by Serena Robar
I whistled deep when I saw her. She looked magnificent. “That is quite a dress, my friend. And some serious cleavage.”
She curtsied, snapping open a lace fan and gracefully fanning herself, delicately hiding her cleavage from view.
“This corset might just kill me,” she admitted and I laughed at her.
“The cost of beauty is never cheap,” I offered.
“Way to be dressed,” she accused as she sashayed down the hallway toward the kitchen.
“I’m almost done, just let me get the dress on. Be right down. You better eat something before we go,” I called out to her as I raced up the stairs.
“On it,” came her muffled reply. I heard my mom’s cries of admiration and surprise when she saw Piper.
I decided to wear my hair up, with a riot of curls cascading down my back. It was the style I thought would show off the princess tiara most appropriately. My dress for the evening was an icy blue, with spaghetti straps that crisscrossed down my back. The chiffon layers of the skirt floated as I walked, flashing a great deal of leg with each step. To complete the look, I wore strappy silver heels, a silver choker and matching hoop earrings. My license was the only adornment I needed on my hands. I checked myself out in the full-length mirror and nodded in satisfaction. Not too shabby.
I grabbed a tiny silver purse for my phone and lipstick, and then draped a silver wrap over my bare shoulders. Good thing I was Undead or tonight might be a little chilly.
The doorbell rang as I walked down the steps and my mom answered it.
Thomas stepped in and our eyes met. I was happy to see them widen in surprise and admiration. Yes, a girl liked to know when she looked good.
Carl stepped into the house behind him holding a bouquet of red roses for his date. Nice touch.
I could tell the instant he caught sight of Piper. His smile widened, his white teeth flashed and a dimple made an appearance. Who knew Carl was a dimple kind of guy? Usually he was growling at me or threatening me or trying to strangle me.
“Encantado,” Carl murmured, bringing Piper’s hand to his mouth and kissing it.
I was amused to see Piper blush to the roots of her jet-black hair. She accepted the flowers but my mother quickly confiscated them to put in a vase full of water. Heaven forbid those blooms go another minute without moisture. Moms.
She returned with a camera and a single red bud from Piper’s bouquet and suggested Piper tuck it into Carl’s lapel. Then we withstood a thousand photographs.
Dad wished us all well as we left. A black limousine was waiting for us at the curb. Carl helped Piper into the car and Thomas waved the chauffer aside so he could hold the door open for me himself.
“Now isn’t this nicer than whacking me?” I teased him lightly.
He grabbed both my hands and looked deeply into my eyes. “The only reason I requested to be your executioner was to protect you, Colby. Some Investigators hate half-bloods and do unspeakable things to them before they finally end their pain. I could not bear to think of anyone toying with you in such a fashion.”
I was surprised by his concern. I could tell he spoke the truth by the intensity of his gaze.
“I would have died in my heart to end your life, but I would have done it to save you further torment.”
I gave him a small half smile, full of tenderness and emotion. Then I assured him cockily, “Dude, you sooo could not have killed me.”
He laughed and kissed the tip of my nose.
“Hurry up out there. We’ll never get to make fun of anyone if you keep gabbing,” Piper complained from inside the limo.
I laughed out loud. With Piper around I would never get too uppity, and with Thomas around, I—well, let’s just say things would never get boring. Next year I was going to PSU. My job was to run my own sorority house! Imagine the fun we would have. What was the Tribunal thinking?
Super Secret Author Confessions Volume 1
My Worst Date Ever …
In college, I experienced my worst date ever. Feel free to mock my pain …
I had a crush on a boy who worked in the dining hall. After many weeks of flirting, he finally asked me out. He took me to a party at his apartment where, within a half hour of our arrival, he received a phone call from his “other” job. He claimed he was also an on-call janitor for one of the dorms. After apologizing profusely, he changed into spandex shorts (Dude, it was the late ’80s), assured me he would return within the hour, and left to fulfill his janitorial duties. I did not see him again until six the next morning.
I was stranded at his apartment with a bunch of people I didn’t know. After playing one too many rounds of Quarters, I crashed on his bed. I also sort of … threw up on his bed. Anyway, about six in the morning I stumbled downstairs and found him cleaning up. He was so sorry and so sweet. He assured me he kept calling to make sure I was okay because he ended up having to “work” all night. I should have been suspicious, because he was really understanding about the whole vomit on his comforter thing. He gallantly offered to drive me back to my dorm after asking me to go to a concert with him the following week.
Once in my own bed, I promptly drifted off to sleep dreaming about our next date. I awoke to a fierce pounding on my door. “Where were you last night?” my friends demanded. I explained about my date and his “other” job. Imagine my surprise to discover my date had left me stranded at his apartment while he went on another date with a girl who lived two doors down from me. He took her to a widely advertised dance in the dining hall and entered the spandex competition (he won second place). Then he spent the night with her and returned home in the wee hours of the morning to me, his original date.
The best part of this story? When I confronted this guy, he was most upset that I wasn’t going to the concert because he expected me to reimburse him for the ticket.
Oh, yes, this is a true story. Sad, but very true.
Eight Things You Didn’t Know About Me
1. It took me three days to write 150 pages of Braced 2 Bite.
2. I watched every season of Buffy in only three weeks. For those of you doing the math, that’s approximately six plus episodes a day. Which would explain why I had to write 150 pages of Braced 2 Bite in three days.
3. My favorite drink is Mountain Dew and I try to have one of my characters drink it in every book. My secret hope is that someone at Pepsi will offer me free Dew in exchange for the promotion.
4. I currently own twenty-eight pairs of shoes, four pairs of sneakers, six pairs of flip-flops, and five pairs of boots.
5. I am an avid scrapbooker who has all the latest gadgets and paper but doesn’t possess a single up-to-date album.
6. Every year, my friends and I have an Oscar party. We dress up in formal wear (complete with tiaras) and pretend we are Joan and Melissa Rivers rating fashions on the red carpet. Then I hit the drive-thru at McDonald’s dressed in my finery.
7. When Googling my name (yeah, like you’ve never done it) I found a company called Robar Guns. They create custom firearms. Now I want to get one just so I can say I’m packing a Robar.
8. I couldn’t think of ten interesting things, which is really sort of sad… .
My first piece of published work appeared in an elementary-school newsletter when I was in the second grade. Please note the amount of angst I had for fish, which may explain why I never had any pets as a child… .
Ode to Fish
Hey, fish you stink
You smell like disinfected odors
When you die, they flush you
Down the toilet and your fish food too.
So don’t lose your smell!!
I hate you fish.
You stink. You do! You do! You do!
I am glad I do not like you.
You stay in the water too much.
And now for a special excerpt from Serena Robar’s next exciting novel …
FANGS FOR FREAKS
Available from Berkley!
A body launched strai
ght at me from the bushes before I had time to register who or what it was. The force of impact was enough to knock the breath from my lungs, that is, if I breathed. Instead of crushing me with its force, I rolled with his momentum and neatly turned over once, then used my feet to send him flying over my head, crashing into crates of recycling awaiting pick-up on the sidewalk.
Doing a quick flip from my back onto my feet, I, Colby Blanchard, moved toward my would-be assailant without trepidation.
“Are you okay, Cyrus?” I questioned, looking for signs of injury as he lay sprawled among the old newspapers and empty soda cans.
“Mhmph,” came his muffled reply as he disentangled himself from the bins, “finish me?” He stood and I was relieved to find him relatively unharmed.
“What did you say?” I asked again, a bit dubious of his reply. His left pant leg was ripped at the knee and I could see the scraped skin starting to bleed.
The scent of fresh blood filled my senses and I had to take a step back. A familiar ache in the roof of my mouth and the loud rumbling from my stomach reminded me I didn’t feed last night. My treacherous hand involuntarily reached for the pocket housing specialized orthodontic headgear embedded with stainless steel fangs. What? Just because I’m fang-handicapped doesn’t make me a freak or anything. I can still get the job done ya know. Just not right now. Now it was a battle of wills, between my true self and the inner demon who demanded to feed.
I took a Zen moment and subdued my hunger. It was so not getting the upper hand here. The first rule of thumb was no feeding on friends and I wasn’t about to break it because I was feeling a bit peckish.
“I said, why didn’t you finish me off? You stood there like some clueless victim waiting for me to find a weapon to take you down.”
“Uh, I knew it was you?” It was an obvious answer, but Cyrus was always all business.
For the last eight months, Cyrus had spent two hours a day teaching me how to fight and protect myself. I met him on a routine visit to see my great-aunt Chloe at her condo in Providence Point. Her neighbor, Bits Walker, was bragging about her grandson, a self-defense instructor and former Special Operative in the military. Like anything Bits said, I took it with a grain of salt. After all, she’d been married four times and on last count, she mentioned seven husbands. I wondered if perhaps, she wasn’t all there.
But one day, there was Cyrus, holding Bits’s yarn as she knitted and listening attentively to her stories. He was smaller than I imagined, with craggy skin and a wicked-looking scar that went across his chin to his left ear, which appeared to be partially missing. He was wiry and muscular. I doubted he had an ounce of fat on his frame.
My thoughts were interrupted by Cyrus digging around the refuse. “What are you looking for?” I asked skeptically. Cyrus was, well, let’s just say he and his grandmother were very alike in the sanity department.
“Aha!” he shouted triumphantly, brandishing what appeared to be a sharpened piece of wood.
“You had a stake?!” I gasped incredulously.
“It’s like I’m having a conversation with Jell-O,” he muttered to himself. “Of course. Did you think I was going to continue attacking you with just my bare hands? You are too far advanced for those tactics. At least I thought you were. I thought you had achieved the black zone.”
Oh crap, not the zones again.
When he first started training me, I was in the white zone, which meant I was completely oblivious to my surroundings. Then came the blue zone or was it the green? I could never keep them straight. Anyway, I quickly raced up the zones to the black zone, which meant I was in Ninja-like awareness all the time. Personally, I liked being in the white zone but when you’re the most unpopular half-blood Undead in the neighborhood, you can’t afford to be in the white zone anymore.
Ever since I was attacked and turned into a vampire—oh excuse me, that would be half-blood vampire—I’d become persona non grata in the Undead community. I think I might have been able to live out my days in relative peace and solitude if I hadn’t petitioned for half-blood rights and emancipated an entire species. That move made me a little less than popular with the full-blood population. Well, excuse me for fighting injustice.
I did such a good job freeing my people, I was elevated to being their Protector, which I am sure was the Tribunal’s way of getting rid of all of us. I imagine they were still kicking themselves that not only was I Undead and around, but I was also becoming a pretty kick-ass Protector in the process.
Today was the day I would meet the rest of my half-blood family. Yep, we are going to show those bigoted full-bloods that we’re every bit as useful and viable a species and deserve to exist. At least, I hoped so. I hadn’t met any other half-bloods yet, but I held high hopes for our success.
“Colby? Hello? Colby Blanchard? Are you even listening to me?” Cyrus asked impatiently.
“Uh, sorry. What were you saying about the zone?”
He sighed in exasperation (he did that a lot with me) and repeated, “Since you refuse to allow me to test your skills in the evening, you have to be in the zone all the time.”
I held up a hand to stop him. “Yeah, yeah, I get it. I’m sorry. It’s just today is the day I meet my new sorority sisters and I’m really nervous.”
“Oh, well then, that’s fine. I’m sure no one will be out to get you today then.”
“Ha-ha,” I retorted sarcastically.
“Today of all days you need to be most aware.”
It took my aunt Chloe exactly twelve minutes to tell Cyrus what I really was and persuade him to train me. Cyrus had believed her immediately, even though I walked around during the day and didn’t have real fangs. I guess it was the incident about his grandmother that did it. I’d insisted on taking Bits to her doctor because she smelled different that day. My super sniffer detected a change in her normal lavender scent. It was a move that saved her life. Bits was on the verge of a heart attack, but thanks to me, she ended up with a bypass and a new lease on life.
He seemed to accept that I was a mutant Undead with limited vampiric powers who needed steel fangs to bite her victims because I had had my canine teeth removed for braces when I was twelve. I mean, it makes perfect sense right? HA! It was my life and even I had a hard time believing it most of the time.
“I wish you would let me teach you defense with weapons,” he complained.
We were back to that old argument. I think he knew how close I was to caving on that one.
In the evenings, Thomas, my Vampire Investigator boyfriend trained with me and we used swords. Actually, it would be fairer to say Thomas used the swords and I just did my best to avoid being beheaded and/or shish-kabobed. Thomas wouldn’t train me using a sword yet; he didn’t think I was quite ready. Well, his actual words were something along the lines of “you’ll poke your eye out” but the gist was the same.
I sighed heavily. “No, just help me avoid the stick.”
He gave me his patented you-are-one-crazy-chick look and dropped the subject.
“Are you going to visit Bits today?” I asked.
“Already did. I have to leave tonight for a mission. I won’t be back until Monday.”
“You’re leaving me?” I said in surprise.
“Yeah, I do have paying customers who need my services, you know. Don’t worry, Thomas won’t leave you alone this weekend, so you should be fine.”
“You know, I don’t need Thomas’s protection to be just fine. I can take care of myself.”
“Oh really? Check out your shirt.”
I glanced down to see a white chalk mark dead center on my chest. When I looked back at Cyrus, he held the “wooden stake” for me to examine. It was really a large stick of chalk.
“Oh,” I said in surprise, realizing that if he was really out to get me, he could have killed me right then.
“You were saying?” His constant superior ways and arrogance were always annoying, but he was particularly obnoxious today.
“B
ite me,” I replied in my snarkiest tone. Yes, I am the queen of maturity when provoked.
“That’s your department,” he said dryly and turned to walk away. Looking back over his shoulder he added, “Be safe and don’t hesitate to finish the job.”
I watched him leave, his body tightly wound, ready to spring if the situation warranted it.
“He’s so weird,” commented a voice from behind, effectively scaring the daylights out of me.
“Argh! Don’t do that! You could’ve given me a heart attack!” I squealed, grabbing my chest for dramatic effect.
“The day your heart starts beating … I’ll be the one having a heart attack.”
Piper Prescott was my best friend and occasional arch nemesis. She wore her hair straight to the shoulders, jet-black with burgundy ends. Her nose was pierced, her skin a shade of alabaster rarely found on another living being and she always, always spoke her mind. We were direct opposites in so many ways, but I wouldn’t trade our friendship for all the Kate Spade bags in Macy’s. Well, usually I felt that way.
“Dude, you are so funny, I forgot to laugh.”
We moved to tidy up the recycling that Cyrus scattered and walked into Piper’s house to wash our hands.
“So, today’s the big day, huh?” Piper asked after folding up the dish towel.
“Yep, tonight I meet the rest of the house. I can’t believe it. You’re gonna be there, right?” I was nervous about meeting them but proud of my accomplishment at the same time. I’d spent the last year of my life preparing for the moment I would meet the first half-bloods allowed to exist in vampire history. All because of me.
“Oh, I’ll be there.” Piper smirked. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“Do you have to be so negative?” I asked her. Piper was of the opinion that a bunch of girls with nothing in common except being Undead and forced to live together was a recipe for catastrophe.
