Eleventh Grade Burns (2 page)

“Three hundred and two”

“Whatever, he’s old. He’s dealt with slayers his whole life, I bet. You should ask him what to do.”

After a moment, Vlad nodded thoughtfully. If anyone would know what to do, his uncle would.

Henry nodded too, looking somewhat relieved that Vlad was actually going to take action. “Anyway, I’d better get back. My mom is on a cleaning rampage because of our extended family moving to town. If I’m not there, who knows what she’ll throw out! The woman has no respect for the treasures of an adolescent male.”

Henry stood and glanced at Vlad, a worrisome expression on his face. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah. I’m fine” Vlad forced a smile, and Henry walked out the front door, closing it behind him.

As soon as the latch clicked, Vlad reached down and retrieved the coin. A deep line creased his forehead as he read the inscription over again. He focused on Otis and spoke with his thoughts.
“Otis? I need to talk to you. I could use some advice.”

Vlad turned the coin over in his hand. An image flashed in
his mind. A small point of silver at the center of his chest. And blood. Lots of blood. Vlad shook his head, willing the memory away
“No. But it can wait until you get home. Just... hurry, okay?”

Otis grew quiet for a moment, then said,
“I’ll
be
there shortly.”

Vlad gripped the coin in his hand and leaned forward, pressing his forehead to the tabletop. He fought, but the memories burst through his dam of resistance. Joss’s eyes narrowing at the sight of Vlad’s glowing mark. The bitter accusations of betrayal. A whisper:
“For you, Cecile.”
The feeling of being punched in the back. Looking down and seeing the silver tip of the wooden stake. He’d coughed, and the pain had dragged him under.

Afterward, when Joss had visited him in the hospital, Vlad had been almost certain he’d apologize. But he didn’t. Instead, he told Vlad that he was leaving. Their friendship, it seemed, was over. No longer friends, they were more than enemies. They were natural foes—vampire and slayer.

And Vlad still wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

The staking incident had been horrific to endure. And recovering from it had been no picnic. But the worst part of it was that he missed Joss, missed his company, his insight, his impossibly dorky way of looking at the world. When Joss had slammed that hunk of wood through Vlad’s chest, Vlad had survived ... but their friendship had not. And he was still mourning it, still grieving over the loss of a very good friend.

Not to mention the reason Joss was returning.

He didn’t need to hear it from Joss’s lips. The note he’d left on Vlad’s locker before he skipped town freshman year had said it all:
Friendship over.

And if it really was over, then Vlad was going to have to formulate a plan pretty quickly on how to face Joss the slayer, rather than Joss the friend.

He sat up, gripping the coin tightly, and watched the door for Otis’s return. After many minutes, the door swung open, and his uncle entered.

Otis immediately met his eyes. “What’s wrong?”

Vlad sat the coin on the table in plain view. “How’d the interview go?”

Otis furrowed his brow with a questioning in his eyes. “It went well. I’ll be teaching mythology full time at the high school.” He paused for a moment and wet his lips. “Is everything all right?”

“Congrats on the job. A lot of students have missed you since eighth grade—they’ll be happy to have you back. Me too.” Vlad dropped his attention to the slayer coin and released a tense sigh. “I have a problem, Otis. Joss is moving back to Bathory.”

Otis closed his eyes for a moment and sighed, visibly relaxing. He took a seat opposite Vlad with a small smile affixed to his lips. “You had me worried for a second.”

Vlad’s eyebrows drew together in confusion. Clearly Otis had lost his mind. “You’re not worried anymore?”

Otis shook his head. The bemused expression on his face irritated Vlad, though he wasn’t sure why. “Vladimir, there are far worse things than a slayer who’s out for blood. Besides, if he steps out of line and threatens you at all, he’ll be easily dispatched. Especially with two, soon to be three, vampires living here in Bathory.”

“Dispatched?” Vlad blinked, dropping his gaze momentarily to the coin on the table between them. “I don’t want to kill him.”

Otis seemed perplexed by this. He grew quiet, obviously mulling over something in his mind. Finally, he nodded and said, “If you’re more comfortable with it, I’d be happy to—”

“You’re missing the point” Vlad’s jaw tightened defensively. “I don’t want anything to happen to Joss. I don’t want you to touch him or hurt him in any way. He’s ... my friend.”

For a long time Otis didn’t speak. Neither did Vlad. He was too busy trying to figure out how the conversation had gone so quickly from asking for advice to killing his friend.

After a while, Otis leaned forward, tension and disbelief ebbing from him. “We are speaking of the same boy who drove a stake through your chest from behind, in the most cowardly way possible, yes? And you want to, what, give him an opportunity to finish the job?”

“No.”

“Then the matter must be dealt with”

“But he’s my friend, or at least he was. I don’t think he’ll try anything like that again.” It surprised Vlad how easily the lie slipped from his lips. Maybe it shouldn’t have. He’d been doing a lot of it lately. Pushing the image of Snow from his mind, he met Otis’s gaze.

Otis furrowed his brow. “Fine. If Joss keeps his distance, I’ll leave him be. But so help him if he threatens or harms you again.”

Vlad shook his head. “Then I’ll deal with him. I don’t want him hurt.”

The corner of Otis’s mouth twitched slightly. “You’ve made that abundantly clear. So what
do
you want?”

The thing was that he had no real idea of what he wanted. The only thing he could think of was for time to spin backward, for Joss to have never become a slayer in the first place. And that wasn’t exactly an option.

Vlad sighed. “Your advice. I want to know how to make a slayer back off without killing him.”

Otis sat back, shaking his head. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know if anyone’s ever tried. As far as I’ve seen, you can’t. Once a slayer has his mark, he will stop at nothing until the task has been completed. It’s always just been easier to take them out of the picture altogether.”

His voice took on a disgusted tone and rose as he continued. “They call it that—a task. Did your
friend
mention that? I suppose it must make taking the life of a person easier to refer to the act as a
task
instead of
murder.”

He threw his arms up, disgusted and angry and acting very much like Vlad wasn’t on his side. “Just as referring to vampires as
things
and
monsters
must make it easier to stomach the idea of killing
people
who happen to have fangs.”

Vlad watched him, wide-eyed, slumping back in his seat. “Why do you sound so angry?”

Otis stood suddenly, and slapped his palms on the table, his eyes fierce. “Because I am! How can you defend him, Vladimir? How can you spare his life when he nearly took yours? He’s nothing, just a slayer, a foolish assassin armed with a wooden stake. They are the ones who declared war on us, and we have every right to defend ourselves when we know an attack is about to happen. That’s all Joss is, Vlad, another casualty of war. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

Otis sat down in the chair opposite Vlad, his eyes seething. “If you ask me, the world would be a better place without him and his kind walking around, free to do as they please.”

Vlad shook his head wordlessly. When he spoke, it was in near-whispers. “Listen to yourself, Otis. You’re grouping them all together and plotting their extinction. You sound just like they do. Maybe you’re not all that different.”

Otis clenched his jaw and pointed a stern finger at his nephew. He stood abruptly, pushing the chair sharply back from the table. Vlad instantly knew that he had gone too far, but he didn’t care. He braced himself for the words that were soon to come flying out of his uncle’s mouth. Hateful words. Words filled with venom and justification.

But the words didn’t come. Otis turned and walked out of the kitchen. When the front door slammed, Vlad winced, but only slightly.

The coin lay on the tabletop where he’d left it. Plucking it up in his hand, he spun it once more, and wondered if Joss had noticed its absence, or if he had any idea where it might be now. It had to be his, after all. There were no other slayers in Bathory. It had to be Joss’s coin. Maybe that’s why Vlad had kept it. Maybe that’s why he couldn’t stop looking at it.

T
HIS ISN’T HEALTHY.”

Vlad blinked up at Nelly from his seat at the kitchen table. He hadn’t been listening but assumed she was referring to whatever it was she was stirring in the saucepan on the stove.

Nelly frowned and sat the wooden spoon on the counter. Yellow goo pooled around the end of it. “You’ve been moping around the house ever since Freedom Fest, Vladimir. It’s not good for you to stay indoors and sulk for so long.”

Vlad dropped his attention to the tabletop. There was little sense explaining how he felt. It seemed that each day was worse than the one before it. First, the situation with Meredith, then he learns that Joss is moving back to town, presumably to finish what he started over a year ago. And to top it all off he and Otis hadn’t been on speaking terms for almost a week, not since Vlad had turned to his uncle for his counsel and compared him to what Otis considered to be the enemy.

Nelly sighed and pulled a couple of twenties out of her purse, dropping them on the table in front of him. “Why don’t you call Henry and go see a movie or something? One last huzzah before school starts tomorrow?”

Tomorrow. Vlad had almost forgotten he’d be starting his junior year in less than sixteen hours. Meredith would be there. He hadn’t seen her all summer. Joss would probably be there too. As if it wasn’t bad enough having to face one of them alone.

Deciding that maybe Nelly was right, maybe he should go out with Henry, Vlad decided to give his drudge a call after dinner. Plus, it couldn’t hurt to ask if his cousin had finished moving in, or maybe changed his mind and decided to move to Alaska instead. He could simply go for a walk to see for himself, but there were two things wrong with that idea: One, he simply couldn’t risk running into Meredith, and two, he didn’t exactly want to be alone out in the open, where a vengeful slayer might be waiting.

He closed his hand over the money and met Nelly’s concerned gaze. “Nelly, do you think I did the right thing by breaking up with Meredith?”

Nelly wiped her hands on a towel and sighed. “I think that’s a question that only you can answer, Vladimir. Do you think it was the right thing to do?”

Vlad thought back to the Freedom Fest. Meredith’s face flitted through his mind, shocked, then saddened. He’d hurt her with his words, and then he’d shoved her. She’d fallen to the ground, sobbing, and all he could do was walk away. He wet his lips and looked at Nelly. “It was the only way I could protect her.”

Nelly sighed, then gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Does your father’s journal say anything at all about how he resisted feeding from your mother?”

Vlad shook his head. Tomas had always told his son that he only fed from blood bags, but lately Vlad was finding that enormously difficult to believe. Personal experience in the form of monthly feeding sessions with Snow had taught him that once a vampire has fed from the source, blood bags were like trading in that brand-new Harley-Davidson for an old scooter. So the question remained, where had Tomas been getting his blood from? The idea that he’d fed from Mellina, Vlad’s mom, sickened Vlad to no end. It had to have sickened his dad too, so it had to be someone else. But who?

Vlad flicked his eyes to Nelly.

No. Nelly would have said something.

She patted his hand. “Well, I’m sure everything will be okay. You just need some time to get over the breakup.”

Groaning, he said, “Yeah, and there’s plenty of fish in the sea too, right?”

Nelly offered a reassuring smile. “Believe it or not, heart-ache doesn’t last forever.”

Maybe not. But it certainly sucked for as long as it decided to hang around.

Vlad’s thoughts turned to Otis. He had looked rather haggard lately, so Vlad had no doubts that he was sticking to their agreement that Otis wouldn’t feed from humans while he was staying in Bathory. But how was he managing it? How was he nuzzling Nelly’s neck without taking a bite? His resolve must have been made of steel. Vlad rightfully felt like such a hypocrite, keeping Otis bound to an act that he himself couldn’t keep to.

Nelly said, “Why don’t you give Henry a call? I’m sure Melissa wouldn’t mind giving him up for one night while you two have some fun.”

Vlad opened his mouth to say he thought that was probably a good idea—even though he didn’t, not really—but then Otis walked in the front door and Vlad snapped his mouth shut again.

He wasn’t mad at Otis; he never had been. But Otis was very upset with him, and Vlad knew why. Otis despised the slayers. Vlad was sure he had his reasons for it, but Joss wasn’t like the rest of them. At least Vlad hoped he wasn’t. Really. Joss was the only slayer that he knew, so he had no real basis for comparison. He only knew that he had hurt his uncle by what he had said, and he felt bad for saying it. But he and Otis both knew that he was right, and that felt worse.

Having his uncle reside in the same town had turned out to be a learning experience in many ways. Initially, they’d been inseparable. Otis had recounted stories about him and Tomas and their adventures together. But ever since the construction on Vlad’s old house had been completed, when Otis moved out of Nelly’s home to stay there, things had been dif ferent. And Vlad wasn’t exactly sure why. They were at odds over the littlest things, and Otis seemed troubled by something that he would not give voice to.