“So no one has seen Summer?” Aisha asked quietly.
I felt the frown again. It wasn’t so much the question itself; it was the way she asked it, as if she knew something that we didn’t.
“Well, did you hear about what happened at the dance?”
Aisha nodded.
“Yeah, well, that’s the only time anyone’s seen her since the bonfire in the woods Friday night.”
Aisha nodded, glancing suspiciously around the table, as if to make sure no one else was listening.
“Since she left with you.”
Aisha’s eyes darted back to me and she watched me.
“You do remember,” I whispered, careful to keep my expression casual so as not to alert anyone else to the seriousness of our conversation.
Again, Aisha looked surreptitiously around the neighboring faces. When she made her way back to me, she met my eyes and shrugged.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“There’s not much to tell really. I can’t even be sure that it’s real,” she said, her voice quivering.
“What? What did you see?”
“It all seems like some kind of a weird dream. All these images and feelings…”
“Such as?” I prompted.
Aisha chewed her lip nervously as she searched for the words.
“Well, I remember going into the woods with Summer. She had to pee, but she didn’t want to go by herself. You scared her that day at lunch, talking about the Slayer and stuff.”
“Obviously not enough to cancel the party.”
Aisha nodded. “That’s the last thing that I remember clearly. Everything else just seems, I don’t know, sort of fuzzy. Like a dream.
“For some reason, I thought I saw Trinity, but she didn’t look like herself anymore. There was a lot of blood and I remember hurting and tasting something kind of rusty.”
“And then what?”
“I remember looking up at the trees in the daylight. The sun was shining and it was so bright, but I could see the branches. I heard Summer crying and somebody whispering and then my legs started hurting.”
Aisha paused, her haunted eyes scared and confused as she looked back over the last few days. I didn’t rush her. I simply listened—carefully, anxiously. Full of dread.
“Then there were crickets and a really weird squealing sound. And laughter.
But it was scary laughter. Crazy laughter. It sounded like Summer.”
“Did you see her?”
“Well,” Aisha paused again, uncertain. “I can’t say for sure. I think I was still dreaming, because she was eating a- a—”
Aisha’s chin started to tremble and her eyes filled with tears.
“What?”
“A pig, Ridley,” she cried quietly. “She was on her knees in the leaves eating a pig raw. Like, she was taking big bites of it. There was blood everywhere and pieces of meat stuck to her face and—”
Aisha stopped, a gurgling sound bubbling in the back of her throat as bile crept up rebelliously. At her description, I could picture it as plainly as if I’d seen it myself. Saliva poured into my mouth.
“I know they were dreams, Ridley, but they felt so real. I can’t get them out of my head.” Tears left wet tracks down Aisha’s ashen cheeks then dripped silently from her chin.
“How did you get home?”
“I don’t know. My mom woke me up crying this morning. She was in the kitchen. I guess she’d been up all night. She was bawling about me drinking and staying over at a boy’s house all weekend, but I had no idea what she was talking about. I told her I couldn’t remember what had happened and she told me not to lie to her. She said I’d admitted it when I came home last night.”
Aisha sniffled pitifully.
“But you don’t remember talking to her?”
“No,” she said emphatically. “I don’t even remember coming home last night. She said it was, like, 2:00 in the morning. All I remember is the party on Friday, those weird dreams and waking up in my bed this morning. And I’m just so tired. There’s no way I could’ve slept somewhere all weekend,” she sobbed.
When she glanced around the table and saw that several pairs of eyes had turned toward her suspiciously, she wiped at her cheeks and pulled herself together somewhat.
“Aisha, have you noticed any marks on you? Bruises or scratches, cuts?
Bites?” I added the last as nonchalantly as I could. She’d likely think I was talking about insect bites or animal bites rather than the type to which I was actually referring.
Aisha nodded. “I’ve got all sorts of places on me. It’s like I rolled around in the woods or in a briar patch or something. There are marks everywhere.”
“Nothing that particularly stands out, though?”
For the first time, Aisha eyed me suspiciously.
“What do you mean, Ridley?”
“I just thought maybe you got a tick or something. You know they say lyme disease is dangerous. Makes you really sick.”
Aisha’s eyes rounded in surprise. “You know, I didn’t even think of that.”
I gave myself an imaginary pat on the back, congratulating myself for my quick thinking.
“I know, right?”
I felt satisfied when I saw the relief flood Aisha’s eyes. I’d given her a plausible excuse for what she’d experienced, for the strange things she’d seen, as well as the time she’d missed. Until she found out definitively otherwise, she’d think she had a case of lyme disease. But at least she wouldn’t think she was crazy.
A healthy dose of guilt was lurking behind that fleeting sense of satisfaction, however, marring the momentary pleasure of it. I felt bad for lying to her. She’d likely been bitten by a vampire and then made to forget the whole experience. The holes in her memory were probably due to the vampire blood not being very mature, very potent. According to Bo and Lucius, there’s much to be said for the power of the blood. That made an even stronger argument for the case that the offending vampire might be Trinity.
Trinity! How could I have forgotten her so easily? It was becoming painfully clear that she hadn’t forgotten any of us. I wondered if that’s what had happened to Summer. Had Trinity fed from her and made Summer lose her mind?
Was Summer so weak that she’d fall apart after only one bite? Or even two? Lucius said it was possible.
When I started to really think about it, Summer seemed exactly that weak.
Personality-wise anyway. I had no idea what her actual constitution was like.