My uncle was holding a crowbar in his hand. He was dressed all in black. There was a belt around his waist with a whole slew of gadgets hanging from it. One of them was a gun. He looked like a commando. I wondered for a brief moment if my father had ever dressed that way when he was hunting vampires. It was like something out of a comic book.
He set the crowbar on the ground, then reached in to pull me out of the police car. When he leaned across my torso, for just an instant his neck was exposed. In the movies, that was where vampires did most of their biting. I’d never really thought about why, but after seeing that boy under the porch, I understood. The neck is the highway to the brain, and the brain needs blood, buckets of it. And unlike the brain, which is surrounded by a hard layer of bone, the vessels in the neck aren’t protected at all. Blood there runs very close to the surface, so it’s pretty much a bull’s eye. When Uncle Max leaned past me, I was tempted to stretch out my teeth and chomp away. I was bleeding and bruised. My body wanted the good stuff so that it could start to heal. But I resisted. It helped to remember what he’d told me—that even vampires have a choice: to be good, or to be something that is less than good. I wanted to do what was right. I wanted to be good.
“Are you all right?” he asked me. “Is anything broken? Are you hurt?”
“I have a cut on my head,” I told him.
He took me by the elbow and helped me carefully from the car. Then he inspected my scalp closely and made certain I wasn’t cut anywhere else.
“We’d better get something on that. It’s bleeding heavily,” he said.
He took my elbow to steady me while he led me to his car.
“We’d better get those off of you first,” he said. He was talking about my handcuffs. “Can you break them?”
I strained. My arms were aching, but I tested myself, just as Mr. Entwistle said I should. Still, I wasn’t quite strong enough.
Maximilian reached down to his belt and removed a canister of something. I heard a hissing noise.
“Try again,” he said.
I didn’t have to work too hard this time. There was a loud crack and my arms jerked apart. The cuffs were still circling my wrists, but the chain between them was now broken.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Liquid nitrogen,” he replied. “When the metal’s frozen, it’s easier to break. Now wait here.” He stepped quickly behind his trunk, opened it up, pulled out a red case and removed a wad of small, white squares. They were pieces of gauze.
“Hold these against your head,” he told me. Then he motioned for me to get in the car while he walked around to the driver’s side. “We’ve got to hurry.”
And so I got in, and it was like stepping straight into a spy movie. The car was unreal. I’d never been in an airplane cockpit before, but I’d seen them in movies, and I’ll bet you this car had more dials, buttons and screens than a space shuttle. And it had two steering wheels. I knew this was a little weird. What kind of car had two steering wheels? And they weren’t even wheels, really. They were like wheels with the tops cut off so that your hands fit on either side, like the controls for an arcade game, the kind you sit in.
There was no window behind me, just a solid wall of black. I wondered how he saw out the back. Then I noticed that in place of a rear-view mirror there was a small video screen. There must have been cameras in the back of the car, because you could see the road behind us. It was all tinted green.
In front of me on the dashboard was a screen covered with white lines. I figured out straight off that these were roads. A red light appeared on one of the lines. It was beeping and flashing and it moved quickly towards another light, a blue one that was sitting in the middle of the map.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That’s either a police car or a car with a police radio,” my uncle said. “Either way, we’re getting out of here. Now buckle up.”
I put the seat belt on. It was padded. Then he stepped on the gas, and the car whined like a jet engine.
“Will they catch us?” I asked.
My uncle smiled, then shook his head. “Not in this car.” He coughed a few times into his sleeve, then pushed the pedal to the floor.
My head was forced back against the seat like I’d been shot from a bazooka. I’d driven a few times with Nurse Ophelia when she’d taken me out to the movies, or to bowl or whatever, but she never liked to break the speed limit. Uncle Max didn’t break it either. He shattered it to bits. The road was winding, and I kept thinking we were going to fly off into the woods, but somehow he kept us from wiping out.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “The car has a vacuum in the bottom. The faster we go, the more firmly the car is held in place.” Then he asked me how my head was.
I checked the bandages. That was when I noticed for the first time that my burnt hand was better. It must have healed when I drank the boy’s blood. But my head wasn’t doing quite so well. There was a long, red blotch on the bottom of the bandages. The blood had soaked right through.
“Keep it on,” he told me. “It will probably heal before we get to my office, but if not, we’ll stitch it up there.” Then he pressed a button and a drawer opened up in front of me. He reached inside and pulled out a Kleenex. “Here,” he said, “take some. Your chin is covered with blood.”
I did my best to scrape it off. Once blood dries it’s like paint. I’d have needed a chisel to get it all. There was blood on my shoes as well. And my scrubs. His car looked like it had just about every gadget you could think of, but I doubted a sink was one of them.
Uncle Max reached for the dash and started adjusting a dial. “I went back for you at the hospital,” he said, “but I was too late. You’d already run. You can’t imagine how relieved I was when I learned that Johansson didn’t have you.”
I told him about my trip through the ceiling, and that made him smile.
“You did well,” he said. “But we were lucky, too. I thought Johansson was retired. I didn’t expect him to be working so closely with the police. It must give him access to all kinds of information. We’ll have to avoid the authorities for now.”
“They can’t all be bad,” I said.
He shook his head. “No. You’re right. But we don’t know what Johansson might have told the others about you. And now . . .” He looked me over. “Now he’s free to make up all kinds of nonsense. No, let me clear this up. I’ll get you to a safe location, then I’ll take care of the rest of this mess.”
After I got as much of the blood off my face as I could, my uncle asked me what happened the night I escaped from the ward. I told him about Mr. Entwistle. About our escape from the police. And about his death.
“You have to find out if he’s all right,” I said. It seemed an absurd thing to suggest. Apparently, a whole building had fallen on him. How could he be all right? Unless his body armour was made on the planet Krypton, he’d probably been flattened.
Maximilian coughed quietly, but he kept his eyes glued to the road. “If what they printed in the paper is true, I think you should prepare yourself for the possibility that he didn’t survive,” he said. “Vampires are just as vulnerable to fire as normal people. And Entwistle kept some nasty company—”
My uncle stopped talking to have another coughing fit. He smothered his mouth with his sleeve, then cleared his throat. I waited for him to say more about Entwistle and what he thought might have happened, but he was apparently finished. I’d forgotten that the two of them were at odds, to say the least.
“Did you find out anything about Nurse Ophelia?” I asked.
My uncle shook his head.
I closed my eyes and let my head fall back against the seat. So Entwistle was gone. And Nurse Ophelia was still missing. She’d done more for me in the last eight years than everyone else in whole world put together. And I hadn’t done a thing to help find her. Instead, I’d spent the last few nights thinking of myself and having fun. She deserved better.
“One thing at a time, Zachary,” my uncle said. “One thing at a time. You can’t do a lot for others when you’re running for your life.”
“I tried to call you,” I told him. “I left a message at your office.”
“And I got it. I called the number you left as soon as I could. When I didn’t hear back from you right away, I started to get nervous. Your face has been all over the news.”
I hadn’t realized that he’d called me back. When I told him this, he looked surprised.
“It was later that night,” he said. “About ten after eleven.”
I wondered why Charlie and I hadn’t heard the phone ring. We’d had Dan’s BlackBerry with us all night. Then I remembered that when I’d left him the message, I’d given him the number for Charlie’s cottage. That was the night of the island party, so neither of us would have been around at eleven. And Dan would have been asleep. He must have picked up the message the next morning, figured it was a wrong number and simply erased it.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” said Maximilian. “You’re in good hands now. And I’ve just secured a deal that should keep us out of trouble. You’re going to do just fine. I’m certain of it.”
It was hard not to believe him. He looked like he was ready to storm the Batcave.
“Did you tell anyone?” he asked me. “About your condition?”
I nodded. “I told Charlie.”
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
“Did he believe you?”
“Yes.” Then I told him about our conversation in his kitchen. And how I had stalked the deer. Finally, I told him about the body at Luna’s.
“It was one of the twins,” I said. “And he’d been strangled. I think it was Vrolok.”
“What makes you think so?”
I told him about my encounter with the bat at Mr. Entwistle’s house. And the fog. And how I’d seen them again at the cottage.
“So you’ve been there?” my uncle asked.
“Where?”
“Entwistle’s house.”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Would you know how to find it again?”
“I think so.”
My uncle seemed pleased by this. But it brought on another round of coughing. This was the worst bout yet. He actually had to slow down the car. When it was finished, he ran his tongue over his teeth. I could smell blood in his mouth. He must have been really sick.
“Is that the first time you’ve tasted human blood?” he asked. “Back at the cottage?”
I nodded. “Is that bad?”
He took a deep breath and checked a few of his gauges. Then he let out a big sigh.
“Yes, it is bad,” he said slowly. “It is bad, and it isn’t.” And he explained to me how human blood made a vampire stronger, which I knew already. But he also told me that once you drank it, you craved it more and more.
“And therein lies the problem,” he said. “You need it to be strong and so you will come to hunger for it. If you don’t get enough, your desire might drive you to desperate lengths. You might even kill for it, if your hunger can’t be controlled.”
Well, I had felt the hunger, but I wouldn’t kill a human being. Not ever. Or so I thought.
“I didn’t kill that boy,” I told him. “I found him like that. Maybe I shouldn’t have fed . . . but I didn’t kill him.”
My uncle’s head moved up and down slowly while he watched the road. “I know, Zachary,” he said. “I know.”
I relaxed when I heard him say this. I put my head back and watched the road.
“Do you think my friends will be all right?”
My uncle didn’t have a chance to answer. A yellow light started flashing on the dashboard. He took his foot off the gas pedal and the car slowed just a little.
“Someone’s using a radar gun up ahead,” he said. “Probably the police. I’ll just have to slow down for a few minutes until we drive through their speed trap.”
I checked the electronic map on the dash. Sure enough, a red light had appeared ahead of us on the grid of white lines.
The engine was quieter now that we weren’t driving so quickly. I thought I heard something behind me. There was no back seat, just lots of trunk, but I was certain I’d heard a muffled voice.
“Is something wrong?” my uncle asked.
I nodded. “I thought I heard a voice behind us.”
My uncle smiled, then reached up and pulled a wire from his left ear. He’d been listening to something. The earpiece was connected to the dash, and when he pulled it out, the sound of people talking came through the rear speakers.
“Is this what you heard?” he asked, turning up the volume.
I listened. “What is it?”
“A police radio. It’s how I found out where you were. It and the radar detector will help us to avoid their patrol cars. I’m not taking any chances.”
About a second later, we passed a police car parked along the side of the road.
“Will they come after us?” I asked.
My uncle looked over and smiled. “You don’t need to worry about them.”
“But you wiped that other car right off the road!”
My uncle nodded. “True. But no one saw us. So as far as anyone is concerned, we’re just another car on the highway.”
My uncle didn’t speed up until the patrol car was miles behind us. Then he turned on an interior light and leaned closer. “Let me check that again, would you?” he said, nodding towards my head.
I lifted my hand so he could get a better look at my gash.
“It looks quite a bit better,” he said. “I think the bleeding has basically stopped. You might want to get some rest now.” He opened a compartment near his elbow that was hidden between our seats. Then he reached in a pulled out a small bottle. “Take one of these. It will help.”
I looked at the bottle. The label said “Zaleplon,” which sounded to me like a city on the planet Venus or something you would use to de-clog a drainpipe.
“They’re sleeping pills,” my uncle said. “If you don’t feel you need one, don’t take one, but I imagine that with all the excitement you’ve had in the last few days, it might help.”
Had I known that I would die the next day, I would never have chosen to go to sleep. I would have stayed awake and asked questions about my mother and my father and what it’s like to hunt vampires. And I would have asked to steer the car. I might even have suggested we stop somewhere along the highway so that I could just run for a while under the moon—run so fast that tears would spill out of my eyes. And I would have called Luna, or at least written her a note or something. But I didn’t know. And so I swallowed two pills and fell asleep.