Blood and Chocolate (21 page)

Simon

S
imon watched the girl walk away, a cloud of anger around her. He was bemused. She had not responded correctly. He had started to moon-weave, and she had broken it. She had snapped it with anger. He was interested. He followed her.

He slipped gradually into a half state, nearer mist than form. It was easy—like dreaming, really—just let go of body and drift. His consciousness held molecules together with tendrils of thought. He blended with the shadows and became the air. She would never see. He flowed beneath trees, slid along walls, cut corners through dying autumn flowers. He always kept her in sight. She walked fast, shimmering the crisp air with her breath.

They usually came to him when his eyes softened with the moon, when he crushed his voice like velvet. They let him caress them. They tipped their heads back and drowned in the stars, while he stroked exposed throat and wallowed in conquest. Sometimes he let them go and allowed them to think it a dream. He left before they broke the spell of his eyes, to sit blinking and head-shaking in cold predawn wind. Sometimes the dark hunger awoke too strong to hold. He clenched them tight, sank fangs deep into yielding neck, and fed on the thick, hot soup of their life. He was lost in the throbbing ecstasy song of blood pumping, life spurting, until blood, horror, and life ebbed, and he abandoned the limp remnants to seek dark sleep.

He stood at the wooden gate, watching the girl enter a forest-green door with diamond windows. He trembled with desire. Lights came on in the house. He circled it, peering in windows—a peeping Tom, ecstasy denied. He inhaled details from the golden warmth he could never have: an Oriental carpet, an antique armoire, cream kitchen tiles, and a painting of bright, crazed, laughing girls. His eyes narrowed. The girls in the painting looked right at him. Just a painting, he chided, but he felt mocked, and an anger rumbled deep in his throat. The lights downstairs dimmed. A light came on above. She goes to sleep, he thought, and begrudged her rest when he had none.

He paced her garden with slinking gait, examining basement windows and garage doors. He could not enter unless invited, but he liked to know the ways in, and out, if needed. The animal was close to the surface tonight. It reminded him of when he first changed, when he roamed the woods like a beast for what seemed an eternity, mindless from shock. Threads of memory clung to him, though most was a blur. Images sparked bright at times; pictures frozen in the muted green light of the forest—savaged corpses of animals, or a gamekeeper crumpled and drained amid the fallen leaves, his head barely attached to his neck. Simon could not ever control it then, and his attack was fierce, made vicious by his own fear. It took a long time to regain the capacity to think. It took longer to leave the forest. But the forest had never left him. Tonight it echoed in him like owl cries, and pine needles rustling.

He marked his territory like a wolf, and urinated on the back-door steps. It helped a little. I know where you live, he thought.

He walked then. He walked long and far, beating the anger beneath his feet. The quiet, dream-laden suburbs gave way to the street life of the urban fringe. Here the streets pulsed with light from corner bars and pizza palaces, late-night video-game arcades, and record stores that seemed to never close. The hot boys stood on street corners, whispering promises of romance to girls in leather skirts who knew that they were lies. Groups of lonely people huddled together against the dark. He felt a kinship here. He was as separate as they amid the crowd. No one saw him. He was too much like the undernourished, ill-clad street waifs of this jangling street to catch an eye. A group of boys ran laughing down the sidewalk, one waving a shirt above his head, bare-chest drunk. Girls paraded bargain-store fashions, their bleached hair and bedroom eyes hiding the fear that they weren't good enough. Soon the cold would force them inside, so they clutched at lost summer.

Simon drifted off the main road to the darker streets. He hummed pitch perfect a song he had gathered along the way. It was one of the angry songs he enjoyed. He beat out its driving rhythm on his thigh as he walked. Occasionally he'd sing a phrase, when he remembered the words.

He paced the uneven pavement in front of row houses with peeling paint but well-scrubbed steps. Through one uncurtained window at a corner house he saw a woman on a man's lap in a shabby chair. They were laughing at a game show on TV. He could have stood there unnoticed for an hour. Suddenly he wanted to smash the window and scream, “Look at me!” He wanted to be noticed. He wanted people to see him. It was dangerous, this want. It was mad. But sometimes he was afraid that he didn't exist. Now and again someone recognized what he was. They had to die. If they didn't, well…It was foolish not to think of protecting himself. There was no one who knew him, no one to say his name.

He turned a corner and startled a dog. They cringed and growled at each other. The dog's hackles spiked, then it whimpered and ran. Simon walked on and found a weed-choked vacant lot. Its only inhabitant was an abandoned car. He sat on a ruined wall and gazed at the moon.

“Hey, boy!” A call from the high brick wall next door. A leg was flung over, and then a scruffy youth of about sixteen pulled himself astride it.

Boy, Simon thought sarcastically. He smiled in anticipation.

“Yeah, you!” came a deeper voice. Another youth, perhaps a touch older, stepped out from behind the car. He was a big lout in jeans and a flannel shirt like a lumberjack.

A sneering boy in a leather jacket followed him. “This is our lot,” he hissed. He carried a half-empty liquor bottle and swayed slightly. His right hand flashed silver. Simon saw he carried a knife. Simon didn't like long pointy things. They made him nervous. He didn't like being nervous.

A scuffling announced the descent of the wall straddler, a thud his landing. The boys spread out and converged on Simon. He rose slowly from his perch, muscles tightened. The boys advanced.

“Where you from?”

“You ain't from here.”

“Nobody here knows you.”

“Yeah,” spoke the wall climber. “And if nobody knows you, you ain't nobody.” He giggled, a high-pitched, nervous sound, and wiped his hands against a ragged Ozzie Osbourne T-shirt.

Nobody. Even this scum called him nobody. Simon stepped toward the danger, into their net. They'd caught shark this time. He smiled.

“Pretty tough, huh?” said the big one mockingly.

The boy with the leather jacket settled his bottle into the crotch of two bricks. “Pretty stupid, you mean.” He tossed his knife from hand to hand. “You a retard or somethin'?”

“Yeah. He's too dumb to be scared.”

Simon turned his back on the third boy, the one who had said that. He was a sheep. The big one was a bully, but the leather-clad one was trouble. He was crazy. He didn't smoke weed, he smoked green. Simon could smell it on him. It reeked like burning plastic and it killed the brain. It made people think they couldn't die.

“This is our playground, buddy.”

“Yeah, wanna play?”

Simon finally spoke. “Is that what you said to your mother last night?”

“Son of a…” The big one charged him, swinging meaty fists.

Simon stepped aside, quick as thought. The boy stumbled, looked confused, then turned like an angry bear to attack again. Simon stepped aside once more. His opponent breathed heavily. Simon smiled. Get the biggest one, and the rest often run. But he kept the crazy one in his sight all the same. You didn't know about dusters.

They danced a lopsided waltz on the waste ground, and the big youth's fury grew and grew. Then Simon stood still. The boy grabbed. He expected to miss but, to his surprise, found that the quarry was his. He panted and grinned. He had Simon's arm in a crushing hold, as he prepared a blow. And Simon, who didn't come up to his chin, clutched the boy's belt with his free hand and lifted him into the air. The boy waved his arms like an insect and gurgled with fear. The boy in the jacket spat an oath but was frozen, enthralled. The other boy trembled but couldn't move either. Simon threw his opponent then, an impossible distance. The boy sailed the air for a moment, then crashed in a pile of debris. The sound broke the spell, and Simon heard the third boy run.

But the boy with the knife laughed. He slinked forward, steel flickering in the streetlight. He had seen a fight or two, Simon surmised, but probably won through sheer viciousness, not skill. Best to deal with him as a cat does a rat—no play, snap it fast.

The boy was expecting another dance, not for his victim to walk right up to him. He hesitated a second, confronted with craziness greater than his, then he saw something in Simon's eyes that made him lunge. He slashed wildly in fear, but too late. His knife went flying. His arm, captured for a moment, went limp, and searing, and useless. He backed away.

It was Simon's turn to laugh; a sound dark and cursed. The blow he landed snapped the boy back and smashed him against the car. The boy started to slide to the ground, but slim white hands reached for him delicately and slammed him once more against the car. The third blow rendered him unconscious and flooded Simon with the sweet warm pleasure of the kill.

“Call me nobody?” he whispered, and his fangs slid from their sheaths. “Call me nobody?” he screamed as if in pain. He hoisted his victim up and tore the boy's wrist open with a savage scissoring of teeth. He raised the boy's arm and, with the pulsing blood, wrote wavering letters on the dingy primer of the car's roof. 1
AM
.

The dark, raw smell of blood intoxicated. He found himself embracing the boy and pulling the damaged wrist up to his mouth. Faintly, somewhere, he felt disgust. A distant echo cried for him to stop. But the blood call was too strong. He had almost placed a reverent kiss upon the hand when sirens screamed too close.

He pushed the limp body from him, but it seemed to cling. For a moment he felt trapped. Then it slid to the ground. But in the midst of panic a perverse whim took hold. He began to strip the jacket from the huddled form, struggling with the boy's inert bulk, bloodying the lining, ripping a seam until it pulled free. Black and glittering, he had his prize. He clutched it to him, leaving its owner his life.

Then he was running. He fled past his first assailant, now staring with white-faced rictus fear, though the rubble of lost homes, out into the night, on and on through the streets, until he arrived in the quiet yard of a house with a dark green door.

He wrapped the bloodstained jacket about his shoulders and sank down beneath an azalea bush. He stared at her window until dawn.

Published by Delacorte Press an imprint of Random House Children's Books a division of Random House, Inc.
New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the productof the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 1997 by Annette Curtis Klause
Part title decorations copyright © 1997 by Cliff Nielsen

All rights reserved.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this work as follows:

Klause, Annette Curtis.

Blood and Chocolate/by Annette Curtis Klause.

p. cm.

Summary: Having fallen for a human boy, a beautiful teenage werewolf must battle both her packmates and the fear of the townspeople to decide where she belongs and with whom.

[1. Werewolves—Fiction.] I. Title

PZ7.K67815B1 1997

[Fic]—dc20          96-35247

CIP           AC

eISBN: 978-0-375-84316-7

v3.0