Bad Blood (4 page)

No answer. I glance outside and realize the sun’s already risen, meaning all good vampires (except for mutated ones like Jareth and my sister) have gone to bed. Great. Now I won’t be able to talk to him until nighttime. I decide to check his messages and listen to him grovel to pass the time away. At least he better be groveling.

Sure enough, I shuttle through thirteen pleas of forgiveness from my boyfriend before the voicemail lady informs me I have no more messages. And, I’m pleased to note, he sounds appropriately worried, freaked out, and apologetic in every single one. As well he should after what he pulled last night. He also asks me to meet him tonight, after the sun sets, at Club Fang, the Goth dance club where I first laid eyes on him last May. The night he mistook me for Rayne and tried to make me his blood mate by biting me in the neck. If only I’d learned to live with the transformation and not gone on that crazy quest to change back into a human. Then I’d be Magnus’s blood mate still. We could have lived happily ever after, without ever meeting anyone named Jane. Sigh. No use crying over spilled blood, I suppose. I dial Magnus and leave him a message, saying I’ll be there tonight at seven. I hang up and consider watching some television, but none of the shows on at six A.M. are worth watching. So I head over to the family computer in the den and switch it on. I’m not as computer savvy as my sister, but I do know how to Google with the best of them. Maybe I can dig up some dirt on Jane. To expose her as the fraud I know she is before she does something to harm the coven or, more important, my boyfriend.

Due to popular demand, Club Fang recently opened up its back room on weekends, creating a makeshift café that serves blood in chilled wineglasses to vampire patrons who have worked up a sweat on the dance floor. They keep the music low here, allowing for decent (or indecent as the case may be) conversation—something impossible to have in the main dance hall where Goths whirl and twirl to bands like VNV Nation and do what I call that footstuck-in-the-mud dance that they all seem to know and love. Rayne insists on coming with me, getting completely Gothed up, cheerleader uniform long forgotten. I wonder what her fellow squad members would think to see her decked out in a lacy, black, Gothic Lolita dress she claims she imported directly from Japan. (I, however, saw the receipt and know she bought it off eBay from some Cosplayer in Reseda.) I’m actually thankful to have backup in case things go badly with Magnus tonight, so I agree and we both get into the ancient Volkswagen Bug we share and head down to the club. After parking, we pay our five-dollar cover to the burly bouncer at the door and head into the club. As usual, I feel completely underdressed in my simple jeans and sweater combo as I step through the archway and enter Hot Topic territory. It’s funny; at school I’m the one who always blends and Rayne is the freak. Here our roles are completely reversed. The other patrons think of me as a tourist, ready to gawk at their Gothic beauty, then go home and tell the frat daddies what a freak show it is. I get more than a few dirty looks as I cross the room, heading for the café. Rayne’s already long abandoned me for the dance floor—unlike me she loves to dance—and I’m sure I won’t see her again for quite some time. Which is fine. I’ve got business to discuss with the boy. I step into the café and scan the room. My heart skips a beat as I catch Magnus sitting at a corner table, across the room, tapping his long fingers against the glass surface anxiously. He’s dressed in a simple black sweater and slim black jeans and is just so beautiful I can’t help but melt a little, even though I am still technically, for the record, totally pissed off at him. After all, he’s still my boyfriend. Still the love of my life. Not to mention one of the hottest creatures to ever walk the planet.

He catches my eye and flashes me a sheepish smile. I cross the room and he rises to his feet to greet me, pulling me into an embrace so strong it’s as if he’s holding on to me for dear life. The thought warms me even more. He loves me. I know he does. And at the end of the day, that’s more important than vampire politics and traditions, right?

We hug for a few moments, then sit down at the table. A tall, pale vampire waitress comes over and I order a black coffee, the only thing in this place not containing some sort of blood infusion. (At least I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.) As she leaves to retrieve my order, Magnus leans over the table and takes my hand in his.

“Sunny, my baby,” he murmurs, pulling my hand to his lips and kissing it softly. His English accent caresses my name in a way that gives me shivers. As much as I like to play tough, I’ve got it bad for this vampire and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Still, we have a lot to talk about tonight and I refuse to get swept up in romance until we do.

“Magnus, why didn’t you tell me?” I ask, feeling my throat clog up with the tears I swore I wouldn’t cry. So unfair that I inherited all the sensitive genes in the family and Rayne got all the kick-ass ones. “I had a right to know.”

My boyfriend lets out a long sigh. “I know,” he says. “And I wanted to tell you, too. Believe me, the whole thing’s been weighing on my mind for weeks. But the council insisted on absolute secrecy until Jane had passed all her certification and DNA tests; they didn’t want word of her selection to get out and have her candidacy compromised by a rival coven. I kept hoping she’d fail—that she’d somehow prove unworthy of the position and subsequently be rejected. Then I would never have had to tell you. The last thing I wanted to do was hurt you for no reason.” He squeezes my hand. “I had no idea that she’d just show up out of the blue like she did yesterday. It was completely against protocol.”

“Well, she did. Protocol or not.” I sulk, knowing deep in my heart I should be trying to be more understanding about the whole situation, but not finding the energy to do so. “And I was totally blindsided since I didn’t even have any idea you were in line for a new blood mate to begin with. In fact, from what Rayne’s said, I thought a vampire only got one chance at a blood mate in a lifetime and your chance was with me.”

“No. That’s just what they tell the noobs,” Magnus says gently. “In order to get them to take the relationship seriously. In reality, if a partnership is broken, a vampire can take on a new mate at any time. It just doesn’t normally happen.”

“Vampires don’t normally take on new blood mates?”

“The partnership isn’t normally broken.”

Oh. So once again, it all comes down to this being my fault. Great. Just great. The waitress sets my black coffee down in front of me, but I no longer feel much like drinking it.

“Sunny, you had to know that this would someday become a reality,” Magnus says, not helping matters by his logic. “I’m the Master of the Blood Coven, one of the largest vampire conglomerates in the nation. That’s a huge responsibility for one person to uphold and I could really use a partner to rule by my side. In fact, in a way it’ll be better for us. I know you hate how I’m always stuck in meetings all night. Just think, this way Jane can shoulder some of the load and I’ll have more time to spend with you.”

Please. As if Jane will go for that. My mind flashes back to her possessive little fingers clinging tightly to my boyfriend. He may only want her as a second in command, but she obviously has other plans.

“What about Lucifent?” I ask, remembering the coven’s previous Master. The one who Rayne’s predecessor, Bertha the Vampire Slayer, had dusted back on my second evening as a vampire. “He didn’t have a blood mate.”

“Actually he did at one time,” Magnus corrects. “A young vampire named Tabitha. She came as a referral from the High Stakes Coven out in Vegas. A beautiful girl with long, white-blond hair and big blue eyes. Everyone was shocked when she applied to be Lucifent’s blood mate. She could have had any vampire in the world.”

“Yeah, Lucifent wasn’t exactly Casanova incarnate.” In fact, he looked like a young Macaulay Culkin—having been turned into a vampire when still a child.

“It does seem weird that she’d pick him out of all the really hot vampires out there.”

“Well, it didn’t take long for us to figure out why she did,” Magnus says, shaking his head. “In addition to her beauty, she had ambition. Too much ambition. And once she was permanently installed as blood mate, she started working to supersede her sire’s powers and take control of the coven. She abused my master, treating him like the child he only appeared to be and overpowering him physically when he protested her actions.”

“So what happened?”

“A fire broke out one night in her chambers. She burned to death. Many believe that Lucifent set the fire himself. Killed his very own blood mate. Which, of course,” he adds, “is completely unacceptable under our laws.”

Something dawns on me. “Is that why Slayer Inc. had him killed?” I had always wondered that—since Rayne swears the company only goes after the baddie vamps who don’t play by the rules.

Magnus shrugs. “Perhaps. Though I imagine they’d been looking for an excuse for quite some time. As you know, child vampires are considered mutants—an abomination in their eyes.”

It was true. Once upon a time Slayer Inc. killed Jareth’s little sister simply because she was living as a mini-vamp. It took hundreds of years and Rayne’s declaration of love for the guy to get over that one, let me tell you.

“Look, Sunny, let’s try to focus here,” Magnus says. “Jane will never take your place in my heart. She will never be more than a business partner to me and you are so much more than that. I love you and need you and cherish our relationship more than you can ever know. After all, I waited a thousand years to find you; do you think I would give you up so easily?”

He looks at me with pleading eyes and I can feel my icy heart melting as fast as Jack Frost in Miami.

“That said, I have no choice but to go forward with this,” he continues. “It’s my job and the lives of a lot of vampires hinge on how well I do my job. Sometimes, though I don’t like it, my duty as Master must come first.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” I manage to choke out. After all, I don’t want him to think I’m some idiot selfish high school girl here. “I do. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less, okay?”

Magnus rises from his seat and walks around the table to pull me into his arms. I bury my face in his shoulder as the sobs overtake me. I know I have to be mature here and accept what’s going on but, at the same time, I can’t shake the fact that things are going to be different from here on out. He’ll have a blood mate. A partner in crime to share things with. Things that, as a mortal, I’m not allowed to know. Sure, they might be strangers now, but soon they’ll grow to have secrets and inside jokes and stories they share with one another and I’ll just be that aging human, on the outside, looking in.

This whole thing really sucks. Maybe I should have just stayed with high school sex god Jake Wilder when I had the chance. Sure, he may have been a little slobbery with his kisses, but at least he was around my own age and would stay that way!

“Hi, guys!”

A bright, chipper voice cuts through my gloomy thoughts. Magnus pulls away from our embrace and my eyes fall upon the person I least want to see in the whole world.

“Hello, Jane,” Magnus says in a gravelly voice and for a moment I wonder if he’s been crying, too. “I didn’t realize you planned to dine here this evening.”

“Well, I heard it was really the only cool place in town for bloodsuckers like ourselves,” she replies, throwing her arms around my boyfriend. I love how she’s already calling herself a vampire, even though she hasn’t gone through with the biting yet.

Magnus pats her awkwardly on the back, then pulls away. Her eyes fall on me and let’s just say they’re not exactly friendly. “Am I interrupting something?”

she asks pointedly.

I open my mouth to say yes, yes she is and she needs to leave Club Fang and never come back, but Magnus is too quick.

“Not at all,” he says. “Have a seat.”

I squeeze my hands into fists. Have a seat?
Have a seat?
Did he just tell that bitch to have a seat? The one he claims will never come between us is now literally between us, squashed into a table designed for two and ordering a cappuccino with a double shot of A negative. Which is completely ludicrous since she’s not even a vampire yet and has zero reason to be drinking blood.

“This is good, actually,” Magnus says. “It’ll give you two a chance to get acquainted. Jane, this is Sunshine McDonald, my girlfriend.”

“Oh Mags, that’s so cute. You have a human girlfriend! I love it!” She offers me a small white hand and I notice that Rayne was totally right about the pink vampire designs on her fake nails. So cheesy. “Hello, Mortal,” she says in total baby talk, as if I’m four years old. “How are you tonight?”

Is she for real? “Um, Jane, I don’t know if you’ve looked in the mirror lately, but I don’t see any fangs in your mouth either,” I snark, unable to help myself. This chick is way too much.

She waves a hand dismissively. “Simply a temporary technicality. I’ve already got through all the training and am officially certified by the council. In a few days, I will be as undead as a doornail.” She tosses me a patronizing smile. “It’s kind of complicated, Sunshine,” she adds. “I don’t expect you to fully understand our ways.”

I squeeze my hands into fists. Complicated? I’d give her complicated. How about some complicated right up her ass? If only Rayne were here. God, sometimes it really sucks to be the helpless human half of team twin. Magnus places a hand on my knee under the table, an attempt to calm me down I guess. “So, Sunny, Jane comes to us from England, where she just completed her Master of Science degree at Oxford,” he explains. “With a concentration in political theory.”

I suck in a deep breath, trying to channel my inner Zen, for his sake at the very least. “Wow,” I say. “That’s . . . impressive. And to think I barely passed Western Civ last year.”

Jane snorts. “Western Civ?” she repeats. “What, are you, like, in high school?”

To my chagrin, she starts laughing. Loudly. “Ohmigod, you are! You’re in high school. That’s so adorable!” She turns to Magnus. “You’ve been robbing the cradle, huh, baby?”