Vampire High Sophomore Year - By Douglas Rees Page 0,21

her yard. It was like she was whispering in my ear.

There was another thing: Mercy Warrener had a broken heart. Every February 13 there would be the same note:

__ yeares since my Beloved did fly from me. And the wound be yet as fresh as the day he left.

Never anything else. Never any mention of the Beloved except for the one back in 1676. I wanted to know who that guy was. To go wherever he’d gone and tell him to get his fanged self back to New Sodom and the woman who loved him.

The key rattled in the lock. Ms. Shadwell came in and saw what I had done with the books.

“Goodness, Master Cody, you have developed an interest,” she said.

Oops. Time for plan B. I didn’t want Ms. Shadwell to know what Mercy had told me about Crossfield. I had a feeling that, if Ms. Shadwell knew what I had come across, it wouldn’t be here the next time I wanted it.

“Let me help you put these back,” I said, sliding Mercy’s journal onto one of the stacks.

I put the book on the shelf where I’d found it, but I hid it at the back, behind all three volumes of Flora and Fauna of Gomorrah County, Massachusetts.

“I hope you found something to get you started,” Ms. Shadwell said from the top of the ladder.

“I might have,” I said. “Do you know what a rattlesnake colonel was?”

Ms. Shadwell laughed.

“Oh, yes. Back in colonial times rattlesnakes were quite a problem around here. And the settlers were terrified of them. There was nothing like them in England. Hardly any poison snakes at all there. Certainly nothing that lets you know it’s about to bite you. So the colonial assembly—”

“The General Court,” I chirped.

“The General Court,” Ms. Shadwell said. “The General Court passed a law that anyone who killed a rattlesnake could call himself colonel if he wanted to. It got to be quite a joke to call someone a rattlesnake colonel.”

“Even if someone was just a kid?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. That was part of the joke. We had one young fellow in town, Nathan Warrener. He loved to hunt rattlesnakes. Took to calling himself colonel when he was younger than you. Folks laughed, but he didn’t care. He ended up with more than a hundred rattlesnake skins. You might ask Master Justin to show you the skins sometime. Last I heard, the family still had the collection.”

You know how it is when you find out something new and you can’t stop thinking about it? That’s how it was with me and Mercy Warrener. It was almost like being a little kid and having an imaginary friend. But the thing was, Mercy Warrener hadn’t been imaginary. She had lived where I lived. Her descendant was my best friend. So when I went home that afternoon, it was almost like I had two sets of eyes. I saw everything twice.

“Those are cars, Mercy,” I said in my head. “That big thing’s a bus. The trees on this street are awful old. Did you see them when they were young, or was this part of town not built yet? That’s First Congregational over there. I know you went there. Not the building you remember, though, right?”

Dad noticed at dinner I wasn’t my usual charming self.

“Is everything all right, Cody?” he asked. “You’re being quiet.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m thinking about this woman I sort of met today. A relative of Justin’s.”

“Oh, ho. Does Ms. Antonescu have a rival, then?” Dad said.

“Not exactly,” I said. “She died in 1820.”

“Then I predict this relationship will go nowhere,” Dad said.

“Hah,” I said. “Very funny.” And went on thinking about Mercy Warrener.

As it would turn out, the joke was on Dad.

That night, I dreamed about Crossfield burning, Mercy Warrener running for her life. I heard some notes of “Yankee Doodle” and saw a couple of rattlesnakes crawling together across a sunny rock. I dreamed a heck of a lot more than I could remember when I woke up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding. But I had the feeling that, at the end of the dream, Mercy had said something to me. I couldn’t remember the exact words. But they had been something like “I do long for it so.”

Long for what, Mercy? In the dark, at three in the morning, it seemed like an important question.

10

I was seeing Ileana that night. We had a date to go to the library.

This was not quite as