The Vampire's Photograph (21 page)

But I have found some clues. Yesterday I was in the basement, not really sure what to do with myself or the confused thoughts in my head. I ended up pulling out the big box where my mom's photography equipment goes. My dad, the newly employed and shaven one, took my broken camera into a shop and found out it was ruined beyond repair. He says we can go shopping for another one, but I don't know—I don't even really want to. That camera started all this, from taking pictures of the places where vampires might live, all the way to being told, by a boy whose life I had just saved, that the end of the world might be my fault. Like I didn't have enough to feel responsible for.

Anyway, I started packing up the developer when I noticed this stack of notebooks in the box. Mom's notebooks. They never interested me before, but the other night I pulled them out, and it turns out they're full of Orani notes and directions for how to do enchantments. There's other stuff too: special candles, glass jars of different powders, some dried flowers. I don't know what all of it is yet, but I'm going to find out.

I have been reading Mom's notebooks for days now. I lie on the basement floor after dinner, making a warm spot with my belly on the old yellow rug, flipping the pages…falling asleep, waking up again. I don't notice when it gets dark.

I found notes on the conduit charm that Kathleen gave me. It lets you enter people's heads to observe and feel what they feel. I guess the conduit will naturally seek out the strongest, most intense feelings in an area, and that's what led me to Horacio and his killer. A stronger Orani would have gotten right to him, but I'm not that skilled yet.

But the bigger question is: Did Kathleen know that I'd find that boy? She must have, right? She must have wanted me to save him. I won't know until I talk to her again.

The other questions are: Who was Horacio? What was this vision he was talking about? Who is this Selene that he was searching for? And what did he mean about me needing to stay with Oliver—that otherwise, the end of the world would be my fault? Stay with Oliver? Stay with it?

It doesn't make any sense. Just like so much lately. I feel like my whole world has changed. But all I can do is try to figure all this out one step at a time. And I have to start at the start…

At Dean.

See, I found something else in this notebook. Something powerful, something I'm probably not ready for as a young Orani…Except, it's something I can do to start solving all these questions. And something that might make me feel better about what happened to Dean…

It's time for a little payback.

I'll keep an eye out for Horacio, but for now, whatever he was talking about will have to wait. I've got something else planned, and it's going to keep me out long after dark…

More later.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Oliver Nocturne series

Chapter 1

Old Wounds

“WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?”

Oliver froze. He was standing over the round stone sink in the center of the bathroom, running a humming, nano-diamond stiletto file over his teeth, as he always did right before dinner. He glanced nervously across the room, to where his older brother, Bane, was drying his face with a burgundy towel.

“I—I—” Oliver stammered. What was wrong with him? How about the fact that he'd lost his friends Emalie and Dean? Or that he'd had to spend every night of this miserable last month and a half living a tangle of lies, pretending he was fine around his parents, who were lying right back to him about his future, not to mention his past?

“Relax,
lamb
.” Bane scowled. “I don't mean
all
the things that are wrong with you. I mean there.” He pointed at Oliver's stomach.

Oliver looked down at his thin, shirtless torso. His skin was its normal pale grayish color, and he would've known by the itching if he'd developed a mold rash, but he was shocked to find a purple wound on the left side of his abdomen, near his waist.

“Huh,” said Oliver. It was a short, bright-red cut surrounded by a deep-purple oval. A small spider's web of crimson lines spread away from it.

“Looks like you got stabbed,” Bane mused, “or maybe you lost a fight with a rat.”

“Shut up,” Oliver muttered. He hadn't even noticed the wound before. Vampires were much less sensitive to pain than humans, and of course there were no mirrors in the house, but now that he focused on the spot, he did sense a faint, dull ache. He pulled at the skin, separating the wound. Vampires didn't bleed or get scabs, but now a bit of brown fluid dripped out. Oliver frowned at this. The fluid, the red spider lines … it all spelled infection. If his mother, Phlox, saw that, she'd be calling Dr. Vincent, and Oliver did not want to go back to the doctor.

During his last doctor's visit, back in December, Oliver had learned that his yearly checkups were not just to make sure he was healthy. He was also being prepared, without his knowledge, for a special but very secret purpose. Oliver had later learned in a vision where he met his future demon, Illisius, that he had a special destiny: to open something called the Nexia Gate and free the vampires from Earth, which some thought of as a prison. Oliver had never heard of Nexia, or a Gate.

And it seemed that only Oliver's parents, Dr. Vincent, and perhaps some others at his father's employer, the Half-Light Consortium, knew about this plan. And while none of them had ever talked to him about it, back in December, they'd all been worried about Oliver because of his sleeplessness, his anxieties, and most of all because of his
human
friends: Emalie and Dean.

Oliver had allegedly killed Dean, and all of that worry had turned to pride. His family had celebrated the occasion, and since then, they'd assumed he was fine and left him alone. He wasn't fine, not even close, but at least since then, everyone wasn't worrying about him all the time. So, the last thing he wanted to do was take this wound to his Dr. Vincent and attract everyone's attention again.

Oliver stuck his finger into the wound. He wiped away a bit of the fluid, and for a moment, glimpsed something dark red and solid-looking. Oliver dug his nail deeper—

Suddenly a searing, vampire-size pain stabbed through his body, causing his legs to buckle. Oliver toppled to the floor, smacking his head on the sink as he did so.

“Ha!” Bane spat. “Dork. Now you're probably going to go cry to Mommy and get the celebrity treatment again.” Bane imitated Phlox:
“Oh, my precious Oliver, my most favorite baby! We'll drop everything to help you!”

Oliver scrambled to a sitting position, wincing. It had been this way with Bane ever since Dean's death. Bane couldn't stand Oliver's newfound fame, which made Oliver crazy, because Dean's death was Bane's fault! After all, it was Bane who had showed up with his friends at Emalie and Dean's chorus practice—Bane who said he was there to
fix
Oliver, who made him choose a human victim to bite, and who had brought that mysterious staff. Yet Oliver didn't remember what had happened in the moments between when he'd pretended to attack Dean, in order to engineer an escape, and when he'd woken up sometime later in a classroom upstairs. According to Emalie, and Bane, Oliver had killed Dean, and there was no doubt Dean was dead, but Oliver refused to believe he'd done it, even though he hadn't been able to find any proof otherwise.

“I should drop that sink on you,” Bane muttered. “That would really get Mom riled up.” He gave Oliver a disgusted glance. “Enjoy the big fuss with your little injury.” He stalked out.

Oliver watched him go. If someone had asked him back in December, when he was lying awake most days and wondering what was wrong with him, he would have said, for certain, that things could not have gotten any worse. Yet now, at the beginning of February, he was
still
having trouble sleeping, his brother disliked him even more, and though Dean's death had convinced his parents that he was fine, and had made the other vampire kids friendlier at school, it had also caused him to lose the only two friends he really wanted.

Oliver got to his feet and returned to the sink. He leaned back to let more light on the wound. This time he spread the skin wide, but didn't try to reach inside, and for just a moment, he saw a flash of crimson light, like the reflection from a crystal.

It's a shard
, he guessed,
from the amulet
. The amulet of Ephyra, given to him by Dead Désirée. She had claimed that the amulet was
“for his protection,”
but what it had really done was shatter, and deliver Oliver a vision of his past. In that vision he'd learned that, unlike every other vampire child, he had been
sired
. He had been a human baby and was turned into a vampire. Vampire children were normally made from the genes of their parents and grown in a special lab. A child could not be sired, because he or she wouldn't be strong enough to withstand the transformation. Yet according to that portal vision, Oliver
had
been, and his human parents had been killed by his vampire parents.

The fact that this wound in his side had been caused by the amulet was another reason why he couldn't tell Phlox about it. While it had turned out that his parents
had
secretly known about his friendship with Emalie and Dean all along, Oliver was pretty sure that they hadn't known about the amulet, nor about the vision it supplied. Oliver wanted to keep it that way until he could find out more about his past.

It all felt complicated, and
complicated
was not something that vampires were supposed to have to deal with.

Oliver looked around the bathroom for something that he could use to extract the crystal splinter. The shard didn't look that big, but it was very deep inside the wound. He considered his stiletto for a moment, but it would probably just push the shard deeper again, and that pain had been brutal. He needed long tweezers, or pliers.…

“Ollie!” It was Phlox, calling from upstairs. “Can you come up here?”

Oliver slipped on his T-shirt, wincing at the lingering pain. He headed back to the crypt where he and his family slept, he and Bane in their own coffins, Phlox and Sebastian in their double-wide model. He threw on sneakers and his dark gray hoodie sweatshirt.

He was halfway up the stone spiral staircase, lit by globes of molten magmalight, when he noticed a strange smell. It was something like cayenne pepper … and sage … and also
rot
. This wasn't the first time Oliver had smelled it around the house. Maybe it was some new cologne that Bane was trying out. He wrinkled his nose. Spices and decay could often smell good, but this combination didn't. As quickly as it had come over him, the smell faded, and yet, how many times in these last couple weeks had he smelled that? Hard to say. Three? Four?

Oliver entered the kitchen to find everything busy. The dishwasher was grumbling, the forge humming. His family was bustling as well—
NOT my real family!
a voice shouted inside—and Oliver felt a familiar surge of anxiety in his gut. He took a deep breath and tried to make his face look calm and unbothered. He'd been practicing this a lot lately.

Sebastian was on the far side of the kitchen island, knotting a wide tie and stuffing it into his black suit vest. Bane was by the sink, bleaching a new streak of white into his black, shaggy hair. Phlox, wearing a shimmering silver dress and black overcoat, was carefully putting on her earrings, which were sapphires held within tiny rat skeleton claws.

“Now that we have the egg whites whipped …” said a smooth voice. Oliver glanced over to find Clarise Clyne, star of
Confections with Clarise
, a popular show on a human food channel, on the plasma screen over the sink. She smiled a tight-lipped smile that hid the points of her teeth as she addressed the camera: “… we're going to add the raspberry sauce.” She produced a glass bowl of a dark crimson sauce that was steaming hot. “Of course, it doesn't have to be raspberries,” she cooed at the camera with a knowing gleam in her eye. “It could be cherries, or anything else you're … fond of.” Vampires knew what she meant.

Oliver sat on a stool at the center island. The forge timer began beeping. “Oh, good.” Phlox grabbed a thick oven mitt and removed a steaming iron plate. “Here we are,” she announced, sliding the dish to Oliver. She spun quickly back to the counter, then froze. “Honey,” she said to Sebastian, “have you seen the cayenne?”

Oliver perked up, watching Phlox scan the black stone countertops. “I swear it was here an hour ago,” she mumbled. It was not like Phlox to lose track of anything, and this was not the first item to go missing in the last few days. Earlier in the week, Phlox had been looking for a bag of frozen Gila monster heads. Also, Sebastian had been complaining that his razor had disappeared. And worst of all, Oliver had lost something very dear and secret to him, something that he'd been keeping in one of the drawers underneath his coffin.…