It left no footprints in the snow and it left no cloud-breath of air behind it. Dr. Sinclair dropped her medical bag in the snow and stepped back. The creature was right in front of her. The face was pale and remote as snow crystals, and the blood that rimmed its mouth was as red and damp as a fresh rose petal. As it reached for her, Dr. Sinclair began to scream.
Tor remembered his forgotten dream with complete clarity, like he was living it all over again.
“Vampires,” he breathed.
“Is that blood?” Raine said in a squeaky little voice.
“That’s blood,” Drake said. “Isn’t it, Tor?”
“It’s blood,” Tor said. There was no mistaking the blood bags, hung from the top of the fridge by hooks and swaying slightly. Tor had seen blood bags before because his dad always donated blood to the Red Cross. His dad had taken him along so he wouldn’t be afraid of donating someday when he was a grown-up, too.
“You think we got vampires in this town?” Drake asked.
“The mayor is a vampire?” Raine said.
Tor remembered how the mayor was trying to kiss his mom, and he was glad he was sitting down because he felt all the strength drain out of him all over again. Was the mayor trying to—?
“Ewww,” he said. He felt like throwing up.
“Wait a minute,” Drake said, leaning in. “There are labels on those bags—one of them says Malone.”
“Stanford Malone?” Raine asked, “Mayor Malone?”
“No,” Drake said. “Jeff Malone.”
There was such complete silence in the room that the humming sound of the fridge sounded huge and loud, like a jet engine revving for takeoff.
“That’s Jeff Malone’s blood?” Raine asked from above Tor’s head, where he still sat and pointed his flashlight at the swaying blood bags and thought hard. There were other bags, too. One was marked “Max Nye,” and another one was marked “Brian Slader.”
Brian Slader. The boy who died.
“Wait a minute—” he started to say, but then a noise interrupted him. There was a loud clicking sound and then the rumble of street traffic. At the front of the office, someone had just opened the outside door.
Tor’s heart felt like he’d just been kicked in the chest. He shut the fridge door and it sucked closed with a horrible sound, too loudly, but Drake was already opening the back door to the alley and there was no time to do anything but run. Tor covered his flashlight instead of clicking it off and followed Raine, who was already crowding Drake out the door.
The alley seemed as light as noon after the dimness of the mayor’s office. Raine locked the door with her huge skeleton key, fingers shaking so badly the key chattered around the old lock before sliding in. She turned it, withdrew it, and they ran down the alley as fast as they could, their pounding feet muffled by the grimy snow.
Raine threw the back door of the Pro Shop open and skidded in. Drake followed and Tor jumped in behind him. Raine turned and locked the door with her ancient key.
“The front, quick!” she hissed. Tor followed her and Drake through the darkened shop toward the front windows.
Outside was the worst thing Tor could think of—the flashing blue and red lights of Deputy Rollins’s big SUV. It was pulled up in front of the mayor’s office and they watched, invisible and still as mannequins behind the window display of coats and skis, as the deputy left the mayor’s office and looked suspiciously up and down the street.
As soon as he turned away, Raine pulled Tor and Drake back from the window.
“We need to get back upstairs, quick,” Drake whispered.
“This way,” Raine said. “There’s a back set of stairs.”
When the apartment door opened ten minutes later, Raine leaned out casually from the study.
“Hi, Mom,” she said. “Hi, Dad. How was the movie?”
Tor was behind the computer screen typing furiously, his ears stinging from the toweling he’d given his hair to get it dry. Drake was back in his sweater of the many awful triangles, sprawled like a cat in the corner of his sofa, and Raine was dressed in gray sweatpants and a fluffy jersey with an imprint of an owl on the pocket. Her ninja look was gone.
“Hi, kids,” Mr. Douglas said. “I’ll go check the shop,” he told his wife, and kissed her on the cheek. Carswell was in her arms, a little bundle of eight-year-old boy asleep with his head on his mother’s shoulder. Mr. Douglas kissed his son’s head. “Back in a minute.”
“What’s up?” Raine asked.
“Deputy Rollins said someone reported an attempt at a break-in tonight,” Mrs. Douglas said, frowning. “Lights in the mayor’s office, or next door at Taffy’s Candle Shop. The person wasn’t sure. At any rate, I’m sure it was just reflections or something. Let me get this boy to bed, he weighs a ton.”
“Okay,” Raine said. When Mrs. Douglas came out of Carswell’s bedroom she was frowning at her watch.
“You need to get home, Tor, don’t you?” Mrs. Douglas said. “It’s nearly nine-thirty.”
Tor jumped to his feet. He’d completely forgotten about his own curfew, which was nine.
“Oh, man, I gotta go,” he said.
“I’ll call your mom,” Mrs. Douglas said. Her face was kind. “I’ll tell her you forgot the time. You just get your coat and you’ll be home while I’m still talking to her.”
Tor threw a glance of frustration at Raine and Drake, who looked at each other and then at him. There had been no time to talk, no time to work things out.
“Do you want me to walk you home?” Drake said suddenly.
“It’s only a block, dear,” Mrs. Douglas said absently, pecking out Tor’s number on her phone.
Drake looked intently at Tor, who felt a cold chill down his spine. It was nighttime, and he would be alone. In the darkness.
“I’ll run,” he said.
“Run fast,” Drake said.
“Nothing makes sense,” Raine said at lunch the next day. She wore interesting loops in her braids, round shells with turquoise beads at the end of leather fringe. The braid decorations seemed very Ute to Tor. This was the first time he’d seen Raine wear anything remotely, well, Indian.
None of them was eating very much. The meal was spaghetti, and the sauce was too thin and runny for Tor to stomach. It looked too much like blood. The lunchroom was roaring, a sound so frantic and fueled with holiday spirits they could have shouted across the table at each other and no one would have paid a bit of attention.
“I know it doesn’t,” Tor said. “But somehow it all fits. We can’t see the connection, but it’s there.”
“They can’t be vampires,” Drake said. “In the movies it’s the good vampires who store blood in their fridge. Right? Good vampires drink from blood banks, bad vampires kill their victims. Isn’t that the way it works?” He was wearing what Tor thought of as his Bigfoot sweater today, the one with lots of colors and tufts of yarn poking out and hanging down.
“I think so,” Raine said doubtfully. “I haven’t watched many vampire shows.”
“I have,” Drake and Tor chorused as one.
“So Mayor Malone has his kid’s blood supply in a fridge,” Tor said. “We rule out vampires because, well—”
“People would be dropping like flies all over town,” Drake said confidently, and Tor nodded. “And turning into vampires, too. That’s what happens in the books and movies.”
“So no vampires,” Raine said. “So the mayor is hiding the snowboarding team’s blood. What on earth can you do with blood? What could they use it for? Tor, are you okay?”
Tor had dropped his head into his hands. He knew, just like that. He’d figured it out. He raised his face to Drake and Raine, who were looking at him anxiously. Drake saw his expression and his eyes lit up.
“You know!” Drake said. “What is it?”
“Bicycle racing,” Tor said. “I heard about this because of bicycle racing. My dad, he follows the Tour de France, that’s a big bike race, they ride across France and—�
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“And you’re babbling,” Raine said sharply. “What is it?”
“Blood doping,” Tor said. “The snowboarding team is blood doping.”
Drake sat back, his jaw dropping. Raine just looked more puzzled.
“Of course,” Drake said furiously. “Of course. The whole snowboarding team was in on it. They were blood doping!”
“Blood doping?” Raine said. “What’s that?”
“You take your own blood out of your body and store it,” Tor said. “As though you’re donating blood, except you keep it instead. Your body replaces the lost blood over a month or so. Then right before you race, you use a machine called a centrifuge to strip out the red blood cells and you inject those back into your body. For a day or so, until your body absorbs the extra red blood cells, you have a big edge. Extra red blood cells mean you can carry more oxygen, your muscles work better, and you can race faster.”
“And it’s undetectable,” Raine said. “Of course! It’s not a drug. It’s your own blood.”
“Mayor Malone is blood doping the snowboarding team before competitions,” Drake said. “He’s cheating.”
“It’s like they’re drinking their own blood,” Raine said, looking revolted. “That’s disgusting.”
“We have to tell someone,” Drake said.
“Of course we do,” Tor said. “But who’s going to believe us?”
“Not Sheriff Hartman,” Drake said. “He’s tight with Deputy Rollins. And you know what Rollins would say about this.”
“He’d never believe us,” Raine said, and stabbed her fork into her mess of untouched spaghetti. “He thinks we’re wasters. He knows Jeff Malone hates you and he’d just think we were trying to get back at him.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right,” Tor said. “We can’t go to the mayor, obviously. He’s the bad guy we’re trying to catch. Not the town doctor, she’s in as much trouble as we are.” He smiled at the two of them, but it was a smile that hurt.
Raine let her fork go and gripped her hands together. “Not the town doctor, no,” she said, and Tor wondered for a bleak moment if next year Raine would be here with Drake, just the two of them eating lunch together, and “Dr. Susan Sinclair” would have been added to her list of doctors affected by the curse. And Tor, where would he be? What lunchroom would he be sitting in? He squeezed his eyes shut at the wave of desolation that threatened to roll over him.
“I know,” he said. The answer had come to him. “I know who to tell.”
“WELL, TOR. DRAKE, Raine,” Ms. Adams said, as the class filed out through the double doors. “What’s up?” She was dressed in purple today, purple velvet jeans and an enormous purple sweater.
“Can we talk to you?” Raine asked. “Alone?”
“Of course,” Ms. Adams said, looking confused. She pointed with her wand toward her office, a cramped and mostly unused room. She raised an eyebrow. “In here, then, if you want privacy.”
Ms. Adams’s eyebrows, as red as her hair, climbed even higher when Drake shut the door, closing them into the small little office. She sat down without a word and faced them.
“We need to ask you some things,” Tor said, after Raine and Drake looked over at him. This was his idea, and he had to start. He swallowed because his mouth seemed to be terribly dry all of a sudden.
“Anything,” Ms. Adams said, and she laid down her wand, which was gripped rather tight in her hands. She held her palms out to them. “This is just me. Ask me.”
“Okay,” Tor said. “Here’s the thing. What would you do—what would you say—if you found a bunch of blood?”
“Blood?” Ms. Adams said. She picked up her wand and gripped it. Her freckles stood out clearly on her face and Tor realized she’d gone white. “Where?”
“Stored in bags,” Drake said. “Hidden away in a fridge. Blood. Human blood.”
“Not at my mom’s clinic,” Tor said. This wasn’t going right at all. Ms. Adams looked completely confused. “Stored away in secret.”
“Where?” she asked.
“We can’t tell you,” Raine said.
“But we don’t know what it means,” Tor said. “At first we thought, well, we thought it might be—”
“Vampires,” Ms. Adams said immediately, and laughed out loud. “Don’t look so surprised, you three. I’ve read lots of vampire fiction. If I saw a hidden fridge full of fresh human blood, that’s the first thing I’d think.”
“But we figured it couldn’t be, not in the real world,” Raine said faintly.
Ms. Adams twirled her wand absently in her fingers. Tor was so amazed by Ms. Adams saying the word “vampire” that he expected to see sparks shoot out the end, or maybe a frog, as though she was a real elf and she had a real magic wand.
“The world is full of more amazing things than you know,” Ms. Adams said. “Don’t come to me if you want reassurance that the world is solid.” She looked at them, her blue eyes as clear and cool as water, and Tor felt like the world had a trapdoor and he was sitting on top of it and it was about to open.
“One of the names on the bags was Jeff Malone,” Drake said. “Jeff hates Tor. He ran him out of bounds and about killed him. Then we see this name on the bag in the ma—in the place where the blood was.”
“Jeff’s having a hard time right now,” Ms. Adams said. “Brian Slader died and he’s grieving about that. Dr. Sinclair took care of Brian, so Jeff wants to lash out at Tor. It’s a natural thing for him to do, although it’s not the right thing.”
Tor suddenly sat bolt upright. He could feel his heart thudding and it was getting louder and louder in his chest until he thought everyone could hear it. Drake didn’t see. He continued with Ms. Adams.
“We think maybe Jeff isn’t so angry at Tor as he is about a doctor being in town,” Drake continued. “A doctor who could figure out what the snowboarding team is doing.”
“What are they doing?” Ms. Adams asked.
“Blood doping,” Raine said. “We think they’re blood doping. Have you heard of it?”
“I have,” Ms. Adams said. “This is a very serious charge, you know.”
“It’s more serious than you realize,” Tor said slowly. His heart thudded even louder now. All the final connections were falling into place.
“It’s cheating, that’s what it is,” Drake said. “Cheaters. Dirty cheaters.”
“It’s more than cheating,” Tor said, feeling breathless. “The first night I was here, Brian Slader took sick with pumo—polo—edema something.”
“Pulmonary edema,” Ms. Adams said gently. “High-altitude sickness where the lungs fill with fluid.”
“He didn’t die of that,” Tor said. “My mom told me. He got edema because he was low on blood. He died of blood loss.”
There was a thunderstruck silence in the room and then there was a tiny, echoing snap. Ms. Adams looked dazedly down at her hands. She’d broken her wand in two.
“They took too much blood,” Raine said. She put her hands over her face and burst into tears. “They took too much blood.”
“They didn’t mean to,” Drake said, patting her shoulder awkwardly. “Don’t cry, Raine.”
“It’s the curse, I know it,” she wept.
“No!” Tor shouted. He was standing but he didn’t remember getting to his feet. “That’s not it at all! The mayor is using the curse, don’t you see? When Brian got sick, and then died, he had the perfect person to blame it on. The town doctor. My mom. Because of the curse.”
“You’re right, Tor,” Raine said. She lifted her face from her hands. Tears still marked her cheeks but she looked furiously angry. “He’s been using my great-great-great-grandmother’s curse to blame Tor’s mom for Brian’s death and all along it was his fault.”
“What is important,” Ms. Adams said, “is who is doing this? And why are you sure it’s the mayor?” She took the pieces of her wand and dropped them one by one into the trash. The can was empty and the wood rattled hollowly as it struck the bottom. S
he opened her desk drawer and took out a thin case. It was made of worn black leather. Ms. Adams opened it and took out another director’s baton. It was highly polished and had a reddish gleam.
“It’s got to be Mayor Malone,” Tor said, his eyes on the wand. It looked very old.
“Mayor Malone,” Raine said.
“The mayor,” Drake said. “Who else could it be?”
“This was my grandfather’s,” Ms. Adams said, letting her fingers smooth over the wand. “I don’t use it often, but since I seem to have destroyed my director’s baton, well…”
“What do we do?” Raine asked. Ms. Adams nodded, her hands still smoothing the wand. Tor knew suddenly that she was using her grandfather’s memory, her grandfather’s strength, to help her. The job of a choir director didn’t usually involve solving a murder, Tor thought, and bit his lip to keep back a shaky laugh. He was suddenly very glad that they’d chosen to talk to Ms. Adams.
“You came to me,” she said. “I don’t feel much like a brave and powerful adult, to tell you the truth. You gave me a puzzle with all the pieces put together. But I can’t wave my baton and make everything better.” She waved it, in demonstration.
“You can’t go to the sheriff,” Raine said.
“He won’t believe you,” Drake said. “He wouldn’t believe us.”
“Nor can I go to the mayor, or the city council,” Ms. Adams continued. “I’m new here, too, remember. I don’t know if the mayor is involved or not—”
Drake, Raine, and Tor all opened their mouths as one, but Ms. Adams held up a hand. “But nevertheless, I have an idea who might be able to help us.”
Tor felt warm clear through when Ms. Adams said “us.”
“The FBI?” Drake asked.
“The governor?” Raine asked.
“The CBI,” Ms. Adams said. “Colorado Bureau of Investigation. My husband has a friend who knows an agent who works there. It’s a lousy connection, a friend-of-a-friend sort of thing, but I might be able to use it. Listen to me, though. You can’t talk to anyone about this. Anyone. Is that clear?” She looked sternly at them.
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