Blood Beast by Darren Shan Page B

a sob or a scream.
    “You’re sure?” Dervish asks softly.
    “Check for yourself,” I say hollowly. “Prove me wrong.” My face crinkles.
“Please.”
    Dervish kneels and gently pushes me away. He examines Loch. Rolls his eyelids up. Puts his ear to the dead wrestler’s chest. Goes through all the same resuscitation tricks that I tried. I don’t bother telling him that he’s wasting his time. Let him find out for himself.
    Eventually he draws back, saddened — but worried too. He looks at me. Then at Bill-E. “Tell me again what happened.”
    “He slipped,” Bill-E moans. “I tried to grab him but I couldn’t reach.”
    “There was nobody else in the cave?” Dervish presses sharply. He looks at me and licks his lips. “
Nothing
else?”
    “No,” Bill-E cries.
    “No,” I whisper.
    “You’re sure?” Dervish asks, voice low, directing the question just to me this time. “It’s important. You were alone? The three of you? You’re
sure?
”
    I nod slowly, confused.
    “I tried to save him.” Bill-E sobs. “But he was too big. Even if I’d caught him, he’d have dragged me down with him, right, Grubbs? It wasn’t my fault. Please, Dervish, don’t say it was my fault.”
    “Of course it wasn’t,” Dervish sighs. “It was an accident.” He rubs his chin, troubled. He stands, looks around, glances at the waterfall and the spot Loch fell from. Doesn’t mention the crack — he hadn’t seen the wall before I howled and split the rock, so he assumes it’s a natural feature.
    “Is there anything you can do?” I ask. “Any spells. . . ?”
    “No,” Dervish says plainly. “He’s beyond help.”
    I fight back tears. “Will the ambulance be here soon? Maybe they —”
    “Nobody can do anything!” Dervish snaps. “He’s dead. You’ve seen death before. Don’t ask the impossible. You’re not a child.”
    I stare at my uncle, stunned by his harsh tone. It sounds like he’s criticizing me for caring about my friend, as though that’s wrong.
    Dervish catches my look and his expression softens. “This is bad. And not just because Loch is dead.” He looks around again, nervously. “I didn’t call for an ambulance.”
    “What?” I explode. “But —”
    “He’s dead,” Dervish says as if that explains everything. “An ambulance wouldn’t have helped.”
    “But you didn’t know that when you came,” I shout. “When Bill-E came to get you, Loch was alive. Why didn’t you call for help? Maybe they would have gotten here before you. Maybe Loch would be alive if —”
    “Billy, come here,” Dervish interrupts me. Bill-E approaches slowly, fearfully, trying not to look at Loch. Dervish keeps me silent with a fierce frown. I want to scream bloody murder but I bite my tongue, waiting to hear my uncle out. When Bill-E’s a few feet away from us — the closest he’s going to come — Dervish speaks.
    “What happened tonight is a tragedy. I feel for you, honestly, even though I’m not showing it. We’ll talk about this afterwards. I’ll give you all the support I can, make it as easy for you as possible. But right now I have to be hard. And I have to ask something hard of you.”
    He pauses. Again a nervous glance around. “As far as the official verdict goes, Loch can’t have died here,” Dervish says. “I’ll explain later. Right now you have to trust me. We need to move the body. Make it look like this happened somewhere else. Cover up the entrance to the cave and tell nobody about it. Understand?”
    Bill-E and I gape at him.
    “Please,” Dervish says. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t crucial.”
    “You want to. . . tamper. . . with the body?” Bill-E croaks.
    “I just want to move it,” Dervish says. “We’ll take it to the quarry. You can say you were climbing there. We’ll call the emergency services once we —”
    “What the hell, Dervish!” I yell. “Loch is dead, and you’re playing games? What sort of heartless —”
    “You’re not