by Trisha Telep
“You’re not supposed to be on this floor.”
Lauren turned around slowly. Dana stood in the corner. Her mouth was a smear of bright red blood. Two long, serrated teeth poked down over her bottom lip. Pale, thin skeletons of wings had sprouted from her back, and her skin was the color of old bones. The bloodshot yellow of her eyes was interrupted by enormous pupils that were utterly without light, and Lauren could not stop staring at her, or at the mess of a body the thing that used to be Dana had left convulsing on the floor behind her, the jugular still spurting in a thinning stream.
“You can’t be here,” Dana said again, her voice more of a snarl now.
The door opened. She heard shouting. Human sounds. Something hit her hard, and then she fell into a merciful blackness.
Thirteen
SHE WOKE TO a high, whining, machine-like buzz and the sensation of pain. She was strapped to a table, and Rakim was bent over her left arm, the tattoo needle doing its work. Blood oozed from the miniscule holes he raised.
“Sorry, I didn’t get a chance to ask you where you’d like it, so I went with the forearm. It’s a classic.” He wiped away her blood with gauze from the boxes she’d brought them every week.
From across the room, Johannes approached, so perfect and golden that it made her ache. He stroked her hair gently as she’d seen him do with the addicts, kissed her softly. “Lauren, it’s okay. Just relax.”
She squirmed anyway. “You killed Antonio.”
“He brought it on himself. He should have left it alone.”
“He wasn’t very tasty, either,” Rakim tutted. “I will be so glad when we run this town, and we don’t have to dine out on its leftovers. Maybe I’ll have me some nice Park Avenue socialite then. Hey, you should hold still if you don’t want your mark to look all busted.”
The pain was back in her arm. “I’ll go with you for your first kill,” Johannes promised sweetly. “It’s not so bad. You’ll see.”
“You get used to it. And you feel totally amazing after.” Alex stood framed in the doorway, smiling. “Before long, you don’t care about what you’re doing.”
Rakim finished his work, wiping away the last of Lauren’s blood with gauze. Her arm was sore and the Angelus insignia was black against the red of her skin. Johannes freed her from the table’s restraints.
“You’re free to go. You have twenty-four hours. If you don’t make a kill, you’ll get very, very sick. If you do choose to be one of us, you have to be back before sunrise. It’s your choice.”
Johannes’s lips were on hers and she couldn’t keep from kissing him back.
The night was hot; the sky was the oily black of old coffee. Lauren wandered the streets of Brooklyn in a haze, the humidity pressing down on her. She rode the F train all the way to Coney Island and back into the city. The bright white inside the train made her eyes burn and her head pound and she got off at Fourth Avenue. Above her, the vampires swarmed the skies shrieking. They were not birds; she knew that now. She was beginning to see and hear everything. Her ears picked up the smallest noises: rats scuttling in alleys, the sighs of discontented lovers, new life coming into the world on a tide of pain and blood, always blood. She passed by her apartment and listened to her parents breathing, could sense their worry. Outside the super’s apartment, she felt his restlessness as he dreamed of his time with the Tonton Macoutes, his machete doing its grisly, silencing work. Everyone had something to hide.
She moved on, fighting the jittery need making itself known in her anxious heartbeat. The skin of her arm was puffy and tight beneath the new tattoo, and every part of her had begun to hurt, as if she could no longer be contained by the limits of her flesh. Bile churned in her gut; her blood, which pumped with a new ferocity, begged for satisfaction. She licked her lips and ran her tongue over the tiny nubs of fangs pushing through her upper gums, making her mouth tender and swollen. How long had it been since the tattoo? Twelve hours? Fifteen?
Here and there she saw the vampires, squatting on the burned-out shells of cars, climbing the fire escapes of the tenements, circling the bridges and the piers, crouched under the overpasses, yellow eyes flashing, tattered wings spread out, lips peeled back to show their bloody maws, bodies breaking in the grip of their unnaturally strong hands. One glanced at her and laughed.
It was an hour later than she had ever remembered knowing before. Sharp pain twisted round her muscles like squeezing vines. In the alley near the water where Johannes had kissed her so perfectly, Lauren fell onto the broken pavement in a cold sweat. She blinked. Her eyelids scratched. The homeless woman staggered up the street without her boyfriend this time. She sang a Stevie Wonder song off-key. As the woman moved closer, Lauren felt her body quickening, tensing, the nubs of her fangs descending. She shut her eyes tight and tried to hold very still.
“Hey.”
Lauren opened her eyes to see the woman very near, so near that the scent of her blood beneath her skin was nearly unbearable. “Hey. You got some change you can spare? I’m hungry.”
“Go away,” Lauren rasped.
“You stupid little bitch.”
“Go. Away,” Lauren growled through gritted teeth.
“You think I like doing this? You think this is my idea of a good time?” The older woman spat on her and cursed until Lauren was forced to take refuge elsewhere. Lauren walked till she was numb, making her way through Red Hook, toward the water, to wait for the sun. At Lorraine Street, the blue of the pool tantalized her. She thought about going in for a last swim, about letting her lungs fill with water and ending it, but when she came around the corner, there was the girl sitting alone on the wall outside the recreation center in her day-camp shirt. It was close to dawn, maybe five-thirty. The sun would be up soon.
“What are you doing out here?” Lauren asked.
“Waiting for my aunt. She went to get me donuts.”
“Donuts are good.”
“I like the ones with the powdered sugar.”
The girl smelled like powdered sugar to Lauren. Like something sweet and perfect. Lauren doubled over and wrapped her arms around herself.
The girl looked at her strangely. “You sick?”
“Yeah, sweetie,” Lauren choked out. “You should stay back. I’m real sick.”
The child was scared now. Lauren could smell the fear mixing in her blood, and Lauren wanted to tell her to get ready because the whole world was sick, as diseased as she felt inside. But this girl with the large eyes didn’t know that yet. It was waiting for her, like a spoiled donut gone to maggots. And then, as Lauren’s body shook with new agony, she realized the girl didn’t have to know.
Lauren would save her.
Fourteen
LAUREN STOOD ON the old cobblestone street taking in the view of the yawning mouth of the city, its steel and stone teeth ready to devour the morning sky. Already, signs of dawn showed. At the top of the hill, Angelus House loomed. Someone had left the front light burning, and Lauren she made her way toward it now with slow, sure steps, adjusting to the tangy iron taste in her throat. She’d only vomited once at the beginning, but the girl was small and too weak to get away, and Lauren had held her with surprising strength. The girl’s blood had tasted sweet and sugary and slightly creamy, as if she might have had a quick cup of milk that morning before leaving the house. It had been fairly quick, all in all. Her only mistake was looking into the girl’s eyes and seeing her face mirrored there. She would not make that mistake next time.
She passed by her old desk. They’d have to find a new assistant, of course. A note had been left on her chair—We’re in the sharing room. She found them standing in a circle, hands joined, waiting for her.
“We are the fallen angels,” they intoned. “We are the shadows in the night.”
Johannes held out his arm to welcome her into the circle, and she took her place, mouthing along with them, her whispers growing stronger, her words gaining power and conviction until her voice could not be distinguished from any
one else’s.
DATING THE UNDEAD is a bad idea. Everybody in Morganville knows that—everybody breathing, that is.
Everybody but me, apparently. Eve Rosser, dater of the undead, dumb-ass breaker of rules. Yeah, I’m a rebel. But rebel or not, I froze, because that was what you did when a vampire looked at you with those scary red eyes, even if the vampire was your hunky best guy, Michael Glass.
None of them were fluffy bunnies at the best of times, but you really did not want to cross them when they were angry. It was like the Incredible Hulk, times infinity. And even though my sweet Michael had only been a vampire for a few months, that just made it worse; he hadn’t had time to get used to his impulses, and I wasn’t sure, right at this second, that he could control himself. Controlling myself seemed like the least I could do.
“Hey,” I breathed, and slowly stepped back from him. I spread my hands out in obvious surrender. “Michael, stop.”
He closed those awful, scary eyes and went very, very still. Eyes closed, he looked much closer to the Michael I’d grown up around … tall, dreamy, with curling blond hair in a surfer’s careless mop around a face that made girls swoon, and not just when he was on stage playing guitar.
He still looked human. That made it worse, somehow.
I tried to decide whether or not I ought to totally back off, or stand my ground. I stayed, mainly because, well, I’ve been in love with him since I was fourteen. Too late to run now, just because of a little thing like him being technically, you know, dead.
I wasn’t in any real danger, or at least, that was what I told myself. After all, I was standing in the warm, cozy living room of the Glass House, and my housemates were around, and Michael wasn’t a monster.
Technically, maybe yes, but actually, no.
When Michael’s eyes opened again, they were back to clear, quiet blue, just the way I loved them. He took another breath and scrubbed his face with both hands, like he was trying to wash something off. “I scared you,” he said. “Sorry. Caught me by surprise.”
I nodded, not really ready to talk again quite yet. When he held out his hand, though, I put mine in it. I was the one in the black nail polish, rice-powder makeup, and dyed-black hair; what with my fondness for goth style, you’d think that I’d have been the one to end up with the fangs. Michael was way too gorgeous, too human to end up with immortality on his hands.
It hurt, sometimes. Both ways.
“You need to eat something,” I said, in that careful tone I found myself using when speaking about sucking blood. “There’s some O neg in the fridge. I could warm it up.”
He looked mortally embarrassed. “I don’t want you to do that. I’ll go to the clinic,” he said. “Eve? I’m really sorry. Really. I didn’t think I’d need anything for another day or so.”
I could tell that he was sorry. The light in his eyes was pure, hot love, and if there was any hunger complicating all that, he kept it well hidden deep inside.
“Hey, it’s like being diabetic, right? Something goes wrong with your blood, you gotta take care of that,” I said. “It’s not a problem. We can all wait until you get back.”
He was already shaking his head. “No,” he said. “I want you guys to go on to the party, I’ll meet you there.”
I touched his face gently, then kissed him. His lips were cool, cooler than most people’s, but they warmed up under mine. Ectothermic, according to Claire, the resident, scholarly nerd girl in our screwed-up little frat house of four. One vampire, one goth, one nerd, and one wannabe vampire slayer. Yeah. Screwed up, ain’t it? Especially living in Morganville, where the relationship between humans and vampires is sometimes like that between deer and deer hunters. Even when vampires weren’t hunting us, they had that look, like they were wondering when open season might start.
Not Michael, though.
Not usually, anyway.
He kissed the back of my hand. “Save the first dance for me?” he asked.
“Like I could say no, when you give me that oh-baby look, you dog.”
He smiled, and that was a pure Michael smile, the kind that laid girls out in the aisles when he played. “I can’t look at you any other way,” he said. “It’s my Eve look.”
I batted at his arm, which had zero effect. “Get moving, before you see my mean look.”
“Scary.”
“You bet it is. Go on.”
He kissed me again, gently, and whispered, “I’m sorry,” one more time before he was suddenly gone.
He left me standing in the middle of the living room of the Glass House, aka Screwed-Up Frat Central, wearing a skin-tight, shiny pleather catsuit, cat ears, and a whip. Not to mention some killer stiletto heels. Add the mask, and I made a super-hot Catwoman.
The costume might have been the reason for Michael’s shiny eyes and out-of-control hunger, actually. I’d intended to push his buttons for Halloween … I just hadn’t intended to push them quite that hard.
I heard footsteps on the stairs, and Shane’s voice drifted down ahead of him. “Hey, have you seen my meat cleaver—holy shit!”
I turned. Shane was standing frozen on the stairs, wearing a lab coat smeared with fake blood and some gruesome-looking Leatherface mask, which he quickly stripped off in order to stare at me without any latex barriers. What I was wearing suddenly felt like way too little.
“Eve—jeez. Warn a guy, would you?” He shook his head, jammed the mask back on, and came down the rest of the stairs. “That was not my fault.”
“The leering? I think yes,” I said. And secretly, that was pretty cool, although hey, it was Shane. Not like he was exactly the guy I was hoping to impress. “Totally your fault.”
“It’s a guy thing. We have reactions to women in tight leather with whips. It’s sort of involuntary.” He looked around. “Where’s Michael?”
“He had to go,” I said. “He’ll meet us at the party.” No reason to tell Shane, who still couldn’t quite get over his anti-vamp upbringing, that Michael had gone to snag himself a bag of fresh plasma so he wouldn’t be snacking on mine. “Seriously—do I look okay?”
“No,” Shane said, and flopped down on the sofa. He put his heavy boots up on the coffee table, sending a paper plate with the dried remains of a chili dog close to the edge. I rescued it, gave him a dirty look, and dumped the plate in his lap. “Hey!”
“It’s your chili dog. Clean it up.”
“It’s your turn to clean.”
“The house. Not your trash, which you can walk your Leatherfaced-ass into the kitchen to throw away.”
He batted his long, silky eyelashes at me. “Didn’t I tell you that you look great?” Shane said. “You do.”
“Oh, please. Chili dog. Trash. Now.”
“Seriously. Michael’s going to have to watch himself around you. And watch out for every other guy in the room, too.”
“That’s the idea,” I said. “Hey, it was this or the Naughty Nurse costume.”
Shane sent me a miserable look. “Do you have to say things like that?”
“Guy reaction?”
“You think?” He held out his plate to me, looking so pitiful that I couldn’t help but take it. “You just destroyed my ability to get off this couch.”
I had to laugh. Shane teased, but he wasn’t serious; the two of us never were, and never would be. He was thinking of someone else, and so was I.
I saw the change in his expression when we heard the sound of footsteps upstairs. He looked up and there was a kind of utter focus in him that made me smile. Boy, you have got it bad, I thought, but I was kind enough not to point it out. Yet.
Claire practically floated down the stairs. Our fourth roommate—our booky little nerd, small and fragile enough that she always looked like you could break her in half with a harsh word—looked even more ethereal than usual.
She was dressed as a fairy—a long, pale pink dress in layers of sheer stuff, glitter on her face, her hair streaked with blue and pink and green. Soft pink fairy wings. I
t made her look both younger than she really was, which was still a year younger than me and Shane, and yet, also older.
But maybe that was just the look in her eyes that got more mature with every day she spent in Morganville, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the vampires.
Claire paused on the steps, looking at Shane. Her mouth fell open, ruining her ethereal fairy look. “Seriously? Leatherface? Oh God.”
“You were expecting something out of Pride & Prejudice?” Shane shrugged and held up the mask. “You don’t know me very well.”
Claire shook her head, and then caught sight of my own outfit. Her eyes widened. “Holy—”
I sighed. “Don’t say it. Shane already did.”
“That’s really—wow. Tight.”
“Catsuit,” I said. “Kind of the textbook definition of tight.”
“Well, you look … wow. I’d never have the guts.” Claire wafted over in her layers of pink to sit next to Shane, who gallantly moved his Leatherface mask to make room.
“You look fabulous,” he told her, and kissed her. “Oh, crap, now I’ve got glitter, right? Leatherface does not do glitter. It’s not manly.” Claire and I both rolled our eyes, right on cue. “Right. Small price to pay for the privilege of kissing such a beautiful girl, what was I thinking? Sorry.”
Shane was an idiot, but he was a good idiot, mostly. He’d never hurt Claire intentionally, I knew that. I wondered, though, if she knew that, from the look of concern that flickered across her expression. “Do you like the costume? Really?”
He stopped goofing and stared right into her eyes. “I love it,” he said, and he wasn’t talking about the costume. “You look beautiful.”
That erased some of the worry from her eyes. “It’s not too, you know, little girl or something?”
I realized that she was comparing herself to my Catwoman suit. “It’s Halloween, not Hello, Slut,” I said. “You look fantastic, CB. Hot, but not obvious. Classy.” I, on the other hand, was starting to think I looked like a little too obvious, and not at all classy. “So. Are we going, or are we going to waste our amazing fabulousness on this B-movie fool?”