Twice Bitten

by Diana Greenbird

  ‘That hurt.’

  I knew he wasn’t lying. I could see the red mark I’d left on his perfect porcelain face. Not that it had anything to do with the force of my punch. It was more likely to do with the quick contact my silver rings had had with his skin.

  That tiny moment of elation was somewhat diminished, however, when I felt the solid arms of someone pulling me back – like I was going to go in for a second hit and I needed to be restrained.

  The feel of their cool flesh against mine was the same as I’d felt all those years ago. There wasn’t just one vampire in this school – there were two.

  Their glamour pressed in around me, caging me between them. I could feel my body trying to tell me to give in – to let them have whatever they wanted. It ached to be claimed, my blood singing to theirs. The pain in my chest from my fractured ribs put an end to that.

  ‘You feel weird,’ the vampire holding me whispered into my ear. He, too, had that same British accent, though his was slightly more cockney. ‘Your energy’s all wrong.’

  ‘Grayson, let her go,’ the original vampire said. ‘She’s injured.’

  Grayson let me go, and I pushed him away from me for good measure.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Grayson asked me.

  He was twice as broad as the other vampire, his skin black (yes, surprisingly vampires weren’t all Caucasian males, TV, welcome to the twenty-first century), and just as astonishingly beautiful. I recognised the name Grayson, but I couldn’t place it.

  I narrowed my eyes at Grayson. His glamour was slightly different to the original vampire. The haze was there and the beauty, but I didn’t feel any pull to him like I did with the other vamp.

  ‘You,’ I answered in response to his question about what was wrong with me. I mean it was the most succinct answer I could think of, unless this vamp wanted to sit down and have the full mental, physical and historical list of things wrong with me. We’d probably miss first and second period. Whatever conviction in my voice seemed to really set him off.

  ‘Christ, I’ve never met you before in my life, woman,’ Grayson said. ‘All I did was stop you trying to break your hand punching the lights outta my mate.’

  ‘It’s no problem,’ the other vampire said. His eyes hadn’t left mine. I realised that whilst my attention had been on Grayson, he had been staring at me as intently as I had been staring at him before.

  ‘No problem, mate… what the hell are you talking about no-?’

  The nameless vampire interrupted Grayson. ‘We’ve got to get to class.’ He pulled Grayson by his t-shirt away from me. ‘Seriously, I’ve got no problem, love,’ he said to me, backing away, his arms up in surrender.

  I stayed still. I’d gotten my answers about the Code… but little else.

  I didn’t go back into class. I walked the half an hour trip back to Maybelle’s house and let myself in with the key.

  Since Maybelle would be expecting me at the pickup zone after school, I text her to say I was getting a ride back home from a friend. No doubt I’d regret that lie later today when Maybelle would ask “which friend” I’d gotten a ride from considering I’d made a sum total of zero, but I’d preferred that question than the one as to why I was skipping school.

  Both Maybelle and Ken were at work, so I had the house to myself. I collapsed on the sofa and closed my eyes. If meditation was a thing I could do, I would have tried it then because my mind was going into overdrive trying to understand what the hell was happening. Not one, but two vampires were at my high school.

  What the hell was going on?

  For the rest of the week, I played ill. Maybelle believed it easily – perhaps it was the healing puncture in my lung or the scars that convinced her? Most people took time off school or work to recover from injuries like mine. Maybelle had been especially cautious around me and had only agreed to let me go back to school after a week of rest if I took it easy and didn’t exert myself and disrupt my healing. Punching the other vamp and Grayson restraining me back had certainly upset my healing process.

  All I had to do to find myself excused from school was to say that perhaps school was a little “taxing” and she’d begun her hover mode; telling me I needed to stay in my room and only come down for meals if I felt up for it.

  Which meant, whilst I hid away from the vamps at school, I spent my time divided between homework, eBooks, and boring small talk with the new foster parents. I learnt to walk without my crutches, keeping the CAM boot on. It probably wasn’t advised, but it didn’t feel any worse than when I was using the crutches. Honestly, it felt a lot better since it lessened the pain in my chest by 100%.

  I waited for some sign, some hint that the two vampires were going to act out and seek revenge for attacking one of them, but none came. Code followers, then. Any rogue vampire wouldn’t have let that action slide. They would have tracked me down after school and done away with me in whatever means they thought necessary for a lowly human threatening their power.

  I had known that it was unlikely that the vampire would have reacted on school grounds, especially since he’d created an alias for a reason. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t seek me out and dispose of me in his own time, when it couldn’t be linked back to him. It’s why I felt safer hiding out in Maybelle’s house. There was no risk of being taken away to a secondary location. I could view my exits and entrances on the security system that they had installed. And along with my silver rings, I had silver powder that basically worked like a mace spray. Ken also owned a gun. I mean, it wasn’t like he knew I figured out where it was. At least here there was some weapon that could put down a vamp (no, they didn’t need to be staked in the heart. Think more zombie lore than vamp – decapitation, destroy the brain). I wouldn’t have any of that in school.

  As the days went by and neither Grayson nor the original vampire turned up at my house, I got my answer.

  The “no problem” of the cocky bastard replayed again and again. These vamps had bigger things in mind being at this school to let a little human girl like me mess up their plans. They didn’t want me causing any trouble for them. It only made me more intrigued as to what they were doing playing the role of normal teen students.

  *

  On Sunday, I learnt that Maybelle expected me to come to church with her and Ken. The last time I’d gone to a church service, I’d been six years old. It had been the triple funeral for my parents and grandma. Suffice to say, I’d not exactly had the best experience.

  ‘I’m not really sure church is my thing,’ I told her.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Maybelle said.

  She was the true Southern woman, hair up to the gods, dressed in her Sunday best, fiddling with a gold cross on her neck. She tucked a few stray baby hairs behind her ear in the mirror in the hallway and turned to me.

  I was standing on the stairs, dressed in my usual (at least current usual since I couldn’t wear my regular black jeans). Skirt that unzipped from the front, tank top with black shirt over it, knee high sock on one foot, CAM boot on the other. I also had on a puffer jacket and scarf in my hand, considering this argument didn’t seem to be going my way, and I was probably going to end up out of the house despite whatever protests I made.

  ‘Perhaps it might be best if Olivia stays home. She shouldn’t overexert herself,’ Ken said. He was waiting by the door, clutching the keys in his hand, occasionally checking his watch to make sure they weren’t late. This argument was costing them precious minutes to get a good pew.

  ‘She’s been sitting at home all week and said she was up for going back to school tomorrow – this is hardly more taxing than that, is it? You’ll be fine sitting in a pew for a few hours, won’t you honey?’

  She could say “honey” all she wanted. Her Southern charm wasn’t tricking me. I knew she had master manipulator skills down to her very bones. Especially since I found myself in the back of their car not a few minutes later, with her talking away a mile a minute about how it was so good for me to come.
There were plenty of kids my age who came to their church – people I should know from school.

  I snorted to myself in the back seat. The only students I’d paid attention to were vampires. I very much doubted I’d find them in the house of God.

  Church was exactly how I expected it to be. Like on TV, the pews looked hard on my ass; the priest was unwaveringly optimistic; and the people in the congregation were both a mix of those who genuinely enjoyed being here or had been dragged by someone who did.

  I was milling around the edge of the entrance porch, pretending to read the scripture that had been painted on the wall, when a face I recognised from school popped up next to me.

  ‘Hello!’ It was Gi. Still in a dress, still with her hair in braids (this time one down her back).

  ‘You go to church here?’ I asked.

  Gi rolled her eyes at me. It was a gesture I tended to do when people asked me obvious questions they didn’t really need an answer to. It immediately made me like her at least ten percent more.

  ‘Do you?’ Gi asked back.

  I crossed my arms, giving a subtle look over to Maybelle who was greeting her friends. ‘My foster mom decided it would be a good idea.’

  Gi laughed at me. ‘You look absolutely delighted about it.’ Like me, Gi took a quick glance to the family she’d left behind. A short man and two little girls around ten who looked like little versions of Gi (same birthmark just under their left eye, with little bow-mouths).

  ‘How badly do you want to ditch?’

  ‘An insane amount,’ I said. I thought I might as well be honest. I doubted I could act interested enough in the service for someone not to look right through me if I lied.

  I could feel the pressing gaze of Maybelle as the crept closer towards us. She had been hovering on the periphery, talking to her friends, and had slowly been getting closer to me and Gi once she noticed I was engaging in a conversation. I tried to school my expression and not show how annoyed I was. Gi covered her knowing smile at my annoyance with a radiant one she directed at my foster mom.

  ‘Hey Maybelle,’ she grinned. It was like she radiated positivity. ‘Do you mind if Liv sits in the back with me?’

  ‘Gi!’ Maybelle said, as though she hadn’t noticed that Gi had been there at all and she’d somehow just mysteriously popped up next to us. ‘Of course not, honey. It’s so good to see Olivia making friends.’

  We waited in the porch until the congregation had all filed into the main room and sat in the pews, before Gi grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the church, to around the back to the graveyard. Gi led me through the overgrown graves with an expert pace, like this maze of stones was one she travelled often.

  The church hadn’t looked that old, but back here the weather had taken its toll on the occupants. October was still three weeks away, but I could see that the occasional tree had already started to drop their leaves, excited that fall had begun. Grass crawled up the sides of the graves; moss clinging between the words. It was a far cry from the organised white stones of Long Island National Cemetery I’d seen as a kid when dad would take me to the gravestones of his mom and dad. They’d both been soldiers. Both died in action when he was a teenager. He’d been raised by his aunt. I doubted my dad had ever considered that the thing we would most have in common would be that we would be orphaned at a young age.

  Even back then, before I’d been an orphan, I’d never had an aversion to graveyards. Perhaps that’s why Death had chosen me as his BFF. After my parent’s deaths, it had been being around the living that I feared – not the dead. When I was in a graveyard, the company I kept wasn’t one I had to worry about. Death didn’t get jealous here. There was no risk of him claiming these souls as his own, because he already had.

  Gi had put quite a distance between us and the church now; all we could hear was the passing of a car, or the occasional gust of wind. That was until I heard the steady chatter of company.

  Rounding the big oak, on the edge of the church grounds, Gi led me to a group of three teenagers who were sat in various positions around the graves. A couple (you could tell from the way they were sitting: her on his lap, messing with his hair, and him holding her around the hips) and a girl with “theatre student” written all over her in bright colours.

  ‘Who’s this then, Gi?’ the guy called out. He had shaggy black hair that was a month or two overdue a haircut and fell about his eyes. He was dressed in obnoxiously gauche leisure wear – the type that was extremely expensive and didn’t look like it was invented at all for sports despite being basically just a souped-up tracksuit and trainers combo.

  ‘Olivia,’ Gi said, introducing me. ‘She’s just started at our school.’

  ‘The motorbike girl,’ the theatre kid said.

  She looked me over in the same judgy way that the head cheerleader had at school. No need to worry, drama geek, I wanted to say. I stick to the shadows, not the spotlight.

  ‘Yeah… that’s me,’ I said.

  I was feeling a little ambushed. Whilst I’d been happy to accept Gi’s offer to ditch, I hadn’t realised it would mean socialising. Brianna’s promise lingered in my mind. But I was literally surrounded my reminders of Death. It wasn’t like I needed to be told what the worst-case scenario of befriending these normal kids would be.

  ‘This is Jenny,’ Gi pointed to the girl on the guys lap, ‘Robbie,’ the guy, ‘and Martha.’

  ‘I think you’re supposed to be in my history class,’ Jenny said.

  I recognised her as the girl who’d gone over to help the second baseman I’d hit with the ball back on my first day at school. The guy might possibly have been Robbie now that I thought about it.

  ‘You haven’t been around school these past few days, have you?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Yeah… it’s been a bit of a rough week,’ I said. Like: vampires turning up at my school, rough week.

  ‘You’ve lost the crutches, that’s got to mean some progress?’ Gi asked, settling down onto a bit of grass by Martha.

  She thought I’d been referring to my healing injuries. Oh, sweet innocent child. If only that was the worst of my problems.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Sure, I mean I’m getting better. Just had a little set back, that’s all.’

  ‘We don’t get many people riding motorbikes around here,’ Martha said. Referencing back to the original cause of my accident, I’m sure.

  She sure was fixated on my bike. The accident hadn’t been my baby’s fault. That blame was on the mystery figure who’d appeared out of nowhere. Unless he’d just been an illusion of baby’s headlight reflecting off the rain.

  ‘I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but you really don’t look like the type,’ Martha said.

  ‘The type?’

  ‘To ride a bike.’

  Did she think I was making it up to look cool or something? I knew there was always that image people expected: the bad girl on the bike, smoking, causing trouble, stealing people’s boyfriends or sleeping around in general. I didn’t follow most of those clichés, besides the getting into trouble part.

  ‘I don’t?’ I raised an eyebrow.

  ‘It might be the skirt.’

  I snorted. Of course. Well, that wasn’t entirely me, anyway. The second day in Maybelle’s house, I realised none of my usual black skinny jeans were going to be an option, so I’d bit the bullet and ordered a dozen skirts with zips or buttons down the whole length of the front so I didn’t even have to try and slip them past my foot at all. I could honestly say that my bare legs had never seen so much daylight in their lives.

  It figured that the theatre kid would judge my outfits. Where she was all colour and joy, I usually stuck to the black side of the colour pallet, occasionally delving into a blue or grey. But she had a point. You didn’t tend to wear skirts on a bike. Not only were they a bitch (riding up and showing your panties most of the time), but leaving your legs bare simply wasn’t safe. Especially not if you were prone to danger and accidents like I was. And I did
n’t even mean car crashes. The amount of times I’d got my foot caught just stepping off my bike at the beginning and embarrassingly falling over had been too shocking to count.

  ‘Purely out of necessity,’ I told her. ‘Once this thing is off those skirts are on their way to a thrift store.’

  ‘I don’t know, I think they suit you,’ Gi smiled. ‘You’ve got nice legs.’

  ‘Thanks, I guess,’ I said. I never really hung around people to garner compliments off them. I wanted to say something like… “nice kindergarten dress”, but it would probably come out wrong.

  ‘So, where’d you move from, new girl?’ Robbie asked me. Jenny hit him in the ribs. ‘What?’

  I caught Jenny mumbling something about me being a foster kid and it not being polite to dig into that kind of thing since I probably had “trauma” in my history. I gave a sideways glance to Gi – since if I could hear it, the rest of them could and should know how awkward it was being talked about as if I wasn’t right there.

  ‘Liv is living with Maybelle,’ Gi told Jenny. ‘She’s good people,’ Gi told me, like I might be wanting a review of the foster parent I didn’t really have a choice of staying with.

  ‘One of the best, actually,’ Jenny said. ‘My mom works with her quite a lot since she’s on the town council and Maybelle always asks for her help with the fundraisers. In the summer she’s around my house nearly all the time and they’re like two chatty Kathy’s. You really get to know someone by eavesdropping on their gossip. Mom’s a total blabber mouth.’

  Robbie muttered something under his breath about it being genetic.

  ‘Ah, you’re one of the foster kids,’ Martha said, as if she’d finally placed me (and hadn’t heard what Jenny said). Apparently, despite the celebrity of my accident, no one had linked why I was in town to what had happened to me.

  ‘Maybelle always gets her foster kids to attend church,’ Jenny explained to me. ‘They usually come for about two weeks and then manage to find an excuse – any excuse – not to return. Richard lasted one week before he used football training as an apology, even though training’s on Saturdays. Robbie was the one to give him that idea since he always uses baseball practice to get out of doing his chores. His brothers hate him for it. But I mean, it’s a good idea – anything to get out of church.’