Heir of the Dog (Liars and Vampires Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  “The police are here!” I heard another girl shriek.

  “Oh, thank God!” called another.

  I saw the silhouette of Miss Patterson stagger to her feet; she’d been behind her desk the whole time. She looked like a deer caught in the headlights.

  “Are we safe?” asked another girl.

  “I don’t know,” said the boy next to her.

  There was a beep as the principal’s voice came back over the intercom.

  “Attention students and staff. Please remain in your rooms. The police have arrived and are going to proceed to search each room. We ask that you remain patient as we resolve this situation.”

  Miss Patterson collapsed into her chair at her desk, having lost the strength to stand.

  Other students were crowding together, already chittering like little birds, talking over one another in one corner of the room.

  I pulled myself up to my feet and wobbled over to my desk. My legs were like jelly. I wasn’t sure they would hold me. I sank down onto my chair, my tailbone striking the hard plastic, but I slid right out onto the floor.

  Everything was shaking. My head was swimming. I felt like I was ready to puke.

  I had been through a lot since moving to Florida. I had dealt with violence, death and close calls. I’d been hurt, badly at times. I had walked into a room filled with vampires, sure that it was going to end in my death.

  But this…this was something way more real than vampires or faeries.

  Chapter 3

  Who hadn't learned to fear school shootings over the last few years?

  The stunning imagery of running children, the raw gut-punch feeling of knowing kids had been targeted – again, the sheer, clenching fear as we watch it play out on the news networks for endless days after the incident.

  The twisted parts of my mind always wondered what it would be like to live through something like that. To experience a real lockdown in the school because of a dangerous person. The human mind relishes torment. That’s why we all watch horror movies with jump scares and gore, tickling parts of our brain designed to warn us of a snake in the brush or an enemy hiding in the woods.

  Maybe movies were easier because we know they aren’t real. We can turn off the television or shut off our phones or walk, knees clacking together, out of the theater and know that our lives will never be the nightmares that the actors pretend to go through.

  Living through the lockdown, though?

  It wasn’t anything like I thought it would be.

  No one tells you how cold the room gets, or how chills rack your spine as you try to reassure yourself that the school isn’t an unsafe place and that yes, you’ll be able to come back. Tomorrow, even, in our case.

  They don’t mention how time slows down as you wonder about yourself and your own safety and they definitely don’t say anything about the guilt that follows after you realize you're fine.

  He didn’t have a gun, but the fear, the uncertainty, held a power over us, nonetheless, lingering long after he was gone. It was as though he'd tripped some primal trigger within us, primed to be hit at any moment.

  Girls held onto one another in the parking lot after we'd been evacuated, makeup smeared under their eyes from glittering tears. The guys stood together in solidarity, eyes distant and faces blank.

  I’d faced worse than this. Much worse.

  Even still…the atmosphere that surrounded me was almost funereal. You couldn't get this many members of the student body together and expect this much of a quiet pall to fall over them. Assemblies were loud and raucous.

  This was dead...as if somebody had actually died.

  At least no one had. That would’ve been enough to ruin everyone’s month.

  News spread fast in these kinds of situations. Even though we’d been told to not contact anyone on the outside of the school until everything had been sorted out, parents still showed up, waiting behind the police line, their faces stricken, as though expecting casualties to be announced in spite of the all clear having been given.

  I watched it all through the window of our classroom, wondering how everyone else was feeling. Since our room was the one that had been impacted, they took extra time to question each of us. We told them that Derrick’s dad was long gone; he’d taken off before they even showed up. Derrick's face was as pale as a vampire’s as they led him from the room for questioning. I couldn’t imagine how he must’ve been feeling.

  Poor kid.

  When they finally let us out, I walked past a group of girls just outside the front doors who were two years younger than me, all of them on their cell phones.

  “Oh my gosh, you guys, I am literally shaking,” said one girl with more makeup on than I had ever worn in my life.

  “I’ve never been more scared,” her friend said, clutching her face in her hands.

  “This is the most traumatic thing to ever happen in my life,” the third said. “I need to see my therapist, like, immediately.”

  Before moving to Florida, I probably would’ve been traumatized like them, if they actually were going to take it as more than a chance to get attention on social media. They were certainly all well set to get their fifteen minutes of fame today.

  My legs and back ached, the adrenaline leaving a painful reminder in every nerve that I had been in life or death, fight or flight stress. Again. My head throbbed and I knew that I desperately needed quiet. Which was unlikely to happen with the entire student body clumped in great globs on the front lawn, hemmed in like cattle by yellow police tape.

  “Hey, Cassie!” It was Xandra, waving at me from one of the picnic tables alongside the school.

  I wandered over, grabbing a crisis blanket from an unattended ambulance as I passed. I offered it to her as I approached.

  “Girl, I’m fine, do you not feel how hot it is? You could fry an egg on the sidewalk,” she said, waving a hand dismissively. “I saw those freshmen gawking at you.”

  I rolled my eyes and looked back at the social media trio I'd passed on the way out. They hurriedly went back to their phones from admiring me. “What's that all about?”

  “You look cooler than most right now.” Xandra winked at me. “Not your first rodeo, right?”

  “So, are your parents here?” I asked her, changing the subject as quickly as I could. “I assume after everything they’ve dealt with lately…” I trailed off, giving her a pointed look.

  She shook her head. “Nah. I texted them and told them what happened. But this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Lots of parents try to come and pick up their kids without legal permission.” She looked at me with a steady gaze. “That’s what happened, right? At least that’s the rumor going around.”

  “Yeah, it is,” I said. “Dad gone mad. He was trying to pick up a kid in my class.”

  “The rumor mill got it right this time,” she said, nodding. She was playing with the black choker necklace she was wearing. “Who'd-a thunk it? How about you? Is your mom in complete freak out mode?”

  “I texted them too,” I said. “I said, I’m okay, don’t panic.” I shrugged. “I’ve ignored the twenty-seven follow-up texts. They would know if anything was wrong. But Mom's gonna mom.”

  Xandra gave me an understanding nod. “Yep. That’s true.”

  There was a group of police officers off to the side, crowding around in a circle. I could just make out Derrick's blond hair through the wall of navy uniforms.

  “He’s such a normal kid,” Xandra said, following my gaze. “Like, good grades, never goes to parties. Sweet sort of guy. I guess there’s weirdos in every family.”

  “Does that make me the weirdo in mine?” I asked.

  “Probably. You don't really have any competition and your boyfriend drinks blood, so...”

  “Very good points in my favor.” I nodded along, then fell into a pensive state listening to a single siren whooping in the distance, some cop who hadn't shut off the noise on his car when he parked. I’d seen a side
of Derrick that maybe nobody ever had before.

  He had been terrified of his dad. Not angry, not excited.

  Terrified.

  That raised a lot of questions in my mind. Was Derrick so quiet because he was dealing with abuse at home? Did he put on a good face here because he was hiding what was going on in his life outside of school?

  The police circle around him started to break, officers wandering off in ones and twos. Two of them hung back about ten feet from him as the others headed off, on guard duty, apparently. They looked serious, talking in low voices just outside his earshot.

  Derrick just stood there, all by himself, looking lost like a wallflower on prom night.

  “Did you open this yet?” I asked Xandra, eyeing a water bottle on the table.

  “No, they brought ‘em around when they offered us blankets,” Xandra said. “This being Florida, I get the water bottles. Still wondering about the blankets. At ninety-two degrees, it just defies logic.”

  I scooped the bottle off the table and started back across the parking lot.

  “Don’t forget to text Mill,” she shouted after me, teasing me. “You know how he worries.”

  She really liked to have the last jab, didn’t she?

  Derrick was standing underneath a live oak tree, with sprawling branches overhead that I would have loved to have climbed if I were a kid. He had a crisis blanket in his arms and was staring at his feet. He was about a head taller than me, but by his posture and the slump of his shoulders, you would have thought he was two feet tall. He didn’t see me coming.

  “Hey,” I said in a quiet, easy tone, trying not to spook him.

  He looked up and to my surprise, he gave me a small smile. I guess there wasn’t going to be much that would scare him after what we had just gone through. “Hey,” he said.

  I held out the water bottle to him. “Here.”

  “Thanks,” he said, taking it. This close, I saw that his eyes were the same color as the sky in winter, a cool, pale blue that was haloed in green. He glanced over my shoulder as he unscrewed the cap and I followed his gaze. The teachers and principal were speaking with the police officers who’d just been surrounding Derrick.

  “They’re trying to decide what to do with me,” he said, his expression not changing.

  I looked back at him. “What do you mean?”

  His eyes fell. “Well, it’s my fault that this happened in the first place, you know? If it wasn’t for my dad —”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s not like you told your dad to storm the school.”

  Derrick didn’t reply; the guilt was still clear on his face. He just exhaled heavily through his nose, then took a long sip from the water bottle.

  “I’ll take your silence as a yes,” I said.

  He just read the label of the water bottle; Pure spring water bottled at the source.

  “Your mom’s not here yet, I guess?” I asked, looking around.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “I see,” I said.

  An even more awkward silence fell over us and some birds sang to one another in the tree over our head.

  “Well, I won’t bother you for long,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure that you were okay.” I turned to head back toward Xandra, when Derrick spoke up again.

  “I’m sorry. It’s Cassie, right?”

  I stopped and glanced at him over my shoulder. “Yeah.”

  He stared down at his brand new blue Nike sneakers. “I’m sorry if my dad freaked you out.”

  I tilted my head to the side, surveying him. This kid really had a guilt complex, didn’t he?

  “Why would you be sorry about that?” I asked. “I already told you, it’s not —”

  “I know, it’s not my fault. But I could have handled myself better. I…just kind of freaked out.”

  I shook my head. “It was your dad. We don’t expect our parents to be anything other than perfect, do we?”

  He looked down at me with wide eyes. “Uhm...”

  “I learned the hard way that my parents are just people. Normal people with normal fears and mostly normal wants, except for my dad's weird thing with collecting old, unopened baseball cards. He gets them, then opens, then chews the gum, even though it's hard as a piece of wood. I really don't know what's going on with that. It's gotta taste like old cardboard-”

  “Parents aren't perfect, no,” Derrick said, oh-so-politely, knocking me back on track.

  “Right,” I said. “They just happen to be older and are in charge of taking care of us. It’s hard being an adult. With bills and...stuff.” Whatever adults did. Watched cable instead of Netflix and Hulu, I assume. Suffered through commercials trying to sell them old-age creams and insurance.

  “Yeah, I hear that,” he said, his eyebrows disappearing underneath his hair as he nodded. “I’ve learned a lot these last couple years just how childish my parents are. How petty they can be.”

  I could almost feel a life story coming on. I might as well have had counselor tattooed on my forehead.

  “My mom is divorcing my dad,” Derrick said, eyes back on his shoelaces. “It’s been really messy for weeks now. Months really.”

  Ouch, divorce. Thankfully, that wasn’t something that I had to deal with in my own family, but I'd had friends that went through it. Still, I had no idea what to tell Derrick. What do you say to someone whose whole world felt like it was falling apart?

  It struck me that I did sort of know what that was like. Not divorce, but threat of death and my parents being kidnapped all sort of drew out similar sorts of feelings, didn’t it? Paralyzing fear, inability to think of anything else, desperate attempts to fix everything…

  “In my own way, I get what you’re feeling right now,” I said. “I’ve been through some pretty rough stuff in my own life.”

  “Divorce?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No. Not divorce.”

  “I know this is going to sound stupid, but...I don't think you know it unless you've been through it.” He hung his head. “He’s my dad, but since this started he’s…he’s just gone wild. He’s out of control. Mom and I don’t really know what’s going on with him.”

  “When did all this start?”

  “I don't know.” A shrug ran heavy all along Derrick's shoulders, making him seem like a scarecrow torn loose by strong wind. “He’s always been kind of a weird guy, but lately, it’s been worse. Like, as the years went on, his temper got worse. He takes his anger out on Mom. He and I got into a fight about something once, like a physical fight. And the next day, it was like he didn’t remember it. Or maybe didn't want to. He’s moody on and off and I can’t ever tell if he is going to be my dad like he used to or...I dunno. Mr. Hyde, maybe.”

  Jekyll/Hyde? That sounded like a psychological break, honestly. “What does your dad do?” I asked.

  “He’s kind of a freelancer,” Derrick said with a shrug. “He does odd jobs. Plumbing, electrical, landscaping. He is never happy anywhere for very long. Changes employers a lot.” He sighed heavily. “I don’t get it. He takes his frustrations out on us because we’re all he has. But…I’ve never seen him do anything like he did today.”

  “What do his outbursts look like?” I asked. I wasn’t really sure why I was asking, other than maybe my gentle probing was helping him talk about it and earning me that forehead Counselor tattoo.

  Yeah, right. It’s actually because I was a magnet for the bizarre and unnatural.

  “He disappears for days at a time,” Derrick said. “Mom thinks he goes to drink himself into oblivion. He comes home, stumbling in, bloody, looking like he was in some sort of fight.”

  Gone for days at a time, looking worse for wear when coming home. Angry, aggressive. Snarling at the door like some sort of…animal.

  The sirens in my mind went off full blast.

  Mood changes, shoddy memory, coming home looking like he’d been in a fight.

  Then today, charging into th
e school and stalking his son like he was prey. Derrick even used the word wild when describing him.

  “Sorry, I don’t really know why I told you all that,” Derrick said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I guess I haven’t really told anyone.”

  “It’s cool,” I said. “I get it. Everyone is only pretending their life is perfect. Beneath the surface, every smoothly swimming swan is paddling like mad.”

  “Hah.” He gave me a grateful ghost of a smile. “Thanks. I’m glad you aren’t upset with me. Though I probably looked like a coward, huddled in that corner of the room. I should’ve faced him.”

  “What good would it have done?” I asked. “You aren’t a coward. It was smart.”

  “I don't know about that.” He lifted the empty water bottle. “Thanks.”

  “Yeah, no problem,” I said and then turned to walk away.

  But before I got very far, I hesitated.

  Stay out of it, a little voice chimed in, talking in the back of my head. Don't ask, don’t ask –

  “Hey, Derrick?” I asked, turning back around.

  “Yeah?”

  “Your dad…he wasn’t...” I felt a real squeeze in my guts, pressure from trying to get this out, but out it popped anyway, “...by any chance…Amish, in the past?”

  He blinked, giving me a funny look. “Yeah, he was. He left his community when he turned eighteen. How – how did you know that?”

  Crap.

  “Oh, just a guess,” I said, forcing a smile. “I…know some Amish. Sort of.”

  Derrick gave me a curious look. “No one has ever guessed that before. Wow.”

  “Well, I’ll see you later,” I said, not wanting to answer any more questions. “Take care of yourself, all right?”

  “All…right,” he said. “Bye?”

  A lump formed in my throat. I heard Xandra calling to me, but I ignored her. So not in the mood for telling her now.

  Of course. I really was a magnet for the weird. That was just the way that my luck ran lately. I should play the lottery – if there was a paranormal Russian roulette lottery that didn't result in the prize of a silver bullet in the skull. Mostly because I'd need that silver bullet, it was sounding like.