Smoke and Mirrors

The Real Chapter Four: In which Dracula's New Secret Plan is Revealed and Cricket Hates Latin

A/N: My sincerest apologies for the delay. This chapter's original copy got lost. Sorry! PS- It gets crazy in this chapter.

Disclaimer: I own Drea, Lysander, Maggie, Ella, Raze, and Cricket. Rachel, Jenny, and Christine own themselves. Anyone else I'm not too sure of.

Cricket

"Colleen! Did you do my homework!" My God, Chris is annoying. I glared at the boy next to me.

" Did you get a brain? No. So I did not do your homework." I frowned and pulled out Drea's copy of the Prophecy.

"I'll pay you to do it now." I rolled my eyes. Every single day…

"Bite me Barbie" I muttered. Drea turned around from in front of me and raised an eyebrow at me. Then she paled. I turned around to see what freaked her out.

"Uh-oh…" I whispered to myself. I hurriedly shoved the Prophecy into the black hole known as my backpack.

"Cricket, doesn't that look like Dracula from Van Helsing?" Christine said to me. I raised my eyebrow. Only Christine.

"Yup." I looked nervously at the vampire walking up to the teacher's desk.

"Greetings, I am Mr. Dragulia. I will be your substitute teacher in Latin for the foreseeable future…" I suddenly felt very happy that I did my homework.

S M O K E A N D M I R R O R S

Latin class finally ended forty-five minutes later. Dracula was evil! He spent ten minutes reaming out Chris for not doing his homework. Everybody pretty much behaved after that.

Note to Self: Vampires have nasty tempers. Don't provoke them.

At the end of class, Dracula asked Chris to stay after class. Drea and I looked at each other. Then, a thought ran through my head. I grabbed Drea and Christine and dragged then to a bathroom.

I checked that it was empty, then turned to Christine. "I need your cell phone." Ella taught Carl to use a phone, and Gwen wrote the numbers he couldn't answer.

It picked up on the second ring. "H-hello?" I smirked slightly.

"Carl, it's Cricket. We have a problem. Dracula's our new Latin teacher." I waited five seconds for that to sink in.

"My god! I'll go tell Van Helsing! This is not good!" I thought furiously.

"Carl, calm down! Tell Van Helsing to wait and HIDE, we can't risk him getting arrested. Oh, and Carl, was there a lot of vampires at the masqurade ball?"

"Yes, thousands why?" Oh, (deleted ) I hope I'm not right. I'll run it by Drea first.

"I'll tell you later, okay? Bye!" I hung up. Drea was trying to calmly explain the situation to Christine, which was working fairly well.

"I hate to brake it to you guys, but we have a new problem," I scowled. It's not fair, really. We're just kids.

"Worse than Dracula trying to kill us?" Drea shot back mock-sweetly.

"Carl confirmed that there was thousands of vampires at the masquerade ball. And vampires only kill one or two people a month. Dracula killed thousands. Get the picture?" I pushed my wild hair out of my face and scowled.

"My God…" Drea yelped. "They get turned into vampires! And Chris is with Dracula!"

"Well, he's probably a human shake right now." Christine commented cynically.

"Sadly true," Drea said wryly. "Let's warn the others."

S M O K E A N D M I R R O R S

"Wait, so Chris is a vampire now? Freaky." Raze commented.

"So what are we gonna do about it?" Ella demanded. She was pretty ticked off. Scientific first and foremost, she was probably still in shock.

"Pray we don't get killed?" Lysander and Gwen chorused. Oh, yeah, they like each other. When ARE they going to admit it?

"CRICKET! GUESS WHAT!" My friend Jenny yelled. Her nickname is Drunken Butterfly, because she's sort of a ditz. My marginally saner friend Rachel was following her.

"Brilliant, Jenny, just yell it for all the world to hear!" Rachel replied disapprovingly. I snickered. Those two were better than cable, really, they were.

Raze walked up to them. "Calm down you two, and tell us whatever it is."

"We were coming here, to lunch-" Rachel began.

Jenny cut her off. "When we saw a woman with dark hair-"

"With Mr. Dragulia-" Rachel continued, fiddling with her bracelet.

"and they turned into bat thingys!" Jenny finished triumphantly. We looked at each other.

"This is so not good." We chorused.

That's when all h--- broke loose.

A/N: I did this whole thing without using the word said! This is gonna be about 12 chapters or so, w/ epilogue.

Next time: In which vampires are fought, and Gwen loses it.