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Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
If you were dying…
If you were sixteen and dying…
If your blood was spilling out of you, calling to them, the creatures of the night, and you knew you were dying…
If you saw their pale faces and the gleam of sharp teeth in the moonlight, and you felt your blood spilling warmly over your hands, and you knew beyond any doubt that you were dying…
Wouldn’t you say yes?
Yes, turn me.
Yes, I want to live.
Yes…make me one of you.
Chapter One
THERE’S A MURDERER in my school. And this time it isn’t me, so I’m kind of ticked off.
The body was lying on the front steps of Luna High School, upside down. His blood was running all the way down the steps to the ground, like a red carpet laid out to welcome us inside. He was wearing a red-and-gold Luna Tigers football jersey and a startled expression. I guess being thrown out of a third-storey window would surprise me too. The broken windowpanes creaked ominously up above, and shattered glass sparkled in the blood around him, reflecting the morning sunlight.
We could smell the blood the minute we pulled into the parking lot. I heard Zach’s stomach growl – which, if you ask me, is a totally inappropriate reaction. And also ridiculous since he’d had, like, two gallons of blood for breakfast already.
At the bottom of the steps, a couple of policemen were speaking into their walkie-talkies and trying to fend off all the curious teenagers who were early for school. Mostly that included the swim team and kids whose parents have to get to work early. And students like me and Zach, who prefer to be indoors before the sun is too high in the sky.
Don’t worry, we’re not going to burst into flames or anything. That’s a myth. Go back and read Dracula, and you’ll see – the sun just drains his powers; it doesn’t kill him. Not that I’m saying Bram Stoker was an expert or anything, but he’s kind of right about that part. So I don’t die in a ball of fire the moment I step outside, which is a plus. But the bad news is that too much direct sunlight gives me a wicked headache, and then I have to lie in a dark room for a while to recover. It’s kind of like having a mild sun allergy. It gets worse for older vampires, who have less tolerance. We also cover ourselves in this crazy herbal sunscreen, which helps a little bit, although I think it makes me smell like basil.
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
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.
“Wait,” Olympia said. “Let’s observe for a moment first.” I assume her high level of caution is how she’s managed to survive seven hundred years, but it drives me bats. (Ha ha ha! More vampire puns! OK, OK, I’ll stop.)
Well, I don’t know what she was observing, but I kept my “observational” eyes on Mr Hot. Could he be a vampire? He seemed a lot more tan than me, but maybe he was just born with darker skin.
The problem is that vampires don’t look particularly unusual most of the time. I think my canine teeth are maybe a teeny bit longer, but they only get really long and pointy and obvious right before I bite someone. Zach’s normal smile, for instance, is toothy and obnoxious, but not in a Look out! he’s going to bite! kind of way. It’s more like Look out, he’s going to hit on you, and then you’ll discover that he never flosses! And if you ask me, dental hygiene should rank pretty high on a vampire’s to-do list. Sure, we can’t get cavities, but Zach proves that bad breath can be eternal.
Other than his meaty breath, I don’t think there are any clues about Zach that would make someone think he’s a vampire. He looks like any other doofy seventeen-year-old jock, all muscles and shiny, sandy-blond hair and stupid jokes about body parts. None of that dark, pale, brooding vampire stuff that you read about. He’s tall, but that’s where the resemblance to Dracula ends.
My new best friend Vivi thinks Zach is dreamy, which I find faintly horrifying. (Despite the fact that I once felt the same – which is even more horrifying.) But I can’t convince her of how wrong she is, because she thinks I’m just like, “Ew, that’s my brother,” when of course the truth is that he’s not my brother at all. And I am definitely an expert on his long-term dateability potential.
Zach has no problem with the blood-drinking part of being a vampire, by the way. He mixes it into his morning health shakes with raw eggs and protein powder and all kinds of other unmentionable goop that he says will make him more buff. No one’s had the heart to tell him that vampires pretty much stay the same shape they were in when they died. Crystal will never lose that last five pounds; Bert will always look like a teeny-weeny accountant, despite being in reality stronger than any of the men in town. That growth spurt I was sort of hoping for in my senior year is never going to happen – but on the other hand, I can eat as much ice cream and as many cheeseburgers as I want, which I’ll admit almost makes up for the fact that I still have to drink blood to survive.
Anyway, if I can’t even tell by looking at Zach that he’s a vampire, I don’t see how I’m supposed to spot a vampire who’s a total stranger. I can’t exactly walk down the halls of my high school peering at everybody’s teeth.
Even with super-sight, I couldn’t see anything special about my hot guy’s canines, although he did smile helpfully – and very cutely, I might add – at a couple of people who went past him. But once his friends had passed by, he went back to staring at the body in that intense, thoughtful, totally hot way.
“That one,” Olympia said suddenly. But she wasn’t pointing at my guy. She was pointing at a tall, thin, pale guy in a hooded sweatshirt who was slouching up the sidewalk towards the school. I couldn’t figure out why she found him suspicious. He hadn’t even noticed the body yet. His blue eyes were focused on the ground.
I squinted at him. OK, sure. He was kind of cute too. In a brooding-poet kind of way. Or – I glanced at Olympia – in a vampire way. Surely not all pale, brooding guys were secretly vampires though. Right? I mean, before I died, I’d known a couple of those quiet, soulful guys in my old school – the ones who never leave the house or cut their hair or speak in class. And they weren’t vampires. At least, not that I knew of. But Olympia’s vampire radar was probably better than mine.
Olympia rolled down her window and pointed at one of the policemen, putting a finger over her lips. I was going to say, “Um, I don’t think they can hear us from here,” when I realised that now we could hear them…so if anyone out there was a vampire, they’d probably be able to hear us too. I kept quiet.
The policeman spotted Poet Guy, hurried over to him and grabbed his elbow.
Poet Guy blinked, finally looking up. “Dad?” His voice was soft, like if moss could talk. He stared around at the crowded parking lot and spotted the body. His expression barely shifted. “Oh. I see.”
“Go home, Rowan,” his dad said in a low voice.
Rowan shrugged. “Why? It doesn’t bother me.”
“It should,” his dad snapped. “I don’t want you near this kind of thing. Go home.”
Rowan’s eyes narrowed. “Is this because…Do you think I did this?”
“Shut up,” the policeman growled, glancing around. He steered Rowan forcefully in a circle and shoved him along the sidewalk until the body was out of sight.
“All right, all right,” Rowan said, jerking free. “Not like I care.”
“See you at home, son,” the policeman said. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, looking nervous as he watched Rowan slink away.
I used to like policemen until they totally failed to save my life. Now every time I see one handing out a parking ticket, I’m like, Really? You don’t have a dying girl to save somewhere? This seems like a better use of your time? OK, then.
Olympia rolled up the window again and started the car. It was pretty clear that school was going to be cancelled for the day.
“Well spotted,” Zach said. “I guess that guy’s totally a vampire.”
“Perhaps,” Olympia said. “Perhaps not. You should keep an eye on him, Kira.”
“Me?” I said. “Why me? Can’t I keep my eye on—” I was going to say “that guy instead,” but when I turned to point, I realised that my smiley Mr Hot had vanished. Sigh.
“You’re on thin ice, Kira,” Olympia said. “I suggest you follow the rules as closely as you can until we figure out what happened here.”
“I know what happened here,” I said. “Some vampire killed Tex Harrison. To be more specific, some vampire who isn’t me. A not-me vampire who has nothing to do with me.”
“Kira!” Olympia said sharply.
“All right, all right,” I grumbled, sitting back in my seat and folding my arms mutinously.
Well, fine. It could be worse; at least Rowan was cute in his own way. And after all, I do have two eyes. Nobody said I couldn’t also watch Mr Hot.
Wilhelm had already seen the news on TV by the time we got home. For all that he hates the last thirteen centuries so much, he sure doesn’t seem to have a problem with modern technology, most especially TVs. And microwaves to heat your coffee-laced blood. And lights that you can clap on and clap off from the comfort of your own coffin.
“KIRA NOVEMBER!” he hollered from the den as soon as he heard the front door open.
“I DIDN’T DO IT!” I bellowed back.
“YOU GET IN HERE RIGHT NOW!” he shouted. Yeah, in case you were wondering, it turns out that dads are pretty much the same whether they’re fifty or fourteen hundred years old.
Olympia put a firm hand on my shoulder before I could dart upstairs. “Let’s discuss this,” she said meaningfully. Ugh. I suppose I should be grateful that I get to be in on these “discussions”. My real mom used to just ground me, without an explanation or anything, which kind of sucked. But man, Olympia and Wilhelm can talk forever about my misbehaviour and all the punishments in store for me. I mean, they literally have all the time in the world. I think most teenagers should count themselves lucky that their parents aren’t immortal like mine.
“But I swear I didn’t do it,” I said, trying to fidget away. No luck; Olympia’s grip has seven hundred years of vampire strength in it. “What happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’?”
“Doesn’t apply to repeat offenders,” Zach smirked.
“Shut up, Zach,” I said. “Shouldn’t Zach have to join us for this? I mean, I don’t see why he isn’t as suspicious as I am.”
“Hello? Alibi?” Zach said, tossing his head annoyingly so his hair resettled in that shiny, perfect way it always does.
“Don’t you worry about Zach,” Olympia said. She steered me towards the den and Zach gave me a smug salute as he sauntered up the stairs. “Zach is not your problem, Kira.”
But she’s wrong about that. Zach is most definitely my problem, and with my luck, he always will be.
Because I’m the one who made him a vampire.
Chapter Three
IMET ZACH ON the first day at my first new school. My previous school, not Luna. It was my first day as a vampire high school student. That was a year ago. Obviously we’d had to move away from my hometown in Michigan; I couldn’t exactly keep flitting around Ann Arbor after I’d supposedly died in a car accident. So Olympia relocated us all down South – apparently vampires are used to moving a lot, so no one in the family complained – and signed me up to redo junior year at a new school.
I’d never moved before. I’d lived my whole life in Ann Arbor and always known the same people. Plus I’d never had to deal with hiding a part of my identity before. But I tried to be like, OK, so we’re in Georgia. I can do this. I’m not just the new girl. I’m a vampire. I don’t have to be afraid of mean girls and gossip any more. I could snap their necks in half – er, not that I will or anything – but it’s nice to know that I can. Plus I’m going to live forever. I might as well start acting like it.
That was the pep talk running through my head for the thousandth time when I finally found my locker that morning, which took a while because there was a guy leaning on it and blocking the number. He grinned down at me. He smelled like testosterone and basketballs.
“Move,” I said.
“Ooo, feisty and gorgeous,” he said, not moving. “Just how I like ’em.”
“Ooo, beefy and stupid,” I said. “Add sweaty and we’ll have a trifecta.”
“I’ll have a trifecta with you any time,” he said, leering. I rolled my eyes. The equally thick-headed guy he was waiting for snickered and closed his locker, which was two over from mine.
“Good one,” the thick-headed guy said. “Let’s go.”
“You go on,” Zach said. “I think I’m about to get lucky.”
“Yeah, you are,” I said. His eyebrows waggled. “Lucky that I don’t want to get kicked out, so I’m not going to kill you today.”