Deathless (6 page)

Leesa suspected the blue streaks were the reason Cali was wearing a pair of furry black earmuffs instead of a hat—so she wouldn’t have to cover up her newly decorated hair. Because it was certainly cold enough out for a hat, that was for sure. The sun hung low in a clear blue sky as the afternoon ebbed to a close, and a stiff northerly breeze made the thirty degree temperature feel much colder.

Leesa had pulled her dark blue ski cap down over her ears, and even though she was wearing a pair of black leather gloves, she had her hands tucked deep into the pockets of her bright blue down parka. A pair of tan Ugg boots kept her feet warm. Her cheeks tingled in the cold, and she could see her breath floating up in front of her face in a misty white cloud.

Cali was wearing a heavy dark brown leather jacket with a fluffy light brown fleece color. Her jeans were tucked into a pair of knee high black leather boots, which, from the way she was bouncing back and forth on her feet, were not doing nearly as good a job keeping her feet as warm as Leesa’s Uggs.

“
This ain’t like San Diego, huh?” Cali said, blowing out a long stream of steamy breath.

“
Ha! Not even close.”

“
I bet on days like this, you wish Rave had a car.”

Cali did not know anything about Rave’s magical heat, but she knew he was a member of a clan called the Mastons, who, like the Amish, did not use any modern devices or appliances. So there was no way she could know that walking arm in arm with Rave was more than enough to keep Leesa warm, and that once they reached the other side of the river, she would be cradled in his arms as he carried her, making her even warmer.

“
Yeah, that’d be nice,” Leesa said. “But there’s nothing I can do about it—except dress warm.” She kept few secrets from Cali, but had not told her about Rave’s true nature. That information was not hers to share. As far as Leesa knew, Cali had never even heard of a volkaane. Leesa had pointed Stefan out to Cali and told her he was a vampire, so Cali did know vampires were real. Cali being Cali, she thought that was really cool.

“
You’re gonna be in for a
long
winter, girl,” Cali said, grinning. She puffed out another big cloud of steamy breath. “Ol’ Man Winter is barely getting started.”

Leesa pulled her gloved hands out of her pocket. “Heck, it’s not like I lived in San Diego my whole life,” she said, a bit defensively. “I grew up in New Jersey, remember?”

“
Yeah, but only until you were seven, right? That was a long time ago. I bet your blood has thinned a lot by now.”

Leesa wondered what Cali would think if she knew about the
grafhym
blood in her veins. Knowing Cali, she would probably think it was way cool. When Leesa told Cali Stefan was a vampire, she’d asked if he had any vampire friends he could fix her up with. She had been joking, of course. At least, Leesa hoped she had been joking. Besides, Cali had already had a boyfriend, a cute frat guy named Andy, who she really liked.

“
So, tell me again why we’re waiting out here in the cold for Rave?” Cali asked. “Instead of waiting inside, where it’s nice and warm.”

“
Because I can’t wait to see him, that’s why. Don’t tell me that thick New England blood of yours can’t handle it?”

“
Rule forty-three,” Cali said. “Never let yourself seem too eager where a guy is concerned—even one as hot and nice as Rave.”

Leesa grinned. Cali had a “rule” for seemingly every situation. She had finally admitted she made most of them up on the spot to suit whatever point she was trying to make. But she did have a few real ones. Indeed, that’s how she and Leesa had first met, at Freshman Orientation the first day of school. Cali had come up to Leesa and told her she was cute. Leesa wasn’t sure how to handle the comment, especially since she had never thought of herself as all that cute. Cali had followed her statement with “rule seventeen: always make friends with a cute girl, because there will be plenty of extra guys around.”

Leesa brought her mind back to the present. “I’ll try to remember that in the future, oh wise one.”

Rave’s arrival ended their banter. He strode rapidly up the sidewalk toward them, a big smile on his face. He was wearing a black and white checked flannel shirt, with no hat and no gloves. He looked great, as always.

“
I do see why you’re so eager, though,” Cali whispered. “Rave is definitely smokin’.”

Leesa smiled. Cali was more right than she knew. And she was pretty sure Rave had heard what Cali said, though she knew he would never let on.

“
Hi, Leesa. Hi Cali,” Rave said when he reached them. He gave Leesa a quick kiss on the cheek. The cold disappeared immediately from her skin.

Cali looked at Rave suspiciously. “How come you wore gloves back when you first started dating Leesa, but don’t have any today, on one of the coldest days of the year?” She was referring to the story Leesa had told her and two other friends, Stacie and Caitlin, about how Rave kept his gloves on when he held her hand on a not so cold day early in the fall. Leesa had suffered quite a bit of teasing about it.

Rave grinned. “I guess I wasn’t in love back then. Love keeps me warm now.”

Leesa blushed, but she loved hearing him say that.

“
Very smooth, Rave,” Cali said, smiling. “Very smooth.” She turned to Leesa. “Are there any more like him at home?”

“
Ha! Should I tell Andy you asked?” Leesa asked.

Cali’s smile widened. “Never mind. So, where are you two lovebirds off to?”

If only you knew
, Leesa thought. But she was not about to tell her that first Rave would carry her fifteen miles in his arms—in little more than an hour—and then they would very carefully kiss under the watchful eye of Balin, to make sure Rave didn’t lose control and accidentally burn the life out of her. Not that Cali wouldn’t totally get into a story like that, Leesa knew. Especially if she described how amazing Rave’s kisses were.

“
We’re just going for a long walk, maybe stop for a pizza,” Leesa said. “Nothing fancy. What about you? What do you and Andy have going on tonight?”

“
We’re gonna check out a place over in Meriden. Test out my new fake ID.”

Cali was eighteen, just like Leesa, but that didn’t stop her from drinking. Andy was twenty-one, so he was legal.

“
Have fun, but be careful,” Leesa said. She almost never drank, though she’d had a glass of wine with Cali twice. And she’d had a bit of Balin’s homemade mead once, too.

“
Yes, Mom,” Cali said, grinning. She stamped her feet a couple of times. “It’s freakin’ cold out here. I’m going back inside. Try not to freeze, you two.”

“
See you later,” Leesa said as Cali turned back toward the dorm’s entrance.

Leesa snuggled up against Rave’s side, soaking in his warmth. There was no way she would freeze.

“
Let’s get going,” she said.

Time did strange things whenever Rave carried Leesa in his arms. Their journeys seemed to last forever, a joyous eternity of bliss. But when he put her down, she always felt cheated, as if the trip had barely begun. She did not understand how something could seem endless, yet be all too short at the same time. She bet nothing in her physics class could explain that.

Rave set her down gently on the rutted dirt road in front of Balin’s ancient cabin—road being a kind description of what was really nothing more than a wide dirt path. Rave’s people preferred it this way, to keep outsiders from wandering into their settlement by accident. No driver in his right mind would try to negotiate the narrow, pitted roadway in any vehicle without off-road capabilities. A stout wooden gate a half mile from the highway kept even these away.

To the outside world, the Mastons were simply a strange clan—some even called them a cult—who had forsworn the trappings of the modern age. When Leesa first told her friends she had met a Maston, Cali tried to warn her off, recounting stories about strange noises, blue fires and even rumors of human sacrifice. The noises were real—they were called the Moodus Noises, named after the nearby Moodus River. The unexplained underground rumblings and tremors had been occurring in the area for centuries and were a well-known piece of Connecticut lore. They had nothing to do with the Mastons, though. Blue fires were also real, of course, though the volkaanes took care to shield any displays of their magical fire. As for human sacrifices, that was nonsense cooked up by overactive imaginations trying to deal with a group of people they did not understand.

Leesa had been to Balin’s home several times before with Rave. The small, one-room cabin was the oldest in the Maston settlement, built by Balin himself over three hundred years ago. Constructed from trees hewn from the local woods, the logs were cracked and weathered, and the mud between them was black with age. Two tiny windows winked from the front wall—glass had not been an option when the cabin was built, so deer hide had hung over the openings back then. Glass had been added later. A thin ribbon of smoke curled upward a few feet from a stone chimney before being blown away by the stiff breeze. The whole area was wonderfully quiet.

Farther up the road, before it curved into the woods, Leesa could see another old cabin and a couple of crude wooden houses. Each home had a small field cleared beside it—more of a garden, really. They were bare and fallow this time of year, but in the spring, the gardens would brim with vegetables and herbs. Across the road, an apple orchard covered a low hillside. The gnarled gray branches were bare of leaves, but she had seen the trees when they were full of delicious fruit. The Mastons were very self-sufficient. Balin even brewed his own homemade mead.

Rave led Leesa up the short dirt pathway to the cabin door and knocked twice.

A moment later, the door swung open. Balin stood in the doorway, smiling. The old volkaane was even taller than Rave, with a lean body only slightly bent from more than five hundred years of living. He wore handmade buckskin clothes, the same as he had worn when he was younger—unlike many of his folk, he had never switched to more modern garb. His long hair was dark gray, the color of lead, with streaks of the characteristic Maston copper still visible in places.

“
Greetings, young Rave,” he said. “And Leesa, it is always a pleasure to see you, my dear.” He stepped back from the doorway. “Come in, come in.”

Leesa still had not gotten used to hearing Rave called “young Rave,” since he was more than a century and a half old, but that’s how Balin always referred to him. Balin had been Rave’s teacher when Rave was a child, and the “young Rave” appellation had remained with him all these years.

The inside of the cabin was Spartan. The entire place was one room, six paces wide and ten paces long, furnished with simple, handmade wooden furniture. A rectangular dining table with a split log bench on either side filled most of one end of the cabin, and a buckskin sleeping mat stuffed with straw lay upon the plank floor at the other end. In the middle of the room lay a brown bearskin rug so old the fur had worn away down to the skin in several places. Naturally, there was no television, radio, or refrigerator anywhere to be seen.

A small fire popped and crackled in a stone fireplace built into the far wall, adding its flickering light to the illumination cast by four tallow candles high on the walls. Volkaanes did not need fireplaces for warmth—their inner fire kept them warm no matter what the temperature—but they often used fires for cooking and light. If necessary, their inner heat could even be used for cooking, but it was usually simpler and more efficient to put something over the fire. A black metal cooking pot hung over the fire right now and Leesa could smell a stew of some kind bubbling inside it. Four crude wooden chairs formed a half circle in front of the fireplace—volkaanes enjoyed watching any kind of fire flicker and burn.

“
Sit down, please,” Balin said. “Can I get you something to drink? Water? Mead?”

Leesa remembered how good Balin’s mead tasted, but the stuff was really strong, so she opted for water. Besides, Balin got his water from a natural spring out back and it was pretty tasty in its own right. Rave also asked for water, so Balin crossed to the table and poured two pewter mugs of water from a big ceramic jug.

While Balin was getting their water, Leesa pulled off her hat and gloves and shoved them into the pockets of her parka, then peeled off her jacket and handed it to Rave, who hung it on a wooden peg in the wall by the door. She settled into one of the chairs in front of the fire. This close to the flames, the smell of Balin’s stew was even more delicious.

Balin handed a mug of water to Leesa and one to Rave. Rave took the chair on her left, and Balin sat down to her right. With the fire in front of her and a volkaane on either side, Leesa could not imagine any better place to be on a cold winter evening. And what would be coming soon would warm her up even better—and she wasn’t thinking about the stew….