Fangs for Freaks

by Serena Robar

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Teaser chapter

  Berkley titles by Serena Robar

  BRACED TO BITE

  FANGS FOR FREAKS

  DATING FOR DEMONS

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2006 by Serena Robar.

  Excerpt from Dating for Demons by Serena Robar copyright © by Serena Robar.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley JAM trade paperback edition / November 2006 Berkley trade paperback edition / July 2010

  eISBN : 978-1-101-43484-0

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Berkley JAM trade paperback edition as follows:

  Robar, Serena.

  Fangs4freaks / Serena Robar.—Berkley Jam trade paperback ed. p. cm.

  Summary: As Protector of the half-blood vampires, Colby is called into action when her sisters in the newly established Psi Phi sorority house start experiencing ugly, unexpected attacks, either from a member of the Vampire Tribunal, or from a spy.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-43484-0

  [1. Vampires—Fiction. 2. Best friends—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction. 4. Universities and colleges—Fiction. 5. Horror stories.] I. Title. II. Title: Fangs 4 freaks. III. Title: Fangs for freaks. PZ7.R5312Fan 2006 [Fic]—dc22

  2006020547

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is dedicated to my husband, Jason,

  without whose unflagging support I could not begin to pen

  the stories in my heart. Or buy the shoes in my closet.

  Acknowledgments

  There is always someone who comes along and makes a good book better.

  Special thanks to Holly Henderson-Root at Trident Media Group, who acted as my second set of eyes; my Goddess Divine agent, Jenny Bent; and to my brilliant, hardworking editor, Cindy Hwang, who knew exactly what tweaks were needed to give Fangs more bite.

  Hehe. Bite. Get it?

  One

  A body launched from the bushes, straight at me, before I had time to register who or what it was. The force of the impact alone was enough to knock the breath from my lungs—that is, if I breathed. Instead of crushing me, I rolled with his momentum and neatly turned over once, then used my feet to send him flying over my head, crashing into crates of recycling awaiting pickup on the sidewalk.

  Doing a quick flip from my back onto my feet, I, Colby Blanchard, moved toward my would-be assailant without trepidation.

  “Are you okay, Cyrus?” I questioned, looking for signs of injury as he lay sprawled among the old newspapers and empty soda cans.

  “Mmmph,” came his muffled reply as he disentangled himself from the bins, “… finish me?” He stood and I was relieved to find him relatively unharmed.

  “What did you say?” I asked, a bit dubious of his reply. His left pant leg was ripped at the knee and I could see the scraped skin starting to bleed.

  The scent of fresh blood filled my senses and I had to take a step back. A familiar ache in the roof of my mouth and loud rumbling from my stomach reminded me I hadn’t fed last night. My treacherous hand involuntarily reached for the pocket housing specialized orthodontic headgear embedded with stainless-steel fangs. What? Just because I’m fang-handicapped doesn’t make me a freak or anything. I can still get the job done, ya know. Just not right now. Now it was a battle of wills, between my true self and the inner demon who demanded to feed.

  I took a Zen moment and subdued my hunger. It was so not getting the upper hand here. The first rule of thumb was no feeding on friends, and I wasn’t about to break it because I was feeling a bit peckish.

  “I said, why didn’t you finish me off? You stood there like some clueless victim waiting for me to find a weapon to take you down.”

  “Uh, I knew it was you?” It was an obvious answer, but Cyrus was always all business.

  For the last eight months, Cyrus spent two hours a day teaching me how to fight and protect myself. I met him on a routine visit to see Great-Aunt Chloe at her condo in Providence Point. Her neighbor, Bits Walker, was bragging about her grandson, a self-defense instructor and former special operative in the military. Like anything Bits said, I took it with a grain of salt. After all, she’d been married four times but on last count, she mentioned seven husbands. I wondered if perhaps she wasn’t all there.

  But one day, there was Cyrus, holding Bits’s yarn as she knitted and listening attentively to her stories. He was smaller than I imagined, with craggy skin and a wicked-looking scar across his chin to his left ear, which appeared to be partially missing. He was wiry and muscular. I doubted he had an ounce of fat on his frame.

  My thoughts were interrupted by Cyrus digging around the refuse. “What are you looking for?” I asked skeptically. Cyrus was, well, let’s just say he and his grandmother were very alike in the sanity department.

  “Aha!” he shouted triumphantly, brandishing what appeared to be a sharpened piece of wood.

  “You had a stake?!” I gasped incredulously.

  “It’s like I’m having a conversation with Jell-o,” he muttered to himself. “Of course. Did you think I was going to continue attacking you with just my bare hands? You are far too advanced for those tactics. At least, I thought you were. I thought you had achieved the black zone.”

  Oh crap, not the zones again.

  When he first started training me, I was in the white zone, which meant I was completely oblivious to my surroundings. Then came the blue zone or was it the green? I could neve
r keep them straight. Anyway, I quickly raced up the zones to the black zone, which meant I was in ninja-like awareness all the time. Personally, I liked being in the white zone, but when you’re the most unpopular half-blood Undead in the neighborhood, you couldn’t afford to be in the white zone anymore.

  Ever since I was attacked and turned into a vampire—oh, excuse me, that would be half-blood vampire—I’d become persona non grata in the Undead community. I think I might have been able to live out my days in relative peace and solitude if I hadn’t petitioned for half-blood rights and emancipated an entire species. That move made me a little less than popular with the full-blood population. Well, excuse me for fighting injustice.

  I did such a good job at freeing my people, I was elevated to being their Protector, which I am sure was the Tribunal’s way of getting rid of all of us. I imagine they were still kicking themselves that not only was I Undead and around, I was becoming a pretty kick-ass Protector in the process.

  Today was the day I would meet the rest of my half-blood family. Yep, we were going to show those bigoted full-bloods that we’re every bit as useful and viable a species and deserve to exist. At least, I hoped so. I hadn’t met any other half-bloods yet, but I held out high hopes for our success.

  “Colby? Hello? Colby Blanchard? Are you even listening to me?” Cyrus asked impatiently.

  “Uh, sorry. What were you saying about the zone?”

  He sighed in exasperation (he did that a lot with me) and repeated, “Since you refuse to allow me to test your skills in the evening, you have to be in the zone all the time.”

  I held up a hand to stop him. “Yeah, yeah, I get it. I’m sorry. It’s just today is the day I meet my new sorority sisters and I’m really nervous.”

  “Oh, well then, that’s fine. I’m sure no one will be out to get you today, then.”

  “Ha, ha,” I retorted sarcastically.

  “Today of all days you need to be most aware.”

  It took my Aunt Chloe exactly twelve minutes to tell Cyrus what I really was and persuade him to train me. Cyrus had believed her immediately, even though I walked around during the day and didn’t have real fangs. I guess it was the incident about his grandmother that did it. I’d insisted on taking Bits to her doctor because she smelled different that day. My super sniffer detected a change in her normal lavender scent. It was a move that saved her life. Bits was on the verge of a heart attack, but thanks to me, she ended up with a bypass and a new lease on life.

  He seemed to accept that I was a mutant Undead with limited vampiric powers who needed steel fangs to bite my victims because I had had my canine teeth removed for braces when I was twelve. I mean, it makes perfect sense, right? HA! It was my life and I had a hard time believing it most of the time.

  “I wish you would let me teach you defense with weapons,” he complained.

  We were back to that old argument. I think he knew how close I was to caving on that one.

  In the evenings, Thomas, my Vampire Investigator boyfriend, trained with me and we used swords. Actually, it would be fairer to say Thomas used the swords and I just did my best to avoid being beheaded and/or shish kebabed. Thomas wouldn’t train me using a sword yet; he didn’t think I was quite ready. Well, his actual words were something along the lines of “you’ll poke your eye out” but the gist was the same.

  I sighed heavily. “No, just help me avoid the stick.”

  He gave me his patented “you are one crazy chick” look and dropped the subject.

  “Are you going to visit Bits today?” I asked.

  “Already did. I have to leave tonight for a mission. I won’t be back until Monday.”

  “You’re leaving me?” I said in surprise.

  “Yeah, I do have paying customers who need my services, you know. Don’t worry, Thomas won’t leave you alone this weekend. You should be fine.”

  “You know, I don’t need Thomas’s protection to be just fine. I can take care of myself.”

  “Oh really? Check out your shirt.”

  I glanced down to see a white chalk mark dead center in my chest. When I looked back at Cyrus, he held out the “wooden stake” for me to examine. It was really a large stick of chalk.

  “Oh,” I said in surprise, realizing if he was really out to get me, he could have killed me right then.

  “You were saying?”

  His constant superior ways and arrogance were always annoying, but today he was particularly obnoxious.

  “Bite me,” I replied in my snarkiest tone. Yes, I am the queen of maturity when provoked.

  “That’s your department,” he said dryly and turned to walk away. Looking back over his shoulder, he added, “Be safe and don’t hesitate to finish the job.”

  I watched him leave, his body tightly wound, ready to spring if the situation warranted it.

  “He’s so weird,” commented a voice from behind, effectively scaring the daylights out of me.

  “Aargh! Don’t do that! You could’ve given me a heart attack!” I squealed, grabbing my chest for dramatic effect.

  “The day your heart starts beating … I’ll be the one having a heart attack.”

  Piper Prescott was my best friend and occasional arch nemesis. She wore her hair straight to the shoulders, jet-black with burgundy ends. Her nose was pierced, her skin a shade of alabaster rarely found on another living being and she always, always spoke her mind. We were direct opposites in so many ways but I wouldn’t trade our friendship for all the Kate Spade bags in Macy’s. Well, usually I felt that way.

  “Dude, you are so funny, I forgot to laugh.”

  We moved to tidy up the recycling that Cyrus had scattered and walked into Piper’s house to wash our hands.

  “So, today’s the big day, huh?” she asked after folding up the dish towel.

  “Yep, tonight I meet the rest of the house. I can’t believe it. You’re gonna be there, right?” I was nervous about meeting them but proud of my accomplishment at the same time. I’d spent the last year of my life preparing for the moment I would meet the first half-bloods allowed to exist in vampire history. All because of me.

  I knew that the Tribunal was sending me at least three new girls, if not more. One from as far away as Europe.

  “Oh, I’ll be there.” Piper smirked. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “Do you have to be so negative?” I asked her. Piper was of the opinion that a bunch of girls with nothing in common except being Undead and forced to live together was a recipe for catastrophe.

  She opened the fridge and took out a Mountain Dew. “I’m just saying this thing has disaster written all over it.”

  She tried to open the can but couldn’t get her finger under the tab.

  “Oh here, give it to me.” I used my manicured nail to pop open her soda. “Are you still biting your nails?” I started to lecture, and then gasped when I noticed two of her cuticles had been chewed to the point of bleeding. “Piper! Your poor fingers. You’ve got to stop that!”

  Piper put her hands over her ears and started to sing, “La la la la, I can’t hear you, la la la.”

  “Oh fine.” Piper usually resisted my suggestions for self-improvement. She’d always bitten her nails. Since kindergarten, when she was bored or stressed, she nibbled at them. I guess having a best friend who was a half-vampire that no Undead liked was a bit of a stressor.

  I returned her drink and brought the conversation back to my meeting. “And tonight doesn’t have disaster written all over it. These girls are lucky to be alive and I bet they are just as excited to meet me as I am to meet them. After all, I saved them. Because of me, they get a second chance. You’ll see.”

  We plopped down on a comfy couch in her living room, enjoying the air-conditioning for a moment.

  “You seem awfully confident they are going to be happy with this arrangement. If I recall, you weren’t all that thrilled with being attacked and turned into a vampire. What if the Tribunal told you that now you had to move acro
ss the country and learn the vampire ways?” Piper made it sound like vampires were part of the Dark Side or something.

  “Of course I wasn’t happy but I would rather be sent to Psi Phi House than be ‘relieved of my Undead status.’ And I’d be pretty darn thrilled to meet the person who was responsible for me getting a second chance to live as well.”

  Piper looked at me unconvinced and took a sip of her drink, so I gave up and changed the subject.

  “Where’s your mom?”

  “She’s still at work. We only have a couple of days left until we go to Europe. Even though she is dragging us on a work thing, I’m kind of excited. I miss England,” she added wistfully.

  Piper’d spent a summer with her family roaming the European countryside and loved it. She was kind of a gypsy at heart.

  “You’ll still be on e-mail, right? I know your cell phone won’t work over there, but you’ll still have Internet access, right?”

  “Quit being so nervous. You’ll be fine,” Piper reassured me.

  “Yeah, I know.” I started to nibble on the cuticle of my thumb.

  “I saw that Thomas was over last night. Is he finally putting out?” Piper asked.

  “Piper! What kind of question is that?” I gasped, feigning outrage.

  “So that would be a no, then.”

  I debated playing the offended victim but frankly, I needed some advice on this one. “What’s wrong with me? We’re in constant physical contact. He wrestles with me at training and I’m all, yeah baby come and get it, but he’s been a perfect gentleman. It’s starting to tick me off.”

  Thomas and I met eight months ago when he arrived at my house the night after I was attacked and turned into one of the Undead. He was a Vampire Investigator and it was his job to take care of any unlicensed vampires, like myself. And not “take care of ” in the good sort of way. But Thomas fell for me and I have to admit, I fell for him as well. At least, as soon as I determined he wasn’t going to stake me on our next date.