Vampire Crush (14 page)

“Thanks for that,” I say when James steps up the stairs beside me, and then, because I can’t resist, “I thought you were going to the movies with Amanda.”

“Nah,” James says, and I have to distract myself to hide what I am sure is a glow of pleasure. I look away to do a quick scan of the room. Girls outnumber the boys three to one, and the smal number of males present wear their friend status like lodestones around their necks. Most of them hide in corners, staring into their plastic red cups like they might offer up what to do next. As for the girls, a few of them have grass hula skirts—whether vampire provided or not, I don’t know—but as expected, I am the only person not showing any real skin.

“If you want to remove your protective shel ,” James says,

“you won’t hear any complaints from me.”

“That’s okay. I’m here as more of an observer.”

“I figured you weren’t here for the company.”

I study his face in the shadows cast by the sharp angles of the stairway. Except for that one time during chemistry, I’ve never seen him looking less than healthy and refreshed. Now he’s leaning back against the railing and studying me with a smile. I’ve missed talking to him, I realize. I’ve missed it a lot.

Feeling exposed, I glance to the top of the long stairs. The other half of D’Ashley is standing there like a golem, his arms crossed over his chest as he stares down at us.

“What’s he doing there?”

Reluctantly, James fol ows my gaze. “Vlad doesn’t want people going upstairs.”

“Why?”

“He’s got this thing about people touching his stuff.”

“That’s al ?”

“Pretty much,” James says. “There aren’t any giant wal diagrams that say, ‘This is My Evil Plan,’ if that’s what you’re thinking.”

That is what I was thinking.

“Let’s go up,” I say, suddenly inspired. “He might let me through if I’m with you. We could find out more about who he’s looking for and what the Danae wants with her.”

He looks away. “I knew this was a mistake,” he mutters. Frustration takes over. “Then why do you keep helping me? First with the journalism project, and now with the party. You have to know why I’m here.”

He opens his mouth but then seems to be at a loss for words. “I don’t know,” he final y says. “Vlad told us we had to come, and I saw you standing there and maybe I just thought that the party would be more interesting with you in it,” he says before the sincerity is ruined with a twitch of his lips. “I mean, there was that party at Morgan Michaels’s house in sixth grade where you drank al that orange soda and then left when everyone started playing kissing games.”

“I didn’t leave,” I say, even though I’m pretty sure I did.

“It was right when we started. I remember.” Something warm has crept into his eyes. There’s a brief second where my body feels carbonated, but then I think I hear the burst of Vlad’s laughter above the din, and it reminds me that no matter how much we skip down memory lane, the cold truth is that we are stil at odds. I can’t keep doing this; it’s distracting, and it only makes me want things that are impossible.

“I have to go,” I say and head down the stairs. He cal s out behind me, but I’ve already squeezed between a girl in a nautical-themed suit and a senior wearing a kiwi wrap over her black string bikini. I dart through a doorway on the right, where raucous shrieks mark the hub of the party. The room’s high ceilings and large windows make it a coveted living room, or at least it was once. Between the shuffling feet of party guests, I catch glimpses of the dark, couch-shaped patches where furniture must have once protected the burgundy carpet from decades of sun. The cream wal paper is stained along the top border, and in many places it curls at the edges. A tattered Victorian couch sits in the corner, covered in gray velvet and missing a few buttons, and folding refreshment tables are set up at the far end of the room. The Hawaiian theme isn’t going to win any decorating contests; the room looks more like Dracula’s dungeon than a balmy island getaway. A limp sign, with ALOHA written in crooked yel ow letters, wilts over the punch bowl, and a few dejected leis hang off the ornate chandelier that hovers above the sea of bobbing heads. Ambiance is obviously a low priority when you have young girls to kidnap.

I make my way to the refreshment table, trying to figure out my game plan as I go. Avoiding Vlad’s notice is priority number one, although I stil need to keep an eye on him in case he targets anyone in particular. And then there’s the little black book. Now that I’ve infiltrated his home base, there might be a chance to get my hands on it. I pick up a flimsy paper plate and survey the meager offerings. Not surprisingly, vampire catering leaves something to be desired. Generic cheese puffs lie scattered around a bowl of congealing ranch dip that stil holds the shape of the can it came from. The carrots should be a safer option, but instead of being cut into stick form, someone has sliced them into tiny coin-sized discs. How appetizing. I pick up a carrot medal ion and start to nibble, swiping a cup from the leaning tower to my right and heading toward the punch. It looks orange, sugary, and unnatural—normal enough. I’m tentatively ladling some into my glass when someone comes up beside me.

“Yo, Soph, what’s up?” Neal Garrett says, resplendent in neon green swim trunks. He grabs a cheese puff and pokes it into the ranch dip. “Cool party, huh?”

“What are you doing here?”

“I came with my girlfriend,” he says proudly. After checking to make sure no one’s listening, he leans down to whisper,

“We’re playing hide-and-seek. She’s kind of bad at it, though, so I thought I’d take a breather and let her think that it’s taking me a long time.” He pauses. “What are you doing here? You never struck me as the party type.”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time,” Neal says. “I’m counting to ninety-one thousand.”

I open my mouth to tel him that it’s not important when I spot Violet charging toward us angrily. She’s not wearing anything so revealing as a bathing suit, but she’s gotten into the spirit of the evening by wrapping a flowered sheet around her body like a toga. It makes her stumble a little as she bears down on us. Neal yel s her name, his voice a mixture of surprise and pleasure.

“What are you doing?” he says. “You’re supposed to be hiding!”

“I was sitting in that dusty old cupboard forever,” she pouts.

“The cupboard in the study? But you hid there the last time! And the time before that.”

Violet shrugs; I’m not surprised that her favorite part of hide-and-seek is being found.

“Is the cupboard upstairs?” I interrupt.

“Sophie!” she cries, delighted. “I thought you would not come.” When she notices that my eyes have slid to where she has looped an arm through Neal’s elbow, she giggles.

“Oops,” she says. “We have been keeping it a secret, but you can be the first to know. Neal and I are courting.”

“Congratulations,” I say, my stomach sinking. A serious talk about not turning one’s boyfriends into vampires is on the horizon, but right now I need to focus on Vlad. “Can I, uh, play hide-and-seek with you?”

Violet lights up. “Of course!” She orders Neal to start counting again. “And this time I
won’t
be in the cupboard,”

she says, and then grabs my hand and pul s me through the crowd.

When we reach the top of the stairs, D’Ashley stands, an efficient sentry. Violet slips beneath his arm without hesitation, but when I try to do the same, I feel the heavy weight of his hand on my shoulder.

“Oh, do let her in, Ashley. Neal is probably at fifty by now!”

she yel s and fol ows it up with a kick to the shin. Clearly disgruntled, he lets me pass, and I am plunged into the darkness of the hal way.

Violet’s eyes adjust to the gloom far quicker than mine, or at least I assume so because she’s running down the hal way while I’m stil clutching at the wal . “I am going to hide in the cupboard,” she says excitedly before dashing into what must be the aforementioned study.

Dust pervades the air, and I try not to cough as I grasp the handle of the door closest to me. Apart from a few scattered drop sheets that lie wadded in the corners, the first room is empty. The second turns up more dust bunnies, and the third is fil ed with a col ection of tattered couches and armchairs that were most likely granted a lastminute reprieve from the garbage truck. They are arranged in a cheery circle, almost as if the vampires spent their evenings in discussion. An old TV is pushed to one side, and beneath it are stacks of DVDs. Unable to resist, I sort through them to find that Vlad has amassed every high school comedy imaginable, from John Hughes to
10

Things I Hate About You
and beyond. This is what he was using as research to infiltrate our high school? That almost frightens me as much as anything else.

It strikes me that I haven’t come across any beds, and I don’t find any in the fourth and fifth rooms either, although clothing hangs in the closets: velvet for Violet, knee-length skirts for Marisabel, and a row of white shirts for Nevil e. I realize that I never asked James if he sleeps. I hope so; the image of him sitting alone in his old bedroom, awake, al night every night, makes my throat constrict. No wonder he didn’t want to go home that night, I think, and I feel a rush of overdue guilt.

Now there’s only one room left, and I begin to lose faith that my bril iant hide-and-seek spying technique wil turn up useful information. When the last door swings open to reveal one lonely rocking chair, my heart sinks. I do a loop around the room anyway, hoping that the thump of music downstairs is loud enough to cover the creak of floorboards. The chair is positioned to face the window, and the high vantage point of the house means that the sitter has a vaulted view of the neighborhood down below, with its slanted roofs and twinkling house lights. It’s as majestic a view as you’re likely to find in suburbia. I wander to the far wal and slide open the closet door, pushing when it sticks. There is clothing here, as wel , but while the other closets were a jumble of styles and owners, this is organized to the level of neatness normal y associated with former military men, serial kil ers, and Marcie. To the right are shirts and jackets, al covered in plastic and arranged by color. I recognize the black jacket that Vlad wore on the first day of school, and look down to find the pair of pointed boots from that afternoon in the woods gleaming up at me in the dark. An unbidden shiver shoots through my body, and it takes a moment to regain my composure.

His jeans hang on the left side, and while they aren’t covered in plastic, they each have an individual hanger, back pockets facing outward. This proves that old maxim that people who hang their jeans up are to be feared, even if I just made that maxim up.

I start to push the door closed, thinking that I would have learned more hiding in the cupboard with Violet, when a bulge in the back pocket of the outermost pair catches my eye. At first I don’t believe what I’m seeing. But no—Vlad’s journal is stil there, stuffed in the back pocket of his jeans. He left his plans for vampire domination in his other pants. I pul it out so forceful y that the jeans fal off the hanger. I rearrange them, heart pounding, and then open the pages with trembling fingers. Vlad’s cramped, flowery handwriting covers every bit of paper, with lines squeezed into the margins or running up the spine and dead-ending in the corners. I go to the rocker and let the smal bit of light from outside pour down over the yel owed pages.

The first few pages are just a list of names and dates, beginning with “Anton and Evangelique Mervaux (d. 1815, burned)” and ending with “Christiana Jones (d. 1999—

kil ed).” Beneath that Vlad has written question marks of al sizes, some scored so deeply that he’s torn through the page. If what Marisabel told me was right, this must be the list of the girl’s descendants that he’s been piecing together through the years—but if he knows where it ends, why is he here?

Next comes a series of journal entries, the first of which dates from 1966. They are terse reports of research, mentions of lost children, dreams of what life wil be like once he is Danae and can get revenge on al the vampires who have snubbed him, and complaints about being Unnamed. There are years of time in between entries,
years
, and a smal part of me can’t help but admire Vlad’s tenacity; the longest I ever pursued a story was one month. I stop at an entry of unusual length.

March 13, 2000

New Orleans

Third appeal to join the Society

of the Divine One denied, even

with fake identity. Broke into their

archives. The last descendent

was (obviously) female,

recorded death in Canada. No

further research done. Obviously

a society of incompetence to

which I would not want to belong

anyway. Three-year gap from

Christiana’s last sighting in

Michigan unexplored. Previous

flights had been limited to

months. Why three years?

The next few entries outline his theory. Christiana stayed in Michigan because she had fal en in love and become pregnant. What’s more, he thought that she had given birth to a child, the next descendent of this family tree that everyone thought had died out a long time ago. But soon after arriving here, she adopted an alias that he has stil not been able to discover, although her child would have to be anywhere from fifteen to seventeen.

November 23, 2009

New York Upstate Wilderness

Truly, everything is coming

together. Met a vampire named

Neville, who bears the mark of

the Danae and who seems very

interested in my work. This is my

link to them; this is the sign I

have been waiting for.

The fol owing entries al detail his preparations to bring the group here, which included glamouring people out of their money and possessions and being blood-drive bandits. My heart skips a little when James’s name first appears.

April 11, 2010

New York Upstate Wilderness

Violet’s new conquest, James,

has actually turned out to be

useful for reasons other than to

stop her incessant sulking. He is

not only familiar with the location

of the girl, he may have attended

school with her during his early

years. At first he seemed

reluctant to return, but was

convinced by yet another

example of particularly clever

thinking on my part. “Well used

are those cruelties that are

carried out in a single stroke.”

—Machiavelli

I frown, wondering exactly what “particularly clever thinking” and that quote are supposed to mean—it can’t be anything good. Maybe I should show it to him in yet another attempt to lure him over to my side, or
at least
give him a heads-up—I shake my head, realizing this is just another example of Distraction via James.
No.
Girl. Danae. Moving example of Distraction via James.
No.
Girl. Danae. Moving on.

We’ve reached Vlad’s first day at Thomas Jeff. August 30, 2010

Town of Michigan

Infiltration of Thomas Jefferson

school successful. The child is

here. I can taste her… .

Why is this woman still talking? If

she thinks that I am going to stop

wearing my pointed boots, she is

sadly mistaken.

I let out a loud snort and then turn the page quickly, feeling guilty at being amused by Vlad’s ramblings. Thankful y, the fol owing entries putter out into endless rants about how the other vampires aren’t helping and he doesn’t even know where James is. I move past a number of blank pages to the next section, which is a listing of girls he’s rejected. Caroline sits proudly at the top, fol owed by approximately thirty other girls that I’l cross-reference with my own list later. When I turn the next page, I swear that my eyes start to tingle. This. This is what I’ve been looking for. Vlad has made a rough sketch of Nevil e’s tattoo, large enough that the star’s four main points touch the edges of the page. By each tip he’s written a name—last names from the look of it, unless there’s some poor soul wandering around with the name “Vandervelde.” I squint and look closer. Instead of a “D” in the center, Vlad’s written

“Mervaux,” the big, bad, human-baby-having vamp family itself, and I would guess that these others are vampire families as wel .

Excited, I move on to what appears to be a timeline. Some dates are far apart and others are crammed together, and they’re al in different colors of ink, like this is something that he’s been adding to for a long time.
1798: Human child born to the

Mervaux and named Mercedes

(star mark on right shoulder).

Vampire families are split

between those who think it is a

miracle and those who think that

she is an abomination, including

the ruling family of the time

(Desmarais—now extinct)

1799: In fear, Mervaux call for

help. Nine families answer—

Vandervelde, Doyle, Greco,

Rose, Wolf, Magnusson, Kaya,

Quinn, Pavlov. Danae treaty

signed.

1806: Desmarais falls. Nine

families take power under new

name of Danae.

1820 (?): Mercedes gives birth

to child (vampire father?), also

human, also female. Named

Melisande (star mark, lower

abdomen).

1845: Under pressure, Danae

abdicates in favor of elected

leaders and is forced to disband

as a condition. Do so publicly,

but not in private. Tattoo is

designed so that members will

know one another.

1847: Melisande gives birth to

daughter (definite vampire

father), child still human. Named

Michelle (star lines on palm).

1869: Michelle disappears.

Reason unknown.

1902: I am born.

1965: Victor Petrov circulates

influential work, The Lost

Daughter, underground, in which

he argues that the human line of

Mervaux vampires continues.

Later recants and says, “It was

just a novel,” but then

disappears.

I turn back to the beginning of the journal—Vlad’s first entry is dated in 1966. Victor’s “novel” obviously converted Vlad enough that he’s spent the last half a century searching for her. I read over the timeline again, doing my best to make sense of the rush of dates and bite-sized history. The Danae isn’t just looking for the girl because of her supposed powers; they’re looking for her because she and her line are their crown jewel. Or at least she was until she vanished.

When I flip to the next page, I find more cramped writing and the header “Col ected Myths and Legends.” Before I can start to read, however, the door creaks behind me. I whirl around to find Neal standing in the entranceway, staring at me with surprise. Guess what? His neon swim trunks glow in the dark.

“Found you!” he says before his face wrinkles in confusion. “Why are you standing in the middle of the room? You’re worse than Violet.” His eyes fal to the book in my hand. “What’s that?”

“Nothing,” I say, annoyed at the interruption until I realize that I’m lucky it’s just Neal. Vlad might be hunting for this, which means that I should save a more thorough read for later. I attempt to shove it in my pocket, but girl pants are not as accommodating as boy pants. Left with little other option, I lift my T-shirt and wiggle it into the space between my back and the waistband of my jeans; at least if Vlad tries to take it back it wil be covered in girl cooties. Holding up my hands, I say, “You got me!” just as Violet’s blond head appears behind his shoulder. She tickles his sides, and he jumps.

“Too long
again
,” she says, but she is smiling. “Let’s go downstairs. I am tired of the cupboard.”

I let them walk in front of me, head stil pounding with new information until the way Violet loops her arm through Neal’s and he bends down to whisper something in her ear makes me think this might not be a problem that can be moved to the back burner.
This is not good,
I think as her giggle bounces up the stairway.
This is not good at all.
When we get to the bottom of the stairs I grab Violet’s free arm. “I need to talk to Violet for a second,” I tel Neal. “Go have another ranchy cheese puff. I hear they’re magical y delicious.”

“But—”

“We’l find you,” I say and pul Violet into the next room: the kitchen.

A thick layer of dust coats the new appliances. The sink’s faucet is a dul green, and the only light stil working is the one hanging over the oven. Cobwebs cling to every corner, including the slatted pantry door. The most neglected room in the house, it’s been left mostly empty by the other partygoers.

Mostly. A girl I recognize from the soccer team and her friend stumble in, gossiping about how so-and-so just threw herself at Vlad for the third time, energetical y enough that her top slipped down and exposed her man entrancers to the world. “And he just studied them for a few seconds,” she says, “then pul ed up her top and said, ‘Thank you, that was an immense help.’ Sometimes he’s so weird.”