Vlad shrugged into the green camo jacket and pulled on the heavy black boots.
'Just leave that here,' Anna said, gesturing to his white Vamp Camp clothes. Vlad picked them up with incredibly obvious distaste, but then shook them out and laid them over the almost naked Brian snoring beneath him.
'So considerate.'
'I know,' he said with a grin.
'You still look like a vampire though.'
'Why?'
Anna cocked her head to the side. 'I dunno, maybe it's because I knowyou're a vampire.'
'You're so prejudiced, judging me just on the type of teeth that I have.'
'What can you do,' she said with a shrug, prompting him to smile again. Anna looked him up and down, trying to hide the appreciation in her eyes. Now he looked less like an asylum patient and more like a wonderfully deadly soldier. His baggy white clothes were gone and the uniform fit him perfectly.
He straightened out his collar and pulled the slayer's cap down over his black hair.
'That helps... a bit.'
They walked towards the window where people's badges were scanned and tried to peer at the slayers outside without being spotted. Darkness had long since closed in around the camp, and the grass in front of the gate was ablaze with floodlights.
Vlad looked thoughtful. 'Any weapons they have will only hurt me...'
Anna paused for a minute. 'I dunno, getting sprayed with extra-pungent garlic gas wouldn't be that nice for either of us.'
Vlad nodded. 'We just scan our badges to get out don't we?'
'Yeah, there's a scanner against the wall.' Another pause. 'Vlad, if you can super-speed once we open the gates, then I can just walk out a bit later and pretend to be none the wiser.'
'I'm not that fast at the moment, that's the thing.'
'Ok, well...' Anna's sentence was chased away by the sound of the gate opening. A large looking figure waddled out onto the grass to join the six slayers posted there.
'Flying stakes! That's my Dad!' whispered Anna, and they both tried to conceal themselves even more behind the window frame.
'I forgot he was your Dad,' said Vlad, almost to himself.
'What?'
Vlad paused for so long Anna started to get a jist of what immortality felt like.
'Your Dad is in on it, isn't he?' Vlad's deep-set eyes met hers. 'He must be the one instigating it. He's the Warden after all.'
Anna cringed internally. 'He... he was the one I followed to the torture chamber.'
Vlad wore a deep frown, but his voice was rather light. 'Anna, it wasn't a torture chamber...'
'It might as well of been.'
She wasn't standing for any excuses now. It was like someone had pushed her into a lake as clear as crystal, and now her mind was too. All that doubting, worrying that she was wrong to be friends with Vlad because of his vampiric state. Her father was wrong, and she was looking at him now through a completely new lens. He wasthe instigator of those horrific things she had seen, and in her mind she couldn't separate him from those images.
'He runs this stupid camp and all those horrible things. For that I think I might hate him.'
'Anna...'
'He's always told me what horrible creatures vampires are, but I've never heard of vampires doing anything as cruel as what I saw.'
Vlad didn't know what to say to that, but was saved by the head of Anna's dad popping up at the reception window.
'Oh,' the Warden said. 'I don't think I know you.'
Vlad's eyes were as wide as saucers. 'I'm filling in. Brian's... not feeling too well.' He glanced to his side to where Anna was standing, and realised that she wasn't. She was crouching down beneath the window.
'I'll come in, I need to talk to you about the security.'
Before Vlad could stop him he was scanning his own card against the scanner and striding through the gate.
'We can't let him see the sleeping slayers!' Anna hissed at Vlad, tugging his trouser leg.
Vlad felt his muscles tense, and in the blink of an eye he was at the reception door.
'You super-sped!' Anna whispered, looking almost relieved. 'Get out as soon as you can. I'll meet you in the park across the road.'
Vlad nodded and walked out to meet the Warden in the hallway.
'What's going on with the reinforced gates? They should be down by now,' said the Warden, folding his chubby arms across his chest.
'Yeah, about that...' said Vlad, scratching the hair underneath his cap and trying as much as he could to pull the hat down over his features, in case the Warden recognised him. 'Pete's in there trying to run the program, but there's a bit of trouble with the computers speed...'
'We need the gates down right now!' His voice was getting sterner by the minute.
'I was just going to tell the guys outside actually...' Vlad walked past the Warden towards the exit, then realised with horror that he didn't know where Brian's card was.
'Hang on a minute!' the Warden said, turning to look at Vlad. 'I've just told them what's going on. We need to get this gate system...'
'Dad!'
As soon as her Dad's back had turned, Anna had slipped out of the reception door and ran around the corner. She came striding up now looking like she'd just been for a happy stroll through the camp.
'Huh? Anna, what in the name of all that is wooden and pointy are you doing here?'
'Dad I...'
'Didn't I tell you specifically not to come back here? And at this time of night!'
'Ok, I'm sorry! But I just thought I'd...'
'Enough. I don't need any of you excuses. You're leaving. Now.'
'Are you coming too?'
'I can't, there's a bit of a crisis here at the moment...'
'Yeah I heard all the alarms and stuff, what's going on?'
'Never you mind...' The Warden pushed past Vlad and swiped his card against the wall. He placed his hands firmly on his daughter's shoulders and steered her through the open gate.
Anna pulled a face at Vlad, telling him to follow. He walked out behind them, but the Warden decided to stop just outside of the gate, and so as the gate closed Vlad was stuck between that and the Warden's wobbling form. He was through the hard part, he knew that. There was another wall that lined the edge of the grass surrounding the camp, but Vlad could see even in the dark that the gate in it wouldn't be hard to get through.
Really, he should of been absolutely ecstatic at the fact that he was nearly out of the camp, but a tingling dread of recapture had settled in his bones. He wasn't safe yet.
That thought had just crossed his mind when another louder and longer alarm screamed over their heads.
'Huh? What?' said the Warden, peering up at a flashing light above his head. All the other slayers turned, guns at the ready, and moved away from the gate as well. Vlad followed suit.
'What's going on? What's that alarm for?' said one of the slayers in a deep voice.
'Does that mean the reinforced gates have been switched on?' said another.
'Do none of you know what the hell is going on?' screamed the Warden.
The smallest of the slayer guards shifted his gun to one side and frowned. 'I do, but I don't get it. The gate's got a body-heat sensor installed. That alarm goes off whenever a moving, humanoid shaped thing passes through that doesn't produce body-heat.'
'So in other words, a vampire,' said the guard standing next to the small one.
The Warden was standing there shaking his head. 'But the only people who came through the gate just now were me, Anna and...'
There was a pause more deadly silent than a vampire in a sun bed. Every pair of eyes came to rest on Vlad.
Anna's heart was hammering in her chest and her mind was whizzing within her. Vlad's face turned into an awkward smile, which to her looked utterly adorable, but to the slayers around them was more like a pearly-white threat.
The group was bewitched in a stunned silence, but Anna knew it wouldn't last for long. She had to do something.
'Eeeeek!' she squealed. 'A vampire!'
With all her might she pushed her Dad out of Vlad's way. Being as fat and bumbling as he was he stumbled backwards into some of the slayers. Vlad took the chance, and as his gun fell to the floor with a clatter he sped past the slayers.
He was fast, but not obscenely fast. Anna held her breath as she watched him near to the outside gate. He had just reached it when a loud whirring noise started beside her. One of the slayers had moved quickly, and a long and purple beam of light shot in the direction of Vlad. Anna heard him cry out, and watched as his floodlight-illuminated figure fell to its knees just in front of the gate.
She felt sick. He was going to be caught, and maybe they would just execute him and be done with it.
The Warden had gathered himself by now, and Anna heard his voice telling the slayer to fire again.
The whirring sound of the slayers gun started beside her as it charged for another shot. She had to think fast.
'Wait!'
Grabbing Vlad's discarded gun she hitched it into firing position in her arms.
'Don't worry, I'll zap him!' she cried.
She ran as fast as she could towards Vlad, promting her dad to scream out her name behind her. The whirring sound started from a different gun, causing the Warden to scream louder still.
'Don't fire you fools! You might hit Anna!'
'But she's not a vampire sir...'
'Oh yes, of course not... then fire! fire!'
Anna felt panic flare within her, but then she watched as Vlad picked himself up, wrenched open the gates and sped off into the gloom.
A smile lit up on her face and sent happiness blazing through her whole body. He was out!
'I'll get him Dad, don't worry!' she shouted over her shoulder, and leaving the brightly lit Vamp Camp she followed her accomplice off into the gloom.
