I slept late the next day, probably because of all the running Mr. Entwistle and I had done the night before. The sun had been down for about an hour when he came to wake me. He was dressed in his body armour.
“Sleep okay?” he asked. He had his hand on the doorknob and was leaning in from the hallway.
I stretched and yawned, then clamped my eyelids down to try to wake myself up.
“I have to go out,” Mr. Entwistle continued. “I’m going to try to get us some blood.”
I sat up. “Good,” I said. “I’m starving.”
Mr. Entwistle looked at me funny. “Starving?”
“Yeah.”
He stepped into the room. “You’re starving?”
I nodded again.
“But you drank yesterday. I watched you.”
“So did you,” I said.
“Yes. But I won’t need blood again for another week, at least. I’m just getting more because I’ve run out and some might be available, not because I need to drink it right now.”
Well, this was weird.
“I usually drink twice a day,” I said.
He looked at me like I had two heads. “Twice a day?” He thought for a moment. “Must be that cow swill you were drinking. Vampires don’t need that much blood. Not when they get the real stuff.”
“Really?”
“Haven’t you seen the movie Dracula? He drinks a woman dry and sleeps for a hundred years.”
“I thought that was just a story.”
“Well, it is. Or that part of it.”
“Have you ever slept for a hundred years?”
“Well, no. But . . . but you can’t do that nowadays. The world changes too quickly. If I’d fallen asleep a hundred years ago, I wouldn’t know what a car was. Or an electrical appliance. Or airplanes, movie theatres, radios, televisions, push-up bras, computers, telephones, Velcro. Why, I’d be useless. But that’s not the point. A vampire should be able to drink and coast for a while. Twice a day!”
I guess as a vampire I didn’t quite have my act together yet.
“So you’re going out?” I asked. “Should I come?”
He shook his head. “No. Too dangerous. You need to relax. Think. Sleep some more. Start writing the great Canadian novel. I won’t be long. An hour, tops.”
“Where are you going?”
“Blood donor clinic. They’re closing in another half hour, so I’ve got to hurry.” He turned to the door, then stopped. “By the way, I’ve been thinking about your uncle.”
“What about him?”
“I think it’s time for Maximilian and me to sit down and settle our differences.”
“What differences?”
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “There are a lot of opinions about how to solve the vampire problem.”
I sat up and swung my legs out of the bed. “You mean that we exist?”
“More or less. Some people want to see us wiped from the face of the earth . . .”
“I don’t think my uncle is one of them,” I said.
Mr. Entwistle cleared his throat. “Maybe not. But it is how he deals with the rogues.”
“The bad ones.”
“Exactly.”
I think I understood this. After all, weren’t most vampires evil? “How else are you supposed to deal with them?” I asked.
“In a word, forgiveness. ‘Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?’ Abraham Lincoln.”
Abraham Lincoln. I’d heard that name somewhere. “Is he that guy with the beard?”
Mr. Entwistle shook his head in disbelief. “Guy with the beard? Guy with the beard! Is that what they’re teaching you kids in school these days?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never been to school.”
This seemed to stump him completely. He was speechless for about ten seconds.
“Never been to high school?”
I nodded.
“It’s the most important time of a young man’s life!”
He must have seen that this bothered me, because he flipped his hand through the air like it didn’t matter at all.
“So what? I never went either. And I’m richer than Bill Gates.”
“Well, rich in memories.” He smiled again, then his face flattened out and his voice got a little more serious. “Don’t worry, boy. There’s a reason for everything. Why my wife and son died. And my daughter. Why we have this contagion. And if there is a reason for your being here, it might just be so that your uncle and I can find a way forward without having to declare war on each other.”
I was scratching my head when he said this. I stopped and looked at him carefully. What did he mean? I was afraid to ask. In his body armour, he looked more formidable than anyone I’d ever seen. But it was more than that. He had a kind of inner strength. A confidence. My uncle had it, too. I didn’t want them to be enemies. And I didn’t want to be stuck in the middle. It was bad enough that Vrolok was after me.
“Where does the Baron Vrolok fit into this?” I asked.
“That conversation will have to wait.” He pulled up his sleeve and checked his watch. “Yeah. I need to boogie. Clock’s ticking.” He stopped in the doorway. “We’ll get in touch with your uncle when I get back.”
“Is that a promise?” I asked.
“I make no promises. My word is my bond.” He smiled a tight-lipped, goodbye kind of smile, then nodded. “And until I get back, you’re grounded.”
“What does that mean?”
“You can’t leave the house. That’s the way it is when you go underground. You have to stay out of sight until the coast is clear.”
“For how long?”
“No idea. But the library’s down the hall. That should keep you out of trouble for at least a few centuries. Hopefully, by then your troubles will be over.” Then he grunted a goodbye and slipped out the door.