A Dark-Adapted Eye Read online

  A Dark-Adapted Eye

  Heather Crews

  A Dark-Adapted Eye

  Heather Crews

  Copyright © 2013 by Heather Crews

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the author

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  To Stacey and Lynnette

  one

  event horizon: the invisible boundary around a black hole past which nothing can escape the gravitational pull, not even light

  At eighteen, newly graduated, I was daring and exuberant. Rebellious. I thought so that morning, anyway, looking in the bathroom mirror with my serious eyebrows pulled down low. I’d put a pink streak at the front of my long, dark brown hair after my best friend had convinced me. Now I pulled the shower-damp strands over my shoulders, examining the change. I wondered if Les would notice it.

  Flipping my hair back, I left the bathroom. In the kitchen I fixed myself some cereal and settled down at the round table to eat it.

  Ivory was stretched out on the orange, zigzag-striped living room couch, flipping back and forth between news channels. Seeing me, he sprang up and joined me at the table.

  “I think it’s time you learned about vampires,” he said as I lifted a spoonful to my mouth. I stared out the sliding glass back door, ignoring him. “I’ll teach you to shoot, and Les can show you how to use a knife. Maybe you can even take a few self-defense classes.”

  “You don’t even know if they’re real,” I said disparagingly. Because of these so-called vampires, Ivory barely allowed me to go outside after dark anymore, despite that I was now legally an adult. “This is stupid.”

  “Trust me, Asha, they’re real. Haven’t you been watching the news?”

  For months, there had been semi-regular reports of vampire attacks, so many that people no longer felt comfortable attributing them to some sort of serial killer. I, however, stubbornly clung to the notion that mythical creatures were not among us.

  “Not really. Besides, should I believe everything I see on TV?”

  “No,” my brother replied calmly. “But you should believe this.”

  “Whatever,” I muttered.

  Ever since our mother’s death two years earlier, Ivory had been annoyingly persistent about this vampire thing. She’d died in a robbery at the gas station where she’d worked, but Ivory insisted it had been a vampire attack. I couldn’t believe my brother was so crazy, and I was aghast at the scattered reports of vampires on the news, both national and local. Was no one sane?

  “I’m just trying to protect you.”

  “If you were a star,” I said with menace, “you would be Arcturus.”

  “Identifying a vampire isn’t always easy,” Ivory continued, oblivious to my lack of interest. “But if you’re constantly on the lookout, you can usually spot one.”

  “And at that point, it will probably be too late,” Les quipped, emerging from the hall with his slouchy swagger and immediately turning me into a puddle.

  Ivory glared at him. “My point, Asha, is that things are different now, and they’re about to be a lot different. You’re a target.”

  “I’ve always been a target. Before, you were always warning me about rapists and murderers.”

  “Yeah, well, now they have fangs.”

  I grimaced at his words and allowed my gaze to travel to Les. He was scanning the news channels, just as Ivory had done. He was my brother’s best friend and had been living with us since almost immediately after Mom’s death. He’d taken Ivory’s old room and Ivory had moved to the master. I had naively hoped his closer proximity would spark some kind of change in our relationship, but even after two years of living under the same roof, he still acted most of the time as if I didn’t exist.

  Turning back to Ivory, I found myself fixed in a warning glare. I put on an innocent face, hoping I hadn’t looked too wistful. Scooping up the last bite of my cereal, I smiled. “You were saying?”

  “Be careful. And be prepared to defend yourself. You can’t delay the inevitable, and ignoring vampires won’t make them go away. Things are going to happen, Ash. Something’s coming. I can just . . . feel it.”

  With a noncommittal huff, I picked up my bowl and took it to the kitchen sink. I hated Ivory lecturing me all the time. After a violent incident, Dad had disappeared from our lives almost two years before Mom’s death. Once it had fallen to Ivory to take care of me, he took his role very seriously. Too seriously, I thought.

  A horn honked out front and I ran out to meet Criseyde before Ivory could say anything else. The back seat of her car was piled high with boxes and bags.

  “Whoa,” I said, climbing in. “I hope you don’t expect me to help you unpack.”

  “Nope, I just need help carrying it all up the stairs. I got it in the car by myself, but now my arms hurt.”

  Criseyde had dyed her hair a brilliant, experimental red, a much more dramatic look than my pink streak. She glanced at it in the rearview mirror as she pulled away from my house. “Do you think this looks too much like, I don’t know, ketchup?”

  “No. It looks like rubies. Just like you wanted.”

  “So what are we going to do tonight? We haven’t done anything to celebrate graduation yet, and we have to show off our new hair.”

  “I don’t know if I can do anything,” I said. “Ivory hasn’t let me go out in, like, forever.”

  “So what? You’re eighteen now.”

  “I know, but . . .” I shrugged and made a face. “Vampires.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s a problem.”

  I looked at her. “You believe all that stuff?”

  She shifted a little, looking uncomfortable. “Well, I don’t know. Everyone’s talking about it. I heard at work that it’s worse here than anywhere else in the country. There’ve been a lot of murders, apparently, and the bodies don’t have any blood in them. Plus so many people have actually seen vampires.”

  “Supposedly.” I wanted fervently to believe vampires were nothing more than creatures of folklore. I didn’t want them to be real and, if they were, I wanted to be able to ignore them. I didn’t want scary things in my world. I wanted everyone to let me have my denial.

  “Nobody I know is dead, thankfully,” Cris continued. “They say this stuff is happening mostly downtown. Which is where everything happens anyway.”

  The first time Criseyde and I had ever talked to each other was because of a Spanish project we’d been assigned to work on together in tenth grade. I’d seen her in the halls, hanging with popular girls and bad girls, so I never thought she’d want to be friends with me.

  “Those girls don’t listen,” she’d told me, surprising me by confiding in the first place. “And they don’t care what I have to say. Sometimes I just want someone to talk to.”

  She needed someone who could talk back, too, and though we were nothing alike on the surface—she was vivid and enthusiastic, whereas I was quiet and predictable—we got along surprisingly well. Most people at our school had tended to judge her based on her appearance. It was true her short skirts and tight shirts afforded her a certain reputation among our classmates, but I couldn’t have cared less what anyone said. It turned out she was loyal, made me laugh, and had the ability to make me do things I wouldn’t have done on my own. Like put a pink streak in my hair.

  “Did you ever think about, like, where you’re going to live someday?” she’d whispered to me one time across the table in the school library. “Who you’re going to be?” We hunched toward each other with our books propped up so the teachers couldn’t see us talking. We’d discovered a common love for
eighties music, French films, and the color red. It wasn’t much, but best friends were born in an afternoon.

  We reached her new apartment, a small studio in a green-colored complex much closer to her work than her parents’ house was. Helping her haul all her stuff up the gravel-encrusted steps, I wondered if I’d ever have my own place. Ivory and Les had worked hard to finish paying off the house after Mom’s death and because of their efforts, I didn’t even need a job. I longed for some fraction of independence, though, something like what Criseyde had achieved for herself. I wasn’t particularly adventurous, but I still wanted to go places and do things.

  After we’d lugged up all the boxes, I put my hands on my hips and surveyed my friend’s new apartment. Criseyde had opted not to bring her wrought-iron bed from home and had bought a bright blue futon instead. Still, I had doubts that all her stuff would fit comfortably in a space not much larger than my bedroom.

  “Where are you going to put all your clothes?” I peeked beneath the flap of one of the boxes and spied something with sequins.

  Her cat-green eyes traveled to the small, narrow closet. She didn’t have a dresser either. “I’m not sure. I’ll have to get creative.”

  “You’re the only one I know of who already has her own place. Dorm rooms don’t count.”

  “Well, I’ve been saving for four years. I’ve earned this.” She looked around proudly.

  Criseyde’s parents had money, enough that she probably didn’t have to work if she didn’t want to, but it was nothing to her. She’d gotten a job as soon as she was old enough to work and had saved enough to get her own apartment. Now that we were out of school, she planned to work full time to pay the rent.

  “We’re definitely going out tonight,” she said.

  “All right,” I relented. “I wasn’t doing anything except . . .”

  “Stargazing?”

  “Yeah.” I smiled sheepishly and spared a fond thought for the binoculars Ivory had recently rescued from a thrift store for me. “There’s a full moon tonight.”

  “Everyone else is taking some fancy trip or getting expensive laptops or something. I wish I was on a plane to Paris, but this is the next best thing.” Cris grinned. “Besides, we are going to have so much more fun than anyone from our class!”

  I laughed, knowing it was probably true. Criseyde made everything fun. “Get some stuff and we’ll go to my house and get ready.”

  “What about Ivory?”

  “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” I said in a lofty tone. She grinned approvingly.

  I was rather astonished at my sudden change of attitude, since I always tried to follow the rules and do what was expected of me. Maybe it was Cris, whose presence always made me feel braver, or maybe it was the pink streak in my hair, but I was going out tonight, no matter what Ivory had to say about vampires.

  We drove back to the house, a rather ugly but cozily familiar structure of pale beige stucco and dark brown wood trim. The carport was vacant, but Cris parked on the street anyway.

  I was glad we could avoid seeing Ivory and Les before heading out. Now that I was eighteen Ivory may not have had a real say in where I went or when, but I decided it was better if I kept certain things to myself. That way he wouldn’t worry and I wouldn’t feel guilty for not listening to him.

  Cris and I didn’t even have a chance to start getting ready, however, before we heard the roar of Les’s Shadow and the rugged wheeze of Ivory’s truck pulling into the driveway. A moment later a tall girl with shoulder-length black hair entered the house, scanning the living room as if it didn’t meet her expectations, though she’d already seen it a few times. She was Zella, Les’s current girlfriend. I knew her name, though she’d never actually introduced herself to me. Les hadn’t bothered with introductions either. I felt speechless in the face of her sharp, intimidating beauty.

  Les and Ivory came in the door after her. Like Cris and me, they were so different from each other and always had been. Ivory, tall and Viking blond, the perfect son, perfect student, impossibly good, always right and aiming to please. Bad boy Les, with his string of girlfriends and reputation for delinquency, who rode a motorcycle without a helmet.

  He was tall and lean, dressed in worn jeans and a white shirt and his black motorcycle jacket, like he always was. A lock of his silky, light brown hair constantly slipped down across his forehead. His translucent pale green eyes were guarded and never seemed to turn in my direction.

  I had been in love with him for as long as I could remember. Well, at least since I was nine. He was twenty-one, like my brother. The problem, though, was that most of the time he didn’t seem to think of me in any capacity other than Ivory’s little sister.

  Quickly I averted my gaze before he or Zella caught me staring. She didn’t seem like the forgiving type.

  It was on the tip of my tongue to inform Ivory of my plans for tonight, as I was used to doing, but I caught Criseyde’s wide-eyed look and thought better of it. I started to drag her back to my room so we could get ready, but Ivory stopped me.

  “There’s something you need to see,” he said, reaching for the TV remote. “Both of you.”

  Criseyde made an impatient sound. I just shrugged and waited. Ivory was always showing me vampire-related news clips and it was easier just to watch them and be done rather than argue.

  This news story surprised me, however, and I slowly lowered myself to the couch to watch it.

  “—alarming live footage,” the news anchor was saying. The screen switched to a helicopter shot of a highway outside of town. In the desert twilight, several figures walked toward the city in scattered formation. Dozens of them. As the camera followed their slow progress, I could see stopped traffic and curious motorists getting out of their vehicles to take pictures. The mysterious figures moved as if in a trance and seemed not to care they were walking in the middle of a highway.

  “It remains unclear where the vampires came from, or how long they have been walking,” the anchor said. “Las Secas appears to be their undisputed destination, however. What will this influx of bloodthirsty creatures mean for the local population?”

  The anchor, delivering her monologue in an impartial, toneless voice, snapped her papers together. She looked at the camera, her brow beginning to knit with worry. She disappeared for the weather report.

  “They’re coming here,” Ivory said, disbelieving.

  “I thought they were already here,” I said. “That’s what you’ve always said, anyway.”

  “They are. They’ve been coming here for a while. It’s just that the general population didn’t know about vampires. Even when Mom got killed, they were still just a myth. Ever since then they’ve become more and more mainstream. Now it’s like they don’t care who knows about them.”

  “Nobody’s prepared to deal with that many vampires,” Les said. “One on one, yeah. But that, what we just saw . . . there’s so many.”

  “One on one?” I said.

  He and Ivory exchanged a look. “Ah . . .”

  “Didn’t you know, Ash?” Ivory asked.

  “Know what?”

  “We hunt vampires. We have for two years now, almost. We started after Mom died.”

  “What?” The word was spoken in triplicate, expressing my astonishment as well as Zella and Criseyde’s. “Why would I know that?” I said. “No one ever tells me anything.”

  “It’s been worse here than anywhere else in the country,” said Les, barely glancing at Zella. “They don’t need people to hunt vampires anywhere else, for some reason.”

  “I didn’t know anyone needed vampire hunters,” I said in a small voice.

  “I’ve been telling you,” Ivory said.

  “Yeah. Well. Are we even sure those people on the highway are vampires? They could just be . . . weird cult people. Or something.”

  “They’re vampires. You think the news is going to claim something like that without being able to back it up?” He went to the back door and dre
w the blinds tightly shut.

  “This can’t happen,” I said, eyes fixated on the TV. Just this morning I had been vehemently denying the existence of vampires, refusing to believe in them no matter what anyone told me. Now they were coming to overtake my hometown for some unknown reason.

  As expected, the coverage of the vampires ambling elegantly, inexplicably, along the highway into town continued throughout the night. It seemed as if some hypnotic force drew them to us, and their numbers only seemed to grow. There was an emergency conference in Washington, D.C, the outcome of which people all over the country awaited anxiously.

  People were leaving Las Secas in a panic, not willing to wait for the government’s verdict. The camera followed them too, hastily packed cars zooming along the outgoing highway. It seemed as if half the population was getting out and soon traffic had backed up for a couple miles in a long line of headlights. Some of the vampires walked right alongside the cars and a few people got nervous enough that they steered off into the desert to drive in the dirt.

  For the rest of the night our world revolved around the TV. The footage varied seldom, and we were rapt. We watched the footage greedily, almost ceaselessly, certain we were watching the beginnings of our own doom.

  Zella stormed out sometime around midnight, angry that Les wouldn’t leave with her, or at least divert his attention from the news. Les’s short-lived relationships always ended messily for some reason. He reacted to Zella’s absence with indifference, lifting one shoulder in a shrug when she slammed the door.

  “Sorry,” he muttered blandly.

  “Good riddance to her,” Ivory said.

  “How come you don’t have a girlfriend, Ivory?” Cris asked, losing interest in the TV when a cheerful commercial for a steam mop interrupted the intensity of the news.

  His face hardened at the question and faint pink spots appeared along the tops of his cheekbones. “I just haven’t found anyone I like enough.”

  Ivory was handsome, smart, kind, and athletic, and he’d had plenty of dates in school, but girls had never really interested him much. He always had a list of quibbling reasons why he didn’t want to continue seeing the girl he’d taken to prom or homecoming, and now his dating life had pretty much fizzled out altogether.