Team Human (18 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The Craziness of Humans

I
stumbled out of Cathy's house, trying to pretend my eyes weren't swimming with tears—trying to pretend so hard that I tripped on the porch steps and hit the ground on my hands and knees.

Beauty and grace in distress, that was me.

The knees of my jeans were dirty. I tried to brush them off, but the stain seemed to be sticking, and I didn't care. My palms stung, and so did my eyes. I blinked fiercely, then realized I had to climb back up the porch steps to retrieve my bike.

Obviously, I thought as I pedaled furiously, heading for home, obviously Cathy figured she didn't want or need friends as long as she had Francis for all eternity. She'd decided to make it clear that she didn't want me tagging around after her anymore, taking classes because she took them, studying hard because she did.

Not that I tagged around after her! She was being like Francis, contemptuous of all humans. She might talk about caring for Anna, but I was the one Anna had come to for help. I was the one who had found out everything we knew so far, and I was the one who would get to the bottom of it.

Cathy could study her vampire books and dream of endless bliss with Francis—oh, it rhymed, I should tell Francis so he could put it in another ballad!—I was going to help Anna.

The blood was pounding in my ears so hard, I thought that it was the thudding I heard. Everything was a blur of refusing to cry and wanting to show Cathy. Then someone tapped me between the shoulder blades.

I swerved on the sidewalk, wheeling my bike savagely to a stop that nearly sent me careening into the road, and found myself staring at Kit.

He was looking sweaty and disheveled, curls springing every which way.

“I have been … running after you … yelling your name… for three blocks!” he panted.

Now that I thought about it, the thudding had been a bit like running footsteps.

“I was thinking,” I said, summoning up all the dignity I had left. “Thinking deep thoughts.”

“I went to your house and you weren't there,” Kit went on, regaining his breath. “Where were you? Why were you cycling as if the hounds of hell were coming after you in a Mack truck?”

“Never mind that,” I snapped. “Why were you chasing after me?”

Kit looked at me as if I was dimwitted in some way. “You came to my house and talked to my mom instead of talking to me. In fact, when I saw you, you said you weren't there to see me, and you ran out of the house and banged the door.”

“Well, I'm terribly sorry if I'm not as courteous as all your undead acquaintances.”

“Courteous?” Kit asked. “What?”

He ran a hand through his hair. I could've told him that was a bad idea. It already looked like there was some sort of localized tornado going on directly above his head.

“I've obviously upset you in some way,” he said carefully. “Tell me how.”

“All human girls are upset when they're broken up with!” I yelled at him.

Did vampires take it easily? I guess they had a lot of experience. Centuries of experience getting rejected. After a while you wouldn't even raise an eyebrow in response to the latest dumping.

Oh yes, Cathy was so right, vampirism was a dream come true.

Kit stared at me. “Broken up with? I didn't break up with you!”

Technically, that was true. Because technically we hadn't been going out. But I didn't think it was very gentlemanly of him to point that out. Had Francis taught him nothing?

“You said you'd call!”

“Yes,” Kit said. “Because I was going to call you. Did I not call soon enough? I was about to call you when you showed up at my shade.”

It was my turn to stare at him. “You were about to call me? But you said ‘I'll call you.'”

“Yes,” Kit said. “You haven't gone deaf, have you? Or stopped understanding English? Because you're not making any sense.”

“When a guy says ‘I'll call you,' it means they're not going to call you. It means they're dumping you.”

“What?” Kit said. “I said I was going to call
because
I was going to call. Why would anyone say that if they weren't going to? That's completely insane! How do humans even function as a society? That's like me going to the cheese store and saying ‘Oh, hello, I'd like to buy some cheese with this money of mine,' and getting arrested for shoplifting brie! Actually, I don't think my cheese metaphor makes sense, though compared to ‘I'll call you' meaning ‘get out of my life,' it's crystal clear. But that's because humans don't make any sense! None!”

He stopped, out of breath.

“Oh,” I said in a small voice.

The knot in my chest eased a little. The fact I hadn't been dumped was the only good news I'd had all day.

“It's a whole thing,” I continued, in the same small voice. “When a guy says, ‘I'll call you,' and he doesn't say when—that means he won't call you.”

Kit pulled his phone out of his pocket and pressed a couple of buttons. My phone vibrated in my pocket. I fished it out, smiling.

“Madness,” Kit whispered softly into his phone. “I meant I'd call you. This is me calling you.”

We stood staring at each other over the handlebars of my bike on the phone to each other.

“Cathy and I just had an enormous fight,” I said. “And Rebecca Jones is dead. So she can't have kidnapped Dr. Saunders. So where is he? Is he even alive? Don't even think about mentioning amnesia. And I can't tell Anna any of this. And Cathy's going to become a vampire, like, tomorrow. And I still don't know what college to go to, or what I'm going to be when I grow up. And I thought you'd dumped me.”

Kit pushed the handlebars aside and wrapped his arms around me. It felt warm and wonderful and uncomfortable because my bike was between us. I placed it gently on the sidewalk. Then we held each other even tighter. Kit stood in the gutter and leaned down and our mouths were touching. The intensity of the kiss pushed the cold and sadness away.

“I didn't dump you,” Kit whispered, pulling me closer. “I didn't even realize we were going out. But if we are, I'm glad.”

“I see that,” I said, kissing him again.

“We'll fix this,” he said. “You'll fix it.”

The next kiss was deeper and warmer than the last.

“I should get home,” I said, not wanting to in the least. “My parents will be worried.” I pulled my phone out to check the time. “Possibly also mad.”

“I'll walk you,” Kit said.

It was only two blocks away, but our progress was slow. Slow and glorious. It took us another twenty minutes to say good-bye outside my house.

“Good-bye,” I said yet again.

“Bye,” Kit said.

We were still holding hands. I moved a step up; Kit moved one down.

“Do you want to go somewhere with me early tomorrow morning?” I asked, taking one more step. We were holding on with the tips of our fingers. “Very early?”

“Will it be as exciting as our visit to the Center for Extended Life Counseling?”

“I hope not,” I said.

Our fingers slipped apart, and Kit ran halfway down the street, where he stopped, fished keys out of his pocket, and opened the door to a battered-looking car.

Kit had a car?

That might come in handy.

Kristin called me that night to talk about her latest breakup, which was with a girl called Elspeth Moonfeather (not her real name) who had six gargoyle tattoos.

“No more crazy wenches!” Kristin said, as she always did. Yet somehow the next girl was usually even more insane. “So,” she added. “How's your love life? I have heard reports from a very reliable source that you now have one.”

“You mean Lottie,” I said.

Our brother is not a reliable source of anything except amazingly terrible farts. And ridiculous gossip, apparently.

“I may mean Lottie,” Kristin said airily. “He may have also mentioned this boy is called Kit, and you looooove him. That'd be a direct quote.”

“Augh,” I said.

“Oh wow,” said Kristin, sounding all of a sudden incredibly overexcited. “You didn't deny it.”

“I deny it!” I told her instantly. “I am not, and hope I never will be, in looooove with anyone. I deny it absolutely. I am in utter and complete denial.” I paused. “Uh. Scratch that. Don't snicker at me!”

Kristin snickered. I was lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling. I pounded my head against the pillow a few times.

“I may be kind of seeing someone,” I said. “Sort of. His name may, in fact, be Kit. But it's not serious. I mean, it can't possibly go anywhere. He was raised by vampires. He doesn't even know anything about humans. He was under the impression that human girls want to have sex all the time and he had to tell me he wanted to wait.”

“There are human girls who
don't
want to have sex all the time?” Kristin asked. “They do with me. Huh. I guess I should just put that down to my irresistible charm and good looks.”

“He's going to become a vampire himself in a couple months.”

“Ah,” Kristin said. “Well. That is a problem. I know how you feel about vampires.”

“What?” I asked. “Why does everyone keep acting as if I have a problem with vampires? I don't have a problem with vampires. You said Cathy shouldn't be dating a vampire. You agreed with me!”

“Well, sure,” said Kristin. “I think vampire groupies are dumb. And I know Cathy gets way too intense and serious about things, and getting intense and serious about a vampire seems like a terrible idea. But I'm not saying I'd never date a vampire. You, though, Mel. You love to laugh. Not to mention you're always fierce about your friends, and the way you saw it, a vampire hurt Anna. None of those things are bad! It just means you are less likely than anyone I know to be Team Vampire.”

It didn't sound as bad when Kristin said it. Not like it had when Cathy had been yelling at me.

But then, Kristin couldn't stop being my sister. While apparently Cathy could decide to stop being my friend.

“This is why I'm delighted about Kit!”

“Uh,” I said. “Sorry, I can't make any sense of what you just said. Possibly because it makes no sense!”

“Well, you know,” Kristin said, “you tried dating Ty because you were such good friends, even though it was pretty clear neither of you were that into each other. Then you got burned by that jerk Ryan, may he be afflicted with pustules. You've not had much luck in love, which has made you cautious, which is reasonable. Totally reasonable. But now Cathy is not being cautious. She's never been serious about a guy before, right? It's scaring you. Do you think that's part of why Francis freaked you out so much?”

“No. You haven't met Francis. He's freaky.”

“What I'm trying to say is that you concentrate on your friends,” Kristin said. “And that's awesome. But I also think it's awesome that you've met a guy and you're seeing him in spite of the fact that it's totally not sensible. Raised by vampires, Mel! That is nuts!”

“Well, yes, but—he makes me laugh. Like, a lot.”

“Oh, Lancelot was so right,” Kristin said. “Listen to you, this is precious.”

“Shut up.”

“You really like him, don't you?”

I thought about Kit, about everything he'd told me about his shade, about his life. About how whenever I smiled, he smiled back at me, brilliant and amazed.

“On the understanding that there will be no follow-up questions,” I said, “yes. I like him. A lot. But I'll tell you something. He gets any gargoyle tattoos or changes his name to Moonfeather, he's so dumped. And since it can't go anywhere, can we talk about something else?”

“How's Cathy?” Kristin asked.

My throat had gone tight at the thought of Kit's smile, how that smile would vanish off the face of this world when he became a vampire.

It closed up almost entirely at the thought of Cathy.

“Can we talk about something even more else?” The tone of my voice sounded odd even to me.

Kristin must have agreed, because for once she didn't push.

“How are things on the Anna front?”

“Not good,” I replied, thinking of all that I suspected and everything I feared. “But someone gave me a clue today. I know what I'm going to do next. And you know I always feel better when I'm doing something.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

What We Found in the Basement

K
it had a car, but he was not a very good driver. On the short drive from my place to the school, he barely took his foot off the brake, causing the car to shudder in a way that could not have been good for it.

“Who taught you to drive?” I asked, trying not to clutch the seat. I had been imagining a much more romantic trip. “Francis?”

Kit laughed. “No, Francis hates cars. June taught me.”

“June?”

“Also in our shade. She's the youngest. Other than me, I mean. She turned in the 1950s.”

“Which is when this car is from, right?”

“Seventies, I think. It's a Ford Country Sedan. That's why it's so roomy. Though it breaks down a lot. Just got it out of the shop the other day. Exhaust pipe fell off.”

I believed it.

“June's the only one who likes cars. Not that she drives much anymore. No point really. In the city, vampires can move about as fast as a car.”

They can certainly go faster than this one, I couldn't help thinking.

Kit slammed on the brakes because a traffic light had turned red half a mile ahead.

“Um,” I said. “I don't think you need to stop quite this soon.”

“Oh, right,” Kit said, cheerfully, easing his foot off the brake a little and causing the car to make its shuddering way to the traffic light, which was now green.

Fortunately, Craunston High was just around the corner. Kit did his version of parking and we both got out of the car. Me more shakily than him. We walked the block to the school in silence.

Kit was staring at my high school as if it was something awe-inspiring and strange. The pale morning sunlight made the chunky redbrick building sitting squatly in front of us look slightly less hideous than usual.

“So hundreds of you go here all at once?” he asked, his voice wondering. Because going to Craunston was so mysterious and exotic, as opposed to being homeschooled by vampires.

“Thousands,” I told him. “Well, two thousand, but that still earns the plural.”

“Wow,” Kit breathed. “That's a lot of high school students. How do you remember everyone's name?”

“You don't,” I said. “Just the ones in the same classes as you.”

“Huh,” he said, looking overwhelmed.

“Yeah,” I said. “It's handy to have people around for gym.”

“Yeah,” Kit said, and as well as looking weirded out, he looked a little wistful. “That does sound like fun.”

“But I bet you learn a lot more history than we do.”

“Also waltzing,” said Kit, grinning.

I raised my eyebrows. “How could I forget?”

Anna hadn't seemed at all sure about it, but she had given me the keys to the school when I'd promised her that I would return them as soon as I could. I'd also assured her that I was a mere step from finding out what was going on with her mother and that I would tell her everything as soon as I was sure.

She'd run out to give me the keys still wearing her pajamas, with her hair a red riot around her face. We'd hidden behind Principal Saunders's SUV to make the exchange, crouching down by her sandy tires as if we were spies.

I couldn't tell her what I suspected. I wasn't even sure I suspected it anymore. Cathy was right. The leap from what I knew to Principal Saunders being a murderer was a big one.

My hands shook a little as I fitted the key into the lock of the front door.

“So,” Kit said, bouncing nervously behind me. “You want me to come look at this basement with you.”

“Yes,” I said. “Your mother interrogated me about the time a huge flood of rats came bursting out of there. She made it seem important.”

“Rats?” Kit said. “That's not normal, is it?”

“No, it's really not.”

Kit followed me closely as we went down the halls, eyeing the art projects lining the walls with fascination.

“Anna's mom is the principal. She should have been where the students were, trying to make us leave in an orderly fashion, getting us not to panic,” I continued. “Or she should have been the one making announcements. She wasn't doing any of that. She was down in the basement, getting her tights all ripped up. Why? What was she doing down there? Why did your mom ask so many questions about that day?”

“Are you sure you want to be the one going down there? It could be dangerous. We could ask Mom—”

“No,” I said.

I didn't think Camille would be pleased to hear from me again. Not to mention we probably wouldn't find anything. I had no idea what we were looking for.

There might also have been a tiny part of me that wanted to do this myself. If Cathy could see me now, breaking into a school on a Saturday morning intent on searching the basement, she wouldn't think I was such a sheep.

My thoughts of showing Cathy stuttered to a halt as I remembered everything she'd said. I stopped. Kit took my hand in his, pulled me to him, and held me tight. “It's just a basement, right?”

“Right.”

It was extremely unlikely that if Dr. Saunders had murdered her husband, she would have buried him in the school basement. But it didn't hurt to have a look around, did it?

I went to the door at the bottom of the stairs where Cathy and Francis had once stood and sorted through the keys, trying first one and then another, the jangle very loud in the silence of the school.

When the right key turned in the lock, I heard Kit suck in his breath. I opened the door.

It looked very dark down there. I could barely make out the flight of steps.

I was glad I'd asked Kit along, because otherwise I might have chickened out. Instead I pulled my small-but-more-powerful-than-the-light-of-my-phone flashlight out of my pocket and turned it on.

See, Cathy? I told her in my head. I can think ahead. I can be prepared! Sheep don't use flashlights.

I took one step, then another, carefully walking down the stairs.

Halfway down, the entire room burst into brilliant light. I gasped.

“Er, sorry,” Kit said from the top of the stairs. “But there was a switch right here. It's easier to move around when you can see everything.”

“Right, yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

The basement was not in the most pristine shape. It smelled dank and moldy, though the stairs and floor showed signs of recent cleaning. I guessed by the clean-up crew after the Ratocalypse. They hadn't done a great job. But at least there were no rat corpses.

“I have to say, the beach is winning as the best date location,” said Kit from behind me, “by a lot.”

We were in a giant gray room with bare brick walls. Why use up the budget on painting the basement? There were cobwebs everywhere, and naked old pipes crowded the low ceiling and tops of the walls. Most of the room was filled with old desks and chairs and piles and piles of boxes. All of it liberally covered in dust.

The janitor had his own office and staff and several ground-floor storage rooms for cleaning supplies and tools. I imagined he and his staff only ventured down here to dump stuff. It certainly looked like it.

The floor was concrete. I decided that was a good sign. It would be awfully hard to bury someone in a concrete floor without a jackhammer, and Principal Saunders could hardly show up at school with a jackhammer and a corpse. Wouldn't she also need a cement mixer to make the cement to fill in the hole? They weren't the most fashionable accessories. Somebody would have noticed. Not to mention the noise. No such thing as a stealthy jackhammer.

“Seriously,” Kit said. “I loved the beach.”

“I may take you someplace fancy next time,” I told him. “But you'll have to dress all pretty for me.”

I looked up and caught Kit's grin. It made me feel braver about moving on. I had to explore every inch of the basement. There was a large gap instead of a door at the far side of the room. “This looks like a corridor.”

“And here,” Kit said, “is another handy light switch.” He flicked it and the corridor lit up, revealing more concrete floor and more old pipes along the ceiling. If anything, this one was even lower. Kit began to stoop. “So what exactly are we looking for?”

“I don't really know. Something unusual? Some signs that the floor has been disturbed?”

“How do you disturb concrete?” Kit kicked the ground with the heel of his shoe. “Feels pretty solid.”

“It is. I'm probably barking up the wrong tree.”

“But you have a theory, don't you?”

“Um,” I said. I'd decided that the basement was starting to look a lot more cheerful. Nowhere to bury a body, and although some of the rooms we passed had junk in them, it was hardly enough junk to conceal a body.

“Come on, tell me.”

“It's stupid and insane and probably wrong. I mean, hopefully wrong.”

Kit adopted the traditional waiting position, crossing his arms across his chest and raising an eyebrow. His waiting stance was rendered somewhat awkward by his having to stoop his head.

“I think, no, I don't think, it's just a guess, a wrong guess, most likely.”

“Go on.”

If Cathy could talk calmly about a woman we'd known all our lives murdering her husband, so could I.

“What if Principal Saunders killed her husband and faked the whole running-away-with-Rebecca-Jones thing? And what if she buried the body down here? And what if when she was doing that, she disturbed the rats and that's why they invaded the school?”

All right. So not
that
calm.

“You're right,” Kit said. “That's quite a leap. Why would that many rats freak out at someone burying a body? Wouldn't the rats happily eat the body?”

“Ugh. I don't know. Maybe. I'm not a rat expert. But trust me, I'm hoping my theory is totally wrong.”

We hit the end of the corridor.

“I guess we have to start looking in these rooms,” I said, flipping on the switch in the first one. Lots of junk. We walked in and started poking around. No bodies rolled out. Though a few dead moths did. Same in the next room and the next and the one after that. I was regretting not bringing a water bottle. It felt like my entire throat was coated with dust.

“Is that a piano?” Kit asked at the fifth room we investigated.

It was. Kit pulled off the cover and plunked at the keys. We both grimaced.

“To call it out of tune is an understatement.”

“Hey, is that a door behind it?” Kit asked.

It was. With surprisingly little effort—wheels on pianos, an excellent idea—we rolled the piano out of the way. The door opened easily, revealing a small room with an old boiler, and running from the boiler were more old dusty pipes.

In the shadow of the boiler, on the pipe, there was a flash of silver.

We walked into the room and flipped on the light switch, which did not work.

Time for the trusty flashlight. I'd been sure it would come in handy. I aimed the flashlight at the glint of silver as I knelt by the pipe, and realized I was looking at a few lengths of bike chain.

Except it was too long to be a bike chain. They were real chains.

In the shadowy corner of boiler and pipe, on the brick wall, there were crisscrossing lines. The bricks were scarred with long deep marks.

“Whoa, Mel,” Kit said, in a low voice. I felt him lean against me, shoulder pressing solid and warm into mine. He took my hand, the one that was holding the flashlight, and held on tight.

There were four gouges in the wall like someone had made them with his hands.

In one of the deepest gouges, there was something pale and irregularly shaped.

I pulled it out and shone the flashlight on my palm. It looked a lot like a fingernail.

Someone had clawed at this wall so desperately, he had left a fingernail behind, lodged in the brick.

If Dr. Saunders had told Principal Saunders he was leaving, and she'd decided she wasn't going to let him …

“She can't be keeping him prisoner. She can't be,” I whispered. “She'd have to be totally crazy.”