Jane Jones (16 page)

“How did I become a vampire, then? If you never touched me,” I asked, challenging her.

Ms. Smithburg lowered her chin and looked at me with a pitying expression.

“Oh, dear. Your parents never had
the talk
with you?” she asked. “Well, this is awkward.” Her tone became derisive again. “Let’s see … sometimes when a man vampire and a woman vampire love each other very much …”

Now she was toying with me and I’d had enough. I stepped forward and leaned over her desk, to show that I wasn’t afraid of her, when really, I was kind of afraid of her. A lot.

“Just tell me,” I growled with bogus bluster.

“Oh, fine.” She pouted. “From what I can guess, when your family woke up and saw what had happened to them, they must have become hysterical. And then when you failed to die, like you should have, they must have become even more hysterical. Then, because they loved their little girl and couldn’t dream of living eternally without her, they decided to go ahead and turn you too. Unfortunately, what they didn’t know then was that when an immediate family member turns another, it has terrible results. It’s similar to inbreeding. At least that’s what I’ve heard from some elders within the community. You know, your family could learn a lot from the community, if they didn’t seem to love being such eccentric little outsiders. At any rate, their terrible error is certainly why you have that awful
blood-intolerance allergy that’s made your life so pathetic. It was a rookie mistake.”

I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach and I could barely breathe. I looked down at the floor and clutched the edge of the desk to steady myself.

“The good news,” said Ms. Smithburg, “is that you are useless to me. So you’re safe! If I had found you and your family sooner, before my husband’s health had declined so much, we might have been able to make do with just a donation. Now I’m afraid it will require more of a complete sacrifice. So I do apologize for that.” I raised my eyes from her desk and looked her full in her wicked face.

“You stay away from my family,” I ordered.

She leered and clucked condescendingly. “Such a fierce warning, Jane. But even if you were smart enough and strong enough to protect your family, the day will come when you’re not there,” she said. “We can wait for that day.”

With that, the minute hand on every clock in the school lurched forward in unison and the midday bell rang. Ms. Smithburg stood up, smoothed her skirt, and said, “Class dismissed!”

Before I could think to do or say anything, she was gone from the office and I was alone.

I banged through our back door and threw my backpack down on the kitchen linoleum.
I shoved my hand into the drawer where my mother stored our few kitchen implements and felt around for anything sharp. Nothing. Fine. I grabbed a spoon, flung open the freezer door, snatched the plastic zipper bag containing my supply of rare Bombay blood and slammed it down on the counter. I opened the bag and jabbed sharply at the icy red mass until a baseball-size chunk flew off and skittered into the sink. I reached up into the cabinet and grabbed one of the glasses my mother usually served the rest of my family’s blood meals in. My solid blood blob wouldn’t quite fit. Fine! I reached up for an old, cracked teacup that had been left in the cupboard by the previous occupants of our house. I wiped furiously at the cup with the damp dish rag that was hanging over the faucet, then tossed the frozen lump in and set it in the microwave to twirl around on the defrost setting.
Usually, I would step away from the microwave just in case it was giving off radioactive waves or something that might be harmful to vampires, but this time I stood right in front of it and stared through the glass as the blood melted and became a puddle within its vessel. When the oven beeped, I popped open the door, wrapped my hand around the cup and brought it to my face, breathing in the warm metallic scent as I prepared to—

“Jane, what are you doing home?” My mother, arriving in the doorway and seeing me, stopped and clutched at the front of her blouse in anxious surprise. “What’s going on here?” Never in my life had I been angrier with someone. I wheeled on her and before she could say another word, I bared my fangs and poured the gory contents of the cup into my mouth, swallowing all at once. In my entire time as a vampire, the thought of consuming so much blood at once hadn’t ever crossed my mind. Instantly, heat spread throughout my chest and limbs. My face tingled. It was undeniably intoxicating, and for the first time, I could understand the sinful appeal of gorging on some unsuspecting victim.

“Jane, what have you done?” She rushed toward the counter, picking up the bag that contained what was left of my food supply and examining the significant dent I’d made in disbelief. Then she dropped the frozen blood and grabbed
my face, looking into my eyes. “What have you done?”

“What have
I
done?” I cried. “What have
you
done? Huh? Maybe you should answer that.” I allowed my anger to boil over, and because of the surplus of blood coursing through my veins, it felt like flexing a taut muscle. Violent energy flowed through my skin and into my mother’s palms, causing her to tear her hands away from my cheeks. Good. I never, ever wanted her to touch me again.

“Jane. J-Josephine, I don’t know what you mean,” she whispered, with a stricken expression. “Tell me what it is.”

I stared at her for an uncomfortably long time until she finally had to look away and busy her stinging hands by putting the spoon in the sink and picking up my discarded cup. I was incensed.

“What it is?”
I shouted, veins popping out of my neck like cords. “What it
is
is that today I found out that we’re not the only ones who go around from town to town using aliases and being freaks. For example, my history teacher, Ms. Smithburg? Today I found out that that isn’t really her name after all. Her real name might sound kind of familiar, though. I believe it’s Ruth Pike. Does that ring a bell?”

The cup fell from my mother’s hands and shattered, sending bits of broken bloodstained china in every direction. Seconds after the crash, my father came through the
kitchen door, wearing flannel pajamas and a look of alarmed concern.

“What’s all the racket?” he demanded, running a hand through his wild bedhead.

“Oh, Jim,” my mother said. Her eyes were moist, which was easy for her, because she was normal as far as vampires go. She could make a teaspoon’s worth of tears when she really tried, unlike me on most days. On most days all I could do was wish that I was a slightly more ordinary version of a disgusting monster. And now I knew just who to blame for that.

“She told me everything,” I said. “She told me that I was as good as dead and that instead of letting me go, you decided to make me what you’d become so that we could be together forever. But what you didn’t know was that when a blood relative turns a blood relative, I’m what happens. An abomination who can barely live but can’t really catch a break and die either.” My mother covered her face with her hands as my father put a protective arm around her back, but I wasn’t finished. “You’ve spent so many years smothering me and being overprotective, and the crazy irony is that what I really could have used some protection against was my own mother! And Ma, you know the part that disgusts me most? It’s that you never had the guts to tell me the truth about what you did to me.”

“Josephine,” my father said grimly, “that’s enough.”

“Daddy,” I whimpered, “how can you defend what she did to me? How can you—”

“Magpie,” he interrupted, leaving my mother’s side and coming toward me. My mother uncovered her face and caught his arm to stop him.

“Jim, no,” she said. He stopped and put his hand on her hand and squeezed it, nodding once, slight and sad. Then he looked me in the eye.

“Magpie,” he whispered. “Your mother didn’t do this to you. It was me. I’m the one who was too afraid to let you go. I’m the one who did it. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.” I felt like the floor tilted and dropped away from me, and all I could hear was a sound like rushing water in my ears. My father closed in to hug me, but I threw off his arms, shaking my head.

“Don’t,” I said. “Please don’t touch me.” Though I’d felt despair more times than I cared to remember, it paled in comparison to the way I felt at that moment. For the first time, my soul felt as dead and cold as my static, necrotic heart. Everything I thought I knew was suddenly meaningless. I wanted out of there, but I had one piece of information I’d leave them with. I stared at the far wall and spoke to neither of them in particular.

“Ruth Pike found me because she needed to get to
you,” I said flatly. “Her husband is sick and he needs the blood of a vampire that
he
created in order to be restored to health. They expect one of you to give your life in exchange for the wonderful gift they bestowed on you.”

Although I wasn’t looking directly at them, I couldn’t help noticing their sudden, extreme reaction. My parents whimpered and clutched at each other, but I stayed hard, not allowing myself to show any feeling. After learning that they’d not only destroyed my life but had also lied to me about it for three quarters of a century, why should I care that one of them might be in danger? Let them figure out how to handle it, because I was done.

My father grabbed my mother by the shoulders. “Where is Zachary?” he asked, shaking her. She let out a frantic wail and started breathing in shallow, racked sobs. At the mention of my brother’s name, the blood in my stomach began to churn and suddenly my palms were wet with a thin sheen of nervous sweat. It felt unfamiliar and gross.

“He didn’t come home yet. He isn’t home from school,” she screamed. My brother coming home from school late was a fairly typical occurrence. Sometimes he stopped at the library to pore through insanely dense scientific texts. Sometimes he wandered into the scrubby pines to study the flora and fauna. Sometimes he missed his bus and had
to walk because he was being bullied by kids who thought he was just a little nerd but had no idea that he was an elderly genius who could end their lives if they pushed him too far. But right then I started to worry that maybe that wasn’t the case today. I started to worry that something was really, really, really, really wrong.

“Is Zach one of the ones that …” I searched for the question I was trying to ask. “One of the ones that Turner Pike … could use?”

My mother, who’d been pressing her fingers tightly to her lips, lowered them as tears welled up and clung to her long lower lashes. “Zach is the only one that he could use,” she said in a raspy voice.

Before anyone could say or do anything else, I barreled out the door and down the walk, running as fast as a stiff, sickly, young, old vampire hopped up on too much rare blood could go, pumping my skinny arms and legs like I remembered doing once out on the prairie years before, when I thought a bobcat was chasing me.

I got to the corner, and before I could let my intuition choose the direction I would take off in, I saw two figures approaching from up the road. One seemed to be rolling and the other seemed to bob and skip. One was tall and broad and goofy and the other was short and scrawny and Zach-ish. All the adrenaline in me rushed out of a hole in
the sole of my ratty sneaker and I crumbled to my knees, panting and shuddering with relief. I heard the slapping of rubber soles on the tar and when I looked up again, a long moment later, my baby brother was in front of me, with Eli Matthews right behind.

“Jane,” Zach yelled, “are you okay?” I put my hand out, and he took it and helped pull me to my feet. A happy zap jumped from my hand to his.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I was just catching my breath. Thanks.”

“Well, what the hell?” he complained. “You scared the devil out of me.” I laughed at him. It was so funny to see a little kid cursing and claiming you scared the devil out of him. I messed his hair and squeezed him to me, then held him out at arm’s length and shook him a bit.

“I’m the one who’s had the devil scared out of me!” I said. “And Ma and Dad. What were you two doing?”

Before he could answer, my parents came screeching around the corner in our old family Volvo. When they saw the three of us, my father slammed on the brakes. Zach and Eli glanced at each other uneasily. Despite the appearance that my entire family was made of lunatics, Eli didn’t turn and run in the opposite direction for some reason. The three of us piled into the backseat of the car and took the less-than-one-minute drive back to my house in
silence. When we filed into the house, I could see that while my father had thrown on a wool peacoat, he was still wearing his flannel pajamas and his feet were bare. I didn’t even have the wherewithal to be humiliated.

Back inside the house, my parents never got a chance to speak before I started on Zach with the third degree. “Where
were
you, Zachary? Do you have any idea what time it is? Did you ever hear of a phone?”

“Jane, you sound exactly like Ma. No offense, Ma,” Zach said. “What is the big deal?”

Eli, sensing that the situation might be a bit more serious than Zachary comprehended, cleared his throat. “It was my fault, Jane,” he explained. “I was walking home from school and I ran into Zachary … Zach. He was telling me a little bit about his experiments and that he needed to get some stuff … chemicals … for his chemistry set, so I offered to take him to the hobby shop? You know, the place downtown? I figured he could pick up what he needed and I could walk him home. Mr. and Mrs. Jones, I should have had him call, or I should have called. I apologize.”

My mother’s arms were wrapped around Zach’s shoulders like she would never let him go again. She nodded silently.

“No. It’s Eli, right?” my dad asked. “Thank you for getting our boy home safe.”

Eli looked down, stepped on the toe of his sneaker with the toe of his other sneaker, and cleared his throat again. Then he looked up at me.

“I figured if I walked him home that I might see you. I needed to talk to you,” he said, turning slightly red on his neck. “I put a note in your locker, but I guess …”