Night Runner (12 page)

I
slept late the next day, probably because of all the running Mr. Entwistle and I had done the night before. The sun had been down for about an hour when he came to wake me. He was dressed in his body armour.

“Sleep okay?” he asked. He had his hand on the doorknob and was leaning in from the hallway.

I stretched and yawned, then clamped my eyelids down to try to wake myself up.

“I have to go out,” Mr. Entwistle continued. “I'm going to try to get us some blood.”

I sat up. “Good,” I said. “I'm starving.”

Mr. Entwistle looked at me funny. “Starving?”

“Yeah.”

He stepped into the room. “You're starving?”

I nodded again.

“But you drank yesterday. I watched you.”

“So did you,” I said.

“Yes. But I won't need blood again for another week, at least. I'm just getting more because I've run out and some might be available, not because I need to drink it right now.”

Well, this was weird.

“I usually drink twice a day,” I said.

He looked at me like I had two heads. “Twice a day?” He thought for a moment. “Must be that cow swill you were drinking. Vampires don't need that much blood. Not when they get the real stuff.”

“Really?”

“Haven't you seen the movie
Dracula
? He drinks a woman dry and sleeps for a hundred years.”

“I thought that was just a story.”

“Well, it is. Or that part of it.”

“Have you ever slept for a hundred years?”

“Well, no. But . . . but you can't do that nowadays. The world changes too quickly. If I'd fallen asleep a hundred years ago, I wouldn't know what a car was. Or an electrical appliance. Or airplanes, movie theatres, radios, televisions, push-up bras, computers, telephones, Velcro. Why, I'd be useless. But that's not the point. A vampire should be able to drink and coast for a while. Twice a day!”

I guess as a vampire I didn't quite have my act together yet.

“So you're going out?” I asked. “Should I come?”

He shook his head. “No. Too dangerous. You need to relax. Think. Sleep some more. Start writing the great Canadian novel. I won't be long. An hour, tops.”

“Where are you going?”

“Blood donor clinic. They're closing in another half hour, so I've got to hurry.” He turned to the door, then stopped. “By the way, I've been thinking about your uncle.”

“What about him?”

“I think it's time for Maximilian and me to sit down and settle our differences.”

“What differences?”

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “There are a lot of opinions about how to solve the vampire problem.”

I sat up and swung my legs out of the bed. “You mean that we exist?”

“More or less. Some people want to see us wiped from the face of the earth . . .”

“I don't think my uncle is one of them,” I said.

Mr. Entwistle cleared his throat. “Maybe not. But it is how he deals with the rogues.”

“The bad ones.”

“Exactly.”

I think I understood this. After all, weren't most vampires evil? “How else are you supposed to deal with them?” I asked.

“In a word, forgiveness. ‘Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?' Abraham Lincoln.”

Abraham Lincoln. I'd heard that name somewhere. “Is he that guy with the beard?”

Mr. Entwistle shook his head in disbelief. “Guy with the beard? Guy with the beard! Is that what they're teaching you kids in school these days?”

I shrugged. “I don't know. I've never been to school.”

This seemed to stump him completely. He was speechless for about ten seconds.

“Never been to high school?”

I nodded.

“It's the most important time of a young man's life!”

He must have seen that this bothered me, because he flipped his hand through the air like it didn't matter at all.

“So what? I never went either. And I'm richer than Bill Gates.”

“Really?”

“Well, rich in memories.” He smiled again, then his face flattened out and his voice got a little more serious. “Don't worry, boy. There's a reason for everything. Why my wife and son died. And my daughter. Why we have this contagion. And if there is a reason for your being here, it might just be so that your uncle and I can find a way forward without having to declare war on each other.”

I was scratching my head when he said this. I stopped and looked at him carefully. What did he mean? I was afraid to ask. In his body armour, he looked more formidable than anyone I'd ever seen. But it was more than that. He had a kind of inner strength. A confidence. My uncle had it, too. I didn't want them to be enemies. And I didn't want to be stuck in the middle. It was bad enough that Vrolok was after me.

“Where does the Baron Vrolok fit into this?” I asked.

“That conversation will have to wait.” He pulled up his sleeve and checked his watch. “Yeah. I need to boogie. Clock's ticking.” He stopped in the doorway. “We'll get in touch with your uncle when I get back.”

“Is that a promise?” I asked.

“I make no promises. My word is my bond.” He smiled a tight-lipped, goodbye kind of smile, then nodded. “And until I get back, you're grounded.”

“What does
that
mean?”

“You can't leave the house. That's the way it is when you go underground. You have to stay out of sight until the coast is clear.”

“For how long?”

“No idea. But the library's down the hall. That should keep you out of trouble for at least a few centuries. Hopefully, by then your troubles will be over.” Then he grunted a goodbye and slipped out the door.

A
fter Mr. Entwistle left, I lay in bed for a few minutes flipping through magazines and thinking over what I should do. My brain kept taking me back to the vampire problem—about the rogues, the bad ones—as though that was somehow the secret to figuring everything out. I was going to have to ask Mr. Entwistle more about it. And about Vrolok, in particular. If that wasn't his real name, I had to find out who he was and what powers he had. Talents, Mr. Entwistle had called them. Was he a shape-shifter? Could he walk through fire or breathe under water? It made me wonder what
my
talents might be. Before long I was out of bed and pacing the room.

Walking up walls. That would be cool. Just like Spider-Man. Maybe I could build my own web-shooters, too. Of course flying would be better, but I couldn't really imagine how that would work. I mean, if you were light enough to fly, wouldn't you sort of float around all the time? Maybe there was more to it than that.
I'd never even had any flying dreams, so I wasn't exactly qualified to say. Charlie got them all the time, so if he became a vampire, maybe that would be his talent. Then he'd never have to worry about getting caught. Of course, if I could turn invisible, that would pretty much solve things, too. And getting blood wouldn't be a problem. I could just sneak into the civic hospital and drink it out of bags.

As I pictured myself gorging on a huge stash of blood, my stomach rumbled. A hollow spasm followed. It was time to feed. I stepped out into the hall to have a look around. I thought there might be a supply of blood hiding someplace. And if not, then at least I was moving. That might take my mind off my hunger.

I started my search in the kitchen, but the only thing in the fridge was wine. The cupboards were empty, too—nothing but dusty plates and a box of light bulbs. I went down into the basement. Three doors opened off a central hall. The first room had padded walls and a padded floor and ceiling. I'd seen a couple of these back at the ward, although I didn't remember the ceilings being padded. I guess when vampires got put in time-out, they were a little more jumpy than normal people. Next to the padded room was an office. The computer on the desk wouldn't have been out of place on the Starship
Enterprise
. Newspaper clippings were tacked to the wall beside it. Most of them had to do with people disappearing. The last room was full of filing cabinets. They were all locked.

I went back upstairs. There was nothing in the bedrooms but magazines and closets. Then I found the library. It stretched the whole length of the house and was lined with wall-to-wall bookshelves. Other volumes were piled in stacks on the floor. The room was practically groaning from the weight of them all. Mr. Entwistle wasn't kidding—it would have taken centuries to read them all. Most of the books were old.
Very
old. And even though I've heard a lot of people say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, well, you sort of can with
an old book, because if it was crummy someone would have thrown it out a long time ago. So you can bet I was pretty excited.

The only light in the room came from a gas fireplace that was set in the wall opposite the door. Two windows sat on either side, and through these I could see the yellow glow of a streetlight outside, and the dark silhouettes of leaves and branches. It was like they were waving to me, begging me to come outside and join them. Plunging into the darkness for a long run would have to wait. Without Mr. Entwistle, I wasn't going anywhere.

I was just deciding where to begin my search for books about vampires when something fluttered across the window. I caught a glimpse of a dark shape out of the corner of my eye. When I turned it was gone, so I moved closer, to get a broader view of the yard outside. The night air was so thick with fog you couldn't see the sky. It made the neighbouring houses look hazy and ghostly. Bats were diving under the streetlight in search of food. That must have been what caught my eye. In the shadows below, two green, glowing eyes blinked up at me. It was a raccoon. We stared at each other, then it bolted from its hiding place and disappeared. As I watched the fog roll past, the porch lights across the street faded to a soft white. The street lamp all but disappeared. So did the bats. I thought at first that they were just hard to spot in the haze, but when I listened for them, I couldn't hear anything. A chill went through me and I shuddered. A cold had settled into the room. And a quiet. I held my breath, but all I could hear was the sound of my heart and the wooden floor creaking under my feet.

I backed away from the window. I probably shouldn't have been so close to it anyway, in case someone saw me. Then I realized I was being silly. With all the fog, anyone in the yard would have needed X-ray vision to see up here. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that something wasn't quite right. I snuck back to the window and edged one eye past the frame. Something flew past and I jumped back again. It was a large bat. The biggest I'd ever seen.

I hid behind the rocking chair so that the back of it was between me and the window. The flapping of large, leathery wings returned. This time it didn't go away. And it was much louder than it should have been. I peeked around the edge of the chair. The bat was hovering right outside the window. Wait a minute—hovering? That wasn't right. I was hardly what you'd call an expert, but I'd spent enough time running the city streets after midnight to know that bats darted. They were always on the move. You'd never see a bat soar like a hawk, that's for sure. They sort of flopped through the air, instead. They could do it pretty quickly, but you'd never call it graceful. This one just . . .
hovered
. It was unnatural. And it raised goosebumps on my arms and neck.

I stayed hidden behind the chair until I heard the sound of tires crunching on gravel. Someone was pulling into the driveway. I stiffened at the sound. Then I noticed that the flapping had stopped. A car door slammed. Then another. I didn't want to risk going to the window to see who it might be, not with that bat outside. It looked big enough to tear the beak off a bald eagle. It didn't take a genius to figure out what that meant. Not after listening to Mr. Entwistle's description of vampire talents. Some were shape-shifters. He'd said so himself, and the stories were full of things like that. It seemed crazy, but then again, three days ago I'd been nothing more than a kid with a bad sun allergy. I couldn't take anything for granted any more.

I quickly tiptoed out of the room. I reached the top of the stairs just as several sets of feet climbed onto the porch. The old planks creaked. I heard whispers. I hesitated. There was no way I was going to go down into the hall. But I had to know who it was. A sinister thought had taken form in the back of my mind. Dracula, the same vampire who could turn himself into a bat, couldn't enter a stranger's house without an invitation. That usually meant having a human servant break in first, then open a door or window. Once he'd
even got a dog to break in for him, or maybe it was a wolf. I couldn't remember.

I bent down so I could see through the hallway onto the porch, but there were no windows set in the door and none beside it, either, so there was no way to see who was lurking outside. I did notice that a steel bar had been set across the back of the door, sitting in a pair of brackets. I didn't remember Mr. Entwistle barring the door when we came home. He must have set it up that way before he left.

I strained to listen, then something crashed against the door. It sounded like a wrecking ball. The whole place shook. A crack appeared in the middle of the door and bits of plaster dropped from the hall ceiling.

The people outside were smashing their way in!

I tore down the stairs just as another crash sounded from the porch. The door broke apart, but the bar remained in place. Through the opening I could see two policemen. They were holding something between them that looked like a small battering ram. Off to one side was a man in an overcoat with a thick, pink scar under his eye. Everett Johansson. Somehow, he had found me.