The Calling (12 page)

Paige coughed and shook her head. “Can I stay the night with you, Miki? I don't think I can get home.”

“Sure.” That was my plan. Miki wondered if she could push Paige into the apartment and still have a few minutes alone with Davin.

“Why is it so dark?” Paige asked after they walked a few steps away from the main street.

“I think someone has broken all the streetlights.” Miki looked up at the poles that should have been lit. “I'm glad you came with us, Davin. I might have been afraid.”

Davin turned his head and seemed to search up and down the street. His actions made Miki think he was afraid himself. He was certainly nervous. That didn't help her a bit. If Davin was scared, maybe there was something to be frightened about. She glanced behind them, then across the street, but saw nothing and no one.

A block from the apartment a fluttering sound came from behind them. Then from both sides of the street and the alley they'd passed. She heard the same sound ahead of them. The noise was a combination of whispering and bird wings, or bats beating the air with their wings.

“What is that sound?” she finally asked.

“Let's hurry.” Davin placed himself between Paige and Miki, taking both arms, practically making them run with him.

“Do you know what it is?” Miki asked, her heart starting to pound against her rib cage.

“I don't like it.” He didn't answer the question she asked, but Miki felt he recognized the sound.

They had reached the apartment door when a flock of bats flew right at them. Paige screamed as they tangled into her long hair. Miki waved her arms and tried to place her key in the door lock. Davin sheltered them both with his body and his cape spread wide.

“Hurry, get inside.” He spun and flailed his arms, took off his cape and swung it at the whirring black bodies.

As Miki unlatched the door, Davin pushed her and Paige inside, then slammed the door. Miki and Paige were inside the apartment. Davin stayed outside to fight off the attack.

“Davin!” Miki screamed. She tried to twist the knob again, open the door, and pull Davin inside with them. The cold, brass knob would not turn. The door would not open.

Objects seemed to thud and batter at the door as if they were trying to break it down. She could hear Davin's angry voice shouting. But she couldn't help him.

Seventeen

M
IKI HEARD SCRATCHING
, Scritching, scraping sounds at the door, like thousands of tiny bat claws. The noise seeped through the thick wood and into the apartment as if the door were paper or screen wire. How many bats were there? How long would it take them to break right through the door and fill the apartment with their leathery black bodies.

What did they want? Had the heavy, humid night, the thick, vaporous fog driven them wild, making them want to swarm and attack anything they came across? The movie,
The Birds
flashed through Miki's mind frame by frame. Those birds had organized and attacked at will, with some motive in mind. To take over the world or some such crazed idea. But that was a movie. This was real. Birds and bats don't decide to attack someone. Maybe killer bees swarm and attack, but—

Miki soon realized she wasn't going to make sense of what was happening on the other side of the thin door. She tried to stop thinking.

She and Paige clung to each other and sank to the floor, leaning on the door, protecting their heads with one arm as if the bats could seep into the room and tangle in their hair.

Paige began to sob, but Miki, even though she was afraid, was more worried about Davin than she was about herself. He was out there. He was fighting off the bats that seemed to have gone mad in the thick, black night.

Were the bats really attacking or was there just a big bunch of them and they happened to fly toward Miki, Paige, and Davin? Davin hadn't thought so. He'd acted scared himself, then protected Miki and Paige, shoved them inside the apartment as if he understood the danger. He had, Miki knew. He had known why the bats were attacking them.

When all was quiet outside the front door, Miki stood, wishing there was a glass in the door. She wished she could look outside without opening it.

Finally, fearing the worst, she eased the door open and whispered, “Davin? Davin, are you there?”

No answer.

Paige stopped whimpering. “Be careful, Miki. Please don't open the door.”

“I have to. I have to find out about Davin. He may be out there. He may be hurt. He helped us. Now we need to help him.”

Paige finally got up and moved. Slowly Miki swung the door all the way open. The night air rushed in, smelling stale and fetid like rotting fruit or spoiled wine. Fog tumbled inside the apartment without a sound, muffling Paige's sniffling.

“He's gone,” Miki whispered, stepping outside and looking up and down the sidewalk. She could see nothing, but she knew. She could feel that he wasn't there. “Davin's gone.”

The night was too quiet, holding its breath until it was safe to exhale. No cars crept along the street. No footsteps echoed along the sidewalk. They lived in the city where one heard emergency vehicles every few minutes. No siren wailed, no truck rumbled toward an emergency.

“Close the door. There's nothing we can do.” Paige pushed against the front door. “I don't like the way it feels out there. Something's wrong. It's too quiet, and it's too early for the streets to be so deserted. I feel as if you and I are all alone in the city, maybe all alone on the planet.”

“You're letting your imagination run away with you, Paige,” Miki scolded. As if she hadn't done the same thing for the last half hour. But it was easier to fuss at Paige then to fault herself for being panicked.

“He probably just walked away after those bats flew by.”

Miki resisted giving in. “Maybe we should go back to the theater. Make sure he got back, that he's all right. He lives there, sleeps there. But I don't have any phone number, so I can't call him. I can't just worry about him all night.”

“No, we can't go back. Not tonight, Miki. I'm too tired, and you can't go alone. I won't let you.”

Miki knew Paige was right. Going back to the theater would be foolish. Davin, if he was all right, would be mad at them. He had seen them safely home. She'd have to wait until tomorrow to see if he was also safe.

She stepped back inside the apartment, closed the door, and threw both the dead bolt and the safety chain. She'd have to let her mother in when she came. Assuming her mother wasn't sound asleep in her bed right now. Surely she would have heard them.

Moving like a robot into the kitchen, blanking out her mind, Miki made cocoa, insisting that Paige have something warm to drink before she went to sleep. She acted more than tired. She seemed drugged or sick.

Paige leaned on the table, watching Miki heat milk. “Miki, I was afraid tonight, even before you fell. I mean, I felt really strange pretending to be a vampire victim, but I almost liked it. Do you know what I mean? Did you experience that when you started to dance with those people?”

“Yes, I felt I was in another world as soon as I heard the music and started to move with it. Almost as if Davin had hypnotized me.”

“That's it. I felt as if I was in a trance, that I had to do what they told me to do, or what the music told me to do. I had to let them touch me, pass my body among them. Their lips were warm on my neck, like a kiss.”

Miki understood everything Paige said. She had experienced the same thing that Miki had felt. The dancers had a power over them that was hard to explain, hard to understand.

Miki poured Paige a cup of cocoa and one for herself. Gripping the warm cup in both hands, she leaned over it and inhaled the chocolate smell, savoring the “normal” odor compared to the smells in the theater, the fragrance of Primavera's perfume, the frightening scent of the night as they walked home.

She associated the hot chocolate smell with her mother, with being comforted, with cozy winter nights. Where nothing bad could happen. “What were you afraid of?” Miki remembered Paige saying she was afraid even before she fell.

Paige stared at her drink. “I know you think I'm a coward, and that I'm afraid to try new things, and I admit I would never do some of the things you do. Like I would never have gone into that theater in the first place. Then asked if I could dance with that troupe.”

Miki didn't contradict Paige. What she said was true.

“But I like to think I have good intuition. About what to do and what not to do. Maybe about what is safe and what is not safe. I think you have to have that to live in a city. To grow up with strangers all around you. Don't you?” Paige looked at Miki, expecting an answer.

“I guess so. But what are you really trying to say, Paige?”

“Miki, Davin's hands could never have healed that fast. There would have been scabs, or worse, from burns as bad as he had.”

“I thought that same thing when I saw him tonight, Paige, but maybe he wasn't as badly burned as we thought. Look at my leg.” Miki held out her foot and pulled her tights up to expose the burn she'd gotten from the skirt fire. “There's just a small red smudge left.”

“I saw his hands, the blisters, the red raw flesh. Those were first-degree burns. And there was nothing, not even a red smudge on his fingers. There was no sign at all that he'd been hurt, that he'd been burned.”

“So. What are you saying?” Miki's voice was sharp because she didn't want to hear this.

“I saw Primavera step back when you tried on that cape in the store, when you looked at yourself in the three-way mirror. Remember?”

“I remember how great it looked. I didn't see her behind me. No, I didn't see her move.” Miki was following what Paige was saying now, but she refused to agree.

“You didn't see her because there was no reflection from her in the mirror. And none of Romney and Kyle, sitting beside me in the backseat of that big car. I looked in the rearview mirror and the only person I saw was me.”

Miki started to shake her head. “No, no, what you're suggesting is crazy, Paige. It's impossible.”

“It's not impossible. I thought so, too, at first. But now I know, Miki. I know. I read Joey's comic book. I made a list of clues. I've checked all of them out.”

“You used a comic book to—to—”

Paige had saved her best argument for last. She took Miki's hand and placed her fingers against her neck. Miki felt two tiny, almost imperceptible bumps, like pinpricks on the skin of Paige's neck.

Immediately she stood up, moved closer to Paige, pulled her long hair aside, and stared at her long slender neck. The scabs were hard to see. The tiny holes had sealed over quickly. But they were there. On Paige's pale neck there stood out side by side puncture marks. Her fingers flew to her own neck. Nothing. Smooth as cream.

“They—”

“The troupe—the Theater of the Dead. The dancers pretending to be vampires, Miki. They—”

“They really are vampires.” Miki couldn't believe it, but she said it for her.

Eighteen

“B
ATS
. T
HEY CAN
change into bats. Bats followed us home, tried to hurt us.” Miki gasped and knocked over her cup of cocoa. A brown stain, like dried blood, spread over the white tablecloth her mother had put on the night before. Bats gone mad had followed them, attacked them. Davin had protected her and Paige. “Davin! Davin is in danger.” She felt a sharp pain pierce her chest and she held her breath.

“Miki,” Paige said quietly, touching Miki's arm. “Davin is one of them. You know that.”

She did know that. Had she known it all along? Had she refused to believe it? Or had she wanted to be a part of the troupe so badly that she didn't care?

The unwanted realization that Davin was a vampire, a creature who lived on blood and death, who preyed on the innocent to achieve a horrid immortality, churned in her stomach, became thick syrup in her veins. Her body rested heavily on the kitchen chair—muscles, bones, skin a dead weight. She had trusted Davin, invited him into her arms, felt and welcomed the feather touch of his lips on her neck, knowing, knowing all that time that he was more than a dancer pretending.

She had never felt so lost, so bereft. And as if her mind and her body were already infected, as if Davin had some hypnotic hold on her will, she still wanted to be with him. She wanted to dance with him. To feel his arms holding her as the trapeze floated up and back, as the velvet swing cradled them and kept them safe, separate from the rest—apart, different.

He would never hurt her. He wasn't the one who—who hurt Paige. It was the others, Rima, or—It was hard to think that any of the troupe except Rima would hurt either her or Paige. It was impossible to believe that they really were vampires.

No such thing existed outside of books and comics and movies.

Did it?

She made a decision. “I'm going back tomorrow, Paige. You won't go. I'll go in and pretend that I know nothing. I just want to see if they'll let me dance with them. They won't know that I suspect that—that they hurt you. That they are—vampires.” Miki kept saying the word so she could think about the possibility. But what was there to think about?

They had already tried to kill her and Paige. The rest of the troupe had followed Miki and Paige and Davin home, turned into bats, tried to attack. Davin wouldn't let them, or at least he had protected them. This time.

Paige looked aghast. “You can't go back in that theater, Miki. You can't put yourself in danger like that. I won't let you!”

“You can't stop me, Paige. I won't be in danger. And if I am, then it's my decision. If these people are dangerous, someone needs to know that. To do something about it.”

“You don't have to.”

“Who does? I found them. In a way, I've exposed them. I have to do something to stop them.”