Underdead (24 page)

Three of the officers silently peeled off and began moving quietly through the parking lot, guns and flashlights out, searching.

I always park at the far end of the lot. I tell myself it’s because I can use the extra exercise, but it’s really because I usually get to work too late for any of the good spots. It took a while for the officers to get to me. By the time they had me pinned under their flashlights, and had ordered me to put my hands were they could see them, Gavin had arrived.

He hurried over and crouched down to peer under the car. “Jo?” His face looked drawn. “Are you all right? Shit, you’re bleeding.”

“I’m fine,” I said, as coolly as I could under the circumstances. “I think someone took a shot at me, but they missed.”

“How did you get under—never mind. Can you get up?”

“I don’t think so,” I admitted.

Gavin’s head disappeared before I could finish. He briskly addressed one of the officers. “Chris, get an EMT over here. Now. She’s hurt.”

The EMTs duly hustled over. Gavin backed away to give them room and ordered the officers to go on with their search.

“I’m fine, really,” I told the man and woman who bent down to assist me. “I’m just stuck,” I said miserably.

They gently pulled me out and insisted upon wrapping me in a blanket against shock and tending to the bloody scrape on my chin. They made sure I wasn’t hurt anywhere else before they pronounced me good to go.

Gavin escorted me to one of the police cars and guided me gently into the front seat. Then, he crouched down in the doorway, blocking out some of the light and noise, and asked me what had happened. I gave him a quick summary.

“Did you see anyone in the parking lot when you came out?”

They had left the car running and the heater felt warm on my feet, but my teeth had begun to chatter a little and I huddled in the protective warmth of the blanket and shook my head.

“So you dropped your keys, you bent down to get them, and someone shot at you. Then what?”

“I hit the ground and banged my chin.”

Gavin’s eyes flicked quickly to my bandaged chin and then back to me. “And then?”

“I stayed there. I wasn’t sure what had happened—I mean, I thought it was a bullet, but it’s not like I’ve ever been shot at before and it seemed so, well, surreal.”

“Did you see anyone? Someone running away?”

“No. I didn’t feel it was prudent to get up and take a look.”

“Did you hear anything? Anything at all?”

I thought back. “Noooo, nothing for a while, but then I heard Maxine come out of the administration building, and then Kendra came running over from the gym.” I explained the conversation I had overheard. “And then the cavalry came,” I summed up with a wave to all the emergency vehicles.

Gavin asked a few more questions, pressing for details, which I answered as best I could.

He went silent a moment, staring at a point past my left ear. “What I still don’t understand,” he said slowly, “is how you got stuck under the SUV.” His gaze flicked to me.

I didn’t deign the question with a response.

One of the officers came over to the car and said in a low voice to Gavin, “I have a few people for you to talk to, sir, when you’re ready.”

“I’ll be right over.” Gavin turned back to me. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.” He tucked a trailing end of my blanket into the car, patted me on the shoulder and left.

He had locked me in, and there I sat for a very long, boring time. I watched as Gavin spoke first with Maxine, and to Kendra, and then to Roger who had come out only after the police had arrived, though he must have heard the shot. Typical. Roger would always think first about saving his own skin. A few other teachers and students, and even a parent or two, trickled over to see what the excitement was all about, but an officer, assisted by a suddenly officious Fred, kept them back.

It wasn’t very interesting to watch conversations I couldn’t hear, so I turned my attention to the other officers. I couldn’t see much from my vantage point, but from the activity over by my car, I guess I they had managed to dig the bullet out of my door.

I had memorized every button and light on the dashboard and was beginning to nod off when the door opened. The fresh air made me blink.

“Jo? Come on, I’ll take you home in my car.” Gavin said. He helped me out of the panda car and into his Jetta.

“How come I only ride in your car after something bad has happened?” I said querulously as we left the parking lot. “And what took you so long? I’m starving.”

Wordlessly, he pulled up to a fast food window. When the disembodied voice asked what we wanted he turned to me with his eyebrows raised in silent question.

“I want your largest hamburger, very rare, with nothing on it.” I’d never liked mayo on hamburgers, and for obvious reasons, ketchup now gave me the creeps. “Wait, make that two.”

Gavin ordered a grilled chicken sandwich and a side salad for himself. He paid at the window, and handed me the bag when the food was ready, but I didn’t bother opening it. To my way of thinking, there is no point to eating in the car when you’re less than three minutes from home, except to snitch some fries, and Gavin hadn’t ordered any.

“You must never date,” I said.

“What?”

“You didn’t order fries.”

“I didn’t want any.”

“Everybody wants fries.”

He stopped the car at the edge of the fast food lot and turned toward me. “I didn’t. If you wanted fries, why didn’t you order them?”

“I didn’t—Oh, never mind.”

“Do you want to go back? We can get some fries.”

“You can’t get fries now,” I protested. “That’s just wrong.”

He looked confused.

I took pity on him. “Really, Gavin. It’s okay. We can go.”

He hesitated, to make sure I was serious, and then pulled back into traffic.

“Gavin?”

“What.”

“If you do go on a date, get the fries.”

“I thought you didn’t want the fries.” He gripped the steering wheel as if he wanted to strangle someone.

“Never mind, Gavin.”

I ate the first burger in record time and managed half the second before Gavin cut me off.

“I need to talk to you, and I’ll need you awake and functioning for that.”

“What for? I already told you what happened.” Despite my protest, I put the burger down and wiped my hands and face on a couple of paper napkins as I had pretty much reached my burger limit anyway. I got up to throw the whole mess into the trash and brought the cookie jar back with me. I had been well trained by my mother to use plates for everything, lest I drift inexcusably into heathen territory, but that night I didn’t bother. This had not been a one or two cookie evening.

Gavin helped himself to the cookie jar and went over my statement again with me. When he was finished we sat in silence.

I pushed the cookie jar away and wound a corner of the tablecloth around my index finger. I unwound it and started winding again on the next finger. I glanced at Gavin. He was staring at the wall, his mouth drawn down in a thoughtful frown.

“So, did this have something to do with Bob’s death, or is one of my students a little too bitter about his or her grade on the last test? I’ll admit I set the curve a little lower than normal this time, but I wanted to give them a little push. Because you know once spring hits they’re going to want to slack off—”

“Someone shot at you with a silver bullet,” Gavin said.

“What?”

“A silver bullet. Not silver colored, silver-
plated
.”

“Cheap bastards. They could have at least sprung for gold if they were only going to plate the damn thing.”

“Jo.” Gavin turned to face me. His chair squeaked on the linoleum. “Do you understand what that means?”

“Someone thinks I’m a werewolf?”

The corner of his mouth curved up briefly in response as if he couldn’t help it, but his eyes remained grave. “No. Aside from a stake to the heart, a silver bullet is the only way to really kill a vampire, according to some authorities.”

“But I’m not a vampire. Dammit, Gavin, why do I have to keep saying that?”

“Someone thinks you are, or wants us to think it.”

“That again? Don’t you think you’re rushing to conclusions? For all you know someone could have been fooling around with an antique pistol with an old silver bullet in the chamber. The fact that I’m part vampire, or whatever, could be completely coincidental.”

“No. The bullet wasn’t new, but the plating was.”

There went that theory. I scraped cookie crumbs into a little pile and began forming it into a small snake with the side of my index finger. “Still, it could have been an accident.”

Gavin shook his head. “They don’t exactly sell silver bullets at the corner drugstore, Jo.”

I wanted to make another joke, but nothing came. I left off my snake and stared blankly at the tablecloth until the sunflowers became disarticulated blurs of yellow, green and white. The implications of Gavin’s words sunk in slowly, coating my brain in a thick fog that limited all thoughts but one:
Someone really wanted me dead. Someone had planned it
.

“Hey,” Gavin said, “you didn’t get bitten by a zombie, too, did you?”

I didn’t say anything. My teeth began to chatter.

Gavin got instantly to his feet. “Oh, no. C’mon, Jo, it’s all right. You’re safe now.” He pulled me up, steered me to the couch and gently tucked the afghan around my shoulders. He turned on the TV to the
M*A*S*H
reruns I liked and made me drink some tea that was very hot, very sweet, and very liberally laced with alcohol. When I was warm enough to have pushed off the afghan and had begun to laugh in the right places, Gavin quietly saw himself out.

I had just fallen asleep on the couch wrapped in the Afghan when someone knocked on the door. I pulled one of the throw pillows down over my ears and buried my head in the corner of the couch like a mole burrowing back into its nest, and tried to go back to sleep, but whoever was at the door was too persistent for me to ignore. I hauled myself up off the couch, pushed my feet into the pink bunny slippers my mother had gotten me at Christmas and shuffled sleepily to the door.

“Who is it?” I had to raise my voice to be heard over the sound of the neighbor’s yappy dog.

“It is I, Jo, open the door. I need to talk to you.”

“Geez, Gavin. Now what? Can’t it wait ‘til morning?” I undid the deadbolt and pulled open the door. But it wasn’t Gavin on my doorstep. It was Will, all six foot plus of him, long, lean and gorgeous in black Armani. I stood there, staring at him, until another round of barking from the neighbor’s dog snapped me out of my stupor.

“Oh shit!” I pushed the door shut again. I should have known better than to open it—Gavin wasn’t nearly so particular about his grammar.

“Jo, please. I won’t hurt you.” Will spoke as if the idea were repugnant to him. He hadn’t tried to prevent me from closing the door but remained a foot or two away, proud and unruffled.

“That’s what they all say.” But I hesitated, undone by his calm. I was curious to know why he had come. He didn’t seem dangerous. No, I take that back, a man who could send frissons down my spine from three feet away would always be dangerous, but I just didn’t believe he had come there to kill me. I eased the door back open, taking the precaution of containing my gaze to his feet. If my wimpy vampire stare could keep my sixth period class in line, his could do just about anything.

We stood there, wrapped in a thick silence save for the continued yapping of the neighbor’s dog.

“That dog,” Will said abruptly in a clipped voice that emphasized his faint accent, “needs to go to obedience school.”

It wasn’t what I had expected him to say. It was so…
normal
. I glanced up in surprise. “I know. I try not to make noise past nine o’clock—once you wake him up, he’ll go on like that for hours.”

Will’s answering smile was conspiratorial and brimming with humor, and for a moment, I remembered why I had been so attracted to him in the first place. With it came the uncomfortable realization that he wasn’t as one-dimensional as I wanted him to be. I couldn’t just categorize him as terrible and evil, put on my white hat and ride off into the sunset. He wasn’t so easily labeled or so easily dismissed. I
liked
him, the quickness of his mind, the ready wit, the intellectual bent of his humor. I had grown to respect his queer sense of honor, so unexpected and so at odds with who he was, or more precisely, what I had labeled him as.

All that could have been meaningless—vampires are by nature charming, it is part of their allure—if it weren’t for his
awareness
, his appreciation for the irony of our situation. It was almost as if he was giving me a choice, or perhaps that he was giving himself one. I shook these dangerous thoughts out of my head and reminded myself I was standing at my door in the middle of the night talking to a vampire.

“What you want, Will?”

“What do I want?” he repeated slowly. His mouth quirked up wryly in unspoken answer, and for moment I thought his blue eyes looked wistful, almost sad, as if something he yearned for had touched him just long enough for him to taste its intangible sweetness before moving out of reach. The impression of melancholy was fleeting, gone so quickly I would have been sure I had imagined it had I not seen it before, that night we met. I didn’t flatter myself that it had anything to do with me, except perhaps peripherally. It was too deep-rooted, too woven into the fabric of who he had become to have been awakened so recently.

Will didn’t answer his own question but he did address mine. In a voice that grew harsh with fury, he informed me he had come after learning of the commotion at school that night. “I heard someone shot at you. Is that true?”

“Yes, in the parking lot as I was leaving.”

Will look outraged, as of he wanted desperately to find the person who had had the temerity to shoot at me and beat the pulp out of them. I felt an inner rush of satisfaction. Whether I liked to admit it or not, every girl secretly wants her own personal champion, someone who’ll rush in and beat the crap out of anyone who looks at her sideways. The kicker, of course, is there’s a fine line between a knight in shining armor and a chauvinistic jerk. I want someone who will go to bat for me, not take away my bat and tell me to sit nicely on the bench where I won’t get dirty, if you know what I mean.