Eleventh Grade Burns (10 page)

Vlad thought it over for a moment, but nothing unusual came to mind. “As far as I can tell, I haven’t changed at all.”

Otis nodded thoughtfully. “Perhaps it was Dorian’s blood—the vampire we drank from was his creation, his son, after all.”

Vlad gawked. “He killed his son just for a snack? That’s seriously twisted.”

Otis squeezed Vlad’s shoulder and steered him toward the door. “Stay away from him, Vlad. Dorian is brilliant and cunning. He’s also extremely dangerous, and he’s taken a liking to you.”

They entered the hallway, and Vlad watched as Otis locked his classroom door. He couldn’t help but ask, “In the same way he took a liking to you?”

Otis turned, leading him down the hall, toward the front doors of the school. “No. In the same way he took a liking to his son.”

Vlad gulped and decided that staying away from Dorian would be top priority, right alongside steering clear of Joss when he was in a staking mood. Which was probably always. Maybe it was better if Vlad just wasn’t alone again ... ever.

As they made their way down the steps, waving to the janitor on their way by, Otis said, “I won’t be dropping you off at home today, Vlad. Vikas is expecting you.”

“Expecting me?” Vlad racked his brains but couldn’t recall having arranged anything with Vikas.

Otis nodded, unlocking the rusty door of his crappy car. As he slid into the driver’s seat and Vlad slid in next to him, he said, “You’ll be training for two hours every afternoon. Vikas wants to get you sharp. Especially with a slayer in town.”

Vlad frowned at his heavy backpack. “I suppose you expect me to do homework too.”

Otis laughed. “Of course.”

The car turned this way and that, until it found its way down Lugosi Trail and Otis brought it to a stop in front of Vlad’s former home. Once inside, Otis excused himself upstairs to grade papers. Vikas was waiting in the kitchen with a stern expression on his face. Vlad immediately wondered if he was in trouble.

“Today, Mahlyenki Dyavol, I will teach you what I know about the Slayer Society. Then we will practice how to effectively dispatch a slayer.”

There was no question in Vikas’s tone, no possibility that Vlad might not want to know these things. He had to know them, and Vikas was determined to teach him. Just in case. Vlad nodded slowly, and dropped his backpack to the floor.

Vikas pointed to the chair across from him. “Sit.”

Vlad sat, feeling all the while like he was in trouble, like he was being punished. When he spoke, his voice was gruff. “What if I don’t need today’s lesson, Vikas? What if Joss changes his mind?”

Vikas’s brow furrowed, as if what he was about to say was enormously difficult for him. “I have seen his thoughts, Vladimir. He thinks of nothing but taking your life. You must learn how to defend yourself against your enemy. You must know how to kill Joss when the time comes.”

When. Not if.

Vlad stood, his heart racing. “No matter what he did in the past, Joss is my friend. I’m not going to—”

Then suddenly, he felt Vikas in his mind. As Vikas spoke, he nudged Vlad, forcing him to follow his simple, firm instruction. “Sit.”

Vlad sat, but not of his own free will.

“This is vital knowledge that you must have if you are to survive another encounter with this slayer. I have promised your uncle that I would ensure your safety and I shall. Though it would bring me great pleasure to dispatch this slayer myself, I have been told that I cannot unless he first breaks the peace between us. Therefore, that task falls to the first of us to be attacked. Should that be you, Mahlyenki Dyavol, you will need what I will teach you today. I will teach you and you will learn, even if I have to hold you here with my mind the entire time.”

Vlad swallowed hard, vowing never to mention to Vikas or his uncle that Joss had already made the first move. Or that he was determined to find a way to free Joss from the Society’s clutches.

Vikas released his hold on Vlad’s mind and began his lesson, despite Vlad’s protests. “The Slayer Society is a relatively small group of humans—all but a few male, all but a few middle-aged—who are bent on the destruction of vampirekind. We have no one to blame but ourselves, of course, as it was a vampire who created the slayers.”

Vlad raised his eyebrows in surprise, but remained silent, very much irritated at Vikas’s use of mind control.

“As you know, there are laws. The highest law being that no vampire should dare take the life of a fellow vampire. However, that is not to say that there are not certain vampires that deserve death, or that there are not those who would use the death of another to increase their own standing in Elysia.” A puzzled look crossed Vlad’s face. Vikas answered the question that Vlad had not yet asked, “Politics are the same in all cultures, it matters not what type of government they follow. To work around this law, which brings with it the absolute punishment of death—”

Vlad’s heart all but stopped. Otis had killed Ignatius last year. He could only imagine what that meant for his uncle.

“—a vengeful vampire by the name of Terryn took it upon himself to inform a small group of humans that vampires existed, with the explicit purpose of training them how to take down his vampire enemies. Revealing the truth of Elysia is a high crime, yes, but with his new group of assassins behind him, no one on the council dared to defy him. So Terryn lived several happy years after organizing his group of slayers, until they killed him.”

Vlad, intrigued by the history lesson, finally found his voice. “But why wouldn’t Terryn have just turned the slayers into his drudges and command them to obey him?”

“You’re quite astute, Mahlyenki Dyavol, for that is exactly what he did, and he blinded them to the fact that he was a vampire.” Vikas smiled to see that Vlad had decided to turn this into a discussion rather than a lecture. Vlad could feel Vikas’s control release. He trusted Vlad to stay put. “However, that too is a violation of Elysian law. You see, a vampire is only allowed to bind himself to two humans. Any more than that and our connection with them becomes too diminished to maintain control over all of them at once. Terryn’s original group consisted of thirty-four. And he trained them so well to recognize a vampire’s characteristics that they eventually saw through his control and realized his true nature. He became a victim of his own creation.”

Vikas had barely moved since he started talking. He was still sitting at the kitchen table with his hands clasped in front of him. Vlad noticed that the expression on his face had softened, but only just. “You knew him, didn’t you?”

“Yes. There was a time that I had called Terryn my friend. But that was before he lost touch with Elysia. Before he decided to lift himself to a position of power that he knew was not meant for him.” A hint of remorse flashed in his eyes. “Even so, I was sad to hear of his death.”

“So, then what happened?”

Vikas finally shifted in his seat and regained his composure. “Ever since that day in 1835, there has always been a Slayer Society, though their beliefs have warped and twisted over time to the point where their goal—the destruction of vampirekind—borders on religion. They believe that new slayers are not chosen, but that the small piece of Terryn which was put into each of the original members shows itself in a member of their own family. The society members that exist now are all direct descendants of the original slayers. They believe that vampires are evil monsters, who drink babies’ blood and sleep in coffins. They are persistent, resilient, and will stop at nothing to do us in. They are our enemies. And as we created them, it is our right, our duty, to rid the world of them.”

Vlad chewed his bottom lip for a moment before saying, “I understand your concerns, Vikas, but why are you telling me all of this?”

Vikas met his gaze. “Because you’ve made it quite clear that you do not understand the severity of the slayer’s presence. To your uncle or me, dispatching the boy would be a fairly easy task. But to you, you who are still committed to a nonexistent friendship with him, it won’t be quite so simple.”

Shaking his head, Vlad stood at last. “Joss isn’t going to try to kill me.”

“It is your denial that will end your life, just as sure as his stake.” Vikas stood and crossed the kitchen to the window. As he stared out at the backyard, his fingers traced the lines on his forehead. After a moment of quiet contemplation, he turned back to face Vlad. “Prepare yourself for what will come, Vladimir, or you will die, and neither Otis nor I will be able to prevent it.”

Vlad was looking at the man who had been his friend and mentor for two years now—one of the very few people on the planet who knew his secrets (well, most of them anyway) and who he knew he could trust, and had, trusted with his life. Even though he stared directly into Vikas’s eyes, they both knew that Vlad was somewhere else, lost in his own thoughts.

Vikas was right. No matter how much Vlad hoped and wished that he wasn’t, he was right. The Joss he knew from his past was muted by the Joss he’d become, and clinging to the memory of the boy he knew two years ago was putting Vlad and those he cared about in danger. He would never hunt Joss, nor would he allow anyone else to. He would cling to the hope that a new friendship could be built between them, and that Joss may yet be saved from the cultlike ways of the Slayer Society. He would cling to the tense peace that existed between them. But if Joss should break that peace, Vlad needed to be prepared.

And he would be.

Reluctantly, he sighed. “Okay. Tell me what I need to know.”

I
N-SCHOOL SUSPENSION was clearly invented by someone who really, really despised the idea of kids doing anything but homework and who thought that staring blankly at the wall without speaking was just about the most entertaining thing in the world to do. They were obviously evil to the core, and Vlad was cursing their unknown name during his entire trek down the hall and over to the old wooden door at the end of the hall, just past the cafeteria.

The door was scraped up and ugly—fitting, considering it opened up to a fate worse than most prisons. And lucky Vlad, he wasn’t serving this sentence alone. Bad enough he’d be spending the day doing schoolwork in a forced silence that many monks would envy, but he had to do it all in the company of the one boy who’d already come close to killing him once and probably would try again.

With a deep, depressed breath, Vlad turned the knob and opened the door.

He’d never seen the inside of the ISS room, so he really had no idea what to expect. Immediately, there were three small steps to climb and once his feet hit the wooden floor, he recognized what the room had once been. He’d heard that many years ago there had once been a stage attached to what now served as the cafeteria, but that it had been walled off and turned into storage. Apparently, that storage room was also home to ISS. Boxes and various odds and ends lined three of the walls. Five desks sat facing an empty one. Two were occupied by boys that looked like bad news. Vlad took his seat nearest the door.

A moment later, the door opened again. Joss took a quick look around and approached the desks. After a glance at their rather scary-looking company, he begrudgingly took the seat next to Vlad.

Vlad chewed the inside of his cheek absently. He very much wanted to say something to Joss, something that would break the tension, but nothing came to mind.

The ugly door opened and Mr. Hunjo wedged his immense shoulders inside. He went straight to the small desk at the front of the room and barked, “What are you staring at? Get to work!”

Vlad finished up his schoolwork relatively quickly, and af terward, sat quietly, waiting for the day to come to an end. The room’s silence was only broken by the soft snoring of Mr. Hunjo, who’d succumbed to boredom and had decided that his best defense was a good nap. Vlad looked over at Joss and dared to whisper, “Why are you in Otis’s class? What do you want?”

Joss shrugged halfheartedly. “What else, but to learn mythology? You know ... unicorns, trolls ... vampires.”

He met Vlad’s eyes then, and Vlad resisted the urge to read his thoughts. He didn’t really want to understand how a slayer thinks, what a slayer feels. He just wanted to be left alone.

Remembering they weren’t the only ones in the room, Vlad said, “So you have an interest in the make-believe, eh?”

Joss leaned closer and, after they both jumped at a particularly loud snort from the sleeping gym teacher, he responded, “I believe in truth and justice and the good of mankind. No matter how much bloodshed it takes to protect those things.”

Joss’s eyes were full of an eagerness that sent a terrified chill through Vlad. He shook his head in shock. “You’re a monster.”

Joss was quiet for a while. Then he sat back and returned to his schoolwork, but not before uttering, “It takes one to know one, Vlad.”

S
PRAT BOUNDED FROM THE CAR to the door of The Crypt, dragging October along behind him. Kristoff was already inside and Andrew was following at a leisurely pace. Vlad was bent over, tying his shoe near the car.

He was relieved to be back at The Crypt for a night, as the past month of classes with Joss were already seriously stressing him out and he needed to blow off some steam. Plus, it had become a regular thing to do with his goth friends.

Friends. Vlad had friends. He shook his head, smiling.

As the door to the club closed behind Andrew, Vlad stood and moved toward it, ready to feel the thumping of bass in his chest and smell the adrenaline in the dancers’ veins.

“It does smell delicious, doesn’t it?”

Vlad clamped down on his thoughts and turned. He knew that voice. His eyes scanned the shadows until he noticed something dark moving within them. His chest tightened—partly from fear, partly from surprise. “What do you want?”