* * *
Previously on a Suburban Fantasy and Urban Fantasy (Book 1 and 2 respectively)
Rachel Lin Smith was just a quiet shy teenage girl, until a serial
killing vampire turned her into a monster like him against her will.
Getting away, she was able to cope with the changes in her life thanks to the
help of her geeky friends Ian, Andrew, Bilal, and Jason. They shared
adventures pitted against time traveling mayors and Toronto gangs before
finally stopping Rachel's Ex from ever hurting anyone ever again.
A new kid, Jon, has moved into town with his seeming bodyguard Erika. They're both more than they seem and Erika got in a fight with Rachel after both women came to the aid of a mother in need. It turns out there's a new vampire infestation in town, and a lot of secrets that need to come out. Ian meets a modern day practicing blacksmith and she agrees to make Rachel a new sword to replace the one she lost fighting her sire. In a moment of gratitude, Rachel and Ian have sex.
A new kid, Jon, has moved into town with his seeming bodyguard Erika. They're both more than they seem and Erika got in a fight with Rachel after both women came to the aid of a mother in need. It turns out there's a new vampire infestation in town, and a lot of secrets that need to come out. Ian meets a modern day practicing blacksmith and she agrees to make Rachel a new sword to replace the one she lost fighting her sire. In a moment of gratitude, Rachel and Ian have sex.
Ian doesn't know it's only been a day since Rachel and Tanya had sex.
CHAPTER THREE
“A House of Lost Boys Part 1”
Mike almost couldn’t see his brother’s car under all
the snow, and that was quite the feat considering their car was jet black.
“Your father has already gone to bed,” his mother said
from the doorway to their house. She was shivering from the cold breeze despite
the checkered quilt she’d wrapped around her shoulders. It was no surprise
their father was already passed out, he worked hard at the financial advisement
firm he ran, always boasting that he wanted to give his boys the future he
never had. It meant early mornings, late nights, and no fun.
“Will you boys be out here much longer?” she asked the
two Jones brothers who often shared beers before bed. They were sitting on the
white bricks that made up the large front porch that overlooked their wide
driveway.
“Naw,” Mike told her, swigging from his drink. Though
he was underage, his parents didn’t care. They often said they respected their
children to make their own decisions. “But you go ahead and join him, we’re
good.”
“Night you two.”
“Good night ma,” Mike’s brother told their mom, Mike
only quietly taking another sip of his drink. The night made Mike feel uneasy.
As Mike heard the door close behind him, he reached
over and smacked his brother’s leg. “Hey John, Can I bum another one?” he
asked.
“I think it’s my brotherly duty to say no,” John told
him. Everyone said Mike looked just like his older brother. The reality as he
saw it though, Mike was much better looking. His brother was starting to get
chubby in the cheeks from all the drive thru he’d been eating since his
girlfriend dumped him. This was why Mike refused to get too close to any woman.
Relationships were better off kept casual. Not that anyone would listen to him.
John pulled out his pack of smokes, almost as if to
taunt Mike. “You’ve been having one every night. You sure you’re not getting
addicted?”
“You’re kidding me,” Mike complained to his brother.
“If anyone is addicted here, it’s you.” John always had a pack on him, but
insisted he only smoked casually and was immune to their addiction. Then again,
Mike’s brother had always been an idiot. “You know nights are hard for me.”
“Nights are hard for me too,” John said quietly, and
Mike knew his brother was thinking about his girlfriend again.
“You wanna talk about it?” Mike asked, his voice
dropping as well. He’d already heard it all before, but it was nice listening
to mundane problems every once in a while.
John looked at his brother, and then to the cigarettes
in his hand. “Shit,” he said, offering one to Mike. “Yeah, I miss sleeping with
her sometimes. I used to look over at her while she slept, any time I had
anxiety. It was like better than cigarettes.”
Mike lit his smoke, happy for the distraction. Still
the snow was coming down, but based on what the weather had been predicting
that wasn’t likely to change until morning. He took a deep drag.
“She was so hot, and the sex was something else,”
Mike’s brother continued. “But we fought all the time. It was like nothing I
did was good enough. And yet I didn’t care. I was able to like separate all the
bad things she did from the person I loved, Hid them away in a box.”
Mike took another drag of his smoke. John was quiet
for a moment.
“I think I was afraid,” John said, taking a deep drag
of his own smoke. The two of them swigged their beer. “I think I was afraid of
losing her, and I was holding on no matter how much it hurt. Like holding onto
a burning life raft because you’re afraid you can’t swim.”
“Have you ever felt fear like that?” John asked his
brother.
Mike knew fear. More than he could ever tell John. The
cigarette was about the only thing keeping his hand from trembling with fear as
it was. If John knew the truth, about monsters from another dimension and
vampires like in True Blood, he wouldn’t be so worried about his girl problems.
Mike finished his smoke. It hadn’t taken him long.
“I’m tapping out,” he told his brother. There was a vibration in his pocket and
he pulled out his phone to see he’d gotten a text from Andrew. “Code Black,” it said, “Meet tomorrow morning computer lab.”
That was something Mike was pretty sure he wasn’t going to do. Code Black meant
something to do with the supernatural and vampires, and frankly he didn’t
understand why his friends kept wanting to play with that crap.
He’d found it all fun and interesting at first too,
but something had changed in him after seeing Rachel’s psychotic vampire sire
unleash on them at the church last year. Watching the man/monster tear through
entire walls like they were paper, and toss Rachel around like she was a doll,
were enough to put certain things into perspective. Things like what would have
happened had Rachel failed. Eckhart could have effortlessly killed all of them
before they even knew what was happening.
It was like waking up one day when you were a child,
and realizing how easy it would be to go outside and suddenly be hit by a bus,
or trip out a window to fall ten stories, or break a chair leg and crack your
head against furniture. The world was a scary place, and the human body was
fragile. And if you really let yourself think long and hard about it, it was a
rabbit hole you could descend from which there was no escape. It was a spiral
Mike couldn’t seem to pull out from.
“You know you can talk to me about anything,” John said,
watching Mike in silence.
“Even North Carolina winning March Madness?” Mike
asked, diverting the conversation to a topic he knew would still be a sore spot
for his brother.
“Go to bed,” John said, punching Mike playfully on the
shoulder.
“Alright,” Mike said, getting up. “But I’m not helping
you unbury your car tomorrow.”
“You are if you want me to drop you off at school,”
John argued.
“If I have to spend an hour shoveling in the morning,”
Mike warned, as he opened the door to go inside, “Then I get to drive the car
to school and you can carpool with dad.”
“Aw man,” John said, Mike already closing the door
behind him. “He listens to Ed Sheeran. Like on repeat.” Mike had heard the
tunes coming from his dad’s study but he hadn’t realized it had gotten that
bad. Before Ed Sheeran it had been Shawn Mendes, Mike wasn’t sure how much more
of this he could take.
It was like the nightmares. Right when he thought he
was okay and could deal, his subconscious told a different story. Closing the
door to his room, Mike noticed his guitar in the corner as he sat down on his
soft king sized mattress. His music hadn’t been the same since the event. It
was hard sometimes for him even to play a chord. He’d been starting to try his
hand at writing songs before the school year began, and now try as he might he
couldn’t interpret his emotions to words.
Not that he had anyone he could talk about his
problems to. Turning off the light, he dropped his pants and curled under the
covers. Closing his eyes he knew that soon he would be seeing Eckhart again;
seeing those fanged teeth lunging at him from not nearly far enough away.
Mike could take comfort, at least, in being pretty
sure he wasn’t the only person in the world having nightmares that night.
* *
*
Hassan stumbled into his house, and yelled for his
father. Nothing. Good, his dad was still at work.
Hassan had come home in time for dinner, a bowl of
microwavable rice, but once his father had left to start his second shift,
Hassan left too. He had older friends he would hang with, older kids together
with whom he would vandalize the park and drink beers, when they could convince
people to buy them some. That night they’d managed to procure an entire pack of
24 and, between the 4 of them, they’d pounded back the whole case.
Hassan made immediately for the bathroom, and began
dry heaving into the toilet. He’d puked a few times on the way home, but his
stomach didn’t seem about ready to let up even when there was no more rice to
come out. Dry heaving was the worst, a lot worse than normal heaving. It was
like his entire insides were going to force themselves out his mouth. By the
time he was done, it was all he could do to collapse onto the floor of the
bathroom in a pool of sweat and tears.
He might have drank too much.
Picking himself up, he dragged himself to his room, to
pass out on the uncomfortable futon that had been appropriated for his bed. His
head was spinning, everything around him seemed to be rocking like he was on a
boat. Groaning he curled into a ball, worried he might start dry heaving again.
Anything but that.
“Your room is pathetic,” a voice said from the
darkness. At first Hassan wasn’t sure if he’d even heard it correctly, or if
perhaps he was so drunk he was now imagining things.
“Look at you.”
Hassan was sure he’d heard something that time.
Sitting up in his bed, he threw his shirt at the light switch but missed in his
drunken stupor. There was definitely someone else there, sitting on the box for
the futon that doubled as Hassan’s desk. All his furniture was makeshift
repurposed items like the massive Tupperware bins he was now using as bed side
tables.
Hassan’s eyes were slowly adjusting to the dark, even
as the room continued to spin around him. He could sort of make out glasses on
the short skinny figure slowly getting off the desk and stalking towards him.
“Billy?” Hassan asked the dark shadow of a figure.
“Watchoo doin in my room?”
Billy kept circling Hassan’s bed, more really
semi-circling, getting to the wall, and turning to orbit just a little bit
closer every time. “You’re not even scared yet,” Billy said, his voice soft and
steady, quite a startling contrast from the squeaky stuttering dweeb Hassan was
used to pushing around.
“Billy,” Hassan said, feeling bad for the way he’d
treated the kid. “Your friends have been looking for you.” Billy didn’t seem to
react in any way, not that Hassan could see his face in the dark. Hassan
reached his arm out and grabbed the side of the bed, steadying himself as his
swooning sight threatened to topple him over. “Your parents have been worried
n’ shit,” he told his once victim.
“I don’t have any friends,” Billy said, hesitating
only but for a moment upon Hassan’s mention of his parents.
“You do,” Hassan said. “Jacob and Sabrina. They’ve
been asking all around ‘bout you.” Hassan wasn’t even sure if Billy was still
listening. “I even helped them.”
“You’ve never helped anyone in your life,” Billy said,
his voice squeaking a little at the end, a reassuring sign that the old Billy
was still in there. Hassan drew his covers closer to him almost as if they
could protect him.
“I’m sorry,” Hassan pleaded with Billy. “I treated you
unfairly and I get that.” He felt bad, he never realized Billy had it in him to
run away from home, be so confrontational like this. Hassan was impressed,
maybe Billy was cooler than he thought. “My dad has some beers in the fridge.
Maybe we could have some drinks and talk about this.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little too late for that?”
Billy asked, right at the foot of the bed now.
“Too late?” Hassan said with a snort. “What are you
going to do? Kill me?”
Billy climbed onto the bed, crawling towards him and
passing beneath a ray of moonlight from the window. It was enough for Hassan to
see the glimmering white of Billy’s teeth. They weren’t crooked anymore.
“Whenchoo get braces?” Hassan asked, his head swooning
as he could feel himself starting to pass out.
“When I’m done,” Billy said, almost on top of Hassan,
“you’re going to wish I’d just killed you.”
Hassan’s screams would be heard emanating from his
house for many hours before the sun started to rise, but the neighbors only did
what they always did, and shut their windows.
* *
*
Cory Spencer stifled his yawn as he stepped from the
sub-basement parking garage into the elevator. The doors closed, the entire
elevator like one surrounding unsettling mirror. It made Cory want to hurl, his
night at the bar still weighing heavily on him as he struggled to hit the
button for the tenth floor. From P4, that would be quite a while before he hit
is destination. He just had to keep himself together for a couple minutes.
His reflection looking back at him wasn’t a
complimentary one. He was pale white as a cigarette, with what remained of his
hair combed over in the greasiest way to ineffectually cover his growing bald
spot. He was only 36.
His suit, blue and white, hung off his skinny taunt
frame like loose papers off a poorly rolled cigarette.
Cory really needed a cigarette.
He didn’t smoke. Not anymore. It had been a couple
months now of struggling and sweating and eating. Every once in a while he
could almost forget he’d once been a smoker. But then at random times, or very
specific times like when he drank, his cravings would surface again. This
morning they were particularly bad. He popped a couple sticks of gum in his
mouth, one of almost a hundred different tools he had to distract him from
wanting to smoke.
The elevator hit ground floor and the doors opened to
the smug face of Cory’s long running partner at their investments firm, Donald
Braitermin. “You look like shit,” he said in his deep voice. Donald had been
with him last night. He’d had matched Cory shot for shot and yet didn’t seem
remotely effected.
“How do you do it?” Cory asked, envious.
“Good living,” Donald said, getting on the elevator
beside Cory. “Protein shakes and four hours of crunches a day bro.”
Cory groaned as the elevator doors closed. “That is
inhuman.”
“Life is sacrifice,” Don said as the elevator lurched
into motion. “Straight out of the bible.” Cory wasn’t exactly sure what that
meant, but Donald was spewing all kinds of nonsense all the time. He was the
best bullshitter Cory had ever known.
Don seemed to examine himself in his reflection on the
elevator, fiddling with his already perfect spikey blonde hair.
“Do you use spray on that?” Cory asked, not that it
mattered to him. His receding hairline had long since receded.
“Naw,” Donald said with a laugh. “You hear about North
Korea?”
Cory shook his head, still trying to keep his dinner
in. “I try not to pay attention to foreign politics,” he admitted to his friend.
“Don’t you have a south Korean client?” Don asked
Cory.
Cory could only shrug as they neared their floor.
“He’s got insane inflow. I’ve been funneling his money into all kinds of
bullshit stocks and then taking like half his measley earnings.” The man never
paid attention to his finances. As long as it was pulling a profit, the man
didn’t seem to care that it could potentially be pulling in so much more. “I
get about fifty thousand a year straight to my bank account.”
“From one client?” Donald asked with a whistle. “I
guess that’s why your name comes first.” The doors opened on the name of the
firm, Spencer & Braitermin.
“Awesome work man,” Donald said to Cory, offering his
fist for a fist bump. Cory connected with him. “You slay any pussy last night? I
railed hard on this one tall chick. She was like a basketball player or
something. Six four. Six Six. All legs.” Don laughed and made for his office.
Cory didn’t bother to say what he figured Don already
knew. He hadn’t taken anyone home last night. Girls weren’t much interested in
his lack of hair up there and abundance of hair down there. He supposed he
could flaunt his money, but to tell a girl that he was rich required getting
them to listen to a word he had to say for more than five seconds without getting
a drink thrown in his face. Namely, it wasn’t going to happen.
It was to Cory’s surprise, then, that a beautiful
woman was waiting for him in his office. He looked outside the door for his
assistant but could see she hadn’t come in yet. The woman waiting for him in
his office looked a little Asian, with long black hair and a loose fitting
black shirt over jeans. She was tall, or maybe just taller than him, but the
way she held herself was enough to make her look gargantuan. Cory didn’t know
who this woman was, but she was beautiful and he wanted to know. He yearned to
know everything.
“Mister Spencer?” the woman asked, and Cory was
relieved to learn she was looking for him and not his partner Donald. “Cory
Spencer? My name is Isabol Teung. I’m a
reporter for Voice news.”
She was a reporter. Suddenly Cory didn’t feel too
inclined to pursue a relationship with her any further.
“I’m sorry,“ Cory said, skirting around her to sit
down at his desk. “Now really isn’t a good time.” He still felt like he was going
to hurl, and a big glass of water would be exactly what the doctor ordered
right about then. “If you could make an appointment with my assistant, I’m sure
I’ll be able to get to your concerns as soon as possible.”
“You can’t shut me out that easy,” Isabol said to
Cory, sliding off where she had been leaning against his desk, and turning to
confront him. “You’re at the center of a big story I’m trying to blow wide
open.”
“Is that a fact,” Cory mumbled, grabbing Tylenol from
his desk and popping a couple pills back. He also pulled out a warm bottle of
water and swigged it.
“Is it true you have made a large portion of your wealth
by taking advantage of people with lesser means incapable of defending
themselves?” The reporter leaned over his desk, her dainty form tantalizing and
yet undeniably off limits. Cory wondered if the woman knew how hot she was.
“Perhaps we can talk about this over dinner?” Cory
suggested, both opening up a possible romantic turn for his evening, and giving
him more time to prepare for her barrage of hard hitting questions.
“Mister Spencer,” Isabol said, leaning in even closer.
Cory could almost see into her shirt. “I’ve had every kind of man try to hit on
me. I am immune to your advances.” She backed away from his desk and made for the
door. Just as she got there, she turned back around. “I’m going to make an
appointment with your secretary. If I can get ahold of her. You won’t be able
to dodge my questions forever. No matter how much you try to objectify me.”
With that, Isabol Teung of Voice News was gone. Cory
hadn’t been trying to objectify her, he’d swear by it for about as much good as
that would do. That had gone about as well as any conversation he’d ever had
with the opposite sex.
The next person to step into his office wasn’t a
beautiful woman, and it definitely wasn’t his assistant. It was an older man,
with black skin and neatly trimmed facial hair. The man slinked into his
office, completely ignorant of Cory’s private space.
“Please sir,” Cory pleaded, pinching his nose between
his eyes as his headache threatened to overtake him. “If you could just wait in
the lobby for my assistant, I’m sure she would be happy to make room for you in
my schedule.”
“I think YOU can make time for me,” the man stated,
stepping confidently into Cory’s office. “You are Mister Spencer after all.”
“Yes,” Cory groaned to himself. “That’s me.” He was
really wishing today that he could be anyone else.
“You wrote the article ‘How to get rich quick by
putting yourself first?’ didn’t you?” the man asked, sitting down in front of
his desk in an extravagant purple suit.
“That was all me,” Cory said, waiting for the hammer
to fall.
“At fifteen,” the man continued, “you ripped off your
parents and stole their college fund savings to gamble on the stock market and
win big. Since then you have been making a fortune off of taking advantage of
people who don’t know any better. You figured out the secret to life, a secret
your more than willing to share with anyone who loads your webpage. A majority
of the people in the world are unimaginably stupid. And if you can take
advantage of that you can go far.”
“It’s true,” Cory argued. “Most people are stupid.”
“I’m not most people,” the man said crossing his legs.
“In fact I admire you.” There was something about the man’s voice that told
Cory he was being sincere. “I’ve read all about you on your internet. All about
you and your career in taking advantage of others.”
“Who are you?” Cory asked, more curious than ever.
“My name,” the man said, a grin forming on his lips,
“Is Nathaniel of Capsin. I believe a partnership between us would be mutually
beneficial.”
“You don’t say,” Cory said, not sure what to make of
this man who suddenly showed up in his office before his assistant had even
come in. “And what exactly would you need me to do?” Cory asked, and the man in
a purple suit fished his hands around in his pockets.
“Ah,” Nathaniel said, pulling wads of cash from his
pocket. “Here’s over a hundred thousand dollars.” He placed the wads of cash in
a pile on Cory’s desk. He then placed a note on top of it. “I want you to take
all this and invest it in the stocks I have listed here.”
Cory grabbed the list and scrutinized it intently. “Wi-Lan.
Rogers. Sierra. All these are good choices. Strong tech businesses. But this
one?” Cory pointed at one name on the list. “There’s been nothing but bad news
coming in. People have been abandoning the stock like it’s on fire.”
“Which sets us up to profit tremendously,” Nathaniel
said, getting up from his seat to rap his knuckles on Cory’s desk. “I want you
to put most the funds in that last one. Do everything I say, exactly as I say
it, and you will not just be rich. You will gain power like you could hardly
imagine.”
Cory looked up at the man, perhaps with wider eyes
than he’d intended.
“Yes,” Nathaniel said. “That’s right. There is more to
power than money. And you know that. You have money. But it isn’t everything. I
can bring you real fulfillness, Cory Spencer. Your life will finally have
meaning. And purpose.“ Nathaniel watched Cory for a moment, before he began
backing out of the room. “I know you’ll do as I’ve asked. People like us know
when to grab an opportunity by the balls.”
Cory laughed, despite himself, and gave the list of
stocks one more glance over. Laughing again, he dropped the note on his desk
and shook his head in disbelief. Looking up, his new partner was already gone.
“Cancel my morning schedule,” he yelled for his assistant. There was no
response. “Patricia? Where the hell is she?”
* *
*
“What’s this code black all about?” Tanya asked Andrew
and Bilal, arriving to school early enough to take part in the meeting. She
hadn’t seen Alice around and wondered if the redhead was avoiding her after
their kiss yesterday. Tanya felt bad for using her oldest friend like that, though
the look the two nerds were giving her as she joined them outside the cafeteria
implied it had done its job.
She’d received a text last night from Rachel, saying
that there was a code black meeting in the computer lab before class. It seemed
urgent, and Tanya remembered what they’d told her of their geeky secret code
language. Black meant something vampire related. She wondered what Rachel could
have gotten up to in one night, while Tanya had been trying to catch up on her
homework.
It seemed everything around her was happening so fast.
So many balls were asking to be juggled all at once, and she couldn’t be
everywhere at the same time to catch them as they fell. One by one they were
hitting the ground and shattering in many little pieces. They were glass balls
for some reason, in this metaphor. Incidentally Tanya had never tried to
actually juggle before and wasn’t about to start. She hadn’t achieved
everything she had in her life by setting herself up for failure. Succeeding
was all about knowing your strengths and sticking to them, at least that had
been Tanya’s philosophy for a long time.
“I know what I want it to be about,” Bilal said, and
Tanya had to admit his look was far more judging than Andrew’s.
“This just in,” Tanya said bitterly, crossing her
arms. “Girls would rather kiss each other than kiss you. Yeah that’s code black
material.”
“Please,” Andrew said, sipping from a coffee. “Don’t
fight, children. My parents woke me up at like two last night to ask me to help
them beat a raid in World of Warcraft.”
“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” Tanya
said, feeling bad that she’d just insulted the only person between them who
hadn’t aggressively tried to dismantle her life. She thought she’d change the
topic. “What are you drinking? Black? Double Double?” They made their way down
the hall towards the computer lab.
“Hot chocolate,” Andrew admitted to her, “I don’t
actually like coffee.” Tanya couldn’t help but shake her head.
“Okay now that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,”
Tanya said. “Care to go three for three?”
There were cheers coming from the computer lab, and
stepping inside they saw that Gordon, Jason, and Ian were already there,
playing on a Nintendo Switch.
“You guys got a Switch?” Andrew asked, moving to join
them. “And with Bomberman? I’ve wanted one but I bought too many trade
paperbacks this month.”
“Ding ding ding,” Tanya said, and she was pretty sure
she saw Bilal smile.
“My mom had it waiting on the bed for me when I got
home,” Ian said to his friends, leaving Tanya to wonder if Ian might be sadder
even than Andrew.
“Give me that,” Bilal said, taking one of the fiddly
controller things from Gordon.
“I was getting bored beating everyone’s ass anyway,”
he said handing his controller over freely.
“I challenge you,” Bilal said, pointing the doohickey
at her. “To decide once and for all who deserves to be Editor in Chief of the
Abbey Park Quill.”
“Oh no,” Tanya said, backing away. “I don’t do the
video games thing.”
“Come on,” Ian said, offering his controller to her.
She took it though she wasn’t sure why. “It’s simple. That’s you,” he said,
pointing at a character on the screen.
“Why am I pink,” Tanya complained. She moved the
character with the joystick. It seemed she was in a maze, trapped behind a
stone wall.
“You can plant bombs with A,” Ian told her.
“I prefer to call it C4,” Jason said, everyone
watching intently at the battle that hadn’t even begun yet. Bilal was on the
other side of the maze trapped in his own cage of walls. “Blow holes with the
C4 to get to Bilal, and then stick him with C4.”
“You can kill him with your bombs,” Ian explained to
her, “Or trick him into killing himself with his own bombs.”
“Alright,” Tanya said, convinced she didn’t have it.
But what did she have to lose. “If you beat me, I’ll forgive you for
double-crossing me.” If Tanya was being fair, she wasn’t doing enough for the
newspaper to hold onto her position anyway.
“It’s nice to see the newspaper meant so much to you,”
a girl’s voice that could only belong to Alice said from the doorway. “Please
tell me that’s not the reason for the code black.”
“I didn’t know you were coming,” Tanya said, almost
dropping the stupid controller. Her character dropped a bomb, and she only
barely managed to avoid its explosion, opening up a new area for her to
explore.
“Yeah well, Alice said, moving to a corner away from
everyone. “Now that I’m in the know I don’t really wanna give that up.”
There was a tapping signaling that someone else was
coming, and Rachel stepped into the room, a cane in her hand tapping against
the hard floor. She was followed in by the new kid Mason and his attractive
older friend. Rachel and the other woman looked like they’d been in some kind
of fight, though Rachel’s bruises seemed to be healing far faster than the
other woman’s.
“Rachel!” Ian said, hugging his friend. “How’d the
sword work last night?”
“I didn’t get to use it much,” Rachel said, lifting
her cane to show it off as if it were a sword. Or was it a sword? “I didn’t
want to hurt anyone.”
“Can I see that?” Tanya asked Rachel, her game long
forgotten. Rachel handed her cane over, and Tanya examined it excitedly. It was
black, with an ornate hilt that had a diamond in the center. Holding her thumb
over the gem, she pulled on the hilt and pulled the sword from the scabbard
that doubled as a cane. The sword was small and thin, though perfectly sized
for Rachel’s hands. The blade was heavy despite its size and seemed durable
too.
“Nice switch,” Rachel said, noticing the game Tanya
had been playing. Jason had taken over for her, and seemed to be trying to bait
Bilal into a trap.
“Don’t get too excited,” Ian told her, “the battery is
probably about to fail.”
“Why are they here?” Alice asked, nodding her head at
the new kid. He was sitting down with Gordon and Jason on their side of the
computer lab while the older woman seemed to be ready to join Rachel at the
front of the classroom.
“You won’t hear me complaining,” Andrew said, getting
closer to the woman. She seemed at least eighteen. “My name’s Andrew,” he said,
offering the woman his hand. “What brings a woman like you to a high school
like this?”
“Erika,” the woman said, giving Rachel a look. “You
didn’t warn me your friends were all freaks and creeps.”
“I usually try to lead with that,” Tanya said,
crossing her arms while leaning her butt against the nearest desk. “Tanya.”
“Which one are you?” Erika asked Tanya. “A freak or a
creep?”
“Let’s put it this way,” Alice said, moving a little
closer. “Out of the women in this room, you’re the only one she hasn’t kissed.”
“My kind of girl,” Erika said with a grin that Tanya
matched.
Rachel seemed to notice the tension between her and
Alice, and the vampire’s face scrunched up. “What happened with her?” Rachel
asked Tanya.
Bilal scrambled his hand into his pocket. “I can show
you,” Bilal said. “I’ve got pictures.” Ian rolled his eyes, as if Bilal had
already been showing them around.
He was about to hand his phone to Rachel but Tanya
stopped him. “I’ll break you.” She was going to say break his phone, but
changed direction mid-sentence.
“I’m here,” O’Burn said, closing the door behind him. Timothy
O’Burn was a teacher at their school, teaching science in the upstairs science
labs. He had also spent a period of his youth as a vampire hunter and he’d had
numerous run-ins with Rachel last year.
“I didn’t know you had a teacher in your little club,”
Erika said to Rachel.
“It’s not a club,” Rachel argued, looking around the
room. “Is this everyone? Where’s Mike?” Tanya had forgotten Mike Jones was even
a part of their fang gang. He certainly hadn’t been hanging out with the rest
of the group much lately that she’d seen.
“I haven’t seen him,” Andrew told the teenage vampire.
“I sent him a text, maybe he’s too busy getting ready for baseball season.”
“You might as well start the briefing without him,”
Jason said.
“Who did that to you two?” Tanya asked. “You both look
like you were in a fight.”
“We sort of fought each other,” Rachel admitted
sheepishly. “It seems Erika and Mason have their own secrets like us.”
“Like you guys?” Mason asked, looking around the room
and stopping on Gordon. “You all have Synesthesia too?”
“Synesthesia?” Gordon repeated. He turned to his
computer, and began pulling up the internet. “I’ve heard of that.”
“Is that how you were able to kick my ass so readily?”
Rachel asked Erika.
“You got in a number of licks yourself,” Erika
admitted to the vampire. “Mason has the synesthesia though, not like me. He was
born with it.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Mr. O’Burn said from where
he was leaning against a desk, “But isn’t synesthesia a blending of your senses.
Being able to see sounds, or taste smells.”
“Yeah,” Gordon said, finding what he was looking for.
“I saw a documentary on this once. For some people, they could see letters and
numbers like colors, and their brains could use that to pull off complicated
mathematical calculations with ease.”
“That’s how it started,” Mason told the gang, his face
turning as red as his hair as everyone had their attention on him. “I thought
at first I was seeing things. My parents were worried there was something very
wrong with me, and when the doctors told them about a government study to fix
people like me—“ Mason trailed off for a moment, looking down at his feet.
“They jumped at the opportunity to send me away.”
“The facility they took me to,” Mason continued, “it
was more like a prison than a hospital or boarding house. They kept us in
cells, sticking us with some needles to take our blood, and other needles to
inject us with all kinds of strange coloured substances.” Mason rubbed at his
arm. “And there were pills three times a day. They never told us what they were
doing to us. But after a while they started putting some of us through trials.”
“Jesus,” Andrew said. Everyone in the room was
listening to Mason speak. “You weren’t even allowed to watch TV?”
Mason shut his eyes for a moment. “Some of the trials
were mental. Have us trying to predict numbers on cards we couldn’t see, or
calculate math problems. Sometimes there was a TV. In one instance they had me
play Madden and plan strategies to beat the most difficult AI.”
“Well that doesn’t sound so bad,” Bilal said from
beside Jason. Jason kicked him. “Awww, owww, aww.”
“Other trials were physical. They liked to test our
reflexes. Have the guards beat us, or have us fight each other. Pelt us with
balls or try to lift weights. And there was something about what they were
giving us, my abilities weren’t going away like they had promised. Instead they
were getting stronger, and I could do more things, things I couldn’t do before.
Things no synesthete could do.”
“I’m sorry,” Tanya said, trying to follow along. “A
what?”
“Synesthete is someone who has Synesthesia,” Gordon
said, though Tanya figured it must have been easy being smart when he had the
computer right there. “Synesthetic is the adjective.”
“That’s really confusing,” Ian admitted, and it looked
like he was trying as hard as Tanya to keep up.
“After a while I grew tired of playing their games,” Mason
said, continuing with his story. “I stopped complying and I started trying to
hide my powers. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I hoped maybe they
would let me go if they thought my abilities were fading. Instead they put me
in a cell with her.”
“I’d been there longer even than him,” Erika picked up
the metaphorical torch where Mason had left it. “I was the president’s special
little prisoner.”
“Why?” Mr. O’Burn asked. “You said you didn’t even
have Synesthesia.”
“Yeah,” Erika agreed. “But I didn’t need it to royally
piss him off. They kept me in solitary confinement. Treated me like an animal.
Fed me only when they wanted, made me have to fight for the food. Guards would
often come in and beat me. Sometimes I’d get the upper hand and kill one of
them. They seemed to like that a lot. Got a kick out of making me kill. Some
nights they would come in while I slept and surprise me with needles, like he
was talking about. I think they were experimenting on how to give normal humans
like me his abilities.”
“So wait,” Bilal said, trying to piece something
together. “You’re telling me if the President, of the United States,” he was
carefully annunciating every word, “were to see you on the street, he would
point at you and say ‘Hey you! Erika!’”
“No,” Erika corrected him. “I’m saying if President
Daggers saw me on the street he’d yell ‘Kill the bitch’ and then probably go
into some long monologue about murder, torture, and general evil stuff.”
“So what can you do?” Andrew asked Erika.
“Kick my ass,” Rachel told them, and Tanya had to
admit that was no easy feat.
“I was given a sort of specialized synesthesia,” Erika
explained. “I have enhanced spatial awareness, and I get like visual cues
informing me of things of interest in my field of vision. I can sense someone
moving against me before it happens, and my visual cues are color coded. The
more red they are, the more of an immediate danger they are to me.”
“On top of that,” she continued, “I can see how much
ammo is left in a gun just by looking at it, or how much battery is left in a
phone. I can even see the speed of a car passing by.”
“And to think all I got for all my trouble was a
headache,” Mason told the group.
“I had a friend with synesthesia, and she used to get
headaches too,” Erika said, her voice softening for a moment. “What she ended
up being capable of far surpassed what I could do. So they killed her for it.”
When Erika looked up again, she had returned to her
original story. “When they put him in my cell, I think they expected me to kill
him like I had killed others before. They thought they had turned me into a
savage unthinking killing machine.”
“But she took pity on me,” Mason interrupted her.
“Spared my life. When they tried to force us to fight, she helped me overpower
them and we escaped. We changed our names, left the country, and we’ve been
hiding out here ever since. Erika’s been protecting me. She’s been like my own
personal superhero.”
“Changed your name?” Andrew asked. “So you’re not
Mason?”
“Jon Mason, actually,” Mason told him.
“I’m sure that will stump the US government for a real
long time,” Jason mumbled sarcastically.
“And I’m really Erika,” Jon’s female protector said
from the front of the classroom. “If anyone asks you about us, you—well first
you tell them it’s none of their business. But if that doesn’t work you tell them
I’m Vicki.”
Erika turned her attention to Rachel. “Well we told
you our private little secret,” she said to the vampire. “Now tell us yours.
What were those things we fought last night? The demon children.”
“Demon children?” Alice asked from the back of the
room. “We’re fighting demon children now?”
“They were vampires,” Rachel said quietly. “Like me.”
“You’re a vampire?” Jon asked, his voice dripping with
disbelief.
Andrew grabbed his shoulder, reassuringly telling Jon,
“You’ll get used to it.”
Rachel’s gaze
fell on Tanya, and the student council president wished they could have the
entire room to themselves so that she could kiss the teen vampire and hold her
tight. “What happened to that child vampire you encountered the night I fought
Eckhart?”
“I don’t know,” Tanya admitted honestly. “She went off
the pier into the water and we never saw her again.”
“You didn’t kill her?” Rachel asked coldly.
“You wanted us to kill a kid?” Tanya asked with
surprise.
“No,” Rachel said with a shake of her head. “Of course
not. I don’t know.” She seemed tired. “I think she’s been making more children
like her.”
“Oh my god,” Alice said from the back of the
classroom, her mind clearly going through all the same horrifying thoughts as
everyone else.
“I came upon about twenty in an abandoned apartment in
the commercial district on Kerr.”
“There was more than twenty,” Erika corrected her.
“And could be even more than what we saw,” Rachel
said. “They seemed to be coming and going.”
Gordon was furiously working his computer again.
“There have been a lot of missing children reports,” he told them as Andrew
turned on the projector. Gordon projected the face of some of the children.
“Any of these look familiar?”
“Yeah,” Erika said, browsing through the faces.
“I think that one bit me,” Rachel said, stopping at
one face and rubbing her shoulder. “Why didn’t anyone tell me about these
missing children?”
“You don’t watch the news?” Alice asked
condescendingly.
“If what you are saying is true,” Mr. O’Burn said to
the teenage vampire, “then this is a very serious issue.” Though his face
looked young enough that he could almost be one of them were it not for his
facial hair, the expression he had on his face now aged him a good ten years.
Rachel nodded. “You won’t get an argument from me,”
she said. “All I can think about is the life they’ve lost, and their families
who won’t understand what’s happened.”
“Parents aren’t going to be too happy learning their
kids are now savage killing machines,” Andrew said, also typing away at a
computer.
“They can’t know,” O’Burn told the gang. “For those
parents their children are as good as dead. This is exactly what happens when
you allow a vampire infestation to grow unchecked.”
“You’re kidding me,” Tanya said, horrified at what
O’Burn was saying. “What do you want Rachel to do? Kill them all?”
“It has to be done.”
Tanya looked to Rachel. “You can’t seriously agree
with him.”
“I don’t know,” Rachel admitted quietly. “It’s hard
for me sometimes to control my bloodlust. Even now, there’s a part of me that
would feed on any of you.” Tanya rubbed the bite Rachel had given her only just
the other day, remembering the vampire’s fangs sinking into her leg. She
wondered how much Rachel really did have it under control.
She noticed Ian was looking similarly uncomfortable
and she was pretty sure she saw him touch his neck.
“For a kid,” Rachel continued, “it must be impossible.
They wouldn’t have the self-control, they would be monsters under the
bloodlust.”
“Can I vote we stop using the word bloodlust?” Bilal
asked with a raise of his hand.
“Seconded,” Ian said quickly. He WAS looking a little
pale.
“The point is that we need to start considering these
kids already dead,” Mr. O’Burn said, stepping to the front of the class. “And
then we have to make it happen.”
Tanya couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Again,
let me be the voice of reason,” she said, raising her hand like Bilal had just
done. “You’re kidding me with this, right?”
“Well they can’t go home to their parents,” Mr. O’Burn
said as if it was obvious. Tanya supposed it was, but admitting it felt cold.
Made her feel sick to her stomach.
“Hey I agree with you a hundred percent,” Erika said,
with a raise of her hand. She quickly realized what she was doing and dropped
it. “Jeez you got me doing that now. Look for the record I tried to kill em
all, and she gave me this.” Erika pointed to Rachel and then to her black eye.
“So you agree that what he’s talking about is insane,”
Tanya insisted to Rachel. She couldn’t believe no one else was speaking up
about this.
“This whole situation is insane,” Rachel said slowly.
“Tanya,” Bilal said, as if HE could talk reason to
her. “What if they get my sister next?”
“What if it WAS your sister?” Tanya asked pointedly. A
silence fell around the room. “What if it were your brother?” she said to
Rachel. “Or if it was any of us.”
“It will be if you don’t amputate the leg now,” Mr.
O’Burn said, a little darker than Tanya had ever known him. She’d never thought
she would see the day where he would beg for the mass murder of children.
Rachel wasn’t saying anything. It seemed she was
listening to everything everyone had to say, and Tanya could almost see the
gears churning behind her eyes. Everyone in the room was waiting to hear what
she had to say. They were all ready to follow her lead. “There’s got to be
another way,” the teen vampire said at last.
“Like a cure for vampirism?” Jon asked, making his
first contribution to the discussion.
“There’s no such thing as a cure for vamprisim,” Mr.
O’Burn said with what sounded like conviction. “If you don’t kill those
monsters, more people will die. I won’t stand by and watch this notion of
having mercy on vampires continue to be entertained.”
“Then get out,” Rachel said so quietly Tanya almost
thought she hadn’t heard her right.
“What?” Mr. O’Burn said in disbelief. “You’re kidding
me with this, right?” He sounded for a moment a lot like Tanya had just
sounded, and Tanya had to admit it felt better being on the other side of the
debate.
“I think the lady said her piece,” Tanya mumbled,
glaring at O’Burn.
“I’ll take your opinion into consideration,” Rachel
said, backing him up to the door of the classroom. “But I’m not ready to give
up on those kids and the last thing I need is a trigger happy vampire hunter
past his prime doing something we’ll both regret.”
Mr. O’Burn opened his mouth to complain but Rachel
stopped him. “Go back to your lab and teach science to your kids,” she told him
in a way that didn’t sound remotely like an ask, “the ones that are still
alive. If I see you out there I swear to god I will show you exactly how past
your prime you are. Leave.”
“Actually you all have to leave,” Mr. Martin said,
coming into the classroom from a different door with his laptop cradled in his
arms.
“Uh,” Mr. O’Burn spoke over Rachel. “I gave them
permission to be here.”
“Bully for you,” Mr. Martin told the other teacher. “I
need to set up for a class. They’ll have to leave.”
“Man,” Gordon muttered as he packed his laptop into
his backpack. “You guys really have to find us a new home base.”
This wasn’t the first time they were being kicked from
the computer lab, and it wouldn’t be the last. “Let’s reconvene in the Cafeteria,”
Tanya said to the group, joining Rachel who made sure she had her cane before
leaving with the group.
Andrew joined them. “I’ve been looking for more information
on possible magical artifacts on the internet,” he told them. “I’ve found some
message boards and reddit threads that might be helpful. I could post on them
asking about a cure to vampirism. I dunno what I’ll find, but I can’t get
anywhere until I can get access to a computer.”
“Just head to law class and do what you can from your
laptop,” Rachel told him. She was right, it was too soon to class time to even
bother heading to the cafeteria. That and Tanya needed to get a start on the morning
announcements.
“The rest of you,” Rachel said to the gang surrounding
her, “I want you trying to think up some other alternatives to a cure.
Something just as out of the box.”
“Uh,” Bilal said. “I’d love to help, but I have to
organize my campaign to run for president of student council.”
“What?” Tanya asked in surprise. He’d already taken
her editor in chief position from her. How much more was he going to come
gunning for?
Rachel gave Bilal a glare that Tanya wouldn’t have
wanted to be the focus of. “I used to think everything was back to normal,” she
told them. “I thought we could relax after defeating Eckhart and I might be
able to live a normal life.” Tanya thought she knew where Rachel was going with
this and she did not agree.
“Because I have been so caught up with my own life, I
didn’t realize the spreading darkness in the city. This is my fault that this
has gotten so out of control,” She looked around the circle teary eyed. “I need
all of us working together to fix it.”
“Aww,” said Deisha’s voice from somewhere down the
hall. “Look at the circle jerk. And Rachel in the center. Where do you want my
load? On your face? In your eye?”
Jon looked around in surprise, but Tanya knew exactly
where that had come from.
“Doesn’t that mean she has a dick?” Erika asked,
leaning into the circle, confused by the bully’s insults.
“It’s funnier for us if we don’t correct her,” Ian
told Erika, with a reassuring nod.
Andrew didn’t seem to find it too funny. “We really
need a new HQ,” he complained to the group.
“I’ve got a place,” Jon suggested with a look at
Erika. “We have a townhouse nearby but it’s not exactly furnished or anything.”
He scratched his head in thought. “If you wanted to bring your own stuff you
could use the space for whatever you want. The entire main floor and the
basement.”
“I call dibs on the basement,” Gordon said. “It’s
about time I put together a new set up.”
“So let me get this straight,” Andrew said, getting
excited. “You’re telling me that you have a large empty space completely free
of adult supervision that we can hang out at whenever, and shape it anyway we
like—and you didn’t lead with that!?!”
* *
*
“You’ve been holding out on us,” Jacob said, finding
Stacy on the playground at recess. She was still wearing the loose gray zip up
hoodie from earlier, but this time she had another shirt underneath it, a pink
long sleeve with a flower.
“All this time we were looking for Billy,” Sabrina
said, standing supportively at Jacob’s side. “Why didn’t you tell us you were
closer to him than any of us.”
“Is he alright?” Stacy asked, though she must have
known from their looks that he wasn’t. “Did you meet his parents?”
“He ran away from home,” Jacob told Stacy, acutely
aware that Stacy still hadn’t admitted they were friends. “His parents don’t
know where he is.”
“Well I don’t know,” Stacy insisted. “He never told me
anything.”
“He never talked about running away?” Sabrina asked
the other girl. Around them, the grade fives were having a snowball fight and
building snow forts. But being in grade seven, Jacob was far too old for that.
“He would talk about settling down,” Stacy argued.
“Would tell me he wanted to be older so he could have a job, and buy a big
house, and give me the family he thought I deserved.”
“That sounds nice,” Sabrina said. “Why would you hide
your relationship with him at school?”
Stacy kicked at the snow, and didn’t seem quite sure
how to respond. “We just—I just didn’t want to. I thought—you don’t know what
it’s like.” She shook her head and looked accusingly at them. “We can’t all be
perfect like you.”
“We’re far from perfect,” Jacob said, to the sound of
disappointment from beside him where it had seemed Sabrina had taken the girl’s
comment as a compliment. He ignored her. “Was there a specific house he would
talk about buying?”
“Yeah,” Stacy said with a nod. She then shook her
head. “A big abandoned place that’s been ‘For Sale’ forever.”
“What?” Jacob asked, confused by her shaking her head.
“Can you take us there?”
“I can’t imagine why he’d be there,” Stacy insisted.
“There’s nothing there for him. And he’d never risk getting in trouble…” she
trailed off.
“I think the Billy you knew,” Sabrina said to their unlikely
friend, “wouldn’t have run away from home either.”
Stacy drew her hoodie closer to her, a cold breeze
picking up.
“Don’t you have a coat?” Jacob asked.
“There weren’t enough for the whole family this year,”
Stacy told them, and Sabrina gave Jacob another look. He knew what she was
thinking, yet another story of dysfunctional parents. “I have seven sisters and
three brothers,” Stacy explained. “Because I’m the youngest, all I ever get is
hand me downs.”
“I just got my allowance,” Sabrina told the other
girl. “My parents are divorced so they always spoil me each week. Like they’re
trying to one up each other.” She reached out and put a hand on Stacy’s
shoulder. “I’ll buy you a new coat if you help us find Billy.”
Stacy pushed Sabrina away. “I don’t want your
handouts,” she said angrily. Sabrina’s jaw dropped in offence. “You don’t think
I get enough handouts?” Stacy mumbled and looked to the ground. “But I’ll take
you to the house. Not for money—not that. Because I owe it to Billy.”
“Yeah,” Jacob said, still not forgiving her for
leaving Billy out to dry like that. “You do.” He wondered how much of Billy’s
decision to run away was Stacy’s fault?
* *
*
“I wonder if there’s anything new in the polka-dot
hat,” Mr. Winston said, reaching into a large floppy hat and pulling out a
piece of paper. “Ah yes. One question. Who sent this?” he looked around the
room and laughed. “I’m kidding.”
Winston was their law teacher, a strange eccentric man
he was constantly making inappropriate jokes and spreading strong political
views in an environment that was supposed to be bias free. Most days Rachel
enjoyed the class, but today it was seeming to drag on forever. Rachel was
hungry. She couldn’t ignore it, no matter how much she tried. But every time
she thought about feeding, she also thought about those kids and how much they
were feeding.
She wanted to be out there looking for them, not here
listening to their teacher answer dumb anonymous questions from a hat.”
“How did the US president get elected,” Mr. Winston
read on the card, and Rachel wondered if someone in their group had asked the
question. “Well that’s a long answer that takes me all the way back to the end
of Obama’s second term. A year ago. Seriously, were any of you paying attention
to the news before my class?” A majority of the people in the room shook their
heads.
Mr. Winston sat down on his desk. “The elections last
year were brutal. The front runners in both parties were among the most
disliked candidates in United States history. One member of the Democratic
party knew that Hillary had no hope in beating Donald Trump. Knew that she had
been poisoned too much by their team. So Shirley Mason made a deal with the
devil.”
Rachel looked at Jon, who wasn’t sitting beside her.
He mouthed “No relation,” and she smiled.
“Does anyone remember what she did?”
Tanya raised her hand. Of course Tanya knew. “She
appointed a leading conservative runner as her Vice-President.”
“That’s correct,” Winston said with a wink to Tanya.
“Robert Daggers had already held a major position in George W. Bush’s cabinet
during his terms in office. He had the experience and with his appointment it
gave both the Republicans and Democrats an opportunity to unite under one
representative.”
“Shirley Mason beat out Donald Trump handily,” Mr.
Winston said with triumph in his voice. He was a great story teller. “But it
was all a Republican trap.”
He slid off his desk and dimmed the lights as if for
dramatic effect. “They set her up, put her in a no-win scenario and impeached
her for acting in a crisis she couldn’t have possibly prevented. There was
nothing to be done, however. Bob Daggers had all the power in the senate. He
was sworn into office only six months ago and yet already his effect on the
world has been far reaching.”
Alice raised her hand. She’d chosen to sit far from
Tanya, for some reason. What she hadn’t realized upon choosing her seat, was
that it had been right in front of Deisha. Deisha had been whispering things to
her all class which she seemed to be trying to ignore with growing annoyance.
“Why do people allow him to do all the bad things that
he does?” Alice asked the teacher. “If everyone knows President Daggers is up
to no good, why don’t they impeach him like he did President Mason?”
“A man named Edmund Burke once said that ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do
nothing’ and it’s a hundred percent true here. The conservatives had a strong
motivation to accomplish their goals.” Mr. Winston paused, waiting perhaps for
someone to guess what it was motivating them. No one did.
“Money,” he explained. ”The root
of all evil. There’s a common misconception that money and power and success is
equivalent to experience, competency, and intelligence. It’s not. A lot of
people who are successful have done so by taking advantage of people with
lesser means than them. They are often good at one thing. Manipulating and
exploiting. Two things.”
“With money and power, things
come easier and easier to you,” Winston continued. “It’s possible to create a
delusional world view where you come to expect that everyone must be able to
achieve whatever they want as easily as you, and those who aren’t just aren’t
trying hard enough. That type of viewpoint is wholly ignorant of the lack of
opportunities present for people with lesser means, many of whom might be just
as qualified, if not more so, than that person of means.”
“It’s that kind of delusion that
leads to the invention of bullshit theories like trickle-down. You’ve heard of
the trickle-down theory, haven’t you? It’s the idea that if you give money to
the rich instead of the poor, the rich will spend in the economy and the money
will trickle down. That of course ignores that if you gave money to poor
people, they too would be able to contribute to the economy, instead of
struggling just to pay their rent or put food on their tables.”
Rachel leaned over to Tanya. “I
can’t take any more of this,” Rachel complained. He was going to keep going on
like this forever.
“There’s only half an hour left,”
Tanya said with a look at her watch.
Andrew noticed Rachel and Tanya
talking from his spot on the other side of Ian. He moved to lean over Ian who
complained loudly.
“Do you mind?” Ian asked, squishing
back against his chair.
Andrew shook his head as he
practically crawled over Ian’s lap. “Not at all.” He got close enough to
whisper to Rachel, “I’ve posted on some subreddits like I promised. No response
yet.”
“Keep watching,” Rachel whispered
back, not wanting to mention that she could have heard him where he had been
sitting. “I need to get out of here,” she told him instead. “Can you make a
distraction?”
Andrew sat back in his chair, and
suddenly raised his hand. “I have an anonymous question,” he announced loudly
to the class. Everyone turned to look at him. Getting out of his desk, he
stumbled over to the far wall away from where Rachel was sitting close to the
door.
“Which of these portraits of past
presidents do you think is the most accurate?” Andrew asked Mr. Winston, who
circled the classroom to join him on the far wall. “Do you think it’s this
round stick figure here, or this one-- is that a person or an eggshell?”
“They were made by my son’s
kindergarten class,” Mr. Winston said, facing away from the door and making it
almost too easy for Rachel.
Grabbing her bag with a simple
snatch, her cane sliding into a knot on the knap sack that she’d made
specifically for it, she slipped out the door as silent as a ninja without
anyone noticing. She was halfway down the hall towards the stairs when Tanya
caught up with her, moving not nearly as quietly. Tanya was just an all-around
heavier footed woman. The large clunky combat boots didn’t help.
“What are you doing?” Rachel
asked, surprised at Tanya’s presence.
Tanya slung her bag over her
shoulder and crossed her arms. “I’m coming with you,” she insisted.
“You ever think maybe I wanted to
do this alone?” Rachel asked. She couldn’t face Tanya. Not now.
“No,” Tanya said. “Because we’re
a team. It was you and your gang of dweebs that insisted we do this as a team.
And that means not being alone.”
Rachel stopped in the middle of
the hallway. She couldn’t bring herself to look Tanya in the eyes. She couldn’t
even look up from her feet.
“Is everything all right?” Tanya
asked.
Rachel shook her head. “I had sex
with Ian yesterday.”
Tanya snorted. “What was that
like?” she asked Rachel, not at all the reaction the vampire had been
expecting.
“I’m serious,” Rachel said,
continuing towards the stairs.
“Alright,” Tanya said, keeping
up. “Seriously, what was that like? I mean I’ve seen him masterbate but I
didn’t really get a good look at his junk.”
Rachel stopped again, and this
time she had no problem looking Tanya in the eye. “Wait what?”
“That’s a long story,” Tanya said
with a dismissive wave. The two of them quickly took the steps down to the main
floor.
“I think we have time for it,”
Rachel said.
Tanya shook her head, “We really
don’t. Do you know where we’re going?” They pushed through the front doors into
the daylight. “I’ll drive.” Like there was any doubt.
Rachel still wasn’t sure she
wanted to go with Tanya though, even as she pulled her cane from her bag and
twisted the handle so that it would open up into an umbrella. “You’re not
jealous at all?” she asked, unable to believe it was true.
Tanya sighed, grabbing Rachel by
the hand. “What do I have to feel jealous about?” she asked the vampire teen,
who could feel herself blushing.
“That I love you and Ian at the
same time,” Rachel said quickly, again feeling her eyes shift away from looking
directly at Tanya’s face.
Tanya cupped Rachel’s chin in her
hand. “All I heard just now,” she said softly, “was that you love me.” Tanya
kissed Rachel tenderly on her lower lip. As she let go of Rachel’s chin, Rachel
lunged at Tanya and rammed her tongue practically down Tanya’s throat.
“I believe everyone has room in
the heart for many people,” Tanya said as they broke for her to breathe, “Your
mother, father, brother. Favourite teacher. Favourite actor.” They then started
making out again, just where they stood in the middle of the school parking
lot.
“It’s Ian who will need some
convincing,” Tanya said the next time they broke.
Rachel laughed despite herself.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“Well I’m here for you,” Tanya
told Rachel. “No matter what you need me to be.”
“Now where are we headed?”
Rachel already had some ideas
flowing. “First I want to revisit where I saw them last,” she told Tanya.
“Do you think they might revisit
their old home?” Tanya asked Rachel.
Rachel hadn’t mentioned that
she’d burned the whole place to the ground. “I dunno,” she said to Tanya. “But
at the very least we can look for clues.”
* * *
Jon’s beautiful only slightly
older protector was waiting for them when class let out at Jon’s locker.
“How did you know which one was
his?” Andrew asked Erika, as Jon opened the combination to swap textbooks with
his bag.
“My magical powers,” Erika
boasted non-challantly. “You still wanna do this?” She asked Andrew.
Andrew nodded a definite affirmative.
“I’ve never wanted to do anything more in my life.” Suddenly he remembered the
threesome he had almost taken part in. “There’s a list.”
He spotted his athletic friend
down the hall and called after him, “Mike!” he yelled. “Mike Jones!”
The crowds of people filling the
hallways were a noisy bunch, but Andrew could be loud when he wanted to be. Mike
turned around.
“You missed the meeting,” Andrew
said as Mike joined them at the lockers.
“Yeah,” Mike said, sounding
almost a little like Jason. “My song writing has really been taking off
lately.” He scratched the back of his neck and seemed to be acting a little
awkward.
“That’s great,” Andrew said,
trying to be supportive. “Have you met the new kid yet?” He was going to
introduce Mike to Jon, but Mike seemed to be distracted by Erika.
“And who might you be?” Mike
asked the older woman.
“Victoria,” Erika introduced
herself and offered her hand. It took Andrew a moment to remember why she’d
used a different name.
“Her real name is Erika,” he told
Mike. “Vicki is just her fake name she’s using cause she’s running from the US
government.”
“That must be rough,” Mike said, kissing
Erika’s hand. Erika pulled her hand away and gave Andrew a dirty look.
“It was supposed to be a secret,”
she mumbled.
“Hey,” Andrew insisted. “Mike is
one of us.” He turned to his friend. “We’re setting up a new home base at their
house. You wanna come?”
“We could use the extra car to
lug my stuff,” Gordon said, joining them from, well Andrew wasn’t actually
quite sure where.
“Will you be there?” Mike asked
Erika, throwing her a lopsided grin. Andrew was pretty sure he remembered Mike
calling this his signature Greek charm. He had been quite adamant that no girl
could resist it, but it didn’t seem to be having any effect on Erika.
“I live there,” Erika said with
minor annoyance. She looked to Gordon and asked, “Are all your friends this
creepy?”
“I wouldn’t really call all of
them my friends,” he admitted to her, and Andrew felt a little offended. “They
more just kind of conscripted me to their cause.”
“So she’s gonna be there,” Andrew
said, turning back to Mike. “You coming?”
“No vampire stuff?” Mike asked,
and his voice got a little uneasy. Andrew had never seen Mike a little uneasy
before. “I mean the US Government stuff cool. But no vampires?”
“Sure,” Andrew said, more just
telling Mike what he wanted to hear at that point.
* * *
“This is the house Billy wanted
to buy when he grew up?” Jacob asked, feeling immensely underwhelmed. “What was
he going to grow up to be? A Beetleborg?”
The house was definitely
abandoned, and there was no wonder it hadn’t left the market in years. It was
run down, with flayed wooden planks for a porch and boarded up windows. It was
a large mansion sized building, probably an extravagant place in like the early
nineteen hundreds. It didn’t seem, however, like anyone had set foot in the
place for longer than Jacob had been alive.
“I don’t get your reference,”
Stacy said from beside Jacob. He looked to Sabrina, on his other side, who also
shook her head.
“It’s from before we were born,”
Jacob admitted to them. He had a strange family, and they had led him down a
colourful childhood. “Forget about it. So you think Billy is in there?”
“I very seriously doubt it,”
Stacy said, eyeing the house warily.
“I think if anyone tried to go in
there,” Sabrina suggested, “the whole place would come down.”
That hadn’t been very reassuring.
“Well there’s only one way to find out,” Jacob told his friends. He followed
the path to the front porch and stepped up to the door. To his surprise, the
two girls were still at his side. He hadn’t actually expected them to follow
him. He was scared out of his mind, he couldn’t imagine what they were going
through.
Reaching out, he grabbed
Sabrina’s hand with his right. He had once heard a saying that every town had
its own haunted house. It might have been from a movie. He just hadn’t ever
thought that adage had included Oakville.
Grabbing the door handle with his
left hand, Jacob twisted it and the door opened easily. He let go and the door
creaked wide on its own, spewing light over the dark cobweb infested furniture
inside.
“Billy?” he called into the
house. There was no response.
“Maybe we should go,” Sabrina
suggested, being always the voice of reason.
Stacy apparently didn’t agree.
Rolling her eyes, she stepped confidently into the front hallway of the house,
and spun around. “See,” she said back at them. “Nothing to worry about. And no
Billy.”
Jacob and Sabrina waited at the
door for the inevitable ‘thing to worry about’ to make itself known. Stacy had,
after all, just jinxed herself.
Even Stacy was quiet and still,
almost daring something to come out and attack her.
“There’s no one here,” Sabrina
pleaded to her friends. “Let’s just go before we’re caught and get in trouble.”
Jacob gave Sabrina’s hand a
reassuring squeeze. “I think we should have a look around first and be sure,”
he told her, following Stacy inside.
Each footstep he made creaked
along the floor, as if everything could cave in at any moment. He took his
steps slow and deliberately. Against the wall there was a large pendulum clock
that was still swinging and keeping time, much to Jacob’s surprise. How long
had it been swinging like that? So much dust had accumulated over it that Jacob
couldn’t even see the wood of the clock under a coat of white.
Behind them there was a loud
creaking, and they turned in time to see the door shut on them. Whoever had
closed it was nowhere to be seen.
There was a rustling to Jacob’s
right. And another rustling on the stairs to the left.
“Billy?” Jacob called out into
the house.
“I was wrong,” Sabrina said,
pressing close to Jacob and grabbing at his shirt. “I don’t think we’re alone.”
Suddenly a piano in the living room blarted with noise, and a kid a number of
years younger than Jacob crawled out from inside. He was dirty, and his clothes
and face were stained with blood.
And he wasn’t the only kid. There
were children climbing down from upstairs, and pouring in from the kitchen. One
kid jumped out from behind the TV, and another jumped down from the crystalline
chandelier. It wasn’t long before Jacob and his two friends were very much
surrounded.
“We were just looking for our
friend Billy,” Jacob said loudly to the crowd of children. Sabrina grabbed at
Jacob desperately in fear, begging for him to keep quiet. “Clearly you’re not
Billy. You’re a house of lost boys. So we’ll just be going now.”
One kid from the back of the pack
pushed his way to the front, a short scrawny kid with glasses. He was older
than many of the other children.
“Billy,” Stacy said, stepping
forward with excitement. “We’ve been so worried about you.”
“Stacy,” Billy said her name,
stepping closer to her while buttoning up what must have been a fresh flannel
shirt.
“I’m hungry,” Billy said with a
snarl, reaching out as if to tenderly caress Stacy’s cheek. Instead he grabbed
her roughly, and lunging forward he bit into her neck.
Sabrina screamed.
Next Time on Urban Fantasy
Rachel has to save her brother, while Andrew and Mike get in more trouble than they can handle, knowing full well Rachel is too busy to come to their aid.
And that was the chapter. Hope you enjoyed. I'm sorry that one was late. The next one will be early, I'll try to have it up on Sunday. Sunday is my first night off of the week each week, so that's the day I'll aim to release each chapter. Hope you liked what you read, and will continue reading more, and maybe even comment below or via my twitter @AndrewGeczy it would take you but moments and mean the world to me. Remember you can read more chapters below on this blog, or subscribe on www.patreon.com/99geek for only a dollar a month and download everything in easy to read PDF format. Not like here. These PDFs can open on your phone or tablet or PC. And you can always subscribe, download everything, and then unsubscribe. Cost yourself just a dollar. Over a thousand pages of content for a dollar can't be that bad.
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