CHAPTER 12
IN WHICH EVAN IS FOOLISH
MEGAN. DINNER TIME, TECHNICALLY.
Megan had, of course, texted her parents about going out after school, and again to tell when she’d be home, once it seemed like they were wrapping up. She hadn’t, of course, gotten a response. She was running late by the time she actually got there, though, mostly because she’d gone home in a happy daze and had gotten on the wrong trolley.
“Hiiii, I’m hoooome,” Megan called as she closed the front door behind her, a big dumb grin plastered all over her face.
Silence greeted her. It was a Monday, after all. Well, it’s not like Megan wasn’t used to it. So she went and made herself a light dinner. As she did, she tried to keep her mind on her lovely afternoon with Angie and Ryan, and not on how Evan had stormed off.
Not on how Chris now definitely knew something was up.
Not on what Chris might think when he found out the truth.
Not on the possibility that Evan might never forgive her, now.
Needless to say, she failed.
ANGIE. FULL TWILIGHT.
Angie and Ryan watched TV while Angie ate, then went downstairs. Angie spent a while with her legs across Ryan’s lap, reading a manga while he played a video game.
Eventually though, Ryan paused the game and said, “Is he still in there?”
“Think so,” Angie said. “I haven’t heard him come out.”
“I’m going to go check on him,” Ryan said, getting up. She moved her feet and looked up at him as he said, “I’m starting to wonder.”
“Wonder what?” Angie asked, confused.
He didn’t answer, just heading up the stairs. After a moment she bookmarked her manga and followed him, asked again as she climbed the stairs, “Wonder what?”
“If he’s even here,” Ryan said, from the top of the stairs. He didn’t wait for her, he just marched over to Evan’s room and knocked while saying, “Evan, I’m coming in. Put your pants on.”
Angie giggled despite herself as she reached the top of the stairs. Ryan pushed open the door to Evan’s room. Then worry jolted through Angie, because he definitely wasn’t in there.
She stood behind Ryan, and they both surveyed the room, which in a way was surprisingly clean, considering that Evan didn’t ever really leave the door open or let people come in anymore. His laundry was all in hampers and there weren’t any dirty dishes or pieces of trash anywhere. The floor seemed to have been swept recently, though the rugs seemed like they could use shaking out or vacuuming.
However, there were books scattered all over the place—on the bed and the bedside table and the computer desk and the floor. A lot of reference books: books about Beasts, books about dungeons, books about guns... A few hunting memoirs… A couple of graphic novels about hunting... Many of them had ad-hoc bookmarks in them or were simply flopped open, with both face-up and face-down examples in sight.
In one corner sat Evan’s old acoustic guitar, the one thing in the room that did look dirty—it’d been so long since he’d picked it up that it was covered in dust.
“Hey,” Angie said at Ryan’s back. “We, uh, spend a lot of time together. When is he doing all this reading? Does he ever sleep either?”
Ryan glanced at her as he picked his way across the room to Evan's bed. “Not much, I guess,” he said uncertainly, keeping his voice low. “Half of these are my books.”
Spread out on a towel on Evan’s bed lay his gun cleaning kit. It had clearly been recently used. The case for Evan’s 11.9mm caliber magnum revolver lay on the bed, closed.
“Shit,” Ryan said, leaned down, and opened the case. The revolver was gone. “Shit,” Ryan said again. “I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”
“You think he’s actually out there? Trying to find a Beast? No warding mantle or anything?” Angie asked.
“Well, shit,” Cali said from where she was peeking around the doorway. “He’s not fucking in there?”
Ryan contemplated the cleaning kit and the case for a long moment. “He’s not happy with his rate of fire and accuracy with the eleven-nine yet. He feels like he either has to shoot too slow so that he’s accurate or that he’s not accurate at the rate of fire he wants. So if he was going to break curfew, at least he took it. He might not have.” He sighed. “It’s just that his standards are too high. I hope he doesn’t default to the ten-eight, because it won’t have stopping power he needs for any Beast he might find without a Light Bearer to lure weaker ones. Even with the eleven-nine… If he finds a Beast it’ll be one that’s fed, and by himself his chances aren’t good.”
“What do we do?” Cali said, expression stricken.
“Yesterday, I wouldn’t have known what to tell you. Today… well, first let’s search the house.” He turned and picked his way back out of the room.
EVAN. EARLIER, JUST AFTER SUNSET.
It hadn’t been hard to walk quietly past Cali without her noticing. Ryan and Angie had just gone downstairs—he could still hear them walking around, which meant if he was careful they wouldn’t hear him.
For years now, Evan Cadell hadn’t been able to stop obsessing over a handful of scenes from his life.
Virginia, his older sister, taking up the sacred lantern, the flames flaring silver-white as she lifted it off the pedestal. The excitement and fear his parents radiated, both in equal measure, as they beheld her silver-tinged flame. It was, of course, her eleventh birthday. He’d been five and three-quarters, California four and a bit.
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Virginia training, the lantern globe at the end of her spear flickering and crackling as she leapt and twisted, practicing the spear carrier forms and techniques. All those years of his childhood, watching her play catch up as the first and only Light Bearer in the family, attending his own lessons, hoping that he’d be one too.
His father’s face as the lantern stayed orange and low when he picked it up on his own eleventh birthday.\
Virginia’s face as she lay unmoving in the coffin, not long after her seventeenth birthday. She’d delayed and delayed her first hunt, uncertain she was ready. She hadn’t gone out until months past her sixteenth birthday, well over a year behind most other Light Bearers. After her first few hunts, she’d expressed regrets she hadn’t gone out soon. She experienced great success, bringing home forty-four bounties over the year and change she hunted—ostensibly for herself, though of course for the family. She’d gotten more confident with each one. Too confident, as it turned out. They’d had to keep the lower half of the coffin closed.
His father’s small grave marker, lost among so many others, the slab of stone gleaming in the sunlight in the section of the cemetery devoted to those slain in the line of duty.
Right now, though, some new scenes were replaying in his head, fierce and bright, having joined those older and colder. “Oh, we just missed Chris?” “Oh, isn’t he amazing?” “Tell us about them, you goof!” “Aw, nah. Gramyres hunt alone. You know how it is.”
Evan Cadell steeled his resolve, and stepped out to face the dusk. He had to be out there that night.
He just had to.
He set off down the lane without any destination in mind. He’d lived in the area since he was a small child, so it wasn’t like he was in danger of getting lost. He’d been out much later than this. The sun, below the horizon though it was, still bathed the sky in reds and purples. But the gaslights that flanked the street were already on, the flames glinting off the streetcar rails running up the center.
There were still others out, even after sunset in this residential area. The trolley’s bells went off while he was still on his own block, and it hummed by him up to the stop on the corner ahead of him. Various salaryfolks got off after it hissed to a stop, mostly young, single professionals in this corner of the neighborhood. The area was mostly boarding houses and apartments, as close as it was to downtown Bellevue and as far from the schools. He recognized some of them—as many of your neighbors as you ever recognized in this modern era. He nodded to those he recognized as they passed him on their way home. Their eyes flicked to the 11.9mm magnum revolver on his hip, which his father had given him for his thirteenth birthday. Perhaps they compared it to the pistols they carried, in hip or shoulder holsters.
No one stopped to question his presence out on the lane after sunset. No one was that invested in the residents of the old city-owned boarding house in any event. They knew what that probably meant—survivors. Next of kin to someone killed by the Beasts. Nothing they wanted to think about too long.
He walked for a time, picking turns mostly at random, knowing well enough where he was, as the glow of the sun waned and the shadows deepened in the eaves. The last of the golden light pooled in the solar panels on the tower houses’ roofs, gleamed off the wind turbine blades on their tall flexible spires rising up from each tower house, right up until it no longer did, fading orange to rose to dusky purple. He paced through more residential areas, avoiding major streets and their accompanying trolley lines, trolley stops, and militia watchtowers. He took care when he crossed them.
Gradually, he passed from the southern edge of Persephone’s Garden up through the core and into the fringe bordering Bridal Trails. He avoided moving lights in the distance, indicative of parties of late commuters getting escorts home from the nearest trolley stop. He kept to areas of shadow where low hanging tree branches blocked the radiance of the gas lamps.
The sounds of people faded—the murmurs of folks talking on their treks back to their homes from the trolley had been constant when he’d left. Such murmuring dwindled to the occasional indistinct voice or two in the distance, until even those disappeared, leaving the sounds of a few night insects, the sounds of trolleys passing every few minutes a few blocks away, an occasional voice drifting out of an open window.
No one noticed him enough to challenge his presence out in civil twilight, that close to his curfew. No one saw him after civil twilight passed, after the curfew started and the young night settled over the neighborhood. He’d never been out this late, not without others around him, without that extra circle of light cast by an escort’s lantern. The heavily tree-lined streets around Bridal Trails were extra well-lit by gaslights, but this meant the shadows beneath the foliage of the trees were that much deeper.
The stars came out. Not many—the light of thousands of gas lamps throughout the cities caused light pollution, blotted out many of the stars. But Evan had seldom just stood under the black sky of the night and looked at the stars. He took the opportunity to do so, once and again and again, as he paced through the dark. He kept to the shadows and avoided intersections with guard posts and watchtowers.
Evan cut through the parklets that alternated with houses near Bridal Trails, through very dark groves indeed. His heart hammered. Walking through the darkness out here without an escort’s light, even with the gaslights around, was something he’d imagined often, but never done. Stepping into the pools of gloom where the lamp light didn’t fall was hitting him harder than he'd expected.
All wise folk fear the dark, for only the Light Bearers can cast it back.
There weren’t really any people out at this point, and he went minutes at a time without hearing anything but his own movements, his own breath, the occasional night insect or bird, and the distant sounds of the trolleys. He wondered at his own idiocy, wandering out in the dark like this, risking fines or worse. If he encountered a Beast, he wouldn’t get to shoot it. It would shun the light, stalk him in the dark, and wait until it could strike. If it didn’t, that would be so much worse for him—that would mean it was really something he couldn’t handle. He just let his feet walk, though, and didn’t turn back toward home.
He needed to be out there. It felt like something he had to do.
At one point he saw a moving lantern or torch, some sort of flame, carried by a figure several blocks away—likely a Light Bearer out on patrol, or a militia escort on their way back to their station. He cut away through the grove he was walking beside, turning back to the southwest. Nothing broke the silence that had fallen over the area as civil twilight finished darkening into the true beginning of the night.
The night was dark. The moon, home of the Powers Above, hadn’t yet risen, or had already gone down. Or was new. Evan didn’t know. Too bad. He loved looking at the moon.
It wasn’t that he’d never been outside at night at all before. At various times in his life there had been events keeping him—usually the family as a whole—out after dark, after which they’d always gotten escorts home. And certainly they’d been out after dark on their own block at times, particularly for Independence Day celebrations. So he’d had opportunities for stargazing and moon watching in the past.
It was always a thrill, though, to see the stars in the night sky. Having seen them before didn’t change the fact that all humankind was trapped by the daylight. That the night belonged to the Beasts and to nature, with only the moon and its Powers truly in humankind’s corner.
As Evan emerged from the residential neighborhood around Bridal Trails Nature Reserve and approached the back of a small shopping tower, the silence broke. He heard a short, sharp scream and one single pop. A small caliber gunshot. For a long moment, he froze.
Evan crept through the last parklet, into the thin strip of concrete between it and the tower. He froze again, holding his breath. Nearby, he could hear… something. Some rustling… ripping sound. A wet noise—a tearing. He wasn’t that far from the west side of the tower, and crept that direction.
He peaked around the front corner.
Out on the moving walk that ran along the length of the tower, there was something moving. A strange pale shape, too long, hunched over another, darker, form. The lower form seemed human.
The one looming over it was very much not.