The Night Shifters (31 page)

I shook my head. “I
don’t know.”

She cupped my chin
and made me look into her eyes. “There’s a way to find out. I can
give you something of mine.”

“Not that again,” I
said, blinking furiously.

“
Please,
Hazel, listen to me. You
must
know
more if you’re going to be ready for whatever is on the other side
of
that
.” She looked at
the Hole, her face tight with worry. “Two or three drops of my
blood should do it. Take them. I promise you won’t feel any ill
effects.”

“You’re awfully
concerned about me all of a sudden.”

She smiled sadly.
“All of a sudden? All right, think that if you want. I’m not a
beggar.” She turned away and stood with her arms crossed, gazing
out the window. “You were the one who said you could leap.”

I was struck by how
much she reminded me of King. Except that she had the hurt quality
of a rejected lover. Maybe he could look that way too. But I
doubted he could be as gentle about it as Camilla. She was no
pushover – but she had shown a lot of restraint, I had to
admit.

I stared at the
Hole again, and tried to remember. But I couldn’t.

“
Here’s the
deal,” I said. “Two drops. No seduction, no silky talk, no
nothing
.
Okay?”

“Okay.” She pricked
her palm with a sharp nail. Exactly two drops beaded up, glistening
jewels. She offered me her palm.

I wouldn’t have
looked into her eyes then for anything. I closed mine, and licked
the blood up.

And waited.

Colored dots
swam behind my eyes, but that was nothing new. No pictures or
thoughts came with them. I could hear myself breathing and wondered
where Camilla was.
Why am I standing here with my eyes closed, like an
idiot?
I wondered, but I
felt compelled to keep them closed, even though I knew I must look
silly.

Blue floated into
my mind’s eye, posing like a supermodel inside the jade gate,
twirling in her blue dress as she came out of the dressing room,
turning up her nose at my poor, ruined house. She would be laughing
if she could see me, like she laughed when Two pushed me out of
Camilla’s tree.

Then I saw
her somewhere else, on a playground dancing. Dancing with
me
. And I knew. My eyes popped open.

“Serena,” I
said.

“What about
her?”

“I’ve seen her
tonight.”

Camilla frowned.
“Are you sure?”

“Positive. I knew
her when we were both eleven. I went to school with her. She’s been
trying all Night to kick me out of the picture.”

“And what about the
hole?”

“I’ve seen it
before.” I took another long look at it. “It’s getting ready to
open.”

She took hold of my
shoulders then. “How can we stop it?”

“We don’t want to
stop it. We’ve got to let it open.”

“Why?”

I sighed. “I
don’t remember that part. And I don’t think more blood will help
me. Serena put the fix in before this Night even started. Because
this has happened before. Serena and I have to dance, we’ve got to
compete at recess. She’s been doing everything in her power to keep
this from happening – and for that reason alone, it’s
got
to happen. Do you understand? Because she
doesn’t want it to.”

Camilla turned the
full power of her eyes on me, and I forgot to resist. She was a
Night Shifter; I was asking her to take an awful lot on faith. What
was good for me might not be good for her or any of the others. But
finally she nodded. “I’ll let this play out. I confess, my
curiosity has gotten the better of me. And I must admit – I’m
inclined to trust you, Hazel. You may turn out to be wrong, but
your intentions are good.”

Something
about her tone warned me that if my intentions ever turned out to
be
not
so good, there would be hell to
pay. “And what about Serena? What if she doesn’t even show up for
the contest?”

“She’ll show up.
She won’t be able to stay away. She has no more choice than
you.”

“Good,” I said.
“Now how do I get back to class?”

“Leave that to me.”
She gave me one final kiss on the cheek.

•

When I arrived back
in class, Mrs. Fee had shrunk to her normal size and was scribbling
math problems on the chalk board. She looked surprised to see
me.

“I brought a note.
“ I held it out to her. I watched her face as she read it. I knew
what it said:

“Hazel has been
thoroughly punished and may return to class now. She needn’t be
punished anymore, and she is allowed to go to recess today.

Sincerely,

B. Clifton”

“All right,” said
Mrs. Fee. “Sit down and get out some paper. Copy down the problems
on the board.”

I obeyed. It was an
easy enough task, so simple it was boring. I added, subtracted,
multiplied, and divided numbers while the old clock ticked away the
minutes to recess.

Ten minutes before
the bell would have sounded, the door swung open and Blue strolled
in.

Or should I say
Blue a.k.a. Serena a.k.a. The Popular Girl?

She was still
wearing the beautiful blue outfit, and as soon as the girls saw her
they all called, “Hi Serena!” in eager voices, anxious for her
approval, for admittance into the inner circle of the loveliest and
the best dressed. Even some of the boys broke their taboo about
girls and joined in the chorus.

Serena smiled
prettily at Mrs. Fee and handed her a note. Mrs. Fee barely glanced
at it and returned the smile. “Go ahead and sit down, dear. Recess
in ten minutes.”

Serena glided down
my row, heading directly for the seat behind me. As she passed my
desk she said, “No one likes you anymore.”

That hurt more than
it should have, partly because it was the same thing she had said
to me all those years ago when I had shown her my house, and she
had declared it unfit for human habitation. “Sir John says the
Night likes me,” I whispered back. “And the Masked Man loves
me.”

She laughed. “Bet I
can steal him away from you.”

That shouldn’t have
gotten to me either. But the closer we got to recess, the more I
felt like the old me – the kid who didn’t have much confidence, who
always had her head in the clouds and who wasn’t very good at
verbal sparring with popular girls. It was all coming back to me
now, the year that Serena came into my life and somehow managed to
threaten my happiness with a few choice words and disdainful looks.
Camilla’s Men claimed the Masked Man wouldn’t have anything to do
with Serena, but how did I know that was true? Maybe they were just
playing with me.

I fumed for the
last few minutes, until the bell released us onto the
playground.

•

It was dark as ever
out there, but no one seemed to notice the lapse in logic. The Hole
hung over us like a giant storm, lightning flashing in its center
like the veins of a bloodshot eye. Some of the boys pointed at it
excitedly, and I was afraid the teachers might cancel recess. But
they seemed utterly unconcerned.

Serena walked
beside me as if we were friends. “What did Mrs. Fee say about your
catsuit?” she asked. “I bet she had a fit.”

“She didn’t like it
much.”

Some boys standing
by the monkey bars whistled at us as we walked by. We ignored them
in the usual girlish fashion.

“Why have you been
trying so hard to get rid of me?” I asked her, suddenly. “Even back
in school you tried to do that. Why couldn’t you just live and let
live, Serena?”

“What are you
talking about? I thought you were my best friend.” She looked me
full in the face, as if I were crazy, as if everything I thought I
remembered was wrong. After all, the Night could be tricky, maybe
it didn’t want me to remember the truth. When she looked at me that
way I wanted to believe her. We could be friends; I would be
popular, like her. I could show her my new, improved house. I bet
she’d like it this time.

This time. Because
the last time...

Your house looks shabby because it’s a reflection of
you...

Regardless of what
might have happened when we were kids, I certainly remembered the
dirty tricks she had played all Night.

“Your letters,” I
reminded her. “All along, you’ve been trying to shove me back into
the waking world.”

“Don’t you want to
go back?”

“No!”

“But you don’t
belong here.” A little line appeared between her brows. “You just
aren’t cut out for this kind of life, Hazel. Even your name is too
ordinary.”

I blushed “It’s a
beautiful name.”

She smiled and
shrugged. “You never could stand to lose. Sometimes you even
cheated at games, Hazel. Remember?”

Actually, I didn’t.
And even if I had done that, “We were children then.”

“We’re children
now.”

She sounded happy
about it. Lightning flashed over our heads, and the other kids
rushed around in excited play. They sensed something was in the
air, but I felt less excited with every passing moment. All those
years ago, I had been the one to challenge Serena to that contest.
She humiliated me when she passed judgement on my house, and I
wanted to prove I was as good as she was. But I had no plan when I
got to school that day; the idea had occurred to me spontaneously,
at recess.

If only I could
remember how it had turned out! Had I won? If so, why didn’t I feel
the urgency I had before? I wondered if I should challenge her then
and there, or wait for some kind of cue.

Music drifted
toward us on the wind. Someone had brought a radio. They were over
by the baseball diamonds, some big boys who looked dangerous and
interesting. They looked too old to be at our school. They had
noticed us, too. I started to walk toward them.

“What do you think
you’re going to do?” asked Serena. “Dance? Like we did before?”

“So you
remember.”

She threw her
lovely head back and laughed. “Things are a little different now,
Hazel. We were evenly matched then, I’ll grant you that. But I have
lived a thousand years to your seventeen, and I’m not just a girl
anymore, no matter what appearances are.”

“Neither am I.”

“I won’t do it.”
She stopped in her tracks and glared at me, all pretense at humor
gone. Her anger just made her look lovelier. “You’ll have to dance
by yourself. You’ll look like a fool, jumping around in your
catsuit like you had the body to do it justice.”

I resisted the urge
to glance down at my breasts. I could feel them growing again, and
I didn’t want to jinx them. They weren’t back to size B yet, but I
knew they were getting there.

“You won’t compete
with me because you’re afraid to lose,” I said.

She gave me a smile
so full of scorn and pity I felt withered .

“That’s why you
tried to trick me with those letters,” I went on, desperately.
“That’s why you wanted me out of the way!”

“I sent the letters
because I knew you would be stupid enough to believe them. It’s as
simple as that.”

I wanted to slap
her. I felt my hand start to move, and then one of the boys called,
“Cat fight! Cat fight!” And they all laughed. The laughter was
sobering. I turned my back on Serena and walked toward the boys.
After a moment, she was back at my side.

The boys watched us
coming, their eyes looking us over in a way that made me wonder if
my boobs might have made it back to grown-up size, after all. They
seemed older than they had a moment before, more like teenagers.
Their chests, bare under leather jackets, showed muscle.

“Is that your
radio?” I asked a boy who could have been a younger version of the
blond biker, with hair like gold and eyes that tilted over high
cheekbones. He smiled with white teeth.

“You like this
station?” He turned the sound up. The music was fast and hard.

“Perfect,” I
said.

“No!” A
black-haired boy grabbed the radio out of the other boy’s hands and
turned it off. “Don’t waste the batteries.”

They glared at each
other over the radio. They both had dark blue eyes. “Give it back,”
said the blond.

“No. Fight me for
it.”

“This is not our
fight. Let them do what they must.”

“No,” said the
black-haired boy. The blond lifted his chin, then lowered his right
hand in a sharp, chopping movement. As if on cue, the sound of
motorcycles filled the air, and the Wild Hunt appeared down the
road. They roared up to the fence and in through the narrow gate,
tearing the dirt and grass up as they came. Serena screamed, and
all the other kids began to scream too. She turned to run, but I
pushed her to the ground.

She twisted like a
cat and landed in a crouch, glaring up at me in rage. But it was
too late. The Wild Hunt had surrounded us, driving all of the other
kids and the teachers off the playground.

“A vote!” cried the
blond boy, who looked even older. His hair was a wild mane now, and
his jacket parted to reveal a medallion in the shape of a mask.
“Shall these two beautiful girls dance for us or not?”

“Dance!” shouted
everyone but the black-haired one, the one who had dumped me on
that lonely road to nowhere. He gave me a sullen glare, then
lowered his eyes.

“I can do nothing
about it,” he conceded.

The blond took me
by the hand and helped me up onto a large, concrete pipe which lay
on its side. He turned on the radio, found the station with the
hot, fast music, and turned it up high.

I just listened for
a moment, snapping my fingers and feeling the beat. I let my body
move, subtly at first, and then with energy. The Wild Hunt started
to clap and whistle. They inspired me to new heights. After a
moment I could feel Serena up there beside me, and the competition
was on.