Page 41 of The Vampire and the Case of the Perilous Poltergeist

‘Has he left forever?’ Sidnee asked Aoife.

Aoife shook her head slowly.Not yet,she mouthed. Whatever: he was obviously calmer now that we’d understood what he’d been trying to tell us.

‘Petty was a shifter,’ Sidnee said wonderingly.

Evidently so, which made me wonder how a bear shifter like him had supposedly died of exposure in the woods. Had it been foul play? A dark thought came to me: how long had the MIB been operating out of here? How many recruits had been kidnapped or killed? The supernats’ natural suspicion of each other and their total lack of information sharing made them vulnerable.

Aoife faded soon after Petty and we stood alone in the plant room. ‘I’m exhausted,’ I managed.

Sidnee yawned. ‘Yeah, me too. What are we going to do with that?’ She pointed at the attaché case.

Danny frowned. ‘We need to read the contents and copy them, if we can. We can take turns snapping some pictures ofthe pages. Once it’s in the Cloud, it doesn’t matter if anything happens to this lot.’

Or us, I thought darkly.

‘That’s alotof pages,’ Sidnee sighed.

‘We’ll have to go through them tomorrow, see if there is any dirt on anyone else at the academy,’ I suggested. ‘We need to know who the enemy at our gate is besides Thorsen and Miller.’

Danny lugged the case back to our room and I buried it in my closet. Sidnee and I said our goodnights then collapsed on our beds.

Tomorrow was going to suck.

Chapter 30

Sure enough, when my alarm went off I knew even blood wouldn’t revive me enough to face the day. Exhaustion dragged at my limbs and every fibre of my being wanted to roll over and go back to sleep.

I couldn’t though: I still had a lesson to do with Fluffy, still had the attaché case to look through, still had Sergeant Marks thinking this was all a school finance issue – and I still didn’t know who we could trust. As a former MIB, Engell was right up there as a suspect, but the thing with Patkotak was giving me pause, unless Engell knew that Patkotak was on a hunt and couldn’t be contacted.

The conspiracy theories were making my head spin. Knowing that the MIB was behind everything made me trust Sergeant Marks a little more, although I knew that the MIB did employsomesupernats so he wasn’t completely in the clear.

We mustered, did PT with a grumpy Wilson, then had a takedown test with Blake before class. I was anxious to see how well my attempt at vampire mind control had worked, so I kept Thorsen and Miller firmly in my tired gaze. It felt odd when Thorsen strolled in and didn’t barge into my shoulder; he still looked at me, but his gaze wasn’t filled with the usual vitriol.

But whatever fates existed, they certainly had it in for us. First to do the mat test were Sidnee and Thorsen – and Thorsen had a very distinct bruise on his face. If my mesmerising hadn’t worked…

‘I don’t know how it happened,’ Thorsen was saying to one of his friends. ‘I must have fallen out of bed.’ He was frowning as if he didn’t quite believe his own explanation, and with good reason: it was total bullshit.

In the end, the takedown between Sidnee and Thorsen was fairly routine. Both of them toed the line and, for whatever reason, Sidnee let him win. He didn’t crow in triumph or shove her around, so I guessed I was officially competent at mesmerising. Go me.

I shivered a little; it wasn’t a skill I really wanted.

Danny and I were paired up and passed our test with flying colours. Naturally.

When we were dismissed for breakfast, I ran up to the dorm, took the case from my closet, flipped through the top folder and started taking pictures of each page. I hadn’t gone far when Danny and Sidnee joined me. ‘Hand me another one,’ Sidnee said.

‘And one for me,’ Danny added. I passed them both a file.

‘Scan-read for now and look for familiar names,’ I instructed. ‘We’re trying to see who we can trust.’ After a few moments, I huffed in annoyance. ‘There’s nothing in mine.’

Sidnee finished a few minutes later. ‘Me neither.’

‘Nor this one.’ Danny sounded discouraged. ‘It’s talking about subject blah-blah and reeling off a list of numbers, but nobody identified by name.’

I glanced at the clock. ‘That’ll have to do for now. Let’s go to breakfast before anyone gets suspicious.’

After I’d slugged back my cold blood, we ran down to the cafeteria. ‘I’ll look at another file while you’re getting ready for your Fluffy lesson,’ Sidnee said.

‘Thanks.’

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