“You mean cut class?” Maria asked, disapprovingly. “Like the rest of the day?”
“It’s no big deal,” one of Blake’s friend said. “There’s only a few classes left.”
“Well, I have a quiz next period,” Maria said. “I can’t. And we don’t cut class.”
“Whoa,” Blake’s friend said back, mocking her. “Excuse me. Goody-goody.”
“Come on Scarlet, let’s go,” Maria said, grabbing her wrist.
“I think it’s a great idea,” came a voice over Scarlet’s shoulder. “We’d love to go.” Scarlet cringed. She looked and saw Vivian standing there, with two of her popular friends, grinning back at Blake. Blake’s friends lit up at the sight of them.
“Awesome,” two of them said.
Blake himself looked unsure. After all, he’d invited Scarlet, hadn’t he? How dare Vivian come over and pretend like she was the one invited.
“Let’s go, Scarlet,” Maria said.
Scarlet stood there, torn. She didn’t want to cut class. That wasn’t her. At the same time, the thought of Blake hanging out with Vivian made her sick. This was her chance. After all, the dance was Friday. And if there was any chance of Blake’s asking her, she felt she had to do this.
“I’ll come,” she said to Blake.
Blake broke into a smile.
“Scarlet, seriously?” Maria said. “Your parents would kill you.” Scarlet turned to her.
“It’ll be fine. Like they said, the day’s basically over anyway. Come with me.” But Maria shook her head and stormed off without another word, clearly pissed.
Scarlet watched Maria leave. That left Scarlet all alone, with Blake and his friends—and Vivian, and these popular girls. The thought of it churned her stomach. But she felt like she had no choice.
She had to do what she had to do.
When Scarlet turned back around, the group was already several feet away, their backs to her, walking quickly across the fields, down towards the woods. Vivian, she noticed, had already stepped-up and locked Blake’s arms in one of hers, yanking him close to her, as they strutted off.
Scarlet swallowed hard. This was not going to be easy.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Caitlin sat in her office in the university library, elbow on her desk, head in her palm, poring over the book before her. She had spent all morning pulling rare books from the stacks, and now her desk was covered with them.
But these were not the usual books she worked on. When she’d arrived this morning, the first thing she had done was clear her desk of all her work books—and made room for a whole new set of books. She had walked into work today determined, obsessed with finding out exactly what was happening to her daughter and figuring out how to help her.
After her horrible argument with Scarlet the night before—the first argument she could ever remember the two of them having—Caitlin had a terrible night, tossing and turning with little sleep.
She kept thinking of Father McMullen, of their meeting. She recalled the look her husband and daughter had given her when she’d asked Scarlet to come to church. Caitlin couldn’t help feeling that her own family now hated and distrusted her.
Caitlin felt increasingly alone, and more and more she wondered if she was losing her mind, imagining the whole thing. She desperately needed to find proof that she was right. That she was not crazy.
Caitlin had awakened determined to take action, and had figured the perfect plan, had realized at least one thing that she could do. She could use her expertise. She could go back to work and use all the library’s resources, read up on anything and everything related to vampirism. She could learn about its history, its origins, its rituals, and anything and everything even peripherally related to it, including all forms of magic and sorcery and occultism.
Caitlin had entered the library at seven AM, an hour before it opened, and had let herself in. She had walked down the empty lobby with a newfound energy, determined to use all her skills to understand and decode what was happening to Scarlet. Whether it was myth or fact, civilization had been recording vampire legends and stories for thousands of years, and surely, all the collective knowledge and wisdom of thousands of years had to contain something that could be of help to her.
Caitlin had crossed the corridors of the university’s ultra-modern library, the walls a sleek modern white, her shoes echoing on the marble floor beneath her. She’d felt a bit creepy walking through this huge empty structure, the only one in the building, but had put it out of her mind as she’d hurried up the steps, her shoes clicking as she went, and quickly lost herself in the stacks.
Luckily her library had a reputation for its vast collection of rare volumes, which is what had lured her to accept a job here. They also had a constant traveling exhibit, books on loan from other universities and collections; as fate would have it, October was “Occult Month,” and they had several additional volumes on loan that they normally didn’t—some of the rarest in the world, in fact.
Before Caitlin hit the stacks, she’d used their online catalogue system, doing her research, using her brilliant mind to immediately get an overview of the rarest and most important volumes in the field. Once she immersed herself in a topic like this, she could take it all in with dazzling speed, process and analyze it faster than just about anyone. As she expected, there were a lot of dubious and skeptical books in the occult genre—books that sounded hokey or were dismissed by scholars.
But there were a handful of titles that seemed to persist throughout the centuries, embraced by one generation after the next, and which even scholars could not dismiss so easily. Within an hour, she felt confident she had an overview of the dozen or so most important books in the field that she had to read.
As she searched the catalog, she was thrilled to see her library had, on hand, editions of most of them
Caitlin grabbed a cart and had dove into the stacks, looking up each book by its call number, and slowly adding them to her stack. Some of the books were harder to find than others, and she’d had to use a ladder and go to the top, dusty shelf, deeper in the stacks than she’d ever been. One book she found stuck between two books, and literally had to pry it out. Another book she couldn’t find anywhere—until she realized that it was on display in the front window, for the Occult Exhibit; she guiltily unlocked the glass, slid it back, reached in, and removed it, making a mental note to replace it as soon as possible, before anybody noticed.