Vampire High Sophomore Year - By Douglas Rees Page 0,34

frame up. It looked sad and lonely in the corner of the factory, but it would be safe enough. That’s what we told ourselves.

I went outside and looked at what was left of the corn patch. I put a few of the mounds back together. Some had corn and some didn’t. It didn’t matter. It just had to look like we were back in the corn business.

While I worked, I went over what Gregor had told us, and not told us. I was pretty sure someone must be watching us. If they hadn’t been before, they probably were now. And Gregor had an idea who it was, even if he wasn’t saying.

It made me curious. I wondered if whoever it was had left some evidence.

I walked slowly around the mill looking for anything that might have been dropped. While I was doing that, the windows of the mill began to screech open. Frames that had been painted shut back in the 1930s were being forced open by the jenti. And when they had them open, things began to fly through them. Old machine parts, mummies of dead rats, and bolts of rotten cloth came sailing out in every direction.

Since I didn’t want to get hit by a cast iron flywheel or a hundred-year-old rat, I went inside.

Turk was sitting inside the wigwam with her legs pulled up. She was shouting at the jenti, who were ignoring her while they cleared the floor junk.

“Go amuse your cousin,” Gregor said when I came in. “I think she has not enough people to shout at.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m on a secret mission.”

It had crossed my mind that maybe whoever had burned the wigwam and torn up the corn had paid a visit to the inside of the building, too. I dodged past the jenti and went up to the second floor, then the third. Everything looked just the way it had. Dirty and cluttered.

I got the flashlight out of Turk’s car and went down the basement steps.

The door at the bottom hung open.

Turk and I had been down here precisely once. And when we left, I had closed the door. I remembered that clearly, because it had been so hard to pull shut. Now the door handle was lying on the floor, snapped off.

We had had company. Maybe we still did.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Down here. Now.”

Turk, Gregor, and his guys appeared at the top of the stairs.

“Aha,” Gregor said. “Interesting.”

He came down and joined me.

“Last night, when I saw the fire, I decided to stay here until morning,” Gregor said. “About an hour later, I thought I heard the outer doors open and close. But when I looked, I saw no one.”

“So someone’s interested in this basement after what, eighty years?” I said. “Let’s see if we can find out why.”

We looked at everything: the storerooms, the generators, the old circuit board. But nothing looked different.

Nothing I could see.

But Ilie nudged Gregor and pointed with his chin.

“Ah,” Gregor said, and added something in jenti.

Constantin, Ilie, and Vladimir all started whispering, and I didn’t understand more than two words of it. Damn.

“What, what?” Turk demanded.

I shined the light where the jenti were staring with their see-in-the-dark eyes.

At first I didn’t see anything. But when I moved the beam around, I could see some faint lines scratched into the brick above one of the storerooms.

No matter how I shifted the flashlight, the lines didn’t make any sense. But there were too many of them to be random. And they couldn’t have been done in a few seconds. They were too elaborate. If they looked like anything, they looked like a large, loopy Y with some angular squiggles at the bottom.

So what were they and why were they here? And who had put them here, and when, and did it matter?

“Talk,” Turk said to Gregor. “What do you see?”

“Nothing that concerns a gadje,” Gregor said.

“If it’s in this building it concerns me,” I said. “Tell us what it is.”

“It is an old bit of jenti graffiti,” Gregor said. “Someone who worked here in the old days must have put it there.”

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“Who can say now?” Gregor said. “Some private joke, perhaps.”

“A laugh riot,” Turk said. “But I don’t believe you.”

Neither did I. I could feel the Rustle going on around me.

That mark. We didn’t expect to see it here.

No. But it is here.

Why?

It doesn’t matter. We find out who did it.

Yes. And then we break their wings.

That was what I thought