by Mia Archer
“I don’t need you encouraging her,” I said to Arnold.
“Whatever,” he said. “You’ll excuse me if I’m more interested in helping out the hot chick who used to be a ghost. Solidarity.”
I growled and wrapped him in tendrils of death magic. That would keep him for a little while. It would eventually dissipate, but he wouldn’t be able to move for a little while.
I figured it was the least he deserved for making life difficult for me.
“Stacy!” I shouted, trying to catch up with her and knowing it wasn’t going to do any good even as I did.
She was moving through the crowd with a purpose. There were three entrances to the cafeteria on this side, and there was only one entrance the guy could be going for.
I stopped moving through the crowd when I saw that girl from earlier walking through. She locked eyes with me and blushed for a moment before she continued moving the way she’d came. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was about her, but there was something that drew me to her.
I shook my head and looked around. The crowd had completely changed in the time it took for that dark-haired beauty to walk past me. It was enough to make me wonder what the hell it was about her that distracted me like that. Sure her look was a little retro, but it’s not like that was a weird thing these days.
Maybe it was that I didn’t recognize her. The school was small enough that everyone knew everyone else. I’d heard of schools that were so big that you saw someone you’d never seen before every day, but this place definitely wasn’t like that.
Whatever. I needed to find Stacy. She was going to kill that guy, and the last thing I needed was her murdering someone in the middle of a crowd at school. That would mean enough witnesses that it’d be difficult to cover it up if it turned out the guy was a vampire.
Not to mention I still wasn’t sure if the guy was a vampire. That would be an even bigger mess if she stabbed some poor bastard who didn’t have fangs.
I made it out into the hallway and the crowd was a lot thinner out here than I would’ve figured. Staring at that girl really must’ve done a number on me if I was losing track of time.
Stacy stood in the hall staring off into the distance. She was also still carrying that stake in her hand which made her look just a little weird. She was getting looks from people going around her, but when they realized I was approaching they suddenly had places to be.
I looked around for the guy with the glitter lotion. Was it possible he was around here somewhere and he was the reason she was staring off in the distance like that?
“Stacy?” I said, waving my hand in front of her. “Come on Stacy, what the heck’s wrong with you?”
I was starting to lean more and more towards the guy being a vampire if he could do something like this. Sure I wasn’t sure if mesmerizing people was actually something vampires could do, but something happened to her to get her from going from murder mode to standing here staring like an idiot.
“Stacy!” I shouted. Still nothing. So I reached out and smacked her with a touch of my magic. Just across the face. Just enough to get her attention.
That finally got her to blink and her eyes focused on me.
“Gwen?” she asked. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” I said, some of the irritation I felt creeping into my voice. “You can’t go running around with a stake in your hand! That’s the kind of thing that’ll get you kicked out of school if a teacher sees you!”
I looked around. As though mentioning a teacher was enough to bring one of them around I saw Mr. Lee, the assistant principal, looking at us. He looked away when I made eye contact, though I’d seen him looking at that stake.
Huh. Maybe there was something useful about my new reputation if it could get us out of trouble.
“We need to get out of here before you get in trouble,” I said.
“But what about the vampire?” she asked. “We have to stop him! He must’ve done something to me! One moment I was chasing him and the next it was like…”
I shivered and tried not to think about how close what she was saying felt to what’d happened to me when that girl walked in front of me. Did she have something to do with it too?
“We’re going to be late to class,” I said. “You can hunt vampires later when we’re not supposed to be learning stuff.”
She still had a far off look in her eyes. Like she was looking at something but not quite understanding what she was looking at. Then she looked at me and her expression firmed up.
“No,” she said.
“No?” I asked. “I mean class is going to start. That’s pretty much a given.”
“Maybe it is,” she said. “But I’m not going back to class. Not when that vampire is still out there. If he did this to me then he could do it to someone else, and I’m not going to have someone’s death on my head. He went this way.”
And once more, before I could do anything to stop her, not that there really was anything I could do to stop her, she was moving down the hallway again and completely ignoring me as I chased after her.
At least Mr. Lee kept right on ignoring Stacy even though she was stalking down a hall carrying a very sharp implement that could do some damage. Which was sort of the point, but it wasn’t something I could see a school administrator with a perpetual stick up his ass approving of.
“Stacy,” I hissed, catching up to her. “This is a really bad idea. We don’t know what we’re going up against. We don’t even…”
Only once more Stacy was ignoring me. I wasn’t sure exactly when I’d developed the power of invisibility along with all the reaper magic I had going for me, and I wondered if there was some way I could use this strange new power.
“I’m pretty sure he went this way,” she said. “We need to catch that bastard before he finds some poor girl and sucks her dry!”
Stacy was about to round the corner, which didn’t seem like a good idea considering there was potentially a vampire on the other side of that corner, when she stopped. Like she stopped so suddenly that I very nearly ran into her.
“What the hell Stacy?” I hissed, but she rounded on me and put her hands to her lips.
Okay then. She wanted me to be quiet. She got down close to the ground and peered around the corner. I could hear voices around that corner, and wondered what she was looking at. So I peered around the corner myself.
I figured if I couldn’t convince her that this was a ridiculously stupid idea then at least I could make sure she didn’t do something that would put her in danger.
Only when I peered around that corner I got one heck of a surprise. There was a group of a couple of guys and a couple of girls facing down the sparkly dude. I didn’t recognize any of the dudes or one of the chicks, but I did know at least one of them.
That girl. The one who’d been in the lunch room. The one who’d been such a distraction that I let Stacy get away. And I suddenly got the bad feeling that we’d walked into something here that was a lot bigger than one vampire getting his sparkle on to creep on high school girls.
“What the heck is going on there?” I hissed, hopefully low enough that they wouldn’t hear us creeping on them from our hiding place.
“I’m not sure, but I don’t like it,” Stacy said.
Her tone worried me. That was the kind of tone she got when she was about to do something that got both of us in trouble. Sure I could appreciate that it was because she didn’t like the obvious sight of someone getting bullied in our school, a school that she saw as hers since she was one of the more popular people and she was also one of the rare people who took that duty seriously.
Still, I wasn’t sure if we wanted to mess with anyone who could obviously push around a vampire. Like the big guy in a letter jacket that looked really old was doing now.
“Oh no he didn’t,” Stacy growled. “That shit does not happen in my school.”
And before I could stop her she was around the c
orner and advancing on these new kids who I was pretty sure were all vampires, leaving me back here scrambling to stop her before she became a snack for these teenage daywalking bloodsuckers.
3
Rescue
“Hey! What the heck do you think you’re doing?” Stacy shouted.
I turned and looked down the hall. Mr. Lee was still standing there looking at us, and it looked like he’d rather be anywhere but where she was now.
Students weren’t the only ones who’d heard the rumors about me. It bugged me that the teachers were buying that stuff hook, line, and sinker, but it’s not like it could annoy me all that much considering most of the rumors that’d been going around about me were one hundred percent true.
Right now he looked like he was trying to decide whether or not it was worth getting involved in a fight I was involved in. Finally he sighed, rolled his eyes, and made his way down the hall towards us.
That made me feel a little better. Sort of. If these things were vampires then they were probably trying to keep a low profile. That was how they worked.
Vampires were creatures of the shadows these days. Sure there might’ve been a time when they lived in castles and lorded it over their food, but those days had ended when humanity started advancing up the tech tree and developing the kind of weapons that could give supernatural creatures a really bad time if they revealed themselves to the world.
Humanity had hunted just about every apex predator they came across to extinction, or to the brink of extinction. To the point that the only place those things existed these days were mostly in places humans didn’t want to live in huge numbers or places humans had set aside specifically for the apex predators to live.
A lot of the smart supernatural apex predators had seen the writing on the wall a long time ago and decided anonymity and working in the shadows was better business than letting the world know they existed and being hunted by food with guided missiles and atomic weapons.
I’d like to see people continuing to enjoy hamburgers if cows developed the ability to precisely kill them from halfway around the world by pushing a button.
Only those ancient apex predators could still be dangerous striking from the shadows, and right now Stacy was advancing on the things. I wasn’t sure Mr. Lee was going to get there in time to save her cute ass. Which meant it was my ass that was in the lurch trying to save her instead.
Which was pretty much business as usual. We were back to the way things were when I was trying to save her from Graham the necromancer.
I advanced on the vampires as Stacy gave them a piece of her mind. A really big piece of her mind, too. She didn’t sound happy. She also didn’t sound appropriately terrified like she should’ve.
“…honestly, what do you think you’re doing pushing someone around like that?” she asked, hands on her hips as she looked at each of them in turn.
I looked at the girl from the cafeteria. The one who’d turned so many heads. She looked at me and blushed, then looked away. At least this time it didn’t seem like there was going to be any of that hypnotic nonsense.
The big guy seemed more amused than anything. He laughed, a deep laugh that came from the center of a massive chest, and shook his head.
“What are you talking about?” he asked. “The guy is a nerd. You should be happy we’re taking care of him for you.”
“I’m not happy about it at all,” Stacy said. “I know you might be new here and all, but bullying is not cool!”
The group of probably-vampires exchanged glances. There was a brief beat where they seemed to be trying to decide if Stacy was serious, then they all burst into laughter.
“Are you serious?” the big guy asked. Seriously, the dude was built like a tank. Like he looked like he would already be tough to take on in a fight even if he didn’t have vampire strength.
Only the laughter died down as they looked at Stacy and realized that yeah, she was totally serious. I couldn’t help but admire her as she stood up to the guy, but I also couldn’t help but feel a touch of panic as she reached behind her and put her hand on the stake she’d tucked into her back pocket.
“I don’t know who you think you are coming to my school and acting like this,” Stacy said. “But you…”
“Now you listen here,” the big guy said. “This might be your school now, but you have no idea what things were like when…”
“What seems to be the problem here?”
For a surprise everyone turned to look at Mr. Lee. He was using his principal voice. I guess that was something that worked on the brains of a bunch of forever-teenager bloodsuckers. Or maybe the fact that they were stuck with teenager brains made them more amenable to listening to an adult using the principal voice even if there was no reason for a group of teenage vampires to listen to a principal.
Talk about an unfortunate age to be stuck at for all of eternity.
“This is none of your concern,” the big guy said, though he sounded a touch nervous. Maybe there was something to my teen brain principal voice theory after all.
His attitude only seemed to irritate Mr. Lee. He brought himself up to his full height, looking for all the world like a cat trying to puff itself up so it would look bigger. Or a snake raising up so it would look more threatening to the stupid idiot that dared bother something with fangs.
Poor Mr. Lee had no idea he was threatening something with fangs right now.
“What did you say to me young man?” he asked. “I will not stand for students talking to me like that!”
“Um, it might be a good idea for you to let me handle this,” I said, hoping to keep the poor assistant principal from getting sucked dry before he knew what was happening.
Mr. Lee looked to me. I could see the wheels turning in his head. No doubt he was thinking about all the nastiness that’d gone down around homecoming, and thinking that he’d rather be anywhere but around the weird stuff that happened when I was around.
It was a feeling I could sympathize with, because I was feeling the same way right at that moment.
“Right,” he said, shrinking back. “I think I’ll just be going now, if you don’t mind.”
“Good idea,” the big one said.
Mr. Lee turned and more or less ran as fast as his cheap discount dress shoes would carry him back the way he’d come.
“You asshole!” Stacy said.
I looked to my girlfriend and wondered if she’d lost it. Seriously. Then again she’d never seemed to care about risk of bodily harm or death. Not after she’d already been killed by a necromancer and brought back a few times.
"What are you going to do about it?" the big one asked.
Stacy reached up and looked like she was going to actually pull up her sleeves like she was getting ready for a fight. Even though she was in a tank top that skirted the dress code that didn’t actually have sleeves to pull up, which she realized when her hands went to her surprisingly toned biceps.
Cheerleader muscles, don’t knock’em. It's not like she was roided out or anything, but she was tough. I was well aware of just how strong she was. I’d found that out the hard way a couple of times.
I didn't think she’d necessarily be able to take a vampire in a fight, but I also knew that wasn't necessarily going to stop her from trying to take a vampire in a fight.
"Now Stacy…" I said.
The vampire girl interrupted me. She was pretty. Then again I doubted a vampire would go around picking someone ugly to turn into an eternal immortal companion. No, if everything I'd heard was anything to go on then bloodsuckers were just as shallow as the rest of humanity. Maybe more shallow, considering they used the whole seduction thing to try and lure in their prey.
An ugly vampire was a dead vampire since they couldn’t lure in prey as effectively in the modern world.
"Shut up," the girl snapped, dropping that whole mystery girl routine. "You might think you're the big thing right now, but I'll show you exactly what you are."
"Wh
at the hell is that supposed to mean?" Stacy growled, and then her voice went lower for the next bit. "And who the hell do you think you are wearing a cheer pin? Maybe you were on the squad back in the fifties when you waved your pom-pomps around, but you’re nothing now you bloodsucking bitch.”
I glanced at her and sure enough, there on her shoulder was a cheer pin that looked sort of like the one Stacy wore on her letter jacket. This pin was scuffed and dinged, it clearly had more mileage on it than Stacy’s, but it was a cheer pin.
Which made sense, I guess. If this girl really was a vampire, and I was pretty sure she was, then she naturally would’ve gotten some use out of any clothes she had from back when she'd been turned.
"You might think you’re hot shit right now," the girl said. “But we're going to show you what it means to really run this school. When he reveals himself…”
When he reveals himself? That sounded appropriately ominous. I was wondering who he was and about to ask about it, but the cat fight brewing got out in front of any attempts I might make at playing detective.
She smiled. The kind of cruel smile I’d expect from a vampire who'd been stuck as a teenager for the past few decades and had never really moved past being a hormone-fueled bitch, for all that she could be older than my parents. She threw herself at Stacy, almost faster than I could blink, her hands at Stacy's neck.
Stacy didn't so much as blink. No, she did exactly what I'd expect of her given our time together. Which is to do something stupid that ran the risk of pissing off the scary undead monster threatening to crush her windpipe. She reached out and grabbed the cheer pin on the scary vampire’s shirt and ripped it off. The vampire stared at her, wide-eyed and in disbelief, and then the fangs came out.
Oh yeah. It just hit the fan.
4
Geekpire
It was weird. There were so many pieces of entertainment over the past thirty or so years that had gone to great trouble to try and make vampires terrifying to a modern audience through the use of prosthetics and masks. You had them "vamping out," to look more like monsters and less like people wearing Halloween fangs.
