The Knaveheart's Curse

by Adele Griffin

  She stuck the book back in her shelf. Then she ran to her bed and buried her head under her pillow, pulling up the covers around her neck.

  Knavehearts, yeesh. That brought back some traumatizing memories. Knaves were the most vengeful of all the vampire families. In the Old World, they’d kept an iron claw over land and castles, and they’d fight any hybrid claiming even minimal vampire power. In the end, it was better to be mortal in the New World, her family had decided, than fight pureblood Knaves for all eternity in the Old.

  Now one was here, on the search for an heir. Maddy hoped the Knave would just hurry up, find that stupid Tenth, and hightail it back to the Old World, chop chop.

  Until then, they were all in danger. Hybrids, rats, humans—everyone.

  5

  TUNNEL OF TERROR

  All night, Maddy’s nightmares fed her fears, which was why she overslept.

  The next morning started badly, when she discovered the shorts and shirt she’d thought were clean-folded in her dresser hadn’t changed position from when she’d dropped them in her hamper. Ew, and they still smelled like the Candlewick Café kitchen, where she’d helped Big Bill peel onions for his famous French onion soup with soy cheese.

  In the scramble to get to the lobby of Dakota’s Midtown apartment, Maddy also forgot to brush her teeth and hair.

  “Why, Madison, you’re looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!” Nora announced merrily. “We’re happy you’ll be spending the day with us!” Dakota, wedged behind her mother, agreed with a tiny nod. “Ready for some golf?”

  Though Maddy meant to answer, “You bet!” when she opened her mouth, all that came out was a loud burp that smelled like the Granny Smith apple she’d gnawed on the way over.

  Club Lullaby, where they’d be playing, was outside Manhattan, in Queens. Dakota’s mom was driving them, and they launched the drive with a lively game of I Packed My Grandmother’s Trunk. It wasn’t until they’d got all the way to P (Maddy had just packed Grandmother a putrid, puréed prune) and had turned into the Midtown Tunnel that Maddy realized she was breaking a golden rule: vampires should never cross underneath running water. Uh-oh. When Maddy got really, really scared—as she was right now this minute—she started to dry up.

  “Water! Water!” Maddy gasped.

  “Sorry, Maddy. You’ll have to hydrate later,” said Nora. “But Club Lullaby makes a lovely limeade.”

  “Aaaaaggghhh,” Maddy wheezed. Her throat was already dusty. Her lips were cracked.

  “What’s wrong?” Dakota twisted around in the front seat. “Swallow your gum?”

  “Release me from this most foul tunnel.” Maddy twitched as Old World words confused her thoughts. She whipped out her asthma inhaler, which did no good, because this was a completely different issue.

  Calm down, she told herself.

  But she could feel her eyes starting to sink back into her skull. Oh, no—fear was sucking out her internal liquid supply. She was starting to petrify. The Argos had warned her about this. Hudson said that once he almost dried up at the dentist, when Dr. Wen found a cavity on his baby fang. He’d been so scared he’d run outside with the clip-on bib still hooked around his neck.

  It had taken a lot of coaxing to get him back. Hudson didn’t like the dentist. Too many centuries of bad memories, when dentists used wrenches, leeches, and lancets.

  But there was no way to run out of a tunnel. Maddy was trapped. And if she got too dehydrated, just one thing would save her. The only available beverage in this car. Blood. Maddy began to unbuckle her seat belt.

  “Madison, rules! Sit back and keep that seat belt fastened,” warned Nora, but now Maddy’s ears pricked as she heard Nora’s heart pumping with nerves. A whirring sound, tantalizing as a cherry Slurpee machine.

  “Hang in there, Maddy,” encouraged Dakota, “and I won’t tell kids at school you’re scared of tunnels.”

  Maddy’s eyes rolled wild. All she could focus on was Dakota’s plump neck, her pulsing, juicy vein. “Hhhhhhhhhh . . .” Maddy’s hiss startled them all. The tip of her tongue scraped her fangs. She pressed her lips together.

  “Breathe into your inhaler, sweetie,” advised Nora. “There’s a girl.” But in the rearview, her wild eye caught Maddy’s. Yet I’m powerless to stop, Maddy thought. She tried to fight the urge. Fortunately, at the same second that she lunged forward to snack on delicious Dakota, a light appeared at the end of the tunnel.

  Relief. All fear evaporated. Maddy’s claws instantly relaxed back into dimpled girl hands and Dakota’s neck again looked like a grimy kid neck, no longer tempting as a caramel apple.

  “Ahh.” Maddy rolled down the window to drink in the fresh air. Close one.

  Nora and Dakota still looked scared. And when had all these leaves blown into the car? Maddy looked around curiously. Why hadn’t any landed on Maddy or anywhere in the backseat? Dakota and her mother seemed guilty as they shook the greenery from their heads, shoulders, and laps.

  “Dearie me, that was a dreadful asthma attack, Madison,” said Nora, plucking a leaf from her ear as they crossed the parking lot. “Let’s find someone to give you a once-over. Just to be safe, all right?”

  “Uh-huh.” In the distance, Maddy saw a peak-roofed wooden house set on a smooth sheet of lawn. New World green, she thought. Where had she heard that phrase again? Then she remembered and gulped. Uh-oh. How could the Knaveheart’s Curse have slipped her mind so quickly? New World green was all around. Her eyes moved to check out the tennis courts, shaded by silver pines. Woods looked safer.

  If a Knave was around, the woods made a good escape route.

  “‘Club Lullaby, a Haven for the Young and Old.’” Maddy read the sign nailed to the clubhouse. A few of the Old were snoozing on the porch. “What kind of club is this?”

  “It’s a sports-and-hobbies club. They’ve got loads of rules, so just remember to say, ‘may I,’” explained Dakota. “Sure you’re up for a golf lesson, Maddy? P’raps you want to rest with the oldies.”

  “I’ll be okay,” said Maddy. She’d just keep off the widest, green-iest greens and hope for the best.

  Nora led the girls past the clubhouse and to an adjacent bungalow marked CLINIC, where one of the staff coaches checked Maddy’s pulse and reflexes.

  “I’d make a lousy doctor. I can’t even find her heart,” the coach said, shamefaced. Maddy wasn’t surprised—after the tunnel scare, the shy blip of her hybrid heartbeat would be too faint to locate.

  She was relieved the coach didn’t take her temperature, which, at fifty degrees Fahrenheit, might have given him an even bigger shock—and was why hybrids tended to stick to their own, Argos-approved doctors as they made the transition to mortality.

  “I just need some fruit juice,” Maddy promised. “Then watch out, Tiger Woods!”

  “That’s the spirit,” said the coach, pouring Maddy a cup of limeade.

  “Make it two,” said Nora. With a weary wave for the girls, she retreated to the clubhouse porch with the other limeade loungers.

  On a small putting green, the lesson was under way. A dozen or so kids, including Dakota, wheeled sporty bags stocked with golf irons.

  “Ooh. Maybe I’ll take this,” said Maddy as she fished inside a pretty plaid golf bag and selected the shortest iron.

  “Maddy, careful. It’s not ‘maybe I’ll,’ it’s ‘may I,’” explained Dakota. “As I said, you must watch your manners here.”

  “Hey! That’s my golf bag.” Lisi Elcris, in a minidress paired with fancy tasseled golf shoes, bounded across the green, her kid brother, Adam, rolling behind.

  “Sissy Smellkris. What a frightful surprise.” Maddy bared a hint of fang.

  “I’m rubber, you’re glue, what bounces off me will stick to you,” said Lisi, stabbing her finger against Maddy’s chest. Of all the New World insults Maddy had heard these past few years, Lisi easily claimed the lamest.

  “As a matter of fact, Maddy and I are friends today,” Dakota piped up.

 
“Poor you.” Lisi stuck out her tongue as Maddy picked up her golf iron.

  “Hey, that’s mine!” Lisi squawked, reaching for the iron and jumping right into Maddy’s first-ever practice swing.

  “Oh—ouch.” Maddy felt bad. She hadn’t meant to connect her iron so smoothly with Lisi’s kneecap.

  “Yowch!” Lisi was hopping up and down. “You hit me on purpose, and I’m totally reporting you!”

  “It was an accident,” corrected Maddy. “And I said I was sorry, didn’t I?”

  “Technically, Mads, all you said was ‘oh—ouch,’” murmured Dakota.

  “You should sit this lesson out,” bossed Lisi. But she’d stopped hopping, Maddy noticed, so her knee couldn’t have hurt that much. “Besides, your clothes smell oniony. You’re giving off fumes, and that’s not fair to the rest of us.”

  Adam snickered. “Giving off fumes,” he repeated.

  “It’s Club Lullaby that gives off fumes,” said Maddy. “Loser fumes. You should rename it Club Stinks.”

  Adam laughed at that, too. “Club Stinks.” But Maddy was mortified. Lisi could be such a bully. And she was ruining the Day of Friendship.

  “I don’t feel like playing golf,” Maddy decided. It was too sunny out here, anyway.

  “What will you do?” Dakota’s dark eyes darted around, as if trying to anticipate what mischief Maddy might find.

  “Eh, I’ll figure out something. Come find me when it’s time for lunch. Later, warts.”

  Whistling, Maddy kept her nose in the air as she strolled off the course. Probably best to get off these dangerously wide green fields, anyway . . . though her cheeks went beet red when she overheard Lisi talking in a loud voice about how she was going to tell management to banish Maddy from Club Lullaby for good.

  She’ll pay for wrecking the start of my Day of Friendship, Maddy decided. I’ll strategize an excellent revenge plan. But first, she thought as she bounded up the clubhouse steps, more limeade.

  6

  A BOX OF DISGUSTING

  One handful of uncooked oatmeal and molasses. Best cure for flatulence.” Mr. Elcris wheezed on his words. He even sounded full of hot air, thought Maddy.

  She was crouched under the Lullaby clubhouse porch, indulging in her most favorite sport, eavesdropping.

  “Wild yams help my embarrassing gassy episodes,” quavered Mrs. Elcris’s high-strung voice.

  “If you don’t want gas, dear, you gotta skip the kidney beans,” Mr. Elcris scolded. “I’d rather find a cure for hair loss.”

  “Oh, Stan!” Mrs. Elcris sniffed.

  Gag. Maddy grimaced. Those Elcrises sure liked to have sickening conversations when they thought nobody was around. Eeeyyyuck.

  She rolled out from under, taking with her the plastic litter she’d found to throw it away properly. Since Hudson was an environmental crusader, the Livingstones knew it was crucial to clean up the New World.

  Though Maddy had been listening in for a long time, the kids still weren’t finished with their golf lesson. Even under the porch, Maddy’s skin was cracking from the heat. She needed moisturizer. She’d already had one scary episode today.

  In the clubhouse locker room, Maddy dropped her porch litter in a recycling bin, where she found a shoe box marked with the Elcris Shoe Emporium logo for Lady-swing Premium Golf Cleats.

  “Excellent!” In spite of where the box came from, any box had the potential to be treasure. Maddy fished it out and looked inside. No cleats, but a whole lot of paper tissue. She tucked the box under her arm. Good find.

  Now to get her hands on some moisturizer. With her sharpest-bladed pinkie nail, Maddy picked all the locks down the row until she found a locker stocked with a full bottle of aloe lotion. She held it directly over her head and squeezed. Her skin, dry as a roadside iguana from scalp to toe, made a greedy, sucking sound as it absorbed.

  Ah, relief.

  Replenished, Maddy picked up a nearly empty mouthwash bottle. She let her hyperextended tongue roll all the way down to the bottom, soaking in the spearminty essence.

  Ah, refreshing.

  The wide-toothed comb of this locker was thick with hair, which gave Maddy her next idea, to create a Box of Disgusting. In the Old World, a Box of Disgusting was a dangerous tool, a hand-packed bomb of dust, dirt, hair, scum, lint, fingernails, earwax, tartar, belly button and toe jam, cigarette butts, and anything else that looked like it might be decaying or crawling with germs. A dash of Disgusting to the eye could inflict temporary blindness; a pinch in the ear could cause vertigo. And pity the stomachs of those who got Disgusting dissolved in their dinners.

  Maddy remembered how she and her Old World friends, Elewynn and Hautement, had been legendary talents at creating Disgusting. Now, Maddy realized sadly, if she wanted to concoct something remarkably Disgusting, she was all on her own. As usual.

  “But it might be just the right weapon if that Knave’s on the loose,” Maddy thought out loud. She shook the shoe box. “Fate even sent me this vessel.”

  After re-picking the lockers and stripping all combs and brushes of every flake of dandruff and strand of hair, Maddy roamed the entire locker room, unclogging the matted shower drains, plucking used tissues and Q-Tips, and, from behind a toilet, one spiderweb in which was a caught a shriveled caterpillar shell.

  All into the box.

  Next, windowsills. Experience had taught Maddy that the best icky stuff nestled in deep crevices. Sure enough. In went two dead scarab fighter beetles and a squished pod of chewed gum.

  Maddy was so intrigued with her project that at first she didn’t pay any mind to the voices drifting through the open window.

  “It’s not fair, D. We’ve been friends all year. I even let you wear my wooden watermelon bracelet for two weeks, and it’s my most favorite thing I own.”

  “We’re still friends, promise. Plus Maddy’s not as bad as you think. She gave me back my birthday present, and here’s a teensy secret about her—she’s deathly scared of tunnels.”

  Lisi and Dakota! Maddy’s skin itched worse than when she’d been struck down with scarlet fever, many centuries ago, during a deadly epidemic. No matter how many years Maddy had inhabited this earth, she always got sensitive when she overheard people talking about her.

  “Madison Livingstone, scared of tunnels?” Lisi snickered. “I’ll remember that one. But why’d ya have to bring her here?”

  “We’re not real friends, exactly. We’re just for-the-day friends.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Dakota sighed. “Like, we’re being friends. As an exchange of favors.”

  “Huh.” Lisi snorted. “So you’re fake friends. Whatever. I’m not jealous. Anyway, my super-fantastic cousin Zelda who’s visiting from Denmark is my best friend plus we’re family. She plays guitar better than anybody, and she makes us all homemade gazpacho every morning.”

  Ha ha ha. That Zelda already found a way cooler friend than you, thought Maddy, scoffing. And she happens to be my big sister, Lexie! She wished could shout that down to them.

  “What’s gazpacho?” asked Dakota.

  “A delicious drink,” Lisi assured. “And if you come over, I’ll give you some.”

  The conversation turned to delicious drinks. Listening in, Maddy seethed. How humiliating, to be exposed as a fake friend! She kicked off her sneakers to hoist herself onto the windowsill. Her extra-long feet and double-jointed knees steadied her hind crouch-grip. “You girls are about to get totally Disgusting-ed,” she muttered.

  It wasn’t until she was staring down at the unsuspecting tops of the two girls’ heads that Maddy remembered her pact with Dakota.

  No tricks, no pranks.

  “Fie!” Maddy spat. Of course, she could break the pact, but the sticky issue was that vampires feel very loyal to verbal agreements. In Old World days, paper was expensive, and writing was a rare skill. Most people’s word was their bond.

  But Dakooty’s word was worth nothing. She just broke her own promise by blabbermouthin
g that Maddy was scared of tunnels.

  The Box of Disgusting tipped in Maddy’s hand. How funny would it be if one beetle fell on each girl! She cackled to herself.

  Suddenly, there it was. A vampirish knowledge, slipping through her skin, pricking up her ears and fangs. She was not alone in this locker room. Somebody—or something—was watching her. Somebody—or something—had heard her cackle.

  Maddy looked up as the shadow passed over.

  What was that? She froze. Slowly, her head circled, click click click, all the way around, in a complete rotation, as her eyes darted to every corner of the locker room. The lines of the poem slivered through her consciousness . . . to Newe World green / Treeless, where Nine glides unseen.

  Whatever it was, it was gliding unseen, all right. Maddy’s heart knocked in her chest. From below, her ears picked up the faint sounds of Dakota and Lisi standing up and walking away.

  Swoosh! The creature zoomed in like a hawk, but a hundred times faster and a thousand times stronger as it grazed past, knocking Maddy off balance.

  “Hey!” She swayed light as a leaf in the windowsill.

  Swoosh! From the other side, the thing whipped past again, smacking so hard against Maddy that when she caught herself, pop!—like a cork from a bottle, her clavicle separated from her acromiun in a type I acromioclavicula joint dislocation (most vampires know the medical names of their bones) injury.

  “That hurt!” Way worse than a clonk to the kneecap. Such brute strength was almost completely inhuman. Maddy shivered, her green-blue blood gone icy. The Ninth Knave. It had to be!

  With one option, Maddy took it.

  Swoosh! As the creature whipped past to clip her again, Maddy was ready. Flinging her Box of Disgusting over her shoulder and straight at the Knave, she bounced into a back handspring and vaulted herself out the window.

  7

  IN THE GRAVEYARD

  Whoosh! through the air and smack! Maddy hit the ground hard. Her bones creaked. Her collarbone cracked. No time to check damages. She ran, not stopping until Club Lullaby was miles behind her.