Twice Bitten

by Diana Greenbird

  ‘Most definitely.’

  ‘You’re a pain in my ass.’

  ‘Love you, too.’

  Nowak would be turning up some time in the next few weeks to check out the Sons – see what they were up to and if it was all by the Code. Ali had also said he would be dropping off a car for me.

  I’d begged her to bring me a bike if she was going to bring me anything, but she said she couldn’t trust me not to splatter myself on one of those wet Seattle roads, so a car it was.

  It wasn’t like I could turn my nose up at a free car. Though I knew Nowak had probably won it in some street race, it was still undoubtably going to be better than anything I could afford. Especially since I was poor as hell for the next few months until my birthday, when I became legal age and could inherit the money my parents and grandma had left behind.

  In the meantime, I planned to get my hands on Emerson’s laptop. Shouldn’t be too difficult. Like with getting into fights, this wasn’t exactly my first rodeo.

  I planned out my next move as I got ready for bed, pulling on my PJ top and settling into the warm duvets. I stared up at the ceiling, twisting the rings on my fingers as I thought about how I could access Emerson’s personal laptop, where his weaknesses were and what Ali or I might find on there.

  Eventually, my brain turned from the plans of the next day to simply switching off. And for the first time in twelve years, I didn’t dream of the little brown house. I dreamt of something entirely different.

  England was suffering. You could see it in the streets as the body collectors carted off the dead for the plague pits – so many corpses that it was impossible to bury them all individually.

  Families lowered the bodies of loved ones who had succumbed to the plague with poles from their houses. Parents abandoned their infected children. The city’s cats and dogs were culled. Plague doctors wore beaks with posies inside to protect them from the miasmas. Priests were dying quicker than most, the plague gripping them as they performed the last rites of those who would not last through the night.

  Humans wanted answers. The French and Swiss blamed the Jews for poisoning the cities’ wells in order to cause the plague, burning hundreds of them alive. Others turned to witchcraft, asking astrologers what might be done to stop the pestilence.

  From noblemen to the homeless peasants, the plague did not discriminate. It took life where it found it and few survived. The only ones completely unaffected by the plague were those of the Blood World – protected from the Black Death where mere mortals were not. The Divine of the Blood World had always been gifted with superior health. But it was now, when the world seemed to be ending and pestilence gripped the nation, that the Divine were brought out of the shadows. No longer could they hide their gifts.

  They watched on as the mortals suffered and died. They tried to help where they could. Those select few mortals that knew the secrets of the Divine – those which had helped keep their secret for centuries – begged for the cure, some way to save them. But the Divine could not help. There was no cure. It was simply biology. And the only “cure” was to rid the mortals entirely of everything that was human and become a new creature altogether. In their last breaths, those mortals privy to the secrets of the Divine, cursed them for not sharing their gifts. And still the Divine lived on and the mortals perished.

  It was at this time that evolution found a way to create a new breed of human from these strong plague survivors. For whilst they may survive the plague, humans were still under threat from another predator: the monstrous Divine who needed life’s blood to survive.

  These new, superior hunters were not like the predecessors who had dedicated their lives to ridding the world of the Divine. Those past hunters had either been jealous of the gifts bestowed upon the Divine: the longevity of their lives, the supernatural powers to control elements, mystic forces and see beyond this realm. Or, they had been blinded by prejudice and religious doctrine, believing the Divine were vile, unholy, murderous creatures sent by the Devil to either tempt Godfearing Christians to sin, or kill those pure enough to remain true.

  The old hunters only knew whisperings of the Divine, and failed to catch the true superior species, instead praying on weak mortals, those who were labelled “witches” but had no supernatural powers at all. The old hunters were simply humans, no special skill other than the power society and the royal family gave them. If they ever came face to face with a real Divine creature, they would not have been able to bring themselves to kill it, falling under the spell of their Glamour.

  But the new hunters… they were not entirely human at all. These new hunters could not be spelled or swayed by the monstrous Divine – later called vampires in the eighteenth century. They were immune to the change and could not be transformed from mortal to creature of the night. They could see through the lies the monstrous Divine held in place, to conceal their true form. They were the ultimate hunter.

  In a time when everyone was looking for a reason for the cause of the plague, these new hunters saw an answer no one else could: the Divine. It made sense, did it not, considering they were the only ones who did not fall prey to this pestilence.

  The only way the hunters saw to end this cycle of death, was to kill those who had started it.

  Never before had mortal, human hunters ever stood at chance against the Divine, but this was a new era. With their power of Sight, and inability to be swayed, they could blend with the average human whilst spotting the Divine and plotting their downfall in secret.

  To the immense surprise of the Divine, these new hunters excelled at their job. When they could not capture the monstrous Divine for their speed and preternatural senses protected them, the hunters went after their family and loved ones until the Divine gave themselves up to the hunters to be slaughtered.

  Silver became an effective weapon against them – the purer the silver, the more damage it could inflict. Fire was best.

  Whilst the plague had done little to hurt the Divine, these new hunters were dwindling their already small numbers drastically, so much so that there was a fear they could soon become extinct.

  I woke up with the fading memory of my odd dream from the night before. I recalled dreaming – rather than being haunted by flashbacks of my parents’ murder – from back when I was a child. The odd narratives and pictures, people working their way in and out of my visions like extras on a film scene.

  It had been so long since I had a “normal” dream, that I almost felt like over-analysing every detail of what I’d seen that night as I slept. But I didn’t have time to start a dream journal, even if the act alone of dreaming was a strange thing for me. I had a plan to get to. One where supernatural creatures were called vampires, not Divine. And they were annoyingly attractive teenage students, not victims of a new breed of humans created through evolution to rid the world of the vampiric scourge.

  Maybelle dropped me off at school once again, an endless chatter filling the car (one sided) until she told me to have a great day and that she’d pick me up later.

  As I exited the car and made my way over to the entrance of the school my eyes were automatically drawn to where the Sons had parked. Emerson wasn’t there – I could tell by the absence of the bond between us, but Charlotte and Grayson were.

  Like the day before where I’d observed them, most of the football team hung around Grayson, rotating around the vampire couple. Martha’s analogy of bees was apt in this situation, too, I thought.

  Unlike yesterday, Grayson sensed that I was watching them. He narrowed his eyes as he spotted me, his mouth half open as if he were going to shout me over to him.

  I quickly glanced at my phone like I’d gotten a message and headed into the building without looking up. The last thing I wanted was to be drawn into conversation with him – or be spotted hanging around the carpark. Way too suspicious considering my plan for today. But at least I had Grayson and most of the football jocks as witnesses to say they’d seen me head into school. That wou
ld be useful later.

  I decided to break into Emerson’s car second period whilst everyone was in class. Half of the parking lot was in view of the science windows, but the other half (where Emerson parked his car), was around the back where no one could really see.

  I’d checked for CCTV before and found none. Which the school should really invest in, especially when there were some students who had bad intentions around here.

  Unlike in the movies, I couldn’t simply break the window of Emerson’s car with my elbow. I would likely just end back in the hospital. Instead, I’d brought with me a car-safety hammer. Beautifully named because it was what people kept inside their cars in case of an emergency where they needed to break open a window or slice their seatbelt when they were trapped inside their car. Or – in my case – break into a vamp’s car.

  I didn’t waste any time, knowing I was on the clock. I popped the safety cap off the “hammer” and smashed it in the centre. The jewels of glass fell in small, safe cubes. I’d stepped to the side so none of them landed on my clothes.

  Thankfully no alarm went off. It’s wonderful the modern evolution of technology, isn’t it? At one point when the alarm was first invented our first thoughts always went to: oh no. That person’s car is being broken into, let’s help them out and stop the thief. Now, it was all: would someone just turn that stupid thing off? Someone’s probably just opened their door without turning off the alarm first or accidentally bumped it with the door. A heck of a bad time for the poor fools who were getting broken into. Great for me. Since most people kept it off to save the hassle.

  I’d smashed the back window because it was easier to access the whole car from the back seat than the front. I pulled myself in using the grab handle, crouch-standing on the backseat rather than sitting on the broken glass. Emerson’s car was large. Way too ostentatious for a seventeen-year-old (at least in appearance) guy. But it wasn’t like it was the only model in the parking lot. There were a lot of pretentious pricks in this school.

  I spotted his laptop right away, under the backseat of the passenger side. I pulled that out and put it beside me. I then went into the glovebox and checked in there, in case there were any other insights I could get. Nothing.

  I pulled the laptop across my chest and climbed back out. I dusted myself off one last time and hurried back into school.

  I’d chosen to break in now because the class I was missing wasn’t one I shared with Emerson or one of the AA Team – so they wouldn’t know my alibi wasn’t as airtight as I would later claim it to be. I’d only missed the first ten minutes of class, so I still had a while with the laptop before I had to make it back onto my normal schedule. I figured missing the whole class was better than turning up tardy – I was more likely to be noticed then.

  I headed to the library, putting a few textbooks on the table in front of me like I had a free period and was simply studying. I pulled out the memory stick Ali had given me a year back and plugged it into Emerson’s laptop.

  This wasn’t the bug that would upload all his details – that couldn’t exactly fit onto such a small device. It was a simple password hacker Ali had developed when she was seventeen. She’d gifted it me after everything that had gone down with Christian, when I needed to get into my foster dad’s laptop.

  By plugging it in, it did, however, send the IP details of the laptop to Ali and from there she could do her magic.

  None of Emerson’s documents were password protected. He’d probably thought that the password alone on his laptop was enough. And who really in their right mind would steal from a vampire?

  A lot of the folders were school essays – could he be any more boring? He was literally a creature of the night who didn’t have to do any of this shit. Why would he choose to write a thousand-word essay on how reality TV enforced dangerous stereotypes?

  I sped through the documents, none of them drawing my eye. Then there was something I found odd. A folder that didn’t have a name. None of the documents within it had a name either. I clicked on the first PDF and opened it. It was scans from an old book written in the fifties by someone called Cassidy Grimm.

  I checked the time. I didn’t have long. I might have spent a little too much time checking his browser history. Either he knew the incognito trick or Emerson had zero healthy teenage boy habits.

  I went into his email account and sent the files to my private email address, then deleted any trace I’d sent them to myself. I put the laptop in the bag and made my way to Emerson’s locker.

  Thanks to some skilful spy-work yesterday, when Gi and I had been waiting for Emerson to get his books for our last class of the day together, I knew his code. I then opened his locker and slid in his laptop bag. No one could accuse me of stealing if everything he owned was still in his possession. Not that I was going to get caught, of course. He’d have no proof. It wasn’t as if Emerson could say the reason he’d known it was me was because he could smell it.

  I was about to shut his locker door when I saw the sketchbook he’d been hiding from me in art class. I had about five minutes before the corridors started pouring with students, but I was nosy. Sue-me.

  The first few were pencil sketches of the woods surrounding this small town. I recognised them from the ginormous fallen tree I’d passed when riding in. They were beautiful and bewitching. The way he used darkness to capture the light rather than the other way around was a talent I wish I didn’t admire from him.

  His later sketches moved onto people – shapeless silhouettes. The crowds at the local football games; the crush of students in the corridors; people sitting in a classroom. But it was the last sketch that had me transfixed. One page filled with a collage of scenes. Me sitting on the bleachers, looking up to the sky, my hair falling around my shoulders. Me sat in class, daydreaming out the window. Me standing in front of a fallen pile of books. All of them from memory, all of them in fine detail.

  The most prominent image of the collage was of me in art class. I could see from the position that he’d draw it to scale: exactly as he had seen me sitting in the row in front. It was in the moment that I’d looked back at him, probably to say something bitchy or sarcastic. But my face didn’t look cruel or full of contempt. He’d drawn my expression innocent, hopeful even. I’m sure it was never an expression that I’d seen on my face before.

  I tore the page out before shoving the sketchpad brutally back into the locker.

  ‘Have you ever hung out with Charlotte or Grayson?’ I asked the AA Team at lunch.

  I was distracting myself from what I’d found in Emerson’s locker by trying to find out as much information I could on the Sons. The sketch still burned like a lit flame in my bag, like I could physically feel it staring at me. The image of my face repeatedly. Somehow, I had managed to keep some semblance of control over the panic that would usually engulf me in moments like that. I wasn’t sure how, or why, but I wasn’t going to question it.

  Gi and Emerson hadn’t joined us yet in the theatre. Martha sat on the front row, whilst Jenny and Robbie sat cross-legged on the stage. Yesterday, Gi had joined Martha on the seats whilst Emerson paced or moved around – distracting everyone from his lack of eating as he was always in motion. He still brought a packed lunch, though, which I found odd.

  I couldn’t tell whether they had permission to eat in here or whether it was just a well-kept secret. I knew the drama club tended to hang out in the rehearsal rooms on the second floor of the main school building – I had a feeling that club would have asked permission from the drama teacher if they were allowed to hang here and would have gotten first dibs over the AA Team.

  ‘No. Like I said before, the Sons are super close, but Grayson and Charlotte are pure Cheer crowd,’ Jenny said. ‘They don’t have the same holy defence mechanism as Emerson.’

  ‘They’re brainless troglodytes,’ Martha said. ‘They don’t have an artistic bone in their body.’

  That was basically her version of saying they sucked ass. I also did
n’t have an “artistic bone” and was a serf dining in the presence of her royal theatrical genius. Massive eyeroll.

  ‘I don’t even know why Emerson hangs out with Charlotte and Grayson at all,’ Martha said.

  ‘Because they’re all insanely attractive and birds of a feather,’ Jenny said in a duh voice.

  ‘Birds of a feather flock together, until the cat comes,’ I said automatically.

  Jenny stared at me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s… I didn’t know that was the end of the saying.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I shrugged. ‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it? You only know who your true friends are when bad things happen. It’s easy to be friends when all it requires is hanging out and having good times.’

  I had a feeling we were all thinking about Gi and how she’d been cast aside by the Cheer crowd when they realised she wasn’t as identical to the rest of them as they’d all believed.

  ‘Do you know any more sayings like that?’ Jenny asked, probably to distract us from the pure vitriol that was high school’s treatment of any kid who strayed outside the “norms” of that was to be expected from a white, heterosexual, middle class society.

  I thought for a bit. ‘Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back?’

  Robbie burst out laughing. ‘For serious?’

  I shrugged. ‘Urgh, yeah.’

  It was a phrase pretty pertinent to what I was up to now – spying on three preternatural creatures. It was also one more thing I’d learnt from Ali. She believed I shouldn’t shun away from answers and should always keep my eyes open and brain working, looking into the links of the world. Probably because she, more than anyone, knew how much was hidden and how much out there was still left undiscovered.

  ‘Genius. Tell me more,’ Robbie demanded.

  I was starting to feel like a performing monkey.

  ‘Blood of the covenant is thicker than water of the womb,’ I said. They stared at me blankly. ‘The original saying before it was replaced by “blood is thicker than water”. It means relationships formed by choice are stronger than those by birth.’