Carmilla Read online

  “Right?” I ask.

  The next piece of footage is the exploding CD. Perry turns ashen. “She’s a witch. We have to get you out of here. Now.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. This is where I live. This is my room. If anyone is going, it’s her.” Though now I know she’s not all bad …

  “Leave it alone, Laura, I’m begging you. I don’t want anything to do with her or this. I’m all out. And don’t involve LaFontaine,” she warns before bolting through the door.

  I still have the footage on Repeat, trying to make sense of the senseless.

  LaFontaine pops their head in. “Sorry, we lost Carmilla at the Shunned House again after her class. Damn. This is killing my rep.”

  “She was just here.”

  “How the hell? She’s slippery. What’s up with you, Laura?” LaFontaine settles down next to me on the side of my bed.

  “Everything. I miss my dad, even when he’s riding me about my grades. I’m behind in my classes. I’m sucking at life.” And my roommate may or may not have me next on the hit list. All signs point to me. My stomach tightens, as does my face. Fear will do that to you. What if I never see my family again?

  “Talk to me,” says LaFontaine.

  “I think I’m next up on the victim list.”

  “You really think Carmilla has you in the crosshairs?”

  I breathe in. “I want to be wrong but I’m not sure I am. Perry wants me to leave it alone. But I can’t. You know what I mean?”

  “For sure. I think Perry’s wrong” — said with an impish smile — “we can go over her head.”

  “You’d do that?” I’m shocked that they would go around Perry.

  “We have to.”

  I hesitate. “Who’s even over her head?”

  “The dean.” Not her again.

  “What would we even tell her? I get that Carmilla is doing some pretty outrageous things on the video, but the dean isn’t a fan of my videos. Won’t that get us in trouble?”

  “Yes and no,” LaFontaine explains. “If the dean wants to control Carmilla, who better to share our theories with? You have proof, so that helps the dean. You can use all of your cub reporter skills. I think we should go to the Faculty Club. She’s there every afternoon.”

  They make a valid point but I’m hesitant. I need to think this through. “I thought we were avoiding her at all costs.”

  “Desperate times …”

  I do feel desperate. “Let’s do this!” Now I’m fired up.

  LaFontaine holds up a finger. “You might want to consider a shower. No offense but you’re ripe.”

  “Are you insinuating that I smell?” I use deodorant. I think I’m offended. No, I know I am.

  “When was the last time you showered?”

  I sniff my armpits and ponder the question before silently making my way to the shower. I can’t argue with them on this. Something has to give when you’re juggling crime solving and freshman first love. Not to mention Carmilla. And for me that thing has been personal hygiene. “Give me an hour, then we’ll find the dean.”

  LaFontaine gives me a thumbs-up before leaving. Seriously, the shower drain is clogged with Carmilla’s raven hair. I use a hanger to remove it. Disgusting.

  I have to admit the hot water was just what I needed to reinvigorate my fighting spirit. LaFontaine and I devise a plan to sneak into the Faculty Club pretending to be a distinguished young visiting professor and a research assistant. LaFontaine has the blueprint of the building spread out on my table. “Here’s the entrance. There’s usually a greeter. We’ll need these, just in case.” A phony faculty badge with my picture on it is handed to me. Impressive.

  “We need to dress the part,” I say, a little panicked. My excitement might have got the best of me when LaFontaine suggested this. Maybe I should heed Perry’s warning.

  LaFontaine reaches inside a hefty bag and unearths a bougie blazer. “Here, wear this with some dark jeans. Pull your hair back. You’ll look just like Ms. Brewster, the guest lecturer for modern European history.”

  I do as directed. I commit. LaFontaine slips on a sweater and jeans with some glasses and continues with the plan. “We’ll walk through the courtyard into the lobby area. If anyone questions us, we’ll whip out the badges.”

  Please do not let it come to that, I think. I’m already sweating.

  “We’ll mill about. Zero in on the dean. Move in. Unleash the truth. Then we’re out. Five minutes tops.”

  Seems fairly innocuous. I try not to think about everything that could go wrong.

  The Faculty Club is tucked away behind some trees on the north end of campus, near a man-made creek. The path to the French doors is cobblestone, and the building is unmarked, like everyone just knows what it is. Like the rest of the campus, the Faculty Club is dark and foreboding.

  Inside are leather couches and a dimly lit open space where at least twenty-five faculty members are drinking wine and socializing. We mingle, fitting in according to plan until LaFontaine gets baited into a conversation with the head of gnostic mathematics. One minute I’m eating a canapé, the next I’m getting pushed into a table. LaFontaine starts going all WWE on this professor, arguing about the long-term strategic plan for the Illuminati. They keep screaming that they’re trying to raise awareness. Apparently LaFontaine subscribes to the notion that traditional religious ideas are no longer a belief system. That does not go over well. Apparently it’s a hot-button topic for both of them.

  LaFontaine lobs a melon ball at the professor. That’s when the professor stabs LaFontaine with a skewer from the chicken kebab, cutting their face.

  Campus police arrive, along with some curious students. Hysteria and yelling start. Punches fly, along with fish. It must be written somewhere that you throw fish during times of distress at Silas.

  As we’re being “removed,” I snag a little something off the wall. It’s a picture of the Dean’s Council circa 1954, and I tuck it under my blazer quickly. With the wind blowing at fifty degrees, our teeth chattering more with each step we take, we head to the library to figure out who these people are in the photo with that era’s dean. Research time.

  One of them is a ringer for my roommate. But the picture was taken before she was born. Now we’re on a mission.

  We head across campus to the library. Mostly everyone is gone by the time we get there. LaFontaine and I tiptoe around, not wanting to call attention to ourselves. We hear an odd noise.

  “Did you hear that?” I’m a little jumpy.

  “Sounds like something scratching,” LaFontaine says.

  It weirds me out a little but we continue our journey, making our way to the subbasement. LaFontaine moves toward the online system to access the whereabouts of all the yearbooks from 1954 until now.

  “Hey, the staircase moved. It’s not here,” I say. Chills run down my spine.

  LaFontaine concentrates on the computers that begin to rattle. Then they get louder and louder. “Run. Run. Run,” they warn us.

  We both freeze. “What the hell?” I ask. The rumbling from stacks of books is getting closer and closer. Some of the books start flying at us, totally airborne. Right off the shelves.

  We duck but not quickly enough. The card catalog attacks us, leaving paper-cut carnage on our arms and faces. We’re stuck in a vortex of flying fiction and index cards from the seventies. LaFontaine tries to fight them off, yelling, “They’re vicious!” and swiping at the blood on their shirt.

  “We have to do something!” I scream.

  LaFontaine makes a flamethrower from hairspray and a lighter because, of course, they have those handy. Those bio classes are really paying off.

  So basically we’re trapped in a flaming vortex. Suddenly the sprinkler system goes off, soaking us. We snatch up a stack of yearbooks before they get drenched and climb out of a basement window, man
aging to evade the fire department and campus police who are converging.

  But we’ve found a gold mine.

  * * *

  •

  We dodge all the commotion and race back to my dorm room. Perry is livid when we get there but tends to our wounds. Yeah, wounds.

  “What happened?” she asks.

  “Things got nasty after the altercation with security at the Faculty Club. These paper cuts are a bitch,” I complain. LaFontaine is brooding, still reeling from the professor’s verbal lashing as well as the conflagration.

  “Didn’t I say leave it alone?” Perry shouts.

  “We had to go,” I insist. “We’ve come this far.”

  “It was irresponsible,” Perry snaps. “I’m not doing this anymore. I won’t watch you all be the next in line.”

  Danny is mad in a more subdued way, pacing in front of the window on the lookout.

  “Ow,” LaFontaine complains when Perry dabs the skewer puncture with alcohol.

  All the arguing in front of the webcam — which stays on all of the time now — isn’t really helping, but the students of Silas need to know the truth. They need to know what happened when we pursued our lead.

  “Do I need to remind you that if you were minding your own business and leaving this alone just as we discussed, you wouldn’t be yelping right now?” Perry says in frustration.

  Dejected, LaFontaine nods.

  “Yeah,” I interject, “but as they were dragging us out, I snatched this picture off the wall. Security never saw us. Check it out.”

  I wave the photo in front of Danny. “This is the Dean’s Council in, like, 1954. Look at the woman in the black dress. Maybe Carmilla’s grandmother or something?”

  LaFontaine tries to explain to Perry. “There was only one way to find out who these people are. That’s why we went to the library.”

  Perry passes around mugs of hot cocoa, her anger subsiding as her motherly instinct takes over.

  I slide next to Danny, stringy wet hair and all, leaving the emergency blanket wrapped around me. I open the yearbooks. “Look at all these names,” I say. “Basically, the same girl shows up every twenty years. It’s my roommate, Carmilla. With a new name, like no one has ever heard of an anagram.”

  Danny takes the sheet of paper and reads the names off: “Millarca Kersantin 1994, Arcillma Karstienn 1974, Mircalla Karnstein 1954. Not very inventive, if you ask me.”

  Next to each name is a picture of Carmilla. Carmilla 1994 is sporting a sexy schoolgirl look with a short tartan skirt and an undersized sweater. Carmilla 1974 rocks a dressy pair of flared pants with a skintight ribbed white tank that makes me do a double take. The 1950s look is much more conservative. Long skirt with a short-sleeved shirt buttoned at the neck.

  Truth: she looks amazing no matter the year.

  “The thing is, every time this person shows up, students go missing,” Danny says.

  “We already know that Carmilla is nocturnal and has the strength of an ape. She’s lived forever and she drinks blood and she doesn’t age,” I explain.

  LaFontaine gets excited. “Well, we know she’s a vampire. We’ve known that since the first milk situation.”

  I leap to my feet and throw my hands up. “Hold up. All of you knew Carmilla was a vampire? A straight-up blood-sucking vampire?” I can’t believe this.

  “You didn’t know?” LaFontaine scoffs.

  Danny speaks up. “I had no idea either. I just thought she was a bitch.”

  “She’s not a vampire,” Perry philosophizes. “There are no such things. She’s just got amazing skin, hates light and is hemoglobin deficient.”

  Even she knows she sounds ridiculous. Of course Carmilla is a vampire. That explains a lot, right? How could I have missed it? All the signs were there. This college is turning me into a clueless idiot. I flash to her biting poor Kirsch. Did she make him a vampire, too?

  I grab LaFontaine by the shoulders. “Let me get this straight. We’ve got something lurking around campus taking people, and you didn’t think it was pertinent information to share that my roommate is a vampire?”

  “Well, when you put it that way …”

  I start freaking out. “I’m next. The creepy dreams, the charm bracelet. It all means something.” I’ll never sleep again.

  “And her seductive eyes. The way she looks at you, it’s so obvious that she’s crushing on you,” LaFontaine throws in.

  On you? I wonder. You as in everyone? Or you as in me?

  A vampire who’s crushing on me. Is that even possible?

  Danny’s head snaps back. “What seductive eyes?” I almost make a joke but she’s straight-up serious. She’s jealous.

  “Come on, Danny, you’ve seen her,” says LaFontaine. “She’s stunning. Her hair flows like a majestic horse’s mane. Her dark eyes look right through you.”

  I have to put a stop to this — we’re veering off course. “You guys. She. Is. A. Vampire. Oh God, I’m living with Lestat. How are we supposed to stop a vampire?”

  “Staking. Decapitation. Immolation,” Danny reads off her phone. Google knows all. “Something about an iron needle through the heart. Normally, I wouldn’t condone this kind of thing, but in cases of seductive eyes I could make an exception.”

  Perry holds up her hand. “Stop! We can’t just kill everyone that Sue, I mean, LaFontaine, thinks might be a supernatural creature. Only loony tunes make plans to stake someone with no real proof.”

  “Ha! We have so much proof. Who wants some soy milk? Why, I do, I’m feeling anemic.” LaFontaine thinks the joking is hilarious, but no one is laughing. An awkward silence hangs in the air.

  I have to weigh in. “She’s right, guys. Even if we figure out a way to turn Carmilla into a firepit, that would mean we’d never get the answers we’ve been searching for. And we’d have no shot at finding Betty or Elsie. We don’t need her dead … or deader. We need answers.”

  Danny puts her hand on my knee. “Okay, Hollis. How do we trap a vampire?” I wish I knew the answer. Also, I wish I knew if I wanted her to keep her hand there.

  “You’re not going to like this but I have a brilliant idea,” LaFontaine offers. Perry cringes. “We use something to lure her into a trap of some kind — a rope net, maybe, or a room filled with garlic. That’s the easy part.”

  “Okay,” says Danny, ready to go this far. “What’s the bait? Bags of blood?”

  Matter-of-factly, LaFontaine replies, “More like, who’s the bait?” then looks at me. “Laura.”

  How did I know that was coming? Danny stands between me and LaFontaine.

  “Absolutely not.”

  Perry paces nervously around the room, pulling her hair in and out of a ponytail. She’s waiting for someone to say something.

  So I speak up. “I’m down with it, I think.”

  Danny turns to me, taking my arm. “Explain to me how offering yourself up on a platter to a vampire who wants to seduce you isn’t the worst idea ever?” She almost sounds betrayed.

  I edge close to her. “I know this isn’t the smartest plan but it’s the only plan.”

  “Hollis, the fact that it’s a default plan isn’t good enough!” Danny insists.

  “Are we still belaboring the vampire theory?” Perry asks. “It’s probably just some Silas crackpot jerking us around.”

  “I’ll bring salt with me,” I promise Danny. “Wait, is salt a vampire thing?”

  “Not unless we’re making margaritas,” LaFontaine cracks, attempting to lighten the mood. Lucky for me, just then Kirsch and Will stumble in with Sarah Jane and Natalie. The girls dance into the room chanting, “Party! Party!” I can’t help chuckling at the grass skirts and leis they are wearing.

  Kirsch talks over them. “Hey, Laura’s friends. Will and I came to invite you to a luau tomorrow night. A celebration of peace.” He sin
gles Danny out. “It’s what you wanted, right? Peace. So you need to come.” He bounces in, wearing a coconut bra, goofy as all hell. “We’re even roasting a pig with an apple in its mouth.”

  The mismatched socks and camo cargo shorts clash with the bra. That doesn’t stop him from posing for selfies. He checks his latest picture. “Posting.”

  Of course he is. His phone starts to sing with dings from all of his followers.

  I nod, leaning close to him. “Question. If we were going to try to catch the person who’s been inflicting all this chaos on us, would you and your brothers be in on it with us? You know, to help me out.” I know he’d never say no to me.

  “We’d be honor bound to shred that guy for you,” he answers. He bows. Will and Danny shake their heads, but I’m starting to think his goofy is charming. Or it’s the sleep deprivation mixing with the fear that’s distorting things.

  “Great. We’ll see you at the party, right, ladies?”

  They all grudgingly grunt yes or various forms of it.

  “God, they’re such tools,” Danny whispers.

  Perry chimes in. “Anything but a Zeta party. Last time we went to one, they pantsed Kirsch in front of everyone.”

  “So immature,” Danny says.

  I put my foot down. “We need their help. We’re going. And we’re going to like it.”

  Perry drags LaFontaine out of my room, lecturing them on why all of this is the worst idea and a waste of time since vampires aren’t real. “You’re buying into the fiction of it all. Tom Cruise does not make them real.”

  Once they leave, Danny implores, “Please don’t do this. I have a bad feeling. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  Don’t look into her eyes, I tell myself. “I know you aren’t psyched about me teaming up with the Zetas, but if I’m vampire bait I need numbers to have my back. Having a band of ’roid ragers on my side doesn’t seem like such a bad thing.”

  I can’t believe my first semester in college has come to this. I am vampire bait. I need the Zetas. Two truths I never thought would be.

  “That’s hard to argue with, but I’m still not a fan of it. Dangling you out there for her and knowing we’re relying on the Zetas does not help. Get some rest. We’ll talk in the morning and figure this out together.”