Evil Returns by Caroline B. Cooney

she looked around in surprise, and almost in anger, but nobody had touched her and nobody had seen anything.
    Only her shadow. It had pulled loose again.
    Her shadow would attach itself only to a human, and what Devnee was going to do was not human.
    For a moment she let herself think. For a moment the thoughts—terrible, shameful, evil thoughts—circulated in her brain.
    But nobody was paying any attention to her. Even the teacher did not care that Devnee was walking to the back of the room instead of working. Even Aryssa had lost interest. Devnee Fountain was not worth the effort of tracking.
    In the rear of the classroom, Devnee opened a window.
    A shaft came through. Not light. Not as if the sun had suddenly come out. But as if the dark had suddenly come in.
    It lay vibrating, that path.
    Devnee went back to her stool. She picked up her scalpel. “If you want, Aryssa, you can stand over there at the back of the room till I’ve finished up.”
    The eyeball looked right through Devnee, into her heart. It saw what she was doing, and how.
    She carefully did not think. If she thought, she would know. If she knew, she would stop. So it was best neither to think nor to know.
    Aryssa slipped off her high stool and drifted to the back of the room.
    The teacher said with a frown, “Aryssa?”
    “I have to get a sip of water,” explained Aryssa, giving the teacher her meltingly beautiful smile, and getting the usual melting response.
    The eyeball stared on.
    Devnee put a scalpel through it.
    The tower was dark, and she did not bother to turn on the light. He was more likely to come in the dark anyhow. It was a matter of waiting. She waited a long time.
    She wondered what he was doing all that time.
    All night long.
    When he came, it was almost dawn. At first he was quite hard to see: He was all oozing cape and wrinkled foil fingernails.
    And then he smiled.
    She had never seen him smile before.
    His teeth were immense as posters on walls, dripping blades.
    Dripping blood.
    Devnee gasped. “What—” she whispered.
    “What did you think?” the vampire said.
    “I thought—”
    “You knew,” said the vampire calmly.
    “I—” Devnee staggered backward. “I thought you were—like—a visitor—or—a—night creature—or—like—a dark ghost.”
    The vampire laughed. He sounded rich and contented, like cream soup.
    She cried, “I thought you would—like—haunt her!”
    “Now, Devnee. You knew what I would do. You saw the tools of my trade. You counted the hours of night in which I was busy.”
    This night—this night in which she had done her homework, and written up her lab experiment, and argued with her brother, and had an extra snack—this night he had … the vampire had … Aryssa had …
    She could not think about it.
    It was not decent to think about things like that.
    “It was a good trade,” he told her. “You got Aryssa’s beauty, and I got—” He smiled again. He dried his teeth on his cape, and once more they gleamed white, shimmering like sharpened pearls.
    Now she knew why the cape was dark and crusted, and why it stank of swamps and rot.
    Devnee licked her lips and wished she hadn’t. She clung to the shutters for strength and wished she hadn’t. At last she said, “But what happened?”
    “What do you think, my dear?”
    “I’m trying not to think,” said Devnee.
    “Ah yes. You humans are very good at that. It’s probably for the best, Devnee, my dear. And of course, a beautiful girl does not need to think. And now you are beautiful.” His eyebrows arched like cathedral doorways, thin and pointing, vanishing beneath his straight black hair. With his eyebrows up, his eyes seemed much wider. Too wide. As if they were from biology lab. As if they were half dissected.
    “Is Aryssa—is she—I mean—will she—that is—”
    “She’ll be fine,” said the vampire. “She’s just rather tired right now. She won’t be in school much for the next few weeks. And of course when she