The Year of Disappearances (Ethical Vampire #2)

“What’s their disease?” Root’s voice sounded clipped and professional.

“It’s called Colony Collapse Disorder,” I said. “I checked it out on the Internet. Nobody knows the cause, but there are plenty of theories.”

“Most likely the cause is stress,” Root said, “brought on by something humans created. Pesticides, possibly.” For the first time, I had an inkling of what my father appreciated in her.

Mãe said, “I got a response from the Florida Department of Agriculture. They’ve had calls from all over the state. They haven’t come up with a definitive answer yet. But normally, if bees leave a hive, other insects and animals move in to eat the honey. Nobody’s touching this honey.”

“No bees, no cross-pollination.” Dashay’s hands flew outward. “Imagine what could happen to the food supply. What will people eat?”

“Just deserts.” Root’s eyes gleamed as she said it.

I turned to my mother, sent her the thought: Root has made a pun?

Mãe didn’t respond. Her eyes moved restlessly around the table.

Root began to pile my father’s mail into a canvas bag she’d brought with her. She said she was staying with a friend near Sarasota. “Do you know when he’s coming back?” she asked my mother.

“Not yet.” Mãe shook her head, as if to clear it. “He’s looking for a new home.”

“I knew that much.” Root pushed back her chair. “What I need is a time frame. Our research can’t go on hold indefinitely.”

My mother said, “Neither can our lives.” The passion in her voice surprised us, perhaps herself most of all.

Chapter Three

I’ve never much cared for Sundays—dull brown days, according to my personal synesthesia. Synesthesia is common among vampires. For my mother, Sundays were gray. Dashay said her days of the week stopped having colors when she was thirteen, soon after she began seeing sasa.

I was staring at the survey chart that hung on the kitchen wall when Mãe came in and threw her arms around me.

“What’s this about?” My voice was muffled by her shirt.

“You looked glum,” she said.

“I think I’m homesick.” The words came out in capital letters, deep and dusky blue. They brought with them memories of Saratoga Springs—of gray winter skies and green spring mornings—and of life with my father in an old Victorian house. He’d taught me in the library every day, the world outside shut out by thick velvet drapes. Now I felt those lessons had ended too soon.

Mãe released me. “I could teach you,” she said. “Not the same things he did. I can teach you about cooking and plants and horses. About myths and legends, and other things that he doesn’t know. And about kayaking.”

If there’s any antidote for Sunday, it’s kayaking. Even on that hot Florida day, there was a breeze on the river and a sense that time had stopped—that nothing had changed since the Seminoles paddled the same waters.

Mãe’s kayak was yellow and mine was red. She gave me a crash course in basic kayaking skills. Then our boats glided out into a green and golden world.

“I did something stupid this morning.” Mãe’s voice floated across the emerald-tinged water. “I phoned Bennett.”

It didn’t seem stupid to me. “What did he say?”

“No one answered.”

A kingfisher cackled loudly from a branch overhead, and we stopped talking to admire his fierce little face and punk haircut. Punk—that’s a word I learned from watching television at my friend Kathleen’s house. Our house in Homosassa had no TV.

“Anyway, I wanted to hear Bennett’s side of things,” Mãe said. “Dashay’s story doesn’t all make sense to me.”

“Then it isn’t wrong to meddle, so long as your intentions are good?”

She grinned. “I guess I had that coming. Yes, it’s still wrong. But it’s not as wrong as doing nothing when your best friend’s heart is broken.”

I was about to point out the fallacies in her reasoning when I heard Dashay’s voice in my head: Let it go, Ari.

So I let it go. Over our heads, the tips of the mangrove trees bent and nodded.

I’d barely begun to explore the area, so when Mãe was ready to turn back, I went on alone, toward Ozello, a village I’d never seen.

Alongside the kayak, a large gray mass suddenly surfaced in the clouded water—a manatee, his rough, wrinkled skin gray and green, crusted with plankton. He came so close I could have touched him, but I didn’t. Mãe had told me once that she didn’t think much of humans interfering with manatees. “They prefer to be left alone,” she said. “Just as we do.”

Two deep scars ran along the manatee’s back, probably made by boat propellers. The state park in Homosassa Springs ran a refuge for injured manatees, releasing them when they’d recovered. I wondered if he’d come from the refuge. He sank out of sight again, the muddy water closing over him. Separation was a means of self-preservation, I supposed. That’s why vampires didn’t intermingle more with mortals, why we had our own culture—our own values, our special tonics, even our own bars.

I moved on, not sure whether I was on the Salt River or St. Martin’s. Homosassa is riddled with inlets. Seven spring-fed rivers run toward the coast, shaping the land like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

White smoke trailed along the horizon and now I saw its source: two hyperbolic cooling towers, part of a nuclear energy plant. Putting aside all the arguments for and against nuclear power, one thing is for certain: the towers don’t become one with the landscape, by any means. They sat, squat and ugly, a testament to man’s disregard (or contempt?) for landscape and natural beauty.

I heard the powerboat before I saw it. The whine of its engine shattered the peace of the place and made a great blue heron perched on a mangrove take flight.

As the boat rounded the bend, it was moving so fast I had no time to maneuver. I saw a blur of a white hull aimed straight for me.

Then I was in the water.

Mãe had told me to pull the release strap on the kayak’s skirt if I needed to get out fast, and I tried that, holding my breath underwater, vowing not to panic. The strap resisted at first, then came free.

Mãe’s voice in my head said: “Kiss the boat. Push up.”

Kissing the boat meant leaning forward, putting my hands on either side of my body so that I could straighten my legs and push up and out. I was nearly free when I felt someone grab me, twist my body, yank it hard.

Then I was breathing again, and when I opened my eyes, I saw unbearably bright shades of yellow and green. My right ankle hurt. I lifted my leg, let it float in the water.

“She’s okay!” The voice behind me sounded elated.

Someone was supporting me, dragging me away from the kayak. He wasn’t tall, but he was muscular, and he reeked of beer.

“Lay back in the water,” he said to me. He wore aviator sunglasses that hid a good part of his face, but I thought he must be seventeen or eighteen. “I’ll pull you to the boat.”

He spoke with so much authority that I didn’t correct his usage, although a stubborn voice in me was crying, It’s lie back. The shock of being capsized made me somewhat compliant.

The boat was more than twenty feet long, with the name MY DOLL painted across its stern, beneath two outboard engines. A green canopy shaded the cockpit. I was hauled aboard as if I’d been a case of beer, passed from hand to hand. I shut my eyes, suddenly dizzy. When I opened them, I was lying on the deck under the canopy, in the company of my rescuer, another boy, and my “new friends” Mysty and Autumn.

The girls looked at me with barely concealed dislike. I sent them back one of their favorite words: whatever.

But I must have not only thought it but said it, because the boys laughed. All of them, it occurred to me, were very drunk.

I didn’t know whether to feel angry or grateful. At least what had happened to the manatee hadn’t happened to me.

They insisted on taking me and the kayak home. I had misgivings, but I let them. My ankle pain was bearable, and I knew the sprain would heal rapidly; most injuries do, when you’re a vampire. The intensity of the sun did worry me. My scalp had begun to prickle, meaning I’d been overexposed.

I lay beneath the canopy and—forgive me—tuned in to their thoughts. All was not shipshape aboard My Doll. The boat didn’t belong to anyone aboard; the boys had “borrowed” it for the day from the marina where Jesse, my rescuer (and in his mind hero) worked. Jesse was Autumn’s brother. The other boy was Chip, one of his friends who’d come along to “hang out” with Autumn. The encounter with my kayak cut short their outing, and Autumn and Mysty directed their resentment entirely at me.

Feeling stronger, I sat up. “You know, this is a manatee zone,” I said. “You were speeding.”

The boys couldn’t hear me because of the engine.

Autumn said, “Give me a break. Really.” She wore a black bathing suit that made her look exotic, too sophisticated to be on My Doll.

“Manatees migrate in the summer,” Mysty said, thinking, Or is it winter? She’d been forced to watch a nature documentary in school.

“Some are still around. I saw one today.” I wanted to shout at them, but I knew it wouldn’t change anything. “Should they be driving?” I asked. “They’re pretty drunk.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” Autumn’s voice was sharp-edged. “Big deal, they had a few beers. You’re the one who drinks that Picardo stuff. We saw it in the liquor store. That stuff is eighty proof!”

“That bartender lied to us.” Mysty looked at me as if I’d told the lie back at Flo’s Place. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“I was with my mother.” I spoke without thinking.

The words mollified her. She assumed my mother didn’t know I was drinking alcohol and that the bartender had lied to protect me. She was accustomed to complicated lies, particularly when dealing with parents.

“Your ankle still hurting?” Autumn tossed a pack of cigarettes to me. She’d stopped blaming me.

“I can’t smoke now. Almost home.” I was glad to see Mãe’s dock looming ahead.

At the last possible minute, Jesse slowed the boat. I told him where to tie up, and they lifted me and the kayak ashore.

“I’m fine,” I lied, and managed to walk a few steps. “Thanks.”

“You sure?” Jesse wanted to be a hero as long as he could.

“Very.”

“Come on!” Mysty wanted to get back to the beer party.

“We’ll call you,” Autumn said, her thoughts inscrutable as ever.

I knelt to tie the kayak to cleats on the dock, and I waited until they were gone before I hobbled up the path to the house. I hoped they wouldn’t call.