Coach Bakula stepped through the crowd, chaperoning in one of his lighter-duty suits. A bolo tie, even. He nodded to both of them, spoke reasonably. “Girls, Principal Haywood would like to see you.”
Mindy felt her blood run cold.
In a few minutes, they were in the principal’s office—the only light you could see in the school if you were driving by. Mindy’s heart was pounding, sweat beading at her temples, her blood surging inside her skull. She wondered if Haywood could hear it. If it was tempting her. But no, that was ridiculous.
She took one look at Mindy and Lucia, shared a glance with Bakula, and said, “I’m going to have to eject you from the dance.”
Lucia said nothing.
Mindy said, “What, why?”
Bakula was settling next to the door.
“I’ve heard from the chaperones that your dancing was inappropriate, and I can see that your clothing does not meet with the dress code.”
“What the WTF?” Mindy barked. She’d never argued with a teacher before. It was easier than she would’ve thought. “She’s wearing a floor-length gown, my dress is colored champagne.”
“I can see the sides of her breasts,” Haywood argued, hand moving at Lucia like she was flicking something toward her.
“You can see her armpit and that dumb tattoo she got on her ribs.”
“My tattoo is awesome,” Lucia said. She wasn’t really listening. She was picking up a balancing eagle toy from Haywood’s bookshelf, resting the beak on her finger and prodding the wings.
“It’s distracting to the male students and inappropriate for a school function,” Haywood argued. “We can’t be seen to encourage this kind of behavior…”
“Lesbianism?”
“Sex.”
“Are same-sex couples allowed at school functions?” Mindy demanded.
“If they follow school protocol.”
“Protocol that isn’t applied to straight couples.”
“It is applied equally and fairly—”
“There were straight kids dry-humping on that dance floor, I don’t see them in here!”
Lucia had the eagle balanced on her fingernail. “Do they have these as bats?”
Mindy turned around. “Lucia, could you please support me here?”
Lucia flicked her finger. The eagle went flying. “We’re leaving. Your blood is young and fresh and flows as smooth as silk.” Her eyes racketed to Principal Haywood. “Yours is old. It moves in your veins like cold syrup. Just pushing and pushing and…” Lucia moved a flattened hand forward in starts and stops. “Never getting anywhere. It’s about ready to stop.” Eyes went back to Mindy. “What more do you want?”
They left. Mindy paused in the doorway, taking out her compact she flicked it open, looking into the mirror but aiming it toward Haywood at her desk.
The chair where Haywood was sitting was empty.
“I am sorry,” Haywood said, from beside her now—she’d come out from behind her desk. “I know how much fun these dances can be for young people. There’ll be others…”
Mindy dropped her hand to her side. Glanced down to the compact in it, aimed upward. Saw Haywood’s reflection right beside her. “Yeah. Can’t wait.”
CHAPTER 25
Bakula went out with them, leading them to the front door. “I do apologize for that. It helps, when you’re educating children, to know more than they do, but that’s something we can’t always have.”
Mindy reached over to take Lucia’s hands. “It’s fine, I guess. I mean, we’ve still got each other.”
“Yeah,” Lucia said with a glance down at her hand in Mindy’s. “This just means we can go home and bang sooner.”
Mindy slapped at her.
They were at the school’s padlocked doors. Bakula took out a key and unlocked them. “You are very wise for someone who has not yet graduated high school,” he told Mindy, letting them out.
It was a chilly night out, but Mindy barely felt it. She didn’t even feel Lucia put a jacket around her. She’d been expecting this. Expecting some dumb joke or a slur or an obscure rule. And she’d seen herself calmly, coolly shooting all of it down with a mix of rationalism and snark, rallying the proles to her side, having Rachel Maddow come down to interview her. Instead, she’d exited quietly out the back. And now she was walking to her car, feeling angry, and not even at them. At herself, for how ashamed she felt. Like she’d been conned into feeling shame.
“It’s not Haywood,” she said, like that was the reason her cheeks were burning, her ears were burning.
“I know,” Lucia said. “I saw her reflection in the pictures on her desk. Think I would let her get close to you if I wasn’t sure?”
“Shame. She could really use a stake through the heart.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Lucia said. “School dances are lame anyway. The night is young. We’ll drive down to Austin, I’ll take you to the Hole In The Wall. I have a fake ID, and I took the bouncer’s virginity. They have a pretty good band playing, if their website isn’t out of date—Children of the Night.”
“What music do they make?” Mindy asked.
“Punk-pop.”
“Jesus.”
“Don’t pretend you’re too good for punk-pop. You tried that with Selena Gomez, remember, and it did not work.”
“I am not too good for Selena Gomez. I can only dream of the day I am.” Mindy pulled the jacket tighter around her. They weren’t going to the car. By mutual, unspoken decision, they were just walking around the desolate school. “You’re taking this well. Usually you’re a bit quicker to defend my honor.”
Lucia shook her head. “I don’t care about them. I care about you. And you don’t care about them either.”
Mindy straightened the jacket again. It was way too big for her. Too big for Lucia too, in fact. She checked it, finding it was a letterman jacket. “Where’d you get a letterman jacket?”
“From a letterman.”
“El, am I wearing a dead guy’s jacket?”
“No. The hospital got him stabilized.”
“Quentin?”
“Yeah. He never asked for it back, so I guess it’s mine now. And I want my girl to wear my letterman jacket.”
“You want to be prom king too?” Mindy teased.
“You can be prom king. I have a thing for tiaras.”
Mindy leaned over, rested her head on Lucia’s shoulder, found Lucia slowing down so they could walk that way. “Take me away from all this.”
“To a bar in Austin?”
“To a bar in Austin.”
“We have to keep it weird, you know.”
They cleared one of the couple of stretch limousines parked around the lot and saw a car idling at the edge of the schoolyard. A bubble light was on top, hitting them with red left hooks, blue right crosses. Card leaned against the car, lit up so thoroughly by the light it was like it was shining out of him.
Lucia trotted up to him, Mindy falling behind. As they came within earshot, Card reached into the car and flicked off the cherry top. Now the only light was from the light poles, burning everything yellow, and Card’s cigarette crayoning his shadowy face red.
“Heard you had a bit of a ruckus,” he said around it.
“We murdered the dance floor,” Lucia said. “No wonder someone called the cops.” She looked to Mindy. “Go wait in the car. He wants to talk to me.”
“You sure?”
“I can handle ’im.”
Mindy nodded and started for her car.
Card reached out suddenly, grabbing her arm, and Lucia tensed, but Mindy held her other hand up.
Lucia didn’t relax an inch.
“Where’d you get that?” Card asked, eying the Band-Aid on the side of Mindy’s throat.
“Cut myself shaving.” Mindy pulled her arm away from him.
Card took his eyes off her, put them on Lucia. “I know Mindy’s involved, but you’re the ringleader, aren’t you? I don’t get the sense Ms. Murphy has a lot
of friends, unless she’s even easier than she looks.”
“I have, like, seven hundred Facebook friends, okay?” Mindy protested.
Lucia gave her a look. Mindy walked over, already reaching out to Lucia in her mind, giving herself double vision seeing through Lucia’s eyes.
“Got another of those?” Lucia asked, pointing to the cigarette in his mouth.
Card took the pack out of his pocket, rattled the tar around by smacking the bottom with the heel of his hand, then shook one out to offer her. She reached for it. He jerked the pack away, then saw she’d already taken one. Lucia smirked at him, curled lips around the cigarette.
“Got a light?”
Card took out a lighter. As he lit her, Mindy pushed a thought into her mind.
Since when do you smoke?
Since I died. Dead people don’t get cancer. And I look really sexy. You should watch sometime.
Watch you smoke?
Yeah.
I think I’ll not get cancer instead.
Your loss.
Card took the lighter away, leaving a glowing ember at the tip of Lucia’s cigarette. She sucked it in, gathering the polluted air into her dead lungs, then spoke so it trickled out of her lips. “You’ll want to watch how you talk about Mindy around me.”
“You really do care about her, huh?”
“That’s me. All heart.”
Be careful with him, Mindy urged.
He’s fishing. Hoping he can get one of us to confess to something naughty. You haven’t been naughty, have you, Minz? I know I haven’t.
“You care about Seb too?”
Lucia held up her level hand, wobbled it a bit, made an “ehh” sound.
“Yeah. I guess Mindy’s more into him. You’re more into her… I guess it all works out.”
Lucia took the cigarette out of her mouth and shook some ash from it. “If I were living on a cop’s salary, I guess I would dream of being a comedian too.”
Card reached into his pocket, took out an evidence bag wrapped around a smartphone. He took the smartphone out—his lips leering around his cigarette—powered it on, unlocked it, and turned it on Lucia. There was a picture of it. An upskirt.
“That Mindy?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t know, can you zoom in? Usually I’m seeing her cameltoe from less of a distance.”
Card stared at the picture. “Found this on one of the victims. It seems like people who do wrong by Mindy end up in the hospital an awful lot. Is that why I should watch how I talk about her?”
“Well, in my experience, if a guy takes one photo like that, he takes a lot. So I’m betting a lot of women were on his phone.” Lucia dropped the cigarette to the ground, smashed the butt out beneath her high heel. “Maybe he ran into someone who wasn’t so photogenic.”
Ask him if the police will be pressing charges against Chester Molester.
“I trust you’ll be investigating him for sex crimes.”
“I think he’s suffered enough.” Card dropped the phone back into its bag. “Don’t you?”
“You know when you’ve suffered enough? When you die. And even then, sometimes…” Lucia trailed off.
Card stopped leaning against the car. Through Lucia’s eyes, Mindy saw him tower over her.
“You think because I can’t prove anything that I can’t get to you.” Mindy could smell the tobacco on his breath. “I can get to you. I can get to your mother, I can get to your brothers—I can get to Child Protective Services and let them know that the only real parent in your house is an eighteen-year-old girl who dresses like Megan Fox.”
Lucia kept her mouth shut. Otherwise he would see her fangs.
“Give me Seb. Give me Mindy. I’ll let you walk this time. I think we both know you can find someone else. After all, you must be getting bored of the lesbo thing by now.”
Inside the car, Mindy was hugging herself. Hugging Lucia. Don’t give him a fucking inch.
“I would never do anything to hurt Mindy,” Lucia said, speaking with Mindy’s calm.
“That’s too bad. Because I know you’re playing some goddamn vampire game and you’re obsessed with Murphy, maybe the same way she’s obsessed with you. But two of you means you’re twice as vulnerable. I’ll keep running at her, I’ll keep running at you, one of you will crack and give up the other one. I’ll live to see you behind ba—” The vampire struck.
He hit Card from the side, striking him against his car so hard the tires ground a few inches across the tarmac, rubber screeching like the scream Card would have made if his throat hadn’t been bit in half. The vampire held Card by the throat, letting him process, his face spasming into confusion, fear, pain, and despair.
Then, as Card’s blood soaked his shirt front, the vampire opened his mouth. He didn’t have Lucia’s petite elongated canines. He had viper fangs that barely fit in his mouth. His jaw had to unhinge slowy to let them out. He clicked like a flywheel as his mouth gaped open and his wet lips kept on stretching, stretching. Card’s expression settled on a look of pure panic. His funerary mask.
The vampire’s entire skull pushed out of his distorted, peeling, mouth like a newborn shark, born to eat. The soft, flaccid flesh of his face drifted back on his cranium, pushed back like an empty mask, leaving no eyes, no nose, only a stark white death’s-head’s maw. The Big Bad Wolf teeth of his face clamped onto Card’s head, and at last there came a sound. Lucia thought for a moment Card was screaming, but no. It was the screech of his life being pulled out of him. The vampire sucked and slurped and changed. His death-pale skin coloring with the stolen blood, tanning, was becoming more human.
It happened in seconds. Card just seemed to decay. His skin sank to his bones, clothes dangling from wire-hanger flesh, his veins standing out as the blood was clawed out of them, so fast that they ripped open, pulled taut and tore through Card’s flesh like stiletto wire. Dry, desiccated flesh ripped open and whistled with the force of the vampire’s bloodlust.
Card didn’t even have time to lift his hands. His wedding ring slipped off a shrunken finger as he went limp. With a snap and grind of bone, and a flutter of dead skin, the vampire bit through his face and skull, leaving a scarecrow’s hollow head. The body stood there, not knowing it was dead as the vampire stepped away from it. Then, drained of blood, robbed of life, Card’s empty body fell to the ground. A bag of bones.
Bakula sucked his fingers clean. His cavernous skull was a triumph of unnatural survival over true life, his entire being no more than an insatiable hunger with a man’s visage hanging off it. He flicked a clot of Card’s blood at Lucia, splatting her on the cheek. “They’re never going to believe it wasn’t you.”
Mindy snapped on the high beams. She screamed, hit the gas, and drove full speed right at him. She’d done her best to send a warning to Lucia on whatever mental link they had, but Lucia had been a blank slate, bouncing Mindy’s thoughts back at her untouched, mesmerized with Bakula’s decimation of Card. Now, finally, she moved, throwing herself aside as Mindy drove at Bakula straight on. She rammed into his outstretched hand with the Taurus’s grille.
His arm stayed rigid, but the force pushed him back—dress shoes shredding across the blacktop before he dug in his heels with a crumble of asphalt, grounding himself. He remained upright, holding Mindy’s Taurus in place even as she jammed down the gas and sent the tachometer up to 5000 rpm. She didn’t move an inch. Then the hood started to crinkle under his grip.
He looked through the windshield at her. Smiled with a mouthful of knives. He threw his arm up, Hollywood style, crooked to cover all of his bloody face, save his eyes. The same man who had watched over her, sympathized with her, cared for her. All of that now leeched away, leaving his true nature displayed in malicious, red-eyed glee.
He said in a mock Bela Lugosi accent, “I vant to suck your blood.”
Lucia threw herself into the passenger seat. “Reverse!”
“Oh Jesus, God…” Mindy couldn’t think anymore. Her adrenaline had run dry
since starting the car and driving it into her English teacher at seventy miles per hour—she’d thought that would do it. Now he exerted himself—gently—and the car moonwalked, going backward as the tires spun forward.
“Drive!” Lucia screamed, grabbing the gearshift and dragging it down to R. “Get us the fuck out of here!”
The gears screamed bloody murder, but obeyed, and the Taurus lunged backward, smashing into a parked car. Mindy went ass over teakettle, even in her seatbelt—Lucia was the one who shoved the gearshift back to D. She ripped the seatbelt away, dragged Mindy over to the side, and vaulted into her seat.
Bakula watched impassively as she hit the gas, threw the car into a 180-degree turn, and sped over the school’s lawn to mount the curb and settle onto Outlook Drive. They flew forward, taking off into the night.
“Is he following us?” Mindy asked, when she was able to open her mouth without screaming.
Lucia didn’t answer. She just stared straight ahead as the speedometer climbed, hitting sixty, hitting seventy. Traffic was light this time of night, a collection of red taillights practically standing still. Lucia veered around them, took a curve too fast, and slashed the car across the guardrail in a shower of sparks before regaining control.
“El, slow down.”
Lucia was staring straight ahead, but it was like she wasn’t even seeing the road. She ran a red light, a chorus of honking car horns fading behind them…
“All along…all along… It was him! You said it wasn’t, you said!”
“Lucia…” Mindy looked for the source of the sudden chapping noise. It was the steering wheel. It was splintering in Lucia’s grip. “Lucia, stop!”
They buzzed past a stop sign, a squeal of brakes as they cut off a truck. Another curve, tires kicking on dirt as they skidded over the shoulder, gravel flying off the tires and sparking off the undercarriage before Lucia got it back on the road. Mindy vaulted over the cup-holders and jammed her foot down onto the brakes, bringing them to a screeching, smoking stop.
Lucia was out of her seat, pushing the door nearly off its hinges, leaving the steering wheel permanently disfigured. Mindy had to turn off the engine, then figure out how to put the car in park before she crawled out of the cab after Lucia, now a spectre in the night with her white dress and her makeup bleeding off her face.
Ex-Wives of Dracula Page 32