Dark Dreams Part 1

Dark dreams.

Ann Hodgman.

PROLOGUE.

In the shadow behind the ruined cathedral of Aubigny, a wolf is waiting.

Winters here are wicked. The cold is so bitter it hurts to breathe, so cruel that cobblestones shatter and birds, flying, freeze and fall lifeless to earth. Knife-sharp icicles glitter perilously from the eaves of the ancient stone houses, and the snow is packed as smooth and hard as gla.s.s.

The sun set five hours ago. Now the streets of this tiny town lie petrified under the full moon's pitiless blue stare. The wolf crouches silently in the shadows.

He is used to waiting.

Three ancient stone houses face the cathedral's cobbled courtyard. On some evenings, the lights in the houses are warm and bright. Tonight, though, 2 * Children of the Night only a window or two is lit, and the houses are silent. A woman stops before a window the ice has sealed shut. She touches the gla.s.s with a forefinger, shivers, and pulls away from the window.

The wolf whines quietly. The centuries he has spent roaming the French countryside in search of prey have taught him patience, but he is terribly hungry.

Suddenly a door creaks open in the middle house. A child's blonde head peers cautiously into the darkness.

A child. A little girl, maybe three years old. A child can't move very fast. A child might make a mistake.

The girl opens the heavy door a little wider and slips out of the house, shivering in her pink nightgown.

The door bangs shut behind her.

The wolf is on his feet now. Silent as a cat, he too steps forward, to the very edge of the shadow falling from the cathedral. His mouth is watering. He runs a tongue over his pointed teeth.

"Oh, thereyou are!" says the littie girl as she spies DARK DRBAMS * 3.

her doll at the foot of the steps. Clutching the icy iron railing gingerly, she pads down the steep steps toward her baby.

The wolf tenses to spring.

Is there no one who can protect this child?

Her soft pink hand reaches down for the doll.

Snarling, the wolf vaults across the narrow street and hurls himself at her.

With a thin scream, the child drops her doll and tries to pull out of his way. But the steps are too steep for her chubby legs. She manages to scramble up only one of them before the wolf, growling horribly, is upon her. His teeth are ravenous for her throat. . . .

At just that moment, the door swings open. "No!" a woman shrieks in terror. "My G.o.d, nor Faster than a heartbeat, she springs down the steps and grabs her daughter's arm. The wolfs claws rake across the little girl's leg, but he never gets the chance to bite. In an instant mother and child are back inside. The door slams behind them, and the wolf streaks back into the shadows.

He has no time to regret his loss. He must escape 4 * Children of the Night the town quickly. He will have to find his prey somewhere else tonight.

Forgotten once again, the doll rolls off the last step and lies facedown in the snow.

CHAPTER 1.

I don't belong here.

Sixteen-year-old Lila Crawford sighed as she stared around the crowded cafeteria at Pelham High School. It was the usual drab, noisy sty, but at that moment she felt as though she'd never noticed before how truly horrible it was. Frayed posters hanging crooked and defaced on the dingy walls, some teacher's hopeless attempt to cheer things up. Linoleum floor crusted with crumbs and muddy sneaker-prints and sticky with soda spills. The smell of dirty steam that has perfumed every school cafeteria since schools began. And rising above everything else, the feverish pitch of two hundred students with exactly eighteen minutes to relax before the afternoon bell goes off.

Yes, it was a familiar scene. But today, somehow, 6 * Children of the Night watching it all gave Lila the sense that she had somehow wandered into the wrong life by mistake.

"Who died, Lila?" her best friend Samantha Bar-del suddenly said, breaking into Lila's revene. Samantha was sitting next to Lila at the lunch table; their other best friend, Marci Zwick, was sitting across from them. As usual, Samantha's lunch consisted of a donut and a bag of chips. Lila didn't recall ever seeing her take a bite of real food. Marci, who never ate where anyone could see her, was lunching solely on a diet soda. "What're you thinking about?" Samantha went on.

Lila nodded at the scene in front of them. "I'm just sick of this place, I guess," she said. "It gets a little disgusting, don't you think?"

Marci turned and scanned the room. "Doesn't look so bad to me," she said acidly. "Just a bunch of people eating their lunch, that's all. Do you want everyone sitting around with their hands folded?"

"No, but . . ."

Lila didn't bother finishing the sentence. She was suddenly afraid she sounded like a goody-goody. After all, what did she have to complain about? It wasn't as if this cafeteria was her major source of DARK DREAMS.

excitement. The bulk of the kids sitting around her couldn't possibly have as much fun as she did. Plenty of them probably didn't have any friends, while she, Lila, had too many to keep track of. In fact, she thought, trying to cheer herself up, it's probably safe to say that everyone in this cafeteria would be my friend if they got the chance (even that poor Nancy Bailey in the corner, who keeps all those tropical fish in her bedroom). And how many people could say that? Not even Samantha and Marci were as popular, though they certainly came close.

"You know who I think's disgusting," Samantha said, "that moron, Todd Hecht." She grimaced disdainfully at a tall, gangling boy sitting alone at a table across the room from them. He was reading a book intently, trying to look as though he didn't notice the straws the guys at the next table were blowing his way. "Doesn't he make you totally gag?"

Lila shrugged. "Not really. He's not that bad, actually. He's in my algebra cla.s.s."

"Oh, come on," said Marci. "He's a complete parasite."

"You don't even know him," Lila retorted. "How can you-"

8 * Children of the Night Samantha snorted. "It's easy for you to talk, Lila. You're only going out with the cutest guy in the whole school. You can afford to be nice about the losers the rest of us are stuck with."

"I'm not being nice!" Liia protested. "I'm just telling the truth! Todd doesn't make me gag, okay? I'm not saying I'd go out with him."

"That's exactly what I mean," Samantha cut in.

"I'm just saying he doesn't make me gag. So stop looking at me like I'm crazy."

Now Marci spoke up again. "You know Lila's always sticking up for people," she drawled, stabbing her straw venomously into her soda can. "She's not satisfied just being the prettiest girl in the junior cla.s.s and having the best boyfriend and all. She wants to be the nicest person in the school, too. She thinks she's Mother Theresa or something."

"I do not!" Lila objected. "I just don't feel like spending every single lunch period making fun of people! Can't we talk about something else for a change besides who we hate?"

Marci gave an elaborate sigh. "Q-kay. Let's talk about this delicious cafeteria food. Then we can DARK DREAMS * 9.

talk about the fascinating cla.s.ses we're taking. And then maybe we can get into something really worthwhile, like the weather or poor people or something. Thank you for improving our lunchtime conversation, Lila."

Lila didn't bother answering. It's not worth it, she thought wearily. I'm too tired to argue with them today.

Marci Zwick was right about one thing, anyway. Lila was the-well, not the prettiest girl in the school, maybe, but one of them. Auburn hair, huge, liquid amber eyes, the perfect face and body-Lila couldn't think of a time she hadn't found her own appearance tremendously rea.s.suring. Her two best friends looked pretty good, too. Samantha was a cla.s.sic blue-eyed blonde. "Like something from a shampoo ad," Lila always teased her. And Marci had a cloud of dark-brown ringlets and huge black eyes. The three girls made such a perfect combination that sometimes Lila wondered uneasily whether that was the reason they were such good friends.

But naturally she didn't say anything about that particular suspicion to Samantha and Marci. It certainly wasn't the kind of thing you talked about, 10 * Children of the Night even to your best friends. Besides, the three girls' personalities were complementary in the same way. Marci was the edgy, sophisticated one, Samantha was the nice, enthusiastic one (even though sometimes she did remind Lila of an overeager puppy), and Lila-Lila fell somewhere in between. Sometimes Marci irritated her, sometimes Samantha exhausted her, but for the most part the three of them got along very well.

What am I doing here?

Lila glanced up, startled. It had been her own voice she'd heard. Had she spoken out loud? It seemed that she hadn't. At least, neither Marci nor Samantha seemed to have noticed anything.

"Are you guys going to the game after school?" Samantha asked in a smoothing-things-over voice. Pelham's varsity football team had started off the season with five straight wins, three of them upsets, and almost the whole school had started showing up at games.

"Of course she's going to be there," said Marci. "She's got to cheer for Corey. Being the girlfriend of the great Corey Ryan is a full-time job."

Lila smiled weakly. "I have to confess, sometimes DARK DREAMS * 11.

I wish that Corey didn't even play football. It gets a little monotonous watching him win every single game. But yes, I'll probably be there. If I stop feeling so tired, that is. What I'd really like to do is go home and take a nap."

"You do look terrible," Marci said helpfully. "All pale and dragged out. Are you feeling all right?"

Lila shook her head. "I think I must be coming down with something. My whole body feels as though I've been hit by a truck. My head, my joints, my leg."

"Your leg?" Samantha interrupted. "What did you do to your leg?"

Lila reached down to rub the spot on her calf that had been throbbing on and off all day. "I must have banged it or something," she said. "I've had this little scar there since I was a baby, but for some reason it's really bothering me today."

She glanced down at her leg as she spoke-and gasped.

The scar on her right calf was so tiny, three white, threadlike lines just half an inch long, that Lila had never paid much attention to it. In fact, she didn't even know how she'd gotten it. Now, though, the scar was an inflamed red, and it had swelled angrily as though it were infected.

"Yuck!" Samantha shuddered as she glanced down at Lila's leg too. "What happened to you? That looks horrible!"

"I ... I don't know. But no wonder it's been bothering me."

"You'd better have the nurse take a look at it," Samantha advised. "Maybe you've got some kind of weird bug bite or something."

"Some kind of weird food poisoning, more likely," Marci said dryly. "That's what this place will do to you."

Lila laughed politely. How many cafeteria jokes have I heard since first grade1? she wondered. Hundreds'? Thousands? These days she could barely muster up a smile when she heard one. And how many more would she have to suffer through before she finished high school and college?

Clear but distant, like the chime of a muted bell, she seemed to hear her own voice again.

I've got to get out of here, it was telling her.

DARK DREAMS * 13.

But there was no place to go.

Pelham won the football game 31-10, and Lila was there to see it-as well as she could see anything through eyes that were three-quarters closed. At one point she felt so woozy that she almost toppled off the bleachers, but Samantha gave her a warning pinch before she could embarra.s.s herself.

"Wake upr Samantha hissed into Lila's ear. "Don't you care about this game?"

Not exactly.

Still, Lila forced herself to sit up straight. What would Corey think if he looked up into the stands and caught her dozing off? What kind of supportive girlfriend would that make her?

Every high school has a boy like Corey Ryan-a star, a golden child, the one whose name all the parents know. You can pick out a boy like this in the first grade and track him all the way through school, and he'll never miss a step. He's always the only ninth-grader on the varsity team. He's always the one who gets to escort the governor around when she visits the school. He's the one who never does anything wrong but never alienates people, 14 * Children of the Night either. He's always polite, even to people who don't matter. He makes the all-state team and wins the Good Citizenship award and marches off to a nice college without ever wavering. You can't not like someone like Corey Ryan.

When she'd first started going out with Corey, Lila had spent most of her waking time marveling at her good luck. She'd gone out with enough boys to know that the All-American types could be pretty horrible. "Either they're totally in love with themselves and totally horrible to everyone who doesn't like sports or they act as though they're campaigning for something all the time," she had once complained to Samantha.

But Corey ... Corey got along with everyone. He couldn't have been mean or selfish. It wouldn't have occurred to him. He was too happy for that- too happy, in a world where the sun had always shone on him, to bother finding fault with other people. And he's mine! I got him! Lila kept telling herself jubilantly.

But today, for some reason, Lila didn't feel much of anything when Corey loped across the field toward her after the game.

DARK DREAMS * 15.

"Hey, babe!" He was grinning happily and shaking back the long blond hair that always got in his eyes. (The coach hated Corey's hair, but Corey played so well that he never had any excuse for making him cut it.) "How'd we do?"

"You know the answer to that," Lila said with a smile, leaning down from her seat to kiss him. His face was as flushed and cheerful as a one-year-old's, she thought.

Corey reached up and ruffled her hair as Samantha and Marci melted discreetly out of sight. "Want to, you know, take a walk later, or something?" he asked. "After I've changed?"

"Um-well, actually, Corey . . ."

Lila hesitated. Her leg was hurting more than ever, and her head was starting to really throb. All she wanted to do was go home and fall into bed. "I'm kind of tired," she said reluctantly.

Corey's face fell as though she'd slapped him. "But we just won the game!" he said in a bewildered voice.

"So what do you want? A reward?" Lila snapped before she could stop herself. Then she clapped her hand over her mouth.

16 * Children of the Night "Oh, Corey, I'm sorry,'1 she said in horror. "I didn't mean that at all I don't know what's the matter with me today."

"That's okay, babe," Corey said slowly. "If you're not feeling well ..."

But now Lila couldn't stand to see him looking so disappointed. "I'm sure there's nothing wrong with me that some time with you wouldn't cure," she said quickly. "Really, Corey. I mean it." She shook a teasing forefinger at him. "You go and get unsweaty, now. I'll meet you in front of the school."

Like magic the grin reappeared on Corey's face. "Sounds good," he said.

Tired as she was, Lila couldn't help smiling back. "It doesn't take much to make you happy," she said.

Corey reached up, pulled her down to him, and kissed her again. "Don't sell yourself short," he whispered.

Half an hour later the two of them were strolling through the woods that bordered the reservoir near Lila's neighborhood. This was one of Lila's favorite spots. The woods themselves were beautiful-a lacy, dark-green s.p.a.ce made hushed and mysterious by the overhanging branches of hundreds of DARK DREAMS * 17.

hemlock trees. The path downhill led to a rocky brook punctuated with little waterfalls. The path uphill led to the town reservoir, which was ringed with a stone wall and a miniature stone gatehouse with a pointed slate roof. Lila and Corey had taken the reservoir path this time, and now they were leaning their elbows on the stone wall and gazing into the quiet depths below.