by Trisha Telep
For a moment, they sat in silence together, looking out over the lake. The wind had come up, and ruffled Jen’s hair, lifting it away from her hot forehead, cooling her burning skin. The moon shone down on the lake, making it glow. Jen had the feeling of floating away from the rest of the world, being something holy and apart.
“Come here.” Colin drew her down next to him, wrapping his arms around her, pressing their bodies together. She had never been so close to another human being; she wanted to lose herself in the moment, but kept marveling at how strange it all was—the feeling of the grommets on his jacket pressing into her skin, the cold air and the heat of his body, the slide of his lips across hers. He tangled his hands in her hair, raking his fingers down and through it. He drew up the back of her shirt in handfuls, and she felt the cold of his rings on her skin as he slid his hands under, fumbling with the clasp of her bra.
“No … don’t,” she whispered, but he just laughed, flicking the clasp open. He’d done this before, it seemed. His hands on her bare skin made her shudder.
“Relax,” he said, again, but Jen didn’t feel relaxed. She felt agitated—she didn’t know why—every nerve in her body humming. Her skin itched. She felt awkward suddenly, not at home in her body. Even her teeth felt too big for her mouth.
“I want to stop,” she said.
He pulled back just enough to look down at her, bewildered. His pulse was pounding. She could see it under the skin of his throat. “I thought you wanted this,” he said. “You didn’t want to go on a date. You said you just wanted me to come to your window.”
“Not for this,” she said.
He stared down at her. “Your teeth,” he said. His pulse was hammering now. She couldn’t look away from it, fluttering under his skin. Her stomach twisted, growling. She was—hungry. “Are those real?”
Jen blinked, bewildered. “What?”
“Baby, those are truly freaky.” He was grinning again now. “I love how you’re so into this stuff. I knew you would be the minute I saw you. So—you want to bite my neck?” He swept his hair back, leaving the pale side of his throat exposed. “Go ahead.”
He leaned down, closer to her, until all she could see was the blue veins under his skin, the beat of his pulse, and she could—smell the blood. Her ears roared, the sound of the wind driven out by the audible sound of rushing blood. Pale bodies sinking back into darkness, dark hair blown on the wind, red fingernails scraping across the front of an old-fashioned white shirt, blood on an exposed throat, blue veins running under skin like a roadmap—
When her teeth met in his throat, he screamed. No one ever screamed in the books, but Colin screamed. He tried to push at her with frantic hands, but she had her legs wrapped around him, her arm across the back of his neck. She clung to him like a tick as he reared up and then collapsed, his scream turning to a gurgle.
And then there was just the blood. It exploded into her mouth, hot and salty, and she felt her eyes roll back, her hands digging into Colin’s shoulders, kneading them the way a cat kneads its mother as it drinks milk. He was still struggling, kicking at her feebly, but it didn’t last long. She didn’t know it, but she’d opened his carotid artery with her teeth. He bled out in under a minute, going limp under her body, eyes open and staring glassily at the sky. She didn’t notice that, either. She was still drinking.
The blood was gone too soon. Suddenly there was no more of it pumping into her mouth, there was only the dry sucking noise her mouth made against his skin. She jerked back, revolted.
She stared. Colin lay twisted on the ground, his neck bent at an unnatural angle. She reached to touch his arm, then snatched her hand back. His skin felt papery and limp, his body light as a husk. His skin was a dull putty color.
“Colin,” Jen whispered. “Colin?”
The whites of his eyes were flecked with blood. She had made a mess of his neck. It looked like an animal had been chewing on him. No neat puncture wounds, just a ragged sort of hole. His clothes were drenched in blood. It was all over her, too. Her hair hung in sticky red tassels down her shoulders.
The worst part of it was that she was still hungry.
Jen wrapped her arm around herself and let out a wail, and then another one. They echoed through the silence of the cemetery like a fire alarm going off in an empty house. She was still wailing when someone stepped up behind her and put their arms around her from behind. She heard a voice in her ear, soft and soothing.
“Jen, Jen,” Gabby said. “It’s all right. Everything’s all right. Let’s get you home.”
Jen’s parents were waiting for them in the kitchen. All the lights were on: the room looked as bright and white as the inside of a marble tomb. Her father was leaning against the counter, her mother sitting at the table, turning a cold cup of coffee around and around in her hands. She looked up when Jen came in, Gabby leading her by the hand like a trusting child.
Seeing the blood all over her daughter, she paled. “Jen,” she whispered.
“I’m all right,” Jen said, automatically, but her mother was looking past her, at her cousin.
“What happened?” Jen’s mother asked Gabby. “Did she kill him?”
“He’s dead, all right,” Gabby said. “Colin.” She pointed toward a chair. “Sit down, Jen.”
Jen sat. A great feeling of unreality had come over her, as if she were floating through a dream she knew was a dream. She was in her house, but it wasn’t really her house. This was her kitchen, but not. These were her parents, but not. The words they said to her, to Gabby, had no meaning.
“Where’s the body?” It was her father, still leaning against the counter. His face was set, almost expressionless. For the first time, Jen noticed that there was a duffel bag at his feet.
“The cemetery. Up by the lake,” Gabby said.
“I’ll take care of it.” Jen’s dad hoisted the duffel, affording Jen a brief glimpse of what was inside—a shovel, a knife, some lighter fluid. Tools. She stared as her father patted her mother on the shoulder and went out through the side door, shutting it carefully behind him.
“I don’t understand,” Jen said, softly, not to anyone in particular, and not expecting an answer, either.
“Of course you don’t,” Gabby said, an odd sharpness in her tone. “You don’t know anything. You couldn’t possibly understand.”
“Gabrielle. Please.” Jennifer’s mother stood up. Her back was very straight, and she looked at Gabby with a sort of tired disapproval. “Now is not the time.”
Jennifer watched her mother with dazed eyes as she took a white dishtowel from the rack and dampened it under the sink. She came over to her daughter, and tenderly cleaned the blood from her face, even the crusted blood at the corners of her mouth, sponging the stains from her hands, turning the white towel pink. Jen sat silently, letting her mother minister to her as if she were a child and the sticky stuff all over her was spaghetti sauce or melted red Popsicle.
“He wasn’t a vampire,” Jen said finally, staring at the bloody towel. “Was he?”
“Of course not,” Gabby snapped. “He was just a stupid kid who thought all that goth stuff made him look cool. You’re the one who—”
“Gabby.” Jen’s mother’s tone warned.
“He said I was special,” Jen whispered. “Different.”
“You must have liked him very much,” said her mother. “Humans have a way of sensing when a vampire desires them. It causes them to feel desire in return.” Her voice was matter-of-fact. “It makes it easier to find prey that way.”
“You knew,” Jen whispered. “You knew what I was.”
Her mother patted the side of her face gently. “I didn’t know. I hoped the curse had passed by you like it passed by Gabby. Sometimes it skips a generation or two. Part of me hoped it had died out completely in the family. Seeing what my mother went through …” She sighed. “Hunting in the shadows, always fearing being caught. Your father’s had to clean up after her in the past. That’s why we moved here.
To get away.”
“That’s why you wouldn’t let me go out with boys,” Jen realized. “Not because you were afraid for me, but because you were afraid for them.”
“We knew that if you did have the curse, if you were … what you are, it would start showing itself when you were a teenager. When you got interested in boys. The desire to feed on blood, it’s all tangled up with … with adult feelings. Romantic feelings.”
She still can’t bring herself to just say sexual feelings, Jen thought. Even though I just killed someone. Even though I’m sitting here covered in his blood, she thinks I’m a child.
Jen turned to look at Gabby, who was staring at her sadly. She looked so glum and miserable and ordinary. Jen almost felt sorry for her.
“You knew, too,” she said to her cousin. “Didn’t you?”
“My mom told me about the curse once she figured out I didn’t have it,” Gabby admitted. “Sorry I couldn’t tell you. But honestly, I didn’t think you had it, either. Not till Bridget started talking about Colin being a vampire and I saw how fascinated you were. It was weird, Jen.”
“Gabby warned us what was going on,” said Jen’s mother. “It gave us a little time to be prepared. See, you can’t control yourself right now, Jen. And that’s why you have to go live with your grandmother for a while. Someone will have to teach you how to be what you are.”
“I’m not doing that,” Jen said, turning back to her mother. “I’m not leaving here.”
Her mother looked startled. “We know what’s best for you—”
“No, you don’t,” Jen said. “You should have told me all this stuff before. You said you were protecting me, but you set me up. I killed Colin because of you.”
“And if you stay here, you’ll wind up killing someone else.”
“I guess you should have thought of that before,” said Jen. Gabby gave a startled laugh as Jen stood up, pushing her mother’s restraining hand away. “You called it a curse,” Jen added.
“It is a curse,” said her mother. “A family curse. Only the women in our family get it.”
“Maybe I don’t think it is one,” Jen said.
Her mother’s expression changed. Jen remembered what Gabby had always said about their grandmother—that everyone was afraid of her. Her daughters, too.
Her mother stood up, facing her. “You’re upset,” she said. “You should go to bed. We can talk about this in the morning.”
“Sure,” Jen said. “In the morning.”
She turned and walked out of the kitchen, up the stairs toward her bedroom. She caught sight of herself in the mirror that hung on the landing. Her clothes were stiff with dried blood. Her face was luminous, her eyes glowing. She looked—different. Under the blood, her skin seemed to shine. She was almost beautiful.
She smiled, wide as she could, showing the sharp tips of her needle incisors, the ones Colin had thought were so funny and so fake. She thought of the way his skin had crunched under her teeth when she bit into it, like the skin of an apple.
Her mother had been right. There would be other boys.
IT WAS ALMOST time—a few minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve. New Year, new vampire hunter. Would I be the one?
I sat down shakily in the ancient stone chapel of the former Universidad de Salamanca, the most ancient university in Spain. When the war broke out, most of the universities in Europe shut down. The Americans figured the vampires would never attack us on our native soil. We paid dearly for our arrogance.
For the last twelve years, Salamanca had been the home of the Academia Sagrada Familia Contra los Vampiros. It was the school for vampire hunters—my school. There were foreign students from all over the world, because the Academia was the best. Academia graduates took out the most vamps, and they had the highest survival rate. There were six living Academicians; Juan Maldonaldo had been a hunter for nine years. Unbelievable.
Not that the survival rate was very good—out of the original ninety-six of us in our class, we were down to eighteen. We shuffled into the chapel in our ceremonial black robes, our hoods concealing our faces. We were about to take our final exam. Only one of us would pass.
I had dreaded this moment for two long years—the moment my foot crossed the threshold of the Academy—and feared it for two months. Diego, our Master, had warned us that as the time grew near, we would experience high anxiety. About a dozen of my classmates woke screaming from nightmares. There was a lot of jogging in the middle of the night. Even though drugs and alcohol were forbidden, I knew that people were swigging wine and taking Xanax so they could get some rest.
None of them carried the extra burdens—or the accompanying terror and guilt—that I did.
I should say something, tell someone, I thought. But I would sooner cut out my own heart than tell them what I’d done. What I might do.
At the thought, my heart skipped beats, and I clung to the back of the carved mahogany pew.
In the last two months, I had broken a lot of rules. For some of the things I had done, they didn’t even have rules. No one would have dreamed of crossing the line I had leaped across last Halloween.
Exactly two months ago, on October 31, everything had changed. The Vampire War had taken a brutal turn when the vamps had murdered the daughter of the president of the United States. The Cursed Ones didn’t put it that way, of course. They claimed they had “liberated” her—changed her into one of them—and that our side had murdered her when we drove a stake through her heart and cut off her head.
Like everyone else, I demanded payback. I couldn’t wait to take revenge. Although we were pledged to run together, I wanted a vampire to die by my own hand. I ran with my grupo across the ancient medieval bridge as the dying sun turned the stone city a golden color. We scoured the hills for blood drinkers, Spaniards and Americans, Koreans and Swedes. In our body armor, we sang our song, which had always sounded so corny to me before. Translated into English, it went like this:
We are the vampire hunters.
Our cause is holy.
From Spain we come to save the world.
Race from us into the sunlight, demons of hell!
Better that you die in flames than by our hands!
That night, Antonio de la Cruz was by my side. Sometimes he held my gloved hand in his as we charged through the darkness. My crossbow smacked the bruises I had gotten in Advanced Streetfighting the day before.
Fog rose around us like smoke from a wildfire. I heard shouts and Antonio’s hand left mine. I called for him; he answered, very far away. I saw a face floating in the fog before me, and I ran toward it. But it wasn’t Antonio.
It was Jack.
Don’t think about him, I ordered myself, my vision blurring as I focused on the stained glass windows of the saints. The Savior melted and blurred. Think about your legacy, and the promises that you made. Think of your grandparents.
Charles “Che” and Esther Leitner, my grandparents, were former revolutionaries, or at least that was their term for it. Nowadays we called them terrorists. During the Vietnam War, they had bombed banks and military bases. I had a picture of Papa Che and Gram in a locket around my neck. In the picture, Gram was my age. Her super-curly hair—like mine—tumbled down to her waist. She wore a leather headband, round wire-rimmed glasses, an army jacket, and a pair of tattered jeans. My grandfather could have been her twin, except he was taller.
They were so proud of me for joining the Academia. My parents … not so much. Not at all, in fact. They were pacifists, and they said that it was time to stop the fighting and listen to the vampires, find a way to coexist. We fought about it, bitterly.
My grandparents said my parents were hopeless dreamers. When the war became more brutal, I sided with Gram and Papa Che. There was no way we could sit down and negotiate with the vampires. They were monsters, ravening beasts. We might as well walk up to them and show them our necks.
But now …
“Let us come to order,” Diego said, as he swept
into the chapel from the side door by the altar. We all had to learn Spanish. In the old days, before the vampires declared war on us, students came to Salamanca to learn Spanish, not hand-to-hand combat.
Diego stood in front of his ornate wooden chair, which was upholstered in black velvet. Black was our color, the symbol of darkness. The sun was not for us. More than once I had stopped to think how much more in common we hunters had with the vampires than with the rest of humanity.
So, it begins, I thought, trembling. The bell would toll at midnight, both a celebration of the new year and dirge for the seventeen of us who would not become vampire hunters. The vampires would hunt all of us for the rest of our lives. Our identities were known. Only one of us would receive the sacred elixir that would strengthen him or her for the ordeal ahead, and make them quick to heal. The rest of us would be vulnerable, easier to kill.
The elixir itself was magic. Rumor had it that it was made up of some incredibly rare herbs that could only be harvested on a single night of the year and lay in the heart of one of the vampire strongholds. Armand, one of the priests at the school, was the only one who could make the elixir, and there was never enough for more than one hunter.
I looked across the stone chapel at Antonio, who was busy crossing himself. He was dressed in a black robe, like me. Beneath the robe he wore body armor, like me. His profile was sharp. Tendrils of loose black hair brushed his cheeks. Like every other girl at the Academia, I had had an intense crush on Antonio. It took almost a year to understand that his heart had no room for romance or girls. Vampires had slaughtered his entire family. He was the only one left. They took everything from me, was what he said. He burned with a hatred that astounded me; it made him seem like a different kind of being.
In his presence I often felt foolish. No one had slaughtered my family members, or friends. I had come to study how to fight vampires because it sounded cool, glamorous, and because I wanted to be more like my grandmother than my mother. I had been a stupid kid. As my thoughts drifted back to Jack, I realized that I still was.