“How…” Mr. Rouse began, “how did you know to come, Doug? Did Pamela call you?”
“No, actually…I was already here for this girl I know. Abby. She…passed out while driving.”
“Abby…Abby. I’ve met her, haven’t I? She dresses just like that Cat!”
That wasn’t really true. Cat dressed more punk, Abby more romantic, but they both wore a lot of black. Dark makeup. That was probably enough for Mr. Rouse. Doug knew it didn’t take much for some parents to see Satanists and death worshippers. His mom had once described his cousin Kristi as “pretty goth” for wearing plum-colored lipstick. Which matched her plum-colored polo shirt and the embroidery on her cutoffs. Mrs. Lee insisted she only wore it for “shock value.”
Doug looked at Jay. He looked at the boy who was ostensibly his best friend and willed himself to have a feeling. Any feeling, but it should be fierce, and raw. Nothing came. There was nothing in him anymore that was fierce or raw except his lust. And even as he thought this, he knew it wasn’t true. Increasingly, his vampirism wasn’t a lust, it was an itch. An itch that needed a lot of scratching, sure, but…just an itch. A constant irritation; a rash; a chicken pox on his soul.
“You kids are falling in with a dangerous group of people, Doug. You have to see that. Before it’s too late. It was almost too late for my boy.” His voice cracked, and he pressed a red fist against his mouth while Pamela reentered the room. “There are some bad, bad kids at that school.”
That was true. There were some very bad kids at that school. Monsters. Pamela had wanted to know if any one of them might have done this to Jay, and the answer was of course.
Of course.
32
THE WOLF IN CREEP’S CLOTHING
DOUG COULD SCARCELY believe his luck. No sooner had he vowed to hunt Victor down and destroy him, than a pale wolf charged at him through the trees.
He’d left the Rouses abruptly, left the hospital before meeting Abby’s parents, and it did feel like fleeing a crime scene. He walked swiftly through the first doors he could find marked EXIT, corkscrewed down the ramps of a parking garage, and emerged into the night air.
He had no car here. He’d have to walk home. Or fly home as a bat? No, he liked this shirt.
He was picking his way through the shared woods between the hospital and the seminary when the wolf appeared, upwind, and it smelled like Victor. It slowed and made a wide circle before him and bared its teeth, but stopped short of growling. Doug wondered how best to fight a wolf. He’d have to snap Victor’s neck, he decided. Maybe sacrifice his own arm. He was walking through trees—why hadn’t he picked up a stick?
But there was no attack. Wolf Victor reared back on his hind legs and in that instant Doug realized he was turning human again. Despite himself, Doug looked away. It seemed like a private moment. There came a squeak, the sound of a million discrete hairs pulling back into the skin.
Doug was seeing altogether too much of naked Victor.
He would try to get Victor circling again, he thought, try to get close enough to a tree to snap off a branch, then drive it into Victor’s chest. There was a sternum in the middle of the chest, wasn’t there? And ribs. He’d break the ribs.
“Who were you talking to at school?” Victor snarled, his chest heaving. “Who was that?”
It wasn’t the question Doug was expecting. “Who was who? I talk to a lot of peo—”
“Today! In the parking lot, just as the sun went down.”
Doug narrowed his eyes. “Are you spying on me or something?”
“I was coming off the field after practice. You were standing right there in the open with…some guy.”
“It was just Stephin David. My so-called mentor? You know.”
“That’s Stephin David?”
“Sure. What?”
Victor just looked away, into the ether, and Doug sidestepped gingerly to a tree with a low-hanging branch. He could just make out Victor’s mutterings, despite the wind: “That’s Stephin David…I know where he lives.”
“So you were at school, at practice,” said Doug. “What’d you do before practice?”
Victor looked at Doug, but his mind might have been racing through the trees. “What?”
“Let me lay out your schedule today as I see it. You had school, lunch, school, a quick errand to kill my best friend, then back to school to spy on me. Did I leave anything out?”
“I killed your best friend?”
Better to let him go on thinking he did, thought Doug. If he hears Jay survived, he’ll just try to finish the job. “You know what you did,” he said, his hand closing over the branch. It was thick enough to be strong and already snapped by wind or lightning. If he could wrench it free from the trunk, it would be just over a foot long. Perfect. “Did Borisov tell you to do it? To protect everyone’s precious secret identities?”
“Where are you getting this shit? Jay’s dead? I didn’t do anything to Jay. And I haven’t been talking about him and I never told you anything about wanting to kill the vampire who made me, either. Yeah, I know you’ve been spreading that around. What the hell?”
“I didn’t say that. The signora misunderstood me. But that’s no reason to go try and kill Jay—”
“I told you, I didn’t kill Jay. But you’re gonna get me killed, you know that? I’m in a shitstorm of trouble now with the old vampires. I thought we were friends.”
Doug caught his breath. He swallowed away some of the dry crust in his throat. “You…we were.” In an instant Doug saw that what he’d assumed was a monster was actually a boy his age, a boy he used to play with on summer vacations. He lost his grip on the tree and his arm sank. Victor did not currently look like a killer. He looked sickly and naked.
“You’re always asking about Jay,” said Doug. “And that day behind the gym when he walked up to us…it almost seemed like you were afraid.”
“I was afraid. I am afraid. For Jay, for us, about everything being different,” Victor mumbled. “Aren’t you afraid?”
“Why are you so pale?” asked Doug.
“Being a wolf…it makes you burn through blood kind of fast.”
“Then why do it?”
“I just…feel like I’m in my right skin when I’m a wolf. I’m not real good at being people lately. I’ve been…scary, I guess. I scared my mom.”
Maybe he felt exposed then. He stretched to cover his crotch, his arms stiff as a clock’s. Six-thirty, Naked Standard Time.
“Does it work,” he asked, “killing the vampire that made you? Does it make you human?”
“Oh, so now you want to do it?”
“I just want to know if it works.”
Doug frowned as a new possibility occurred to him. “Asa says it does. So…do you remember everything you do when you’re a wolf? Afterward?”
Victor bit at his thumbnail. “You can’t really trust that Asa,” he said. “Who knows what he’s up to—you know?”
“Do you remember your time as a wolf?” Doug asked again. “Are you in control? Or do you just go on autopilot, like when you’re driving?”
“I don’t know. I gotta go.”
Victor became a wolf again and disappeared into the darkness.
Doug couldn’t follow. He wasn’t that fast on foot, or as a bat, and he didn’t know how to turn into a wolf. He considered trying, thinking wolfish thoughts, confident that getting stuck halfway this time wouldn’t be as big a problem as it had been that night at the farm. Why, he might even turn into some sort of man-wolf. That didn’t sound so bad.
Then, in a moment of honesty, he imagined what sort of animal might really fall halfway between a wolf and himself, and the image that came to mind was purebred American hairless terrier.
Chewbacca had been an American hairless. Small, spotty skinned, a face like a butcher-shop window. Doug allowed himself to think of Chewbacca then, pictured the dog’s final moments: probably so happy to be meeting another vampire; confused to find he was, in a moment, small g
ame in his own house.
Doug felt the chill suddenly. Something noxious rattled up in him, and he crumpled into a pile of leaves and sobbed. Thinking about a dog he’d never liked, he cried like he hadn’t cried in years—retching, convulsive tears. A dog. A boy and his dog. Jay and Chewbacca, like Batman and Robin, like Han Solo and…Chewbacca. Jay, his friend, nearly dead in an indifferent room in a building behind him. He cried until his tears ran red and he had to staunch the flow with his palms.
Okay, he thought when he could stand again. Okay, and he snapped that tree limb free of its trunk and cleaned it of smaller branches. Right, and he ran toward the lights of the city.
Even if he hadn’t had a pretty good idea where Victor lived, Doug could have followed him home. He was arguably the only vampire wolf who’d trespassed through the seminary grounds in a while, probably the only one who had crossed Lancaster Avenue that evening. Certainly the only one who’d threaded the Taco Exchange drive-thru so recently that the paper-hatted attendant was still pressing his clotted, dumb-struck face against the cashier’s window.
Victor lived on a narrow street lined with the sort of smallish, vertical houses that were all stairs and U-turns. Doug stood panting at the bottom of Victor’s driveway, the tree branch in his hand. He’d lost an opportunity, sure, and that was stupid of him. He’d let Victor talk his way out of a staking. It wouldn’t happen again. Victor had obviously acted while in wolf form, and he couldn’t remember the details anymore. Each time doubt reached in with its wet fingers, Doug banished it with thoughts of Jay. Jay in the hospital room. The largely theoretical tableau of Jay bloody and helpless in his own living room, kitchen, or backyard.
He crept up the driveway, tasting the air. The concrete under his feet was cracked into puzzle pieces and stained with faded, continental shapes. Grass grew optimistically through the cracks.
He couldn’t really expect to be able to sneak up on another vampire, Doug realized. He would just have to stay on guard. He ignored the front door—nobody ever entered through their own front door—and stepped up a small, steep flight of stairs to the side door. But, no—the trail cooled here. Where was Victor?
The driveway ended at an open carport. It was a good place to hide, a good place to wait for someone who was following you.
“I’m coming, Victor,” he said in a soft voice that he trusted would be heard by wolf ears. “I don’t care. Get the drop on me if you want, I know how low on blood you are.”
The carport was crowded with the detritus of modern life—paint cans and mulch and cracked flowerpots formed a car-shaped bunker around a dull gray Accord. It sort of wasn’t a good place for an ambush, after all. Doug could barely move. A bright white square on the windshield of the car caught his eye. He prized it free of the wiper blade and it unfolded in his hand.
MOM—
I’m going to see a man tonight. I’m going to see if he’ll give something back to me.
I’m sorry for how I’ve been acting. I’m sorry for sneaking out. I know I said I’m not on drugs, but I kind of am, too. It’s hard to explain.
If you’re reading this, it means I didn’t come back. Send police to the ugliest house facing Clark Park in West Philly. Send a lot of police. Tell them he has a lot of guns, and he deals drugs to kids. And that he’s only there in the daytime.
I’m so sorry.
Victor
Doug folded the note again and put it in his pocket and thought for a long time. All right, he sighed. I’m going to Clark Park. It seemed so far away, and he’d been running all evening. If he wanted to be prepared, he needed blood.
That was okay. He knew a couple places he could try on the way.
33
VANT
THEY SAT in Cat’s room, not doing their homework. Sejal was not doing her Pre-Cal and Cat was not writing an essay about the Louisiana Purchase.
“Honest, I don’t think she’s told anyone,” Cat said. “I heard it from Abby. You were all downstairs at the same time—maybe she overheard you?”
“I did not exactly ask Ophelia to keep it secret anyway,” Sejal said. “I was only nervous. I couldn’t stop talking.”
“So you really think Doug’s a vampire? Really really?”
“I don’t know. Tell everyone I was only joking, yes? Tell them…Lord, tell them it is just a saying in India, and that I was misunderstood.”
“That’s good,” said Cat. “That’ll work.”
There was a lull. Cat made as if to read a page in her textbook, the same page she’d been reading and rereading all night. Sejal pushed some numbers around, and looked askance at a plastic shopping bag that was just visible inside her backpack.
“But do you see why I might think it?” asked Sejal.
“I don’t know…a vampire?”
“I thought you believed in the vampires.”
“I…kind of believe in them when they’re on TV, but we’re talking about Doug.”
“Okay, fine.”
“I mean, I know he’s changed this year, but—”
“I was probably just hopped up on Niravam. Is that right? ‘Hopped up’?”
“It’s awesome, if you’re trying to sound like my dad.”
“I got rid of it. The Niravam. I flushed it. I’m sorry.”
The doorbell rang, followed immediately by four crisp knocks. Cat pushed up to her feet and scrambled out of the room, down the stairs. In distant tones Sejal heard Mrs. Brown bluster, and Cat say, “I told you, never answer the door!”
Sejal returned to her math and kept her head down for half a minute before she heard a faint cry, from Cat she thought, as if some little terror had just been squeezed out of her. Sejal rose and ran to the top of the stairs. There were police officers by the front door. Just like from the American cop shows.
“How?” said Cat to the officers. She had her arms folded tight into her chest, her fists pressed up against her chin. “Is he going to be okay?” Mrs. Brown put her arm around Cat, and Cat leaned into it. Mr. Brown appeared now from the living room.
“They’re telling them about Jay,” said Doug, behind her. Sejal flinched, turned. He was there in the hallway. She opened her mouth to scream. “Don’t scream,” said Doug. “You already screamed, and they didn’t come. They’re too busy with their own stuff.”
Sejal nodded. She had already screamed and they didn’t come. Had she?
“Don’t make any noise,” said Doug. He was curling his arm around her, cutting her off from the staircase. Downstairs voices were rising. Cat was upset, Mr. Brown asked someone, “Just what are you implying? That my daughter is hopped up on drugs?” Sejal ducked Doug’s arm and rushed back into the bedroom. She fumbled with her book bag, with the flimsy loops of the plastic shopping bag inside. Everything had the tarnished tunnel vision of old films and nightmares. Finally she produced a clove of garlic and a pocket Bible that someone had handed her on South Street. She had also been handed three nightclub flyers and an ad for carpet cleaning before she’d learned to keep her hands at her sides, but at least she’d gotten the Bible. The contents of her little bag had seemed embarrassingly crackpot only moments ago, but now she brandished them like they were the chakra of Vishnu.
Doug was in the doorway. When he came near, she got a foggy feeling, a feeling she was certain now that she’d had before.
“What are you holding those for?” asked Doug. “Here.” He approached, and Sejal backed right up to the wall, pressing against it until the pushpins dug into her shoulder blades. Doug took the Bible, and she dropped the garlic.
“Come sit on the bed,” he said.
“What did you do to Jay?”
Doug looked horrified. “How can…It’s what Victor did to Jay. And now I have to settle things with Victor. Then I can be a better person, like you said. But first…I have to do one more bad thing.” He took hold of her wrist.
“It does not work like that,” Sejal shuddered, and she thought, Victor, too? “You have to be it all the time. You have to be
it for yourself and no worries about the other fucking people.”
Doug winced. “I don’t like it when you swear.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Doug reached for her other wrist.
Sejal threw her fist forward and punched him in the face. Not a slap—a real punch. The pain of it creased her knuckles and jolted up her arm. It didn’t seem to make much of an impression on Doug, and in a moment he had both of her wrists pinned against the wall.
Now the fog really rolled in. She could feel her breathing grow shallow, and all sounds faded away. Doug was still talking to her. Doug, or someone who looked like Doug. Close. A little blurry. She could feel his breath, which seemed to her an impressive detail since she knew none of this was real. She nearly laughed because vampires were only real on television.
The person who looked like Doug was still talking. Trying to explain something. And now look. He’s crying. That’s hard to watch. I’ll close my eyes.
The darkness was absolute. But then the hot breath faded away.
Cat was shaking her awake.
“You look like Cat,” Sejal slurred, and tried to get up from the floor.
“What the hell?” said Cat. “Why were you sleeping like that? Didn’t you hear us?”
Sejal stared at her, confused. Cat had been crying. It reminded her of Doug. Doug had been here.
Cat crossed behind her and closed the window. “Jay’s been attacked, but they think he’s going to be all right. They think me and Abby and Jay are all part of some goth cult or something because we all wear black and Abby’s anorexic or whatever. Asswipes. You know who else wears black? Fuckin’ asswipe cops—they wear black. Ooh, they’re a danger to society, they—”
Cat burst into tears again and sat down on the bed. “I’m sorry,” said Sejal, and she sat beside her. “I’m sorry.”