But I did win, and everything changed.
Practically overnight.
Months later the first Scarlet Stain book was published. It took off like fresh hotcakes on a winter morning, and the rest is history.
My mom, a struggling waitress at the time, had heard about Nightshade Academy in one of her gossip magazines—that all the stars’ kids and all the smart and talented and beautiful kids went there. She was convinced that it was the right place for a girl like me.
So after I made enough from the first Better off Bled book to get her out of the trailer park and into a big house in the nicest part of town, she signed me up and shipped me off.
That was freshman year, and I haven’t been home since. The feeling I get from Mom and her new husband, Ronald, is that they’d rather see my monthly checks than little old me.
Fine by me.
Mom always said I was “just another mouth to feed” anyway; now I can feed Ronald and her via long distance, and everyone—including me—is happy.
But along with the very adult freedoms of making my own money and living away from home with all the beautiful people at Nightshade Academy came very adult pressure: the need to achieve, to keep up with a grueling publication schedule of two new books a year, plus a full course load, the rare extracurricular activities I’d need if I decided I wanted to get into a good college, and the normal social life of being a semipopular teenager in a place like Beverly Hills.
Sometimes it’s heaven. I mean, who am I to complain, right?
Other times it’s hell.
Right now I’m somewhere in between.
I sigh, polish off my first biscotti in frustration, and contemplate another when the bell over the door chimes.
I look to see who it might be—in this town, you never know when a Taylor or a Vin or a Kanye or even a Kim might stop in for a quick pick-me-up—when instead I see . . . Reece.
He has changed again, this time into black track pants, expensive sneakers, and a shiny silver hoodie, the kind you might wear while running a marathon—on the moon!—and walks straight to my cozy corner table.
He’s so confident, so smooth, like a predator on the hunt. Is it any wonder my heart skips a beat and he is instantly forgiven?
I try to look away, to act bored, or at least disinterested, and fail miserably.
Does he act so confident because I’m desperate?
Or am I desperate because he acts so confident?
I close my laptop out of habit. I hate anyone, no matter how beautiful, reading my work until it’s finished, polished, and printed.
And even then, I prefer they do it as far away from me as humanly possible.
“Nora,” he says, taking a seat across from me. “I am so sorry.”
“Are you, like, bipolar?” I somehow find the courage to ask before he can make himself comfortable.
He doesn’t smile. “No, I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”
I look at him in amazement.
Is he that cold?
Or just that clueless?
“Dude.” I lean in just a tad so we don’t become a spectacle for the rest of the Hallowed Grounds patrons. “You have stood me up twice, brought me chocolates and roses, and now you’ve tracked me down to my favorite café—all in less than twenty-four hours. It’s like you’re Jekyll and Hyde or something.”
“Wrong book,” he murmurs. Before I can fake a coughing fit and ask him, Dillweed says what? he adds, “It was unforgivable, but I must ask, can you forgive me?”
I shake my head, too tired to play these games. “I don’t want to forgive you. We don’t know each other well enough for forgiveness at this point. What I’d like is for you to either quit doing things I need to forgive or just . . . leave me alone.”
He arches one eyebrow. Remains silent. His dark eyes are hypnotic, so I look away.
When I do, I see the two actress-slash-model-wannabes in their brown-on-green Hallowed Grounds aprons, gawking at him and whispering behind the cappuccino machine.
That’s just the thing: a guy like Reece? He could have any girl he wanted, anytime.
What would it be like to stroll into a coffee shop and set two voluptuous teenage girls all atwitter? And if you had that power in a town like this, why would you ever, in a million years, make a play for someone like me?
I sigh and when I look back at him, he is smiling.
“You’re quite the wordsmith, aren’t you?” he asks, his grin dazzling, his cheekbones haunting.
“What does that even mean, Reece?” I snap, finishing off my coffee. I’m desperate for another biscotti but just try getting one now with a Greek god sitting across from me and the cashiers drooling.
“It means you don’t save your eloquence just for your books. You speak just as articulately in real life. I so hoped you would.”
“Hoped I would what? I’m confused. That’s the problem. Nothing here adds up. Didn’t we just meet? Like last night? Didn’t you transfer here from Manhattan because your parents thought a change of scenery would do you good? Stop acting like I’m the reason you’re here. It’s not flattering. Frankly, it’s vaguely creepy.”
“Creepy or not, you are the reason I’m here.” He’s not smiling. In fact, those chocolate-brown eyes—now a shade darker—are kind of drilling into me, pinning me into my chair, making me want to sit somewhere—anywhere—else.
“How is that even possible? What, because you’ve read a few of my books? Because you’ve got a crush on Scarlet Stain and think just because she came out of my twisted teenage brain that somehow I must be like her? Here’s a news flash, pal: I’m nothing like her. OK, maybe I have red hair, but I don’t know karate, I don’t dress in all black, I don’t practice black magic, I’ve never kicked anyone’s butt, and I’ve definitely never seen a vampire, let alone hunted one, so if that’s your twisted little game, then—”
“Oh, but you are like her.” He leans forward now, that spicy cologne intoxicating, his breath fragrant as it caresses my cheek. “Much more than you know. You have that same savage tongue, and you’re not afraid to use it.”
“OK,” I say, unplugging my laptop and sliding it into my laptop bag. “You’re clearly delusional.”
“Am I?” He leans in and drops his voice an octave. “I came here for you. I haven’t just read your books; I’ve memorized them. They’re . . . brilliant. Not in a classic sense, mind you; but as part of the vampire canon, they are nothing short of brilliant.”
“What are you, some reporter angling for a story? If so, call my literary agent.”
I start to get up, but he stops me with a cold hand on my forearm.
I look desperately around the room, but everyone is either (a) absorbed with their dates or (b) absorbed with themselves—this is Beverly Hills, after all. Suddenly, even the giddy teenybopper clerks who were undressing Reece with their eyes are now fumbling over themselves, frothing up some steamy milk for Eazy Billz, a rapper who’s just barged in with his entourage of nine.
“I’m not a reporter,” Reece says in a new tone, not a particularly nice one. “I’m not a fan either. I’m a collaborator, a fellow writer, and I have an idea for your next book.”
“Wow.” I try to snatch back my wrist—and fail. “Now I’ve heard it all.”
He yanks me down from my half-standing position, and I hit the chair hard. It screeches against the rough tile floor, but no one notices, since everyone is murmuring about Eazy and his latest platinum album.
Suddenly, I’m scared.
Beverly Hills or no, I’ve read enough news stories to know that bad things happen, even to good girls.
Yes, we’re in a clean, comfy, well-lit place, but just outside that door, two streets away, is a sketchy alley where anything could happen.
There is no Wyatt to save me, no Abby to tell me to run, no Scarlet Stain to leap through the ceiling tiles and impale this creep on one of her tailor-made daggers, swords, or maces. It’s just me and my horrible, no-good, rotten instin
cts.
With all the commotion in the room, all the stargazing and self-importance, Reece could literally drag me up by my arm, zip me out of the store, whisk me somewhere dark and lonely, and no one, not a soul, would think twice or remember a single detail.
I can just hear the police interrogation now:
“What, Officer? Nora who? No, I don’t know who was sitting there.”
“She might have had red hair, maybe blonde. Brown?”
“Are you sure it was a girl sitting there, ’cause I could have sworn it was a guy!”
A tremor passes through my body but never gets farther than my forearm, maybe because Reece still has my wrist clamped tight.
“Sit down and listen,” he barks above the din. “It’s very simple. You have a deadline; I have an idea. You are running out of stories, and I have one that will spark your creativity like a firecracker in a pile of dead leaves. We will work together. It’s just that simple. Be it now or later, our . . . partnership is inevitable.”
I stare back at him, my mind reeling, palms sweaty, heart racing.
How does he know I’m on a deadline?
How does he know all my ideas have dried up?
What’s more, how did he know to find me here tonight?
There are too many questions, too many coincidences, for this to be anything good . . . or natural.
At last I wrench my hand free and stand, though it takes everything I’ve got—and then some. I storm past saying, “Abby was right. You are a stalker.”
“Abby should watch her tongue, then, shouldn’t she?” He stands, his face inches from mine. His eyes are even darker, his lips thin and gray as he adds, “Or she’ll end up like Bianca.”
Chapter 6
The TV is glowing and blaring when Abby gets home that night after another late shoot on the Zombie Diaries set.
She gives me the universal, big-eyed, openmouthed, hands-in-the-air What’s up? sign—I almost never watch regular TV, so she must be shocked—and I point to the live feed currently spilling across the fifty-five-inch flat-screen in reply.
“Bianca’s missing,” I say simply, the pit of my stomach empty from half-crying ever since I left Reece at the Hallowed Grounds café.
“Oh my God,” she says, sitting next to me on the couch and instinctively reaching for my hand. “When? How?”
“They don’t know,” I answer, wincing as she touches the bright-red spot where Reece held my wrist just hours earlier. “She was supposed to make a shareholder’s meeting at her dad’s corporate offices after school, and when she didn’t show, her father told the cops. They started digging, calling her teachers at home, even some of her classmates. No one’s seen her since homeroom.”
“But that’s crazy. You’re sure she wasn’t in food and culture class today?”
I shake my head. “She wasn’t in any of our classes today. Not one.”
“Except for homeroom,” she says, voice barely above a whisper. She’s clutching my hand. I wince again, and this time she notices. She takes her hand away, and although I rush to cover the bruise with the sleeve of my white hoodie, she sees it and gasps. “What is that? Who did that?”
I cover it. “Nothing, Abs. Nobody.”
“Nobody nothing,” she says in her best acting-like-a-concerned-parent voice. “I can see the finger marks from here. You tell me who did that, or I’ll call Wyatt and—”
“No, no, don’t call Wyatt. He already thinks I’m stupid enough as it is. It was . . . Reece, OK? It was Reece, and I don’t care what you think or how wrong it is not to say anything. I just don’t want anyone to know. OK?”
“Reece did that?” she stands up, pacing between the cluttered coffee table and the TV. “When? How? Why? Why would a guy you’ve only just met do something as . . . violent as that?”
“I was down at the Hallowed Grounds after school, trying to get some writing done, and he just . . . showed up.”
“I told you that dude was a stalker,” she says triumphantly, looking at the half-empty box of chocolates on the edge of the coffee table. With one swipe, she slides it off the table and into the wastebasket.
“He was all crazy. Apologizing for flaking out on me today at school one minute, then threatening me the next.”
“Threatening you how?” The TV grabs Abby’s attention, blasting Bianca’s yearbook picture on the local news.
It’s the photo from last year, the same one they’ve been running on every station now since I returned from the café, barred the door, and started flipping channels just to get Reece’s angry, accusatory voice out of my head. “Nothing, really. He just . . . He says he has this idea for a book, a Better off Bled book, and that we’re going to write it together . . . or else.”
“Or else what?”
I look past her bouncing knee to the TV screen, which still shows a close-up of the quite gorgeous, quite missing Bianca Ridley.
“Or else . . . he said . . . I’d wind up like her.”
Chapter 7
Abby and I are clustered with a few other kids in homeroom the next morning, figuring out the wording for a Missing poster we want to post around the school halls, when none other than Bianca Ridley walks through the door and takes her old seat, like nothing ever happened.
Nobody says anything. Nobody can.
We’re all . . . well, shocked would be an understatement.
A kind of awkward silence fills the room until Bianca just starts chatting with her posse, whispering and snapping gum and twisting her hair like six kids aren’t sitting in front of her with a notepad full of words like missing and foul play and parents and very concerned.
Finally Mrs. Armbruster stands up, lowers her knuckles to the top of her desk like a drill sergeant about to drum out a new cadet, juts her jowly but lovable face forward, and says, “Bianca Ridley, you had us all in a state. Do you know everyone in Beverly Hills is out looking for you right now? What do you have to say for yourself?”
And Bianca, still snapping her gum, twisting her hair, looks at us all and says, “Um . . . that it’s nice to be loved?”
Mrs. Armbruster wrinkles her nose, adjusts her bifocals, opens her mouth to say more, and then, nonplussed, just sits back down.
That’s that.
I mean, what do you say, really?
Go to the principal’s office?
You’ve got detention, missy?
Write “I will not pretend to be missing and freak everyone out including people who don’t even like me” on the board five hundred times?
I turn around, look her up and down, and say, “Bianca, what happened to you? We all thought you were . . . dead.”
“What for?” she says, and suddenly I notice she’s not quite as perfect as the day before.
Her hair’s a little unkempt, her lipstick’s mussed, her shirt’s buttoned wrong, and her super-short skirt is super crooked.
“Can’t a girl take a mental-health day without some goody-goody putting out an APB?” She sneers at me, Abby, and the class in general.
“Yeah, well, warn somebody next time you want to fall off the planet,” Abby says.
“Don’t blame me.” She looks over our heads and at the door. “Blame him.”
We turn to find Reece standing in the doorway, wearing a black distressed jacket with the off-white stripes down the sleeves, his jeans tight, his boots untied, his white T-shirt straining against an Olympian’s chest. He breezes in our direction, walks right past Abby and me, sits next to Bianca, and . . . plants one square on her lips.
Right there, in front of the whole class, Mrs. Armbruster included. OK, she’s already sleeping again, but still. What if she weren’t?
“Ew.” Abby groans, turning around.
I wish I could do the same, but I’m transfixed.
A writer word, I know, but the only one that works in such an extreme situation.
I literally can’t take my eyes off them.
And I’m far from a voyeur. I mean, gross, but . . . this is more
than sexual.
This is, like, behavioral.
It’s like watching two gorillas in a zoo and trying to figure out what separates them from Homo sapiens.
“What are you looking at?” Bianca asks once they’ve finally come up for air. She’s lining her lips with a fresh coat of gloss from her (real) diamond-studded compact.
“Are you two insane?” I say. “I mean, clinically? As in rubber-room-for-two-bound? Have you lost your frickin’ minds? You don’t just go missing one day and come back the next and start dating and expect everything to be fine. It’s . . . it’s . . . antisocial.”
Bianca looks at Reece, and Reece looks at Bianca, and they have quite a laugh over that one.
“Hey, look,” Bianca says, acting bored, “I explained it to my parents, my parents called the cops, I got a stern talking-to by Principal Chalmers on the way into school today, all’s right with the world. If they’ve forgiven me, then what’s the big deal? So turn around and face the front if you know what’s good for you.”
Reece pats her hand. “Now, now, Bianca, don’t snap at Nora. It’s not her fault sour grapes taste so bitter.”
“Sour grapes!” I say, soliciting a harrumph out of Mrs. Armbruster, but I don’t turn around to acknowledge it. I just lower my voice a smidge and ask, “Who would want to go out with a schizophrenic, moody stalker creep like him in the first place, Bianca?”
“Hmm, judging from the veins sticking out in your neck, you would!”
And they laugh and laugh, Bianca and Reece and her pretty little minions, taking up the whole back row of homeroom like this is some comedy club downtown and I’m the last-minute amateur about to get yanked offstage by a giant hook lurking in the wings.
Finally I turn, but not before Reece reaches out a cold hand, patting my soft, warm shoulder, and says quietly, just so I can hear, “Ignore me if you must, but know this much: this isn’t over.”
Chapter 8
Bianca deteriorates throughout the day.
The Vampire Book of the Month Club Page 5