“Why do you think that I could help?” Xandra asked. “Do you think my experience runs to lunatic vampires?” She paused. “I wonder if there are non-lunatic vampires or if this is just sort of the way they are …?”
“You’re the only one that I can talk to about this.”
She turned her nose up. “You’ve got parents, haven’t you?”
“My mom already blew up at me for staying out late. If I bring …” Vampires, I didn’t say. No word for it though—I didn’t dare say that aloud—so I threw my hands up. “Byron into this, she’d only freak even more.” Xandra looked at me like I had four eyes. “You didn’t tell your parents what happened last night?”
“Of course not.”
“So what did you say?”
“I told them that I went to your house to study and that we fell asleep.”
Xandra’s face flushed. Her eyes slitted under low eyebrows. “You dragged me into your lie?” She looked like a coiled snake, ready to strike. Apparently the idea of being used as cover really got her hackles up.
“Listen, you don’t understand,” I said, holding up my hands. “My parents don’t believe a thing I say anymore.”
It was harder to say out loud than I thought it would be. Lying had just been so easy, like second nature. But having to fess up to it, and not under the scrutinizing eye of my parents, was just … strange.
“I … I sort of developed a reputation for being a liar back where I’m from. When I was a kid, it didn’t matter if I told the truth or not about things that happened to me. I’d usually get in trouble anyways. So I started telling my parents what they wanted to hear. It worked for a long time, but when I got to middle school and one of my teachers caught on to my lack of effort, she brought it up to my parents, and that was when they learned to not trust me. And this last year … it kind of caught up to me in a big way.”
Xandra looked at me with a practiced skepticism. “So you told them that you were at my house.”
“You’re basically the only person that I know at this school,” I answered. The reality of that statement was more depressing than I wanted to think about.
“You don’t think that they would have taken it better if you told them, like, the truth?”
“The actual truth?” I echoed. “Are you serious? What would I have told them? Hey, Mom, I got chased by a vampire last night.”
I sighed, and leaned against the sinks. My fingers grazed the roses’ cellophane, and I yanked my hand back, wincing as if it had burned me.
“Even if I told them that some creepy guy had been chasing me, they wouldn’t have believed me. They’d just assume I was making stuff up. Like they always do.” A different expression passed over Xandra’s face chest at that. Pity? Sympathy?
“That’s a shame,” she said eventually, her tone surprisingly gentle. “I … I can’t imagine not telling my parents what happened last night.”
“You told them you were chased by a vampire?”
“Are you crazy? That stays between us. My parents may be eccentric, but they aren’t quite on that level.”
“So what did they say?” I asked. “You know, to … whatever you told them.” A pause. “What did you tell them?”
“That some total creeper followed us a few blocks and wouldn’t leave us alone, so we hid out in the bunker. After that …” Xandra sighed. “Well, my dad wanted to know Byron’s name so he could call the police. So we did, and filed a report.”
It made me wonder how in the world my parents would have reacted if they would have actually believed me. It was hard to imagine my father being so protective, my mother sitting on the couch with me, her arm around me, whispering reassuring words and encouragements.
“Anyway, the police called back about an hour before I left for school,” Xandra said. “Apparently there is no record of a Byron Vesper in the US. Maybe he used a fake name, I dunno.”
“Hm …” I said, taking it all in, pulse racing. Were teen heart attacks rare? It feels like they’d overindex in people who experienced the shock of waking up to the fact that vampires might be a for-real thing. And one could be stalking you.
Xandra shrugged her shoulders. “My parents drove me to school, walked me to the door, and explained the situation loosely to the principal, but he suggested that it was some drunk guy looking for anything with legs, if you catch my drift.”
“So the school knows now?” I asked, feeling like this situation couldn’t possibly get any worse. “Do they know about me too?”
She pursed her lips, and then exhaled through her nose. “Yeah. I told them that you were there.”
I blinked. “Well, I guess at least our stories line up that we were together,” I said. When the bright side of the situation was no better than a smudge of grey, you took what you could get. “Why didn’t anyone call me in to the office to talk about it?”
“I don’t think they took it very seriously,” Xandra said, scowling. “Big shock, right? Ignoring a woman’s complaints.”
“So what do we do?” I asked. It felt like it was the two of us against the world, like a bad 90s movie. “Because you and I both know that we are not crazy, and Byron Vesper does exist.” I pointed at the card in her hand. “We have proof, after all.”
“Maybe for us,” Xandra replied. “But how would we prove we didn’t write this ourselves?”
I swallowed hard. “What do we do?”
Xandra gave me a leveling look. “Do you believe me now that he’s a vampire?”
“You’re still stuck on that theory?”
“You’ve mentioned it a time or two since we’ve been in here,” she said.
“I don’t know.” I looked at the flowers behind me, like they were going to leap to life and give me sterling advice to get us out of this mess. “Maybe we should just lay low. I keep telling myself he won’t appear if other people are around, so at least we’re safe at school.”
“And I’ll be going home to a house full of people,” Xandra said.
I glanced at the time on my cell phone. “I’m going home to an empty house for two hours.”
Xandra’s face paled, and she reached into her own pocket for her own cell.
“What’s your number?” she asked.
I hesitated, and she glanced up at me.
“Well? How else am I going to check in on you later?”
Despite her attitude—she was not exactly the friendliest soul I’d ever crossed paths with—I felt a rush of affection and gratitude for Xandra.
I gave her my number. She texted me a red rose emoji.
“Very funny,” I said, cocking an eyebrow.
She laughed, and we left the bathroom together, the roses, both dying and dead, still lying in the sink.
Chapter 8
I waved up at the camera as I slid my key home in the lock. The street was bustling with screaming kids riding on scooters and playing basketball. Cars drove down the street, people on their way home from work or off to their night shift.
And it felt like a totally foreign world, one that I used to belong to.
“Yes, Mother, I know you see me,” I said through my gritted-teeth smile, and pushed my way inside.
I had two hours before my dad got home, and in that time, I wanted to make sure I took every precaution to protect myself. I found a baseball bat in the garage that had belonged to my dad in his college days. Somehow it had found its way down to Florida with us, lucky for me. I made sure to stay in the kitchen while I worked on my homework so that I was near the knives, forks, and other pointy things. And for added precaution, I took a whole head of garlic and broke each and every clove off, scattering them around the room. It would probably stop anyone in their tracks, vampire or not.
Dad wasn’t happy when he got home. He stayed on just this side of yelling. Which I had expected—Mom did the yelling, Dad did the quiet “I’m so disappointed in you” routine. Normally, that would have piled on the guilt, back when I was getting busted for legit lying.
But now I didn’t care. Partly because I wasn’t guilty in this case. But mostly because at least he was home.
I didn’t want to be alone anymore.
I tried to take my banishment from the television, the mall, and any sort of social plans, as if I had any, with humility. The more I could be home and not out wandering the world where Byron could get to me, the happier I was.
Having said that … it wasn’t like I was sure that he couldn’t get me at home. Who knows, maybe he would just come in and kill my parents and me before I even knew what had happened.
For some reason, in spite of the Florida heat, I couldn’t stop shivering.
Once my dad was finished laying on the guilt, I went upstairs to take a hot shower. I stood under the stream for so long that the windows and the mirror completely fogged up, and a cloud of steam swirled around the ceiling. Thankful that the mirror was misted over—I knew I must look awful, and I couldn’t bear to look at myself—I brushed my hair out, threw some conditioning spray in it, and then padded to my room in my bare feet.
Slipping into pajamas, I collapsed onto the bed, staring up at the ceiling.
That was a bad idea, because as soon as I was lying down, my eyelids grew heavy. Terrified as I might be, now that I had a bit of downtime my body would force my brain to shut down for a bit in order to rest—even if it was to be a particularly restless sort.
I was glad I’d left the roses at the school, I realized as I lay there, staring at the ceiling as the cloudy feeling of tiredness crept in. The sight of them had almost made me ill, and the smell of them certainly would have.
And Xandra. She had texted me, just like she said she would, not long after I got home. I promised to let her know if anything went amiss. Thankfully, it hadn’t so far.
Slipping into the fatigue produced by losing an entire night of sleep, I didn’t even realize I’d nodded off.
I jerked awake, and realized that my room was now dark, lit only by the street lamps’ glow leaking in through the blinds. I clutched at my chest, feeling my heart hammer against my ribcage.
I sat up and wiped my hands over my face.
The clock on my bedside table read 12:34. I had been asleep for hours. And no nightmares. Yay for small miracles.
There was a clink like a spoon on a teacup, and I looked around. It came again, like something was hitting glass. Rain?
I stood and walked to the window, pulling back the blinds, and fell backward into a pile of clothes, a soundless scream filling my mouth.
Byron Vesper was standing in my backyard.
I scrambled backward until I was pressed flat against my door. I gasped for breath, which suddenly was unwilling to come. Tears wetted my cheeks. I clutched my hands to my mouth, trying to stifle the horror threatening to spill from between my lips. I couldn’t tell if I wanted to bellow in fear at the top of my lungs or vomit, nausea creeping up and stirring my stomach silently.
Maybe he hadn’t seen me yet. He had been winding up like he was about to throw something.
There was another clink, quiet, yet somehow it echoed through the room like a gunshot, and I realized that he was throwing pebbles.
What was I, some lovesick girl? He couldn’t possibly think that I was going to fall for that trick.
Clink.
Clink.
Clink.
The sound was like the beating of the heart in that old Poe story. I kept thinking my parents were going to hear it, that between the rocks hitting my window, I’d hear their angry footsteps coming down my hall to rain more judgment and fury on me.
I forced myself to my feet, keeping silent, heart still screaming in my chest.
Well, he hadn’t tried to rip my throat out yet. Maybe he had come to apologize?
Somehow, in spite of it all, I felt it—a magnetic pull. It dragged me toward the window, like the North Pole pulling relentlessly on a compass needle. Horror and fear overridden, I found myself stalking inexorably forward, breath held in my chest. At the window, I looked out. Byron was still standing in my yard, wearing a dark blue vest over a clean, crisp white button-up. He had dark jeans on, and his hair was tousled ever so perfectly.
He gestured for me to open the window.
I hesitated. He hadn’t leapt up to the window to try and kill me. He was just standing down there, placid.
I bit down on my lip, but I threw back the lock and pulled the window open a crack. “What do you want?” I whispered.
“‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?’” he asked, an air of drama permeating his words. “‘It is the east, and Cassandra is the sun.’” He took a little too much pleasure in saying my name, and it made me feel a little sick hearing him say it that way.
“I’m not your Juliet—” I started to say, but gasped as he suddenly appeared at the sill, then somehow slid smoothly into the room through the crack I’d made. I fell backward again, scuttling on the floor. At almost the exact same second, he had crossed the space between us and clasped his hand over my mouth to prevent me from shrieking.
His eyes bored into mine, and his grip was as tight as iron.
“Don’t make a sound, my little rose, or I’ll be forced to take care of your parents.”
That was all the persuasion I needed.
Chapter 9
“There now,” Byron murmured, removing his hand from my mouth. “That wasn’t very hard, was it?”
The scariest thing about the entire thing was not that he was in my room, accosting me, or even the fact that he had just threatened my parents like it was nothing.
No: it was that his skin wasn’t warm, or even room temperature. His hand felt like a rubber glove packed with hardened snow wrapped around my mouth.
Cold skin. Super strength. Inability to stay out in daylight. Ability to evaporate and drift through the window like a cloud. Desperately attractive.
“What are you?” I managed to get out, my voice trembling. I felt my back bump into my dresser, a sharp corner finding its way into my kidney. I didn’t even realize that I was backing away from him.
He was looking around my room. “Hmm?” His hands were in his pockets now.
“Oh, come now, you don’t know?”
He picked up a small, porcelain unicorn from my bookcase that my grandmother had given me when I was six or seven. Turning it to gaze at it from all sides, he smirked. “Not one for myth, are you? Well, that’s fine. You’ll believe me soon enough.”
Suddenly, and I really didn’t understand how, he was standing directly in front of me, his hands wrapped around my waist, pulling me close to him.
I did what any sane person would do and tried to push him off, but his hold was unyielding.
“I thought that your new friend Xandra would have convinced you by now,” he said casually, watching my face closely.
I did everything I could not to meet his eye.
I didn’t want him to feel my fingers trembling, or hear my shuddering breaths.
He laughed softly.
“Did you like the flowers?”
That made me look at him.
His gaze was electric, a shock to my terrified system. He was so unbelievably handsome, even when I was scared to death of him. How was that even possible?
Is that how Stockholm syndrome starts?
“I guess you didn’t like them enough to take them home with you,” he said, his voice gaining a hard edge. “You left them in the bathroom, after all. “
My mouth went dry. How did he know?
He un-snaked his hold on me, and I jumped away from him, wrapping my arms around myself. His touch had seemingly sapped all of the heat from my body, and I shivered, my skin crawling from the chill.
“I’ll make it easy on you, all right? I take you for an intelligent girl, Cassandra.” He emphasized my name, then smiled mischievously. “Since that’s the only way I’ve taken you thus far …”
I gritted my teeth, revulsion threatening to make me heave my guts up.
“But
you have continued to surprise me with your lack of grip on reality.”
“You’re the one who lacks a grip on reality,” I retorted. Childish maybe, but I was not enjoying having insults, suggestive comments and attacks hurled at me. Nor was I about to stand there and just take it.
He didn’t seem phased. “Xandra is right about me, you know.”
I snorted sarcastically. “What, about you being a stalker and psychopath? Figured as much.”
“About being a vampire.”
He said it so matter-of-factly, so calmly, that I wondered if I had heard him correctly.
“She gave me away. But don’t worry,” he said, holding his hands up. “I won’t hurt her. She lives in a fantasy world already, and no one will take her seriously.”
What was she going to think when I told her all about this little meeting tomorrow? Was she going to doubt it then?
“She was slightly off about some of the things that we can and cannot do,” Byron continued, and paced back and forth in the small space. “But they are trivial. Good job with the garlic by the way, my little rose. But I wasn’t going to come in and attack you this afternoon. I was at home, thinking of you.”
My chest tightened.
I wondered if my heart was about to stop beating.
“And so here we are,” Byron said, his voice almost jovial. He smiled at me like he was seeing an old friend for the first time. He crossed the distance between us and stared into my eyes.
“No, I won’t hurt Xandra … because I love you, dear Cassie. Can you feel it? We should be together. Forever.” He leaned closer to me and I jerked away. “I want to drink of you, to love you the way only I can … to give you the eternal embrace …”
His fingertips grazed my cheekbones, and I got the feeling he was trying to lean in to nuzzle my neck. “Just look at the color in your cheeks …” His fingers moved down to rest on my mouth. He was almost breathless. “Those lips, so red … so alive … I can hear your heart beating … fluttering for me …”
The intoxication in his voice made me sick, but I wouldn’t let him have the satisfaction of looking away like a frightened kitten.
No One Will Believe You Page 5
