The exam went on for hours, until Jane finally stepped in, told Dr. Hudson that we’d been through enough for one evening, and invited his team to leave River Oaks. Like, now.
Dr. Hudson protested loudly, even as the other vampires packed up their equipment. They seemed to understand that Jane was in charge, while Dr. Hudson had science on the brain.
“Are you certain we couldn’t just pop them over to the lab and run some daytime tests?” he whined. “Just some sleep monitoring, noninvasive. Mostly.”
“Mostly?” Ben asked.
Jane shook her head emphatically. “No.”
“Just a quick sleepover,” Dr. Hudson pleaded. “There’s so much left for us to learn from them.”
“Don’t make me tell you no twice, Dr. Hudson. Take your equipment out of my house, and get me the results.”
“Well, at least let me leave some sample-taking kits so you can measure their daily data.”
Jane stared at him in a way that made me feel grateful that, so far, I’d only seen her mildly annoyed with me. Dr. Hudson slumped out of the room. Jane followed him out and closed the parlor door. We heard the scientists packing their gear into the vans parked in front of the house. We heard Jane explaining to Dr. Hudson that he had no right to use her two wards as guinea pigs and that if she caught him doing anything creepy with our tissue samples, she would see him get the “upsetting, scientist version of The Gauntlet.”
“And I want my sock back!” I yelled through the parlor door. The door opened, and Jane’s hand appeared, tossing the little plastic bag into the room with us. “Thank you!”
Ben and I sat in stunned silence, staring at my discarded sock. It looked so sad and gross, crime-scene evidence thrown into the middle of Jane’s cozy, comfortable parlor, that I started giggling. My hysterical guffaws became full-on belly laughs. And pretty soon I was doubled over, with tears streaming down my cheeks. Ben, I noticed, was not laughing.
At all.
“I don’t find much about this funny,” he told me. “I had a life before you bit me. I had plans. And they didn’t involve being turned into a vampire. This is not supposed to be me, OK? I’m the Stiles. I’m the powerless, normal human who sits on the sidelines and watches the people with superpowers do their thing, and then I help clean up the mess.”
I meant to apologize. I did. But instead, what came out of my mouth was “So why don’t you whine about it a little more, Ben? I didn’t understand what I was doing. I’d realized a grand total of three seconds before I bit you that I was a vampire! God, I know, this is not how you expected your life to be, but it’s not like you’re covered in boils or porcupine quills or something.” I can only blame this response on the sheer number of swabs I’d encountered in the last few hours.
He threw up his hands. “I know that. I know. I should have moved away. And I don’t know why I didn’t. I just couldn’t. And I know that’s not your fault. What I know in my head and the crazy gorilla rage in my gut every time I see you are two very different things. I can’t say I’m always going to feel this way. Because we seemed to be clicking before all this happened,” he said. “And you seemed like a really nice girl with a great laugh, and you loved Thai food and hiking and could sort of tolerate bowling. But now neither one of us can have Thai food because you bit me.”
“I know.”
“And we can’t go hiking, because hiking at night is dangerous. And hiking during the day would kill us both. Because you bit me.”
I pursed my lips. “OK.”
“And forget bowling, because vampires can’t handle the smell of rented shoes.”
“I’ve got it,” I told him.
“Because you bit me.”
“OK!” I spat.
“So for right now, I need some space from you.”
“That’s great, except I live two doors down from you, and we share a bathroom,” I shot back.
“I said I knew it didn’t make sense!” he exclaimed, throwing up his arms.
“Fine,” I ground out. And it took all I had not to turn my back on him and flounce away like a little kid.
Ben flopped down on the sofa and got comfy. “Look, Jane’s not going to let anything happen to us. It could be a lot worse, really.”
“That’s easy for you to say.” And when Ben gave me a blank face, I added, “Jane clearly loves you. But she seems to think of me as some sort of evil demon woman who defiled her favorite Half-Moon Hollow teen. If it came down to a choice between the two of us, she’s going to choose you, every time.”
“Why would it come down to a choice between the two of us?” he asked, frowning. “It’s not a game show.”
“Because having two fosters in a situation like this, with all of the drama and superpowers and bloodletting, it just won’t work. It never works,” I told him.
“Fosters?”
“Do you honestly think she would be slapping all of these rules on us if it was just you? No talking to our friends? No leaving the house? No Internet access?” I exclaimed. “If it was just you, you would have an iPad with Wi-Fi built in so you could chat with your friends anytime you wanted.”
“Yeah, she would have all these rules, especially with all of this extra-weird vampire stuff we have going on. Because Jane likes me, but she’s not crazy. New vampires can do some extremely stupid tricks when they’re not supervised. Jane pulled off most of them. It’s sort of a miracle she’s still around.”
“Well, didn’t Ophelia say you’re some sort of computer genius? Can you get around the firewalls she’s installed on my laptop?” I asked.
“I am a computer science major, about to graduate with honors, yes. And no, I probably can’t get around anything the Council installs on our laptops. Because I’ve met the people they hire for their IT department, and they make my programming look like a monkey bashed its fists against the keyboard. And I won’t do it, because I want to trust Jane. When she thinks we’re ready for Internet and phone privileges, she’ll give them to us.”
I groaned. “I liked it better when you said you wouldn’t talk to me. You are of no use to me. None.”
“Well, if I’m not talking to you, I guess I don’t have to tell you about the fact that Jane’s a mind-reader. And she’s been getting better and better at reading vampires’ brains.”
“Oh, shitballs,” I grumbled.
Because I’d had some seriously unkind thoughts about Jane since she’d shown up in my recovery room. Also, I’d had some different sorts of thoughts about Gabriel, and those I definitely didn’t want Jane to hear.
Ben opened his mouth to add something more, but Jane walked back into the parlor. Outside, we heard several vans pulling out of Jane’s driveway. I shrank away from her instinctively and tried to think of something besides my underlying hostility toward Jane and the seminude thoughts I’d had about her husband.
Wait, I couldn’t think about the fact that I’d had those thoughts, either.
Jane’s “brain scanner” didn’t seem to be on at the moment, or she had a really good poker face when it came to people who were living in her house having seminude thoughts about her husband.
Ack! Why couldn’t I stop thinking about it? Why?
Jane gave us a strained but cheerful smile and rubbed her hands together. “OK, kids. You’ve been very good little vampires. And it occurs to me that I haven’t been a very good surrogate sire, keeping you cooped up like this.”
“So we get our phones back?” I asked eagerly.
“No, better,” Jane assured me. “You’re going to get to go outside, in the yard.”
I tried not to pout. I really did. But I only had so much control over my bottom lip. Ben looked confused, too, so at least I wasn’t alone in that.
“Come on, you two!” We followed her out onto the huge front porch, where Georgie and Gabriel were arm wrestling. Georgie was winning.
Jane shook her head, but there was a little smile on her face as she stepped out onto the grass. The night was cool and cloudless, the sort of weather you dreamed about in the choking heat of high bluegrass summer.
Would I miss that? Afternoons that stretched until nine thirty? The sensation of sitting in your car in August after a day spent in air-conditioning, feeling like you were sliding into a hot bath? Lying out at the beach? I mean, sure, I’d only been to the beach once, when I was seven, but I’d always meant to go again when I could afford it. And now I was never going to have that experience. How much fun could it be to go to the beach at night? Wasn’t that when sharks attacked?
I had a feeling that I would have a lot of these little moments over the next few months, realizing what I would be missing out on now that I was undead.
That would be fun.
“Close your eyes,” Jane told us.
When I didn’t immediately close mine—because this could all be some complicated ruse to allow Jane to drop some sort of net over me and let the scientists cart me away without damaging her furniture—she huffed out a breath.
“Really?”
“Fine.” I sighed, though I kept one eye open a tiny bit, just in case.
“I feel like I’ve neglected you in your first nights as vampires. A good sire would have helped you balance out all of the things you feel you’re missing now that you’re undead by showing you all of the awesome things that you can do. Since you’re both without a good sire right now, I want you to close your eyes. Forget about what you can’t see,” Jane told us, and I smarted from that “without a good sire” comment. “Listen to the wind rustling through the dying leaves. Listen for the heartbeats of all the animals hiding in the woods. Take a deep breath, and take in all of the scents in the air around you. Smoke from a neighbor’s bonfire. The drying grass, which someone was supposed to mow yesterday.”
Behind me, I heard Georgie groan while Gabriel snickered. “Told you,” he said.
Despite my net fear, cutting off one of my senses really did help me pick up on new scents and sounds. I could hear dozens of fluttering heartbeats in the distance, the dry rattle of leaves. I could smell smoke and decay and dry, cracking earth. Each new sensation was layered on top of the last one, but it wasn’t overwhelming. It just helped me figure out my surroundings. For instance, I could smell a skunk waddling around somewhere off to my left. I definitely wanted to avoid that. And I could hear a dog barking in the . . . wait, that wasn’t in the distance. That was getting closer.
“No!” I yelled as Fitz came flying out of the darkness and threw himself at me. I’d braced for it, but I still went crashing into Ben. We landed with an “Oof,” sprawling across the grass. With doggy kisses on my cheeks, I opened my eyes. It was like seeing the world for the first time. I could see every star in the sky, not just white pinpricks on a black backdrop but the actual halo of light surrounding a center of brilliant fire. I could see every leaf falling from the trees surrounding Jane’s house. I could see the outline of every blade of grass.
“Whoa,” Ben whispered.
“Ouch.” I grumbled, trying to roll Fitz off my chest.
“Fitz, off!” Jane told him sternly. “Go!”
Fitz went running off into the trees.
“Better go catch him,” Jane said.
“Is this a trick?” I asked. “Like entrapment? Are you going to shoot me if I run?”
Jane rolled her eyes and shooed me away. “Just run.”
I dug my toe into the ground and took off. It felt like I’d been launched out of a catapult across the lawn. I’d never been a runner. My legs were long but had never had much power when I was human. Now I was streaking across the lawn so fast I didn’t feel my feet touching the grass. Gabriel and Jane followed Ben and me closely, laughing at our childlike enthusiasm for sprinting. Georgie sped ahead, just because she could.
I was dead, but I’d never felt so alive, like every nerve ending from the tips of my toes to my scalp was firing at full blast. And I once drank a Surge soda at a Katy Perry concert. I felt connected to every muscle in my body as I moved, hurtling myself into the next moment.
The manicured lawn gave way to long-abandoned pastures, outlined with rotting wooden fences. Ben was beside me, whooping as he ran. He jumped into a tree, climbing from limb to limb and then hopping down from the top without missing a beat. Could I do something like that?
A smelly little cow pond was coming up, about the size of a backyard pool. I ran at the rickety old dock that barely touched its shore and sprang off the end, leaping over the pond. I landed, sinking in the damp earth up to my shins. I laughed, yanking at my legs until I freed my shoes from the mud.
“You OK?” Ben yelled, zipping past me.
I called, “Yeah, but my shoes will never recover.”
Gabriel stopped and helped me shove my muddy shoe back on my foot. Georgie skipped around us, doing back handsprings in the tall grass. She stuck her landing, arms raised in a V of triumph, and did a little bow.
“Ophelia did something similar once,” she told me. “But her foot was stuck in a person.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you are an extremely creepy little girl?”
Georgie shrugged. “Yes, but no one has seen them in so long that it doesn’t really matter.”
I started to laugh, which, I assumed, was not the reaction Georgie was expecting, because her responding giggle was more startled than amused.
“It’s a mad world, Meagan,” she said. “We have to use the weapons we’re given. People underestimate me because I’m small and cute. They just can’t imagine someone like me committing an act of violence. I use their ignorance to my advantage.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” I plopped down in the grass and pulled her to sit next to me. In the distance, Ben suddenly veered right, toward the woods. I couldn’t hear exactly what Jane was saying, but it didn’t sound like Woo-hoo! Run faster that way!
“What’s he doing?” I asked.
“Something that is making Jane curse, which isn’t good.”
Jane was following on Ben’s heels like a sheepdog, heading him in the other direction. Georgie pursed her lips, her fog-gray eyes making secret calculations. Meanwhile, I lay back in the grass and watched the tiny movements of the stars overhead.
“Oh, his house,” Georgie said, nodding in the direction Ben had been running. “His house is five miles that way.”
I sat back up. “Oh. That sucks.”
Georgie nodded. “Truly. I met Ben’s parents once. Nice people. Smelled delicious.”
I stared down at her and shook my head. “Dude, no.”
Georgie shrugged.
Meanwhile, Jane was practically dragging Ben back toward us, her arm wrapped around his shoulders. “Ben, honey, we’ve talked about this.”
“I didn’t mean to, Jane, I just thought—”
“You just thought you’d pop into your parents’ house for a surprise visit?” She sighed. “That’s a little advanced for your first night out, don’t you think?”
Ben’s heartbroken expression tested the limits of the term “puppy eyes.” “I just thought about my parents, sitting at home, not knowing where I am or how I am, and I just couldn’t resist the urge to run home.”
“I understand, Ben. But we can’t take a risk like that with you, not this early. I told you, we’ll let you see them as soon as it’s safe.”
“Well, at least no one got stabbed,” Gabriel told her.
I raised my hand as if I’d missed most of my Intro to Cryptic-Speaking Vampires class, which I had. “What?”
“I’ll tell you about Jane’s first week as a vampire sometime,” Georgie whispered. “It’s hilarious.”
Ben dropped down in the grass at Georgie’s side, looking miserable. I felt a familiar flash of guilt for making it impossible for him to live his
nice, normal life. But, like with most emotions that made me uncomfortable, I just tamped it down. I’d move along to something else, until they popped up again at some angsty, inconvenient moment. Emotional maturity—I was doing it wrong.
“What else can we do?” I asked Jane. “I mean, we’re fast, and we’re strong. What else?”
Jane sank to the ground in front of us. She and Gabriel were a bit more graceful in their descent than we floppy youngsters were. “You’ll still have those weird human moments of clumsiness, especially in your first few years. It’s like your body forgets sometimes that you’re not limited to human speed and reactions. But over time, you’ll get even smarter, faster, stronger. Just be careful. Remember that you can hurt people around you, so you’ve got to watch yourself. Avoid sunlight, silver, getting poked with wooden objects. Other than that, who knows? You’re sort of ahead of the curve in terms of special tricks. And you may develop a talent that’s just for you. Like Ophelia and her phone frying.”
Suddenly, remembering Jane’s own special talent, I frowned.
Don’t think anything rude, I told myself. Definitely don’t think anything about Gabriel. Or the fact that you want to smash all of Jane’s unicorns with a brick. Don’t think—dang it!
“Did you tell her about the mind-reading thing?” Jane demanded. “Damn it, Ben! You know that makes people uncomfortable around me.”
“I thought it was the fair thing to do,” Ben said. “I would want to know.”
“It’s actually working against me,” I told him. “Because I keep telling myself not to think about things I shouldn’t think about, but in the process, I think about those things. Maybe my special talent is bad timing and inappropriate thoughts?”
Ben snickered. I gave him the finger, which made him laugh harder.
“Children,” Gabriel said mildly, though he was smiling, too.
“Well, for the record, I don’t go sneaking around in people’s brains. Because that is rude, even if it would make my life a lot easier to know what the hell you’re thinking.”