Free Fatal Bargain by Caroline B. Cooney

dusted herself off, as if she had been sitting on the sand at the beach and was ready to go in the water now. Immediately Sherree began worrying again what she looked like, and whether her hair still looked good, and if she needed to reapply her lip gloss, and if she’d wrecked her clothes from the dust and ickies that floated around this horrible place. She wanted a mirror so she could do a proper inspection of her face. Sherree dug deep into her pocketbook, searching for her mirror.
    Bobby came out of his trance. When he was still pinned in the air, he had been forced to stare into the ruined lives of the humans the vampire had taken over the decades. The horror of their destruction had turned his mind to ice. His screams had tightened in his throat and turned solid, and his heart seemed to thud in a vacuum, keeping him alive, but giving him no warmth, no pulse.
    When he had come down, he was a blank.
    It was truly like being half dead. Bobby had been able to investigate himself: He had seen that his flesh continued to function in its earthly way, taking in the air it needed, circulating the blood it required. And yet he was not all there. His mind — his soul — his very self — whatever those things were composed of: They hung suspended.
    He had thoughts, but they were distant. His thoughts seemed to have traveled out of state. Or out of body. His thoughts floated around him without meaning anything to him.
    Bobby, the consummate athlete, had never before had no grip on himself. No possession of his abilities.
    But now the vampire was gone. Bobby looked around, confused and disoriented, but was himself again. He felt his personality come back, as if it lay in puddles around the room, and was now tilting, sliding, coming back into the jar of his mind. I’m me again, he thought. The vampire didn’t take me after all. He just showed me what he can do.
    Zachary’s body had not slowed like Bobby’s. While Bobby had seemed to enter a mental hibernation, Zach had entered a horrible trembling, a constant vibration. Even when he could not see his muscles quiver, even when he could not observe his joints shivering, he could feel his corpuscles and cells shuddering. His complete interior, everything under his skin, was shaken by the fall. Shaken by being caught. Shaken by the taste and flavor and stench and feel of the vampire’s cloak.
    That cloak that had draped itself over his body. Truly it had been the lining from thousands of coffins. It was not moss, yet it was wet and green and growing. Every centimeter of his skin had recoiled in horror at its touch.
    The vampire himself had never touched Zach.
    He had been caught and picked up and removed to the tower by the cloak. Zach had not even been able to feel the vampire’s arms supporting him, although they must have. What strength could a cloak have?
    But now the vampire was gone.
    The vampire’s departure was so complete that Zach’s body knew it right down into the depths of his gut, and he ceased to shake from his fall.
    The vampire was gone.
    Zach was afraid to look around. In his shuddering self-oriented existence, had he missed the “event”? Had the vampire taken a victim while Zach was busy trembling? Was Zach going to count heads and find there were now only five teenagers in the tower? Who would the sixth be? Which of this group was missing now? Missing forever? Missing into that unspeakable horror that had scraped Zach’s skin? Peeled Zach’s fingers from the window and yet caught him at the bottom?
    And where? Where would that sixth one be right now? Swallowed in that cloak? Feeling the jaws of —
    Zach wrenched his mind away, and counted.
    He saw Bobby. He saw Lacey. He saw Randy. He saw Sherree. For one long, hideous, ghastly moment, he could not see Roxanne. And then his eyes lit on her: half fallen right through the floor.
    Zach’s body heaved itself in one last final shudder, more of a convulsion, really, and he stumbled forward to try to get