Birth of the Vampire (The Vanderlind Realm)
Page 14
I have to admit, I was a little stunned. I wasn’t used to females avoiding me like a bad stench. Haley needed to listen to me, but I wasn’t about to go chasing after her. Instead, I took the cap off the flask and let the fragrance do the work for me. I knew she had to be hungry if all she was doing was sucking the juice out of slaughtered animal meat.
She immediately whipped her head around and asked, “What is that?”
I took a healthy pull from the flask before telling her, “Blood.” Her eyes bulged a little, and I could tell her mouth was watering. “Would you like some?” I offered.
“No,” she insisted, but that didn’t stop her from snatching the flask from my hand and gulping down its contents.
I watched with some fascination. Her transformation from mortal to vampire was quite remarkable. She’d been perfectly acceptable as a human—not tempting but not repellant. As a vampiress, I found her to be completely bewitching. Not that I was attracted to her in that way. Her transformation into a creature of the night had obviously left her completely insane, and I’d had enough crazy in my life.
“You cut your hair,” she said after she’d sated her appetite and emptied the bottle.
I felt a small wave of pleasure that she’d noted the change in my appearance. “It’ll grow back,” I told her, in case she favored men with longer hair.
In an abrupt change of topic, she asked me, “Are you a vampire?”
“Yes,” was the only thing I could think to say in reply.
Haley took this information in and after a moment asked, “Am I?”
“Yes,” I said again.
She thought this over some more. “So when I was in that car crash, you decided that instead of letting me die you would turn me into a vampire?”
“Yes,” I said for the third time. “I have given you the gift of eternal life.”
Haley frowned. “Gee, thanks. Just what I always wanted … to live forever.”
“Pardon me?” I said, not quite sure I’d heard her correctly.
“Being seventeen sucks enough as it is,” she informed me. “But you turned me into a vampire, and now I’m stuck being seventeen forever. Isn’t that how it works?” She made some sort of expletive that I didn’t quite catch. Then grumbling to herself, she said, “Now I’ll never be old enough to get into a bar.”
“I don’t think you quite understand the gift I’ve given you,” I said.
“Oh, I think I do, Dorian. And I wouldn’t go around calling it a gift,” she said, practically growling at me. She was obviously furious. “Weren’t you the one complaining at Blossom’s party that life got super boring when it went on forever?”
“I wouldn’t say complaining,” I told her. “But it is true that life does tend to lose a bit of flavor when you have it in unlimited supply,” I had to admit.
“Then why did you save me?” she asked, folding her arms and glaring at me.
“Would you rather be dead under that tree you collided with?”
I had her there. She couldn’t think of an immediate reply. So I pressed my advantage by telling her, “Haley, you are a vampire. And I am your maker. You may not fully appreciate the great gift I have given you right now, but I assure you that someday you will learn to appreciate being a member of the undead.”
She gave me a funny look. “How old are you?”
I returned her look. “Why do you ask?”
“I was just wondering,” she said with a shrug. “You don’t really talk like a modern person.”
“I speak perfectly correctly for this time period,” I insisted. A vampire had to update his speech patterns when mingling with humans in order to blend in.
“If you insist,” she said, not sounding at all like she agreed with me.
I decided to ignore her comment. After all, I wanted to convince her that I was to be her mentor, not get in an argument about the authenticity of my speech patterns. “As I was saying,” I continued firmly. “As your maker, I will guide you through your transition from ordinary human to ruler of the night.”
“Yep.” She nodded. “That’s exactly how teenagers talk right now. You nailed it.”
Doing my best to ignore her snide remarks, I said, “There are many things you need to learn before you begin your new life.”
“Like what, for example?” she asked, looking interested.
“Like the fact that you don’t wander around town using your influence to make mortals obey your every whim,” I snapped.
“My influence?” She raised a finely shaped eyebrow. “Is that what it’s called?”
“Yes,” I said, “and it’s to be used with discretion.”
“Well, my car is trashed. How else am I supposed to get around?” she asked me.
“You could always fly,” I told her, pointing out the obvious. “That’s how I usually do it.”
“Fly,” Haley said. The idea had obviously never occurred to her. “Yeah, right.”
“There are so many wonders of the undead world that I will show you,” I said. I knew many humans who would have sacrificed ten years of their mortal lives to see the marvels that were at Haley’s fingertips if she was only willing to stop being stubborn.
For a moment, I thought she looked tempted, but then her face hardened. “I don’t have any money, you know. I’ve got to get my GED at least, or I’m never going anywhere, so …”
“Money is not an issue,” I assured her. The Vanderlinds had so much wealth, we were on the cusp of being vulgar. “And as far as schooling, I will be giving you an education.”
She frowned even more. “I’ll think about it,” she said and started trying to walk past me to enter the store.
I couldn’t believe my ears. I was offering her the world, and she had to think about it. “What do you mean by that?” I exclaimed.
Haley gave me a flat look. “It means, I’ll think about it.”
Chapter 31
Haley
I climbed into my bed with a cooler full of meat at my side and a blanket blocking the crack at the bottom of the door. I’d explained to the cashier at the Stop-n-Save that all the steak was on sale, and she rang me up for the price of ground chuck. I knew Dorian had said not to use my “influence,” but I wasn’t exactly flush with cash, even after scamming most of the customers at the diner. So I did what I had to do. The way I looked at it, getting a discount on meat was better than me attacking some random vagrant and making him my midnight snack.
I lay on my back, a slab of raw meat in my hand, and stared at the ceiling. I had a lot to think about.
There was a possibility that a gorgeous vampire had just offered to share his life with me while showing me some fabulous hidden world and sharing some important tips on being a bloodsucker.
Or I had completely lost my mind.
I hated to admit it, but the insanity version sounded more likely. First of all because vampires didn’t exist. And secondly because insanity ran in my family. Like ran marathons.
And then there was the flying thing. Was Dorian just my subconscious trying to get me to jump off a roof or something? Is that what he meant by fly? And what did he mean by, “I will be giving you an education”? It sounded kind of sexy in a way.
That was probably the strongest indication that I was nuts. Super hot, wealthy men did not offer to spend extended periods of time with me. That was for romance novels; that wasn’t for me. I was probably so crazy that I had convinced myself I couldn’t handle the sun and needed blood to survive just to make my life even more miserable. Maybe it was my way of avoiding going to Chicago while simultaneously making it impossible for me to go back to high school. That actually made a lot of sense.
I had to just get over it. I had to deal with my breakdown and get on with my life. It was time to become sane again. I sat up in bed. The sun had been threatening to rise as I’d shut the door to my room and put the blanket in place. I didn’t know how long I’d been lying there, but I knew it had to be at least above the horizon.
“Gah!” I wailed as my flesh started burning and my head started throbbing. I quickly jammed the blanket back in place.
If I wasn’t a vampire, then my brain was doing a pretty good job of tricking me into thinking I was.
I lay back on my bed and stared at the ceiling some more. I wanted to cry but fought back the urge. Vampires don’t cry. Vampires are badasses that don’t care about other people’s feelings and don’t have any feelings of their own.
I blinked rapidly to fight back the tears that were welling in my eyes. I desperately wished I had someone I could talk to. Someone that actually cared about me because I was feeling pretty scared and definitely all alone. If I really was a vampire, then I kind of sucked at it.
I spent the day lying perfectly still and focusing on deep breathing. At some point, I realized that I didn’t actually have to breathe anymore. I discovered I could hold my breath longer than was humanly possible, but I kept making my lungs expand and contract. It was kind of a habit.
I went into a sort of state that wasn’t exactly sleeping. I was still aware of being awake, but I felt like I was in some kind of trance. Maybe it was deep meditation of some kind. I couldn’t tell, but at some point, I came back into consciousness with the knowledge that the sun had gone down.
I got out of bed, hesitated, and then slowly peeled back one corner of the blanket from the base of the door. My room remained dark. It was safe to get up. I had to be at work in a little over an hour, and there was a lot to figure out before then.
I had to get this vampire versus crazy thing settled. If I was a vampire, fine. I would figure out how to live as a vampire. But if I was crazy, then this was the end of the line. I had seen crazy up close and personal. I was not doing crazy.
I climbed up to the attic of Kevin’s house and pried open one of the small windows. It took a few moments, but I was just barely able to wiggle through. Just jump. Just jump. Just jump, I kept telling myself as I struggled. I hesitated a moment, perched on the sill. I was either going to end up a bloodstain on Uncle Kevin’s driveway, or I was going to fly. A moment later, I was falling.
As the air rushed past me and the ground got closer, I inhaled the fragrance of the frosty night. I could almost hear the snow as it drifted all around me in big, puffy flakes. I could see the stars as they twinkled so brightly. I remembered something I’d read a few years earlier about people who had jumped off of bridges and survived. Every single one of them had said that on the way down, they had realized that all of their problems and miseries weren’t worth killing themselves over. Every single one of them had said that after they’d jumped, they’d discovered that they wanted to live. The article had actually scared the crap out of me because I couldn’t stop thinking about all the people who had jumped and then died. They probably had the same regrets on the way down. Even if I was crazy, there was still so much of life to enjoy. I just had to keep myself from getting locked up or killing anyone. How hard could that be?
Then I realized I had been falling for a long time for someone who had only jumped off a modest two-story house. Looking around, I realized I wasn’t falling. I wasn’t exactly flying either. It was more like I was gently drifting toward the ground. I felt both relieved and a little terrified. Relieved that I was going to live. I didn’t know what to make of being a vampire. At least I’d firmly established that I did not want to die. No matter how miserable I felt at times, there was always a chance things could get better. I definitely wanted to live. And I also felt a little stupid for jumping out the attic window. If I’d wanted to check to see if I could fly, I could have always jumped off a chair.
Once I had drifted to the ground, I tried leaping into the air a few times to see if I could fly on command, but I had no luck. It was something I would have to work on later. I had a lot of things to get done. If I was going to make anything of my life after death, I had to get organized. I needed a car, and I needed a computer. The library only stayed open late on Thursday nights, so that really wouldn’t give me enough time to get my GED online. Even if I had one of the library’s computers all to myself. And if getting people to give me a ride was taboo, then I really needed a way to get around without running through the streets like a maniac because the flying thing was kind of tricky.
I also probably needed a new phone. Not that I had that many people to call, but I felt weird without one. I guess I was phone dependant, just like the rest of America.
When it came down to it, what I really needed was money. Quite a bit of money. I thought about asking Debbie to help me out. Or using my influence over Kevin. Neither of those options sounded super great. But I also didn’t think I could get away with shaking people down for better tips at the diner. It was kind of a jerky thing to do, even to the cheapskates. And eventually the customers would stop coming if they felt like they were spending too much money. I didn’t want to do that to Debbie. But I really couldn’t think of any fast way of getting cash. Plus, my voracious meat habit was really flippin’ expensive, even with getting the Stop-n-Save cashier to give me a discount.
If I’d thought my life sucked before, becoming a vampire definitely hadn’t made it any easier.
I decided I would just walk to work. It was a simple solution. I would practice the flying thing later, off of a ledge that wasn’t quite so high.
It was a cold night. People were shivering in their down parkas and layered up with fleece. But I found I just wasn’t that chilly. I could have easily gone without my jacket, but I knew that would look weird. As I walked through the center of Tiburon, I peeked in the various shop windows, stealing glances of people being normal and doing normal things. I’d always wanted to be normal. Just an average person doing average stuff. Fat chance I had of that after Dorian Vanderlind turned me into a vampire.
I stopped short in my tracks. There in the window of a fancy boutique was a mannequin in a beautiful, silvery-blue floor-length gown. It was the exact gown from my dream, down to the spangles across the bust. I wanted it so badly, I was practically fogging up the glass. My dream of going to Winter Formal with Tommy had been smashed, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want a pretty dress. Impulsively, I entered the shop.
“We’re just about to close,” a well-groomed lady said as she heard the door chime.
“That’s okay,” I told her. “I just want to try on one thing.”
The gown fit me perfectly. My new curves and shallows did a lot to help it cling in all the right places. “It’s lovely,” the saleslady gasped, clapping her hands in excitement as I exited the dressing room to view myself in the three-way mirror.
I had to be a vampire because there was no way I ever looked so hot as plain old Haley Scott. I looked like some young woman in a magazine after she’d been photoshopped. I knew it was vain, but I couldn’t stop admiring myself. Could vampires see their reflections in mirrors? I thought maybe they weren’t supposed to, but I could see myself just fine.
“You have to get it,” the woman said. “You look gorgeous.”
I had quickly checked the price while I was in the changing room, and I knew the gown was eight hundred dollars. Way, way, way out of my budget. I thought about influencing her to just give me the gown, but that seemed like a crappy thing to do. “I really love it,” I told her. “It’s my dream dress. I mean, like exactly my dream dress. But there’s no way I can afford it.”
“Hmmm …” the lady said, pinching her lips together and taking a few steps back to view me at a distance. “Do you need it for Winter Formal or something?”
I didn’t actually need it for anything, but in my dream it was for Winter Formal. Then again, why shouldn’t I go to Winter Fo
rmal? Kids were technically allowed to go stag, and I was still enrolled at Tiburon High. Just because I hated almost everyone in the entire school didn’t mean I should have to miss out on the dance. “Yes, Winter Formal,” I blurted. “I should have looked for a dress earlier, but I didn’t have a date.”
The woman shook her head. “I’m sure most of the boys were just too intimidated to ask you.”
I just shrugged, not sure what she meant.
“Tell you what,” the woman said, smiling at me. “I have a fashion show coming up in about two weeks, and I’m short on models. If you’re willing to do the show, then I’ll lend you the dress. But you have to be really careful. And get it dry cleaned afterward.”
“Seriously?” I asked, giving her a double take. She was willing to lend me the dress, and I hadn’t even used my influence over her. I couldn’t figure it out. Was this how it felt to be really good looking or something? People being nice to you for no apparent reason?
Ten minutes later, I was walking out of the store with the dress in a suit bag draped over my arm. There was actually no way in hell I could do the fashion show because it was in the afternoon, and I’d shrivel like a piece of overcooked bacon, but I decided I would figure out an excuse later. At that moment, I just wanted to enjoy the thrill of having the perfect dress for a dance. Of course, I was a vampire going to a mortal’s dance I didn’t even have a date to, but that was beside the point. Tiburon High’s Winter Formal was going to be my big blow-out before I got the hell out of town.
Chapter 32
Dorian
I really had no idea what to make of my scion. She was behaving in a way that was completely alien to me. Was this just the behavior of modern girls, or was Haley some kind of outlier that would hang around my neck like a snarky albatross?
I knew I had to speak to someone with more knowledge about being a maker than I had bothered to acquire in my years of being a member of the undead. I was too embarrassed by my rude behavior to seek help from my aunt. And the thought of admitting to my father that I’d had a moment of weakness made my skin crawl. I finally settled on a family friend who I knew to be in New York for the holiday season. She was from a very old vampire family, so I was sure she had probably encountered a situation such as mine at some point in the hundreds of years she had been on the planet.