sister. Balthazar looked across the club and saw her—
—Charity and Jane in their dresses from the 1600s, with Constantia standing between them—
“Do you want to live it all again? I’ll make sure that you do.” Redgrave leaned closer to Balthazar, his feral smile bright in the gloom. “Unless you get out of town now. Leave Skye to me.”
Skye—Skye didn’t belong to this place, to this time—
Balthazar sat upright in bed, startled awake. That dream had been a vivid one.
Too vivid.
Any vampire’s dreams could be invaded by that vampire’s sire. Normally it was an affectionate gesture—which was why Redgrave had always left him alone. Balthazar had hardly thought of this skill before last year, when Charity had taken to invading Lucas’s dreams during his time as a vampire. She had tormented him psychologically all night long until Balthazar had stopped her—by invading her dreams in turn. It had been a savage business, one that sickened him to think of.
But not as much as it sickened him to realize that Redgrave was following their example. From now on, any given night could see his dreams turning into a torture chamber. The dreamer never understood the true nature of the dream until it had ended; until then, all the fear, confusion, and pain was quite real.
Balthazar thought once again of seeing Charity and Jane standing side by side. He remembered the last time he had seen that, and he never wanted to return there.
If the only way to stop the dreams was abandoning Skye—
—then let Redgrave do his worst.
Balthazar knew how to look twenty-one years old if he had to.
He’d mastered that art long ago, though these days it mostly came in handy when he needed to buy a beer. (Whose idea had it been to raise the drinking age that high anyway? As someone who’d grown up in an era when fifteen-year-olds were considered adults, he found the modern prohibitions on marriage and alcohol consumption ridiculously Puritanical—and he’d been a Puritan.)
At any rate, he knew how to appear older than the age he’d died at, nineteen. Allowing a shadow of stubble to grow on his cheeks got him partway there. Wearing expensive, well-cut, conservative-looking clothes helped a lot, too.
Now, looking twenty-four years old—that was tougher.
His suit appeared right. The stubble was scratchy without making him look unkempt. Balthazar studied himself in the mirror before dispensing a considerable amount of hair gel—“Infinite Hold,” it promised, somewhat rashly—and combing it through, so that his curls vanished into a hard, slicked-back style. Then he pulled out a pair of tortoiseshell glasses with the modern rectangular frames. The lenses were merely glass; he’d heard these were fashionable these days and had bought them just to experiment. But hopefully they’d work as part of his disguise, too.
Double-checking his phone, he saw that Lucas had sent the fake documents he needed. Supposedly there was a twenty-four-hour copy center in town; he’d be able to print those off, and he knew that Lucas and his other friends would provide the phone verifications necessary.
This could work—if he played his role right. It was all up to him.
“It’s lucky you showed up today,” said Principal Zaslow, across the desk in her cozy office at Darby Glen High. “There was a car accident last night; we lost our history teacher for at least two months. I had no idea where we were going to find a qualified substitute who could work that long, starting immediately.”
Balthazar gave her his best, most confident smile. “I’m your man.”
Chapter Eight
“DO YOU REMEMBER THAT THING THAT WENT around about how gang members were going to beat up people at random, for, like, an initiation? And if anybody flashed headlights at you then you had to get out of there because they’d picked you? I bet that’s what happened to Mr. Lovejoy.”
“That’s so stupid. He was in a car accident.”
“I heard he was driving drunk.”
“He’d be fired already if that were true. Maybe the person who hit him was drunk and that’s what you heard.”
“You’re awfully quiet, Skye.” Some girl looked at her with narrow ferret eyes. “What, feeling guilty? Were you the one who ran him down? The rich think they can get away with anything.”
People laughed. Skye flushed with shame; the taunt struck too close to the truth. What had happened to Mr. Lovejoy was, however indirectly, because of her.
And it was one more reminder that school was not just unbearable now—it was also unsafe. If Redgrave or any of the other vampires came in here, who was going to stop them? The elderly school secretary who sweetly asked visitors for their ID at the front door? Not likely.
Maybe it was ridiculous to think that vampires would come barging into Darby Glen High, but she didn’t know how far they’d go, or what they would or wouldn’t risk. Surely they wouldn’t want to kidnap her in public. But who knows?
She’d gotten up early enough in the morning to walk to the bus while her parents were going to their cars. That wasn’t much protection, but it was something. Here at school, she was totally exposed.
To everything, including Britnee Fong.
“Should we be quieter?” Britnee was perched on the edge of Craig’s desk; he’d hitched two of his fingers through a belt loop at the waist of her denim skirt. “Because, like, won’t they come in here? And tell us to shut up? Then we’ll get a substitute?”
Madison glanced at Skye, like My God, that girl is stupid, before she said, “Do you seriously think that we’re not getting a sub? Is your big plan for us to just sit in here silently all semester and hope they don’t notice Mr. Lovejoy is out?”
“It’s weird they haven’t gotten anyone in here already,” Craig said quickly, obviously trying to stand up for his dimwit girlfriend. “The other teachers are probably pissed off by now.”
Probably this was true, Skye thought—in the absence of Mr. Lovejoy, her homeroom had gone from hushed voices to the verge of anarchy. So far, the drawings on the dry-erase board weren’t obscene, but they’d probably get there in five more minutes. Wasn’t it bad enough that she was going to have to go through every school day in fear for her life without everybody being completely obnoxious in the bargain? She slumped down over her desk.
“That was never—Bianca was always with Lucas, really. Our relationship was more about hiding their romance.” And if he’d been fool enough to forget that for a while, he thought, he had no one but himself to blame.
“But you liked her, didn’t you?” This girl had seen right through him. “Do you still?”
“No. I mean—of course I care about Bianca. I always will. But she never wanted what I wanted. It took me a while to accept that, but I have.”
Why did it feel so strange, talking about that with Skye? It felt like … like talking about one girlfriend to another. Bad form. Though of course Bianca had never really been his girlfriend, and Skye—that couldn’t happen, for her sake.
They’d cleared the last remnants of ice from her bedroom, and he’d double-checked the entire first floor and fixed the locks—though Redgrave’s phobia of wraiths meant that the doors probably could be left wide open from now on without the tribe returning. Tonight’s crisis was taken care of: time to look toward the future.
“You’re going to take the bus to school in the morning, right?”
Skye gave him a look across her darkened bedroom. “Of course. I’m not going to walk along the road again by myself. But what do we do after that? If they came after me on one of the main streets in town, they’d come after me in school.”
“I’m working on that,” Balthazar said. He didn’t want to make any promises before he knew for sure. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Wait—you’re leaving?” She looked stricken.
“I promise you, they aren’t coming back tonight.”
“But you could still stay here. My parents wouldn’t see you.”
“There are a few things I need to take care of. If I did that here, I’d keep you up.”
“Like I could sleep after this.” Skye sighed, but more in tiredness than frustration. Balthazar disliked leaving her, but for the moment she was safe, and he had to think about protecting her in the long term.
“Just go to school tomorrow and trust me, okay?”
He tossed the words out lightly, a phrase and nothing more. But Skye’s expression became solemn as she said, “I trust you.”
She really meant it.
He hadn’t realized, until that moment, how badly he’d wanted to hear her say that.
That night, he returned to the cheap hotel room he’d rented on the edge of town, when he’d believed he would be here for only a handful of days. Obviously he’d need a longer-term solution, with Redgrave on the scene. The danger to Skye wouldn’t go away in a day, or a week. This required long-term thinking. This required commitment.
Balthazar went to bed around midnight. Though he, like most vampires, preferred to remain awake at night and rest during the day, he knew that behaving this way separated him too completely from human society. There were times he’d allowed himself to drift into a vampiric existence; those were the times when he’d looked up to see that a year or a decade had come and gone without his having had a single meaningful experience. No more, he’d decided.
Besides, if he wanted to help Skye, he’d need an early start.
And he did want to help her—more strongly than he could have imagined he would after only a couple of days—
Refusing to think about it anymore, Balthazar went to sleep.
And dreamed.
1988.
How long had he been out of synch? Five years? Closer to ten, maybe. Balthazar’s jeans and T-shirt weren’t quite right—everybody wore jeans washed out pale now, and the stripes on his shirt’s sleeves had gone from ubiquitous to unfamiliar. But he could pass. He could manage.
It wasn’t like he hadn’t left the house in Chicago for ten years. He’d made trips to the hospital blood banks and the butchers, to get the blood he needed. He’d walked to the nearest bars and walked back. Sometimes he went to the store for cigarettes. But depression hung a kind of veil over everything—clouding it, making it more distant than it really was.
Now that Balthazar was pushing himself out again, that veil was gone. In its place was a world transformed.
Like cars. When had cars become so dull? Everything was white or gray, boxy and boring.
Women’s fashions were interesting—sort of like the 1940s on acid. Big hair, big shoulder pads, brilliant neon colors: It would take some getting used to, but he’d give it points over the 1970s.
And the storefronts all seemed to have gone away. Maybe this was because of those “malls” he’d heard about. He’d have to see one.
“Look at this,” said Redgrave, falling into step beside him. “Balthazar’s revisiting his glory days.”
Balthazar stopped where he stood, staring at Redgrave, trying to understand how he could be here. It made no sense—he hadn’t seen Redgrave in at least—in at least—
“You tried to destroy my tribe. To destroy me.” How was Redgrave in his mind? Everything around them was changing now. The twilight Chicago street seemed to be shimmering—no, melting, not vanishing but melting the way candle wax did—taking on new shapes.
The shape of a dance club in the late 1970s.
He’d been here once. No. This was the first time. Balthazar’s confusion only increased as Redgrave became more and more gleeful, clapping his hands as he circled Balthazar. A haze of smoke from cigarettes—and other smoked substances—made the blinking lights around them seem almost eerie.
“I’ve only just begun finding ways to hurt you,” Redgrave said. “Take this dream, for example. I’d never have done anything so rude, if you would only mind your manners. But Charity says you haven’t minded yours at all.”
Charity. His baby sister. Balthazar looked across the club and saw her—
—Charity and Jane in their dresses from the 1600s, with Constantia standing between them—
“Do you want to live it all again? I’ll make sure that you do.” Redgrave leaned closer to Balthazar, his feral smile bright in the gloom. “Unless you get out of town now. Leave Skye to me.”
Skye—Skye didn’t belong to this place, to this time—
Balthazar sat upright in bed, startled awake. That dream had been a vivid one.
Too vivid.
Any vampire’s dreams could be invaded by that vampire’s sire. Normally it was an affectionate gesture—which was why Redgrave had always left him alone. Balthazar had hardly thought of this skill before last year, when Charity had taken to invading Lucas’s dreams during his time as a vampire. She had tormented him psychologically all night long until Balthazar had stopped her—by invading her dreams in turn. It had been a savage business, one that sickened him to think of.
But not as much as it sickened him to realize that Redgrave was following their example. From now on, any given night could see his dreams turning into a torture chamber. The dreamer never understood the true nature of the dream until it had ended; until then, all the fear, confusion, and pain was quite real.
Balthazar thought once again of seeing Charity and Jane standing side by side. He remembered the last time he had seen that, and he never wanted to return there.
If the only way to stop the dreams was abandoning Skye—
—then let Redgrave do his worst.
Balthazar knew how to look twenty-one years old if he had to.
He’d mastered that art long ago, though these days it mostly came in handy when he needed to buy a beer. (Whose idea had it been to raise the drinking age that high anyway? As someone who’d grown up in an era when fifteen-year-olds were considered adults, he found the modern prohibitions on marriage and alcohol consumption ridiculously Puritanical—and he’d been a Puritan.)
At any rate, he knew how to appear older than the age he’d died at, nineteen. Allowing a shadow of stubble to grow on his cheeks got him partway there. Wearing expensive, well-cut, conservative-looking clothes helped a lot, too.
Now, looking twenty-four years old—that was tougher.
His suit appeared right. The stubble was scratchy without making him look unkempt. Balthazar studied himself in the mirror before dispensing a considerable amount of hair gel—“Infinite Hold,” it promised, somewhat rashly—and combing it through, so that his curls vanished into a hard, slicked-back style. Then he pulled out a pair of tortoiseshell glasses with the modern rectangular frames. The lenses were merely glass; he’d heard these were fashionable these days and had bought them just to experiment. But hopefully they’d work as part of his disguise, too.
Double-checking his phone, he saw that Lucas had sent the fake documents he needed. Supposedly there was a twenty-four-hour copy center in town; he’d be able to print those off, and he knew that Lucas and his other friends would provide the phone verifications necessary.
This could work—if he played his role right. It was all up to him.
“It’s lucky you showed up today,” said Principal Zaslow, across the desk in her cozy office at Darby Glen High. “There was a car accident last night; we lost our history teacher for at least two months. I had no idea where we were going to find a qualified substitute who could work that long, starting immediately.”
Balthazar gave her his best, most confident smile. “I’m your man.”
Chapter Eight
“DO YOU REMEMBER THAT THING THAT WENT around about how gang members were going to beat up people at random, for, like, an initiation? And if anybody flashed headlights at you then you had to get out of there because they’d picked you? I bet that’s what happened to Mr. Lovejoy.”
“That’s so stupid. He was in a car accident.”
“I heard he was driving drunk.”
“He’d be fired already if that were true. Maybe the person who hit him was drunk and that’s what you heard.”
“You’re awfully quiet, Skye.” Some girl looked at her with narrow ferret eyes. “What, feeling guilty? Were you the one who ran him down? The rich think they can get away with anything.”
People laughed. Skye flushed with shame; the taunt struck too close to the truth. What had happened to Mr. Lovejoy was, however indirectly, because of her.
And it was one more reminder that school was not just unbearable now—it was also unsafe. If Redgrave or any of the other vampires came in here, who was going to stop them? The elderly school secretary who sweetly asked visitors for their ID at the front door? Not likely.
Maybe it was ridiculous to think that vampires would come barging into Darby Glen High, but she didn’t know how far they’d go, or what they would or wouldn’t risk. Surely they wouldn’t want to kidnap her in public. But who knows?
She’d gotten up early enough in the morning to walk to the bus while her parents were going to their cars. That wasn’t much protection, but it was something. Here at school, she was totally exposed.
To everything, including Britnee Fong.
“Should we be quieter?” Britnee was perched on the edge of Craig’s desk; he’d hitched two of his fingers through a belt loop at the waist of her denim skirt. “Because, like, won’t they come in here? And tell us to shut up? Then we’ll get a substitute?”
Madison glanced at Skye, like My God, that girl is stupid, before she said, “Do you seriously think that we’re not getting a sub? Is your big plan for us to just sit in here silently all semester and hope they don’t notice Mr. Lovejoy is out?”
“It’s weird they haven’t gotten anyone in here already,” Craig said quickly, obviously trying to stand up for his dimwit girlfriend. “The other teachers are probably pissed off by now.”
Probably this was true, Skye thought—in the absence of Mr. Lovejoy, her homeroom had gone from hushed voices to the verge of anarchy. So far, the drawings on the dry-erase board weren’t obscene, but they’d probably get there in five more minutes. Wasn’t it bad enough that she was going to have to go through every school day in fear for her life without everybody being completely obnoxious in the bargain? She slumped down over her desk.
