HORROR THRILLERS-A Box Set of Horror Novels (46 page)

They had lived in
the house since she was born. Their neighbors knew them enough to
speak to. Some neighbors had moved in and moved out again, their
incomes taking them to more sophisticated habitats. The ones who
stayed kept to themselves, so that a family of vampires could live
unnoticed by curious humans.

Two of Dell's
friends lived on the same street; she'd grown up with them. They had
spent nights at one another's houses, had backyard barbecues
together, played dolls under the shade of the crape myrtle. She had
gone swimming with them at the neighborhood pool, discussed boys with
them, and traded clothes.

Knowing her so
well, would they ever guess she had changed? She couldn't let that
happen. They'd never known about Eddie or her parents. Why should she
think they'd discover her secret? No one believed in vampires anyway.
It was the stuff of movies and books and TV shows. Quite a popular
myth in entertainment now and again, but that made the reality of
them even more fantastic. If Hollywood made them up, how could they
be real? Impossible.

And some of the
movies! They made her family laugh. They made them fall off their
chairs laughing. What idiot had done those scripts, what nincompoop
had written those books, they asked one another?

Dell had just
rented an old video about vampires starring James Woods, one of her
favorite actors. Even he could not make the inane dialogue come out
as real—and if he couldn't, no one could. It was that bad. In
the movie it was all the Catholic Church's fault there were vampires.
An exorcism in the 1600s had gone badly. Hah! If only that was what
it was. How easily the mistake could have been rectified. Near the
end of the movie, with Jimmy Woods ransacking a vampire town with his
trusty steel bow-and-arrow contraption, the arrow connected to a
steel cord hooked to a Jeep to haul vampires out into the sun to
burn, Dell got up and savagely turned off the VCR. This kind of thing
made her angry. It made vampires look . . . like . . . animals. Rabid
animals that had to be put out of their misery.

She wished that one
day she could tell Hollywood how it really was, how difficult it was
to maintain a normal existence, how heartbreaking it was to know you
were cut off from mankind, how the prospect of living for many
lifetimes over drained the soul of pity and hope. Not that they would
believe her or that she would ever really want to tell them. No. She
would not want Mentor tracking her down, taking her off to some
dreary old monastery.

So her friends had
their heads full of stupid movie ideas of what vampires should be and
would never be looking for someone like her anyway. There was no
reason for her closest friends to even have the thought that she was
something other than human.

It would be the
same as believing she was an alien from outer space, hatched from an
egg.

Unless she did
something really stupid, no one would ever know.

Then again, if she
didn't learn how to breathe properly, she was going to be in one hell
of a lot of trouble, she thought, realizing she hadn't taken a breath
in minutes.

She sucked in air
and let it out as she walked the house, room to room. If she ran, she
would have to exert her will and pretend she was breathless. If
someone were to accidentally knock her down or if she fell—which
she supposed she probably wouldn't, ever again, unless it was to fool
someone, she would have to pretend she'd lost her breath. She must
recall how she'd breathed naturally for seventeen years,
unconsciously, and get into the habit of it all over again.

On the second day
she thought she had mastered breathing so that it came more naturally
to her. It was funny how the air tasted. It was as if the little sacs
in her lungs had taste buds and relayed them to her brain, the same
as her tongue did. The air in the living room sometimes recalled the
taste and scent of popcorn left over from human guests. Sometimes it
tasted of the tweed fabric on the sofas and sometimes it just seemed
it was a room full of dust despite the fact that her mother was a
neat housekeeper. The air in her bedroom was made up of distinct
scents of lipstick and foundation powder and deodorant and peach
toilet water. The bathroom—she tried to stay out of the
bathroom. It tasted downright foul, with old, stale scents coming up
from the drains of the tub and sink. Those particular bodily
functions had ceased along with the end of her intake of food and
drink. Pure blood did not produce waste. The bathrooms now were just
places where they bathed and shaved.

On her second day
home alone when Eddie got off the school bus, Dell met him at the
door. He threw down his schoolbooks on the sofa and made for the
kitchen. He never had to study anymore. His memory was phenomenal.
All he had to do was glance over pages and they were committed
forever to memory. That was a change Dell was looking forward to. Now
perhaps she'd truly understand chemistry. She would soon tackle her
father's computer, go on the Internet, and study the online
encyclopedias. She'd end up acing her tests. She'd have more
knowledge than a college grad. She wouldn't even need to go to
college, except for the sheepskin she might want to show the world so
they'd believe she was educated.

She followed Eddie
to the kitchen, watched him take, a bag from the white cardboard box,
and loft it higher than his face. He hadn't even said hello to her
yet.

"You get
really hungry at school, don't you?" she asked.

"Mmmm."
He had his fangs in the bag, but he cut his gaze to her.

"Isn't it
funny? It feels almost like when we were human and needed to eat
food."

He nodded.

"But it's not
really food, the blood. It just keeps us vibrant, gives us our energy
back. It doesn't even go into our stomachs. And the hunger isn't
centered there, is it? It's like . . . all over our bodies . . . or
mostly in our brains. Like if our brains had teeth, they would crawl
out to search for blood." The thought gave her a shiver. It made
her think of zombie movies. More dumb stuff from Hollywood. She
rubbed her arms.

"Mmmm."

He finished
draining the bag and, with his foot, hit the garbage pail pedal. He
dropped the bag inside. They were very careful to double bag their
garbage for pickup. They didn't want some garbage man breaking open
one of the bags all over the street, strewing dozens of plastic
transfusion bags that were slick with rotting blood.

Eddie turned to
her. "Is that what you do all day here, think about how
everything's different?"

"Well, yeah, I
guess I do. What did you think about?"

"Scaling Mount
Everest,"

"No joke?"

He laughed, passing
her by, heading for his room. "Yeah, it's a joke. I don't
remember what I thought about. Girls, maybe."

She had to remember
he'd changed two years before, so he was fourteen now even though he
didn't look it. He was definitely in the girl stage. Some things
stayed the same.

"I have some
questions," she said, following on his heels.

He plopped down on
his twin-sized bed, swinging his feet up, and put his hands behind
his head, staring at the ceiling. "Shoot."

"You mentioned
girls. You think about girls a lot, I guess. What are you going to do
about it?"

"About what?"
He hadn't taken his gaze off the ceiling, as if her questions might
have their answers written there.

"About girls.
Are you going to date? Have a girlfriend?"

He closed his eyes
and didn't respond for several seconds. Finally, he said, "Mentor
discussed that with me. He'll get around to it with you, too."

"Tell me what
he said."

"I think he
should tell you. Or what's the point of having Mentor?"

"Eddie!"

He opened his eyes
and looked at her. "What?"

"Tell me,"
she said impatiently.

He shrugged. "You
can't get involved . . . uh . . . romantically . . . with humans."

She had been afraid
of that. Ryan Major's face floated into her mind. The boy who had
just transferred to her school and who, before she'd changed, she had
been hoping to find a way to meet. He didn't even know her yet. And
now he probably never would. Some other girl, a cheerleader no doubt,
would snag his attention and Dell would be lonely. All of her life!
All of her many lives!

She sank down onto
the side of her brother's bed. He moved his legs over to make room
for her. "Do our kind ever fall in love? With another vampire,
maybe?"

"I don't
know."

"So we go
through all the years to come without . . . without loving anyone?"

"Mentor didn't
say that."

"I guess he
wouldn't. I mean, Mom and Dad fell in love."

"Yeah, but
they met before they changed," Eddie said carefully.

"Well? What
did Mentor say? It isn't like our emotions died. How do we keep from,
well, from falling in love?"

"You need to
ask Mentor."

"I'm asking
you!" She hit one of his legs with her fist. How come he was
still a pesky kid brother? She wished he was thirty and smart.

"Well, I'm not
thirty," he said, reading her mind. "But I am smart."
He grinned widely. "Mentor said . . ." He paused.

She hit him again
with her fist to jostle him.

"Stop it! That
hurts. He said it's like the hunger. You don't want to ever kill
someone, right?"

"Right. He
told me that. How I might have to fight off the urge."

"You do the
same thing about boys."

"I have to
fight off falling in love?"

"Something
like that."

"That's
horrible! Mom and Dad found one another, and Grandma and Grandpa.
Even Uncle Boyd and Uncle Daniel."

"I think they
were all human and together before . . ." Eddie said.

"Oh. But Mom
and Dad knew they might become vampire.”

"Now you have
the gist of it," Eddie said.

"But if they'd
already changed, they would still have gotten together, right?"

"I guess."

"You're saying
then that I just have to stay away from humans. My only choice is
someone like me."

"Ask Mentor."

Dell gave up. She
rose from the bed and stomped out of the room to show her
displeasure. She didn't want to talk about love and boys and marriage
anyway. It had just come to her, that's all. What did he think, that
she cared?

Eddie was sitting
on the living room sofa holding his book bag when she entered the
room.

"I wish you'd
stop that." She meant how he appeared somewhere else all of a
sudden. She'd left him on his bed and yet here he was in the living
room.

"I can't help
it if I can move instantaneously and you can't."

"I can't yet."

He grinned at her
and unzipped his bag. "Give me a minute to flip through my
history notes. I have a test tomorrow."

She found the
remote and turned on the TV. "I hate TV," she said, feeling
petulant and wanting to criticize everything around her.

"Then don't
watch it."

She saw him open a
notebook and begin turning the pages rapidly. In less than two
minutes he closed it again and stuffed it back into the book bag.

She studiously
ignored him. So what if she couldn't do anything with her powers yet?
So what if there was no point in trying to talk to Ryan Major? She
flipped the channel changer, going through various HBO cable
channels. All the movies were either action flicks or romantic
comedies. She was not in the mood for either.

"You're
seriously pissed, aren't you?" Eddie asked. She changed the
channel again.

"Look, there's
more to it than what I said. You'll just have to talk to Mentor about
these things."

"Okay!"
She mashed the channel changing button hard and saw the CNN news come
on. She left it there, watching pictures of a flood in Ohio.

"No point in
getting mad at me. It's not my idea. I'm left out in the cold, too,
you know."