Trials of a Teenage Werevulture (Trilogy of a Teenage Werevulture Book 1)

by Emily Martha Sorensen

  “Nobody was there, and the filing cabinet your friend reported seeing was empty,” he said grimly. “Innocent people don’t clear out that quickly.”

  “I’m glad you believed us,” I said, swallowing.

  “I’ll be frank,” he said: “not everyone does. There are a lot who think it was just a teenager making something up to get attention. But she didn’t look like that to me. She looked scared. And even if some have their doubts, this is not a threat we can afford to ignore.”

  I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me.

  “You’re a very brave girl, Lisette,” he said.

  That made me feel worse. It told me there was something to be scared of, that I wasn’t just being paranoid. It wasn’t what I’d wanted to hear. “Thanks,” I muttered anyway.

  When I went to Mom and Dad, Mom blew her top.

  “No!” she shouted. “You are not going back to that — that place!”

  As if it hadn’t been her idea for me to go in the first place.

  “It’s not just my life on the line, Mom,” I said angrily. Angry was good. Angry kept me from feeling scared. “It’s everyone in the entire city. The police need evidence, and I can get it for them.”

  “You’re a teenager!” Mom exploded. “You shouldn’t be doing anything that puts anyone’s life on the line!”

  Dad said nothing, but I could tell from the tense look on his face that he agreed.

  Collette, for once, wasn’t talking. She had used one of her bird feet to open a soda can, but she was just holding it. She hadn’t taken a sip.

  “Look, I don’t want to do it either,” I said. It was hard to hold on to my anger when I knew what they were saying was reasonable, but I tried to anyway. “Someone needs to. Do you want me to be a coward who runs away when I can save people, or do you want me to be the kind of person who does the right thing, even when it’s dangerous?”

  Mom was speechless.

  “Yesterday you didn’t even know what taint was,” Dad murmured.

  “Yeah, and that’s the point,” I said fiercely. “If we stop whatever Rarity Clan’s planning before anyone gets tainted, every other teenager in town can have the luxury of never having heard of it, too.”

  “Every other teenager who doesn’t pay attention in History class,” Collette muttered.

  Oh, shut up, I thought. Like you were any different in high school.

  Dad drew in a deep breath. “Don’t say a word to Annette,” he said. “If she knew, she’d think that gave her license to be incautious, too.”

  “Simon!” Mom gasped. “You don’t think we’re going to let her do this!”

  “I’d really rather not,” Dad said solemnly, “but she has a point we can’t ignore. If Rarity Clan isn’t stopped, it might very well be dangerous for everyone in town before long. Including Lisette.”

  My stomach clenched. I tried very hard not to show how much that logic affected me.

  “I kind of wish it had been me in this position instead,” Collette spoke up. “And I’m really glad it wasn’t.”

  Truer words had never been spoken.

  The next day, I skipped the last half of Flyers’ Ed — I had better not get an F in this class, I thought grumpily when Mom and Collette came to pick me up — and they drove me to the public library. No words were exchanged.

  As I got out of the car, Mom burst into tears.

  “Mom!” Collette hissed. “Don’t be conspicuous! Do you want them to know we know?”

  Mom started crying harder and slammed her fist on the steering wheel.

  I had no clue what to do with this. “I-I’ll see you later today,” I said with false cheerfulness. “After the meeting’s over. I’ll give you a call when it’s time to pick me up.”

  Collette nodded curtly.

  I stood there, hovering. Should I give them a hug? Should I tell Mom I loved her? That would probably just make Mom cry harder.

  Collette made a shooing motion with her hand and jerked her head towards the fountain, where two other teenagers from the clan were sitting and watching us curiously.

  “Well, bye,” I said awkwardly, shutting the door. “Love you!” I couldn’t resist adding, even though we didn’t usually say that.

  Mom choked on a sob and then drove off.

  Collette’s going to have a really trying afternoon trying to calm her down, I thought. I felt bad for making Mom so upset, but I was sort of mad, too. I was the one who was going into danger, and she was freaking out so much that it was making this seem all about her.

  I tried to beat back the knot of fear in my stomach and act normally.

  “Hi,” I said, sitting down next to the two teenagers. They were perched on the top of the three stairs up to the fountain, so I did the same, even though the top step felt damp. Above us, a half-human, half-seal was delicately spraying water into the air. I had never seen a real selkie behave like that.

  “Hi,” the guy said. “Lisa, right?”

  “Lisette,” I corrected. I waited for him to remind me what their names were, because I’d completely forgotten. I didn’t want to ask, because sometimes people got touchy when you told them you’d forgotten their names because they’d just been forgettable.

  “Oh, right,” he said. “What’s up with your mom?”

  Great. I still didn’t know what to call them. “Uhh, you know how moms worry,” I said vaguely.

  “Is it depression?” the girl asked. “My mom gets like that when she forgets to take her meds.”

  “My mom hasn’t taken medication today,” I said carefully.

  The girl nodded. “Yeah, I know how that is.”

  Man. I couldn’t even remember these two’s species. The only species I remembered from the meeting were the pumpkin and the echidna I’d met afterwards. Come on, weren’t they going to help me out here? They’d only met one person on Tuesday. I’d met, like, fifteen!

  I couldn’t even remember the name of the cute guy. I really couldn’t be expected to remember the names of a girl I’d barely talked to and a guy who wasn’t cute!

  Maybe I shouldn’t say that to them.

  “Uh, so,” I said awkwardly, “how long have you two been in Rarity Clan?”

  “Only two weeks,” the guy said.

  “Two and a half weeks,” the girl added.

  “Wow, that’s not long at all,” I said, surprised.

  The girl shrugged. “The clan only started three weeks ago.”

  My mouth fell open. “What? It’s that new?”

  “Yeah,” the guy said. “We’ve never changed locations before, though. This’ll be weird.”

  My heart was racing. I wondered if the police could hear my heart beat under the recording thingy that was under my shirt. Come to think of it, it was starting to feel really uncomfortable under my shirt. I wanted to check the wire and make sure it wasn’t coming loose. I started to, and then remembered that that would be really stupid.

  Would they search me at the meeting? Where were the police that were supposed to be watching me, anyway? I couldn’t see them anywhere. Of course, if I could see them and could tell for sure they were police, it would be a bad thing. But man, I was antsy.

  “Ummm, so what species are you two, anyway?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

  “Umdhlebe,” the guy said.

  “Ghilliedhu,” the girl said.

  Well, that told me exactly nothing. If they’d at least said “weresomething,” I’d know which race they each were.

  “A specter and a . . . vampire?” I guessed hopefully, figuring they weren’t giants or abatwas or basajauns, because those would have been obvious.

  “We’re both kapres,” the girl said.

  Oh, kapres. That meant they weren’t really that different from me. Kapres were like weres, except they shifted into trees instead of animals. “I’ve never heard of either of those species.”

  “I told you about mine last meeting,” the guy snapped. “Umdhlebes are a type of poisonous tree. There are on
ly three of us in the city, and one of them is my dad.”

  “So you chose to become one on purpose?” I asked.

  He looked very offended. “Is there something wrong with that?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “It’s just that my turning went wrong. I figured everyone’s had.”

  He looked annoyed. “Well, it did go wrong. I wound up the wrong subspecies, so I won’t get to help turn anybody in the future. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t want to be an umdhlebe!”

  Right, got it, Mr. Kapreclaneasilyoffended, I thought.

  “My turning didn’t go wrong,” the girl said, swiping at the screen of her phone. It looked like she was playing Angry Werebirds. “It’s just that my clan only has six people, and they’re all old. My best friend was supposed to become a ghilliedhu, and then she decided to become a kappa instead. Can you believe that? No loyalty!”

  And so you decided to quit the clan you chose to join? I thought skeptically. Guess who has no loyalty.

  Another teenager I vaguely recognized from two days ago trotted over from the bike rack. It looked like he’d just locked up his bike. How he’d managed to bike here I wasn’t sure, because he had enormous bug wings attached to his shoulders.

  Since his arms and neck were covered in fur, and it looked like the fur kept going under his T-shirt, I was pretty sure he wasn’t a werebutterfly in half-form or something, but what in the world was he? I couldn’t remember whether I’d already asked him or not. Maybe I shouldn’t ask if he was going to get all offended, too.

  “Hey, Alex. Hey, Jordan,” the new guy said.

  Yes! Now I knew both their names! The girl was Alex, and the guy was Jordan! Or, wait . . . maybe the guy was Alex, and the girl was Jordan? Argh! They both had unisex names!

  “Hi, Alex,” the girl said, raising her hand briefly without looking up from her phone.

  Oh, you are kidding me, I fumed. There are two people in the clan who have the same name?

  “You were . . . what was your name again?” the new guy asked me.

  “Lisette,” I said. “Lisette Wereclanvulture. What about you?”

  “Alex Basajaunclanmothman,” he said.

  The other guy looked startled. “Wait, you’re not a weremoth?”

  The furry guy who was definitely named Alex looked annoyed. “No. I’ve told you that twice now. There are over a hundred weremoths in the city.”

  “Oh. I just figured you were, I don’t know, a rare species of moth or something.”

  “And that’s the second time you’ve said that,” the mothman said sourly.

  I grinned. It was nice to see the easily-offended guy do exactly the same thing.

  Two more teenagers that I vaguely recognized were heading towards us, one from inside the library and one slamming the door to a car she had driven here.

  I felt a slight stab of jealousy about the girl who looked eighteen or nineteen having a car, but only a slight one, since most werebirds didn’t bother with cars unless they had unturned kids. There just wasn’t much point when flying was faster and you didn’t need to pay a ton of money to do it.

  The one heading out of the library was a very short boy with a very long beard. He tripped over it, and then he tossed it over his shoulder in annoyance.

  I wondered why he didn’t shave it off. And then I wondered if it always grew back. He was a tomte, right? There had to be a reason why they always had beards. He’d mentioned that even his mom had a beard, which was pretty appalling. Him I remembered from the other day, primarily because he hadn’t noticed until the end of the meeting that he’d had an entire slice of pizza stuck in his beard.

  From what I understood, tomtes weren’t super uncommon, but his parents had had a fight with the leader of the tomte clan in Sky City, so they’d quit, and he’d come to Rarity Clan instead. He’d found the clan through the website.

  The cute pumpkin guy drove in with a gorgeous girl in the car next to him, and I was immediately distracted. Who was she? Was she his girlfriend?

  As soon as he parked the car, she leaned over and gave him a long, lingering kiss.

  I made a face. Yep. Girlfriend. And please, get a room.

  At 4:05, according to the clock on the library, Loretta Vampireclanso-called-jiangshi finally bothered to show up.

  “You’re late,” I told her helpfully. “Rodrigo told us not to come late.”

  “Just giving everyone the chance to arrive before I did,” she said calmly. “Is everyone here?”

  “My brother couldn’t come because he had a dentist appointment,” a girl said, raising her hand.

  “Why couldn’t he just reschedule?” a boy next to her asked. “This meeting’s supposed to be important.”

  The girl put her hands on her hips. “Do you know how hard it is to get an appointment for a filling in a vampire fang?”

  “I’m aware of Jamal’s appointment,” the woman said. “Is the new boy here?”

  A tall and awkward doglike boy raised his hand.

  “Good,” Loretta Vampireclanso-called-jiangshi said. “Then I’d like you all to gather around me. Six in front, six behind, the rest on either side. Not too far away, please.”

  My heart skipped a beat. “What are we doing?” I asked.

  “We’re walking to our destination,” she said briskly. “Now please hurry up. We don’t have any time to waste.”

  I walked to her right side and couldn’t help but glance behind nervously. There was a faun man sitting on a bench outside the library who I was pretty sure was one of the police officers keeping an eye on me. He had a stroller that could easily fit an abatwa partner, and he’d been there since before I’d arrived. He didn’t seem to be watching us, but hopefully that was a good sign. Either I was wrong about who the police officers were, or he was doing a good job of not being suspicious.

  Either way, that was good. That was good, right?

  Man, that wire under my shirt seemed itchy. I wanted to scratch it, but that would be a really, really bad idea.

  Loretta Vampireclanso-called-jiangshi started to walk, and we all followed in a crowd around her, the ones in front continuously looking back to make sure they weren’t going too quickly.

  We walked to the end of the corner before I dared sneak a quick glance back. The faun was still sitting on the bench, flipping through a thick book. There was somebody walking towards the building really slowly. And the clock still said 4:05.

  Huh? I thought, startled. We’ve been walking for several minutes, surely —

  There was a gasp ahead of me, and I spun around to see what the people in front of us were seeing. A car had just turned the corner and was moving towards us at a pace resembling a glacier. On the other side of the sidewalk, a werepig woman had just turned the corner, walking an enormous dog that was straining at its leash and yet moving like a action scene in slow-motion.

  “Wh-wh-what’s going on?” one of the guys in front burst out.

  “We’re just moving more quickly than everyone else around us,” Loretta Vampireclanso-called-jiangshi said calmly. “I told you we had no time to waste. Now please, let’s pick up the pace.”

  There were murmurs of awe around me, and everyone did start walking more quickly. I felt a spurt of panic as we turned the corner ahead, then another as we turned a second corner, then a third.

  The officers who are supposed to be watching me won’t be able to follow us! I thought. They’ll have no clue where we went!

  It was all the more terrifying because I was fairly sure that was exactly what Rarity Clan was intending. And I had no idea if the police had known to prepare for it.

  About half an hour later, we reached a shabby house with an overgrown yard that was full of foot-tall dandelions and other weeds. The mailbox was rusted shut, and one of the numbers had fallen off the door. There was a lighter spot where it had once been, so I tried to memorize the address, anyway, despite the sinking sensation that we wouldn’t meet here again after we were done with today.


  Loretta Vampireclanso-called-jiangshi had successfully left behind anyone who had been assigned to keep me safe. And there was nothing I could do about it.

  Chapter 10: Baobhan Sith

  “Hello again!” Rodrigo said with a friendly smile as we piled into the rundown house. “It’s good to see you all!”

  “Is this where you live?” a boy demanded. “Because it’s really, really ugly.”

  Rodrigo laughed. “No, I’m afraid I’m just renting it for the day. For reasons that will soon become obvious, we won’t be meeting in the same place twice from now on. We’re going to have to be a little bit more discrete.”

  I could see other teenagers around me stiffening. All of a sudden, I wasn’t the only person who realized something was wrong.

  As for me, my blood was like ice. If Rodrigo was admitting it, that was a very bad thing.

  He’s about to taint us all right now! Run! I wanted to scream.

  I spun around, but the front door was already blocked by the centaur, who stood casually in front of it. My gaze flew to the windows, which were all boarded shut.

  This was bad. This was very, very bad. This was very, very, very, very bad.

  Should I shout and warn them? Would it do any good if I did? I didn’t think it would do any good if I did. And if I tried it, that would only tell Rodrigo I was the one who’d told the police. Of course, he might suspect me anyway. Did he suspect me?!

  “Oh, there’s no need to worry,” Rodrigo said with a laugh. “I’m not suggesting you do anything illegal, or immoral for that matter. It’s just that we have a guest this meeting who has good reason to keep their species secret.”

  “Who?” the mothman guy demanded.

  “Me,” Loretta Vampireclanso-called-jiangshi said calmly, stepping through the crowd. She sat down on a dilapidated couch, and then, with one smooth movement, removed one of her heavy, steel-tipped boots.

  Gasps rang through the crowd.

  “I thought she was a vampire,” a girl said.

  “Is she a basajaun?” a guy murmured.

  “Do vampires have goat feet?” I heard somebody else ask.