CHAPTER TWO
“Narng.”
Darkness swirled through my head, but it wasn’t the familiar darkness of the inside of my eyelids, or even the twice-experienced darkness of anesthesia, but a really black darkness that was filled with sorrow . . . and concern.
Are you injured? Does anything hurt?
“Gark,” I said. At least I think it was me. I felt my lips move and all, but I don’t think I’ve ever said the word “gark” before in my life, so really, why would I be saying it now, to this sad blackness that talked directly into my head?
Gark. I’m not familiar with that word. Is it something new?
“Mmrfm.” Yep, that was me speaking, I recognized the “mmrfm.” I said that every morning when the clock radio went off. I’m a heavy sleeper. I hate being woken up.
You don’t look injured. Did you strike your head?
The motorcycle! I had been run over. I was probably dead. Or dying. Or delirious.
You stepped directly in front of me. I had no time to avoid you. You really should learn to look before you walk out from behind trucks.
You shouldn’t have been driving so freakin’ fast, I thought back to the voice that rubbed like the softest velvet against my brain, not in the least bit surprised or shocked or even weirded out that someone could talk to me without using words. I’d been with the GothFaire for a whole month. I’ve seen stranger things.
The voice smiled. I know that sounds stupid, because how can a voice smile, but it did. I felt the smile in my head just as clearly as I felt the hands running down my arms, obviously checking me over for injury.
Eeek! Someone was touching me! The second my hands were touched . . .
My brain was flooded with images, like a slide show of strange, unconnected moments in time. There was a man in one of those long, ornately embroidered coats like Revolutionary guys wore. This guy was waving his arms around and looking really smug about something, but just as soon as I got a good look at him, he dissolved into mud and rain, and blood dripping from a dead guy in World War I clothes. He was sprawled backward in a ditch, his eyes open, unseeing as the rain ran down from his cheeks into his hair. It was night, and the air was full of the smell of sulfur and urine and other stuff that I didn’t want to identify. That dissolved, too (thank goodness), this time into a lady with a huge, and I mean huge, like a yard-high, powdered white wig and a giganto-hipped dress with her boobs almost popping out of it. She was lifting up the bottom of her skirt, peeling it back slowly, exposing her leg as if it were something special (it wasn’t), saying something in French about pleasure.
I jerked my hand back from the man touching it at the same time I opened my eyes. Vampire. Moravian. Nosferatu. Dark One. Call him what you want; this man was a bloodsucker.
His eyes met mine and I sucked in my breath.
He was also the cutest guy I had ever seen in my whole entire life. We’re talking open-your-mouth-and-let-the-drool-flow-out cute. We’re talking hottie. Major hottie. The hottest of all hotties. He wasn’t just good-looking; he was fall-to-the-ground-dead gorgeous. He had brown-black hair pulled back into a ponytail, black eyes with lashes so long it made him look like he was wearing mascara, a fashionable amount of manly stubble, and he was young, or at least he looked young, maybe nineteen. Twenty at the most. Earrings in both ears. Black leather jacket. Black tee. Silver chain with an ornate Celtic cross hanging on his chest. Oh, yes, this was one drool-worthy guy bending over me, and just my luck, he was one of the undead.
“Some days I just can’t win,” I said, pushing myself into a sitting position.
“Some days I don’t even try,” he answered, his voice the same as the one that had brushed my mind. It was faintly foreign, not German, like Soren’s and Peter’s, but something else, maybe Slavic? I haven’t been in Eastern Europe long enough to be able to tell accents very well, and since everyone in the Faire speaks English, I haven’t really had to learn much. “You are unhurt.”
“Was that a question or a comment?” I asked, ignoring his hand as I got to my feet, brushing off my jeans and testing my legs for any possible compound fractures or dismemberment or anything like that.
“Both.” He stood up and flicked the dirt and grass off my back.
“Oh, lucky me, I got to be run over by a comedian,” I growled. “Hey! Hands to yourself, buster!”
His hand, in the act of brushing grass off my legs, paused. Both of his eyebrows went up. “My apology.”
I tugged down my T-shirt and gave him a look to let him know that he might be a vamp, but I was on to him. That was when it struck me that I had to look up to glare at him. Up. As in . . . up. “You’re taller than me.”
“I’m glad to see that you aren’t suffering any brain damage. What is your name?”
“Fran. Uh . . . Francesca. My dad’s parents are Italian. I was named for my grandma. She’s in Italy.” God, could I sound any more stupid? Babbling. I was positively babbling like an idiot, to a man who at some point in his life had a big-haired French Revolution babe baring her legs at him. Oh, brilliant, Fran. Make him think you’re a raving lunatic.
“That’s a very pretty name. I like it.” He smiled when he said that last bit, showing very white teeth. Nonpointy teeth. As in no fangs. I wanted to ask him what happened to his fangs, but Soren and some of the band guys had just noticed us standing with the cable spilled all over, and the motorcycle lying on its side.
“Fran, are you all right?” Soren asked, jumping off the truck and limping toward me. One leg is shorter than the other, but he’s really touchy about his limp, so we don’t say anything about it.
The vamp glanced at Soren, then back at me. “Boyfriend?”
I snorted, then wished I hadn’t. I mean, how uncool is snorting in front of a vamp? “Not! He’s younger than me.”
“Is something wrong, Fran?” Soren said, limping up really quickly, giving the dark-haired guy a look like he was trying to take a favorite toy away. To tell you the truth, I was kind of touched by the squinty-eyed, suspicious look Soren was giving the guy.
“It’s okay. I was just run over. The cable isn’t hurt, though.”
“Run over?” Two of the band guys hurried around Soren and grabbed the cable, examining the ends of it.
“Joke, Soren. I’m not hurt. This is Imogen’s brother.”
The dark-haired vamp gave me a curious look before holding out his hand to Soren. He didn’t deny it, so I gathered my guess was right. It was no surprise, though. I mean, how many authentic Dark Ones were going to be hanging around the Faire on the very same evening Imogen was expecting her brother? “Benedikt Czerny.”
“Chairnee?” I asked.
“It’s spelled C-Z-E-R-N-Y. It’s Czech.”
“Oh. That’s right. Imogen said she’s from the CR. How come her last name is Sorik?”
“Females in my family take their mother’s surname,” Benedikt said smoothly, then pulled his bike upright. He was talking about Moravians. I wondered if anyone else knew what he really was. Imogen said only Absinthe knew about her—I had discovered it by accident one night when we both reached for the same piece of berry cobbler and my hand brushed hers.
“I’m Soren Sauber. My father and aunt own the GothFaire.”
Soren had puffed himself up, his normally nice blue eyes all hard as he glared at Benedikt. I’d never seen him like that; usually he was all smiley and friendly, kind of like a giant blond puppy who wants to tag along.
“It is a pleasure to meet you,” Benedikt said politely. He turned to me and offered his hand.
I stuck mine behind my back. “Sorry. I have this thing about touching people. It’s . . . uh . . . a skin problem.” A skin problem. A skin problem! Great, now he’d think I had leprosy or something.
His left eyebrow bobbled for a moment before it settled down. He looked back at Soren. “Is there somewhere I can park . . . ? Yes, I see. Thank you.” His black eyes flickered over to me. I sucked in my cheeks and tried to look like I wasn’t the sort of leprosy-riddled babbling idiot who walks out in front of motorcycles. “I look forward to seeing you both again.”
“Wow,” I said as he walked his bike over to where a horse trailer was parked next to Peter and Soren’s bus. “Is he, like, major cool, or what?”
“Major cool?” Soren looked after Benedikt. The guy had a really nice walk. I mean, niiiiiiice. Course, his skintight black jeans didn’t hurt any. “I suppose so.”
I hugged my arms around my ribs, vaguely surprised that they didn’t hurt despite my being slammed to the ground. Nothing on me hurt. To tell the truth, I felt kind of . . . tingly.
“You should stay away from him,” Soren said. I dug the latex gloves out of my pocket and put them on, then pulled the black lace gloves from my back pockets. I had bought them from one of the vendors because they looked suitably Goth. No one would look twice at someone wearing black lace gloves, but experience taught me that if you go around wearing latex doctor’s gloves, people start to give you strange looks. Soren watched me put on the gloves without saying anything. I told him I had hypersensitive skin (not terribly far from the truth) the first day we met, and he’s never said anything about my gloves since. I guess what with his limp, he figured it wasn’t kosher to comment on my gloves.
“Why? He seemed okay to me.”
“I don’t like him. You should stay away from him. He could be . . . dangerous.”
I grinned and socked him on the shoulder in a friendly buddy sort of way. “Yeah, right, I know the truth; you’re jealous.”
His eyes got all startled-looking. “What?”
“His bike. You’re jealous ’cause he came roaring up on a big Harley or whatever it is, and your dad won’t let you get a Vespa until you’re sixteen.”
He just stared at me for a second, then turned back to the truck. “Are you going to help unload or not?”
“Sure.” I smiled to myself. Guys hate it when you get them pegged so quickly. I spent the next hour helping the band set up behind the big black curtain that hid the back of the stage from the front, where the magic acts were held. GothFaire got two basic kinds of customers—average people who were excited to see a traveling fair come to town (and we went to some really small towns)—people who wanted to have their palms read and fortunes told, and buy some crystals and aura pictures and all that cheesy stuff—and the rockers who traveled from around whatever country we were in to hear the bands. The last band we had was from Holland and they were really popular, bringing in lots of people for the shows, but as the Crying Orcs were local boys, I figured the crowd wouldn’t be as big for them.
I wandered around for a bit, watching the visitors (they were much more interesting than the people they came to see), more than a little bored. I thought about going to see if Tallulah had manifested any interesting ectoplasm (lately it’s all been coming out in the shape of Matt Damon—she’s got a bit of a crush), when I realized that it was a quarter to eleven. I hung around the outside of my mother’s tent until her customer went off clutching a bottle of happiness. (Mom’s most popular potion—it really works, too. I drank a big jug of it when I just learned how to crawl. She said I laughed for a week straight.)
“Franny, could you watch things for a couple of minutes? I have a few premade vials of happiness and luck, but ran out of blessings. I’ll just run to the bathroom and be back in two shakes of a cat’s tail.”
I swear Davide rolled his eyes. “Sure, no problem. Hey, Mom, do you know anything about Imogen’s brother?”
“Imogen’s brother? I didn’t know she had a brother. Now, where did I put those keys . . . ?” She bent over, searching through the huge mom-bag she carries, looking for the keys to our trailer. The first week we were here, when I was going through the horrible shock of having to move from our nice house outside of Portland to a small trailer in the middle of Germany, she told me I could pick out what to paint on the trailer. Everyone in the Faire had their trailer painted with their own emblems on it. Imogen’s was gold and white, with scarlet hands and runes. Absinthe’s was pink and green (a horrible combination), while Soren and Peter’s bus-turned-into-home-on-wheels was a soft sky blue with a castle and knights on horseback stretching down the length. Soren told me the town in Germany where he was born had a big ruined castle that he used to love playing in.
Mom wanted a representation of the Goddess on ours. I decided on a midnight-blue background with gold stars and crescent moons on it. She put all sorts of metaphysical meaning into it, saying I had chosen to portray the mystery of the unknown, yadda yadda yadda.
I just thought it was pretty.
“Drat it all, I know I had my keys when I left the trailer; I remember locking up after you left. Honey?”
“I gave you my keys two days ago, Mom. Don’t tell me you’ve lost those, too?”
“Bullfrogs!” Mom takes this witch stuff seriously. She doesn’t swear, because most swear words have their origins in curses, and she won’t dabble in anything dark like a curse. She practices only good magic. It gets a bit tedious sometimes. I mean, I could have really used a couple of quality curses during my sophomore year.
She held out her hand. “Would you?”
“Mom!”
“Please.”
“I am not the Clapper! You’ll have to find your own keys.”
“I know, baby, but I have to use the bathroom, and I want to change into my invocation gown. Just this once, please?”
I turned my back to the opening of the tent so no one would see me as I peeled off the lace glove, then the latex one beneath it. “You know I hate doing this. It makes me feel like a big fat freak.”
“You’re not big or fat or a freak; you’ve been blessed by the Goddess.”
I took a deep breath and tried to clear my mind, like she said I was supposed to do in order to open myself up to all the possibilities. “Is anyone looking?”
“Not a soul.”
I took her hand in mine, and tried to ignore the rush of thoughts that filled my mind. Mom arguing with Absinthe about the band stealing the Faire money. Her worries about me not being happy here battling with her desire to be with the Faire, all mixed up with the fear that the Faire would close if the thefts didn’t stop. Her pain over Dad remarrying so quickly after the divorce. The sudden thought that she hadn’t changed Davide’s litter box, a growl of hunger, a sense of loneliness that so closely resembled my own that I almost dropped her hand . . . I gritted my teeth and tried to focus my mind to pick through hers until I found what I wanted to know.
“You dropped them just outside of the trailer. They’re in a tall clump of grass beneath a candy wrapper,” I said, letting go of her hand with a sigh of relief. Mom was the only person I could touch who didn’t leave me feeling all creepy . . . until Benedikt. I blinked at that thought, and realized it was true. Touching him didn’t freak me out like it did when I touched anyone else—he was warm and soft, inviting, a bit mysterious, but oddly comfortable, considering I’d only just met him.
And, of course, there was the fact that he was a vampire.
“You’re such an angel,” Mom said, kissing my forehead and rushing off to the trailer, pausing to tell the group of people approaching the tent that she’d be back in ten minutes.
“If I’m an angel, where are my wings?” I whispered. It was what I always said whenever she called me an angel, starting from the time when I was little and she would swing me around and around, and tell me I was an angel sent to bring heaven to earth.
I looked down at my hand. It wasn’t small and slender like hers, or long and graceful like Imogen’s. It was big, and my fingers had blunt tips. A musician’s hand, someone had once told me, but I had to stop piano lessons when I was twelve because I couldn’t stand touching Mrs. Stone’s piano. Too many kids used it for their weekly lessons—I’d go home afterward shaking and near tears. That was when Mom finally figured out what had happened to me.
“How long have you been a psychometrist?”
I turned around slowly, wondering if Benedikt had read my mind .
“Since I was twelve.”
He stood on the other side of the table, a large black shape blocking my view of the sky turned indigo and black. “Puberty?”
I nodded and tried to look away, but couldn’t. It was something about his eyes, glowing with an inner light as they watched me fiddle with my gloves. I didn’t want to talk to him about the weird things I could do. I didn’t want him to think I belonged in the freak show.
You’re not a freak.
“Stop that,” I said, taking a couple of steps backward, as if distance would keep him out of my mind.
Are you afraid of me?
His eyes were the color of dark oak, little golden flecks against the warm honey brown, flecks I could see even though his face was thrown into shadow. “Why should I be afraid of you? If anyone should be afraid, it’s you. I know your secret.”
And I know yours, he said into my head as he started coming toward me.
I backed up a couple more steps, straightening my shoulders, trying to look big and tough and mean. “Yours is worse than mine, so if you don’t want to end up on the business end of a sharp stake, you’d just better back off and leave me alone.”
I don’t want to leave you alone.
“You don’t know who you’re messing with—” I started to say, then shrieked when he lunged toward me, grabbing my arms and pulling me toward him. We stood together like that for a second, me braced and ready for him to bite me, him looking down on me with eyes that were changing into glittering ebony.
“I don’t want to mess with you at all, Fran.” Slowly, very slowly, his hand slid down my arm. I watched it as it headed for my naked hand, my bare hand, my hand that kept me from being happy like any other kid.
“Don’t,” I said, ashamed it came out a whimper.
“Trust me,” he said softly. His fingers trailed along the back of my bare hand, then curved under, pushing my arm up so that our palms rested together. I gasped and held my breath, waiting for the rush of images, waiting for the everything that would pour from his mind into mine.
There was nothing. I was touching him, hand to hand, and I felt nothing, saw nothing.
I looked from our hands to his face. “How do you do that? How do you turn yourself off like that?”
His fingers twined through mine, and all of a sudden I was aware that he was a guy and I was a girl, and we were standing together holding hands.
“You know who I am.”
“I know what you are, if that’s what you mean.”
He nodded. “What do you know about us?”
“I know that you’re a vampire . . .” His fingers tightened on mine. Poop. Used the V-word. “. . . but that you prefer to be called Dark Ones. I know that you drink people’s blood to survive, and you’re probably a couple of hundred years old—is Imogen your older sister, or younger?”
“Older.”
I don’t know why that made me feel better, considering he was probably at least three hundred years old, but it did. “And I know that you are really sad most of the time, but somehow, you can block the images in your mind from me at the same time you can talk into my head.”
“Do you know anything about how a Dark One is created? How he can be redeemed?”
“Um . . . you’re created . . . something about a demon lord cursing you?”
I thought his eyes were black before, but they went absolutely obsidian. “My father was cursed by a demon lord.”
“Oh, that’s right. Imogen said something about the sins of the father being passed on to the sons, but not the daughters. I don’t know anything about redemption.”
He looked at our hands, still locked together. It was strange touching him, feeling his warm fingers twined through mine, and not having my head filled with his thoughts and memories and everything else I felt when I touched people. “For every Dark One there is one woman, called a Beloved, who can redeem his soul, a woman who can balance his darkness with her light, and make him whole again.”
“Oh,” I said. So it wasn’t the smartest thing I could say. The guy was holding my hand—it was hard to think about anything but how warm his hand was.
“You are my Beloved.”
I snatched my hand out of his, jumping backward straight into the metal rods that held the tent up. The pointy bit of bone on my wrist whacked into it, making me yelp in pain. “You’re crazy!” I said as I rubbed my sore wrist. “You’re psycho! You’re a total nutball! You’re some sort of stalker!”
He stepped forward. “I don’t have a choice in the matter. Dark Ones have only one Beloved—many never find them. I had almost given up hope that I would ever find mine. Let me see your wrist.”
“Why, so you can bite it? No! I don’t want you touching me. You’re some sort of weirdo vamp perv. Leave me alone.”
“I swear to you I will not hurt you, and that I am not a weirdo vamp perv. Let me see your wrist.”
He stood in front of me, close enough to grab my wrist but not touching me, just waiting for me to offer up my wrist like a good little sheep.
I am so not a sheep.
I made a fist with my right hand at the same time I stomped on his foot as hard as I could, kneed him in the happy sacs, and as he doubled over to clutch his crotch, punched him in the Adam’s apple like Mom showed me in case some guy ever got nasty with me.
I just don’t think she anticipated that guy being a vamp.
