Destined For a Vampire (12 page)

Savannah turned and walked cautiously to the door. I followed. So did Mr.

Grant.

He opened the door and held it while we exited. “Home by midnight.”

Savannah sighed. “Fine, Mr. Cleaver. Midnight.”

Mr. Grant smiled tolerantly, shaking his head in exasperation.

I was uncertain what I should do to help Savannah, but she took the reigns and reached out to grab hold of my forearm.

“Just gonna leave a blind girl to trip and fall, is that it?”

I laughed nervously. Her teasing took some getting used to.

“I’m kidding, Ridley. Just let me hold your arm and don’t get too far ahead of me. We’ll be fine.”

She said it so tenderly, so compassionately, as if she knew that I was struggling with my role in the night, with my role as her
friend
. I just wanted to hug her. Beneath all her joking, wise-cracking and goof-balling, Savannah was really pretty amazing. Devon had seen it first. It had taken the rest of us a little longer to catch on.

Once she was seated in the car, I shut the door and started to walk off. Her shriek stopped me.

“What?” I said, jerking open the door. “What is it?”

“You shut the door on my tail,” she said in a forlorn voice.

It was just then that I saw that her dress tapered off in the back to a long, narrow train that looked like an elegant tail, perfect for Medusa’s lower snakey half.

Savannah picked up the material and placed it gently in her lap, sniffling delicately.

“My tail! It’s broken.”

I know my face must’ve been comically horrified. Until I heard her laughing.

“You’re mean as the snake you’re wearing,” I said, slamming the door shut and walking around to the driver’s side.

“Gotcha ‘gin,” she boasted happily.

“Are you always like this?”

She pursed her lips for just a minute, while she thought. “Yeah, pretty much.”

“How does your dad stand it?”

“He laughs a lot.”

“I bet,” I said, starting the engine and shifting into gear.

Once we’d arrived at the school, there was practically a party around Savannah, our new school celebrity. She handled the spotlight with admirable aplomb, however, and I just stood back and watched her.

I searched the costumes for something that seemed like a Summer look or an Aisha style, but I saw neither of them, nor did I see Drew.

Maybe they’re not here yet,
I thought.
Or maybe they’re disguised better
than what you’d think, like as angels or something equally dichotomous.

To get my mind off them, I surveyed the gym. It was decorated with all sorts of macabre materials and paraphernalia. Tons of spider web loaded with spiders and bloody fingers and severed limbs hung above the dance floor. Black lights stood in all four corners, making the black seem blacker and the white seem to glow. There was a refreshments table set against one wall with a faux stone path that led to it. It wandered through headstones and fog, like you might find in a real cemetery—minus the zombie heads-and-hands emerging from the haze, of course.

I admired it all as the cheerfully costumed students continued to clamor around Savannah.

The loud music faded into the familiar thump of a not-quite-slow song. Its beat brought to mind steamy nights and writhing bodies. The sensual rhythm called to many of the people surrounding Savannah, beckoning them to the dance floor.

Scary couples and gruesome groups started to move in unison to the heavy bass. I searched the made-up and masked faces for Savannah until I located her bright, serpentine halo. She’d been lassoed into a dance by a dead cowboy I recognized.

He sat three rows behind me in study hall.

Suddenly aware of being the lone person not on the dance floor dancing, I turned to make my way around to the refreshments table. I was skirting the writhing mob of dancers when I felt a familiar tug in my belly.

I stopped in my tracks and looked around. Immediately, my heart sped up, banging like a drum, keeping time with the erratic expansion of my lungs as I grew more and more breathless.

I searched the faces for the one that occupied far too many of my thoughts, but I didn’t see him. I could’ve almost convinced myself that I’d been mistaken, but the magnetism that I felt intensified with every breath, assuring me that it was no mistake. Those invisible strings were pulling me, no
dragging
me into the middle of the crowd, where bodies were crushed together so tightly they moved as if they were one.

Weaving my way through perfumed and cologned figures, I felt like I was getting lost in the fray when I saw a tall, darkly cloaked figure watching me through a break in the mob.

He was dressed as Dracula. His robe was ebony satin with a blood red lining and the hood that covered his head shadowed all but his mouth.

My breath hitched in my throat and burned in my lungs. My pulse thumped wildly and my skin tingled in response to a presence that I couldn’t forget. It was Bo. Beneath the hood that concealed most of his face and the cloak that concealed most of his body, I knew it was him. I’d know him anywhere. I’d love him always.

I could see only his handsomely square jaw and chiseled mouth. My eyes hungrily memorized the lips that I’d never forget the taste of. I felt like I’d been starved of them for far too long.

As Bo’s hand rose slowly from his side, reaching out to me through the crowd of bodies, the words to the song carved themselves onto my heart. Bo was both my sweetest dream and my most beautiful nightmare.

Without hesitation, I stepped forward and slipped my hand into his. A little bolt of electricity shot up my arm when our skin made contact. Bo pulled me to him and I inhaled, reveling in the tangy scent that had teased me for what seemed like forever, and probably always would.

Bodies brushed me from every angle, every direction, but the only thing that I felt was Bo pressed to my front from chest to thigh. I looked up into the most consuming eyes I’d ever seen and I fell into them, sinking into the only place I ever really wanted to be.

I saw Bo’s lips move and, even above the music, I heard his whisper.

“I never thought I’d get to love someone so beautiful,” he said.

The words echoed through my soul and warmed me to my toes. With Bo staring down at me, his words in my ears, his body moving gently against mine, it was the most surreal moment—dream-like, so much so I never wanted to wake from it.

The music surrounded us, wrapping us in a pulsing cocoon of privacy amid the sea of bodies. I laid my palms flat against Bo’s chest as one of his hands snaked around my waist. The fingers of his other hand teased the skin of my arm as they made their way up to disappear beneath the hair at my nape. I felt them tangle in my hair and then curl into a light fist.

With one quick tug, Bo pulled my head to the side as he bent toward me.

I gasped when I felt his hot lips at my throat. I pressed my body closer to his, running my hands down the sides of his firm abdomen. I felt the hard muscles contract beneath my fingertips as Bo’s breath hissed through his teeth.

Lyrics about guilty pleasure wove a sensual web around us. My blood heated with thoughts of Bo’s skin on mine, covering me, sliding against me.

The friction of Bo’s body rubbing against mine, moving in time with the music, sang along my nerves and turned my core into a raging inferno. When I felt his tongue licking at the pulse that beat violently beneath my ear, I had to bite my lip to keep a moan from escaping.

“There’s no one like you,” he said, his lips tickling my sensitive skin as he spoke. “There’s no taste like you,” he sighed, trailing his tongue up to tease the lobe of my ear, drawing it gently into his mouth. “No feel like you,” he moaned, his hand moving to the base of my spine and pressing my hips into his. “There’s no one
that I need like I need you.”

My insides melted. I wanted to cry with the pleasure of it, the bitter-sweetness of it. I couldn’t imagine ever wanting someone as much as I wanted Bo. I didn’t think my heart could take it without exploding. I would gladly give up years of my life to be with him, if only for a little while. In the end, I knew it would be worth it.

Bo raised his head to look at me, his eyes searing me with a heat so intense, I felt it in my stomach. Without a word, he tightened his hold on me and lifted until my feet were several inches from the ground and my chest was plastered to his.

Slowly, he turned and walked out of the crush, away from the crowd.

He carried me toward a deserted corner of the gymnasium and into a short, dark hallway that led to a door that emptied out onto the stage in the auditorium right next door.

The music still thudded in my chest, obscuring the excited patter of my heart.

Bo walked to the back of the hallway, to its blackest point, and stopped, pushing me up against the wall and holding me there with his body. And then his mouth was devouring mine.

As his tongue tangled mercilessly with mine, I grabbed his shoulders and held on tight. I felt his hands at my thighs, his fingers working the material of my dress up until I could feel skin on skin.

I wanted Bo so badly it almost hurt. I wanted more. I wanted it all and the frustration of it was killing me.

At first, the scream sounded like it came from somewhere inside me, like the cry of my body for Bo’s attention suddenly became audible. But then I heard the music die and an uncharacteristic hush fall across the gymnasium, which lay only a few feet away.

Bo leaned back and looked at me, both of us breathing like we’d just run a marathon. Confusion and a little concern swirled in his beautiful, velvety eyes. A frown creased his shadowed brow as he let me slide to the floor. My dress shimmied down my legs and righted itself at my ankles as we both turned to look toward the gym.

Bo took my hand and led me from the dark, back out to where everyone was shuffling to get a better view of something that was happening around the refreshments table, near the exit.

The closer we got, I could hear that someone was crying. A girl. And one of the chaperones was soothing her, encouraging her to calm down and tell him what happened.

Bo and I pushed our way to the far right interior edge of the crowd so we could see. It was Bailey Adams. She was dressed as a cat in a skin-tight black suit.

The material was torn down her arm, her tail was missing and one of her ears was bent. A fine red spatter covered her face—blood. She’d obviously rubbed at it, causing it to streak across her cheek and smear her whiskers.

She was hiccupping, bawling her eyes out, trying to speak around her terror.

“Take your time, Bailey. Just tell me what happened. Are you hurt?”

“No. She didn’t want me. She took Jason.”

“Who? Who took Jason?”

“Summer. She took him.”

“Summer? Summer
Collins?”

“Yes,” Bailey cried, her sobbing renewed. “I think that’s who it was. She jumped out from behind the side of the school and attacked us. We both fell down to the ground, but it was him she wanted. She started biting him. She took two big chunks out of his face. Right in front of me. I-I-I saw her do it,” she stammered hysterically.

“I crawled over to him and grabbed his arm, tried to pull him away from her, but she wouldn’t let him go. She just chewed on him and kind of shook him, like alike a- a toy. Blood was going everywhere and- and then she got up, grabbed hold of his foot and dragged him off.”

Mr. Hall looked suspicious. “Bailey, are you sure that’s what you saw?”

“Uh-huh,” she said solemnly, nodding her head and wiping the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Summer Collins? Attacked Jason and…and…”

“Dragged him off,” she supplied.

“Dragged him off?”

“Right.”

“Could it have been a prank, Bailey? Are you sure what you saw was real?”

Onlookers started murmuring, looking at one another. A prank like that would be epic. But Summer? That just didn’t sound like her at all. Not the Summer I knew anyway. Of course, I hadn’t seen
that
Summer, the one I
did
know, in a while.

“Ok,” Mr. Hall sighed, resigned. “Let me call the police and then I’ll call your parents, alright?”

Bailey nodded, sniffling, as Mr. Hall pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911.

“I want everyone to stay inside until the police get here,” he announced as he waited for someone to come on the line.

Hushed whispers broke out among the masqueraders and the horde started to disburse a bit now that the spectacle was over. Bo took my hand and pulled me away from everyone else.

“Stay here,” he said. “I’m going to see if I can find them.”

“Do you think Summer’s a…a…” I said, looking at him meaningfully.

His brow furrowed. “That’s the thing. It doesn’t sound like it. A new one of us would’ve gone straight for the throat, not the face.”

“Then what are you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” he said vaguely. “Just stay here with Savannah. I’ll be back.”

And then, with a peck on my lips, Bo was gone. Just as quickly and mysteriously as he’d appeared at the dance, he left it. It was at least a full minute before something he’d said finally registered—Savannah.

I’d forgotten all about Savannah.

Frantically, I whirled about, searching the crowd for her vivid hair. I didn’t see her anywhere. Fear swelled in my throat like a suffocating balloon.

I started asking everyone I passed, “Have you seen Savannah?” All shook their heads. No one had seen her.

I found the dead cowboy she’d danced with and I asked him. He was marginally more helpful.

“She went to the bathroom right before Bailey came in freaking out. I haven’t seen her since.”

The knot in my throat grew and my chest squeezed in impending panic.

Ohmigod! Ohmigod! Ohmigod!

I flew from the gym, out the door and down the hall toward the first set of bathrooms I came to. Surely she would’ve used the closest ones since she was no longer able to see her way around.