Team Human

by Justine Larbalestier

  Cathy’s mom was calling me. She had never called me before. Not even once.

  I sat bolt upright.

  “May I talk to Cathy, please? She’s not answering her cell phone.”

  “Wh—” I began, and then cut off the “What are you talking about, Cathy’s not here” before it was born.

  Think, Mel, think.

  Fact: If Cathy’s mother thought Cathy was here, then Cathy must have told her she was here. Fact: Cathy hated lying, so Cathy must think she was doing something really important.

  Fact: All Cathy thought was really important right now was an undead love weasel.

  “Wh-wh-whhhy no,” I said. “Cathy can’t come to the phone right now. Because! Because she’s in the bathroom. That’s where she is. And I can’t go in there and give her the phone. Cathy and I are close, but we’re not that close. Besides, you know Cathy! She’s so shy. About peeing. And just generally.”

  There was a long pause.

  “I wondered if she was feeling better,” Ms. Beauvier said.

  “She’s having a great time!” I told her. “Well, not right now. Right now she’s in the bathroom.”

  “Mel,” Ms. Beauvier asked, “you girls haven’t been drinking, have you?”

  “Just high on life!” I said. “And chocolate ice cream. You know, the classic breakup dessert. Which, speaking of, it’s melting, so I gotta go. I’ll tell Cathy to charge her phone and that you called!”

  I hung up.

  Cathy’s voice echoed in my head, the way it had been that afternoon, quiet and sad and with a hint of speculation that I hadn’t caught.

  I’m sure he left for a good reason. I just wish—I wish he could have told me what it was.

  That was how much good all this “for her own good” stuff had done. Now Cathy was off to get the answers Francis and I had kept from her.

  She’d gone after Francis.

  She’d gone into the Shade.

  No matter how much I blamed myself for not telling Cathy the whole truth, there was one thing I was congratulating myself on right now. I was so glad I’d read Francis’s file.

  His address had been on it.

  Presuming that Francis had told Cathy where he lived, and she hadn’t—oh please no, but surely, surely Cathy could never be that dumb—gone off to comb the whole Shade for Francis, which would be like looking for one particularly snotty piece of hay in a haystack, I knew where she was going.

  Who says crime doesn’t pay?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Cathy in the Shade

  I’d been in the Shade before. You know how it is: Relatives come from out of town, you do the tourist thing, hop on a bus with them, and endure the withering contempt of the vampire tour guide who hates tourists for invading her neighborhood and gawking at her and her home and hates herself for making a living as a tour guide. Though your relatives don’t realize it’s contempt. They think the tour guide is scary, and that they’re being superdaring being on a bus with a vampire who could EAT THEM ALL! They shudder with delight and point at all the scary vampire houses and ooh and aah over the lack of lighting in the Shade and at how fast the locals move.

  And every single time some tourist on the bus will shout, “Oh my, did you see that bat!” At which point the bored tour guide will inform the tourists—as they have informed every busload of tourists that has ever gone into the Shade—that there is no relationship between vampires and bats or any other animal for that matter. Which is when the astute tourists will peer out the window again and notice that there aren’t any animals. Animals don’t like vampires, and the feeling is mutual. But the tourists will assume that there are no animals because the vampires ate them all. They will shudder again. Your tourist uncle will glance at you and notice you’re not shuddering, so you pretend to be scared as well. It’s sad. And when you’ve done it more than once, it’s also deadly dull.

  Being in the Shade alone was different. It’s one thing when one or two of the vampires are mingling with humans but another thing entirely when there’s one of you and many of them. Everything about the Shade says No Humans Wanted (Except as a Snack).

  There are no apartment blocks or office blocks or malls. No buildings that had to be slapped up in a hurry because the neighborhood needed a day-care center or a supermarket. Vampires are never in a hurry, they don’t eat food or have children, and they have strong views on aesthetics.

  Plus they mostly like really old stuff. The couple of times someone has gotten planning permission in the Shade, the vampires have either bribed, terrorized, or once, according to rumor, killed the offending person.

  Mind you, that developer had wanted to build a McDonald’s for the tourists.

  I rode in on my bicycle, figuring that if a vampire did go rogue and attack, the bike gave me a slightly better chance of escape. I was grateful the moon was almost full. Even so, my eyes had to adjust to the lack of lighting.

  The Georgian, Gothic revival, and art deco buildings, and others whose styles I couldn’t identify (neofederalist-Transylvanian–Gone with the Wind–Greek-Explosionist?), loomed like monsters’ castles against a backdrop of darkness. At every huge, black window I thought I saw someone watching.

  There were no tricycles in any of the driveways, no dogs barking, no raccoons getting into the trash or cats fighting. There were no children. No laughter or crying or yelling emanating from the houses. All I heard was the occasional noise from a television and, of course, the street traffic. Vampires like to promenade.

  The Shade was a dark other world, with pale-faced creatures walking a little faster and more fluidly than they would have outside the Shade. I felt like every single one of them looked me over and calculated their odds of draining me without getting caught. Every time a vampire police patrol (always in pairs like human cops) strode by in their distinctive shiny uniforms—much cooler than human cop uniforms—I had a strong urge to hug them.

  The Shade was colder and darker and smelled different than human neighborhoods. It made my skin crawl. Thinking about Cathy out here in the dark somewhere, equally alone, made me pedal faster.

  If something happened to her, I was never going to forgive myself.

  And I really was going to beat Francis’s head in with a deck chair.

  It was almost anticlimactic when I turned the corner on Francis’s street and saw Cathy standing uncertainly in front of his house.

  Her long hair was blowing in the breeze, her face tilted up to gaze at the windows, not with suspicion like me, but with longing. The house was a pointy-turreted affair with columns on the porch. Together, Cathy and the house looked like the cover of a romance novel.

  Until I barreled forward, dropped my bike, grabbed Cathy, and shook her by the shoulders.

  “Are you totally crazy?”

  Cathy gave a startled yip. “Mel! What are you doing here?”

  “I— What are you doing here?” I demanded. “As if I didn’t know. What I’m doing here is bringing you back home. Your mom called. She was looking for you, so I said you were at my place. By the way, you’re welcome. Let’s go back to my place.”

  Cathy shook her head.

  “Come on, Cathy. You don’t even know if he’s here. That’s a vampire house. You’re not going to knock on the door and ask a stranger—a strange vampire—if Francis can come out and play, are you?”

  It was wrong to use Cathy’s shyness against her. I knew that. As soon as I had Cathy home safe, I was planning on feeling very guilty indeed.

  “No,” Cathy said, looking even paler.

  I felt a small glow of triumph, which disappeared instantly when Cathy said, “I’ll go around the back,” and headed determinedly around the building.

  I charged after her. Right through some vampire’s carefully tended bed of petunias, but I’d worry about undead gardeners coming after me later.

  To my horror, I found Cathy prying up what seemed to be a trap door. She was trying to break into the vampires’ house.

  �
�Cathy,” I said, in a very quiet, calm voice, “what do you think you’re doing?”

  “I know which room is Francis’s,” Cathy announced. “He described it in his journal. All I need to do is get in and make my way up to him.”

  I wondered if I had seemed this insane to Anna when we were breaking into the school. If so, then it was no wonder she’d been alarmed.

  I was still trying to articulate my many, many objections to Cathy’s plan when she gave a final heave to the trapdoor and disappeared inside.

  “Cathy!” I called, scrambling after her, falling a little way until my shoes hit packed earth, and I stood around blinking in the moonlight that streamed in, revealing crates and barrels of …

  “A vampire wine cellar? I thought they didn’t drink … wine.”

  Cathy smiled at me faintly, so I knew that the real Cathy was still there somewhere under the piles and piles of crazy that love for Francis had spontaneously generated.

  As far as I could tell from the limited light, the vampires’ cellar was on the small side. I could make out a big wooden staircase leading up to the rest of the house. Below it, the moonlight illuminated a spiderweb. When the spiderweb trembled, so did I.

  “Cathy,” I said, “we have to get out of here. We’re going to get caught. This is not safe.”

  Cathy hesitated.

  “Cathy, please,” I begged. “This is all my fault, I’ll explain everything, but we have to get out of here. Now!”

  The silver strands of the web shivered once more.

  That was all the warning we got.

  A blur moving with lethal intent came down those tall wooden stairs and over the railing. It coalesced into a woman, black hair flying, leaping right at us with her fangs bared.

  I seized Cathy and pulled her behind me, my fists clenched. Not that I had a chance against that speed and those teeth.

  “Mom!” someone shouted. “Mom, chill!”

  The vampire stopped like a bird hitting a window. Her lip stayed curled. Her fangs glittered at me.

  “What are you doing in my home?” she whispered, and the harmonics of her voice made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

  Behind me, I felt Cathy shiver.

  “Cathy, don’t you dare move,” I said in a low voice.

  “Cathy?” the vampire asked, with less threat of grisly death and more surprise in her voice.

  She had a faint French accent, and I finally noticed what she was wearing. (Fear for my life makes my fashion sense fly right out of my head.) Collar open at her throat, badge glinting—she was wearing the dark uniform of the vampire division of the police force.

  We had broken into a vampire cop’s house. We were so smart.

  “Cathy?” echoed a guy around my age, who was standing on the stairs peering down at us. A perfectly ordinary guy, with a mop of curly hair and a rock band T-shirt on. He moved down the stairs at an ordinary human pace. “Cathy of the sonnets? Cathy of the love ballad?”

  A visible shudder went through the vampire cop. As if that old story about vampires fearing crosses was true, and she was shying away from one.

  “Please do not speak of the love ballad,” she begged.

  The guy sat down on the bottom step and propped his chin up on one fist. “Cathy,” he said. “Great.”

  Since the human guy and the vampire cop had linked up something as incredibly dumb as love ballads with Cathy, I did have an idea who might have written them: Francis.

  At least we’d definitely got the right house.

  “So, yeah,” I said, knowing Cathy wouldn’t open her mouth in a million years. “This is Cathy.”

  “This is a most unorthodox method of paying us a visit,” the vampire observed, and sounded more French than ever. “You did not notice the front door? But I suppose you had better come upstairs. We have a kitchen and a wide variety of food suitable for humans,” she added with what seemed to be pride. “Kit goes grocery shopping every week. Though I could wish he bought more vegetables.”

  “Nag, nag, nag,” grumbled the guy, as if his presence in their shade was not completely weird and inexplicable. He got to his feet.

  “This way,” said the vampire.

  Her tone brooked no argument. Not to mention that we had, um, broken into her home and thus put ourselves in the wrong.

  With Cathy holding my elbow in a death grip, we followed the vampire up the wooden stairs and into the heart of Francis’s shade.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Kitchen of the Undead

  The first thing I noticed was that this vampire home had artificial lighting even though all vampires can see perfectly in the dark and, as the vampire cop had promised, a kitchen too. I had to assume both were for the benefit of the guy, who was currently sitting on the kitchen counter staring at Cathy with a great deal of curiosity.

  “Francis isn’t here,” he observed as his vampire mom—he’d really called her that, presuming we hadn’t misheard—asked us, “Tea?”

  “No, thank you,” I said as Cathy whispered the same thing to the floor.

  “I am Camille,” the vampire said. “This is my son, Kit.”

  We hadn’t misheard, and now she was agreeing with him. How was that possible? Forget the fact that they didn’t look the least bit alike. Camille was small, bird-boned, her hair a sheet of midnight black (very appropriate for a vampire). Kit was tall and lanky, his hair an explosion of brown curls.

  It made sense that vampires would still take an interest in kids they’d had before turning, but I didn’t think that was what was going on. The older vampires are, the less human they look and behave. Camille’s skin looked like white stone and she moved like water.

  “Hi, Camille. Hi, Kit,” I ventured, sitting in the chair Camille had indicated. Cathy cautiously lowered herself onto the chair next to mine, careful not to look either one in the eyes. Instead of asking the obvious: “How on earth are you his mom?” I said, “I’m Mel and this is—”

  “The famous Cathy,” Kit finished.

  Cathy blushed and lowered her gaze even further, studying her own feet. At least she’d believe me now that Francis did think she was special. That was the only positive I could think of.

  “Who makes Francis so very happy. That’s a line from the aforementioned ballad,” he explained. “In case you’ve been fortunate enough not to hear it. It’s probably the best line in the whole thing, which I think speaks volumes as to how very bad it is.”

  I giggled. Kit immediately turned to me and smiled brilliantly.

  He had a great smile, bright and a little wicked. Though it was weird to smile like that at a complete stranger trespassing in your home.

  Of course, everything about this situation was weird.

  “Francis wrote a love ballad about Cathy?”

  Cathy blushed even deeper. I wondered how it would feel to learn that the love of your life had written a ballad about you? Probably very different from learning that he was using you as a test subject for his book on humans and love.

  Kit nodded. “For the last few days he’s been singing it nonstop while accompanying himself on the lute. I offered to burn the lute during the day, but Mom won’t let me.”

  “An officer of the law cannot sanction destruction of personal property, no matter how tempting,” said Camille, who was making tea despite the fact we had refused it. “I do admit, however, that it is very tempting.”

  Cathy looked up, clearly torn between protesting the aspersions cast against Francis’s lute and her shyness in front of strangers. She looked down again.

  “I liked Francis a lot better before he was crossed in love,” Kit remarked.

  “No, you didn’t,” said Camille, leaning over Kit’s shoulder and presenting him with a brimming teacup. He grinned.

  It was creepy. Camille sounded like a mom, exasperated and fond, but she looked too young to be Kit’s mom and, well, too like a vampire to be anybody’s mom.

  When Kit grinned at her, there was no answering grin on C
amille’s face. It made my skin crawl, seeing her smooth, statuelike face next to his, and their hands touching.

  I looked away. Maybe that’s why he’d smiled like that at me. Nobody in this house full of the quiet undead would ever have laughed at one of his jokes.

  When I looked back, Camille was seated at the table, her face wearing the same nonexpression as before, but Kit was looking at me. He had one eyebrow raised, and he was scowling slightly.

  I raised both eyebrows back at him. (I can’t raise just one, however much I practice in front of the mirror.)

  Kit’s face, which was extremely expressive, possibly as some sort of compensation for living among vampires, moved from a scowl to a smirk and then back to a smile.

  “To be clear. It’s not that I don’t like Francis,” he said. “It’s that … you know how Francis has an opinion on everything? On account of how he knows everything?”

  I nodded. “I am aware of this aspect of Francis’s personality. Yes.”

  Cathy made a small sound.

  “He loves to impart his knowledge. And since he deems me to be the least wise of our shade and quite possibly of the entire world, I’m the lucky recipient of the majority of his pearls of wisdom.” Kit shuddered. “And his bons mots.”

  Kit referring to himself so casually as part of a shade was like hearing a fish saying they belonged to a flock of parrots. Yet it seemed rude to point out that he wasn’t a vampire. Like telling a crazy person that they’re not Napoleon.

  “No, darling,” Camille drawled, “it’s that the rest of us heard them long before you were born.”

  “He also likes to study me.” Kit mimed Francis holding a magnifying glass. I laughed again. The resemblance to Francis was uncanny.

  Kit looked utterly delighted, and again it made me shiver to see him respond like that, a born class clown in a house of vampires.

  “I was his human in captivity,” Kit continued, trying to get me to laugh again. “I was questioned. Measured. Examined. Probed.”

  I thought about the human subject Francis had mentioned in his file. Was this why Kit was kept here?