Jane Jones (13 page)

Instantly, the sound that all my classmates and teachers were psychologically conditioned to associate with the end
of our day rang out more than two hours early. I waited a moment for chaos to ensue, then swiftly skipped out of the office and into the milling crowd of students as bewildered teachers asked each other whether everyone should be corralled or allowed to leave. Before things had a chance to settle down, I was out.

Now, after spending my afternoon deflecting questions from my mother about why I was home from school early again, and my evening sitting down at the dinner table with my family—which was something Ma insisted that we still do every night even if the rare feast before us only consisted of three small glasses and one sad spoon—I was finally alone. My father had gone to work, my brother was probably under his bedcovers pretending to sleep while he read textbooks, and my mother was watching that show where they try to track down criminals with the help of viewers’ tips. I was a criminal now. I wasn’t sure if anybody but me knew it, or if I was in any way wanted, but I was reasonably certain I’d broken at least a few actual laws. I hated to admit it, but becoming a juvenile delinquent was kind of giving me a rush. Funny, because the only thing being a vampire ever gave me was a rash. Okay, a rash and diarrhea and potentially coma-inducing shock. But you still get my point about juvenile delinquency being a little fun.

Sitting down at my own desk, I booted up my com
puter and took the hall pass I’d scribbled on out of my pocket. I carefully entered the street address I’d copied from the school’s payroll folder, 124 Water Street, Fairhaven, then hit Enter. After a moment, a map of an urban area popped up. I zoomed in on the exact building in question. There had to be some mistake. The address Ms. Smithburg had claimed she lived at belonged to a church.

Nee-neet, nee-neet, nee-neet …
I’d set the alarm on my cell to go off a full two hours earlier than I usually woke up and slept with it on my pillow. When it did, I was startled awake, but not before I had managed to semiconsciously bat it away with my hand, sending the phone skidding on its black plastic shell across the carpeted floor of my room. I launched myself out of bed after it, knowing I had to silence the chirping before Ma’s eagle ears heard it from down the hall and …

“Jane,” she said, peering through my door that she’d already opened a crack without knocking, “what are you doing up so early?” I finally found the button to halt the alarm. They say “better late than never,” but sometimes it’s not.

“I have to, um …” I paused, trying to formulate my latest lie. You’d think I’d have gotten better at it from doing it so much. “I have to meet Eli? To work on our project. In the school library.”

“At five o’clock in the morning?” She stepped into my room, clicked off my droning heat lamps, and wrinkled her forehead at me in the darkness of my room.

“I’m not meeting him until six,” I said. “But I didn’t want to be late. We’ve got a ton of work to do, okay?” I doubted this would be okay with her. I prayed she wouldn’t call me on whether or not the school library was even open at six.

“But it’s still pitch-black out,” she worried. That was a good one! I spent so much time gooping myself up with sunblock and covering every exposed inch of my skin just so I wouldn’t blister and burn in the daylight, and she was worried about me going out in the dark? What was she afraid of? That I’d get run over by a car and wind up extra dead? I couldn’t win no matter what was happening in the sky.

“I’ll be fine, Ma,” I reassured her. I tried to stand up, but my joints were stiffer than I’d noticed when adrenaline had sent me flying out of bed moments before. I grabbed on to my dresser and hauled myself to my feet.

“Janie, you don’t look well. Are you sure you don’t want to just stay home and get some rest?” Wow. For my mother to suggest that I miss a day of school, I must have really been in rough shape. I knew she was right, though. The stress of the past few days had taken a toll on me and my body was starting to protest.

“I can’t, Ma. I gotta do this,” I said finally, picking up my glasses and sliding them on so my mother could see how fine I was. She might have stopped talking, but she never stopped staring at me with a look that was equal parts worry and suspicion as she nodded and backed out of my door, pulling it closed as she went. If my mother had any idea what I was actually planning to do with my day, she might have tried to wrestle my weak body to the floor and hold me there until I promised never to leave the house again.

I looked into my closet and briefly considered dressing all in black, but then thought:
Yeah, and why don’t you also wear a bandit mask so you can look really inconspicuous, Jane?
I opted instead for my normal uniform: worn jeans, a gray hoodie, and grubby old canvas sneakers. I knew from experience that you couldn’t get more invisible than that. I ran my fingers through my hair and snapped a band around my messy ponytail. I didn’t even bother to check the mirror and see what I looked like, because I knew the answer was “the same as always, but a little worse.” I tossed a bunch of information I’d researched and printed out the night before into my backpack and zipped it closed.

Taking the stairs slowly, I arrived in the kitchen to see my mother had a place set for me at the table with my
spoon and a double-drop of warm Bombay. I hadn’t expected that.

“Ma, I already ate this week,” I said. “We can’t really afford to …”

“We can’t really afford to have you unwell,” she said. “So eat.”

I knew that once defrosted, the blood couldn’t be refrozen, so it would be stupid not to feed. I also knew that the supply of incredibly rare and expensive black-market blood we kept in our freezer would not last for very long with my brother secretly chipping away at it for his experiments and me eating two helpings a few times a week. I picked up the spoon and waited for my hands to steady before carefully guiding it into my mouth. The metallic feeling of the spoon and the metallic taste of the blood spread out over my tongue and slid down my throat. Almost instantly, I felt a warm wave wash over me.
If I could eat that way every day
, I thought,
how different might my life be?

“Thank you, Ma,” I said to my mother, pushing back my chair. I stood up and she helped me on with my backpack, peppering me with questions about SPF 100 and cell phones and syringes, all of which I had in there, just in case. She kissed me on the forehead with her own parched lips and I felt a little shock, which may have been static
electricity or may have been a little of Ma’s strong vampire energy passing into me. I recoiled, then instantly regretted it. Even though my mother was a pain, I could tell she was trying.

I left my house while it was still cold and dark and walked down my block, turned the corner, and arrived at the bus stop, where I waited. Hopefully my mother trusted me enough not to follow me, hiding behind trees and in bushes. I hoped she trusted me, because I really didn’t want her to see me boarding a bus that was traveling in the complete opposite direction from where I’d
told
her I was headed.

I swiped my pass and took a seat. At this hour, the bus was nearly empty except for me and the burly driver in his blue polyester Transit Authority shirt, plus one or two commuters on their way to or from jobs that may or may not have been more loathsome than my father’s. I looked at them in their drab uniforms, clutching tall paper cups of coffee and wiping sleep from their eyes, and thought of how tired my dad must be all the time. Every day I made sure to allot plenty of time for feeling sorry for myself, stuck at age sixteen, going to high school after high school. But seeing these people made me realize how selfish I’d been. These mortals were exhausted because of their long hours and backbreaking work, but with any
luck, they might be able to save a little bit and one day retire and rest. My father couldn’t do that. Year after year he toiled away doing work that was difficult or dull, just to make sure we had a safe place to live and sleep and eat. Then, just when he might have earned a promotion or a raise, it was time for us to move on and change identities so no neighbor or acquaintance would ever question how odd it was that his children were, in fact, not growing like weeds. He could never let anyone notice that we weren’t growing at all. While most other adults in the vampire community lived off of old fortunes that seemed to never run out, my father had become a vampire with nothing in his pocket and struggled to get us to where we were today. He’d probably wished a million times that he could just leave it all behind, but fortunately for my family, he never did.

“Miss,” the driver said, looking at me in his wide overhead mirror and rousing me from my reverie. “This is Fairhaven. Last stop.” I looked around and saw that I was the only one left on the bus. I grabbed my backpack.

“Thanks,” I said to the driver as he pulled a lever to swing the divided doors open for me.

“Don’t mention it,” he said, winking.

Don’t worry
, I thought.
I wouldn’t dream of mentioning this to anyone.
I pulled up my hood and started walking
the four blocks east toward Water Street and the old Waterfront Church.

Where the bus had dropped me off had been nice. Not most-parts-of-Port-Lincoln-that-I-didn’t-live-in nice, but decent. There were some storefronts that looked prosperous, as well as some big, old houses that you could tell had once been grand and beautiful but were now divided into apartments recognizable by the multiple mailboxes hanging from their front doors. The fences were mended, if not recently painted, and the lawns were neat, if not overly big. Then, for every block I moved east, my surroundings became increasingly sketchy, as signs of decay crept in. When I reached Water Street, I was shocked at the number of abandoned buildings and boarded-up homes. It seemed such a shame that a neighborhood just across the road from a beautiful Atlantic Ocean sound could have become that blighted. The street was so eerily deserted that it seemed like even the shady characters you’d usually encounter in an area such as this had said, “No, thank you. I’d like to lurk in a slightly more upscale area.”

I stopped to get my bearings and looked for a house that still had address numbers on the door. For a moment, I thought I was only in the double digits and walked a few yards up, but soon realized that the first house I’d spotted had been missing the third number. The ramshackle
Victorian I stood before was clearly marked 272, so I started walking down, wondering how many blocks it would take before I reached the church.

All night I’d been thinking about what I’d find at this church, if I found the church at all. I had to admit that I was half expecting it to be a dead end, a fake address used by Ms. Smithburg and a likely waste of time that I could scarcely afford. Then, when I turned it over in my mind a bit more, I wondered if maybe I
would
discover something. I mean, maybe it was just a cover address Ms. Smithburg was using, but I’d learned from my late-night Googling that, despite hard times in the area, the church was still operating under the stewardship of a Father Kilcannon. Surely, if paychecks and school correspondence for a Charlotte Smithburg had started showing up at his church, this priest would have contacted the school to notify someone. There’s no doubt the nasty secretary would have taken the call, decided something was fishy, and then asked Ms. Smithburg to explain herself while she tutted and judged the whole time. Maybe I’d talk to this priest and pump him for info! The more I convinced myself that I might possibly have to pump someone for
anything
, the more nervous I became. When I reached a hulking, old Italianate manse with rickety and sloping wooden decks and stairs extending from every side, my instincts told me it might
be smart to cross the wide boulevard and continue walking along the edge of the water, where I’d be less likely to be seen by anyone. The day was shaping up to be overcast and gloomy, but I couldn’t expect the streets to stay deserted forever.

From the vantage of the shoreline, my eyes scanned each building across the street as the sound of choppy little waves rose from the water. Normally, I was a big fan of lakes and rivers and oceans, but you know how you always hear about rats leaving a sinking ship? This seemed like the kind of place where rats might gather to get on board a leaky ship in the first place. I stepped carefully to avoid any broken glass or rusty metal, but the main thing I was afraid of were some jagged wooden posts that were sticking up here and there, left over from a pier that must have rotted away. Leave it to me to be the first vampire in history to trip on her shoelace and stake herself through the heart.

When I next looked up, less than a hundred feet away, I recognized the silhouette of the run-down church that I’d seen on my computer screen the night before. In person, it only looked half as nice. I thought about crossing back over to get a closer look, but something told me to stay where I was and be patient. That something was probably me imagining my mother’s voice saying, “Stay where
you are … and be patient!” Whatever it was, I obeyed. Finding a relatively debris-free patch of ground, partially obscured by a clump of yellow sea grass, I sat down. I checked the time on my phone. Seven a.m. on the dot.

I made an agreement with myself that I would sit and watch the wide front doors of the church for fifteen minutes and if nothing happened, I would just get up and walk over. But when those fifteen minutes were up, I decided to give it another quarter of an hour. At half past seven, I decided that I could wait for an additional fifteen minutes. I was quickly realizing that when it came to confronting a potential nemesis, I was a procrastinator. When 7:45 rolled around, I figured that another fifteen minutes wouldn’t kill me. I was in the middle of making a corny joke to myself about how fifteen
billion
minutes wouldn’t even kill me, when something caught my attention. I flattened myself low to the ground and watched as an expensive-looking brown sedan pulled down the driveway next to the church and turned onto the road. It looked an awful lot like the car I’d seen Ms. Smithburg drive away from the school in yesterday, and the person driving it looked an awful lot like Ms. Smithburg.