Dark Light of Mine (41 page)

Police were swarming my school, and it was all my fault.  Well, mostly anyway.  Elyssa and I stood at the back of the milling student body of Edenfield High, most of who were gaping at the wailing fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars zipping around the school grounds across the road from the church parking lot where we'd been evacuated.

The face of Mr. Turpin, my English teacher, caught my eye as he met a group of the po-po in the middle of the road and spoke with them.  "If only those cops knew who they were talking to," I muttered to Elyssa.

"He is a master of deception," she said, gripping my hand as her gaze found my target.  "But he's also full of useful information."

Mr. Turpin, aka, Underborn was the most notorious assassin in the Overworld.  But whatever information he had to offer wasn't worth it.  "His price is too high."  I let go of Elyssa's hand, trading it for her shoulder so I could pull her closer.  Without her, I wouldn't have survived the past few days.  Underborn had marked my father for death.  When I tracked him down and demanded he rescind the hit, he admitted it had mostly been a ploy to lure me to him.  To test me, as he put it. As a price for calling off the hit, I'd had to help him with a vampire problem at my high school.  Now our institution of lower education looked like a warzone.

"He'll want you to go after Maximus, instead of your mother, won't he?" she said, phrasing it more like a statement than a question.  Her violet eyes met mine.  "I've got to convince my father to mobilize the Templars.  They don't understand the threat."

The threat Maximus posed was pretty clear, at least to me.  According to Underborn, he was recruiting high school students all over Atlanta—maybe even the entire country—to form a rogue vampire organization.  But Maximus's blood wasn't potent enough to turn people into vampires.  When he tried, the turning failed and transformed the person a member of the walking dead, a zombie with vampiric abilities.  Those in the Overworld called them vamplings.

Maximus had turned Brad Nichols and the result had been carnage.

"Your dad is too focused on taking down the spawn to care about a rogue vampire."  I thought back to my disastrous meeting with her parents.  To say Thomas Borathen despised my kind would be a huge understatement.

She brushed a lock of black hair behind an ear as a gust of wind dislodged it.  "Underborn told us my father's feelings might change if we figure out who engineered the Thunder Rock massacre."

Thunder Rock.
  Before I was born, Thomas Borathen had led a group of Templars to take in a rogue spawn responsible for manifesting into his demon form and consuming the souls of those unfortunate enough to cross his path.  Instead of finding a lone spawn, they'd encountered hordes of dark creatures from the demon plane.  Only two Templars escaped that day:  Thomas Borathen and Kevin Sorensen.  But Thomas didn't know about Kevin.  In fact, my eyes were looking at the supposedly dead Templar right now—Underborn.

"Yet another mystery our beloved assassin wants me to solve," I said with a pshaw.  "It's a never-ending cycle with that guy."

Elyssa's eyes narrowed.  "We can't just let him dictate terms for everything, Justin.  I say we make him talk.  He might know where your mother is.  He might even have blueprints for the Conroy's house for all we know."

"Or where Mr. Gray lives."

She bared her teeth at the mention of the name I'd given the sorcerer who'd sent his gray-suited golems after me, knocking her out during the attack.  "I'd definitely like to pay him a visit."

"How in the world do we make Underborn spill the beans without agreeing to another of his tasks?"

She tapped a finger on her chin.  "He's got to have a weak spot we can exploit."

I scratched the back of my neck as I thought about it.  "He said there are moles in his organization.  People who will kill him if he interferes with their business."

She nodded.  "I'll bet we could use that to our advantage."

"Time to threaten him for once."  I rubbed my hands together in anticipation.

The pressure of someone or something watching me prickled the hairs on my neck.  It took less than a second to find the source.  Outside the police roadblock to my left and nearly a hundred yards away, a blaze of red hair in the window of a parked limousine captured my gaze.

Kassallandra.

The breath caught in my throat as the window on the car rolled up and the face vanished from sight.  This wasn't good.  Not at all.  Dad's family, the Slades, had arranged a marriage between him Kassallandra Assad, except Dad had fallen in love with my mother, Alice, and run away with her.  I was pretty happy with the outcome—being born and all—but hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and Kassallandra was a demon spawn like my father.  Her temper obviously matched her fiery hair because she'd sent hellhounds to track him down and fetch him to her like a human Frisbee.

But now she was here.  Watching me.  Why?

It didn't take long for my brain to connect the dots.  She probably planned to use me to get to Dad.  We had to corner Underborn and question him fast.  The last thing I wanted was to add hellhounds to an already exhausting day.

Agnes Wright, Principal Perkin's secretary, appeared through a break in the crowd.  Her beady little eyes locked onto me.  She jabbed a finger my way and spoke to two officers who appeared behind her.

"Oh, crap," I said to Elyssa.

She saw Agnes leading the policemen our way and grimaced.  "Did she see Principal Perkins and Coach Burgundy take you outside the school earlier?"

I nodded.  "Ted Barnes was there too.  They took me to the football training room just before Brad and his two goons burst in and killed everyone."  Just thinking about the black veins racing up Brad's face made me shudder.  The vampling virus had turned him into a half-dead lunatic with all the strength of a vampire.  Perkins and his good old boys hadn't stood a chance.

"If the cops ask you, tell them that those two were talking to you about scouts at the next football game."

"Scouts?"

"Yeah, college football scouts.  Tell them they were tipping you off that there might be scouts and that you could get a college scholarship.  Then they let you go back to class and that's the last you saw of them."

"Yeah but what if these cops know about Perkins and the others blackmailing me to play football?  For all I know the entire police department was in on it."

"If there's one thing I've learned about corruption, the big players hold the most valuable information close to their chest and only tell their underlings what they need to know.  If they were planning to make big bucks by manufacturing supernatural steroids from your blood, there's no way they would've told anyone outside their little group."

I could have run away at supernatural speed and they never would have caught me.  But if I did, the cops would assume I was guilty.  Ending up on the FBI's most wanted list would be the perfect capper to a crappy day.  So I swallowed the nervous lump in my throat and tried to act natural.

"He's right there, officer," Agnes Wright said as she and two local police officers closed in on me.

I almost gulped but somehow managed an innocent look of concern.  "Who, me?"

"Yes, you, you rotten kid!" Agnes screeched.

"That'll be enough, Ma'am," said the officer to her right, a dark-skinned officer of medium build who looked like he wanted nothing more than to get the school secretary far, far away from him.  He looked at me.  "Justin Case?"

I nodded.  "Yes, officer?"

"Mind if I ask you a few questions?"

I managed a shrug.  "Sure."  Elyssa squeezed my hand as a jackhammer pulse pounded in my chest.

"I'll take him to my car," the officer said to his companion.

I looked through the milling mass of students in the church parking lot and across the road where the nearest patrol cars sat, blue lights flashing.  "What's going on?  What happened?"

He gave me a shrewd look as we walked toward the car, a look that made me think he could see straight into my soul and pick out every little lie.  Once we arrived, he retrieved a metal clipboard from the front seat and wrote a few things down on the paper clipped to it.

"Where were you at ten this morning?"

"Biology class."

"And after that?"

"Uh, Ms. Wright called my class on the intercom and told me to go to the front office."

"And?"

"I went there and met with Principal Perkins and our football coach."  That much was true.

He wrote that down.  "What was the nature of the meeting?"

"They took me outside and told me some college scouts might be coming to our football game this Friday and if I played well, I might have a chance at a scholarship."  Actually, they hadn't said much of anything until they'd gotten me inside the football training room where Sheriff Skinner, Chief Amerson, a doctor, and two goons with guns were waiting.

"Anything else?"

"They said they were proud of me, sir."  The absurdity of that lie almost made me burst into hysterical laughter.  Instead, they'd informed me the blood sample I'd submitted for testing as part of the standard procedure for joining the football team had returned very surprising results.  They thought I had a miracle steroid in my blood enabling me to be the best football player they'd ever seen and planned to milk me of that steroid and make millions.  Until Brad showed up and killed them all.

The officer scribbled my lies on his notepad, stopped, and tapped the pen against his chin.  "Where outside were you exactly?"

"On the side of the school, kind of near the cafeteria."

"Did anything else happen?"

"No.  I left them right after they told me about the scouts and headed back for class.  Well, first I had to go to the bathroom because I was kind of nervous about the scouts thing and it upset my stomach something awful.  Whew, let me tell you it took a few minutes to squeeze
those
demons out."

He cleared his throat and raised an eyebrow.

I wondered if I might have over-embellished the details.  "Uh, yeah, let me think.  Oh, and then I headed to class but the bell rang and I found out we were evacuating."

"Did you hear anything on your way back to class?"

I shook my head.  "No.  Just the bells."

He narrowed his eyes and stared at me for several seconds.  "Are you sure that's what happened?"

"That's exactly what happened."  It took everything I had to look him in the eye and keep a straight face.  For all I knew everything in my posture and voice was screaming, "Liar!"  I swallowed and asked, "What's wrong?  Why did we have to leave the school?"

"I'd like you to have a seat in this car until I say you can go."  He opened the rear door of the patrol car and motioned me in.

"Am I under arrest for something?"  My heart was trying to burst out of my ribcage at this point and it was all I could do not to run away at top speed.

"No, but I need to confirm your statement before I let you go back to your friends, okay?"

I nodded and got into the car.  He shut it and walked across the barricaded road.  Underborn met him halfway and spoke with him.  My nerves splintered even further.  No telling what the slimy back-stabbing assassin was saying.

I slumped in the seat and buried my face in my hands.  I could kick the door off the hinges.  Run away and never look back.  My normal life was all but over anyway.  With the sheriff and his co-conspirators dead, my friends Ash and Nyte would probably be safe from retaliation.  But another part of me recoiled in horror at the thought of giving up on a life that, up until a month or so ago, had been painfully boring and normal.  I'd been an overweight dyed-in-the-wool nerd with a hopeless crush on Katie Johnson, who I'd mistakenly believed to be the love of my life.

I shuddered at the memory, but still kind of missed being normal.

Screams and shouts reached my ears and tore me from my thoughts.  I peered through the windshield of the patrol car but saw only the other car blocking off the high school entrance.  I looked through the side window and saw students scrambling deeper into the church parking lot in a panicked mass.  One of the cops standing in the middle of the road pulled his sidearm and aimed at something behind me.

I twisted in my seat as the officer fired and saw bullets pinging off the grill of a huge truck charging right at me.

###

MEET THE AUTHOR

John Corwin has been making stuff up all his life. As a child he would tell his sisters he was an alien clone of himself and would eat tree bark to prove it.
In middle school, John started writing for realz. He wrote short stories about Fargo McGronsky, a young boy with anger management issues whose dog, Noodles, had been hit by a car. The violent stories were met with loud acclaim from classmates and a great gnashing of teeth by his English teacher.
Years later, after college and successful stints as a plastic food wrap repairman and a toe model for GQ, John once again decided to put his overactive imagination to paper for the world to share and became an author.