Balthazar
Page 31
Until the moment a great weight fell upon him and dislodged the stake.
Balthazar screamed. The stake now jabbed through his chest, if not his heart, with the full pain of a deep stab wound. He sucked in a breath and found his lungs filled with smoke; when his eyes would see again, he realized that Charity had fulfilled his plan to the letter—she’d simply turned it against him instead of against Constantia. He was the one now trapped in a burning house, half a smoldering timber across his gut searing his skin, only seconds from oblivion.
Charity, why?
But he knew why. He had killed his sister. She was returning the favor.
Despair settled over him, heavier than the beam that pinned him down. It would be easy to just lie back and let it happen. And yet he couldn’t. Maybe that made him a coward. Maybe the instinct to survive outlasted death itself.
Using all his remaining strength, Balthazar shoved the fallen timber off his body. His remaining clothes were singed, his skin blackened and blistering. The tips of his fingers stuck to the stake he yanked from his own chest, peeling away from his flesh. He staggered toward the nearest window and threw himself through it; glass stabbed into him, just one more layer of pain to mingle with all the rest.
The fall hurt, too; the bones in one forearm snapped as he hit the ground, but somehow he managed to stifle a shout of pain. Balthazar crawled away from the burning house, expecting Constantia and Charity to arrive at any moment to finish him at any cost.
But no one was there. In Philadelphia during the influenza epidemic, even firefighters weren’t risking their lives for anyone else. And apparently Charity and Constantia had already written him off.
Balthazar found his way to the edge of town, to an abandoned building where rats dwelled and made for easy eating. He remained there long after his burns and broken bones healed. Long after the flu epidemic ended. He spoke to no one. He let his beard grow. He spent long days watching a rectangle of light from his room’s one window crawl from one side of the room to the other as the sun rose and set.
Dozens of days.
Hundreds of days.
Without human blood, he felt himself changing: his flesh hung more loosely on him, and his fingers increasingly curved into claws. The monster was taking over, but the monster could feel no pain, so Balthazar accepted it. Filth matted his hair and beard, and his torn clothing turned into mere rags. When vermin scurried close enough to be caught, he devoured them. He was as low as he deserved to be; that was as much as he thought about the matter, when he bothered to think of anything at all.
One evening, though, as he lay on the floor halfway between stupor and slumber, he heard a low, guttural laugh. “Lookit this. Some damn hobo.”
“Trash, if you ask me.”
“Might have something in here, though.”
“Not this guy. Lookit him. He don’t need a squat. He needs a grave.”
“We can take care of that, can’t we?”
Balthazar breathed in, smelled human blood, and the monster had killed and devoured them both long before his mind told him he’d even been in danger.
He stood over the corpses of his victims for nearly an hour as he tried to process his return to human consciousness. Already Balthazar could feel his body restoring itself, taking on the muscular form he’d had in life. His tangled beard disgusted him now, as did the grime coating his body, but he’d have to clean himself later.
First he had to figure out just how long he’d been in this place.
One of the dead men was at least close to his size, so Balthazar put on his shirt, coat, and shoes before venturing outside. It was late at night—but that was all he recognized. The entire neighborhood had been rebuilt around him. The roads were repaved, and no horses and carriages were to be seen; instead, automobiles rolled past, faster and more contained than they’d been before.
Buying stock in General Motors was a good idea, Balthazar thought. But his portfolio wasn’t his main concern at the moment.
Moving more naturally and decisively now, Balthazar went to a nearby trash bin and pulled out a crumpled newspaper. The headlines blared unfamiliar information—Depression, Dust Bowl—and one unexpectedly familiar phrase—President Roosevelt? Again?—but he’d read this and absorb the contents later. Right now he cared about only one thing: the date.
April 26, 1933.
Almost fifteen years gone, and he hadn’t even noticed them going.
He would have to return to Evernight Academy and enroll again. There he could find out what the world was like these days and start to adapt. Balthazar hated the process of starting over, but he could do it when he had to.
And he would this time, too, though his weary heart still held only the thought of his sister, and the knowledge of pain.
Chapter Twenty-one
BALTHAZAR KNEW HE SHOULD BE RELIEVED AT the news that Skye had a date. It was a definite sign that she was willing to walk away from—whatever it was that had been building between them. She was no angrier than his bad manners deserved; she wasn’t going to cry or carry on like a woman scorned. They could cooperate in figuring out her powers; they could work together to ensure she remained safe from Redgrave. She wouldn’t ask anything else of him. That was exactly what he should hope for.
Instead, as he drove back to his home through the winter storm, he kept thinking about Skye in Keith Kramer’s arms.
Keith Kramer. A mere boy. And not even a particularly intelligent, dynamic, or kind one. One who turned in history papers late, and despite repeated corrections kept confusing your and you’re. He was handsome in a generic sort of way, though, and apparently a football star—some girls went for that, but Skye? Not her. She was special. There was nothing ordinary about her. Keith was the definition of earthbound.
Damn, but he needed a cigarette. His resolution to quit had never been as difficult as it was right then. He wanted to light one up, suck it in, blow out smoke that could kill other people. Such as Keith Kramer. How could she even think of going out with that … blond lump?
She can think about it because you cast her aside, he reminded himself. You don’t have the right to control who she sees.
Yet the mere thought of Keith’s hands on Skye’s lithe body made Balthazar furious with jealousy.
For one moment, he couldn’t see the road in front of him, even his hands clenched on the steering wheel. All he saw was his dark vision of Skye lifting her face for someone else’s kiss—
And that was the moment someone walked into the road in front of his car.
He shouted in wordless horror at the thump of his car striking flesh and bone. Even as he slammed on the brakes, sending his car careering into the thicker snow alongside the road, the body was flung up onto the hood, onto his windshield, limp and in tatters. For a moment he could only stare, aghast, at the crumpled form that lay in front of the windshield. Then, slowly, his victim lifted her head to stare through the glass at him.
“Gotcha,” Charity said, before bursting into peals of laughter.
Balthazar slammed his fists against the steering wheel in frustration. “Jesus, Charity! You scared the hell out of me.”
She grinned at him, wriggling with pleasure as if she were a little girl telling riddles again. “Just think! If it had been a human, you could’ve eaten it! And no guilt about biting that one at all.”
“Your idea of guilt and mine are very different.”
Her expression darkened. “They are, aren’t they?”
Balthazar got out of the car. His feet sank in loose, powdery snow almost up to his knees. The darkness around them was nearly total, and by now almost nobody else was foolish enough to be out on the road. He and Charity were alone. Her white dress and pale hair made her appear to be part of the snowstorm around them.
“You’ve gone back to Redgrave,” he said. “Thought you had your own tribe.”
“I do. They’re with me. But you never forget your first love, do you?”
Once again he remembered the barn where he’d drawn his last breath as a living man, and how slick with blood and gore it had been when he’d finished murdering her. No moment in his existence had greater horror than the one when he’d seen Charity dead by his hand—lying next to his first love, the woman he’d tried to save by sacrificing his sister. Tried and failed.
Charity was thinking of it, too. Her high, youthful voice shook, as if from the cold. “Why do you never choose me? Why am I never the one you want to save?”
“Why do you always choose to go back to Redgrave? How can you be on his side after what he did to both of us?”
“Redgrave only killed you,” she spat back. “You’re the one who murdered me!”
They’d had this argument before—hundreds of times, over hundreds of years. This was Balthazar’s cue to retort that he’d been given no choice, that she knew how it was, that she would have died one way or the other before that night was through. Would she rather be poor Jane?
But this time was different. Because this time, he’d been back there. He’d relived it, as vividly and immediately as he had experienced those events the first time. This time, Balthazar finally understood.
Charity wasn’t asking him why he hadn’t somehow managed to save them all from Redgrave’s clutches.
She was asking why he hadn’t done her the mercy of allowing her to be the one who died.
Jane had a chance, he’d told himself. Charity didn’t. Charity’s spirit and soul had already been broken.
But that was why he should have killed her. Had Jane been a vampire—maybe she would’ve been a killer like Redgrave, because the change transformed people in every possible sense, but maybe she would’ve been like Balthazar or the other vampires of Evernight. Sane. Reasonable. At any rate, her choices would’ve been her own.
By turning Charity into a vampire, Balthazar had ensured that she would remain trapped in the labyrinthine chambers of her own insanity for all time.
Balthazar said, “I’m sorry.”
“You always say—”
He sank to his knees in the snow and looked up at her. The gesture silenced her beyond any words he’d ever spoken.
All the same, he spoke. “Charity, if I could go back, I’d do it all differently. If Redgrave told me again to choose one of you to turn, I’d walk to you and snap your neck myself. I’d let you go along with Mom and Dad. I’d let it be over. I would set you free. What I did to you I live with every single day, and even though you don’t see it, I swear to God, it’s as bad as the fate I made for you.”
She only became angrier. “You can’t go back! There’s no wishing for it, because I wish and I wish—” Charity wiped angrily at her face with the back of her hand; it was the first time Balthazar realized she’d begun crying. “We’re vampires now. Both of us. We always will be. So there’s no such thing as ‘Redgrave’s side’ or ‘our side.’ We’re on the same side, forever. Thanks to you.”
Balthazar didn’t rise. The snow was already thick on his shoulders and the front of his coat. His car’s headlights showed him that Charity’s feet were bare and raw. “It’s not as simple as that. What Redgrave is—that doesn’t have to be what we are.”
“What we are is vampires. You just play-pretend you’re a human.” Charity’s eyes narrowed. “Is that why you got yourself another girlfriend? A simple, stupid human girl filled up with the best blood of all—”
“You don’t get to judge her. Judge me all you want. You’ve got the right. But not Skye.”
She bent over, bringing her face not far above his. Despite her disheveled appearance and singsong voice, her eyes were shrewd. “Or are you saving her for yourself? Make her your girlfriend, and then you can have all the blood you like and never, ever share.”
If only he could answer that he’d never drunk Skye’s blood.
Balthazar screamed. The stake now jabbed through his chest, if not his heart, with the full pain of a deep stab wound. He sucked in a breath and found his lungs filled with smoke; when his eyes would see again, he realized that Charity had fulfilled his plan to the letter—she’d simply turned it against him instead of against Constantia. He was the one now trapped in a burning house, half a smoldering timber across his gut searing his skin, only seconds from oblivion.
Charity, why?
But he knew why. He had killed his sister. She was returning the favor.
Despair settled over him, heavier than the beam that pinned him down. It would be easy to just lie back and let it happen. And yet he couldn’t. Maybe that made him a coward. Maybe the instinct to survive outlasted death itself.
Using all his remaining strength, Balthazar shoved the fallen timber off his body. His remaining clothes were singed, his skin blackened and blistering. The tips of his fingers stuck to the stake he yanked from his own chest, peeling away from his flesh. He staggered toward the nearest window and threw himself through it; glass stabbed into him, just one more layer of pain to mingle with all the rest.
The fall hurt, too; the bones in one forearm snapped as he hit the ground, but somehow he managed to stifle a shout of pain. Balthazar crawled away from the burning house, expecting Constantia and Charity to arrive at any moment to finish him at any cost.
But no one was there. In Philadelphia during the influenza epidemic, even firefighters weren’t risking their lives for anyone else. And apparently Charity and Constantia had already written him off.
Balthazar found his way to the edge of town, to an abandoned building where rats dwelled and made for easy eating. He remained there long after his burns and broken bones healed. Long after the flu epidemic ended. He spoke to no one. He let his beard grow. He spent long days watching a rectangle of light from his room’s one window crawl from one side of the room to the other as the sun rose and set.
Dozens of days.
Hundreds of days.
Without human blood, he felt himself changing: his flesh hung more loosely on him, and his fingers increasingly curved into claws. The monster was taking over, but the monster could feel no pain, so Balthazar accepted it. Filth matted his hair and beard, and his torn clothing turned into mere rags. When vermin scurried close enough to be caught, he devoured them. He was as low as he deserved to be; that was as much as he thought about the matter, when he bothered to think of anything at all.
One evening, though, as he lay on the floor halfway between stupor and slumber, he heard a low, guttural laugh. “Lookit this. Some damn hobo.”
“Trash, if you ask me.”
“Might have something in here, though.”
“Not this guy. Lookit him. He don’t need a squat. He needs a grave.”
“We can take care of that, can’t we?”
Balthazar breathed in, smelled human blood, and the monster had killed and devoured them both long before his mind told him he’d even been in danger.
He stood over the corpses of his victims for nearly an hour as he tried to process his return to human consciousness. Already Balthazar could feel his body restoring itself, taking on the muscular form he’d had in life. His tangled beard disgusted him now, as did the grime coating his body, but he’d have to clean himself later.
First he had to figure out just how long he’d been in this place.
One of the dead men was at least close to his size, so Balthazar put on his shirt, coat, and shoes before venturing outside. It was late at night—but that was all he recognized. The entire neighborhood had been rebuilt around him. The roads were repaved, and no horses and carriages were to be seen; instead, automobiles rolled past, faster and more contained than they’d been before.
Buying stock in General Motors was a good idea, Balthazar thought. But his portfolio wasn’t his main concern at the moment.
Moving more naturally and decisively now, Balthazar went to a nearby trash bin and pulled out a crumpled newspaper. The headlines blared unfamiliar information—Depression, Dust Bowl—and one unexpectedly familiar phrase—President Roosevelt? Again?—but he’d read this and absorb the contents later. Right now he cared about only one thing: the date.
April 26, 1933.
Almost fifteen years gone, and he hadn’t even noticed them going.
He would have to return to Evernight Academy and enroll again. There he could find out what the world was like these days and start to adapt. Balthazar hated the process of starting over, but he could do it when he had to.
And he would this time, too, though his weary heart still held only the thought of his sister, and the knowledge of pain.
Chapter Twenty-one
BALTHAZAR KNEW HE SHOULD BE RELIEVED AT the news that Skye had a date. It was a definite sign that she was willing to walk away from—whatever it was that had been building between them. She was no angrier than his bad manners deserved; she wasn’t going to cry or carry on like a woman scorned. They could cooperate in figuring out her powers; they could work together to ensure she remained safe from Redgrave. She wouldn’t ask anything else of him. That was exactly what he should hope for.
Instead, as he drove back to his home through the winter storm, he kept thinking about Skye in Keith Kramer’s arms.
Keith Kramer. A mere boy. And not even a particularly intelligent, dynamic, or kind one. One who turned in history papers late, and despite repeated corrections kept confusing your and you’re. He was handsome in a generic sort of way, though, and apparently a football star—some girls went for that, but Skye? Not her. She was special. There was nothing ordinary about her. Keith was the definition of earthbound.
Damn, but he needed a cigarette. His resolution to quit had never been as difficult as it was right then. He wanted to light one up, suck it in, blow out smoke that could kill other people. Such as Keith Kramer. How could she even think of going out with that … blond lump?
She can think about it because you cast her aside, he reminded himself. You don’t have the right to control who she sees.
Yet the mere thought of Keith’s hands on Skye’s lithe body made Balthazar furious with jealousy.
For one moment, he couldn’t see the road in front of him, even his hands clenched on the steering wheel. All he saw was his dark vision of Skye lifting her face for someone else’s kiss—
And that was the moment someone walked into the road in front of his car.
He shouted in wordless horror at the thump of his car striking flesh and bone. Even as he slammed on the brakes, sending his car careering into the thicker snow alongside the road, the body was flung up onto the hood, onto his windshield, limp and in tatters. For a moment he could only stare, aghast, at the crumpled form that lay in front of the windshield. Then, slowly, his victim lifted her head to stare through the glass at him.
“Gotcha,” Charity said, before bursting into peals of laughter.
Balthazar slammed his fists against the steering wheel in frustration. “Jesus, Charity! You scared the hell out of me.”
She grinned at him, wriggling with pleasure as if she were a little girl telling riddles again. “Just think! If it had been a human, you could’ve eaten it! And no guilt about biting that one at all.”
“Your idea of guilt and mine are very different.”
Her expression darkened. “They are, aren’t they?”
Balthazar got out of the car. His feet sank in loose, powdery snow almost up to his knees. The darkness around them was nearly total, and by now almost nobody else was foolish enough to be out on the road. He and Charity were alone. Her white dress and pale hair made her appear to be part of the snowstorm around them.
“You’ve gone back to Redgrave,” he said. “Thought you had your own tribe.”
“I do. They’re with me. But you never forget your first love, do you?”
Once again he remembered the barn where he’d drawn his last breath as a living man, and how slick with blood and gore it had been when he’d finished murdering her. No moment in his existence had greater horror than the one when he’d seen Charity dead by his hand—lying next to his first love, the woman he’d tried to save by sacrificing his sister. Tried and failed.
Charity was thinking of it, too. Her high, youthful voice shook, as if from the cold. “Why do you never choose me? Why am I never the one you want to save?”
“Why do you always choose to go back to Redgrave? How can you be on his side after what he did to both of us?”
“Redgrave only killed you,” she spat back. “You’re the one who murdered me!”
They’d had this argument before—hundreds of times, over hundreds of years. This was Balthazar’s cue to retort that he’d been given no choice, that she knew how it was, that she would have died one way or the other before that night was through. Would she rather be poor Jane?
But this time was different. Because this time, he’d been back there. He’d relived it, as vividly and immediately as he had experienced those events the first time. This time, Balthazar finally understood.
Charity wasn’t asking him why he hadn’t somehow managed to save them all from Redgrave’s clutches.
She was asking why he hadn’t done her the mercy of allowing her to be the one who died.
Jane had a chance, he’d told himself. Charity didn’t. Charity’s spirit and soul had already been broken.
But that was why he should have killed her. Had Jane been a vampire—maybe she would’ve been a killer like Redgrave, because the change transformed people in every possible sense, but maybe she would’ve been like Balthazar or the other vampires of Evernight. Sane. Reasonable. At any rate, her choices would’ve been her own.
By turning Charity into a vampire, Balthazar had ensured that she would remain trapped in the labyrinthine chambers of her own insanity for all time.
Balthazar said, “I’m sorry.”
“You always say—”
He sank to his knees in the snow and looked up at her. The gesture silenced her beyond any words he’d ever spoken.
All the same, he spoke. “Charity, if I could go back, I’d do it all differently. If Redgrave told me again to choose one of you to turn, I’d walk to you and snap your neck myself. I’d let you go along with Mom and Dad. I’d let it be over. I would set you free. What I did to you I live with every single day, and even though you don’t see it, I swear to God, it’s as bad as the fate I made for you.”
She only became angrier. “You can’t go back! There’s no wishing for it, because I wish and I wish—” Charity wiped angrily at her face with the back of her hand; it was the first time Balthazar realized she’d begun crying. “We’re vampires now. Both of us. We always will be. So there’s no such thing as ‘Redgrave’s side’ or ‘our side.’ We’re on the same side, forever. Thanks to you.”
Balthazar didn’t rise. The snow was already thick on his shoulders and the front of his coat. His car’s headlights showed him that Charity’s feet were bare and raw. “It’s not as simple as that. What Redgrave is—that doesn’t have to be what we are.”
“What we are is vampires. You just play-pretend you’re a human.” Charity’s eyes narrowed. “Is that why you got yourself another girlfriend? A simple, stupid human girl filled up with the best blood of all—”
“You don’t get to judge her. Judge me all you want. You’ve got the right. But not Skye.”
She bent over, bringing her face not far above his. Despite her disheveled appearance and singsong voice, her eyes were shrewd. “Or are you saving her for yourself? Make her your girlfriend, and then you can have all the blood you like and never, ever share.”
If only he could answer that he’d never drunk Skye’s blood.
