Silver - By Kailin Gow Page 0,31
to,” Fal on said.
Jake nodded too. “But if you feed often enough, you can keep from kil ing people.”
Briony had to ask. “George, do you know anything about where Pietre might be? About what he is doing now?”
George shook his head. “He left me here rather than help me. I have heard nothing since.”
Briony sighed. From the moment she had seen George, she had been worried about that.
“What is it, Briony?” George asked.
Briony told him. She explained everything that had happened as clearly as she could, from the battle to losing Aunt Sophie.
“And you think Pietre could be the key to getting her back?”
Briony nodded. “He’s the most likely one to know something. But I don’t know how we’re going to contact him if he and his vampires are in hiding now.”
“Why,” George said, and just for a moment, it seemed that the old George was back there, “that should not be hard. We’l start by re-opening this diner, for one thing.”
“How does that help?”
“If Pietre’s vampires are hiding, then they wil wait until things have gone back to normal before they make an appearance. So we wil make things normal. You wil go back to school. Your friends wil behave as they did before the battle. Soon, the vampires wil be out. They cannot steer clear of the town for long if they want to feed.”
That raised one obvious question, of course. “And how wil you feed, George? What’s to stop your customers from becoming your dinner?”
George stood very stil . “I know what I am, and I would rather die than become that. If I harm anyone here, the other members of the Preservation Society wil kil me. I would expect them to.” He looked at her. “I would expect you to, Briony.”
Briony forced herself to nod. “But until that point, we just have to go on as normal?”
“As normal as possible,” George agreed. “Though in one sense, things wil be different. I cannot be a part of the Preservation Society any longer. Not as I am. And your great aunt isn’t here. That leaves you, Briony. You wil have to make sure that it stays strong. I have a feeling that the town wil need it before very long.”
Chapter 12
It wasn’t easy, putting everything back the way it had been. It took Briony and the rest of the diner’s staff most of the rest of the day to get it into a fit state to open again, even with Fal on and Kevin helping out. They had to thoroughly clean every surface, get new stock into the large freezers off the kitchen, and work hard to get the whole place into a condition where they could feel ready to open the doors to diners once more.
That wasn’t the hardest part of it, though. The hardest part came with every look Jil or Pete or Percy gave George, in the little hint of suspicion and fear that came with it. They had al agreed to come back to work when George had asked them, or at least when Briony had assured them that it wasn’t a trick, yet none of them seemed to be able to forget what George was now.
Not that Briony was doing much better. She found herself glancing across to the diner owner whenever she thought he wasn’t looking, just checking that everything was al right. Or, to put it another way, checking that he hadn’t turned into a rampaging monster in the time since she had last looked. Briony knew that she needed to trust George more than that, but after everything that had happened, could she?
Towards the end of the day, she voiced her fears to Fal on. “I’m worried about what wil happen with George,”
she said. “Wil he be strong enough to contain himself once there are more people in here, do you think?”
Fal on shrugged. “There’s no way to tel , but George is strong.”
“Even so…”
“Would it help if I were around?” Fal on asked. “I could help contain him if things went wrong. You could al feel safer then.”
Briony didn’t want to nod. Doing so felt like a betrayal. Yet she did it anyway.
They reopened for business that evening, and the diner was surprisingly busy, given that it had shut with no warning. People came in, looking around as though they expected some major refurbishment, but then shrugging and ordering what they always ordered when it wasn’t there. There were so many that soon, Briony and Jil were rushed off