Vamps, page 8
“Yeah. I got away clean. But I did see someone else get staked while I was there.”
“Founders have mercy!” Cindy gasped, covering her mouth in surprise. “Was it anyone we know?”
“No,” Cally replied, shaking her head. “It was some oldie.”
Simon and Cindy exchanged a relieved look. “Praise the Founders for that, at least.” Cindy sighed.
“So, are you ready for that big test in Mr. Dirge’s luring class this week?” Simon asked.
“Yeahhh. About that.” Knowing how intense the rivalry was between dear old Varney Hall and Bathory Academy, Cally knew she was heading into rough waters. “I’ve been going through changes the last couple of nights….”
“How so?”
“It seems my asshole dad has made big plans for me.”
“Your dad?” Simon frowned. “The one you’ve never met?”
“That’s the one.” Cally took a deep breath. She knew there was no putting it off. She might as well tell them and get it over with. “He’s decided to ‘better my education’ by sending me to Bathory Academy.”
“You’ve gotta be shitting me!” Simon’s face suddenly drew itself tight.
“I wish I was. Tomorrow’s my first night. I’ve got to wear a school uniform and everything. This afternoon he had the uniforms delivered to the apartment. I hope you never see me in it.” Cally grimaced in distaste.
“But Bathory’s an Old Blood school!” Cindy exclaimed, stating the obvious.
“It was tough enough at Varney Hall—I can only imagine how welcome I’m going to be at Bathory. But I’ve got to do it.”
“Yeah, well, good luck with that,” Simon said, already a former friend. “Speaking of school, Cindy and I better get going.”
“Huh?” Cindy said, surprised by Simon’s sudden announcement. “Going where? It’s still early….”
“You remember, Cindy,” Simon said, dragging her out of the booth by her elbow. “We’ve got that exam in undead management tomorrow.”
“We do? Oh! Right! We do!”
“That’s okay. I understand,” Cally said as they hurried off.
She’d dared to hope for more support from Simon and Cindy and was hurt and disappointed by their response. But even Cally felt like a traitor to the New Bloods, who had once been her closest friends.
“Do you mind if I have a seat?”
Cally looked up from her dark thoughts and was surprised to see a familiar face smiling down at her.
“What are you doing here?” she gasped as Peter slid into the booth.
“Waiting for you to show up.”
“Are you stalking me?” Cally asked, not sure whether to be pleased or alarmed. “How did you know I’d be here?”
“I have my ways of getting information,” he replied, flashing her a look that suggested it wasn’t a joke.
Cally cocked her head in disbelief. “You’ve been lounging around expecting me to show up? Why would you do that?”
“So I could thank you for saving my life.”
“You did that the other night.”
“Would you rather I leave?” he asked.
Cally looked into Peter’s eyes and felt a pull of attraction even stronger than the first time their gazes locked. “No,” she admitted. It was kind of ironic that he’d shown up just as Simon and Cindy had gone away. “To tell you the truth,” she said with a crooked smile, “I’m actually kind of glad to see you.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.” Peter smiled, taking her hands in his own. “Cally—I have a confession to make. Ever since I met you, I can’t get you out of my head. I don’t understand what I’m feeling. But do you feel it too?”
“You don’t know who I am,” Cally whispered, not wanting it to end.
Peter’s smile faltered and he quickly looked away, unable to meet her eyes.
“I know more than you think I do…. I never told you my full name, Cally. I was afraid to.”
“Afraid?” Cally’s heart began to beat like a hummingbird caught in a spider’s web. “Why would you be afraid of me?”
“Because I thought you would kill me if you knew who I really was.”
As she listened to Peter’s words, Cally knew she didn’t want to hear what he had to say. She glanced about uneasily as she tried to regain her composure and force her lips back into a smile. “Why would I want to kill you? That’s crazy talk.”
“Cally, my name is Peter Van Helsing.”
Cally sat there for a long moment.
“I have to leave,” she said numbly, pulling her hands free.
As she began to get up, he grabbed at her, snaring her by the wrist. “Cally, it’s not what you think! You’re in no danger! I’m not going to hurt you!”
“Leave me alone!” she snapped, jerking free of his grasp. “Stay away from me, Peter! I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to!”
Then she was gone.
Cally ran down Metropolitan Avenue, angrily knuckling the tears from her eyes. On some unconscious level she must have known he was a Van Helsing right from the start. What really aggravated her was how clichéd the whole damn thing was: vampire and vampire hunter falling for each other at first sight. How much lamer could it possibly be? She was just as pathetic as her mother. But at least her mom knew what she was getting into right from the start—even sought it out, in fact.
As far as Cally was concerned, there was nothing sicker and more disgusting than loving someone dedicated to the systematic genocide of your people, except, by all that was unholy, hoping that she might see him again.
Cally’s mother was waiting for her just inside the door when she came home.
“There you are, sweetheart! Tomorrow’s going to be a very important night for you, so I want you to make sure you get a good day’s sleep! That means no staying up late to watch The View, young lady!” Sheila threw her arms around her daughter, hugging her tight. “You won’t regret it, I promise! You’ll see—it will all be for the better!”
“Yeah. Whatever.” Cally sighed as she peeled herself free of her mother’s embrace. “I’m going to take a shower before I go to bed.”
Cally’s room was at the end of the hallway. She slammed the door shut behind her and kicked off her shoes. As if the events of the night weren’t already upsetting enough, the first thing she saw was one of the Bathory Academy uniforms draped across the foot of her bed, like the empty skin of a serpent.
CHAPTER 9
There is nothing about Bathory Academy’s exterior to suggest that its students are fledgling vampires. There’s no outward sign of the strange nature of its teachings—unless you count its eternally shuttered windows. Beautifully designed, the three-story mansion on East Ninety-first Street was built by one of the old robber barons, back when the Upper East Side was still the suburbs. In fact, the only building in the vicinity that dates back as far as Bathory Academy is its male counterpart, Ruthven’s School for Boys, located two streets over on East Eighty-ninth.
Every Monday through Thursday night, from late September until early May, a succession of limousines pull up in front of the school, disgorging a steady stream of young girls dressed in maroon blazers and gray pleated skirts. What they do inside the school is anybody’s guess. Most nights the students remain inside the building until at least two in the morning, sometimes as late as four. Every so often groups of students leave in the company of what are assumed to be faculty members, whisked away in shiny stretch limos on mysterious midnight field trips.
These sightings aside, the girls and their teachers have remained little more than phantoms to the generations of New Yorkers who have found themselves neighbors to the school. And since those who do not mind their own business have a tendency to suddenly disappear forever, it’s far safer for all concerned to simply explain away Bathory Academy as a private night school for the children of the pampered rich who cannot be bothered to get up at the crack of dawn and prefer to sleep away the daylight hours in their parents’ penthouses.
Getting dressed was one of Cally’s favorite things. She’d always had a flair for styling clothes. Ever since she was old enough to talk, she had been allowed to dress however she pleased, or at least as far as her pocketbook permitted. She loved buying unusual fabrics, ribbons, and lace and using them to customize the skirts and dresses she found at vintage shops and flea markets.
As she checked herself in the mirror, she regarded the dreadful maroon blazer and gray skirt with disgust. It was so drab and nondescript compared to what she usually wore. More than ever she wished she was human and could have a tattoo! Sadly, vampires healed so fast the ink was literally pushed out of the skin within seconds of being applied. Perhaps there was another, less drastic way of proclaiming her individuality on her first night at her new school?
She opened the jewelry box on her vanity table and took out a pair of vintage Bakelite bangles she inherited from her grandmother. One was a pale olive color that could almost pass for jade; the other was sunflower yellow.
“That’s better,” she said with a smile as she slipped the jewelry onto her left wrist.
As she stood on the elevated platform at Marcy Avenue, the wind whipping about her exposed legs, Cally found yet another reason to loathe her school uniform. Judging from the number of leers she was getting from creepy-looking guys, it was a real perv magnet.
As she walked up the stairs of the school, Cally wondered what lay ahead for her behind Bathory’s blood-red doors.
The first thing she saw on entering was the full-length portrait of an outstandingly attractive woman, her milk-white face framed by reddish hair. The lilac shade of her flowing dress offset her luminous green eyes. In one slender hand she held an open roll of blank parchment; the other held a scrivener’s talon.
What Cally found particularly striking was the look in the woman’s eyes. Unlike other early Romanticera paintings Cally had seen in museums, there was nothing coy or coquettish in the woman’s gaze. Instead she radiated a mixture of wisdom, curiosity, and determination. She seemed to be staring expectantly at Cally, as if she had just asked a question and was patiently awaiting a reply.
Cally walked over to look at the brass plaque attached to the bottom of the portrait’s frame. To her surprise, the inscription was in English, not the formal chthonic script of the Old Bloods. It read: OUR FOUNDER, MORELLA KARNSTEIN.
Even though the subject of the painting was long dead, Cally felt as if she were somehow welcoming her to the school. Maybe she could fit in here after all. But first she needed to locate the school secretary and find out what her classes would be.
Cally looked around, suddenly aware of how empty the building felt. Although there were supposed to be at least seventy students attending the school, there were no voices buzzing behind the closed doors of the classrooms or rattling of lockers in the hallways. The only sound she heard was the rapid clicking of fingernails on a computer keyboard, coming from the office on her right.
She walked in and saw a middle-aged woman dressed in a gray jacket and skirt, her long dark hair piled atop her head and held in place by several strategically placed sharpened pencils. She was seated behind a desk, entering data into a computer. On seeing Cally, the school secretary stopped, her fingers frozen in mid-keystroke.
“What are you doing aboveground?” the secretary asked sternly.
“I—I’m sorry,” Cally stammered, startled by the woman’s severity. “I’m a new student—I was told to report to the school secretary when I got here….”
“You’re the New Blood,” the secretary said, her upper lip wrinkling as if she smelled something foul. “And you’re late.”
“I realize that,” Cally said. “I had to take the subway to get here and it took longer than I thought….”
“Tardiness is not tolerated at Bathory Academy. Nor is non-regulation clothing, jewelry, or accessories,” the secretary said tartly as she eyed Cally’s unusual hairstyle and the colorful bangles on her wrist. “While such outlandish personal fashion statements might be acceptable at a place like Varney Hall, they are frowned upon here. You would do well to remember that, Miss Monture.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Cally replied quietly.
The secretary got up, walked briskly to a filing cabinet, and pulled out a manila folder. She strode over to a tabletop photocopy machine and slapped a piece of paper from the folder onto the glass. Her body language made it clear that being forced to attend to a New Blood was almost too galling to bear.
“Here’s your class schedule,” the older woman said, literally shoving the photocopied paper into Cally’s face. “You are to report immediately to the grotto for assembly. Is that understood?”
“I guess so.”
“Then go join the others,” she said curtly, slamming the door shut behind her.
“Thanks a lot, bitch,” Cally muttered under her breath as she stood in the hallway, frowning at her class schedule.
It was printed in chthonic script, the written language of the Founders, which looked like a cross between Chinese, Sumerian, and chicken scratch. She’d learned the simplified version of the language at Varney Hall but wasn’t familiar with the more formal version preferred by the Old Bloods. It was going to take a little deciphering on her part to figure out exactly when, where, and what her classes would be. To make matters worse, Cally had no clue where to find the grotto.
She looked around, desperately hoping to catch sight of a student or faculty member, but the first floor of the school was deserted, save for an undead servant dressed in janitor’s grays slowly pushing a broom down the hall.
Since her family didn’t have servants, Cally hadn’t grown up surrounded by the undead like most of her New Blood friends. The undead tended to creep her out. It wasn’t that they scared her or anything; it was just that she didn’t know where to look or what to say whenever they were around. It seemed super-weird to be waited on hand and foot by people you—or at least someone in your family—had essentially murdered.
She walked up to the caretaker sweeping the floor and politely coughed into her fist. “Excuse me…?”
The janitor kept pushing his broom along the floor.
“Hello?” Cally said, a little louder than before, this time tapping him on the shoulder.
The man with the broom jumped slightly. He turned to look at her, a stunned expression on his face. “You are talking to me, mistress?” he asked, clearly baffled by why she would want to do such a thing.
“I’m sorry if I’m interrupting your work, but I was hoping you could, uh, help me find where I’m supposed to go?”
“I am only the janitor, miss.”
“Yeah, I can see that. I just need to know where the grotto is.”
“It is located on the third level, miss,” the janitor said, turning back to his broom.
“The grotto’s upstairs?” she asked with a frown, looking to the upper stories over her head.
“No, miss,” the janitor replied with a shake of his head. “It is below.”
“So how do I get there?”
The servant said nothing but merely pointed at a door across the hall from them marked JANITORIAL.
“But that’s the supply closet,” she said, frowning harder than before. She turned back to ask another question, only to find that he had already pushed his broom down the hall and around the corner.
Cally scratched her head, baffled by the janitor’s instructions. Still, just to be on the safe side, she walked across the hall and peeked inside the cleaning supplies closet. Instead of a bunch of mops and cases of floor wax, she saw a large wrought-iron cage elevator complete with an undead operator dressed in a maroon jacket with Bathory Academy’s insignia emblazoned across the breast pocket.
“I need to go to the grotto,” she said hesitantly. The elevator operator had the same thousand-yard stare as the janitor, and it was starting to spook her.
“Very well, miss,” the operator said, pulling first the interior elevator door and then the folding gate shut behind her.
Cally grabbed one of the side rails to steady herself as the car suddenly jerked into motion. “I’m new here,” she explained. “Can you tell me what the grotto is?”
“I do not know, miss,” the operator replied, his eyes riveted straight ahead. “I have never seen it.”
Cally frowned, perplexed by his response. “You mean you work here and you don’t know what the grotto actually is?”
“I am the elevator operator, mistress,” he replied, as if that explained everything. “It is my duty to take students and faculty from one floor to the other. I have been doing so for—what year is this, mistress?”
“2008.”
“Ahhh.” He nodded slowly. “In that case, I have been inside this elevator for one hundred and twenty-seven years. That is all I do. All I shall ever do.”
“Okay. I see,” Cally said, now officially creeped out. She decided to spend the rest of the lengthy ride to the mysterious grotto in silence.
Stepping out of the elevator, Cally heard a strange mixture of buzzing and high-pitched piping, as if someone had angrily shaken a hive full of bees and tossed it into a cave full of bats. She followed the sound, walking down a long vaulted corridor that ended at a huge doorway. Its massive metal doors were standing open.
As she got closer, the buzzing resolved itself into the sound of dozens upon dozens of voices talking excitedly, while the piping proved to be the ultrasonic chittering of those speaking in the true tongue, the ancient language of the Founders.
Cally stepped across the gigantic threshold and found herself not in a room but a cavern, one as grand and awe-inspiring as any cathedral. The roof soared over two hundred feet above her head, held aloft by six enormous rock pillars. If she remembered correctly what she’d learned from the tour guide during the trip she and her grandmother made to Howe Caverns when she was ten years old, the huge rock formations that hung down from the ceiling like gigantic icicles were stalactites, while those pushing up from the floor like huge fangs were stalagmites.
