Sophomore Year

by Douglas Rees

  “We could have used the help,” I said.

  “I am not so popular in New Sodom,” Dracula said. “In certain quarters, my involvement would not have been welcome.”

  “You mean with the Mercians,” I said.

  “Yes. We can see how much difference my reticence made,” Dracula said.

  “I wish you’d been here last night,” I said. “It was great till the place burned down.”

  “I meant to be. I could not resist. But I booked a commercial flight and we were grounded by bad weather in Brussels. That is the last time I let anyone else fly me anywhere.” He threw out his arm toward the mill. “But this,” he said. “What will you do now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what I can do. Look at this place.”

  The empty windows didn’t stare the way books always say they do. They were shut. Shut in pain. Through the gaping doorway, I could see down to the basement and up to the sky.

  “Wiped out,” I said.

  “In any case, you accomplished much, very much. I am proud to know you, Cody Elliot,” Dracula said.

  “I did find this,” he said. “I expect you know the rightful owners.”

  From under his coat he took out a carefully folded square of cloth.

  “It’s Justin’s,” I said. “Where was it?”

  “Over there,” he said, pointing off toward the river.

  I unfolded it.

  “It is very old,” Dracula said. “See? The grommets wore through in the wind. Probably it tore loose before the fire started.”

  “Sorry, Mercy,” I said to the angel and the twisted snakes. “We did try.”

  “Mercy?” Dracula said. “Did Mercy Warrener make this flag?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Dracula held it to his lips and kissed it.

  He said two words in high jenti that I knew: “My love.”

  “She must have been a great woman,” I said.

  “She was the heart and soul of her people. Their essence,” Dracula said. “Their queen.”

  “She never mentioned anything about that in her journal,” I said.

  “Journal?” Dracula said. “There is such a thing?”

  “Just a lot of scraps of paper she saved over the years for her family,” I said.

  “I must see this thing,” Dracula said.

  “It’s at Vlad, in the special collections room,” I said. “I don’t know what it’s doing there. It’s not even cataloged.”

  “Is it possible?” Dracula looked up at the gray sky. “Mercy, did you reach out a hand across …?” He shook his head. “I am being foolish,” he said.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “I’ve kind of had a feeling she’s been around, off and on.”

  “She feels so close,” Dracula said, and kissed the flag again. “I asked her to wed me and she said she would do so. It would have healed the wound between her people and mine.”

  “You must be the Beloved,” I said. “In the journal. Every year she remembers the day her Beloved went away.”

  “Yes,” Dracula said.

  “So what happened?” I said. “I mean, if you want to talk about it.”

  “There were no Burgundians in New Sodom then,” Dracula said. “I had come on an adventure. To see the New World, and the jenti living in it. And if they had found something worth having, I would lead the Burgundians here and we would seize it. That was my thought. But I met Mercian, and changed my mind.”

  “Mercy’s real name was Mercian?” I said.

  “Mercy Ann Warrener,” Dracula said. “Mercian. And she was a silver eagle. When she told me she would have me, I felt like I wanted to live ten thousand years, and spend each day of them with her.”

  “But why’d you break up?” I said.

  “The regalia. Her regalia, her crown and scepter, disappeared,” Dracula said. “They were most secret and sacred things. They had survived more than a thousand years already. They had survived the loss of Mercia itself. Only two people knew where they were. Mercy and her mother, Queen Susannah. Mercy told one other, myself. When they disappeared, I was naturally blamed. The Mercian militia came. I was lucky and escaped. Most of me escaped.”

  He held up his right hand, and I saw that the last two fingers were missing. “Captain Danforth was an excellent swordsman.”

  “And the regalia never turned up, right?” I said.

  “No,” Dracula said. “Mercy went uncrowned. There were no more Mercian queens.”

  “I just figured something out,” I said. “I think some Mercians believe those regalia are in the mill. Or were.”

  “Why?” Dracula said.

  “The whole thing,” I said. “The weird marks Gregor found over one of the storerooms. The fact that nobody seemed to own the mill, but the town wouldn’t let us have it. Somebody really, really didn’t want us here.”

  “Come,” Dracula said. “Let us see what we can see.”

  We stepped over the line of yellow tape and went into the ruins.

  The fire had destroyed the wooden floors, of course. We could see down into the basement. It was filled with black wood and scorched bricks. The walls that had held the floors up were jagged. They looked ready to topple over.

  All but the wall that separated the generator room from the rest of the basement. It still looked pretty strong, because it was twice as thick as the others. Twice as thick except for a slot about three feet wide that was open to the sky.

  “Now, that is odd,” Dracula said.

  We walked out on top of the double-thick wall and looked down into the slot. We couldn’t see anything.

  “Help me,” Dracula said.

  Carefully, we pulled the top course of bricks away, then the next, and tossed them down into the debris. Then the next bricks and the next.

  And soon we could see it. A blackened wooden box that just fit into the slot.

  Dracula gave a cry and forced his huge hands down into the hole. When he had the box, he held it in his arms like it was a baby.

  “Come, Cody,” he said. “We must open this in front of witnesses. You have your cell phone?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Call Justin Warrener. Call Ileana. Call Gregor for good measure. And call your own parents. Gadje should be present.”

  “Mom doesn’t know I took her car,” I said.

  “Call, friend, and take the consequences,” Dracula said. “This is a morning for consequences.”

  In less than an hour, Ileana was there with her folks, Justin and his mother had come, and Mom, Dad, and Turk were driving up.

  “Cody, if you think you are going to get away with what you did—” Dad said.

  “Please, Dad,” I said. “Kill me later.”

  “I will,” he promised. “In the meantime, you’re grounded.”

  “I need to catch up on my homework anyway,” I said.

  Gregor came soaring over the river, landed, and bowed to Dracula.

  “Thank you all,” Dracula said. “I believe this casket contains the lost regalia of the Mercian Realm, things which were lost many years ago, and which I was accused of stealing. It is my wish that all of you should testify later to the contents of this casket.”

  He laid it on the ground and opened the lid. It snapped off in his hand.

  There inside were a silver crown with a double-headed eagle, a scepter with the same emblem, and a heavy chain with another eagle hanging from it. They were almost black with age and tarnish.

  “Mrs. Warrener, you will please accept these,” Dracula said.

  Mrs. Warrener took the box from Dracula. Then he bowed to her.

  “Your Majesty,” he said.

  “Never call me that, sir,” Mrs. Warrener said. “These things have caused enough misery.”

  Everyone was caught in that moment.

  “Yes,” Ileana said. “It is time for cleansing.”

  “Indeed it is,” her mother said. “Princess, will you not take command here?”

  But t
hat wasn’t all Ileana did. A few calls, and we started to see Burgundians lifting into the sky over New Sodom and heading our way. Not long after that, Mercians and gadje started to show up in their cars. They came as slowly and carefully as if they were in a funeral procession. But the people who got out were dressed in their grubbies and ready to work.

  “You do good work,” I said to her as the crowd grew.

  She hugged me and kissed my cheek.

  “You two are together again?” Dracula asked.

  “Yes, Ancestor,” Ileana said.

  “Good. I am pleased to know that you are not a complete idiot, my descendant,” he said.

  “Whoa,” I said. “You can’t call her that.”

  “Yes, he can,” Ileana said. “He is my ancestor. And he is right. I am not a complete idiot.”

  Then she held a hand out to Turk.

  “Ancestor, this is my beloved’s cousin, Turquoise Stone,” Ileana said. “Turk, this is my most honored ancestor, Vlad Dracula.”

  Dracula took Turk’s hand.

  “Ah, the artist,” he said.

  For once, Turk was too impressed to say anything.

  “I asked Cody what his plans were for this ground, and he could not say,” Dracula went on. “What would you tell me?”

  Turk swallowed and said, “If we could, I’d do it all again. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.”

  “Why do you not?” Dracula asked.

  “Little things, like it would take a few million dollars we don’t have,” Turk said. “It’ll cost hundreds of thousands just to pull down what’s left of this place. Then there’s architect’s fees, construction materials, workers, legal stuff.”

  “And there is also the political side,” Gregor added.

  “I think perhaps that will not be so great a problem now,” Dracula said. “I have a feeling something has changed here.”

  As I looked around at the growing crowd, I had that feeling, too.

  “As for the money,” he went on, “I will give it, if you will permit me. We might buy the mill next door and get to work quickly. We will see. I am bored with doing the least I can do.”

  “Wow,” I said. It was all I could say.

  I went over to Justin.

  “Dracula found your flag,” I said.

  “Pretty good shape for such an old rag,” he said, holding it out in front of him. “Maybe we could fly it while we work. Just today.”

  “We’d need a pole,” I said.

  “We do poles,” Turk said. “Come on, Bat Boy.”

  “Do not call me that again,” Gregor said.

  Turk grinned and said, “You prefer Loverbat?”

  “I prefer that you spare me your asinine gadje wit,” Gregor said.

  He took her hand, and Turk shut up.

  Quiet and together, they went down to the thicket by the river and came back with a twenty-foot limb.

  “Where can we put it up?” I said.

  “Permit me,” Dracula said, “an old bat’s foolishness.”

  He tied the flag to the pole and lifted himself on his wings to the highest point of the ruin.

  The wind caught the flag and it blew straight out.

  I looked up at it and gave Mercy Warrener a thumbs-up.

  “We did it, Mercy. And I think we’re going to do it again.”

  There was a low roar, and the first Dumpster trucks hauled into view. People cheered.

  The cars kept coming all day.

  Master Elliot:

  This report, while it fulfills the requirements for the course, does not represent a high standard of historical writing. In particular, the excessive personal detail, and I refer here to your frequent references to kissing various persons and how that made you feel, are of no interest to the serious reader.

  That said (and it must be said), it is impossible to ignore the facts that, since the events somewhat excessively detailed in this report, the Township of New Sodom has dropped its opposition to your claims of land tenure in Crossfield, a design for the New Mercy Warrener Arts Center has been approved with surprising alacrity, and the financial backing of His Eternal and Royal Highness Prince Vlad Dracula has been secured. As we all know, ground will be broken next week.

  Such events can only indicate to the reader who knows of them that you have absorbed the real lessons of this course, indeed of history itself, better than many more fluent writers. I feel no great hesitancy in awarding you a B.

  Sewell Gibbon, MA

  DOUGLAS REES was born at March Air Force Base, California. He is the author of several books, including Vampire High, Lightning Time, and Grandy Thaxter’s Helper. He has been a college history teacher, a dishwasher, part owner of a ballet school (he can’t dance), a storyteller, a hospital orderly, and a number of other things. He now works as a young adult librarian in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives with his wife, Jo (the model for the lycanthropic librarian in the Vampire High books), and too many cats.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Douglas Rees

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rees, Douglas.

  Vampire High : sophomore year / Douglas Rees. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When Cody’s Goth cousin Turk moves into his house, enrolls at Vlad Dracul, and decides to turn an abandoned nineteenth-century mill into an art center, the vampire (jenti) students are not pleased, and Cody’s hopes for a great sophomore year are blighted.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89665-1 [1. Vampires—Fiction. 2. High schools—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction. 4. Artists—Fiction. 5. Goth culture (Subculture)—Fiction. 6.

  Massachusetts—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.R25475Vd 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009027168

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.0