The Night Shifters (17 page)

“The ground isn’t
far,” I told her. “We can probably just – “

She screamed, and I
looked over my shoulder. A figure emerged from the pool, a creature
of pure ink, dripping as it solidified. It turned an eyeless face
in our direction and seemed to see us.

“Jump!” I advised,
unnecessarily, because she was already on the ground and running. I
followed her, and the two of us sprinted down the street as fast as
we could. She ran a little ahead of me, so I let her lead as we
rushed down one street, then another, and then yet another.

“Hey,” I said when
I felt a safe distance had been reached, “enough!”

She ignored me and
increased her pace. I was growing too tired to keep up. “Oh, the
hell with it.” I just let her go. I stopped and bent over with my
hands on my knees to catch my breath. When I looked up again, she
stood at the far end of the street, looking at me.

“What’s wrong with
you?” she called, her voice so faint I could barely hear it.

“Nothing!” I yelled
back.

“What?!”

“Nothing!!” I had
to stop and breathe some more. It couldn’t be a very good idea to
be yelling like that, where god-knows-what could hear us – maybe
even the manna-man from the pool. I could imagine his sightless
head turning toward the sound of our voices. I shivered and gazed
down the street in the direction from which we had just come.

Nothing moved down
there. And yet...

“
Come
on
!” she commanded. I didn’t feel like yelling a
long explanation back, so I began to walk toward her.

“Run!”

I shook my
head, and she put her hands on her hips, managing to look furious
even at a distance.
Jeez, what a bossy little snot!
I thought to myself, almost giving in to an impulse
to turn and walk away. I couldn’t let her get to me that way –
after all, I was the adult here. She must have been lost, sucked
into a Night world she didn’t understand. I felt I should explain
things to her.

She was tapping her
foot by the time I caught up to her. I had a little speech in my
head that I wanted to give as soon as I got close enough, but I had
barely opened my mouth when she said, “I think I might be safer
without you. You’re just an old slow-poke.”

My cheeks
burned at that, and once again I considered just walking away. But
she came and put her arm around my shoulders, as if sensing she had
gone too far, and drew me along the street in a companionable way.
“I like your catsuit. I wish I had mine on instead of these dumb
old pink shorts. I
hate
pink.”

“Thanks.” I drew my
breath for another attempt at my speech.

“
I really
like it here,” she said. “It’s so
dangerous
! I never want to go back to the boring old real
world.”

Well, that threw
me. She looked utterly confident now that we were walking – and she
was as tall as I, making me wonder if I had assessed her age
properly. She had small but definitely noticeable breasts. “How old
are you, anyway?” I asked her.

“Eleven.”

Maybe she was
just tall for her age. I was too, five-foot-eight by eleven (okay,
so I’m a
tall
pixie). But I
stopped growing after that, and she might just keep
going.

“You know, it’s not
just fun and games here,” I said. “You can actually get hurt.”

“No kidding,” she
said, sarcastically. “If it’s so bad, how come you’re still
here?”

That really pissed
me off. She might be just a kid, but she had managed to throw the
truth in my face. I had to think for a few minutes before I could
answer. “I’m a consenting adult.” I winced at the lameness of it
even as I said it.

She laughed. “You
liar.”

“Look, kid.” I made
a final effort to get control of the situation. “I’m twenty-six,
and I’ve just managed to save my skin several times tonight. You’re
just eleven, and – “

“
You
liar
! You are not twenty-six!”

“I am so!”

“Liar, liar, liar,
liar!” She skipped down the street, chanting the accusation, like I
had made up the flimsiest story in the whole universe.

I started to get a
funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. “How old do you think I
am?”

“You’re the same
age as me,” she gloated.

“
Look at me.
Look at my face, my – “ I was going to say
my breasts
, but when I looked down at the objects in question
I got a nasty shock.

They were gone. Or
almost gone, anyway. My size B apples, those lovely little
attributes I had worked so hard to grow, were now barely there at
all. They felt sore too, just like they had when I was –

“– Eleven.”

“So stop trying to
act all bossy and know-it-all with me,” she said. “I’ll bet you
don’t even wear a training bra yet.”

I felt like
crying. I wanted my boobs back. No one had warned me they might
disappear like that. What a cheat. “I
am
twenty-six,” I said sullenly.

She snorted. “Go
ahead and pretend.”

“I’ll just do
that.”

“You think you’re
so hot.”

She stood with her
weight on one leg, her hip thrust out aggressively in that
universal girl-challenge, promising painful verbal cuts if I didn’t
yield. I stood solidly on both feet, but it was hard to keep my
eyes level with hers.

“Look. We can’t
just stand around arguing like this. We’ve got to keep moving, or
that thing from the pool will catch up with us for sure.”

She glanced down
the street with a casualness that looked a little forced. “Okay.”
She tossed her head. “Fine with me.” And she started off again,
obviously determined to be the boss. I didn’t argue. I was too
shaken from my recent loss.

•

Of all the things
the City of Night could have thrown at me, this was the one I never
could have seen coming. The city had shifted around me plenty of
times, but I hadn’t known it could reach out and shift me too. If
we ran into any of the people I had met so far, I wouldn’t be able
to face them as equals. The Masked Man would dismiss me as a child,
and now I had absolutely no way to convince this snotty blonde girl
that she couldn’t order me around. This was a really low blow.

We had walked
for some time in silence when I looked up and caught the girl
studying me. She gave me a sharp smile. “I wish I had
my
catsuit. I hate these dumb shorts.”

“They look pretty
cute to me,” I offered.

“Really? You want
to trade?”

“No! I mean, this
was a gift and – I don’t want to take it off. You know, sentimental
reasons.”

Her nostrils flared
at that. “Oh really? Who gave it to you?”

I didn’t want to
tell her. But finally I said, “The Masked Man.”

“
Oh
him
,” she said dreamily. “He’s so
cute
! Do you think he might give me one like
that?”

“I don’t know.” But
I certainly hoped not. Now that I was technically the same age as
her, I was starting to see her as a potential rival, and that was
way screwed up.

“
Hey look!”
She stopped suddenly and pointed down the street. “A
boutique
!”

A big store front
with well-lit, Art Deco windows displayed a variety of alluring
clothes. Some of the mannequins had on catsuits almost like mine.
She ran to the front door and tried the handle. The door was
locked.

“It’s probably
after hours,” I called.

She snorted.
“It’s
always
after hours,
silly.” She looked around in the parking lot until she found a
sizable rock, then threw it at the front window. It shattered
easily. She looked over her shoulder at me
challengingly.

“Scared?”

I wasn’t. In
fact, I wanted to look at the pretty clothes as much as she did.
But I felt a little freaked out about how easy it seemed to be for
her to get what she wanted. The Night might like me, but it didn’t
readily accommodate my whims. If
I
had thrown
the rock, it would have bounced off the window and flown right back
at me.

Maybe this girl
would come in handy, if her bossiness didn’t get out of hand. So I
shrugged and climbed over the sill, brushing pebbles of safety
glass out of the way and wiggling past mannequins. Soft light
illuminated the goods in the shop, instantly enthralling me.

The boutique looked
like a giant version of Camilla’s room, jammed full of clothes,
accessories, and mirrors. Every item there was perfect, and I
wanted them all; it dazzled me to have so much choice. If this
place had existed in the Day world, it would have tempted me right
into bankruptcy. It was a boutique for goddesses, not mere
mortals.

But the girl seemed
right at home. She crawled through the window as calmly as if it
were the main entrance – then rifled rack after rack, discarding
items that I would have liked as beneath her notice. She kept
looking at me, or rather at my catsuit. I think she was comparing
it to everything else she saw.

“The Masked Man has
excellent taste,” I warned her. “You might not find one as nice as
this.”

“Just watch me.”
She disappeared into a dressing room with an armful of clothes.

I wandered around
alone for what seemed like a long time. I felt surprised every time
I glimpsed myself in the mirrors. My face and neck were perfectly
smooth now, without the laugh lines or the little frown lines
between my brows. You might think that would be pretty cool, but it
just made me remember how much I wanted to be a grown-up (or at
least a teenager) when I was eleven. It wasn’t a happy time for me;
it may have even been the time when everything started to
unravel.

Unravel
. How does your
life come unraveled at eleven? Nothing terrible happened to me, as
far as I could recall. No, this seemed to be a more subtle thing, a
sense of dissatisfaction and despair. Maybe it was the time I began
to notice how badly real life compared to my dreams.

Eleven is just
about the time you start to wonder what you’re going to do with
your life; I’m sure plenty of people know by then that they want to
be dancers, carpenters, writers, doctors. And even the ones who
don’t know seem not to care, like being a kid will last forever and
you can spend the rest of your life complaining about homework and
watching Saturday morning cartoons – like that’s supposed to be
some wonderful existence in the first place.

Maybe it is. Maybe
I just couldn’t see it. When you’re eleven, you’ve got perfect
skin, boundless energy, and you don’t appreciate it. Even now, when
I looked in the mirror, I felt dissatisfied. I thought I looked
babyish.

But I still liked
the way the catsuit looked on me. It even made my little breasts
seem more prominent.

I went closer and
had a better look at them. I could have sworn they were now more of
a solid size A. Could they be growing? My hips were thinner than
the last time I had seen them, but maybe they were growing too.

“Look what I
found!” The girl danced out of the dressing room in her new outfit,
and I caught my breath.

“The color is
called Heavenly Blue!” she said, twirling around. She had picked
out a short, filmy dress and some white, ankle-high boots. She
looked like the most beautiful girl in the universe.

My heart sank a
little. “Perfect. Are you happy now?”

She danced up to a
mirror, adoring herself. “Come stand next to me.”

I knew she
wanted to compare our images and reassure herself that she was now
the prettiest. But why would she need to compare herself to
me
? I decided I was curious myself, so I stood
next to her. Her face got very serious as she looked from herself
to me, comparing us point by point. I couldn’t help but do the
same. And I made an interesting discovery. In my own way, I was as
pretty as her.

“We’re like
opposites.” I didn’t see any reason to be upset about her beauty
when I had my very own.

“Yes,” she said.
“I’m Heavenly Blue and you’re Hellish Black.”

“There’s nothing
Hellish about Black.”

“
I was
complimenting
you, silly. Guy!” She flounced off
to a rack of earrings. I gave myself another glance in the
mirror.

“Are you going to
look at yourself all night?” she teased.

I joined her at the
earring rack. They were lovely, but I didn’t see any that could
compare with the ones I had on.

“Where’d you get
your earrings?” she asked.

“The Masked Man
gave them to me.”

“What is he, your
boyfriend?”

I shrugged. I
wasn’t sure if I could call him that.

“Don’t you even
know?”

I decided to level
with her. “The Masked Man is a god. Gods usually aren’t
monogamous.”

She thought that
over as she examined a pair of gold and sapphire dragonflies,
lovely, delicate things that might have rivaled my silver
flowers.

“Well,” she
concluded, “you don’t have to be monogamous either, do you?”

“I suppose
not.”

“I think monogamy
is unnatural.”

I thought that was
kind of a weird thing for an eleven-year-old to say, but I had to
admit she wasn’t your usual kid. She had very sophisticated tastes.
She discarded the gold and sapphire dragonflies for a pair of
white-gold and pearl sea shells. She glanced at my earrings,
smiled, and fastened the shells to her own pretty lobes.