Eternal Kiss (29 page)

Jen’s parents were waiting for them in the kitchen. All the lights were on: the room looked as bright and white as the inside of a marble tomb. Her father was leaning against the counter, her mother sitting at the table, turning a cold cup of coffee around and around in her hands. She looked up when Jen came in, Gabby leading her by the hand like a trusting child.

Seeing the blood all over her daughter, she paled. “
Jen
,” she whispered.

“I’m all right,” Jen said, automatically, but her mother was looking past her, at her cousin.

“What happened?” Jen’s mother asked Gabby. “Did she kill him?”

“He’s dead, all right,” Gabby said. “Colin.” She pointed toward a chair. “Sit down, Jen.”

Jen sat. A great feeling of unreality had come over her, as if she were floating through a dream she knew was a dream. She was in her house, but it wasn’t really her house. This was her kitchen, but not. These were her parents, but not. The words they said to her, to Gabby, had no meaning.

“Where’s the body?” It was her father, still leaning against the counter. His face was set, almost expressionless. For the first time, Jen noticed that there was a duffel bag at his feet.

“The cemetery. Up by the lake,” Gabby said.

“I’ll take care of it.” Jen’s dad hoisted the duffel, affording Jen a brief glimpse of what was inside—a shovel, a knife, some lighter fluid. Tools. She stared as her father patted her mother on the shoulder and went out through the side door, shutting it carefully behind him.

“I don’t understand,” Jen said, softly, not to anyone in particular, and not expecting an answer, either.

“Of course you don’t,” Gabby said, an odd sharpness in her tone. “You don’t know anything. You couldn’t possibly understand.”

“Gabrielle.
Please
.” Jennifer’s mother stood up. Her back was very straight, and she looked at Gabby with a sort of tired disapproval. “Now is not the time.”

Jennifer watched her mother with dazed eyes as she took a white dishtowel from the rack and dampened it under the sink. She came over to her daughter, and tenderly cleaned the blood from her face, even the crusted blood at the corners of her mouth, sponging the stains from her hands, turning the white
towel pink. Jen sat silently, letting her mother minister to her as if she were a child and the sticky stuff all over her was spaghetti sauce or melted red Popsicle.

“He wasn’t a vampire,” Jen said finally, staring at the bloody towel. “Was he?”

“Of course not,” Gabby snapped. “He was just a stupid kid who thought all that goth stuff made him look cool. You’re the one who—”

“Gabby.” Jen’s mother’s tone warned.

“He said I was special,” Jen whispered. “Different.”

“You must have liked him very much,” said her mother. “Humans have a way of sensing when a vampire desires them. It causes them to feel desire in return.” Her voice was matter-of-fact. “It makes it easier to find prey that way.”

“You
knew
,” Jen whispered. “You knew what I was.”

Her mother patted the side of her face gently. “I didn’t know. I hoped the curse had passed by you like it passed by Gabby. Sometimes it skips a generation or two. Part of me hoped it had died out completely in the family. Seeing what my mother went through …” She sighed. “Hunting in the shadows, always fearing being caught. Your father’s had to clean up after her in the past. That’s why we moved here. To get away.”

“That’s why you wouldn’t let me go out with boys,” Jen realized. “Not because you were afraid for me, but because you were afraid for
them
.”

“We knew that if you did have the curse, if you were … what you are, it would start showing itself when you were a
teenager. When you got interested in boys. The desire to feed on blood, it’s all tangled up with … with adult feelings.
Romantic
feelings.”

She still can’t bring herself to just say
sexual feelings
, Jen thought. Even though I just killed someone. Even though I’m sitting here covered in his blood, she thinks I’m a child.

Jen turned to look at Gabby, who was staring at her sadly. She looked so glum and miserable and ordinary. Jen almost felt sorry for her.

“You knew, too,” she said to her cousin. “Didn’t you?”

“My mom told me about the curse once she figured out I didn’t have it,” Gabby admitted. “Sorry I couldn’t tell you. But honestly, I didn’t think you had it, either. Not till Bridget started talking about Colin being a vampire and I saw how fascinated you were. It was weird, Jen.”

“Gabby warned us what was going on,” said Jen’s mother. “It gave us a little time to be prepared. See, you can’t control yourself right now, Jen. And that’s why you have to go live with your grandmother for a while. Someone will have to teach you how to be what you are.”

“I’m not doing that,” Jen said, turning back to her mother. “I’m not leaving here.”

Her mother looked startled. “We know what’s best for you—”

“No, you don’t,” Jen said. “You should have told me all this stuff before. You said you were protecting me, but you set me up. I killed Colin because of you.”

“And if you stay here, you’ll wind up killing someone else.”

“I guess you should have thought of that before,” said Jen. Gabby gave a startled laugh as Jen stood up, pushing her mother’s restraining hand away. “You called it a curse,” Jen added.

“It is a curse,” said her mother. “A family curse. Only the women in our family get it.”

“Maybe I don’t think it is one,” Jen said.

Her mother’s expression changed. Jen remembered what Gabby had always said about their grandmother—that everyone was afraid of her. Her daughters, too.

Her mother stood up, facing her. “You’re upset,” she said. “You should go to bed. We can talk about this in the morning.”

“Sure,” Jen said. “In the morning.”

She turned and walked out of the kitchen, up the stairs toward her bedroom. She caught sight of herself in the mirror that hung on the landing. Her clothes were stiff with dried blood. Her face was luminous, her eyes glowing. She looked—different. Under the blood, her skin seemed to shine. She was almost beautiful.

She smiled, wide as she could, showing the sharp tips of her needle incisors, the ones Colin had thought were so funny and so fake. She thought of the way his skin had crunched under her teeth when she bit into it, like the skin of an apple.

Her mother had been right. There would be other boys.

I
T WAS ALMOST
time—a few minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve. New Year, new vampire hunter. Would I be the one?

I sat down shakily in the ancient stone chapel of the former Universidad de Salamanca, the most ancient university in Spain. When the war broke out, most of the universities in Europe shut down. The Americans figured the vampires would never attack us on our native soil. We paid dearly for our arrogance.

For the last twelve years, Salamanca had been the home of the
Academia Sagrada Familia Contra los Vampiros
. It was the school for vampire hunters—my school. There were foreign students from all over the world, because the Academia was the best. Academia graduates took out the most vamps, and they had the highest survival rate. There were six living Academicians; Juan Maldonaldo had been a hunter for nine years. Unbelievable.

Not that the survival rate was very good—out of the original ninety-six of us in our class, we were down to eighteen. We shuffled into the chapel in our ceremonial black robes, our hoods concealing our faces. We were about to take our final exam. Only one of us would pass.

I had dreaded this moment for two long years—the moment my foot crossed the threshold of the Academy—and feared it for two months. Diego, our Master, had warned us that as the time grew near, we would experience high anxiety. About a dozen of my classmates woke screaming from nightmares. There was a lot of jogging in the middle of the night. Even though drugs and alcohol were forbidden, I knew that people were swigging wine and taking Xanax so they could get some rest.

None of them carried the extra burdens—or the accompanying terror and guilt—that I did.

I should say something, tell someone
, I thought. But I would sooner cut out my own heart than tell them what I’d done. What I might do.

At the thought, my heart skipped beats, and I clung to the back of the carved mahogany pew.

In the last two months, I had broken a lot of rules. For some of the things I had done, they didn’t even have rules. No one would have dreamed of crossing the line I had leaped across last Halloween.

Exactly two months ago, on October 31, everything had changed. The Vampire War had taken a brutal turn when the vamps had murdered the daughter of the president of the United States. The Cursed Ones didn’t put it that way, of course. They claimed they had “liberated” her—changed her into one of them—and that
our
side had murdered her when we drove a stake through her heart and cut off her head.

Like everyone else, I demanded payback. I couldn’t wait to
take revenge. Although we were pledged to run together, I wanted a vampire to die by my own hand. I ran with my
grupo
across the ancient medieval bridge as the dying sun turned the stone city a golden color. We scoured the hills for blood drinkers, Spaniards and Americans, Koreans and Swedes. In our body armor, we sang our song, which had always sounded so corny to me before. Translated into English, it went like this:

We are the vampire hunters.

Our cause is holy.

From Spain we come to save the world.

Race from us into the sunlight, demons of hell!

Better that you die in flames than by our hands!

That night, Antonio de la Cruz was by my side. Sometimes he held my gloved hand in his as we charged through the darkness. My crossbow smacked the bruises I had gotten in Advanced Streetfighting the day before.

Fog rose around us like smoke from a wildfire. I heard shouts and Antonio’s hand left mine. I called for him; he answered, very far away. I saw a face floating in the fog before me, and I ran toward it. But it wasn’t Antonio.

It was Jack.

Don’t think about him
, I ordered myself, my vision blurring as I focused on the stained glass windows of the saints. The Savior melted and blurred.
Think about your legacy, and the promises that you made. Think of your grandparents.

Charles “Che” and Esther Leitner, my grandparents, were former revolutionaries, or at least that was their term for it.
Nowadays we called them terrorists. During the Vietnam War, they had bombed banks and military bases. I had a picture of Papa Che and Gram in a locket around my neck. In the picture, Gram was my age. Her super-curly hair—like mine—tumbled down to her waist. She wore a leather headband, round wire-rimmed glasses, an army jacket, and a pair of tattered jeans. My grandfather could have been her twin, except he was taller.

They were so proud of me for joining the Academia. My parents … not so much. Not at all, in fact. They were pacifists, and they said that it was time to stop the fighting and listen to the vampires, find a way to coexist. We fought about it, bitterly.

My grandparents said my parents were hopeless dreamers. When the war became more brutal, I sided with Gram and Papa Che. There was no way we could sit down and negotiate with the vampires. They were monsters, ravening beasts. We might as well walk up to them and show them our necks.

But now …

“Let us come to order,” Diego said, as he swept into the chapel from the side door by the altar. We all had to learn Spanish. In the old days, before the vampires declared war on us, students came to Salamanca to learn Spanish, not hand-to-hand combat.

Diego stood in front of his ornate wooden chair, which was upholstered in black velvet. Black was our color, the symbol of darkness. The sun was not for us. More than once I had stopped to think how much more in common we hunters had with the vampires than with the rest of humanity.

So, it begins
, I thought, trembling. The bell would toll at midnight, both a celebration of the new year and dirge for the seventeen of us who would not become vampire hunters. The vampires would hunt all of us for the rest of our lives. Our identities were known. Only one of us would receive the sacred elixir that would strengthen him or her for the ordeal ahead, and make them quick to heal. The rest of us would be vulnerable, easier to kill.

The elixir itself was magic. Rumor had it that it was made up of some incredibly rare herbs that could only be harvested on a single night of the year and lay in the heart of one of the vampire strongholds. Armand, one of the priests at the school, was the only one who could make the elixir, and there was never enough for more than one hunter.

I looked across the stone chapel at Antonio, who was busy crossing himself. He was dressed in a black robe, like me. Beneath the robe he wore body armor, like me. His profile was sharp. Tendrils of loose black hair brushed his cheeks. Like every other girl at the Academia, I had had an intense crush on Antonio. It took almost a year to understand that his heart had no room for romance or girls. Vampires had slaughtered his entire family. He was the only one left.
They took everything from me
, was what he said. He burned with a hatred that astounded me; it made him seem like a different kind of being.

In his presence I often felt foolish. No one had slaughtered my family members, or friends. I had come to study how to fight vampires because it sounded cool, glamorous, and because
I wanted to be more like my grandmother than my mother. I had been a stupid kid. As my thoughts drifted back to Jack, I realized that I still was.

On the night I met Jack—Halloween night—Antonio had told me that of all the girls in the class, he respected me the most. Would he still have respected me if he had known that I had fallen in love with a vampire? No, he probably would have killed me himself.

“You understand,” Antonio had said, “why I cannot …” And then, and there, I knew that Antonio loved me. I don’t know what kind of private battle he had fought, but he had lost it.

It was too late, but I never told him that. We never talked about it, and so I never had to tell him that I had been so careful not to let my feelings deepen for what I had assumed was a lost cause. Since he never told me that he loved me, I had no reason to tell him that old cliché—that while I loved him like a brother, it went no further than that.

As if to make my point, I sat alone, like almost everyone else. The only two who sat together were Jamie and Skye, both red-haired. The rest of us guarded ourselves; we had learned to harden our hearts. Jamie, a fierce streetfighter from Northern Ireland, was the hardest of all of us. Skye, a London goth, liked him, but it was obvious that he was oblivious. I was afraid that my own choices tonight might kill them.

Or Antonio
, I thought, staring at the gut-wrenching carving of Christ Crucified hanging behind the altar. If you didn’t enter the Academia a believer, you became one: crosses, holy water,
and communion wafers really did work against vampires.
Most
vampires.

I knew one who was immune.

Or Jack
, I added to my prayers.
Don’t lay his death at my door.

I could see my breath. My stomach clenched as Diego looked straight at me.
He doesn’t know
, I reminded myself.
He can’t know. I’ve been so careful.

Beneath my black robe, my body armor was strapped on over a ratty old black sweater and a pair of faded, tattered jeans. It was what I’d had on the first time I met Jack. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was trying to say by wearing the same clothes, but I felt better with them on. Safer, maybe.

It was dangerous to feel safe. Possibly even fatal.

My grandparents had never felt safe. They had been on the run all their lives. Warrants for their arrests were still active.

“And so, on your last night, we are assembled,” Diego said.

I jerked upright. My thoughts were scattering. It was a nervous habit, a terrible one—“drifting,” I called it. I had been drifting when I met Jack. He could have killed me.

After all this time, I still wasn’t sure why he hadn’t.

“First we will say Mass, and then I’ll pair you up for your hunt this evening.” Diego nodded to the back of the church. “The archbishop himself will give you communion. You will be as well armed as the archangels.”

But only one of us would receive the elixir after tonight’s exam. It seemed so horribly wrong, so unfair. To go through all the training, and make the vows, and then to be denied the best
weapon our side had. They would try to protect us; some of us would make our way to other schools to try again. Or maybe to teach. But honestly? Most of us would die.

The archbishop and the altar celebrants arrived next, swaying down the center aisle as the altar boys and girls swung incense burners. One tall boy, a little younger than me, carried an enormous gold cross. The archbishop wore gold and white robes. He was old and solemn. Some people claimed that the church kept the war going because they wanted the vampires wiped out. There was even talk that the church had ordered the death of the president’s daughter to make sure no one softened toward the Cursed Ones.

At last the archbishop arrived at the altar. He raised his hand high and blessed all of us. I swallowed hard. My throat was so tight I was afraid I would choke to death.

The Mass proceeded. I had imagined this night a hundred times, a thousand. The pageantry of the ancient Latin mass. The heavy symbolism. I had even dreamed about it—bats flying from the altar to be transformed into white doves. But whatever comfort the Mass might bestow on others was wasted on me.

I was shivering. It was so very cold. Then finally the archbishop gestured for us to sit in the pews.

Diego stood beside the archbishop. He raised his chin and began to read from a list held a distance away from him.

“Jamie and Skye,” he began, announcing the first pair. Jamie glowered at Diego, earning a glare of disdain from the archbishop. Skye flushed to her roots.

“Eriko and Holgar,” he continued. The two gestured to each other in the drafty room.

I looked at no one, and no one looked at me. Antonio stared straight ahead. Maybe he knew.

“Jenn and Antonio,” said Diego, and there were actual sighs in the chapel, like steam. Some girls had not given up on Antonio. It seemed so ludicrous—and yet, I envied them. I hadn’t let any of my strong emotions out … before Halloween.

Diego finished reading the list. Then the midnight bells tolled, waterfalls of music purifying us, baptizing us.

There were vampires in the hills. They had been sighted. They knew that tonight we would come after them, and they had probably already sown the forests and the hills with traps for us. Last year’s vampire-hunter graduate had been slaughtered less than twenty-four hours after this very ceremony.

Then two by two, we took communion. I stood shoulder to shoulder with Antonio, as the short line progressed up the aisle, to accept the communion wafer and drink the ceremonial wine—the body of Our Savior, the blood of Our Savior. I was intensely aware of Antonio beside me. And then, as we knelt for our blessing, his hand brushed mine.

I had never understood why they sent us out two-by-two, as if we were animals on the ark, or Mormon missionaries—the Mormons kept each other company and guarded each other from sin, but they had a common goal: to convert others to their cause. We, however, were in direct competition with each other. Some of us believed that the Academia was lying to us; maybe
we were put together because after the examination was over, we would work together.

Then it was over, and we were filing out of the chapel. Someone had put a candle in my hand. The golden glow played over Antonio’s sharp features.

There had been talk of the savage vampire band in the woods. There were seven of them. Two of them were French, four Spanish, and one—the leader—was an American, named Jack. The Academia held Jack personally responsible for the deaths of thirty-six of my classmates.

This is insanity
, I thought, as outside the church quivers of wooden stakes were slung across our chests like bows and arrows. We carried packs of crosses, holy water, and communion wafers. Modern weaponry was not allowed, nor did it work—another inexplicable fact, among so many, that made up what we had been taught about vampires and vampirism.