Elatsoe

 At the Ring Transport Center, Jay arrives with Ronnie and her friends. Ronnie brings one of Al’s old sweaters, and Kirby tracks his scent to the Allerton mansion. Vivian repeats the plan: They must “stay together,” “be quick,” and “avoid confrontation whenever possible” (385). She orders Ellie and Jay to stay in the car while the adult women enter the house. At Allerton’s mansion, the party to celebrate Willowbee’s bicentennial is in full swing. The rescue party agrees to retreat if the ghost cuts their cell phone signals. Vivian streams from her phone, so Ellie and Jay can see what she sees inside the mansion.

As Ellie and Jay watch from the parking lot, they see “a dark blotch in the western teardrop mirror” (394) that looks like a face. They try to call Ronnie and warn her that “Trevor’s ghost is in the room” (395), but Trevor scrambles the phone lines in an attempt to force Ellie and Jay to enter the mansion. A kindly jester offers to escort Ellie and Jay inside, but once they follow him in, he reveals himself to be a vampire named Glorian. He traps them inside, and when Ellie tries to banish him from the premises by declaring her Lipan Apache heritage, he is unfazed. He explains that he was “born along the bank of [their] fertile Kunetai over two hundred years ago” (402), and he is Lipan as well, so Ellie’s trick is useless. Ellie and Jay realize they are in trouble and run from Glorian.

As Ellie and Jay flee from Glorian, Ellie summons her grandmother’s woolly mammoth. It charges at Glorian, and “the cursed man [flies] through the air and slam[s] into the far wall” (406), but he survives the attack and continues to pursue them. They run into a room full of coffins, locking the door. Suddenly, Kirby appears and helps them find the coffin containing Al, who is alive and knocking on the coffin. As Glorian bangs on the door, Ellie and Jay try to roll the heavy coffin forward. Ellie thinks about summoning the dogs of her ancestors to help, but she is “afraid to fly too close to the sun” (412). Suddenly, the door flies open, and Glorian attacks.

As Glorian charges at them, Kirby attacks. The vampire “shout[s] into a walkie-talkie” (414) and calls for backup. During the struggle, the vampire pulls a gun on them. Suddenly, Al “kick[s] the metal coffin lid (414)” and it hits Glorian. Al joins the fight while Ellie and Jay quickly free another imprisoned vampire. Once Glorian is sealed in a coffin, Al tries to explain what Ellie and Jay already know: that Dr. Allerton “heals ancient vampires by exchanging their developed curses for the health of young vampires” (418). Jay apologizes for getting Al into this mess and not being excited about Al and Ronnie’s engagement. They decide to go looking for their friends and family, then escape from the mansion together. However, when they open the door, they find a dead body lying outside with its head “twisted one hundred and eighty degrees” (419). Ellie knows that this is Trevor’s doing.

Ellie, Jay, and Al realize that the dead body is one of Allerton’s exorcists that Glorian called for backup. As they leave the dungeon, Ellie sees “drops of blood on the railing and a red handprint on the wall” (421), and when they turn a corner, they see “broken bodies slumped against the walls and sprawled, in pieces, across the floor” (422). Ellie tells Trevor’s ghost that this violence was unnecessary, but he speaks to her on the walkie-talkies and says that he couldn’t run the risk of “let[ting] an exorcist ruin [his] fun tonight” (423). Ellie convinces Trevor’s ghost to let them pass through the corridor, but he stops Ellie from leaving with the others. Trevor reanimates the corpses of the dead exorcists, and Ellie declares that he isn’t Trevor because her cousin would never do something like this.

The ghost admits that it’s not really Trevor but “an emissary of a murdered man, unleashed to right a terrible wrong” (426). It tries to convince Ellie to unleash all of the emissaries that are trapped between the world of the living and the dead, and when Ellie refuses, the emissary attacks her with shards of glass. Ellie uses Kirby’s howl to escape, and she rejoins Jay and Al. They look at their watches and realize that the masquerade dance has started, and the emissary’s victims will be “worse off than fish in a barrel” (431). They sneak back into a different part of the mansion to find the rest of their group, and when they find the crowded ballroom, Abe is about to give a speech. However, the emissary interrupts by flinging a piano up and throwing it straight into the crowd.