"I think it's Aunt Opal," Jade said.
Chapter 3
She's not looking so good," Kestrel said, peering over Rowan's shoulder.
Rowan said, "Oh,dear," and sat down Great-aunt Opal was a mummy. Her skin was like leather: yellow-brown, hard, and smooth. Almost shiny. And the skin was all there was to her, just a leathery frame stretched over bones. She didn't have any hair. Her eye sockets were dark holes with dry tissue inside. Her nose was collapsed.
"Poor auntie," Rowan said. Her own brown eyes were wet.
"We're going to look like that when we die," Kestrel said musingly.
Jade stamped her foot. "No, look,you guys! You're both missing it completely. Look atthat!" She swung a wild toe at the mummy's midsection. There, protruding from the blue-flowered housedress and the leathery skin, was a gigantic splinter of wood. It was almost as long as an arrow, thick at the base and tapered where it disappeared into Aunt Opal's chest. Flakes of white paint still clung to one side.
Several other pickets were lying on the cellar floor.
"Poor old thing," Rowan said. "She must havebeen carrying them when she fell."
Jade looked at Kestrel. Kestrel looked back withexasperated golden eyes. There were few things they agreed on, but Rowan was one of them.
"Rowan," Kestrel said distinctly, "she wasstaked. "
"Oh, no."
"Oh, yes," Jade said. "Somebody killed her. And somebody who knew she was a vampire."
Rowan was shaking her head. "But who would know that?"
"Well ..." Jade thought. "Another vampire."
"Or a vampirehunter,"Kestrel said.
Rowan looked up, shocked. "Those aren't real.They're just stories to frighten kids-aren't they?"
Kestrel shrugged, but her golden eyes were dark.
Jade shifted uneasily. The freedom she'd felt on the road, the peace in the living room-and now this.
Suddenly she felt empty and isolated.
Rowan sat down on the stairs, looking too tired and preoccupied to push back the lock of hair plastered to her forehead. "Maybe I shouldn't havebrought you here," she said softly. "Maybe it's worsehere." She didn't say it, but Jade could sense her next thought. Maybe we should go back "Nothingcould be worse," Jade said fiercely. "And I'd die before I'd go back." She meant it. Back to waiting on every man in sight? Back to arranged marriages and endless restrictions? Back to all those disapproving faces, so quick to condemn anything different, anything that wasn't done the way it had been done four hundred years ago?
"Wecan't go back," she said.
"No, we can't," Kestrel said dryly. "Literally. Unless we want to end up like Great-aunt Opal.
Or"she paused significantly-"like Great-uncle Hodge."
Rowan looked up. "Don't even say that!"
Jade's stomach felt like a clenched fist. "They wouldn't, she said, shoving back at the memory that was trying to emerge. "Not to their own grandkids. Not to us."
"The point," Kestrel said, "is that we can't go back,so we have to go forward. We've got to figure out what we're going to do here without Aunt Opal tohelp us--especially if there's a vampire hunter around. But first, what are we going to do withthat?" She nodded toward the body.
Rowan just shook her head helplessly. She lookedaround the cellar as if she might find an answer in a comer. Her gaze fell on Jade. It stopped there, and Jade could see the sisterly radar system turn on.
"Jade. What's that in your jacket?"
Jade was too wrung-out to lie. She opened thejacket and showed Rowan the kittens. "I didn't know my suitcase would kill them."
Rowan looked too wrung-out to be angry. She glanced heavenward, sighing. Then, looking back atJade sharply: "But why were you bringing them downhere?"
"I wasn't. I was just looking for a shovel. I was going to bury them in the backyard."
There was a pause. Jade looked at her sisters and they looked at each other. Then all three of them looked at the kittens.
Then they looked at Great-aunt Opal.
Mary-Lynnette was crying.
It was a beautiful night, a perfect night. An inversion layer was keeping the air overhead still and warm, and the seeing was excellent. There was very little light pollution and no direct light. The Victorian farmhouse just below Mary-Lynnette's hill wasmostly dark. Mrs. Burdock was always very consider ate about that.
Above, the Milky Way cut diagonally across the sky like a river. To the south, where Mary-Lynnette had just directed her telescope, was the constellation Sagittarius, which always looked. more like a teapot than like an archer to her. And just above the spout of the teapot was a faintly pink patch of what looked like steam.
It wasn't steam. It was clouds of stars. A star factory called the Lagoon Nebula. The dust and gas of dead stars was being recycled into hot young stars, just being born.
It was four thousand and five hundred light-years away. And she was looking at it, right this minute. a seventeen-year-old kid with a second-hand Newtonian reflector telescope was watching the light of stars being born.
Sometimes she was filled with so much awe andand-and-and longing-that she thought she might break to pieces.
Since there was nobody else around, she could let the tears roll down her cheeks without pretending it was an allergy. After a while she had to sit back and wipe her nose and eyes on the shoulder of her T-shirt.
Oh, come on, give it a rest now, she told herself.You're crazy, you know.
She wished she hadn't thought of Jeremy earlier. Because now, for some reason, she kept picturinghim the way he'd looked that night when he came to watch the eclipse with her. His level brown eyes had held a spark of excitement, as if he really cared about what he was seeing. As if, for that moment, anyway, he understood.