“I finally found you!”
A stone-cold skeleton mask stared back at me.
“Uh…Luna is still not feeling well,” I rambled. “Allow me to escort you to get her cough drops.”
I took his white skeleton hand and tried to lead him toward the gate.
The Angel of Death didn’t follow.
Instead he held up a pack of vitamin C with his bony hand. He turned away from me and headed for the ceremony.
I raced after him.
“I’ve been trying to tell you,” I began. “Luna isn’t the girl you think she is. She’s not some nice straight-A cheerleader. She’s going to double-cross you.”
He shook his head and walked on.
“Trevor. You can’t!”
When I caught up to him, I grabbed the sleeve of his costume. With a quick jerk, he pulled his arm away.
I was on a mission, impossible as it might be. I grabbed his plastic scythe, but he continued to walk on.
I raced ahead, blocking his way with the scythe.
“Wait,” I whispered, out of breath. “Please, before you go any further. You were the one who tried to convince the town about the Sterlings. Why don’t you see Alexander in the daylight? Why did Luna and Jagger invite you to a cemetery? You were right all along. They weren’t rumors. It was all because they are vampires.”
I stared at his fixed skeleton face. He waved his skeleton hand and pushed his way past me. I followed him back to the site of the covenant ceremony.
A crowd of aliens had already gathered in front of the tomb. Ghosts and witches were everywhere, standing, sitting, leaning.
In front of the tombs was a coffin with a lit candelabra. Alexander, passing as Trevor in his Grim Reaper costume, was waiting on one side with a pewter goblet.
With all my might, I grabbed the arm of the Angel of Death standing next to me. “Don’t go,” I begged. “Please. Alexander is up there, trying to divert their vicious plan. Watch what happens, and if I’m wrong then I’ll kiss you right here in front of the whole school!” I blurted out.
He stopped and looked at me for a few long seconds.
My heart ceased. I realized what I had just committed to. Our plan had better work. I held all our lives and my mouth at stake here.
We hid behind some partygoers, standing a few feet from Alexander.
Then I saw Luna walking up the cemetery aisle, gravestones on either side of her, a dead bouquet in her hand.
Becky and Matt snuck in next to me.
“This is cool. It’s like a creepy gothic wedding,” the friendly witch said. “Maybe we can be next,” she teased Matt.
I yanked the Angel of Death back. “I’ve tried to tell you all along,” I said in a whisper. “You were right about the Sterlings. They are vampires. And so are Luna and Jagger. Please believe me. Before it’s too late.”
Alexander drank from the goblet.
Luna reached my Grim Reaper and drank from the goblet too. Then she said something inaudible.
“What did she say?” Becky asked.
“‘To the king and queen of the graveyard,’” Matt repeated.
Luna turned to Alexander. She leaned in to him.
I gasped. The crowd cheered.
“No!” I shouted, lunging forward, but a cadaverous hand stopped me.
I turned to see the Angel of Death behind me.
Just then Alexander grabbed Luna’s shoulders and held her at arm’s length.
“What are you doing? Don’t push me away!”
“Kiss her! Kiss her!” the crowd chanted.
But Alexander kept the vampiress at bay with one hand. He pulled off his reaper’s hood.
“I’m not Trevor!” Alexander exclaimed. “Now you can stop your games.”
“Why is Alexander there?” Matt said to Becky. “What’s going on?”
Luna glared at my true love. She started to laugh. “It was never Trevor I wanted here. It was you!”
Alexander stepped back, confused. Luna grabbed his oversized sleeve. “Now I don’t have to wait for you to take me. I can take you!”
I lunged forward, but the Angel of Death squeezed my shoulder.
“Get off!” I ordered.
Thank goodness Alexander was stronger than the waifish Luna. He held his scythe in one hand and the writhing vampiress at bay with the other.
On the far side of Luna a Grim Reaper pushed through the crowd toward the struggling vampires.
“Luna, what are you doing?” he yelled. “This wasn’t the plan. You are not supposed to be with Alexander!”
The crowd cheered, “Fight! Fight!”
Alexander began to cough, letting go of Luna.
“This is who I’ve always wanted,” Luna defended. “Alexander is who I’ve waited my life for.” She coughed, too, and clung to the side of the coffin.
The hooded reaper yanked off his shroud. Blond hair flung down over his face. It wasn’t Jagger. Standing in between Luna and Alexander was Trevor Mitchell.
I stepped back, shocked. If Trevor, Luna, and Alexander were struggling by the coffin, whose hand was on me?
I inched away and tried to release my hand. The Angel of Death only squeezed harder. Then he pulled me a few feet away from the ceremony.
I turned and tore off the reaper’s black hood. Blue and green eyes stared back at me. It was Jagger.
“You aren’t going anywhere, Monster Girl,” he said with a seductive, menacing voice.
My vampire boyfriend grew red with rage as he saw Jagger by my side on sacred ground. “Raven!” Alexander called. He started to wheeze and began to stagger toward us.
Trevor glanced over, shocked and confused.
I tried to pull my hand away, but Jagger tightened his grip and started to cough.
Alexander was doubling over but was determined to reach me. “Jagger, let her go!” he warned.
With every step Alexander took forward, Jagger took one back.
The confused crowd started cheering. Some shouted, “Kiss! Kiss!” while others yelled, “Fight! Fight!”
Luna recoiled from the confused and rejected Trevor, her pasty complexion turning even paler.
Jagger’s eyes began to tear. His breathing became labored.
What could be making all the vampires ill?
Then it hit me. The vampires began to get sick when Trevor showed up.
“What’s wrong with Alexander?” I heard Becky ask Matt.
“Trevor’s taken garlic pills!” I shouted to Alexander. “Take your antidote,” I said, pointing to my leg.
Alexander wheezed but reached underneath his cloak and pulled out his serum. Becky and Matt ran to his side while Alexander jammed the shot into his leg.
Jagger backed up, pulling me farther away from the crowd.
“Get off of me,” I said wedging my boot between us.
“Not so fast,” he said with hypnotic eyes. “Alexander made a fool of our family in Romania, and you were planning to do it again tonight?”
“Let me go—”
“Where’s your vampire bite, Raven?” he whispered.
“I told you, I can’t show you.”
“You were very convincing. Until Luna discovered a compact mirror in your purse. You led her on; you led us both on.”
“I did not!”
“Then why aren’t you wheezing now? And most important, what’s this?” He reached underneath his cloak and pulled out a cell phone. He flipped the phone open and held it before me—a picture of a cheerleader and a soccer snob at school, taken by Trevor. And standing in back of them was a mortal Raven, reflecting back for all vampires to see.
“You have a cunning and crafty nature. You turned out to be more of a vampire than Alexander,” Jagger said flatly.
Alexander pushed through the crowd toward us. Trevor followed close behind.
“What is Jagger doing with Raven?” Trevor asked.
“Back off!” Jagger shouted. “You will not make a fool of my family anymore.”
; “What’s he talking about?” Trevor said, now standing by Alexander.
“Get back!” Jagger shouted to Trevor, coughing as he spoke. “You think you have it all with your sports and your pretty girls. But you were never like us and could never be good enough for my sister.”
“You planned this all along?” Trevor asked Jagger. “Raven was right, trying to warn me about you for days. Why? Just because I was different?”
Trevor had picked on me all my life because I was the outsider. Now he faced the same ridicule.
“Go back to your soccer field,” Jagger said. “This game is way out of your league.”
I stared at my mortal nemesis, whose face was growing red with rage. For the first time in sixteen years, Trevor Mitchell had finally met a bigger bully than himself.
Trevor looked at Jagger as if he were a soccer ball that needed to be kicked into the opponent’s goal.
“Get off,” I said to Jagger. “You’re hurting me!”
Alexander’s eyes turned red. “Jagger. You have one second to let her go! Otherwise, it’s all over!”
Jagger’s grip was so hard around my wrist I couldn’t move.
“It’ll feel like a pin prick,” he said to me in a seductive voice. He gently stroked my hair away from my shoulders. He leaned toward me and flashed his fangs.
“No!” I cried.
And the world went black.
18
Cryptic Kryptonite
I awoke, lying flat on my back on the grass, the stars twinkling above me.
“Raven?” Becky asked, her hand outstretched. “Are you okay?
My world was dizzy. I grabbed my neck. “Am I a…?” I asked.
Becky helped me up. “I thought you were kidding when you said they were vampires. I think that Jagger guy really believed he was. He tried to bite you.”
I felt my neck for wounds.
Suddenly the memory started to come back. I never thought it would happen. My nemesis and the love of my life, enraged for different reasons, both staring straight at me.
I had spent the last few days trying to save Trevor from the clutches of a vampire and now he, alongside Alexander, unknowingly saved me.
The impact of their tackling Jagger had sent me flying to the ground.
Becky and I now raced the few yards to the tombs, where a huge crowd had gathered. Alexander was standing over Jagger, who was coughing and wheezing. Luna was leaning against the covenant coffin.
Trevor had no idea that the garlic tablet was making them vulnerable. He thought it was his bravado.
The soccer snobs encircled Jagger and Luna.
Matt and Becky stayed by my side. “Alexander’s deathly allergic to garlic,” I said.
“It looks like Jagger and Luna are, too,” Becky remarked. “That and being pummeled by Alexander and Trevor.”
“I told Trevor the gelcap was an aphrodisiac,” I proudly whispered when I reached Alexander.
“Apparently he told his friends, too,” he said softly with a smile. “The entire soccer team must have taken them.”
Alexander turned to Jagger and Luna. “It’s time you return to Romania. For good.”
“Yeah, go back to Romania, you freaks!” Trevor said, balling up his fists.
I put my arm around Alexander’s waist and held him close.
Then I turned to Trevor.
“I guess you are the school bully again,” I complimented.
Just then a dog started barking, distracting everyone. We all turned around.
“What’s going on here?” Old Jim, the caretaker, called, holding a flashlight toward us.
Ghosts and goblins started to jump the fence. Werewolves and witches hid behind tombstones. The soccer snobs took off around the shed. Becky and Matt raced up the cemetery aisle.
“What’s with all these cans?” Old Jim scolded. “I’m going to call the police!”
Alexander, Trevor, and I turned back to the coffin.
All that remained was the flickering candelabra.
Jagger and Luna were gone.
19
Vampireville
Back at Alexander’s attic room, after weeks of adventures with the twin vampires behind us, Alexander and I finally had a chance to be alone and chill.
I had a lot of time to make up for in the lip-action department. We cuddled and kissed in his comfy chair until I thought my heart would explode out of my chest. He nibbled playfully on my neck, and I wondered if it was hard to resist my mortal self.
“Anytime you are ready,” I offered. “The cemetery is only a few miles away.”
“I like you just the way you are,” he said, and brushed a few strands of hair from my face. “You know that.”
“But you may like me better,” I teased.
He began tickling me, and I cried out in laughter. I leaned back and accidentally kicked something hard against the wall.
It was the door handle to his hidden attic room.
I was immediately brought back into the reality of the situation.
“Just for a minute?” I pleaded.
Alexander hesitated.
“After all I’ve been through. All we’ve been through. It would mean the world to me,” I added.
Alexander paused. His midnight eyes could not mask the dark conflict that he was trying to conquer in his soul. After a moment he rose from the chair and offered me his hand.
Exhilaration rushed through me like I was Veruca Salt about to step into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
Alexander pulled out a skeleton key from his pocket, pushed away the comfy chair, and unlocked the secret door.
He slowly opened the entranceway into his cryptic world.
There, as I’d seen a few days earlier, a secret in the shape of a casket—a simple black open coffin with dirt haphazardly sprinkled around it. Next to it there was a wooden table with an unlit half-melted candle and a small, softly painted portrait of me.
I walked inside the room. Alexander followed me and lit the candelabra. The room was sparse—void of a decorative soccer headboard like Trevor’s or hanging posters of sports teams like Billy Boy’s.
I peered into his coffin: black sheets, a black pillow, and a rumpled blanket.
“I love it. You don’t even make your coffin. Just like any teen.”
I looked into his lonely eyes, which now sparkled.
Then I noticed something silver lying on the pillow, catching the candlelight. I leaned over and picked it up. It was my black onyx necklace that Alexander had replaced with the vampire’s kiss one he’d made for me.
My heart melted as I held it in my hand.
“I sleep better knowing I have a part of you close to me.”
No one had ever meant so much to me as Alexander. For my whole life, I’d suffered as an outsider. The fact that because of me he, too, felt less alone in his world was almost too much for this dreamy goth girl to bear.
Tears welled up in my eyes.
“May I?” I asked, motioning to the coffin.
Alexander’s forehead wrinkled, then a smile overcame his face as if he were relieved to finally share a piece of him he had to keep private from the world.
I unlaced my boots and held on to the attic door as Alexander helped me yank them off. He held my hand as I stepped into his coffin. The mattress was soft against my socks. I lay back, and pulled the cozy black duvet over me.
The candelabra gently lit the room and shadows danced around like tiny vampire bats. I smelled the sweet scent of Drakar on the pillow.
The casket was small and claustrophobic. The sides of the coffin entombed me. I felt like one of the undead.
“This is so cool!” I shrieked.
I smiled up at my boyfriend as he gazed down at me with pride.
“I’m ready.”
“I don’t think—”
“But I have to…I need to know what it’s like.”
A small handle had been nailed inside the lid with a dangling chain.
I reac
hed up and grabbed the chain.
I took a deep breath. I gently pulled the chain toward me. The heavy lid began to lower slowly. Alexander’s smiling face began to disappear from view. Then his shoulders, his AFI T-shirt. Finally all I saw was his handcuff belt buckle. Light in the coffin gradually turned to thick black darkness until I couldn’t even see the chain I was pulling; then my own hand disappeared.
I felt as if I were being buried alive.
The coffin lid lifted open and a blast of light hit me.
“Alexander—” I could hear a faint voice call from the other room.
I squinted and tried to adjust to the candlelight as I sat up.
Alexander held out his hand and pulled me out. “But I didn’t get to—,” I began, like a disappointed child.
“We’ve got to go—”
“Alexander,” Jameson called as he rapped against the bedroom door. “I’m going to retire for the evening and I’d like to say good night to Miss Raven,” the butler said.
Alexander grabbed my shoes, blew out the candles, and locked the closet.
“We’ll be right there,” Alexander called back as I pulled on my boots and laced them.
If Jameson had arrived a few minutes later, I would have known what it was like to retire for eternity.
That night, as I rested in my own bed—a spacious double bed, with no walls or lids—I wondered what it would have been like to have lain in Alexander’s closed coffin. Total darkness, without so much as a faint streetlight shining in.
I imagined how hard it must have been for Alexander to let someone, anyone—even me—into his darkened world behind the secret attic door. I smiled, knowing what I must mean to him to be the one he shared it with.
As I closed my eyes, I imagined my true love spending his sunlit hours alone in his coffin, inside the confines of a hidden closet, buried away from any sources of life—the sounds of birds, rainfall, or people. The world that Alexander thought was so cold, dark, and lonely was just that. My heart broke and began to shatter into a million tiny pieces. Tears began to well up in my eyes, thinking while I was at school, surrounded by students and teachers, that the love of my life was locked away, alone in the dark. There was no one to touch, say sweet dreams to, kiss or squeeze. I wondered if the world I’d been romanticizing for so long—his world—as Alexander had often told me, wasn’t so romantic after all.