by Liz Jasper
I put out a hand to stop her. For all I knew, Will was hovering outside in the shadows, waiting to see my reaction to his gift. “I think that can wait ‘til morning, Mom. Maybe you could make us some hot chocolate?” I let a little fatigue color my voice. It wasn’t hard to do, I was bone tired and running on leftover adrenaline. She bustled off, pleased to be able to do something to mother me a bit.
Gavin headed for the door. “I’ll need you to sign your statement tomorrow and I’ll probably have a few follow-up questions.”
“I’ll come by the station on the way home from work.”
“You’re going to work tomorrow?”
“Trust me. It will be worse for me if I put it off.” Plenty of teachers, students and parents lived within spitting distance of Bayshore, and had followed the police sirens to the school parking lot, like moths to a flame. I could only imagine what was swirling through the grapevine already. Oh, no! Had Kendra said anything about vampires in front of all those people?
As if reading my thoughts, Gavin said in a low voice, “Don’t worry, we spoke to the headmaster tonight in the privacy of his office and I assure you, vampires were never mentioned. Kendra hasn’t spilled the beans yet—and I’m quite sure her lawyer will advise against it. She’d have to admit how she’d been following both you and Bob—and how she’d nicked his neck in an attempt to frame you. ‘Accidental homicide’ is much more palatable to a jury when you don’t add in those disturbingly premeditative-sounding bits.”
“Hmph.”
“It’s only a tight little group at the station that knows about this, Jo, and I’ll make sure nothing gets out on our end. As far as anyone will know, she attacked you with a regular old knife. I don’t want to make things awkward for you at work.”
“You mean any more awkward than the fact she hated me enough to try to kill me?” I said. “You know this is going to resurrect all those stupid rumors about me and Bob. I almost wish you would let the vampire rumor take its course—at least no one would believe that one!”
There was a loud crash in the kitchen. My mother seemed to be wrestling more pots on the stove than were necessary for a couple cups of hot chocolate. I put a hand on Gavin’s arm to get his attention. “Thanks,” I said simply.
I thought his expression softened slightly before he looked away. “So,” he said. “What’s the significance of the Thomas Hardy book?” Apparently I was wrong about the glimpse of humanity. Really! The man was made of stone.
Gavin waited for a response, but I didn’t answer him. The truth was, I really didn’t know what Will had meant in sending that book. I had told him about my weird Christmas ritual of reading Hardy books to distract him from what I had thought was some closely held regret about his career—as some sort of human resource manager. Talk about title inflation.
But while depressing Victorian literature might help put petty holiday complaints in perspective, I didn’t think there was any frigate of a book big enough to take me away from the fact that I was turning into a vampire.
Will’s victims usually experienced a quick transformation, but I was facing a protracted death. Not only did I know I was going to die (un-die? I’m still a little fuzzy on that part), but I knew what my fate would be. And unlike most people, I had no hope of wearing wings and a halo.
Had Will sent the book to underscore the supreme hopelessness of my situation or to help me face it? Was it a nice gesture or a cruel one?
Gavin’s voice pulled me out of my dark study. “All right,” he said, “Don’t tell me. I’ll guess. Let’s see…Will was born in the 1800s and was a contemporary of Hardy. No?” He put his hands in his pockets and leaned casually against the door jamb. “Well then, perhaps he hasn’t actually read the book and thinks The Return of the Native is about a nudist colony in Malibu. If that’s the case, I’m all the more glad I told your mother to steer clear of him. That’s not it either? Well, I’m out of ideas. I can think of no reason why he would give you a depressing book to read. I read that book in high school and am still getting over it. Don’t look so surprised. I can read, you know. It’s practically a requirement for graduating college these days.”
He pushed himself back to an upright position with his shoulder so that he stood very close to me. He smelled good, an inexplicably comforting blend of wool and fabric softener. “Please, Jo, be careful.” He spoke slowly and seriously. “Kendra may be in jail, but somehow I was never as worried about that threat.”
“Really, Detective,” I said with a lightness I did not feel, “you worry too much.”
“Perhaps. But I’d rather you stayed alive. Because if you didn’t—” His gray eyes burned into mine before straying briefly to my lips. I felt a heated rush down to my toes. “Your mom would come after me. And for some reason I’m more scared of her than anything else I’ve run across.” He smiled that rare grin of his and his silvery gaze held mine for a brief, breathless moment. And then he turned and let himself out.
UNDERDEAD
IN DENIAL
PREVIEW
Chapter One
* * *
If it hadn’t been for the faint odor of gym socks I never would have believed I was in the theater at the Bayshore Academy.
The stage was transformed into an amazingly accurate replica of the school quad, complete with real grass (I could smell the sweet, earthy sod from my seat.) and a Broadway quality backdrop of the Long Beach shoreline. It was so impeccably rendered I half expected the Queen Mary to pull up from its moorings and glide over the horizon in a belch of black smoke. But the sets were nothing next to the actors, who were emoting like soap opera stars in Emmy Award season. I wasn’t sure if what I was watching was spectacularly good or spectacularly bad, but I couldn’t look away.
I gasped with the rest of the audience as a rowdy mob of football players produced a noose and went after head cheerleader Esmeralda. And as they strung her up between the goal posts and let her swing, I actually rose in teacherly alarm.
I knew from watching copious amounts of television (You grade ninety-six copies of each assignment, then judge me.) that the actress had a safety harness hidden under her cheerleader costume. Even so, it was a very convincing effect and as my initial tug of alarm dissipated, I couldn’t help but wish the play had called for a more exciting death.
I bet the director really could have done something with a play that called for, say, a knife fight. I wondered what he would have used. Some sort of special mail-order stage blood and a pump?
I was halfway through imagineering a really good design to simulate arterial spray that involved those little packets of ketchup you get at fast-food restaurants before I realized what I was doing. Obviously, I’d been spending too much time with my middle school students. Bloodthirsty things.
As Esmeralda gave her fifth and final death spasm, someone cut the lights, plunging the theater into inky darkness. A faint breeze emanating from the back of the theater broke the stale, noisome air and as I gratefully turned in my seat, I could just make out a slight, misshapen silhouette standing in an open doorway. A spotlight snapped on, identifying the hunching figure as our hero, Quasimodo, the Chess Club Chairman. As he limped convulsively up the aisle to where the cheerleader’s body lay in a pool of golden light, an unseen figure up in the balcony keened a lament.
I whispered across the seat arm to Becky, “This isn’t exactly the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, is it?”
Becky is the high school’s hot-shot chemistry teacher. She is also one of my best friends and the reason I was spending Thursday night watching this unexpectedly artsy high school production instead of polishing my lesson plan for tomorrow. Or grading lab reports. Or surfing the net for ideas on how to make my eighth grade students interested enough in earth science that they didn’t seek their own entertainment in the form of lobbing spitballs. At me.
“Shhh!” With an impatient jerk of her hand, Becky waved me to silence.
“Don’t you shush me. You dragged m
e to this…”
Becky wasn’t listening to me or the play. She was craning her neck to get a better view of the backstage area just visible from our seats at the far right of the theater. Her slim black-clad figure hummed with so much energy I could almost see sparks shooting from her spiky, bleached-then-dyed-silver hair.
I let my curious gaze follow her line of sight. She was fully checking out the director, a compact, thirtyish man who was giving stage directions with mouthed words and wild flourishes of his arms.
“Oh for the love of Pete,” I said. “Not you too.”
Dan Sterling—Drama Dan, as the students adoringly called him—had made another conquest. I tried to figure out what the big thrill was. I suppose Dan looked a little like Leonardo DiCaprio, if you imagined the famous actor redrawn with crayon colors. Dan Sterling’s eyes were sky blue, his cheeks were lightly flushed with pink sherbet and his hair was yellow straight out of the basic eight crayon box. He might be a little too boyishly handsome for my tastes, but that didn’t seem to be keeping just about everyone else from joining the Drama Dan fan club.
A good half of the students—roughly the female half—were wildly in love with our interim director. I hated to think what would become of all his mooning groupies on Monday when our regular drama teacher came back from maternity leave and Drama Dan returned to his job as the lead actor at the Milverne Theater.
I gave up on getting anything lucid out of Becky and returned my attention to the stage, where an anguished (I could tell from the loudness of his chest thumps.) chess-club-Quasimodo was mourning cheerleader-Esmeralda.
All at once the little hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I was trying to figure out how Drama Dan had managed that particular stage trick when Carol, my other best friend at Bayshore, slid quietly into the seat I’d reserved for her. Not wanting to miss whatever was coming next, I kept my eyes firmly glued to the stage.
“It’s about time you showed up,” I told Carol in a low voice. “This play is something else. You’re going to have to come back tomorrow night and see it from the beginning.”
“Is that an invitation?” The low, silky voice wasn’t Carol’s, not even close.
The stage lights went up and the audience around me went wild, clapping and whistling at whatever was happening on stage. I sat frozen in my seat, staring at the man occupying the seat next to me, watching the lights from the stage dance over the sharp cheekbones and harsh planes of his lean face. Brilliant blue eyes the color of the night sky just before the sun went down glinted with intelligence and humor.
It had been months since I’d seen Will. He hadn’t changed a bit. His inky black hair was still longer than current fashion. He still favored beautifully tailored black clothes that undoubtedly cost more than I made in six months. I couldn’t have clicked my heels and wished up a more gorgeous male. And as if that weren’t enough, he was intelligent, had a wry sense of humor and could charm chocolate off a newly dumped woman with PMS. He was, decidedly, perfect in every conceivable way.
Except for the tiny personality flaw of wanting me dead.
Undead, actually. Like him.
For one wild moment, I considered jumping to my feet and telling everyone to make a run for it as there was a vampire loose in the theater. But I didn’t. No one would have believed me. Everybody knows vampires don’t exist.
As if in mockery of that thought, the very real warmth from Will’s lean, lithe body radiated across the armrest. Oh, he existed all right. And, God help me, he smelled fabulous. I have no idea if it was cologne or aftershave or just the soap he used combined with his natural scent. I’ve never been up on that sort of thing, but whatever it was, it was making my hormones hum as hard as my nerves.
I first met Will nearly a year ago. After a whirlwind sixty-minute courtship, he apparently decided I would do and sunk his teeth into my neck. Thinking him some sort of Goth freak who was taking the vampire thing a little too seriously, I fought him off. But not quickly enough. Not before he’d managed to turn me nearly into a vampire.
So that’s me, Jo Gartner. I have my mother’s red hair (The original red-gold shade, before her colorist, Rafael, got hold of her head and sanity.) and my father’s hazel eyes. I’m five foot ten and I’m almost Undead.
Last spring the secret had nearly cost me my life and I’d begged Will to leave me alone. To my surprise, he had honored that request. I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him, all spring, all summer, all fall…
Until now.
A cold rush of fear snapped me out of my open-mouthed shock. “What are you—”
Will put a finger to my lips.
“Shhh, let’s watch the rest of the play. I admit to being intrigued by this…unique interpretation of the classic.” As he spoke, his mouth brushed my ear, sending warm shivers down my spine. Goose bumps of terror popped out everywhere else.
He relaxed back against his seat with every indication of enjoying the play. I sat bolt upright and tried to keep the air going in and out of my lungs.
The play ended with a finale that made the audience jump to their feet in a frenzy of applause. The house lights went up and I glanced at Will. He was looking boggle-eyed at the stage.
He said, “That was…”
“I know.” For a moment, I forgot he was a walking death threat and we were in complete harmony.
Becky was halfway into the aisle at the side of the theater before she thought better of leaving me, her date, without a word. Catching my eye, she pointed surreptitiously to the stage to let me know she was heading over to congratulate the director. She had taken two brisk steps in that direction before she stopped and did a double take at Will. Her black eyebrows shot into her spiky silver bangs. And then she stared dreamily at him, her urgent mission apparently forgotten.
“Don’t let us keep you.” I gave her a shove toward the stage before she could introduce herself. I thought it best not to widen her circle of friends to include vampires.
Becky wrenched her gaze away and gave herself a slightly befuddled shake. Meeting my eyes, she flashed me a look that said, “Well done, Jo, we’ll talk later,” and left for the stage, her progress slow and a little unsteady.
Will’s sapphire gaze followed her retreating form. “She looks familiar.” His voice was thoughtful and contained that hint of an accent that I had never been able to place.
Becky had been the one, in all innocence, to point Will out that fateful night last December. I didn’t want him to think of Becky as “familiar”. I didn’t want him to think of Becky at all. It was bad enough he’d met my mother.
“How about some coffee?” I had no idea if he drank coffee—or ate, or imbibed anything but blood—but the crowd was relocating to the foyer and I wanted to stay with them.
It might seem irresponsible of me to encourage the head of the local vampire clan to linger in the midst of so many innocent people, but I knew Will wouldn’t do anything to me, or anyone else, in a crowd. It was in his interest to keep his identity secret. Crowds, even those comprised of well-mannered prep-school parents, teachers, and students, had a bad habit of turning into a panicked, torch-carrying mob when they learned they had a vampire in their midst.
Granted, in this day and age it would be hard for anyone to locate torches and pitchforks in a pinch. But after tonight I’d put my money on finding just about anything in Drama Dan’s prop room and this was a resourceful group.
With the force of a fast-moving river, the departing crowd pushed us into the foyer and dropped us off in an eddy by the refreshment table. I grabbed a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a small plate of the cafeteria’s rock-hard pink cookies and pushed them into Will’s hands.
We were greeted, almost immediately, by a tall, plump spinster in her sixties and a small, prissy man a couple of decades younger. The school librarians. Gossip central had arrived.
I reminded myself that I wanted to be around people. Any people.
Janice spoke first in a quiver of jowls. “Jo, don’t you lo
ok lovely. It’s so nice to see you in a skirt.”
An unsaid “for once” hung in the air. Janice wasn’t shy about voicing her—their—opinion that “the students have a dress code, and so do we”. Becky had been the librarians’ special project since the day she stepped on campus in Doc Martens and low-slung black jeans, and she avoided both the librarians and the library like the plague.
I usually did too, but with Will on one side of me, the junior librarian mouth breathing on the other, a wall behind and Janice blocking any chance of forward escape, I was trapped. Janice went for me like an evangelist sighting a heathen in the holy land.
“Isn’t that sweater nice on you, Jo. Green is always handsome with red hair. So much better than that pink you wore the other day. And how nice to see you out of your running shoes. Why you look practically dainty in those tiny heels. I always say, a tall woman shouldn’t be afraid of her height. And is this your young man?” She peered nearsightedly up at Will, who had her by a full half a head though she was only an inch shorter than me.
Around us, the crowd was rapidly thinning as parents herded their children to the parking lot and home for the several hours of homework they undoubtedly still had ahead of them. The wealth of opportunities this presented wasn’t lost on Will, who was slowly but surely edging me away from the librarians. Reversing tactics, I dug in my feet. The last thing I was going to do was allow myself to be led into a dark corner where I would be alone with Will.
The words tumbled out of my mouth before I could take them back. “Janice, Gilbert, this is Will.”
Will’s eyes narrowed as he shot an unreadable look in my direction. I felt his body tense next to mine and for a moment, I thought he was going to make a break for it, dragging me with him.
He put down his untouched coffee and then his cookie plate. Smiling widely, he shook hands with both librarians before draping an arm possessively around my shoulders. He smiled lovingly down at my face. “I adore Jo.”
