~Part 1 Chap 7~
Jackie strode through the yard watching the tombstones for any sign of movement.
“Chad! Where are you?” She shouted, knowing fully well he’d never answer. Bunny-Chan darted off in search for him. She smiled and slipped into her invisible state, waiting by the door for him to make an appearance. He had snuck out at breakfast, and she couldn’t stand not knowing exactly where he was.
Soon she got impatient and began pacing, as she approached the corner voices rose through the air to meet her ears. She recognized Rawning‘s voice, she was talking to someone and she heard Chad’s name. She dropped to all fours and listened through the crack in the wall, pressing her ear against the rough paint.
“There’s only three more of the weak,” Rawning rumbled, “I say we get rid of them all tonight, they’re not going to get powers.”
“There’s still a chance!” Ms. Dugood’s warm voice was a stark contrast from Rawning’s, “Why don’t we just let them have a few more days?”
“We all know you like that Chad; you think he’s a good boy and would never want anything to happen to him just because he helped you pick up papers.”
“No! I just dislike the idea of giving up on them!”
“Well then,” Warabe’s deep voice cut into the argument, “You wouldn’t mind if he was the next to go? We can save the rest for later.”
“Um-”
“Well?”
“No sir,” she replied timidly.
Rawning’s horrible laughter echoed around the room as Jackie jumped back from the wall and sat in the dirt, Bunny-chan in her lap.
“No, I can’t let this happen!” she whispered and thought a moment, “I know what I must do!”
??
Devin groaned, elbow deep in blood and gore. Despite her being a vegetarian she wasn’t very timid about gore. She grabbed the heart and pulled it into place before beginning to sew the chest closed. She had just finished sewing up the gash that ran from the neck to the navel when her door burst open and Jackie screamed at her.
“Devin! I-ugh, what’s that smell? It‘s horrible!”
Startled, she tugged on the thread a bit too hard, and it ripped the skin. The body had the appearance of deflating and she tried her best not to kill her friend. Jackie was right though, it did smell terrible, probably from the bile and rancid flesh. She supposed she hadn’t noticed because she’d been immersed in it so long.
“The smell was, is this,” she motioned to the pale, deflated, body.
“Ugh, why? Why do you have it?”
“Rawning was going to assign it to us tomorrow so I wanted to get a head start. I chose this body because it looked fine from the outside but it had been in a car crash so the internal organs had all been ripped and rearranged. So I had to do a lot of work and I was almost finished when you slammed open the door and it um…deflated?”
“Oh, can I have it? I don’t want to work on someone’s corpse and that’ll probably be a better grade then I’ll ever get.”
Devin shrugged, “Sure, but you need to carry it. So what’re you so worked up about?” She asked, washing the blood off herself.
Jackie began speaking too fast for anything but dolphins to understand her. Devin sighed and steered her towards a chair.
“Calm down! What’s wrong?”
“Well I was looking for Chad and heard voices so I checked to see who it was, I wasn’t eavesdropping, well maybe I was but I didn’t mean to-”
“What’s the main point?”
“They’re going to kill Chad! Because he doesn’t have powers! You need to do something!”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know, something! Just promise me you won’t let them hurt him!”
“I promise I won’t let them kill Chad, okay?”
Jackie sniffled, “Okay, should I tell him?”
“I don’t think so, his sanity already hanging by a thread here. We’ll tell him later, once I figure out something to do. Now go do something, I’ll take care of it.”
Jackie nodded and got up, then looked around, “Where’s Skelacat?”
“Somewhere, she couldn’t take the smell,” and as if on cue, Skelacat phased through the door.
Jackie reached down and held Bunny-chan like a small child with a teddy bear before walking out the door.
Devin groaned and changed out of the bloody smock, sitting in the middle of the closet. Each of her reflections stared back at her, as though expecting something.
“What?” She snapped at the image, it seemed to mock her, smiling sweetly at her frustration.
“What should I do?” She shouted. Somewhere inside she knew it would never answer, but it still felt good to yell someone.
She stood up and screamed at the reflections, fully aware of Skelacat watching her. Finally, dizzy from the screaming, she sighed and slid down the walls into a seated position.
“What am I supposed to do?” she whispered, feeling as though she should be crying, “I need to save the people here, I’ll be dead tomorrow from Lucile, I need to create an escape plan and then send everyone back home, and on top of it all I need to find a way to save my best friend’s true love.”
Skelacat pranced past her and stared at the mirror, “Sometime’s I wish I had a reflection,” she announced, and then looked at Devin expectantly.
“Forget the mirrors!” Devin yelled as she hit the glass, it rained down around her like a million shards of pure silver. She felt numb and could hardly feel the glass cut her back; she hadn’t put up a shield but instead buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook but no tears poured forth, then, she got an idea and her head popped up.
“Skelacat, what did you say?”
“That I wish I could see my reflection.”
“That’s it!” Devin jumped up and grabbed the map of the school from her backpack.
“See, you can do this!” Skelacat told her.
“You knew it; you just were waiting for me to get it too! Next time just tell me!” She yelled at the small cat as she ran to the end of the hallway and began searching for a way into the passageway.
Skelacat nodded, signaling that she would do so and pressed the third brick up from the bottom, something clicked and she instructed her to pull on the wood panel right next to the wall.
“Ehem, what are you doing?” Warabe’s cold voice echoed through the hallway.
“Um, trying to see if I can hear the ocean?” She replied before turning to him, she smiled sweetly.
“Your going to be trouble aren’t you?” He had no emotion in his voice at all, and the scrape against his cheekbone stood out like an infected cut.
“Did you expect anything else?”
He nodded before leaning in as close to her face as possible, “We know it was you,” he whispered before turning and walking away, his thin figure almost drifting down the hallway. She suspected that he was completely bones, or wire or something, because there was no way a flesh and blood being could be that thin.
She shrugged and turned back to the wall, waiting until they could no longer hear him and pulled on the board. The bricks began moving, rearranging themselves until they formed a tunnel. They moved in silence, it seemed that they should have filled the hall with noise but they didn’t.
Skelacat took the lead, her body casting an eerie white glow throughout the tunnel. The light was enough to find their way by and Devin felt she should consult the map but Skelacat seemed to know her way and she’d learned long ago to trust her.
“So how’d you know how to get in?” she asked, whispering due to the tunnel, it seemed to demand it.
Skelacat stopped a moment and looked at her, “I know a lot of things.” She then turned back around and kept moving, not looking back. They walked in silence for a while, and just Devin began to wonder when the tunnels would end they came across a round room. The ceiling was low but she didn’t need to stoop, for once grateful about her short stature, and the walls were dirt, unlike the rest of the brick tunnels.
“For what do I owe this visit?” Loren’s voice drifted to her, obviously out of the reach of Skelacat’s glow.
“I need your help, and if you do this then I’ll consider you debt repaid,” she told the darkness; she didn’t like the feeling of being in charge of someone’s life.
A light went on; torches hung around the room and bathed everything in flickering light. She inspected the room, nothing was really there, just a pile of blankets, a few rotting chairs around a dirty table, and the torches.
He stared at her, an odd look on his face but didn’t reply.
“What?” She asked, wondering what was so weird.
“You’re bleeding,” he murmured.
“What?”
“You’re bleeding.”
And then the pain set in.
Oh god, the pain.
She hadn’t realized she’d been running around with shards of glass in her back, she’d been completely numb but now that her attention was to it she howled in agony, the shrieks echoing off the walls of the tunnels. They burned, they burned like red hot blades stuck in her flesh and she scrabbled at her back, making them bleed more and her fingers shred.
“Pull them out!” She screamed at him, the mix of loss of blood and shrieking making her head light.
“I can’t! I don’t know if I-” He yelled back.
“Do something!” She was still grabbing at her back, then backed up into a wall, they sunk deeper into her flesh and she felt hot tears stream down her face. She shrieked again, screaming out in pain and frustration.
“Oh god! Oh god! I’m dying! I’m dying!” She turned hysterical, “Skelacat! Help me! Help me!”
Next thing she knew she was hurtling down the brick passageways, Skelacat on her stomach, telling her to be quiet. She bit her cheek until it bled, trying her best not to scream. The shards weren’t normal, they burned, hellishly, magically, and it didn’t go numb like most pain, where if it was there for a while then she’d get used to it. It seemed that it grew steadily more painful second by second and her vision swam before her. She whimpered, unable to scream anymore.
“Don’t worry! We’re almost there!” Loren told her, he carried her and Skelacat, running as fast as his legs would carry him, faster than human legs could go.
The bricks opened in front of them and then she was in Jackie’s room. Thank you God, she was there, looking through her drawings. At the sight and surprise she dropped the case, the drawings flying through the room.
“Holy crap! What happened?” Jackie shrieked as Devin was set on the bed.
“I don’t know, I saw her and she was bleeding then-”
“Get these fucking things out of me!” she screamed, curling up in the fetal position.
“Here, I’ll put up a soundproof barrier and a painkiller on her,” Skelacat told them. Then the pain was numbed, like a nagging thought in the back of her mind, but it was still there.
She relaxed, not doing anything, enjoying the freedom from the pain.
“Are you okay?”
Then she sat up and screamed at Skelacat, “You couldn’t give me a painkiller before?”
“Yup, she’s fine,” Jackie announced.
Skelacat looked guilty, “Sorry, I couldn’t think strait before.”
“Fine, get these out of my flesh!” She screamed, pain giving way to anger.
Skelacat and Jackie sat behind her, pulling the shining shards out of her and setting them in the now empty plastic drawing case. Jackie grimaced as she worked, being careful not to cut herself or touch too much blood.
“So what exactly happened?” She asked, pulling a particularly large shard out.
“I broke the closet mirrors, they rained down but I was so preoccupied that I didn’t notice. I realized that if Chad were to become a vampire then he’d have powers, right? Hey! Stop licking my blood!” She yelled at Loren, who had begun licking the blood off his hands and arms.
“Fine,” he muttered, “You are in charge anyways.”
“Good boy, now I went to find him and he told me I was bleeding, then it started hurting. Not like normal, it burned like hell.”
Devin grimaced; it began to hurt again, “Loren, can you go get Chad and Jasper? And my backpack under my bed with out being seen?”
“At once,” he murmured, bowed and faded from sight, a creeping white mist had taken his place. It seeped under the door and out of sight.
“That was cool,” Devin noted, and then got shocked by Jackie sniffing her.
“What the-” She began.
“You still smell like death,” she murmured, then sniffed herself, “I don’t though.”
“Um, I was completely rearranging a dead body earlier remember?” She reminded her.
“Yeah, it’s just, never mind.”
There was a knock on the door and the mist seeped under it again, reforming back into Loren.
“It’s open,” Jackie called out, pulling the last of the shards out and throwing them away.
Jasper was the first one, pulling Chad in behind him. His eyes widened at the sight of all the blood and he ran to her side.
“Holy-are you okay? God, why do you keep torturing yourself?” Jasper asked, genuine concern in his eyes.
“Yeah, I’m fine. It was an accident, a stupid accident,” she told him, then turned to Chad, “I’m not going to beat around the bush, your dead little boy, unless everything works according to plan and that doesn’t normally happen.”
He gulped, “What?”
“Jackie found out that they were planning to kill you because you have no powers, I found a way to give you powers, but everyone involved must agree and do everything I say.”
Chad gulped again and nodded, all color had drained from his face and he collapsed into a chair.
“Okay, Loren will need to make you a vampire; vampires have special abilities so you would have powers.”
“You want him to suck my blood?” He asked incredulously, “We haven’t even known him twenty-four hours! How do you know he won’t just kill me?”
“To make a vampire you don’t suck their blood,” Loren told him, “Besides, I wouldn’t want to suck your blood.”
“Oh, so I’m not good enough, huh?” Chad asked, he had finally snapped, “I never wanted to be here! Unlike all of you freaks! Devin the bitch witch, Jackie the invisible stalker, Jasper the orphan druggie, and finally Loren the 15th century vampire! I’m not about to sacrifice my normality for something I don’t even know is true!”
“Skelacat, can you put a healing spell on my back? Or should I?” Devin asked, her tissue reformed and she stood up and went to the closet to change.
Clean, she walked out and strait to Chad and whispered in his ear, “Chad, you have four choices, you get killed by the teachers, I kill you, you do as I say, or you commit suicide and I kill you before you die by your own hands.”
She withdrew from him and smiled, “So what is it?”
He gulped and looked at Loren, “Fine, I’ll become a vampire.”
She reached out and he flinched but she patted his head, “Good boy.”
??
“Why again am I on the roof?” Chad asked, looking at the group.
“So there’s no disturbances,” she told him, “So Loren, if you don’t suck blood to transform someone, how does it happen?”
“It’s like a disease, and it always leaves a scar though the skin heals fast. Here, you’ll see, but keep your defenses up, there’s no way to see how he’ll react.”
He strode up to Chad, “Devin, please chain his feet to the building so he can’t run off the edge.”
She shrugged and snapped her fingers; the roofing material grew up around his ankles. He tested it and found he couldn’t move his feet, and Devin nodded, happy with the job.
“Give me your hand,” Loren asked.
Chad held out his hand, “What, are you going to ask me to marry you?” he asked, forcing out a weak laugh.
Both Jackie and Loren narrowed their eyes, “Never mind,” Chad muttered, “Just make it quick.”
“Okay, this might hurt a bit,” Loren told him and, before he could react, ripped open the skin on top of his hand.
Chad bit his lip and watched the ruby red blood pool atop his skin, Devin stared with wide eyes. It was like a plane crash, you couldn’t look away as Loren ripped open his own hand without so much as a flinch and let it drip on Chad’s cut. The black drips blended with the red and began to spread, Loren’s own skin stretched back over the cut so the only way to tell he’d been cut was the blood.
Chad was still staring at his hand in horror as the red disappeared and was replaced with black, the kind of black that absorbed all light and swallowed all colors. She watched as he began to twitch and the skin reformed over the slash. His eyes glazed over and his pupils faded, disappearing into his green irises. His hair began to lighten from dark brown to an unnatural red, the same red as Loren’s shock over his left eye.
Devin smiled, oddly pleased by the transformation, it seemed to complete the group somehow. She strode over to the edge of the roof and sat with her legs dangling as Chad began to scream in pain. The screams echoed over the vast expanse of brown land. She watched as students poured out of the building, looking frantically for the source of the horrid screams.
Jasper walked up next to her, “Loren says that this can take hours. Do you want to see something?”
“Depends, is it perverted?”
“No, but I think you’ll really like it.”
“Fine, as much as I’d like to listen to Chad’s man screams I’ll come with you.”
She scooted off the side and fell in a slowed descent to the ground. Magic is really handy, she thought as Jasper landed right next to her, his wings sucking back into his body.
“C’mon,” he told her, walking off behind the building. She followed him through the densely packed tombstones. He finally stopped behind a large tomb and waited for her to catch up.
As she rounded the corners of the tomb her eyes met a motorcycle. It was black and red and perfect, but she held back her excitement.
“A motorcycle?”
“Yeah, it’s originally my Dad’s but he said I could have it at sixteen. I decided to bring it here with the spell thing. I hid it out here so no one would take it for a joyride.”
“Smart boy. Let me ask you something, are you perfect?”
“What? No, no one is. Why?”
“It’s just that you play music, have a motorcycle, put other guys to shame with your-never mind.”
“My what?”
“Looks.”
He sighed, “Thanks, do you want to go for a ride?” He sat on the motorcycle and patted the seat behind him.
“So you want me to ride bitch?” she asked.
“Yeah, so? You coming or not?”
She shrugged and sat behind him, he offered her a helmet but she refused, putting a spell on them instead. He revved up the engine, and the motorcycle gave a comforting rumble before shooting off over the land. It felt like flying, they went so fast, and the wind blowing through her hair reminded her of the first time she’d been on a motorcycle. She’d been ten and riding with her father to check things nearby. She’d been afraid she would fall off and clung on like death as they sped over potholes. She eventually started laughing and decided she loved the freedom of motorcycles.
Snapped back to the current situation she found that she was laughing into the wind as tombstones sped past them, or maybe they sped past the tombstones. She loosened her grip on Jasper’s waist as he pulled the bike around and skidded to a stop, looking curiously at a hovering red line. It was about a foot thick and three feet above the ground, it ran off in both directions, disappearing behind the thick clusters of tombstones.
“What do you think it is?” She asked, getting off the motorcycle.
“I don’t know, but it looks dangerous,” he replied, “C’mon Devin, get away from it!”
She inspected it, it was clearly magical, and non solid. She turned back and smiled at him before stepping through it, waiting for something terrible to happen.
Nothing.
No pain, no horrible transformation, no dying.
She punched the air, “Oh yeah! Nothing holding us here! Escape is easy!”
Jasper pulled her back through the red substance, “Ever heard the saying ‘Curiosity killed the cat’?” He asked angrily.
“Dog.”
“What?”
“I never did like ‘Curiosity killed the cat’ so I changed it to dogs.”
“Huh? Whatever, still!”
“Still what?” She asked innocently, she liked to see him angry.
He sighed, “You are the stupidest girl I’ve ever met.”
She climbed back on the motorcycle, “It doesn’t help that I’m dirty blond.”
He smiled coyly and lipped his lips as he climbed in front of her, “Mmm, a dirty blond.”
“Hey! That's not what I meant!” She yelled as they took off back towards the school.
??
Chad had finally stopped screaming and he stood in the middle of them, panting. She couldn’t see his eyes through his bangs, but she suspected they held fury. The group kept a wide berth around him, just out of reach, each whispered to each other or themselves. Devin finally walked closer, followed by Jackie.
“Chad? How’re you feeling?” She asked, her head cocked to one side as she tried to see his eyes.
“Die damn you,” He muttered.
“He’s fine,” Jackie announced.