Underdead (16 page)

Two hours later, after I had knocked many, many balls senseless, Gavin steered me into the food court and bought me a large hot fudge sundae. I felt like a little kid, happy and tired after a healthy dose of good clean fun. Vampires and murderers seemed as distant and remote as fairy tales, and for once, Gavin didn’t bring them up. I couldn’t help but wonder why he had done this for me, and how he knew this was just what I needed. Maybe he hadn’t been lying when he told me I reminded him of his little sister.

Despite having taken great pains to eat my sundae like a lady, I managed, as I somehow always do, to get hot fudge on myself and had to go to the bathroom to de-sticky.

It was the first time I’d gone into a public restroom without first doctoring the mirrors, and I entered warily, not sure what I’d do if someone noticed that I didn’t reflect as well as everybody else. Thankfully, I had it all to myself.

I wet a wad of flimsy brown paper towels and dabbed gently at my chin, but I couldn’t see myself well enough in the mirror for such a genteel cleanup to have much effect so I bent down and washed my face in the sink. As I was rinsing off the soap, I heard the door open and stole a glance at the mirror, trying to assess whether it was mounted high enough over the sinks for me to stay out of range. Fortunately, it didn’t matter. No one had come in. I breathed a sigh of relief. Really, this whole vampire thing was ridiculously hard to live with.

I reached for more paper towels to dry my face when suddenly I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“Hello, Jo,” said a voice behind me as a blast of musky perfume hit me like a wall.

I jumped about a foot in the air and turned to find Natasha standing behind me. She was calmly applying lipstick—by feel, I assume, since her lovely heart-shaped face didn’t reflect one whit in the mirror. “Jesus,” I said, clasping a hand to my chest. My heart was beating so fast I wondered if I was having a heart attack. “You scared the crap out of me!”

Her smile made my flesh crawl. “Oh, did I? Poor Jo. I’m so sorry.”

“What are you doing here?” I tried to keep the nervousness out of my voice, though I knew Natasha was well aware of her impact. “Are you following me?”

“Now, why would I do that?” She drifted closer, blocking my path to the door. I resisted the impulse to move backward, surreptitiously bending my knees instead, in case she attacked.

She pouted prettily. “Really, Jo. I don’t know why you act so hostile toward me.”

“Maybe it’s because you killed my friend.” Truth be told, my fear of her had little to do with whether or not she had killed Bob.

This gave her pause. “Did I?” she said delightedly, “Which one was he? Oh wait, you don’t mean that teacher, do you?” She tilted back her head and laughed. “Really, honey, that’s not my style.” Her smile faded and her lovely face took on an unbecoming hardness. “You know as well as I that I didn’t harm a hair on his head. Will told you he’d put him off limits.”

She stepped closer, eyes glittering dangerously. “You’re off limits too.” She reached out a hand tipped with long, red nails and stroked my hair. I cringed. “You’re his new pet. None of us can touch you. He wants to turn you himself. You should be flattered. He hasn’t troubled himself over a new recruit in a long time.”

I shoved her hand away from me. “How interesting. Wait, don’t tell me. The last person he recruited, it you wasn’t it?”

Her eyes narrowed dangerously as she managed, barely, to keep herself in check. “Don’t act so smug, you little bitch. He would never think to blame me if you bled to death from slashed wrists in a public bathroom, would he?”

I realized I’d made a mistake and had pushed her too far. I was pretty sure she didn’t have a knife on her—her tiny purse wouldn’t hold one, and the bulging curves in her formfitting clothes were all her—but that didn’t mean she wasn’t dangerous. I glanced wildly around the room, looking for something I could use as a weapon or a shield, but even the trashcan was nailed securely to the wall.

Natasha smiled excitedly, a singularly unpleasant look, and began to circle me, like a cat playing with a mouse. I was about to scream for Gavin, when a group of girls came storming into the bathroom, giggling and rushing for the stalls. I pushed past Natasha and ran out of the bathroom toward the food court. I took the last corner at a full sprint and ran smack into Gavin.

“Aaargh!”

He grabbed my shoulders to steady me. “Are you all right? Did something happen in there? What took you so long?”

I took a gulping breath. “Natasha.”

A single word was enough. Gavin headed for the ladies’ restroom at a run. I followed, and when he would have gone in after her, I grabbed his arm and held him back.

“What are you doing? You can’t go in there!”

“What?” He strained against my hold.

“There’s half a dozen high school girls in there.”

“Then I definitely need to get Natasha out of there.”

I shook my head. “She’s long gone. She was right behind me when I left.” Besides, if I read Natasha right, the last thing she’d want was a bunch of nubile sixteen-year-olds hanging around the love nest back at the castle, or wherever it was they called home.

Gavin led me back to our table in the food court and we both wordlessly turned our chairs so our backs were fully against the wall. I sat down with a thump. My knees were still shaking. The carnival music that had so charmed me earlier jarred my ears with its frivolity.

The food court was in the middle of everything and had floor-to-ceiling windows. It was an ideal location to hunt for someone—wayward children, potential dates, vampires—and had probably been designed with just that attribute in mind. “What did she want?” asked Gavin.

“Oh, I don’t know, to kill me?”

“She won’t hurt you.”

I made a noise of disbelief. “Says you.”

Gavin stopped scanning the room for a moment to focus impatient gray eyes on me. “I told you. She can’t. Not unless Will allows her, and he won’t. He won’t let another vampire finish off his work, especially a lower ranked one. It would make him look bad. She’s just trying to scare you.”

Natasha had said as much, but she’d also suggested an easy way around such restrictions. “Know that for a fact, do you? Well, you’re free to believe what you want, but I don’t think she’s harmless. Besides, Will probably doesn’t even know she’s here. She could have knocked me over the head in the ladies’ room and no one would ever have known it was her. You wouldn’t have, would you? You’d probably think it was just some gang banger. You are ridiculously closed minded when it comes to vampires killing people the regular way.”

“Back on that again, are you? I told you, they don’t work like that.”

“And I told you, however much you believed in your theory, it’s just that. A theory. Pardon me if I choose not to believe Natasha’s filled with good intentions when it comes to me.”

Gavin reached for his phone.

“Who are you calling?”

“Backup. If she’s still here, there’s a good chance she hasn’t killed yet, and I’m tired of finding bodies.” He broke off to speak with the person at the other end of the line.

When he was done, he turned back to me. “I’ll have another officer take you home. In the meantime, why don’t you give me as detailed a description as you can. I think I have a pretty good idea of her physical description from the last time you saw her. So why don’t you start with what she was wearing.”

As little as possible. “A dark blue miniskirt and a lighter blue camisole. Trust me. You’ll know her when you see her. She’s every man’s fantasy.”

“Not every man’s.” His phone beeped. “They’re here.” He stood up. “C’mon.”

I balanced my jumbo cup of coffee atop a thick stack of handouts that were still warm from the copy machine, pushed my classroom door open with my shoulder and stopped dead on the threshold. “What the hell?”

Every surface gleamed. There wasn’t a paper out of place or a book out of line. Even the glue gun gone wild dioramas were as tidy and well-behaved as a row of altar boys on a Sunday morning. The headmaster must have ordered the janitorial staff to give the room an extra scrub over the weekend, and boy had they. The room was clean. Too clean.

The place looked like a morgue.

But if there’s one thing I’m equal to, it’s a clean room. In no time at all I had the room messed back up to my usual level of casual housekeeping. I re-cluttered the counters with handouts and papers I’d graded over the weekend, dragged the dioramas back to their usual spots and hid as much of the gleaming desktops as I could with dusty trays of soil samples that probably hadn’t seen the light of day since 1965. When I was satisfied my room looked its usual lived-in self, I popped down to the faculty lounge to check my mail, leaving my classroom open for the early birds as had been my habit. I wanted things to be as normal as possible for my students.

In the faculty lounge, Roger was holding court near the coffee maker. By his side was a small mousy woman I judged to be in her mid-thirties. Roger beckoned me over to meet her.

“This is Mrs. O’Neill. She will be taking over for Bob.” His voice rang out as if introducing royalty and then dropped to just above a whisper as he introduced me like I was the poor stepcousin. “Jo teaches eighth-grade earth science, and is new to the profession. I’m sure she’ll appreciate any tips you can give her.”

His words had me seeing red but she held out her hand in a friendly gesture and I forced my tight lips into a smile.

“Hi Jo, I’m Leah.” She spoke quickly, in a cheerful rush. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, and I hope you’ll be the one to teach
me
things. As it stands, I can barely find my way to my classroom. And it’s
Ms
. O’Neal,” she corrected Roger nicely. “I’m a single parent.”

Roger frowned at this unexpected broaching of what he considered an indelicate subject and steered her firmly away from me—as if I were poisoning her—toward a group of English teachers. I left to the sound of Roger reciting Leah’s credentials (they were impressive) in a pompous voice and puffing out his chest at their nods of respect, as if
he
was the one with the master’s degree from Harvard.

I had been away from my classroom longer than I had planned and hurried back, taking the upper hallway at a run when I heard all the noise coming from my classroom. I arrived wheezing for breath at my doorway to find two of my more “challenging” homeroom kids having a sword fight. And not just any sword fight—one of the boys was lunging at the other with a giant six-foot lance made from two meter sticks stuck together with duct tape.

“Knock it off!” I grabbed hold of the “sword” just in time to prevent a decapitation. “Take the tape back off the meter sticks and put them away.”

“Aww!”

“But we found them this way!”

“Right. And the meter sticks just pulled themselves out from under the sink and tied themselves together.” I raised my eyebrows and made an untying gesture with my hands and they sullenly began pulling off the duct tape. I didn’t kid myself that they heeded me out of any respect for my authority. I’d spent the past five months establishing a useful system of bribes or punishment, and they knew better than to be the reason no one got doughnuts on Friday.

The bell rang, cutting off the rest of their complaints as they shuffled off to their classes. My first period students arrived on the heels of their departure and I instructed them to get out the homework I’d assigned over the weekend. Lots of grumbling and whining about the workload accompanied the zipping of backpacks, sounds of shuffling paper, and loud thunks of earth science texts being dropped onto desktops. As I made the rounds, I overheard a lot of gossipy speculation about where exactly in the classroom Bob had died, but the urgency about Bob’s death had clearly faded over the weekend.

It was a little sad, how quickly he was becoming a memory. But it had been almost a week since his death—and they still thought Bob had died by accident.

And that wouldn’t change unless the police arrested someone, but they were no closer to finding his killer. Nor was I, for that matter. Maybe it was time to step up my efforts? I would, I promised myself, but later. I pushed all thoughts of Bob’s murder to the back of my mind and forced myself to focus on my students.

I finished my rounds, put my grade book on my desk and went to the whiteboard in the front of the room. “All right,” I said, uncapping a blue marker. “Now.” I looked out at my students and saw…complete and utter disinterest. These were good students. They’d read the chapter on minerals and answered the questions at the end of it—or at least taken the trouble to copy someone else’s—and knew what was in store for them. Unit 3: Rocks and Minerals. They didn’t like it. Neither did I. I don’t know what brilliant minds decided eighth graders were the proper recipients for long chapters on ore deposits and glaciers, but they should be hauled out back and shot.

I’d be happy to hold them down, and by the looks of it, quite a few of my students would volunteer as well. I turned to face my class and projected as much enthusiasm as I could muster into my voice. “Minerals,” I said. I wrote it on the board in big blue letters and examined my handiwork. Maybe I should have chosen a more lively color. Didn’t blue put people to sleep? I held up a rocket-shaped rose crystal; a thin, flaky sheet of pale gold; and a shiny, metallic cube made up of hundreds of smaller cubes. “Rose quartz, mica muscovite, and galena.” I passed them around. “All minerals, all different. Can anyone tell me what they have in common?”

A hand shot up. “Ms. Gardner?”

“Yes?” I tried to keep the sound of desperation out of my voice.

“Do we get to set anything on fire today?”

I sighed quietly. “No.” They sighed quietly. It was a long class. When three girls in the front row started passing notes back and forth, I could hardly blame them.

Now that the third quarter had begun, I lost my second period prep to second-period study hall.
Yippee.
Thankfully, the group was so small I was able to hold it in my classroom instead of the cavernous room off the library that had lots of pillars for students to hide behind and doodle on. I had a reasonable chance of controlling them. Even so, Maxine had arranged for me to have an aide, a nice Junior boy who needed some charity work to buff out his college applications. He made all the difference in the world.