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“Don’t worry,” I said. “I don’t bite. Ha ha.” I took my hand back, prying off his fingers. I was about to walk out of there and straight home to tell Olympia we needed to move again, when he finally spoke, in a wobbly, I just saw a pterodactyl kind of voice.
“What if I wanted you to?” he asked.
“Wanted me to what?”
“Bite me,” he said. He took my wrists again and pulled me closer, shaking back his hair to expose his neck. “Do it. I want to be like you. I want to be a vampire too.”
“Yikes, dude,” I said, trying not to look at his neck. “Care to think about that for half a minute? It’s kind of like proposing to me, only even more eternal.” I thought that would scare him off, but it didn’t. Which maybe should have been a warning sign, but at the time I found it endearing. So sue me. I was in love…or at least I thought I was.
“Exactly,” Zach said. “I love you. I’ll always love you. I want to be with you forever.”
I didn’t say yes. Not even with his neck right there waiting for me. Some little corner of my brain was going, Wait! Think! This is not a normal reaction! Run away! Unfortunately that little voice wasn’t yelling loud enough, although it tried its best for the next few weeks, during which Zach pleaded with me every day to turn him into a vampire. Even in my love-blind state, I started to find it pretty annoying. I kept thinking, Can we please have one date that doesn’t end with you shoving your neck in my face and pledging your undying love? Can’t we just eat pizza and maybe talk about our homework now and then?
Then one day he called me and told me to come over right away. I told him it would have to wait because I was dying my hair. He told me he was dying.
I said, “You too? What colour?”
And he said, “No, seriously dying. I mean dying.”
“Literally?” I said. “Could you wait until my hair is dry?”
He said he didn’t think so, because there was an awful lot of blood already and he was feeling kind of woozy.
That’s when I realised he was serious.
Thank goodness for vampire super-speed. I got to his house in about nine seconds flat. Zach was slumped against his bathtub, looking pale, as blood from a long cut on one of his arms pooled around his jeans and bare chest. There was a glass next to him half-filled with blood and a piece of paper with bloody fingerprints all over it. It was weird and gross, and yet my whole body started freaking out with hunger at the smell of all that blood.
“What on Earth were you doing?” I asked, standing in the doorway. I didn’t want to get too close to that smell.
“I love you,” he said in this whispery, trying-to-be-heroic voice.
“Answer the question,” I snapped.
“Well, I…I was going to write you a note in my blood to show you how much I love you…and then there was so much blood I thought I’d save it for you to drink.” He waved his hand at the glass. “But then it kind of…kept coming and…I think I did something wrong.”
“I’ll say you did something wrong,” I said. “You freaking nearly killed yourself, you idiot. Couldn’t you prick your finger like a normal person, instead of slicing up your whole arm and bleeding to death?”
“I didn’t mean to,” he said, sounding irritated and a little less whispery. “And don’t call me an idiot.”
The scent of all the fresh blood was making me dizzy. “We should wrap you up,” I said, “and get you to a hospital.” I grabbed a towel and knelt next to the tub.
“It’s too late for that,” he said, back to his dying voice. He practically pressed the back of his hand to his forehead. “Don’t you see, this is perfect. We’re meant to be together. It’s a sign.”
“Yeah, a sign that you’re a moron,” I muttered, trying not to breathe in the scent of the blood as I wrapped the towel around his arm.
“I’m dying, Kira,” he said earnestly. “You have to change me…to save me.”
“I should have left you in that closet on the first day,” I snapped. His blood soaked through the white cloth instantly, spreading like red fireworks.
Zach lifted his wrist towards my face and the towel fell off with a splat. “Drink,” he said. “It’s all right. I want you to. Then we can be together…forever.”
There was nothing else I could do. The smell of all that blood was too much for my willpower. I was sure I’d never get him to the hospital in time. He was going to die and it would be my fault.
I sank my fangs into the bloody gouges on his arm.
Yeah, it was amazing. It was the last amazing moment I had with Zach. I don’t want to describe it, because remembering it now makes me feel all creepy, but it was mind-blowing. I can see how some vampires become addicted to drinking from the living. Olympia had warned me about that too.
After Zach was fully dead, I left his body there and went home to tell Olympia what had happened. She laughed and laughed and laughed until she literally fell out of her coffin. Which, incidentally, was not quite the reaction I was expecting.
“Well, we’re in love,” I said, offended. “I’m sure it’ll turn out fine. Like Bert and Crystal.”
“Oh dear,” Olympia said, wiping tears from her eyes. “Now perhaps you’ll see why listening to seven hundred years of experience is a good idea.”
Yeah. About a month later, in a rental car somewhere in the middle of Kansas, while we were moving around every night to hide our trail, Zach tried to get to second base with me and I threw him out of the sun roof. We had to drive half a mile back to find him. He sulked all the way to Montana.
That was the end of that relationship.
Chapter Four (#ulink_7d3531bb-12ce-5e48-a088-2e26e20738ba)
TRAGICALLY, I AM now stuck with Zach until he decides to go off and start his own vampire family somewhere, which requires a level of maturity I’m fairly sure he won’t be able to muster any time in the next five hundred years.
On the plus side, our cover story in this new town was that we were supposed to be brother and sister, so he couldn’t hit on me in public any more. That didn’t stop him from trying sometimes when we were at home – hence the long midnight walks to avoid him. He kept staring soulfully into my eyes and saying things like, “You want to be with me, Kira,” or “We are meant for each other,” which would maybe have more impact if his idea of “soulful” didn’t involve enormous, googly eyeballs. The good news is, I’m still a lot stronger than him, as apparently that is a skill I am extra-blessed with. Zach? Not so much. Olympia asked me to stop throwing him out windows though. They’re expensive to replace and the noise might disturb the neighbours.
That whole saga is why they immediately blamed me for this new vampire attack. As if I hadn’t learned my lesson! I was pretty sure I’d never date again, just in case I accidentally landed another obsessive lunatic. If you asked me, I was the vampire least likely to bite another high school football player.
But Wilhelm was convinced that after biting Zach, I’d become addicted.
“I knew this would happen!” he huffed, wagging his finger in the air. “I knew it was foolish to turn a child of this horrifying century! She’s a degenerate menace! We should lock her in a coffin and feed her through a tube until she is old enough to be trusted!”
I glanced at Olympia. “You guys don’t really do that, do you?”
“Not unless it’s necessary,” Olympia said, which didn’t reassure me very much.
We were in the den, which is Wilhelm’s favourite room after the basement, where he sleeps. Olympia deliberately chose a house with very few windows – they’re hard to find, but cheap, because nobody else wants them. The den had only one small window. Like all the others in the house, it was covered with dark blinds and heavy velvet curtains.
On the table next to Wilhelm’s Barcalounger was the only light in the room: a tiny lamp with a pale red shade. Olympia had convinced Wilhelm to give up his dripping Gothic candles after he set the last Barcalounger on fire. This new chair was covered in a prickly red-and-black plaid. The colours matched the dark red Oriental rug and the sleek, black metal coffee table, but stylistically the room was a bit of a mishmash.
Not that I’ll ever tell my vampire parents this, but they’re not exactly the world’s greatest interior decorators. It’s like they’ve latched on to a couple of trendy things from each century and haven’t noticed that the world has moved on.
This is unfortunately true of their clothes too. We’re not going to even discuss the tragedy of a medieval vampire in a pale blue leisure suit. I make Olympia run her outfits by me every morning before I let her drive me to school.
“She is running wild!” Wilhelm bellowed now, talking about me again. “She will bring the vampire hunters right to us!”
“This isn’t the Dark Ages, Pops,” I said. I love the way Wilhelm’s hair stands on end when I call him that. “There aren’t mobs of ignorant villagers outside with pitchforks and torches. Nobody even believes you guys exist. Us guys, I mean.”
“That is precisely the kind of thinking that will get us all staked!” he shouted. “These new vampires think they can bite anyone they like! They don’t remember how the hunters watch for any signs of us! Careless, reckless, selfish—”
“But I didn’t do it!” I yelled over the end of his sentence. “Call me what you like, but I DIDN’T BITE HIM!”
Wilhelm glared at me with beady, bloodshot eyes. He wasn’t bitten until fairly late in life, so he’s kind of grizzled and grey for a vampire. Plus he’s had the same moustache since the 800s – long and droopy and fluffy. Apparently it keeps going in and out of fashion, so he sees no need to shave it. Personally I think it’s really distracting to talk to someone who looks like he has giant fuzzy caterpillars crawling out of his nose.
“It might be true,” Olympia interjected. “We can’t be sure she did it.”
“We can’t be sure she didn’t,” Wilhelm snarled. “We should move again, and quickly, before they come to hunt us down.”
“Oh, no,” I said, remembering the long weeks of car travel and switching cities and identities. It was bad enough after my death; after Zach’s it was even worse, because he was there pestering me the whole time and there was no way to get away from him. I was kind of hoping we’d stay here in Massachusetts for a while. “Please don’t make me start junior year all over again.”
“I hardly think relocating is the worst of your problems,” Olympia pointed out.
“There could totally be other vampires here,” I said. “We saw this way suspicious guy at the school, didn’t we, Olympia? And it’s a pretty big town, right? There could be vampires all over the place!”
“Most vampires are not as foolish as you are,” Wilhelm growled.
“Let me find the vampire who killed Tex,” I said. “If I can figure out who did it, will you believe me? Can we stay?”
Olympia and Wilhelm looked at each other for a long moment. Sometimes I think they’re actually talking to each other when this happens, which is fully creepy. Nobody wants parents with telepathy.
Finally Wilhelm snorted, which made his moustache flounce up and down. “I am not happy about this,” he said. “I want that to be clear.”
“All right, we’ll let you try,” Olympia said to me. “But if you haven’t figured it out in one week, we’re moving again.”
“And then there will be consequences,” Wilhelm warned. I didn’t need telepathy to know he had locked coffins and feeding tubes floating through his head.
“Be careful,” Olympia said. “Not all vampires are as civilised as we are.”
Really? Less civilised than medieval Romanians? I bet.
Finally I escaped upstairs to my room. Zach and I are the only ones who use the upstairs; we don’t quite hate the sun as much as the others do, and it occasionally manages to sneak in through the blinds on the top floor. Our deal is that I get the rooms to the left of the staircase and he gets the rooms to the right. He’s not supposed to come over to my side, although you can imagine how well he obeys that rule.
Bert and Crystal have a room on the first floor. They’ve both been vampires for less than a hundred years, so they still do some human things like sleep in a bed, although their mattress is rock hard. I guess one day they’ll switch over to coffins, like Olympia and Wilhelm, who sleep behind a hidden door in the basement in parallel caskets of ancient stone. Allegedly one day I’ll want to sleep in a coffin too, but I am highly dubious about that theory. I like my bed to be as fluffy as possible, with about seventeen pillows and a down comforter. Wilhelm thinks this is a sign of my “moral decrepitude” and “debilitating laziness”. I think it’s a sign of I just like sleeping, dude.
In fact, when I got upstairs, that’s exactly what happened – pretty much right away. I mean, I tried to start my investigation. I got as far as Googling Tex Harrison and finding out that he kept a blog on his My Space page. But it turned out to be all about sports and how awesome the Luna Tigers are and what an awesome quarterback he is and blah blah Patriots and Red Sox, plus a detailed rundown of his daily workout regimen and everything he’s ever eaten. Ever. Can you really blame me for falling asleep?
When I woke up, I was lying across my bed in a mountain of pillows. My vampire instincts told me that it was dark outside. I rolled over and saw Zach standing in my doorway. Really “lurking” is the most appropriate description.
“Go away,” I said, throwing a pillow at him.
“You forgot to lock your door again,” he said.
“You forgot to not be an ass again,” I said. “Stay on your side of the house.”
“I hear you’re going to solve Tex’s murder,” he said with a smirk. “Looks like it’s going well so far.”
“Um, hello? All the best detectives do their work in the dark,” I said.
“I can think of better things to do in the dark,” he said, waggling his eyebrows.
That was my cue to leave.
“Have some blood before you go out!” Olympia called from the kitchen as I stomped past.
“No thanks!” I called back, grabbing my keys. I slammed the door behind me and started running. I never used to like running, but it turns out it’s a lot more fun when you’re nearly as fast as a car. And it doesn’t make me tired any more, at least as long as the moon is out. Plus it’s a lot safer to run unnaturally fast at night – not so many people out on the street.
I made it to the high school in about ten minutes. It looked all gloomy and shadowy in the moonlight, the brick and concrete merging into silvery edges. Most of the glass had been swept up, but I could see a few tiny shards they’d missed, still shimmering on the steps. I guess the police had been busy, because even the crime scene tape was gone. They probably really wanted school to get back to normal the next day.
They’d done a pretty good job of cleaning up; only the smell of blood still lingered, a whisper of what had happened here, and I’m guessing that only a vampire nose would pick that up. Even the broken window above was covered with a black tarp, one corner flapping a little in the wind.
There’s another cemetery right beside the high school – not the one I usually go to. This one is smaller and older, with tiny, crooked gravestones. With that on one side and the football field on the other, the school has a lot of open space around it. Only a couple of houses have a view of the front steps, and that’s across the parking lot. I was guessing nobody could have seen anything, especially that late at night, without vampire sight. It was only eleven o’clock now and already all the houses were dark. Unhelpful day-dwellers.
I padded across the grass that edged the parking lot, staying close to the shadows just in case. Long trails of purple-grey clouds slid across the moon. A small piece of glass crunched under my sneaker as I climbed the steps. Tex must have landed with a lot of force; I could smell blood spatters on the front door. And blood was the only thing I could smell. The scent of the attacker was completely masked by the overwhelming scent of Tex’s blood.
The door was, of course, locked, which made me wonder how Tex and his killer had gotten inside in the middle of the night in the first place. Not that it’s hard for a vampire to get into places like this. We have to be invited into private homes, but everything else is wide open to us. For instance, I could have just pulled the door off, but I thought that might be a little suspicious. Probably not an approach Olympia would have approved of.
Instead I climbed the big oak tree that grows beside the school’s front steps. Climbing trees is another thing that’s more fun with vampire strength and speed. I was level with the top floor in about twenty seconds. I wriggled along the length of a branch until I could reach the flapping corner of the tarp. There was just enough space for me to squeeze underneath and flip through the open window. The broken panes of glass were gone. Only a gaping round hole was left in the wall of the school.
My shoes hit the tile floor with a tiny squeak. I was in a long hallway lined with metallic-green junior class lockers. Moonlight slanted through the windows in the classrooms on either side and the matching round window at the far end of the hall, facing the back of the school. Another hallway bisected this one in the middle, making a kind of plus sign. Or a cross, if you want to be all woooooo mystical about it. As it turns out, crosses don’t bother me. They freak Wilhelm out really badly though, so I think maybe you had to believe in them when you were alive to be bothered by them once you’re a vampire. I would test this theory by throwing a Star of David at Bert, but that would be mean.
Holy water does irritate my skin, and garlic makes me sneeze for about an hour. Neither of them can kill me though – so much for those theories. I’m afraid it’s a stake through the heart, an axe through the neck or a whole lot of fire, and that’s it. Not stuff I have to worry about much in my everyday life. Unlife. Whatever.
I circled the spot in the hallway in front of the open window, although I had no idea what I was looking for. Clues? Graffiti scrawled on the wall: “I killed Tex Harrison here”? The floor looked as scuffed and ordinary as it did every day. I crouched and ran my hand across the cold, speckled tiles.
My fingers brushed against something that rolled. I caught it and picked it up.
A small red bead.
Hmmmmm.
Of course, anyone could have dropped that here any time. Hundreds of kids went through this hall every day. My own locker was right around the corner, in the bisecting hallway.
Still, I slipped the bead into my pocket.
Although I knew it wouldn’t do any good, I inhaled, trying to see if any of the scents here were stronger than the others. As I expected, there was too much of a jumble to pick anything out.
Except…No, I was wrong. There was one unusually sharp scent. It’s hard to describe how vampire noses distinguish what they smell, but if it helps, this one smelled a little like mist and moonlight and jazz and tuxedos and antique books. (I know, I bet that was really helpful.)
As I separated it out from the rest of the muddle, I realised that it was surprisingly strong and getting stronger.
Or…closer.
I whirled around.
I wasn’t alone.
Chapter Five (#ulink_0d142ee1-715e-55f4-8dd3-ae34fcc31e27)
IF I’D HAD a heartbeat, it would have skidded to a stop.
He was standing in the doorway of a classroom, his hands clasped behind his back. The moonlight dappled the floor behind him, hiding his face in shadow. All I could see was his long, lean outline.
