Mrs. Tanger wore a pale-pink J.Crew sweater set and an actual pearl necklace on top of dark tailored pants. I tugged self-consciously at my dark-green hoodie. There were bleach stains on my jeans. I’d been going for “college student,” but now I just felt like a homeless person.
“My husband is on an overnight retreat to Palmdale, but Corry’s upstairs in her room,” she told me. “It’s straight up the stairs, second door on the left. I’ll be in the kitchen if you girls need anything.” She rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “Corry’s little brother Jonah needs two dozen cupcakes for the school bake sale tomorrow, and of course he just told me now.” She gave me a hurried wave and headed deeper into the house.
Huh. Kind of anticlimactic.
I took a deep breath and climbed the stairs, knocking on the designated door. Just before it opened, I felt an old familiar tug, the water-bending-through-glass feeling of another null in my radius.
Corrine—Corry—must have felt it, too, because her brown eyes were wide when she opened the door. “You feel different,” she said breathlessly. “Like them.” She was a couple of inches shorter than my five foot seven, with a sweet face, a neat blonde bob, and modest teenager clothes—jeans and a simple long-sleeved purple top. She was pretty in an all-American general way, but her eyes were different. There was something tired and broken about them, as though she had resigned herself to just going through the motions, probably forever.
I swear, it didn’t remind me of anyone.
“Uh...Hi, I’m Scarlett. You must be Corrine. Can I come in?”
“Oh, sorry, yeah.” She stepped aside, letting me into the bedroom. I don’t know what I’d been expecting—maybe posters of boy bands and stuffed animals—but the room’s personality seemed to be in transit. There were dark spots on the violet wallpaper where posters had recently been removed, and in the middle of the room, there was a plain cardboard box nearly filled with the kind of junk kids acquire—trophies and battered paperbacks and photo albums. “Everybody calls me Corry.”
“Cool...Are you guys moving?”
“What? Oh, no. I’m just putting some stuff in the basement, for storage. Here, you can sit down at my desk.” She cleared a stack of binders off the desk chair and perched at the foot of her bed. When we were both seated, there was a long awkward moment while I worked up what to say.
Finally, I said, “Corry...Maybe this would be easiest if you told me how much you know. About what you are and what you can do.”
She nodded eagerly, her fingers twisting together in her lap. This girl was just bursting to talk to someone. “Okay, yeah. Um, all I really know is what Jay—that’s the guy—told me.” She took a deep breath. “He said there are evil things in the world, and I can, like, turn off their evil. Sort of save them. He would kill them when they were like that so they could go to heaven...And he said if I helped him, he’d keep Mr. Herberts from ever hurting me again.” Her voice was shaking by the time she finished, and she’d hugged her arms around herself.
I ached for her. “Is there something else?” I asked softly.
“I thought Jay would just, you know, go beat him up, threaten him or something,” she blurted. “I didn’t know...”
“What happened?” I asked, although I knew the answer.
“Jay killed him,” the girl said quietly. “He made it look like an accident in the woodshop classroom, but he died just like all the others.” She paused, and I could see her thinking about the people she’d helped Jay kill. “Were they...Were they really evil?” she asked me, with something like hope in her voice.
Corry was trembling now, and I felt completely incompetent. She needed me to tell her that she’d done the right thing, that she’d helped slay the monsters, but it just wasn’t that simple. And now I was going to make her a murderer. “Oh, honey...What Jay said isn’t exactly right. There are creatures in the world that you maybe didn’t know about, but they’re not all evil or all good, just like regular people.” I was about to say that the vampires were mostly evil, but I thought of Beatrice and held my tongue.
I froze as Corry hugged her knees to her chest and began to cry. My fingers twisted helplessly in my lap. I wanted to touch her but didn’t know how she’d take it.
“Jay said we were doing good,” she sobbed, “and in the park, I just shut my eyes and stayed still, and he did these things and...” Her voice broke off. “It was so horrible. But the guy in the parking lot, he was even worse. He was crying and...and begging. And I knew something wasn’t right, so I ran away.” She rolled across the bed, pulling a tissue off her nightstand and blowing her nose. She took a moment to collect herself and then held up a red cell phone with a beat-up Hello Kitty sticker on it. For some reason, the sticker broke my heart. “And like I told Mr. Carling, Jay sent me this text today, and he wants to do it again. When I said no, he...He tried to blackmail me. That’s why I called Mr. Carling.”
“How did you find him?” I asked, trying to follow the story.
She blushed under her tears. “My parents block a lot of websites, but I can still read the LA Times online. I saw the article on the parking lot guy, Ronnie? And it said he had a mother, and I looked her up. I called her and said I worked with Ronnie and I wanted to set up a memorial. She read me the contacts on his cell phone.”
“That was very smart,” I said. “Back up a second—you said Jay tried to blackmail you. Blackmail you with what?”
“He has a recording that Mr. Herberts made,” she said simply. “A DVD.”
Aside from Hugo the vampire, I’d never really hurt anyone in my life. But if that teacher weren’t already dead, I would have seen to it myself.
When I was sure I was calm, I said, “Look, I need to stop this Jay, and for reasons that are long and complicated, I don’t have much time. In fact, I have almost no time. You know how you felt when I came into the room?”