Eventually, I crawl into bed, but I don’t sleep well. My dreams resemble a flickering black-and-white horror movie. I’m in a cave swatting bats out of my hair, then fending off spiders with a can of spray paint. Finally, I end up on a windswept moor with a silver and gray wolf. He asks me to dance. I refuse. He retaliates by chewing on my toes.

My eyes snap open. It would be nice if my brain could take this seriously.

The temperature dropped in the night, and while the rain is lighter now, it’s still heavy enough to drum against the attic roof. Wrapping myself in a faded afghan, I climb out of bed and shiver my way across the cold hardwood to the open window. Sliding behind my desk chair, I grasp the splintered frame and push down.

Suddenly, a hand snakes up from the darkness, and I jump back just as four fingers clamp over the sill. Stumbling over my desk chair, I crash to the floor, feet caught up in the netting of my afghan. I claw frantically at the mess around my legs as the hand becomes an arm and then a head and then a torso. A body vaults into view, filling the frame, blocking the outside light.

I have two options. Run downstairs with a rabid vampire in hot pursuit or lurch forward, close the window, and pray that the mixture of screen and glass is resistant to fists. So far the intruder isn’t even scratching at the screen. For an assassin, he’s taking his time, and closing the window might buy me more. Muttering “Close and lock, close and lock” like a mantra, I spring up and rush forward, hitting the window and pushing down with all my might until I hear a satisfying snick.

My attack brings more than I bargained for. Startled by my sudden appearance, the intruder loses his grip on one of the frame’s sides. He swings backward like a saloon door, one hand clutching the upper eave of the window, one foot balanced on the outside cement ledge, and all other limbs dangling in space. The full glow of the streetlight floods his face, and I find myself staring into James’s face—James’s very annoyed, very angry face.

For one crazy, hurtling second I heave a sigh of relief; if forced to choose, he is the better option. But then again, I would also rather drown than be eaten by snakes.

Before I can figure out the next course of action, James begins to move, and move strangely. He swings his body back to and fro until he has enough momentum to bring his other foot back on the sill. Steady once again, he crouches in front of me, a particularly nimble gargoyle. So much for getting the upper hand.

“Let me in,” he says, the glass muffling his voice.

He’s soaking wet. His green shirt is plastered to his shoulders like a second skin, and beads of water race down his nose. I feel a twinge of sympathy, but then tell myself to snap out of it. Twinges of sympathy are better than being turned into an amnesia zombie.

“I don’t care to be mind-wiped, thank you,” I say through the glass. Little clouds of steam appear and vanish between each word.

“I’m not going to mind-wipe you!” he says. “I just want to explain.”

My eyes take in his frown, his narrowed eyes. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” I say, “but you seem a little angry. Why should I believe you?”

“Because I am telling you that I won’t.” I must still look skeptical, because he brings his palm up to the window, pushing down so hard that I can see the small traces of his heart line. “I swear.”

I check his eyes and body language for signs of deviousness, but there are none. I bite my lip, torn. This is the moment, I think. This is the moment where you can make a very smart choice or a very stupid choice.

“Sophie,” he pleads again when he sees me wavering. “You’ve known me my entire life. You have to trust me. I’m still . . . just, please.”

Memories of the last week’s conversations flicker through my mind. It had all felt so normal, just like Old James and Old Sophie. Before I can think about it any more, I open the window halfway.

I am going to make the stupid choice.

“Listen,” I say and then lean over to make sure that there’s no glass preventing him from hearing me clearly. “You can come in—but make any sudden movements and I swear I will run downstairs for the garlic. Marcie buys it in bulk. Already chopped, too, if that means anything.”

His face breaks into a smile that would be more appropriate on the face of a lottery winner than someone I just threatened with prepackaged foodstuffs. He yanks up the screen without the slightest hesitation. If he’d wanted to bust in without asking, that barrier would have bought me a whole .42 seconds—a grim thought. His hands reach for the window next, but I bang on the glass until he lets go.

“I want a verbal commitment.”

He dutifully parrots that he will under no circumstances fiddle with my mind. He caps it off with a Boy Scout salute.

“The salute was a bit much,” I say, pushing the window the rest of the way up. I sweep my hand back in a welcoming gesture. “James, you may come inside.”

“Aw shucks, Sophie, that’s swell. I sure do hope my manners are as nice as yours one day.” He ducks through the window and closes it behind him.

“I thought I had to invite you in.”

“Not really, no,” he corrects before stooping over to shake out his wet hair.

I dodge to the side to avoid an inadvertent shower. “I’m pretty sure that—”

“You don’t.” He stands up straight, surveying me as though he’s suddenly seeing me in a new, geeky light. “How many vampire movies have you watched?”

More than a few, if I’m being honest. In retrospect, I should have cried vampire that first day in the auditorium, but we’ll chalk that misfire up to general sanity. “Not that many,” I mutter. “And there’s a pretty big consensus on the invite thing, I’ll have you know.”

“Well, the consensus is wrong. And besides, if you thought I needed an invite to get in, why did you freak out at the window?”

It’s a valid point, but not one that I feel like acknowledging. “I didn’t freak out. I just thought you were the neighborhood pervert. He likes me. A lot,” I say as he starts to smile. “What?”

“Did you wear the cape just for me?”

“Huh?”

He points to my shoulders. “The cape.”

I look down. At some point in my terror I had seen fit to tie the afghan around my shoulders. Oh my God.

“It’s just something I wear sometimes,” I shrug, untying the knot at my throat in what I hope is an offhand manner. Self-conscious, I cross the room to sit on the bed cross-legged, tucking my feet beneath my knees until not even the pink of a pinkie toe is visible.

“You don’t have to sit all the way over there,” he says, raising an eyebrow in the way that always made me jealous back when I aspired to be an arch villain. “I don’t bite.”

Considering earlier events, it’s a gutsy joke. “How long have you been waiting to say that?”

“Since I moved home,” he says, taking a seat by the leg of my desk.

“Nice.”

We lapse into silence. I lean my head back against the wall, keeping watch on him from the corner of my eye. He’s brought his knees up closer to his chest, and his hands rest calmly on top of them, patient and relaxed.

“You know, you don’t get a free pass here. If you want me to really trust you, you have to tell me everything. You have to answer all of my questions, no matter how stupid or invasive they are.”

“Okay,” he says without hesitation.

“I mean it,” I say, looking at him directly. “No evasion.”

“Okay.”

“Fine, then,” I say archly. “What did you do with the flip-flop you stole in third grade? I never found it in your yard.”

He doesn’t miss a beat. “I dug a hole and buried it by the swing set.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah. With my hands,” he adds. “The neighbor’s dog watched me the entire time. I had to wash under my nails for weeks to get the dirt out.”

“Okay. How did you become a vampire?”

He blinks a few times. “You go from zero to sixty, don’t you?”

“It’s the best way to get honest answers,” I say. “Why? Backing out?”

“No. But I wonder if you’ll answer a question for me first.”

If it has anything to do with my blood type, I’m going to kick myself. “What?” I ask, suspicious.

“What bothers you more?” he asks, leaning forward. “The fact that I’m a vampire or the fact that you have me here, sitting in your bedroom, after midnight? Because I actually think it’s the second one.”

He flashes a toothy smile. In any other time, under any other circumstances, I would almost think that he was . . .

“Are you flirting with me?” I ask, stunned. “Now?”

I think I see a flicker of disappointment wash across his features, but it could just be a shadow. “Please,” he says coolly. “I was just curious. And besides, I thought the whole vampire thing was supposed to be sexy. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t going to start giggling and twirling your hair.”

“I think you’re safe. One, vampires lose a little something when one of them tries to snack on your neck, and two, I’m still not sure what you’re doing back. So spill,” I order, frowning when all that follows is a few seconds of awkward silence. “I’ll get you started. Once upon a time, I met someone with really pointy teeth, and they said—”

“Okay,” James cuts me off. “This isn’t easy, you know? What you’re going to hear isn’t one of my best moments. After my parents died, it was . . . hard.”

“Was it really a fire?” I ask, bracing myself for a story of how the fire was a cover-up, of midnight vampire attacks and bloody handprints smeared across white sheets. Instead he surprises me with a short laugh.

“Yep. Just one of those random tragedies everyone reads about in the newspaper and everyone forgets three days later. Except for the people it happens to.”

It’s hard to imagine that when I was cursing the day-to-day indignities of being a high school freshman, he was dealing with having his life suddenly ripped out from under him. Imagining James as a sudden orphan causes me to pull the afghan back up and wrap it, mummylike, around my shoulders. He’s stopped talking again, but for once I don’t poke or prod.

“Anyway,” he continues so suddenly that I jump, “after my parents died, they had to figure out what to do with me. My grandparents had died long before I was born, and my parents didn’t have any siblings. If they had left it up to me, I would have taken my chances on my own, but I was sixteen, and legally that meant I had to be placed in a foster home.”

A foster home seems so . . . clinical. “Were the people nice?”

James shrugs. “I guess. They lived in an old renovated farmhouse with acres of fields around it. Susanna bred some form of German shepherd, and Ian spent most of his time with old tractor parts. An old country bus picked me up for school. When I went.”

“When you went?”

“Yeah. I probably skipped half the time, but I passed. Barely,” he snorts and then opens his eyes. “You know, when you’re happy it’s hard to imagine not caring about anything. But I didn’t. Not myself, not my future, not anyone. Sometimes I imagined what it would have been like if we’d never moved, if we still lived next to you and your family, and if you and I still spent most of our days coming up with the perfect insults for each other. I’d stay up late at night, imagining conversations that could have happened on the way to school, in our backyards, over the phone . . . ,” he says and then shoots me an embarrassed glance. “It was stupid—I had other friends, and you and I didn’t even talk that much after sixth grade.”

I don’t know what to say. I feel like I should admit something personal as well—that when he kissed my cheek on the hammock I was just pretending to be asleep. That the day his family moved away I cried. Or, a little voice inside whispers, you could sit closer. That’s a sure sign of emotional solidarity. That little voice is right, and from the way James is still looking at me, I’m going to have to come up with something a little more supportive than a few jokes. Trailing a clump of covers, I scoot to the edge of the bed and then slide to the floor. Now there’s not as much space separating us, but even that measly six feet has taken on the proportions of a football field. Do I scoot over and loop my arm around his shoulders, or is leaning forward with a concerned expression, Oprah-like, okay?

I’m still wrestling with myself, eyeing the floor like it’s Mount Everest and wondering how the whole vampire thing fits into the equation, when James’s voice pipes up. “Comfortable now?” he asks with an off-kilter smile that says he knows exactly what stupidity I’ve been debating.

“The bed was too soft,” I say in a rush, which makes him grin even more. The good news is that he’s smiling again; apparently all I need to do to make him feel better is tap into my inner social moron. “I’m so sorry, James.”

He shrugs again. “Not your fault.”

“But that still doesn’t explain where the fangs come in. My money’s on a certain girlfriend from the wrong side of the afterlife.”

His expression turns cagey. “Possibly.”

“You mean there are several choices?” I ask, and then resist the urge to bang on my chest. Where did that shrillness come from? Clearing my throat to evict whatever jealous-girlfriend type has come in and changed the wallpaper, I strive for something calmer. “I mean, the only logical choice is Violet.”

“I had other girlfriends, you know.”

“I’m not saying that the only girl who would find you attractive is one with serious codependency issues. I’m saying that I’ve been English buddies with Violet this past week, and she’s said a few things that are finally starting to make sense. And then there’s the fact that she flipped in the lunchroom when she saw us talking.”

“Okay, it was Violet.”

“Did you lose a bet? Check the wrong box on a survey? Because she’s kind of weird.”

“Funny,” he says. “So I told you how Susanna and Ian’s farm was in the boonies, right? There were maybe three houses within a five-mile radius. Two of those were owned by old retired couples. The other one, the closest one, was deserted. Or so everyone thought.”

“Dum dum dum.”

“Yes, dum dum dum. Thank you.”

“No prob.”

“A few weeks after I moved in, I started taking walks. Sometimes I’d even go in the middle of the night, climbing out my window and down a tree like in the movies. One night I walked farther than I ever had before—anything to keep my mind off of reality—and I came across one of those rambling old country houses, complete with a wraparound front porch. For a second, just a second, I thought it was our old house. Or this house,” he says, squinting up at the ceiling. “Honestly, other than its size, it was completely different. But it was enough to make me try the front door.”

“Breaking and entering. Awesome,” I say, happy when it makes him smile. I prefer it to the sadness, times infinity.

“The inside wasn’t nearly as rundown as I expected,” he continues, “and there was an old couch against the wall. Newspapers were everywhere. Old, yellow ones. And stacked up in the far corner was what I thought was a pile of sticks,” he says.

The emphasis on “I thought” makes me a little queasy. I almost don’t want to ask. Almost. “Let me guess. Not sticks?”

“No,” he says flatly. “Not sticks. Animal bones and fur, from a lot of animals. More than could crawl inside for warmth and then die in the exact same place. I turned and ran for the door, but then there was Violet, standing with her arms twined around the pole of the porch and smiling. You know, I think I actually said hello. She looked like a doll, especially in one of those dresses.”

“Anyone can look like a doll when their waist has been cinched to the size of a milk ring,” I say peevishly and then feel foolish when James gives me a confused look.

“Anyway,” he says, “Violet grabbed my arm and said that she was glad to meet me.”

“And then she dragged you to the shed and bit you, right?” I ask, thinking that I’m being helpful by filling in the blanks. A+++ for me. I wait for a sign of affirmation, a mouth twitch, a blink, a head wiggle, anything, but nothing comes. “Right?” I repeat.

James suddenly finds his shoelaces fascinating.

“Are you kidding me? You mean it didn’t happen that night? You mean you went back?”

“After my parents died I couldn’t believe how normal everything was,” he says before I can ask him how he could have been so stupid. “Even though I was in a different place with different people, it still felt the same. Susanna made dinner every night at the same time my mom did. She even used some of the same magazine recipes. Every morning I would wake up to the same dumb bird chirping, and every day I would put on the same clothes. And yet all it did was remind me how different everything was, how horrible. Nothing at Violet’s was the same. Not her, not the life, and not the rest of them. It felt like getting lost in a movie or book. It was an escape.”

“But didn’t their extreme strangeness set off any warning bells?”

He gives me a withering stare. “Give me some credit. But vampires are supposed to be outside the realm of possibility, right? And besides, I didn’t see you jumping up and down in the cafeteria crying monster.”

“True. But I didn’t see their animal-bone collection, either.”

“Fair enough,” he says. “The truth is I didn’t care. It felt like a dream, and I acted like it was a dream. One night Violet asked me if I wanted it all to last forever. I said yes. She bit me, she told me to bite her, and by that time I was so out of it that I did. When I woke up I thought, hey, at least nothing will ever be the same.” His head thunks against the desk. “It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. You can’t kick me more than I’ve kicked myself.”

“Couldn’t you have just dyed your hair purple and called it a day?” I ask weakly. When I think about the loneliness and grief that drove him to do this, I am suddenly choked up. I slide halfway across the floor to be closer, to let him know that I appreciate his honesty. When I stop, he lifts an eyebrow.

“Really? That’s the best sob story I’ve got. What does a guy have to say to make you move all the way?”

When I don’t answer, he scoots forward, closing the distance himself and leaving me to stare dry-mouthed at the inch between our knees.

“Do you know that all the blood in your body just rushed to your cheeks?” he asks. “They’re glowing.”

My head jerks up. Without thinking, I clap my hands to the runaway body parts, which do feel a little bit warm.

“Whatever. It’s too dark to tell that,” I say with false bravado.

“Darkness doesn’t matter. One of the few benefits of my new condition.”

“What?”

“I can see body warmth, pools of blood. And right now, your cheeks are two giant beacons.” He points at my face like I might not know which cheeks he means.

“I flush easily,” I say.

“Uh-huh,” he says, clearly a nonbeliever. Now seems like the perfect time for another subject change.

“So what other superpowers do you have?” I ask. “And if you say X-ray vision I am going to shoot myself.”

He doesn’t respond. It’s obvious that the question makes him uncomfortable—he sits up straighter and shifts his weight from side to side. Apparently I am going to have to play a guessing game. “If Vlad is any indication, I would say that you have powers of persuasion.”

“To an extent,” he says cautiously.

“And you’re stronger?”

“Yes.”

“And you have heightened senses.”

“Yes.”

“And you sparkle in the sunlight.”

His lips make the “yuh” shape, but then he does a double take. “What?”

“You, uh, sparkle?” I try again. When his bafflement fails to disappear, I begin to ramble. “I mean, now that I think about it, I’ve seen you in the sun and there doesn’t seem to be any glitter action. But aren’t you not supposed to go in the sun?” Someone really needs to step in and universalize vampire lore, pronto.

He continues to look at me as though I like to eat grass in my spare time. “Sunlight doesn’t kill us, but it makes us weaker. So does using any of our gifts,” he says, and the sarcasm is thick on the last word. “The more we use them the more we need to . . .”

“Need to what?” I prod.

“The more we need to drink,” he says.

My stomach lurches. While I knew that vampirism was a blood-sucking operation, this is James. James. He likes red licorice and banana-and-peanut-butter sandwiches. I know this because he used to steal them out of my lunch box all the time and replace them with pieces of paper that said, “James: 1, Sophie: 0.”

I turn to study him in the moonlight. He has gone back to studying his shoes, but I can tell that he is watching me from the corner of his eyes. My mind is tossing up images of him bending over the ivory columns of exposed necks and snatching up rabbits in the woods. In these images he is dressed in a cape with red lining and a tailed tuxedo, not the T-shirt and jeans he’s wearing now.

Unconsciously, my fingers creep up to my neck. The puncture wounds have scabbed over into two bumps that are hard and curved like tiny turtle shells. Perhaps I should be more worried than I am.

“Yes,” James says darkly. “I do drink blood. But never yours. Never anyone alive’s really. Too dangerous. And . . . you know. Wrong.”

His voice startles me—I hadn’t thought that I said anything out loud. I look at him, confused.

“Er, right. We can sort of read thoughts when we’re close to someone. Sometimes. Occasionally. We have to be touching you if we want to go very deep. But it goes hand in hand with the mind-wiping thing that we should talk about.”

I know that I should be like, “Yes! Mind wiping! Please explain at length and in detail!” but right now I just feel like seeing if I can stuff myself beneath my bed for the rest of eternity. I frantically try to think back to the times we’ve been “close” in the last week. There was that first night in his backyard, and then today in the lunchroom, and then—

“Now,” James fills in helpfully.

I scoot sideways faster than anyone has ever scooted before, and I don’t stop until my back is against my bedroom door and there’s at least twelve feet between us.

“Oh, come on,” he says, “I haven’t picked up on anything embarrassing. Although it’s nice to know that someone thinks my arms are pretty.” His mouth starts to twitch. “Well, mine and Danny Baumann’s.”

Dear God. Danny Baumann was something that I had meant to take to my grave, unless that fantasy played out where we met at a twentieth high school reunion and he was blown away by my poise and reporting experience, and I got to spend a lifetime staring at him before we were buried side by side. Which would still mean taking him to my grave, actually. So yeah.

“This is not funny,” I say when I can finally speak. “This is an invasion of privacy. Stop it.”

“I would if I could,” he says. “It just happens. They say that you learn to control it as you get older—the other vampires can—but so far it’s been a year and it’s still going strong.” He rubs his eyes, suddenly weary. “I’m glad this came up, because we need to figure out what’s going to happen on Monday. Vlad will be expecting you to know nothing about what happened today in the woods. If you show the slightest ounce of mistrust, he will become suspicious, and I can’t predict what he’ll do next. If you haven’t noticed,” he says wryly, “he’s kind of a loose cannon.”

“So what am I supposed to do? Not think?”

“No. But if the way you followed four hungry vampires into the woods is any indication, you weren’t doing much of that this afternoon anyway.”

I hold up a finger. “Okay. One, I didn’t know they were vampires—I just thought they were part of some sort of weird cult thing. And two,” I add, because number one doesn’t sound all that smart in retrospect, “insults are not going to help me keep my neck intact. Seriously, what am I supposed to do?”

“There are things that make it harder for us to pick up anything.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve noticed that if people are concentrating really hard on something, I don’t hear anything. It’s the stray thoughts that come through, the departures from regularly scheduled programming.” He stops, a new emotion flickering across his face. “Are you really going to keep hiding in the corner?”

“Can you hear me over here?”

“Not really.”

“Then yes,” I say, and he frowns a little and looks away. I may not be able to read minds, but he’s obviously hurt, and that makes me feel guilty. Especially considering that the reason he’s here tonight, telling me all of this, is because he had to stop me from becoming Vlad’s very special Pringle.

Knowing I’m going to regret this later, I scoot back across the room until there are only a few inches between our knees.

“Okay, let’s practice. Try to tell what I’m thinking,” I say, but he’s already dropped his gaze to squint down at my legs.

“What are those? Dancing raisins?”

“Whales. And I would kind of like to focus on the tips and tricks to vampire mind defense right now, not my pajama decisions.”

“Fair enough,” he says and then leans forward, close enough that I can make out the green of his eyes. I’m suddenly distracted by his bottom lip, which really is very nicely shaped. And there’s a freckle punctuating the corner of his mouth that I can’t recall from our early years.

“That’s because I doubt you ever looked at my mouth this closely when we were eight,” he says.

I rear back. “I wasn’t ready!”

“Sorry. It’s not a one-two-three-go kind of situation.”

I point behind him. “Argh. Just . . . go to that side of the room.”

“What?”

“You say you have to be close to hear anything, and since I can see Vlad coming, I should at least have two or three seconds to start concentrating. So go over by the bookcase and then walk toward me.” When he doesn’t move, I add, “Any time now.”

Reluctantly, he stands up and moves to the far wall, and I search for a topic. I could choose a subject like the weather or why I hate the word “pungent,” but that’s not going to prove that I can hide my thoughts when it really counts.

After I hop to my feet, he starts his re-approach. I close my eyes and try to concentrate on the things that I would never ever want to say aloud.

James, the fact that your new hobby is drinking blood does not disturb me nearly as much as it should. Also, you have grown up to be quite cute.

When I open my eyes, his chin is in front of me. I look up to find him staring down at me with patient attention and something else that I can’t quite define.

“It worked,” he says after a few moments. “Nothing but fuzz.”

“Really?”

“Yep. Complete blank. What were you thinking about?”

“Er, nothing important,” I say, staring up at him. When did he get so tall?

“Sophomore year,” he says and then winces. The brief courage that came from my previous success starts to crumble.

“How am I supposed to do this?” I ask.

“Avoid Vlad. Period.”

“But I have English with him! I mean, he sits in the front and I sit in the back, but—”

“It should still be fine,” he says, sounding about as reassuring as a doctor who’s just dropped his keys in his patient’s open heart cavity. “Like I said before, Vlad’s old enough that he won’t be picking things up unless he’s actively trying. Just try not to let him get too close.”

Realizing how close I am to James, I retreat to take a seat on the end of my bed. “What about Violet? She’s in my English class too.”

“Violet doesn’t use her powers very often. It’s draining, and she thinks blood drinking isn’t very ladylike. Besides, she has enough problems in her own head to worry about anyone else’s.”

“Harsh words for your girlfriend.”

“Ex-girlfriend,” he corrects quickly. “If that.”

“Nice.”

James blinks in a way that would be cute if he were not being a dirtbag. “I don’t understand why you’re angry.”

“Maybe I just think you should be a little nicer to the girl who shared eternal life with you.”

He runs his hands through his hair, which I am quickly learning is his I-am-exasperated with-your-craziness tell. “Eternal life that I don’t want,” he stresses. “A girl that I don’t want. If we’re being completely honest, I want—”

I cut him off. “You should have thought of that before you let her give you an undead hickey. And while we’re at it, what’s so bad about eternal life? I mean, maybe it’s time to focus on the positives.”

“Besides sun headaches and the blood drinking and the insane company?” he says, and for the first time since we began, James is getting angry, honestly angry.

“And the superstrength,” I counter, “and the mind reading and the coolness factor and the—”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore!” he interrupts, walking over to look out the window. “I don’t even know how we got here. Let’s talk about something else.”

He’s right. Time to change the subject. “Okay,” I say. “What is Vlad doing here?”

James studies me for a few moments. “Vlad is looking for a girl,” he says finally.

“I got that much,” I say with hard-won patience. “What does this girl do? Fly?”

“No.”

“Does he vant to suck her blood?”

James shrugs. “He hasn’t really kept us in the loop.”

Up until now, James has been nothing but an open book, keeping his gaze on me far more than my fluttery stomach can take. But now he’s deliberately turned away from me. As he pretends to peer out over his backyard, it strikes me that I recognize this pose from when we were kids; this is James keeping a secret.

“What don’t you want to tell me?” I ask.

Instead of answering, he walks across the room to the bulletin board that hangs over my dresser. Leaning forward, he points at the picture wedged in its corner. “Isn’t this that karate class they asked you to resign from? Are you the small, scowling one?”

This source is obviously tapped. “It’s late, and I am exhausted,” I say, and it’s not a lie. A weight has settled between my eyes, and the pillow on my bed is growing larger and more appealing. Like a giant fluffy marshmallow filled with Marshmallow Fluff.

“You’re kicking me out?” James asks, surprised.

“You seem to be done talking.”

A wave of irritation dims his features. “I didn’t know that I was just here for information.”

“You’re not! It’s just that I’m tired and I was attacked by vampires in the woods today and their leader seems to want me dead when he’s not too busy being the most popular person in the world, and I would just like to go back to sleep and forget about it for a little bit,” I finish, realizing that I’m not handling this well at all.

James watches me for a few moments. “Vlad’s not the most popular person in the world,” he says.

“What?”

“In the vampire world he’s not popular at all. In fact, he’s an outcast. Persona non grata. If there were vampire restaurants, they would have signs that say, ‘No Stakes or Vlad.’”

If James had said that Vlad liked to wrap himself in cellophane and sing show tunes for fun, I couldn’t be more surprised. Considering his penchant for sticking his nose up in the air and acting better than everyone else, I assumed he was at the top of whatever food chain would take him.

“But why?” I ask.

James takes a seat in the desk chair, leans back, and looks at me with eyes that are too artificially wide to be innocent. “Do you still want me to leave?”

Well played, James, well played. For a brief second I wonder why he is so resistant to going home, although way back when, Marcie said that if he was over here more often they might as well adopt him.

“You can stay,” I say.

“Good,” he says, stretching and settling in. “The vampire world is built on hierarchy. Take the stupidity of high school, multiply it by eighteen, add a side of twisted, and you’ll end up with something close to what living in vampire society is like. There are hundreds of families, and every single one can tell you who ranks above and below them.”

“Vampire families? Like brother and sister?” I ask, thinking of Marisabel. Maybe they were siblings, kind of.

“Sort of. When you are made into a vampire you are reborn with the name of your maker, and you’re pretty much stuck with it. You can marry out of it, but that hardly ever happens—apparently most vampires would set themselves on fire rather than marry down.”

“Fifty dollars that Vlad’s name isn’t really ‘Smithson.’”

“Vlad doesn’t have a name. He was made by an Unnamed. They’re considered parasites in the vampire community, vampires that were made off the grid.”

“So . . . then you’re all Unnamed.”

“Pretty much. All of us that Vlad made.”

“Okay. But what does that actually mean? You don’t get chosen first for dodgeball?”

“More like we have no rights at all. At best we’re ignored, and at worst we’re killed. That’s why most Unnamed lay low; they’re the ones hiding in empty houses and creeping out only at night.”

In other words, exactly what James was doing before I lured him back to the exciting hallways of Thomas Jefferson. I look to James with a smile, expecting to find some sort of wry recognition, but he doesn’t seem to have made the connection.

“Vlad doesn’t seem like the laying-low type.”

“He didn’t for a long time—apparently when he was first made, he loitered a little too closely to the legitimate families and a lot of them wanted him dead. But then he cooked up this Danae scheme and has been working on that ever since.”

I lean forward, excited now that we’re getting to something that I might already have an inkling about. “The Danae,” I say. “I know that Neville is a part of it, but what is it?”

“How do you know that Neville is a part of it?”

“He has a tattoo with a ‘D.’ I’ve been investigating.”

James doesn’t look entirely thrilled by that revelation. “I don’t know all that much about it,” he says, “other than that it’s a sort of vampire secret society with members all over the world. There are official vampire courts, but the Danae is what really pulls the strings. Kind of like a high-class Mafia.”

“But then that means that Neville can’t be Unnamed. Why is he slumming it with Vlad?”

“He claims that the Danae is interested in seeing where Vlad’s search might lead. Vlad, of course, is thrilled. He thinks that if he finds this girl, they’ll make him a member.”

“That’s weird.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of par for the course with Vlad.”

“No, I mean about Neville being a representative of the Danae. Because in our interview, he seemed pretty bitter about them. He said he wished he could remove the tattoo,” I say, but then shake my head. We’re getting off track. All I really need to know is who this girl is and why finding her will be enough to break through the social barrier. But when I ask James why they would care about finding her, he hesitates again, and I wonder what it is that makes him so close-lipped on this one subject.

“I think I’m going to turn in,” I say, faking a yawn.

James smiles. “I can see your belly button,” he says, and I immediately put my arms down, embarrassed at my blatant attempt at manipulation. We sit in an awkward silence, until he relents.

“I really don’t know that much about her,” he says. “Vlad’s only told us what he wants us to know. I know that she has some sort of star birthmark.”

“You’re kidding me. A star?” I ask. This sounds more like a My Little Pony than a person.

But James nods his head and confirms that yes, it’s a star. “And I know that she’s a sort of legend in the vampire community,” he continues. “I know that there are certain beliefs about her blood.”

“Beliefs like what?”

He hesitates again. “Some say that it can make a vampire’s powers immune to the sunlight, some say that it’s an aphrodisiac. And some say that it can reverse vampirism entirely. And that’s it. That’s all I know.”

I wonder why he was so reluctant to tell me, but I’m glad that he did. “Thanks,” I say. “We don’t have much to work with, but if Vlad’s working with the same amount of cluelessness I think we’ll be okay.”

“Be okay for what?”

“For beating Vlad to the punch. For finding the girl, warning her about whatever he’s going to do with her.” I stand up, my legs tingling after all this time on the floor. After nudging James’s legs to the side with the tip of a toe, I grab my sophomore yearbook from the bottom drawer of my desk. “Vlad has rejected Caroline, so we only have three hundred more high school girls to go. You know, maybe Vlad knows something he’s not sharing about finding her among the popular girls. He did home in on Caroline very quickly,” I say, and then I realize that I’ve been chattering on without asking for advice from the person with insight into the vampire in question. “What do you think?”

James is silent. I turn to find him staring at me with a look that contains such a mix of guilt and shame that I can’t help but ask him what’s wrong.

“What if we let Vlad find her?” he suggests softly.

“I don’t understand.”

He doesn’t respond, just continues to look at me, and suddenly I get it. “You think her blood might turn you back,” I say in disbelief.

“It’s just one girl,” he says, but I detect a note of uncertainty that suggests he’s been trying to talk himself into this way of thinking for a long time. “We don’t even know what they’ll do with her.”

“I think we can assume that it’s not give her a free shopping spree to the mall! I would say that anything Vlad is wrapped up in is probably hazardous to her health. And you know that,” I say, “or you wouldn’t be sitting on the sidelines. You don’t want to be a part of finding her, but you’re fine with reaping the benefits if it does happen.”

And then James is standing, only I don’t see him stand. One second he is looking up at me from my chair and the next he is across the room, staring at me angrily.

“Since when do you even care about your classmates, Sophie?” he says. “Today I saw you sell out the only friend you seem to have. And for what? A stupid journalism project?”

“Hey,” I say. “I feel really bad about that. And in a non-psycho universe, it wouldn’t have led to her ending up in the woods with a pack of hungry vampires.”

“But it did.”

“Fine. I’ll haul myself up on the stage and let people throw stones at me on Monday.” I lower my voice, hoping to go down a path that’s more persuasive than accusatory. “But you know there’s danger and you’re letting someone stay in its path. In fact, you’re hoping that the danger catches them.”

“So what do you want me to do? Just stay like this?”

I wait for the echoes of his question to die away. “You chose it,” I say, wincing at how harsh it sounds.

“It was a mistake! And, okay, I watched a lot of Psychic Network back when I couldn’t sleep after my parents died, but maybe there’s a reason that Vlad thinks he’s going to find her here. Maybe it’s a chance to start over. Maybe—”

“Are you listening to yourself?” I ask, and then try to be more diplomatic. “I’m sorry that you are upset, but your mistake isn’t something someone else should have to pay for.”

“You can stop,” he bites out. “I get it.”

The curt reply gives me pause. After a few moments of tense silence, I say, “So you’ll help?”

“Help you get in Vlad’s way? No.”

“Then I guess you should go,” I tell him, trying to make my voice firm where my resolve is not.

This time he doesn’t protest. He looks out the window, and at this moment, I would give anything to have his mind-reading powers. But since I don’t, I cross the room, open my bedroom door, and peer down the short hallway to the stairs.

“You’ll want to be extra quiet by my parents’ room—Marcie’s a light sleeper,” I say. “But once you reach Caroline’s, you’re good. She could sleep through a monster truck rally,” I whisper, but when I turn back to check that he’s heard, the room is empty and the window is open. James is gone.