Josie Griffin Is Not a Vampire (22 page)

Johann, Helios, Avis, and Tarren burst through the back door.

Helios pointed to me. “Get off of her!” he yelled, and the electricity surged. Every bulb in the house snapped on and the ceiling fan began to spin.

Atonia screeched and retracted her claws from my body. I scrambled backward, gasping for breath as Tarren rushed in, waving her arms and yelling, “I’ll whip your clings, you bugly itch!”

Atonia fluttered for a moment, as if trying to figure out what Tarren meant but Maron saw an opening and charged.

“Tarren, look out!” I tried to yell. It came out barely more than a croak, but it was enough for Tarren to spin around and see Maron rushing toward her.

Tarren pointed to one of the broken chairs across the room. She raised her arms and the chair levitated then she flung it toward Maron. The chair zipped through the
air as Tarren yelled, “Blushing crow!” The chair transformed into a large black bird that looked strangely embarrassed to be in the room. “Crushing blow! Crushing blow!” Tarren yelled, but it was too late. The crow flapped away through the open door. Tarren held out her arms to block Maron and screamed, “Hop stag!” Maron jumped and in midair morphed into a deer with huge antlers. The stag cleared Tarren’s head and landed in the center of the room, confused and angry.

Atonia screeched and rocketed forward. She sank her sharp talons into Tarren’s shoulders, but Tarren refused to go down. “By the strength of ten thousand faeries!” Tarren yelled. “You’ll never take me.” The wraith flung Tarren across the room, but she didn’t smack into the wall or fall to the ground because the strap of her tank top caught the edge of the spinning ceiling fan blade. She hung from the whirling fan like a faerie-shaped piñata, screaming obscenities and daring Atonia to come back for her. “Bring it, you hazy crying flag. I’m not done with you yet!” she yelled as she twirled.

“Baby, I’m coming!” Avis yelled. He ran forward, furiously high stepping into the center of the room, which startled the stag. It reared onto its back legs and ran for the door.

“Helios! Johann! Stop her!” I barked, but they both ducked out of the doorway as the stag charged. She hurtled into the dark night and we heard her hooves clattered against the pavement outside.

I looked back at Avis, whose head jutted and arms
flapped. I cringed and covered my eyes, half afraid to witness his transformation into a wolfman. Then I noticed that he’d sprouted what appeared to be black feathers over his body. His shoes and clothes peeled away as his arms became wings, his toes grew webs, and his face morphed into two beady eyes and a bright red beak under a flopping cockscomb on the top of his head.

“You’re a were-chicken!” I croaked at the mad-flapping rooster on the loose.

The feathers around his neck splayed forward as he jumped and crowed around the room, chasing Atonia who flapped from wall to wall, dive-bombing our heads. The zombies ducked, I hit the ground, and Helios crouched with one arm up, but Johann lost his mind. He ran across the room, waving his arms, squealing like a little girl. “Shoo! Shoo! Get away! Get away from me!” he screamed. Atonia grazed his head, followed by a squawking, flapping Avis. “It’s in my hair!” Johann screeched and frantically batted at his head as he ran into the zombie girls at the top of the steps. They enveloped him, moaning and begging, pulling him down the stairwell like an undertow. “Kayla!” he yelled. “Kayla, help me!”

“Johann!” came a muffled cry beneath the flailing arms and legs. Then zombie girls were flung from the doorway like useless rags. Kayla and Johann emerged, arm in arm, triumphant in their reunion. But Atonia plunged at them. Johann squealed and clung to Kayla. Together they thrust across the floor as if they were
dancing the tango. Atonia swooped again and Johann threw his body over Kayla in an epic dip. They rolled across the floor and landed under the rickety table.

I pushed up to my hands and knees, trying to find the strength to fight for my friends but I was still woozy and weak. I looked to Helios. Our last remaining hope, but he hadn’t moved from his crouch, one arm shielding his face as if he were paralyzed with fear.

Atonia flapped up to the ceiling and hovered over me, claws out, teeth bared. “Josie!” someone yelled. I turned to see Kayla standing tall. She looked different. Not exactly like herself, but no longer zoned out like the zombies. Her eyes shone and her skin glittered. She grabbed the table and snapped one of the legs off like it was a toothpick then she threw it to me. I snagged it midair.

I felt the weight of the wooden leg in my hands and I planted my feet. “Come on!” I screamed, my voice now strong. “Bring it, you evil hag!” Atonia plunged at me claws first. I pulled back on the chair leg and swung as hard as I could.
Thwap!
The wood caught her squarely in the jaw and sent her tumbling backward across the floor. I tightened my grip and ran for her. Atonia looked up at me and bared her fangs. She hissed and spread her wings, but before she could lift off the ground I swung again and landed a blow on her sternum.

Pffff!
Her body exploded like a vacuum cleaner bag full of dirt. A million tiny particles drifted in the air and covered all of us with a fine, powdery dust. We coughed
and sputtered, manically trying to brush the dust off of us, but it absorbed into our skin. I tingled, from the inside out as the memories of my childhood rushed into my body again. One by one each of the zombie girls shuddered, shook, and reanimated, inflating like balloons on a helium tank.

“What happened??” “Where am I?” “What’s going on?” they asked as they came to.

“Kayla!” I called. I searched for her in the bedlam and found her standing beside Johann, an eerie glow to her skin and eyes. “Kayla,” I reached out to her. “Are you okay?”

Johann covered his face and wailed, “I was weak!”

My hand flew to my mouth. “You didn’t.”

Slowly, sadly, he nodded. But Kayla smiled, her incisors gleaming. “He set me free,” she said. “Just as I asked him to.”

“Oh hells no,” Tarren said as she spun. “This is a truttload of bubbles.”

As soon as the words left her mouth, tiny floating spheres filled the room. Raining down softly from the ceiling, our hair and clothes and the floor were quickly covered with thousands of sudsy bubbles.

“What in the name of Zeus!”

We all turned around. There in the doorway stood the most gorgeous woman I had ever seen. Her black hair, shining like polished onyx, tumbled over her shoulders and down her back.

“Mom!” Helios shouted, then the lights went out.

I was mesmerized by the woman illuminated in the moonlight. Rays of sun seemed to emanate from her hand as she searched the room. Then I realized, it wasn’t sun rays at all. She was holding a flashlight. The bubbles created prisms in the light and made little rainbows dance over Avis, still in chicken form, scratching and pecking at the floor. Tarren spun slowly above our heads as the ceiling fan came to a stop. “Hi, Thea,” she called down. The former zombie girls wandered around the room in their skanky clothes that were then four sizes too small. They laughed and joked as they poked the bubbles and wondered what kind of crazy party they’d all been at.

Helios’s mom turned the flashlight onto him. He cowered in its glow. “Your text said people were in trouble here. I left my dinner party. I called the Council. But this…” She swept across the room with her light again. I dropped the chair leg. Johann quickly stepped away from Kayla. Avis’s feathers had molted and he’d morphed back into human form. “Oh no, not again!” he said, covering himself with both hands.

“This looks like you’re having a party!” Thea said.

“God, Mom,” Helios said, stamping his foot. “You never believe me.”

o
nce we had Tarren down from the fan and some clothes thrown together for Avis, we all gathered in the living room and tried to explain everything to Thea. It took a solid fifteen minutes to get the story out, but by the time the line of white Council vans started pulling up in the driveway, she seemed convinced that we’d done the right thing.

“Well,” said Thea. “That’s quite a story. However, I don’t believe the Council needs to know all the details.” She looked from Tarren to Avis, Johann to me, then to Helios. “What they don’t know won’t hurt them and I can make sure they know just enough to count you all as heroes.”

We let go a collective sigh of relief.

“Except for you,” she said, pointing to Johann. “You broke one of the most sacred laws. You changed a human.”

Kayla stepped forward from the shadows and wrapped her arm around Johann’s shoulder. “It was my choice.”

Thea scoffed. “He took advantage. You were in an altered state.”

“I knew exactly what I was doing,” Kayla said. “I wanted this almost as soon as I met him.”

Johann blinked at her. “You knew?”

Kayla nodded. “Yes, that first day, I knew what you were.”

“But how?” he asked.

Kayla looked to me.

“My blog?” I cringed then buried my face in my hands. “It’s all my fault,” I moaned. “I’m so sorry.” I looked up at Johann, expecting to be met with hate, but his eyes were kind.

He put his arm around Kayla’s waist. “Without you, Yosie, I would have never met my destiny. How can I be angry?”

“Oh, Johann,” I said sadly.

“I chose to be changed,” Kayla said. She pushed up her sleeve and held out her inner arm. Two red puncture marks on the blue veins stared out like beady eyes. “After he ran for me in the kitchen, gallantly evading that horrible wraith, and we rolled across the floor in love’s embrace.…”

“That’s not the way I remember it,” Tarren said half under her breath.

“I put my arm in his mouth and begged to be bitten,” Kayla said.

“But he did the biting,” said Thea. “The Council has very strict laws about that. I won’t be able to intercede.”

“What will happen to them?” I asked.

Thea looked grim. “I don’t know. We haven’t had a case like this in a very long time. But whatever it is, it won’t be good.”

“What if we leave?” Johann asked. “Right now. Take our chances in Saskatchewan as a young married couple?”

“Johann?” Kayla squealed. She threw her arms around his neck and jumped for joy. “Are you asking me to marry you?”

Johann stepped away. “What, huh, whoa…” he sputtered. Then he snorted. “I’m from a different era. 1980s East Berlin.” He held her at arm’s length. “If I’d met you then, we would have gone to the discotheque. Maybe had a picnic with our weekly ration of hard salami. Then later, after we applied for our one-room apartment, then perhaps…”

We heard doors slamming in the driveway.

“You have to go,” I pleaded with them. “Before the other Council members get here.”

“Mom?” Helios said.

Thea pressed her lips together. “If perhaps I were to walk out to the front porch to greet the Council and when we returned Johann and Kayla were no longer here, I
would have forgotten them completely.” She turned and strode slowly out of the room.

I was the first to throw my arms around Kayla and Johann and I begged them for forgiveness. “I’m so so so sorry. It’s all my fault and I…”

“Yosie,” Johann said, patting my back. “It’s okay. Kayla and I are meant to be together.”

Kayla snorted and stepped away from him. “Yeah, only you have no intention of marrying my butt.”

“Ah,
liebchen
, you’re only seventeen,” said Johann.

“For the rest of my life,” Kayla said.

He ran his finger down the side of her face. “We have eternity together,” he told her.

She softened. “Where’s Saskatchewan anyway? Down south?”

Johann pulled her to his side. “Don’t worry,” he assured her. “We’ll get some very nice boots and warm coats. Maybe we can start a little business there, selling moose jerky.”

“Here.” Helios held out his keys to Johann. “Take my car. It’s parked out back.”

Johann looked stunned. “Are you sure?”

“It’s just a car,” Helios said with a shrug. “I can get another one.”

“Can you get one for me?” Tarren asked.

Johann took the keys then hugged Helios. “You are my brother.” They parted ways. He hugged Tarren then Avis. “I will miss you,” he said.

“You sure?” Tarren asked.

“Eh,” Johann said. “A bit anyway.”

“You be safe now,” Avis told him.

Then Kayla stepped forward. We all took turns hugging her, except for Tarren who stood back, thumped her hand against her heart and whispered, “Blood,” as she tried not to cry.

Kayla grabbed her and pulled her against her chest like a little girl hugging her favorite doll. “You can come visit us anytime,” she said.

We heard the front door open then heavy shoes against the creaking wooden floor.

“Go,” we told them and pushed them through the open window. They flew across the backyard and left silently in Helios’s chariot. When we turned around, Thea had come back. We could hear other voices in the hall.

“Where are all the girls?” she asked.

“I think they’re all in the basement,” I told her, “getting a new wardrobe and trying to figure what the heck they’re doing here.”

“Hmmm,” she said, pondering. “How are we going to explain that one?”

“What will you do with them?” I asked her.

“Ah, leave that one to me,” Thea said. “We will take excellent care of them. I have plenty of experience setting troubled girls on the right path.”

Helios leaned over and whispered, “You’ve never met my crazy sisters. These girls are nothing compared to Selene and Eos.”