Vampire High Sophomore Year - By Douglas Rees Page 0,64

a good shriek, but apparently not what she was after. Because she did it again, long and wavering like a siren. Then she shrieked three more times, each time on a higher note. Then she screamed in short little bursts like a machine gun. She kept making up new screams until her voice started to give out on her. Then, in a rasp that we could barely hear, she said,

“The earth is our mother.

Let’s make her scream.”

And she sat down.

All the Daughters clapped, and both remaining pairs of moms and dads. Mr. Shadwell sat leaning forward with his hand on his chin and a frown on his face.

Hieronymus Bosch got up next, and ran through something about garbage. That was the whole poem, a list of what was in his garbage can. At the end of it, he said, “With thanks to Walt Whitman,” and bowed to Mr. Shadwell.

Mr. Shadwell sat back and crossed his arms.

I wasn’t sure I liked the way this was going. I didn’t want to see Mr. Shadwell get dissed. Or trod on. But then Justin put his hand on my arm and whispered, “Just thought you ought to know. Your cousin’s here.”

27

If Turk was back, I’d better know why. Mr. Shadwell would just have to be on his own for a while.

“Thanks,” I said. “Come on.”

We went downstairs.

Turk had come in with a new wave of visitors. Most of them were jenti, and all of those were Burgundians. Half of them had their patented jenti sneers firmly in place. The other half looked like they didn’t know what they thought.

“Thanks for coming,” I said to as many as I could reach while I searched for Turk. “Poetry and theater upstairs. If you hang around here for a few more minutes, we’ll have some traditional jenti stuff. Thanks, thanks.”

Turk was lounging around in her art exhibit with her hands in her pockets. She looked exactly the same, which surprised me for some reason. Maybe because it felt like she’d been gone for a long time.

When she saw me, she smiled and waved.

“Hi, Cuz,” she said. “Not bad so far.”

“Do Mom and Dad know you’re back?” I asked.

“I’m not back,” she said. “I just came to our opening. I’ll take off again when it’s over.”

“We’ll talk about that,” I said. “You left me holding the bag on this thing. You owe me.”

“It was good for you,” Turk laughed. “Forced you to act on your own. If you’d had me here to do it all for you, you wouldn’t have learned anything.”

I said something in jenti that would have made her slug me if she’d known what it meant.

“By the way, where’s the big guy?” Turk said. “You know, the dumb one?”

“He’s around,” I said. “Patrolling. Checking up. Being a duke. By the way, a war’s supposed to start tonight.”

“Cool,” Turk said. “That ought to get us noticed.”

From the other side of the room, Ms. Vukovitch’s throaty voice was filling the air with sexy-sounding songs.

Turk and I went over that way.

Most of the chairs were filled. Jenti and gadje were sitting close together, leaning forward, caught in the music.

Ms. Vukovitch finished her song and smiled.

“Thank you for coming tonight,” she said. “We all know this is not a usual night. Halloween never is. And this is not a usual Halloween. No one knows what’s going to happen. But then, do we ever really know? This is a song about not knowing, and finding out that you do not know. I used to sing it in Vienna about a hundred years ago.”

While she was singing, Gregor came in to the room. When he saw Turk, he stopped moving. He looked like he had when Justin handed him the Mercian eagle. He didn’t know what to do.

As Ms. Vukovitch finished her next song, he went over to Mrs. Warrener and whispered to her and Ms. Vukovitch.

“We have a request from our young duke,” Ms. Vukovitch announced. “A traditional jenti lament. It is the story of a jenti’s betrayal by an untrustworthy gadje. It is a song we all know well.”

Now Gregor looked straight at Turk, and she stared right back at him. They were eyeing each other like a couple of snakes.

The audience kept growing. People were filtering in from outside and being drawn to the music. There had been thirty; now there were more than twice that.

There was nothing to do here.

I went back upstairs to see what was happening at the poetry thing.

Mr. Shadwell was just getting up.

“This