Liz Jasper - Underdead 02

by Underdead in Denial

Chattering voices pealed like warning bells from the path around the side of the administration building. I pulled myself together enough to push Will away.

  By the time the group (To this day I have no idea who was in it.) rounded the corner into the parking lot, Will was leaning casually against the SUV parked next to me, gorgeously unruffled, appearing every inch the chivalrous male. He wasn’t looking at the group. His midnight gaze was fixed on me. He watched and waited as I somehow fit my key in the lock, got in, started up my car and drove out of the parking lot.

  When I looked back, he was gone. Another black shadow in the night.

  The fear I had kept at bay came back with a vengeance, shimming down deep into my gut like a filet knife. I reached up a hand to touch my neck. I didn’t really think he could have bitten me without my knowledge, but then Will was capable of a lot of things I didn’t understand.

  The skin was smooth and dry. No new marks.

  I pulled up to a stop sign and rested my forehead against the cool vinyl of the steering wheel. “Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.”

  Someone behind me leaned on the horn. I jolted upright and drove forward. I realized I was cold. Freezing. I started to shiver. My hands shook so bad, I had a hard time keeping them on the wheel.

  At the next stop sign, I pulled to the curb to let a couple of impatient tailgaters pass and dug for my cell phone. As soon as my fingers closed around it, the shaking subsided a little and I started driving again. Maybe I should have waited until I was calmer, but I didn’t. Movement made me feel less like a sitting duck. But only a little.

  I desperately needed someone to talk to and there was only one person—one human—who knew my secret. I hadn’t spoken to him in months, but I thought this was a good time to renew our acquaintance. I fumbled with the buttons on my cell phone.

  The number rang and rang and finally switched over to a robotic recording saying the number was no longer in service. I jabbed the “end call” button and cursed technology for depriving me of the satisfaction of banging a receiver back on its cradle.

  At the next stop sign, I called the main switchboard at the local police station and asked to be transferred to Detective Raines. He answered on the first ring.

  “Dammit, Gavin, what the hell do you think you’re doing, changing your cell phone number?”

  There was a slight pause. “Jo?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to reach you?”

  “By calling the police station, as you just did.”

  I hung there in stunned silence. It’d taken me weeks of knowing him last spring to get his personal cell phone number, and I had thought it meant I could rely on him. Apparently I’d misunderstood his willingness to help me. “Why did I think you could help? Goodbye, Detective Raines.”

  I ended the call and cursed him until I pulled into a parking space right in front of my apartment. Go figure. The night all hell broke loose, I got the number one parking spot. There’s the universe in balance for you.

  Stifling a noise that was half sob, half slightly hysterical laughter, I grabbed my book bag from the passenger seat and bolted for my apartment. I took the stairs at a run, as if a dozen hungry vampires were after me. Which, for all I knew, they were.

  When I got inside, I jittered around, turning on every single light and ended up in the kitchen. I had the freezer open for a full five minutes before I accepted there wasn’t any ice cream inside. I slammed it shut, pulled butter and eggs out of the fridge and got to work on comfort food. After a few minutes of alternating nuking and stirring two sticks of butter into a soft fluffy paste, I started to calm down. My hands were almost steady as I measured out white and brown sugar and cracked an egg into the mixing bowl.

  I had the first tray of triple chocolate chip cookies in the oven and was almost humming with denial when someone knocked on my door. I glanced at the oven clock. It was after eleven. I wiped batter off my hands on a yellow daisy kitchen towel and went through the small living room to stand in front of the door.

  “Who is it?”

  “Gavin.”

  I flicked on the outside light and opened the tiny peephole door that local builders had favored back in the twenties. It was Gavin all right. I re-latched the peephole, and after a short internal debate, let him in.

  The last time I’d seen him, long hours and the strain of a murder investigation had aged him so he looked closer to forty than his actual age of thirty. A new man stood before me. He was as trim and fit as ever, but a summer of biathlons had given him what my mother would have called a “healthy glow”. He was…relaxed, down to the golden stubble wreathing his jaw.

  My summer had been spent cowering indoors, hiding from sunlight. I felt like a pasty, redheaded mushroom and resented every sun-bleached hair on his head.

  “Detective,” I said, crossing my arms and fighting the urge to drop kick his toned butt back out the door.

  “Hello, Jo. Long time no see.” He looked at me closely, but as usual his inscrutable light gray eyes gave nothing of his thoughts away.

  He sniffed the air and headed, uninvited, for the kitchen. “You’re baking cookies.”

  He pulled out a chair from the small table in the breakfast nook. “I don’t suppose that’s why you called me?” He turned the chair so he could face me and sat down, stretching his long legs into the kitchen.

  “No.”

  The timer went off. I pulled the first batch of cookies out of the oven, transferred half onto an inverted brown paper grocery bag to cool and the other half to a plate. I handed Gavin a napkin and the plate before I realized what I was doing.

  I stood frozen at the second horror of the evening. My mother had rubbed off on me.

  Gavin picked up a cookie and took a large bite. The chips were still molten and he had to breathe quickly through his open mouth to cool it.

  “I was watching the high school drama club’s fall production tonight. Will stopped in to say hello.”

  Gavin swallowed his mouthful of cookie. “I see. Had you invited him?”

  I snatched the plate of cookies off the table and plucked the half-eaten one from his hand. “I don’t know why I bother with you.”

  Gavin look mournfully at the cookie plate in my hand. “Really, Jo. You didn’t used be this sensitive.”

  “Oh? And what makes you an authority on my character?”

  His face took on a shuttered look. “Nothing.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his broad, well-muscled chest, suddenly businesslike. “What did Will want?”

  I felt myself blush.

  “Right. Anything else?”

  I gave him a look, and I didn’t care if it had enough uncontrolled vampire venom in it to reduce him to a pile of ashes. “If you’re not going to take this seriously, why don’t you leave?”

  He held up his hands in surrender. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  When he spoke again, he sounded more like the old, worrywart Gavin. “I assume this is the first time you’ve seen him in a while.”

  My head dipped in a tight nod. “Since last spring.”

  He took a small wire-bound notebook out of his jacket pocket and sighed. “Why don’t you tell me everything Will said.” Fishing out the ballpoint pen that was tucked inside the spiral, he flipped to a blank page.

  He’d asked nicely and I was scared enough that the old maxim, “a burden shared is a burden halved” sounded pretty good to me.

  Who was I kidding? I would have made him listen if I’d had to tie him up to get his attention.

  “Let’s see…” As I forced myself to think back over the whole evening without skipping over the more troubling bits, I nibbled on a cookie to calm myself. Gavin was watching me with a funny look on his face and I realized it was the one I’d stolen out of his hand. I put the cookie down, gave him back his plate and, closing my eyes, told him everything I could remember.

  “Not much to go on, is it?” he said when I stopped talking.

  “No.”

 
Gavin stood, put his empty plate in the sink and looked longingly at the few cookies left cooling on the counter before leaving the kitchen. He did his usual circuit around my tiny apartment, checking all the windows to make sure they were shut and locked. I followed him, trying not to show how nervous I was at the prospect of being alone that night.

  “I think it would be a good idea if you got home before sundown, at least for a while. I’ll talk to the chief and see if I can’t get a couple of uniforms to drive by your place at night.”

  Officially, Gavin was “visiting” from a small community up north to “learn” investigation techniques from the Long Beach Police Department detectives. Only the Chief of Police, and maybe one or two other necessary people affiliated with the department, such as the coroner, knew Gavin was there to quietly rid Long Beach of vampires, and they all wanted to keep it that way. Whenever a suspicious case came down the pike, the chief made sure it ended up on Gavin’s desk.

  My apartment, for as much of my meager paycheck that it ate up each month, is absurdly small and in no time at all we’d circled back to the front door. Gavin dug into his back pocket and handed me a card. “My new number’s on that. Call anytime.”

  He fixed his silvery-grey gaze on me for a long, silent moment before he turned to leave.

  All at once, my nerves seemed to catch up with me. I caught his arm before he went through the door. He stopped and turned slowly back to face me.

  “Do you think I should be worried?” I asked.

  The hard grooves of last fall returned to Gavin’s face as he dropped the pretense of trying to make me feel better. “Yes.”

  Chapter Two

  “Lock your door.”

  As if I needed to be told. I slid home the deadbolt with enough force that Gavin would be sure to hear it from his car, where he should have been by now if he didn’t, at some level, think me incompetent. When the ringing subsided, I heard the soft pad of his running shoes as he turned and headed back down the stairs.

  I returned to my warm chocolate-scented kitchen and finished baking cookies, putting them away as they cooled. Precisely one third went into zip-top bags and into the freezer, against future cookie emergencies. The next third went to refilling my Disney villain cookie jar. After I formed the remaining eleven cookies into a pretty, overlapping wreath inside my favorite cookie tin to bring with me to work the next morning, I did dishes.

  Every bowl, spoon, measuring cup and sheet pan got a soapy hand wash and towel dry. I put them all away, organizing drawers and cupboards as I went. It wasn’t until I found myself clutching a green cylinder of cleanser as if the immediate future of the world relied on my cleaning the grout between the kitchen counter tiles with a toothbrush that I admitted I was a little rattled.

  It wasn’t just that Will had reappeared in my life. I had known he would, the way one knows things deep inside one’s gut. What scared me was why he’d returned, now, after all this time.

  It had not escaped my notice that vampires, at least the few I’d met, didn’t have neck scars from where they’d been bitten. Becoming Undead, apparently, was quite good for the complexion. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen a vampire with so much as a hangnail.

  Being Underdead, on the other hand, was crap. Sure I could still go out during the day like a “normal” person. Except that I had to slather on SPF a million and wear so many layers of clothing that a bag lady would chide me for overdoing it. But if I didn’t take precautions, in five minutes my skin would be as fried as if I’d lain out from dawn to dusk on a sunny June day doused in baby oil. And it would stay that way. My skin didn’t have those miraculous vampire powers of recuperation.

  It was only recently that the seeping bite marks on my neck—the ones Will had put there last December—had completely scarred over. Why had they healed now, after all this time?

  I had told myself the holy water I’d conscientiously dabbed on it every Sunday after Mass (Okay, every other Sunday.) had worked its magic. But what if I was kidding myself? What if my neck had finally healed because I was sliding farther along the human-vampire continuum toward the friends-and-family-are-snack side? Was that why Will had shown up tonight at the theater after five months of silence? Because I was no longer balancing on the knife’s edge of normal but had crossed some invisible threshold into the vampire world?

  I didn’t think so. I didn’t suddenly feel more…vampish.

  I did feel tired. Horribly, bone-weary tired. Stumbling to the bedroom, I kicked off my shoes, tugged off my khakis and sweater and crawled under the covers. I left the lights on.

  I was almost asleep when a terrible thought yanked me conscious again. What if I was vampire enough now that Will no longer needed permission to enter my apartment?

  Don’t be silly, I told myself, wrenching my gaze from the shadowy triangle behind my bedroom door. My eyes drifted back almost immediately and with a huff of irritation that sounded frighteningly like the noise my grandmother made when Gramps left crumbs in the margarine, I got up and pushed the offending door flat against the wall.

  On the way back to bed, I grabbed my childhood teddy bear from its ornamental position on the dresser and, wedging myself between it and a baseball bat, fell dead asleep.

  By second period the next morning thoughts of vampires elicited no more than a yawn. I’d like to say it was a case of logic triumphing over panic, after all, no vampire could get to me while the sun was up, but I suspect it had more to do with sleep deprivation. That and the Introduction to Chemistry unit.

  Blinking hard, I glanced around my classroom at the half-asleep zombies propped cheek on elbow and admitted I needed to do something before someone fell into a coma.

  Especially as it might be me. My eighth-grade students weren’t the only ones finding it hard to care about the Periodic Table of Elements. I mean, I had a poster of it on the wall. Wasn’t that enough to tide over young minds for a few years until Becky got hold of them?

  Sigh.

  “Okay, let’s take a poll.” My voice had a jarring note of forced brightness that made the entire front row perk up long enough to switch arms for cheek propping.

  I drew a rectangle on the board and scribbled in a seven. Below that I added an N and below that wrote the number fourteen.

  “How many of you think there are eight electrons in the second orbital of a Nitrogen atom?”

  No one raised a hand and I experienced a small jolt of excitement. After two days of drawing orbitals on the board, they were finally getting it. Hallelujah, we could move on.

  “Are you sure?” I taunted, giving them a chance to change their minds. No one did. My enthusiasm was growing like…a balloon in outer space. Already, some part of my brain was beginning to spin out ideas for the upcoming astronomy unit.

  “Okay, how about nine electrons? No takers, huh?” I paused, savoring my moment of victory. “Any votes for seven?”

  No one as much as moved an eyelid.

  “How many of you are in my poll?” I demanded.

  The morning break bell rang and my students sprang back to life and hustled out of the room. I sank into the hard wooden chair at my desk, put my head in my hands and sighed.

  “That’s a helluva way to start the school year.”

  “Go away,” I said through my fingers.

  “I have coffee.”

  My classroom door was ajar and a slim hand came through, waggling a giant cup of Peet’s.

  I grunted and Becky came the rest of the way in. She was, as usual, clad from head to toe in black. Between that and her spiky silver hair, she looked more like a hip Korean high school student than a teacher.

  She handed me the cup and I drank down a quarter of it in a single gulp.

  “Oh thank God.” I was slumped hard against the back my chair, but at least I was upright.

  She gave a nonchalant swish of her hand.

  “Please. Call me Becky.”

  I didn’t respond and she studied me, frowning. “What is wrong with
you lately? I swear, you’re turning into a cranky old lady and you’re only twenty-three.”

  “Nothing is wrong.”

  I yawned hard and rubbed my face, snatching my hands away as my fingers began to search for evidence of skin damage commensurate with a new degree of vampire-ness from my sprint to and from the car that morning.

  There was no change since the last time I’d checked, twenty minutes ago.

  “I’m just tired.”

  I jerked my chin toward the Wicked Witch of Oz cookie tin atop my book bag on the high, blacktopped lab counter at the front of my classroom. Equipped with a sink and gas jets, the counter was designed for lab demonstrations, but more often used as a sort of open air crap drawer. Earth Science doesn’t really lend itself to demos. There’s only so much baking soda, vinegar and red food coloring you can mix inside a cone before you accept the best way to showcase a volcano’s explosive power is to pop in a DVD of Mt. St. Helens blowing its top. Not that that keeps me from stinking up the classroom with as much vinegar as I can heft, but you get my point.

  “I made cookies if you want some. Triple chocolate.”

  For once, Becky ignored the cookie lure and leaned over my desk to examine me more closely. “You look terrible.”

  “Thanks so much.”

  “Something’s going on with you.” Crossing her arms, Becky gave the demo counter a quick, automatic check for spills and leaned against it. “And I think I know what it is.”

  I started in disbelief. “You do?” It came out as a whisper.

  “Yes. Let’s look at the symptoms, shall we?” She ticked them off on her fingers. “You haven’t gone on a date in months…”

  The fact that she hadn’t yet heard I had acquired a boyfriend last night—Will—wasn’t particularly unusual. Becky’s disdain for the school grapevine was legendary. But having forgotten seeing him last night was. I wasn’t sure whether I was more alarmed at the idea of Will having secret mind-altering powers or excited by the idea that I might finally have stumbled upon something on the plus side of turning Undead.

  Did I have mind-altering powers I didn’t know about?