The Year of Disappearances (Ethical Vampire #2)

Dashay nearly fell into a kitchen chair. “Sweet mother of life, what a night.”

I sat next to her. Mãe poured us glasses of cold spring water from the bottles Dashay had stored in the refrigerator. Then she took a chair across from mine. We sat and listened to the ocean, felt the breeze from the open window, rubbed our eyes. I wanted to scream.

Instead I broke the silence. “We didn’t ask Root what’s in the bottled water. I bet she’d know.”

Mãe looked confused until Dashay explained her theory. “Go fetch the bottle the nice nice man gave to you,” she said to me. “We can ask Dr. Cho to have it analyzed.”

“Better give her a sample of our tap water, too. And some of that water you brought from home.” Mãe stretched her arms behind her and shook the tension out of them. “First the bees are tainted. Now the water. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Dashay said, “but it looks to me as if someone’s out to take control of nature. Manipulate it, use it. I don’t know why. But I think Bennett is one of the victims.”

Then she confessed: the week before, she’d driven to Atlanta again. “This time I didn’t even bother going to his place,” she said. “I knew that woman would be there. So I called him up, told him the Internal Revenue folks needed to meet with him.”

Mãe explained it for me. “Vampires have to be careful to file tax returns. Otherwise the government comes after us, takes away our property, may even put us in jail.”

“Bennett came downtown to the federal office building, and I was waiting.” Dashay sighed. “I put on a pretty dress and all, thinking he’d see me and realize what a dog he’d been. It didn’t work. I touched his arm and I looked into his eyes. I admitted I’d been the one who called him, not the tax man. I told him we needed to talk. All that time he looked right through me. Finally he said, ‘So I don’t need to meet with the IRS?’ And then he bolted right out of there, back to that woman he met on the plane.”

“So you think maybe he drank the water?”

“Of course he drank the water!” Dashay slammed down her own glass. “What else do you do on a plane? Unless you’re smart, like me, and don’t ever take what strangers hand you.”

Mãe and I each thought she was being—a little crazy, Mãe thought; somewhat irrational, I thought. But who knew? She’d been right about the sasa.

“Did Bennett have a sasa in his eyes?” Mãe asked.

Dashay shook her head, making her long green glass earrings bounce. “When I looked into his eyes, I saw nothing. You understand? I couldn’t even hypnotize him. Nobody was home. But he was carrying a bottle with him, and you know what it said on the label? Orion Springs.”

“I don’t understand why you even went to see him.” Normally I wouldn’t have made such a comment, but tonight was not normal. “I thought you were with Burton these days.”

Dashay didn’t seem offended. “Cecil takes me out to dinner,” she said. “Sometimes we drive down to Tampa and go dancing, have a bite at this little supper club we go to. There’s no harm in that.”

“Why can’t we be like geese and mate for life?” I said.

They seemed stunned. Then they made weird noises, my mother and her best friend, noises that mixed amazement and sympathy and laughter. And I was not trying to be funny.

Dr. Cho came out of the bedroom, closing the door quietly behind her. “Glad you’re having fun,” she said. “Well, I think he’ll be all right. Now do you think you can keep him stable and not let anyone give him injections?”

“Root has been banned.” Mãe spoke again in her hardheaded voice, so different from her usual Savannah drawl. “We’ll keep watch.”

Dr. Cho turned to me. “What are you doing here?”

“I came home for the weekend.”

“But it’s Wednesday.”

“I was on a field trip in Savannah,” I said. “I dropped by to see how things were going.”

“That’s fine,” she said, “but don’t you have schoolwork to do?”

It was none of her business, really. But she was right. I had a paper due early the following week: an analysis of what we’d seen at the caucus. I had a working thesis for the paper, and even a tentative title: “Situating Outsiders in Contemporary Culture.” The paper I really wanted to write would have a different title: “Eternal Outsiders: Vampires as Outlaws in the Mortal World.”

“Yes, I have schoolwork to do.” I’d hoped to have a few days on Tybee to lick my wounds—a cliché of which I’m fond. But maybe it was better for me to go back than wallow in emotions.

Dr. Cho nodded briskly. “I’ll take you back tomorrow, if you like. I have a few calls to make near Hillhouse.”

My mother made soft sounds of protest, but Dashay said, “Ari needs to finish things up. You wouldn’t want her to flunk out in her first semester.”

After the doctor left, my mind began to sift through the implications of what Root had told us.

“Mãe,” I said, “what are we going to do?” Then I felt guilty for asking, because she looked so tired.

She bent over the table, her hands clasped. “Do?”

“About the drugs. So many people are taking V. And the kids taking Amrita—I’ll bet they don’t know it’s making them sterile.”

Dashay said, “Well, we’d better find out who’s distributing the drugs and make them stop.”

She knew as well as we did how difficult such a task would be.

“I can’t come up with an answer tonight, Ariella.” Mãe pushed back her chair. “Raphael needs me now. Once we get him on his feet again, then we can think about saving the world.”

I nodded. But the weight of what we’d learned sat on my chest all night.

The next morning, I looked in on my parents—my father breathing deeply, his eyes closed, my mother huddled in the same chair Root had occupied the night before. I kissed both of them. In the kitchen I hugged Dashay good-bye.

“Be careful,” she said. “Don’t worry too much. We’ll figure this thing out.”

Then I climbed into Dr. Cho’s hybrid car and buckled my seat belt. She looked across at me, her black hair loose over her shoulders. “Do you know how to drive?”

I said no.

Some mother she’s got, Dr. Cho thought.

“I never asked to learn,” I said. “I’m only fourteen.”

“Fourteen going on forty.” She started the car and, on the way out of town, pulled into a church parking lot. There she gave me my first driving lesson.

My initial nervousness gave way to elation as the car moved around the lot, braking and turning. When she told me it was time to stop, I said, “Please, one more lap.”

“You’re a natural,” she said. “You should ask your parents about getting a license.”

We changed places, and she drove us off the island.

“Is my father ever going to be himself again?” I tried to keep emotion out of my voice, but it wasn’t entirely possible.

“He’ll be better than his old self. Just you wait.” She drove as fluidly as Mãe, but with more emphatic stops and starts. “Now that he’s off that old formula and onto mine, he’ll have a full emotional range. His feelings have been suppressed for years, thanks to that Root woman.” She shook her head. “What was that about, anyway?”

“She loved him,” I said. “And she hated my mother and me for being in the way.”

“How melodramatic.”

“It was more than melodrama.” I didn’t know how much to tell her. “Last night Dashay removed a thing from her eye.”

“What sort of thing?”

I described the sasa, not using the word.

“And she extracted it how?”

Once again, I felt as if I were being interrogated. “I couldn’t see it all.”

“Sounds as if it might have been a tumor.” She was angry. “No job for an amateur.”

“But Dashay’s done it before.” I was probably making things worse, I realized, but I kept talking. “She has the ability to see these things in the eye.”

“Sounds as if she’s practicing iridology.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s an alternative medical practice,” she said. “The theory is that defects in the iris indicate tendencies toward particular illnesses. Iridologists use elaborate maps of the iris, linking locations to certain organs and glands. It’s largely bogus, of course. But even traditional Western medicine acknowledges that the eyes can be indicators of diseases.”

“Dr. Cho, I appreciate you talking to me about these things,” I said. “But my head is kind of full right now.”

She gave me a quick, curious look. “Is the serum I gave you working out?”

“I seem to have more energy,” I said. “That is, when I’m not sleep-deprived. And I feel things very deeply.”

“Aren’t those good signs?”

“I guess.” Feeling deeply wasn’t much fun, I thought.

“Better to feel than not,” she said. The car moved onto the Islands Expressway.

“I guess. I wouldn’t want to be a zombie, like Mysty.”

Then I realized: she didn’t know about Mysty, or the house near Oglethorpe Square. As we drove, I told her about the recruiting, and the “makeovers,” and the use of Amrita. While I was at it, I told her about V, too. It turned out she’d heard about that drug.

“I see kids at the clinic who use V,” she said. “But this Amrita stuff sounds really serious. Making people sterile without their consent—do you know how bad that is?”

“What can we do about it?”

“We need to talk to the authorities.” She said it decisively.

My heart sank. I’d had enough of the police and the FBI.

“No, Ari.” She turned to me and smiled. “I mean the vampire authorities.”

As someone who’d spent several months studying politics, I’d thought I had a basic understanding of how governance systems worked. But Dr. Cho showed me that I didn’t know much.

Vampires don’t have police. We don’t have a separate government or court system. But we do have a group that arbitrates and advises: the Council on Vampire Ethics, or COVE. Known generally as the Council, it comprises ten members selected by a group of former members. Members serve ten-year terms. Some represent sects and others are independent. They range in age from forty to one thousand years.