Woodbury, Minnesota
ReVamped © 2010 by Lucienne Diver.
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This one is for M’ie and T-Bird.
Love you, girls.
Quick recap: When we last left our heroine, which would be me, she and her minions—screw it, me and my minions—had just defeated a vampy vixen, a psycho-psychic, and the vampire council of Mozulla, Ohio. Go, us! There were network news vans and the whole nine yards. Unfortunately, we don’t show up on film in all our fanged fabulosity, so the Feds were able to come in, sweep it all under the rug, and put us to work for them. Whether we liked it or not. Let me tell you, that just bites.
Now that you’re up to speed, I present to you:
Gina’s Rules for Surviving Super Spy School Training
First, the dirt and sweat and all are just too horrible to contemplate. Your sanity pretty much depends on finding your own Zen kind of happy place, like the Victoria’s Secret one-day sale or poolside with your own personal cabana boy, whichever you prefer.
Unless you enjoy cold showers, be the first one to the bathroom in the morning, even or especially if it means body-checking your archnemesis on the way. She’ll heal.
Cargo pants make you look hip-py. Unfortunately, the Feds have no sense of humor when it comes to giving your fatigues a miracle makeover. Tying your blouse into a belly shirt, or turning your khakis into cut-offs and making hairbands out of the remaining fabric, it turns out, are practically punishable by death.
If you break a nail during super spy school training, you’re actually encouraged to stop and pick it up. Maybe you can do a patch job later. What you don’t want is to leave anything behind that can later be used for some kind of forensic analysis or locator spell.
Making out on missions, unless it’s part of your cover, is totally grounds for extra push-ups. Great for your bod, but hell on your love life.
When going goth—and I mean hello, can I get a color palette here, please?—you’ve totally got to strike words like totally, awesome, phat, and fresh from your vocabulary. Also, exclamation points. Whatever, however, is a total keeper.
When they’re teaching lock-picking and all, hold something back. If they know just how good you are, you’re going to have a really hard time sneaking out for pre-mission snogging with your honey.
Who are “they,” you ask? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. And trust me, no one would ever find the body. ’Course that might be because you’d become one of us—the few, the proud, the unmentionables, and I’m not talking about those Vicky’s Secret panties here, people.
1
I sat in the middle of spook central’s briefing room, staring at the sorry state of my manicure rather than the blah-brown walls. Actually, brown was giving them too much credit. These walls didn’t have enough balls for brown or bleach for what the hoity-toity might call ecru, but I just call boring. They’d sort of curled up and died somewhere in between. There weren’t even any motivational posters to break up the color block. Only a bunch of high-tech AV equipment. My boyfriend, Bobby, had about geeked out the first time he’d seen it. Although, calling Bobby “geeked out” was like saying the sun was shiny or water wet. Kinda redundant and repetitive.
I sat between Bobby and Rick-the-rat, a rose between two thorns. I was contemplating a mani-pedi in fuchsia or cobalt or something to liven up the place—and me—when it registered on me what Agent Stuffed Shirt had just said.
“Come again?” I asked, sure I’d heard wrong, even with all my undead enhancements like super-hearing and Spidey-senses.
“You’ll be going undercover as a goth girl.”
My eyes must have bugged out, as unattractive as that was. “Unh-uh. No way. I look ghostly in black!”
Agent Stick-up-her-butt, a.k.a. Stuffed Shirt’s partner Maya, gave me a meaningful look over her teeny-tiny librarian glasses.
“Even more than usual,” I added.
When I’d lived and breathed, I’d been almost religious about maintaining a certain level of tan to keep myself—at five foot nothing—from looking any more waifish than necessary. My three-inch heels never hurt either. But death has a funny way of screwing with the best-laid plans, and every day since I’d clawed my way out of the grave I could feel myself fading until I was all china-doll pale, my porcelain skin a total contrast with my long dark locks. A monochromatic wardrobe would wash me out like hotel sheets.
“Oh, I didn’t realize you didn’t like dark colors,” said Agent Stuffed. “Let’s see what else we have.” He flipped through the file in front of him. “I’m so sorry, the position of pretty, pretty princess has already been filled.” I recognized sarcasm when I heard it. Agent Stuff … Sid … was better than average at dishing it out. But then, so was I.
“Do you have something in a prima ballerina?” I asked. “I hear tutus are very slimming.”
Bobby leaned over as if to talk sense into me, but Sid just laughed.
“I’ll see what we can do for next time. For now—”
“Suck it up and deal,” Rick finished for him. I gave him the stink eye. Rick was supposed to be my minion, not the Feds’, whatever they might think. Blood was, after all, thicker than blackmail. And in vamp terms, Rick was my blood, or would be as soon as he crossed over from the land of the living. We’d done the whole blood exchange thing when he’d needed a transfusion so badly a few months back. So, I’d be his, like, dam, weird as all that was. If I was going to suffer magical motherhood at the tender age of seventeen, he owed me a whole lot more than some popsicle art and a punk attitude … something like eternal devotion.
“Children, sit,” Sid commanded, before I could think of an appropriate put-down.
Bobby gave my hand a squeeze, as if that would stop me from running off at the mouth, but I subsided, excited despite myself to h
ear about our first assignment. At the very least, it would get us out of a government compound so secluded it made Area 51 look like a tourist attraction. There was nothing but scrub brush all around our gated perimeter and not a decent mochachino to be found anywhere. I couldn’t drink them anymore, of course, but I could smell and remember.
Maya dimmed the lights and pressed a button that could have been anything from a detonation device to a game-show clicker, but turned out to work the movie screen in front of us. At that moment it was showing a street lined with antique-looking streetlights and brick buildings, ending at one that looked particularly historic with a mill wheel out the back, by which I guessed there was a stream there as well.
“Wappingers Falls,” she began. “A quiet town on the Hudson River with a confluence of creeks and small tributaries … and ley lines.” Bobby was poised to take notes, making me wonder if there’d be a quiz later and what the hell “confluence” meant anyway. Affluence I got, but confluence? The opposite, maybe. Like really terrible poverty? So sad.
“Massive dips and surges in the energy of the ley lines have been messing with our operations in the region,” Maya continued. “The problem seems to be centered here.” She clicked over to a high school pretty much like any other—brick with mirrored windows, L-shaped, looking just as squat and institutional as possible. “Maureen Benson High. Further investigation has revealed other abnormalities—falling test scores and attendance, students sleepwalking through school, sudden outbreaks of violence. You’re going undercover there.” She nodded toward the folders in front of us. “If you’ll flip open your files, we can continue.”
She paused to let everyone do her bidding, but I took my time. In a matter of months, I’d gone from the top of the high school heap to the bottom of the black ops barrel. I mean, go goth? What kind of assignment was that? After rescuing my classmates from the evil wench who’d turned them into her very own undead army, you’d think I’d deserve a medal at the very least, if not a tickertape parade and my own made-for-TV movie. But oh no. The Feds had made me and my minions an offer we couldn’t refuse. The others had already been given field assignments. They must have saved the best for last.
“Rick, Bobby, you’ll be brothers,” Sid continued, bringing me back to the briefing. “Fraternal twins, actually. That will explain your simultaneous enrollment at Maureen Benson High. Maya and I will be posing as your parents. We’ve kept your identities pretty close to reality. The test scores are falling most notably among the “brains.” Bobby’ll fit right in. Rick, most of the aggression is coming, not surprisingly, from the jocks and the coaches. We’ll put you on that. We’d like you to figure out what’s sparking the strangeness. Is someone messing with powers they shouldn’t be to assure top placement, either academic or athletic? If so, why is the weirdness leaking out to other groups?”
Bobby’s blue eyes shone with the light of a thousand suns. Before the whole vamp makeover, they’d been hidden away behind Coke-bottle lenses. Now … well, they were pretty heart-stopping. Coupled with his shaggy chestnut hair, they made him look almost like the guy from High School Musical. And, it turned out, he had some really wicked powers, practically as off-the-charts as his IQ. Telepathy, a little bit of mind control, some telekinesis thrown in for good measure. Yup, I knew how to pick ’em.
“Gina,” Sid snapped. I sat straighter and pretended I hadn’t been mooning over a guy—my own, no less. “You’ll be an emancipated minor. No parents in the picture and a place of your own. As I mentioned, you’ll be infiltrating the goths. The arcane is right up their alley, and if anyone is tapping into the ley lines …”
… I was to become their new BFF.
2
I nearly balked when I saw the governmentally supplied apartment I’d been given as goth-girl Geneva Belfry. It reminded me of a postage stamp, and not the large commemorative kind either. My sink and shower were so close that I could brush my teeth and wash my hair at the same time. I guess undercover operatives posing as goth girls who’d divorced their parents didn’t exactly rate penthouse suites. But still, did it have to smell like feet?
At least it was stocked to the gills with the elixir of life—blood. The real thing, brown-bottled for my convenience. It was a far cry from the rush of drinking straight from the vein, but had the advantage of the Feds’ super-secret supplements. The blood was apparently infused with a sort of sunscreen potion that would allow us to stay awake during the day and even face brief bouts of sunlight, but for all we knew, it could be laced with tracers to help them track us or some kind of nanobots that could kill us remotely if we disobeyed orders. That wasn’t me but Bobby talking, when they’d first briefed us on the blood. Personally, I figured that if the government wanted to get to us, they would, one way or another. I wasn’t going to sweat it. I had bigger things to worry about, like what the hell I was going to wear. Because you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
I used to plan for the first day of school weeks in advance. My besties Becca and Marcy and I would put in hours of power-shopping and coordinating outfits, giving each other facials, manicures … the works. But Becca had been left behind in Ohio with the rest of the living, if you could call it that, and Marcy was off on a mission of her own. So, I was facing a new school all by myself with no one to play mirror for me, which barely mattered, really, because my wardrobe looked like something out of an old black-and-white horror film. There wasn’t a single gem-tone, sparkle, or spangle in the whole batch of government-issued threads.
After discarding a dozen outfits, I finally chose a baby doll T-shirt that at least had some form to it and expressed exactly the way I was feeling: Bite Me. The “i” in “Bite” was dripping blood. I paired it with a pleated skirt that wasn’t too hideous and a pair of fishnet stockings and examined my shoe selection. I nearly called the whole thing off right there—sneakers with flaming skulls, matte black hightops, combat boots, platform Mary Janes. That they even made platform Mary Janes was a travesty of epic proportions.
I tried to think of the mission. Fashion faux pas were a small price to pay … right? I mean, I’d gone so far as flats when we went up against the vampire council, like, a lifetime ago. And no one had died … at least not due to the sorry state of my shoes.
Besides, with all the weirdness at school, probably no one would even notice what I wore. And at least my hair was already naturally black, so I didn’t have to put up with a bad dye-job to match my new secret self. I pulled my hair into two even ponytails like the goth girl from NCIS, who I was using as a model since she was kind of cool, if way too perky to live.
Makeup was going to be a problem. Before we were split up following training, Marcy and I had practiced putting makeup on ourselves, using each other for feedback. I’d gotten decent marks on eyeliner and lipstick, but mascara was a lost cause. Despite their advances, even the Feds couldn’t quite figure out why vamps didn’t have reflections, or find a way to reverse the effect. “It’s magic” didn’t satisfy even the people whose undercover ops involved remote viewing research, psychic phenomena, and the under-dead. Anyway, I figured it shouldn’t be a problem unless lurking in ladies’ rooms became a big part of my job description.
Cringing as I did it, I strapped on the platform Mary Janes and tried to own the look and my new name. Geneva Belfry, world-weary super goth, been there, done that, didn’t bother to buy the T-shirt. Piece of cake. Devil’s food.
I grabbed my death’s head backpack, basic black of course, left the apartment with its thrift-store furniture and funny smell, and started on my way to school in my governmentally supplied wheels, a white-and-primer-colored Nissan with a gazillion miles on it and a Dracula Is My Co-Pilot bumper sticker. If Agents Stick and Stuffed had a sense of humor between them, I’d have thought they were kidding, but I didn’t think they were big into irony.
The Feds had already transmitted their forged records to my new school, which I’d learned was, like, two hours from a city with actual cu
lture—Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor, Tiffany’s. Who even knew that there was a whole state outside of New York City? Or that vast stretches of it were Edward Scissorhands suburbia or even, get this, farm and horse country. Wappingers Falls’ big claim to fame, Bobby’d told me with glee, was that it was mentioned in some Law and Order episodes as a place where suspects or their families lived. As claims to fame went, that was almost as lame as Washington Slept Here. I mean, if he’d done something really exciting, maybe, but sleep? I did it all the time. No one had ever put up a plaque.
Anyway, the main office of Maureen Benson High was located just off the entrance on the short side of the L. It took a moment for the woman behind the counter to stop chatting with a coworker and take my name. Her shockingly red head bobbed up and down as she examined me.
“Bite me?” she asked, looking pointedly at my shirt.
“No thanks,” I answered, “I’ve already eaten.”
“Tastes like chicken,” a voice behind me added, thick with masculine amusement.
I turned to see a guy also dressed in basic black—jeans, T-shirt, and combat boots—and wearing more chains than a bike rack. He had one piercing through his right brow, a thick chrome bar, and five more piercings marching up his left ear, and he was totally wicked hot. Instead of the blue eyes that were my usual weakness, his were a dark and intense brown to go with his dark brows and the out-of-control hair that half fell into his eyes. I wanted to run my fingers through it—just to test the thickness, of course, but that sort of thing tended to give guys ideas.
“Hey,” I said instead, loading it with just the right amount of come here often? to keep him interested. After all, I needed to start making friends … or at least contacts. Maybe even minions.
“Hey, yourself. You new?” Goth Guy asked.
The administration lady gave him the same hairy eyeball she was giving me, but went off in a huff when he refused to react.
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