Vampire High Sophomore Year - By Douglas Rees Page 0,56

her purse.

“Yeah, right,” she said.

“They always do this to us,” Gelnda said. “We’re not surprised.”

What she said didn’t make a lot of sense, but I knew what she was talking about. I’d gone to Cotton Mather High, the gadje school across town, for a semester last year. Guys like these were a joke to the rest of the kids. A mean joke, from what I’d seen. It’s dangerous to be different in high school.

“No, really. You sound perfect,” I said. “Only there’s a slight problem. The jenti are getting ready to kill each other, and from what I hear, their war’s going to start at that building. It’s going to open on Halloween. But all hell’s going to break loose when it does.”

“That would explain a lot,” Basil IX said.

“The sirens. The fires,” Hieronymus Bosch added.

“War,” War said. “And I wasn’t even invited.”

“None of us were,” Famine said. “We’re just gadje.”

“They’re going to slaughter each other, and we’ll just get stepped on, same as always,” Death said.

“Trod on,” I said. “As in ‘Don’t tread on me.’”

Yeah, right. In New Sodom, everybody trod on everybody else. The gadje trod on the jenti, and the Burgundians and the Mercians trod on each other, and now they were both going to use the gadje as pavement for their street fights.

Mercy Warrener got trod on all her life. Goth kids got trod on. For that matter, I had a few footprints on my own face. Sooner or later, everybody was dirt under somebody else’s feet. It was probably inevitable.

But accepting it wasn’t. You could be a sidewalk, or you could be a rattlesnake. Or at least you could try.

These guys were not what Turk had wanted for the center. They weren’t important, they weren’t connected, and they weren’t even grown up. But they needed the center and the center needed them.

“Listen,” I said. “What if you guys went ahead and showed up? What if we just said, ‘Go ahead and start your damn war. We want this place, and we’re going to make it happen’?”

“We think that would be cool,” Gelnda said.

“Don’t say yes so fast,” I said. “I have no idea what’s going to happen if we do this. The jenti may still start their war. The town may try to do something to stop us. At the very least, we’ll be breaking about six laws. But maybe if we show up and do what Mercy—what my cousin and I—wanted to do all along, it may untie this knot New Sodom’s tied in.”

“Would we be beaten?” Famine asked with a little smile.

“Take a look at me,” I said. “And it could get worse.”

“Killed for reading poetry,” Gelnda said. “Perfect.”

“It’s no joke,” I said. “It could happen.”

“It could happen anyway,” Pestilence said. “Like you said, nobody knows what’s coming next.”

“The thing is, we need all those people you talked about,” I said. “The more people we have in that mill, the more likely this is to work. We’ve only got about eight days before Halloween, so we have to start getting the word out now.”

“We need a Web site,” Pestilence said. “I can do it if you want.”

“You’ve got the job,” I said.

“I do good work,” Pestilence said.

“You should get started,” Gelnda said. “The rest of us will leave now. Everybody go home and start networking.”

“Listen, there’s one thing I have to ask,” I said. “You guys are all Daughters of the Crypt? Even the guys?”

“We took a vote on the name,” Gelnda said. “They lost.”

“The vote was along gender lines,” Hieronymus Bosch said. “It wasn’t really fair.”

The Daughters of the Crypt, except for Pestilence, took off.

I couldn’t believe how calm these kids were. And I didn’t think it was because they were clueless about the danger. Maybe there’s something about being everybody’s in-house loser that helps to make you strong. Anyway, I was glad to have them on my side.

Pestilence and I went up to my room. She sat down at my computer and went straight to work. It was like her brain was hooked up to the screen, and her ideas made a detour through her fingers to get there.

DANGER! ART!

Was the first thing we put up, in dark red letters that emerged one at a time from a field of black. An image of Crossfield before the mills came next, and the words “On a dark and blood-soaked field …”

Then an image of the mill.

“… a new peril to the people of New Sodom has arisen.” Then a picture of one