How to Party with a Killer Vampire (3 page)

Great. I was just starting to relax and now this. Cruz was right: What else could go wrong at our upcoming Vampire Party? If it was anything like some of my other events—everything.

 

By midnight, the decorations were in place, Jonas the vampire was able to disappear without a glitch, and rough cuts of the film were ready to be viewed on the side of the large mausoleum. Although I kept looking over my shoulder, I’d seen no more signs of Otto Gunther. At this point I should have been eager for tomorrow night’s party. But the threats the old man had made—or implied—had unnerved me. These days it seemed as if every crazy person was ready to shoot a gun for any reason. I’d read in the news yesterday that some guy killed another guy over a parking place in the City.

Of course, in a city like San Francisco, that might have been justified, but still . . .

“I’m pooped. You ready?” came a voice from behind.

I jumped.

“Brad! Don’t sneak up behind me like that! Especially in a cemetery.” I checked the new Mickey Mouse watch that Brad had given me after I’d hosted a surprise birthday party for Andrew, his brother. “Where have you been?”

“Loading stuff into the SUV.”

“So you didn’t see that ginormous old guy who stopped by to threaten us?”

“What guy?” He scanned the area.

“Never mind. Just don’t sneak up on me again. Don’t you watch horror movies?”

“Nope. Just crime dramas and police shows. Horror movies give me nightmares.”

I felt my tension melt away with him standing next to me. “You’re kidding, right? I didn’t think anything scared you. Except the maggots you sometimes clean up at your crime scenes.”

He crossed his muscular arms over his muscular chest, almost causing me to have a muscle spasm. “I’m not afraid of maggots. I just hate them.”

“Horror movies are only make-believe, you know,” I said, teasing him. I happened to love them.

“That doesn’t stop Freddy from invading my dreams, the way he does in those Nightmare on Elm Street movies.” He shivered.

It could have been that the cold was seeping into the cemetery—or not. I was sure Brad could take down Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers more quickly than a kiss from a vampire, but it was fun to see this vulnerable side of him.

“Well, let’s get out of here before that old guy comes back with a killer backhoe,” I said, referring to the mysterious Otto. “We’ve done all we can here tonight, and it looks like everyone else has packed up and left. We’ll finish the rest tomorrow.”

“You got somebody watching over all the stuff we’re leaving behind?” Brad asked.

“Oh yes. Cruz brought a couple of his security guards, and I hired Raj for extra security. He’s around here somewhere. . . .” Scanning the darkness, I spotted my favorite TI security guard, Raj Reddy, shining his trusty flashlight into the dark recesses of the cemetery. No doubt he was searching for illegal gravediggers from Dr. Frankenstein’s lab.

“Who’s there?” Raj suddenly called out from several yards away.

I followed the beam of his flashlight as he swung it back and forth through the rustling eucalyptus trees, trying to penetrate the darkness.

Uh-oh.
Was Otto back?

I spotted a small circle of light in the darkness, about eight to ten feet up in the air. The tiny, intense beam seemed to hover over a headstone, as if suspended in midair, then to bounce to the next, defying gravity.

This was not Raj’s flashlight beam—not unless he’d learned to levitate. For a moment, I thought it might be one of Lucas Cruz’s special effects. But Cruz and his gang had already left.

And this wasn’t in my party plan.

Neither was the scream that followed.

“Did you hear that?” I said, backing up against Brad. I was shivering, and not just from the cold cemetery air that seemed to slice right through my San Francisco State University hoodie and jeans.

“Sounded like a scream,” he said. “Where did it come from?”

“Look! What is that?” I whispered to him, and pointed toward the small but intense beam of light. It suddenly appeared to turn in my direction. Then it disappeared.

Brad wrapped an arm around me. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Some kids fooling around in the cemetery.”

“But that light. It was bouncing around in midair. . . .”

“Hey, you don’t believe in ghosts, remember?” Brad gave me a squeeze.

Had I said that? At the moment, I believed in everything from aliens to zombies.

“Who’s going there?” Raj called out again, his flashlight waving back and forth in the darkness like a metronome on speed. Or was it just his hand shaking?

Brad released me and headed over to Raj, who was about ten feet away. Realizing I was alone, I quickly followed.

“See anything?” Brad asked as we all stared into the shadowed night. In spite of the few remaining party lights left on and the full moon, the darkness was thick and oppressive.

“Not anymore,” Raj said. “It seems to have—”

“There it is again!” I shouted. This time the light bounced along in another part of the cemetery, off to our left. Raj swung his flashlight beam in an attempt to pinpoint it.

Before he could get a bead on it, we heard another scream. If the first one was playful, as Brad suggested, this one sounded urgent.

Next came a loud thud, followed by a string of words that would have been bleeped on Jerry Springer’s show—all in a matter of seconds.

The three of us rushed over in the direction of the sounds. These were definitely human noises, I reminded myself as we neared the location. Raj shined his light around until he spotted a figure on the ground a few feet away.

It was the body of a man.

He lay on his stomach, arms and legs askew. I could tell, even in the dim moonlight, that he wasn’t breathing. His chest wasn’t moving.

Brad started to kneel down when suddenly the body coughed. The man rolled over and sucked in a large gulp of air. Brad sprang up.

Raj shined the flashlight on the young man. In spite of the cold night air, he wore knee-length baggy shorts and a thin T-shirt that read “Traceur.” On his head was a band with a small headlamp, and on his feet were a brand of athletic shoes I didn’t recognize.

Raj focused the beam of light on the young man’s leg. It was covered in blood. As we stared at him, he opened his eyes.

“You okay?” I asked, stepping forward.

“Got the wind”—the young man puffed—“knocked out of me.”

“Tore up your leg pretty well too,” Brad added, kneeling down to examine it. The guy had scraped the skin off his shin, which caused a lot of bleeding and probably hurt like hell, but the injury looked superficial.

“I’m okay.” He sat up; then, with Brad’s help, he slowly stood, putting his weight on his strong leg. “Lark?” he called out. “Spidey?”

Lark? Spidey? I frowned. Did the guy have a head injury as well?

A young girl, maybe eighteen or twenty, materialized out of the darkness. Raj ran his flashlight over her. She had short black hair and even shorter, precisely cut bangs. Her eyes were lined in black, and she sported a lip ring, eyebrow ring, and a tattoo of a bird on her left hand. Much like the young man, she also wore a headlamp, short baggy pants, athletic shoes, and a black T-shirt that read “Take Flight.” I had seen the same shirt on Duncan Grant. Although Duncan was kind of a geek, he loved extreme sports, everything from Geocaching to skateboarding.

Another young man appeared behind the girl, this one with a shaved head and a tattoo of a spiderweb around his neck. He was dressed much like the other two, including the headlamp, but he was barefoot. His shirt read “Know Obstacles, Know Freedom.”

“Fall again, Trace?” the girl said, smirking more than smiling. I guessed this was the Lark referred to earlier.

“It’s nothing. Just a scrape,” the-guy-who-must-be-Trace said, still favoring his hurt leg.

Spidey the skinhead just laughed.

“Who are you guys?” I asked, completely baffled by their presence in the cemetery so late at night. “What are you doing here?” I hugged my hoodie closer to my chest, partly to protect myself from the cold, partly from the intruders.

The three looked at one another; then the girl called Lark said, “We’re not hurting anything.” She ignored my other questions.

“You’re trespassing,” Brad said.

“So are you,” the bald one called Spidey said, cocking his shaved head.

“Actually, we have permission to be here,” I replied. “So, you want to tell us why you’re running around in a cemetery at this hour?”

The guy called Trace grinned. “We’re not vandalizing the place, if that’s what you mean.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“They are doing some kind of satanic thing,” Raj said. “I read about this in
People
magazine.”

Spidey suddenly jumped up on the vertical headstone next to Raj. He looked a little satanic, backlit by the moon. A second later, he leaped to another headstone, then another, and another. All the markers were of varying height and thickness, each one taller and more challenging than the next. But Spidey seemed to have no fear of falling. He leaped so gracefully, he could have been on wires, like Jonas Jones earlier—only with a better pulley system.

Finally he reached a mausoleum that had to be at least eight feet tall, with a crumbling facade of Roman columns and birds with broken wings. But instead of jumping down from his high perch, Spidey lunged at the even higher structure, barely grasping one of the birds. And instead of falling, as most human beings would have, he used the bird as leverage to flip himself up and on top of the domed monument—all in a flash of an instant.

This guy was crazy, pure and simple.

Trace turned to us. “Parkour,” he said.

“What?” I said, thinking he said my name. “Do I know you?”

“Par-
kour
,” Trace repeated, emphasizing the last syllable.

To my surprise, Brad nodded. “Cool. What kind of shoes do you use?”

I looked at him. Was this really a time to talk about shoes? Granted, shoes told a lot about a person—I’d combined my experiences working my way through college as a shoe salesperson with my degree in abnormal psychology to quickly read people. But what did shoes have to do with this?

Trace slipped off the shoe, the one from his hurt leg, and handed it to Brad. “KO Parkour,” he said, as if that meant something. “Weighs only nine ounces. Perfect combination of traction and design. One piece, not too thick, good arches, killer grip. Forty bucks.”

Brad whistled at the price. Was that good or bad?

“Good thing they’re cheap,” Trace went on. “I have to get a new pair every couple of months.” He was obviously proud of these strange-looking shoes.

“You don’t like Waterpros or Slams?” Brad asked.

“Nah, too expensive. But Lark wears Nike Darts or Dunlop Volleys.”

They might as well have been speaking Klingon.

“And Spidey, you go barefoot?” Brad asked the other guy.

“Yeah, dude, I like the freedom of movement and the feel of the surfaces.”

I had a feeling Spidey was missing a few Twinkies from his lunch box.

“What are you all talking about?” I said, shaking my head at this bizarre, middle-of-the-night discourse.

Brad turned to me. “It’s a sport called parkour. People who practice it are called traceurs. Duncan’s been talking about getting into it.”

“Parker? Tracer? I still have no clue what you’re talking about.”

“Par-
kour
, like
your
,” Lark said, rolling her darklined eyes. “It’s kinda like skateboarding, without the skateboard. Go on YouTube and type in ‘parkour’ if you really want to know.”

“Actually,” Trace said, “it’s much more than that. It’s a philosophy that combines movement with the environment. A traceur has to overcome any obstacles that get in the way—mental or physical.” This guy was the smart one—and obviously the leader of the pack.

“So it’s like running an obstacle course,” I said, summarizing.

“Sort of,” Trace conceded. “But the idea is to run as if you’re being chased, or you’re chasing someone. And it’s not just running. It’s jumping, climbing, rolling, balancing, grabbing hold or hanging from something—any kind of movement that will help you get from point A to point B, using only your body.”

“And the mental part?” I asked.

“Parkour can help you find out what you want in life, then give you the drive to go after it,” Trace explained.

“It’s sounding like some kind of religion,” Raj said.