Blood Moon by Alexandra Sokoloff Page A

she’d heard anything from her but she was just gone. We never heard anything about her after that.”
    “No calls, no postcards…?” Roarke asked, though he knew the answer.
    “She never wrote or called anyway.”
    “Not ever?”
    Erin shook her head. “A couple of times my mother had her over, usually a holiday, Thanksgiving, Christmas. But that was a long time ago, when we were still kids.”
    “Can you remember the last time?”
    There was a flicker on Erin’s face. “I was ten. It was after she got out of juvie. I think Mom felt guilty, like she could’ve done more. It didn’t work out so well. Patrick didn’t like Cara, kind of ragged her, and she wouldn’t talk around him. Not that she talked a lot, anyway.”
    Patrick was Erin’s slightly older brother. “Any reason for the friction between her and your brother?”
    “Nothing that made sense.” She gave him a thin smile. “You know, we grew up as the kids whose family got killed by the Reaper. Boogeyman kind of stuff — ‘He’s coming back to get you…’ Like that. And the ‘crazy cousin’ thing didn’t help.”
    “ Was she crazy?” he asked without thinking, and immediately regretted it.
    But she only looked at him steadily. “Well… who wouldn’t be?”
    He couldn’t argue.
    “When she did visit you, were there places you went, on a family vacation… or did your mother’s family have some vacation spot?”
    “Disneyland? Sea World?” Erin suggested. Roarke realized, startled, that she was making a dry joke.
    “Can’t see it,” he told her.
    “And you would be right.” Erin looked away, down the long plaza. “She didn’t like to be around people much. I think she liked it when we drove places, though. It felt like she relaxed more in a car, on the road. Especially out of the city.”
    It fit what Roarke knew of Cara himself. She was a traveler.
    “Did you see her—” he stopped. Erin looked at him enquiringly. “Did you ever see her act out violently? Or talk…” he paused, searching for the words. “In an unbalanced way?”
    Erin’s face shadowed. “She wasn’t violent around us. But she could look at you and stop your heart. I mean, she did it with Patrick, not with me, but she’d freeze me up when she did it to him. She watched everyone . All the time. There was so much going on inside her I thought she would burst. And once…”
    Her eyes went distant in a way that made Roarke hold his breath, waiting for whatever she was going to say.
    “I’m in med school. You don’t have to guess. I was a shy kid. A brain. I got picked on. Maybe would have been even without the whole family ghost.” She breathed in, a long breath. “Cara came over for one of the happy family meals one night when I was about ten, so she would have been fifteen. We went out to a restaurant, some stupid hamburger place, and Derek Sanders was there with his family. This guy from school. He’d made a special project out of me, the way kids like that do.” She paused, and Roarke waited, feeling a sense of inevitability.
    “He didn’t say anything to me, and I didn’t say anything to him, nobody said anything. I was just praying that nothing would happen. We ate our Happy Meals and Cara looked at me, and she looked at him, and she didn’t say a word. And at the end of the night Cara went back to whatever home she was in at the time and I went back home to sleep… and the next morning Derek showed up to school with two black eyes and all hunched over. And when I passed him in the hall he flinched away from me. Flinched.”
    She stopped, and took another breath. “He never said another word to me.” She looked at Roarke, with steady dark eyes. “Is that what you mean by violence?”
    It’s exactly what I meant , he thought. It’s Cara to a T .
    “You never told her anything about how he’d treated you.”
    She laughed shortly. “I didn’t talk to Cara. Never anything beyond, ‘Pass the bread.’ My mom was afraid of her. I