Chapter Six

She got detention, of course. She didn't care. Detention, she'd discovered, was not the worst thing in the world. Being kidnapped and threatened with death by a Night World assassin was considerably higher on the list.

Because of the bomb, the FBI also wanted to question her. Why had she come to the school before it opened? What had she been doing in the science classroom? Had she been trying to make something? Another bomb, maybe? Was she the person who had planted the bomb in her English classroom a few days ago? Or maybe she was a copycat, someone who imitated a previous crime?

Anne waited, refusing to say anything to anyone, until Amaranth showed up at the school, her cheeks pink with running. Amaranth started to talk to the FBI agents and the principal, making odd little motions with her fingers as she did so, and after a while the adults all started to nod. Yes, it was wrong that Anne had ended up in the science classroom. But she hadn't done anything that was a crime. There weren't any signs that she had been making a bomb. There was no reason to suspect her of anything other than coming to school before the school opened. Maybe she'd picked a lock or something, which was wrong, but she hadn't really done any damage. It was just one of those things that teenagers did sometimes, for odd reasons known only to themselves. Not worth investigating seriously. Just one of those teenage things.

In spite of Amaranth's best efforts, though, the principal still frowned and gave Anne detention. And because she had to go home and change out of her bathrobe, she missed her first class and got additional detention. Amaranth, who missed her first class as well while she escorted Anne home and back to school, also got detention.

"So what happened?" Amaranth hissed, as they sat in the detention room after school, ostensibly doing their homework. "How did he get you away? How did you escape?"

Anne filled her in as best she could.

"It sounds like he used his vampire powers to knock you unconscious," Amaranth judged. "All vampires can hypnotize humans, and the strong ones can knock you out. It figures that he's strong. An assassin would be." She snickered suddenly. "And the name he gave you!"

"What's wrong with it?"

"It's not his real name." Amaranth sounded very sure.

"How do you know?"

"All Nightworlders know. It's from Kafka. Only reversed. Franz Kafka," she explained, when Anne looked blank. "He wrote short stories in the early twentieth century. And one of the stories he wrote was called Metamorphosis. The first sentence says something like 'Gregor Samsa woke up and found that he'd become a giant vermin.'"

Anne was lost. "Who's Gregor Samsa?"

"The main character. Anyway, the story's about how he woke up and found that he'd turned into a giant cockroach, or a giant bug of some kind. Vermin."

"And the assassin reversed the name," Anne put the pieces together slowly. "Instead of calling himself Gregor Samsa, he called himself Samuel Gregory. Almost the same, but in reverse."

"He must be a made vampire, not a lamia. He chose the name because, instead of turning from a person into a vermin, he turned from a vermin into a person. At least, that's probably how he thinks of it."

Anne turned over the idea in her mind. It sounded right. It disturbed her that anyone would choose an alias for himself that said he thought that he'd been vermin once. After all, she was human, and she didn't think of herself as vermin. Though the look on Samuel's face when he'd flung himself away from her, at the end. . . .

"What did he mean when he said 'soulmate'?" Anne asked. "When he looked at me—and I guess he was looking at me, and not something behind me—and said 'soulmate,' as if something horrible had happened?"

She'd had time to collect herself and to remember exactly what Amaranth had told her about soulmates. That Nightworlders were increasingly finding that they were soulmates with humans. That soulmates were two people who were meant for one another, and only for one another, and that if one of them died, the other one would feel as if all the joy had gone out of his world, forever.

"Tell me exactly what happened when he grabbed your wrist," Amaranth said. "Exactly."

Anne described, for the second time, the strange feeling of being surrounded by Samuel Gregory's presence. How the ordinary physical world around her had seemed to fall away. And then how the strange feeling had ended abruptly when Samuel Gregory had dropped her wrist and looked as if he'd seen the worst thing that could exist in this world.

"Wow," Amaranth said softly. "I can't believe it."

"What?"

"I mean, it's really too unbelievable."

"What?" Anne all but cried.

The teacher supervising detention sent her a warning glance. Anne lowered her head hastily and pretended to be absorbed in solving an algebraic equation.

"You're his soulmate. A human and an assassin from Circle Midnight." Amaranth laughed softly. The detention teacher didn't seem to mind when Amaranth made noise, Anne noticed.

"No one is going to believe this. Absolutely no one."

"I don't believe it either," Anne said firmly.

But something at the back of her brain was disagreeing. Was telling her that in those few brief instants, she'd experienced a connection to her soulmate. It wasn't just that what she'd felt exactly matched what Amaranth had described soulmates as feeling when they met. Something in her simply knew, past all doubt, that Samuel Gregory was her soulmate.

Her soulmate was an evil vampire assassin out to kill her.

"This isn't fair," she muttered. "This just isn't fair."

"He's your soulmate," Amaranth insisted. "And it's a good thing, actually."

"Why? How could this possibly be a good thing?"

"Well. You're alive, right? He didn't kill you after all."

Anne felt sick. Amaranth seemed so calm about the whole idea that she'd been about to die. . . .

"He didn't kill you because you're his soulmate," Amaranth explained. She sounded happy. "He can't kill you now that he knows you're his soulmate. So you're safe."

"I . . . don't know that it's that easy." Anne was sure it wasn't going to be that easy.

"He can't kill you now," Amaranth repeated, sounding very confident. "It would be like killing a part of himself. He won't do that."

"I don't know. . . ."

"Maybe he'll even want to join Circle Daybreak! That would be so cool for us! Circle Midnight would be sick with jealousy." Amaranth was actually getting excited, Anne saw. "Every time they lose one of their people to us, they've got to be terrified. Their world's ending, and we're the future. We're what the world is going to be. Humans and Nightworlders living together in harmony. It's coming, Anne, and you're going to be part of it because you're soulmates with a Nightworlder. He wouldn't leave Circle Midnight except for you. You are so lucky to be a part of this."

For the first time, Anne wondered seriously if Nightworlders and humans could really live in harmony together. She could still feel the towel pressed firmly to her mouth, iron hands holding her still, Samuel Gregory's mind pushing hers down into darkness as he prepared to take her away to die. . . .

She didn't want to hurt Amaranth's feelings. It also occurred to her, suddenly, that it wasn't quite safe for her to hurt Amaranth's feelings. Not only was Amaranth one of the two Nightworlders standing between her and a Night World assassin, but Amaranth was a witch who could cast spells on other people. She'd seen Amaranth do it. And Anne didn't have any powers of her own.

If she and Amaranth had a fight, which one of them would win? And could you really feel yourself equal to a person who'd always win a fight with you? She didn't know.

"We really shouldn't be talking about this here," she hedged. "Someone might overhear us."

"If anyone does, I'll just make them forget," Amaranth promised blithely. But she didn't insist on continuing the conversation. Anne focused on her algebra with secret relief.

Lying on the queen-sized bed in his hotel bedroom, the heavy curtains firmly shut against the harsh sunlight, the vampire calling himself Samuel Gregory tried to figure out how he could repair what had gone disastrously wrong with his assignment to kill Hunter Farmer's daughter.

He'd been sent to kill her. He'd been sent to find out what she knew, who she'd learned it from, and to kill her and everyone who had given her the information about the Night World. Ivy had told him she suspected Amaranth Klein and Mary Lyon were Daybreak sympathizers.

He knew, without hiding it from himself, that finding out how Anne knew about the Night World meant torturing her. When she gave him names of the Daybreakers she'd been in contact with, he'd have to find and torture them too. The more names he got, the more Daybreakers could be tracked down and killed. It was reasonably certain that they were all guilty of breaking Night World law. It was part of Daybreak's philosophy to tell humans about the Night World. Whether they'd actually done so or not hardly mattered. At the very least, those that hadn't told humans about the Night World encouraged other Daybreakers to do so.

His job was to kill the Daybreakers in this particular town, including Anne, and to report any information he got about Daybreakers elsewhere to the Night World council. Which would take his report into consideration, and the reports of spies and other assassins like him, and decide where to strike next.

Unfortunately, he had turned out to be soulmates with his target. And this was very, very bad.

Lying on the garishly colored bedspread, he examined his feelings dispassionately. What did he feel about Anne, the newly discovered daughter of one of the most ruthless slayers of the twentieth century? What did he want to do about her? About his unexpected and undesired connection to a vermin?

He wished she'd never been born so that she'd never have presented him with his current dilemma. Unfortunately, that was no longer an option.

He decided, slowly, that the soulmate connection between them wasn't his fault. He hadn't done anything to deserve it; it wasn't some horrible punishment placed upon him for having snuck sweets out of the kitchen when he'd been a human boy. When he'd been a vermin himself, before he'd changed to become a full-fledged Nightworlder.

He hadn't been quite sure before what to believe about the reports of Nightworlders finding human soulmates. On the one hand, the reports were horrific, disgusting. Nightworlders should not be involved with humans. Night World rules reflected this necessary division between the two worlds.

But on the other hands, there had been so many reports that it seemed unlikely, in fairness, to be propaganda that Daybreak had cooked up. No, he could believe that Nightworlders were really finding themselves to be soulmates with vermin.

That didn't mean it was a good thing, though. Daybreak said it was. But he rather thought it was like a plague. Something that was spreading through the entire Night World population, one unhappy victim at a time. Weakening their society. Causing dissension, just when the vermin's technology had reached such heights that it was becoming very hard to continue the masquerade.

Well, he was a plague victim. Not his fault. It wasn't your fault if you got ill.

What was important, though, was how you responded to illness. With courage and wisdom? Or with weakness and folly? He needed to find the right way to respond to the disaster which had overtaken him.

He couldn't do what so many weaker Nightworlders did, of course. He certainly wasn't going to join Circle Daybreak and try to take up some life with his soulmate. He was an assassin, someone who killed Daybreakers. Not one of them.

In fact, he thought dispassionately, he didn't really want to live with his soulmate. He'd rather never see her again. She was just a girl, still in her teens, and naive. He'd seen that when she'd thought he would stop at killing her alone. She had some courage, he'd admit, but he really didn't care whether she had courage or not. She was misguided, and she was involved with the equally misguided Daybreakers. He was centuries old, and he was an assassin by his own free choice, and he had no intention of tying himself to a naive high school girl who was either vermin or a Daybreaker, whichever way you wanted to look at it.

That having been said, he didn't particularly want to kill her either. Whatever this mysterious disease of soulmates was, everyone agreed that bad things happened to the survivor if one of the pair died. He didn't want to suffer any more from the plague than he already had at the embarrassment of finding that he had a vermin soulmate.

In addition, he didn't really have any ill-will for her. He doubted that the soulmate connection was her fault, any more than it was his. She just had the bad luck to be his soulmate, and to be Hunter Farmer's daughter. He'd seen her and watched the way she'd moved in the science classroom, clumsy in the way of ordinary humans, and he knew that she wasn't a slayer herself. Maybe she had the talent to become one, maybe not. Right now, she was just an ordinary vermin, even if the Night World council thought it too much of a risk to let her live.

But what bothered him most was that he hadn't simply been assigned to kill her. He could kill quickly, so quickly that the victim never knew what was happening. Like most vampires, he usually killed with nothing but his own body for a weapon. But he knew how to use weapons too. He was, after all, an assassin.

A single gunshot through her brain and she'd die without knowing she'd been hit.

Or he could use his telepathic powers to knock her unconscious and then strangle her. Again, she'd never know what was happening, never feel any pain, never suffer.

But he hadn't been assigned just to kill her. He'd been assigned to get information from her as well. And that meant torturing her.

He considered whether he could use the soulmate connection to get the information from her without torture and decided that it was too dangerous. He hadn't had a soulmate before and simply didn't know the extent of the connection. He'd heard that it was closer than ordinary telepathy, that it was impossible to hide your feelings from your soulmate. But could you hide facts, if you tried? He really didn't know, and he couldn't risk losing the information.

So it was the usual way—torture--or nothing.

He frowned, staring at the ceiling with its stippled circles of paint. He'd really rather not torture his soulmate to death. Even if you left aside the possibility that the pain would somehow filter back through the soulmate connection to him, he didn't really want to go that far. Let the girl live in the United States for the rest of her natural life, and he'd retreat to Europe and stay there for the next hundred years. People said that the world was becoming a global village, but he thought it was still large enough for a Nightworlder and a vermin to avoid one another if they tried. Or, if worst came to worse, he could kill her quickly. He didn't want to, but he supposed he could do that, if the Night World council insisted.

But something in him shrunk at torturing the girl until she died.

He stared at the ceiling, trying to decide how to handle the situation. What was the best thing to do? Or, if he couldn't find anything that was good, what was the least bad?