“Well, yeah,” he said, with a laugh. “But that’s to be expected.”
I snorted. “That’s not funny, Ben.”
He shrugged. “It’s a little funny. And hey, you stopped, right? That’s crazy advanced for a newborn, stopping yourself mid-feeding without hurting anybody.”
“Yay for me,” I muttered.
Thump . . . Thump . . .
“I’m just glad you stopped. Otherwise, worst first date ever,” Ben intoned.
I sat up, tilting my head. “If this is your idea of a date, I do not want to know the rest of your romantic history.”
“It is a sordid and blood-soaked romp,” he deadpanned.
“No, it’s not,” I told him.
He grinned. “No, it’s not. But it is incredibly weird and a teeny bit sordid.”
“But you’re OK?” I asked him, standing again.
Thump . . . Thump . . .
He blew a raspberry. “Fine. Give me a cookie and juice, and I’ll be at a hundred percent.”
“Really? You’ve got blood-donation jokes right now?”
Thump . . .
Ben snickered and parted his lips to say something else, but suddenly his face went slack. The rosy glow faded from his cheeks, and they went ashen and pale. His eyes rolled up, and he dropped to the floor like a marionette whose strings had been cut. He flopped into a boneless heap, his head smacking dully against the tile.
“Ben!” I launched myself across the room to kneel over him. He wasn’t breathing. His heart rate had slowed to nothing. Why hadn’t I noticed? I hadn’t taken that much blood. Why had he collapsed?
“Help!” I screamed. “Help me! Please!”
I tilted his head back and tried to breathe some life back into him. But his chest rose once, and then nothing. Trying to remember something from the first-aid class I’d taken in high school, I crossed my hands over his heart and pushed down to start CPR. I felt something crack dully under my hands, and I shrieked.
I’d broken his ribs. I’d forgotten about my strength and broken his bones in my panic. “Help!” I screamed, before trying to breathe into his mouth again.
I glanced around the room—there had to be something in here to help me. There was no phone. There were no medical kits. But near the door, next to the light switch, was a bright red button labeled “V11.”
It looked like a nurses’ call button in a hospital room. V11 was the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead’s hotline for humans with vampire problems.
And I was up to my ass in vampire problems.
Scrambling to my knees, I slapped my hand against the call button and crab-walked back to Ben. An alarm roared to life, echoing down the hall. I left a bloody handprint on the wall panel.
He still wasn’t breathing, and his skin was paler and grayer by the minute. I couldn’t hear a heartbeat. His eyes were unfocused, staring off at the ceiling.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, cradling him in my lap. “I don’t know what’s happening.”
Twin drops of water fell onto Ben’s gray cheek, tinged with a hint of pink. Because vampire tears have the tiniest bit of blood in them. And I was a vampire.
This was bullshit.
Before I could release more of those tears, the alarm bell stopped, and the door burst open. I closed my eyes, expecting some sort of vampire SWAT team to come spilling into the room and stake me. Because they were going to kill me. The Council did not tolerate vampires who attacked innocent humans, no matter how newly risen. They were going to come in here and stake me. I could only hope they’d make it quick.
But the expected staking did not come. I cracked one eye open and saw a pretty brunette vampire in a purple Specialty Books T-shirt, standing in the doorway. The ID badge around her neck read “Jane Jameson-Nightengale.” Her jaw was slack, and she was shaking her head as she stared at me.
“Help me,” I whimpered.
She seemed to snap out of her stupor, glanced down at the dead boy in my arms, and yelled, “Holy hell, what did you do to Ben?”
2
Try to find other vampire sires who inadvertently fell into parenthood to mentor you.
—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire
Jane Jameson-Nightengale made some sort of hand motion behind her back, and I heard a bunch of clicks from the well-lit hallway behind her. She dropped to her knees beside Ben. “You’re not even supposed to be awake right now! How did you bite him?”
Jane’s hands slid over Ben’s neck and wrists, checking for a heartbeat. Her fingertips lingered against his skin at each of his possible pulse points for several moments. And every time she failed to find a pulse, her face crumpled just a little bit more. Who was Jane, and how did she know Ben?
“He’s not breathing. No pulse,” she whispered, whipping her head toward me. Her eyes flashed an angry amber. “He’s cold. He was only in here for ten minutes. Even with the blood loss, his body temperature shouldn’t be this low!”
“I don’t know what happened!” I cried. “I bit him, but I only took a little. I mean, I could hear his pulse drop a little as I drank, but I pushed him away, and he was fine. He was talking and laughing about me biting him one minute, and the next, he just flopped on the floor dead. Did he have a heart condition?”
“No, he’s perfectly healthy. None of this makes any freaking sense!” Shaking her head, Jane lifted Ben’s bitten wrist to her nose. “What the hell? Your bite mark smells funny.”
“Well, I haven’t brushed in a couple of days,” I said, shrugging. “I’ve been dead.”
“No, you haven’t brushed in twenty-four hours. I mean—never mind,” Jane told me. She yelled toward the door, to someone I couldn’t see. “Let’s get Ben into a secured containment room. Total lockdown, no one has access but me. Protocol: Jupiter Ascending.”
The expected vampire SWAT team—wearing uniforms marked with “UERT,” for undead emergency response team—swept into the room on swift, silent feet. They rolled a gurney into the room and gently lifted Ben’s body onto it. They covered him with a sheet and rolled him away before I could even object.
All but two of the vampire storm troopers marched out in formation, leaving Ophelia to appear in the doorway, looking shocked and annoyed. “Meagan, how are you awake?”
“I don’t know!” I yelled. “All I know is I died in the most embarrassing way possible, and then I woke up here.”
“Not the most embarrassing way possible,” Jane mumbled, crawling across the floor to grab my face in her hands. She gently, but firmly, pulled my chin down with her thumbs and looked at my mouth. She leaned slightly closer and inhaled.
“Your mouth smells like the inside of a head shop,” she told me.
“Wull, thass juss fackin roo,” I told her. Or at least, I tried to. Her thumbs kept me from pronouncing actual words. I guess my primal undead reptile brain did not appreciate her being this close to my face, because I felt that raw pressure in my mouth again and heard my fangs drop with a snick.
Jane blanched and sat back on her heels. “You have four fangs instead of two.”
“What?” Ophelia dropped to her knees and squinted at my extended teeth. Her own mouth fell open, and her brow wrinkled. “I have never seen that before.”
Jane pulled a compact from Ophelia’s purse and held it up to my mouth. And while I was fully aware that vampires could see their own reflections, it was definitely comforting to see my own face in the glass. And that it had stayed the same.
Or had it?
The girl in the mirror was gorgeous, frozen forever at twenty, with the sort of lineless, airbrushed perfection that only existed in magazine ads. I’d heard about this little quirk of vampire evolution, but I’d never seen the “before and after turning” comparisons. Vampires had to be beautiful to lure in blood donors. And while I was cute before
, now I’d been upgraded to a full-on ten. My eyes, dark like my mother’s, almost glowed with flecks of amber and gold. My hair was braided, but I could glimpse reddish-gold highlights that hadn’t been there before. My normally olive skin had paled to a creamy tan, but it was luminous and smooth, without one blemish in sight. My lips were full and rosy, and oh, my God, I totally had two sets of fangs.
I carefully tapped the tip of my tongue against the expected major canine fangs. Right next to both of my canines were slightly smaller, but still very sharp, extended fangs that had replaced two of my premolars. Any vampire looked dangerous, but somehow those two little extra-sharp teeth made me appear even more threatening.
Ophelia pushed the mirror out of the way and put her hands on my face, manipulating my jaw back and forth as she examined my mouth.
“Do you mind? That’s my face!” I snapped at her. Literally. I tried to bite her, which she did not appreciate.
“Sorry,” Ophelia said, yanking her hand back and pushing to her feet. “I’ve never seen this before. Do you know how old I am? I have not said ‘I’ve never seen this before’ in a really long time.”
Jane stood and pulled me to my feet. She peered at my eyes and spread my brows and cheekbones apart with her fingers. I swatted her hands away. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Jane, respect boundaries, please,” Ophelia said dryly.
“What is going on, Ophelia? What’s wrong with me? Is Ben going to be OK?”
Jane shot a look at Ophelia but didn’t say anything. I got the impression that there was some sort of relationship between the two of them, but it wasn’t necessarily a friendly one. Now that I thought about it, I seemed to remember Ophelia ranting about someone named Jane sending her a “high-handed” e-mail and plotting some sort of revenge. But I was pretty foggy about the details other than having to Google what “high-handed” meant.
“We don’t know,” Jane said. “His heart has stopped, which could be a sign of the turning process. But it’s also part of the process of dying.”
“But I didn’t give him any of my blood,” I protested. “I drank a little bit of his, and that was it. I thought you couldn’t be turned into a vampire without blood.”
“Well, vampires aren’t supposed to be up and walking around twenty-four hours after being turned, either. That’s the only reason we allowed Ben into this room. You weren’t supposed to be a threat. But the rules seem to be changing,” she said, giving me a long, speculative stare.
Ophelia patted my shoulder in what I thought might have been meant as a comforting gesture. “We’ll know if his body doesn’t start to decompose over the next couple of days.”
I blanched, and the disgust at that image was enough to make me feel the most like myself I had since I’d woken. “That’s lovely, Ophelia, thank you.”
“Meagan, you’re a vampire now. You waved good-bye to ‘lovely’ yesterday.”
My hands dropped to my sides. “You keep saying that. I don’t know what you mean.”
Jane and Ophelia exchanged another long look.
“Stop giving each other secret face messages and send actual words in my direction!”
Jane sat on the edge of my hospital bed and leveled me with a serious look. “We don’t know what to tell you, Meagan. We’re flying blind here. I’m not even sure you’re a real vampire.”
What did that mean? Was I some sort of supernatural freak? A vampire-shark hybrid? My knees felt watery, and all that warm Ben blood threatened to come up.
Ophelia grabbed my shoulder and gave me a firm shake. “You will not faint, and you will not throw up. Vampires don’t faint.”
“OK,” I said, nodding frantically as I clapped my hand over my mouth. “OK.”
“Get her out of here,” Jane told Ophelia as she waved the remaining UERT members away.
“Where is ‘here,’ anyway?” I asked.
“We’re in a sublevel beneath the dorm,” Ophelia said.
She led me down a brightly lit white hallway. I saw doors marked “Sunblock Storage” and “Backup Blood Storage.” A UERT officer stood guard at every other door, staring silently as Ophelia took my hand and hustled me past.
“Are those guys always here?” I asked. “Like lurking under our dorm at all times, while we’re sleeping?”
“No. The UERT responds to emergency situations involving vampires. Your human police officers would not be up to the task,” Ophelia murmured. “Don’t say anything more until we’re behind closed doors.”
She yanked open a door marked “Interrogation.” That didn’t sound good.
The room looked comfortable enough, if a little small. It centered around a white laminate table and a couple of padded chairs, and featured lights that didn’t threaten the well-being of my corneas.
Ophelia pointed to the chair across the table. “Sit. Do you need anything else to drink?”
Wordlessly, I shuddered and shook my head.
She sat in the chair across from me.
“I’m really sorry about this, Ophelia. I don’t know what’s happening.”
“Vampires are supposed to take three days to rise, Meagan. Every historical text, every vampire I’ve ever talked to, every hieroglyph etched into cave walls has the same story. You’re bitten, you drink the vampire’s blood, you go to sleep for three days, you rise. You’ve been down for barely twenty-four hours. And it’s possible you turned Ben with just a bite. You are turning everything I know about vampirism on its ear, Meagan, and I don’t appreciate it.”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t understand. Other than your unusual method of dying—”
“Humiliating, and let’s never speak of it again,” I said.
“Just wait until you hear Jane’s,” she shot back with a smirk. “This makes no sense. Your turning was textbook. Tina called for a volunteer. One of the vampires stepped up and presented his ID card showing that he was one of the campus’s approved volunteer sires. I was still upstairs, directing the staff through cleanup after the party. Otherwise, I would have turned you without hesitation. I’m sorry about that. I would have been a good sire to you, and I think you would have been more comfortable with someone you knew. Nonetheless, your volunteer sire fed you enough blood that Tina was reasonably satisfied you were going to make the transition. Your sire disappeared into the crowd. Tina says his name was James Marsters, but she didn’t have time to take a scan of his ID. Also, he’s not showing up on any of the school rosters, and we have not been able to contact him for a signature on the Council reports.”
“That’s because James Marsters is the name of the actor who played Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was a fake ID,” I told her.
Ophelia frowned. “Yes, Jane said the same thing. I find myself equally annoyed with him for lying during such a crucial process and annoyed with you for knowing that when I didn’t,” she muttered.
And I laughed, despite the incredibly shitty situation, because I was going to have to start Ophelia on one of those Captain America “pop culture she should have been exposed to by now” notebooks.
“Did my sire have double fangs, too?”
Ophelia shook her head. “He only had to bite you once to drain the little bit of blood you had left. I saw the punctures. They were perfectly normal.”
“What about the morons who were playing Ultimate Frisbee with a forty-five-freaking-pound barbell weight?” I demanded.
“Thrown at vampire strength.” Ophelia shrugged. “They babbled something about needing the extra weight to make the game fair, and then they ran away, like the cowards they are. We’re looking at security footage now to help us identify them for questioning.”
“I cannot believe I died in a tragic Ultimate Frisbee accident. Who dies as an Ultimate Frisbee bystander?”
“Morgan and Keagan have been worried sick,” Ophelia said, ignoring
my lame lament. “They’re not happy about the fact that they won’t be allowed to talk to you until your bloodthirst is under control. And they don’t know you’re awake already, which puts an extra wrinkle in things.”
She went on. “They stayed in my room last night and didn’t leave until this afternoon, which is, by the way, the first time I’ve allowed humans in my sleeping space during daylight hours in centuries. They insisted, despite my many, many, many attempts to make them leave. I think they just couldn’t face your side of the room without you in it. They’re still more pleasant roommates than Brianna was, even with the ‘hostage crisis’ element to the situation.”
Morgan and Keagan were my suite mates at New Dawn Residence Hall. I roomed with Morgan, and Keagan had a single next door, specially assigned by the housing office because of “problematic snoring.” She’d tried sleep-apnea masks, nose strips, and those jaw adjusters. But nothing could slow down her buzz-saw sleeping noises.
I hadn’t believed that such an adorable petite person could produce such a hellacious racket, but the first night we all spent in the dorm, I could have sworn Satan was chipping wood in the room next door.
Morgan had been difficult to read when we first moved in. She insisted that she was not a nice person, but she always treated me kindly. I thought she would find Keagan too perky to tolerate, but they got along like two peas in a pod. Morgan insisted that one day she would find Keagan’s dark, petty center, and on that day they would make the evening news.
The pair of them had become the glue that kept me cemented to University of Kentucky’s campus. And now they were six floors away from me, and I wasn’t allowed to talk to them. They might as well have been on the moon. The weird finality of what had happened to me—dying, coming back, biting Ben—all seemed to land on me at once. My life was over. Nothing would be the same for me. Again.
I flinched as Jane opened the interrogation-room door. Ophelia let go of my hand, and the sympathetic expression on her face hardened to one of boredom. Jane sat next to Ophelia and gave me a long appraising look. She opened a small notebook and set a UK Wildcats mug in front of me, with a coaster. It was filled with dark red blood that smelled like fresh-baked cinnamon rolls and every carb I ever wanted to eat.