I shook my head. I’d had enough. The antiseptic smell of the hospital and the boop-boop of the equipment were overwhelming. It felt like my head might just explode.
None of the others wanted to see the bully boys either. Not surprising. I squeezed Bram’s hand. Lily and Bella gave him a kiss on the forehead—very, very gently—and Ulric teased him about how unconscious guys got all the action. I almost smiled at that. I thought that if Bram were awake, he’d smile too.
7
We went quietly, but as soon as I hit the daylight, I knew I was in trouble. My skin started to burn and itch at the sting of the sun, and I realized that I hadn’t had any of my fortified blood with its sunscreen potion since late last night. It shouldn’t have been a problem. I’d gone longer without blood, but the whole awake-during-daylight thing apparently took more out of me than usual, and I hadn’t been compensating. I hadn’t even realized I needed to. Yet another thing to discuss with my keepers.
Ulric, seeing me wince, took it for emotion—or at least a good excuse to snake an arm around me. The flesh he touched, now shaded, nearly sang with relief.
“You okay?” he asked.
I gave him a sidelong glance. “I’m fine, but if you need a hug, knock yourself out.”
“Really?”
“Hug only. Bust a move and you’ll pull back a bloody stump. Capisce?” It wasn’t until it was out of my mouth that I realized I was perfectly capable of making it happen. After what Ulric had seen, he probably realized it, too.
“I always knew you were trouble,” he said, as though proud of it.
I smiled feebly and hurried to get to the car, out of the sun and his embrace that much sooner. Not that the hug felt bad. That was the problem. I was seriously in need of some distance. I was with Bobby. Ulric was an assignment, nothing more.
Lily’s phone beeped at her as we got into the car, letting her know she’d missed a message at some point. She checked it as I pulled out.
“Gavin and Byron are fine. The police must have finished with them just before they came for us. They’re hanging out at Gavin’s place,” she reported. “They want us to come by.”
“I’m done in,” I said, “but I’ll drop you all there.”
I was relieved, actually. One stop rather than three meant I could get to Agents Stick and Stuffed and my doctored blood that much the sooner. Get some answers, report on Rick’s rage, maybe even feel Bobby’s arms around me. I needed that in a way that my totally self-sufficient self didn’t want to face.
Once the goth trio disappeared—into a remarkably normal looking whitewashed brick house—I drove like I was headed for a BOGO sale at Bloomies. Probably I should have driven in some kind of crazy, evasive pattern, just in case the police were tailing me or something, but the direct route meant I had a better chance of making it to Stick and Stuffed before I burst into flame. Already my eyeballs were on fire. Note to self: invest in some serious shades, maybe Dolce & Gabbana.
I called ahead to beg Agents S&S to raise the garage door for me so that I could drive right in, but it was Rick-the-rat who answered the phone, snarled at me, and hung up again. I was so relieved to see the doors slide upward at my approach, though, that I almost didn’t want to hurt him.
As darkness closed in on me, I said an instinctive “Thank you, God!” even though I was pretty sure he’d blocked my calls when I went over to the dark side. I prepared to face Rick, who was glaring from the doorway of the house that he and Bobby shared with the Feds like one big, happy, dysfunctional family.
“We have to talk,” I said, glaring back at him.
“Right,” he sneered.
“No kidding,” I continued. “All of us.”
He called into the house, “Good thing you’re all here. Her royal highness has summoned us to an audience. All hail the royal slayer of innocents.”
I brushed past him, accidentally swinging an elbow toward his solar plexus. All the air oophed out of him.
“First of all, I didn’t slay anyone,” I informed him. “And second, your guys were attacking my peeps, so don’t even try playing the innocent card.”
Three sets of eyes were staring at me as I entered the eat-in kitchen, which was right off the garage. Agent Stuffed had barricaded himself behind a wall of two laptops, a printer, and a stack of paperwork a mile high. Couldn’t be much actual eating being done at that table, not without getting crumbs in the keyboard. Agent Stick poked her head out of the fridge to stare and then blink, shake her head, and stare again. But it was Bobby and his baby blues that really arrested my attention. He was looking at me like I’d just stepped out of a slasher film carrying a bloody chain saw.
“What?” I asked.
“You … you’re kind of, um, hot,” Bobby said, rising from his place at the table beside Agent Stuffed.
I blinked. “Well, duh, but—”
“No, I mean you’re smokin’, as in an actual fire hazard. And your skin is kind of, ah, peeling.”
My hands flew up to my face, and I screamed. My skin felt like the outside of a fire-roasted marshmallow.
Agent Stick—Maya—shut the door of the fridge, grabbed a towel from the bar on the front of the stove, and took it to the sink to run cool water on before handing it to me. “Here, try this. I’ll start you a cold shower.”
Hands covering my deformity, I followed her out of the room. “Don’t listen to a word Rick says before I get back!” I commanded.
Behind me I heard Rick laugh and vowed to kill him dead. Really dead. Like Rasputin’s third-time’s-the-charm level dead. Yeah, we’d heard all about Rasputin in spy school. He was the crazy Russian padre who’d advised the last czar and played faith-healer to his son. Assassins tried to take him down during the Russian Revolution. If only they’d staked him or cut off his head instead of poisoning, shooting, and drowning him, the Russians still might not know about vampires, and we wouldn’t have had to waste so many spies and resources in that Cold War. The U.S. might even now be a true superpower, instead of just must-see TV for the rest of the world. Anyway, Rick was dead, dead, dead … as soon as I dealt with my really bad chemical peel.
“What happened?” Maya asked, running the water and unable to meet my eyes for long. I was that hideous.
“Too long in the sun. What the hell’s going on with that? I used to only need blood every couple of days or so. Now … look, if I need more to keep from becoming a crispy critter, you need to say so.”
“Interesting,” she answered.
“Interesting? Is that all you have to say?”
Now she met my eyes. “Look, the potion is experimental. Virtually hot off the presses. Possibly we have to refine—”
“So we’re guinea pigs?” I … well, I didn’t screech. I was brought up better than that.
“We’ve done some trials, of course,” she said coolly, “but it was impossible to be sure of optimum dosages without a field test. So much depends on metabolism, exertion, exposure—”
“Great. Lovely. And, hey, if your test subjects burn up, it’s instant cremation. No messy funeral costs, no covering up the body. Clean. Efficient. Probably even eco-friendly.”
She didn’t even blink. Just showed me to the towels and first aid supplies and let herself out.
Ten minutes later, I’d painfully scrubbed the charred skin from my face, and what was left was a newly grown, baby-fine layer so sensitive the very air hurt it. I couldn’t imagine applying cream. Just like a peek-a-boo blouse, the new skin exposed veins and muscle, ligaments, whatever. I was totally hideous. I could only hope I’d dropped the others off before I’d reached the point of extra crispy.
I wrapped a towel around my body, bathhouse style, wrapped another around my head like a turban, and tried to keep my knees from buckling as I let myself back out into the hallway, pressing Maya’s dishtowel to my face again to hide it from prying eyes.
“Got blood?” I asked as I hit the kitchen.
Bobby handed me a mug, pre-warmed, as I sat down b
eside him, totally without meeting his eyes.
“You’re kind of, ah, under-dressed,” he said. “But I like it.”
“My clothes smell like barbecued me,” I grumped. “Another set for the incinerator. At this rate, by Friday all I’ll have left is my birthday suit.”
“Excuse me?” Agent Stuffed asked.
“Never mind.” I took a sip of the blood, which tasted like Ghirardelli hot chocolate to me right about then. A tingle shot all the way through me, part pain from the healing and part pleasure. I closed my eyes for a second to let the ripple of sensation pass. When I opened them again, everyone was staring.
“So, what shall we talk about first?” I asked. “The fact that the Feds are using us as lab rats for their daylight draught, Rick attacking me today at the hospital, or the weirdness at Red Rock?”
Bobby looked at Rick the way I looked at anyone standing between me and the last size six Manolo Blahniks in fire-engine red. “You attacked her?” he growled. “It better have been part of your cover.”
Coming from Bobby, the Neanderthal thing was so … so totally sweet. It wasn’t that I liked macho crap, it was just that I couldn’t imagine Bobby pulling it for anyone but me.
“Whatever,” Rick answered. “She started it.”
“Me?” I asked, incredulous. “How exactly did I start it?”
“Children, don’t make me separate you three,” Agent Stick cut in, just like a real mom. “We’ve got bigger problems. Gina, we did some checking after you reported to Bobby yesterday. Read this.”
Agent Stuffed—I was going to have to remember to think of him as Sid before I slipped up in his presence—passed us each a file, which I opened reluctantly, given that the last file had gotten me into all this. It was like a rap sheet on Red Rock. “The events you describe … ” Agent … Sid … went on to summarize what was right there in front of us. “You talk about a power-boosted, out-of-control feeling—well, I researched the location, and Red Rock lies along the same ley line as your school. What’s more, it’s what we call a node. Think of it like a geyser—mostly quiet, but every once in a while it goes off, flares up, like it’s doing now.”
I looked at the dossier. As recently as thirty years ago, it had been the meeting place for some kind of coven. All fun and games, I guessed, until the leader was arrested for the negligent homicide of her own daughter, who’d gotten into her mother’s spell supplies, some of which, like deadly nightshade, had earned their names. Red Rock had made it into the news. Way, way back before that, it had been sacred to the Hopewell Indians, a spot for special ceremonies calling on the Great Sky Father. Clearly a place of power.
“So it’s flaring now?” I asked, shooting a quick glance at Rick. There had to be more to all this. Rick hadn’t been at Red Rock last night with his new buddies. I’d have seen him.
Sid nodded.
“Our equipment still shows the disturbance centered around the school, but it could be radiating outward, activating other hot spots,” Maya said.
“Or,” Sid drew the word out, looking at each of us in turn, “the partying brought the place to life—libations poured with every drink spilled. Cuts, nicks, or other forms of bloodletting. Good way to wake a place of power.”
“Good to know,” I said, a lot more flippantly than I felt. I mean, sheesh, when I’d joked about using the force and turning to the dark side, I’d thought I was kidding. Now I had to watch out for places as well as people? And what did it mean that Red Rock had my blood? I’d walked around barefoot, cut my feet on rocks as I ran to Bella’s aid.
“So, what do we do?” Bobby asked, ever practical.
“Stay away,” Sid said fiercely. “Let it settle. Keep other kids away.”
“Wow, way to be proactive,” I mumbled.
Sid and Maya both glared.
“What does all this have to do with Rick?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Sid admitted. “Rick?”
The man … boy … of the hour looked pissed. “How should I know? At lunch some of the guys and I were talking, and we just got more and more worked up, until Red and I decided to cut out, head over to the hospital—”
“Looking for a fight?” I asked.
“What? No! Just checking on our fallen, you know? And then I saw you and all this rage—” His fists clenched, vibrating with barely leashed fury.
We were all staring at him.
“What?” he asked again. “I didn’t do anything. She’s still … not breathing … isn’t she?”
I stuck my tongue out at him in lieu of launching myself across the table, which in my current state of undress might not be the best idea ever.
“How do you feel now?” Sid asked.
Rick shrugged his tense shoulders. “I don’t know. I don’t exactly want to kill her, but I don’t exactly not want to kill her.”
“She has that effect on people,” Sid muttered, getting me back for my earlier comment.
“Okay, onto the missing kids,” Maya jumped in.
“I still want to talk about your experimental potion.”
“There’s nothing to talk about. You need more, you take more. End of story.”
“Side effects?” I asked. “Potential for overdose? Will we build up a tolerance?”
“I guess we’ll find out together,” she answered with supreme unconcern. “Now, the missing kids.” She tossed us each a stapled packet. “We’ve identified them as Tyler Dyson and Teresa Mendoza. Agent Epps and I are already watching the hospitals and morgues. We need you out among the kids. Find out if anyone’s seen them and what rumors are circulating. They may even turn up. Gina, Teresa is apparently in your seventh-period art class, so you’ve probably met.”
I shook my head. “I haven’t even made it to seventh period yet. Yesterday was the party, today the hospital.”
“Geez Louise,” Sid groaned, running a hand down his face. If he’d been a cartoon, his features would have stretched and snapped comically back into place. Of course, if he were a cartoon, he’d probably still be in black and white. I mean, Geez Louise? What decade were we in anyway? “Why the hell did we go through all the trouble of arranging your classes to expose you to the most cliques if you’re not even going to go?”
“Hey, I go where the investigation leads.”
“Wild parties? Run-ins with the police?” he ranted.
“What’re you—my father? The kids went missing from the party, didn’t they? So I was in the right place, just—”
All the righteous indignation left me right about then, but I wasn’t going to back down.
“Just looking the other way,” Sid said, relentless. “Getting into trouble.”
That hurt. Responsibility sucked rocks. Up until a few months ago, I hadn’t been responsible for anything more than color-coordinating my wardrobe. But foil one vampire vixen bent on world domination and suddenly people expect all kinds of things. Some days it just didn’t pay to wake up dead.
“Fine,” I said through gritted teeth. “Bad secret agent. No cookie. So, what’s the plan?”
“First, we get you dressed. I’m sure Maya will have something that fits.”
“Damn,” Bobby said under his breath. Maya shot him a disapproving look and I smiled.
“Then,” Sid continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “we hit the streets. Someone has to have seen something. We cover the hangouts, listen for the rumors. Maybe we’ll catch a break and the kids will show up safe and sound. We ought to be about due for a break.”
8
Rick and Maya got the mall. I’d think I was being punished, but as consolation prizes go, Bobby was a pretty good one. He and I partnered up to hit the town’s main hangouts—the DQ, the Dunkin’ Donuts, and the Denny’s. I kid you not. Until Sid listed them off, I had no idea we had such a thing for the Ds. ’Course, it went along with the other fave five D words I was starting to pick up hanging with the goths—ditch, delinquent, dark, death, dreamy. No, no, dreary, not dreamy. Lord, was I losing it?
We got to our first stop, the Dairy Queen, and I parked the tail end of my car with its Dracula Is My Co-Pilot bumper sticker up against a tree, just in case any of my crowd went cruising by—I’d told them I was done in. On the other hand, who hadn’t had a sudden craving for a chocolate shake or goopy sundae at odd hours of the day or night? No one I knew. Of course, my mom, being totally figure-conscious, always took me for the low-fat, slow-churned kind with sugar-free fudge, hold the whipped cream, when we went at all. Good times. I tried not to think of her and Dad back in Ohio, still mourning my death. Or not mourning and turning my room into a home spa. It could go either way.
It wasn’t hard to redirect my thoughts with Bobby sliding across the bench seat toward me.
“You know …” he said, trailing a couple of fingers over my thigh, which was clad in one of Maya’s black skirts that, sadly, fell below the knee on me. It was still better than her pants, which would have flopped around my feet like clown shoes. “It’s probable we’ll be seen together. We need some kind of cover story.”
“Oh, like you tutoring me in math?” I teased.
His fingers rose from my thigh to trace over my stomach, up the valley between my breasts. “Sure, like that,” he answered. “Or anatomy or chemistry.”
He leaned in for a kiss, and I met him halfway, nearly moaning at the contact. It had been way, way too long. Days.
I felt zippy like I had at Red Rock, only this time it was all-natural. I slid my hands into his Zac-Efron-shaggy hair to hold him in place as I kissed him back. He stroked my hair, my neck, down again over my borrowed shirt. I started to shiver, trailing my hand down his chest, determined to get the same reaction out of him.
Something rocked the car, jolting us suddenly so that our teeth clicked together. We jumped, ready for action, and found that a pack of teens had decided to use my car instead of the nearby picnic tables for their snack. Two girls and a guy were planted on the hood, and three others stood peeking in our windows like we were the entertainment.
I glared back at the one staring in the driver’s side window, hand up like a visor over his eyes to help him see inside. I debated slamming the horn, but I didn’t think it would scatter them. Putting the car in drive … now that might do the trick.
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