Defy the Dark (13 page)

“Medium-sized buildings,” he said. “Crouch first. Don't go for a skyscraper. I'd describe that as o'erarching ambition.”

Berthe twisted the pull around her wrist, plastic beads digging into her flesh hard. She could not believe he was trying to make a joke.

“So you're—” she said, and could not find the words in her sour, dust-dry mouth. She tugged hard at the blind. “You're like me?”

The blind tumbled down with a rattle and a bang, the plastic cord suddenly slack around her wrist and sudden sunlight flooding in, making her blink.

Her ears filled with the sound of the boy hissing, a cat's noise from a boy's throat. She saw him move fast, backing away from the sudden sunlight and into a different dark corner.

There was a hand held up, protecting his face, but she could still see his bared inhuman teeth.

“No,” he whispered. “I'm not like you.”

This last revelation was too much, the world of strangeness expanding too far. Berthe could not bear another second in this little house.

She turned and ran, as she'd wanted to before, out into the sunlight where he could not follow her, and she told herself that it would not happen again.

 

S
he kept telling herself that. She sneaked in through her bedroom window and pretended she had got in late and slept in her own bed that night, tucked in innocent and harmless under her sheets.

She told herself that when she lied to her friends that she was all better now, she told herself that when she refused to go on the next camping trip, even though she had always signed up to go on every trip before. She told herself that, lying in her safe bed, under her safe sheets, with the windows open so she could see the moon had not become bright and dangerous yet.

She could hear her parents having whispered fights all the way across the house, and even though they were ordinary fights that left no trace of bitterness behind, she had never known they had those fights before. She didn't want to know now. She could hear Natalie and Leela murmuring secrets meant to exclude her, and even though she knew she'd done the same thing with both of them, that every pair of friends had secrets between just the two of them, actually hearing it hurt.

That she was able to hear all these things hurt worse. The scar on the inside of her elbow was a silver crescent moon, shining and smooth on her skin, but the moon was long past crescent.

She could not get away from the world or herself. The night and her body lay in wait to betray her.

She stopped telling herself that it would not happen again, because she could not bear to think about it at all.

But she remembered, as well as the fear and pain, what the boy at the coffee shop had said.

You don't want to hurt anyone, do you?

She walked across town as the sun died, on the night of the next full moon, and knocked on a gray door.

The boy from the coffee shop let her in.

It happened again.

 

B
erthe came downstairs in another pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt that read
BEING PESSIMISTIC WOULDN'T WORK ANYWAY
. She was not tempted to run out the door this time. She had spent a month running already.

The boy was standing in the same shadowed corner he had stood in the last time. Berthe noticed he had fixed the blind.

He had loomed large in her mind, the moment of hissing and teeth overwriting everything else, but he looked very much like he had in the coffee shop, dark hair swept back in a particular, deliberate way, wearing fingerless gloves of all things. The room looked exactly the same as well, down to the cup of tea and the cookie on the table.

“Thank you,” said Berthe. She felt she had to, even though she didn't know how to mean it.

“You're welcome,” he said quietly. He gestured toward the table. “Do you want a cup of tea?”

“Yes,” Berthe said. “All right.”

She walked toward the table and sat down in the chair. “Can I—”

“I do not drink . . . tea,” said the boy, and smirked to himself before his face smoothed out, serious and pale. “I don't eat. It's for you.”

It made her feel strange, to realize that he had gone out and bought tea and cookies for her last month, laid them out thinking she might be hungry.

She took a sip of the tea. It was cooling, but she saw the strips of sunlight on the kitchen counter and knew he could not have made it later. The whole room had sneaky pieces of sunlight in it.

The heavy shutters and door upstairs clearly formed his refuge, and she had exiled him from it.

“Thanks,” she said again, and meant it a little this time. “The tea's good. Is there a cure?”

“It isn't a sickness,” said the boy. “It's who you are now.”

“So that would be a no.”

He was silent, though his attention stayed fixed on her. Now that Berthe was looking back at him, she saw why he might wear glasses: they helped hide his eyes' strange brightness and the way they tracked movement, more alert than a human's would.

Or maybe he needed glasses. Could a creature like him need glasses?

“You knew what I was,” Berthe said, utterly unable to talk about him smelling her. “You recognized it. So you must have met other people like me.”

“I knew one. She was kind to me,” said the boy. “But she can't help you. I'm sorry. She's dead now.”

“What did she die of?” Berthe heard her voice shake, felt her lips tremble, and put the cookie to her lips to hide it.

“She killed herself,” said the boy softly. He added, “I'm sorry,” again.

“I'm the one who should be sorry,” Berthe said, swallowing desolation and a mouthful of cookie so dry it scraped her throat. “She was your friend.”

Killed herself,
Berthe thought despairingly. Because she hurt somebody, or because she could not live being like Berthe was now a moment longer? She didn't know, and the woman could not tell her now. She could not tell Berthe anything.

“What about the—the person who bit me in the woods?” Berthe asked desperately. “They must be like me. Couldn't we find them? Couldn't you smell them?”

The boy's eyebrows rose. “I'm not a sniffer dog,” he said mildly. “Even when you were human, I'm sure you could smell a pie. I don't imagine you could wander the city streets and track a pie down by scent.”

“Isn't there some way?” Berthe said. She put down the cookie and the tea and put her face in her hands, too wretched to be embarrassed. “Isn't there any way?”

The boy cleared his throat, a soft apologetic sound, after she had sat with her head in her hands for some time. She looked up and saw him looking at the floor, at one of the strips of sunlight.

“They might still be in the woods,” he said. “If they are, I don't think they'll be able to help you. But if you want, I'll go with you to look.”

“Yes,” Berthe said. Any relief at this point felt like overwhelming joy. “Yes, please. Thank you. Can we go now?”

“Well,” the boy said, “no. I fear that if I burst into flames and died in agony, it might hamper the expedition somewhat.”

“Oh.” Berthe felt like an idiot and also just felt lost. She had seen him leap away from the fallen blind, seen his teeth, but every moment in his company it seemed more unreal. She could run around the room pulling up blinds, and though he seemed solid and real, he would turn to ash. A shudder rang through her, all the way to her aching bones. “Can we go tonight?”

The boy said, “Of course.”

“Thank you,” Berthe said again. Every one of her thanks had become more real, by degrees. She turned away from her tea and the crumbs on the table, tilted her head so she was looking at him, at the strange eyes glittering behind his glasses. “I'm Berthe.”

“Berthe,” he said, pronouncing it correctly right off. “That's French, isn't it?”

“Yeah.”

Berthe always felt a bit awkward about her name. She didn't look elegant and French, dainty and well dressed like her mother, who she'd once heard described as everything a woman should be. Berthe was tall and blond with strong shoulders, like her dad. But they hadn't known what she would be like when she grew up.

The creepy guy from the coffee shop, the creature with the teeth who had saved her, said, “I'm Stephen.”

It was such an ordinary name, it made Berthe almost smile, and then bite on her lower lip in case that offended him.

He didn't look offended.

“I can't say it's nice to meet you, under the circumstances,” said Berthe at last. “But . . .”

He smiled, mouth closed and teeth hidden. It was, under the circumstances, quite a nice smile.

“Likewise.”

 

T
he woods near her town were not full of gnarled oaks and whispered legends of a curse. The trees were all pine trees, grown for lumber, with a lot of handy campsites. Berthe had gone hiking through these woods a hundred times and never felt the least alarm. She had been so absolutely sure that when it came right down to it, she was safe.

The woods at night, nobody but her and a relative stranger, were very quiet. It was also very bright, even considering that the moon was one night past full, a shining coin in the sky. Berthe could see the silver stir of pine needles as a tiny animal ran through them, yards and yards away. Every tree branch was a clear silver line struck against the sky.

When she looked at Stephen, he had his glasses off. She'd been right, she thought: he didn't need them for anything but concealment. His eyes looked silver, too, his pupils subtly wrong, darting after every movement in the wood.

Just like her eyes were. Berthe wondered what her eyes looked like to him.

“Which of us can see better?” she asked.

“I don't know,” Stephen answered. “Does it matter? We can both see very well. We are predators. But you're stronger and faster. My kind are built for a more cunning type of hunt.”

Predators. Hunt.
The words danced grotesquely in Berthe's mind.

Stephen blinked. “Sorry. That came out a great deal more disturbing than it sounded in my head. I'm afraid I'm out of practice with conversation.”

“You don't talk to people?” Berthe asked blankly.

“Not really,” said Stephen. “Not in depth. The less contact with other people, the less chance they'll notice I'm not aging. I can stay in one place longer.”

“You don't,” Berthe said. “You don't age. Right, obviously. Because that's how you work, with the no sunlight and the—not aging. And you talk like an old person. How old are you?”

You talk like an old person,
Berthe repeated to herself silently. She never had known how to talk to boys.

“Sixty-two,” Stephen answered.

Berthe stared.

“I know,” said Stephen. “It seems glamorous and otherworldly for someone like me to be a hundred years old, or two hundred. But there is the problem of getting there.”

It was a real age, an age that a person could be, the age for women with blue hair and blouses, for men with canes and tweed caps, for grandparents. That made it much harder to assign to the boy in front of her, his face smooth and his eyes faintly glowing.

“You wait until I'm a hundred years old,” Stephen said, mouth quirking. “The ladies will love it.”

“I'll be fifty-four by then,” Berthe told him.

There was a brief awkward pause.

“I meant the ladies in general,” Stephen said. “They will be lining up. I will have to carry extra dance cards, on account of how my dance card will be entirely full.”

There was another silence, broken by a rustle far away that made Stephen's head turn, chin lifting, scenting the air. Berthe turned with him, trying to make out whatever he did, and caught something: wild and strange, musk and fur. She wondered if that was how she smelled to him, and then she did not have time to wonder further: Stephen was running, fleet and sure, faster than any boy who looked like he did should have been able to. Faster than anyone should have been able to.

Berthe was fast. She didn't run track or anything, but she played lacrosse and in gym she tended to win races. She wasn't fast enough to keep up with Stephen, she knew, but she tried, anyway, and it was shockingly easy. Her feet found every place, tree roots and leaf drifts where she might have tripped or slipped, seeming not even there. It was like running over smooth ground, and she was past Stephen, toward the wild scent, with the wild wind in her hair.

There was a dark shape at the foot of a tree, and it twisted away from her and almost ran into Stephen, who hissed at it, teeth gleaming. For a moment Berthe felt a tremor run through her, a chill of profound unfamiliarity: that Stephen was not like her, and the shape between them was.

Except Stephen was here to help her, and this was the creature that had attacked her.

“Why,” Berthe said, voice tearing in the wind, “why is he still a wolf? It's not the full moon—he shouldn't be—”

“Some of you turn wild.” Stephen's voice was calm because it was always calm, but there was a slight strain to the calm now. “And you don't turn back.”

Berthe's heart banged in her ears like many doors slamming all at once: no answers, no hope, no help to be had, just a dumb thing with eyes shining up at her, green like her own but split with lines of yellow like lightning.

It was moving, low on the ground but with intent, toward Stephen.

The hair on the back of Berthe's neck stood up, but for once she didn't feel afraid. She felt—it was more like outrage, and she moved in her new smooth way and was standing between them, making a sound that was mangled by her human throat.

I won't let you: challenge: mine,
said the sound, and the animal backed away. It understood her.

It understood her because she was halfway to being an animal herself, because there were no answers but only this horror beyond words in the woods.