Lucy
It was almost normal.
I was hanging at the beach with my boyfriend and he was holding my hand and he kept giving me those smoldering sidelong glances I loved so much. Not that I’d admit it to him, but he could probably hear my heart rate change. Sometimes having a vampire boyfriend had its disadvantages. He smirked, as if to prove my point.
We stayed at the edge of the crowd. I knew what it meant when he clenched his jaw in that particular way: temptation. There was lots of space, though, and the wind off the lake blew away most of the scents that made him hungry, like warm skin and blood and the sweat of the girls dancing.
My life’s just weird.
Still, it was a beautiful night. It was crisp and just a little bit misty at the edge of the water. The moon hung sideways, like it was going to fall into the lake and drown if the wind blew too hard. The stars glittered, too many to count. My friend Nathan caught my eye and made the face he always makes when he thinks someone’s gorgeous. He fanned himself dramatically. I just laughed.
It would have been perfect if my best friend would get over herself and get down here.
“So, Solange seriously isn’t coming?” I asked, disgruntled. “Not even for, like, half an hour?”
Nicholas shook his head gently. “Luce, she can’t. She’s not … subtle. She can’t even retract her teeth properly right now,” he added quietly.
“She’s really starting to piss me off.”
“Believe me, I know.” The muscles in his throat spasmed when he swallowed. “Could you do that weird yoga breathing your mom taught you to calm yourself down?” he asked, even as he dipped his head to nuzzle the side of my neck. I tingled all over, my breath going shorter—which was the opposite of calm yoga breathing. His mouth was soft, tickling under my ear. My knees suddenly felt wobbly. I shifted slightly; if I was going to go all embarrassingly mushy, so was he. I slid my hand up his arm, the cool muscles moving under my palm. He was in short sleeves as usual, since vampires rarely got cold. He only wore a coat out in public in winter so as not to draw attention to himself. As if that beautiful, serious face didn’t draw enough attention.
I touched his shoulder, skimming my fingers up to dig into his hair, smiling devilishly.
“It’s not a competition,” he whispered against my lips.
“Show’s what you know,” I whispered back, kissing him until he pulled me closer, his hands on my hips. His tongue touched mine and my smug triumph turned into something else entirely. He was yummier than chocolate.
Someone whistled, the sound piercing through the very tiny space left between our bodies. Applause followed. I opened my eyes to half my classmates watching us. Nicholas swore softly under his breath.
“So much for stealthy,” I said cheerfully.
He turned toward the cliff, tugging me behind him. His teeth gleamed.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He nodded. “Just give me a minute.” He was very pale, as if he were made of seashells and pearls. It was deceptive. Nothing cut deeper than a broken seashell, despite the delicate opal shimmer.
I put my hands in my pockets and turned on my heel, watching the fires gleam on the still lake and the elongated shadows of my friends in the sand. Nicholas was more private than I was, and he always wanted to do his vampire-struggle thing alone. I was finally learning to let him, even though it went against all of my instincts not to get right up into his face to see if I could help him. Or at least bug him until he was himself again.
I saw Quinn and Connor both detach themselves from the party and come our way, just as Nicholas swore again, differently this time. When I glanced back at him, his head was tilted, his eyes fierce. His fangs were fully out again. “Someone’s coming,” he said.
Quinn and Connor reached us before I could say anything. They both looked grim. Hunter ran through the sand behind them, scowling.
“I said, wait up,” she muttered. “Hey, Lucy.”
“Hey, Hunter.” She was wearing a short sundress and sneakers. She looked like any other girl at a bonfire, but I knew she had at least eight different weapons stashed all over her. I had a stake in my boot and two more in the inside pocket of my jacket. Nicholas’s nostrils flared.
“Hel-Blar,” he spat. “Coming down the cliff, behind that cave.”
I couldn’t smell the wet mushroom, green swamp smell of a Hel-Blar vampire, but then I had a regular, boring human nose and the wind was blowing off the lake. I smelled only smoke and water and, if I inhaled hard enough to make myself dizzy, a faint whiff of Hunter’s shampoo.
“Stay here,” he added. He and his brothers were gone in a blur of pale skin and pale eyes before we could answer.
“Yeah, right,” I said anyway, knowing he’d hear me.
Hunter suddenly had a stake in one hand and a dagger in the other hand. She didn’t even dignify their order with a response, just started running. The stench didn’t hit us until we rounded the cliff side. Quinn was clinging to the exposed roots and tall grasses, dirt raining down. He grabbed the blue-skinned vampire by the ankle and tossed him down to his brothers, waiting below. Nicholas staked him, ashes billowing around their ankles.
From the dark cave beside us, Hunter and I heard a yelp, followed by a shriek.
“What the hell, man?” a guy bellowed.
“Another one,” Hunter said. We both advanced toward the mouth of the cave. Hunter broke a light stick she pulled from her bag and tossed it inside. The green acidic glow made me think of aliens and sci-fi movies.
And then there wasn’t time to think at all.
A Hel-Blar had a couple cornered in the back of the cave, fish bones and broken glass around their feet. In such a cramped, humid space, the odors were nearly visible—slimy rotting mushrooms and the scum on old water, the kind not even insects will visit. A girl clutched her shirt closed with one hand and hyperventilated. The guy was trying to look brave, but when he saw the blood on his arm, his eyes rolled back in his head. At least it didn’t look like teeth marks. The way his shirt was torn, he’d probably been thrown into the cave wall.
“Keep it together,” Hunter barked in that military-school voice of hers. His back straightened before he consciously thought of it. The Hel-Blar snapped his teeth together, all of them wickedly pointed and as sharp as needles. He wore an odd, twisted copper collar around his neck. Since when did Hel-Blar accessorize?
“What is that thing?” the girl squeaked.
“Just a drunk raver kid, all dressed up,” Hunter answered. “Stay where you are,” she snapped when they stumbled forward. The Hel-Blar snarled.
I picked up a handful of pebbles and threw one at his head. It bounced off his temple and he whipped his head around. I just grinned, showing all my teeth like any good predator, and threw another rock. I kept throwing them until he snarled again, saliva dripping on his chin—and leaped for me.
Okay, so the plan worked better in theory.
Because no matter how prepared I was, or how many times I’d had a vampire leaping at my face, some facts remained the same. They were faster than me. Always.
“Duck!” Hunter yelled as I stumbled back. I went down, hitting my knee hard. Pain bloomed. I’d have a wicked bruise by morning.
You know, if I didn’t get eaten.
Hunter threw her stake with the kind of ease and accuracy one might expect from a straight-A student at a vampire-hunter high school.
Thank God.
The momentum of the stake biting into his chest stopped the Hel-Blar in his tracks. He flew off his feet, clutching at the wound. Thick blood oozed between his fingers. The stake had done enough damage to slow him down but it hadn’t penetrated through his rib cage into the fleshy heart underneath. So he wasn’t dead.
Yet.
I took advantage of his pained yowling and threw myself forward with my own stake. I thrust it into the wound next to Hunter’s stake. Then I leaned back and used the heel of my boot like a hammer to shove it through clothing, skin, and in between bones. Hunter jumped over his decomposing body to usher the couple away. The Hel-Blar disintegrated into dust and a pile of mushroom-scented clothes.
I crab-walked backward to the cave mouth and then pushed to my feet, panting. Nicholas dropped down from the cliff edge in front of me. I screamed before I could stop myself, choking on adrenaline as he rose out of his crouch.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I nodded, coughing. My body was trying to sort through all the stimuli and was momentarily stunned. “I’m fine,” I finally managed to croak.
“What was that?” the girl asked shrilly. “It was, like, some monster, did you see that? Where did he go?”
“We scared him off,” Hunter assured her.
“That thing was not human,” the guy insisted.
I made my expression calm and unimpressed. “You’re drunk,” I said. “You’re seeing things.”
He rubbed his face. “Uh …”
His girlfriend pulled him backward. “Can we go? I want to go. Now.”
They wandered away, back toward the fires and the people. Hunter let out a breath. “That was way too close,” she said, taking out her cell phone. “I’m calling it in.”
Nicholas pulled me against his side. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
I nodded. “We dusted him,” I said, a little proudly.
“I—” He cut himself off abruptly. He, Quinn, and Connor all whirled back toward the cliff.
“Coming around the back,” Quinn said so softly I barely heard him. Hunter hurried to hang up her phone, but they were already moving out like some vampiric fan. We had to run to catch up again.
“So not fair,” Hunter muttered. “I work out all the damn time and he’s still faster.”
“I know,” I agreed, huffing. “Sucks.” I wasn’t even as fast as Hunter. For one thing, I still couldn’t run and talk at the same time.
The moonlight made the Hel-Blar look strangely beautiful, as if she were made of opals and lapis lazuli. Nothing could make the smell beautiful, though.
Before Nicholas and the others could cross the rocky peninsula to reach her, two figures dropped from the hill above. The guy kicked the Hel-Blar in the neck with his steel-toed boot, ivory lace fluttering from his cuffs when he put a hand out to steady his landing. The girl followed, landing with her arm outstretched, stake plunging into the Hel-Blar’s chest. Ashes drifted down and disappeared into the lake.
Nicholas’s older brother Logan and his girlfriend, Isabeau, grinned at each other.
“Heads up,” Hunter said suddenly. We followed her gaze. At the top of the cliff was another Hel-Blar and Isabeau’s giant gray wolfhound, Charlemagne. They were both snarling.
“Merde,” Isabeau said when the Hel-Blar approached her beloved dog. “I will kill him.”
She was running toward the hillside when a strange sound ululated from the woods. It was a cross between one of those old-fashioned hunting horns and a broken flute. It was haunting but sharp enough that I wondered if there was blood coming out of my ears. We all winced, especially the vampires, with their sensitive hearing. Quinn swore, in extreme detail.
The Hel-Blar screeched, clutching his ears. Then he looked around, as if he was frightened.
I’d never seen a Hel-Blar frightened like that before.
It didn’t bode well.
He snapped his teeth before running away from us, from the dog, and from the unprotected students laughing on the beach.
That was something else Hel-Blar never did: run away from food. And that’s what we were to them.
“What the damn hell was that?” Quinn demanded.
We looked at one another, bewildered.
“I’ve never seen that before,” Hunter said. “I thought Hel-Blar were all about the mindless feeding.”
“So did I,” Nicholas muttered. “I hate it when they change the rules. And why are they all wearing those collars?”
“Attend-moi,” Isabeau called up to Charlemagne. He waited patiently at the top of the cliff.
“Isabeau!” I exclaimed. “You’re back.”
She wiped her stake clean in the sand and smiled her rare, reserved smile. “Oui.” Her French accent was just as thick and she still wore the same kind of tunic dress, with the chain mail work over her heart. Bone beads dangled in her hair. “I have been here for a week now.”
“A week?”
“Solange asked for me to come.”
“Oh.” I was not going to be one of those jealous best friends too insecure and stupid to share. I was evolved and I did yoga and I was better than that, damn it.
Nope.
Hurt pinpricked through me. A hard lump of dread was forming in my belly, as if I’d swallowed a peach pit. In a certain kind of story, I’d grow a tree from my belly and peaches would fall out of my mouth when I spoke.
Instead, I just felt like I was going to be sick.
I tried to keep my smile firmly in place. “Oh,” I said again.
Nicholas stepped toward me but I took a step back. I didn’t want sympathy. It was mortifying. Logan just looked at me for a long moment before slinging his arm over my shoulders. “Come on, Lucy, tell me whose nose you broke this week.”
“No one’s. Maybe yours right now,” I grumbled. “I didn’t know you were back, either.” I’d missed him too, with his frock coats and wicked smiles. He wore a bone bead like Isabeau wore in her hair, but on a leather thong around his wrist. He’d been staying with Isabeau’s people, the Cwn Mamau, getting to know their ways since he’d been initiated into their tribe. Isabeau was a Shamanka’s handmaiden and knew all about the magical aspects of being a vampire, the stuff the Drakes had never really believed in until Solange turned sixteen. I liked her. It’s not that I didn’t want Solange hanging out with her. I just didn’t want to be left out. And this was just further proof that I wasn’t an honorary Drake anymore.
Thinking about that made me kind of nauseous.
I texted Solange.
You’re meeting me tomorrow night. 9 pm. Oak tree.
We met at the oak tree only when we wanted to be certain of privacy. That tree had heard more stories about cute boys, mean boys, and parental interference than anything else on the planet. It was on Drake property, so it would be safe enough, and I’d take Gandhi to protect me on the car ride over to appease my parents.
“We tracked those three from the woods,” Isabeau was telling the others. “And one who tried to eat a dog.”
I could just imagine what Isabeau had done. Dogs were sacred to her tribe. Cwn Mamau meant “Hounds of the Mother.” There probably weren’t even ashes left.
“They must be getting desperate,” Hunter remarked grimly. “I’ll put an anonymous call in to get the cops to bust up the party. It’s obviously not safe here.”
“I’ll wait with you,” Quinn said.
“Take my motorcycle.” Connor tossed him the keys. “I’ll catch a ride with Nicholas.”
I nodded. “I’ll get Christabel.”
I ran to the edge of the water by the farthest bonfire. I knew she’d be there, away from the crowds and as close to the lake as she could be without actually being in it.
“We have to go,” I said.
She turned. “Oh. Okay.” She frowned at me. “You look weird. Did you and Nicholas have a fight or something?”
“No, but someone called the cops on the party and I’d rather be out of here before they show up.”
“Good plan.” She grabbed her knapsack and followed me. I stopped to warn Nathan about the cops. He scrambled for his stuff and by the time we’d climbed the steps to the parking lot, we could see the frantic whispering travel from fire to fire. Nicholas and Connor were waiting for us in the Jeep. Nicholas was on his cell phone. I hopped into the car and pulled out before Christabel’s door properly closed.