Chapter Eleven
Anne was taking a quiz in her history class when the door opened and a student she didn't know entered. Anne tensed slightly, but the student merely walked to the front of the room and gave an envelope to Ms. Green, the teacher. Ms. Green opened it, read the note inside, and frowned slightly.
"Anne." Ms. Green gestured that she ought to come to the desk.
Anne set her pencil down slowly and came.
"They need to see you in the principal's office," Ms. Green said softly, when Anne reached the desk. "Just leave your quiz here. We'll find some way for you to make it up later, if they keep you after the bell."
"Do you know why they need to see me?"
Ms. Green shook her head. "No, I'm sorry. They haven't told me." She glanced at the clock, which showed fifteen minutes before the end of the period. "You'd better take your books with you, just in case."
Anne went back to her desk, grabbed her notebook and history text, and followed the other student out of the room.
As she approached the office, she felt the now-familiar sensation of dread and fear. She had no idea why she was being summoned, but she doubted it was to get good news. And she didn't even know what classes Amaranth and Mary and Neil had right now. She had no way to reach them.
Well, she'd said she wanted to stay and fight. So that's what she would do. If Samuel Gregory was inside and waiting for her, she'd show him that she wasn't about to die meekly.
She entered the office with her head held high.
But Samuel Gregory was nowhere in sight. The only person there was the secretary, who gestured her toward the principal's office.
Inside, the principal was talking in a low voice to a policewoman. Anne hesitated in the doorway.
"Ah, Anne. Come inside. This is Anne Jamison," the principal said to the policewoman. "Anne, please close the door behind you."
Samuel was nowhere in sight, which was some relief to Anne's tense nerves. But the sight of the policewoman was not reassuring.
"Anne," the policewoman said, as soon as Anne had shut the door, "I'm afraid I have some bad news for you."
"Anne's mother was shot?" Amaranth looked horrified.
Mary nodded. "That's what the rumor is, anyway. The police came and got Anne out of her history class and took her to the hospital."
"Ms. Jamison isn't dead, then?"
"I heard that they were operating on her, so I guess not."
"We have to do something," Neil said. "This has to stop. We have to fight back in some way."
"But he's her soulmate—" Amaranth's face crumpled suddenly. "How can this be happening? This isn't supposed to happen! The soulmate principle is supposed to solve everything—."
"I guess it isn't going to solve everything this time," Neil said. "I tell you, we need to do something. Fight back and stop him, before he tries to kill someone else."
"Maybe the first thing we should do is go to the hospital and see Anne," Mary said practically. "She needs friends right now."
"This is my fault," Amaranth said. "I told her that everything would be all right because Samuel was her soulmate. I believed he couldn't do anything like this to her. I told her not to worry." She started to cry.
Neil clenched his fists. "That guy should be dead."
"Let's just go to the hospital, okay? That's all we can do now."
"The doctors think she'll be all right," Anne told them. Her face was blotched white and red, as if she'd been frightened into crying. Which, Mary thought, she probably had been.
"That's good," Amaranth said. "Anne, I'm so sorry. We all are—."
"It's all right."
"But this is my fault. I told you that you could trust Samuel, that he was your soulmate. . . ."
"It's all right," Anne interrupted. Her voice was gentle, but something about it caused Mary to look at Anne more sharply.
"I think I'll need . . .what Neil talked about getting me before."
The gun, Mary thought.
Anne turned to Neil. "Do you still think you can get it for me, Neil?"
The boy nodded grimly. "Yes. I'm pretty sure I can."
"As soon as you can would be good."
What was wrong with Anne's voice, Mary thought, finally pinpointing her intuition, was not anything that you could hear. It was something that you couldn't hear. Anne wasn't crying any more. She didn't sound upset. Rather, she didn't sound as if she felt anything at all. The girl who had tried to learn sword-fighting from Mary had disappeared, leaving a blank-faced doll behind.
She's in shock, Mary guessed.
The doll turned toward Amaranth.
"Amaranth, you said you could help me, too."
Amaranth, who had started crying again, sniffed and wiped the tears away.
"Yes," she said fiercely. "Yes. I can give you a spell that will kill a vampire. Though it might not work if he's got protection spells around him," she added. "And it will take a little while to get all the ingredients."
"I think maybe we ought to talk about this," Mary began.
Amaranth turned on her angrily. "This isn't the time to talk any more! Neil's right, we have to do something! Samuel Gregory is bad. He's pure evil. You fight evil, not talk about it!"
"He can change," Mary said stubbornly. "That's what Daybreak believes. We can all change."
"He doesn't deserve the opportunity to change! Not any more."
"I think he's sick and screwed-up," Neil contributed.
"He doesn't want to change," Anne said, in the same empty voice she'd been using. "So there's nothing we can do but fight him. That's all that there's left to do."
Mary cut a quick, worried glance in Anne's direction. She didn't think that Anne should be making any decisions while she was still obviously in shock. "Maybe you should rest a while and think about it," she suggested.
"I don't need to think about it. I've already thought about it. He shot my mother, and I'm going to kill him." Anne's voice didn't waver in the slightest. Didn't rise or fall with any emotion.
For some reason, Mary remembered a story she'd once read about a poet who'd fallen in love with a beautiful girl who sewed in her cottage all day long. Too late, he'd found out that his beloved was a mechanical doll who wielded her sewing scissors to cut out people's eyes. She felt no remorse, of course, because she was only a doll. In order to save himself, the poet had been forced to hack her apart with an ax that had been conveniently leaning against the cottage wall.
Looking at Anne's blank face, Mary could imagine her friend's hand firmly gripping a pair of sewing scissors. Or was she the poet, forced into violence by Samuel Gregory's heartlessness? Mary didn't know.
"You should still rest," she tried again.
But she'd never been good with words, and she felt that none of them was listening now. Amaranth, Neil, and the blank-faced thing that had been Anne. They were all determined to throw themselves into ridding the world of the vampire calling himself Samuel Gregory.
She'd been outvoted. Mary looked away, unhappily, while the other three started to make plans.
The six-hundred-year-old vampire who'd served the Night World council for half a millennium was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling. There was still a day left of the two-day period he'd given his human soulmate to flee to a Daybreak safehouse. He didn't have anything to do except to wait.
He was sorry, in a distant and remote way, for Anne Jamison. Or Anne Farmer, to give her the last name her father had used as an alias. He supposed it didn't really matter how he thought of her.
He didn't really have any particular hatred of her. She'd simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. That was her misfortune, and perhaps his as well, though he thought the whole situation was probably easier on him than on her. He was six hundred years old, after all, and in that time he'd learned to cope with problems. He was probably more able to deal with the shock of finding an unsuitable soulmate than she was.
In theory, soulmates were supposed to be made for one another, two halves of a spiritual whole. He thought that this might be perfectly true. The only problem was that he'd lived too long, and he and Anne were now out of synch, so to speak. If he'd met Anne when they'd both been seventeen and he'd been human, probably everything would have worked out reasonably well. They could have had a fine time growing up together, and then growing old together.
But as it was, he'd gone his own path alone, and he was simply too far down it now to be able to consider Anne as anything other than a nuisance. Night World assassins didn't need soulmates. In fact, they needed not to have soulmates. He'd been alone for six hundred years, and however lonely he'd been at times, he knew he'd adjusted to his situation.
Maybe that was it. He'd adjusted to his situation. To being a vampire, to being hundreds of years older than the vermin around him, to being an assassin. The part of him who might have had something in common with Anne Jamison was six hundred years gone. He couldn't see an echo of himself in her. He couldn't even dream of falling in love with her, the way most soulmates allegedly did.
He'd heard that some vermin were reincarnated over and over again, becoming something called "Old Souls." Perhaps Anne was one of those. Perhaps she'd had a life when he'd been human, six hundred years ago. They hadn't met then, and she'd eventually died, only to be reborn now.
Well. He didn't know if he believed in Old Souls—he scarcely believed in the soulmate principle, even though he apparently had a soulmate of his own—but there was some reassurance in the thought that Anne might be an Old Soul. If she'd lived one life without him, she could perfectly well live a second one. In fact, for all he knew, she'd already lived several lifetimes without him. It was hardly cruel of him to demand that she continue to live her lives in the same way that she'd apparently been doing.
He'd go on living his way, she'd go on living her way, and things would be back to normal again. They'd both suffer, perhaps, but suffering was normal. That was one of the things his six hundred years had taught him.
He simply hoped that Anne would have the good sense to reconsider and leave, or that her friends would have the good sense to persuade or force her to do what was in her best interests. He didn't want to have anything to do with the girl who might have been a match for his soul when he too had been young and innocent, six hundred years ago, but neither did he want to torture her to death. In fact, as far as he was concerned, torturing anyone to death was an extremely unpleasant matter to be done only when necessary.
Unfortunately, from the point of view of those who held his oath, it was frequently necessary.
She had another day to make up her mind, and so he had another day to wait for her decision. He shut his eyes and let himself drift toward sleep.
"I need the gun by tomorrow evening," Anne said coldly. "He'll come for me tomorrow evening. The two days will be up then. Can you get me the gun by then?"
"I will," Neil promised.