Stolen Night (7 page)

He picked up the dagger.

‘I’ll kill your friends one by one,’ she hissed through clenched teeth. ‘Kate was easy. The rest will be painful and slow.’

Vicken plunged the knife through the air but he was not as fast as the vampire.

She jumped off me and ran out of the door. Vicken scrambled after her, dagger in hand, but she was gone. I gasped for air, drawing in heaving hot breaths. I clutched my chest and rubbed at the
skin where her boot had pushed against me.

Kate was easy, the rest will be painful and slow.

‘Vicken!’ I coughed, rolling on to my stomach and snatching my bag of herbs from the floor. I pushed up from the mess of bottles and inhaled a mix of scents such as fig and
patchouli. Vicken had run as fast as he could, but he was no match for a vampire who needed no breath. By the time I stumbled out of the shop, Vicken stood in the middle of the street. All we could
see was her blonde hair and lean form disappearing into the twilight over Main Street.

I walked slowly to join Vicken. He blinked, scanning the street to see if there were other vampires about. The only movement came from the fast-flying clouds sweeping by above our heads. He
sniffed a couple of times and looked over at me.

‘You stink.’

‘Gathered that,’ I replied. My blouse was slick with essential oils.

‘We should go back and check on the shopkeeper,’ I said. ‘Though if someone comes in and catches us before she’s awake, we’ll be implicated.’

‘I’ll go,’ Vicken said. ‘I’m not afraid of human idiocy.’ He bent down and dropped his knife into his boot. ‘That vampire was quick. I couldn’t
get a clear shot if I threw the dagger.’ He sounded like he was trying to justify it to me.

‘Mind you, she didn’t kill us,’ I said.

‘No, she didn’t,’ he said, and grabbed on to his shoulder. He winced. ‘But she tried to take me with her.’

‘She wants the ritual.’

‘Gathered that too,’ Vicken said, and sniffed in my direction. ‘Wait here, where I can see you.’ He hesitated. ‘And smell you.’

‘So, do the movement again,’ Vicken demanded, sucking on a cigarette. We stood on Wickham beach and I mimicked the motion Suleen had made earlier that summer.
‘He waved his hand and her body just appeared?’ Vicken asked.

‘Not really. It was an outline of it. Like a ghost.’

That moment seemed a thousand years ago now. Now the yellow tape and police officers had gone. Someone had combed through the sand. Combed it, cleaned it, taking away all evidence that someone
had been killed there.

‘I told you,’ I continued, ‘we were indiscernible to the people around us. Invisible.’

Vicken stood up, dropping the cigarette on to the sand as a Wickham security vehicle pulled past the entrance to the beach. The car window slid down and a security officer called out to Vicken
and me in the darkness.

‘Curfew in twenty minutes!’ he yelled.

‘Thank you!’ I called back.

After a moment, I said, ‘She had that
look
,’
’
recalling Odette’s saunter on the beach. ‘That power-hungry look. The one where the madness has just
begun to take over.’

I stopped pacing as Vicken lit another cigarette. He stood facing the ocean, his back to campus.

‘Hey, kids! Fifteen minutes to curfew!’

On the path a different security guard, this one portly with a beard, pointed down at us. ‘No one out past nine,’ he reminded us.

When the students came back to campus in the next few days, they would find it much altered. Vicken and I had walked off campus that morning to see a construction crew erecting a heavy steel
gate. It was set to connect between the two gothic entrance towers.

By the time we returned that afternoon, a twenty-four-hour guard manned a booth at the entrance. A booth which had remained empty the entire previous year.

Now, on the beach, a guard was watching.

I joined Vicken at the water’s edge.

‘How are we going to protect ourselves if there’s five of them?’ I asked. ‘I’m not exactly a sunlight-wielding vampire any more.’

Vicken was quiet for a moment and then said, ‘That’s just it, isn’t it?’ He nodded to himself. ‘We need to rely on sunlight.’

‘That depends. She was strong enough to hold you, paralyse you. We don’t know what kind of strength she has. And she was out before sunset this evening.’

‘It was almost sunset. And she might just be very strong. We don’t know her powers. We’ll have to try to let it play out until we know what we’re dealing with. I’ll
nose around for some more information.’

‘You be careful. You sure your ESP hasn’t waned at all?’ I asked, hoping that some of Vicken’s vampire traits had not yet faded following his transformation. He shook his
head. Like Vicken, all I’d had left of my vampire powers after the ritual were my sight and my extrasensory perception. There was no telling when they would disappear for Vicken, but mine had
weakened the longer I was human. The more time he had them, the more advantage we had. We walked away from the beach and back towards Seeker.

When I returned to my room and Vicken to his dorm, I lit a white candle on my coffee table. I collapsed back on to the couch and watched the candle flame flicker and dance. The light became just
a golden blur. I leaned my head back on the couch, and as I watched the flame its dancing rhythm lured me to sleep. As I drifted off, visions of Justin slamming doors, and screaming at me in front
of an audience of people, lingered in my mind. More nightmarish images came: Justin racing his motorboat and driving it head on into Rhode, lying helpless on the shore.

Then the images changed.

I walk down a familiar pathway. I am at Wickham. There are brick buildings covered in dirty snow. No students. Windows are blackened, the union vacant. I walk the long path towards Wickham
beach.

‘What is this place?’ I ask the empty campus, and suddenly I am not alone. Suleen is at my side. We walk in the snow towards the Wickham beach. As I look towards the shore, a
discarded broken rowboat sits in burnt pieces on the sand.

Quartz dorm windows are dark, abandoned. No one walks in or out of the dorms or hurries with cups of coffee to their classes. Wickham is darkened, deadened. A ghost town.

‘Is this the future?’ I ask.

‘This is Wickham if Odette achieves the ritual,’ Suleen says. ‘No one that wicked can pour evil intentions into a ritual this powerful without repercussions. She will
destroy . . . everything.’

I stop, gasping in the bitter winter air.

I shot upright on the couch, placed my hands on my thighs and tried to catch my breath. I froze a moment – the tip of my nose was ice cold. It was as if I had been walking around outside
on a snowy day.

‘Suleen?’ I said aloud. ‘Suleen?’

I twisted about to look around the room, but it was just a dream. And I remained alone.

A sea of black cloth. Black T-shirts. Black dresses. Black skirts. Black boots.

It was black for miles. I knew I wore everything in that closet last year but . . .

‘Do I own
anything
that isn’t black?’ I asked the closet. Everyone already had reason to stare at me: I had left for six months at the end of last year; my best friend,
Tony, had died; and I was now back at school with no explanation.
What would Tracy and Claudia say?
I wondered, holding a skirt in my hand. There were bound to be questions and talk about
Kate, the third girl in the Three Piece, who was now dead. I pulled a black blouse and black jeans from the closet. My breath caught in my chest. Would Tracy and I be friends this year, without
Tony around?

I sighed and tried to shake away the dream from the night before. Odette’s reign if she achieved the ritual would turn Wickham into an abandoned hell. A hell without those I loved, without
Justin or Rhode.

Hello
, I thought, holding the blouse to me.
I am Lenah Beaudonte. I wear all black, all the time, and at one time was a harbinger of death.

I sighed again and made myself a cup of coffee.

When I stepped out on to the campus, I slid on a pair of sunglasses. For the briefest of moments I expected to see Tony waiting for me, as he had done so often the year before.
I expected to see the gauge earrings in his ear, the charcoal on his fingertips and the backwards baseball hat. I could have seen my beautiful Japanese friend if I imagined hard enough.

But he was dead.

School, on the other hand, was lively despite the new security presence. The campus was vibrant with students from the upper schools scrambling from building to building. Some exited the union
grasping mugs and cups, others held to-go boxes filled with a quick breakfast. I walked in the shade of the branches, though I no longer feared the sun. I looked down at my palms, at the lifelines
I knew so well. I wondered briefly, though I knew it would never be answered, why sunlight once came out of my hands in my second life as a vampire. Who made those decisions in the world and why
had that power been given to me?

As I walked towards assembly, I knew that when I could wield sunlight I harboured an enormous amount of power. I gulped my coffee and stopped short, as a realization came to me. If I had
remained a vampire, I would still be one of the most powerful vampires in the world. The desire for power, the high I once felt as a vampire, throbbed deeply within me for a moment, then ebbed
away.

I started walking again. Vicken stood up from a bench about ten paces down the pathway. Seeing him there, with a backpack slung over his shoulders, made me smile. Beyond, in the distance, the
harbour sparkled in the morning sun.

‘I’m skipping this,’ Vicken said flatly.

‘You can’t,’ I replied. ‘They take attendance.’

‘Attendance?’

‘Roll call,’ I clarified.

‘I should never have let Rhode convince me to go to this sodding school.’

I stopped. A spark of surprise flickered in my chest. At the mere mention of his name, I immediately imagined scenarios about Rhode. Rhode in Hathersage walking through the empty halls, Rhode
watching me from afar, protecting me. Was he wondering if I was all right?

‘So,’ I said, ‘Rhode convinced you to go to Wickham?’

‘Not convinced exactly, but you do realize I haven’t been in school since there were horses and buggies?’

‘When did you speak with Rhode?’

‘Before he left,’ he replied, though I didn’t exactly believe him. I stopped short and looked straight ahead. Standing together by the entrance to Hopper were Claudia and
Tracy, Justin’s brother Roy and some lacrosse players I did not know. And there, standing by his brother, was Justin.

‘What is it?’ Vicken said, alarm colouring his tone. Perhaps he was a bit more ready to grab for his dagger than usual. ‘Oh . . .’ he grumbled, when he saw who I was
looking at. Justin embraced Claudia with a big hug. When he pulled away, she wiped her eyes and I saw that she was crying. This unit had existed before my arrival at this school, before I’d
darkened their doorstep. Now they stood together, shoulders slumped, looking smaller to me somehow. Not in numbers, but in their energy.

‘I liked her perfume, the pink one with the twisted bottle,’ Vicken said suddenly. He had closed his eyes for a moment in concentration. His wild hair framed his face in mane-like
waves. ‘She’ll miss that smell,’ he said, though the words he was saying were not his own.

‘What?’ I asked quietly.

‘Your friend Tracy. She wishes Kate were here. Because . . .’ He hesitated. ‘Because she listens better than Claudia.’

I watched the group a moment. Tracy was looking at Claudia, though she wasn’t speaking.

‘And your other blonde friend, she . . .’ He hesitated again. ‘She wants her friend to go shopping with, to walk with, she misses her presence. But I don’t get it.
It’s been over two months since she died. Why haven’t they calmed down by now?’

I understood mortal grieving, even if Vicken couldn’t.

I would miss Kate plopping down in a seat next to us, offering us gum first thing. I would even miss her digging endlessly into my love life, asking inappropriate questions. We weren’t
close, I knew that, but, still, her death left a ghost in my mind.

‘Two months is nothing,’ I said, thinking of Tony. His death, unlike Kate’s, left a hole in my heart that I was sure would never heal. ‘The sorrow of death can linger for
years.’

Death had been so easy to understand when we were vampires. But, as a human, the death of a loved one was a point in history always to be referenced. A fixed point in your life that you
constantly measured yourself against as you grew older – a baseline.

The pin in the heart.

‘Well, let’s just go get attended and get to class,’ Vicken said.

‘Attended?’ I said, tearing my eyes away from Justin and his friends.

‘You know – roll.’

Vicken dug a piece of paper out of his pocket while I snuck another look at the group I once considered my friends.

‘I have world literature first,’ Vicken said, squinting at his schedule.

Justin walked towards us purposefully and I prepared myself with a shake of my hair over my shoulders.
You deserve this. Take it, accept it. You deserve what he is about to say to you
. He
picked up speed. In fact, his feet carried him faster and
faster
in our direction. Vicken looked up from his scrap of paper only at the last moment.

When Justin’s body slammed into him, Vicken was blasted into the air and hit the ground flat on his back. Justin knelt over Vicken and with devastating force punched him in the face. I
reacted out of instinct. I kicked Justin directly on his hip, which disarmed him and he fell away from Vicken. A rather large crowd had formed already as I bent down to pull at Vicken’s arm,
helping him up. He stumbled on his feet and wiped his right eye. Blood blossomed in the skin below it. It was already swelling.

‘Give me a mirror!’ Vicken demanded.

‘Odd time to be vain,’ I replied.

‘I want to see this!’ he said incredulously. He shook his head as though it was preposterous that I wouldn’t know this was an important moment.