Birth of the Vampire (The Vanderlind Realm) (6 page)

“Six-thirty,” she told me. “That should give us plenty of time.”

As I hurried over to the moms with crayons and kids menus in hand, I felt strangely excited. It was almost as if Erika was being nice. All I had to do was find someone to cover the end of my second shift, get home, shower, do my hair, and convince Uncle Kevin that I wasn’t going out to have sex with the entire football team. How challenging could that be?

Chapter 7

Dorian

I’m embarrassed to admit that I was more excited about the teenage mortal party than I was willing to reveal to Jessie and the rest of my family. Daniel was his usual breath of stale air about my attending the event, remarking cleverly, “Oh. Will we all be taking on mortal charity work for the holidays?”

The trouble with vampires—and I speak from over eighties years of study in the field—is that we’re all so damn convinced of our own superiority. But is a man dying of malaria convinced he is better than his fellow men because he was bitten by an infected mosquito? Most vampires are no better at being the undead than they were at being the living.

I was at a bit of a loss as to what to wear for the festivities. The undead spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about their wardrobes. It was strange that when you had eternity at your fingertips you could get so bogged down in the minutia of life.

How did one dress to fit in at a party of modern mortal teenagers? I really had no idea. I think it was sometime in the late 1960s that well-tailored clothes seemed to fall out of fashion. At first it was just in America, but then it quickly spread to the far corners of the globe. I didn’t know whether to blame it on laziness or modern fabrics, but I missed the days when men had their collars starched and women knew how to properly lace up a corset.

I knew if I showed up in something baggy, I’d feel more out of place than I would in any ridiculous costume I could don for a fancy dress ball. Why did young men want to wear clothes that were large enough to conceal a conjoined twin? Modern fashions made little sense to me. I had to wonder if young women enjoyed the look of baggy trousers. Not that I was planning on luring a mortal female into anything more than innocent conversation, but it was interesting to ponder.

In the end, I decided to just wear whatever struck me from the wardrobe I had available during my visit. I wasn’t trying to impress the children, after all. I was just trying to not cause a commotion.

I found Jessie unusually anxious about attending the party. He was convinced that his precious girl was in danger and that she, or any other guest at the party, could be attacked by a member of the undead without any warning. And that, in my opinion, was the problem with mortals. They were so fragile. Their very lives were always hanging in the balance from numerous activities that they participated in every day yet paid little attention to while doing. The fact that most adult humans drove around in cars always fascinated me. None of them seemed to realize that they were hurtling toward very solid objects at great rates of speed. And rather than paying attention, they chose to talk or sing or do numerous things on their phones, all the while blithely assuming that their mortality was postmarked for a much later date. It was absolutely bizarre behavior for beings who didn’t even have a protective shell.

I could tell that my cousin was constantly thinking about his mortal love. He’d always had a knight-in-shining-armor complex, even back when he was a human. And I couldn’t blame him, in a way. He’d lost the first mortal he’d loved in some sort of wretched tragedy, so I was sure that made this second mortal all the more precious.

Still, I wanted to enjoy my evening, so I was really hoping Jessie would lighten up.

Chapter 8

Haley

Finding someone to cover the end of my shift turned out to be surprisingly easy. There were barely any customers, so Debbie said she could just handle the end of my shift. I think she was excited that I actually had something to do that involved other kids my age.

Uncle Kevin wasn’t even home when I got there. I had no idea where he was, and I didn’t care, just as long as I could get back out of the house before he returned. My luck stayed with me, and even by the time I was scrawling a quick note saying, “Going to a party with Ashley. Shouldn’t be home too late,” he still wasn’t around to give me the third degree.

With each additional piece of luck, I began to feel better and better. There was still the Tommy weirdness, but I had to remember he was a teenage boy. And that, apparently, was a bizarre state to be in. He probably didn’t even realize he was being an inconsiderate jerk. Wasn’t that one of the symptoms of teenage-boy syndrome—complete obliviousness to other people’s feelings. I decided I was just going to go to the party with a positive attitude and see what happened.

Erika lived in one of the nicer houses in Tiburon. It wasn’t the biggest, but it was still about three times larger than the one I shared with Uncle Kevin. It had a manicured lawn and a three-car garage. I had left the house feeling pretty cute, but by the time I climbed the front steps to ring the bell, I felt positively shabby.

“Hey,” Erika said, yanking open the door almost the exact second after my finger left the button. Her father was Korean and her mother was German, which left Erika looking like some fabulous blue-eyed manga character. The rumor was that she modeled in Asia over the summers, and I could believe it. She was really pretty in an unusual way.

There weren’t a lot of families with Asian heritage in Tiburon. I was pretty sure if she hadn’t been so damn gorgeous, she would have been ostracized for being different. It was that kind of town. But it was hard to snub a girl who looked like she’d just fallen out of an animated movie. “Come on in,” she said. There was a brief flash of apprehension across her pretty face as I stepped over the threshold. She glanced around the street before shutting the door. I didn’t know if that was because there had been some problems in Tiburon in the last few weeks or if she just didn’t want anyone seeing me walk into her house.

Erika’s house was a cool blend of European and Asian art. Silk pillow covers in rich colors adorned couches and chairs, made even more vibrant by the whiteness of the walls. Many pieces of the furniture were a dark carved wood that I knew I would be afraid to sit on for fear of scratching an antique. On one wall were several framed photos of a very pretty model who looked like Erika, but a really sophisticated version of the girl. I had to assume the rumors of her modeling career were true.

“Do you want anything to drink before we head up to my room?” she asked. “That’s where all my makeup and stuff is.”

“Um … A glass of water would be great,” I told her, trying to conceal my excitement that she was actually treating me like a real guest.

I followed Erika into the kitchen, where she filled two glasses with water out of a pitcher and then put a plate of carrot sticks and celery on a tray. “I always like to snack before a party,” she told me. “If I show up and I’m too hungry then I always end up eating a bunch of junk.”

“But you’re so skinny,” I said, a little surprised that she ever thought about those kinds of things.

She nodded her head a little. “Yeah, but I work at it.”

I wondered if Ashley and the other girls knew that bit of information or if it was something that Erika only felt comfortable saying to me because I wasn’t part of her group.

Erika’s room was colorful chaos. By the multitude of beautiful silk robes and curtains and pillows, it was obvious that she had been to Asia numerous times. I tried to suppress a wave of envy I felt wash over me. Some day, I really wanted to travel.

She had a vanity table that was literally covered in makeup. She had three different tackle boxes on the floor. They were all open, displaying stacks of various little trays, and those were all filled with makeup, too.

“Okay,” Erika said as she munched on a celery stick. “Let’s get started.” She turned on a bright light that she shined directly in my eyes. Peering into my face, she asked, “Do you know what kind of look you’re going for?”

“Uh …” I really hadn’t thought about it. I was too busy trying to manage work and thinking about the party and worrying about Uncle Kevin and fretting over Tommy. “I have no idea,” I admitted. Uncle Kevin would have a fit if I came home dunked in makeup. Ashley wore a ton, but that didn’t seem to faze him. “Something natural, I guess.”

Erika nodded, her eyes never leaving my face. “I can see that,” she said. “A lot of girls our age overdo it with the makeup.” Then in a more confidential tone, she added, “Sometimes I just want to shout at them, your face is not a coloring book.”

I had to laugh. Her criticism of our classmates was so unexpected. “Or maybe you could just tell them to stop coloring outside the lines.”

Erika smiled back at me. “I like that one. I might write that down to use in my blogcast.”

I blinked at her a few times. “So you’re really going to do a video makeup blog?”

“I think so,” she said. Then she sighed, her shoulders visibly lifting and lowering. “I don’t know. I mean, it’s a lot to put out there.” She turned away to pick through some brushes she had on her vanity. “I just don’t want people to be all critical. You know what I mean?” She gestured for me to sit on the small stool that matched the vanity.

I had the feeling she didn’t mean the random stupid comments people post online. She was talking about people’s opinions a little closer to home. I was surprised. Erika appeared so cool and confident; it never occurred to me that she cared what anyone else thought. Or that anyone would think to criticize her. But our high school was filled with kids constantly talking behind each other’s backs, so I guess I shouldn’t have been that surprised.

“I definitely know what you mean,” I told her.

Erika had been staring at my face, but then she looked me in the eyes for a moment. She chewed on her lower lip and then nodded. It felt like we shared a moment of understanding.

“Here,” she said, pulling a few baby wipes out of a box dispenser. “Wipe off whatever you’ve got on now and we’ll start from scratch.”

As Erika got to work on my face, I couldn’t help but be impressed. She had so many brushes and pots and glosses. “You should do this professionally,” I said as she sculpted my brows with a perfectly sharpened eyebrow pencil.

“That’s the plan,” she told me. “That’s why I want to start the blog. So I can build my reputation.”

“Really?” I was a little surprised. “Why don’t you just keep modeling? I mean, isn’t the pay pretty good?”

“I do all right over the summers,” she admitted. “But I’m too short to work in America or Europe. And besides, I have to think of what I’m going to do after modeling.”

“College?” I suggested.

“Exactly,” she agreed. “But my parents will only help with tuition if I go for something practical like a CPA or whatever.”

I would have killed to have a family member offer to help me with any kind of tuition. But I didn’t say anything because I felt like we were bonding, and I didn’t want to make her feel bad. “So what do you want to do?”

“I want to do makeup for the movies. Not like blood and guts or anything but just like the regular stuff people wear. You know? That’s my ideal job. But I could do makeup for runway shows and stuff as well. And then maybe design my own line of organic makeup someday.”

“Wow,” I couldn’t help but exclaim. “I’m just hoping to scrape enough money together to get through college and then maybe land some kind of middle management job or something.”

“Yeah, right.” Erika grinned at me like she knew I was kidding. “You have to have bigger dreams than that. You’ve got to aim high.”

“That is aiming high,” I said in a small voice, trying not to show I was hurt. It was obvious she didn’t realize I was starting from a pretty big hole.