The Night Slayer Excerpt

Seahound (Alex)

Alex May turned thirteen today, and nobody wished him a happy birthday. Worse, he was about to do something that would likely result in a painful beating. Worse still, it could expose his biggest secret—the color of his blood. It had recently changed from its normal red to a blueberry jam-like purple.

Sixteen-year-old Bull was the meanest boy in Serene Cove, the group home for orphans where Alex lived. Bull had just whacked a fourth grader at the playground.

“Please stop,” the fourth grader whimpered. His tears sparkled in the rays of the setting sun.

The other kids at the playground remained quiet, as usual.

Bull flexed his biceps, large enough to force a crazed gorilla to apologize for being too noisy. They hadn’t nicknamed him Bull for nothing.

Alex needed to stay out of it. He’d never talked to the fourth grader, had never done anything with him. He didn’t even know his name. Why get in trouble with Bull yet again? He decided not to get involved this time, but he could watch things from up close.

He dropped the soccer ball he’d been juggling with his feet and neared Bull and the boy.

Bull pulled the boy’s ears. “Hey, look! An inch longer already.”

Stop it, Bull, Alex shouted inside his head and tried to look away. But his eyes remained glued to the fourth grader’s twisting face.

“It hurts,” the boy cried.

“It should,” Bull snapped.

“Enough is enough, Bull!” Alex smacked Bull’s shovel-sized hand away. “You better leave now,” he told the fourth grader.

The boy stepped back but hesitated, staring at Alex with wide, tearful eyes.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got this.” Alex shooed the boy away and took a deep breath. He most definitely didn’t have this.

“You’re gonna eat dirt,” Bull said.

“You should be the one eating dirt,” Alex said. Unfortunately, he wasn’t Hawaii’s junior boxing champ—Bull was. “Your breath already smells like it.”

Several kids giggled. They’d gathered around the two of them but had kept themselves at a safe distance.

Bull glared at them. The kids looked at each other and fidgeted.

“Do it!” Bull snarled, saliva spraying out of his mouth.

“Bull, Bull, Bull,” the kids chanted in low voices. Most closed their eyes.

“Louder!” Bull barked. His nostrils flared with every breath.

“Bull! Bull! Bull!” they started yelling.

“That’s more like it.” Bull grinned, exposing grimy, crooked teeth that looked like crumbling tombstones in an abandoned graveyard.

Expecting a sneak attack, Alex tightened all his muscles.

Bull shoved him hard to the ground. “Do you feel like the defender of the weak now?”

“Oh . . . so, you finally admit to only picking on the weak ones?” Alex said confidently, though his rear end screamed like a bazillion wailing toddlers.

Alex knew Bull would need a full day to come up with any response, no matter how dumb. But Bull’s eyes were fixed on something on the ground between them.

It was a thin ballpoint pen made of rosewood, which had dropped out of Alex’s pocket.

Bull raised his foot.

“No!” Alex shouted, scrambling for his pen. Mom’s pen.  

Bull stomped his foot down, hard, and smashed it.

“What’s going on there?” a new janitor called out, standing in front of the group home some thirty yards away.

“Alex slipped and fell,” Bull said, running his fingers through his greasy hair. He offered his hand to Alex. “Take it,” he said through his teeth, eyes blazing.

Alex stood up. On his own.

“We’re not done,” Bull told him and walked toward the building along with the other kids. 

“I’m fine,” Alex called out, waved to the janitor, and straightened himself up.

The janitor went back inside.

Alex breathed out. At least there’d been no bleeding, so his purple blood was still a secret.

He’d first noticed the color change a month ago, after he’d made a game-winning shot in a basketball game, just beating the buzzer. Bull hadn’t taken kindly to losing to Alex, so he’d slammed him to the ground, scraping Alex’s knee. The sight of the purple blood had scared the bejeebers out of Alex. Luckily, his long sweatpants had hidden the scratches from the other kids.

Later, he’d used three times as many bandages as usual. He’d borrowed them from the nurse’s office that night.

He’d tried to forget what he’d seen, but two fresh cuts last week confirmed his blood had really turned purple. He’d done some research in the library and learned that only a few animal species didn’t have red blood. But all humans did. Why didn’t he?

Alex picked up the pen—the only thing he’d inherited from his mom. Bull had broken it in two. “Sorry, Mom.” His eyes prickled.

Mom’s pen. The slamming to the ground. The two piled on top of each other, and Bull would pay for it.

He headed back to his dorm, not giving more than a glance to the lush green forests in the distance or the dark blue Pacific Ocean that bordered their Hawaiian island of Molokai. His eyes darted left and right along the paved pathway until he spotted what he was looking for—a gecko. It was about five inches long, bright green with yellow speckles on its upper back and neck.

Alex moved silently toward the gecko, then darted out his hand and caught it.

“Don’t worry, little one. I won’t hurt you,” he said, relaxing his grip. “I just want to give you something to eat. There must be loads of insects in Bull’s boxers.”

Bull usually prowled for someone to taunt before bedtime, so Alex went into his own room to wait for the right moment to set his plan in motion. His roommates were all there, playing cards.

“Hey,” Alex said.

No reply. They hid their faces behind the cards in their hands. They weren’t mean or anything. They just had to ignore him or answer to Bull. Still, Alex always greeted them, but inside, his stomach churned.

He hid the gecko in a shoebox and jumped into bed.

He waited. And waited. And waited—until 11 p.m. Finally, his roommates fell asleep, leaving the cards in a jumbled pile on the floor.

Alex climbed down from his bed as quietly as he could. He took the gecko out of the box, tiptoed to the door, and carefully opened it. He checked to make sure no one was in the hallway and then headed down to Bull’s room.

Bull’s snoring could be heard even in the hall. In fact, they probably heard it all the way in California. Alex opened Bull’s door ever so slowly and entered the room.

Oh, boy! The smell-o-meter in Alex’s nose boomed. In a head-to-head stinking competition, Bull’s stench factory would beat a skunk’s den—hands down. Alex held his breath.

Bull was asleep on a top bunk. No one slept below him or on the other set of beds. Not even his smart-as-a-pile-of-bricks friends wanted to share a room with him.

Alex stepped onto the lower bed. The rusty old metal creaked.

Bull stopped snoring.

Alex froze, his heart hammering against his rib cage.

Bull made a loud snorting noise once . . . twice . . . and happily continued sleeping. 

“Go, have fun,” Alex whispered to the gecko. “But don’t even try to breathe in there.” He raised Bull’s covers and placed the gecko right next to Bull’s thigh, silent as death.

Slowly, he backed away . . . slipped into the hall . . . shut the door behind him . . . and exhaled.

Bull let out a scream to end all screams. It was a shriek that would chill anyone’s blood, whether red or purple. He raced out of the room.

Alex hid in a small alcove and peered out.

“Ow,” Bull shouted, his body twitching. “Something is crawling on me!”

Kids tumbled out of their rooms, rubbing their eyes. Alex emerged from the alcove.

Bull hopped down the hallway like a jackrabbit, tumbling into the kids, screeching, and pointing at his boxers. “Ow, ow. Get it off me!”

No one dared laugh out loud. One boy across from Alex hid his face with a pillow. The fourth grader whom Bull had taunted earlier looked at Alex and nodded. Alex nodded back.

The gecko calmly crawled down Bull’s leg, undisturbed by his jumping. It looked happier, even fatter. It leisurely strolled down the hallway like it knew it was a big shot now.

Oohs and ahs followed it.

Bull stormed back into his room. The rest of the kids sprinted back into theirs too, before any adults came up to see what all the screaming was about.

Alone in the hallway, Alex put a hand in his pocket and pulled out the two pieces of the broken pen. His parents had left only three things for him with their lawyer: their photo, Dad’s watch, and Mom’s pen. The lawyer had given them to Alex a week ago—before his birthday—following Mom and Dad’s wishes. The lawyer didn’t know why they’d attached the items to this specific birthday. And the pen hadn’t worked—its push button was stuck.

Alex had considered opening the pen up to fix it every day for the past week but was too afraid to mess with it.

He examined the two fragments and noticed a rolled-up piece of paper in the longer one. It must’ve been blocking the mechanism all along. But what was it doing inside the pen?

He unfolded the paper to reveal neat, tiny handwriting. His fingers tingled.

My dearest son,

There are so many things I want to tell you in case we don’t return, but there’s no time.

Now that you’re thirteen, you should’ve gotten your powers already. And I know you’ll be strong. But that also puts you in grave danger from the Man with No Face. He’s incredibly powerful, and he has followers on land, among the undead, and in the seas. Especially watch out for skaramars, Alex. They are sea monsters that can smell us from miles away, and there are a few near Hawaii. 

You have to get to 21.22, –156.86 before you’re discovered. I hope you’ll be safe there. You must—you absolutely must—keep your powers and the location of the shelter secret.

Love forever and ever,

Mommy

Alex’s mouth became as dry as sand. He wanted to memorize every line, every curve in Mom’s writing. But questions chased each other in his head.

What powers was he supposed to possess? He didn’t have any. Well, he could eat as much as a grizzly bear after its winter nap without gaining weight. But that had to be because he played so many sports. Maybe Mom had been mistaken.

On the other hand, he did have purple blood now, but that didn’t seem like a power either. It sure wasn’t like being able to shoot lightning bolts out of his palms to zap Bull’s rear end. It was more like having grape juice flowing through his veins.

And what danger did she mean? Alex had never heard of the Man with No Face—nor did he have a clue how someone could not have a face. Weirdest of all, Mom had mentioned the undead. Alex enjoyed movies with monsters and zombies, but surely, they couldn’t be real.   

Still, Mom had obviously been worried for him and had even hidden the message. And fishermen sometimes talked about huge, strange creatures in the seas, which could be the skaramars his mom had warned about. But smell us from miles away couldn’t mean these skaramars could sense just their family’s scent, could it?

Luckily, even though he lived on an island, he rarely swam and had never dived. He didn’t like the ocean. His parents had died there.

21.22, –156.86. Those numbers looked like coordinates. He’d found the longitude and the latitude of the group home for homework once, and these seemed similar.

Alex skipped steps on the way down to the library, ignoring the pain in his body. The door was locked, of course, but no problemo. It had also been locked during the nights he’d come here to get information about creatures with funky blood colors.

He took a paper clip out of his pocket and straightened it out. He then put his ear to the hallway floor. No sound of steps.

It’s okay, he told his annoyingly loud heart and inserted one end of the paper clip into the keyhole. He moved it left-right, up-down, pushing on the locking mechanism.

CLICK.

He opened the door and entered without turning on the lights. He walked to the computer farthest from the door and powered it up. A few long minutes later, he found the location: It was several nautical miles away from the island—in the ocean.

What sort of shelter could be in the middle of the sea? There were no islands visible on the map. But perhaps a tiny one—like a sandbank—could be present, too small to appear on a general map. What could lie there, though?

The whole thing seemed too incredible to believe—some big danger, his supposed powers, the secret shelter. The message had come from Mom, though, and it had been a big deal to her, so it had to be true.

Alex needed to think, so he headed out of the building. He walked for a few hundred yards to the tall cliff nearest to his dorm. He stepped to the ledge, waves smashing into the sharp gray rocks below.

He gazed at the dark horizon