“Can you do anything with this?” Vince asked.
“I thought we’d try a simple location spell.”
I’m not my mom, but what she’d told me is that you could capture the essence of a person from the things they’d touched and use that essence to locate them. Sounded easy to me.
Vince placed the note in a copper bowl and I turned my attention to my mother’s tatty old spell tome, conveniently located on a shelf under the table. The location spell looked very easy; I put a dab of potion in the brazier, then added a smidge of liquid from another bottle, and lit the whole mess on fire. Vince opened the window an inch.
As the fire hit the chemicals, the bowl erupted into a geyser of toxic smoke. It smelled like the pits of hell, or really stinky socks. We ran out of the room, tears streaming from our eyes, coughing. I could imagine Mom downstairs, opening the parlor window, approving of how much knowledge we were gaining as we proceeded to blow up the house. She thought we were using my chemistry set, but still.
“Sorry, Vince,” I choked out after a century of coughing. “I don’t think it worked.”
“It’s cool,” said Vince. “There’s always plan B.”
“Which is?”
Vince had the wherewithal to grab his backpack as we ran out of the room, another sign of a good hunter. He handed me a newsprint magazine.
“Cool!” I said. I was holding the most recent Little Shop of Horrors, exclusively available through the mail from a horror fan in Iowa. “But I don’t see—”
“Look at the mailing label.”
“Edward Shoemaker?”
“According to the yearbook, that’s Ned’s name.”
“Where’d you get this?”
“At the rink.”
“He’s got good taste in magazines.” Realization dawned. “Why didn’t you stop me?”
“You really wanted to cast that spell. I wasn’t going to stop you.”
I slugged him on the shoulder. He slugged me back.
“So, Ned was at the rink? That’s too close to home. We’ve got to take him out.”
CHAPTER TWO
By Ned, Betrayed
Vince and I decided to skip school to take care of our Ned problem. I never skip school, but this was a calculated career move. I was going to show my parents Vince and I could be monster hunters and uphold the family name and all that. Provided we could locate Ned’s coffin before he woke up.
After some research, because no one takes the bus, I found out it was easy to get downtown from Burbank. The bus ran less frequently as the day wore on, so Vince and I would have to make sure we had Ned staked and processed before we lost the half hour bus schedule. That meant Ned had to be dead instead of undead by six. We planned to be home much earlier than six, so the ‘rents wouldn’t know what was up. With forty-five minutes travel time, we’d finish and leave on the two-thirty. Easy peasy. Unless, of course, we were late because Ned had killed us. That would be really embarrassing.
Later, we would announce at our leisure that we’d killed Ned, maybe a big reveal at dinner. I wanted to bring back Ned’s head for this. Vince and I tossed that idea back and forth, but he talked me out of it. “This guy is a friend of my mom and dad’s,” Vince said. “That would be uncool.”
I touched Vince’s arm. “Vince,” I said, “Face facts. The Ned your parents knew is gone. All that remains is the shell of the geek, inhabited by unspeakable evil.”
“No head, Abby.”
Vince brought me around in the end. After all, how were we going to carry a severed head on the bus? Ichor would get everywhere and can be mistaken for blood. A lot of people don’t believe in vampires, or understand they need to be protected from the supernatural. Besides, there was no guarantee we’d have a head left. It could potentially explode or turn to dust. I’d seen it happen. In movies.
The place where Ned lived was run down, but not as nasty as I had imagined it. A sign on the front door told residents that the building was locked from 11:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m.. Maybe to keep the victims inside.
A desk clerk watched a little television on a dusty shelf to the right of the reception desk. He squinted at us like we were from Mars, especially me in my school uniform.
“Hi,” said Vince, “we’re looking for Ned?”
“Ned?” the desk clerk echoed. His eyebrow hairs waved a bit like cat whiskers or insect antennae.
“Yeah. Ned Shoemaker?”
“Skinny little guy?” Vince said. “Fifteen? Sixteen?”
“Ned,” the man said in that tone that adults use to show us kids we’re idiots.
“Yes,” I said, backing up Vince. “Ned.”
“I know Ned,” said the clerk. “What do you kids want with him?”
“He’s a friend of my dad’s,” said Vince.
“Well, I guess you’re going to have a long wait for Ned. Ned doesn’t usually come home until ten or so. I could take a message, tell him you came by?”
“Naw,” said Vince. “We’ll drop by later.”
I couldn’t think of what else to do either. I glanced at my watch. “He’s not back until ten?”
“Yeah.” Vince’s mouth narrowed. “We could go home. They’d never know we’d skipped school.”
“I say we wait.” If I was going to get in trouble, I was going down in a grandiose way. I wanted my first monster.
I could see the moral struggle cross Vince’s forehead. Be the good son or stand firm in the boundary between the natural and the supernatural. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. We wait.”
Vince was quiet as we walked to a nearby cafe. I consulted the
