by Jayme Morse
“What is it, Riley? Just say it, because you holding it in is just going to freak me out.”
“So… you’re not a faerie, but you’re paranormal, too,” I told her gently.
Her eyes went wide. “How did you know?”
“We all are. You, me, and Drew. We’re vampires now.”
Her jaw dropped open. “I’m a vampire? I thought that you meant…” she trailed off, looking visibly shook up.
“What? Are you okay? I know it’s a lot to take in right now, especially with everything else. But we’re going to be okay.”
At least, I hoped we would be.
She shook her head. “I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if I… I don’t know if me and you are going to be okay. What if being a vampire doesn’t mix well with other paranormal beings? Like, what if you can’t be a vampire and a faerie at the same time?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It should be fine, right? I feel fine. It wouldn’t have been possible to turn me into a vampire if it didn’t mix well with my faerie blood.”
As I said that, I heard Noah tell the guys that he thought the three of us had died.
How did we get into this car, how did we get saved, without him seeing it unfold in front of him?
“I guess,” she said quietly.
“Jordan, can you hear the guys talking in your head?” I asked.
She frowned. “What guys?”
“Slade, Julius, Tristan, and Noah?”
She shot me a look. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I insisted. “They’re the ones that are keeping us in this cage. I’m telling you, I can really hear them. I’m not just imagining it.”
Why could I hear the guys and she couldn’t? I wished Drew was awake so that I could question him about it, too.
It seemed strange that I was the only one that could. If we were all vampires, then shouldn’t we have all had this ability? It didn’t make any sense.
“I believe you,” she replied with a shrug. “Still not the weirdest thing that’s happened all night.”
“I feel like that’s going to be our new motto,” I joked.
“God, I hope not. After we get out of this stupid car, I want nothing weird to ever happen for a long, long time.”
I shrugged out of my denim jacket, making sure to grab Dylan’s ring from its pocket and slide it onto one of my fingers—a different finger from the one I normally wore it on. Noah had said it was a magical ring. I wasn’t sure if that was true, but it felt like I needed to keep it close to me.
“Is it faerie time?” Jordan asked excitedly. “I can’t wait to see what your wings look like.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about her watching me. It made me a little self-conscious. But at the same time… I wanted to share that part of me with someone. It was the most interesting thing about me.
Or, it was, until I became a vampire, too.
Still, the human part of me was so boring. If I even had a human part of me anymore.
I didn’t have a ton of friends—just two really good ones. Two that had become closer than ever in just a few short hours.
But it made me feel lame to know that the only parties I was ever invited to were the ones Jordan threw.
Not that it was surprising, though. I didn’t go out of my way to meet new people. I wasn’t even a part of any clubs or after school activities.
School. How was I going to sit in the classroom and be able to focus on my schoolwork without getting distracted by thirty appetizing heartbeats?
And what about my family? If Noah hadn’t been lying, if his body really was one hundred years old, that meant that I’d never age while the rest of them did. How wouldn’t they notice?
I had so many questions that I wasn’t even sure I’d ever know the answers to.
But it wasn’t something that I needed to be worrying about yet. I had the rest of my life to worry about that, if we managed to get out of this alive.
For now, all I needed to focus on was getting the three of us out of here.
I unzipped my black and red floral dress and pushed it down over my legs. Then I pulled my tights off.
“What do these guys want with us?” Jordan asked.
“That’s exactly what I’d like to know,” I replied with a sigh.
Jordan shook her head in annoyance, crossing her arms over her chest.
“We could have avoided this… we could have avoided all of this, if we hadn’t gone to the graveyard to talk to my brother.”
“It’s too late to think about that now,” I said, even though she was right.
“We’re never trying to talk to a ghost ever again.”
“Sounds good to me,” I replied. “Especially not while I’m wearing a magical ring,” I added.
I couldn’t help but wonder if that ring was the entire reason this whole thing happened. What had Dylan gotten us into with that ring?
I turned around, unclasping my bra.
Jordan gasped. “When did you get a tattoo?!” We always said we’d get our first tattoos together,” she complained, sounding disappointed.
I glanced over my shoulder at her. “What are you talking about? I don’t have any tattoos.”
I craned my neck around to try to look at whatever she was seeing on my back.
“Yes, you do. It’s a crescent moon with, like, a bird, or something in the center. I don’t know, I can’t really see the whole thing. It’s too dark.”
She grabbed her phone from her coat’s pocket and took a picture, with the flash on, of my lower back.
I hoped that the flash hadn’t drawn any attention to us. I glanced out the window. To our benefit, the rest of the parking lot looked pretty empty.
“Take off your coat,” I told Jordan before I even bothered to look at the picture.
“Why?” she asked, raising her eyebrows at me.
“Because, before tonight, I didn’t have a tattoo. I’m pretty sure one of the guys tattooed me,” I said.
Had the guys tattooed me while I was asleep?
It was surprising that I hadn’t felt it, but it was the only thing that would have made sense.
As Jordan shrugged out of her coat, I took her phone from her so that I could see the tattoo on my back. The tattoo that someone else had chosen for me. I was afraid to look. What if I hated it?
It made me so angry.
Tattoos were supposed to be special, and now I had a design that I probably never would have chosen for myself.
Deciding that I could always cover it up with something nicer, I glanced down at her phone.
It was actually pretty.
Tiny pink and purple stars made up a crescent moon. It made it look almost glittery. Jordan had been wrong about the bird, though. It wasn’t a bird at all. It was a tiny faerie with swirly black wings.
I pushed Jordan’s shirt up in the back, finding that there wasn’t a tattoo.
“That’s weird,” Jordan commented. “Maybe my tattoo is somewhere else?”
We checked everywhere on her body. She had no tattoos at all.
Why had the vampires only tattooed me?
Chapter 7
Noah
Candlelight flickered up the walls, casting a glow around our new Headmaster’s office, where we were speaking to each other through mind-speak.
“Do you have any idea of what you’ve just done?!” Slade asked, his big blue eyes hard and cold as he stared me down.
“It was an accident!” I shot back.
“You don’t accidentally suck the blood out of three people,” Tristan pointed out.
“That was just selfish,” Julius spat.
“I was starving,” I said defensively.
But they’d never get it. I’d said the same thing in different ways so many times to try to get them to understand. They were still judging me for it.
Then Slade lost his patience with me.
“Noah, do you have any idea how bad this is for all of us?!” he screamed at me.
The vein in his tan forehead looked like it wanted to pop. I’d never seen him so angry in my life.
“Hush, Slade,” our Headmaster said. “We don’t want to wake the other students.”
Headmaster McCullough sat with her arms folded on the other side of her desk, silently judging me. Her reddish-brown painted lips were pursed together in a scornful look.
I’d only gotten out of my coffin for less than a day, and already my closest friends and Headmaster hated me. Good going, Noah.
That was about my luck. My friends hadn’t even gotten the chance to welcome me back to the real world, and already, I had made them hate me.
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” I told Slade, and I meant it.
“You did hurt someone. Three someone’s,” Tristan pointed out.
I ignored him, my eyes pleading with Slade’s ocean blue irises.
“I wasn’t planning to hurt anyone,” I insisted. “It was just that they were there at the worst possible time, a time when I didn’t have control over myself, and they were so tempting. I hadn’t had any blood in years, and I could hear their heartbeats racing. They sounded like hummingbirds.” It was a delightful sound, really.
“Of course their heartbeats were racing. They were racing because you scared them. You are a horrible person, Noah,” Julius said. His nearly black eyes that were usually so kind were full of anger.
“It’s just that I was in that coffin for so long…” I trailed off, trying to find the best way to justify what I’d done.
“You weren’t even in there that long! It wasn’t even a year,” Slade said, his voice still loud and angry.
“It felt like forever,” I grumbled.
“Yeah, well, we’ve all been in a coffin at some point and you’re the only one that had to have a feast when you were reawakened,” Slade replied, shaking his head in annoyance.
“It felt like I was in there for a lifetime,” I explained. “It felt like it had been a hundred years. I had to lay in there forever, listening to you guys living your lives normally. I could hear everything you guys were doing without me. I missed out on everything.”
“Yeah. And thank god we could hear everything you were doing, too. We got there as quickly as we could,” Tristan said, pushing his light brown hair out of his face.
“Hmm,” our Headmaster said.
I glanced over to see that she had removed her black framed glasses and was trailing the earpiece over her lips as she watched us intently.
“Hmm what?” I asked, kind of annoyed that she was interrupting us.
I didn’t even understand why she had to be here for this.
“I just find it so fascinating that you all can hear each other’s thoughts.” She glanced around the room at each of us. “That’s quite unheard of in vampires.”
I shrugged. “We’ve always been that way.”
Our Headmaster leaned forward, holding my gaze with her slate gray eyes.
“Tell me, what am I thinking at this very moment?” she asked.
I shrugged again. “I don’t know, lady. It doesn’t work like that. It only works within the four of us.”
She pursed her lips and sat back in her tall leather chair, crossing her thin pale arms over her chest while she glared at me.
“Young man, are you going to be a good fit for this academy? Perhaps Nightshade Vampire Penitentiary would be a better fit for you.”
“No, no. That’s not necessary,” Slade replied. He came to stand behind me, squeezing my shoulder hard. “We’ll keep him in line.”
He’d always been our leader, our protector. Our Alpha.
“I don’t want to go to prison. I’ll keep myself in line,” I said, with a defiant glance up at Slade.
I was greeted with four looks of doubt. Not one of them believed that I could do it.
I let out a laugh, but it wasn’t because I found it funny. I didn’t care about what Headmaster McCullough thought. It kind of hurt that my friends didn’t even believe in me.
“I swear. After tonight, I’ll be the perfect student. I’ll have an early bedtime—”
Headmaster McCullough cut me off. “You’ll have a curfew.”
I raised my hands up and pointed at her excitedly. “Sounds good. Hell, I’ll even study.” Anything was better than going back to jail. “And I’ll never murder anyone ever again,” I said.
“You haven’t murdered anyone,” Slade told me.
“I haven’t?” I asked, feeling confused as I turned to look at Slade.
“I could have sworn I felt their hearts stop beating when I was drinking from them,” I thought to myself, allowing the guys to hear me.
It wasn’t a conversation that I was willing to allow our Headmaster to hear.
“We saved them,” Slade’s voice echoed back into my head.
“All of them?” I asked.
“Yes,” Tristan replied.
“How?”
“There’s going to be three new vampires walking around campus,” Slade said.
A nervous lump formed in my throat.
Now it was my turn to shout. “You turned them?! What were you thinking?”
“We didn’t want to let them die just because you were being a blood-hungry douchebag,” Slade explained.
“Oh, perfect. So they get to become vampires so that we can die instead. Makes perfect sense,” I said as my stomach twisted into a knot.
“It’s a fair tradeoff. They were innocent. You were not,” Tristan said, his steel gray eyes judging me. “We were all willing to risk it for you. Feel special.”
“I don’t feel special. Maybe I did the wrong thing, but I don’t think you should have risked it. You should have just let them die. Now we’re going to have to watch our backs for the rest of our lives. What if we get caught?”
“Maybe? You absolutely did do the wrong thing,” Julius replied. “We felt that saving them was the right thing to do. Maybe if you hadn’t run off to go find somebody else to feast on, you would have seen how hard we worked at saving them.”
“You look like you’re having a moment,” our Headmaster interrupted us. She looked almost giddy. She shook her head in awe, a smirk on her face. “So fascinating.”
We gave our best attempts at sheepish, innocent smiles.
If only she knew how bad we really were.
She stood, grabbing her long black coat from the rack it was hanging from, and headed for the door. “I trust that you’ll be able to find your dorm room.”
“Of course,” Slade said with a nod.
“Where’s my dorm room?” I asked her.
“You’re staying with us, obviously,” Tristan replied, shoving his hands in his pockets.
“Thank you, Headmaster. For everything,” Slade said.
She waved and gave us one last smile over her shoulder.
“For everything? What all did she even help with?” I asked.
“She gave us the key to her office,” Slade replied.
“Not that she knows it,” Tristan added.
“We compelled her,” Julius explained.
“You guys compelled our Headmaster? And you act like I’m the only one around here who does fucked up shit.” I shook my head at them. “Why did you want the key to her office?”
“Students aren’t allowed to turn humans into vampires. It’s illegal,” Slade said.
“The penalty is death,” Tristan said.
“I know,” I replied. “That’s why I was so mad that you turned them into vampires. I still think you should have just let them die. It’s terrible and it sucks, but they were already almost dead to begin with.”
“Well, we didn’t have to do that because we figured out another plan,” Julius said.
“Which is?”
“We’re about to make some fake admissions records for them. We’re going to cover this whole thing up. No one will ever have to know we were the ones who turned them.”
I breathed deeply, trying to calm myself down. “Have
any of you ever made fake admissions records before?”
Slade shrugged. “No, but how hard can it be? We’ll be fine. We always manage, one way or another.”
I didn’t like the way he’d said that.
Chapter 8
Riley
Once I was completely naked, I thought about how badly I wanted to shrink.
When I first found out I was a faerie, Grandma Maureen had told me how easy it was to shrink your body. All you needed to do was picture yourself as the size you wanted to be, and it would happen.
I really needed to be the size of a chipmunk so that I could fit through one of the metal holes in the dog cage.
Jordan couldn’t contain her laughter after I explained to her how it worked.
She burst into giggles. “Be one with the chipmunks.”
I had a really hard time holding it together as I pictured a tiny version of myself running up a tree.
My wings appeared first. They sliced through my skin like a knife. I hunched over in pain until it subsided.
“Your wings are so pretty,” Jordan cooed as she reached out to touch them. “But sharp. Ouch. I didn’t think they’d be sharp. I thought they would be feathery and silky… or like butterfly wings.”
They were so sharp that they’d cut her. I could smell her blood, but fortunately for me, it hadn’t smelled appetizing. I wondered if it was because I was shifted into a faerie. Maybe I didn’t get blood cravings when I was in this form.
I glanced over to see her sucking on her finger. A moment later, she removed it from her mouth.
“Already healed,” she told me.
I couldn’t respond. My body became so hot. My joints ached, and my skin felt tingly as I got smaller. Jordan seemed so… huge next to me.
“Oh my god. It worked,” she said, her voice full of disbelief. She sounded so loud. Her voice echoed around me. That was something I was going to have to get used to. “I can’t believe it actually worked.”
Truthfully, I couldn’t either.
Flying was the easiest part of it, I’d found, when my wings started moving all on their own. Really, it would have been harder to get them to stop. I discovered that all I needed to do to get going was jump up and let my wings carry me in the right direction.