Chapter 8

Nathan Marsh

It's time for a little bit of good, old-fashioned misbehavior. Not too much anymore, really, since the family I live with considers me to be over eighteen now. There's an agreement with my 'parents' that I may stay at the house without rent as long as I remain in good standing for my last year of school. There's really no reason for them to forbid me from leaving the house at nine in the evening to drive to Wyoming, but at the same time, it would in theory be hard for me to pay attention at school tomorrow.

The weekend would be a much better time for me to take an overnight and not cause any trouble with my cover family, but Emily will be gone in the morning for several days, and I'm certain that things with Carl and Ivy are about to sour quite severely, since she is at this very moment out with Ben.

Being able to drive very fast and without headlights, I cover the miles to the state line in just a couple or hours, and then find myself in Pangbourne a couple of hours later. The little town of barely ninety people is dead quiet at nearly two in the morning. All of the houses are dark, and there's a light smell of wood smoke in the air from a few homes that have a stove burning to fend off the chill in the air.

One of the houses has neither wood nor propane burning to keep it warm. I can barely detect its occupant, whose body is barely above the temperature of the air around it, but the computer it is sitting at shines clearly in my sight. This is the one I want to know about.

She has game cameras around the home, and I can detect the wires of burglar alarms around the doors and windows. Her attempts at warding against my kind are unskilled, though, amateurish and rushed. I must have scared her when I removed the other hunter from consideration back in January, but she has not maintained her wards around the property. The outer circle around her yard is so insignificant that I can pass the boundary freely without hesitation or alerting her at all, especially since I am keeping my mortal form mostly intact and my true nature mostly suppressed.

I creep up to one of the windows and find that even in the dark of night, the blackout curtains are drawn. The thick fabric hides even the sound of the keyboard from my sensitive ears. Since the vampire inside seems quite intent on whatever is on its screen, I come around to the detached garage. The physical burglar alarm is easy to spot. The more subtle protections take some more examination to locate and care to circumvent. There is a ward on every door, but like the outer circle, she does not have the skill to set one properly against one as strong as I am. I look behind me, and can detect a more serious protection for the house itself, possibly set by someone stronger and more experienced, but it has not been properly maintained. Still, it would take me a lot more time than I have available if I wished to go through it without alerting her.

Once I get past the door and into the garage, I take a quick inventory. On the surface, it looks like the garage of somebody who loves to work their machines hard, and takes fastidious care of them. The truck is a big dual-wheeled pickup. The motorcycle is a KTM Duke 690 adventure bike, and there are two ATVs. Red tool chests and a workbench line one wall. A mountain bike hangs from the rafters. The concrete floor is sealed and swept, not a thing is out of place. The pickup and one of the ATVs have hefty, rugged tool boxes mounted on them. I pick the lock on the one on the ATV, and find that underneath a tray for smaller tools, there's a hidden compartment. Inside, I find a pistol loaded with silver bullets, silvered blades, and other implements for hunting other vampires. They all have the signature drop of blood in a drop of blood sigil of the Negre vampire clan.

There's a part of me that wants to finally end this hunt I've been on for the past four years, looking for this particular hunter. But for one thing. Ivy's recent divination had inspired me, and I did some work of my own, using my sight to look around the corners and into the shadows of the future. The only ones where Ivy lives beyond the next month have this hunter in them. So I need to find out what she's up to.

Unfortunately, I have no means of intercepting whatever she's looking for online. I am good, but nowhere near good enough to get into the house and just look over her shoulder undetected. Another look at her weapons shows me she's only concerned with a vampire, not with a werewolf or a mortal. Sure, she's got the standard protections up against lycanthropes, but the kit she has is very specialized for hunting her own kind.

Interestingly, there's nothing set up for my kind, even though I had taken great care with the other hunter I dispatched a few months back to make it clear exactly what sort of creature was responsible. Perhaps they consider the encounter between myself and the other vampire to have been a truly random occurrence. It is no secret that my kind have no love for their kind.

In that case, the nearly single-minded focus on hunting another vampire tells me this one might be aware of Ben's presence in the area. That she is not preparing for werewolves tells me she hasn't gotten close enough to Ben to know that that Carl is in the equation. Which means that Ivy hopefully has not come to her attention yet, either.

But my peek into the future tells me Ivy's survival beyond the next few weeks is tied into this particular hunter. So I do not think it will be long before she narrows in on Ben. And as much as I dislike Ben, he is tied into Ivy's fate as well. I still do not know what that fate is, though. Just that she has drawn Ben, Carl, and myself to her. Unfortunately, all three of us have histories as well. I just hope that Ivy does not get caught up in them.

But I have lingered longer than is safe. If the hunter catches me in her garage, things will not go well for her in the ensuing fight. I carefully let myself out of the garage and undo whatever disruption I've done to her alarms and tells. I wait a few blocks down, watching her house for an hour, but she doesn't leave. I would like to stay longer, but I need to get on the road back to Stokers Mill for school, and the hunter is unlikely to come out to start something closer to dawn than midnight.

I make it back home barely in time to sneak back into my room before somebody comes to wake me up. Kate cocks an eyebrow at me while she sits at the table eating a bowl of cereal. Since I don't sleep, I am usually out of my room before Kate, and ever since my body has been big enough to reach the stove, I have made her breakfast when I've heard her start waking up. Even though I keep to what mortals would consider a vegan diet, I have no qualms against cook her eggs and sausage, buttered toast, or hash. Over time, it has become a ritual between us, the way we start the day. I think having that daily touchpoint with somebody as good-hearted as Kate has gone a long way towards tempering my occasional tendency to let my blood run hot. It has become especially important to both of us this spring, as Kate will be moving to Boston at the end of August to start college.

Our parents may not have noticed anything – they can be rather dense that way. But Kate most definitely knows the only reason I would not have been in the kitchen before she was out of bed is if I were out of the house. Her look is a silent way of asking me if I were up to trouble she might need to cover me for.

"Do I even want to know?" she asks, after our parents head out for work.

"I was up in Wyoming," I tell her, fishing around in the fridge for some berries and an orange. I rather enjoy being able to tell a positively ridiculous truth to her.

"Well, I hope you gassed up the car. It's your turn to drive today."

It isn't until mid-morning that I get a chance to talk to Ivy alone. Our second period classes are next to each other, and we have AP Chem together for third. Teachers long ago figured out that I was a bad influence on Ivy's lab work, so I know that I've got just a few minutes before we get to class and end up at lab benches on the opposite sides of the room.

"Good evening last night?" I ask her. She's still stepping pretty light, even well into the school day.

"I know. It's pretty obvious, isn't it?" she asks, smiling at me. Then her face becomes serious. "You're not about to lean on me over Ben are you? I already know I'm going to get an earful from Carl and Kate. It would be nice if one of my closest friends would be a bit supportive."

"Did it feel right to you?" I ask her.

Without hesitation, Ivy says, "Yes. It did. The only time it has so far." She looks up and to the side briefly, and the smile returns to her face. "Yes. Last night was right."

"As long as that remains true, let me wish you well, then."

"Thank you," she says, quietly. "I think you're the only one other than me that kind of gets Ben. I know you don't like him, but I think you at least understand him."

"As long as he continues to treat you well, perhaps he will grow on me."

"He definitely finds you interesting. I don't think he really has you figured out, but I think he'd like to know a lot more about you."

Oh, Ivy. Ben certainly would like to know more about me. I am quite surprised he still has not even hazarded a guess about me. Well, the distraction of a pretty woman can do that, I imagine, and that hunter I finally found last night has definitely been on his mind.

"There still seems to be something you are hesitating about, though," I say to Ivy. "Like you are not completely convinced this is the right thing for you." Here I am decidedly playing unfair. She is hiding that uncertainty very well. If I hadn't been out to her circle soon after she had done her divination, I would not be able to see that her words have confidence, but there is a little bit of an act to them.

"Maybe I'm just trying to temper my excitement," Ivy says. "I mean, this is the first guy that's really lit a fire in me, but I'm also out of here in a few months. Ben has no idea what he's doing after he's done here. Hasn't applied for colleges yet, doesn't know if he wants to wander for a while before trying, or if he'll just go a different route for his future. That frees him up to follow me wherever I go, but is the morning after even the time to be thinking about something like that?"

"Oh, I know."

"Yeah. You and Rachel had that before she left last year."

"Following her was not an option for me, though."

"Yeah," Ivy says. "But it was the same. You started something when you both knew everything was going to change. Do you regret you two breaking up when she left?"

"No. Nor do I regret having been with her," I say. "We kept it light, you know. Because the future was so unsettled."

"She told me. Falling deeply in love with you would have confused everything."

"Very much so," I say. "A lot of emotions hit all at once the day you realize you have certain feelings for someone. Then the first time you act on them, they come at you all over again. We had something intense in its own way, despite knowing it was just for a few months. But they were some great months. If we hadn't looked at it that way from the start, it would have been much harder to part when the time came without things getting very confused and somebody getting hurt very badly."

"I'm just..." Ivy gestures with her hand, as if trying to pluck thoughts and words from the air. "I know the risks in getting too involved with Ben. Emotionally or physically. But I've been so careful and cautious all my life. And now that I've opened the door to those feelings I've never had before, I'm feeling them like you wouldn't believe." She looks at me, and screws her face up into a frown. "I kind of want to take it all. Take everything I've denied myself, or not let myself feel or think. I just want to embrace these feelings without reserve or remorse."

"And you are not sure it is safe to do this with Ben?"

"I don't worry about Ben hurting me," Ivy says, just as we get to the classroom. She looks at me again, still with that questioning frown on her face. "I don't' know. I have to think some more." She shakes her head, and heads straight for her lab bench.

This leaves me just dying to know what her question was in her circle the other night. It most definitely was not, 'Should I take up with Ben?' It does not seem as if it was, 'How far should I go with Ben?'

Something tells me that she has not brought this question to her grandmother. And even if she had, I am quite sure Emily would keep the conversation confidential, unless there were something leading to immediate or extreme danger to Ivy. Witches are extraordinarily good at keeping each other's confidence, and I know that Emily would be especially cautious about anything she told me, even if it were necessary to break the seal for Ivy's safety. To go out to her circle would do me no good, either. I can guess at generalities by the evidence a spell leaves behind, but no specifics. To watch her perform a divination would give me no insight, as she would like not ask her questions out loud, nor would the answer be audible to any but her.

Plus, and here is perhaps a sign that Kate's good heart has infected me in some very deep but subtle ways, if Ivy has a question of personal or intimate nature that is of such importance to her that she would seek magical guidance for it, perhaps the right thing to do is to give her privacy around it. Unless and until I see some sign that she is in immediate or extreme danger with Ben.

Ivy is tremendously important. This I know. But she is also a young woman exploring her body and heart for the first time. She deserves the chance to feel all of its joys and risk all of its heartbreak fully and without undue interference. She deserves the chance to take her own leaps of faith, to chart her own course or make her own mistakes as she will.

However, I still love Ivy deeply, and at the first sign that Ben will bring her to harm, the vampire will find out exactly what I am and how powerless he is in the face of my wrath.