Once we were clear of the barn and the stockyard, I leaned forward to whisper in her ear, “Take me to him, girl.”
Sali probably didn’t understand the words, but she knew what I wanted her to do whenever I said them, and took off. We both preferred to ride at a running walk, as hers was faster and smoother than any other breed’s, but my own impatience got the better of me, and I urged her into a lope as we crossed the road and followed the winding trail into the dense, dark woods across from our farm.
The glow of a few candles lit the windows of the old manor house, and a big black stallion stood tethered outside. Prince turned his head and then shuffled around, his ears perking at the sight of Sali. She came up alongside him, touching his nose with hers before she stood still so I could dismount. Once I tied her beside him I gave both horses a pat and then walked over to the wide stone steps leading up to the front door, and the dark boy waiting there for me.
At five-foot-ten I loomed over most boys my age, but Jesse Raven stood a head taller. People would have called him lanky, at least until they saw him move; he had the slim, tough build of someone who had been riding horseback almost since he could walk. The paleness of his skin made his long, straight hair looked like polished black silk, and when he looked at me the moon threaded amethyst light through the dark strands. He had dark gray eyes that even in the shadows glittered like marcasite, and a face so beautiful sometimes it hurt me just to look at him.
“Catlyn.”
He had grown up speaking Romanian and Russian and a bunch of other languages I didn’t know, and while he spoke perfect English, his accent added an extra syllable to my name, changing it into something strange and exotic. Despite everything we had been through, seeing him still occasionally made me feel as if I were dreaming. That at any moment I would open my eyes and find myself in my bedroom, and he would be gone.
“Jesse.”
“You’re late.” He held out his hand.
“Better that than never.” I curled my fingers around his, shivering a little with how good it felt to touch him. “I’ve missed you.”
“How long have you missed me?” he asked as he drew me inside.
“Nine days, three hours, ten minutes and I made myself stop counting the seconds.” It didn’t matter how long we were apart; I could feel him every night, almost from the moment he woke. “I got the job in town.”
Jesse picked me up like I weighed no more than a kitten and whirled around, laughing with me.
“I never doubted you would,” he said as he set me back down on my feet. “But I am glad it is decided.”
Getting the job at the bookstore had been the simplest solution to our problem, namely of trying to see each other without my brothers or Jesse’s parents finding out about it. Our families regarded each other as natural enemies, and because of that felt they had the right to keep us apart. My brothers and Jesse’s parents had taken extreme measures to do just that, too. They hadn’t just erased my memories of moving to Lost Lake, meeting Jesse and falling in love with him; they’d made everyone in town forget me, Jesse, and almost everything that had happened since my brothers and I had moved to Lost Lake.
They didn’t understand who we were, or why we were together. It didn’t matter to Jesse that I was a Van Helsing, the granddaughter of a family of vampire hunters. It didn’t matter to me that Jesse was only one step away from becoming a vampire himself. We both knew, almost from the moment we first met, that we were meant to be together. The world might have wanted us to be monsters, but when we were together we were just a girl and a boy who were crazy about each other.
“There is one thing,” I said to Jesse. “Either Trick or Gray will be waiting for me at the bus stop every night I work. So you won’t be able to drive me home.” Which had been part of our original plan when Jesse told me about the job at Mrs. Frost’s.
“We will still have thirty hours every week for ourselves.” He smiled and touched my cheek. “I think by the new year you will be completely bored with me.”
“Oh, sure, that’s going to happen.” I rolled my eyes. “I have to recite Shakespeare’s twenty-ninth sonnet about a hundred times a day just so I don’t think about you when Trick is around me.”
We knew my oldest brother had the power to make me forget things; what I still didn’t know for sure was if he could also read my thoughts whenever he wanted. I suspected he couldn’t, because he would have known about me meeting Jesse from the beginning, but I wasn’t a hundred percent positive yet. And it wasn’t like I could ask my brother about his weird Van Helsing ability, so to be safe I never let myself think about Jesse around him but instead thought of the sonnet.
“I found out something else today that might help us,” I told Jesse. “Mrs. Frost told me that she just bought a huge collection of rare books from the estate of a guy who was into the occult. I think we should look through them and see if we can find out anything else about vampires and the Van Helsings.” Something occurred to me. “Did you or your parents know Julian Hargraves?”
“We knew the family, of course, but after they came to Lost Lake they kept very much to themselves,” Jesse admitted. “Julian never married or had children, and after his parents passed away he inherited their home. Toward the end of his life he became quite reclusive. What are you hoping to learn from his books?”
“I want to know if there’s a cure for this. Not just for you,” I added. “For me, too.”
My ability, which I still didn’t quite understand, somehow gave me the power to attract and control cats. Not just the pet-type of cat, I had discovered, but any feline. Before erasing my memory, Trick had told me that all cats responded to my thoughts, but that was the sum total of what I knew.
Paul Raven, Jesse’s father, had told me that all the Van Helsing children were born with special abilities that helped them hunt and destroy vampires. He thought I would use mine on Jesse, but we’d already passed that test. Wounded, desperate for blood and nearly out of control, Jesse had begged me in the boathouse on Halloween night to kill him. Instead, I’d given him my blood. At the time I hadn’t cared about the consequences—drinking human blood was supposed to be the final step that would transform Jesse into a vampire—but then we’d learned that my blood wasn’t altogether human.
My father had been infected with vampire blood, just like Jesse and his parents. And because vampire blood also ran through my veins, drinking it hadn’t pushed Jesse the rest of the way into becoming a full-fledged monster.
My heritage meant nothing to me. I didn’t want to be a vampire, a vampire hunter, or anything else besides a normal human girl. Jesse wanted to be human again, too. So if there was some way for us to be normal again, I was going to find it.
Do you have to find it tonight?
No, I thought back to him. Since Halloween night, Jesse and I could read each other’s minds. Part of a bond that formed between two vampires, it was just one more thing we were not supposed to be able to do.
It also still scared me, so I said out loud, “Let’s take a ride over to the lake cabin.”
Four
Jesse’s parents had given him the land we were riding
on, and hundreds of acres surrounding it, which contained dozens of old riding trails, overgrown pastures, empty barns and grain silos and even some abandoned old houses, like the cabin we found by one of the four lakes on the property.
Prince and Sali preferred racing to exploring, but once we took them on the narrow trail they fell into our usual riding positions, Jesse and Prince in the front and Sali and me following behind. Nothing ever bothered us, but sometimes my presence attracted some feral cats, lynxes and other felines to trail after us, so I kept my thoughts clear and calm. Once I had even drawn a Florida panther and her two cubs that lived on Jesse’s land to me, and while the horses didn’t spook easily, I didn’t want to disturb the big cat.
Not that any other, non-feline critter would bother us. Predators instinctively avoided vampires, Jesse had told me, and since I’d never had a run-in with anything I guessed they were the same with half-vampires. Then there was the connection we shared. Sometimes when Jesse and I were together I could almost feel it in the air, as if the two of us being close to each other generated a kind of unseen energy. He had many of the same powers that full vampires possessed, and I had my Van Helsing abilities, which Jesse’s father had once told me were still developing.
Into what, I didn’t know. Thinking about it only made me dread finding out.
The trees parted away from the trail, and over Jesse’s shoulder I saw the sagging roof of the old lakeside cabin, and reined in Sali.
The little lake was hardly more than a pond, but it had an interesting spiral shape. Strips of earth sprouting water grasses curved around the edge and formed some clusters in the center. It reminded me of a creek that had gotten tired of running and curled up for a long nap.
Jesse dismounted and tethered Prince to one of the remaining fence posts, and reached up to help me down. I could swing off by myself, of course, but I liked holding his hand. Once we tied up Sali we walked down by the water. The moonlight lit the surface of the murky water, turning it into silver-white crystal.
“In the spring it won’t be this quiet,” he predicted as he put his arm around my shoulders. “There will be birds and crickets and frogs, and after dark they become quite loud.”
“I don’t care.” I leaned my head against his shoulder. “I like the sounds they make.”
He glanced down at me. “I will remind you of this when the frogs begin their mating season.”
We walked over to the cabin, which Jesse had told me had been here since before his family had come to America in the late nineteenth century. Whoever had built it had used enormous oak trees, notching each end before stacking the trunks like Lincoln Logs. More split trunks had been stacked against a V-shaped frame to form the roof. While the walls of the cabin were still sturdy, the split trunks had slowly rotted over the years; many looked to be on the verge of collapsing.