Never Bite a Boy on the First Date

Basically it sucks, since I no longer have to worry about skin cancer, so I should be able to tan as much as I want. Instead I’m stuck with the skin tone I had when I died. Not that we get a ton of sunshine in freezing Massachusetts anyway. Luckily for me, the pale look is coming back in. (It is coming back in, isn’t it?)

Right. Back to the dead guy.

There was one more thing we could spot from across the parking lot. The police wouldn’t know what they were looking at, but to vampires like us, the four big holes in his neck were a dead giveaway. (Ha ha! Hilarious pun! I know, I know, stake me now.)

Where in vampire legend does the image of two perfect little puncture wounds come from anyway? You see that everywhere, but it’s kind of physically impossible to do, and I should know – I have actually tried this experiment. Yeah, you’ve got your fangs up top, but you also have two sharp little fangs on the bottom, and the only way to really latch on and get all the blood you need is to bite with all of them, which leaves four tiny little puncture wounds – and that’s if you’re neat.

More often, as in this case, it leaves a bloody mess.

I’ve got those four little scars on my neck and my wrist – one set from Olympia (my vampire “mom”) and one from Crystal (my vampire “sister”). I hide the marks with my hair and my watch, and they kind of look like freckles now. Creepy freckles, but it could be worse.

I could be missing half my neck, like this guy.

“Gross,” Zach offered from the backseat, leaning forward to peer over my shoulder. I edged closer to the window, away from him, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Someone needs to work on her technique.”

Olympia parked the car and turned to stare at me with her big, dark, I know everything eyes.

“I didn’t do it,” I said immediately.

“Kira—” she started.

“I knew you would think it was me! That’s so unfair! I swear, I didn’t do it! Oh my God, make one mistake and suddenly every vampire attack is my fault.”

“You must admit it’s odd,” Olympia said. “Two vampire attacks in two towns in a row. Before you came along, I managed to go twenty-five years without seeing any vampire attacks in public like this.”

“OK, I agree it’s weird, but this wasn’t me,” I said. “I swear.”

It’s true, you don’t see a vampire attack every day. In fact, you hardly ever see one. All the rules about this were drummed into my head from the moment I woke up with fangs, and then re-drummed again after my little mistake last year.

“Besides, I’m not the eat-’em-and-leave-’em type, remember?” I added.

“Hey, that’s Tex Harrison,” Zach said, squinting through the windshield at the body.

“No way,” I said. We’d only been here a month, but even I knew Luna’s star quarterback. “How can you tell?”

“His football jersey,” Zach said. “Number nine? Hello?”

As if I would know that.

“See!” I said, turning to Olympia. “That proves I didn’t do it! I would never bite a Neanderthal like Tex Harrison. His blood probably tastes like beer and Cheetos.”

Olympia rolled her eyes. She does that a lot. Possibly just around me. I think she’s beginning to wonder if bringing a sixteen-year-old vampire into the gang was such a good idea. It’s still unclear whether I’m going to act sixteen for the rest of my immortal life. If you ask me, I’d say I’m already way more mature than I was a year ago, so I don’t think she has anything to worry about. I’m the one that has to worry, because it’s probably not going to be fun to be twenty-nine in a sixteen-year-old body…or fifty…or five hundred. If I have to go to high school over and over again for the rest of eternity, I will seriously decapitate myself.

Olympia always says, “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” meaning when I manage to actually get through an entire school year without some big, dramatic death (mine, for instance) forcing us to move. On the plus side, by the third time around, US History is a total breeze…although, sadly, not any less boring.

“Is he going to wake up like us?” Zach asked. “I mean, will he be a vampire? Should we stake out his grave?”

Olympia winced at his choice of words. She’s a little sensitive about things that can kill us. Hardly anything in our house is made of wood, for instance.

“It depends,” Olympia said. “If he was bitten before he died, then yes, he’ll become a vampire.” She pointed at the river of blood dripping down the steps. “But judging from that, he was killed first and then bitten. Otherwise the vampire would have drained much more from him before tossing him out the window. My guess is that the vampire decided to have a snack after throwing him through the glass, but she—”

“Or he!” I protested.

“—was probably interrupted, since there’s still so much blood inside the corpse too.”

“This,” I said, “is a seriously sick conversation.” I haven’t entirely adjusted to the whole yum, blood, yum aspect of being a vampire. My body wants it, but my head is still like, Ew, that is BLOOD, time to faint.

“I’ll have to talk to Wilhelm about this,” Olympia said with a sigh. Wilhelm is my vampire “dad”. (He prefers the word “patriarch”. If you call him Dad, even ironically, he will flail his pale arms around and make outraged huffing noises through his moustache.) He mostly lies in his coffin, brooding and issuing proclamations about how degenerate the world is today. Apparently things have gone way downhill since, like, the Middle Ages.

“Well, tell him I said I didn’t do it,” I said.

“Who else could it be?” Zach said. Very helpful. Thanks, Zach.

“It could be you,” I suggested. “Whoever said you had good impulse control?”

That was kind of a low blow, I’ll admit. He flushed angrily, which was only possible, by the way, because of that two gallons of blood breakfast I mentioned earlier.

“I was on a blood run with Bert last night,” he said icily.

“That’s true,” Olympia agreed. “They were gone for hours.”

“Where were you?” Zach asked.

Out by myself, as usual, which he totally knew. If I’d known he was out, I might have stayed home and watched TV instead. But lately I’ve been in Zach-avoidance mode, which means lots of long, solitary midnight walks until I’m sure he’s asleep. (He’s still on a more human schedule than the rest of us.) Doesn’t make for a great alibi, unfortunately.

“At the cemetery,” I said with a sigh. I know – I’m such a cliché. But it’s really peaceful at night. I like looking at the gravestones and trying to guess whether any of their inhabitants came back as vampires too. Also, moonlight makes us stronger, which is handy when you have to put up with Physics and Gym the next day. I’m sure vampires back in Transylvania in Wilhelm’s day never had to suffer like this.

“If it wasn’t one of us,” Olympia said, “that would mean there’s another vampire in this town.” Probably more than one, in fact. We mostly travel in families, just like regular, non-bloodsucking folks. It’s easier to blend in that way.

I scanned the growing crowd of students in the parking lot for anyone who looked suspicious. Or, you know, hungry.

Mostly everyone just looked sleepy. I mean, it was six o’clock in the morning. Dead body or not, that’s way too early for anyone to be awake. I felt that way as a human and I definitely feel that way as a vampire. This is when I should be going to bed and sleeping away all the daylight, but Olympia believes in acting as much like a human as possible. Trust me, I fall asleep the minute I get home from school, though. I wake up with the darkness and do my homework at three o’clock in the morning.

Most of the faces around us looked tired, like they’d been up late too.

But there was one guy…

OK, I’ll admit it. He caught my attention mostly because he was hot. I mean, sure, I’m a bloodsucking vampire, but I am also still a teenager in a new school; hence, I am always on the lookout for hotties. This one looked like he might be part Japanese, like me. But he had to be part something else too – maybe Polynesian? Hawaiian? – because his hair was dark and curly, and frankly he looked as if he ought to be surfing, or at least starring in a movie about surfing. He was leaning against a black car a few feet away from the police barricade, all casual and whatever: Oh, look, a murder…whatevs. He had one of those cute little rope necklaces around his neck and he was wearing sunglasses.

But with my vampire super-sight – all charged up from last night’s moonlit saunter – I could see his eyes through the dark lenses, and that’s how I could tell that he was staring intently at the body. It wasn’t the Whoa, dude, there’s a dead guy on our steps kind of staring everyone else was doing.

It was more like I know exactly what that is.

Chapter Two (#ulink_3f656037-74f0-529d-ab9f-bccf25a3c990)

OF COURSE, I’M not a mind reader. Though I hear that’s a nifty power, which, like mesmerising people, you can use only after a lot of practice and about a thousand years as a vampire. (Just in case that’s true, I’m careful not to think any of my more “degenerate” thoughts around Wilhelm.) So I couldn’t be sure what the hot guy’s expression meant. But I certainly wanted to know.

“Maybe I should go investigate,” I said, my hand already on the door handle.