Someone Should Save Her
Liars and Vampires, Book 2
Robert J. Crane
with Lauren Harper
Someone Should Save Her
Liars and Vampires, Book 2
Robert J. Crane
with Lauren Harper
Copyright © 2018 Ostiagard Press
All Rights Reserved.
1st Edition
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Author’s Note
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Other Works by Robert J. Crane
Chapter 1
Where do we begin?
In school, of course. Not in fair Verona, but Tampa—not so fair in winter, when the skies do occasionally go grey and the rains get flipping cold, and the temperature gets close-ish to freezing …
My name is Cassie Howell, and I’m a compulsive liar.
The weather was definitely the worst that I had seen since moving down to Florida from the snowy rolling hills of New York State. It had been so cold that most of the native Floridians had come to school bundled up in bubble jackets, hats, and gloves. All I’d heard the last week was how cold it had been, how they missed the triple digit temperatures, and how some of them even thought they had seen frost(!) on the grass that morning instead of dew or the remnants from the sprinkler system.
I, on the other hand, was almost comfortable in a sweatshirt and sneakers. I was in Florida, for Pete’s sake. These yahoos had no idea what cold actually was. They hadn’t lived in a place where it didn’t matter if it snowed six feet overnight; we still had to go to school.
But that wasn’t the only way I was different from all of the other students. No, I was more different than most of them even knew. I was the new girl, sure, but I probably knew something about the city of Tampa and its surrounding neighborhoods that no one else in this class did.
Well, except for Alexandra. Xandra, for short. She hated being called Alexandra.
Aside from her, no one else in my class knew that I had met—and killed—vampires.
About a month after Christmas, not long after I had moved to Florida with my parents, I’d met Byron, a handsome, conceited boy who claimed to go to my school. It was very quickly evident that he did not. After he cornered Xandra and me in her dad’s business one night, an entire world of vampires opened up before me.
I had attended a vampire soirée, been visited by vampires, and had had a showdown with Byron in his own home, where I outsmarted and eventually killed him. Self-defense, just FYI, no murder for funsies here. If killing the undead still counted as murder, at any rate.
That was three months ago. Since then, my life had pretty much gone back to normal, thank God. I was going to all of my after-school activities, including math league. Now that I was back on a healthy sleeping schedule, my grades were on the rise, and I was being a good girl, following all of the rules.
Things with Mom and Dad were polite, if a bit tense. I think Mom felt sorry for me, which I took in stride—pity was way preferable than anger and snide remarks. Dad had been extra nice as of late, making my favorite dishes for dinner on the weekends, buying me a new laptop, and even offering to get me my own car once I got my driver’s license. Which I was behind on getting due to the move.
We had sort of agreed without saying it that we were not going to bring up Byron, and how he had stalked me and then kidnapped them. Which probably wasn’t the best approach for them—they didn’t know that Byron was dead. I think they secretly believed he was going to pop back up in our lives. But for me, every day that passed without us talking about it was a good day. The most important change since then: I was doing everything I could to avoid the lies that had caused me so much trouble in the first place.
Except … yeah. My lying days weren’t quite done yet.
It was a Thursday, and I was sitting in my sixth period class, English. Yet again, we were working through a Shakespeare play. This time, it was A Midsummer Night’s Dream—a welcome change from Romeo and Juliet. That one had been agony to sit through after Byron and his weird obsession with it.
My chin rested on my arms, which were folded on the desk in front of me. I hadn’t had much time before school this morning, so my auburn hair was pulled up behind my head in a ponytail, and all I had time for was a quick application of mascara and bronze eye shadow, which I thought accentuated my gold and green eyes. Everyone else was taking notes, paying attention. There were even a few hands in the air to ask questions. Even Xandra seemed into the discussion.
Just kidding. She was falling asleep.
At least I thought so.
She must have felt my eyes on her, because her own icy blue eyes snapped open, and seemed to bore right into me.
Her multi-colored hair, which was now dark blue at the ends, and pale blue near her roots, was knotted in double buns on top of her head. She wore an oversized sweatshirt that hung off one shoulder, and skinny jeans that could only be described as the color of mustard.
Her face split into a smile, which I returned.
Xandra, being my best (and pretty much only) friend, was one of my favorite reasons for going to school. Our relationship had started out a little rough, but through trial and tribulation, we found ourselves joining forces. I learned pretty quickly that Xandra pretends not to care, but when it really comes down to it, she is a good, loyal friend.
She still had no idea how valuable that was to me.
“Fifteen more minutes,” she mouthed at me.
I nodded, though not exactly successfully, with my chin tucked into the crook of an elbow.
She had been there the night that Byron had materialized out of what I was still convinced was thin air and had been the one that had suggested the possibility of vampires existing in the first place. I had written her off as a complete whack job, but as Byron continued to surface, and the unsettling truth of his world became more and more apparent,
I found myself turning to her more and more.
And she had believed me. She never even told me that she thought I was crazy.
Having a friend, a solid one, was my biggest help when I was stuck in a situation with a crazed vampire to whom the word “no” was an invitation to see if he could drive me insane before turning me into one of his kind.
I saw Xandra’s brow suddenly furrow together as she looked just past me.
Curious, I turned to look too.
There was a young man standing just outside of the room, through window in the door. He was tall, with untidy sandy blonde hair, flecked with bleached blond streaks from living in Florida his whole life. He had bright blue eyes behind his nerdy glasses.
And I was very aware that he was looking straight at me.
I rolled my eyes and looked away.
Gregory Holt.
What was he doing out there? He hadn’t been in school all day. I hadn’t seen him in any of the other classes we had together. So why was he standing out in the hall like that?
And why was he staring at me?
I could see him waving his hands in the window out of the corner of my eye. I looked back at him. He was motioning to me. There was a look of desperation on his face.
I ignored him as best as I could. Nonetheless, guilt roiled in my stomach. Shouldn’t have made eye contact, damn it.
Gregory had found himself dragged into the wake of Byron picking apart my life. Like Xandra, he had seemed perfectly happily to believe that vampires were real, which was helped along by the fact he’d seen Byron coming and going like a stalker as Gregory watched me and my backyard from his house next door like … also some kind of weird stalker, just the curtain fluttering type. A peeper, maybe?
But where Byron had drawn me and Xandra together, nothing of the sort had happened between us and Gregory. Maybe because he totally bailed when my parents were kidnapped. Hard to be friends with a loser coward like that, you know?
And now he was trying very hard to get my attention. I was almost waiting for him to start using smoke signals.
I laid my head down on my desk, intent on ignoring him. If he really needed me, why couldn’t he wait until after class?
I checked my watch. He only had to wait seven more minutes.
My teacher hadn’t noticed Gregory at the door, but some of the other students definitely had. The girl sitting in front of me whispered to her neighbor. “What’s he doing?”
“No idea, but something must be wrong.”
My teacher paused, picking up on the hum of the class’s mounting distraction. “All right, what’s up?” Mrs. Boyle asked.
“Someone’s hanging around by the door,” a girl in the front row answered. Finger pointed, like the teacher needed the reminder of where the door actually was.
Her heels clacking on the floor, Mrs. Boyle made her way from behind her desk to the door. There was a rush of warm air from the hall into the room as she pulled it open.
“Mr. Holt,” I heard her say in her high-pitched voice. “What, may I ask, are you doing at my door?”
“I need to see Cassie, Mrs. Boyle,” he said quickly. “I mean, Mr. Jefferson needs to see her. He—” he stammered, “he asked me to come and get her.” A moment of silence before he added, “Something about math league?”
I lifted my head to find Mrs. Boyle staring at me, almost indifferent.
“All right,” Mrs. Boyle said. “Miss Howell, you may go. Collect your things; I don’t expect you’ll be back before the end of class,” she added, glancing up at the clock on the wall.
I grimaced, but gathered my books, nearly dropping one, and made my way out into the hall, my face burning, all eyes on my back as I left. I guess that’s what happens when, like Gregory, you’re a goody-goody for so long. People just assume that he’s incapable of lying.
But he definitely was. I can tell these things.
Mrs. Boyle closed the door behind me, and no sooner had she done so than I rounded on Gregory, my finger pointed at his chest.
“What are you doing?” I hissed through my teeth. “I know for a fact that Mr. Jefferson doesn’t need me for anything. He’s not even involved in math league!”
Gregory recoiled ever so slightly. His hair, I noticed this close, was stuck to the back of his neck and his forehead with sweat. I knew enough about his schedule, from our occasional run-ins, that he hadn’t been in gym earlier, so it had nothing to do with vigorous exercise. Eyes wide, jaw set, body rigid—I realized now, face to face with him, that he looked awful.
A knot of dread formed in my stomach. “What?” I asked, calmer, more even. “What happened, Gregory?”
He swallowed hard, his eyes as distant and blank as stone. “I have a problem and only you can help me,” he said. “It involves vampires.”
Chapter 2
“Vampires,” I said coolly, my hands going to my hips.
Though class was in session, a few students were milling about the halls. Threatened by possibly being overheard, Gregory hissed at me, grappled me by the arm and dragged me around the next, deserted corner.
“Hey!” I said.
“Keep your voice down!” he whispered.
“Keep my—you said it in the first place,” I hissed.
“Not as loud as you did!”
I pursed my lips—part irritation, part to lock out the underlying scent of Pine-Sol, which smelled more like bathroom than Christmas tree and pervaded the school in an unpleasant fog. I swear it was getting worse lately.
Gregory swallowed hard. In a whisper, he said, “Someone I know is being stalked by … by one,” he settled on. “Or more than one. I don’t know. I just know—” He looked all around, but we were still totally alone. “It’s a vampire.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
He looked around again, rubbing his hand over the nape of his neck. His hair still clung to his forehead. “They’re coming after her at night. Only at night.” Gregory wasn’t easily flustered. It gave my disbelief pause. He’d admitted to me, without shame and straight to my face, that he’d been watching me through his window, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. So to see him like this, so het up … I couldn’t deny that something was very seriously the matter here.
Still, I said, “That doesn’t mean anything. They could just be night owls, or maybe they have the night shift or something. Or maybe they’re college students. People in college never sleep, right?”
Gregory didn’t seem to think anything I was saying was funny.
“And why are you saying, ‘they’? What’s up with the pronoun game? Is this a Tumblr thing?”
Gregory whispered, “I think it might be more than one person.”
“Might?” I asked. “So you aren’t even sure?”
He pursed his lips together and sighed heavily through his nose, dropping his eyes to the floor.
“Look, I don’t know what to think or say, okay?” he said, desperation clearly written all over his face.
“All right, chill out,” I said, a prick of worry creeping into my mind. “There are a ton of explanations for why this could be happening. Vampires don’t have to be the definite go-to.”
Gregory turned to look at me again.
“I mean, I hate to say it, but what if this person you know has a stalker? Or a jealous ex? Or something that is way more reasonable than a vampire?”
Gregory hung his head but stayed silent.
“Listen, classes are about to get out—”
“They’re vampires. I know it,” Gregory finally said. He spoke with absolute certainty—and despite trying to convince him that he was incorrect, that there was a perfectly rational explanation for what he had seen, I felt the blood drain out of my face at the possibility that he was correct. “Cassie, please,” he said, laying a hand on my shoulder. “Can you help?”
I brushed his hand away. “Let me put it to you the way you did to me just a couple of months ago … um, no.”
He sh
ook his head slightly, maybe trying to clear some of the insanity that seemed to have taken root. “Wait, why not?”
“Because I’m out,” I said, taking a step backward from him, my hands up in the air in surrender. “Done. Kaput. Finito. I want nothing to do with the vampire world—if that’s even what this is all about.”
“But you’re the only one I know who could—”
“Call the police, Gregory. That’s what this imaginary friend of yours should have done in the first place.”
As if that would help if they were dealing with vampires.
Cassie, stop it. They are not vampires.
But not all vampires were bad, per se … Mill and Iona were good examples of decent vampires. At least, they hadn’t tried to kill me.
Yet. A chill passed over me. I brushed a hand over the raised flesh of my arms to stifle it.
What if this really was vampires? What if they were clawing their way back into my life via this particular side street?
What was I going to do then?
I’d need help, that’s what. From people like Mill and Iona again. But how …
No. No, no, no.
“No,” I said, turning to walk back around the corner. “I am not dealing with this—”
“Cassie, this girl—she’s our neighbor.” It was a blatant last-ditch attempt to get my attention, riddled with strain and panic and exhaustion … and it worked.
“What, like someone who lives next door to you?” I replied, trying to keep the tremor out of my own voice.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “It’s Laura Grayson.”
My head fell back, and I stared up at the ceiling.
“Crap.”
Chapter 3
I knew Laura Grayson. Everybody knew Laura Grayson. That was kind of the point of Laura Grayson. Every single person in school knew her, and every single person in school loved her—at least to her face.
And her face was hard to forget. She was a short girl, shorter than me, with long, wavy blonde hair that belonged on a mermaid. It was always flawless, and I often overheard her insisting that it was natural, and that she wished it was straight, because she never felt like she could do with anything with it. She had bright green eyes, and a cheery, contagious smile that she always seemed to be wearing.
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