My mind raced. She’d said that nobody would hear me because she’d soundproofed things, but she hadn’t said that we were in a time pocket, like she had before. She’d also said she only had an hour and a half left, and she’d probably used a lot of that up carrying me indoors and putting me in the cage.
In other words, we were probably in normal time right now. That wouldn’t last long, though, because she had to be absorbing my time right now. How quickly? She’d said a few hours to suck sixty or seventy years. That meant that every minute was me losing . . . aw, man, I didn’t want to do math.
More time than I wanted to lose, anyway.
I whammed my beak against the cage, then used my talons to try to pick the padlock she’d clamped through the door. When that didn’t work, I tried shifting back to half-form in the hopes that that would bust the cage, but that shoved my growing neck against the top of the cage at a dangerous angle that I was afraid would snap it, so I quickly shrunk down again.
Loretta flipped through her fashion magazine, completely ignoring me.
I let out a screaming hiss —
A spectral shape drifted up from the floor behind Loretta. An insubstantial shape with glowing eyes and floating white hair. It raised a metal toolbox over Loretta’s head.
I squawked in surprise, but Loretta didn’t even bother to look up from her magazine. “As I said, no one can hear —”
The banshee went substantial, and the toolbox came down with a loud wham! Loretta’s eyes went wide with shock, and then she tumbled over.
Kegan dropped the toolbox and raced over to the cage.
“I told you you were being stupid!” she shouted as she wrestled with the door, discovered it was padlocked, and then grabbed the bars and made the whole thing insubstantial around me.
I spread my wings and hopped out, passing through her as I landed on the linoleum floor. I shifted back to half-form.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I gasped, hugging her. “How did you find me?”
“Well, duh, of course we drove after her when we saw the direction she was going!” Kegan exclaimed. “And duh, of course rush hour traffic kept her from getting too good of a head start! And duh, of course I stowed away in the trunk of her car while she was caught at a red light!”
“You are the greatest!” I cried. “I can’t believe my parents let you do that!”
“Let me?” Kegan snorted. “They didn’t let me. They were screaming at me not to do it. But I knew you would need me, and I was totally right!”
“You rule!” I said, and hugged her again.
Loretta groaned on the floor.
“We’d better do something about her,” Kegan said.
“Hit her over the head again?” I suggested, grabbing the toolbox.
“That might kill her,” Kegan said worriedly. “I don’t want to do that. We’ve gotta trap her somewhere so she can’t follow us.”
My eyes flew to the cage, but it was a little too small for her. Then I noticed a set of keys dangling from a hook by the door.
“Lock her in the trunk of her car!” I said triumphantly. “She can’t get out of there without help! And then we call the police to come pick her up!”
“Yes!” Kegan shouted, slapping me five.
Loretta groaned again.
“Quickly,” I added, grabbing Loretta’s feet.
We lugged her outside as quickly as possible, which wasn’t quick at all, and lifting her into the trunk was incredibly hard because she was heavy. But we did it, and just in time — a few seconds after she fell in with a wham and we slammed the door, she started pounding the sides and shouting.
“Hello, 911?” Kegan said into her phone.
“What are you doing?” a horrified voice screamed.
I spun around and saw a middle-aged man gaping at us from the doorway of the house across the street. He was a tiny goblin with a really ugly face.
Oops. We’d forgotten to watch for neighbors.
“She’s a dangerous criminal, and we’re calling the police now to come pick her up,” I explained. “Oh, don’t worry about it, you’re welcome for saving you from her.”
“What are you talking about?!” the man screamed. “Get her out of there right now!”
“Yeah, I can tell you the address,” Kegan said into her phone, craning her neck to check the street sign and the house number. “It’s . . .”
“We’re not letting her out,” I explained. “She’s a baobhan sith. She has to be locked up. If she gets too close to us and there are no walls between us, she could slow us down and escape.”
“She’s not a baobhan sith!” he screamed, still just standing in his doorway. “She’s a jiangshi! There’s no such thing as a baobhan sith! You’re insane!”
Yeah, I’m insane and you’re a coward, I thought. Why aren’t you coming over here to stop us?
I was feeling pretty smug about that until three more doors opened from houses all around us. In one of doorways stood a terrifying minotaur with bloodshot eyes and a stained T-shirt.
“Uh, Kegan?” I said nervously. “Maybe we should start walking away . . .”
Kegan held up her finger and continued chattering a long description of the situation into the phone.
I snatched the phone away. “They’re going to try to make us open the trunk!” I hissed.
“So what?” she asked, grabbing the phone back. “If they try, I’ll just go insubstantial with the key.”
“And another specter could still take it away from you!” I hissed.
Kegan considered that. “Good point.” She tossed me the key. “Here, hide this.” Then she put the phone back to her ear. “No, I’m fine. That was just my best friend being worried about nothing. Okay, at that point I got out of the trunk and looked around, and the orphanage they were at, you’ll want to send people there too because I watched Rodrigo turning the kids, was . . .”
I shifted into human form with the key in my fist, then shifted back to half-form to make the key disappear inside me.
The enormous minotaur finished listening to the goblin’s shouted explanation and then stormed over. “What’s going on?!” he thundered, shoving his horned head in my face.
“We called 911, and you’re welcome to, too,” I said.
The minotaur looked kind of confused. Then he shoved his head back in my face. “Gordon says you stuffed Loretta into the trunk of her car!” he roared.
“Dangerous criminal, baobhan sith, blah blah blah, seriously, you’re welcome to call the police if you want to,” I said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
“Huh?!” he demanded, shoving his face into mine with forceful bafflement.
I was getting the impression that this guy was not the brightest crayon in the box. I really hoped he wasn’t going to beat us up, because that would be painful, and then we’d have to drink vampire blood, which tasted disgusting, and . . .
I suddenly realized that the shouting and the banging from the car’s trunk had ceased, and a terrible thought occurred to me.
How much time did Loretta take from me? She did get a few hours at least, didn’t she?
I really hoped we hadn’t just starved her to death by putting her in there.
Chapter 17: Luckily
Luckily, Loretta hadn’t starved to death by the time the police arrived to get her. We knew because she started pounding again a few minutes later. Unluckily for her, the police seemed terribly unsympathetic when I explained we had no idea how much time she had left.
“Cry me a river,” one of the police officers said succinctly. “If she used up all her own time, that was her idiocy.”
No fewer than six police cars had shown up, sirens blaring, and we had witnessed the very satisfying scene of the minotaur being handcuffed when he’d shouted at a police officer and shoved his head in her face. Really not the brightest crayon in the box, that one.
Three of the officers were discussing who would drive Loretta’s car to the station — everyone
seemed to agree that there was no way they were letting her out of the trunk until the car was in a more secure location that she couldn’t easily escape from — when Kegan tapped me on the shoulder and pulled me aside.
“What?” I whispered, eyeing the two police officers that were watching us. It was starting to get dark, and they were a kapre and a werebat, so they probably couldn’t see us very well as Kegan tugged me over to a shadowy corner by the side of Loretta’s garage. I wasn’t crazy about being out of their sight. What was Kegan doing?
“They seem to be taking it for granted that we’re going back to the station with them,” Kegan whispered back. “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to be grounded for the next century when my parents find out what I ran off and did.”
“Yeah, I’ll be grounded for a decade at least,” I whispered back. “Why?”
“So . . .” Kegan said quietly, “would it be better to go back and take the punishment now, or would it be better to sneak off and do something else first?”
I stared at her. What was she suggesting? Loretta was taken care of, and . . .
Oh. Rodrigo still didn’t know that.
That meant his side was weaker than he realized, and he wouldn’t have time to make up for it by finding more scary people that we wouldn’t know about.
Obviously, we could leave him to the police. I mean, taking care of criminals like Rodrigo was their job. Except he’d known that the police had a recording of the last Rarity Clan meeting. That meant he had been spying on them.
There was no way he could predict what we’d do. And he definitely hadn’t seemed to want me to stay a werevulture. I had to have some kind of power that could stop him, right?
“We don’t even know where he is,” I whispered with some relief.
Kegan held up her phone. She had Ghoulgle Maps up, with an address up on the screen. “He told Loretta to meet him there after she was done draining you,” Kegan murmured. “It’s the new Rarity Clan or whatever-it’s-called-now meeting.”
I gulped. That left me without any excuses.
“It’s a bad idea,” I whispered to Kegan. “It’d be making the same mistake I made a few hours ago!”
“No,” Kegan hissed, “the mistake you made a few hours ago was not taking me.”
I stared at her.
The screen of her phone turned itself off, so she tucked it in the pocket of her jeans and gave me a meaningful look.
“Okay,” I whispered. “But how do we get away?”
“You fly,” she whispered. “I go insubstantial.”
“I haven’t finished Flyers’ Ed! Besides, they’ve got a werebat!”
“Okay,” Kegan whispered, “what do you suggest?”
I scanned the neighborhood for ideas. Half the neighbors were standing outside or peering through their curtains now, watching the police with their mouths agape. One of them was clearly a rakshasa, because the fading twilight was bending in a dim shadow around him.
“Okay,” I whispered, “follow my lead.”
I ambled casually across the street. Kegan followed me.
“Hey!” a tikbalang police officer called. “Don’t wander off! We need you to give a statement!”
“We’re not wandering off, we’re just asking him something!” I called.
One of the police officers split off from the rest and purposefully followed us across the street.
I quickly picked up the pace and headed toward the rakshasa. He took a step back as we neared, as if we were somehow scary.
“Hey,” I said in a quiet voice, “can you do us a favor and make us invisible for a few minutes?”
“What?” His eyes were wide, and he was talking way too loudly. “Why would I do that?”
“So we can stop a very, very bad person,” I said quietly. “If they find out we’re going, the bad guy will know too, because he’s spying on them. Please?”
The rakshasa shook his head vigorously.
“What are you three talking about?” the officer asked casually, nearing us. “Did you see something, sir?”
The rakshasa looked very nervous and fumbled to answer.
We quickly slipped away back across the street.
“That didn’t work,” Kegan whispered.
“Yeah,” I whispered back. “Asking complete strangers to help probably wasn’t the best idea. Um . . . give me a minute . . .”
“It’s only a block away,” Kegan hissed. “Meet me at the address in ten minutes.”
Her eyes glowed, and she melted down into the sidewalk.
“Kegan?” I hissed. “Kegan?”
“Where’s your friend?” an ogre asked me, walking over.
“Um . . .” My mind went blank for a truthful way to answer. “Um . . . can I go to the bathroom? I really, really need to go.”
It wasn’t a lie, I told myself firmly. I did really, really need to go — to Rodrigo’s meeting.
“Sure,” the ogre said, looking suspicious. She gestured for another officer to come over. “We’ll go in with you. Is that where your friend went?”
“She, uh, she really needed to go, too,” I said, hurrying up the stairs to Loretta’s front door, hoping they wouldn’t ask me any more questions. They didn’t, but they did follow me.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, as it was brighter in Loretta’s house than it had gotten outside. I had to try several doors before I found the bathroom — the first one led to a pantry, the second a closet — and I was relieved when I found the bathroom and saw that it had a nice, big window.
I smiled brightly at the police officers. “I’ll be out in just a minute!”
It was perfectly true.
I locked the door and went to open the window, then I jumped as I heard wings behind me. I spun around, heart hammering. Was there a werebird in here watching me?!
A yellow canary landed on the sink and twittered loudly at me.
“Oh,” I muttered, “you’re the one who left those droppings in that cage.”
The canary tweeted and hopped across the sink.
Ignoring my cage’s previous occupant, I quickly slid the window open and shoved the screen until it popped out. It fell to the ground with a clunk outside.
“What are you doing in there?” a police officer called.
“I dropped something!” I called.
Eyeing the pet bird just in case it was secretly a werebird in disguise, I shifted down to vulture, small, small, small . . . well, okay, not that small. I flapped my wings and landed clumsily up on the windowsill. My talons skittered across the wood.
“What are you doing?” the ogre woman shouted.
I didn’t answer, because a vulture squawk would have been a dead giveaway. I stared out the window, trying to get my nerve up.
“Ten second warning!” the ogre woman shouted. “Open this door NOW!”
Sheesh. It was like they thought I was up to something.
I launched myself out into the darkness, beating my wings to rise up in the air. It was tough, because I hadn’t been nearly as diligent in my Flyers’ Ed weight-lifting homework as I should have been, so my arm muscles were not strong enough to flap for long — and therefore neither were my vulture wings.
I only have to make it a block, I only have to make it a block, I only have to make it a block! I told myself, flapping desperately.
My wings, not built for flapping but for soaring, were killing me. I wished I had my Uncle Horus’s super-muscular arms, even though they would have looked weird on me, because his wings were strong enough that he actually went out flying at night. He was the only werehawk I knew of who didn’t bother checking the weather to make sure there were strong enough thermals before flying across the city.
There were shouts behind me, and I thought I heard a bat squeak.
Almost there! Almost there, almost there, almost there!
Below me was the top of rooftop I had seen on Kegan’s Ghoulgle Map image. Far below me. Way too far below me. I was going to pass i
t!
I squeezed my wings against my sides and dive-bombed down. Wait, I was going too fast. Too fast! Too fast!
Brake! Brake brake brake brake brake!
I flared my wings out, but I was too late. I smashed into a pair of metal trash cans, sending them spinning and flying with a tremendous crash. I tumbled head over tail and landed in a daze across one of them.
Gotta get up, I thought desperately. Gotta move.
But my tail hurt way too much. And my wings . . . the right one was killing me. I might have broken it.
The porch light came on outside the house, and the hot Asian guy stepped out, looking around.
Gotta hide! I thought, scrambling, but I couldn’t seem to get off the trash can. I finally managed it, and I landed sprawled across the ground in an ungainly thump.
That got the hot Asian guy’s attention, and he walked over and stared at me.
I tried to move further, and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
“What kind of bird is that?” he muttered.
He didn’t know? He didn’t know a vulture when he saw one? I would have felt offended, except I wouldn’t have been able to tell before I’d turned into one, either. I wasn’t the kind you always saw in movies, with the black wings and red head.
I shifted back as quickly as possible, wincing as the bones crunched reforming into my right arm. Yep, I’d broken it.
“Lisette?” he asked, looking stunned. “What are you doing here? Rodrigo didn’t say you were coming.”
“Rodrigo invited me and I wasn’t going to come, but instead I did,” I blurted out. “You’re a vampire, right? Can your blood heal people?”
He stared at me. “Uh . . . I’ll tell Rodrigo you’re here . . .”
“No!” I yelped, reaching out and grabbing his pant leg with my left hand. “He’s evil and he’s tainting people and you can’t tell him I’m here! The police are probably on their way right now!”
The guy’s eyes widened, and he broke away and ran to the house. “Rodrigo!” he shouted. “Rodrigo! Lisette’s here, and she says the police are coming!”
Argh! I’d never hated anyone as much as I hated him right now!
Trials of a Teenage Werevulture (Trilogy of a Teenage Werevulture Book 1) Page 15
