Never Bite a Boy on the First Date (17 page)

And then a car had come out of the night, as I walked along those quiet suburban streets, and hit me.

“She could have lived,” said the doctor interviewed for the article. “If the driver had stopped and called for help—she’d still be alive today.”

But by the time someone finally found me, it was too late.

My hands were so numb, I could hardly move the mouse. I clicked on the photo that went with the article, blowing it up to fill the screen. It was a shot of my funeral. There were Mom and Dad and Apolla, standing close to the grave and crying. More people were there than I’d have expected…classmates, teachers, relatives…

As I scanned the crowd around the hole in the ground, a face jumped out at me.

I leaned forward, wiping away my tears, and peered at it more closely.

I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I knew that face. But it didn’t make any sense.

Rowan Cantor was at my funeral
.

I
decided I was well within my rights to skip school on Monday. It isn’t every day that you experience horrifying revelations about your own death, after all. It seemed like the perfect time to spend an entire day in bed, sleeping off my sun headache and trying not to think about what I was going to say when I saw Rowan again.

By the time I woke up Monday night, I wasn’t sad anymore. I was angry. Like, seriously, wholeheartedly furious.

“Where are you going?” Olympia called from the den as I marched into the kitchen.

“To take care of my
issues
,” I called back.

She appeared in the doorway with a concerned look as I choked down a glass of blood.
I didn’t plan to get faint during this encounter, no, sir.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

I put the glass in the sink and stormed out the door without answering her.

Her expression was nothing compared to the look on Albert Cantor’s face when he opened the door and found out it was me pounding on the other side. He went pale and sweaty and looked freaked out, as if he was facing a ghost—which, I realized, he basically was.

I didn’t say anything to him. I needed answers from Rowan. I went right past him and down the hall into Rowan’s room.

Rowan was lying on his mattress with one pale arm flung across his eyes. He sat up, blinking, as I slammed the door behind me.

“You lied to me,” I said. That was not the most terrible thing he’d done, but it seemed like a good place to start.

“What?” He rubbed his face and squinted at me.

I tugged the page I’d printed out of my pocket and dropped it on the mattress beside him. “You didn’t move here from San Francisco.”

All the blood seemed to drain out of his face as he stared at the photograph.

“I was just—” he stammered, climbing to his feet. “No, we just happened to be—”

“Don’t
lie
to me!” I yelled. I crossed the room and pulled his locked metal box out of his desk. Before he could move, I ripped the top off, breaking the lock and the hinges. Most of the papers inside were articles about my death. I’d expected that, but it was still kind of a shock to see proof. I grabbed the papers and turned around, brandishing them at him. “It was you, wasn’t it?
You’re
the driver who killed Phoebe.”

Rowan’s shocked, terrified eyes met mine, and suddenly a memory came flooding back: of those same eyes looking down at me, framed by moonlight and bright headlights.

“You said you’d get help,” I said, pointing at him. “You said you’d come back to save her. Instead you let her bleed to death all alone in the middle of the road.”
Alone until the vampires came, anyway
.

Rowan reached out his arms like he was looking for something to hold him up. Finding
nothing, he fell to his knees in front of me. “How—how do you know that?” he croaked in terror.

“Is that why you’re so keen to talk about death all the time?” I asked. “Because you’re a killer?”

“It was an accident,” he whispered. “I didn’t see her.”

“But you just left her there,” I said. “You drove away.”

“There was so much blood.” He clawed at his face like he was trying to rip the memories out of his head. “I thought she would die before I got back. I was scared—I was scared—I was so scared—”

“
You
were scared?” I said. “How do you think
she
felt?”

“Oh, God,” Rowan said in a horrible, wretched voice.

I’ll admit it. I kind of wanted to bite him. Or rather, I kind of wanted to kill him, and
then
bite him, because I definitely didn’t want creepy vampire Rowan hanging around in addition to lecherous vampire Zach. I wanted him gone.

But that wouldn’t solve any of my problems, most especially the one where Wilhelm and Olympia thought I was the murdering type.

“You’re going to confess,” I said, grabbing Rowan’s T-shirt and yanking him to his feet. I didn’t care if my strength startled him. “You’re going to turn yourself in so they know what happened. Jeremy and”—I’d nearly said
Mom and Dad
—“everyone else.”

“No,” Rowan said, struggling. He tried to pry my hands off his shirt, but he couldn’t. “I can’t. I won’t. Dad won’t let me anyway. Besides it was two years ago—it’s over now—”

“It’s not over for some people,” I said, taking a step toward the door.

Rowan started flailing. He threw a punch at my face, which I dodged, and then tried to knock me down with a sudden lunge. I flipped him over so he landed on his back with a thud. With a yelp of anger, he seized my foot and jerked hard. I caught myself on my hands as I fell and pushed myself back up, then kicked his hands aside and planted my boot firmly in the middle of his chest.

Have I mentioned there are
some
benefits to being a vampire?

“You didn’t have anything to do with Tex, did you?” I asked.

“Of course not!” he cried. “Dad won’t even let me out of the house after dark anymore.” He rolled suddenly sideways, jumped to his feet, and tackled me. I threw him over my head and he smashed into the opposite wall.

“It’s not going to be so easy to kill me this time,” I said.

Rowan’s blue eyes went wide. “It
is
you,” he whispered. He dove for his desk drawer, grabbed something out of it, and spun around to point it at me.

A gun, small and black and gleaming.

“Are you kidding?” I said, putting my hands on my hips.

“I will shoot you,” he said.

“That,” I said, “would make me
really
mad.”

“Go away,” he said. “Stop haunting me. Leave me alone!”

“You need help, Rowan,” I said, taking a step toward him. “Look at this house. Look at this room. Look at
you
, and your
incredibly creepy
corpse photos. Your guilt is destroying your whole life, and either you need to deal with it, or you need to be locked up so it doesn’t explode into something like, say, shooting a girl in your bedroom.”

Oh
, I thought at the same time,
I guess that’s kind of what Wilhelm and Olympia were going for, too
. It all made sense to me now. They’d known about Rowan; they’d brought me here and even pointed him out expressly to make sure I confronted my old demons so I could move on and become a well-integrated member of vampire society. Or something like that.

Well, they didn’t have to be so
vague
and
mysterious
about it. They really could have saved me a lot of time by just telling me a few things, since I didn’t even know I
had
death issues to deal with in the first place.

The bedroom door behind me suddenly flew open. Startled, Rowan jumped and the gun went off.

“Rowan!” his dad shouted in terror.

But I had jumped at the same time, knocking the gun aside, so the bullet thumped harmlessly into the closet door. I yanked the gun out of his
hand and threw it at Albert. He caught it with both hands and held it as if he’d never seen anything like it before.

“You need to deal with this,” I said to him. I pointed at Rowan, who was sliding slowly down to the floor. “You can’t keep lying and hiding and hoping that if you run it’ll never catch up with you.”

“What did he tell you?” Albert said weakly.

“She knows, Dad,” Rowan said. “About that girl.”

“Phoebe,” I said, still angry. “Her name was Phoebe.”

Rowan stared at me, all the fight drained out of him. “It’s you, isn’t it?” he whispered.

“Don’t talk crazy, son,” Albert said. He looked exhausted. “She’s right. We can’t live like this anymore. You’re losing your mind, and I feel like I am, too.”

“I’ll be checking the papers for news of your confession,” I said, stepping over the piles of clothes as I headed to the door. “Don’t run again, or I’ll find you.”

I left them like that, facing each other across Rowan’s tiny room. My killer and his dad, who
had covered it up and helped him run.

I didn’t know if his confession would make my parents feel any better, but it was the best resolution I could give them from where I was now.

So take that, death issues.