Vampire High Sophomore Year - By Douglas Rees Page 0,66

her,” I said.

“Thanks,” Mom said. “Maybe I will.”

I checked out the Sixty-Minute Shakespeare company. Every Shakespeare play was getting done in two minutes. The modern dancers were taking a break and watching the actors run through their show for the second time. People from downstairs were wandering in and laughing. Okay, nothing to take care of here. I went downstairs.

Ms. Vukovitch was finishing her last song. Maybe a hundred people were there to hear it. Turk wasn’t one of them. I saw her across the way, looking at someone else’s sculpture, a sort of cascade of broken glass and copper wire.

Gregor was gone. Probably he was outside again.

The applause started slow, jenti style, with everyone clapping together. Then it got faster and faster until it turned into a wave. A wave that went on for five minutes. I timed it.

Then Ms. Vukovitch announced, “This concludes the first part of the program. The next is a new piano composition, ‘Fantasia on Three Folk Themes,’ by Julia Warrener.”

Justin went over to turn pages for his mom.

She began to play, and it sounded like the same music Gregor had sung before the evening began—without the words, of course. But she took the music and wove it into something else, playing it faster and faster. She was turning the sad songs into music for dancing.

And then, a couple of the jenti did just that.

I’d seen jenti dance once before, at Ileana’s birthday party last year. It had been amazing. They’d turned from these quiet, cool people with about as much life as department store window dummies into hawks, spinning across the dance floor and throwing each other at the sky.

That’s what happened now. One couple, then another, then a whole line of couples swinging around the gallery.

Somehow, the chairs disappeared. Mrs. Warrener’s music crashed louder and louder as the jenti feet thumped on the old wooden planks.

Then Ms. Vukovitch took my dad’s hand. And he danced. He didn’t dance like a jenti, but he danced, and Ms. Vukovitch didn’t pick him up and throw him over her head or anything like that, but everyone was watching the jenti and the gadje dancing together. And that did it. In another minute, everybody but me, Turk, and Gregor and his guys was out on the floor.

The dancers who’d been watching the actors came downstairs to see what was going on and jumped in. One girl grabbed Gregor’s hand. The next time I saw her, she was being flung between him and Vladimir in time to the music, soaring up like a beautiful bird.

Then the singer of Styx of One came up, looking like he couldn’t believe what was happening.

He grabbed my arm.

“Hey, man, I came up to complain about the noise,” he said.

“What noise?” I said. “Deal with it.”

He looked around at the swirl of bodies and shook his head.

“All right, man, we will,” he said.

In a few minutes the band was back, with their drums and their amps, and they started playing along with Mrs. Warrener.

Now everybody in the rest of the building was pouring in. The poets came down, and Pestilence grabbed me, and we started dancing. I saw Mr. and Ms. Shadwell close by. She’d changed into a wolf, too, and they were jumping and chasing each other around so fast it was like two streaks of red and gray flowing together. The actors came in next, and they started doing a kind of Elizabethan partner dance, but sped up to match the music, and pretty soon they had jenti learning it.

After a very long time that was too short, the first jenti-gadje band in the history of New Sodom crashed to a stop. Everybody cheered. We cheered ourselves and the band and each other. Gadje hugged jenti, and jenti smiled. A lot of fangs were out, but nobody seemed to mind. It was excitement, not hunger.

Mrs. Warrener and the band’s singer had their heads together. After a minute, she announced, “The group and I have decided upon a set. Please stay and rock out if you like.”

And the music started again.

“This is quite a night, Diaghilev,” Pestilence said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe that angel who was passing by decided to stay.”

“Huh?” Pestilence said.

I explained about un ange passe.

“That’s my last name,” Pestilence said. “DiAngelo.”

“Oh,” I said. “What’s your first name?”

“Angela,” Pestilence said. “But never call me that. Not if you want to live.”

Angela DiAngelo. I wouldn’t have picked her for an angel. But maybe she wasn’t the only angel here tonight. Maybe for