The Vampire's Photograph (15 page)

Oliver looked to Seth beside him. “Hey,” he said softly.

Seth was dealing his role-playing cards. He didn't answer.

“Seth,” Oliver murmured.

“Don't,” Seth whispered out of the corner of his mouth. “Don't do this to me.”

“I heard about your new sister—”

But Seth gathered his cards together and slid out of his seat. Oliver sat there, the chaos of the classroom echoing around him, and he couldn't have felt more alone.

As the night went on, snickers bled into the silent treatment, but otherwise, no one talked to Oliver. It stopped bothering him after a couple of hours, and he started feeling defiant about it. What did
they
know anyway? They were all normal. They couldn't understand what it was like to be him. So, fine, whatever. Still, the night took forever to end.

Oliver lagged behind as everyone left, then headed down the first-floor hall to Emalie's classroom. He weaved between the lines of desks to Emalie's seat, which wasn't hard for a vampire nose to pick out. He pulled a note from his pocket:

Friday night. Outside my house. 3 AM? —o

He folded it tight and wedged it between the underside of the desktop and one of the metal bars.

That morning at dinner was the same. As was Tuesday night at school. Oliver visited Emalie's desk before heading home, to find a return note:

c ya then. —e

He kept the paper.

Wednesday passed normally. It was actually starting to seem like Oliver had gotten extremely lucky. Still, how could it be that every kid at school knew, yet word of the incident at the Underground had not gotten back to his parents? Oliver didn't get it.

Thursday at school was the same as the rest of the week. Oliver was getting used to being ignored when he bothered to notice. His thoughts were on Friday, on the file. When he got home, Sebastian called to say he would be at work until dawn. Phlox left shortly after dinner for a school board meeting. Bane camped out in the living room, playing videogames online with Ty and Randall.

Oliver had spread out his homework on the kitchen island. But he wasn't doing any of it. What was the point? He couldn't pay attention to anything, at least not until he'd looked at that file. He kept thinking about Friday night, and it occurred to him that since it was incredibly risky to have Emalie and Dean over, he ought to make sure that the file was even in the drawer for them to see. And with Bane locked into his game, and his parents out….

Oliver slipped out of the kitchen. He passed the living room and dining room, heading down the hall and into the dark study.

There was a wide antique desk that Sebastian had inherited from the Ming dynasty, with a thin, obsidian glass computer monitor on top. Oliver slid into the leather desk chair, his eyes drawn to the small charcoal sketch of the family beside the monitor. It was from ten years ago. Everyone was gazing with pleasant seriousness, like things couldn't be more normal. Oliver turned away.

The file drawer was in the bottom right corner of the desk. It had no lock. He reached down to slide it open, but whacked the keyboard tray as he did so. The computer monitor jumped to life in blue light. Oliver froze, listening.

“No way!” he heard Bane shouting at his game, down the hall.

Oliver bent back down and slid open the file drawer. Phlox kept the files well organized. Oliver scanned the titles on the folders. He wasn't sure where it would be, but he saw medical records and pulled it out. The file was thin. There were bills for a few tooth regenerations, and for the couple of times that Oliver or Bane had broken a limb badly enough to need it splinted overnight, but nothing else.

He slid the file back and kept looking at the folder names. They were normal, mundane things, and if Oliver's information was disguised in one of those, it would take him far too long to find. But then, near the back, he saw a file with a title unlike all the others:

NEXIA

Oliver wasn't sure what that word meant, but he felt like he'd heard it somewhere. In school, maybe? The ending
-xia
was sometimes used in the names of higher worlds. He reached for the folder.

A green force field shimmered into existence for a moment, deflecting his hand. Oliver tried again with the same result. He tried to touch the folder in front of it and could. Same with the one behind it. That had to be the one. There had to be a way to disable the force field somewhere: maybe a spoken password.

Oliver slid the drawer closed. Other than the computer, the desk was bare. He looked through the other drawers, but they were just full of office supplies. Maybe Sebastian had it somewhere on the computer. Oliver pulled out the keyboard. He called up a search window on the screen, then typed in the folder name: nexia. The computer began to search.

As it churned, Oliver turned his ear back to the door.

“Got one! Got one!” Bane shouted distantly. “Oh, yeeeaahh!”

Oliver looked back to the screen. The search window flashed: no results found. Now what? Well, he still had until tomorrow night to find a way to disable the field. He started to leave when the computer beeped. A chat box had appeared.

There was a message from MAVincent42:
Seb, are you there? I've taken a look at these photos you sent. I think you're right about him
.

Just turn away
, Oliver thought…but instead he put his fingers to the keyboard and replied:
I'm here
.

Dr. Vincent replied:
You should bring him back in. Right away. Tell him the FRI results are faulty, and we need to run them again. My mistake
.

Oliver thought about what to say, then typed:
OK. Can you send me the photos? I lost them—computer crashed
.

There was no reply…. And then:
Loading them now…

Oliver watched the chat box as a wheel spun. Now the corner of a large picture appeared in the tiny box. Oliver dragged the box bigger, until the first photo Dr. Vincent had sent filled the frame.

It took Oliver a moment to believe what he was seeing.

The photo was black and white. It was a view of a room—the abandoned surface level of his house. There was Emalie standing on the floor, in the raincoat she'd worn on her very first visit. And there was the blur of Oliver on the ceiling. Oliver scrolled down. The second picture showed Emalie taking pictures, and a blurry presence hanging down behind her—when he'd tried to take her earring on her third visit. He scrolled farther. The next picture showed Oliver's blur by the window after Emalie had left.

The pictures had rounded edges and had been taken from high in the corner of the room. Closed-circuit cameras…. Of course, Sebastian would have had security features put in.
I'm an idiot
, Oliver thought, wincing. How could he not have thought of that? Really, though, the only thing that mattered was—
they knew
. His parents knew about Emalie. And they had known since the beginning.

Oliver kept scrolling and was hardly surprised by what he saw now. The next photo showed Oliver's shadowy form leaping off the railing in the Underground, with Emalie and Dean on his back. Who had taken it? Maybe some bystander who smelled a story? Someone his parents had hired? Did it matter?

Another message from Dr. Vincent appeared:
Can you get him in tomorrow after work?

Oliver typed quickly:
We have plans
.

Dr. Vincent replied:
Seb, I don't think we can afford to wait
.

Oliver was already getting up from the chair as he typed:
All right. After work. Gotta run. Thanks
.

He closed the chat, replaced the chair as it was, then hurried out of the study. Back in the kitchen, he wondered what to do. His brain was spinning. His parents knew everything! And they'd been pretending, lying to him just like he'd been lying to them.

“Take that!” Bane grunted from the other room.

Why hadn't they confronted him? Grounded him like normal parents? But the answer seemed obvious:
Because what's wrong with me is so serious
, he thought sickly,
they had to wait for the doctor's advice
. There'd be no way to avoid that doctor's appointment tomorrow. Dr. Vincent's office would call to confirm. They always did. And then what?

Something Dr. Vincent had said at the last visit popped back into Oliver's head:
We can always try again
. He'd made it sound like Oliver was an experiment. One that was clearly failing. And what did you do with a failed experiment? You ended it and started over.

“Baaahhh!! Die, humans!” Bane shouted.

Oliver paced around. He had to act like everything was normal, didn't he? At least until the next evening…. But then what? Go to school? Come home for dinner and act surprised when his parents wanted to take him to the doctor? What other choice did he have? There was no way out of this. Not that Oliver could think of.

But, no. No. He couldn't stay here any longer, thinking, pretending, fearing everything. Grabbing his sweatshirt, he left the kitchen without a sound and headed out into the night.

When he slipped out of the sewer at the end of Twilight Lane, Oliver glanced back at his house and couldn't help wondering if he would ever return.

Chapter 13

Dress Rehearsal

OLIVER HEADED FOR EMALIE'S
house. The rain had mixed with sleet, and tiny bits of ice bounced off him as he walked. When he arrived, he saw that the basement was dark but, of course, it was almost four in the morning. There was blue light flickering from the living room. Oliver hopped up on the porch and carefully peered in the window. Emalie's father was asleep on the couch, half-wrapped in a blanket and still in his clothes. Television light washed over him in morphing colors.

Oliver circled around the back of the house and let himself into the basement. He headed up a rickety set of wooden stairs and into the kitchen. He moved silently down the one hallway, past a bathroom, and found another tiny staircase that twisted up to the second floor. The stairs ended at a short hallway. Up here, the ceilings were low. The top corners of the walls were angled to the slope of the roof. There was a door open to a mess of a bedroom on one end and a closed door at the other. Oliver quietly opened this door and found himself in Emalie's room.

There were unpacked boxes in the corners, but the walls were covered with a layered patchwork of photographs as if she'd been living here for years. Emalie's bed was beneath the one small window at the far end of the room. He saw her hair above the blankets and could hear her sleeping breaths. He closed the door and moved over to the wall. There was a large box with a laptop on it, and a square pillow pulled up in front of it as a makeshift desk. Oliver sat beside this, pulled his knees up to his elbows, and leaned his head back on the wall.

Outside, the sleet came down harder, rattling the window and tapping drumrolls on the roof. Oliver stared into space, his thoughts unwinding. He found that, for the first time in a while, he actually felt safe. No one from his family could get to him here, without being invited in.
From your fake family
, he thought darkly.

Suddenly, Emalie bolted up in her bed. “What,” she whispered. “Don't hurt him. It's not your fault.” Her head whipped back and forth, but Oliver could see that her eyes were still closed. “It's—” Now she froze. Oliver watched as she turned toward him, and her eyes slowly blinked open. She squinted, then rubbed at her long tangles of hair. Oliver wondered if he should spectralize, but then Emalie spoke:

“Hey,” she said groggily.

“Hey,” Oliver replied.

“What are you doing here?”

“I didn't know where to go,” Oliver said truthfully. “My parents know about you. They know about everything.”

Emalie put her feet on the floor and scratched at her head. Then she got up, crossing the room to an open box beside the closet. She rummaged around and pulled out a blanket. She threw it to him as she headed back to bed. “What are you going to do?” she asked, sliding back under her blankets.

“I don't know,” Oliver muttered.

“You should stay here,” Emalie said. “I have school tomorrow, and after that Dean and I have a dress rehearsal for our holiday concert. You can hang out here during the day.”

“What about your dad?”

“He'll be out for most of the day, probably,” Emalie said. “But you're pretty good at not being seen.”

Oliver pulled the blanket over him. It felt scratchy compared to the dirt in his coffin, but it warmed him almost as well. The sound of the sleet seemed very loud to him. You could barely hear such a thing from a crypt. A car rushed by outside, and a warped rectangle of light crossed the room. Now Oliver noticed stars on the ceiling. They seemed to be glowing stickers, and they were arranged in perfect constellations. He saw Scorpio, Orion, Cassiopeia.

Oliver looked over at Emalie. She was looking back at him. “How come you're not scared of me?” he asked.

Emalie shrugged. “I don't know. You don't seem that scary.”

Oliver smiled. That was almost an insult for a vampire, but he didn't mind.

“Well,” Emalie went on, propping herself up with her elbow on her pillow, “I mean, you're kinda scary. I don't know, I think the only people that scare me are the ones who like themselves too much, and who think they're always right. You don't seem to like yourself too much.”

“But I'm not
people
,” said Oliver. “I'm not even a person.”

“I think you're a person,” said Emalie. “And…I mean, you were one. You were born a human just like the rest of us.”

Oliver looked around the room, trying to imagine being a human kid. Waking up and looking in a mirror, then out a window to decide what to wear. After a minute, he looked back at Emalie, expecting her to be asleep, but she wasn't. “What happened to your mom?” Oliver asked.