Twice Bitten

by Diana Greenbird

  Emerson wasn’t as resigned as Jenny and Gi were to simply let whatever was going on pass him by. As he passed the guy to get to his seat, the spare easel on the row behind us, Emerson knocked him with his shoulder. Though it hadn’t looked like he’d exerted much force, the guy ended up hitting his head on the desk. When he pulled up, his nose was bloody.

  ‘Sorry, mate. I must have slipped,’ Emerson said.

  He slid into the chair behind us. The guy was swearing, but the look Emerson gave him meant he didn’t try anything here in the class – especially since the teacher had just walked in. He just walked off, out of the classroom.

  I couldn’t help but stare between the drops of blood pooled on the guy’s desk and at Emerson.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘I just didn’t think you could be so easily provoked,’ I said, turning the words he’d used against me yesterday on him.

  ‘I’ll apologise as soon as he does,’ Emerson said.

  He didn’t say anything for the rest of the class. He had his own sketchpad he worked on, using charcoal and different pencils.

  I wasn’t that keen on art, but hadn’t had a choice on the electives since I’d transferred into my final year and art had been a class I’d studied for a couple years in one of my old schools.

  Every time I tried to get a peek at what he was working on, Emerson would shift so I couldn’t see. When I finally got up as the bell sounded, he snapped his sketchpad shut.

  ‘Lunch!’ Jenny cried, as though the prospect of food was as exciting as riding the pacific coast highway.

  ‘Yes, you must have really worked up an appetite, right, Emerson?’ I asked.

  The girls thought I was on about the sketching he’d been so into. From the clench of his jaw, I knew Emerson had got my dig about the blood.

  ‘You two seem to be getting on okay,’ Gi said, mentioning us walking in together and probably the chat in gym class. I’m sure it probably seemed weird from her point of view since we’d both warned her off the other earlier in the day. Or it looked like I’d lied about me and Emerson having a history.

  ‘We’re civil,’ I said.

  Emerson smirked, hearing my reply as Jenny talked about some TV show or other she was watching with Robbie.

  We’d gotten halfway to the library when the guy Emerson had bumped into stopped us in our tracks.

  ‘What the hell was that about?’

  ‘What? That in class?’ Emerson asked as though it had been days ago, rather than less than an hour. ‘It was an accident. I tripped.’

  ‘Like hell you did.’

  I could see the moment the guy decided he was going to punch Emerson.

  My first thought was: I already know how much it hurts to punch Emerson in the face, seriously dude, save your knuckles the pain. Then I was reminded that Emerson probably knew this guy was about to deck him and had the ability to sidestep the punch and avoid it connecting in the first place. Leading me to remember that he could have done that with me, too. But he didn’t. Huh. A thought for another time.

  Finally, my old friend Death popped into my head. Though this high school was one of the best ones I’d been to over the years, a school fight ending in Death wasn’t off the cards for me even here. I’d been in two school shootings; one knifing (not the one where I’d stabbed the territorial parking spot guy, a different one) and one fist fight where the guy had ended up in a coma all on school property. I’d moved schools before I’d found whether the guy had ever woken up. Each one of those cases had been entirely human-central. No vampire involved.

  It didn’t take a genius to understand that vamp-rage, preternatural strength and the smell of fresh blood weren’t a good mix. I was already amazed Emerson had managed to control himself back in the classroom. He hadn’t so much as shown a sign of hunger. I wasn’t going to test it for a second time.

  Like with catching the baseball, and punching Emerson, one minute I was stationary, the next I was moving; the rest of the world around me seeming to stop in time.

  I stepped in front of Emerson, grabbing the outstretched fist of the guy throwing the punch and twisted it behind his back. Then, with the knee on my bad ankle (I wasn’t about to put all my weight on the CAM-boot even if my fracture hadn’t been hurting me lately) I dug into the side of the guy’s chest. He fell to the floor, screaming in pain.

  ‘Holy crap balls! Holy crap balls!’ Jenny was saying over and over again. Gi just looked on with pure shock on her face.

  The guy tried to get up again. I wasn’t sure what Emerson thought I was going to do (I didn’t kick a man when he was down… literally) but he pulled me away.

  ‘Liv, calm down.’

  ‘I am calm,’ I said.

  My voice was entirely steady. Emerson seemed to realise that, and probably noted that my heartrate hadn’t even sped up a little. This wasn’t me in some berserk fury. This was me simply reacting automatically to a situation… violently. I recalled Emerson calling me psychotic and anti-social earlier in the day. Looks like I just proved him right. I frowned.

  ‘Okay, then maybe back up a little,’ Emerson said.

  The guy was still groaning on the floor. I looked him over. I didn’t think I’d dug my knee in too hard, but men could be such wimps. I was walking around with several fractures and I wasn’t complaining. He couldn’t even handle a little bruising.

  ‘What? You’re acting like I’m in the wrong here,’ I said, shrugging him off. ‘In case you missed the memo, I just stopped that guy from hitting you in the face.’

  ‘I can handle myself.’

  ‘Yeah, you do such an excellent job. You handling it is what made the guy come back and finish what you started.’

  Emerson said, ‘he started it when he started humming that stupid song.’

  ‘It’s a song, it’s not-’

  ‘Emma made it my theme-tune,’ Gi said, trying to diffuse the argument between us.

  There was more to that story, but I didn’t get to hear it because a teacher had been called. It made sense that she assumed Emerson had been the one to knock Brett – as I discovered his name – to the floor.

  It took all of two seconds for them to decide to give both the boys detention. Emerson didn’t show any sign of clarifying that I’d been the one to put Brett on the ground, and Brett was winded so didn’t speak at all.

  ‘You’ll report to the principal’s office after school,’ the teacher said. ‘Detention is only the beginning. We have a zero tolerance for violence in this school – no matter your athletic status.’ They said the last bit pointedly since both Brett and Emerson were on the baseball team together and apparently a big deal.

  At the term “principal” Gi paled. She then took the teacher aside. By the first few sentences I could hear that she was trying to persuade her to let Emerson off with just a detention.

  Jenny was already over the drama – or at least she was over the aftermath. She was busy texting Robbie what had happened whilst Brett was taken off to the nurse’s office.

  ‘Has violence always been a problem for you?’ Emerson asked whilst we all waited for Gi. Jenny wasn’t paying attention.

  ‘What sort of a question is that?’ I scowled at him.

  ‘I have a lot of techniques you can use if it is,’ he told me.

  ‘I’m sure you do.’

  ‘This animosity between us is eventually going to get tiring, love.’

  ‘Says the guy who a few hours ago was fuelling it by telling Gi I wasn’t trustworthy.’

  ‘Huh,’ he said. Like he hadn’t expected her to share that information with me.

  ‘Anyway, asshole, I’m not too fussed about you getting tired, Emerson. It’s when you’re hungry I have a problem.’

  ‘Completely misguided,’ Emerson muttered to himself. ‘When you get bored of all this stupid prejudice shite, let me know, and we can talk.’

  ‘Talk?’

  ‘Even if you don’t have questions, I do. And I have a lot of answers you clearly
need.’

  ‘You guys ready for lunch?’ Jenny asked.

  Gi had come back and announced Emerson had one half-hour detention tonight and no longer had to see the principal.

  I was a little in awe at her ability to persuade faculty since the stern expression on the teacher’s face had been one I’d seen a thousand times on the most stubborn, immoveable educators who loved to see kids get their comeuppance.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, going back to attempt to ignore Emerson and the annoyance that I was having to break my loner rule because of him.

  Emerson was right. He did have answers I needed, but I didn’t trust him to give me the honest ones. Those, I decided, I needed to find on my own. And it was about damn time I got to it.

  5

  I left last period early so I could watch the school exit that afternoon to spot Charlotte. Since the AA Team kept themselves separate at lunch, I hadn’t had a chance to spot her then – and we were in separate halves of the year so shared no classes together.

  Eventually, I saw a person who could only be Charlotte. She had short brown hair cut into a sharp bob and porcelain pixie features. She was hanging off the arm of Grayson, who was surrounded by his jock football buddies all in their varsity letterman jackets.

  Unmistakably, she was a vampire. Even from the distanced I watched them, I could feel the vamp-glamour working. The Sons weren’t here stalking a human girl, then. Back to square one. Three vampires in high school and no logical explanation. Perhaps I needed some backup.

  When I got back to Maybelle’s place that night, I did what I probably should have done the second I realised there were vampires going to the same school as me: I called Ali.

  ‘Finally decided to grace me with your presence, chic?’ Ali said, in lieu of a “hello”.

  ‘I’ve been busy.’

  ‘As I’ve seen. Was breaking the odd rib not enough – you had to completely destroy the Multistrada 1000, too?’

  ‘Don’t remind me.’

  It wasn’t a surprise that Ali already knew about the accident. She kept a track of her friends in the unconventional way of stalking their online lives – from medical to financial, not just the ordinary social media stalking that had come about with the rise of Facebook a few years ago.

  ‘What can I do you for, babe?’ she asked me.

  I could hear the squeak of tires and the shifting of a stick gear whilst Ali drove. Ali wasn’t the type to talk holding her cell phone; she was the type to have a system she’d built which hooked her phone to her car and played it through the speakers.

  ‘I’ve got a bit of a dilemma…’ I started.

  ‘What sort are we talking about here? Creepy foster brother? Teens at school? Gang trouble? Drug problems? Bad grades?’ Ali said them all like they were all on equal footing and all equally as solvable. Which for her, they were.

  I didn’t like to idolise people, but for Ali I made an exception. Perhaps it was because my thirteen-year-old-self had been so impressionable. Or because she was the only living person who knew the truth about what happened to my parents. Whatever the reason, she’d never let me down. Never given me reason to doubt my admiration for her.

  ‘There’s a vampire at my school.’

  The horn on her end of the line beeped. ‘Say again, chic.’

  I didn’t need to repeat myself. I knew she heard me. ‘Three, actually.’

  She swore a series of expletives that weren’t all in English. Most of them were languages that I couldn’t even recognise, though I knew they were curse words.

  ‘Principal, teacher, guidance counsellor?’

  ‘Student,’ I said. See. It was weird they’d choose to be a kid.

  ‘What are they up to?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Are they still sticking to the Code?’

  ‘Yeah. The strange thing is that one of them actually seems open to talk to me about it. Doesn’t that run contrary to the Code?’

  ‘Vamps don’t exactly get a lot of human company who know the truth about them,’ Ali said. ‘Especially not types like you who can’t be persuaded otherwise. The ones who know for certain are likely part of the Blood World and so it’s technically not breaking the Code since they’re not revealing the secret.’

  Alejandra Romero started off as a simple hacktivist when she was sixteen, then was approached by a secret organisation (which she’d believed was a cult at the time) to work for them. The organisation turned out to be humans who knew about the truth of the Blood World (their name for the collection of vampires and other creatures that lived within the shadows) tasked with hushing up the truth as to not upset the natural balance between supernatural and mortal creatures.

  In the modern era, no one could hide a secret as big as the existence of otherworldly creatures without the help of humans. Especially since the supernatural’s made up most of the 1%. Like calls to like; power calls to power. And what was more powerful than preternatural and supernatural abilities along with butt loads of money? All those lizard people and Illuminati conspiracies tended to just be the wackier side of the hidden truth that was vamps were secretly running most Fortune 500s.

  Though it was in Ali’s organisation’s best interest to keep the existence of vampires a secret from the general populace, it was ultimately up to people like Ali who they told or not. It was why she’d shared the truth with me. Letting people who’d been attacked by vampires remain in the dark either left humans to self-destruct (the suicide rates were astronomical) or seek out answers on their own to “expose” the truth.

  Since Ali had shared the truth with me, I thankfully hadn’t fallen into either category which would have ultimately led to a meeting with Death. It also meant that I was informed for whenever I did meet another vampire again.

  Ali had warned me that, whilst I was probably safe until I left high school, colleges were practically crawling with the leeches as were political parties and the upper crust of society. Which had been exactly why I was avoiding any higher education and planning on travelling after I graduated. The longer I could put off meeting a vamp, the better.

  But just because I’d known of their existence, and the Code – plus everything Ali had taught me on how to protect myself from them – hadn’t made a shred of difference when I’d come face-to-face with Emerson in class. If I had a therapist, I’m sure they would be all very understanding about how I was triggered, and the panic attack was a natural reaction to confronting a memory I had all but blocked in my conscious mind. But it had just made me feel weak and stupid.

  It was probably why I had justified punching Emerson in the face. I was simultaneously throwing my anger back at the cause of my own pathetic weakness, and defending my actions by saying I was just making sure that Emerson was following the Code. I mean, even if he was following the Code, he very reasonably could still hurt me. The Code only mentioned killing. Hence my hide out in Maybelle’s with a shit load of silver to defend myself from an angry Code abiding vamp, or a murderous rogue.

  I didn’t mean to continue to provoke him now, that was just a side-effect of spending time with him. I’d probably be the same with anyone who got close to me, though maybe I’d tone down the “bitch” by a few notches. His vamp-glamour and my discomfort about being drawn to him against my will probably caused me to push back a little bit harder than usual.

  ‘He keeps going on about how “misguided” I am. Like I’m some half-wit who doesn’t know a vamp when I see one.’

  ‘Are you certain he is a vampire?’

  The only other creature Ali had told me about were witches. They were more common than vampires. They didn’t have preternatural strength or reflexes; their powers were solely in the supernatural side of things. I’d never met a witch. Ali told me I probably wouldn’t be able to tell if I did. They didn’t have any glamour like vampires.

  ‘Yes. Vamp-glamour, smooth-to-touch, quick reflexes, super strong, super hearing-’ Emerson had heard me muttering far too many times, ‘-a
nd silver burns him.’

  Though he had been buying books about witches at the store when I’d seen him – odd. I probably needed to remember that for later.

  ‘I don’t even want to know how you’ve tested half of those things out, chic,’ Ali said. ‘I don’t like how close you are to this.’

  ‘I don’t like it that they’re at my school for no good reason.’

  ‘I think I might send Nowak down to check things out.’

  I nodded, though she couldn’t see me. ‘I was wondering if you could bug them or something. You know, put a trace on them and see where they’re going, who they’re talking to. That kind of thing.’

  ‘As fab as you think my skills are, I can’t just pull out their virtual lives from thin air. I have to have something to go on.’

  ‘I could get you the guy’s cell? His laptop?’

  I knew Emerson’s car since I’d seen him drop off his stuff before he’d gone to his detention. It was some large ass SUV model. Charlotte and Grayson had gotten into a tiny sportscar parked beside him. I also knew that he left his laptop in there (exactly like the type of person who’d never even considered they could be stolen from).

  ‘His laptop would do,’ Ali said. ‘But I don’t want you putting yourself in the middle of this.’

  ‘Please,’ I rolled my eyes. ‘He’s practically in my face every day. I share most of my classes with the creature. If he was planning on breaking the Code-’

  ‘He’d act exactly like he wasn’t and wouldn’t let some punk like you provoke him into breaking his goodie-goodie act until he’d gotten what he wanted.

  ‘I mean it, Liv. You toe the line with death far too easily for my liking. You need to stay out of this. I’m not saying that it’s likely he’d be the type to break the Code – you know how rare that is – but it’s unusual a vamp turning up at school and I don’t want you risking anything-’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Chic. I’m serious.’

  ‘I hear you.’

  ‘You’re going to ignore me and do whatever you want, aren’t you?’