by Harold Wall
"what the hell is that?" yelped Finn. It took her a moment to realise it wasn't part of his story.
She followed his aghast stare and a frisson of unease ran through her. Someone had sprayed graffiti inside her locker in sloppy yellow letters.
Vamp tramp.
As first day pranks went, it was pretty mild. "Fashion critique, I guess," she said, touching it to find the paint dry. "I knew those fishnets last semester were a bad idea."
"That's not what it means." Finn was tightlipped, taut as a hound on point. He reached past to slam the locker shut. She flinched at the noise, discord to the chatter and laughter
around them.
"Explain then."
"Later. When there's less people about."
The sharp scent of ozone rode the air, a sure sign that Finn was angry. The witch had a fiery temper, and that was more than mere metaphor. She eyed his ginger hair. No smoke.
Good: there was nothing like trying to hustle a raging bundle of magical hormones outside before his hair combusted.
"Finn, are you okay?" she said tentatively.
"Like I said, later." He gave her a tight, grim smile. "I'm trying not to go all Human Torch on"
"Oh my god!"
The shriek split the air like lightning. Everyone turned to look, conversations dying away.
Across the hall, Grace Thelasso was hugging herself, stood in a clutter of books that she'd clearly dropped. And on the inside of her locker door was more graffiti, yellow and lurid.
Catch of the day.
But that, Celia suspected, wasn't what had made her scream.
No, the very dead, very rotten fish dripping out of her locker had probably done it.
Celia's stomach turned. Grace was a dolphin shapeshifter. And that...that was one sick message.
Grace was gasping like she was caught between tears and screams, her face yoghurtwhite against her dark hair, and no one seemed to want to go near her. As the smell hit, Celia
could see why: it had clearly been stewing in there for some time.
"Finn..." she said, trying not to breathe too deeply.
"Yeah, I see it," he murmured.
Grace stared into her locker, shivering. Then her legs crumpled and she hit the floor with an almighty thud. Chaos erupted – people rushed to her, a throng of waving hands and
overlapping voices while Grace lay as still and pale as a slaughtered swan in the middle of it all.
"Do you know first aid? Should we put her in the recovery position?"
"is disgusting, what is wrong with people?"
"like that. And check her airway – that's what they do on House…"
"reeks. Eugh, at least she didn't leave anything in there."
The bell for first period shrilled. Around them, the hallway started to empty out. Even with first day dramas, no one wanted to be tardy this soon.
Finn nudged her, voice muted. "Did they leave anything in your locker?"
God, she hoped not. Visions of dead bugs from a hundred Bmovies flashed before her. A quick glance showed nothing out of the ordinary, but she poked through her books to be
sure. "Just paint. Guess I was lucky."
Finn caught her arm. His eyes were dark blue slits, his fingers hot as if he'd been baking under the sun for hours. As he hustled her away, he sounded grim. "Maybe. But whoever it
is, they know about the Nightworld."
She heard what he didn't say, what made his grip a little too hard, his steps a little too fast.
Not just the Nightworld: us.
drifted through her classes in a daze, ears pricked for gossip. Everyone was talking about Grace, if not with any great accuracy. Rumour said she was pregnant, she had lifethreatening
meningitis, her boyfriend had ditched her, a storm of halftruths and outright lies told behind cupped hands.
By the time lunch rolled around, she was desperate for answers.
"You," she said, collaring Finn as he clumped out of history class. "Outside, now."
The hill at the edge of campus belonged unofficially to their circle of friends. So it was no great surprise to see Delphine Thetis already there, her long red hair in a plait, picking at
a limp salad.
"Phi!" Finn brightened, hauling her up into a huge, theatrical hug. "How are you?"
There was more to that question than social mores. Phi's grey eyes were soft and a little sad as she settled back down. "Okay. Getting used to it. It's still weird without Mom." She
gave a oneshouldered shrug. "And it's even weirder being human."
He rocked a hand. "Could be worse. If you were still mer, it might be you finding dead fish in your locker."
Phi frowned. "It's true then? No one in the pod would talk to me."
Before summer, Phi had been a dolphin shapeshifter, just like Grace Thelasso. She'd been their golden girl, and her father had been their leader.
But when her parents had arranged a marriage for her, the only way she could escape it was to give up her powers. That, it turned out, wasn't enough for her former fiancée. Far
from being an ideal husband, he was in fact a powerhungry maniac who'd enlisted a dragon and the local werewolf pack to help him wrest control from Phi's dad.
In the ensuing struggle, it had all gotten incredibly messy. Some nights, Celia still woke up gasping for air, surfacing from nightmares of a cave where her friends lay dying, from a
forest where she had been tortured. If it all seemed unreal, she had only to look at her little finger which had never healed entirely straight after the wolves broke it.
"Still?" Finn snorted. "They're idiots. It's true. And she's not the only one."
"Who else?" said Phi, looking intrigued.
Celia raised her hand.
"Really?"
"Really," she confirmed. "Just graffiti in mine." Then she prodded Finn in the leg. "And you're going to tell me exactly what it means and why you got all crabby."
"You too, darling?" A shadow fell over her, cast by a girl as effortlessly styled as a model. All long brown legs and limegreen eyes, Joana Katter looked every inch the wildcat she
became. "That makes three then."
"Who's the other one?" she asked. "Me, Grace..."
"Nessa Arlin." Celia knew her by sight: a bubbly blond cheerleader who happened to be a witch.
"What did they leave her?" said Finn, an edge to his voice.
"Suffer not a witch," answered Jo, distaste curling her mouth. "There was a burnt bit of meat in her locker too."
Some joke this was. "I think it's time you told me what mine meant," Celia said to Finn. "Why were you so mad?"
"Wait, what did yours say?" Jo asked.
"Vamp tramp. Whatever that means."
Phi's eyes flashed to her, wide. Jo's fingers flexed as if she wished she had claws.
"Tell her," instructed Phi.
Heaving a sigh, Finn lay back on the grass. His face was thoughtful as he gazed up at the sky. "It's a Nightworld term, sort of, from the enclaves. It's what they call the volunteers.
The ones who let the vampires do what they want."
"You mean feed?" He shook his head, and Celia got it. "You mean whatever they want."
"Yeah. You get fed from too often, your hormones get screwed up. It gets addictive. Eventually you can't tell the difference between pleasure and pain, which suits the vampires just
fine. My aunt..." His eyes were halfclosed, his voice deceptively tranquil. "She got caught up. My dad tried to get her out, and he pissed off a lot of important people doing it. That's
why he and Mom moved here."
"What happened to your aunt?"
"She died. I didn't even know about her until last year." He cracked a rueful grin. "You remember I went on a date with Lily Michelmas? Yeah. Dad gave me a big pep talk about the
dangers of dating a vampire. Told me all about Aunt Gwen, blissed out while they peeled off her skin. I told him there hadn't even been any tongue, never mind teeth and lifel
ong
addiction, but no, no, he had to leave me with that mental picture before I went out with one of the only girls who can see past the hair."
Celia laughed, and it helped a little. "Finn, it's not the hair. It's the fact you flirt with anything that breathes."
"Not anything," he said indignantly. "Only pretty things."
"Speaking of pretty things," said Jo, "Someone obviously knows about Riose. And they think he's feeding on Cee."
Celia sputtered.
"Of course I'm not," said a cool voice, and Celia looked up as the object of their conversation arrived.
Riose Orage came from an old and respectable vampire family. At first glance, he was lean as a sword, an unsmiling, unobtrusive boy with dark hair, but that was all part of his
camouflage. He moved with a panther's silky grace, and those narrow turquoise eyes took in everything and gave away almost nothing. Unless, of course, you happened to know
him well enough to see past the diffident act.
"We know you're not," said Jo with her usual impatience. "But our little doodlebugs think differently."
His attention swung to Celia. "The graffiti guys? Did they leave you a message?"
"They tagged my locker," she said cautiously.
His mouth drew tight. Riose's voice was very calm as he said, "With what?"
"Vamp tramp."
Silver spiked through his eyes like lightning. Jo flinched and touched her temples as if she had a headache. Finn was looking similarly pained, which meant Riose's anger was
leaking out into the air like carbon monoxide. At times like this, Celia was glad she was human and as supernaturally sensitive as a polystyrene cup.
"It's probably a joke," she suggested, though she couldn't even convince herself of that.
"Hilarious," snapped Riose. "Nothing gets them rolling in the aisles like death threats."
"It's sick, but it's just words," said Jo. She shrugged at Riose's incensed look. "Not saying I agree, Ri. Remember when Will Ratner set the fire alarms off in the middle of winter?
That wasn't fun either, but it was harmless."
"I don't like it," the vampire said, but some of the tension left his body.
"Well, neither do I," said Celia. "And if it happens again, then we'll worry. But I want to grill Phi about her sexy reborn soulmate"
Finn let out an enormous groan. "He's too old!"
"He's only been alive for a month," said Phi somewhat shyly.
"This time round!" objected Finn. "Before that he was twenty thousand years older than you. That's not an age gap, Phi, that's an age Grand Canyon. And he's a phoenix. He's
completely ruined my monopoly on spontaneous combustion."
Celia giggled at his outraged expression, and in the wave of protestations and confidences and laughter that followed, she almost forgot the slur defacing her locker and all that it might mean.
"Well, we survived," announced Finn as he caught up with Celia by the gates. "Day one of junior year is over."
"Hey, Farrier!" A longlegged black boy loped up to them. "When's the party?"
Finn gave him that weird upright hand clasp that seemed to be some kind of male bonding thing. Celia had tried it with Finn once and he'd looked at her in much the same way as
she imagined Victorian maiden aunts looked at debutantes when they used the salad fork for the fish course. "Hey Arch, how was summer?"
"Not bad, not bad." Arch wrinkled his nose, looking very much like the hare he shapeshifted into. "So c'mon, where and when?"
Finn was the oldest in their year, and his birthday almost always fell in the first week of the semester. Consequently, it had become something of an event. In the last two years,
there had been more breakups, makeups and shakeups than the average soap opera season.
"Friday. You free?"
"For one of your parties? I'm always free. Usual place?"
"Yup. Out in the barn. The parents are taking off for the weekend. Any chance you can bring over a couple of speakers?"
Arch grinned. It was easy to see where his nickname had come from: he'd started life as Evander Gabriel, but had become Archangel ten minutes into freshman year after someone made the obvious joke. Even if he didn't behave like one, when he smiled, he looked the part. "Maybe. Any chance you can give them back in one piece this year?"
"Hey, I didn't knock them over," said Finn, and in tandem, they looked at her. Figured.
"Jo was the one who danced on them!" she protested, hands held up to declaim her innocence.
"Yeah, but I seem to remember someone assuring me that they were designed to take her weight," said Finn.
"Yep, that rings a bell," agreed Arch, eyes twinkling. "And if Riose hadn't held you back, I'm pretty sure you'd have been up there defying the laws of physics."
"You were holding Nessa back," she pointed out.
Arch's amusement faded into a frown. "Yeah. You know, she thought that graffiti crap in her locker today was me? I mean, I was kind of a jerk, and the breakup was messy, but..."
"Any idea who it was?" she said lightly.
He shrugged, a line between his brows. "Not me. Like I told Ness." He hefted his bag over his shoulder with a faint look of alarm. "Speak of the devil woman..."
With a turn of speed that explained why he was a track star, Arch shot out of the gates as Nessa walked down the stairs with a gaggle of friends. From the daggers the cheerleader
glared at his back, she wasn't convinced of his innocence.
As she passed them, her glower melted into a smile full of sunshine. "Yours Friday?" she called to Finn.
He tipped her a wink. "You can be mine any day of the week, Ness."
"Arch'll kill you if he finds out," Celia muttered out of the corner of her mouth.
"I'll be discreet," said he for whom discretion was merely a winning word in Scrabble. He slung a friendly arm around her. "Whereas you, my gorgeous tramp, are clearly not."
"That's vamp tramp to you, Farrier." She grinned at him. "Hey, what do they call a witch's servants?"
He paused, looking pensive. Then he said, "Well, I call mine Phi and Celia..."
The elbow in his ribs, she considered, was entirely deserved.
took the same route home she always did, through the centre of town. And everything felt normal again – the words in her locker were shut away, halfforgotten. The sun
beat down on her, heat soaking into her skin like oil in a warm bath, while hard glints of light danced from glass and metal.
And then she saw a bright flash at the corner of her eye that didn't vanish as she moved, tucked down an alleyway.
That shade of yellow was eerily familiar.
She hesitated, then turned down the alleyway. And it was revealed. Huge straggling letters covered the brick wall. That in itself wasn't odd: every town had graffiti and Ryars Valley
was no exception. But the words sent a chill crawling down her spine.
There will be a reckoning.
There was something else, too, at the end of it. Two concentric circles overlaid by an inverted V. It seemed deliberate, but it meant nothing to her. She drifted closer, hardly aware
of anything else. Tentative, Celia brushed the paint with her fingertips. Dry.
A reckoning...
Someone touched her arm and she screeched, turning on them with flailing hands.
Her frankly pathetic attack was neutralized in seconds by a firm grip around her wrists. She met turquoise eyes, familiar and just a touch amused.
"Only me," Riose said. "Can I let go, or are you going to flap at me again?"
She scowled. "I wasn't flapping."
"You were." His thumb was brushing the inside of her wrist in a soft, absent motion that she couldn't seem to ignore. "Some selfdefence that was. Your mom would be outraged."
As it always did, the memory of her mother demonstrating judo moves on Riose and Finn brought a smile to her lips. "I was distracted."
"I can see why
," he remarked, his attention flicking to the wall. He let go of her, but not before she felt a momentary tightness in his grip. "They've been busy, haven't they?"
"Whoever they are," she said.
His jaw was set. There was something less than human in his eyes as he regarded that lurid threat, something of a predator's pitiless regard. "I have the feeling we'll find out soon
enough."
She made a face. "I hope not."
He didn't look at her, but there was something low and fierce in his voice as he said, "If they come near you, they'll have me to deal with."
"I can deal with them myself, thank you," she retorted. "You might have snuck up on me like a ninja"
"I called your name. Twice."
"like a ninja who talks very quietly," she amended with a frosty stare.
"I shouted, actually."
With a huff, Celia carried on. "but if the Spray Team come anywhere near me, I'll do exactly what Mom taught me to do."
Riose looked sceptical.
"Give them the Slone knee and run like hell," she clarified.
The corner of his mouth crooked up. "That sounds like your mom. I guess I should be glad she didn't demonstrate that move on me."
"Nah." Celia linked an arm through his and began to steer him back to the main street. "She likes you."
"No, she doesn't. And stop trying to distract me. This isn't just someone messing around in school now, Cee. This is something bigger."
"It's graffiti," she said. "It's some idiot with an aerosol and too much time."
"Maybe you're right. Or maybe they're saying what others want to. There's a reason we keep what we are secret. When humans find out we exist, it goes one of three ways. They
hate us or they fear us or they envy us."
His certainty hurt. She stopped, dropping his arm, and he turned to gaze at her, quizzical, as if he couldn't see that his words had separated them like the bars of a jail. Him is his
world, dark and wild, her in hers.
"And which one am I?" she said.
The silence bristled like a thicket full of nettles.
His face became expressionless, but she had seen that stillness in him before. It was practiced, his instinct when he was threatened or unsure, assessing the danger like a trained
professional.
And that...well, that wasn't so far from the truth.
