Schumann points to his office, eyes wide as saucers behind his glasses, as if he’s equal parts angry and frightened.

“Now, Jake.”

Later, they call my mom to tell her to come pick me up, since both me and Randy have been suspended.

It’s not until the principal looks at me over the phone (in obvious annoyance) that I know my mother isn’t answering the call.

It’s also when I know—somehow know without a doubt—that something is very wrong at home. Horribly so.

IN THE END, I WALK home from school with a note in my backpack that Mother is supposed to sign, letting her know about my suspension and to call if she has further questions.

When I enter the house, yelling out for her, I’m barely surprised to see old Mr. Jensen, the janitor from my school, sitting at the kitchen table. He watches me approach, but hardly moves from the chair he’s settled into. The hand holding the gun also doesn’t move, but stays steady, pointed directly at my mother, who is tied up in one of the other chairs. Her hands and feet are bound with thin white rope, and I absently wonder if he’d taken it from the school, and how he’s a thief if he did.

Mom sits calmly, you know, considering. Her eyes look almost bored, but her mouth is set in a grim line, and I know what she’s thinking:

What I wouldn’t give for a cigarette.

“Hiya, Mr. Jensen,” I say, dumping my backpack to the floor.

Mr. Jensen, still wearing his janitor uniform—Dickie’s pants, black steel-toe shoes, a blue button-down work shirt—only nods at my greeting.

He looks nervous.

“My father,” he says, his words a slow drawl, like he’s as bored as my mother looks, “killed vampires.” Mr. Jensen has an oddly southern sling to his words, an accent often mimicked by the kids at Sabbath High. “And when he died, I took over.”

I look at my mom, who only stares back. If those eyes are relaying any sort of message, I’m not getting it.

“Okay,” I say.

He nods, as if I’ve given permission to continue.

“Been following your family a couple years now. My father knew there were vampire in this area. More than a few, actually.”

This is news to me, but I stay quiet.

“Your father being one, of course.”

“But he’s dead, Mr. Jensen.”

He nods sagely, that gun hand not twitching in the slightest. “I know, I know. You saved me some work there. But I fear the blood is in you, and in her.” He looks to my mother for the first time since my arrival. “So, I gotta do you both, just to be sure.”

I start to respond when his hand jerks and there’s an air-shattering CRACK, the whiplash sound of the gun firing in our small kitchen.

My mother’s chair is flung backward, landing with an impossibly loud crash, the yellow wall behind her sprayed crimson. Her legs twitch and her face, thankfully, is turned away from me, but a part of her blonde hair is slowly turning red, from the roots to the tips. A slow-moving pool emerges from beneath her head, and I look away, back at the janitor.

He’s turned the gun to point at me, and I’m shaking. Whether in anger, shock, or fear I don’t know. Maybe it’s misery.

“Now you,” he says.

I think Mr. Jensen is surprised at how fast I move. I hear the bullet whizzing by my head, the punch of it hitting the wall where I stood only milliseconds before. The basement door is only a few feet away, and I’m already through it before he can get off a second shot.

I’m at the bottom of the stairs when I hear him curse at the doorway, most likely looking for a light switch that doesn’t exist. Not knowing what else to do, or where to go, I do the one thing that seems, if not rationale, appropriate.

I open the coffin, climb inside, and close the lid. I instantly feel better. Safer. An illusion, sure, but if you could find peace in the last moments of your life, you’d do it, right?

Footsteps clomp slowly, carefully, down the stairs. I slow my breathing, close my eyes, try to relax until it’s over.

My foot taps against the metal urn. “Dad?” I whisper.

There’s no answer. Only the emptiness, the quiet.

“He got mom,” I say softly, the words barely audible as I move my lips in the total dark of the coffin. “And now he’s gonna get me.”

When he still doesn’t answer, I go on, wanting just one more conversation with him before Mr. Jensen lifts opens the lid, points that gun at my head.

I try to imagine my father’s voice, smooth and deep, in my mind. I try to imagine what he would say to me now, in the moment. What he would teach me.

But there’s no voice. Not even in my imagination. It’s as if he’s suddenly gone; really, truly gone, and I wonder why it’s taken me so long to realize that. Why it only seems real to me at the end.

Part of me wants to cry, to scream and wail and batter my fists against the hard wood inches from my face. To take the urn of his ashes into the light and dump it into a strong wind, let it take him away, so I’ll never hear his voice again, never wish he was here with me, lying with me in this tomb of my life.

As tears burn my eyes, however, I hear the thunderous sound of feet hammering on the stairs. Coming down.

Coming down fast.

There’s a scream—a man’s scream—and the loud crack of the gun going off in the room just outside the coffin. I hear thumping—something being thrown against a wall over and over again—then there’s a groan, followed by a crackling noise, as if someone was crushing a fistful of eggshells ….

And then silence.

A few moments later, hands settle on the lid of the coffin, then lift it up.

My eyes have always been keen in the dark and are quick to adjust—the few moments in the coffin have practically given me night vision—so I can see my mother clearly as she looks down at me, a smirk on her wet, dripping lips.

There’s a dime-sized hole in her forehead, and her face is half-painted with her own drying blood. “Come on out,” she says. “It’s okay now.”

I climb out of the coffin and hug her around the waist. She hugs me back and I can feel the strength in her arms. Her body sings with rebirth.

There’s a twisted mound of flesh on the floor behind her, Mr. Jensen’s face a frozen snarl of shock and terror. His stomach is ripped open, his skin gray and shriveled, the limbs atrophied.

He’s been drunk dry.

I look up, concernedly, into my mother’s face. I notice her eyes have adapted, as well. They’re shimmering gold in the heavy darkness.

“I’m fine,” she says, then shrugs. “I was bored with the sun anyway.”

I press my face to her dress, her warm skin already cooling against my cheek, her heartbeat nonexistent. “You can turn me,” I say. “We could be together.”