Vampire High Sophomore Year - By Douglas Rees Page 0,55

happens. But I think what happens will be war.”

“A war over Turk’s junk?” I said. “Anyway, what do you mean, war? You guys are gangs, not armies.”

“Jenti do not fight gadje style,” Gregor said. “We are quicker and subtler. And very fierce. War is what it is.”

“Turk wouldn’t like you using her stuff this way,” I said.

“Turk is gone,” Gregor said. “And the Burgundians did not choose this fight.”

I went to my first class and found I was the only person there. Even the teacher was gone, and there was no substitute. It was like that all over Vlad. Of the teachers I knew, only Ms. Vukovitch, Mr. Shadwell, and Mr. Gibbon were at work. They all looked grim, and none of them had much to say to me.

I hung around until the end of the day, then found that the limo service had stopped running. Just stopped. So I had to drag my beaten-up self home, which took a long time.

Which gave me a lot of time to think.

I didn’t want to quit. As far as I could see, quitting would only make everything worse. Quitting would be admitting that I was wrong when I wasn’t. And even if, after I quit, the jenti stopped giving me the silent treatment, even if Justin and Ileana came to make up, they would still be wrong, and I would still be right, and I would have to act like that wasn’t true. But without other people, it was a stupid idea. I wasn’t an artist. I didn’t need an arts center any more than I needed a cruise ship.

Turk might have been a pain, but at least she’d wanted the center. Now no one did. No one but me, and I’d wanted it for other people. For Mercy Warrener, and Ileana, and, though I hated to admit it, I’d wanted it for Turk.

I kept thinking about Turk’s art sitting in the cold dark of the mill, maybe for years, and the wigwam lost there, lost and useless. Unless it went up in flames as part of some jenti battle.

I finally turned the last corner and started up the street to my house. As I climbed up the steps, the door opened and Mom met me.

“Cody, you have company,” she said in a loud whisper.

“I do?” I said. If it was Ileana, or even Justin—

“Yes,” she said. “And I have no idea who they are.”

24

In the living room there were seven kids who looked sort of like jenti but weren’t. They were dressed in black and their skin was pale, but they were shorter than jenti, and some of them were wearing sunglasses indoors. Jenti never do that.

They were sprawling on the floor like they hadn’t figured out how to use chairs.

One of the girls, who was fat and had her hair roached up into a terrific Mohawk, got up.

“Cody Elliot, we presume?” she said.

“That’s me,” I said.

“My name is Gelnda,” the fat girl said.

“Hi, Glenda,” I said. “’S’up?”

“Gelnda,” she repeated. “We are the Daughters of the Crypt Poetry Slam Collective of New Sodom. These ladies are War, Famine, and Death. The tall guy over there is Hieronymus Bosch, and the other one is Basil IX. The one over there under the coffee table is Pestilence.”

I saw a pair of long legs sticking out one end of the long brown table by the sofa, and a lot of long, frizzy brown hair coming out from the other end.

“I’m practicing,” Pestilence said. “For being in my coffin.”

“We are here to be part of your opening,” Gelnda went on.

“Whoa,” I said. “How did you hear about it?”

“My mother is president of one of the groups you contacted,” Famine said. “I heard her talking to another president about it.”

“We think it’s a valid idea, and we want to be part of it,” Basil IX said.

“We will read our stuff,” Hieronymus Bosch said.

Pestilence wriggled out from under the table and rolled to her suitcase-sized purse.

“We’re serious writers,” she said, and held out a thick sheaf of papers.

It was a huge pile of poems, and the way she held it out to me was kind of timid and in-your-face at the same time.

“There are others,” Gelnda said. “Musicians. Artists. People like that. We all know each other. We need a place.”

“Better than the Screaming Bean,” Pestilence said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We could have used you.”

The Daughters looked like I’d just slammed the door in their faces. They were looks of real pain.

Pestilence stuffed the poems back in