Blood Moon (27 page)

Abruptly I couldn’t stand it anymore and stalked to the door.

“Where are you going?” Sarita asked, glancing up from her homework.

“Out.”

“Where?”

I sighed, turning back. “Why?”

“Because it’s dark now and you’re not allowed off campus. Headmistress Bellwood was very clear on that when she talked to me.”

I gritted my teeth. “I’m not going off campus.”

“Oh.” She bit her lip, looking unconvinced. “Are you sure?”

I just left, slamming the door behind me. It wasn’t her fault she was stuck with a crazy roommate, but if I had to explain myself to one more person I’d punch someone. I went back up to the roof where I could be alone to watch the last of the sunset. It was my new ritual, to stand and witness the lavender and indigo light sink
between the trees, to see the stars brighten, the mountains darken. And hope and pray with all my might that Nicholas was safe out there. Somehow, if I was there watching over the light fading, I could protect him.

And freeze my ass off.

I tucked my chin into my scarf just as the door to the rooftop squeaked open. I refused to look away from the woods. Sarita or Hunter or whoever it was would just have to wait.

“Hi, sweetie.” Mom’s arm came around my shoulder. She leaned down to kiss my temple.

“You’re on duty today?” I asked. Dad had come yesterday, sneaking me real ice cream and a bag of candy.

“You’re never a duty, Lucky Moon.” It was finally dark enough that the lights flicked on and I let her turn me around. She scrutinized me. “How are you today?”

“I’m okay,” I assured her, smiling wanly. “Really.”

“We miss him too, honey.”

“I know.”

She hugged me, smelling like Nag Champa. It was comforting, making me think of simple things like drinking tea in the kitchen and family movie nights. “I know he’s okay,” she said. “You’d feel it, if he wasn’t.” She sounded so sure of it that I nodded, wanting to believe that too. “Why don’t you come home?” she asked again.

I shook my head. “It’s better to be busy. And I’m busy here.”

We stood there, just watching the stars and the moon, Mom singing one of her favorite chants softly. She pressed another bag of art supplies into my hand before leaving. Between her and the
counselor, I was going to have to take up art therapy as my new major.

I stayed up on the roof for a little longer, letting the cold air clear my head and sparkle through me. A strange flash of light from the woods on the edge of the field had me squinting. Just when I wondered if I’d imagined it (great, hallucinations now), it flashed again. It bobbed erratically, like the reflection off a mirror. My cell phone vibrated in my pocket.

“Hello?”

It was Logan. “Meet me in the woods.”

“Is that weird light you?”

“Yeah, it’s a mirror. I don’t want some student screaming ‘vampire,’ so get down here quick and don’t get seen. We’ll be past the willows.”

I would have scaled down the outside of the building if I’d thought it would get me there any faster. I rushed down the stairs and burst outside, my heart in my mouth. I had to force myself to slow down so no one would notice me. I skirted around the far edge of the crossbow field and ducked down into the undergrowth, not straightening until I was well hidden in the trees.

I took the path Hunter and I usually used, crossed a narrow half-frozen creek with the help of my staff and turned left at the willow trees. Logan waited there in his favorite velvet frock coat, next to Isabeau and her wolfhound Charlemagne.

“Any news?” I asked, hugging him as hard as I could.

He hugged me back, shaking his head. “Not yet. But we have an idea.”

I eased back, smiling at Isabeau and scratching Charlemagne’s head when he shoved it under my hand. “Okay. What is it?”

Logan looked exhausted, but over the layer of grief there was a spark of something else. “Isabeau found a spell.”

I blinked at them both. “I’m in.”

“Do you not want to know what the spell is?” Isabeau asked.

“Don’t care. I’m in.”

She smiled briefly. “Logan said you would say this. Come with me.”

We crossed between more willows and into a grove of spruce trees so thick and twisted you couldn’t see into the center. Isabeau pushed through, holding back the branches for Charlemagne and me. Logan was behind us, casting a last probing glance before letting the evergreen snap together like a locked door. It smelled like Christmas and winter.

A single candle burned in a bowl of water in the center of a very cramped, uneven circle. Around the candle there was a pouch made of red flannel stitched with runes, a rattle made from a painted dog bone, and a scatter of crystals. It looked like the tables my mother set up around the house for holidays where she burned incense and left offerings of milk. It might have freaked some people out, but I was instantly comfortable. The ground was bumpy with tree roots when I sat down, crossing my legs.

“So what’s the deal?” I asked as Charlemagne wedged himself between me and peeling trunk and rested his head on my knee.

“There is a spell that might help us to locate Nicholas,” Isabeau explained, the candle light glinting off the chain mail on her dress and the pendants around her tattooed and scarred throat. With
her long dark hair and green eyes, she was pretty as a doll. You know, the kind of doll that came to life at night to kill monsters. “Kala is stronger, you understand, but she will not leave the caves, and humans are not welcome.”

“And Isabeau thinks we need you for this,” Logan added quietly. “Your connection to Nicholas could make the difference.” He pulled a shirt out of a bag and handed it to me. “You need to wear this.”

I shrugged out of my coat and pulled the black T-shirt over my head. It smelled like Nicholas, like black licorice and sandalwood. I hugged myself, forcing the lump in my throat to dissolve. “What else?”

“Isabeau is going to dreamwalk,” Logan answered. “Kind of like astral traveling.”

“Right.”

“You know what this is?” She sounded surprised.

“You’ve never met my mother.” Logan and I smirked at each other. My mother made power bundles of sacred objects for each of the Drake brothers on their sixteenth birthdays, to help them through the bloodchange. And she danced naked under the full moon in our backyard all the time. A little astral travel was nothing.

Isabeau nodded once, impressed. “
Bien
. This will make it easier.” She jabbed more painted bones in the ground in a circle around us. One of them was wrapped in copper wire. She passed me an amulet made of garnet beads and tarnished silver. I slipped it over my head.

“Ready?”

I wiped my palms on my jeans, feeling a nervous giggle well into my throat. I was finally
doing
something. Something useful. I felt the jaws of panic which had been clamped around my throat for days release, just a little. I could breathe again.

“I’m ready.”

“I will take you,” Isabeau said. “All you have to do is relax and follow me.”

“It’s a little disconcerting,” Logan warned me. “Hell, when it happened to me the first time, I thought someone had slipped me drugs.”

I nodded. “I can do this.” I took a deep breath and muttered Mom’s mantra. Logan sat where he was, a sword balanced across his knees. He stayed focused, guarding us.

At first nothing happened. I took deep breaths, as my butt got numb from the cold ground. I breathed some more. And then it was like the pendant Isabeau gave me started to heat up, slowly, then like an ember cradled over my belly button.

“Open your eyes,” Isabeau murmured. “Lucy.”

“I don’t feel any different. I don’t think it worked.” I opened my eyes, disappointed. “Whoa.”

Isabeau was standing in front of me, and yet I could see right through her to where her body was still sitting among the tree roots. Charlemagne sniffed me, then put his chin on his paws. The edges of the branches and the dog bones glittered. Logan’s sword was so bright it was hard to look at. The world had been bleached to bone and then certain areas painted with carnival colors. Even I was glowing faintly.

“Why am I pink?” I held up my hand, looked right through it. It made me feel really weird. “I look like bubble gum.”

“It’s your aura,” Isabeau replied.

“My aura’s cotton-candy pink? Dude. That’s embarrassing.”

“Come, we haven’t much time.”

I stood up, feeling all floaty and lightheaded. My boots hovered just above the ground. I could feel the wind, but not the cold bite of it through my clothes. And the hot pulse of the amulet burned, shooting sparks.

“Um, is it supposed to do that?”

“Think of Nicholas. Think of him as hard as you can.”

I hadn’t done much else in days so that part was easy. I imagined his tousled dark hair, his serious smile, and the way he looked at me just before he was going to kiss me. I saw his favorite black tie, the photo of us on his desk, the winter-storm gray of his eyes. I visualized him so intensely, so completely, that the sparks whirling off the amulet like a Catherine Wheel stuck together. They clung to each other until they’d formed an outline, his outline. His shoulders, his tall lean body, the gleam of his fangs.

I reached out a trembling hand to touch him because I couldn’t help myself. My fingertips dragged through the sparks, and they came apart like fireflies. I snatched my fingers back, but he was already gone. The tiny floating lights shot away from us, between the boughs.

“Viens.”

Isabeau grabbed my hand and dragged me out of the tiny grove. We half ran, half flew through the forest, following the
trajectory of the streaking lights. They took us over a swamp, around massive red oaks, through a herd of sleeping deer. A buck lifted his head, antlers pale as butter.

The sparks turned red, like embers. They swirled in a whirlwind, hovering over a flock of bats. Beneath them, Solange and Constantine sniffed the air and searched the undergrowth for prints. Isabeau shot me a curious look.

“Nicholas!” I ordered the sparks, hearing the deep velvet of his voice, his dry laugh, the sweet way he had of saying my name when we said good night. A few of the sparks stayed where they were, the rest continued to fly between the trees. They led us to the mountains, which wasn’t surprising. They fell apart drifting through the stone. Caves glowed briefly, as if candles had been lit inside.

“What does it mean?” I asked Isabeau frantically. “Where is he?”

“In a cave.”

“Which one?”

She looked sad, annoyed. “I don’t know.”

A few trailing sparks found one another, like static. They flared brightly once, burning Nicholas’s face into my eyes. I blinked, the afterimage of him blinking back at me. When they faded, the light had a blue tint, smearing everything with indigo and turquoise and lavender. I blinked. She swore in French. “We must go. Your body is pulling you back.”

“No! Not yet!”

She grabbed my hand again. “Now, Lucy.”

“No!” I struggled. She just spun me around and yanked on the
chain of the amulet. It came away in her hand, and I felt myself being sucked back, the trees blurring in the wrong direction, colors smearing into a hundred shades of blue.

I landed in my body, as if I were cliff diving. I gasped loudly, then pushed up, groaning. “Ouch.” The tip of my nose and my cheeks were numb. My left foot was asleep.

Isabeau sat up, smiling triumphantly. I scowled. “Why are you smiling? We didn’t find him!”

“No, but did you see the way sparks flashed briefly into his silhouette? At the end, by the caves?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So,” she explained. “Now we know he’s alive.”

Logan and I both stared at her for a long moment, afraid to believe her.

“He’s alive?” I asked in a small voice. “You’re sure?”

She nodded, touched Logan’s hand. “I’m sure.”

Relief made me giggle through the tears, and if it had a slightly hysteric tinge, no one commented on it. Logan was too busy grinning just as idiotically.

Isabeau just looked at us, calmly, as if we were nuts.

Chapter 26
Solange

Saturday night, 8:00 p.m.

I paced the Bower, wanting to hiss at everyone and everything. We still hadn’t found Nicholas. I was still fighting with my family. I was still fighting with myself, conscious of red-soaked needs I couldn’t articulate.

The others lounged about, drinking from glass bottles and arguing over politics. I didn’t care about politics. But I was beginning to wonder if it was the only way to get things done.

Constantine motioned Penelope and two guys out of the shadows around the outdoor salon. They came willingly, as always. My fangs poked into my lips.

Spencer, who’d been sprawled on a couch, sat up frowning. “Bloodslaves?” he asked.

I just shrugged and looked away.

“Not cool,” he added. He shook his head before he left the clearing.

Marigold reached for a lollipop then followed, tossing me a careless smile. “Sorry, princess, but he’s cuter.”

I just sighed. I felt too big for my body, like it was too crowded inside my head. I wanted blood. I wanted to be left alone. I wanted to march into the Blood Moon camp and demand they all go out and search for my brother.