The Season of Risks

Dashay made me tell the story twice, and then she asked questions.



No, I said, the cat never touched me. I'd felt scared, yes, but I never thought the cat had come to hurt me.



It had moved the way a normal cat moves. It didn't smell or speak. And yes, I did feel its gaze on me, although it had no eyes.



Finally she seemed satisfied. She sat back on the living room sofa, her eyes bright and alert as if it were morning, not the middle of the night. Grace sat beside her, making small sounds of concern.



"I don't think she meant you any harm," Dashay said. "I do wish I'd been here to talk to her myself, but you said the right kind of words."



Dashay and my mother had some special intuitive power that allowed them to have conversations with animals. My father and I envied them.



"But why did she come here?" I sipped the mug of cocoa she'd made me. Cocoa, as if I were a child. But the warmth of the drink calmed me.



She rubbed her palms together. "Could be someone sent her. Or could be she wanted to check in on you, the way a friendly spirit will. Wanted to make sure you're not feeling too sad about her passing."



I'd felt more than sad; I'd felt guilty. Malcolm wouldn't have killed her if I hadn't lived close by, and if he hadn't felt the need to stalk my father and me. But I'd repressed those feelings as much as I could. Now I let my anger against him surge, and I let Dashay hear my thoughts.



She'd never met Malcolm, but she'd heard about him. "What's this fellow look like?"



"Tall, almost as tall as my father. Blond hair, a little long on top, parted on the side. Narrow nose and narrow eyes. I think they were gray. Some people might call him handsome, I suppose. He always wears suits-the tailored kind, like the ones my father wears. And he's very, very smart. When he talks, you believe everything he says."



Dashay listened hard to my description, and I knew she would remember it. "And you met up with him in Savannah?"



"He seemed different there." I set down the cocoa mug. "For a while I believed that he really was our family's friend. He can do that, the way he talks. Make you think up is down, left is right."



"Hah." Dashay didn't like smooth talkers. "Well, Mr. Malcolm better stay away from you now. Or he'll be dealing with me."



I felt so drained that I went to bed without asking her how the meeting with Bennett had gone. But next morning, that was the first question out of my mouth.



"Good morning," Dashay said in reply. She was drinking tea at the kitchen table, wearing one of her embroidered caftans, a long pink scarf wound through her hair.



One of her eyes winked at me over the rim of her cup. I poured myself a cup of tea and sat across from her. The kitchen walls, newly painted a glossy pale yellow, shone in the morning sunlight. There, while we ate toast spread with honey, she told me about Bennett.



"It's like you said," Dashay told me. "He claims he was drugged. The water he drank on the plane where he met that woman, he says something must have been in that water. Because after that he didn't think about me." Her voice sounded neutral, but I sensed emotions ran deep beneath each word. "Maybe it was the woman, not the water."



I thought of the Sirens, whose sweet songs were designed to trap and kill Odysseus, and of Circe, the enchantress who kept him under her spell for more than a year. But Greek myths aren't the only ones featuring femmes fatales; they turn up in Hebrew, Islamic, Teutonic, Celtic, and Polynesian tales, and probably many more that I haven't read. All around the world, women have been casting spells of enchantment for centuries.



"And now, he says, after months and months the spell is broken. He says one morning he woke up with my name in his mouth, and when that happened he came straight back here. And he's been calling me and pestering me for the last week, wanting to tell me all of this."



I couldn't help asking, "So what happened last night?"



She sighed. "I met him down at Flo's Place." It was the local bar-and-grill that catered to the vampire crowd. "He looked-not so good. Thin, you know? Can you picture him scrawny?"



The Bennett I'd known had been a big, healthy man, all muscle. "How can that be? He's a vampire."



She shook her head. "He's a half-and-half."



Like me. And I began to wonder: how vulnerable am I?



"Well, that fellow, he's a shadow of his old self. He's lost his house, his business."



I tried to remember what Bennett's business had been, but I wasn't about to interrupt her now.



"He asks me to give him another chance." Dashay had finished her tea. She looked into the empty cup, as if it might tell her something.



"Then you have to give him that chance." She hadn't asked me, but I felt sure I was right. "You have to try to forgive him. Look at my parents, all they've been through. They're still sorting things out, and they may end up apart in the end, but at least they're giving it a try."



She opened her mouth, but I wasn't finished yet. "Forgiveness means everything."



My voice rang with conviction. Where did that come from?



Then she smiled at me. "Little Miss Knows-It-All. How old are you now? Fifteen going on forty?"



I didn't mind her making fun of me. It was worth it, to see her smile.



We spent that day working around the farm: exercising and grooming the horses, cleaning the stables and the hives, weeding the gardens.



I never minded that kind of work. When I'd first come to Blue Heaven, I wasn't allowed to do chores. My mother had worried that I wasn't strong enough. Children of vampires and humans sometimes suffer from physical weaknesses that full-fledged vampires never experience, and in fact I'd been a fragile child. But once I crossed over-by biting a mortal-my constitution changed, and my stamina grew.



Still, hours of farmwork tested that stamina, and by the end of the day I was thinking of nothing more than a bath and bed.



And maybe a call from Cameron. Sometimes he called my cell phone at night, usually between ten and midnight, to tell me what his life on the road was like. At first the media had ignored him or treated his campaign as a joke; no third-party candidates ever got far, and at best they were considered spoilers, stealing votes from the main-party contenders. But as he made more appearances in more places, people had begun to take him seriously. Sometimes he asked my opinion of a line he planned to use in the next day's speech, and I felt happy to give it, although I wondered why he would listen to someone like me. My experience of the world was so limited, compared to his.



I took my bath early, before supper, and I was towel-drying my hair when Dashay came out from her room, wearing a chiffon dress.



"You're going out?"



"We're going out." She twirled to show me the thin yellow panels inset in her dress's white skirt. It reminded me of a wild iris. "I'm taking you to dinner at Flo's."



Flo's isn't a fancy place, but Dashay inspired me to put on a pale green sundress. Twenty minutes later, we were sitting in our favorite worn-leather booth, sipping Picardo. Logan, the bartender, came over to say hello, and some of the locals greeted us. Most vampires aren't overly social, even among themselves. We respect each other's need for privacy and space.



I looked around, half expecting to see Bennett, but didn't find him.



We dined on raw oysters, followed by fried ones-not so healthy, but delicious all the same. Oysters are full of zinc, oxygen, calcium, and phosphorus-also found in blood-which makes them another excellent substitute for vampires who don't bite humans.



It had been a long day, and we focused on the food. At eight Logan turned on a wall-mounted television set. Dashay made a face and began to protest, until she saw what was on: a debate among four presidential candidates. One of them was Neil Cameron.



The first thing I did was block my thoughts, but I knew I couldn't block my facial expressions. I moved sideways in the booth so that Dashay could see only half my face.



She glanced at me. "I didn't know you had so much interest in this political stuff."



I reminded her about my American Politics course last semester. I'd described it before, but so much had been going on, I said, that she must have forgotten. I babbled on until the debate began.



Cameron wore a dark suit, a light blue shirt, a dark blue tie. He smiled in the early minutes, when the camera was on him, and after that I found it hard to pay attention to anything the others said. What I did hear sounded a bit familiar-a rehash of points he'd made in a speech back in Savannah-but when the questions turned to health care issues, I tuned out the words entirely. Vampires don't need health insurance; they have their own practitioners and their own drugs, and a barter system to pay for them.



Dashay said something, but I kept my face turned to one side, my eyes fixed on Cameron's mouth. Then she waved her hands at me. "Hello!" she said, making an odd gesture with both hands.



"What does that gesture mean?"



"As I was saying, he's kind of cool, that Neil Cameron, making Mentori signs right on TV. He's a bold one."



"What are Mentori signs?"



"You don't know?" Dashay enjoyed discovering my pockets of ignorance. "Mentori is vampire sign language. It's a kind of code we use to communicate amongst ourselves. Nice when we can't speak or don't want to share thoughts."



My father hadn't used Mentori, and if my mother had, I'd never seen it. I looked back at the screen. Cameron's left hand extended, palm up, and his right palm met it at a forty-five-degree angle.



"That's the open mouth." Dashay repeated the gesture across the table. "I can't believe your mother didn't teach you this. It means 'time to fix the problem.'"



"Or 'time to bite.'" Logan stood next to our table. "Another round?"



Dashay nodded, and he left us. "Time to bite," she repeated in a low voice. "That's the low-class meaning."



"A sign can have different meanings?"



"Yes, yes. Same way that words do." Dashay looked back at the TV screen. "You see?"



Cameron was talking about the need to strengthen health benefits for the unemployed and homeless. Both palms faced upward now, and he raised them in short bursts, three times. "That means we need to act right now," Dashay said.



Logan set two glasses on our table. "It means 'it's dark outside,'" he said. "'Time to get up!'"



She ignored him, and he went back to the bar. "Cameron is letting the vampires know he's one of them. Risky, but maybe that will get him some of their votes."



I kept my eyes on the TV screen, waiting for the next shot of Cameron. Suddenly the debate ended, the commentators began rehashing it, and Dashay was saying, perhaps for the second time, "Something is wrong with your neck?"



I turned slowly to face her. "It's a little stiff," I said. "I felt a twinge this morning, when I was grooming the horses."



"Is that right." Her voice sounded soft.



I quickly changed the subject. "I thought we might see Bennett here tonight."



"We'll see him soon enough," she said in a tone that finished our conversation.



On the drive home, Dashay promised to teach me Mentori. "Tomorrow," she said. "Wait. Not tomorrow. I have to see a man about buying a horse."



She'd agreed to manage the farm while my mother was in Ireland. In the past, she'd handled most of the horse business, while Mae managed the honeybees and the herb gardens whose produce was traded for blood supplements and other necessities.



Now Dashay would have to do it all. She'd have her hands full, I thought. Was there a Mentori sign for that?



Dashay was gone by the time I got up the next morning. She'd left me a pan of oatmeal and a note: "Back for supper. You cook? Take my car to supermarket. Might be a guest."



I yawned as I reheated the oatmeal. The night before, I had stayed up as late as I could, fighting off sleep while I watched the face of my cell phone, willing it to ring. But Cameron was no doubt busy, while I would be living in a kind of limbo until classes began in September.



I thought about calling him. Instead, I took a shower, then spent nearly an hour staring at my face in the hallway mirror. If I focused hard, I could see my reflection, but it wavered, distorting my features. I saw a flash of blue eyes, a sweep of chestnut-brown hair; but everything always blurred.



That's a curse of vampires: to never have a clear sense of how we look. Contrary to what mortal "vampire experts" might have you believe, we are reflected in mirrors, unless we emutate-concentrate and turn invisible. But we can't see our own reflections except for a few seconds at a time. And photographs of us are usually blurred, since the electrons in our bodies instinctively shut down, stop reflecting light, when we're facing a camera. It's a protective mechanism. With disciplined practice, that instinct can be overcome-Cameron had trained himself to do it, but it had taken him nearly twenty years of practice, he'd told me.



What did Cameron see when he looked at me? I studied the mirror, squinting. Then I gave up. Twenty years of practice? Forty minutes was too long for me.



Hours later, as I was leaving the Sweetbay Supermarket in Homosassa, my cell phone rang. Cameron's voice said, "Can you talk?"



I got into Dashay's sedan. "Yes."



"Could you meet me for lunch?" Static and other voices buzzed behind his words.



"Where?"



"Are you in Tybee?"



"No," I said. "Homosassa."



"That's good," he said. "That's better." He gave me directions to a recreation area called Salt Springs in the Ocala National Forest.



As I drove back to Blue Heaven to put away the groceries, I wondered why his voice carried so much tension.



Salt Springs turned out to be a ninety-minute drive. The countryside rushed past me, greener and hillier than coastal Florida, but I didn't notice its details.



I stopped at a booth to pay the entry fee and hung a yellow tag from my rearview mirror. Then I drove into the park and followed Cameron's directions to Salt Springs. In its parking lot were three or four other cars, none of them Cameron's blue hybrid. Then he stepped out of a white compact model-Of course, I thought. He's driving a rental.



He wore a blue shirt and jeans. I had on jeans, too, and I'd borrowed one of Dashay's shirts: a silk tank top.



He smiled as I walked over to him, but he looked distracted. He made no move to embrace me, and he didn't say hello. "I wanted some time for us," he said, beckoning for me to get into the car.



Once we were inside, with the doors shut, he brushed his fingers lightly across my cheek. Then he started the car and drove down an unpaved road, bordered by tall pine trees, that meandered deeper into the park. Neither of us spoke until we left the car and stepped into the stillness of the forest. Carrying a plaid blanket and a canvas bag, we followed a sandy trail strewn with rust-colored pine needles past campsites and picnic tables. When we reached a clearing by a brook, we spread out the blanket and sat down.



"Hello," Cameron said.



I felt so giddy, so relieved to be sitting next to him, that I felt no need to say a word. He put an arm around my waist and I rested my head against his shoulder, and we sat there, watching water cascade over rocks.



And when he did speak, I wished he hadn't. "I've managed this badly," he began. "The timing is all wrong."



He said the campaign was taking off in ways he'd never expected could happen. "I planned to run as far as I could, to make a point for us, for all of the others," he said. "I didn't think I stood a chance with the general public."



The latest poll numbers were proving him wrong, he said. They showed him running neck and neck with the likeliest Republican and Democratic nominees. His campaign team was already at work in the largest states, organizing local workers and making sure prospective voters knew his name. He apparently had the Fair Share Party's endorsement all but sewn up. Political experts were predicting that, for the first time in the history of American politics, a third-party candidate could conceivably win the November election.



Why did all of his good news make me increasingly nervous?



He took his arm away, turned to sit facing me. "Have you told anyone about us?"



"Of course not." I'd kept him a secret from the beginning, without knowing exactly why.



"I hated to ask," he said. "But my staff tell me every part of my life will become public knowledge now, except of course-" He made a quick gesture that must have signaled being a vampire.



"I want us to survive the scrutiny," he said. "I want us to have a chance at a relationship of some sort." He took another deep breath. "That is, if you want one."



"You know I do." My voice sounded calmer and more confident than I felt.



He took my left hand in his. "Then I want to ask you to wait for me. We may not be able to see much of each other for a while, but I hope that you'll be patient. Wait till we know how far this train is going before you decide to get off."



I thought of lines from a Whitman poem: I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again / I am to see to it that I do not lose you.



"What will happen to us if you lose the race?"



He squeezed my hand. "Then you and I can sail away together and never worry about being 'public knowledge' again."



With those words he seemed to relax. He handed me a paper plate and served salad and fruit he'd picked up at a grocery somewhere. He told me he'd been a vampire since the American Revolution, and I thought, You're more than two hundred thirty years old?



"Does our age difference bother you?" He knew I was fifteen, masquerading as nineteen.



"Of course not. Does it bother you?"



He shrugged. "It bothers my staff a bit. But a roughly ten-year age difference-that can be managed." Cameron's current biography had him born in Florida thirty years ago. That made him the youngest presidential candidate to date and the first to run since a hotly debated constitutional amendment finally was approved, lowering the age requirement for candidates.



I was curious about his "real" age. "How old were you when you crossed?"



"Twenty-two," he said. "And no, I didn't know George Washington, or Paul Revere, even though I was born in Boston. I was an ordinary soldier in the Continental army. I can't even tell you who made me a vampire. It happened one night when I was on guard duty at the camp. Something or someone came at me out of the dark, bit me and made me bite it, and next morning-well, you can imagine the rest."



Every one of us has a crossover story. In a way I'd been lucky: being born half-vampire, I'd been told ahead of time by my father what the moment and its aftermath were like for him. And as a half-breed, I had never been bitten; I self-declared when I bit a mortal in self-defense. If that moment, or another like it, hadn't happened, I might still be living as a mortal, not knowing my true nature.



The memory of it often came back to me, unbidden, like a bad dream. I'd been hitchhiking, on the road to find my mother, and a driver who picked me up tried to rape me. Without thinking, I'd lunged at his neck. Instinct took over, and when I was capable of thinking again, I realized I'd drunk his blood. And the aftermath of that-the guilt, the recurring hunger-made me feel sick, then and now.



But to cross over without knowing what it meant-that had to be a darker kind of nightmare.



"From which I'm still trying to awaken." He'd heard my thought. "You know the old saying: 'For humans, bad things come in threes. For vampires, they come in seasons.'"



I didn't know it. I didn't know any "old sayings," I realized. My father's lessons hadn't included them, and no written records of them exist. Vampires have a tradition of never leaving evidence that could help mortals identify them. It's part of what I think of as the Vampire Way: a code of behavior designed to keep us hidden and safe.



"For a while I tried to keep on as a soldier, hide what I'd become from the others. I always felt as if I was about to be exposed. So I deserted the army. Ran away to live in the mountains. My family assumed I'd died in battle. Over time I figured out how to live, how to get by without biting humans. I lived on sheep's blood for a while."



The thought made me shudder. I tried to focus on the sound of the brook.



"No, I don't do that anymore," he said. "Today my diet is as pure as any Sanguinist's."



"But you're not a Sanguinist."



"I don't belong to any group." He had a twig in one hand, and he sketched invisible patterns on the rock.



"We saw your last debate on television," I said. "You were making Mentori signs. Isn't that risky?"



"I don't see why." He looked up at me. "Humans don't know about Mentori. No vampire would ever tell them about it-it would ruin its purpose. Mentori has been our secret language for centuries."



"But isn't it dangerous to even let vampires know you're one of us?"



"Just the opposite." He smiled. "I want them to get out and register to vote. Besides, as one of my favorite writers said, 'I shall express myself as I am.'"



I recognized the quote from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was one of my favorite books, too-my father and I had read it together as part of my homeschooling. It made me happy that we shared an appreciation of Joyce.



That afternoon had an odd, dreamlike quality about it. Time simply didn't exist. We listened to the music of the stream running over stones. We looked at each other, memorized each other, because we knew we wouldn't meet again for-months? Years? But what did a few years matter, if we might be together forever?



The dream was disturbed only twice: once, when I heard a rustle in the bushes behind us and dropped my plate; and later, when I thought I saw something in those bushes-merely a shape, a transparent form with no defining features, nestled amid twigs.



My head tingled and began to throb. I tried to tell Cameron what I saw. He went to the bushes, pulled the branches apart. Nothing was there.



"You're nervous," he said. "I've upset you."



"I don't know," I said. "I don't know." The sight of the thing was what upset me, I thought.



We knew it was time to leave. We said good-bye with an embrace, no kisses. One kiss would have been too much. But while his arms were around me, Cameron said, "You have my heart."



I said, "And you have mine."



As we separated, our words floated between us, gray as lead. Not grey, I thought. Cameron said, "Yes," as if he knew the difference, or as if he could see them, too.



The words moved out over the rushing water. You have my heart. And you have mine. They slowly drifted downstream.