Red Moon Rising

• Part I
  
• 1 Danny-Something
  
• 2 Everything I'm Not
  
• 3 Specists
  
• 4 Reverberations
  
• 5 Heartbeats
  
• 6 Ideopathic
  
• 7 Like Father
  
• 8 Biology Lesson
  
• Part II
  
• 9 Hang Tight
  
• 10 The Smell of the Blood
  
• 11 Hooked In
  
• 12 Aches and Shakes
  
• 13 Private Eyes
  
• 14 Questions
  
• 15 Quarry
  
• 16 Almost Touching
  
• 17 Suspicious
  
• 18 Viewer Warning
  
• 19 Body Bags
  
• 20 23+23
  
• 21 Seriously
  
• 22 Allies
  
• 23 Off the Frame
  
• 24 Couples
  
• 25 Jagged
  
• 26 Rally
  
• 27 Torn and Twisted
  
• 28 Concealed
  
• 29 Politics
  
• 30 A Whole Lot Worse
  
• Part III
  
• 31 Suspended
  
• 32 Good-Byes
  
• 33 Visitors
  
• 34 Little Moons
  
• 35 Crush Me
  
• 36 Run
  
• 37 Shortcut
  
• 38 The Change
  
• 39 Red Mood
  
• 40 Disoriented
  
• 41 Trapped
  
• 42 Awake
  
• 43 Halfway
  
• 44 Sunshine
  
• Glossary
  
• Acknowledgements
  

For Ellen & Hedy & Jake

with all my love

Just before humans completely split off from their hominid primate ancestors, two separate mutations occurred, result
ing in three different species:
H. sapiens
,
H. vampyros
, and
H. lupus
. From a genetic viewpoint, humans, vampyres, and wulves are 99.6% identical. That four-sixths of one percent makes all the difference in the world.

—Dr. Kavita Singh,
Critical Divergence:
the Human, Vampyre, and Wulf Genomes,
2007

By 1920, vampyres no longer needed to hunt humans. It was then that humans came to understand that vampyres were remarkably intelligent and could contribute a great deal to society. This was the turning point for the vampyre species.

—Bianca Fournier, age 17, youngest recipient
of Pulitzer Prize for Commentary: “Late Invitation:
The Vampyre Journey from Reviled to Respected,”
adapted from her doctoral dissertation

All around the mulberry bush

The poacher chased the werewulf

The werewulf stopped when he heard the first shot

Pop goes the werewulf!

—Nursery Rhyme

F
eeling like you fit in as a freshman in high school is tough enough, but it really sucks when you're only half-vampyre.

It's obvious that I'm not full-blooded. I have a shorter, wider build than a typical vamp my age. I have vamp-blue eyes, but I got my father's coloring: olive skin and hair the color of burnt chestnuts. And even though my vamp immune system rejected most of the ink from the wulftag tattoo, it's still there if you look for it, like a hologram under my skin.

It's not that the other vamps openly avoid me. The ones who've known me since we were little know that I'm technically half-wulf, and the ones who don't assume I'm either half-human, or that I had the genetic treatments.

I look at the vamps sitting at the table with Claire and me: Bertrand, Martina, Oliver, Constance, Hugh. They're arguing about song lyrics, which they do all the time. Martina's my lab partner. I've studied for tests with Constance and Oliver. Hugh has had me over to watch movies in his home theater.

They're good friends, but I kind of imagined I would branch out a little once I got to high school.

“Are you
ever
going to shut up?” Claire asks me.

“What?” I say.

She pushes the purple headband farther back on her head. “You haven't said a word in ten minutes. What's wrong with you?”

“Nothing. Just thinking.” I twist my neck until it makes a cracking sound, which I know grosses Claire out.

Thanks to successful genetic treatments, Claire looks full-vamp. She has ivory skin and pale yellow hair the exact color of plasma, cut in a bob. Her human mother died in childbirth, and her father married another vamp a year later. Everyone assumed she was full-vamp when she moved here, and she has no intention of telling them otherwise.

“You drinking the rest of that, or what?” she asks.

I pass over the bottle of SynHeme. Claire drinks, then makes a sour face. “Is this diet?”

“No. Why?”

She smacks her lips, way too many times, because she knows it bugs me. “Tastes thin.”

“I watered it down a little.”

She holds up the bottle so it's backlit by the moonlight coming in through the big glass cafeteria windows. “Gross,” she says. But she still drinks it.

Though she rags on us all the time, Claire has no interest in making new friends. She took a lot of crap last year after the locker room incident that started all the rumors about her being gay. Her entire safety net, every person who stood by her, is at this table right now.

Claire pushes the SynHeme bottle back across the table. “This is horrible,” she says. “Why would you water down SynHeme?”

“My stomach's been bothering me.” Even though I have the Thirst, SynHeme's been making me feel queasy lately. To distract myself, I look around the caf.

There are rich vamp kids at almost every other table. Guys wearing shirts that cost a few hundred bucks, girls whose spike heels or skinny jeans cost as much as some wulf families' rent. These kids are smart, confident, and good-looking. I would never sit with them.

Down by the serving lines at the other end of the caf is a single table of wulves. Eleven wulf kids in the whole place.

The vamp parents protested wulves' being admitted into Carpathia's Night High Gifted Program. But in the end, it all came down to money. The wulves who come here have families who can afford to live in town, so their kids are entitled to attend. Not that the wulf kids can hack the same advanced academics that vamps take. Wulves come to this building—which doubles as Millbrook High during the day—and take Carpathia electives at night. Even if they can't pass the heavy academic subjects, they still get “Carpathia Gifted Program” on their transcripts just by taking stuff like art and gym and health.

The wulf kids really stand out. They're built like wrestlers: short, wide, and muscular. A lot of them have longish hair to cover their post-Change ears and their skull lumps. Some have facial ridges they never got fixed, even though their parents have the money for the surgery. I guess it's their way of saying, like,
suck it!
to the vamp kids. Same thing with the facial hair—some of them have goatees and sideburns. Or pierced ears and eyebrows. They do it because they can, and vampyre regen means we can't. But rebels or not, all of them have wulftags—the werewulf-head tattoo near the bottom of their right thumbs, each with a red circle around it, meaning they're registered and go to compounds every month.

“Hey! Check it out!” says a vamp kid a few yards from the wulf table. “Feeding time at the zoo! Here you go, moon-doggies!” he yells, throwing a handful of cold cuts at them.

Three wulf kids jump to their feet, but the two massive lunchroom safety officers get there first, hands resting conspicuously on the riot clubs hanging from their belts. They're humans, and it's hard to tell who they dislike more: the vamps or the wulves. To them, we must seem like spoiled rich kids or rowdy brutes. Most likely, they despise us equally.

“Don't even think about it, mutts!” a guard bellows at the wulf boys. One of the wulves, looks like John Fusco, is about to protest, then sees there's no point and sits back down. His friends follow.

Wulves are not wanted, and it's made clearer every day.

“Hello! Danny! Anyone home?” Claire raps her knuckles on the table three times. The chunky silver bangles on her wrist rattle.

“Yes, Claire, I'm here. I know you need my undivided attention.”

“Believe me, I don't need
your
attention. Wherever
you
are is a place of weirdness,” she says. She tilts the plastic bottle and drinks the last drops of the SynHeme. I look out the big windows at the white, waxing gibbous moon.

I hate all my classes, especially ninth grade Organic Chem. It's accelerated, so we'll be up to gross anatomy with cadavers during senior year and get med school credit. But I don't want to be doctor, so what's the point?

Science is actually my worst subject, but I still finish my test in half the time Dr. Burke allotted. Dr. Burke is a new teacher, a human, and usually teaches this class to humans at the state university, so she always seems surprised at how quickly vamps learn. And this class is all vamps, with two exceptions. One being me.

The other is a human named Juliet Walker, who just now is leaning over her test. From this angle, with the moonlight coming in through the shades, I can see her eyebrows furrow as she works out a problem. I love the way she does that when she's concentrating.

I guess I stare at her a lot. I try to hide it, but sooner or later I'm going to get caught, and then I'll feel like the biggest idiot on the planet.

She started Carpathia at the beginning of the term. Bertrand (who seems to get inside information about anyone who's interesting) said a human girl was taking some of our ninth grade classes. He found out that she's actually sixteen and a junior at Millbrook during the day. Even as a junior in the human school, she must be
really
smart if she can handle Carpathia's core academics.

Juliet might be considered plain by vamp standards, but I think she's way cuter than the vamp girls. Her hair is dark-red and wavy, and she usually wears it in a low ponytail. She's not pale, tall, and skinny like all the other girls in school. Which is fine by me. I'm not pale, tall, and skinny, either. And she has a really nice smile.

I've said hi to her a bunch of times, but aside from that or “how's it going?” I've never talked to her; the fact that I have a crush on her almost guarantees I'll make an ass of myself.

The only girl I'd go to for advice is Claire, but then she'd mock me until the end of time. Claire isn't like other vamp girls, either, being that she's secretly half-human and not so secretly a lesbian, which I don't really get. I mean, she's never had an actual girlfriend, so even though she says she likes girls, how can she know for sure? What I'm saying is, she isn't judgmental the way most vamp girls are, but she might still find it weird that I have a thing for a human.

Most people say that interspecies relationships never work. “There are dietary issues,” Mom has said a million times. “Conflicting schedules of sunlight restrictions. And that's not even taking into account the fundamental differences in morals, values, philosophy.” Every kid—vamp, wulf, human—hears the same lecture all the time.

So I can watch Juliet Walker as much as I want. There's no way we'll ever get together.

After class I get a headache, then start to feel dizzy and sweaty as I head to my locker. My vision blurs and my stomach churns. I duck into a stall in the boys' room just in time to puke. It's blue, from the SynHeme I had at lunch. After I'm done, I rinse out my mouth. A vamp guy who I don't know, his white-blond hair gelled up into a pompadour, comes in. He takes a look at me, then walks across the boys' room. “What's wrong with you?” he asks on his way to one of the urinals.

I try to blink away the white spots in my vision. “I'm okay,” I say. It comes out weak and trembly.

He looks me up and down. “You should go to the nurse.”

“I don't need to.” Still dizzy, I lean against the sink.

“You
look
like you need to.”

“No, really. I'm fine.”

I wake up lying on a fake-leather bed in some kind of cubicle. There's a small poster that shows a cartoon of a woman wearing white clothes and holding a syringe, with the words:

I'm a School Nurse: Armed with Needles and Not Afraid to Use Them
. The curtain is pulled open.

“Look who's awake,” says a heavyset human nurse who's hovering over me. The bags under her eyes are probably from working the night shift at Carpathia on top of a day shift at Millbrook.

“Did I pass out?”

“You sure did,” she says. “Did you happen to take a hematocrit reading this morning before you fainted?”

“Oh. No. I can't find my hemometer.”

She shakes her head. She probably hears about vamps losing their portables all the time. “Before I check your blood, you might as well tell me. Did you do any drugs?”

“No.” I try to sit up, but my head starts swimming.

“No blood thinners? Coumidex? Nothing?”

“Nothing. I've never taken anything like that.”

“Okay, we'll see. You're Danny-something, right?”

“Gray.”

She pulls my file. I see her take note of the big yellow-and-black sticker on the outside of the folder, which means I'm genetically part-wulf.

She takes half a vial, runs it through the meter, then attaches the tube to the needle and puts the blood back in me.

“You're anemic. Your crit is low and you're having a globin crash. Didn't you have lunch?”

“I had half a bottle of SynHeme and a sandwich.”

“Half a bottle? Well, there you have it. You need more heme.”

“I just puked. I won't be able to keep it down.”

“We'll go IV, then. You need it.”

She brings out a bag of clear VeniHeme and connects it to the needle she left in my arm, then hangs the bag from a hook on the wall. My heart skips a beat when the concentrated heme hits, then goes back into rhythm.

I notice that there's something stuck to my forehead. I touch it and feel gauze.

“You hit your head when you passed out,” she says. “It was a deep gash, almost to the bone. Even if you have strong regen, it could still take four or five hours to heal. That is”—she wags her finger at me—“if you have a nice big dinner and get plenty of hemoglobin.”

I get home three hours before sunrise, and my little sister, Paige, is watching one of her celebrity-news shows on the wall TV. She doesn't look up when I come in.

“Hey,” I say. “What's up?”

“Virginia Lanchester and Shane-Luke may get married,” she tells me, eyes on the screen.

“Oh, no.”

“Yup. And I predicted it the second she left Tad Snyder,” Paige adds. Paige is the perfect little vampyre, her main interests being fashion and the publicly private lives of celebrities.

“Anyone else home?” I ask.

“Mom's shopping. Jess is out somewhere with her boyfriend.” Paige tosses her platinum hair.

“So you're home alone?” I ask.

“No, Loretta is downstairs doing laundry.”

“You do your homework?”

“Yes, yes, I did it,” she says in the snotty tone she picked up from Jessica. “Do you mind? I want to find out who's getting custody of the babies!”

I just don't see the appeal of shows like this—celebrity gossip masquerading as news. But Paige is crazy for anything having to do with TV. She even loves the songs from commercials.

On the wall above the TV is the picture I always try not to look at (and I always fail). Mom insisted we have a “proper” family portrait done, in a photo studio. The photographer set us in front of a dark background to contrast with all the white skin and blond hair. Paige is in front; she's all-vamp. Her father, Troy, Mom's second husband, is behind her with a hand on her shoulder. He's got his other arm around Mom, whose blond bob and white teeth are almost blinding. In front of her is Jessica, whose genetic treatments worked completely, erasing any chromosomal hint of her father—our father. You'd never know she had a drop of wulf blood in her. She looks like a young carbon copy of Mom, but with long hair. Then, last and certainly least: me. Standing next to Mom makes my skin and brown hair look even darker. And with the black screen behind us, I'm halfway fading into the background. It's the four of them, bright and shiny, and then me. Like a wulf in sheep's clothing.