Extraordinary<li> (26 page)

I felt like I had maybe a minute before I’d be out cold.

But a plan suddenly came to me. I looked at Mutual and jerked my head toward the paper, hoping he understood what I meant.

“Okay,” said Mutual. “I’ll sign.”

Bingo.

Gregory just watched as Mutual very, very slowly signed his name on the form. Though I was so tired I felt like I had sandbags attached to every limb, I took a few slow and careful steps to the side, to the space by the door where I’d left my crowbar, and grabbed it.

Gregory had forgotten that I was awfully handy with a crowbar.

As Mutual finished signing, Gregory blew cigar smoke into his face. I took a tiny step toward the mofo, creeping up slowly and carefully behind him to keep him from noticing.

“That won’t do it,” said Mutual. “I’ll need another puff.”

“It should be plenty,” said Gregory.

“No,” said Mutual. “One more.”

Gregory blew in his face again. Mutual looked more tired to me than he had ever been, but he said, “Bigger than that!”

“You’re one tough cookie,” said Gregory. “But if you insist!”

And he took a big enough puff that Mutual’s entire body was surrounded by smoke, along with most of Gregory’s.

With the last of my strength, I jumped forward and swung my crowbar into Gregory’s ankle.

Since he was a vampire and could have walked off a gunshot, it didn’t do much damage.

But it distracted him.

“Hey!” he shouted. “What the hell are you doing?”

While he turned around, Jason and I both moved to grab the phone out of his pocket.

Neither of us made it. Gregory just stepped aside, and we both ended up crashing to the ground.

“Not smart,” Gregory said. “Not smart at all.”

“Uh, you guys?” said Amber. “Mutual’s gone.”

I looked over to the spot where the puff of smoke had been. The smoke was disturbed, like someone had run through it, but there was no sign of Mutual.

Gregory grinned down at me. “His parents probably watched this whole thing,” he said. “And they came and got him as soon as he signed that form!”

Oh God. I had failed.

Mutual was probably on his way to Alaska.

“Give me my phone!” I gasped.

“What is the deal with this little toy?” he asked. And he reached into his pocket, took out the phone, and looked at the message I’d been sending.

“Give it!” I said as my vision began to get blurry. I was fighting to keep my eyes open, and there was no way I could wield a crowbar again.

Behind me, I heard the Penguin Foot clerk shouting, “No fighting! Get out of here before I call the cops.”

Everyone ignored him.

“So, you solved the mystery, did you?” Gregory growled as he read the text. “Figured out old Gregory’s secret.”

“Did Mutual’s parents send you?” I asked him.

“I guess I don’t have to convert you now,” he said. “Now that they got what they wanted. But since you signed the form, I might as well.…”

“Prove it!” shouted Amber. And she belched.

Gregory and I turned our heads and saw that she was holding up the two consent forms. The signatures had been ripped off, and I guess she had eaten them.

“Spit them out!” shouted Gregory. “Or I’ll cut you open to get them! I’ll bite you! I will!”

“I wouldn’t,” said a voice with a New York accent.

I looked behind Gregory and saw Murray, Mrs. Smollet, and several people from the honor guard.

Murray and a few others vanished, then reappeared holding Gregory down on the table.

“He killed Fred!” Jason shouted. “Check the scent!”

One of the vampires took a whiff of the air around Gregory, like a drug dog, then vanished.

While the three of them struggled with Gregory, I turned to Smollet, who was standing and watching the whole scene, looking terrified.

“Where’s Mutual?” I asked her.

She took a few steps toward me. “When I heard about the unicorn, I followed my nose and found you all here,” she said. “I brought Mutual to his parents, but when I came back to get the consent form, Gregory was threatening you, so I called in the guard.”

“He’s with his parents?” I asked, fighting to stay conscious. “Get him back here! There’s no consent form anymore!”

“And if they hired this guy, they were
way
over the line,” she said.

And she vanished.

The vampire who had been sniffing the air reappeared. “It was him!” he shouted. “His smell is all over Fred’s apartment!”

“Let me go!” bellowed Gregory. “I am a Person of Peace!”

“Somebody get the council on the phone and get us permission to deal with this joker,” Murray called. “I’m not having another vampire attack. Not in my town.”

Gregory broke away from the three by slipping out of his coat, but got intercepted by a vampire on the other end of the lot when he tried to run. He disappeared off the table, then reappeared fighting with the other guy. The two of them moved so fast that they looked like they were just flickering in and out of existence.

Meanwhile, I got woozier and woozier.

I didn’t even have the energy left to turn my head when I heard the clerk shouting, “I’m calling the cops!”

Violence in my head is one matter, but at that moment I realized for sure that I’m no fan of the real thing. Any worry that I really
wanted
the people I fantasized about killing to be brutally murdered vanished right then and there.

The last thing I heard before I passed out was the sound of Mutual’s mother saying, “I know your tricks and manners,” as the Penguin Foot guy shouted, “They’re coming!”

And then everything went black, and all I heard was this roar that sounded like the ocean.

I felt like I’d been asleep for hours when I woke up a few minutes later. I was sitting upright on one of the picnic table benches, and my head was surrounded by smoke.

“There,” said Murray, who was holding a cigar that smelled different from any I’d seen Gregory smoke. “That should wake her.”

“I’m up,” I said. “Where’s Mutual?”

“He’s fine,” said Jason, who was beside me. “He’s totally safe. But don’t look at the parking lot.”

I looked in the opposite direction and saw a few vampires holding Mutual’s parents’ hands behind their backs.

“What would you have us do?” asked his mother. “Watch our only child grow old and die?”

“Yes!” shouted Amber. “That’s what people are supposed to do, you pumpkin-sucking goons!”

I turned toward Amber and saw that Mutual was propped up next to her, fast asleep.

“He’ll be okay, right?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” said Murray. “But I can’t wake him right up from three large puffs of that stuff Gregory had in the cigar. He’ll be asleep for a few hours, at least.”

“Thank God,” I said. “He took two extra puffs to keep Gregory busy while I snuck up on him with a crowbar.”

Murray chuckled a bit. “Three puffs! That’s a brave kid.”

Smollet turned to me. “I’m sorry, Jennifer,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

I remembered that she had apologized to Alley after she got attacked, too.

“You know what?” I said. “You could be a really good person if someone was just being attacked by a vampire every minute of the day.”

I was probably being meaner than I should have been, considering she’d just saved my ass by calling the council.

Of course, Gregory had saved it, too, by calling to tell
her about the unicorn. I guess that was just supposed to scare me into thinking the clock was ticking, but it had totally backfired on him.

Smollet sighed, and I heard the voice of the Penguin Foot Creamery guy shouting, “I warned you!” I looked down Cedar Avenue and saw an ambulance and what must have been every police car in town coming up the road.

When they pulled into the parking lot, the sirens scared away a whole flock of blackbirds that flew off into the night.

Then I saw why Jason had told me not to look in the parking lot.

They had been pecking away at what was left of Gregory Grue.

His fedora was perched on a car antenna. I stared at it for a long, long time.

There’s no happily-ever-after, really.

My story could have ended a few times—like, after I got the date with Fred. Or after we wrecked the gym. But it didn’t. Life is too interesting for that. There was always something coming up next.

After a few days of mourning and recovery, it felt like we’d gotten to happily-ever-after for a while, since Gregory was defeated and the council had called off the diciotto. When the dust had settled and everything had calmed down, there really were a couple of good, happy months before the book came out.

Mutual’s parents swore they had no idea just how bad Gregory was when they hired him four years before. Let me repeat that—
four years before
.

He had been planning his whole scam on me (and Cathy) for four years. His official goal was to get Mutual to
convert, but, if his plan had worked, he would have gotten to convert a couple of girls himself in the process. He’d planned every detail—right down to the unicorn, which he borrowed from Eileen’s ranch, where she was taking care of a couple of “magical” creatures. I never would have guessed she was telling the truth about that when she told me about that at the armory on the day I first met Gregory. Most of her creatures really were just things like cats with wings glued to their backs, but still. Who knew?

We thought we were getting a great deal when she offered us five hundred bucks each for the rights to our story.

The council decided to let Mutual’s parents live, to Mutual’s relief (they were his parents, after all), but they revoked permission for the diciotto, and banished them both to Alaska until further notice—probably as long as Mutual and I are alive.

We haven’t heard from them since, which is fine with us.

Mutual had no trouble with any of the standardized tests and GED exams we signed him up for, and pretty soon he was accepted at Drake, too. With a scholarship that someone had set up for the children of vampires.

Murray gave him a summer job in his office and paid him enough that he was able to get himself a tiny little studio apartment, where he spent his free time discovering all the music and movies the rest of us already knew about.

He made some missteps along the way. One day he was all excited over this new kind of music some joker had told him about—it was called “elevator wave,” or “mallcore,” and turned out to be Muzak—the kind of crud they play at low
volume in stores so that you’ll buy stuff to relieve the boredom.

And the week he discovered
Maxim
magazine was not my favorite week, either.

But I was with him as much as I possibly could be. I had been so buried in my studies for most of my life that I was way behind in my pop culture education, too. I hadn’t even seen
The Princess Bride
until one night when Amber brought it over to Mutual’s house. How in the heck could I have missed that?

See? It’s not that I hate princess stuff or anything—I liked
Princess Diaries
pretty well, too. I just hate
crappy
princess stuff. And princess stuff that leads people to camp out on my lawn, ready to give up democracy in order to have a servant to scrub their toilets for them.

But, anyway, the point is that it wasn’t like Mutual and I rode off into the sunset to live in a castle that we never had to clean or anything.

We argued a lot at first. Sometimes it seemed like Mutual was growing apart from me, or I was growing apart from him, while we figured out what kind of people we were going to be. And the general pressure of all the book stuff, after that came out, really got to us now and then. It’s really tough to build a relationship when you have to tell the press that your boyfriend is actually a guy named Fred the vampire (who, in reality, is dead) just to keep him from getting hate mail.

But we’ve made it work, so far.

And we hadn’t argued in weeks as of the night we were all in the limo together, going to the movie premiere.

“This was a bad idea,” I said. “We shouldn’t have come out here.”

“Hey, free limo ride,” said Mutual. “I always wanted to ride in one of these things.”

“I feel like a complete tool,” said Jason.

“They’re probably going to boo your character all through the movie, Mutual,” I said. “They all think you’re a total dork who was stalking me.”

“Well, I did kind of send you postcards for years and travel across the country and risk my life for you,” he said. “That’s kind of stalking.”

I laughed and kissed him on the cheek.

Even if we don’t end up together, I’ll always have a bond with him that I can’t imagine having with anyone else. With all of them, really.

“Just ignore them,” Amber said. “They won’t know you’re you. They’ll just think you’re Fred, as usual.”

“I should have worn my gorilla suit,” he said. “We all should have.”

Even after his parents were no longer a threat, he had still been into the idea that he should get a gorilla suit. Don’t ask me why—he just had a thing about them. So he got one.

And then I got one, too. It’s not nearly as effective as I’d hoped for running people off the lawn (trust me, you need a bodyguard for that, not a gorilla suit), but when we both get stressed out from all the crap going on, we put on our gorilla suits and run around screaming and beating our chests and throwing bananas around.

It’s insanely fun. It’s even more cathartic than breaking stuff, and with none of the guilt trip or worries that you’re a
maniac. You might have to worry that you look like a nut, but you know what? I don’t particularly care.

I can’t possibly dance naked in front of a window, what with the photographers and all. But I can go jumping around in a gorilla suit, which is sort of the same thing, in a way, if you think about it.

Anyway, as I started college, the future looked bright. Even with the guilt I felt about Fred and Cathy and everything, I remember those as happy days, when everything in the world seemed possible for us.