Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (7 page)

He didn’t glance back.

The dusk had deepened enough now for Ally to realize that there were lights on in many of the houses that lined the green. She could see figures beyond the windows, watching.

Oh, those beautiful houses! The well-kept lawns, the rows of carefully trimmed shrubbery. The gliders on the porches, the flowerpots full of geraniums on the window ledges.

And the hitching posts.

Soon, only one man remained on the green, standing near its far corner. Ally called to him: “Help me . . . ! Please help . . . !” She managed to climb painfully to her feet, then staggered a few steps in his direction, until the chain yanked her to a stop with a clatter. That was when she realized her mistake. It wasn’t a man; it was the war memorial, the statue of the young soldier, staring west toward the now vanished sun, his face immobilized in that silent howl of torment.

It was only now that Ally noticed the cardboard box, sitting in
front of the three hitching posts, about fifteen feet away, its top folded open. There was bedding inside—a little nest of blankets. And nestled among the bedding was the creature. It had been silent all this time, but as the dusk continued to settle upon the village, it began to make a mewling sound. The only language Ally had ever known was English, yet there had been times in her life when she’d overheard people speaking in a foreign tongue and known immediately what they were saying, simply from the pitch of their voices. The same thing happened here, with the creature. Perhaps it was simply because the box looked so much like a cradle—the blankets so much like swaddling—but what Ally heard was a frightened child, calling for its mother.

Mommy . . . ? Mommy . . . ? Mommy . . . ?

The creature’s voice seemed to gain strength with the advancing darkness: a wounded child, calling for someone to protect it.

Mama . . . Mama . . . Mama . . .

Ally could picture how the hills above the village must look at this time of day, the shadows already triumphant beneath the trees. The creature had started to shift about in the box, waving its broken limbs in the air: an angry child, calling for someone to avenge it.

Mother . . . ! Mother . . . ! Mother . . . !

Ally hugged herself, shivering. All around her, the light was fading fast.

Night was coming.

And with the night, an answer to the child’s cries.

L
ightning lashed across the summer sky, coloring it with the purple-black of a fresh hematoma. It was followed by a roll of thunder some three seconds later. No rain, not yet, but the air was heavy with the taste of it, a heady, electric smell that promised downpours yet to come. Lou picked her way along the bank of the creek, mud squishing between her toes, keeping a wary eye on that sky. Summer storms were the best kind for watching and the worst kind for getting caught in. They were unpredictable, temperamental, like her stepdaddy when he had a couple of beers in him and his eyes started to wander along the curves of her sundress.

Lou stopped for a moment, clenching her fingers a little tighter around the jar in her hand as she shook off the memory of his eyes and breathed in the clean scent of yet-unfallen rain. Those were thoughts for another time and place, huddled under her blanket and listening to the shouts from downstairs. She was thirteen: old enough to understand that she was what her mother and her stepfather fought about half the time, and nowhere near old enough to understand why it had to be that way. She sometimes thought that she would never be old enough, that “old enough” was the sort of
idea that came only to frightened thirteen-year-old girls, waiting for the doorknob to turn. It hadn’t happened yet, but she saw the way he looked at her, and she listened to the way the other girls at school talked sometimes in the locker room, when the teachers weren’t around. She knew what came after the sundresses and the shouting.

(There was a smell in the locker room sometimes, when the teachers were away and the girls started talking. It was a sharp, hot smell, and it made Lou think of storms on the way, even though there were no clouds in the locker room, never could be; even though they were safe, small, contained when they sat in that room. Maybe girls and storms weren’t so different after all.)

She resumed her pacing along the creek bed, eyes flicking from the fresh-bruised sky to the black branches of the trees that grew beside the water. Lightning flashed again. This time, the thunder was only a second behind. It was time to go back, time to get home before the rain came down and she got another lecture about behaving like a child. She started to turn—

Lights appeared in the branches of the nearest tree, as unsteady as birthday candles, flickering luminescent green through the darkness. Lou’s cheeks stretched into a grin as she uncapped the jam jar she’d been carrying all this while.

“Gotcha,” she whispered.

Catching fireflies was an art form. Most of the girls her age had already lost whatever skill at it they’d once possessed, trading the steady hand on the collecting jar for a steady hand on a mascara wand. She didn’t see anything wrong with that, exactly—everyone had to grow up to be who they were going to be—but she sometimes felt like there’d been a bell rung over the course of the past two years, one that all her classmates could hear, while she couldn’t hear anything but the siren song of the creek and the woods and the promise of summer fireflies.

When she went back to school in the fall, she would be a high school student, expected to buckle down and fight for her future. What’s worse, she would be a little deeper into her teens, and those sidelong glances from her stepfather would no longer have as much reason to be coy. She couldn’t say exactly what she feared would happen; she didn’t have the words for it, any more than she had the words for the smell that accompanied an impending storm. She just knew that she was afraid.

But that was a fear for later. Right now, it was just her, and the storm, and the fireflies that she swept, one by one, into her collecting jar, until it glowed with the will-o’-wisp light of dozens of circling insects. She held it up to her eye, looking critically at the fireflies as they flew. Lightning flashed again overhead. She barely noticed.

“You’re big ones, aren’t you,” she said, tipping the jar a bit to give herself a better angle. “Must have been a good season for you guys. Never seen ones quite like you before . . .”

And the sky ripped open, and the rain came down.

A
ll summers are unique to the places in which they happen. California summers are hot desert things, brutal in the daylight and cold at night. Florida summers are humid and wet, unforgiving in their unrelenting heat. Indiana summers are alight with storms and fireflies, the sky always the color of a bruise, from the angry green of the impending twister to the acid yellow tainting the edges of an otherwise perfect blue. Indiana summers never let anyone forget that they are wounds carved out of the flesh of the calendar, warm not because of the presence of the sun, but because they are still bleeding.

Lou ran through the rain, her feet squelching in the increasingly sodden grass, her jam jar full of fireflies clutched against her chest like some sort of talisman of safe passage through the storm. She ran, and the storm pursued, sending down torrents of water that threatened to sweep her legs out from underneath her and send her
sprawling into the grass. The conditions weren’t right for a flash flood, she knew, but she ran all the same, because the longer she stayed out here, the more her mother would worry. Her mother seemed to worry all the time these days, and maybe that was another sign of how dangerous the impending storm at home was growing. The time between the lightning and the thunder had worn away to almost nothing, one lingering look at a time.

The motion seemed to be agitating the fireflies. They lit up a little brighter every time her foot came down, until she was carrying a jar full of light across the field, as bright as a fallen star, beating back the darkness as fiercely as it could. She could see the back side of her neighborhood from the hill, the lights on and glowing a little more gently than her captives. All the windows would be closed against the rain, she knew, and the back door with its bad latch would be locked to keep the wind from blowing it open. She was going to have to go around the front of the house and knock like a guest, begging for entrance to her own place. What if they didn’t let her in? The fear wasn’t new, but it was shocking every time it showed its face. She tried to push it aside, and it came springing back, twice as big. What if they said “
You want to be a storm’s child, go be a storm’s child, don’t bring any of your rain or wrongness here
,” and turned their faces away, and turned the porch light off?

No. No, and no, and no again. That was her home down there, nestled safe in its line of homes just like it, and it was always going to be hers, no matter how many bad looks she got from her drunken stepdaddy (and he was never going to be her father, no; her father had bled his life out on the Indiana highway, rushing home from work, and what was sacrificed could never be so easily replaced), no matter how many times her mother pretended not to see. That was her home. She was going home, and nothing was going to stop her.

Lou was so focused on where she was planning to wind up that she stopped paying attention to where she was. Her foot found a
rabbit hole in the hillside, already half-flooded, the rabbits either fled or drowned, and the sound of her ankle snapping was like a bolt of lightning, followed a second later by the dull thunder rumble of pain so big and so unheard of that it seemed to fill her entire body, leaving no room for anything else. She fell, landing hard on the jar in her arms, which shattered and drove glass shards deep into the flesh of her chest and throat.

There wasn’t time to scream, and it wouldn’t have mattered if she had, for the storm took all such sounds as its own. Lou lay sprawled and shattered on the hillside, her own weight driving the glass deeper. She didn’t move.

The storm raged on.

T
here was something dream-like about the storm. It beat its fists against the rooftops and hammered against the windows, but the works of man held fast; save for a little bit of a leak up in the attic, the house was a fortress. Mary twitched the curtain aside and looked out on the backyard. The slope of the hill beyond the fence was a black hump in the darkness, almost obscured by the pounding rain.

“Where
is
that girl?” she muttered, before glancing guiltily over her shoulder. Spenser was angry at the rain, said it was interfering with the television reception, and he was angry with Mary too, for trying to say that digital cable didn’t work like that. The picture had looked perfectly clear to her, but what did she know? She was just the woman who put the beer in his hand and the remote on the arm of his chair before she backed away, keeping clear of his fists, which seemed to swing especially hard when the rain came down. He didn’t like nights like this one. He wouldn’t be happy when he realized that Lou was still out there, chasing fireflies like a little kid.

“
It’s time for that girl to grow up and realize that she can’t be a hellion forever
,” that was what he’d said to Mary not two months before,
when Lou had come bursting in excited by the first summer fireflies. “
If I need to smack some sense into her, I will
.”

Mary liked to think that she would throw him out the first time Spenser laid a hand on her baby girl, but she knew better than to believe it. This house was in her name, but his paychecks paid the bills, and she couldn’t cover the mortgage without him. If her contribution had to be paid in bruises, there were worse things in the world. Crawling back to her mother with her hat in her hands, for example. Pulling Lou out of school and away from all her friends, and all because Mary didn’t know how to pick a man.

It was all justification and she knew it, but that didn’t change the necessity of it.
Why didn’t you leave?
was a question asked by women who lived in safe, comfortable houses with money in their bank accounts, who had never fed their daughters flour dumplings in soy-sauce soup.

“Mary! Get your ass in here!” Spenser sounded furious.

Mary tore her eyes away from the black hills behind the house. “Coming,” she called, and unlocked the back door with a quick, decisive flick of her wrist before walking quickly—not running, no, see? She still had her dignity; she didn’t run when he called her name—out to the living room. The television was on, the picture clear as shallow water. Spenser was seated in his armchair, the special one that no one else was allowed to touch without his invitation. He looked like a poisonous toad, squatting there, stockpiling his venom.

“What’s going on, sweetheart?” she asked, putting every ounce of love and affection she could find into her voice.

“Someone’s on the damn porch,” he said. He turned to look at her, narrow-eyed, and added, “It better not be that girl of yours. I told her to go up to her room after dinner and get started on her homework. I’m not going to be happy if she’s not been minding me.”

“I’m sure it’s not Lou,” said Mary, who knew full well that her
daughter would have tried the back door before she came around front. “It’s probably one of the neighbors, coming over to borrow a bucket.” It would have to be some leak for anyone to be willing to brave the storm rather than use a pot or pan to catch the water. Still, it was the best excuse she had.

Spenser looked at her for a moment more, still narrow-eyed and suspicious, before he turned back to the television. Mary let out a breath she had barely been aware of holding and walked onward, toward the door. The storm wasn’t even half-over yet: she could feel the electric pressure of it pushing her down, making her skin feel too tight and her hair tingle at the edges.

Please go around the back, baby girl
, she thought, and turned the knob.