Fifty Percent Vampire, #1, page 18
A dragonfly buzzed past my nose, a pale blue one, and I watched it flitting between the reeds close to the bank. It was like I’d become part of one of Monet’s waterlily paintings. So calm and peaceful.
All of a sudden something grabbed my left ankle and jerked me down. Next second my head was under water and my eyes bulged as the surface receded above me. I looked down in a panic to see what had taken hold of me, shaking my leg frantically in a desperate attempt to free myself. A horrid green hand, sharply clawed, had pierced my calf and my blood drifted up past my terrified eyes like ghostly smoke.
We plunged inexorably downwards into the murk, my struggles to escape the creature’s grasp useless. Whatever this thing was, it was strong and heavy. Could it be one of the water sprites of which my stepfather had frequently warned? But water sprites only lived in Central and Eastern Europe, not here in America, surely? And they were mythological creatures, right? They didn’t really exist.
Come to think of it, the hand gripping my ankle reminded me very much of the hand of Daniel’s imagined water monster: similar color, similar vicious talons. As the sunlight faded I began to lose consciousness, and the icy cold of the silent depths penetrated to my bones. I couldn’t keep my eyes open; I was slipping away ...
When I woke up again I was out of the water and flying. Really flying, a few feet above the ground, but moving very slowly. So slowly a little kid could have overtaken me walking. Almost imperceptibly I began to rise, accelerating as I drifted higher toward cloudland, circling as I went. The earth slipped away below me and I fell asleep once more.
When I woke up the next time I was standing at the end of a long winding line of people. Far ahead of me I saw a high wall stretching away forever with barbed wire on the top—and those were the Pearly Gates! I was filled with dread. When I reached the front of the line Saint Peter would turn me away for sure. I glanced behind me for a way out but there must have been a hundred people standing behind me.
“Keep moving, keep moving!” ordered the fierce-faced angel on my left, brandishing her flaming sword.
I shuffled forward, water dripping from the hems of my jeans. The last time I’d seen my jeans was when I’d removed them and hung them on a branch at the pond’s edge, but I was pleased to be wearing them again among all these people.
On reaching the towering gates I was waved right through without anyone objecting and I jumped onto the next fluffy white cloud that passed. The cloud whisked me away to I don’t know where. A smiling woman drew up her own cloud directly opposite me and held out a large red-ribbon-wrapped chocolate egg. “Hello, Astrid,” she said.
I rubbed my eyes in disbelief. “Grandma?”
I’d been shown old photographs of this woman by Emma, and it was definitely her. Our maternal grandmother. Thinner than I’d imagined, and with only the last hints of red remaining in her gray hair, but her eyes were the same as Mom’s. So beautiful.
“You look just like June,” she said, as I stepped gingerly across the bottomless divide from my cloud to hers.
“Who?” I asked, puzzled.
“Why, your mother of course.”
“Oh,” I said. “You mean Ophelia.”
Now it was Grandma’s turn to look puzzled. “Who’s Ophelia? The only Ophelia I know of is Hamlet’s ex.”
“She changed her name. June, I mean. Don’t you remember?”
Grandma tutted. “Typical. That’s just the sort of thing your mother would do. What other mischief has she been getting up to that I don’t know about?”
Don’t get me started, I thought, and decided I’d better change the subject. “How’s the weather up here?” I asked, wringing out my wet hair and letting the drips fall over the cloud’s edge.
Grandma regarded me with suspicion in her eyes. “Astrid, my dear, what are you hiding from me?” she demanded, and continued to demand, incessantly. As her voice rose higher and higher and became more and more insistent I woke up for real, barely able to catch my breath.
“If C.G. Jung were still alive he’d have a real interesting time analyzing you,” Rachel remarked when I told her my dream first morning after the holidays, in Psych. “And a water sprite? In America? Plee-ee-ase,” she laughed.
“You two, stop talking,” snapped Mr. Bronsky. “And everybody turn to page three hundred and ninety-four.”
Psychology was one of my favorite classes. I was already imagining myself in a few years’ time a top practitioner. Or maybe a leading neuroscientist. I was having trouble deciding.
That day we were learning about the three distinct parts of the human brain: the neocortex, the limbic, and the five-hundred-million-year-old reptilian. Mr. Bronsky walked round the classroom handing out life-sized plastic models to each pair of students. When he passed one to me I was all fingers and thumbs and promptly dropped it, whereupon it split apart and the pieces skittered across the floor.
“Lesson One,” said Mr. Bronsky drily. “Human brains are extremely fragile.”
Everybody laughed. I bent down to gather up the pieces, astonished at how small the reptilian brain was. Holding it at arm’s length I twisted it slowly round and round between my fingers. Fascinating. The basic human functions were controlled from this tiny organ: heart rate, breathing, body temperature and balance. Next I examined the limbic. The limbic is the seat of emotion, and the neocortex handles all the rest: language, abstract thought, imagination, consciousness and our infinite ability to learn. Without the neocortex there would be no humans.
My thoughts wandered to the question of what might differentiate human brains from those of vampires. Maybe vampire brains had a part humans didn’t have: the add-on that overrode everything else, the slight brain augmentation harboring the killer instinct. As I helped Rachel slot the sections of the model back together I wondered where the vampire part might fit. Maybe George knew, or Angus. If such a thing existed, surely it was to be found lurking deep inside their sick mutant heads.
CHAPTER 29
(Angus)
No Dice
“Angus, my dear boy, surely you don’t expect me to believe your ridiculous tale.”
“George, my tale’s not ridiculous. I’m deadly serious. Astrid’s falling for a human,” I said as I took a seat opposite him in the nightroom. “A cop from the quiet little town you tried to hide her in. Name of Michael Hanson.”
George read on, his attention apparently elsewhere. It bugged me he found me so easy to ignore. Usually our kind were wary of me. But not George.
“Are you listening to me?” I shouted, leaping from my seat and standing over him. “I know what’s going on in her mind. She has absolutely no intention of coming back. Don’t you see the danger? If she hooks up with this guy we’ll have lost her forever and she’ll be putting us all at risk.”
George looked up. “So what am I supposed to do?”
“Something more than just sitting around waiting for the inevitable to happen. Haul Astrid’s ass back here and transform her!”
George turned a page. “Funny you should bring this up while Ophelia is out of town,” he remarked. “I made an agreement with her that I’ll give the girl a chance to see for herself how pathetic human life is.” He shook his head. “No, Angus, I won’t drag Astrid back here because you have … sudden stepbrotherly concerns.” His eyes dropped back to his book.
I exploded. “That woman’s got you right where she wants you. You’re as weak as your brother was. No wonder we’re in trouble.”
At last, a reaction. George shut his book with a snap and looked up. “I think you’d better leave before I wrest your tongue from your mouth and donate it to your obscene collection.” His voice was icy and his eyes had begun to glow.
“George, grow up. How can you possibly sit there and pretend this doesn’t affect you too,” I snarled. “If Astrid refuses to join us–”
Before I could utter another word George sprang from his seat, slammed me hard into the wall and grabbed me by the throat. He lifted me off the floor and shoved his face close to mine. “Consider this,” he hissed. “You’re not in charge here. Astrid is my deceased brother’s daughter. If she makes the wrong choice and follows her own course the price she pays will be decided by me, and you don’t get a say in the matter. Now get out of my house before I decide to amputate your entire head.”
With that my lord and master dropped me and returned to his chair and his book. For a moment I considered tearing him limb from limb, but decided it wasn’t the right moment and stormed out of the room. Damn George and his suspect human sympathies! One day soon I would rip his pathetic little heart right out of his chest, tear it in two and toss the scraps between an alligator’s gaping jaws.
I slammed the door behind me. I wished I’d never set foot in this madhouse. Agreeing to cohabit with George and his crazy mixed-up family had been a huge mistake on my part, but at least doing so had shown me the danger he was getting us into. I grimaced as I rubbed at my sore neck. The others were right. There was only one way we were going to be safe from Astrid.
CHAPTER 30
(Astrid)
Bible Study
Raindrops were battering on the windowpane, so I lay in bed and contemplated the meaning of life, flicking through the Bible app on my smartphone. I have no idea why, but I felt safer reading the electronic version of the Holy Scriptures; it seemed less tangible, less real than the leather-bound paper copy Aunt Jean had offered me, and therefore less threatening.
What did I think of the story so far? If you asked me, the whole of the book of Genesis seemed a tad far-fetched, and I wasn’t too happy about the high incidence of genocides either, nor the numerous royal intrigues.
The accounts of the millennia-old strife in the Middle East captivated me though; as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote long ago, there’s nothing new under the sun. What has been done will be done again and again and again, until we blow one other to pieces. And God said ‘let there be fights’.
I looked to my kindred spirit Mr. Spock (he has pointy ears, I have pointy teeth) for comfort. He gazed back at me impassively from the wall, one eyebrow raised. Not much comfort from him that morning. My Buddha statue smiled his eternal smile. I glanced at my Yin-Yang poster, symbol of the eternal struggle between good and evil, an apposite daily reminder considering what was constantly going on inside my head, and inside the heads of the rest of humanity too, apparently. With the happy thought that I wasn’t the only one on our planet with problems this morning, I rolled out of bed, washed my face, and headed downstairs, following my nose to the source of the smell of freshly-brewed coffee.
“Hey, Astrid, it’s your turn to collect the eggs,” said Emma sleepily, slumped at the table with a steaming cup between her hands. “I did it yesterday.”
“Strange,” remarked Aunt Jean, leaning on her broom. “The chickens are quiet this morning. Has either of you heard the rooster?”
“Mom,” said Emma. “I’m a teenager. On Saturday mornings I don’t hear anything before ten-thirty.”
“I didn’t hear him either,” I said. “Maybe they stayed indoors because of the rain.”
“Maybe,” said Aunt Jean, looking doubtful. I put on my raincoat over my pajamas, stepped into my rubber boots, and trudged, yawning, to the end of the back yard. As I approached the hen house, the unusual silence began to worry me too. Normally the chickens would come running from their shelter when they heard me calling them, clucking excitedly in expectation of a handful of mash each or a pail of kitchen scraps. But today they failed to respond and to my horror I soon found out why.
The three little hens and the rooster were sprawled in blood-stained mud, all of them headless, their wings limply outstretched. One of the rooster’s yellow legs was still twitching, but the hens appeared to have been dead for some time, and their rain-soaked corpses lay still, the feathers they had lost during the slaughter strewn around them. In consternation I looked around for gaps in the wire fence but found none. Whatever had killed our darlings must have climbed over or flown in and out. But what cruel beast would take just the heads and leave the bodies? Something that killed for sport? Or out of spite? Poor little chickens.
As I squelched sadly back to the house to report the terrible news, I heard the swish of wings and looked up at the gnarled lightning-struck oak tree that stood beyond the hen house. A large raven was perched on one of the creeper-bound branches. We stared at each other, the raven and I, until he flexed his glistening black wings, leaped up and dive-bombed me, so close I heard the swish of air and was brushed by feathers even though I ducked out of the way. The raven wheeled away into the gloom of the forest, croaking and cawing with laughter as he dodged his way between the trees and vanished into the darkness.
Later that damp morning we interred the chickens in a common grave beneath the oak and while Uncle James shoveled dirt over the bodies Aunt Jean said a short prayer of thanks for all they had given us. Afterwards Emma placed a small bunch of flowers on the little mound of earth.
I worried about the significance of the chickens’ almost ritual deaths through the rest of the weekend, hardly managing to sleep, and was glad when Monday morning arrived and it was time for school again and I had other concerns to busy my mind. Monday passed in a blur, and after the last class, which was basketball practice with eleventh grade, I strolled home through town for once, tired but happy, high on dopamine and endorphins.
But my mood changed when I reached the intersection of Sanders and Carney. As I began to cross the street, a horn blared and I scooted back onto the sidewalk, my heart pounding. An instant later a patrol car swept past me so close its slipstream almost dragged me after it.
“Hey!” I yelled at the car, which must have been doing at least twice the legal speed. Suddenly the blue light came on and the siren too. I managed to catch the registration before the car disappeared with a screech of brakes and smoking tires into Bushnell Road. It was Mike’s car. Where was he headed in such a rush he’d all but run down an innocent pedestrian?
CHAPTER 31
(Mike)
Man Down
“Hanson here, ETA Rosenberg High five seconds. Over.” I swung my cruiser into Principal Jones’ parking space, puzzled why he wasn’t here himself yet. I jumped out and jogged the fifty yards to the gym entrance. A stocky and shaven-headed man in a dark-blue tracksuit, whistle dangling from a string round his neck, was waiting at the door. A drill sergeant type. So the high school had a new coach. Briefly I wondered what had become of Schrader, the coach I remembered.
“This way, officer,” boomed the coach, and strode briskly ahead of me. “He’s in the boys’ shower room.”
As we walked I heard the ambulance approaching.
“This must have happened less than an hour ago,” continued the coach. “The poor kid was alive and well when we finished basketball practice.”
“What time was that?”
“Four o’clock sharp.”
I looked at my watch. It was now 4:50 p.m.
The coach pushed open a door. “He’s all yours.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Sir, please wait outside, and don’t let anybody in unless they show you a badge.”
“Right.”
The boy was lying face up on the tiles in the communal shower room, dressed only in shorts and missing one sports shoe, as pale as a ghost, not that I’ve ever seen a ghost. Blood trickled from beneath his head, though less than I expected. Following routine, I checked all over for unwelcome visitors, but the locker room was empty. I returned to the body and crouched low for a closer look.
“What the–?” If I wasn’t mistaken, this kid had the same marks on his neck as I’d observed on Zoe Exmouth’s. What was going on here? Did we have a serial killer in town?
Lydia arrived, so I left her guarding the crime scene and went outside to speak to the coach. “Mr. uh ... ?”
“Collins.”
“Mr. Collins, if you don’t mind, I’m going to need a list of everyone who was at practice this afternoon.”
Mr. Collins nodded sharply. “I always fill out an attendance sheet for the insurance. It’s in my office.” He marched off the few yards to fetch it.
When he returned I thanked him and scanned the list. The names were familiar. Huh, we’d interviewed most of these kids at Halloween already. My heart missed a beat at the last name. “Astrid Sonnschein plays basketball?” I asked. Thinking about it, she did look the type, tall for a seventeen-year-old, maybe five-eight, muscular, and she’d told me she was a runner.
“Astrid’s one of my best players. Runs rings round most of the boys her age.”
I closed my eyes and prayed it wasn’t her who, this afternoon between the end of basketball practice and 4:50 p.m., had run rings round and done unspeakable things to Daniel Millwalk.
CHAPTER 32
(Astrid)
Do Not Pass Go
“Miss Sonnschein, where were you yesterday between the end of basketball practice and 4:50 p.m.?” demanded Officer Tafani, stabbing her notepad with a pencil. She leaned across the principal’s desk. “Think carefully now, honey.”
How on earth did she expect me to ‘think carefully now’ after I’d just been told my best male friend Daniel was dead? Principal Jones had announced it in the auditorium like he had for Zoe, but this time he’d summoned me to his office after dismissing the rest of the kids from tenth and eleventh grade, those who’d been with me at basketball practice. So I guessed that meant I was Officer Tafani’s number one suspect.
And what was with the ‘honey’? I rolled my eyes and leaned forward. “I took a shower, got dressed, walked home.”
“Anyone walk with you?”
“No.”
“See anyone you knew on the way?”
Mike’s tailpipe, no one else. “No,” I replied tonelessly.
“So which way did you walk?”
“Bushnell Road, Sanders, Carney, through the park to Wicket Lane.”
