Ryan screamed.

It wasn't at all like the type of scream occasionally heard from Sharpay; no, not that glass-shattering-ear-bleeding-end-of-the-world-drama type of scream.

It certainly wasn't the sort of scream made by people who are secretly enjoying themselves; so it wasn't the sort of scream you hear in parks from little kids or from girls when their boyfriends throw them in the pool.

It was closest to, but still unlike, those screams doctored up for horror movies; it wasn't like the Wilhelm Scream and even less like, "Aaaahh, a zombie!"

Ryan's scream was the scream of a teenaged boy who suddenly wakes up in the middle of the night and knows with horrible conviction that he is about to die.

It didn’t faze the slight figure that perched on his windowsill, gleaming metal implements held threateningly in her small hands, ominously backlit by the streetlight which some heinous civil engineer had placed antagonistically right outside his window.

The scream didn't echo throughout his room—they'd modified most of the house to maximize acoustics. Instead, the sound stopped abruptly as Ryan ran out of air in his lungs. He took a deep breath. Then he screamed again.

Kelsi seemed to smile, in a diminutively deranged way. She slipped down into Ryan's room, like a puff of wind in the night, ephemeral. She spun the tuning forks in her hands, careful not to catch herself with the knife edges she'd sharpened so that they now resembled home made sais.

"N-no, don't get any closer," Ryan stuttered, scooting across his bed, away from her, taking the blankets with them as if they might luckily become bulletproof. "What are you doing, get out of my room."

Kelsi's smile was a Cheshire grin, eerily illuminated while the rest of her was dark as a shadow. Her fancy black composer hat rested jauntily upon her head, and she had chosen the crimson coat on purpose. She reached out and tapped the tuning sai against one of Ryan's bed posts. The metallic note rang out with clarity, but it was off, flat, strained, as if tainted by its new calling in life. She tipped her head to study the sound, the neon light from his clock glancing crazily off her glasses.

"Aww," she whispered, sending chills down Ryan's back, "sounds like you need a tune up." Then she hopped up onto his bed, the mattress barely dipping under her weight, and Ryan screamed and screamed until she finally had him singing at a beautiful C sharp.

The next day, as the examiner drew the sheet over the corpse while the grieving Evans family stood by in shock, the detective leaned in, confidentially.

"So it matches with the others?" he whispered, shooting a furtive glance at the bawling blonde girl and her yuppie parents.

The examiner only nodded grimly.

"Damn!" the detective exclaimed, hurling his pipe to the floor. He stalked to the open window pensively and looked out at the offensive lamppost. He sighed, but it was only a setback, not a defeat.

"I'll get you yet, you damn vampires. I'll get you yet," he vowed.