“Yeah, right, like we believe you, Tyler—you haven’t even been initiated.”
“I did too see him. Kira, didn’t you? You grabbed my arm.”
“That wasn’t Kira, dummy, that was Arielle. She screamed louder than you.”
“Did not. I’m not afraid of vampires, I’ve got an amulet from Carmilla!”
“But why do we have to do this in the middle of the rain, anyway? Why can’t we stay in Kira’s apartment?” a new speaker demanded.
An authoritative voice answered. “We have to be under the full moon for the power to work.”
“But it’s wet, you can’t even see the moon.” This was Tyler again, the one who’d seen the vampire.
“We tried to do it inside last time, but Kira’s little sister saw us and freaked out. You could hear her scream all the way to Wisconsin.”
“I think that was a sign from Carmilla,” the girl with the authoritative voice said. “We need to be as brave as the girls in the book, when they went outside the town gates. See—we’re outside the town gates, kind of—we went away from the city when we climbed over the cemetery gates, and that temple thingy, it’s like Carmilla’s cottage.”
Vampires. In a way, it was refreshing that a bunch of tweens had sneaked out to see a vampire—when my cousin Petra called me, desperate for help, I’d assumed the kids had gone clubbing.
Petra told me she’d gotten a frantic call from Kira Dudek’s little sister.
“Kira Dudek?” I’d repeated, bewildered.
“You know, Vic,” my cousin said impatiently. “Kira’s in one of my book groups, the ones I’m running for the Malina Foundation. Her and Lucy’s mom works a night shift as a hotel maid, and little Lucy says all the big girls come over to their place, only tonight, they all went out in the rain and left Lucy by herself. She’s only seven, Vic, she’s hysterical, and I can’t leave her here by herself. I know I said I wouldn’t keep calling you for help, but, gosh, Kira and her friends, they’re just twelve or thirteen, I can’t let them just run around the city on their own.”
In the two years my cousin has been in Chicago, she’s had five jobs, if you count the three weeks she worked for me last winter. Most recently, she’d been taken on by the Malina Foundation, which serves immigrants and refugees. My old friend Lotty Herschel, who sits on Malina’s board, had recommended Petra for the position. My cousin’s boundless energy made her popular with the foundation’s youth programs. I’d been impressed with the job Petra was doing, but teen curfew breakers were more than she could handle on her own.
I’d been at a particularly annoying event with Murray Ryerson and was just as happy for an excuse to leave—until, of course, I landed in the mud in my scarlet party frock. I’d changed from high heels into running shoes in my car, and I had my waterproof slicker, but I hadn’t packed a backup outfit. I hadn’t been expecting to go from black tie to black mud this evening.
The wind had picked up while I was listening to the girls. The full moon began to shine through the last thready shroud of clouds and I could make out the shapes of uncut shrubs and tombstones. My view of the girls was blocked by a big monument, the “temple thingy” one of them had mentioned. It had a bunch of columns supporting a dome, and a dark figure draped realistically on a slab in the middle. The whole structure was missing chunks of marble, as if a giant had chewed off slabs at random.
When I worked my way around to the front of the monument, I found the girls in a kind of clearing—at least, it was free of the tangling bushes that had overgrown most of the cemetery paths. The ground was marked with a concrete border that had crumbled, exposing pieces of rebar. Gravestones around the perimeter were tilted at drunken angles.
The girls had stopped arguing. They were passing around a bottle of something that made them laugh more raucously. I didn’t know if they were drunk or just thought they ought to act that way, but their wildness was disturbing.
There were seven in all. Several were videoing one another with their cell phones. Tomorrow their friends and relations would be able to admire their antics on Facebook.
“We’d better get started.” It was the girl with the authoritative voice. In the moonlight, she looked like a sprite, as if she herself had come out of elf land. She was shorter than the others, her silhouette topped by a mop of dark curls.
“Get your phones out and set and we’ll go on three.” She counted, and on “three,” the girls all pressed the music buttons on their devices so that a kind of tinny rap concert began.
“Tyler, stand in the middle.” This was the tallest girl in the group. “Everyone else get in a circle and hold hands. We’ll feel the power while the moon is full.”
“Yeah, before Kira’s mother gets off work and we’re all busted,” someone else chimed in.