know it isn’t very Christian of me, but I don’t like the bloke.” Although she remained silent, it was clear by her expression that she shared Blakeley’s point of view. It was an endorsement that Professor Joubert, sitting on her opposite side, couldn’t help but notice.
Bored, Michael felt his mind drift. Physically, he remained sitting in the bleachers; mentally he had journeyed somewhere far away, to a place where it was raining. One drop, two drops, three drops, four.
One raindrop after another fell from the sky and plopped onto the ground, its sound echoing like a distant boom, loud, dissonant, but far enough away that it didn’t present any immediate danger.
Involuntarily, Michael turned his head and looked around as if he would be able to find the cause of the phantom sound in the gym. He did.
Dr. Sutton was still standing at the podium, but that was one of the only things that had remained the same. Every person in the gym besides Michael and Oliver was frozen, immobile, the victim of some time-stopping trick, and while Michael looked the same as he did moments before, Oliver had undergone a transformation, one that Michael was all too familiar with, but still found grotesque nonetheless.
It looked as if the doctor’s body had shrunk and gotten thicker. His shoulders, no longer bony, curved forward, hunkered down by newly acquired muscle. His neck was like the trunk of a small tree, and the increased bulk threatened to pop open the top button of his shirt. The rest of his body strained at his suit’s threadbare material, and Michael couldn’t believe it wasn’t ripping at the seams. Most horrific, however, was his skin.
Oliver’s veins pulsated. They were filled with so much blood that they had grown almost an inch in height to create rippled lines all over his flesh. The excessive quantity of blood also discolored his skin, darkened it, so it looked like he was streaked in charcoal. As the fluid raced throughout his body, his veins trembled and spasmed, making it look as if leeches were crawling between flesh and bone.
The man looked sinful.
As expected his eyes were now completely black, but his fangs were stained yellow and chipped.
Michael assumed they were the jagged, tarnished remains of centuries of battle. A continuous stream of blood fell from one fang to the gym floor, creating the sound that had caught Michael’s attention in the first place. The sound that he wished would stop reverberating in his ears. The sound that drew him into a private conversation with this vile creature.
“Michael.” Oliver’s voice was now unrecognizable, almost unidentifiable; it was like a gravelly hiss, like nothing Michael had ever heard before. “Isn’t it time that you forgave your father?”
The words seeped into Michael’s brain, contaminated his blood as quickly and stealthily as if Oliver’s fangs had pierced his flesh. The seed was planted, a command was given, and Michael shook as the words pulsed through his body. He wanted the connection to end; he wanted whatever power this thing had over him to recede; he wanted to be free. And in an instant he was.
The applause was tepid and perfunctory, but at least it signaled the end of Dr. Sutton’s turn as public speaker. Michael couldn’t believe that the frail-looking doctor’s true image was something so intimidating, so formidable. But Michael was just as formidable. He knew Sutton had tried to control his mind, brainwash him into making peace with his father. It wouldn’t work. Whatever mind-bending powers Sutton had, they weren’t going to force Michael to act against his will. Michael was so proud of himself he laughed out loud and he hoped the doctor understood he was laughing right at him.
“What’s so funny?” Ronan asked.
“Brilliant!” Ronan cried.
Michael pressed his knee into the side of Ronan’s thigh and replied, “I expect to collect my gold star later on tonight.”
Before the flirting could escalate any further, Fritz and Ciaran surrounded Michael and Ronan on either side, and they descended the rest of the bleachers like a four-person barricade with Nakano taking up the rear. When they got to the bottom, Fritz pointed at something across the gym. “Check out the ginger bird.”
Michael did a quick translation in his head of British to American slang. Ginger equaled red and bird meant girl. He looked over and saw Saoirse approaching them, walking arm-in-arm with a very pretty, red-haired girl.
“That’s Penry’s twin sister Ruby,” Ciaran announced, unable to take his eyes off of the girl.
The mere mention of Penry’s name made them all become silent for a moment as they remembered their friend. He was dead barely a year. Sometimes it seemed like the tragedy had just happened; other times it was as if he had been gone for years. For Nakano, however, it was an event that replayed in his mind at least once a day.
Question after question invaded his mind. Why was Penry’s sister here? Had she come for him? Did she know that he was responsible for her brother’s death?
Michael didn’t hear Nakano’s internal shouting, but he knew Ruby’s presence and bringing up Penry’s name would be upsetting to him. At least he hoped it would. When he turned around to see how Kano was taking the news he caught a glimpse of him running out the back door.
“Doesn’t she go to some swanky boarding school in Switzerland?” Fritz asked, breaking the silence.
“She did, until the boating accident,” Ciaran explained.
“What boating accident?” Michael asked.
As Ciaran relayed the details, he continued to stare directly at Ruby. “She was with her family on a small boat in the Atlantic Ocean. Weather turned out of nowhere, and they capsized,” Ciaran explained.
“How do you know so much about her?” Fritz demanded.
“Maybe if you read the newspapers instead of comic books all the time, you’d be better informed,” Ciaran shot back.
“Eh, newspapers are depressing,” Fritz said.
“What happened to the rest of her family?” Michael asked.
“Nobody was hurt except for Ruby,” Ciaran replied.
“That’s strange,” Ronan remarked.
“Hurt badly too,” Ciaran explained. “She was actually in a coma for a while.”
As the girls got closer, Ruby’s resemblance to Penry became startling. Same hair color, same facial features. It was like looking at a softened, more petite version of Penry with longer hair. “Looks no worse for wear, if you ask me,” Fritz said.
“Look closer,” Ciaran instructed. “She woke up from her coma blind.”
The three other boys looked at Ruby to see beyond her physical beauty and the similarities to Penry and realized Ciaran was right. As she walked, her gaze was unfocused; her eyes weren’t distracted by the kids cutting in front of her or any other activity that was taking place throughout the gym. She kept her arm firmly entwined with Saoirse’s, and it was clear that she was being guided across the floor.
What wasn’t clear was what she was doing here in the first place. “Why isn’t she at some sort of school for the blind?” Michael asked. “Or at least back at her old school where she knows the layout better?”
They all agreed that either of those solutions would have been smarter choices than to come to a brand new school she had presumably only visited a few times before. Ciaran explained that her parents had wanted to send her to a topnotch school for the visually impaired, but Ruby had refused and insisted that she enroll in Penry’s old school. “That’s potty, don’t you think?” Fritz asked. “She won’t know her way around the place.”
“True, but Saoirse told me she can be quite stubborn,” Ciaran added.
Ronan peered into the girl and examined her with a vampire’s eyes. He didn’t uncover much of anything except that physically she was a carbon copy of his friend. Turning around to face Ciaran, who was standing