Empire of Vampires ✔️

Chapter Ten

'Just jump, Andrew.'

'Oh Marie,' Georgie chided, 'You can't expect him to jump from that high.'

Marie sighed in exasperation and went to upright the ladder for him, muttering all the way. Andrew stomped down the rungs till he came to face her with a glare.

'I could have died,' he stated.

'Oh that's dramatic, Andrew, I barely let go for a minute.'

He huffed, 'I was trying to get your attention for a full ten minutes!'

She waved him off, glancing about and noticing with disappointment that Georgie had started work on the interior.

Marie turned to look around the field for a moment and then changed the subject. 'Let's go checkout the other tents,' she suggested, 'I can't see them well enough from here. Did you see the dragon James made? He didn't let me look at it.'

'Yeah! It looks great!' Andrew enthused as they started walking clockwise towards it, 'He's been working really hard on it.'

'Does it look better than the cheetah?' Marie gasped, 'Georgie made the bestest for sure!'

'No, the dragon is much better and its huge-'

He paused as they got to the front of the green tent. The dragon's body covered the entirety of the roof, its feet covering the four pillars of the tent. Its scaly back went over the back of the tent, and its tail lay curved on the ground, long enough to start from behind the tent and curve all the way to the front where it ended in a pointy triangle. Its large head was hanging over the banner with translucent shiny orange paper cut into flame shapes coming out of its open mouth.

Andrew had helped James painstakingly make the rows of razor-sharp teeth by gluing sheets of paper in a conical shape and dipping them in a hardening solution for them to keep their shape. He would never in a million years admit this to Marie, however, for she would dramatically call him a traitor to his own house.

'Wow, it came out really well,' Andrew smiled as he greeted James who was adding the finishing touches to dragon's claws.

'Thanks!' James smiled back. 'And thanks for helping, I was really running out of time to finish.'

Oh, crap.

'You helped him??!' Marie rounded on him with a loud dramatic gasp. 'A TRAITOR! A traitor to your own house!' She flung an arm over her chest and pretended to faint in the shock of his betrayal.

Andrew laughed as he caught her around the waist and uprighted her. 'I'm sure the teeth don't make much of a difference,' he reassured her, 'I'm quite certain the dragon would still come in first either way, but why don't you go take a look at the other houses? We may still place second.'

'We're still going to place first overall though because I'm going to run really fast. James doesn't even try.' She shot him a mischievous look before she skipped away.

'What's a dragon without its teeth?' asked James as Andrew knelt on the grass beside him and held the large glue bottle that he was using to stick on the claws. 'You made all the difference,' he added with a sweet smile.

'Well don't tell your sister that, I'll never live it down,' Andrew retorted, flicking the lid of the glue bottle at him.

James laughed as he flicked it back. 'Sorry I brought it up,' he joked, 'I forgot what she was like as a person.'

They managed to finish up the tent just as Coach yelled through her megaphone that the races were about to start and that the two-hundred-meter girl's race was up first. Marie went to the starting line along with two to three girls from each house.