The Night Shifters (3 page)

Explanations seemed
appropriate. “I – “

“I have just the
thing for you,” he said before I could say another word. With much
smiling and eye twinkling, he motioned for me to follow him into
the house.

I
have just the thing for you
was an encouraging remark. I liked it much better than
Receive the black mana,
my love
. So I hurried after
him. We passed many wonderful objects d’art on the way, things that
would have made Nostradamus jealous, things I would have loved to
pause and examine closer, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him for
long. I wondered if it would be all right to ask him for an
autograph. After all, this was
my
dream.

He led me to an
arcadia door and plucked a large crystal from a string, hanging
right where it would have caught the afternoon light if there had
been any.

“The Crystal
Heart,” he said. “This ought to take care of the problem we
discussed. With this, even daemon love won’t beguile you.”

“
Daemon
love?”

“It’s no joke, my
dear,” he said. “Whatever you do, don’t let it fall into anyone
else’s hands. Don’t loan it to anyone, no matter how compelling the
reasons may seem!”

He seemed to expect
an answer from me. “I won’t,” I promised, and he nodded with
satisfaction.

I stared
open-mouthed at the crystal in his cupped hands. As big as my fist,
and cut square, it glowed blue, and had lovely lights swirling
inside. I felt that if I looked long enough, I might fall into
those lights – and the idea didn’t bother me in the least. They
swirled faster, as if aware of my scrutiny, and suddenly they began
to zoom like electrons orbiting an atom.

The crystal flew
from Sir John’s hand to my breast, perching right over my heart. I
felt a moment of pure, unadulterated joy.

And then it
penetrated flesh and bone.

And boy, did
it hurt. Suddenly the world seemed real after all. Sir John was
real, the crystal was real, and the hot pain sinking into my chest
was
very
real. My eyes rolled up to a heaven
full of black and red stars.

Isn’t it lovely?
Camilla seemed to whisper.
What a perfect Night...

For a time, I felt
nothing but pain. I knew I would die. But dying seemed to be taking
a bitch of a long time. My life ebbed and flowed, it roared in my
ears. Each time, the shore of my life seemed farther away.

Stop fighting
, someone
seemed to whisper in my ear.
Let the tide take you, or you’re going to
drown.

I couldn’t believe
that. That seemed like the opposite of what I should do.

Don’t you understand?
asked the voice, and I couldn’t say if it was male or female,
I couldn’t even tell if it was my
own
voice.
You
belong here. Stop fighting and just
be
here.

I stopped fighting,
mostly because I was out of steam. For a while, I just drifted
peacefully.

Then the lights
came back. I opened my eyes. I had collapsed onto the floor, and
Sir John stood over me. He didn’t look like a friendly old British
actor anymore. His eyes were volcanos as he glared down at me like
the Jehovah who leveled Jericho.

“Who are you?!” he
thundered. The crystal in my chest shivered to the sound of his
voice.

“Probably not who
you thought,” I squeaked, and fainted again.

•

When I regained
consciousness, I felt much better, but Night still reigned
outside.

“Rats,” I said. But
oddly, it wasn’t because I still seemed to be asleep and/or crazy.
The only reason I felt disappointed was that I couldn’t remember
any more than I had before. It seemed like I was doing a heck of a
lot of work, for very little reward.

But here I was.
There was no point in sitting there and moping over the situation,
so I sat up and looked around.

Now the house had a
second story. I know it did, because I could see a staircase from
where I lay on the couch.

Sir John was gone.
In his place, a five-foot-toy Union soldier stood over me with a
Civil War sword. He made me nervous, but he didn’t move when I got
up. I tip-toed to the foot of the stairs. Firelight flickered in
the stairwell. If it had been like the glowing green and red lights
I had seen earlier, I would never have gone up.

But it wasn’t, so I
did.

A real den
waited at the top of the stairs. I mean a
real
den, like you’d find in the
wide-awake-not-a-trace-of-insanity-in-the-family world. Warmth and
golden light radiated from the fire in the hearth, glowing on the
books, the ancient maps on the walls, the big roll-top desk – a
statuette on the desk caught my interest, a gold figurine of a
well-muscled young man wearing a horned mask. The eyes glittered as
if he were a living creature.

“Well, what are you
waiting for? Come in,” said a voice from one of the overstuffed
chairs by the fire, the one on the left. Its back was to me, so I
couldn’t see the occupant. A cloud of smoke mushroomed up from it
and drifted to the ceiling.

The other chair
looked inviting. I went in and sat down.

Sir John owned the
voice. He also owned a pipe, which he smoked steadily. Fortunately,
he favored a fragrant variety of tobacco, rather than a stinky one.
He had traded the Egyptian robes for slacks, an old turtleneck, and
an oversized smoking jacket with patches on the elbows. He squinted
at me.

“You’re not
Serena.” There was barely the hint of a question in his voice.

“No.” Now that I
had spit it out, I felt relieved. “I’m Hazel.” Take that,
Serena!

“Hmm.” He sounded
disappointed.

“Hazel’s a nice
witch-y name, isn’t it?”

“Serena isn’t a
witch. She’s an angel.”

“Oh.”

Something
glittered beyond Sir John. I looked into the eyes of the statuette
on the desk, and I could have sworn they looked back.
Who are you, Masked
Man?
I wondered. The horns
of his mask were ram’s horns – was he a war god?

Or a love god...
?

Sir John puffed
big, purple clouds of smoke, which drifted up to join the others
gathering like stellar clouds at the ceiling. He didn’t look angry
anymore. I was happy to see that, anyway.

“Why did you think
I was Serena?” I asked. “Do I look like her?”

He didn’t answer
immediately. Instead, he studied me as if he were trying to see
into my head.

“You look nothing
like Serena as I saw her last,” he said. “But that is precisely
what I expected. You see, she led me to believe she was trying to
escape some old – associations. And we agreed the best way to do
that was to change her appearance. You arrived at my house at the
time we had agreed to meet, and you seemed to know what you were
doing.”

“
I was
playing it by ear. I escaped from Nostradamus and Camilla, who
wanted to – um –
shoot
me full of black
manna.”

Purple smoke poured
out of his ears, and his eyes practically sparked.

“They kidnaped
you?”

“No. They invited
me to a swim party.”

“
Tell me
everything.” He said it gently, and his eyes were friendly, but I
could see a hint of the volcanos that rested deep beneath the blue.
Funny, Mom used to say
my
eyes were like that
–
stormy
blue
. But in Sir John’s
case, that description seemed a lot more justified.

I
wanted
to tell him everything. But I
didn’t. I didn’t tell him about the letter. I felt embarrassed
about being so gullible. So I just told him about my amnesia, the
missing sunrise, and the creepy swim party.

“Oh damn,” he said
when I had finished. “I’ve been suckered. She led me down the
primrose path. And she fooled Camilla and Nostradamus, too – how
extraordinary! But why didn’t Serena come for the Crystal Heart?
It’s such a powerful thing. It will protect you against
bewitchment, Hazel. I would think she would want it for
herself.”

“I forgot about the
crystal. Where is it?”

“Still in your
chest.”

I would have to
take his word for it, because I couldn’t feel the tingling anymore.
I still had a pulse, and the pain was a faded memory. “Can’t you
get it out of there?”

“Not without
killing you. It practically tore my arm off trying to get to you,
by the way – not my idea at all. I expect it’s taken the place of
your heart. Consumed it, actually. Perhaps that’s the answer.”

“What is?”

His eyes
sparked, and I caught a twin flash from the Masked Man on the desk.
“I think I was her back-up plan. If her tactic with the black manna
didn’t work, she could steer you here – and the Crystal Heart would
kill you.
Then
she could come
and claim it from your dead body.”

So I had a complete
stranger for a mortal enemy. “Wow. Good thing this is just a
dream.”

That surprised him.
“Are you joking?”

“No. This has to be
a dream – or a delusion, whatever you want to call it. You don’t
know it, because you’re in it.”

He indulged in a
great deal more eye-twinkling and smoke-blowing as he thought that
over. “Well,” he said at last, “if you’re dreaming, you can change
the dream any way you want, can’t you?”

“I never could. I
always just go with the flow.”

This time the eyes
of the Masked Man flashed so bright, I knew I couldn’t have
imagined it. “Besides,” I continued, “if I’m not dreaming, I have
to be crazy.”

“Really?” He raised
his eyebrows.

“Yes. That’s the
only logical explanation.”

“But if you were
crazy, would you be capable of logical conclusions?”

“Hmmn. That’s a
tricky one.” Obviously Sir John knew something I didn’t. He could
probably even put the Big Dipper next to the Crab Nebula if he
wanted to.

“So if I’m
interpreting your conversation accurately,” he said, “you can’t
shift the Night.”

“I don’t even know
what you mean, so I guess the answer is yes. I can’t.”

He propped his
slippered feet on a stool and refilled his pipe. “You’ll just have
to do whatever comes naturally for you. And you’d better watch out
for Camilla and Nostradamus. They’d like to be top dogs here, so
they can make the place over the way they’d like it.”

“All right,” I
promised.

He tapped his pipe
on the chair arm, and smiled gently. “Do you feel it?”

“What?”

“Things are about
to change for you again.”

“But not for
you?”

“No. I’m a Night
Shifter. But you may have an advantage, my dear. There’s something
I sensed about you as soon as you came into the room.”

“What’s that?”

“
You’re no
ordinary woman. I think the Night
likes
you.”

And then the lights
went out.

•

I felt for the arms
of my chair, but they were gone. Now I sat on the edge of a soft,
flat surface. When I leaned back, I bumped my head on a wall. So I
crawled on my hands and knees, feeling the wall with my hand, until
I encountered a light switch and flipped it on.

One dingy bulb
illuminated a room so normal in appearance, it disappointed me. I
had slept in exactly this sort of room my whole life. This model
looked to be older, so it was built fairly well – what I could see
of it, anyway, since the door leading out was shut.

The room measured
perhaps twelve feet by fifteen. It had no window. I crouched on a
single bed, and against the long wall opposite me stood a chest of
drawers. The short wall to my right contained a big closet. The
closet had no doors, and yawned empty. When I got up to try the
bedroom door, I discovered it was locked.

What was I supposed
to do now, take a nap?

As I turned from
the door, a man’s voice whispered from outside: “I’m going to kill
you.”

Well
that
certainly sucked. I leaned my head next to the
door and demanded, “Why?”

“Because you’re a
girl, and I like to kill girls.”

“I’m not a girl.
I’m a woman.”

“You look like a
girl to me.”

“Well I’m not!”

He fell quiet for a
moment, and I had time to notice the
chocolate-tile-with-pink-and-green-swirls that covered the floor.
It was the same kind of tile I had in my bedroom when I was a
little girl. His voice sounded like something out of my childhood
too, a scary story told at a slumber party.

“
In that case
I’ll come back in an hour,” the voice whispered. “And
then
I’ll kill you.”

I felt him
withdraw, though I didn’t hear footsteps.

If the Night liked
me, it certainly didn’t seem to like me a lot. Could I die now that
I had a crystal heart? I didn’t want to know. Briefly I considered
hiding in the closet or under the bed. But if I were him, I would
look in those places first. So I searched along the walls with my
hands, hoping I might find a secret passage.

I didn’t find a
passage, but I did find a poster. I was fairly certain it hadn’t
been there a moment before. It depicted Camilla, posing seductively
in her swimsuit with the inflatable duck around her waist. Above
her head, in big drippy letters, it said CAMILLA. Under her feet it
said QUEEN OF THE VAMPIRES. Under that, where the movie credits
would normally go, I found a personal message: