by Mia Archer
“Get over here Veronica,” she said.
“What are you doing?” she asked, eyeing Stacy warily.
“I need you to help me out with a little something,” she said.
“Be careful,” I said. “I can heal up if you hit me a little too hard. Veronica is mortal and doesn’t have the same luxury.
Veronica eyed Stacy with even more apprehension than before. Like the last thing she wanted was to take part in whatever experiment we were doing, but it’s not like she had much of a choice. So she shuffled forward.
“Do your best to knock me over,” Stacy said.
“What?” she asked.
“I want you to give me a shove. With all your strength.”
Veronica looked to me like she thought I was somehow going to save her from the latest craziness Stacy had decided to bring into the world. I gave her a little shrug and shook my head.
“I’ve found that it’s usually best to go along with whatever she’s planning,” I said. “I know it might seem a little crazy, but there’s nothing you can do to fight it. She volunteered to become a vampire to try and stop you guys, after all.”
“Damn it,” Veronica muttered.
She leaned forward and pressed her hands against Stacy. Stacy didn’t budge. Veronica licked her lips and tried again. Gave her a good shove. Then Stacy reached out and gave Veronica a push right back.
It looked like a light push, but it was enough to send the former vampire flying back into the crowd. Luckily Jimmy was right there behind her, and he seemed more than happy to catch her and sweep her off her feet before she could land wrong and seriously hurt herself.
“That’s weird,” Stacy said. “I wonder if the vampire strength only lasts for a little while and then it wears off or something?”
“That’s what you were curious about?” Veronica asked, coughing just a little. I guess Stacy giving her a shove had been enough to knock the wind out of her. “My strength and all the other vampire stuff was gone the moment reaper girl here did whatever the hell it was she did to me,” she said.
“Weird,” Stacy said, looking down at her hands like she was wondering how the heck the whole vampire strength thing had stayed with her when it’d left Veronica.
“Not weird at all,” a familiar voice said.
Veronica and Stacy both shivered as they looked behind me. I turned around in time to see darkness in the vague shape of a coffin forming behind me, and then Death himself strode into the gym and had a look around. For a surprise he smiled, though that smile didn’t seem to do anything to comfort either Stacy or Veronica.
“You’re telling me you have some explanation for all this?” I asked. “After all the time you’ve been spending telling me there’s nothing you can tell me about how vampires operate?”
“I didn’t tell you there’s nothing I can tell you about how vampires operate,” he said. “Merely that what you did pulling a vampire soul away from an entrapped soul isn’t something we’ve ever encountered before, though I’ll admit you were more motivated than anyone else who’s ever taken on a vampire.”
“Okay, so can you maybe explain what this has to do with my girlfriend still having vampire strength after the head vampire was offed?” I asked. “And why there are still vampires hanging around the gym, for that matter?”
Death reached up and scratched his head. It was just a touch disconcerting to have the embodiment of the end of all life looking like he legitimately had no idea what the hell was going on here.
“The only thing I can think is she’s already had one out of body experience where she was dead but not dead for some time when you were dealing with the necromancer,” he said. “I’ve never known of someone who’s been lucky enough to fall victim to a necromancer but then float as a free spirit for any length of time. As for the other vampires, I’d say they weren’t in the line of siring that goes back to your Assistant Principal, and so they’re still able to fight. Well, until we take care of those vampire spirits still in them using your method. You’re going to have to show them how to do that, of course.”
Huh. That sort of made sense. Though it was an uncomfortable thought considering it meant there were still bloodsuckers out there who could cause trouble. It also meant more work teaching them how to take out the vampire spirits lurking within, but it’d be worth it if those bloodsuckers got their lives back.
“So you’re saying that because she’s died once and come back, but she’s a mortal, that’s done screwy things when it comes to supernatural things?” I asked.
“Wait, so is that why I didn’t actually feel the need to follow any of the vampire commands that they gave me? It took me a couple of tries to figure out I was supposed to be doing what they said when they did the whole creepy hypnotic eyes thing, and I figured the whole compulsion thing was just lower vampires going along for the ride because they didn’t want to get hurt.”
“Compulsion is very much a thing with vampires,” Death said, again frowning. “That you didn’t feel compelled to do anything other vampires asked you to do is very… odd.”
He eyed her as though she was an enigma. I worried he might be on the verge of saying she needed to be studied more or something, but then he shrugged and turned to me. Smiled.
“You have a very special girl here,” he said. “I imagine that’s thanks in no small part to how impetuous she is. I’d keep an eye on this one if I were you.”
I turned back to Stacy and Veronica. Veronica was still hanging back and looking at Death like she wanted to be anywhere but where he was, but Stacy was looking at him with new eyes. She actually smiled at the guy! I don’t think I’d ever seen a mortal who was willing to smile at Death, but then again I’d never known of a mortal other than my mom who was willing to date a reaper so what did I know?
“So are you going to tell me who your friend is here?” Stacy asked.
I looked between her and Death. “Right! I’m so sorry! I got so caught up in everything. Ladies, meet Death.”
“Death?” Veronica asked, going almost as pale as she’d been back when she was a vampire.
“None other than,” I said. “The big guy.”
It was a good thing Jimmy was still standing behind Veronica, because her eyes rolled into the back of her head and she fell back, totally fainting.
“Now that’s the reaction I’m used to getting from mortals,” Death said, looking at Stacy with a bemused expression.
“To be fair she wasn’t mortal until very recently,” I said. “But yeah. I totally get what you mean.”
“If you’ll excuse me,” Death said. “It looks like everything is mostly in hand here, so I’ll be returning to work.”
“Nice chatting with you!”
He did that whole disappearing act. Again it was like a coffin made out of pure darkness surrounded him, and a moment later he was gone as he stepped through to the other side. Leaving me all alone on this side with Stacy, Jimmy, and a very unconscious Veronica who Jimmy was fanning with his hands in a vain attempt to get her to return to the land of the living.
41
New Students
“Listen, I’m sure using that kind of language was acceptable when you were last a student here, but we do not talk to other students like that in this day and age!”
I rolled my eyes as I walked past a teacher berating one of the “new” students in the hallway. From the way the guy was dressed he was from the ‘80s, so I could take a guess that the inappropriate language he was using started with an f and brought someone’s sexuality into question rather than starting with an n that would bring the ability of whoever uttered that word to not have the crap kicked out of them into question.
The teacher looked at me and opened her mouth like she was almost considering asking me for help, then she shut her big yap and seemed to think better of it. Which was fine with me. Disciplining students who were literally coming from a different decade wasn’t my idea of a good time.
“These poor teacher
s are having a hell of a time of it,” Stacy said, watching the altercation. “What word do you think they used that’s not considered kosher these days?”
“I imagine it had something to do with a bundle of sticks, but I really don’t want to know,” I said.
“I’ll never understand why people are so sensitive about that sort of stuff these days,” Veronica said. “I’d think people would just be able to let language roll off them.”
She was looking around us with some of the same disdain that’d been there when she was a vampire. It’d been tempered by being returned to the land of the mortals, but not by much. She still looked down her nose at the world for the most part.
“Shut up you bloodsucking bitch,” I said.
“Hey!” she said. “I’m not a vampire anymore and that’s not…”
She trailed off and her eyes narrowed. For all that she’d been trapped in a time warp for the past few decades, she was still pretty sharp. She stuck her tongue out when she realized what I was doing.
“Point taken,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
“It’s not about people being too sensitive,” Stacy said. “It’s about the person saying that kind of stuff being an asshole and the world is finally calling them out on it, but to that kind of person it looks like the world is suddenly too sensitive or something. It’s asshole deflection at its finest.”
“You say so,” Veronica said.
I shook my head and stepped into a science class that was a little bigger than it’d been before. We’re talking there were maybe five more students in the classroom.
Having an entire gym’s worth of students suddenly added back into the high school population had stretched things just a bit, but this was a school that’d been built back when the baby boom was in full swing and then stayed in use because the school corporation didn’t have the money to build a new building, so doubling the school’s population overnight hadn’t caused too much overcrowding.
No, if anything it’d simply forced the school system to finally start using most of the school rather than shutting down parts of it because there was no one to fill the seats in those parts of the school any longer.
It’d been a little odd to realize that most of the vampires were so stunted that they’d mostly remained the people they were when they’d been converted to vampirism. Something about the vampire soul that attached itself to them taking over at that moment which left them sort of taking a backseat, mentally speaking, for however long they roamed the earth as a bloodsucker.
That also made me feel better about having all of them back in the school. It meant we had a situation where there were a bunch of hostages who were being returned to the world, and not a situation where there were a bunch of bloodsucking monsters minus the bloodsucking part who were suddenly walking around with the general student population.
“Okay, so if you could all settle down please,” Mr. Whitmore, the high school’s ancient and eternal chemistry teacher who wasn’t a vampire despite looking to be about the same age in every yearbook photo he’d taken for decades, said. I knew because I’d hit him with a touch of death magic to make sure I didn’t get pulled into a weird headspace with a nasty vampire spirit after going through yearbooks to be sure there weren’t any other surprises lurking in the faculty. “I’m talking to you Mr. Farthing! I didn’t put up with your nonsense when you were here the first time around, and I’m certainly not going to put up with that nonsense now!”
I looked between the two of them and wondered that there was actually still a teacher working here who could remember all the students from the first time they were here. It’d made the transition a little easier. Especially since Mr. Whitmore hadn’t ever been the kind of teacher to take crap from students.
I shook my head an sat down. Stacy and Veronica took up station around me, and Jimmy silently settled into the seat behind Veronica. She turned and hit him with a smile that he returned with about a thousand times more intensity.
I still wasn’t sure exactly what was going on with the two of them, but I figured it was also something I wasn’t going to get in the middle of. If they wanted to do their thing then they could do their thing.
“Okay. Everyone has had their fun,” Mr. Whitmore said, clapping his hands to get everyone’s attention. “Now if you could please bring your eyes to the front we’ll get started!”
I tried to pay attention, I really did, but chemistry wasn’t exactly the most mesmerizing of subjects. Besides, I kept getting distracted by looking around the room at the new students who stood out like sore thumbs because they still insisted on wearing the styles from when they’d been in school.
All the thrift and vintage stores in a fifty mile radius had been raided and completely stripped of all their materials, one of the odd things about being vampires for several decades was that most of them had been able to take advantage of compound interest in a major way while they’d been terrorizing the world.
Most of them still had family hanging around the area as well. Heck, most of them still had parents hanging around. Even the ones from the fifties, like Veronica, tended to have parents who’d married young and got jobs in the factories back in the day so they could start popping out kids. Sure they were ancient by now, but a lot of them were still kicking around and still in the same houses they’d been in when their children were taken from them.
That was another thing that boggled the mind. The sheer number of students who’d disappeared over the years without making anyone suspicious. Though I suppose in the end it amounted to one or two every year which was sad, but not exactly the kind of thing to arouse that much suspicion.
Lee had been very good about making things look like accidents. Luke, Arnold, and Jake were proof enough of that. I shivered to think about some of the stuff I’d learned debriefing the vampires along with the Chief and discovering how deep the whole vampire conspiracy went.
The three spectral stooges might’ve been back among the living right now if it weren’t for the fact that my dad had been with them that fateful night when they went off the road. I couldn’t wait for him to get back from the craziness that was Starlight City so I could tell him he wasn’t as responsible for his friends’ deaths as he’d thought for all these years.
I’m sure that’d be a weight lifted off my dad’s shoulders. He’d been behind the wheel, sure, but it’d been a vampire bastard jumping out in front of their car that’d made everything go wrong. The vamps had hit the wrong car that night. They were looking for some football star and his girlfriend who drove a similar ancient boat of a Delta-88 and ran like the bloodsucking bitches they were when they realized there was a reaper in that car.
My mouth set in a frown at that. That Lee bastard deserved everything he got and then some considering some of the crap he’d been pulling.
“Is this lecture boring you Gwen?” Mr. Whitmore asked.
I knew I wasn’t in all that much trouble because he used my first name. Typically he only resorted to last names when he was about to lay into a student.
“Sorry Mr. Whitmore,” I said, trying to make my voice sound appropriately humbled. “I won’t let it happen again.”
“See to it that you don’t, Gwen,” he said. Then he went on in a quieter voice. “I know you’re probably still a little shaken over everything that happened, but know that we do appreciate everything you’ve done to bring back troublemakers like Mr. Thomas, for all that I thought I was through with his antics decades ago.”
I looked up in surprise at that. Old Mr. Whitmore was positively beaming at me, which wasn’t something that happened all that often. He was one of those tough but fair teachers who’d been on the job for so long that he didn’t take any shit from anybody.
Then I looked around the room. Realized that all the vampires who’d been time displaced were also smiling at me. Which was a surprise considering I’d pulled them away from the eternal life of a vampire, but maybe it was that I’d pulled
them away from the eternal tortured life of a bloodsucker that had them smiling at me like that.
Either way it was nice to get some recognition for something I’d done. Recognition that didn’t involve the whole school giving me sidelong glances and acting like I was a freak because of what I was.
“Look at you, the big hero,” Stacy said.
I turned and she winked at me.
“I’ll be sure to give you a hero’s welcome later tonight too,” she said.
She’d been giving me plenty of hero’s welcomes since that night in the gym, but I wasn’t going to knock having another one. I grinned right back at her.
Things might’ve sucked for the past couple of weeks while I was chasing down a bunch of bloodsucking bastards, but on balance everything seemed pretty good now that I’d come through to the other side!
42
Full Moon
Stacy suddenly sat up and looked around. “Did you hear something?”
“You’re probably hearing people in other cars getting it on,” I said. “If the car’s a rockin’ don’t come a knockin’ and all that.”
“No, I seriously think I heard something out there,” she said, staring through the window like she was trying to see something out there. And sounding like something straight out of an ancient black and white B-movie in the process.
Normally I would’ve figured she was jumping at shadows, but I’d seen enough creatures of the night turning up in the flesh lately that I figured I should give her the benefit of the doubt.
I sighed and pulled myself up. She’d been in the middle of doing something that was pretty damn fun, I’m not sure where she learned how to use her tongue like that but I wasn’t complaining, and I figured I’d do just about anything to get her to go back to what she’d been doing!
