Defy the Dark (14 page)

The wolf backed away on its belly, and Berthe sat down among the pine needles.

“Sometimes they still turn back,” Stephen said. “I thought perhaps—I wanted there to be something here for you.”

“A look into the future?”

“No,” said Stephen. “They make a choice—they turn toward the wild—”

“And what other choice is there to make?” Berthe demanded. “The one your friend did?”

Berthe had to look up from the pine needle floor because she could not hear Stephen. He did not breathe and his heart did not beat; when he was still he was a creature of perfect silence and she could not tell if he was there. She was suddenly afraid that he had left, suddenly aware that things could get worse.

Stephen had not left. He was looking down at her, eyes moonlight-eerie in his thin, serious face, and then he knelt down so they were on a level.

“She was very lonely,” he said. “She didn't know what was happening to her at first. She hurt people. She hurt her family. You haven't done that. You're not alone.”

“No,” said Berthe, and thought painfully of her parents, and of Leela and Natalie. They all seemed so far away in a world she did not know how to scramble back to. “But I could hurt them,” she said. “And I can't tell them. And I'm alone with this.”

“You're not,” said Stephen.

“You're not like me,” Berthe told him, her voice low.

She did not just mean what they were, or the feeling of being on different sides in a dark wood. He was in control as she was not: he was not tearing rooms into shreds.

“I only wanted . . . ,” Berthe tried to clarify, “I wanted someone who could explain this to me, from the inside out.”

Stephen looked off into the trees, after the fleeing wolf, and then knelt down on the ground among the needles with her.

“I'm not telling you this to trump what you're feeling,” he said, “or to try and win the argument. I was made by a man who had a whole bevy of us—teenage minions, old enough to be useful, but not old enough to survive on our own with ease. He told us what was happening to us, and what to do, how to feed, how to serve him and recruit for him. We were dependent on him, because of what we were.”

Feed,
Berthe thought, and whispered, “Did you kill someone?”

“I killed three people,” Stephen answered, without hesitating. “The last one was the worst, though I doubt the first two would agree with me. I had a family, once. I waited for my chance to get back to them. When it came, I didn't get away clean—someone was watching me. A window broke, and I was cut, and one of the others had her teeth in my wrist to the bone. I had to tear free. They were hunting me through the streets, and I did not know what to do. I knocked on doors and a woman let me in, a teenage boy covered in blood. In return for her kindness, I knocked her to the floor, ripped her throat out, and gulped down her heart's blood. I stayed in her house all that night and the next day with her body. Without her, I don't think I would have escaped.

“I wanted to get away from the man who made me and taught me. I wish I had not asked for that woman's help. Being able to depend on nobody but yourself isn't so bad.”

“If you can depend on yourself,” Berthe said shakily.

“You can,” Stephen said, and sounded sure, calm again, the alien creature, the murderer who had saved her from hurting anyone. “And you're not alone.”

The night was crystal clear and terrifying, the wolf running through the woods, and when she closed her eyes she could not hear anyone's breathing or heartbeat but her own.

But when she looked up, she wasn't alone, after all, and when she got home from the dark woods, her mother made her hot chocolate, popping in a marshmallow. Berthe looked at the tiny treat in the cup and thought about all the little sweetnesses love slipped into your daily life, almost unnoticed except that when they were added up, they meant you could bear anything.

 

A
t her next lacrosse game she was running, running across the field with her stick in hand, her parents and friends cheering as they watched. Another girl ran at her full tilt, body-checking her.

Berthe barely paused, but she bumped the girl's shoulder—carefully, careful, she had to be so careful, you don't want to hurt anyone, do you?—and the girl fell back, and Berthe ran ahead with the ball and her victory.

It was a bright sunlit moment, but the girl had a bruise on her shoulder afterward. She said in the locker room, with a little admiration but mostly spite, “You're an animal, Lindstrom.”

The other girl was the one who had not been playing fair. If Berthe was playing fair by playing at all, considering what she was.

Berthe went and took a hot shower, scrubbing hard at her unmarked body. She came out of it and looked in the fogged mirror set over the sink, misted glass reflecting back pieces of her grotesquely: blond hair dark-stringy with water, pale blur of flesh and eyes cut with lightning, like the eyes of the wolf in the woods. She pressed her face against the wet glass and took deep shuddering breaths, and outside the building she heard Natalie and Leela whispering secrets Berthe was not supposed to know.

When she was done taking breaths, she leaned back from the mirror, wiped it with her shaking hand, and looked at herself whole and clear.

 

“H
ow do you,” Berthe said, on the third morning after a full moon, sitting with her cookie half-eaten in her hand. “How do you feed now?”

Stephen sat in the corner away from the sunlight. He did not, as she had feared, look offended by the question.

“Not well,” he answered. “There is no way to do it that's right. People who are sleeping on the street. People who are passed out drunk at parties in a garden. Stealing from a blood donation clinic, or a blood bank. I feed in small, dark ways, but I don't kill.”

It was a horrible picture, the monster preying on unsuspecting people. The savagery that ripped through Stephen's bedroom every full moon, that would rip through people, was horrible as well.

And there was something else besides horror in it: the thought of kind Stephen spending half his life desperately scavenging for sustenance.

“You must be hungry a lot,” she said quietly.

He was silent.

“If you want,” she began. She had brought her own clothes this time, and she fiddled with the sleeve of her warm, comforting sweater, pulling it up to expose the veins on her wrist.

It could not be anything like as bad as the liquefying pain she had suffered last night and would suffer, again and again, as long as she lived. And she would get to do something for Stephen: something that might make him happy.

“I wouldn't mind,” she told him.

“My kind can't feed on your kind,” Stephen said, and after a pause, very politely: “But thank you very much. I mean it. Nobody's ever offered me that before.”

It hurt for a moment that her body was disqualified to do something for him. She felt monstrous for not being prey for him, and how stupid was that?

“When I'm—like I am, upstairs, can you hear me?” she asked. “Is it awful?”

“No,” said Stephen.

“How can it not be?”

“How can you stand to look at me,” Stephen said, “when you know what I am? Once you change things from the general to the personal, what does ‘monstrous' even mean? It's not awful. I hear you and it's Berthe, upstairs.”

It didn't seem like her, and she was scared of thinking of it as her, but she gave some thought to trying to remember next time.

Berthe tucked her feet up under her. “How'd you get so smart?”

“Well, I've been around awhile,” Stephen said. “Gives you time to think things through, even if our minds don't mature like yours will.”

“How do you know your mind isn't mature?”

“I'm speculating,” said Stephen. “Of course, it's quite probable that being scared and uncertain and stupid is something you never grow out of, and I just want to think there's some way for other people to do it.”

Berthe blinked at him, startled into speechlessness by the idea of Stephen being scared or uncertain.

He looked the same as ever, inhuman-bright eyes steady behind his glasses, wearing a T-shirt that seemed to be about robots, his face pale and thin and thoughtful.

“I'm glad I can't drink from you,” Stephen told her. “I don't want to be a monster with you.”

“You're not,” said Berthe. She didn't like words as much as Stephen did, couldn't frame the right things to say the way he could, but she smiled at him and said awkwardly, “It's personal for me, too.”

Stephen smiled back. She thought he might cross the room to her, but of course he could not get past the sunlight, the rays between them like iron bars.

 

I
t was three weeks more until Leela told Berthe what she had already told Natalie: that she was gay. After Berthe told Leela that she loved her, was glad to know anything about her friend that Leela had to tell because she loved her, and nothing would change that love, Leela let her know when she was planning to tell her parents, and that she wanted a sleepover at Natalie's house afterward. On the night of the full moon.

Berthe had to say no and hurt Leela with awkward lies. Berthe knew that in the human world, there was no excuse for what she was doing.

“You did get back to your family,” she said to Stephen as the sun was sinking behind his blinds, and her whole body wavered on the edge of the abyss. “Didn't you?”

“I did,” said Stephen. “I got back to them, and I got to stay with them for two years. But after that—it was beginning to be obvious I wasn't aging, and hunting was so hard to hide. I couldn't stay with them.”

Berthe could not talk to him any longer. She had to run up the stairs, lock the door behind her, and feel pain twist her body into a whole new shape, casting her humanity far, far away. She lifted her face to the shut-out moon and howled because it would not stay.

The next day she did not stop for tea or Stephen, just threw on the clothes she had left outside the door and pushed her battered body, used all of her inhuman speed, for the task of getting coffee and pastries from Leela's favorite place. She ran all the way to Natalie's house and rang the bell with the sun still tentative and new in the sky.

Leela opened the door and looked at her, and for a moment there was a silence of hurt and hesitance, a possibility that the door would be shut in her face, but instead Leela reached out and drew her inside.

The three of them spent the day together, talking about how it had gone and what Leela was thinking and feeling, and planning out things they might want to do next, discussing movies and sports and coming back around to Leela because this was her day.

They walked around town until evening came and they got to a certain coffee shop and went in to find crowded tables and people who looked like they were in for the long haul, student types with their laptops.

Stephen, with a book and a coffee cup he had not touched, wanting to be with people even though he didn't speak to them. Stephen, who had made his house something like a home for her—somewhere he had chosen to always let her in, whenever she came—but who had been too scared to stay in his own home, had told her that he felt eternally young and scared, so scared that the only thing he could think of to do was spend all his life in hiding.

“I see a table,” she said to Leela and Natalie, and marched up—the idea of it, of her marching up to a table where a boy was. “Hey,” she said as Stephen blinked inhuman-brilliant eyes behind his glasses and let his book fall onto his saucer. “Can we join you? This is Leela and Natalie. Girls, this is my friend Stephen.”

Leela turned out to have read Stephen's book and discussing it with him made them both smile. Natalie drew Leela to the register, on the blatant pretext of wanting another cookie, to discuss Stephen and Berthe with her, and Berthe stayed behind to discuss them with him.

“Won't they wonder about—where I go to school?” Stephen asked, apparently nonplussed and pleased enough to come close to Berthe's level of conversational flailing.

“Tell them you're homeschooled,” said Berthe, tactfully not adding that the way Stephen talked, they might be assuming this already—though either she didn't notice how he talked was strange anymore or he was talking a bit more normally. “Or maybe a college guy taking a year out. Very glamorous.”

“Do you really think I look old enough?” Stephen asked, sounding almost shy.

“Definitely,” said Berthe.

 

“D
ad,” Berthe said a couple of weeks later. “Next time you have a little space between jobs, I was wondering if you could help out a friend of mine.”

“Space between jobs, what are you talking about? I work my fingers to the bone keeping you in designer clothing and handbags,” her dad told her, pulling on the hood of her sweatshirt. “Is it Natalie or Leela? Leela needs a bookcase set in her wall—I've been saying it for years.”

“It's another friend,” Berthe said. “Um. A boy. Stephen. Is his name. He has porphyria.” And here she turned her face away, because she'd never lied to her dad before. “He's sensitive to sunlight. And he works at a call center—he doesn't have a whole lot of money. I thought if we could put shutters on his windows downstairs . . .”

Her dad was quiet for a little while. “Is that where you've been, some nights you've been home pretty late? Or rather, pretty early in the morning?”

“If the boy can't go out during the day, it's different,” her mother said, as quick to sympathy as she was quick to anger, and her dad looked at her and then pulled Berthe into a hug.

“I'll see what I can do,” he said.

“You should bring this Stephen around for dinner,” said her mother. “What does he like to eat?”