by Max Turner
I wasn’t sure if I wanted her to know.
Her eyes narrowed just slightly. It was enough that Charlie noticed.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he said. “Not that silent talking again.”
Luna sighed and I flopped backwards, cracking my head on the headboard. Hunger had taken root in my belly, and my lungs felt as if I’d inhaled a handful of glass.
“I need a drink,” I said. I looked at Luna. Luna looked at Charlie. Charlie looked at Suki. She folded her arms over her chest.
“Okay, okay,” Charlie said. “We’ve got lots. Just don’t start the show without me.”
He returned a minute later with a blood donor bag that I devoured instantly. The discomfort of healing gave way to the rush. When the aftershocks passed, I got up to change. My friends peppered me with questions. I did my best to answer, starting with Baoh and his news, and ending with my encounter with Pestilence and his attempts to read my mind.
Charlie threw up his hands. “Great. Just great. So you’re saying some fat bag of sores can kill us while we’re asleep?”
“Seems that way.”
“We need to get you downstairs,” Luna said.
“Why? What time is it?”
Charlie had to wipe the front of my alarm clock to see the numbers. It was just after 8:00 p.m. I’d been asleep all day. It felt more like a few minutes.
“I need more sleep,” I said.
“Are you telling me you want to go back to bed?”
I looked at my ruined mattress. “Not in here.”
“Is it safe?” Suki asked. “What if that guy comes after you again?”
“I don’t know. Ophelia might have some suggestions.”
“You can ask her about it now,” Charlie said. “She and my dad are expecting us in the conference room. If they hadn’t sent Luna here on wake-up detail, you’d be a corpse. If we take too much longer to get down there, she’ll probably put us under house arrest till the world ends.”
“I think that’s the least of our worries. If Baoh’s right, the most dangerous vampires in the world are coming here to kill us.”
“Good,” he said. “I’m sick of all this waiting around.”
CHAPTER 8
MEETINGS
SUKI TOOK HOLD of Charlie’s hand. “Didn’t you say we should hurry?”
“Yeah,” he said, but he didn’t move.
She started pulling him gently towards the door. “You’re going to have to see him sooner or later.”
She must have been referring to his father, whom Charlie hadn’t seen, face to face, since Christmas. Apparently, it was a disaster. Charlie’s father was still furious that he was infected, and although that was my doing, Commander Rutherford had a way of blaming his son for whatever happened, regardless of who was responsible.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Charlie said to me, “and don’t even start. Making me a vampire is the smartest thing you’ve done since learning to floss. Don’t feel guilty. Not for a second.”
It was a bit late for that. Suki gave his arm another tug.
“Are you going to be long?” he asked.
I looked around the room. Unless Mr. Clean showed up with a power washer, I was going to be busy for a while.
“I’ll take care of him,” Luna said, waving Charlie and her sister out the door.
“Wait, you guys,” I said.
He and Suki paused in the hall.
“Can you keep this to yourselves, at least until I figure out what to say to Ophelia?”
“No problem here,” Charlie said.
Suki pulled him out the door.
“Do you think he’ll be all right?” I asked.
Luna laughed. “You’re worried about Charlie, after what just happened to you? You’re a piece of work, Zack.” She walked to my closet, grabbed a towel and offered it to me. “Are you going to be all right?”
“How much trouble can I get into taking a shower?”
“Not as much as the two of us could together.” She smiled, then headed out after Charlie and Suki.
“Luna?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
She looked back over her shoulder. One of her canines was pressed against her bottom lip. “You can make it up to me later.”
MY LATE UNCLE Maximilian had some extremely impressive hardware in his collection, including a car that could break the sound barrier and enough guns to storm the White House, but the most useful device to me was the penthouse shower. In less than five minutes, it could turn you into a new man.
After a quick cleanup, I jumped on the elevator, then decided to take a detour to Vincent’s room. He was a very unusual kid, not only because he was the son of Hyde, a vampire hunter the likes of which the world had never seen, but because he was also an orphaned blood drinker, and, like me, he’d died and come back. It made me think the prophecies could have been about him. I wanted to know how he was doing before making any decisions that might put more on his plate than he could handle.
The short hall to his room led past the Vault. This was where he fed. Inside was a mess of chains heavy enough to raise the Titanic. It was the only way to keep him from ripping the place apart when he turned. His bedroom was farther along. From behind his door, I could hear the scratching of a pencil. The smell in the air was an odd blend of women’s shampoo and Vincent’s plastic Lego. I went straight to his door, knocked a few times, then pushed it open slowly.
“It’s Zack,” I said.
“I know,” Vincent answered. “You knock the same as Ophelia, but your footsteps are heavier.”
He was hunched over his desk, colouring. Although he was only eight, he was almost as tall as Luna. If you passed him on the street, you’d put him somewhere in the fourteen or fifteen range, at least until he spoke. His mind was like that of a third-grader, but he aged physically at a rate that was alarming. This was typical of lycanthropes—another reason they were scarce. Since he’d moved in with us, every week was like a year. Some days when he got out of bed you’d swear he looked older than when the girls had tucked him in. And his strength was alarming, at least when he turned. Unlike the werewolves you read about in stories, his transformations seemed to have nothing to do with full moons. Blood did it. When he smelled it or saw it. Sometimes when he just thought about it. It also happened when he got stressed or emotional, which was the most frequent trigger. Until two months ago, he’d been in a coma. When he awoke, we had to break the news that his entire family had been killed. He handled it remarkably well, but no kid, no matter how resilient, can overcome such a loss without the occasional temper tantrum sneaking into the script. Without the Vault, he would have reduced the building to rubble.
I peered over his shoulder, relieved to see him calm and focused. “What are you drawing?”
A red-and-blue figure with black lines on his face was dangling from a rope. Another man, with fangs, wearing a dark coat, stood beside him. He appeared to be holding two swords that dripped blood. There was also a metal robot.
“I haven’t finished that one yet,” he said, reaching for a green pencil crayon.
“Who is it?”
“Doctor Doom,” he answered. He went to work on the cape.
“Where are his arms?” I asked.
He pulled back from the picture and cocked his head to the side. “Charlie’s holding them.” He tapped the fanged character that I’d thought was holding two blades. “He says that if anyone ever hurts me, he’ll rip their arms off.”
“Charlie’s very colourful that way.”
“That’s Spider-Man,” he continued, pointing to the blue-and-red figure with the dark lines on his face. “But I kind of wrecked his mask. My hands are clumsy again.”
Sometimes he grew so quickly there was an adjustment period during which his coordination suffered.
“I think it looks great,” I said. There was an empty chair beside his desk, so I pulled it out and sat down. “I have to go to a meeting. I just wanted to kno
w how you’re doing.”
He stuck his tongue between his teeth while he filled in Doctor Doom’s cape. “I’m fine. Charlie came by already.”
“If you get nervous or need anything—”
“He gave me Suki’s cell so I could call him.” Vincent searched under several pieces of paper, then spied the phone on the floor and grabbed it.
“You know how to use the touchpad?”
“Yeah. Charlie showed me.”
I smiled. Vincent seemed fine, so I rose and told him I’d drop by later with Luna and the others.
“And Charlie, too. Right?”
“Of course.”
I scanned the wall by his desk on the way out. There were drawings of all of us mixed in with superheroes, characters from Star Wars and someone fat, round and blue, who might have been from a Japanese anime. Charlie was in all of the pictures, and he was always the largest. Hardly surprising. It was sort of that way in real life. He threw himself into things with reckless abandon, and the results, good or bad, were usually worth a picture or two.
I gently closed the door, then made my way down several floors to the conference room, where a full debate was in play.
“That’s crazy,” Charlie was saying as I entered. “I don’t want to spend another six hours cooped up in this place, let alone six months.”
Ophelia was seated at one end of the table; Charlie’s father, the other. He was a huge man, over six and a half feet tall, and bald as a cue ball. In jeans and a leather coat, he looked more like a UFC fighter than a naval commander. He and my father had been best friends—close enough that I’d been calling him Uncle Jake since I was a kid, back before I knew about vampires or the Underground or my father’s secret profession.
Uncle Jake’s frown deepened when he saw me. I glanced at Luna, who was sitting beside Suki on the far side of the table.
Charlie was alone on the side closest to me. “About time you showed up,” he muttered.
“I was just checking in with your biographer. He’s illustrating your crushing defeat of Doctor Doom.”
“What can I say? The boy has an eye for talent.” He kicked a chair out for me.
“What have I missed?”
Luna, Uncle Jake and Ophelia all started talking at the same time. I got the gist right away. We were going to hole up here while Charlie’s father went overseas to look into the bounty.
“That won’t work,” I said. “Staying here is no longer an option. We have to go out and get our noses dirty.”
Charlie let out a quiet “Yeah” of approval. Ophelia glanced quickly at Charlie’s father. They started to speak at the same time.
“You’ll be dead within an hour …”
“… won’t last a night …”
Both stopped, then Uncle Jake waved for Ophelia to continue. “We’ve just been informed that a legion of vampires is coming here, hoping to make good on that bounty. The fellow you fought on the roof will be the first of many. Mercenaries. Ex-Coven spies. Assassins. Killers from all corners of the globe.”
“Who told you this?”
“A vampire named Istvan,” she explained.
“And you trust this person?”
“Istvan? Yes. He’s saved me more times than you have years to your life.”
“He’s one of the good ones,” Uncle Jake added. “An old friend of your father’s.”
My father seemed to have a lot of old friends I didn’t know about. “Did you hear from Baoh?” I asked.
Ophelia seemed surprised by the question. “Baoh rarely makes contact with others. He is vulnerable because of his age.”
“I thought the older you got, the tougher you got,” Charlie said.
“That’s true,” Ophelia replied, “but the trade-off is that you must sleep longer. Baoh often rests for years at a time. While he does, he’s at risk. He might be the oldest living vampire in the world. He is certainly the most secretive.”
“He visited me last night on the Dream Road,” I said. Then I passed on what I’d learned about the Changeling and his Horsemen, and about our family line being too long. The news shocked Charlie into a tense silence. He and Luna looked mortified.
“Ours is hardly the first family to extend past two generations,” Ophelia said. “To suggest that anyone should be put into undeath is ludicrous. I will not support it.”
“That wasn’t all,” I said. I then explained about the pathogen, and how I was being blamed for its spread.
I thought Ophelia was going to explode. She rose from her seat and started pacing.
“This is preposterous! No sane person would expect someone your age to assume the near-impossible task of policing our kind. Vlad and his Coven were taxed beyond endurance more times than I care to remember, and that was with the Underground supporting them. To imagine a teenager could manage it right after Vlad disappeared, with Hyde running wild, killing everything in sight, the Underground in shambles … These claims are completely absurd.”
“Absurd or not, it explains the bounty,” Charlie’s father said. “With a prize like that on offer, few will care that Zack’s been made a scapegoat. Did Baoh tell you anything more about him?”
“The Changeling? Just that he could appear as anyone. And that he’s poisonous. Apparently, if he kills you, it’s permanent.”
A hush fell over the room. My eyes were on Ophelia. She had her forehead pinched between a finger and thumb and was chewing gently at the inside of her cheek.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve been thinking this over. We need to go to the Warsaw Caves. My uncle and John Entwistle are buried there. With their help, we have a chance. It’s time to dig them up and bring them back.”
CHAPTER 9
A HOUSE DIVIDED
THE DISCUSSION that followed about my uncle and Mr. Entwistle was painfully short. No one wanted to raise Maximilian from his resting place, because nobody trusted him. About Mr. Entwistle there were other concerns. During his long life as a vampire, he’d evolved into a man as principled as any I’d ever met, but it hadn’t always been that way. In ages past, he’d been so cruel that others called him the Butcher of England.
“You raise up a man like that,” Uncle Jake said, “and you don’t know what you’re getting.”
“It’s true, Zachary,” Ophelia added. “Death changes everyone, and not always for the better. Resurrect John, and you might find he’s reverted back to older ways of thinking.”
“That never happened to Zack!” Charlie said.
“No, but he hasn’t changed enough in his short life for that to be possible. Entwistle lived over six and a half centuries. He’s got a lot of baggage. And even when his intentions were good, he was far too reckless. His head-on approach isn’t the best for this situation.”
“I disagree,” I said. “He told me this would happen. That a new order would be established, and they’d send an army. I think his head-on approach is just what we need.”
Are you sure that’s why you want him back? Luna asked.
I was relieved that she chose to keep this question between us. We’d had this conversation before. She was convinced I wanted Mr. Entwistle back because, deep down, what I really wanted was a father.
“We’re sitting ducks here,” I said. “And I need to get out and address the issue of the spreading contagion.”
Uncle Jake frowned. “Venturing anywhere is too great a risk right now.”
“And I won’t allow it,” Ophelia added. She fixed Suki and Luna with a stern gaze. “I made a promise to your parents that I would keep you out of harm’s way. It’s the only reason they agreed to let you stay with us.”
I pushed my chair back and stood. “If we wait here, we’re toast.” I wanted to add more—that it was my fault that Charlie and Luna were infected and in trouble, and that maybe this outbreak really was my fault too—but nearly everyone started talking at once. Only Suki said nothing. She looked as though she wanted to bolt.
“One at a time,” Uncle Jake said. “One a
t a time …” He gestured to me with an open hand. “You mustn’t take all of this on your shoulders, Zack. And it isn’t as hopeless as you think. There’s another player in the game. He calls himself the Baptist. Word in the Underground is, he’s a bona fide power. And he’s preaching about the rise of a child vampire who will topple the New Order to make one of his own. Sounds like the kind of ally we need.”
“Have you heard of this guy?” Charlie asked Ophelia.
“The Baptist? Yes. He’s relatively young and has been trying to restore the Underground since Hyde’s death. I will look into a possible alliance, while Commander James travels overseas to learn more about this bounty and what’s happening with Vlad’s old Coven. Any information about the Changeling and his Horsemen would obviously be useful. Until we know who they are, and what they can do, the rest of you need to stay out of sight.”
I started to object, but Uncle Jake cut me off. “Zack, your father would never forgive me if I put your life in danger. And, Charlie, neither would your mother.”
“Forget it,” Charlie said. “You can’t expect me to sit around this place waiting for a legion of assassins to show up, one after the other. Attack. Always attack.”
He’d said this before. It had been a mantra of sorts for Alexander the Great. It suited Charlie’s disposition.
“It’s not your responsibility,” I said. “It’s mine. Baoh told me that I have to be involved.”
My friend spun his chair, then stood so we were face to face. “So it’s okay for you to go out, but not the rest of us?”
“This isn’t about dinner and a movie. This is life and death.”
Luna glared at me. Her rage hit the inside of my head like a nail. You’re such a hypocrite. Would you let us put ourselves in danger while you hid here?
She was right and I knew it, but with Charlie barking at me, I couldn’t back down. Not after he’d called me a ditherer and said I needed to be more assertive. “Charlie, I’ll duct tape you to the ceiling if I have to. I’m not going to see you killed because of me.”
I felt Ophelia’s hand on my arm. “The decision has already been made. All of us will stay. We can train. Lord knows we need it. Charlie’s father will go.”