Jenna gives another giant sigh, eyes narrowing and her voice coming out snappish. “Christ, you sound like my dad. Who the fuck cares if I’m shallow? I —”
“Hey, hey, it was just teasing, I —” Jay assures her. “Seriously. I think you’re cool. I’m the one who messaged you, remember?”
Jenna shakes her head. “I’m just sick of hearing it, that’s all. I’m seventeen and I’m hot and I model shoes and I’m rich. I don’t have some secret rebellion in my heart and I’m not going to wake up tomorrow all book-wormy and save-the-environment. I like soda and pizza and romantic comedies, and if you’ve got a problem with any of that then I will destroy you piece by piece, because people like me might be the butt of a thousand jokes but in the end we’re the ones who rule the world, okay? We’re the ones who set the trends that people scrabble to imitate or to rebel against. So don’t give me shit for who I am, because who I am is the goddamn queen of the world, got it?”
Jay thinks he might just be in love. “Marry me?”
Jenna laughs a little, her shoulders relaxing from their confrontational posture. “You couldn’t afford me, not on what you make serving canapés. Oh! That reminds me. Olivia Martram said she saw you and some guy making out at a bus shelter after the party was over. Is she for real?”
“Yeah,” Jay nods, relieved that it had looked like making out. Blake’s probably had a lot of practice in making people see what he wants them to see.
“Because, like, she’s a total bitch and sometimes she makes stuff up just to piss me off,” Jenna goes on. “So I wasn’t sure if it was true or not. I think she thinks that I’m, like, crushing on you or something, which ha, no, I don’t do crushes or dating or anything pathetic and high school like that. So I think she thought I’d be jealous if you got with someone else after we got together in that cloakroom. Which I’m not, for the record. Jealous, I mean.”
“You’re destroying my ego,” Jay retorts flatly. “Can’t you be at least a little jealous?”
Jenna’s smile is sharp as a shark’s. “Destroying egos is what I do best, young one.”
Jay is almost sure that he’s in love.
BETTE
Tommy and Michelle go off to be young and in love and totally gross together after school, so Bette and Rose grab a stack of comics and books and head for the parklands just over the overpass from their neighborhood. They’ve been going there since they were kids, when their parents would let them out without an adult so long as they stuck together and didn’t go too far away.
The trees are gnarled and scrubby, scarred with old love-hearts and initials from the other visitors who spend time in the thick green shade. The earth is soft to lie on but usually at least a little damp, so Rose and Bette bring old towels to lie on while they read. The light that comes through the overhang of tenaciously lively leaves overhead—in past years, they’d begun to yellow and even fall by now—is dappled and soft. It’s a comfortable, sleepy sort of afternoon around them, and the traffic under the overpass sounds a long, long way away.
In theory, Rose is re-reading Plastic Jesus by Poppy Z. Brite yet again, but she keeps getting distracted by her sketchbook and pen, and then that makes Bette distracted from her own reading—a battered copy of Princess Ai, the manga about Courtney Love being an angel from outer space, which Bette has read a million times—by Rose’s drawings, because Bette loves few things in her life as much as she loves to watch Rose draw.
Today Rose is drawing faces, sharp-eyed girls and floppy-haired boys, the lines falling in a way that makes the sketches look vaguely like they’re from the 1960s. Bette doesn’t know exactly how Rose makes the pictures look like that, only that it looks amazing.
A fat droplet of water splats down onto the paper, then another. Thunder rumbles, and Bette and Rose both realize at the same second that the gentle dappled light has turned dim and yellow-gray.
“Whoops!” Bette says with a grin, scooping their stuff up in the towels and making a run back towards the road. She can hear Rose running behind her, but as they reach the place where the trees begin to thin and there’s more trash than grass on the pebbled ground, there’s a scuffle and a muffled yelp behind Bette, and then a hissing noise that makes Bette’s face and hands go cold in an instant bolt of primal dread.
She drops the towels and turns, because even though her brain’s going RUN, RUN, RUN, she can’t leave Rose in the clutches of whatever’s got her.
The thing is, Bette is actually pretty good in a crisis. She stumbles through ordinary life kind of badly, sometimes, skipping too much school and not getting enough sleep and disappointing her mom all the time, but when really seriously bad shit happens she copes well. Sometimes she thinks it’s because of how she had to look after herself so much of the time while her dad was really ill and her mom was too distracted by that to really be a mom. When things are down to emergency power, Bette knows how to keep the systems running.
So when she turns to face the thing that’s grabbed Rose, and her eyes take in the white-haired teenage boy with blood all around his mouth, dressed in ripped and filthy clothes, it only takes her a second to go ‘okay, that’s a vampire’ before she’s grabbing Rose’s arms and pulling her away from the creature. She’ll let herself freak out later, after they’ve survived, but there isn’t time for surprise now.
The rain’s started to fall in earnest on them as Rose screams, and at first Bette thinks it’s just from fear but then she sees the straight razor in the vampire’s pale dirt-caked hand and the thin red line welling up on Rose’s throat.
“Keep your hand on it!” Bette says to Rose. Rose’s eyes are wide and her skin is shock-white but she nods, clapping a palm over the cut. The vampire snarls at Bette and lashes out at her neck with the razor, which close-up Bette can see is spotted with black and brown stains of old blood along its steel blade and ivory handle.
Acting on reflex, Bette raises her arms to shield her face and neck, and when the razor cuts into her palm the only thing she lets herself think is that at least the cut isn’t too deep; it won’t stop her being able to play musical instruments.
In the few seconds the whole fight has taken, other vampires have appeared around them, some white-haired and some with more natural shades, all feral-eyed and terrifying and stinking of garbage and dried gore.
Two have grabbed Rose again, wrenching her out of Bette’s grip, and another has pounced on Bette’s back and she stumbles, falling to her knees as she feels the snap of teeth closing on her neck.
Then there’s more noise, all around, thin high screams that sound more like they come from reptiles than from anything that was ever human. The vampire on Bette’s back shoves her down into the ground and turns, skeleton-thin body in a fighting stance.
Bette rolls onto her back and looks up, clutching at the cut on her palm with her other hand and trying not to hyperventilate. A short, compact figure dressed in ripped black and grey camouflage shorts with fishnet stockings underneath, heavy boots, and a black hoodie punches the vampire with a sturdy uppercut, sending it stumbling, then stabs it with what looks like a miniature cattle prod. The gore-stink turns to a burnt-rotten-meat stink as the vampire shudders and falls face-down onto the grass beside Bette. It doesn’t move again.
Bette doesn’t even get a chance to get over her ‘whoa, holy shit!’ moment before Lily Green’s turning and yelling “Will! First aid over here!” and running after another vampire.
“Did I just get attacked by a vampire? An honest-to-shit vampire?” Bette splutters as Will Cooper crouches beside her and takes hold of her wrist.
“Try to stay calm,” he tells her, easing her arm down and exposing the slice on the underside of her palm. “It’s okay. The blood will stop soon. No, don’t look at your hand. It looks like a lot but it’s not, seriously. You’re going to be fine. You need a couple of stitches but it’s nothing serious.”
Bette feels woozy, but she’s pretty sure that’s got more to do with the world going bugfuck nuts than
it does blood loss. As he talks, Will pulls her to her feet and leads her through the trees to a parked car, its doors open.
“Here, you sit here and wait, and we’ll go get you stitched up soon. Keep pressure on your arm with your other—yeah, like that.”
“Rose is still back there, she —”
“Lily and Anna’ll bring her back with them,” Will assures her. Bette never would have pegged him for being so good at staying chill in a crisis.
Then again, it’s not like she’s spent a lot of time wondering which local bands are secretly vampire hunters, either.
Bette sits and tries to breathe, and she feels like she’s going to cry but instead she just swallows and shivers and lets Will wrap a bandage around the slice in her skin. She doesn’t realize that she’s closed her eyes until she hears more people approaching and has to open them again to look.
Rose is unmoving, an arm draped over each of Lily and Anna’s shoulders as the two of them walk to the car and carry her between them.
“She just fainted, honey, it’s okay,” Anna says, and in any other circumstances Bette would rankle at the condescending note in her tone. As it is, she just nods dumbly as they move to climb into the car with her.
“Got them all,” Lily is saying to Will. “Ten Scrabblers. I haven’t seen them in this neighborhood before. If Russ hadn’t suggested we widen the sweep —”
“But he did,” Will placates quietly. “Don’t borrow trouble.”
Lily snorts, but climbs into the front seat of the car without saying anything else.
As they drive off, Bette’s hand is stinging like fire and her throat is a second hot ache, duller and blunter and bigger than her hand and just as painful. Rose is in the middle seat, propped up by Bette and Anna on either side of her, her head lolling back against the headrest, eyes white-slitted and unfluttering. Half the middle seat’s unclipped seatbelt lies loose on Rose’s thigh, where Anna let it fall like it just being there will do Rose some good in a crash.
The razor cut on Rose’s throat is shallow, a pink line beading with darker red, only one corner of the cut deep enough to really bleed. The blood there is little more than a trickle, smeared by the fight and swept into a few miniscule brush-strokes of gore by the fall of Rose’s loose hair against it.
Bette stares at the blood and wonder what it will taste like on her tongue, if it will seem warm, if it will flow faster if she sucks…
“We’ve got a bite!” Bette hears Anna say sharply, as hands try to force her head up from where she was bending towards Rose’s neck. Bette bares her teeth and hisses, and Lily’s hand strikes hard against her cheek, knocking her back against the door as the car speeds on.
Bette blinks in surprise at Lily, who’s leaning into the back through the space between the driver and passenger seats in the front.
“Don’t do that,” Lily says, her voice firm but not angry.
“I was just —” Bette starts, and then she looks at Rose again. “I was about to drink her blood. Fuck.”
“It’s all right,” Will says, cutting her off before she can become hysteric, his eyes still on the road as he drives. “You’re not turning into one of them. You’ve been infected by a parasite that gets stronger if it’s fed blood, but you aren’t a vampire. Try to breathe and stay calm, we’ll be there soon.”
“You didn’t say you were bitten.” Anna sounds accusatory. Bette pulls the collar of her T-shirt aside obligingly.
“I didn’t think it broke the skin. Sorry for having bigger fucking things on my mind,” mutters Bette, trying to slow her breathing down but mostly failing at the attempt because she just had to be stopped from drinking Rose’s blood and so she’s now feeling rather freaked out as a result.
“It’s shallow. You’ll be okay in a week,” decides Anna, inspecting the marks. “We’ll give you something to help with the cravings when we get back to the warehouse. Sit still and don’t bite anything for ten minutes, okay?”
“Okay.” Bette makes herself nod. “Is this, like, a common thing? Are all the bands around here secretly monster killers?”
Anna’s voice is matter-of-fact and resigned. “No. There’s only us.”
Nobody says anything after that until they arrive at a nondescript warehouse out in one of the industrial suburbs. The windows are boarded over and there’s a scatter of graffiti on the worn brick walls, and it looks like a perfectly ordinary, slightly run-down storage space from the outside.
Bette shakes Rose’s shoulder as the others climb out of the car and head for the tall double doors. “C’mon, sleepy, I’m not going through all this trauma on my own, wake up.”
Rose blinks, eyes scrunching closed for a few seconds before she gives up and opens them. “Bette? What happened?”
“I got bitten by a vampire. Remember the Stars saved us. We’re at, like, their secret vampire hunting lair or whatever now. Come on.”
Rose gives her a long, groggy, disbelieving look, then reaches up to touch her own throat, looking down at the blood smear her fingers come away coated with.
“Did I get bitten, too?”
Bette shakes her head. “One of them had a razor, and you got cut a little bit. You fainted, you sissy.”
“Oh.” Rose frowns at the blood on her fingers, looking thoughtful. “Tommy said that was gonna happen if I kept skipping meals all the time.”
Bette stares at her for a few seconds, then punches her hard on the shoulder. “You jerk! Is this because of that stupid thing with your stupid coffee drink? We nearly got eaten by vampires because you’re crash dieting. I am seriously going to smack you.”
“Ow.” Rose rubs her shoulder, glaring. “Bitch.”
“Fuckhead.”
“Care to join us, ladies?” Lily asks, standing in the open doorframe of the warehouse. “Or are you going to sit out here and pull each other’s pigtails all evening?”
The inside of the warehouse is clean and spare and shadowed, set up into loosely defined areas—a semicircle of mismatched arm chairs and sofas around a low table make up a living room section, with an ancient-looking television against the wall. There’s a kitchen area with a fridge and an oven in another corner, around a large industrial sink, with a long table scattered with herbs and bottles and other stuff along the wall nearby. There’re two more long tables, one set up like a makeshift desk for notes and reference books and the other piled high with stray electronic parts, and then a dojo-style sparring area with mats on the floor and a couple of battered-looking punching bags suspended from the bare rafters high above.
Rose sits down in one of the armchairs, near where Will and Russ are sitting. Russ is dressing a scrape on Will’s forearm, the first aid kit open on the cushion beside him. Lily sits down too, and motions for Bette to join them. There’s no sign of Anna.
“She’s gone for a jog. Work off the extra energy,” Lily explains before Bette can ask. “She always gets wound up after a fight. Me, I could sleep for a week.”
Will turns his wrist over to check his watch, which makes Russ cluck his tongue in frustration and turn it back the other way so he can finish putting on the dressing. “You don’t have time for a week,” Will tells Lily. “But you could get two hours or so before we’re due at the club.”
“Excellent.” Lily grins. “You’d think sitting at a desk doing data entry all day wouldn’t be exhausting, and yet.”
“I’ll do her neck and then your hand, okay?” Russ says to Bette, nodding at the small cut still bleeding a little on Rose’s throat. “Will said you’d probably need stitches?”
Bette nods helplessly, willing to let other people decide all that stuff for the time being. “Yeah, I guess.”
“She’s bitten, too,” Lily tells him. “Do we have any good tea left?”
“A little. I’ll put the kettle on after. Will you be okay with waiting?”
This question, too, is directed at Bette, and she wants to say no, no way. She feels thirstier than she has ever felt in her entire damn life. B
ut she just nods again. “I guess,” she repeats. “Yeah.”
“What’re your names?” Will asks them.
“Bette,” says Bette.
“Rose. I think you know my brother Tommy. He hangs out with Jason and Michelle?” Rose says. She still sounds pretty spacey, and Bette almost feels bad for punching her. Not really, though, because skipping meals is totally stupid and Bette’s still kind of mad at Rose for that.
“Yeah, yeah, I know Tommy,” Lily says, mouth quirking wickedly. “Nice kid.”
Russ gives a cough which sounds suspiciously like the word ‘jailbait’ and Bette, despite everything, can’t help giggling. Rose smiles too.
“The fact you’ve been bitten means Will is probably going to try to poke and prod you as much as you’ll let him,” Lily warns Bette. “If he touches you in your bathing suit area, don’t be afraid to stick him with a switchblade, all right?”
Will punches her in the shoulder, the gesture a perfect match for Bette’s reprimand against Rose in the car. “Shut up, Lil, you’re such a creep.”
Lily gives him a giant cheesy smile and smacks a noisy kiss on his cheek before getting up. “You know you love it. I’m going to go sleep. Bette, Rose, it was good to meet you, glad you’re not dead, see you around.” She pulls her shirt off before she’s left the room, treating them all to the sight of her golden-brown, intermittently scarred back, and the soft dent her waistband makes in the curve of her hips.
Russ rolls his eyes, moving from beside Will to over where Rose is sitting, swabbing at her cut carefully with a cotton ball dipped in antiseptic. Bette forces herself not to stare at the blot of blood on the white.
Will clears his throat. “She’s right. There are some tests I’d like to do on you. Did you know that psychologists call feral children the ‘forbidden experiment?’ Because it would be unethical and inhumane to deliberately create the conditions you need for that kind of subject, but when one comes along because of circumstances beyond your control… it’s a wonderful opportunity to learn. You’re sort of the vampire equivalent right now. I would never, ever want someone to be bitten just so I could run tests, but —”
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