“What?” He said it so matter of factly, as if he was making sense. “Look, who are you? Because I’m this close to screaming.”
“Your pardon, lady. I am Lucas Richelieu.” He looked like he was about to kiss my hand so I snatched it behind my back. “We must go,” he said again, urgently. “Anyone can see you now. ’Tisn’t safe.”
“But going off with some stranger in leather pants is?” I crossed my arms. “Go away, Lucas Richelieu.” He looked so taken aback I nearly laughed. “You didn’t really think I was just going to blindly go off with you, did you?” He’d obviously never met my mother, even if he did know her name. Not falling for pretty boys was one of the first lessons she’d ever taught me. “You’re pretty, Lucas, but not so pretty that I’m going to turn into a drooling idiot.”
He sighed, aggrieved. “This was much easier in the old days, when girls were educated.”
“Hey. I’ll have you know I get As. Well, mostly.” I wrinkled my nose. “How old are you anyway? Eighteen? Nineteen?”
“One hundred and eighty-seven.”
“Of course you are.” I shook my head. I certainly wasn’t going to be able to complain come Monday that I’d had a boring weekend. He didn’t say anything else, only whirled suddenly when a crow landed on an empty planter. He pulled his sword out of its scabbard.
I stumbled back. “Easy, Conan. It’s just a bird.”
“A crow,” he said tightly. “And a cousin of sorts.”
He said something else in a language I’d never heard before as another crow joined the first, and then another. And another. I’d never seen any at night before. I assumed crows went off and slept somewhere, dreaming crow dreams. But maybe they were nocturnal like owls? That was going to bug me; I’d have to look it up in one of Mom’s encyclopedias. We’d had our Internet shut down again when we couldn’t pay the bill.
“Eloise?”
“Yeah?”
“Take this and go inside,” he said very carefully, very slowly, knees bent as if he was about to launch himself into battle. He shoved a necklace at me, and I noticed his hand was covered in burn blisters over the old scars. They were red, fresh. I expected the pendant to be hot, but it was cold, normal. “Go!”
I wanted to tell him he was overreacting, even for a head case, but there was desperation in his voice, enough to have me slipping a leg over the windowsill.
Crows lifted out of the park like a raucous storm cloud, settling back down over the empty planters, the tent, the chairs, the twinkly lights—every available surface that might provide some kind of perch. I shivered despite the rational part of my brain telling me it was just a bunch of birds. But if there really was something weird about them, shouldn’t I be out there helping him? I was stepping back onto the roof when he turned his head, barely, toward me. “Don’t.”
I climbed inside, kneeling on the window seat, where Elvis was hissing, his every hair on end.
Outside, Lucas swung his sword once, twice.
Crows cawed indignantly, a few flying toward the quiet of the park. He was repeating some kind of rhyme, but I couldn’t make out the words.
A crow landed on the ledge in front of me. I’d always liked the crows.
I didn’t like this one.
His eyes were too yellow, wrong somehow. Elvis swiped out a paw, missed. I could have sworn the crow laughed. A few more joined it—enough of them that I slammed the glass shut and slipped Lucas’s necklace over my head. It was heavy, made of iron nails twisted into the surprisingly delicate shape of a leaping stag with some sort of leaf in its antlers.
One of the crows pecked at the glass so viciously that it cracked, blooming like a frost flower. I almost missed seeing Lucas blur, as if he were a watercolor painting soaked too long. He wavered, shimmered, and leaped off the roof.
The crows fled.
“Shit, oh, shit.” I rushed outside and peered over the railing, holding my breath. I didn’t want to see his broken body on the pavement below. I had to call 911.
I peeked.
He was gone.
“That’s impossible,” I said out loud. I leaned farther out but there was still no trace of Lucas, just a hawk riding an air current.
Disappearing boys in medieval costumes on top of crazy crows and crazier old women. Clearly I was crazy too. Because I should be snuggling under my blanket, dreaming about Robert Pattinson, not on the roof inspecting the balcony for crows and weird cute guys swinging medieval weapons over their head. But there was nothing here: no ladder at the side of the building, no window washer’s scaffolding, nothing to explain Lucas’s vanishing into thin air.
Nothing.
Only moonlight and the neon glow of the bar sign down the street. All perfectly ordinary; so ordinary, in fact, that I might have imagined the whole thing if it weren’t for the iron stag around my neck.
I went back inside and sat on the lumpy couch, staring out the window. Maybe I had the flu. I felt my forehead. I was kind of warm; it could be a fever-induced hallucination. Of course, the stifling heat inside the apartment could explain my clammy skin just as easily. So maybe it was heat-stroke.
Which still didn’t explain the very solid presence of the iron pendant.
I scrubbed at my face, as if that could wipe my brain clean.
Lucas had mentioned my aunt Antonia. I had her cell phone number, but she only ever answered it during the winter. She traveled out of the country during the summer months. I dialed it just in case, but there was no answer.
I put the kettle on for rose hip tea. My mom always made it when she was stressed out. An impending psychiatric breakdown was stressful. I was adding three spoonfuls of honey when Mom came in. She raised her eyebrows at the tea, tossing her keys in the ceramic bowl by the door. She’d made it during her pottery phase, and it was painted with pirate skulls. “Bad night, honey?”
I wasn’t sure how much to tell her. I didn’t want to end up in a doctor’s office until I figured it out. Because I didn’t feel crazy. Then again, wasn’t that a sign of being crazy? The iron stag slipped under the collar of my shirt when I moved to put the kettle back on the stove. The cold iron brushed my skin, grounding me. No, there was definitely something going on. It wasn’t as simple as a hallucination. Besides, I reminded myself, Jo and Devin and even Bianca had seen Lucas at the ice cream parlor. If nothing else, he was real.
“There’s the weirdest thing outside,” she said, crossing to the window and climbing out onto the roof. “Come and see.”
Oh my God. Lucas’s broken body really was on the sidewalk.
I dashed past her and slammed into the railing in my haste to look out. My brain kicked in belatedly. If Lucas was down there lying in his own blood, not only would there be ambulances, but I was pretty sure Mom wouldn’t want me to see that kind of thing.
“Look,” she said softly, pointing to the telephone wire across the street. Bright red cardinals perched on the line, watching us. Another landed on the corner of the building next door. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
We watched them for a long time, their feathers red as raspberries.
“Have you heard from Aunt Antonia lately?” I asked, in what I hoped was a casual, normal tone.
She shook her head. “You know how she is.” Her gaze slid away from mine.
“She’s not in trouble, is she?”
“Why do you ask that?”
I shrugged. “Just wondering. Her cell phone’s off again.”
“She’s probably out of range. Or she’s avoiding collection agencies.”
It was a logical explanation.
But it didn’t ring true for some reason.
Especially when Mom hurried inside to fill a water bottle for the empty birdbath on the roof. She refused to meet my eyes, rushing so that she sloshed water on the floor. She didn’t even stop to wipe it up. She always wiped up spills and messes, even the dust visible only to Mom-eyes.
And she was dismissive of Antonia, even though I knew they were close. When
ever Antonia came home for Christmas, they whispered late into the night, as if they were at a slumber party. But neither of them answered direct questions. Why hadn’t I noticed that before? I felt strange, as if I were waking up from a convoluted dream I could only half remember.
There was definitely something going on.
Especially when she went straight to her room after a quick good night. She shut the door firmly behind her.
I focused on the few details I had. Lucas. The pendant. Antonia. Antonia was the only mystery I could work on right now. Though I did check the phone book for Lucas Richelieu. Not a single person with that last name in Rowan. I’d have to go to Jo’s and use her Internet to google him. In the meantime, I gathered up the family photo albums, even the small one Mom thought I didn’t know about. It was the only one with photos of my father.
I went into my room and sat on the bed, flipping through the albums. Mom and Antonia as babies, my grandparents. Granddad looked kind in his faded pin-striped suit. Grandma just looked kind of scary. The prom night pictures of Mom and Antonia were my favorite. The teased and crimped hair alone offered hours of entertainment. Mom at her first art show, sporting a very pink mohawk; Mom selling brownies at the school bake sale last year. We’d had so much fun that day. At the PTA meeting, the principal had suggested that parents dress appropriately, and everyone knew he meant Mom. So she did her hair in rollers and we wore fifties-style dresses and pearls. She looked like Bettie Page or a particularly evil version of Marilyn Monroe. The other moms had sniffed. But Mom was a better baker than they were, so our table sold out before noon.
There weren’t a lot of pictures of Antonia after she turned sixteen, and the few I could find were from Christmas. Our purple tree glittered in the background, tilting slightly under the weight of handmade ornaments. They were mostly paintings of Elvis Presley and fifties pinup girls that Mom did on the back of coasters she took from the bar.
In one of the photographs, Antonia and Mom toasted the camera with glasses of red wine. Antonia was laughing so hard she was falling over. The flash glinted off a pendant slipping out of her peasant blouse.
An iron stag with a leaf in its antlers.
I heard the murmur of Mom’s voice through the thin walls as I tried to figure out what it meant, if it even meant anything at all. I crept to my open window, knowing hers would be open as well since the building didn’t have air-conditioning. I leaned out, listening carefully. Who could she be calling at one o’clock in the morning? I stretched farther out and caught the last few words.
“Antonia, call me. I think it’s starting.”
About the Author
Alyxandra Harvey is the author of Haunting Violet, Stolen Away, and the Drake Chronicles. She studied creative writing and literature at York University and has had her poetry published in several magazines. When not writing, she is a belly dancer and jewelry maker. She lives in an old farmhouse with her husband and two dogs.
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Copyright © 2012 by Alexandra Harvey
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
First published in the United States of America in April 2012
by Walker Publishing Company, Inc., a division of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.
www.bloomsburyteens.com
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ISBN 978-0-8027-3427-3 (e-book)
Alyxandra Harvey, A Field Guide to Vampires: Annotated by Lucy Hamilton
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