Asil frowned at him.
“Fine,” Kelly huffed. But he didn’t smell mad. He still smelled scared.
“Look at me,” commanded Asil.
Kelly looked at him.
“I will not let harm come to you.” Asil smiled, and Kelly took a step back because it was that kind of smile. “In fact, I will do you and your group of vampire players a good turn—and teach Trace not to meddle in other people’s lives at the same time.” He took a deep breath and examined the room again with a feeling of utter joy.
The hunt was on.
“Hey, Bruce?” Kelly said nervously.
Bruce turned to look at him, and no matter how hard Kelly tried to see a vampire, Bruce still looked like a freshman who hadn’t quite grown into his own skin.
“You heard about what Trace did to me, right?”
Bruce frowned. “I heard. I don’t know why we couldn’t find someone else to run the LARP.”
“Yeah, me, either.” Maybe because no one else wanted to put the time in to do it right—and because Trace was a decent game master. “I have an idea that will keep him from ever doing it again to anyone else. Do you know my friend Meg?” Meg wasn’t formally a part of the vampire group, but she did costuming for a lot of them.
“I do.” Bruce smiled, and the avarice that came and went in his eyes made Kelly’s stomach tighten.
“She’s over with Trace and his girlfriend right now, distracting him so I can get you outside without him noticing.” No lies, Asil had told him. Vampires weren’t as adept as werewolves apparently were at telling when someone lied to them—but this one was very old, and with age came some skills. Kelly hadn’t known that werewolves could tell when someone was lying.
Asil’s advice rang in his ears.You’re afraid—and that’s fine. Let him know there’s a reason to be afraid and he won’t pay any more attention to it.
“I’m not the first one he’s tormented,” Kelly said. “But I’m going to be the last.”
“What are you going to do?” asked the vampire.
“I’m going to teach him he can’t hurt people without paying a price,” Kelly told him. “He would never face me on his own if he could help it. Meg is going to get him to follow her outside, out of sight. Then you and she are going to watch to make sure no one else follows him out to interrupt, and to vouch that the fight was fair.”
“You’re going to beat him up?” asked Bruce. “Really?”
Kelly didn’t blame him for the doubt in his voice. Trace was bigger, and Kelly had that whole geek thing going.
“Really,” Kelly said.
He was pretty sure he could take Trace if he wanted to. His mother had given him dancing lessons. His father had insisted that any boy who danced that much needed to be able to protect himself—so he had six years of tae kwon do to go with his dancing.
He tried a smile and wasn’t upset that his inner tension made it fail. “I haven’t done anything like this ever. But I can’t let it go.”
“Shawna told me that the date went okay,” said Bruce. “I didn’t see him, but Shawna said he was handsome—and that you guys did an awesome tango.”
There was something funny about Bruce. Kelly had seen it from the first—but he’d done his best to ignore it, figuring it for the awkwardness that went with being a teenager. But when Bruce smiled back at him, he recognized it for what it was for the first time. Bruce was pretending to be human, but like a second-rate actor, he got it just a little wrong.
Kelly forced himself to stay engaged in the immediate task. In response to Bruce’s question, he nodded. “He was prettycool about everything and very kindly agreed to play along. But it might not have been okay. I’m getting out of the group—grad school means I don’t have time. I guess that’s why I decided to do this. To teach Trace a lesson. There are kids like you in the group, and you deserve to be safe from that kind of pointless harassment. You might call it my Christmas present to them. To you.”
“Why pick me?”
Kelly grimaced. “That’s easy. Who else could I trust? The people who aren’t panting after Trace are panting after his girlfriend.”
Walking into the dark with a vampire at his back was the scariest thing he’d ever done in his life. The woods got dark pretty fast as they tramped through the snow. His breath steamed out of his mouth in the cold air. He was going to regret having left his jacket in Asil’s car before very long. He hiked about a quarter mile in the darkness until they came to a fence. Far enough, he thought, that the sounds of a fight wouldn’t travel.
“Here,” he said, turning around.
“It is very dark,” said Bruce, who was just a shadow in the shadows.
