“Aunt Sophie, I know all this is important, and I can see why you might need to train a successor, but-”
“Why you?”
Briony nodded, and her great aunt shrugged.
“I think you have the right qualities to be an exceptional vampire hunter. You’re athletic, but not dangerous looking. You’re smarter than you let on, and pretty enough that a lot of the things will underestimate you. You’re tenacious, but still compassionate. And of course, you have as much reason as anyone to hate the things.”
Briony went still. She licked her lips. “Are you saying that my parents were…” she couldn’t say it.
Aunt Sophie squeezed her hand. “None of us can know for certain, but when people go missing in these woods, there are only a few options when it comes to what has happened.”
Briony couldn’t help thinking about it. About vampires like the ones that had come to the door falling on her parents and drinking their blood. About them killing her brother. Even though she tried to push the images away, they still came back. Something rose in her then, angry, but not hot with anger. If anything, it felt cold. Cold, and violent, and eager for revenge.
“I’ll do it,” she said, her hands clenching. “When do we start?”
Aunt Sophie shook her head. “Not yet. That’s one of the big things that you’ll have to learn. All this has to fit in with a normal life.”
“Normal?”
“Well, as normal as life can get while you’re looking around for the undead. But I think we should at least get you settled into your school properly before we start thinking about things like this.”
“But I want to start now.”
Her great aunt shook her head, and Briony felt the first tears. She’d hardly cried since learning of her family’s disappearance, but she cried now. Aunt Sophie held her, whispering meaningless things that barely registered as proper words. Somewhere along the line, Briony looked up enough to see that her great aunt was crying too. Was it for Uncle Peter, just as lost to Aunt Sophie as Briony’s parents and brother were to her? Or was it at the thought of what she was about to turn Briony into?
“Shh, Briony. I shouldn’t have told you all of this so soon after everything else that happened. If those fools hadn’t come to the door like they did, I wouldn’t have had to. For now, just concentrate on being a normal teenager. So long as you have your pendant with you, you should be safe enough.”
Briony bit back the urge to smile bitterly. She was in a town full of vampires, about to be trained up into a vampire slayer by her great aunt, and have already convinced the rest of her school that she was a freak. Normal, Briony suspected, was no longer an option.
Chapter 4
The next morning came, and Briony met it feeling a lot more refreshed. With more knowledge of the dangers that were out there, she found that she wasn’t nearly so worried. Of course, it helped that she also had some protection that might work, in the form of the cross her great aunt had given her.
The only question now was how things might go at school. After all, first impressions could do a lot of damage, and Briony had already made hers. Was it too late to change people’s opinions of her? Would she be stuck as the loner girl who stank of garlic?
Briony was not going to let her disastrous first day at Wicked High dictate the rest of her high school career. She shook her head. As frighten she is about vampires, she now had to put it behind her. Aunt Sophie needed her. She was now part of Aunt Sophie’s world, and that meant she had to get used to fighting vampires and whatever was out in the Wicked Woods. Didn’t Aunt Sophie said someone’s got to protect the people in Wicked? If there were more people like Aunt Sophie protecting people, then Briony’s family would not have disappeared. Aunt Sophie needed her as her replacement. Wicked needed her.
Briony clamped her mouth into a determined grin and picked out her best jeans and a light pink top. As bad as her first day at school had been, she was going to grin and bear it. She brushed her silky hair until it was shiny and smooth, applied light makeup, and checked her appearance before she left the house. She was also careful to make sure that her cross pendant was still in place around her neck. Just because she felt a little safer now didn’t mean that she was going to take chances.
She also felt a little better prepared for her classes now that she knew what they were going to be doing. With her mind not quite so firmly on vampires, Briony had been able to concentrate enough to do the reading required for the day’s lessons. Hopefully, it would get her through. At least she wouldn’t fall asleep this time.
Even so, when she arrived at school, Briony found herself taking a deep breath before she stepped through the door. She stopped herself. All she had to do was be confident. Briony did her best. She smiled and greeted the few people whose names she remembered. She walked down the corridors like she knew exactly what she was supposed to be doing, though she did have to pause a couple of times to ask the way to her first class.
“Oh, we’re going that way,” one of a pair of pretty, dark-haired girls said. Briony recognized them from the cafeteria the previous day. They’d laughed just as hard as anyone else at her. “We’ll show you, if you like. I’m Tracey. This is Claire.”
“Hi!” Claire said, or at least exclaimed. Briony had the feeling that she was going to be one of those people who had to exclaim things, mostly because the world was too exciting to merely say them. “You must be new!”
Briony considered pointing out that she had been just as new yesterday, but she didn’t want to draw attention to yesterday if she could help it. Instead, she let Claire babble as they made their way to class, noticing that when people stared at her today, it was only to wonder who the pretty new girl was, not to point out the weirdo.
It was like she hadn’t been there yesterday. People saw her, and they could hardly connect the image with what they’d seen of Briony before, so they ignored that part. The boys from the football team shot her admiring glances, while those friends of Claire and Tracey they passed nodded to her and welcomed her to the school.
Briony suspected that being with the other two helped there. It was like being accepted by a couple of the school’s more popular girls was some kind of test, and having passed it, everyone else decided that she had to be all right. It probably wasn’t the fairest way for things to work, but at that moment, Briony was prepared to accept it if it meant that people wouldn’t make hurtful comments about her.
The first class was History, which Briony always enjoyed, and getting a few answers right proved to be another way of getting some attention from her classmates. Now, she wasn’t just the pretty new girl, she qualified as smart too. The only slightly awkward part was that Briony spent a lot of the class wondering if any of what they were being taught was true. After all, if the teacher could get through the whole thing without mentioning vampires once, wasn’t that proof that they weren’t exactly being told the whole story?
That question gnawed at Briony a little as the morning classes continued. How much did supernatural things do in the world? How much got hidden? It wasn’t easy learning things like biology when you already knew that there were things out there that didn’t abide by rules as people knew them.
Even so, by the time lunch came around, Briony was feeling a lot happier than she had the day before. So far, things had gone without incident. Nothing had tried to eat her. No one had been mean. If anything, people had been kind. That kindness continued in the lunch hall, where Claire and Tracey invited Briony to sit with them. Briony took up the offer, and soon found herself sitting at the center of a cluster of the other girls’ friends, talking about what life had been like back in Florida. Briony did her best to answer, though she steered things away from any mention of her family.
People drifted in and out of the group, but two boys named Bill and Ross were constants. Briony got the feeling that they liked Claire and Tracey, and were angling for dates. She had more sense than to get in the way. Besides, neither boy was really
her type. Both had the bulky look of regular football players, along with nearly identical short haircuts and a tendency to finish each other’s sentences. Briony wasn’t sure if she could ever be that into someone who couldn’t at least pretend to think for himself. Still, they seemed nice enough.
That was one good point about all of this. Briony could feel the press of the cross under her top, but no one around her seemed to be reacting to either it or the silver. It was a lot easier to relax when you were fairly sure that no one nearby was a vampire or a werewolf. Gradually, the conversation drifted onto topics other than Briony, for which she was actually a little grateful. There was only so long you could talk about yourself without feeling self-conscious or coming across as self-centered.
Besides, after a couple of days that had featured the weird, the outlandish, and the simply inhuman, Briony was grateful for the chance to talk about things as simple as boys, music, the chances of the football team winning (quite good), and the odds of Claire passing the math test they had coming up (not so great). Briony did her best to keep up, though in some ways it was like tuning into a soap opera where you didn’t know any of the characters. Some things were easy to guess at, because the same kinds of things seemed to happen in most places, but at other times, Briony just had to smile, nod, and hope that it would all make some kind of sense once she knew who the people involved were.
Briony should probably have guessed that at some point, Pepper would show up. It was, after all, her clique of friends. Besides, she couldn’t let the new girl gain admittance to it without at least putting in an appearance. She showed up about half way through lunch, still in a uniform that suggested she had been putting in some last minute practice before the big game.
She strode over with the confident gait of someone expecting her usual warm reception. When she didn’t get quite the enthusiasm she had been hoping for, Pepper glared at Briony.
“Why, if it isn’t garlic girl. What are you doing here?”
“Oh, leave her alone, Pepper,” Tracey said, “she’s okay.”
When the others agreed, Briony felt her heart lift. Could it really be so easy to sort these things out? Certainly, Pepper seemed to let Briony’s presence go without further comment for a while, as the conversation kept going on the same convoluted topics.
Eventually though, it somehow got back around to Briony. Pepper wanted to know all about her, and unlike when the others had been asking, her questions had barbs. The really annoying thing was that she managed to do it without ever sounding anything other than sympathetic.
“It must be really hard, having to move here, Briony. I heard that this is where your family went missing. That must be so hard.”
Briony managed to mumble something that sounded vaguely like a response.
“I mean, if my family went missing, I would be completely broken up. You must be really strong to be coping so well.”
“My Aunt Sophie has been great,” Briony managed. She could feel sadness rising in her, and anger with it. If someone like Claire had made comments like this, Briony might have accepted it as just rather thoughtless. From Pepper though, it was obvious that everything Briony was struggling not to feel was exactly what she wanted.
“Your aunt? Oh yes…” Pepper smirked. “She lives on the edge of the woods, doesn’t she? People say she’s completely weird, though obviously I don’t believe that. She’s probably perfectly nice, isn’t she, Briony?”
“Pepper,” Tracey began, but the other girl ignored her.
“What? I’m just saying that Briony must be bored. I certainly couldn’t live like that. Out away from people, forced to live with an… eccentric relative because there’s no one else to take me in. I wouldn’t want that. I mean, are you really telling me that you don’t find Mrs. Edge a bit creepy?”
Briony felt that she did quite well at that point. She did not, for example, lose her temper. She certainly didn’t shout at or hit Pepper. After all, she was just a rather stupid little bully, and Briony had seen that there were far worse things in the world. Instead, she stood and headed from the lunch hall without a word, waiting until she reached the corridor before she leant back against the wall, squeezing her eyes shut while taking deep breaths to calm herself.
“Don’t let Pepper get to you.” Briony opened her eyes to see Claire standing there. “She’s just being mean because you’re prettier than she is.”
Briony hadn’t expected the other girl to say anything like that. “Um… thanks.”
“Tracey and me are going to the football game later!” and normal service was resumed. “Ross and Bill will be playing! It’s going to be great!”
“I’m sure it will be,” Briony replied, though she didn’t normally watch much football. She would probably be back at home, reading through textbooks. Or maybe persuading her great aunt to teach her one or two ways to deal with vampires.
“So would you like to come?”
“What?” Briony asked, shaken from thoughts of extra staking practice.
“To the football game. Would you like to come? You can sit with me and Tracey, and Pepper will be too busy cheering to be mean. It’ll be fun!”
Claire grabbed hold of her while she said it, practically dancing up and down. Saying no, Briony suspected, wasn’t optional. At least, it would have been rather like kicking a puppy. Besides, if yesterday she had been complaining that no one liked her, she couldn’t very well complain now that someone did.
“Sure,” she said, “I’d love to go.”
Chapter 5
The football stadium was a little way from the school, not far from the woods. By the time Briony got there, practically everyone else in town had arrived, at least to judge by the number of cars in the parking lot. Aunt Sophie had let Briony borrow the car for the occasion, and Briony was excited enough at the prospect of the big occasion that she hardly thought about the kind of impression she would make showing up in a vehicle that seemed to be mostly held together by the rust.
She found a spot to park in, wedged between an SUV and a pick-up truck, then made her way inside. For what was just a high school football game, there were a lot of people there. Then again, there probably wasn’t quite as much to do in a small town like this, and in any case, Briony remembered either Ross or Bill saying that the team had been doing well. People tended to show up when you were winning.
“Briony! Up here!”
Briony hardly had to look to know that it was Claire doing the shouting. She was up in the bleachers, with Tracey beside her. They were both wearing the team’s colors, which turned out to be a kind of horrible lilac and green combination, and for a moment Briony felt out of place, given that she had forgotten to even ask what they were. Still, Claire and Tracey scooted over to make room for her.
“That’s an… interesting uniform the team have,” Briony ventured.
Claire laughed. “It’s horrible, isn’t it?”
“It was a plan from one of the coaches,” Tracey explained. “Apparently, he thought that if the team looked stupid, they’d have to play that much harder to make up for it.”
Briony’s brow crinkled. “You know what worries me? That actually makes sense.”
Tracey shook her head. “Sense? It’s football. It doesn’t have to make sense.”
She returned her attention to the field, where Bill, Ross and the others were huddled around, receiving final team instructions. Pepper and the other cheerleaders were off to one side, trying to work the crowd up into a frenzy while the visiting high school’s cheerleaders did the same with the other bleachers.
Eventually, the game got under way. It seemed to be a bit of a grudge match, because both teams plowed into each other with even more aggression than Briony might have expected. Even from the start though, it was obvious that Wicked’s team had the advantage. Offensively, they ran circles around the defensive line, stealing yards again and again. Defensively, there were so many sacks that Briony actually found herself feeling a little sorry for t
he opposing quarterback.
Normally, Briony wouldn’t have cared much about football. She had been a cheerleader at her old school, but that was about the occasion and the excitement more than the sport itself. Here though, she found herself getting caught up in the atmosphere, as well as by her new friends’ infectious enthusiasm for the game. Or at least, for those parts involving Bill and Ross.
Half-time came and went, with Pepper and the rest of her squad putting on the kind of acrobatic cheerleading display that left even Briony impressed. It seemed that the other girl had some talents beyond just being unpleasant. Tracey took the time to introduce Briony to a few of the people around her, a bewildering blur of faces and names that she did her best to keep track of, but knew she wouldn’t be able to remember an hour later.
Eventually, the home team won, to the fanatical jubilation of the crowd. Even Briony, who hadn’t been at the school long enough to really care whether it was winning or not, found herself caught up in the excitement of it all. Claire, who was practically jumping up and down by the end of the match, hugged her.
“We won!”
“We did,” Briony agreed.
Claire and Tracey led her down from the bleachers to congratulate Bill and Ross. Claire practically threw herself at Ross, kissing him deeply, while Tracey settled for something a little more restrained with Bill.
“Well done,” Briony said, and the boys nodded their thanks.
“There’s a victory party after this,” Bill said, “are you three coming along?”
Claire and Tracey declared that they were almost instantly. Briony shook her head. “I can’t. I have to get back home.”
Part of her had wanted to give a different answer, but Pepper was looking over, and Briony could see the irritation on her face at the sight of Briony with her friends. She could guess that the other girl would be at the party too, and Briony didn’t want to ruin the evening with another argument. Besides, Aunt Sophie would be expecting her back. Briony didn’t want to worry her great aunt by staying out without asking her, and if she did ask, Briony already had a pretty good idea of what Aunt Sophie would say.
20 Shades of Shifters_A Paranormal Romance Collection Page 273