Free Blood Beast by Darren Shan

maybe that will be the end of the teasing and Loch will start treating Bill-E as an equal.
    But then Bill-E looks Loch over, sizes up his height and muscles, and chickens out. His hands go limp and he turns away with a weak, “See you later then.”
    Loch leans over and mock-whispers to me, just loud enough for Bill-E to hear, “Do you think anyone would notice if I took Spleeny out to that hole and made him
disappear?
”
    “Shut up, you jerk,” I snap, and march ahead of him, paying no attention to his theatrical gasp.
    Home. No Dervish. A note on the kitchen table. “Went to get my bike. Don’t worry about fixing me dinner — still not in the mood for solids.”
    Damn it! Of all the times in my life, why does Dervish pick these few days to be Mr. Impossible to Pin Down! Now I wish I’d hit him with the news as soon as he got home. Would have served the old souse right.
    Too itchy-footed to wait for him. Better to do something than hang around here, struggling to kill time with home-work and TV. So a quick change of clothes, a hasty sandwich, then it’s off to the hole to find out what Loch and Bill-E make of my late-night digging marathon.
    They’re baffled. Standing around the pit when I arrive, jaws slack, staring from the rocks and piles of dirt down into the hole, then back again. Both are holding shovels limply and look like you could knock them over with a fart. “Hell,” I gasp playfully. “You’ve been working hard.” “We didn’t do it,” Loch says numbly. “It was like this when we arrived,” Bill-E mutters. I force a frown. “What are you talking about?” “We haven’t been digging,” Loch says, becoming animated. “We only got here a few minutes ago. We found it like this.” “But who. . . how. . . what the heck?” Bill-E mumbles. We spend ten minutes debating the
mystery.
The simplest solution, which I offer shamelessly, is that somebody discovered the hole after we’d left and did some digging themselves. Bill-E and Loch dismiss it instantly — there are no shovel marks in the newly excavated sections, and no footprints except our own. (I didn’t leave any barefooted prints in the night. I must have been extra light on my feet. Padded softly. . . like a wolf.) Besides, they argue, who the hell would go digging in the middle of the night? “An earthquake?” I suggest as an alternative.
    Snorts of derision. We don’t get earthquakes here. Besides, even if we did, that wouldn’t explain the dirt and rocks piled up around the hole.
    Loch wonders if a wild animal is responsible.
    “What sort of animal do you think that might be?” Bill-E sneers. “A troll or an ogre? Or maybe it was elves, like in the fairy tale with the shoemaker.”
    Eventually Bill-E comes up with a theory that satisfies all three of us, at least in the absence of anything more believable. “Lord Sheftree,” he says. “If this is where his treasure’s buried, maybe he booby-trapped the entrance with explosives. When we were digging, we set them off, but because they’d been buried so long, they didn’t ignite right away. It took them a few hours to explode, by which time we were safely home, clear of the blast radius.”
    “I dunno,” Loch mutters, examining the rocks around us. “These look like they were pulled out cleanly, not blasted.”
    “Maybe it was a catapult-type mechanism,” Bill-E says, warming to his theory. “He had all these rocks loaded on a platform, which was set to shoot them upwards when the trap was sprung. They’d crush anyone nearby.”
    We discuss it further, trying to figure how the trap worked and wondering if there might be more than just one. I advise caution and propose retreat — we should report this and leave it to professionals to mine the dangerous hole. Bill-E and Loch shout me down.
    “We’ll go slowly,” Bill-E says.
    “Carefully,” Loch agrees.
    “If there are other traps, they’re probably slow burners too,” Bill-E argues.
    “But I doubt if