Free Skull Creek Stakeout (Caden Chronicles, The) by Eddie Jones Page B

me and darted back into the shadows, his dark, silky cape fluttering behind the dumpster. I balanced myself on knees and knuckles and, taking a final look behind me, sprinted from the alley like a runner coming out of the blocks.
    I was still running, still checking to make sure I wasn’t being followed, when a front bumper clubbed me on the thigh and sent me somersaulting into the air. The impact bounced me off the windshield and over the roof. I landed in the street and heard tires screeching.

    “He just came out of nowhere, ran right in front of my car.”
    A middle-aged woman bent down, her face contorted with worry as she leaned over me. Next to her, a heavyset man in a blue work shirt knelt on one knee. I tried to sit up, but he put his hand on my shoulder.
    “Don’t move, son. An ambulance is on the way.”
    The man’s voice reverberated off the walls of my head, booming like a football stadium loudspeaker. The edges of my vision appeared too bright, and voices seemed loud and close.
    I levered myself into a sitting position and brushed the man’s hand from my shoulder. I noticed I’d tomahawked skin off three knuckles. I wiped my hand across my jeans and got up, massaging my thigh.
    “Hey, kid, you need to sit back down and wait for the ambulance.”
    I wobbled back toward the alley, saw it was empty, and limped off toward Meg’s.
    With each step the throbbing in my thigh lessened. The thing was, except for skinned knees and knuckles and a dullringing in my head, I really was okay. A split second before the car hit me, I’d jumped and turned the collision into an aerial flip, just like I’d done countless times before while snowboarding. Smacking the windshield and falling onto the pavement hadn’t hurt nearly as much as landing on packed snow after missing a half-pipe jump.
    So yeah, other than almost getting flattened by a pickup and being mugged in the alley, I was fine.
    Meg was still in her blue scrubs and green Crocs when I walked onto the front steps of her house.
    “What happened to
you
?”
    “Took a fall.”
    “I’ll say. Sit while I get something for your hand. I can’t have you bleeding all over Mom’s porch.”
    Meg returned moments later with a wad of paper towels. I could tell the missing corpse had left her shaken because when I asked if I could borrow her laptop to write a teaser for my
Cool Ghoul Gazette
article, she numbly agreed. While she went back inside to get bandages and antiseptic for my hand, I banged out a short piece with all the pertinent details, including the fact that our victim — the one with fangs, bite marks, and a gaping hole in his chest — had gone AWOL. I deliberately left out the business of the mugging, because I didn’t want my editor or Aunt Vivian to worry. And I especially didn’t want to alarm Meg.
    I hit the send button and said to Meg, “Can’t believe you lost the body.”
    “I didn’t lose it. Someone took it — that’s the only explanation.”
    She pressed a bandage against my knuckles. Her hands felt soft and warm and I noticed she smelled like oranges. There was something oddly comforting about the way she dressed the wound, a special tenderness that made me think she didn’t really think I was as obnoxious as she’d said.
    “You did lock up, right?”
    She rolled her eyes and sighed, sending a wave of warm minty breath my direction.
    “What do you think? Yes, I locked up, I’m sure of it.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I don’t know what I’m going to do if it turns out this was my fault.”
    “Maybe the oral surgeon took the body,” I offered. “Or your boss had it shipped off for an autopsy.”
    She pursed her lips and squeezed the bandage onto the last scrape.
    “Sure, I thought about that. But why would someone take blood samples? Doesn’t make sense.”
    “Maybe Forester needed a snack.”
    “That’s not funny.”
    “You’re the one who said our vampire had escaped. I’m just going along with