“Underwater Acoustics Handbook? Songs of Poverty and Death? Weird, Anna, very weird. Not seeing a common thread in all these books.”
“I am a woman of many interests.”
“Or a woman who grabbed whatever books were around to build a fort.”
Anna’s face was now revealed. She looked paler than usual.
“Here’s my theory about your mom,” I said. “I think he’s threatening her or something.”
I wasn’t entirely clear on why Francis might be threatening Principal Saunders, or what he might want. But I really liked the idea of Francis being involved in evil goings-on.
“Why would Francis be threatening my mom?”
I told her about the look on Principal Saunders’s face after the rat stampede. “Pretty suspicious, huh?”
Anna was unimpressed by my powers of deduction. “Not especially. Mom really, really doesn’t like vampires. She didn’t even before Dad ran away. But she’s much worse now.”
“Oh,” I said. “That does make sense.”
“You know how my parents were, Mel.” She lowered her voice. “Before he left.”
According to Anna, her parents had the love to end all loves. They had been together since their first year of college, and to quote Anna, every passing year only saw them more in love. To be honest, they didn’t seem that much more in love than my parents. They weren’t superdemonstrative around each other. I’d seen them hold hands a few times and smile at each other, but that was Mom and Dad pretty much every night of the week. But Anna was convinced it was the love of the ages.
Until her dad ran off. With a vampire.
“What if Francis caused the Ratocalypse as, I don’t know, a warning? And what I witnessed was him telling her so with his steely blue eyes and her freaking out?”
Anna spluttered. I couldn’t tell if it was laughter or not. “Your worry about Cathy has broken your brain, Mel. You’re saying you think Francis is responsible for a plague of rats and scaring my mom,” Anna said slowly. “As opposed to oh, say, the plague of rats being the thing that scared her. I hear she was not alone in being upset.”
I shuddered, trying not to remember the feel of them scurrying over my toes.
My theory did sound unlikely when she put it like that.
“Don’t worry about Cathy,” Anna said. “Love doesn’t last. Francis isn’t going to stick around. He’s a vampire who’s a million years older than her. He’ll be bored very soon.”
I stared at Anna in appalled silence for what felt like hours. Anna somehow intuited that she had not entirely reassured me.
She cleared her throat. “Besides, Mom’s doing what she can to get him thrown out.”
“Really?” I said too loudly. The studious freshmen at the next table over glared. The library was fuller than it usually was. Maybe because the cafeteria smelled of solvents. No rats had made it into the library.
“Mom fought the enrollment,” Anna said quietly. “Said it was inappropriate to have a vampire at the school, that it put the students in danger. She hasn’t given up, even though he’s here. She warned me to stay away from Francis, made me promise not to have anything to do with him and not to tell him anything if he asked me questions.”
“Isn’t that a bit extreme?”
Why would Principal Saunders think Francis would ask Anna questions? Except that she’d warned me not to talk to him and not to let Anna talk to him as well.
She was acting like he was dangerous.
“After what Dad did? I can’t think of anything that would be too extreme. He texted me his good-bye note, Mel. Texted. He didn’t even wait till I was back from camp to say good-bye.” Anna’s eyes began to well.
I’d been at fencing training camp with her when Principal Saunders came to give her the news and take her home. Anna had crumpled. It had been awful. But this was the first I’d heard about the texted farewell. I didn’t know what to say, so I patted her shoulder. How could he be so cruel? Why?
No wonder Anna hadn’t wanted to hang much after that. I wished again I’d tried harder to see her. I should have gone to her house, not accepted her brush-offs. My friend had needed me and I hadn’t been there. She still needed me.
“I’m sorry,” I said at last.
I was going to help her and her mom. They wanted Francis out of here and so did I. Maybe that was all that was wrong with Principal Saunders: The constant presence of a vampire in her school was making it impossible for her to put aside her personal heartbreak and concentrate on her job.
I leaned forward and spoke softly, partly because I was plotting and partly because the librarian was already giving me death glares. “But I’ve got a plan.”
Anna gave a low moan.
“I’m going to need your help.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Great School After-Hours Escapade
That was how Anna and I ended up creeping through the darkened halls of the school late that night. (After we’d both finished our homework and fencing practice. What? Cathy isn’t the only one who wants to get into a good college, even though I don’t know which good college I want to get into yet.) I’d explained to Anna that our target was Francis’s file. It could provide us with clues about him.
Anna was not entirely convinced of the genius of this plan.
The dark was almost as bad as the fact that the air still reeked of industrial-strength cleaners. A day of classes hadn’t done much to weaken it. Both our eyes started watering.
To be fair, I was certain it was better than the stench of rat innards.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Anna said behind me. “I can’t believe I agreed to do this.”
Anna had raised a few teeny-weeny objections about us getting caught, possibly leading to jail time and, even worse, all hope of getting into a good college destroyed.
“Think of it this way,” I said. “We walk through the school every day. Multiple times a day! This is practically routine. Pretty boring, if you ask me.”
“Not in the dark,” Anna whispered. “Not when we’ve broken in!”
“We used your mom’s keys. That’s not breaking in.”
“We took her keys without her knowledge. And we’re still walking around in the dark.”
“Pretend it’s an eclipse,” I whispered back. “Just your average, everyday, really boring … eclipse.”
“I’m here in the dark with a crazy person,” Anna muttered.
In some ways, I felt like Anna was the weak link in our awesome investigating team.
On the other hand, she’d been the one who got her hands on her mother’s keys. Without those, I would’ve had to commit the breaking part of breaking and entering.
Just entering couldn’t possibly be a crime.
Well, maybe half a crime.
I’d never been to the school at night—except for prom and theater and games and fencing practice and tournaments. Okay, I’d been there at night many times, but now, when there wasn’t anyone else around—it was scary.
No. It wasn’t scary. It was fine, and I was fine. I was on a mission.
I gave myself a mental shake. Anna might be falling apart, but I was going to keep it together. I was only doing what needed to be done: saving my friends from worry about their mothers and seduction by vampires. It just so happened that that was one bird. And I had the two stones. Or was it two birds with one stone?
Whatever it was. Someone had to act. That person was me.
I opened the door to the principal’s office. Anna gave a small squeak every time the keys in my hand jangled.
Inside the office, the darkness seemed somehow darker. On the upside, the smell of solvent was less strong here. On the downside, I was briefly possessed by the insane thought that Ms. Cuddy—intrepid secretary of Principal Saunders—might be sitting behind her desk in the dark. Waiting to pounce. I crept forward just the same, Anna bumping into me as she scuttled behind.
Shockingly, ninja secretaries failed to leap from t
he gloom.
I breathed in and out, keeping steady, inching forward until I reached my gleaming goal.
There was moonlight filtering through the blinds onto the filing cabinets. I knelt on the floor trying to read the label on the lowest drawer.
A loud wail shattered the silence.
Anna screamed and jumped back, hitting the wall, and I bit my tongue until two things happened.
One, I tasted blood, and two, I realized the sound was my phone ringing. I drew it out of my pocket, remembering the day when a fire-alarm ring tone had seemed the perfect solution to my constantly missing calls.
“You didn’t put it on silent?” Anna demanded.
“Hey,” I said, opening the phone, “I’m new to a life of crime.”
“Don’t answer it,” Anna said. “Mel. Don’t answer—”
“Hi, Kris,” I said, waving a hand at Anna to calm her. She should know by now that if I didn’t answer, my wonderful sister would keep calling. Kristin’s very determined. “Thanks for calling me back. I’m afraid this isn’t the best time—”
“I thought you needed help urgently,” Kristin said, sounding annoyed. “With this guy.”
Kristin doesn’t actually like guys. She says this gives her a special insight into them, because the onlooker sees more of the game.
“Phone,” Anna hissed. “Off. Now!”
“Just a sec, Anna,” I mouthed, forgetting it was probably too dark for Anna to see.
“Cathy’s an idiot,” Kristin said. “I mean this in the nicest way possible. You know I love her. But if she’s hung up on a hot vampire, you need me. Vampires are like catnip for some girls. They’re girlnip.”
I giggled. “Girlnip.”
“Hang up,” Anna ordered, low and urgent. “Mel, end that call right now!”
I nodded and waved my hand to assure her that I was in the process of ending the call.
“You don’t want Cathy getting a taste for vampires,” Kristin continued. “You don’t want her to end up one of those idiots who hang out in the Shade wearing T-shirts that say I’M CHERRY, TAKE A BITE, do you?”
“No!” I said. Perhaps a little too loudly, but the image of Cathy in a vampire-groupie T-shirt was deeply disturbing.
Anna lunged forward, grabbed the phone from my hand, and slapped it closed.
“Sorry,” she said, looking down at me and panting. “But this is not the time for a chat. We’re on a mission. And it’s not going to be one that ends with us both in jail.”
“You’re right, you’re right,” I said. “On task! I’ll call Kristin later.”
“You don’t have to yell,” Anna whispered.
I gave the phone in her hand a longing look, but Anna slipped it into her pocket.
“Um, Anna, could I have my phone back? I need the light to read by.”
“Swear you won’t call your sister?”
“I swear.”
By my phone’s light I found the right cabinet and then riffled through the folders, squinting at tabs. At last I found the D’s. Duan—my name—came right before Duvarney, but I nobly resisted the impulse to check my file. Breaking into the school to read Francis’s records was completely justifiable and noble; looking at my own would be wrong.
But so tempting.
But so wrong.
I forced myself to move on to the name Francis Havelock Maurice Duvarney, scrawled on top of a folder. I yanked it out and flipped it open.
There were only a few sheets of paper inside—mine had been close to bursting its contents everywhere—which included his address (in the Shade, of course) and his date of birth, and noted that:
Francis Duvarney’s former education was at Eton College, Windsor, England, in the 1860s. No record of graduation. Became a vampire aged seventeen. No criminal record before or after transition.
Then it became much more interesting.
“I knew it,” I said. “I knew no vampire would ever go to high school without an ulterior motive. What a creep! How could he?”
I was becoming more heated and furious by the minute.
“Cathy thought he wanted to mingle with us,” I said. “She thought he was showing interest. She thought he was being nice.”
I spat out the word with such force that Anna made a noise. I’d almost forgotten she was there. She sat down beside me.
“What—what’s he really doing?” she asked, her voice low.
I knelt there in the dark of the principal’s office, clutching the folder. My suspicions had been confirmed.
“He’s studying us. He’s writing a book,” I said. “On Adolescent Homo sapiens sapiens and Love. There is an entire section here about a previous human subject he’s been studying, and how he needed a broader range of subjects for his great work. He says that part of the thesis is that if vampires study human emotions, such as love, it will help them recover their own human feelings. Francis is studying Cathy’s feelings so he can teach himself how to be in love! He’s faking the whole thing!”
That entire scene, with the rats and Francis and Cathy holding each other: What if Francis had set that up? What if he’d just been mirroring Cathy’s reactions when he held her? How was I supposed to tell Cathy that?
“Ugh,” Anna said at last. “Well, that’s enough to make Cathy dump him like a ton of undead bricks. He’s using her.”
“I’ll kill him,” I said. Or rather, snarled, judging from the way Anna flinched back.
“Are there any other clues?” Anna asked. “How are we going to get him to go back where he came from?”
“You don’t think this is enough? Surely once I tell Cathy that he’s studying her and she dumps him, that’ll be the end of Francis. He won’t want us knowing that we’re his test subjects. Surely that means we’d be compromised. Scientists never want the guinea pigs to know what they’re up to.”
“I hope you’re right,” Anna said. “I don’t think I’m up for any more adventures like this.”
I nodded.
“Seriously, Mel, I’d really prefer if we kept things legal from now on.”
“Aw, you’re no fun,” I told her. “But your wish is my command. Though I can’t promise that what I’ll do to Francis Havelock Maurice Duvarney will be entirely legal.”
“Fine,” Anna said decisively, prying the scrunched file out of my hands, straightening it, and using the light of my phone to return it to its correct place. “Whatever you do to him, I’m sure that vampire deserves it.”
CHAPTER NINE
Farewell to Francis
“He’s writing a book. A scientific treatise. About us!” I told Kristin. Returning her call was my top priority after I’d climbed through the window and into my bedroom.
“Who is?” Kristin asked. She sounded annoyed. (It should be noted that my lovely older sister often sounds that way. Or at least she does when she talks to me.)
“Francis. The undead pain in my butt!”
“Why did you hang up on me?”
“Erm,” I said. If I told her that I’d broken into school, there was a chance Kristin would be impressed. She loved to hear about my adventures. But there was also a big chance she’d guilt me into confessing to Mom and Dad. She did not always approve of my adventures. “I was busy. With, um, things.”
“Things?”
“I was with Anna,” I told her, because the truth is always best. “She’s depressed. She’s the one who hung up on you.”
“Oh, that’s right. Her dad ran away, didn’t he?”
“Yup,” I told her. “He hasn’t written to her or called or anything. He told her he was leaving her mother in a text message.” There was a moment of silence as we contemplated what that would be like.
“Grim.”
“Very. Anyway, Francis—the undead annoying person—is writing a book, the title of which is On Adolescent Homo sapiens sapiens and Love. That’s why he’s at school. Not to complete his education. He’s writing a book about us humans. It’s a project to get up close and personal wit
h us and study our mating rituals.”
“With Cathy as his test subject?”
“Yes!”
“While Cathy thinks he likes her?”
“Yes!”
“But it’s all for his book?”
“Yes!”
“Creep.”
“Yes!”
“How deep in is Cathy?”
I thought of the expression on Cathy’s face as she gazed at Francis during the Ratastrophe. “Deep.”
“Hmmm. You can’t tell Cathy, then; you’ll have to tell him.”
“Tell him what?”
“That you’re on to him. That you’ll spoil his pure research by telling Cathy that he’s using her. He’ll have to use his wiles on someone else.”
I visualized informing Francis that he was completely, utterly, and irretrievably in the wrong. I visualized Francis humiliated and ashamed. I visualized myself screaming into that overly handsome face.
“That may be the most fun conversation ever.”
It wasn’t.
For starters, it was almost impossible to get Francis alone. He was either with Cathy or surrounded by vampire groupies, or he was with Cathy and surrounded by vampire groupies. I arrived superearly and sat on the school steps waiting for him. But he was already surrounded as he walked up the steps. He gave me a cold, very short nod.
“Love you too, Francis,” I couldn’t resist calling out after him.
Robyn Johnson glared at me. A cheerleader’s glare can cut you to the very bone.
For half the day, I tried and continuously failed to get him alone. Finally, I grabbed Ty just before the end of lunch. “I need you to distract Cathy so I can talk to Francis.”
“Why do you want to talk to Francis?” Ty asked, with a woundingly suspicious look. “You’re going to be mean, aren’t you?”
“Ty!”
“You are. I know you are. I don’t think I can be part of it. Cathy’s really happy. Happier than I’ve ever seen her.”
That was a complete exaggeration. Cathy was always happy. Just because she was reserved didn’t mean she wasn’t happy. I began to explain this, but Ty ignored me.
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