ReVamped (13 page)

Hailee hissed and launched herself into the store. The sales girl who’d been restocking shoes and watching us out of the corner of her eye flew to intercept, but she didn’t have to worry. Hailee’s buds, who had more sense than she did, grabbed her, clucking like a bunch of hens in a way that was probably meant to sooth.

“Watch your back,” Hailee spat out as her friends led her away. “Some day I’ll catch you alone.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Lily called. “You’d just better hope I never catch
you
without your posse to back you up.”

That settled it—posse, then.

Hailee tried to launch herself toward us again, but she was held fast and dragged away.

“That was fun,” Lily said, looking positively perky. “What do you say we celebrate with a smoothie?”

“What
is
it with you and smoothies?” Bella asked. “Do you have any idea how much sugar they have?”

“Enough to ride a natural high,” Lily answered back. “Then we can tear the guys away from killing zombies and make them take us to a movie.
The Taxidermist XII
started on Friday.”

“Oh, please, number eleven was so lame,” Bella complained.

“Yeah, but this one’s got Milan Jokavic in it.”

“That hot guy from
Wicked Dead III
?”

I smiled, letting it all wash over me, feeling for the first time in far too long like a normal teen. Friends, enemies, shopping …

Suddenly the sales girl was standing in front of us. “You want me to ring those up?” she asked, clearly anxious to be rid of us. We all exchanged looks.

“What the hell,” Bella said. “I’ll wear mine out.”

Still, she disappeared into the dressing room to gather her stuff, as did we all, though I took an extra few seconds to change because I didn’t have the right footwear for my outfit … yet. I met up with them at the counter.

When it was my turn, I passed over my governmentally supplied credit card. I hadn’t thought to ask how it worked. Did they cover my expenses or would the bill be taken out of my paycheck? Whatever. Backseamed stockings were classics, and the sight of Bobby’s tongue dragging on the floor would be more than enough to justify the skirt.

“Shoes before smoothies?” I asked, as the sales girl handed me my bag.

“Sure,” Bella said, surprising me because it always seemed that Lily was the decision-maker of the group. “I know just the place.”

• • •

We didn’t actually get back to the guys for another hour, and it was
another
after that before the next showing of
The Taxidermist XII
, which is how I learned that even goths liked Dance, Dance Revolution. Unfortunately for Lily and Bella, I was at minimum semi-pro. We’d even started to gather a crowd by the time we had to leave for the film.

We girls sat on one end of the row with the guys toward the center, arguing all through the opening credits about how Gavin’s target gun on the last game had been—or not been—misaligned, cheating him of the high score he deserved. When the hushing started he subsided into a pout.

A third of the way through the movie, the
Mission Impossible
theme started playing in my head like a ring tone. Bobby and Rick must have begun their infiltration of the morgue and somehow, Bobby’s mental mood music was bleeding through to me …

And then suddenly it cut off. There was complete and absolute silence except for the screaming onscreen. The hero and the too-stupid-to-live heroine were still alive for the moment. I was struggling to care, struggling not to panic over what might be happening to Bobby, when something very pointy poked the back of my neck and my skin tried to crawl away from it.

Wood, I knew instantly. A stake. Whoever was behind me knew exactly what I was and didn’t seem any too happy about it. I could imagine that I’d made some enemies—the jocks, the pretty-girl posse,
Rasputin
and his minions, though I still couldn’t believe it was him. I mean, even
I’d
paid attention to that part of history class. But only a few people knew we were going to see this particular movie at this particular time and I was sitting with them. Someone had sold me out.

12

The stake piercing my spine was starting to draw blood, and I was temporarily thankful to the goth god that black was good for disguising blood stains. Too bad my mesh probably wasn’t machine washable.

“Do you
mind
?” I asked, half turning in my seat.

“
Move
,” the woman behind me hissed.

I sighed dramatically, then cringed since it ground the stake closer to my spinal column.

Bella glanced over at the disturbance, and I took it as a cue to excuse myself before she got wise to what was going on and put herself into harm’s way. Of course, if Bella was my Judas it wouldn’t matter, but I didn’t know and couldn’t risk her.

“Smoothies go right through me,” I explained as I slipped past Bella into the aisle.

She nodded, twitched her legs aside, and turned straight back to the man being mangled onscreen.

Once I was clear, pointy-stick woman grabbed me by the waistband of my jeans in a grip way too intimate for not having bought me dinner first. I hissed, and she poked me again. This woman was
so
going down, especially if the back of my neck scabbed over and kept me out of pigtails for the foreseeable future. Not that I was really into pigtails, but a girl liked to keep her options open.

I pretended to stumble, to rip myself from her grasp and escape the stake, but the Prickly Princess only tightened her grip on my jeans until it was a damned good thing I didn’t have to breathe.

We were all the way to the exit doors, me mentally calling out to Bobby, hoping he wasn’t in trouble himself and that he’d get Maya a message wherever she might be—which was supposed to be
right freakin’ here
covering my butt. I ran through my mental catalogue of moves—elbow jab to the solar plexus, stomp on her insole, stop, drop, and roll—but the stake was a wee bit intimidating.

As if she could read my mind, the Prickly Princess moved the point to right between my shoulder blades. I was no science geek, but I was pretty sure that from there it was a straight shot to my heart, assuming no pesky vertebrae got in the way.

“Don’t even think about it,” she hissed in my ear.

“About what?” I asked, a little too loudly now that we were away from my friends, at least some of whom were probably innocent. “My mind’s a blank.” I was hoping to make a commotion, but all we got was a round of “Shhh”s and a crew of prepubescents in the back glancing between us and the screen to see which might become more interesting.

“Move,” she said again, emphasizing her point in a very literal way.

I moved, pulling open the heavy theater door and stepping out into the hallway. I had barely registered Maya in my peripheral vision when she struck—grabbing me by the shirt and ripping me from the Prickly Princess’ grip. She spun me toward the doors that lead out of the theater entirely.

“Go!” she yelled, tossing me a set of keys. Prickly snarled and charged Maya, but was blown back by a snap kick to the face. “Go for the car! Pull it around.”

She didn’t have to tell me twice.

I bolted for the outer door that led to the parking lot, hoping I’d find the car up front and center, because the lot was jam packed. I cruised the rows, pressing the
unlock
button every few steps and waiting for the car to beep back at me. I hoped Maya was still winning.

I found the car, planted myself behind the wheel, and laid rubber to the theater entrance, only running over one traffic cone and nearly leaving the undercarriage behind. Maya was in the breezeway between the inner and outer doors, holding a slumped Prickly, Pummelled Princess under the arms like some drunken scarecrow. She seemed a strange choice for a kidnapper or assassin—light brown hair under a silk bandana, big round sunglasses that made her eyes look owlish, a camel-colored sweater, a darker brown full-length skirt and matching boots, and big gold hoops in her ears. She looked like an escapee from a 1970s Nick at Night rerun.

“Sid missed a check-in,” Maya told me as I jumped out of the still-running car to help pour PP into the trunk. My heart contracted, nearly kick-starting again in panic. Sid was supposed to be Bobby’s back-up … and Rick’s. If he’d been put out of commission …

I slammed the trunk down hard over the unconscious Prickly Princess. If she was connected with Bobby’s disappearance … if he’d been hurt in any way … she was dead meat. The kind that didn’t rise again.

“I’ll drive,” Maya said, leaping into the driver’s seat before I could protest. I slammed into the shotgun seat, and she took off before my door was even shut.

“I heard Bobby in my head for a bit,” I told her, holding onto the dash for dear life, my matte black nail polish nearly cracking from the strain. “He just cut off. You don’t think—”

“I don’t speculate,” she said, proving the stick was still firmly lodged up her butt. “We’ll find out soon enough. We’re headed to the morgue now. If we don’t find them there, Rhoda here can tell us where they are.”

“Rhoda?” I asked.

“Old television reference. Never mind, you’re way too young.”

She drove like a bat outta thrift-store hell. It was dark, even darker than it should be at six thirty in the evening, which meant that clouds had moved in while we’d been at the Galleria. No sooner had I thought it than big, fat raindrops started to fall, playing on the roof like
Taps
. I squashed that thought faster than a cockroach with last year’s clogs … not that I’d be caught dead in a pair of clogs. Anyway, no
Taps
because Bobby
wasn’t
dead. I’d know. We had a psychic connection. One that didn’t seem to be operational right now, but still …

Bobby, Bobby, please Bobby,
I burbled in my head.
Come in, Bobby
. If he were anywhere within range of my psychic cell signal, he should answer. Unless … unless it couldn’t go through lead or whatever, like Superman’s vision. I didn’t want to think of him in a lead-lined box. I knew what that meant.

“Can’t you drive any faster?” I asked Maya, even though she was already about to blow the land-speed record.

“Not without hydroplaning.”

“That’s like water surfing right? No traction, no resistance, more speed?” Which only went to show that I was totally not thinking clearly, because it was a night like this one that had ended my first life. Of course, we’d had help then—a little side-swiping and a spin-out into eternity. What didn’t kill you made you stronger, right?

Maya didn’t dignify that with an answer. We were less than a block away from the back entrance of the ME’s office, the one leading toward the morgue, when we spotted Sid’s car and what looked like his body, slumped down in the driver’s seat with his head resting against the window. I heard Maya suck in a breath with a “
Dios mia
.” It was the first time I’d ever heard her curse. I thought it was a curse, anyway. Beyond
nachos
,
huevos rancheros
, and
mariachi
, my Spanish was pretty nonexistent.

She launched herself out into the pounding rain and circled the front of Sid’s sedan to yank his door open and catch his body as it fell out. I grabbed the plastic laminated road atlas out of her back seat and held it over my head as I followed.

“He’s breathing,” she said when I crowded her, trying to get my head in out of the rain.

Sid flinched like he was having one of those falling dreams and had just suddenly woken up.

“What—?” He stared at us, and his pupils were huge. “How did you get here?”

“Sid,” Maya said urgently, “where are the boys?”

“Boys?” He stiffened up then and his eyes fastened on her with laser focus. “Crap! The boys! I was out?”

“Like a trout,” she answered.

He drew his hand down over his face, now wet from the cold spray bouncing off us from the open door. “It was a setup—the vamps let those bodies be discovered. They must have been waiting for us.”

“Which means this isn’t just some rinky-dink operation, some teen witch messing with the ley lines and unrelated vamp activity.”

“So they’ve got the boys?” Sid asked, apparently slow coming out of his funk.

“It looks that way, but we’ve got an ace in the hole.” Maya looked back at her trunk.

“You go question your catch,” he said. “I’ll search the scene here and let you know if I turn up any leads on what’s happened or where they’ve gone.”

She didn’t look all that anxious to abandon him. “You’ve got cell signal?”

Sid checked. “Three bars.”

“Good. Keep it close. Check in every half hour.”

“Will do.”

We were drenched when we got back to the car, all except for the very top of my head which had been covered by the road atlas. The rain had blown in sideways and dripped off the atlas until water wasn’t the only thing pouring down. Black dye ran from my never-been-washed T-shirt, covering my arms like blood. I was a vision.

The trunk thumped and the car bucked. Maya cursed.

“Keep it down back there!” she yelled, like the junk in the trunk would pay her any attention.

It seemed like the longest ride of my life. Wet and uncomfortable, calling out to Bobby with no answer coming back. Just waiting until I could get my hands on the Prickly Princess. I was looking forward to trying out my interrogation techniques.