The former wereechidna girl, who was standing near me, gave me an odd look.
Please don’t make me say anything else stupid, Mom, I thought, sighing.
“Gotta go now,” I said. “See ya soon, okay? Bye.”
I hung up before Collette or Mom could protest. They took the hint and didn’t call me back immediately. I hopped from one foot to the other, looking around, wondering if Rodrigo had left anyone behind to watch us.
An aura, maybe? No, there wasn’t any wind, and auras were only invisible while they were flying. There could be a specter hiding up in a tree with binoculars or something, though. Or maybe a werebird, or wereinsect?
Half the teenagers had already started walking back to the library. I watched regretfully as the kapre and the former pumpkin headed that way, chatting excitedly and exchanging phone numbers. I would have liked the Asian pumpkin guy to stick around. He made nice eye candy.
The wereechidna’s parents picked her up first. I found myself wondering what kind of conversation they were having after they drove off. Was she going to tell them she had changed her species? Were they going to freak out when she mentioned the pink turning stone, like Mom had?
Maybe she wouldn’t tell them about it. Maybe she’d just say it was a magical power some rare species had, to turn people a second time. Would they buy that?
Maybe she’d try to keep it a secret, and they’d find out for the first time at the full moon, and they’d flip out, and she’d try to pretend it just happened randomly. Would that work?
Man, I was glad I didn’t try to lie to my parents. It seemed like it would make things really complicated.
After nearly fifteen minutes, and two other people being picked up, Mom and Collette arrived. I ran over and tried to open the back door, but it was locked. Mom quickly pushed a button to unlock it.
Paranoid, Mom? I thought. She never locked the doors while she was driving.
“So what happened?” Mom blurted out as I was putting on my seat belt.
“Just a minute,” I said, checking the back seat. No insects or anything else that could be a were that had snuck in after me. Mom wasn’t the only one feeling paranoid. “Okay,” I said, finding the back seat clean. “Start driving and I’ll explain.”
Mom pushed the gas pedal and turned the steering wheel, and we were soon heading back down the busy street toward the library we had left.
Where to start, I wondered? Well, might as well start with the most important thing.
“There was a pink turning stone,” I said, “but nobody got tainted.”
There was a sharp intake of breath from Collette, and Mom’s knuckles gripped the steering wheel more tightly.
“He told us all about it,” I said. “He said that aswangs can change people’s species with tainted turning stones. It’s a tool. You know, like, how knives can hurt people but they can also cut food or whatever. It’s a dangerous tool, and he said it is illegal, but it shouldn’t be, because when it’s used safely, people don’t get tainted. He said he can turn anyone whose turning went wrong into the species they wanted to be in the first place.”
“You . . .” Collette didn’t seem able to get the words out. “You didn’t . . . did you?”
“No, I didn’t,” I said. “The worst part about being a werevulture is not having a clan. I didn’t think you guys would let me near the werehawk turning stone if I had touched a pink one.”
Mom exhaled loudly. “You’d better believe it.”
I hesitated. Should I tell them I thought Rodrigo was hiding something? I didn’t really have any proof.
I’d talk to Dad about it later. Maybe he would tell me I was absolutely right, and maybe he’d tell me I was just being paranoid. I wasn’t sure which it would be, and I wanted to hear his opinion before anybody else’s.
“Loretta Vampireclanso-called-jiangshi was there,” I continued, my voice accusing. “She’s not a jiangshi, and she is a total liar, just like I said.”
Mom winced. “I’m sorry that I didn’t . . .”
I didn’t wait for her to finish. “She’s a time vampire. She sucks time from people. She can also give it away. That’s why the meeting took two hours for us, but only a few minutes for everyone outside. I assume she was giving us all extra time. She did that on the way there, too. Everyone else was moving really slowly around us.”
“That sounds . . .” Mom said slowly.
“… really dangerous,” Collette finished for her.
“… like a baobhan sith,” Mom finished.
I blinked. “You know what that is?”
“Only from legend,” Mom said. “As far as I know, all the clans were wiped out before the Middle Ages. The species had a very bad reputation.”
“They couldn’t all be evil,” Collette said. “Not an entire species.”
“Were they all bad guys?” Collette asked worriedly.
Mom was silent for a minute. “It’s possible,” she said. “If the clans chose new members based not on family relationships but based on shared beliefs, and those shared beliefs were nasty ones . . . it’s possible. You understand, though, that that wouldn’t apply to anyone who was a baobhan sith today.”
“She said that they’d been persecuted,” I said. “I guess that would explain . . .”
I stopped as I heard a siren behind us. There were flashing lights in the rearview mirror.
“Mom!” Collette shouted. “Did you run a red light or something?”
Mom pulled to the side of the road, and a police officer got out. A police officer who looked suspiciously familiar. Like the faun who had had the stroller outside the library.
“I knew it!” I said triumphantly. “I knew you were —”
“Ma’am,” he cut me off immediately, not looking at me, acting like he hadn’t been assigned to protect me at all, “were you aware that you ran a stop sign back there?”
“Um,” Mom faltered, staring at him through the window she had rolled down, “I’ve never seen a stop sign back there, and I’ve driven here a hundred times . . .”
“Shhh,” said a voice from beside me, and I looked over and jumped. There was a tiny pixie on the seat next to me. She must have been hiding up her partner’s sleeve and swished in while no one was looking. “We need to warn you not to go back to the station or try to contact us again.”
“Rodrigo does have a pink turning stone, and he used it on people, and he didn’t taint them, but he says aswangs can change people’s species, and oh, they have a baobhan sith, that’s how we lost you —”
“We know all that,” the pixie said, cutting me off. “We answered the call from Alex Basajaunclanmothman. He’s dead.”
I gaped. “What? But — but — I saw him just a few minutes ago —”
“Not a mark on him, just like a jiangshi killing,” the pixie said quietly. “Except that we saw no one approach. Pretty sure somebody stole his remaining time.”
My mouth felt dry. For the first time, I realized what we were dealing with. Rodrigo wasn’t just a nice guy with an unusual power, and Loretta wasn’t just a liar who felt her species was persecuted. If Alex was dead, they were murderers.
And if they thought he was the one who’d told the police about them two days ago, that meant they had wanted to kill me.
Chapter 12: Danger
Completely unreasonably, Dad expected me to still go to school every day, to keep on going to Flyers’ Ed, and to more or less act like everything was normal.
“If you think you’re in danger, the best thing you can do is to act like there’s nothing suspicious about you,” he told me.
Easy for him to say. And Mom of all people agreed with him!
“You can’t stop living your life just because you’re afraid,” she told me.
Hello! Was this the same person who’d dissolved into tears about the thought of me going to that meeting? She seemed perfectly calm now, except that she kept texting me several times a day to make sure I was okay. I’d had my phone tak
en away twice in class now because I’d answered her texts right away so that she wouldn’t worry, which seemed totally unfair.
Other than that, class went on like normal. We studied Federalists versus Anti-Federalists for the third year in a row, did mind-numbing trigonometry, ran laps in P.E., dissected frogs, took a werefrog to the nurse’s office after she freaked out about it, and kept on reading Frankenstein in English class.
Frankenstein actually made a lot more sense if I assumed the reason people kept trying to kill the monster was that they thought he was tainted. He clearly wasn’t, so I started to feel sorry for him.
I couldn’t blame the other people for trying to kill him if they thought he was, though. He wasn’t a species they recognized, he looked and acted weird, and he was huge and strong and scary. If the only way to stop a tainted person before they hurt or killed innocent people was to kill them, yeah, of course they wanted the monster dead. They felt they had to.
The crazy thing was that the word taint was nowhere in the book. After awhile, it bothered me enough that I shot my hand up in class, which was something I would normally never do.
“Yes, Miss Wereclanvulture?” the teacher asked, interrupting Bryan Giantclanogre as he was reading through his page in a dull and monotone voice. The guy was gorgeous, but man, he made a scary scene sound like a snoozer.
I cleared my throat, hoping that I wouldn’t seem like a brown-noser for asking a question. But I really wanted to know. “Um, was Frankenstein’s monster tainted?” I asked.
Miss Specterclanvila raised her eyebrows. “Why would you think that?”
I swallowed. “Well, it kind of seems like he is. Or like people think he is. But the book doesn’t say anything about it. So . . .”
Miss Specterclanvila smiled. “That is one possible interpretation. At the time, taint was a taboo subject that couldn’t be addressed directly, so it’s possible the book was meant as a commentary on how the tainted were treated. Another common belief is that Mary Vampireclanghoul was simply obsessed with death and other morbid subjects.”
Because of her species? I thought. Kegan would love that.
Still, it gave me something to think about.
That day, after class, Dad came to pick me up. That was one of the few things that had changed in our routine: now, Mom and Dad always picked me up at school, and I never went anywhere on my own. I would normally have been annoyed by it, but right now, I was grateful.
“Maybe next week, we can go to the mall together,” Kegan told me as I opened the door to get in the car beside Dad.
“Maybe,” I said.
I didn’t say that that would only happen if I felt safe again, and that I wasn’t sure I would ever feel safe again. I didn’t have to say it. Kegan understood.
“Maybe I’ll bring the mall to you,” she said brightly. “I could buy us both triple-thick milkshakes from the food court, and get lots of clothes for you to try on, and just return the ones you don’t want to keep.”
“Maybe,” I said, grinning. That sounded much safer, although it would miss half the point of going to the mall, which was to check out the guys who passed. We’d both gotten dates that way, which was fun.
I got in the car and waved goodbye to Kegan, and we drove off the school grounds. We turned the wrong way to get home.
“Where are we going?” I asked, startled.
“The library,” Dad said.
The library? My heart skipped a beat. But that was where —
“I don’t want to go to the library!” I blurted out. “The last time we went, I met Loretta Vampireclanbaobhansith there!”
“I know,” Dad said. “But if you’re afraid to go now because of that, that makes it all the more important. Having an aversion to libraries isn’t a good thing.”
“But —” I began, and then shut my mouth. A horrifying possibility had occurred to me.
Was I sharing the car with Rodrigo? Rodrigo was an aswang. He could take the shape of anyone whose blood he drank. Had he drunk Dad’s? Was he kidnapping me?
My breath came out in short gasps. What if he was? How would I know? How would I protect myself? How good an actor was Rodrigo?
I quickly dug my phone out of my pocket and swiped into the address book with my finger posed over Kegan’s name. If I decided I was in danger, I’d press it, and she’d hear the whole thing and know to call the police to come rescue me.
“H-hey, Dad,” I said, my voice shaking. “Do you remember . . . what you said this morning?”
Dad frowned. “About what?”
“Um . . .” My mind raced as I tried to think of something that Rodrigo wouldn’t be able to guess. “About the oatmeal.”
Dad’s forehead creased. “I said we were out and needed to buy more. Is that what you mean?”
“Yes,” I said with an explosive sigh of relief.
Dad glanced over at me with a puzzled look.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to explain. He might still be Rodrigo. And if he was Rodrigo, I didn’t want him to be suspicious. Then again, if he was Rodrigo, he was probably suspicious. I’d been acting weird, right?
I had to test Dad with something else. Something from a long time ago. Something that Rodrigo wouldn’t know even if he’d planted a bug in our house, either mechanical or werebug.
“What was my favorite color in third grade?” I demanded.
“I don’t know,” Dad said, pushing the turn signal. “I assume it was pink, because that was all you ever wore.”
“Ha! That was fourth grade!” I said triumphantly. “I knew it! You’re an imposter!”
Dad blinked, and then pulled the car to the side of the road. He turned the engine off and then turned to look at me.
“Is that what you think?” he asked seriously.
I wriggled uncomfortably. He sure looked like Dad, and he sure acted like Dad, but how could I know?
“Well, Rodrigo’s an aswang,” I said uncomfortably. “He could have imitated you.”
“Good point,” Dad said, looking thoughtful. “He could only imitate the form he had sucked blood from, though. Here.”
Wings sprouted from his shoulderblades, white feathers spiked all over his brown skin, and a rust-colored tail fanned out behind him. A red-tailed hawk was now staring at me from the driver’s seat. A very familiar red-tailed hawk I’d seen every month of my life.
I breathed out a deep, shaky sigh of relief. It was Dad. It really was Dad. I was safe.
He shifted back, and was soon shaped like a human again. “Better?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “We should have, like, a signal or something.”
“We probably should,” Dad agreed. “For one thing, Annette couldn’t shift to prove anything. What do you suggest?”
“Um . . .” I chewed on my lower lip. I couldn’t think of anything. If Rodrigo was listening in, he’d probably find a plan to imitate it. “Next time I ask, tell me the last time I lied to you,” I said at last. That was something nobody would be able to find on the Internet.
“That would work,” Dad said, nodding. He started to turn the key in the ignition, and then he stopped to look at me. “Was there anything else you wanted to settle?”
I thought about it. I shook my head.
Dad turned on the turn signal and merged back into traffic. A few minutes later, we arrived at the brick building with the clock at the top. The selkie fountain was still spraying water, as if nothing unusual had ever happened here.
I followed him into the building, and started to turn to the movie department, where I assumed we were going to find something to watch tonight.
“No,” Dad said, catching my arm. “We’re going to the history department.”
“Huh?” I said. “But why —”
“You’re going to read a book about the last hundred years,” Dad said. “Remember?”
My heart plummeted. In all the excitement, I assumed he’d forgotten. “But I have homework . . .” I tried.
“If your grad
es suffer in order for you to get an education about semi-recent history, so be it,” Dad said firmly. He stopped outside a row of bookshelves that were labeled with numbers in the 900s. “Choose something that looks interesting to you.”
I could tell by the stern look on his face that there was no way I was arguing my way out of this. I sighed in loud protest and pounded down the aisle of bookshelves.
There were books and more books about subjects that sounded dry as dirt and that I’d never heard of. What was the Korean War? Who was this John F. Vampireclanrakshasa who’d been assassinated? And also, more importantly, why was I supposed to care?
A familiar picture caught my eye.
I gulped as I saw the painting of Benedict Arnold that Annette had found online. It was on a cover of a book called The Life and Betrayal of Benedict Arnold, and it was more horrifying than ever.
I picked up the book and I headed back to Dad. I handed it to him.
His eyebrows raised. “This doesn’t look like a book about the last hundred years.”
“This is the book I’m interested in,” I said defiantly.
Dad looked at the book. He looked at me. “Okay,” he said. “You can read this.”
I felt vaguely triumphant as we walked over to the nearest machine to check it out. He swiped his library card and placed the book on the counter so that the thing would scan it.
I might have to read a history book, but at least it was about something I sort of cared about. It was horrible, but I wanted to know what tainted werevultures were like. Maybe I could learn why all the clans had died out.
We walked back to the car, and I felt oddly eager to get home and start reading the book, which was a first for me. I held it on my lap, riveted by the cover at the same time that I was freaked out by it. I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t look away.
“You will still need to do your homework,” Dad said.
I ignored him. He’d given me permission to get bad grades, so he could deal with it. I was totally skipping trigonometry today. SOH CAH TOA and Pythagoras could bite me.
We got home, and I went straight to my room.
Trials of a Teenage Werevulture (Trilogy of a Teenage Werevulture Book 1) Page 10
