Vampire High Sophomore Year - By Douglas Rees Page 0,60

the door. But the only thing that happened was that Ms. Vukovitch and Mrs. Warrener appeared about a minute later and smiled at me.

We sat down, with Mr. Shadwell across from me and the others on my right and left.

At least I wasn’t going to get beaten, arrested, or stabbed.

Mr. Shadwell leaned forward and said, almost in a whisper, “Tell me, Elliot. Is it true that you are planning poetry readings at that mill of yours?”

Huh?

“We have a slam set up,” I said. “Some kids from Cotton Mather are going to read.”

Shadwell took a deep breath.

“As you may recall, I write epics,” he said. “I wish to offer myself as a part of the evening’s events. If you still have room.”

“Wow,” I said. “Are you serious?”

“I do not speak lightly of my poetry, Elliot,” he said.

“No, of course you don’t,” I said, remembering last year, when he’d read us long chunks of the poem he was working on. “I mean, sure, you’re in. But you know—it could get ugly.”

“Precisely, Elliot,” Mr. Shadwell said. “That is why we wish to be there.”

“All three of you?” I said. “But it’s dangerous.”

“Not all jenti approve of this”—and he used a jenti word I didn’t know but that sounded terrible—“that is going on in New Sodom. This Mercian-Burgundian rubbish. We wish to demonstrate our opposition to it. We—”

“It’s like this, gadje boy—excuse me—Master Cody,” Ms. Vukovitch said. “Some of us think your center is a real cool idea. We want to be there.”

“Burgundians and Mercians together, Cody,” Mrs. Warrener finished. “Doing things for the love of doing them.”

“Okay,” I said. “But what do you want to do?”

“As you know, Mrs. Warrener is an accomplished pianist,” Mr. Shadwell said. “She will accompany Ms. Vukovitch, who will sing that night. And she has something of her own to offer as well. An original composition.”

“Ms. Vukovitch is a singer?” I said.

“In my youth, when I was still beautiful,” Ms. Vukovitch purred, “I sang in cafés all over Europe. They used to say I made the piano smoke.”

“We don’t have a piano,” I said.

“Elliot, you’ve lived here long enough to know that things like pianos turn up where they’re needed,” Mr. Shadwell said with a little grin.

“You mean like Dumpsters?” I asked.

“No idea what you mean,” he said.

I couldn’t tell whether he was lying or not.

“But in any case, thank you, Elliot,” he said. “I look forward to Halloween this year. Very much, in fact.”

They didn’t look like heroes. Mr. Shadwell was short for a Burgundian, and bald, and maybe just a little pompous. Ms. Vukovitch looked like the hero’s girlfriend, if he was a very lucky hero. And Mrs. Warrener was as delicate as an autumn leaf. But they were heroes. I had no idea what this was costing them among the jenti, but the price had to be high.

“Thank you all,” I said. “See you on Halloween.”

I went into an empty room, took out my charts, and looked to see where I could put Mrs. Warrener and Mr. Shadwell. The piano would have to go on the ground floor somewhere, so I moved the Sixty-Minute Shakespeare Theater Company from the north wing to the third floor, next to Gregor’s place. I already had two art exhibits slotted in for the walls, but people would just have to share the space. Mr. Shadwell I put in the same second-floor space as the Daughters, and gave them alternate quarter-hours all night long. I hoped that would work.

Before I put my charts away, I looked at them again, checking everything. I had drawn them on graph paper, and had made neat, precise notes of times, places, groups, and artists. It all looked so organized. But there was more going on than I knew about, maybe more than anyone knew about.

This Halloween was going to be long on trick.

26

Halloween came. I was jumpy as a cat all day. I couldn’t concentrate. Or actually, I was concentrating on the coming night, and on what could go wrong, which was everything. I wondered if this was how Diaghilev had felt.

Finally, I decided to go over to the mill and worry there. And, because it was Halloween, I took Turk’s inflatable Scream along with me. My date for the evening.

Getting to Crossfield without Turk’s car was a pain. The buses had stopped running across the river a few days before. I had to take one that stopped five blocks from the river and turned back. And it was slow, slow, slow. The streets