I kept the empathetic smile on my face, thinking that the release of UDA: The Musical would make people feel something, all right. “How do you feel about interpretive dance?” I suggested.
Nina considered if for a second before smashing her hands against her open mouth. “Oh my God. Oh my God, I’m so awful! Here I am lamenting about myself and my contribution to the world when you’re back from your first day as a crime-fighting substitute teacher!”
Sophie Lawson: Crime-Fighting Substitute Teacher. That’s a failed book title if I ever heard one.
“How was it?”
I kept that smile pasted on my face for as long as possible, certain the second I moved my mouth, everything would shatter into a torrent of stupid, self-centered tears.
And it did.
“Oh, Neens,” I said, unable to control the hot tears that washed over my cheeks. “It was awful!”
I fell forward, my forehead plunking against a ballad about the UDA lunchroom. I felt Nina’s cold hand on my shoulder, rubbing softly. “Oh, honey! I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as you think it was. Come on.” She snaked an arm under my chest and pushed me upright. “Tell me all about it.”
I huffed, one of those half-hiccup, half-breath kind of wails locking in my chest.
“Did the girls make fun of your outfit?”
I looked down at myself. “What’s wrong with this outfit?”
“How ’bout I get you some chocolate pinwheels?”
I groaned while Nina rattled away in the kitchen. “The girls are awful, Neens.”
“They’re teenage girls. Of course they’re awful. It’s their job.”
I cast a frown at Nina and pushed out my lower lip pitifully. “It hurts my feelings.”
Nina blew out a long, sisterly sigh, then threw her arm across my shoulders and hugged me close. “They’re just kids, Sophie. And each one of them acts mean and nasty as a defense mechanism. They don’t know who they are yet. Besides, what’s that saying? They’re probably more afraid of you than you are of them.”
“That’s a saying about wild animals.”
Nina shrugged. “It’s not like you don’t have a defense mechanism of your own.”
“What’s that?”
“Me.” She grinned and at that moment a tiny shard of sunlight crept through the window and bounced off her glossy black hair. With her impeccable makeup, incredible outfit and now this diffuse yellow halo, she looked like the quintessential popular girl.
“You’ll come to school and be my friend?”
“I was thinking I’d eat them, but whatever works.”
Chapter Four
I tried pulling my pillow over my head and then pulled ChaCha, my ever-trusty three-pound pup over that, but neither did anything to drown out the incessant pounding that was going on in my skull. ChaCha just rolled off me and went to work licking my eyebrows.
“Oh, ChaCha, stop. Mommy has a—” I was going to say headache, but once I sat up in the blackness, I realized the pounding wasn’t coming from my brain—it was coming from the living room.
The pounding started again and ChaCha jumped to attention, a stripe of hair zipping straight up along her back. She curled her little black lips back, exposing frightening—if miniscule—incisors, and growled.
A stripe of fear went down my own spine and I stopped breathing, listening.
Another three raps.
“Go get it, ChaCha,” I said, pointing. “Go defend your turf!”
ChaCha made a second fearsome growl followed by a pitiful yip as she disappeared under my sheets.
“Useless dog,” I grumbled.
I was halfway through the living room, on my way to our sword closet (it’s not that weird), when the pounding came again. It stopped and I stopped, my every living fiber taut with adrenaline.
“Nina?” I hissed.
There was no answer.
“Vlad?”
Again, silence.
Finally, the front door tore open in a Lucasfilm-style haze of whooshing wind and spitting fire.
“Holy crap!”
I stopped, dropped, and rolled. Somewhere in my subconscious I knew that was for earthquakes or bomb raids, but it didn’t seem to matter as chunks of my doorframe blistered and turned to charred dust on the ground. I was being choked by smoke and my eyes stung, but I worked to keep them open until I saw the figure walking through the flaming frame coolly, as if he didn’t feel the heat.
“Who are you?” I screamed. “What do you want?”
“Sophie?”
My heart was clanging like a fire bell and the soft voice saying my name only terrified me further. I knew that voice, I remembered that voice. I gulped, sour saliva dripping down my throat.
“O-o-Ophelia?” I asked, my lips burning from the heat. “Oh, God.”
Ophelia was a fallen angel. One whom, until apparently right this minute, had been dead, killed by yours truly, staked with a trident to a UDA corkboard. The fact that she was the baddest of the fallen angel brigade made her death warranted. The fact that she was my half sister made the whole thing incredibly complicated.
“Oh God, ohGod-ohGod-ohGod,” I mumbled to my hands.
“No, Sophie, it’s me!”