WHEN I WOKE UP, I WAS CONFUSED. IT TOOK ME LONGER THAN IT SHOULD have
to remember where I was.
The room was too bland to belong anywhere but a hotel. The bedside lamps were bolted to the tables, and the drapes were made from the same fabric as the bedspread.
I tried to remember how I’d gotten to this room, but nothing came at first.
I remembered the black car, the glass in the windows darker than that on a limousine. The engine was almost silent, though we’d raced across the black freeways at more than twice the legal limit.
And I remembered Archie on the seat next to me, rather than up front with Jessamine. I remembered realizing suddenly that he was there as my bodyguard, that the front seat was apparently not close enough. It should have made the danger seem more real, but it all felt a million miles away. The danger I was in personally wasn’t the danger I was worried about.
I made Archie keep up a strange stream-of-consciousness future watch all night long. There weren’t any details so small they didn’t interest me. He’d told me turn by turn how Edythe, Carine, and Eleanor would be moving through the forest, and though I didn’t know any of the landmarks he referenced, I’d been riveted by every word. And then he would go back and describe the same sequence differently, as some decision remapped the future. This happened over and over again, and it was impossible to follow, but I didn’t care. As long as the future never put Edythe and Joss in the
same place, I’d been able to keep breathing.
Sometimes he would switch to Earnest for me. Earnest and Royal were in my truck, heading east. Which meant the red-haired man was still on their trail.
Archie’d had a more difficult time seeing Charlie. “Humans are harder than vampires,” he told me. And I’d remembered that Edythe had said something to me about that once. It had seemed like years ago, when it had been only days. I remembered being disoriented by the way I couldn’t make sense of the time.
I remembered the sun coming up over a low peak somewhere in California. The light had stung my eyes, but I’d tried not to close them. When I did, the images that flashed behind my lids like still slides were too much. I’d rather my eyes burn than see them again. Charlie’s broken expression… Edythe’s bared teeth… Royal’s furious glare… the red eyes of the tracker staring at me… the dead look in Edythe’s eyes when she’d turned away from me…
I kept my eyes open, and the sun moved across the sky.
I remembered my head feeling heavy and light at the same time as we raced through a shallow mountain pass and the sun, behind us now, reflected off the tiled rooftops of my hometown. I hadn’t had enough emotion left to be surprised that we’d made a three-day journey in one. I’d stared blankly at the city laid out in front of us, realizing slowly that it was supposed to mean something to me. The scrubby creosote, the palm trees, the green golf course amoebas, the turquoise splotches of swimming pools
—these were supposed to be familiar. I was supposed to feel like I was home.
The shadows of the streetlights had slanted across the freeway with lines that were sharper than I remembered. So little darkness. There was no place to hide in these shadows.
“Which way to the airport?” Jessamine had asked—the first time she’d spoken since we’d gotten in the car.
“Stay on the I-ten,” I’d answered automatically. “We’ll pass right by it.”
It had taken me a few seconds more to process the implications of her question. My brain was foggy with exhaustion.
“Are we flying somewhere?” I’d asked Archie. I couldn’t think of the plan. This didn’t sound right, though.
“No, but it’s better to be close, just in case.”
I remembered starting the loop around Sky Harbor International… but not ending it. That must have been when my brain had finally crashed.
Though, now that I’d chased the memories down, I did have a vague impression of leaving the car—the sun behind the horizon, my arm draped over Archie’s shoulder, his arm dragging me along as I stumbled through the warm, dry shadows.
I had no memory of this room.
I looked at the digital clock on the nightstand. The red numbers claimed it was three o’clock, but there was no way to tell if that meant a.m. or p.m. No light showed around the edges of the thick curtains, but the room was bright with the light from the lamps.
I rose stiffly and staggered to the window, pulling back the drapes.
It was dark outside. Three in the morning, then. The room looked out on a deserted section of the freeway and the new long-term parking garage for the airport. It made me feel better—by a very small amount—to be able to pinpoint time and place.
I looked down. I was still wearing Earnest’s shirt and too-short pants. I looked around the room and was glad when I saw my duffel bag on top of the low dresser.
A light tap on the door made me jump. “Can I come in?” Archie asked.
I took a deep breath. “Sure.”
He walked in and looked me over. “You look like you could sleep longer.”
I shook my head.
He darted silently to the window and pulled the curtains shut. “We’ll need to stay inside,” he told me.
“Okay.” My voice was hoarse; it cracked. “Thirsty?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I’m okay. How about you?”
He smiled. “Nothing unmanageable. I ordered some food for you—it’s in the front room. Edythe reminded me that you have to eat a lot more frequently than we do.”
I was instantly more alert. “She called?”
“No.” He watched my face fall. “It was before we left. She gave me lots
of instructions. Come eat something.”
He was out of the room before I could protest that I wasn’t hungry. I followed slowly behind him.
There was a living room attached to the bedroom. A low buzz of voices was coming from the TV. Jessamine sat at the desk in the corner, her eyes on the TV, but no interest in her expression. Archie went to stand by her. He ran his hand over her honey-colored hair.
“What’s the latest?” I asked.
“Earnest and Royal are back in Forks. The redhead gave up chasing them.”
I opened my mouth, but Archie was faster.
“They’re watching your father. The redhead won’t get past them.” “What is he doing?”
“Working his way through town, looking for you as far as I can tell—he spent some time at the school.”
My eyes bulged. “Did he hurt anyone?”
Archie shook his head. “They seem pretty committed to the hunt they already started.”
“Edythe?”
“Frustrated, it looks like. They turned on the tracker, but she was already running. She’s kept going north. They’re chasing her.”
I stood there, not sure what to do.
Edythe was chasing Joss. Sure, she had Carine and Eleanor with her, but Edythe was the fastest.…
“Eat something, Beau. Edythe gets really difficult when she thinks her instructions aren’t being followed to the letter.”
There was a tray on the coffee table with a couple of stainless steel covers over the plates on it. I couldn’t think of anything to do besides follow Archie’s order. I sat on the floor next to the table and pulled off the first plate cover. I didn’t look at the food, I just grabbed something and started eating. I was probably hungry. We hadn’t stopped for food during our drive.
They were quiet and motionless while I ate. I stared at the TV, but I couldn’t make sense of what was happening. Was it a news show? Was it an infomercial? I wasn’t sure. I ate until the plates were empty. I didn’t taste any of it.
When there was nothing left to eat, I stared at the wall.
All I could see was Edythe in the forest, faster than a cheetah—faster than a bullet. It was obvious she would catch up with the tracker first.
Lauren’s words echoed in my head. You can’t bring her down. She’s absolutely lethal.
Suddenly Jessamine was standing over me, closer than usual.
“Beau,” she said in a soothing voice. “You have nothing to worry about.
You are completely safe here.” “I know.”
“Then why are you frightened?” She sounded confused. She might feel my emotions, but she couldn’t see the reasons behind them.
“You heard what Lauren said. Joss is lethal. What if something goes wrong, and they get separated? If anything happens, if Carine or Eleanor— or Edythe—” My voice broke. “If that crazy redhead hurts Earnest—how do I live with myself when it’s my fault? None of you should be risking your lives for—”
“Stop, Beau, stop,” she interrupted, her words pouring out so quickly they were hard to understand. “You’re worrying about all the wrong things, Beau. Trust me on this—none of us are in jeopardy. You are under enough strain as it is; don’t add to it with imaginary worries. Listen to me!” she ordered—I’d looked away. “Our family is strong. Our only fear is losing you.”
“But why should you—”
Archie was there then, his arm around Jessamine’s waist. “It’s been almost a century that Edythe’s been alone. Now she’s found you. You can’t see the changes that we see, we who have been with her for so long. Do you think any of us want to look into her eyes for the next hundred years if she loses you?”
My guilt started to ease. But even though the calm that spread over me felt totally natural, like it came from inside, I knew better.
“You know I’d do this anyway,” Archie added. “Even if Edythe hadn’t ask me to.”
“Why?”
He grinned. “It’s hard to explain without sounding slightly schizo- phrenic.… Time doesn’t mean the same thing to me that it does to you—or Jess, or anyone else.” Jessamine grinned and tweaked his ear. “So this
won’t make sense to you. But for me, it’s like we’ve already been friends for a long time, Beau. The first second you became a part of Edythe’s life, for me it was like we’d already spent hundreds of hours together. We’ve laughed at Edythe’s overreactions together, we’ve annoyed Royal right out of the house together, we’ve stayed up all night talking with Carine together.…”
I stared and he shrugged. “It’s how I experience the world.” “We’re friends?” I asked, my voice full of wonder.
“Best friends,” he told me. “Someday. It was nice of my favorite sister, don’t you think, to fall in love with my best friend? I guess I owe her one.”
“Huh,” was all I could think to say. Archie laughed.
Jessamine rolled her eyes. “Thanks so much, Archie. I just got him calm.”
“No, I’m good,” I promised. Archie could be lying to make me feel better, but either way it worked. It wasn’t so bad if Archie wanted to help me, too. If he wasn’t just doing it for Edythe.
“So what do we do now?” I asked. “We wait for something to change.” It was a very long day.
We stayed in the room. Archie called down to the front desk and asked them to suspend our housekeeping service. The curtains stayed shut, the TV on, though no one watched it. At regular intervals, food was delivered for me.
It was funny how I was suddenly comfortable with Archie. It was like his vision of our friendship, spoken out loud, had made it real. He sat in the chair next to the sofa where I sprawled, and answered all the questions I’d been too nervous to ask before. Sometimes he’d answer them before I asked them. It was a little weird, but I figured that was how everyone else felt around Edythe all the time.
“Yes,” he said, when I thought about asking him that. “It’s exactly the same. She tries hard not to be obnoxious about it.”
He told me about waking up.
“I only remembered one thing, but I’m not even sure it was a memory. I thought I remembered someone saying my name—calling me Archie. But maybe I was remembering something that hadn’t happened yet—seeing that
someday someone would call me Archie.” He smiled at my expression. “I know, it’s a circular dilemma, isn’t it?”
“The hair?” He ran a hand over his scalp, unselfconscious. The stubble was just long enough to see that his hair would have been dark brown, nearly black, like his eyebrows. “It was a rather extreme look for 1920. A little too early for me to have been a skinhead, thank heavens. My best guess is disease or bad behavior.”
“Bad behavior?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I might have been in prison.”
“You couldn’t have been much older than me,” I protested.
He steepled his fingers thoughtfully. “I like to believe that if I was a criminal, I was both a mastermind and a prodigy.”
Jessamine—back at the desk and mostly silent—laughed with me.
“It wasn’t confusing the way it probably should have been,” Archie said when I asked him what his first visions were like. “It seemed normal—I knew what I was seeing hadn’t happened. I think maybe I’d seen things before I was changed. Or maybe I just adapt quickly.” He smiled, already knowing the question I had waiting. “It was Jess. She was the first thing I saw.” And then, “No, I didn’t actually meet her in person until much later.”
Something about his tone made me wonder. “How long?” “Twenty-eight years.”
“Twenty-eight…? You had to wait twenty-eight years? But couldn’t you…?”
He nodded. “I could have found her earlier. I knew where she was. But she wasn’t ready for me yet. If I’d come too early, she would have killed me.”
I gasped and stared at her. She raised an eyebrow at me, and I looked back at Archie. He laughed.
“But Edythe said you were the only one who could hold your own against her—?”
Jessamine hissed—not like she was mad, like she was annoyed. I glanced at her again and she was rolling her eyes.
“We’ll never know,” Archie said. “If Jess was really trying to kill Edythe, rather than just playing…? Well, Jess has a lot of experience. Seeing the future isn’t the only reason why I can keep up with Edythe—it’s also because it was Jess who taught me how to fight. Lauren’s coven all had
their eyes on Eleanor—she’s pretty spectacular, I grant you. But if it had come to a fight, Eleanor wouldn’t have been their problem. If they’d taken a closer look at my darling”—he blew her a kiss—“they would have forgotten all about the strong girl.”
I remembered the first time I’d seen Jessamine, in the cafeteria with her family. Beautiful, like the others, but with that edge. Even before I’d put it into words inside my own head, I’d sensed there was something about her that matched up with what Archie was telling me now.
I looked at Archie.
“You can ask her,” he said. “But it’s not going to happen.”
“He wants to know my story?” Jessamine guessed. She laughed once—it was a dark sound. “You’re not ready for that, Beau. Believe me.”
And though I was still curious, I did believe her.
“You said humans were harder… but you seem to see me pretty well,” I noted.
“I’m paying attention, and you’re right here,” Archie said. “Also, the two-second head starts are simpler than the weather. It’s the long term that won’t hold still. Even an hour complicates things.”
Archie kept me updated on what was happening with the others—which was mostly nothing. Joss was good at running away. There were tricks, Archie told me. Scents couldn’t be tracked through water, for example. Joss seemed to know the tricks. A half dozen times the trail took them back toward Forks, only to race off in the other direction again. Twice Archie called Carine to give her instructions. Once it was something about the direction in which Joss had jumped off a cliff, the other time it was where they would find her scent on the other side of a river. From the way he described it, he wasn’t seeing the hunter, he was seeing Edythe and Carine. I guessed he would see his family the most clearly. I wanted to ask for the phone, but I knew there wasn’t time for me to hear Edythe’s voice. They were hunting.
I also knew I was supposed to be rooting for Edythe and the others to succeed, but I could only feel relieved as the distance between her and Joss got larger, despite Archie’s help. If it meant I would be stuck here in this hotel room forever, I wouldn’t complain. Whatever kept her safe.
There was one question that I wanted to ask more than the others, but I hesitated. I think if Jessamine hadn’t been there, I might have done it
sooner. I didn’t feel the same ease in her presence that I did now with Archie. Which was probably only because she wasn’t trying to make me feel that way.
When I was eating—dinner? Maybe, I couldn’t remember which meal I was on—I was thinking about different ways to ask. And then I caught a look on Archie’s face and I knew that he already knew what I was trying to ask, and unlike my dozens of other questions, he was choosing not to answer this one.
My eyes narrowed.
“Was this on Edythe’s lists of instructions?” I asked sourly.
I thought I heard a very faint sigh from Jessamine’s corner. It was probably annoying listening to half a conversation. But she should be used to that. I’d bet Edythe and Archie never had to speak out loud at all when they talked to each other.
“It was implied,” Archie answered.
I thought about their fight in the Jeep. Was this what it was about?
“I don’t suppose our future friendship is enough to shift your loyalties?” He frowned. “Edythe is my sister.”
“Even if you disagree with her on this?” We stared at each other for a minute.
“That’s what you saw,” I realized. I felt my eyes get bigger. “And then she got so upset. You already saw it, didn’t you?”
“It was only one future among many. I also saw you die,” he reminded me.
“But you saw it. It’s a possibility.” He shrugged.
“Don’t you think I deserve to know, then? Even if there’s only the slightest chance?”
He stared at me, deliberating.
“You do,” he finally said. “You have the right to know.” I waited.
“You don’t know fury like Edythe when she’s thwarted,” he warned me. “It’s none of her business. This is between you and me. As your friend,
I’m begging you.”
He paused, then made his choice. “I can tell you the mechanics of it, but I don’t remember it myself, and I’ve never done it or seen it done, so keep
in mind that I can only tell you the theory.” “How does someone become a vampire?”
“Oh, is that all?” Jessamine muttered behind me. I’d forgotten she was listening.
I waited.
“As predators,” Archie began, “we have a glut of weapons in our physical arsenal—much, much more than we need for hunting easy prey like humans. Strength, speed, acute senses, not to mention those of us like Edythe, Jessamine, and me who have extra senses as well. And then, like a carnivorous flower, we are physically attractive to our prey.”
I was seeing it all in my head again—how Edythe had illustrated the same concept for me in the meadow.
He smiled wide—his teeth glistened. “We have one more, fairly superfluous weapon. We’re also venomous. The venom doesn’t kill—it’s merely incapacitating. It works slowly, spreading through the bloodstream, so that, once bitten, our prey is in too much physical pain to escape us. Mostly superfluous, as I said. If we’re that close, our prey doesn’t escape. Of course, unless we want it to.”
“Carine,” I said quietly. The holes in the story Edythe had told me were filling themselves in. “So… if the venom is left to spread…?”
“It takes a few days for the transformation to be complete, depending on how much venom is in the bloodstream, how close the venom enters to the heart—Carine’s creator bit her on the hand on purpose to make it worse. As long as the heart keeps beating, the poison spreads, healing, changing the body as it moves through it. Eventually the heart stops, and the conversion is finished. But all that time, every minute of it, a victim would be wishing for death—screaming for it.”
I shuddered.
“It’s not pleasant, no.”
“Edythe said it was very hard to do… but that sounds simple enough.” “We’re also like sharks in a way. Once we taste blood, or even smell it
for that matter, it becomes very hard to keep from feeding. Impossible, even. So you see, to actually bite someone, to taste the blood, it would begin the frenzy. It’s difficult on both sides—the bloodlust on the one hand, the awful pain on the other.”
“It sounds like something you would remember,” I said.
“For everyone else, the pain of transformation is the sharpest memory they have of their human life. I don’t know why I’m different.”
Archie stared past me, motionless. I wondered what it would be like, not to know who you were. To look in the mirror and not recognize the person looking back.
It was hard for me to believe that Archie could have been a criminal, though; there was something intrinsically good about his face. Royal was the showy one, the one the girls at school stared at, but there was something better than perfection about Archie’s face. It was totally pure.
“There are positives to being different,” Archie said suddenly. “I don’t remember anyone I left behind. I got to skip that pain, too.” He looked at me, and his eyes narrowed a little bit. “Carine, Edythe, and Earnest all lost everyone who mattered to them before they left being human behind. So there was grief, but not regret. It was different for the others. The phys-ical pain is a quick thing, comparatively, Beau. There are slower ways to suffer.
…”
“Royal had parents who loved him and depended on him—two little sisters he adored. He could never see them again after he was changed. And then he outlived them all. That kind of pain is very, very slow.”
I wondered if he was trying to make me feel bad for Royal—to cut the guy some slack even if he hated me. Well… it was working.
He shook his head, like he knew I wasn’t getting it.
“That’s part of the process, Beau. I haven’t experienced it. I can’t tell you what it feels like. But it’s a part of the process.”
And then I understood what he was telling me.
He was perfectly still again. I put my arm behind my head and stared up at the ceiling.
If… if ever, someday, Edythe wanted me that way… what would that mean for Mom? What would that mean for Charlie?
There were so many things to think about. Things I didn’t even know I didn’t know to think about.
But some things seemed obvious. For whatever reason, Edythe didn’t want me thinking about any of this. Why? It hurt my stomach when I tried to come up with an answer to that question.
Then Archie sprang to his feet.
I looked up at him, startled by the sudden movement, then alarmed again
when I saw his face.
It was totally blank—empty, his mouth half open.
Then Jessamine was there, gently pushing him back into the chair. “What do you see?” she asked in a low, soothing voice. “Something’s changed,” Archie said, even more quietly.
I leaned closer. “What is it?”
“A room. It’s long—there are mirrors everywhere. The floor is wood. The tracker is in the room, and she’s waiting. There’s a gold stripe across the mirrors.”
“Where is the room?”
“I don’t know. Something is missing—another decision hasn’t been made yet.”
“How much time?”
“It’s soon. She’ll be in the mirror room today, or maybe tomorrow. It all depends. She’s waiting for something.” His face went blank again. “And she’s in the dark now.”
Jessamine’s voice was calm, methodical. “What is she doing?”
“She’s watching TV… no, she’s running a VCR, in the dark, in another place.”
“Can you see where she is?” “No, the space is too dark.”
“And the mirror room, what else is there?”
“Just the mirrors, and the gold. It’s a band, around the room. And there’s a black table with a big stereo, and a TV. She’s touching the VCR there, but she doesn’t watch the way she does in the dark room. This is the room where she waits.” His eyes drifted, then focused on Jessamine’s face.
“There’s nothing else?”
He shook his head. They looked at each other, motionless. “What does it mean?” I asked.
Neither of them answered for a moment, then Jessamine looked at me. “It means the tracker’s plans have changed. She’s made a decision that
will lead her to the mirror room, and the dark room.” “But we don’t know where those rooms are?” “No.”
“But we do know that she won’t be in the mountains north of
Washington, being hunted. She’ll elude them.” Archie’s voice was bleak.
He picked up the phone just as it vibrated.
“Carine,” he said. And then he glanced at me. “Yes.” He listened for another long moment, then said, “I just saw her.” He described the vision like he had for Jessamine. “Whatever made her take that plane… it was leading her to those rooms.” He paused. “Yes.”
He held out the phone to me. “Beau?” I yanked it out of his hand. “Hello?” “Beau,” Edythe breathed.
“Oh, Edythe,” I said. “Where are you?”
“Outside of Vancouver. I’m sorry, Beau—we lost her. She seems suspicious of us—she stays just far enough away that I can’t hear her. She’s gone now—looks like she stole a small plane. We think she’s heading back to Forks to start over.”
I could hear Archie filling Jessamine in behind me. “I know. Archie saw that she got away.”
“You don’t have to worry, though. You’ve left no trail for her to follow. You just have to stay with Archie and wait till we find her again. Archie will get a bead on her soon enough.”
“I’ll be fine. Is Earnest with Charlie?”
“Yes—the male’s been in town. He went to the house, but while Charlie was at work. He hasn’t gone near your father. Don’t worry—Charlie’s safe with Earnest and Royal watching.”
Somehow, Royal’s presence didn’t comfort me much. “What do you think Victor is doing?”
“Trying to pick up the trail. He’s been all through the area during the night. Royal traced him up to the airport in Port Angeles, all the roads around town, the school… he’s digging, Beau, but there’s nothing to find.”
“And you’re sure Charlie’s safe?”
“Yes. Earnest won’t let him out of his sight. I’ll be there soon. If the tracker gets anywhere near Forks, I’ll have her.”
I swallowed. “Be careful. Stay with Carine and Eleanor.” “I know what I’m doing.”
“I miss you,” I said.
“I know, believe me, I know. It’s like you’ve taken half of my self away with you.”
“Come and get it, then.”
“As soon as I possibly can. I will make this right first.” Her voice got hard.
“I love you.”
“Could you believe that, despite everything I’ve put you through, I love you, too?”
“Yes, I can.”
“I’ll come for you soon.” “I’ll wait for you.”
The phone went dead, and a sudden wave of depression crashed over me. Jessamine looked up sharply, and the feeling dissipated.
Jessamine went back to watching Archie. He was on the couch, leaning over the table with the free hotel pen in his hand. I walked over to see what he was doing.
He was sketching on a piece of hotel stationery. I leaned on the back of the couch, looking over his shoulder.
He drew a room: long, rectangular, with a thinner, square section at the back. He drew lines to show how the wooden planks that made up the floor stretched lengthwise across the room. Down the walls were more lines denoting the breaks in the mirrors. I hadn’t been picturing them like that— covering the whole wall that way. And then, wrapping around the walls, waist high, a long band. The band Archie said was gold.
“It’s a ballet studio,” I said, suddenly recognizing the familiar shapes. They both looked up at me, surprised.
“Do you know this room?” Jessamine’s voice sounded calm, but there was an undercurrent to it. Archie leaned closer to the paper, his hand flying across the page now. An emergency exit took shape against the back wall just where I knew it would be; the stereo and TV filled in the right corner foreground.
“It looks like a place where my mom used to teach dance lessons—she didn’t stick with it for very long. It was shaped just the same.” I touched the page where the square section jutted out, narrowing the back part of the room. “That’s where the bathrooms were—the doors were through the other dance floor. But the stereo was here”—I pointed to the left corner—“it was older, and there wasn’t a TV. There was a window in the waiting room— you could see the room from this perspective if you looked through it.”
Archie and Jessamine were staring at me.
“Are you sure it’s the same room?” Jessamine asked with the same unnatural calm.
“No, not at all. I mean, most dance studios would look the same—the mirrors, the bar.” I leaned over the couch and traced my finger along the ballet bar set against the mirrors. “It’s just the shape that looked familiar.”
“Would you have any reason to go there now?” Archie asked.
“No. I haven’t been back since my mom quit—it’s probably been ten years.”
“So there’s no way it could be connected with you?” Archie asked intently.
I shook my head. “I don’t even think the same person owns it. I’m sure it’s just another dance studio, somewhere else.”
“Where was the studio your mother went to?” Jessamine asked, her voice much more casual than Archie’s.
“Just around the corner from our house. It’s why she took the job—so I could meet her there when I walked home from school.…” My voice trailed off as I watched the look they exchanged.
“Here in Phoenix, then?” she asked, still casual. “Yes,” I whispered. “Fifty-eighth and Cactus.” We all stared in silence at the drawing.
“Archie, is that phone safe?” I asked.
“The number just traces back to Washington,” he told me. “Then I can use it to call my mom.”
“She’s in Florida, right? She should be safe there.”
“She is—but she’s coming home soon, and she can’t come back to that house while…” A tremor ran through my voice. I was thinking about Victor searching Charlie’s house, the school in Forks where my records were.
“What’s her number?” Archie asked. He had the phone in his hand. “They don’t have a permanent number except at the house. She’s
supposed to check her messages regularly.” “Jess?” Archie asked.
She thought about it. “I don’t think it could hurt—don’t say where you are, obviously.”
I nodded, reaching for the phone. I dialed the familiar number, then waited through four rings until my mother’s breezy voice came on, telling
me to leave a message.
“Mom,” I said after the beep, “it’s me. Listen, I need you to do something. It’s important. As soon as you get this message, call me at this number.” Archie pointed to the number already written on the bottom of his picture. I read it carefully, twice. “Please don’t go anywhere until you talk to me. Don’t worry, I’m okay, but I have to talk to you right away, no matter how late you get this call, all right? I love you, Mom. Bye.” I closed my eyes and prayed that no unforeseen change of plans would bring her home before she got my message.
Then we were back to waiting.
I thought about calling Charlie, but I wasn’t sure what I could say. I watched the news, concentrating now, watching for stories about Florida, or about spring training—strikes or hurricanes or terrorist attacks—anything that might send them home early.
It seemed like immortality granted endless patience, too. Neither Jessamine nor Archie seemed to feel the need to do anything at all. For a while, Archie sketched the vague outline of the dark room from his vision, as much as he could see in the light from the TV. But when he was done, he simply sat, looking at the blank walls. Jessamine, too, seemed to have no urge to pace, or to peek through the curtains, or to punch holes in the wall, the way I did.
I fell asleep on the couch, waiting for the phone to ring.
