Page 28 of The Vampire and the Case of the Perilous Poltergeist

‘I’m in,’ she murmured back.

I blinked. I should have thought that through; of course she’d want to come with me, but I couldn’t risk it. ‘If we get caught, we’ll both be expelled. You’d better stay in bed.’

‘Fuck off, Bunny,’ she replied conversationally. ‘You’re not doing this without me. So what if we get caught? Gunnar will understand. We won’t lose our jobs, so how bad could it be?’

‘Bad. I want to be a detective and I know you do, too. If we get kicked out, I doubt we’ll be able to take any other classes. We’ll be expelled with a big old red cross against our names.’

‘So we’d better not get caught.’

I smiled ruefully; I loved the faith she had in us, but that didn’t change the fact that we’d be screwed if someone came by or was working late. Luckily there were no security cameras, but there was a host of other things that could go wrong.

Sidnee was right, though: we stood a better chance if we worked together. One of us could act as a lookout – if we dressed in pyjamas, could we pretend to be sleepwalking? It might look suspicious but they wouldn’t boot us out of the program for sleepwalking, right? ‘How well can you fake sleepwalking?’ I whispered.

‘What?’ Sidnee frowned at me like I was mad. Maybe I was.

I waved it off. Okay, no to the pyjama plan. ‘Never mind. We’ll talk more about it in our room later.’

Fischer entered the lunch hall covered in bandages; he was escorted by Wilson, who was glaring at us like we had personally harmed his commander. My resolve to break into the office hardened. We couldn’t let this continue because nobody was safe.

Chapter 24

I slipped to the bathroom then back to class. We were continuing our lessons on cold-water training but the food and blood had perked me up so I hoped my attention wouldn’t wander quite as much.

Sergeant Marks was already there, replacing the head of the academy after the attack. I suppressed a pang of regret; I liked Marks but Fischer was much more experienced and his lectures had been my favourites. ‘How’s the lieutenant?’ I asked quietly.

‘A bit battered,’ Marks said baldly.

‘Can he shift?’

Marks shook his head. ‘He’s human.’

I didn’t know why that surprised me; maybe I’d assumed that because Fischer knew about supernats, he was a supernat too. ‘That was bad. Petty’s getting worse,’ I started.

‘Yeah. We’re going to have to do something. I guess I need to call in an expert.’

‘Who you gonna call?’ I asked lightly.

‘I don’t think the Ghostbusters are answering,’ Marks said drily.

‘Well, maybe we don’t need them.’ I bit my lip, wondering how much to tell Marks. ‘Listen, I know something about the poltergeist. His name was Petrovich Peril and he was at the academy more than thirty years ago. He died of exposure after getting lost on a hiking trip. He communicated with me, told me that he thinks someone is undermining the academy somehow. He wants us to find out who and to stop them. He says his loyalty is to the academy. I honestly think if we can find out what he’s talking about, the whole drama will stop.’ Though to be honest, the death threat was weighing on my mind. What if I was wrong?

Sergeant Marks stopped tidying up and looked up at me. ‘I see you’ve been doing some investigating on your own. Well, the academy is well-supervised and it would be difficult to do anything that would undermine it, so I can’t imagine what Petty is talking about. The only thing we do in-house is the finan…’ He trailed off and looked thoughtful.

‘What?’ I was burning with curiosity.

‘Captain Engell,’ Marks said slowly.

‘What about him?’ My heart gave a hard beat.

‘He does the academy finances. They’re the only thing that we really control on site.’

Was Marks suggesting that Engell might be embezzling? ‘It did attack Engell’s office,’ I reminded him – the papers flying around had a tonne of numbers on them.

‘Yeah,’ he agreed grimly.

‘Can we prove anything?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t recognize a cooked book if someone hit me over the head with it.’ He frowned. ‘We need to bring in a financial expert to go over the figures – but if we’re wrong, we’ll offend a well-thought-ofofficer with ties to government officials and other high-up types. It’ll be tricky.’

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