The Den of Shadows Quartet Read online

Only one hundred and eighty days of school left, Jessica thought as she prepared for the first day of her senior year of high school. There was barely enough time to get dressed before she had to pull her backpack onto her shoulders and dart down the street to catch the bus. Breakfast? A fleeting dream.

  Ah, Ramsa High School. What a perfect little niche of Hell, she thought as the bus pulled up to the school. In one year, you will be out of here forever. That fact was the only thing that had convinced Jessica to get out of bed that morning: if she passed senior year, she would never need to succumb to the grasp of Ramsa High again.

  She had lived in the town of Ramsa since she was twelve, and had long before realized that the other students would never accept her. Few were openly hostile, but no one could be described as warm and fuzzy, either.

  As she neared the building, Jessica was acutely aware of how many students walked in groups of friends. She had known these people for five years, but that didn’t seem to matter as they moved past her without a word. She even saw two girls notice her, whisper to each other, then quickly retreat as if Jessica was somehow dangerous.

  One senior, a boy Jessica had known since her very first day at Ramsa Junior High, crossed himself when he saw her. She was tempted to start chanting satanically in the hopes of scaring him. He had long before decided that she must be a witch, and she had no idea why. Occasionally, out of spite or simply boredom, she encouraged his belief.

  The thought was amusing in a way The only witches she knew lived solely in the confines of the novels she’d been writing for the past few years. One of her witches could walk right in front of this idiot and he would never recognize her as what she was; Jessica’s witches tended to be rather human in their manner and appearance.

  More humorous, though, was the fact that her old enemy was holding the book Tiger, Tiger by Ash Night. Jessica wondered how he would react if he knew that she would soon be receiving royalties from his purchase.

  Jessica had been struck by the idea for Tiger, Tiger several years before, when she and Anne had been visiting one of Anne’s old college friends in Concord, Massachusetts. She had spent nearly the entire weekend vacation locked in her room, and those hours of work had finally paid off.

  In homeroom, Jessica sat in the back, alone as always. She waited in silent contemplation for attendance to be taken. The teacher was a young woman whom Jessica had not seen before; her name was written on the board and had received a few snickers from the students. Kate Katherine, high-school teacher, must have had sick parents. On the other hand, her name was probably easier for people to remember than Jessica Ashley Allodola.

  “Jessica Allodola?” Mrs. Katherine said as if cued by Jessica’s thoughts.

  “Here,” Jessica answered absently. The teacher checked off the name in her book and went on to the next person on the list.

  The words of Jessica’s adoptive mother, Anne, echoed through her mind.

  “Tomorrow is the first day of a new year, Jessie. Could you at least try not to get sent to the office? Just this once?”

  “Don’t call me Jessie,” she had answered.

  “Just try, Jessica,” Anne had pleaded. “For me?”

  “You aren’t my mother. Don’t tell me what to do.”

  “I’m the closest thing to a mother you have!” Anne had snarled, losing her patience.

  The remark had stung, and Jessica had stalked to her room, mumbling, “My real mother was smart enough to get rid of me early.”

  Snapping back to the present, she wondered bitterly if Anne considered it bad luck that Jessica was the child she had ended up adopting. Jessica wrenched herself from these thoughts as a pretty girl with chestnut hair tentatively entered the room.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” the girl said. “I’m new to the school, and I got a bit lost.” She introduced herself as Caryn Rashida. Mrs. Katherine nodded as she found Caryn’s name on her list.

  Caryn looked around for an empty seat; one was conveniently located next to Jessica. But when she saw Jessica she hesitated, as if she might go sit somewhere else. Jessica wasn’t surprised. The residents of Ramsa all seemed to shy away from her almost unconsciously.

  However, Caryn made up her mind and walked resolutely across the room. Extending a hand, she spoke. “Hi. I’m Caryn Rashida.” She stumbled a bit over her own last name. “Why are you sitting all alone here?”

  Cause I want to,” Jessica answered coolly, leveling her emerald-green eyes at Caryn’s pale blue ones. Caryn held the gaze for a moment longer than most people could, but then looked away.

  With disgust, Jessica had noted the girl’s unease and her decision to make an effort despite it. Jessica had no wish to be taken under Caryn’s wing like a homeless child. Dislike she understood; pity she could not stand.

  “Wouldn’t you rather have some company?” Caryn asked, her tone more subdued but no less friendly.

  Ignoring Caryn’s attempts at conversation, Jessica pulled out a pencil and started to draw.

  “Well, then … I guess I’ll leave you alone,” Caryn said, voice muted. She moved to another table. Jessica continued drawing, ignoring Caryn and the teacher, who was droning on about locker assignments.

  Mrs. Katherine asked Caryn to help distribute the locks, and when Caryn had finished, she lingered a moment at Jessica’s table. Jessica wondered grimly at the girl’s persistence.

  “I’ve never been able to figure these out,” Caryn muttered as she fiddled with her lock. She spun the combination a dozen times without success. “Maybe it’s broken … You want to give it a try?”

  Jessica plucked the lock from Caryn’s hands and had it open in a second. “Hope you don’t need to use the locker too much this year.”

  “How do these things work?” Caryn laughed at herself cheerfully.

  “Figure it out yourself,” Jessica answered as she shut the lock and tossed it back to Caryn.

  “What did I do to you?” Caryn asked, finally deflated, and Jessica wouldn’t have been surprised to see her eyes start to tear. “Why do you have to be so nasty to me?”

  “It’s who I am,” Jessica snapped, closing her notebook and putting it away. “Learn to live with it.”

  She turned her back to Caryn as Mrs. Katherine led the class to their lockers. The girl didn’t try to talk to Jessica again for the rest of the day. No one else did either; besides the arrival of Caryn, nothing had changed.

  CHAPTER 2

  “HOW WAS YOUR FIRST DAY of school?” Caryn’s mother asked as soon as the girl entered the kitchen.

  Caryn’s mother, Hasana Rashida, was a slightly plump, attractive woman with hair of a rich brown, cropped in a serious yet flattering style. She was obviously tired from her day at the bookstore, of which she was the new manager, so Caryn decided not to bother her with details of the icy putdowns she had received that morning.

  “It wasn’t awful,” she answered instead as she fished a spoon from the silverware drawer and went to serve herself some ice cream.

  The thought of Jessica made her uneasy. There was something in Jessica’s aura that she hadn’t been able to identify — something darker than normal. At first, it had almost kept Caryn from approaching. After only one day, she could see that it also kept other students away.

  Of course, that was logical. Caryn wouldn’t have been in this town if Jessica had been a normal high-school student.

  Caryn had tried despite her unease to get to know Jessica, more because the girl had seemed so alone than because Caryn had been asked to do so.

  Prompted by these thoughts, she asked, “Where’s Dominique?”

  Hasana sighed. “She left to deal with some trouble involving her daughters, but she should be back soon.”

  Dominique Vida was one of the few people who could give Caryn the chills just by entering the room. She was the leader of the oldest living line of witches, and her power was impressive. She was the one who had tracked down Jessica’s address and maneuvered Caryn and Hasana into this town, findin
g a house for them and employment for Hasana in less than two weeks.

  Either despite this power or because of it, the woman was emotionally cold as ice in almost any situation. She needed to be: Dominique Vida was a vampire hunter. She could not allow emotion to cause hesitation in a fight.

  If anyone else had asked Caryn to move into this town, where she could barely breathe for the aura of vampires, she would have refused. But Dominique was the leader of all four lines of witches, including the Smoke line — Caryn’s own.

  Dominique could order Caryn to go into the vampires’ lairs alone, and Caryn would do so or risk losing her title as a witch. As antisocial as Jessica seemed to be, at least watching the writer didn’t seem dangerous.

  Following the same train of thought as her daughter, Hasana asked, “Did you meet Jessica?”

  “Yes. She hated me on sight,” Caryn answered gloomily. “And considering how she’s treated, I’m not surprised.”

  Caryn had been shocked at the way Jessica’s classmates seemed to view her — as if she was a poisonous spider. One of them, an athletic senior who’d been flirting with Caryn only a few minutes before, had called Jessica a witch. Hurt by his words, Caryn had needed to swallow an argument; Jessica was further from being a witch than the boy who had made the accusation.

  Caryn glanced down at her bowl, her appetite gone. Her ice cream was melting.

  CHAPTER 3

  ANNE CONFRONTED JESSICA as soon as she walked in the front door. “You’re late.”

  “Sorry,” Jessica answered sardonically. “They love me so much, they asked me to stay a bit longer.”

  “Jessica … on the first day of school?” Anne’s voice was heavy with disappointment.

  “Learn the art of sarcasm,” Jessica suggested. “I needed to walk off some energy, so I swung by the woods on my way home.”

  “Thank god.” Anne smiled and started to fill out the forms that the school had mailed home. An awkward moment went by in silence.

  “Anything interesting happen at school?” Anne asked eventually, though Jessica could tell that her mind was not on the question.

  “Nope,” Jessica answered absently as she searched through her bag for a letter one of her teachers had given out for parents. She handed it to Anne.

  After scanning the letter, Anne asked, “How are your teachers?”

  “Fine.”

  “That’s nice.”

  As usual, their conversation was more of a mandatory social gesture than a method of communication. Anne and Jessica had learned long before that they had nothing in common and had little chance of ever engaging in a truly two-sided talk about anything. Occasionally one actually paid attention to what the other was saying, but such circumstances usually led to arguments.

  Another moment of silence ensued.

  “I’m going to my room,” Jessica announced finally. Leaving her backpack on the couch, she went upstairs and into the dimly lit cavern she had created for herself.

  The windows were covered by heavy black curtains, and the shades were down. A small beam of light squeezed underneath the curtains, but that was all.

  The bed, which was little more than a mattress on wheels, had been pushed into a corner. The sheets and comforter were black, as were all but one of the pillows. The exception was deep violet and made of fake suede. Anne had bought the pillow for Jessica several years ago, when she had still been attempting to influence the girl’s tastes. Besides the pillow and Jessica’s magenta Lava lamp, there was little else in the room that wasn’t black.

  A laptop computer and printer stood out brightly against their dark surroundings. They sat atop a black wooden desk, which they shared with a strewn assortment of floppy disks. The computer was one of the few things Jessica cherished. Here, in the shadowed niche she had created for herself, she churned out the novels that had been her escape from the world since she moved to Ramsa.

  The twenty-nine manuscripts that she had written in the past five years, the brown envelopes that held her contracts for two of them, and a few copies of the published book Tiger, Tiger were the only other nonblack objects in the room.

  It had been only two years earlier that she had first begun the search for a publisher; she could hardly believe how quickly things had gone since. Her first book, Tiger, Tiger, had been released about a week before, under the pen name Ash Night. The second one, Dark Flame, was presently sitting on her editor’s desk awaiting the woman’s comments.

  Jessica flopped down onto her bed and looked up at the ceiling. Sometimes ideas for her books would strike as she lay like this, staring into oblivion, but usually they came from her dreams.

  Even while she was writing, it was as if she was in a dream — one which her waking mind did not understand. She never quite knew what was happening in any of the numerous novels that she was working on at any given time. But she had learned not to read the manuscripts until they were finished. The only time she had broken that pattern, the flow of words had abruptly stopped. That had been the only story she disliked. The scenes written after she had read it seemed forced and unnatural. Trying to think them up had been a chore.

  She didn’t realize that she had drifted into sleep until she was awakened by Anne’s knock on her door.

  “Jessica?”

  “What?” she asked tiredly.

  “It’s dinnertime,” Anne announced. “Are you going to come down?”

  Jessica closed her eyes for a moment more and then got up and turned on her computer.

  “I’m not hungry,” she called to Anne. “Go ahead and eat without me.”

  “Jessica —”

  “I’ll eat later, Anne,” she snapped. Normally she would have at least joined Anne for dinner, just to maintain the illusion of a familial relationship. But when she was in the mood to write, that pull was stronger than her desire to get along with her adopted mother.

  CHAPTER 4

  WITHIN FIVE MINUTES Jessica was writing quickly, lost in the bubble of her imagination. The entire night passed as she typed. It was sunrise when the flow of words halted.

  Exhausted, Jessica turned off the computer, stood to stretch, and fell into bed and a sleep filled with nightmares.

  Jazlyn collapsed to her knees, unable to stand any longer. Her head pounded as her body fought the strange blood that was trying to overtake her system.

  She knew this sensation. She had felt it once before, on the day she had died, years ago. It had not hurt so much then. It had not hurt to die.

  It had not hurt to die …

  Why did it hurt so much to live again?

  Her vision went black as her heart beat for the first time in more than thirty years. She drew a slow, painful breath.

  The heart in her chest labored, unaccustomed to its task. Her lungs burned with the constant intake of oxygen, which seemed to sear her throat. All the muscles of her torso cramped each time she inhaled.

  Finally she fell into blissful unconsciousness.

  Jessica woke, gasping for breath.

  That same dream had frequented her sleep for years, but she had yet to become used to it. The pain was always so vivid.

  She turned on the Lava lamp and let the glow of magenta light calm her. The clock read 6:13 A.M. Though it was less than an hour after she had fallen asleep, she was no longer tired. As always, that dream had forced fatigue far away.

  After showering and dressing quickly, she paused to study herself in front of the full-length mirror in the bathroom. Jessica well knew she had a body and face to die for. At five feet, five inches tall, she was slender but not bony and had well-toned muscles despite the fact that she rarely worked out. Her skin was naturally fair and had been kept that way by her aversion to sunlight. Unlike those of many girls her age, Jessica’s complexion was flawless and always had been. Her long jet-black hair tumbled around a face with high cheekbones, full lips, and expressive green eyes.

  Yet despite her attractive appearance, Jessica had never so much as had a date. Occasional
ly that fact bothered her, though she usually had plainer insults to deal with than oblique dismissals from the boys in her grade.

  Annoyed, she finally turned away from her reflection. Again she’d been unable to find the flaw that made people hesitate when they saw her on the street or in the hall.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Anne was finishing a batch of pancakes.

  “Morning, Jessica,” Anne said as she slid two of the pancakes onto a plate. “Sit.”

  Jessica sat. She was in no hurry this morning, and the pancakes smelled delicious. She realized that she had eaten very little the day before.

  “Smells good,” she offered.

  Anne smiled. “Thank you. I do try.”

  By the time she left for school, Jessica was in a good mood. She even had the heart to smile at Mrs. Katherine when she saw her in front of the building, and the teacher returned her gesture with a nod. Then Caryn walked by, and Jessica’s cheer vanished.

  CHAPTER 5

  AS SHE ENTERED THE BUILDING, Jessica came upon a group of girls who had gathered near the main office.

  “Nice body,” she heard one of them whisper, referring to someone in the office.

  “Who is he?” another girl asked.

  “No idea,” the first one answered. “But you’ve got to admit he’s cute.”

  “Cute?” a third girl repeated. “He is totally hot.”

  Jessica couldn’t see the subject of this profound conversation. Probably some handsome blond substitute who will turn out to be the most hated teacher in the school, she thought pessimistically.

  “Who are you looking at?” she asked the three gawking girls.

  The quietest, a senior named Kathy looked over her shoulder, recognized Jessica, grabbed her friends’ arms, and pulled the girls away.

  Jessica scowled as she watched them go. At least most people were subtle about moving away from her.

  She quickly forgot the girls’ behavior, however, when she glanced into the office and saw the object of their admiration.