Vampire High Sophomore Year - By Douglas Rees Page 0,24

was so tiny it was easy to forget that she was made of steel.

We got back into the limo and headed to New Sodom. The lights gleamed on its civilized, careful, historical streets.

But Crossfield was history, too. Mercy Warrener was history. Maybe everybody in New Sodom wanted Crossfield to sink back into the rocky dirt, but something was going to grow out of that dirt, sooner or later. Something always did.

11

The right thing. You grow up thinking there’s always a right thing and a wrong thing. Then you start to realize that sometimes there’s no right thing. Or that something might be wrong or right, depending on how it works out. Or that there’s more than one right thing, and you have to make a choice. Like this time.

How could I not just forget the whole idea, now that I knew why nobody talked about Crossfield, and what had happened there? Ileana wanted me to. Justin would agree. Nobody but Turk really wanted to go ahead with this thing. Which was a pretty good clue that it was a bad idea.

But what good would leaving Crossfield alone do? It would always be a painful memory, no matter what else happened there. Wouldn’t it be better to try to make something good grow in that place? Something that could make Ileana smile?

I didn’t know. But, since I didn’t, I thought the thing to do was to push it a little further and see what happened.

On Monday afternoon, Turk and I went down to the courthouse. We were going to find out who owned that mill.

The Gomorrah County Courthouse was a red brick monstrosity from the nineteenth century that had been designed to look like a castle by somebody who had never seen a castle. It had turrets and gargoyles and tall, narrow windows covered with iron bars. There were even ramparts that looked like they’d be good for pouring boiling oil down onto the cars driving by.

And of course it had dungeons.

Not real dungeons. Just offices. Three levels of them, all underground and all as small and dark as if the people who worked there were serving life sentences. But jenti aren’t too hot for natural light, so it made a kind of sense to build it that way.

The hall of records takes up most of the first floor basement, but you can’t find the documents about Crossfield there. To find those, you have to go to the annex, which is down on the third basement floor, at the end of the hall, behind an old-fashioned oak door, which is locked. The door has a window of frosted glass and the word ANNEX painted on it, and the word HOURS under that. Under that, there’s nothing.

I knocked. Nothing happened. I knocked again. More nothing.

“Move over, Cuz,” Turk said then, and started dragging one long, black pinkie nail all over the door.

“Turk, what is it with that scratching thing?” I asked.

“Back in the seventeenth century, they got so refined at the French court that they decided knocking was rude,” Turk said. “So they started scratching at the door. And the longer the nail on your little finger was, the politer you were. I just like it.”

“Doesn’t seem to work any better,” I said.

Turk started to scratch on the glass. Figure eights, spirals, curlicues, louder and faster. When she got to the zigzags, the door opened.

There was a tiny white-haired man glaring at us from behind the door. He was wearing a suit so old he looked like a character in a play.

“What do you want?” he snarled.

“Fire,” Turk said.

The little man turned even paler.

“Get outta my way,” he squeaked, and pushed past us. He went scuttling up the stairs, and the sound of his footsteps faded into the stones.

“Turk, that was the lowest lie I’ve ever heard you tell,” I said.

“What lie?” Turk said. “All I did was say the word fire. Is it my fault if he draws false conclusions?”

We went into the annex. Turk shut the door behind us and locked it.

“Now, where’s the stuff on Crossfield?” she said.

It wasn’t hard to find it. There was one wall of shelves with big leather-bound books on them, and the words CROSSFIELD TITLES at the top. The only other things in the room were a wooden desk with a chair, a gooseneck lamp, and a big map on the wall opposite the books.

“Perfect,” I said when I saw it.

It was Crossfield, divided up into lots and numbered. There were spidery words on