Extraordinary<li> (22 page)

“The best thing you can do is stop them altogether,” I said.

“They’ll do this with or without you and me, Jennifer,” she said. “Think about what you’re putting him through. If you don’t convince him to convert quickly, they’ll put him through psychological torment you can’t even imagine.”

I turned away from her and went back to playing, trying to pick out the
Twilight Zone
music just to bug her. When I turned back to look at her again, she had disappeared.

There wasn’t going to be any diciotto. Not if I could help it. We’d keep Mutual in hiding until his parents couldn’t even think about doing it without getting killed by the council.

I assumed that Smollet was just lying about the rumors as an excuse to bug me about Mutual, but when I went upstairs to my nightstand, where I had left my phone, I found that I had about fifty texts from Jason and probably a hundred texts and missed calls from Amber.

Something weird was going on, all right. Amber and Jason knew I was staying home—they shouldn’t have had any reason to believe I was dead because I wasn’t in school.

I called Amber, even though she would have been in class, and she picked up.

“What’s going on?” I asked her.

“Oh, thank God you’re alive!” she said. “When your number called, I was afraid it would be your mom using your phone!” Then I heard her shout out “It’s her! She’s alive!” and heard the sound of people cheering.

It’s kind of nice to hear people cheer that you’re alive. Just saying.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked.

“When you didn’t show up to class, people started saying Wilhelm had killed you.”

“He’s busy being dead,” I said. “And if his clan comes to town, the honor guard will tear them new ones.”

“Well, thank God!” she said. “I didn’t believe that you were dead, but it was hard not to wonder, with everything else that happened today.”

“What
did
happen?”

“Cathy got converted,” Amber said. “She’s a vampire now, once she wakes up from the coma.”

This wasn’t as bad as it sounded. It’s actually a very good sign if you’re in a coma after being converted. The people who don’t survive the operation usually just plain die right away—they don’t get as far as being in a coma.

Still. She had been converted. At school, even!

“Oh my God!” I said.

“I know!” she said. “They found her in a bathroom stall, slumped on the floor. Do you believe it? She got converted in the
bathroom
! Ew!”

“So who did it to her?”

“We don’t know,” she said. “No one knows anything. Most people are saying it was Fred.”

“No way,” I said. “Why would Fred have converted Cathy? He was totally against that.”

“Well, I’m keeping that quiet,” she whispered. “If it wasn’t him, people will think it was Will’s clan or something and they’ll go nuts. But as far as I can guess, it’s either them, or that plan of hers to impress Fred with her selflessness actually worked!”

“There’s no way that worked,” I said. “It had to be Will’s clan. Is the honor guard there?”

“Some of them are. A few got sent to Canada to check on the clan, though.”

“Let me get Fred on the phone,” I said. “I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

I felt myself starting to shake again.

This threw everything right back into chaos.

I sent a couple of texts to Fred, but he didn’t reply. There was no answer when I tried to call him.

I put on the TV news, but there was no mention of anything going on yet—whatever was happening wasn’t enough of a story to hit the cable news channels. I couldn’t even find anything about it online, except for a couple of status updates from people in school who were updating all their pages and stuff from their phones. They didn’t seem to know anything Amber hadn’t told me.

But I left the news on all through Melinda’s piano lesson, and tried to text Fred about every thirty seconds.

Then, while I tried to eat a frozen pizza for dinner, there was a story on the local news about a conversion in a local school. There was speculation that this all had to do with both the dance and the stuff in town being painted purple on Tuesday, but authorities were dismissing it, and the school said the dance would still go on the next night.

As I drove out to the weekly Human/Post-Human Alliance meeting, I tried to get Fred on the phone at every stop sign. There was still no answer.

When I got to the armory, the whole place was a madhouse. Everyone was running around like crazy, and there were actually news cameras, which we normally never had.

Dave, the chairman, was onstage shouting for order.

“We’ll cover everything today,” he said. “And I can assure everyone that there’s no undue cause for alarm! There
have been no attacks on humans. The conversion was consensual. Everyone, please sit down!”

Vlad tapped Murray on the shoulder, and the two of them stepped away from me to discuss something as everyone took their seats.

“Okay,” said Dave. “I’m going to bring up Principal Ward Jablonski of Cornersville Trace High School to talk about the conversion that took place at his school today, then we’ll deal with everything else, okay?”

There was polite applause as Jablonski came onstage. The news cameras got right up in his face.

Corey came over and put a hand on my shoulder, and I just sort of shook him off.

“Not today,” I said.

I couldn’t figure out why everyone was acting nuts. Conversions in schools had happened before. This wasn’t anything new. Something else—something very wrong—was happening. Just when I needed things to go right.

“As far as we’re concerned, there was no
incident
, per se, today,” Jablonski said, though he seemed pretty nervous to me. “Cathy Marconi had signed a letter of intent months ago. She also signed a letter of consent today, she was of legal age, and there was no sign of struggle. The main issue for us was that, uh, what went on in that bathroom was”—he paused and chuckled awkwardly a bit—“was way over the line in terms of appropriate behavior in a school. Obviously, the vampire who performed the operation shouldn’t have been in the girls’ bathroom.”

People giggled a little, but I could tell they were all nervous.

“Now, the young lady had actually been spending the day in in-school suspension for having attacked a vampire herself,” he went on. “The secretary said Miss Marconi had seemed terribly agitated for some reason, and at lunch she begged for permission to be excused to use the bathroom, and, well, she never came back.”

I raised my hand but didn’t wait to be called on. “Do you think it was Fred who converted her?” I asked.

“Well, we assume so,” said Mr. Jablonski. “He wasn’t known to be in school today, but … Next question, please.”

“What if it was Wilhelm’s clan?” someone shouted. “Why aren’t you canceling the dance?”

“We’ve sent guard members to Canada to keep that clan under conrol,” said Jablonski. “But even if they were involved, if we don’t have the dance, we’re just letting them win.”

“Where’s Fred now?” I asked. “What’s he saying?”

Jablonski turned pale.

“I’m going to turn things over to the chairman,” he said. “No further questions, please.”

And he ducked off the stage.

Dave came back up and said, “So you see, folks, no human need be concerned.”

“And anyone comes near that dance who doesn’t have two forms of student ID,
pow!
” Murray shouted out from the corner, where he was still talking to Vlad.

I walked over to where Murray was.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Something else happened, didn’t it?”

“Hey,” he said, “don’t worry. You saw us in action. No one’s gonna mess with you tomorrow night on our watch!”

“But what happened? Why did he dodge my question about Fred?”

Murray breathed in deeply.

“Well,” he said, “we need to keep things quiet, otherwise people will panic. There was a vampire-on-vampire attack today, too.”

“What?”

“Not a vampire-on-human attack,” he said, “so you got nothing to worry about.”

“Who was attacked?” I asked. “Was it Fred?”

Murray nodded. “If that girl hadn’t been converted and the school hadn’t sent us out to his apartment, we wouldn’t even know about it. But someone attacked him. Probably someone who didn’t approve of him converting that girl.”

“Fred would never have done that,” I said. “It can’t have been him.”

“Well, I don’t have any word from the guys who went to Canada yet,” said Murray. “But we’ve got a pretty good sense of smell—once we get a whiff of those guys, we’ll know if one of them was in Fred’s apartment. So we’ve got things under control. No one needs to be worried. Just don’t tell anyone, or they’ll freak out. That school of yours smells enough like garlic already!”

It had to be Will’s clan that had done it. There was no other good explanation for what had happened. One of them had offered to convert Cathy, like she always wanted, and another had taken revenge on Fred for not getting shredded right along with Will.

“Is Fred going to be okay?” I asked. “Like, by tomorrow night?”

Murray turned terribly pale.

“Jesus, kid,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you … it was a vampire attack. When a vampire attacks another vampire, they don’t just knock ’em upside the head, you know?”

“What happened?” I asked. “Tell me!”

Murray took a deep breath. “He’s dead, Jennifer,” he said. “Whoever it was killed him.”

I took off running away from the meeting, scared to death and crying my eyes out. I’d felt like I’d been punched and kicked a few times in my life, but now I felt like an anvil had fallen on me.

I wish I could say that I was a better person than “Jenny” here—that the first thing through my mind was how sorry I was for poor Fred.

However, as I went running out of the armory, I was mostly thinking that
I
was going to die for sure now if I didn’t become undead first. If Fred was dead, he certainly wouldn’t be kissing me at the dance.

Naturally, when I got out the door, I found Gregory Grue standing in the parking lot and grinning. Grinning!

“Hoo hoo!” he said. “Blushing little green apple of my winking, blinking eye!”

“What the hell are you smiling about?” I asked.

“I’m not,” he said, even though he was. “Shame about that poor kid, isn’t it? Cut down in his prime!”

“You can’t possibly expect me to get him to kiss me at the dance now,” I said. “You’ve got to cancel the deal. It’s only fair.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “The moon wanes, and fate takes its cut, kiddo,” he said. “This is just the way the pee dribbles in fairyland. The dance will end tomorrow night without you getting your kiss from Fred, and you’ll drop dead. Nothing I can do, unless you decide to go with option B and get converted. I don’t see what choice you have.”

I’m pretty sure I was crying at this point. I don’t know for sure—everything seems hazy when I try to remember this part of the story. My brain was running in a million directions at once and trying to get used to the fact that becoming a teenage vampire was necessary if I wanted to see another Thanksgiving.

Dying seemed like a better option, really. But if I was dead, Mutual might lose his resolve and agree to convert. I couldn’t let that happen, even if I
would
be too dead to feel guilty.

Meanwhile, Gregory looked like he was having the time of his life. He grinned from ear to ear and breathed in deeply, like he hadn’t smelled fresh air in years.

“So, I granted your wish, didn’t I?” he said. “Cathy’s going to spend her homecoming in a coma before waking up to a miserable eternity as a teenage member of the walking undead. She’s lost her part in the show. She was in the running for valedictorian before, and that’s totally out the window now. And you can bet that getting converted in the bathroom
was not exactly the romantic adventure she always dreamed of. I did everything but throw her under a truck! How do you feel?”

“Awful,” I said. “I have to live through an eternity of misery, too, if I convert!”

“Oh, it won’t be so bad,” he said. “I bet Mutual will decide to become a vampire, too, so he can be with you. At least you’ll be miserable together! And you can get the Wells Fargo Wagon to school all by yourself.”

“I can’t believe this,” I said. “I never wanted to be a vampire. Not even when every other girl did. And I can’t believe Cathy got converted in the girls’ bathroom. Disgusting.”

“You won’t have to do that,” said Gregory. “Just step into your car tomorrow at any time. I’ll have you drive out to a place where it can be done like a medical procedure. We’ll put you to sleep first, so you won’t even have to see the guy who does it.”

I didn’t say anything for a second.

“Is your friend part of Wilhelm’s clan?” I asked.

“If he was, I wouldn’t tell you, would I?” he replied. “If he was, the honor guard would be all over him, and you couldn’t convert. You’d just have to die. Which I’d be okay with, but I’d rather have the money.”

He was right. What was I going to do? Tell Murray, get the vampire friend taken out, and lose any chance I had of making it through the weekend myself?

It was over.

I had lost.

I was going to have to become a vampire the next day. There was no other option, besides just dying, which I wasn’t
brave enough to do. Then I’d have to hope Mutual got through the diciotto without finding out that I’d converted, which they’d surely use to convince him.

I sat down on the ground and just cried while Gregory Grue did his little dance.

After dancing, he crouched down, pulled a marker from his overcoat, and wrote something on my forehead.

His signature swear word, I assumed.

I was too weak and dazed to try to stop him, but after he finished, he went back to dancing around in the parking lot, and I crawled into my car and drove away. I paused only a minute to check the mirror to confirm the word he’d written was what I thought it was.