The red eyes zipped upward on a wire, toward that building, one hand holding something away from its body and toward the team.
The capture box the Friends had been talking about?
Oh, God—
Undeterred, Breisi zoomed toward the shadow figure, hell-bent for leather. At the same time, Dawn winged the locator at it, but it was flying up the wire so quickly that she didn’t know if the device even attached.
But as the figure raised its hand—with the box?—Breisi’s spirit voice screamed, and Frank roared, jumping after the intruder, his fingers outstretched like claws.
He was protecting his girlfriend, maybe because he hadn’t been able to save her when she’d died.
High above Dawn, Frank caught the shadow figure in midswipe, and both of them fell from the wire—Frank controlled, coming to a solid landing on his feet.
The shadow figure waving its arms and splatting to the ground.
Pulling out a silver stake from another jacket pocket, Dawn ran over to the intruder, but Frank was already arched over it like a famished animal, sniffing at the blood pooled around the body.
“Dad?”
He looked up at her, his fangs flashing, his eyes burning through the night.
“Frank!” she yelled. “Back off! We can take it with us while it’s still alive. We can give it medical aid, then question it.”
Too late.
Even with Breisi doing her part to push Frank away from the body, her vamp dad reared back his head, then bit the intruder’s neck.
The shadow figure didn’t even fight back, its red eyes glowing as it convulsed. It let go of the boxlike device it’d been holding, the object tumbling over the ground until it came to a stop.
Dawn realized that the figure’s fall from the wire had pretty much done it in, but she got out a pocket-bound crucifix anyway and thrust the item under Frank’s face. He’d have to exchange blood to turn the figure into a vamp, but even just a bite was a bad precedent to set.
Her father yelped as he backed away, his hands raised to ward off the holy sight. As a lower vampire, it worked on him, just as it did with Costin.
Time seemed to drag as they looked at each other, as Frank’s eyes dimmed and he touched the blood around his lips. She could see the dark of the liquid, even in the moonlight, and the sight tore at her.
Her dad . . . Gone . . .
“Not vampire,” he said, like he was talking around what had just happened. He’d done that a lot back when he’d been stuck raising her and she’d nursed his booze benders.
And like the girl she’d been, Dawn fell back into the same pattern. It hurt less that way.
“The blood isn’t a vampire’s?” she asked.
“No.” He lowered his hand and rested his head against the air, where Breisi was hovering, probably surrounding him and comforting him. “But it’s not really human, either.”
As Dawn absorbed that, she tried to shut out what Frank had done, but she couldn’t. So she allowed the horror, the rage at life, to gather inside, where she could use it later.
She hid her trembling by fisting her hands, hid her emotions by bending down to the shadow figure’s body, which looked human enough in its tight, dark clothing.
Then, as she unmasked it, she dissolved into shaky, terrified laughter.
Because those red eyes?
The faint moonlight told her that they hadn’t been anything more than night-vision goggles strapped to a teenaged boy’s face.
SIX
LONDON BABYLON
The Next Day
CHAQUE dimanche, avant la guerre . . .”
As another student stood in front of the classroom and recited her English-to-French translation of Deux Amis, Della rested her cheek in her palm while leaning on the desk table. Her lackadaisical pose made her eyelids heavy, and she imagined the reader’s voice as light spilling through a window.
Melinda Springfield, Della thought, watching through her lashes as her classmate’s lips formed around Guy de Maupassant’s words.
Melinda, her idol.
Where the human’s hair was rain straight and silver blond, Della’s was frizzy and cursed with the hue of a potato’s skin. Melinda’s eyes were china blue while Della’s were muddy green. Even their bodies were at different ends of the spectrum, Melinda’s legs long, endless and Della’s limbs slightly padded, seemingly half the length.
Yet perhaps she wouldn’t have noticed to such an awful degree if Violet wasn’t always there to reflect on Della’s potato hair or stumpy legs.
“Morissot partait dès l’aurore,” Melinda continued, lulling Della.
Someone coughed delicately from the table facing her, and she knew who it was without even glimpsing.
She looked anyway, catching a smirking Violet, her cat eyes gleaming as she mind-spoke to Della.
How adorable.
Melinda finished her reading, and Della sat up in her chair, wishing she could tell Violet to sod off. Yet, as always, she kept quiet, merely pasting her attention on Mademoiselle, who sat at her desk with her Grace Kelly neck and smile while leading the applause.
“Merci beaucoup,” their teacher said as Melinda returned to her table.
All the upper-sixth-form girls round her stirred as she sank into her seat, easy, confident, so comfortable in her skin.
In French, Mademoiselle made small talk, winding down the last minutes of class. “Everyone who remains behind during Remembrance Day weekend will attend Melinda’s basketball match, yes? Unless, of course, you are traveling home and not staying in the boarding houses.”
“Oui, Mademoiselle,” the class of thirteen said in unison.
Violet crossed her eyes and jarred an elbow at Polly, who sat next to her, winding her bobbed strawberry blond hair around a finger as she stared at the clock.
Polly jabbed Violet in return, but they quieted when Mademoiselle cast them a stern glance, then excused the class.
As the students rose from their seats, Melinda sailed past Della, who managed to find her voice.
“Your pronunciation,” Della said. “It’s . . . perfect.”
She began heading for the door before Violet could see her talking to the human.
“Cheers, Del,” the object of her admiration said, genuinely pleased at the compliment. “See you at the match then?”
Della didn’t dare say yes as she blended in with her mates and squeezed out the door.
While traveling, they were a swarm of the long brown skirts, knee-high boots, white shirts, and thin red ties they wore to distinguish themselves from the rest of the students. During these last two years of school, the sixth-form girls had earned the privilege of going without the basic plaid-skirt-and-blue-jumper uniforms, but Violet’s group would always have their own exclusive marks.
They made their way down the musty halls lined with cases bearing pictures of prefects and lists of club announcements, then settled into the art room to complete their hour of extracurricular activity.
Afterward, they moved as a unit again and, out of the main building, with its dark brick, gothic windows and chimeras poised at roof’s edge, the darkening sky rolled with clouds. In the distance, the city of St. Albans laid itself before them, a church bell marking the hour.
But none of the other students would be able to hear it from this far off. Only them.
Only the five vampires.
“Ill weather on its way,” Violet remarked.
They all knew precisely what she meant because, this morning, the media had trumpeted news of the burial patch on Billiter Street. They would have to find a new place to do away with the scraps from their feedings with Wolfie, who often urged them to overkill.
Most nights the girls merely sipped from their victims then cleaned up the physical and mental aftermaths. Yet, recently, Wolfie had been goading them to build their appetites to a point where they needed more than blood.
Della hugged her books. She, more than any of the girls, expected punishment. . . .
They followed the stone path past the tiny chapel that most of the other Queenshill students used for peaceful reflection, the trail taking them beyond the new technology wing, the football field, the theater, and toward the art deco boarding houses that had been added long after Thomas Gatenby had donated land for the school back in the late eighteen hundreds.
Ultimately, they entered their house’s lobby, the smell of bricked-up air and girls’ perfume hitting Della’s sharp senses. Students leaned on the counter of the main office as their parents signed them out to sweep them off for the weekend.
None of the humans looked at the passing pack, perhaps because the five girls didn’t enjoy house competitions and activities as the others did.
Or perhaps because they intuitively knew the five were different.
“I’ll tell you,” Polly said as they entered the empty stairwell that led to the eldest students’ rooms. “You wouldn’t catch me dead at Melinda Springfield’s match.”
Blanche, with a red headband pushing back her dark hair, broke away as she took the stairs first. “You’d be caught undead, you git!”
She giggled and leaped to the next step, but Violet reached out in a blur and gripped Blanche round the neck, yanking her back so they were face-to-face.
The group halted, surrounding Violet so no one else would see, should interlopers come upon them.
“We’ve been rather tolerant of your cheekiness recently, Blanche,” Violet said between her teeth.
The other girl chopped Violet’s hands away from her neck and gracefully gained her feet. Then, unruffled, she continued climbing, a bounce to her gait, just as if nothing had transpired.
“I’m finally exhausted with you, Vi,” she said.
“Is that so?”
“Yes, and the next time you touch me like so, I’ll rip you to shreds, no matter what Wolfie might think. I don’t recall anyone crowning you our sovereign.”
Violet’s eyes began to sizzle to light purple, her shoulders hunched, her low hiss dragging over the air.
Blanche continued on her way.
Throughout it all, the rest of the girls tried to blend in with the white walls. In particular, Della kept her mind clear. If she didn’t have any thoughts for Violet to read, she wouldn’t be singled out. . . .
Violet sniffed and the others did the same.
Humans.
A door opened at the top of the stairs, and the voices of other students intruded.
Violet straightened her back and resumed the look of a human again. And it was just in time, because two lower-sixth-form girls rounded the corner and spied the group.
The younger students grew silent, then rushed past Violet, Polly, Noreen, and Della, then out the bottom door.
Adjusting her skirt, Violet sauntered the rest of the way up. Noreen and Polly trailed in her wake.
Della brought up the rear, and soon they came to the first-floor hallway, where Blanche had been lounging against a wall, having paused until Violet arrived. She gave the brunette a saucy glance as Violet passed, then took up pace with Della.
Wasn’t that brilliant? the other girl asked mind-to-mind. It feels wonderful to put Violet in her place. I’ve wanted to do it for the last year now.
Be careful, Della thought, trying hard to keep the others out of their link. If she had still been human, she would have been sweating, but she only felt the memory of panic all over her skin.
Careful? Blanche asked. Violet’s no stronger or better than you or I.
Della shot a subtle glance to her friend. Briana thought the same before she left us last year. And so did Sharon just after she deserted us, as well.
Blanche halted. What are you saying, Della?
But she merely traveled on, shutting her mind altogether.
Even so, the recollection of the old group members’ names surrounded Della as she caught up to the rest of the crowd. Aside from the fact that Briana had run away after the death of her guardian sister and Sharon had been taken out of school by her parents, no one knew what had become of either girl. Sharon had promised to e-mail from her new school in the north of Scotland where she had found another vampire group who had taken her in, but the communication had recently dwindled to nothing. And Briana? She had turned her back on them altogether.
Losing them had pained Della, but that wasn’t the only reason their absences disturbed her.
It was only that, every time their names surfaced, Violet would get that little feline smile on her face, as if she knew the reason Sharon had stopped writing and Briana had truly run away from school. However, she had locked the answers away in her own mind, out of the reach of the others.
As the group passed an open door marked, “Housematron,” they called out to the woman who sat at her desk, her dull hair latched into a bun at her nape, her skin sallow, her body frail.
“Hello, Mrs. Jones.”
“Feeling chipper today, Mrs. Jones?”
“We do hope you improve, Mrs. Jones.”
“You do seem better, Mrs. Jones.”
The housematron shuffled her paperwork but didn’t glance up as she spoke in a voice that seemed husky with a constant cold. “Off to concentrate on your prep time? There’ll be no tutors today since most students are going home this weekend.”
Blanche had joined them by now. “Certainly, Mrs. Jones. We have our A-levels to contend with, after all.”
Shortly after the mention of the advanced-level exams, they separated, stopping in their single rooms only long enough to fetch their books and materials. Then they strolled to the common room, which truly was empty for the weekend.
They seemed to be the only ones who hadn’t been called home by their distant parents, who traveled for business or took holidays overseas or went about their everyday human lives while never knowing what their daughters had become.
They completed their studies, returning to their rooms only after they had finished. Terribly hungry by now, they left notes on their doors for Mrs. Jones’s sake in particular: “Taking a snack in town.”
Then, on alert for anyone who might catch them, they dashed outside, skimming the grass, combing over a green hill, down its slope. Farther, into the darkening woods, where under a cushion of crimson and gold leaves, they stopped at a chained door.
Once they lifted the bindings off, they entered the hole, secured the hatch behind them, then zipped through the tunnel until they arrived at a fall of red and orange beads marking the entrance to their very own underground common room.
Parting the barrier, they headed for their own plush fur divans, then plopped to the cushions in this hidden place where Thomas Gatenby, the school’s long-dead benefactor, had kept his . . .
Well, Della supposed they might have been called “household staff,” but the leftover iron chains and shackles on the walls hinted at something more.
The beads parted again, and the girls watched quietly as a thin gray cat slunk inside, then crept to a corner. There, it curled itself over a nest of blankets near a lava lamp that Polly had nicked from her aunt’s house.
When the cat closed its eyes, the girls relaxed. Violet even rubbed her face against the zebra-striped pillows positioned beneath a framed poster of Orlando Bloom. He, and other heartthrobs, decorated the rock walls, which were connected by strings of fairy lights that beckoned like far-off stars.
“Where shall we hunt tonight?” Violet asked.
Next to her, Polly reclined on the divan’s cushions while leaning against Violet. “I don’t want to go anywhere in St. Albans, even if it is the closest. It’s such a tired spot. I prefer the thick of London, where the runaways are easy to find.”
“I prefer it, as well,” Violet said, “and it was time for a change anyway. The same routine was stultifying.”
Noreen was in front of a mirror, arranging her red hair into a Nicole Kidman-type style, even though she had more of a Sarah Ferguson face and figure. However, whenever she danced, she did it like Ann-Margret, as she had
proven the other night while Della had watched and wondered if she should join.
“We could try that new club in Soho,” Noreen said, turning this way and that to take in her reflection. Hardly pleased, she allowed her layered hair to whisk back down to her neck.
From Blanche’s spot in the corner, where she was reclining on a netted hammock, she said, “No ideas of your own, Vi? I was quite looking forward to being ordered about some more.”
Nothing in the room moved.
Not unless one counted the shooting daggers from Violet’s gaze.
She’d been waiting, Della knew. Measuring out the moments until she could get revenge on Blanche for poaching that young man, Harry, the other night. No one took the first sip after Wolfie but Violet; the rest of them always waited to feed on what was left. It’d been their unspoken rule ever since being turned just over a year ago: the most dominant went first, the weakest went last.
It was a wonder Della survived on leftovers, just like the head and arm she’d been given with Kate after they’d lured her to Wolfie’s flat. Unbeknownst to the others, she’d packed away the head in the tote she’d been carrying, thinking to save her spoils for later. She’d been working up the bravery to defy them for the last couple of months, but that night, she’d lost her courage and disposed of the head at the dumping ground instead. There, she’d made certain no one else saw that she hadn’t picked it clean, fearing what might happen if she were to be caught squirreling away food.
She glanced at the cat, seeing that it was sleeping deeply, and Noreen broke the tension by adopting a chuffed tone.
“I don’t much mind where we dine tonight. I’m famished.”
“We’re always famished by this point,” Polly said. “I’m completely knackered from daylight.”
Violet stroked Polly’s neck. “We’re fortunate to walk in the light.”
“No complaints.” Polly sighed and closed her eyes, anticipating what was bound to come next with Violet.
Della couldn’t stop watching. She was only happy she wasn’t Vi’s favorite.
As Noreen crawled onto the divan next to Della, she said, “No complaints here, either.” She put on a smile, knowing her every word and movement was being monitored. “I certainly don’t mind our routine, even if it destroys the weekends because we have to rest.”
A Drop of Red Page 8