Vince placed the note in a copper bowl and I turned my attention to my mother’s tatty old spell tome, conveniently located on a shelf under the table. The location spell looked very easy; I put a dab of potion in the brazier, then added a smidge of liquid from another bottle, and lit the whole mess on fire. Vince opened the window an inch.
As the fire hit the chemicals, the bowl erupted into a geyser of toxic smoke. It smelled like the pits of hell, or really stinky socks. We ran out of the room, tears streaming from our eyes, coughing. I could imagine Mom downstairs, opening the parlor window, approving of how much knowledge we were gaining as we proceeded to blow up the house. She thought we were using my chemistry set, but still.
“Sorry, Vince,” I choked out after a century of coughing. “I don’t think it worked.”
“It’s cool,” said Vince. “There’s always plan B.”
“Which is?”
Vince had the wherewithal to grab his backpack as we ran out of the room, another sign of a good hunter. He handed me a newsprint magazine.
“Cool!” I said. I was holding the most recent Little Shop of Horrors, exclusively available through the mail from a horror fan in Iowa. “But I don’t see—”
“Look at the mailing label.”
“Edward Shoemaker?”
“According to the yearbook, that’s Ned’s name.”
“Where’d you get this?”
“At the rink.”
“He’s got good taste in magazines.” Realization dawned. “Why didn’t you stop me?”
“You really wanted to cast that spell. I wasn’t going to stop you.”
I slugged him on the shoulder. He slugged me back.
“So, Ned was at the rink? That’s too close to home. We’ve got to take him out.”
CHAPTER TWO
By Ned, Betrayed
Vince and I decided to skip school to take care of our Ned problem. I never skip school, but this was a calculated career move. I was going to show my parents Vince and I could be monster hunters and uphold the family name and all that. Provided we could locate Ned’s coffin before he woke up.
After some research, because no one takes the bus, I found out it was easy to get downtown from Burbank. The bus ran less frequently as the day wore on, so Vince and I would have to make sure we had Ned staked and processed before we lost the half hour bus schedule. That meant Ned had to be dead instead of undead by six. We planned to be home much earlier than six, so the ‘rents wouldn’t know what was up. With forty-five minutes travel time, we’d finish and leave on the two-thirty. Easy peasy. Unless, of course, we were late because Ned had killed us. That would be really embarrassing.
Later, we would announce at our leisure that we’d killed Ned, maybe a big reveal at dinner. I wanted to bring back Ned’s head for this. Vince and I tossed that idea back and forth, but he talked me out of it. “This guy is a friend of my mom and dad’s,” Vince said. “That would be uncool.”
I touched Vince’s arm. “Vince,” I said, “Face facts. The Ned your parents knew is gone. All that remains is the shell of the geek, inhabited by unspeakable evil.”
“No head, Abby.”
Vince brought me around in the end. After all, how were we going to carry a severed head on the bus? Ichor would get everywhere and can be mistaken for blood. A lot of people don’t believe in vampires, or understand they need to be protected from the supernatural. Besides, there was no guarantee we’d have a head left. It could potentially explode or turn to dust. I’d seen it happen. In movies.
The place where Ned lived was run down, but not as nasty as I had imagined it. A sign on the front door told residents that the building was locked from 11:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m.. Maybe to keep the victims inside.
A desk clerk watched a little television on a dusty shelf to the right of the reception desk. He squinted at us like we were from Mars, especially me in my school uniform.
“Hi,” said Vince, “we’re looking for Ned?”
“Ned?” the desk clerk echoed. His eyebrow hairs waved a bit like cat whiskers or insect antennae.
“Yeah. Ned Shoemaker?”
“Skinny little guy?” Vince said. “Fifteen? Sixteen?”
“Ned,” the man said in that tone that adults use to show us kids we’re idiots.
“Yes,” I said, backing up Vince. “Ned.”
“I know Ned,” said the clerk. “What do you kids want with him?”
“He’s a friend of my dad’s,” said Vince.
“Well, I guess you’re going to have a long wait for Ned. Ned doesn’t usually come home until ten or so. I could take a message, tell him you came by?”
“Naw,” said Vince. “We’ll drop by later.”
I couldn’t think of what else to do either. I glanced at my watch. “He’s not back until ten?”
“Yeah.” Vince’s mouth narrowed. “We could go home. They’d never know we’d skipped school.”
“I say we wait.” If I was going to get in trouble, I was going down in a grandiose way. I wanted my first monster.
I could see the moral struggle cross Vince’s forehead. Be the good son or stand firm in the boundary between the natural and the supernatural. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. We wait.”
Vince was quiet as we walked to a nearby cafe. I consulted the bus schedule. We could still catch a bus home after ten if we caught it at Temple and Grand.
Ten o’clock inched closer. The waitress threw us glances every fifteen minutes after eight o’clock. We ordered a lot of Coke and we ate two giant slices of peach pie. No doubt my mom and dad were having kittens about where we were. They had good reason to be worried. Their daughter was out hunting monsters on a school night. I’m sure Vince’s parents weren’t thrilled either. There would be panicked phone calls to each other’s houses and the discovery that we’d both lied. Perhaps it would be better if Ned killed us. Then again, we were proving to our parents we were hardcore. That’s why Vince had turned his phone off.
“Honey,” the waitress said as she served us more pie and a fresh fork, “shouldn’t you be going home?” Everyone knew that downtown Los Angeles wasn’t a place where two kids should be at night.
“It’s all right,” said Vince, “our parents are going to pick us up here.”
She walked away. I nodded my appreciation at Vince. An Olympic lying score of nine.
Vince slurped out the dregs of his root beer float. I played with the last fry on my plate. The longer the food lasted, the longer we could put off our inevitable encounter with Ned. The grumble of Vince’s straw as it hit dead bottom made me start. His plate was a graveyard for crumbs and scooped out pie crust.
“More fries?” I offered. I held up the last one as an offering.
“No. Should we go?”
I lowered my eyes, examining the metallic flecks in the tabletop Formica. “I don’t want to.” Just like that. Cat out of the bag. I couldn’t believe those words had come out of me.
“No way,” said Vince.
“I—well—” I readied myself for Vince’s ridicule. I would have teased him if he’d said that to me. Laughing loud and long, I would have called him a chicken. Vince didn’t laugh. He took money out of his wallet and started counting out the bill.
“Do you want me to take you home?” he asked.
“Are you trying to outbrave me, Vince?”
“It’s okay to be scared, Abby.”
“I’m not scared! I’m just nervous! Like stage fright!”
Vince sighed. “If you say so. Do we have some sort of plan?”
“We hide in his room and stake him just before he leaves at dawn.”
“You don’t think he’d notice us?”
“Not if we hide really well.”
“Abby, I bet his room is tiny.”
“We’ll hide in the bathroom.”
“Abby!”
“What’s he going to use the bathroom for? We’ll just stay in there until morning and pow! stake through the heart. Cool, right?”
“He may bring his victim back to his room. His victim might need the bathroom.”
There I had Vince. “It’s my theory Ned does not kill in his room. How would he explain the blood to his neighbors? My dad says blood gets into everything.”
“Okay,” said Vince. “We hide in his bathroom and stake him. That’s a plan. Or we wait by the clerk’s desk, and the clerk calls Ned to see us.”
How could anyone be so naïve? “The clerk is probably his Renfield servant.”
“Renfield?” asked Vince.
“That guy Dracula enslaves to make him help him. The clerk is probably Ned’s Renfield. He’ll help Ned and Ned’ll fang us for sure! My plan makes more sense. It’s the classic movie ambush plan.”
“It won’t work.”
“Shaking hands with the vampire won’t keep us alive!”
“All right,” Vince said, “we’ll see whose plan we use.”
Rock, paper, scissors was the way we’d used ever since we were small to settle disputes of a weighty nature. To my shame, Vince won. His paper completely covered my rock.
“Fine. We’ll do it your way. If I become a vampire, it’ll be your fault. My parents will never live that down.”
The bell jingled as the cafe door opened. Ned walked into the restaurant. I pointed over Vince’s shoulder, and Vince’s face slackened with surprise. The vampire was bringing the action to us.
Ned looked like a copy of one of his pictures in the yearbook. His jeans were worn, his t-shirt frayed at the neck, and he had duct tape on one of his sneakers. Hands shoved in his pocket, he swallowed, and then walked over to us like he was on his way to the gallows.
My fingers dug into my backpack and felt the reassuring angles of my crucifix. Would Ned attack us in a public place?
“Vince,” said Ned. No formal introduction seemed needed.
“Hi—um—Ned,” said Vince. “This is my friend Abby.”
“Hey, Abby.”
You know what makes movies better than real life? A script. When I had imagined this, my dialogue for Ned was better. All our dialogue would have been snappier.
“So,” said Ned. He stood by the table. The waitress glanced in our direction. “I hear you were looking for me.”
“Yeah,” said Vince. “We were.”
“But you started it,” I interrupted. “You’ve been following Vince. That’s stalking.” I rummaged around in my backpack. “Knock it off. Oh, and we found this at the roller rink.”
Ned grabbed the magazine. “Awesome!” he said, forgetting to menace or be sullen, or whatever he was trying to do. “I wondered where I’d left that.”
“Don’t lose it again. Getting the back issues is murder.”
Ned rolled the magazine into a tube and stuffed it into his back pocket. I winced. Handling a collector’s item like that!
After smoothly opening a path to conversation with the magazine, I thought we could get down to it. “What’s up with following Vince? Because we’ve found some notes you wrote to Mr. Cooper, and you know, it’s looking like—”
Ned squirmed.
Vince cut in. “Why are you following my parents? Why are you still so young? Are you a vampire?” Vince fingers drummed on the table, the little clicks emphasizing each question.
I frowned at Vince. “I was getting there.”
“Look,” said Ned. “I made a mistake. Sorry. Just forget you ever saw me, and I won’t bother you or your parents again.”
That was unexpected. “You bet you made a mistake,” I said. “You should have left Vince alone. We can’t let you go now that we know you’re a vampire. We’re responsible for what you do now.”
“Did I say I was a vampire?”
“Figuring that out is not rocket science, Ned. We’ve got all these notes from you menacing Vince’s dad, and now you’re stalking Vince.” I tightened my grip on my bag.
Ned rubbed his chin. “So, Vince, can I get you and Abby something to eat?” There was a moment of silence as Ned surveyed the wreckage on the table. Ned changed tactics. “You guys should go home,” said Ned. “You’re in a lot of trouble with your parents, right? I know my parents would have flipped.”
“We’re not going home until we settle this,” I said, “one way or the other.”
Ned shut me out and looked right at Vince. “I don’t think your friend likes me.”
“It’s nothing personal,” said Vince. “That’s just her way. She thinks she knows everything about...everything.”
How come that line made it into my fantasy version of this conversation, and my real version of this conversation? Of course I came off better in the fantasy version. Real life didn’t seem fair. “What do you want with Vince?”
“Like I said,” said Ned, “I made a mistake. Forget you ever saw me.”
“That,” I said, “would be irresponsible of anyone in the profession.”
Vince sighed. “You know, Abby, maybe Ned’s right. Maybe we should forget about this? He seems sorry.”
“What are you talking about? Do you want to be out in the parking lot of Big Mel’s some night, get fanged, and ta-da! You’re undead?”
“Geez!” said Ned. “Like I would do that!”
I snorted. “You aren’t a very good vampire, are you? What, you’ve been a vampire for maybe twenty years, and you just said ‘geez.’ Isn’t there a vampire school you guys go to? To learn to wave your cape dramatically, stuff like that?”
Now Vince ignored me. That was getting old. “Ned, how did you become a vampire?”
Ned smoothed down his hair, but it sprang again to attention. “Your dad and I grew up in the same neighborhood. A vampire moved in across the street.”
Ouch. A vampire in the suburbs. Not usual, but I had heard of three cases.
“We were stupid. We thought we could break into his house and take care of him.” Ned was talking to Vince, but he was looking at me when he said it, sober. “We were dumb kids, biting off more than we could chew.” Ned flashed his fangs again. “That’s a little vampire joke, right?”
Vince hesitated. “Um...yeah.”
“Your dad learned from our mistake, so he went and recruited a monster hunter, Reginald Rath. Rath tried to kill me, put me out of my misery. He staked me in the wrong spot, and I’m still here.”
As if. “My dad would never miss.”
“Your dad?”
“My dad. Reginald Rath, vampire slayer.”
“That explains a whole lot of this conversation,” said Ned.
I bristled.
Vince spoke before I could get any words out. “Why did you want to see me?”
“I didn’t want to see you!” Ned lowered his voice when a bunch of diners swiveled toward us. “I mean, I wanted to see you, Vince, to know what you looked like, to see Charlie and Nicole, but you know, I didn’t want to make any trouble. I get lonely sometimes. It’s been twenty years and I still look exactly the same.”
If he hadn’t slandered my dad, I might have felt some sympathy for Ned. However, vampires were good at manipulating emotions. Maybe Ned knew more about how to use his abilities than I thought.
“Have you ever thought about living forever?”
I stood up, my backpack tumbling to the floor. “He has not! You can’t recruit Vince! He doesn’t have the time of day for your kind!”
“I’m talking to Vince, not you!” The snarl in Ned’s voice was the cranky wolfish growl vampires are known for when they are hacked off.
The waitress headed in our direction. “Everything okay here?”
“Yeah,” Vince said. “Just a little disagreement. We’re okay.”
“You kids go home,” said the waitress, annoyed. “You’ve been here long enough.”
Ned did something very eerie. “We’re not leaving,” he said in his growly voice. “Abby and Vince need refills.”
She walked back to the counter intent on our order.
“That wasn’t cool,” I said.
“Cut me a little sl
ack, Abby,” said Ned. “You’ll never see me again. And my question to Vince wasn’t an offer. I wanted you to think about it, what it’s like.”
“The problem,” Vince said, “is that Abby and I are monster hunters, and you’ve brought yourself to our attention.”
Ned paused. “You too? That’s too bad. You can’t build a career around what the woman you love does, Vince. You’ve got to follow your own interests and make your own destiny.”
“What?” said Vince, blushing. “No! It’s not like that.”
“Abby, you want to kill me?” Ned coiled like a spring.
I nodded. “It’s nothing personal. We’re sure that once you’re staked, you’ll appreciate us saving your soul from eternal torment.”
Vince’s voice was stiff. “I hope to heaven I could figure out who needed killing and who didn’t.”
I lowered my voice. “Vince, we agreed…”
“We didn’t agree to anything. You’re the one who’s been talking about heads and coffins. I wanted you along in case things went bad, but Ned, he seems harmless enough.”
Vince was a nut. I’d have to have Dad talk to him, explain what undeath was like. Not everyone was Mr. Christopher. “You are crazy! Let me show you.” I pulled my crucifix out of my backpack. You couldn’t beat a classic tool.
“Put that down!” yelled Ned. He sprang away from the table.
“You see?” I said to Vince. “Unholy.”
Ned snarled and ran into the night. Several of the diners started for our table. Vince threw a twenty down on the tabletop and followed, all before I had time to blink.
Shoot! What was Vince thinking, heading out after a vicious vampire? I slung on my backpack and caught up with Vince. His eyes searched up and down the street. Lots of neon and street people, but no Ned.
“Do you think he’ll attack us on the way home?” I asked.
Vince rounded on me. “Abby, for a smart girl, you don’t get it, do you?”
“What?”
“Ned is a lonely guy, but he’s also a nice guy.”
“That’s what you think!” I said. “You’re playing with fire.”
Abigail Rath Versus Bloodsucking Fiends Page 2