Authors: Christine Dougherty
“…so sorry, Promise. I love you. Please come back. I’m so sorry, can you hear me, Promise? It’s me, it’s Chance. Your brother…”
Brother. A brother. She tried to recall the people, the family. There had been a boy, yes, a brother. A beloved baby brother. Hers?
“…have to try it. She’s slipping away, and there’s no way for us to try and bring her around like Lea did with Chance; not when she’s in a coma. The serum has worked in the lab. I think we’re pretty safe with…”
“…what if it doesn’t? What if it makes her worse? She can’t…”
“…gets any worse, then she’ll die, Peter. I know she’d rather die fighting than just fade away. But I think everyone needs to agree. If we…”
She caught the name–Peter–and turned it in her mind, examining it, examining her feelings. Warmth but good warmth, excitement, safety, contentment…contentment. Who was Peter? Why did she recognize the name?
What was her own name? Did she even have one? Who
was
she, exactly?
She became aware of a bite on her arm…spider or mosquito…she wanted to swat it away. But she didn’t have the energy. Then she felt the approach of the hot, the red dark. It was coming on so fast…so much faster than ever before. Her body ached; her mind ached as the hot descended over her, pattering down darkly like grave soil. The hunger too, sweeping across her like a dry wind, leaving her empty, then more than empty, inside out. Hollowed out. A black hole.
She despaired. The nothing seemed preferable to this. The nothing would not hurt, at least. It would not wring her down to a set of hungry, mindless, molecular structures.
It would be a release.
She longed for that release.
She prepared to let go, but she wished she could hear the voices just once more before she lost her hold of herself. She wished she could hear the one that called himself ‘brother’. She longed to…to…what? She didn’t know. But she…
loved?
…that voice and thought there was something more, one last…
Chance?
…thing she had to do.
With sudden clarity, she realized she was existing in the two realities at once: the hot, the cool. They had somehow intertwined, and she was in them, twisted between them, twisted
into
them. The very cells of her body were at war with each other, and everything became grinding, endless pain. Worse than the hot alone, the friction rubbed and rubbed her away, reducing her, dissolving her, tugging bits of her, tugging…she slid and stopped, slid and stopped again, gripping, somehow, gripping fiercely with her mind.
Then she slipped away completely, leaving the hot and the cool both behind.
“Promise!” Peter said, his voice an anguished sob. On the other side of the door, Chance wailed like an animal, and Lea was glad they’d thought to lock him away. At least for this…this part. Mr. West stepped back, the needle dropping to the floor at his feet.
Evans put a hand on Peter’s back, and Peter turned in a rage. “No!” he said, screaming at Evans, bellowing as tears streamed down his face. Evans met his eyes, unflinching. “No! No!” Peter turned back to Promise. Her hand was limp in his, a limpness much worse than the stillness from before. Cold. He put his lips to hers, trying to warm them. “No!” he said, whispering only to her. “Please, Promise. Please. We never had a chance.”
Chance wailed and wailed from the laundry room, and Lea turned away to look out across the empty backyard. She tilted her face up to the sun and brushed away her tears. She took a deep breath in a world that had just become colder. Lonelier. Mark put an arm around her shoulders.
Behind them, Peter cried on.
Chapter 10
She found what had to be…what had to be her…what was left after the war…it was her…her heart…she pushed it, grunting, and pushed again…go heart, go, she thought to herself…go…she pushed it again, and then it thumped…tiredly, doggedly, it thumped again…and again…go heart, she thought, go go go…i need you…i need you now!…
Chapter 11
Peter had his head on Promise’s chest, and at the first tired beat of her heart, he didn’t react. He was too distracted by pain, by feeling so cheated. His tears had wet the front of her nightgown.
Then her heart beat again.
This time he both felt and heard it.
He stood abruptly and froze, looking down into her face. Around him, the world faded. Disappeared. He squeezed her hand, and his mind was filled with only her…only her…only her…
Promise opened her eyes.
Chapter 12
“Evans should be back in Wereburg today or tomorrow,” Peter said. “Good thing we’re heading back today, huh? You wouldn’t want to miss seeing him.” He gave Promise an exaggeratedly innocent smile. She smiled back and swatted his shoulder. Beside her on the blanket, Chance laughed, putting his hand to his mouth. At eleven, he was just getting to the age where other people’s antics were becoming more embarrassing than funny.
The lake sighed and sighed again, a champion of that melancholy sound. Promise smiled at it, not in the least bit melancholy herself. Peter was a little jealous of Evans, she knew. Even though
he
knew Evans interest in her was that of a brother or a father, Evans was singularly
on her side
in all things. That got on Peter’s nerves a little. Chance’s too. He had admitted to Promise that he had a vague, vague memory of being afraid of Evans. Being in jeopardy. Although he couldn’t recall the exact circumstance. Thank goodness.
She glanced at him and smiled, still grateful to have him next to her. He had another vague memory that he had told her about while she convalesced. His memory was of the laundry room door sliding up, disappearing into the ceiling. He’d been afraid of the darkness beyond and the monsters. He had called out for his sister, searching the deserted house, and the lady had appeared–she was blonde, he remembered that, and seemed stunned to see him. She’d said to him, “You’re just a kid, you’re just a kid,” and Chance hadn’t understood it then and still didn’t now. Then the vampires had come, and he remembered running, the lady yelling, telling him to
go, go, hide little boy
and then she had screamed.
“You need some sunblock. You’re getting red,” Promise said and pressed her fingertips to his bare shoulder. When she pulled them away, they left four white, bloodless dots on his skin that began immediately to fade back to red.
He shrugged unconcernedly and jumped up. “Peter, let’s swim, okay? Want to?” He was mostly untouched by the time he’d been sick, displaying the resiliency that children are deservedly so famous for. He had nightmares sometimes, but even those faded on waking. Promise was glad he had only a vague recollection of Deidre and the night she had set him free. Glad, too, to think that Deidre must have tried to do the right thing once she’d realized just what…who…Chance was. But no one would ever know for sure.
Peter smiled up at him and stood, groaning. “Sounds good, bud. It’s too hot sitting here in the sun, anyway,” he said and then looked at Promise. “You’ll be okay?”
She patted the crossbow next to her. “I’ll be fine,” she said and then shielded her eyes against the sun. “But I don’t think we’ll have any problems, do you?”
“Not with vampires, no,” he said and then turned to scan the beach. It was empty except for the two horses standing contentedly, knee deep in the surf. But the world was changing. Again. “Just be careful though, okay?”
“I will be,” she said. “Go and swim but don’t be too long. We have to leave soon and I don’t want to pack wet clothes in with the dry.”
Chance and Peter raced each other to the water’s edge, laughing. Once in, they splashed each other relentlessly, and then Peter grabbed Chance in a bear hug and threw him sideways into the water. Chance emerged, laughing, and they began to tussle again.
In some odd way, we’ve become his parents, Promise thought to herself. The thought brought contentment but also a mild unease. She was only twenty. Seemed young to be a parent although…her mom had been younger when Promise had been born. Odd that with everything that had happened, here she was at the same lake, with a child she was starting to think of as hers, a boyfriend who seemed destined to stick around, and they were heading back to Willow’s End this afternoon. She hadn’t ended up so different from her parents after all, it seemed.
But in many other ways, everything had changed.
She surveyed the empty beach again. They had come here yesterday and stayed overnight, using a few hours to reinforce a hotel room on the road that ran across behind the beach. But there were a lot less vampires now, especially in this area. From what she understood, the west was still very bad, the south almost hopeless. But as the cure was passed around by the National Guard, more and more would be cured. Eventually, the country would become human again, free of the vampire disease.
Not completely free of it
, Mr. West had warned.
Diseases are tenacious and everyone will eventually need to be immunized at birth. We’ll have to always be on guard, though, especially for a mutation.
Promise glanced down at the crossbow again. It was the one Miller had given her two years ago, telling her a girl should always carry protection. Promise hadn’t fully understood Miller at the time…hadn’t really understood the double meaning of the joke. She’d been in some ways so old for her eighteen years, but in other ways…so, so young. She hoped Miller was okay. They hadn’t seen or had word from her in over eight months now. She might have quit the Guard. She might be home right now; or maybe she sat on a beach somewhere thinking of them. Who could know?
Her eyes found Peter. He was standing in shallow water, and his body glistened wetly in the sun. He was lean and tan, and her stomach somersaulted a little as she watched him. She wasn’t as young now as she had been then. Not as innocent. She got the joke now.
She smiled and stretched, relishing the healthy feeling of her muscles aligned to her bones, the strength and resiliency of tendons and joints. She still didn’t take it for granted. Somewhere deep in her mind the scar of the hot time–her brush with the disease–seemed to glow a warning red:
what’s now is not for always, with good consequences and bad. Take joy in what simply is at the moment
.
She would try. But even now, she can feel a rustle of her old discontent. Wereburg is so well known, too well known. She thinks often of Greenville and knows that she and Peter and Chance would be welcomed there with open arms. It might be good to get away from Willow’s End and the past. Sometimes she thinks that memories are like gossamer spider webbing that doesn’t look very tough but can hold you still as stone. Smother you in silken comfort before you realized you’ve stopped breathing.
Yes, she thinks about leaving Wereburg. Especially now that Lea and Mark have gone. Promise had been bitterly upset over their leaving, but what could she say? Mark wanted to go west into Ohio, try and track down his family. It was just possible, with the advances being made, that he would find them. To Mark it was worth every risk. And so then, too, to Lea.
Even with a few weeks to get used to the idea, Promise had cried the day they left. She’d looked at the sidecar of the motorcycle packed with two bags and one small brown dog, and she had burst into tears.
Lea had hugged her as Mark and Peter awkwardly shook hands, their eyes straying back to the girls.
“We’ll be back,” Lea said. “I can’t leave the kids forever, now can I?” In the last eighteen months, Lea had started classes for the little ones. Children flocked to her, and even the most overloaded classroom sat in rapt attention when Lea spoke. She was mother to all…especially the orphaned ones, of which there were many. “And I can’t leave you, either,” she whispered in Promise’s ear. She reached for Promise’s ponytail and tugged. She stepped back, and the pink scrunchie, worn and fraying, lay in the palm of her hand like a magic trick. “Remember when I gave this back to you?”
Promise nodded and more tears came. It was a few days after she’d been cured of the disease. She’d still been very ill, and a strange fever had plagued her, worrying Mr. West. Promise had sweated through nightgowns and bedclothes, and her hair hung in wet straggles from her uncomfortable tossing and turning in the narrow bed.
Lea had sat with Promise during the nights, trying to cool her with a paper fan and soothing words. One night, Promise had had a very bad dream, and she thrashed in the bed and cried out. Lea rocked her gently, telling her to wake up, it was only a dream. Promise had snapped awake and begun crying hysterically. The horrible dream had been about her mother…her mother standing at the back door, wanting to get at her and Chance but willing herself away, sacrificing herself so she wouldn’t harm her children. Promise wanted her mom. That’s all she could say to Lea when she woke, sobbing. “I want my mom…I want my mom…”
Lea had let Promise cry for a long time, and then she stood abruptly, startling Promise into silence.
“Hold on, I forgot…” Lea said and spun from the room. She came back with her hands cupped over something and a wide smile on her face. She stood before Promise. “I saved this for you.” She opened her hands, and the pink scrunchie tumbled out onto the sheet. The last thing Promise’s mom had given her.
Promise gaped at Lea in tired surprise. “I thought I had lost it,” she said and picked it up with bloodless, trembling fingers.
“I saved it for you,” Lea said. “Here, let me.” She gathered Promise’s hair into a ponytail and slipped the scrunchie onto it. “There. You’re beautiful.” She kissed Promise’s cheek, and Promise had hugged her friend, hard.
“I remember,” Promise said and took the scrunchie from her friend’s hand. Behind them, Mark kicked the motorcycle to growling life, and Lady barked. “Now it’s been given to me by two people who I love very much.”
They’d hugged again without speaking, because what else could they have said? Then Mark and Lea had driven away.