Stargazer

“Who was that vampire?”

“I was kinda hoping you could tell us something,” Lucas said as we went up the short stairway to what was now the first aid room, “seeing as how you guys were hanging out.”

“She just sort of came up to me. I never met a vampire on the street before—I was curious.”

“Seriously, Bianca, you’ve got to be more careful.”

Before I could say anything else, Lucas turned on the small electric lantern in the first aid room. The area was hardly bigger than the one cot that was pushed against the wall. Dark gray carpet covered the floor, and this room was small enough for the lantern to fill with soft light. This was almost cozy, and definitely private. Lucas shut the door behind us. I felt a river of warmth flow through me as I realized that we were alone together at last, really alone.

Lucas grabbed me and pushed me hard against the wall. I gasped and he kissed my open lips, then kissed me again harder, as I started to respond. My arms slipped around his neck, and his body was pressed against mine from our knees to our mouths, and I could breathe in the scent of him, the one that reminded me of the dark woods near Evernight.

Mine, I thought. Mine.

We kissed frantically, like we’d been starved for each other the way people can be starved for food or water or air. The way a vampire can be starved for blood. I cupped his face in my hands and felt the stubble of his beard against my palms. His knee pushed slowly between mine, so that both my thighs straddled one of his, and one hand came up against the small of my back, beneath my shirt. The touch of his skin against mine made me dizzy but not weak. I felt stronger than I ever had in my life.

“I missed you,” he whispered against my neck. “God, I missed you.”

“Lucas.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say but his name. It was like there was nothing else worth saying.

I kissed him again, more slowly this time, and that only intensified the kiss. Both his hands pressed against my back now, and we held each other tighter, and I started to wonder how much closer we could get—and then I remembered what it had felt like when I drank his blood.

“Wait.” I turned my head away. My breath came in shaky gasps, and I couldn’t quite look directly at him. “We have to slow down.”

Lucas closed his eyes tightly, then nodded. “Mom is outside.” He was saying it to himself, not to me. “Mom. Outside. Mom. Outside. Okay, that kinda sobers me up.”

Our eyes met, and then we started to laugh really hard. Lucas stepped away from me, enough that I could breathe normally again, but he clasped both my hands tightly. “You look gorgeous.”

“I just got chased down the street. I probably look like a train wreck.” I knew my hair was mussed every which way, and my jeans were dusty.

“You gotta learn how to take a compliment, because I’m not going to stop making them.” Lucas lifted one of my hands to his mouth. His lips were soft against my knuckles. Outside I heard the conversation between the others in Black Cross getting louder. “How long can you stay?”

“Until tomorrow afternoon.”

“Almost a whole day?” He brightened so much that I couldn’t help but blush happily. “That’s amazing.”

“Yeah, it is.” By next week, I knew, this short time would seem like nothing. But for now it stretched out before me as infinite as a sky full of stars, and I didn’t want to think about what would come after. That would ruin it. What mattered was here and now.

I sat down on the corner of the cot, and Lucas sat beside me, laying his head on my shoulder. His arms circled my waist. I ran my fingers through his scruffy hair.

His voice was muffled against my shoulder as he said, “There were times I thought I’d never see you again. Sometimes I told myself that would be the best thing for both of us. But I couldn’t accept it.”

“Don’t ever believe that.” I kissed his cheek. “Not ever.”

The noise from downstairs grew louder yet, and I realized that it was an argument. I tensed, but Lucas sat up and sighed. “Eduardo’s mad as hell.”

“That girl—the one from tonight—she’s the one you guys are here to hunt?”

“That’s the whole reason we’re in Amherst. There have been reports in this area for a few months now. This vampire—we think she’s part of a gang that’s been causing trouble more and more often.”

“Reports? Like, in newspapers?”

“Sometimes, though of course the papers don’t know what they’re reporting. But we hear from people—people who know what’s really going on in the world, who know about us. Every once in a while, we even get info from vampires. They’ll try to buy us off by telling us there’s somebody more dangerous around the corner. Sometimes they’re telling the truth. The word we got was that this gang is killing about once a week—and that’s a lot, even for the deadliest vamps out there.”

I tried to think of that as encouraging. Even Black Cross hunters could talk to vampires rationally sometimes. “The girl we saw tonight can’t be part of any deadly gang. Lucas, she was scared to death.”

Lucas looked over at me again, and in his dark-green eyes I saw that he was wary. We’d had this discussion before, but it never ended well. Quietly he said, “Some vampires really are dangerous, Bianca.”

“Some really aren’t,” I said, just as quietly.

“I know that now.” Lucas leaned his head back against the wall, and I could glimpse a kind of tiredness in his eyes. He was three years older than me, an age difference I hadn’t really been able to see last year, but his maturity was more visible now. “There are bad vampires who ought to be stopped. We stop them. So I tell myself that what I’m doing here with Black Cross is the right thing to do. But if we were wrong about this girl tonight—if we’re ever wrong, even once—I don’t know how to deal with that. And I don’t know how to tell what’s true about the vampires we hunt.”

I wanted to provide some answer for him, but I didn’t know what that answer could possibly be.

Footsteps echoed on the floor outside, coming closer. “Incoming!” Dana called before she opened the door. When she did peer inside the first aid room, she frowned. “Oh, man, I thought I was going to interrupt some crazy monkey sex in here. Figured at least I’d get flashed for my trouble.”

I blushed bright purple. Lucas rolled his eyes. “We’ve been alone for five minutes, Dana.”

“You gotta learn to strike while the iron is hot. Because privacy and this place do not go together.” Dana braced her arms against the doorjamb. “We’re about to head back out. Kate and Eduardo want to resume the hunt before the vampire’s gone too far away.”

Resume the hunt? Oh, no.

“They said no patrol tonight.” Lucas scowled. “The equipment’s not ready, half of us aren’t even dressed—”

“That’s why we train to get ready fast, buddy.” Dana grinned at me, and the overlapping tooth in the front somehow made her look almost sweet. “Bianca can stay safe and warm here. But you and me and everybody else in the crew, we’re heading out.”

“Dana.” Lucas gave her his most melting, pleading look. “I haven’t seen Bianca in months. Come on.”

That look would’ve been more than enough to dissolve me into a puddle, but it didn’t seem to do much for Dana. “You know I don’t care, but Kate and Eduardo don’t want to hear it. You’re lucky they even let her get a look at this place. Hell, when you sent that distress page in, Eduardo was this close to putting us into lockdown.”

Lucas sighed as he looked at me. “Basically, we’re screwed. But only for a little while, okay? We’ll be back before too long.”

“Whatever we can have. It’s enough.”

“You gotta move, Lucas.” Dana started edging out the door. “Like, in about two minutes, when I come back into this room to get our med supplies ready.”

“Thanks,” Lucas said. I gave Dana a quick smile as she went.

As soon as the door shut, he kissed me very gently, with his lips closed, but then more roughly as our mouths began to part. That warm tide of feeling inside me started to flow again, so that I wanted to pull him closer, but neither of us could forget that Dana was just outside. Instead, Lucas leaned his forehead against mine and cradled my cheeks in his hands. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Lucas kissed me once more. After that he let go of me, stood up, and yelled, “All yours, Dana!”

“I don’t want your girlfriend!” she called back. “Just the damn first aid kit!” A few people outside laughed, but it was a kind laugh. Maybe Eduardo saw me as a nuisance, but everybody else in Black Cross seemed happy for Lucas and me. I could never get over how a bunch of vampire hunters could seem so—well—nice.

We’ll be okay, I told myself. I can make it through this. Already I was hungry, but I knew that if anybody in Black Cross caught me drinking blood, they’d attack first and ask questions later. Tomorrow, maybe, I’d have a chance to eat in private, or at least to pour the blood in my thermos down the drain. I could hang on until Saturday night if I needed to.

Lucas edged past Dana on the narrow stairs. Although she was smiling as she set to work, she never looked at me; instead she was focused on her task, hurriedly stuffing bandages and gauze into a small plastic box. “You doing okay, Bianca?”

“I guess,” I said. “How often do you do this? Go out on hunts like these?”

“You say ‘go out’ like we had some big mothership we all return to when our work is done. We mostly travel from place to place. Go where we’re needed. Some people have their own homes they go back to from time to time, but a lot of us don’t. I don’t.” After a short pause, she added, “Lucas doesn’t either. I guess he didn’t tell you that.”

“He hasn’t really had a chance.”

“I keep forgetting that you haven’t hardly gotten to talk to each other since that whole scene went down last spring. That has to be rough.”

“I guess it is.”

“He’s a good guy.” She closed the plastic box and looked at me, serious for once. “Lucas doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. I’ve known him since we were about twelve, and you’re the only girl he’s ever acted like this about. Just in case you were wondering.”

“Thanks.” Though that was pretty amazing to hear, I was thinking about larger concerns than my love life. Instead, I kept remembering the vampire, with her broken nails and uncertain smile. Black Cross might not be an immediate threat to me, but she remained in danger. She had been so lost and alone, another person made to feel small by Mrs. Bethany.

Was that the way I might end up someday? I shivered. Never. I’ll always have my parents and my friends—and maybe even Lucas.

That didn’t change the fact that the girl I’d met earlier was in desperate danger from Lucas’s family and friends. The injustice of it sickened me. But what could Lucas do about it? What could I do about it?

The answer came to me almost immediately, terrifying but inevitable. It took me a second to get out the words: “I’m coming with you.”

Dana stared at me. “On a vampire hunt? That’s crazy.”

“You have no idea”—I sighed—“but I’m going.”

Chapter Seven

“THIS IS NO PLACE FOR AMATEURS,” SAID EDUARDO. The twin scars on his cheek looked deeper—a trick of the dim lights of the camping lanterns on the walls.

I thought fast. “I’ve been going to school surrounded by vampires for more than a year now.” It was the truth, if not the whole truth. My voice shook, but I hoped desperately that Eduardo would chalk that up to emotion, not fright. The man was an unrepentant killer of vampires; it was hard to look him in the face. “I need to know what I’m really up against.”

I’d never seen Eduardo smile before. It wasn’t an attractive expression. “Supposedly they behave themselves at Evernight Academy. You’re only a kid. You should stick to the ones who pretend to be kids, too.”

“I was fighting vampires when I was a lot younger than Bianca is,” Lucas retorted. “I think she can handle it.” He slung his arm around my shoulders, and at last my fear started to wane. Lucas’s support seemed to end the argument; at any rate, Eduardo didn’t protest any longer, and if anybody else had objections, they kept them to themselves.

Lucas glanced over at me, questioning why I was dead set on joining them, but we both knew we’d have to talk about it later.

The hunt didn’t feel like a hunt at first. It was like any other road trip: People murmuring quietly as they pulled on their jackets, looking at one another with tired eyes and clambering into the beat-up van and Kate’s turquoise pickup truck.

I remembered the very first road trip I’d ever taken, when my parents drove me to the beach one summer. They hated the water—both the rivers we had to cross to get there and the ocean that lapped at the shore—but they took me because I wanted to go so badly. They sat under a beach umbrella the whole time. Even though they’d drunk blood before we left, they didn’t want to spend so much time in the sun. While I made sand castles, swam, and played with other kids, they watched and waved. It was a sacrifice they had made for me.

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