Daughters of the Moon Books 1 - 3, Page 2

  “Oh, honey.” Her mother embraced her. “It’s perfectly normal to feel like you don’t fit in. It’s part of growing up. You don’t need to worry. Look at how popular you are at school. You get lots of telephone calls and invitations to parties.”

  If her mother only knew how much of her real self she had to keep hidden. Maybe kids at school liked her now, but what if they knew the truth?

  “I have to do a lot to fit in, Mom.” It wasn’t self-pity. It was fact. “Kids aren’t very accepting of someone who is really different.”

  “What’s so different about you? You’re pretty. You get good grades.”

  Did she dare tell her? Did she have a choice? If her life was in danger, maybe her mother could help. “Do you remember the night when I was a little girl and I woke up crying from a nightmare?”

  “Which night? There were so many.”

  “The night you thought I was playing a game of hide-and-seek?”

  “Yes—I found you sleeping in the bathroom and carried you back to bed.”

  “I wasn’t hiding.”

  “What were you doing, then?”

  “I was . . .” she stopped.

  “Yes?”

  She looked at her mother. How could she tell her that she had been invisible?

  “I was . . . That was the night I found out . . .”

  That had been the night she woke from a nightmare and couldn’t see her body in the pale glow of the night-light. She had been terrified, and afraid to tell her mother. She had thought she had done something bad. Her mother had heard her crying and ran into her room. She had lifted her arms to be comforted, but her mother couldn’t see her. That had frightened her even more. While her mother was searching the house for her, her molecules had come back together, but they had come back wrong. Her face had looked different. She had locked herself in the bathroom then, knowing her mother could never love her now. Sleep had finally taken her, and when she woke in the morning back in her own bed, she had looked normal.

  “Vanessa, what did you find out that night?”

  “Nothing. It’s not important.”

  Her mother lifted her chin and looked into her eyes. “You’re shaking.”

  “I just wish . . .”

  “Tell me.”

  “I just wish I could be like everyone else.”

  “Is that all? Trust me, it’s better to be an individual and to have your own idiosyncrasies.” Her mother sat back at the table. “There’s life after high school. Don’t try too hard to blend in and be like everyone else. Kids who do lose something important.” Her mother continued reciting what Vanessa called Standard Lecture No. 7.

  She left her mother talking to the wall and went upstairs to the bathroom. She washed her feet. The water turned black and swirled down the drain.

  Then she took a bath, put on pajamas, and went to her bedroom. She loved her room. She had window seats and shutters, flowered wallpaper, and a bed with too many pillows. Her mother called the decor “romance and drama,” and said the room looked like it belonged to a fairy princess.

  She turned on her computer and clicked on a program called Sky Show that she had purchased through Astronomy magazine. A thin slice of moon came on the screen. She looked at the date. According to the program, today should have been the first crescent moon, a time when she should have felt adventurous and filled with curiosity.

  But the program had made an error. It was the dark of the moon tonight. Those three nights when the moon was completely dark and invisible from Earth had always had a strange hold on her. She felt nervous then, as if some part of her sensed danger. Catty’s mother said superstitious people believed the dark moon brought death and destruction, and freed evil forces to roam the night.

  A breeze ruffled the curtains. She hadn’t left her window open. Maybe her mother had opened it. She shut the window and locked it, then sat on her bed and stared at her computer.

  The door to her room opened. Her mother walked in.

  “I came to kiss you good night,” her mother said. “Why does it feel so cold in here?”

  “My window was open. You didn’t open it?”

  “No, but that explains the draft I was feeling all night.”

  “My program’s messed up. Did you play around with my computer?”

  “Computer?”

  “Right.” Vanessa shook her head. “Silly idea.”

  Her mother kissed her quickly and started to leave.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know what this means?” She tried to repeat the sound of the words she had spoken earlier. “Oh, Mah-tare Loon-ah, Re-gee-nah no-kis, Ad-you-wo may noonk.”

  “That sounds like Latin.” Her mother smiled. “That’s what you did when you were a little girl.”

  “Speak Latin?”

  “No,” her mother said. “Hold your moon amulet that way.”

  She glanced down. After her father died, her nightmares had become stronger. Always the same dream—black shadows covering the full moon and then, like a specter, taking form and chasing her. She always woke clutching the silver moon amulet she wore around her neck. She was gripping it now.

  “Good night, sweetheart.” Her mother kissed the top of her head and left the room.

  Vanessa stared at the night outside her window. Where would she have learned Latin? She knew it had to be connected to her power. If it weren’t so late, she’d call Catty. Now she’d have to wait until tomorrow to find out if Catty had ever uttered words that she didn’t understand.

  She crawled under the covers. The cotton sheets were sun-dried and ironed and filled with the smell of sunshine. She breathed in the fragrance and glanced back at her computer. For the first time she noticed her alarm clock with the luminous hands. It was turned toward the wall. She got up and turned it back to face her. Then she noticed her wristwatch. It was turned facedown. Odd. Maybe Catty had been playing around and left a calling card. She’d have a serious talk with her tomorrow and tell her that this time her jokes had gone too far.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CATTY AND VANESSA sat at the counter inside the Johnny Rockets diner. The smells of bacon and onions hung in the warm, thick air. Conversation whirled around them in a mad tangle of laughs and squeals, but only the thunder of motorcycles taking off outside was loud enough to drown the loud sing-songy music from the fifties and sixties.

  “I swear I didn’t go into your room last night.” Catty’s brown hair fell in perfect spirals around her face. When she tilted her head, the curls caught the sunlight pouring through the window.

  “Someone turned my clock around,” Vanessa said.

  “Why would I turn your clock around?”

  “Just to show me you had been there.” Vanessa looked at her. “It wouldn’t be the first time you had done something like that.”

  “But I was at Planet Bang with you.” Catty had a slight smile that curled on her lips even when she frowned.

  “I thought maybe you had tweaked time.” She had hoped it had been Catty. “Who was in my room if it wasn’t you?”

  “Maybe no one,” Catty pointed out. “Maybe you’re creeping yourself out. You could have been nervous while getting ready. So you knocked over your clock and set it up facing the wall without noticing.”

  “Maybe,” Vanessa agreed, but the nagging feeling that someone had been in her room wouldn’t leave her.

  “I can’t believe you were so scared that you almost told your mother the truth about . . . you know.” Catty flipped through the song titles in the Seeburg Wall-O-Matic. She picked up the nickels the waiter had left for the vintage machine, dropped two in the coin slot, and punched in a set of numbers. “Would you have told her about me, too?”

  “No,” Vanessa said. “Just me.”

  Charlie Brown boomed from the speakers, competing with the sizzle of hamburgers frying on the grill. A crowd of bikers walked in and straddled red seats at the counter.

  “What would she have done?” Catt
y asked. “It’s not something a mother expects to hear. ‘Hey, Mom, did you know I can be as see-through as a ghost? Wanna see?’ I mean, not see.’” Catty laughed so hard the bikers turned and smiled at her.

  Vanessa wiped the drop of chocolate running over the Johnny Rockets red emblem on the glass. “I’m not kidding, Catty, it wasn’t just the dark of the moon. Someone was following me.”

  “I know one way we can check it out.” Catty dug her spoon into the whipped cream on top of the shake.

  “No,” Vanessa said firmly. “I told you. Never again. Not after last time.” The truth was, Vanessa found Catty’s power frightening.

  “You always say that, and then you end up changing your mind.”

  “I guess. Want my tomatoes?”

  “Last night made you all messed up.” Catty took the tomatoes and tucked them into her burger.

  Vanessa didn’t want to talk about last night anymore. It was better forgotten, like a nightmare. “I looked for you at school today.”

  “I was hopping time,” Catty said. She picked up a French fry covered with chili and cheese and pushed it into her mouth.

  “You got to stop doing that! You’re missing too many tests.”

  “My mother doesn’t care.”

  “But you should.” Sometimes Vanessa felt jealous of Catty’s relationship with her mother. Catty’s mother didn’t care if she missed school, because she knew Catty was different. She also wasn’t Catty’s biological mother. She had found Catty walking along the side of the road in the desert between Gila Bend and Yuma when Catty was six years old. She’d planned to turn her over to the authorities in Yuma, but when she saw Catty make time change, she decided Catty was an extraterrestrial, separated from her parents, like E.T., and that it was her duty to protect her from government officials who would probably dissect her. She brought Catty to Los Angeles, knowing that in a city where anything goes, a child from another planet could fit in.

  Catty had only two memories of the time before she was six. One of a crash, the other of a fire. Both were only flashes of memory and didn’t reveal much about her past. When her power was strong enough, Catty planned to go back to the time before she was six.

  Vanessa rolled down the paper wrapper that swaddled the hamburger. She opened her mouth wide and bit down. Mayonnaise, pickle juice, and mustard ran down her chin.

  The waiter came back. “How’s the hamburger?” he asked.

  “Great,” Catty said and let a piece of tomato fall from her mouth.

  The waiter laughed and picked up the tomato from the counter, then walked away.

  “You are so gross!”

  Catty punched her playfully. “Vanessa, I’m just trying to get your mind off last night. You probably had some dog running after you, or a homeless person who likes to play games. Let’s go back and see.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Catty persisted, sipping her shake.

  “You know why. I’m too afraid we’ll go back some time and get stuck.”

  “So what? All you’d have to do is relive the time. It would be fun. We’d know what was going to happen.”

  “You don’t know if that’s how it really works.”

  “That’s because I’ve never gotten stuck,” Catty pointed out.

  When Catty had first tried time traveling, it had only been in short bursts. Then she had learned that if she concentrated she could make hops in time up to twenty-four hours into the past or the future. Catty figured if she lost her power and couldn’t return to the present, she would just relive a day or, if she had jumped time into the future, lose a day. Vanessa wasn’t so sure. There was also the tunnel, the hole in time they had to go through. She was terrified of getting stuck there.

  “I don’t know why you worry so much,” Catty said, taking another bite.

  “Forget it. It was probably a homeless person, like you said.” Vanessa insisted. “I don’t need to see.”

  Catty spoke with her mouth full. “We should check it out. To be sure.”

  Vanessa plucked a French fry from the globs of melted cheese and chili. She twirled it in the raw onions and slipped it into her mouth.

  “You remember the first time you took me traveling?” Vanessa said with a smile.

  “Yeah,” Catty giggled. “You about broke my eardrums in the tunnel.”

  They had been watching TV after Catty’s ninth birthday party, waiting for Vanessa’s mother to pick her up. Catty wanted to show her something special. Vanessa had thought it was another birthday present. Instead, Catty had grabbed her hand, and a strange heaviness crackled through the air. The fine hairs on her arm stood on end before the living room had flashed away with a burst of white light. Suddenly, they were whirling downward through a dark tunnel. The air inside felt thick enough to hold. She could barely breathe. Her screams bounced back at her until the sound became deafening. Just when it had grown unbearable, they fell with a hard crash back into the living room. Only, the living room was different now. Sunlight came through the windows. Wrapping paper and ribbons were scattered over the gray-green rug. Then they had peeked into the dining room, and Vanessa had seen herself, sitting at the table eating cake and ice cream. She had been too shocked to scream again. Catty stole into the kitchen, and returned with two pieces of cake, and before Vanessa could ask her what was going on, they were back in the hated tunnel with its thick, sucking air and bad smells. Instead of landing in the living room, they had landed five blocks away on someone’s front porch.

  “I got in so much trouble.” Vanessa shook her head. “My mother thought I had wandered off.” She couldn’t tell her mother what had really happened. Her mother would never have believed her, anyway.

  “But the cake was worth it,” Catty said.

  “You ate my slice,” Vanessa smiled. “I was crying because the tunnel scared me so much. Remember?”

  “It’s not like you didn’t get even.”

  “You deserved it,” Vanessa teased. “You were always getting me in trouble.” Vanessa had planned for weeks, practicing with her teddy bear until she could make it invisible with her. Then one Sunday while they were playing in Catty’s backyard, she had hugged Catty and scrunched her eyes in concentration until she felt her molecules pinging. She had opened her eyes. Catty was becoming a dusty cloud. The cloud swirled around, and Vanessa had seen a look of utter astonishment on Catty’s face before she became completely invisible. Success! Her plan had worked. Vanessa’s molecules had exploded outward in complete delight. At first Catty had buzzed around the backyard like a balloon losing its air. Vanessa couldn’t see her, but she could feel her air currents. But then she had started to get cold and wanted to become visible again. Vanessa wasn’t as practiced as Catty. An hour later, even with total concentration, she had only managed to make parts of them visible. When Catty saw her hand floating, unattached to her arm, she had started crying. That had made Vanessa more nervous. It had taken her hours to get them back together, whole and right.

  Catty nudged her. “You should use your gift more often. Practice makes perfect and all that.”

  But Vanessa had felt so badly about what she had done to Catty that she had sworn never to use her power again. Since then she had tried to control her molecules, but in times of intense emotion, her molecules had more power than her ability to restrain them and the light from a full moon seemed to fuel their change.

  “Hurry up and eat,” Catty prodded her.

  “Why? We’ve got plenty of time.”

  Two minutes later, Catty put her hand on Vanessa’s shoulder. Her eyes were dilated as though a powerful energy were building in her brain. Vanessa glanced at Catty’s watch. The minute hand started moving backward.

  “Don’t,” she begged. “This will be the third time we’ve left without paying.”

  “But they won’t know. As far as they’ll know, we never came in. It will be last night for them.”

  “But we’ve still eaten their food without paying for it.”

/>   Catty rolled her eyes. “The food didn’t exist yesterday, so why does it matter?”

  “It just feels wrong, and I told you I didn’t want to go back, anyway.”

  The hands on Catty’s watch stopped moving.

  “You need to go back and see that nothing was there, or you’ll never stop thinking about last night.”

  “I won’t,” Vanessa said. “Besides, Morgan just walked in.”

  “So?”

  “She’s been around too many times when we’ve switched time. I think she suspects something.”

  “Morgan doesn’t suspect anything. She can’t.”

  “I know she can’t, but she’s been asking questions,” Vanessa said. Catty was sure that when she went back in time, people had no sensation of returning to the past. But Vanessa thought people sensed the changes in the length of an hour, the confusion of memory, and a rash of déjà vu.

  “Besides,” Vanessa added. “I told her we’d go over to the Skinmarket with her.”

  “Why do you want to hang out with her when she tried to take Michael away from you?”

  “She didn’t try to take Michael away. She’s a better dancer than I am, and Michael likes to dance.”

  “I don’t want to hang out with her,” Catty complained. “She makes me feel like I’m not clean enough.”

  “That’s just your imagination.”

  Vanessa reached for her soda. As she put her hand out, Catty clasped her wrist. The hands of the watch started spinning backward.

  “No!” Vanessa screamed as “Love Potion Number 9” began playing on the Seeburg.

  The bikers turned and stared at her. Morgan waved, and her lustrous hair swung out as the air pressure changed.

  Vanessa dropped the hamburger and clutched the strap of her messenger bag. Her skin prickled with static electricity. A white flash burned reality away, and the diner roared from them with the speed of light.

  That was the last thing Vanessa remembered as she fell into the tunnel with Catty. She kept her eyes closed as they spun downward, and her stomach lurched. She hated the smell and feel of the air. Without looking, she knew Catty was watching the backward-spinning hands on her glow-in-the-dark wristwatch. When they arrived at their time destination, she’d put all her concentration into stopping the flow of time, and they’d fall back into time and reality.