Never Bite a Boy on the First Date

“Oooooo,” Zach said, which maybe should have tipped me off that we’d hit the outer limits of his witty repartee. But just then the bell rang and the hall started to empty, which distracted me.

“Move. Now.” I gave him my best steely-eyed vampire glare.

“Or what?” he said, crossing his arms as the last couple of kids hurried into their classrooms.

“I’m glad you asked,” I said. In my head I was like, You know what, I’m a freaking vampire. I have super-strength, hardly anything can kill me, and if I get in trouble we’ll just move again. Why hold back?

So I threw him into a janitor’s closet and locked him in while I went to Chemistry.

He was sitting on an overturned bucket when I got back, listening to his iPod. He grinned like a pirate when I opened the door and slipped inside.

“I knew you’d come back,” he said.

“You’d have looked pretty silly if I didn’t,” I said.

“You needed another piece of this pie, didn’t you?” Zach pointed to himself with an oh, yeah expression.

“You’re much cuter when you don’t talk,” I said, and kissed him in the dark.

I didn’t really mean to encourage his alpha-male obnoxiousness. I mainly wanted to shut him up. And also I wanted to see what would happen. I’d never dated a guy like this. My one and only boyfriend back when I was alive was the sweet, sensitive type who took, like, three years just to ask me out.

Plus, when dealing with a guy like Zach, it was nice to have super-strength. Like, for instance, when I found his hands instantaneously roaming to my butt.

“OW!” he yelped as I flung him into a shelf of toilet paper.

“I make the rules,” I said. “Got it? You touch only what I want you to touch.”

“Can I have a list?” he said, recovering quickly. “With descriptive details, please?”

“Seriously, shut up,” I said. I pushed him into the wall, twisted his hands behind his back and held them there while I kissed him again. His kisses were very enthusiastic. And he didn’t try to free himself, so I figured he’d be easy to train.

He was really warm, and he tasted kind of salty and sweet at the same time. Before I knew what I was doing, my mouth went to his neck. I licked his skin lightly and he shuddered. I could feel my canine teeth sliding out. The blood in his veins pulsed under my tongue.

I realised I wasn’t in lust at all. I was hungry.

“You,” Zach whispered in my ear, “are the hottest, most psycho girl I’ve ever met.”

His voice stopped me just before my teeth grazed his skin. What was I doing?

I dropped his hands and jumped away from him as if he had holy water running through his veins. Olympia had warned me that it would be hard once I was around mortals all day long, especially attractive, young mortals. But it didn’t even occur to me that kissing could lead so quickly to wanting to bite someone. Especially someone whom I did not by any means want to turn into a vampire.

That was one of the rules Olympia had lectured me about over and over again: “You bite it, you bought it.” We were responsible for anyone we turned into a vampire. That’s how we survive. If we let new vampires wander loose with no idea of the rules, they’d be staked in no time and the rest of the world would soon catch on that we exist.

It is possible to bite someone and leave them alive, but it’s dangerous and hard to do – Olympia says once you start to drink, it’s almost impossible to stop yourself before your prey is dead. And even if you do stop, the victim probably will have figured out what you are, and that’s not great for us either.

I was lucky that Zach couldn’t see my teeth in the darkness of the closet. I covered my face and tried to force them back down to normal. Don’t think about feeding. Don’t think about feeding.

“Wait,” Zach said, groping for me with his hands outstretched. “Don’t stop. What happened?”

“I lost interest,” I said, stepping out of his reach. My fingers were trembling, but I kept my voice level. “Too bad for you. Now stay away from my locker.” And I got out of there as quickly as I could.

I probably should have guessed that this wouldn’t shut down Zach. If anything, it made him even more interested. I started finding him at my locker every morning when I got there, usually with chocolate. My guess is, he read in some men’s magazine that girls like chocolate, because he really stuck with that theory.

I ignored him for the first week. He loved it when I shoved him out of my way; he went on and on about how freakishly strong I was “for such a tiny thing” until it started making me nervous. I was sure Olympia didn’t want to hear gossip about the new freakishly strong teenager while she was buying up all the raw meat in the supermarket.

So at first I started talking to Zach just to distract him. I told him if he really wanted to bring me something before class, he should try hot chocolate and a croissant. That fit his theory just fine, so the next morning, there was my order, exactly as I’d requested. Like I said – the early signs pointed to “easily trainable”.

“Hmm,” I said, letting the hot chocolate scald away the taste of blood on my tongue.

“So you’ll go out with me this weekend, right?” Zach asked. “I figured we could start with dinner at Los Espejos.” He pronounced it “ezz-PAY-joe’s”, but I still recognised it as the Spanish word for mirrors. Olympia and Wilhelm had scouted out all the more dangerous places in town and this Spanish restaurant was at the top of the list. It was lovely and expensive, but the walls and the ceiling were completely covered in mirrors. Too risky, no matter how besotted my date might be. Our little “family” tried to avoid even walking past it.

“Meh,” I said with a shrug. “I’d rather have a hamburger at Big Burgers and Bowling.”

He clutched his heart. “You are my dream girl.”

So that’s how it started. And I’ll admit it: I kind of fell for him. Dating Zach fit the new take-no-prisoners attitude I was trying to develop. I figured if I could be a badass vampire, I wouldn’t miss my old life so much. It was nice having someone to distract me from wishing I could call my mom or kiss Jasper one last time.

Plus it was sort of exciting to have someone be that into me. He couldn’t keep his hands off me, no matter how many times I threw him into a wall or nearly broke his fingers. I admired his persistence.

On the other hand, it got harder and harder not to bite him. You have to understand, the blood we drink every day to stay alive comes out of a jar in the refrigerator. It is the very definition of gross. Vampires are designed to drink from living (or very recently dead) people; that’s what we’re hungry for. Olympia was trying to teach me to exercise self-control, but I wasn’t learning nearly fast enough to keep up with my relationship with Zach.

After three months, I started thinking about the future. By that point, I thought Zach was pretty hot. I figured it was almost definitely true love forever. And wouldn’t it suck (ha ha!) if I stayed sixteen and he got older and older? Wouldn’t it make more sense to turn him into a vampire while he was still my own age? Then we could really be together forever. Awesome, right?

But I still don’t think I would have done anything on my own. I would have waited at least another three months to be sure that I liked him that much. I mean, I’m not totally crazy.

Unfortunately it was only a month later when Zach spotted my teeth sliding out during one of our make-out sessions – this time in a closet that was apparently not dim enough.

“Whoa,” he said, stepping back. “What’s wrong with your teeth?”

“Uh – nothing,” I said, covering my mouth with one hand. I turned away from him, but he grabbed my arm and pulled me around.

“That is so weird,” he said, which was a much calmer reaction than I would have had. He reached out and touched one of my teeth with his index finger. A drop of blood immediately appeared on his skin, and I panicked. Was that enough to turn him into a vampire? That wouldn’t be fair! I hadn’t intentionally bitten him!

At the same time, I couldn’t stop myself from licking it off. He took his hand back and we stared at each other for a minute.

“OK, yes,” I said. “I’m a vampire.”

Zach let out a bark of laughter. “That’s impossible,” he said.

I let my teeth slide all the way out and held back my hair so he could see the marks on my neck. “It’s not impossible; it’s just lame. Here, check for a pulse, you’ll see.” I grabbed his hand and wrapped his fingers around my wrist.

I knew he wouldn’t find a heartbeat on me, but we were close enough to each other that I could hear his own heart speeding up as he held my wrist and stared at me some more.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I don’t bite. Ha ha.” I took my hand back, prying off his fingers. I was about to walk out of there and straight home to tell Olympia we needed to move again, when he finally spoke, in a wobbly, I just saw a pterodactyl kind of voice.

“What if I wanted you to?” he asked.

“Wanted me to what?”

“Bite me,” he said. He took my wrists again and pulled me closer, shaking back his hair to expose his neck. “Do it. I want to be like you. I want to be a vampire too.”

“Yikes, dude,” I said, trying not to look at his neck. “Care to think about that for half a minute? It’s kind of like proposing to me, only even more eternal.” I thought that would scare him off, but it didn’t. Which maybe should have been a warning sign, but at the time I found it endearing. So sue me. I was in love…or at least I thought I was.

“Exactly,” Zach said. “I love you. I’ll always love you. I want to be with you forever.”

I didn’t say yes. Not even with his neck right there waiting for me. Some little corner of my brain was going, Wait! Think! This is not a normal reaction! Run away! Unfortunately that little voice wasn’t yelling loud enough, although it tried its best for the next few weeks, during which Zach pleaded with me every day to turn him into a vampire. Even in my love-blind state, I started to find it pretty annoying. I kept thinking, Can we please have one date that doesn’t end with you shoving your neck in my face and pledging your undying love? Can’t we just eat pizza and maybe talk about our homework now and then?

Then one day he called me and told me to come over right away. I told him it would have to wait because I was dying my hair. He told me he was dying.

I said, “You too? What colour?”

And he said, “No, seriously dying. I mean dying.”

“Literally?” I said. “Could you wait until my hair is dry?”

He said he didn’t think so, because there was an awful lot of blood already and he was feeling kind of woozy.

That’s when I realised he was serious.

Thank goodness for vampire super-speed. I got to his house in about nine seconds flat. Zach was slumped against his bathtub, looking pale, as blood from a long cut on one of his arms pooled around his jeans and bare chest. There was a glass next to him half-filled with blood and a piece of paper with bloody fingerprints all over it. It was weird and gross, and yet my whole body started freaking out with hunger at the smell of all that blood.

“What on Earth were you doing?” I asked, standing in the doorway. I didn’t want to get too close to that smell.

“I love you,” he said in this whispery, trying-to-be-heroic voice.

“Answer the question,” I snapped.

“Well, I…I was going to write you a note in my blood to show you how much I love you…and then there was so much blood I thought I’d save it for you to drink.” He waved his hand at the glass. “But then it kind of…kept coming and…I think I did something wrong.”

“I’ll say you did something wrong,” I said. “You freaking nearly killed yourself, you idiot. Couldn’t you prick your finger like a normal person, instead of slicing up your whole arm and bleeding to death?”

“I didn’t mean to,” he said, sounding irritated and a little less whispery. “And don’t call me an idiot.”

The scent of all the fresh blood was making me dizzy. “We should wrap you up,” I said, “and get you to a hospital.” I grabbed a towel and knelt next to the tub.

“It’s too late for that,” he said, back to his dying voice. He practically pressed the back of his hand to his forehead. “Don’t you see, this is perfect. We’re meant to be together. It’s a sign.”

“Yeah, a sign that you’re a moron,” I muttered, trying not to breathe in the scent of the blood as I wrapped the towel around his arm.

“I’m dying, Kira,” he said earnestly. “You have to change me…to save me.”

“I should have left you in that closet on the first day,” I snapped. His blood soaked through the white cloth instantly, spreading like red fireworks.

Zach lifted his wrist towards my face and the towel fell off with a splat. “Drink,” he said. “It’s all right. I want you to. Then we can be together…forever.”

There was nothing else I could do. The smell of all that blood was too much for my willpower. I was sure I’d never get him to the hospital in time. He was going to die and it would be my fault.

I sank my fangs into the bloody gouges on his arm.

Yeah, it was amazing. It was the last amazing moment I had with Zach. I don’t want to describe it, because remembering it now makes me feel all creepy, but it was mind-blowing. I can see how some vampires become addicted to drinking from the living. Olympia had warned me about that too.

After Zach was fully dead, I left his body there and went home to tell Olympia what had happened. She laughed and laughed and laughed until she literally fell out of her coffin. Which, incidentally, was not quite the reaction I was expecting.

“Well, we’re in love,” I said, offended. “I’m sure it’ll turn out fine. Like Bert and Crystal.”

“Oh dear,” Olympia said, wiping tears from her eyes. “Now perhaps you’ll see why listening to seven hundred years of experience is a good idea.”

Yeah. About a month later, in a rental car somewhere in the middle of Kansas, while we were moving around every night to hide our trail, Zach tried to get to second base with me and I threw him out of the sun roof. We had to drive half a mile back to find him. He sulked all the way to Montana.

That was the end of that relationship.

Chapter Four

TRAGICALLY, I AM now stuck with Zach until he decides to go off and start his own vampire family somewhere, which requires a level of maturity I’m fairly sure he won’t be able to muster any time in the next five hundred years.

On the plus side, our cover story in this new town was that we were supposed to be brother and sister, so he couldn’t hit on me in public any more. That didn’t stop him from trying sometimes when we were at home – hence the long midnight walks to avoid him. He kept staring soulfully into my eyes and saying things like, “You want to be with me, Kira,” or “We are meant for each other,” which would maybe have more impact if his idea of “soulful” didn’t involve enormous, googly eyeballs. The good news is, I’m still a lot stronger than him, as apparently that is a skill I am extra-blessed with. Zach? Not so much. Olympia asked me to stop throwing him out windows though. They’re expensive to replace and the noise might disturb the neighbours.

That whole saga is why they immediately blamed me for this new vampire attack. As if I hadn’t learned my lesson! I was pretty sure I’d never date again, just in case I accidentally landed another obsessive lunatic. If you asked me, I was the vampire least likely to bite another high school football player.

But Wilhelm was convinced that after biting Zach, I’d become addicted.

“I knew this would happen!” he huffed, wagging his finger in the air. “I knew it was foolish to turn a child of this horrifying century! She’s a degenerate menace! We should lock her in a coffin and feed her through a tube until she is old enough to be trusted!”

I glanced at Olympia. “You guys don’t really do that, do you?”

“Not unless it’s necessary,” Olympia said, which didn’t reassure me very much.

We were in the den, which is Wilhelm’s favourite room after the basement, where he sleeps. Olympia deliberately chose a house with very few windows – they’re hard to find, but cheap, because nobody else wants them. The den had only one small window. Like all the others in the house, it was covered with dark blinds and heavy velvet curtains.

On the table next to Wilhelm’s Barcalounger was the only light in the room: a tiny lamp with a pale red shade. Olympia had convinced Wilhelm to give up his dripping Gothic candles after he set the last Barcalounger on fire. This new chair was covered in a prickly red-and-black plaid. The colours matched the dark red Oriental rug and the sleek, black metal coffee table, but stylistically the room was a bit of a mishmash.

Not that I’ll ever tell my vampire parents this, but they’re not exactly the world’s greatest interior decorators. It’s like they’ve latched on to a couple of trendy things from each century and haven’t noticed that the world has moved on.

This is unfortunately true of their clothes too. We’re not going to even discuss the tragedy of a medieval vampire in a pale blue leisure suit. I make Olympia run her outfits by me every morning before I let her drive me to school.

“She is running wild!” Wilhelm bellowed now, talking about me again. “She will bring the vampire hunters right to us!”

“This isn’t the Dark Ages, Pops,” I said. I love the way Wilhelm’s hair stands on end when I call him that. “There aren’t mobs of ignorant villagers outside with pitchforks and torches. Nobody even believes you guys exist. Us guys, I mean.”

“That is precisely the kind of thinking that will get us all staked!” he shouted. “These new vampires think they can bite anyone they like! They don’t remember how the hunters watch for any signs of us! Careless, reckless, selfish—”

“But I didn’t do it!” I yelled over the end of his sentence. “Call me what you like, but I DIDN’T BITE HIM!”

Wilhelm glared at me with beady, bloodshot eyes. He wasn’t bitten until fairly late in life, so he’s kind of grizzled and grey for a vampire. Plus he’s had the same moustache since the 800s – long and droopy and fluffy. Apparently it keeps going in and out of fashion, so he sees no need to shave it. Personally I think it’s really distracting to talk to someone who looks like he has giant fuzzy caterpillars crawling out of his nose.

“It might be true,” Olympia interjected. “We can’t be sure she did it.”

“We can’t be sure she didn’t,” Wilhelm snarled. “We should move again, and quickly, before they come to hunt us down.”

“Oh, no,” I said, remembering the long weeks of car travel and switching cities and identities. It was bad enough after my death; after Zach’s it was even worse, because he was there pestering me the whole time and there was no way to get away from him. I was kind of hoping we’d stay here in Massachusetts for a while. “Please don’t make me start junior year all over again.”

“I hardly think relocating is the worst of your problems,” Olympia pointed out.

“There could totally be other vampires here,” I said. “We saw this way suspicious guy at the school, didn’t we, Olympia? And it’s a pretty big town, right? There could be vampires all over the place!”

“Most vampires are not as foolish as you are,” Wilhelm growled.

“Let me find the vampire who killed Tex,” I said. “If I can figure out who did it, will you believe me? Can we stay?”

Olympia and Wilhelm looked at each other for a long moment. Sometimes I think they’re actually talking to each other when this happens, which is fully creepy. Nobody wants parents with telepathy.

Finally Wilhelm snorted, which made his moustache flounce up and down. “I am not happy about this,” he said. “I want that to be clear.”

“All right, we’ll let you try,” Olympia said to me. “But if you haven’t figured it out in one week, we’re moving again.”

“And then there will be consequences,” Wilhelm warned. I didn’t need telepathy to know he had locked coffins and feeding tubes floating through his head.

“Be careful,” Olympia said. “Not all vampires are as civilised as we are.”

Really? Less civilised than medieval Romanians? I bet.

Finally I escaped upstairs to my room. Zach and I are the only ones who use the upstairs; we don’t quite hate the sun as much as the others do, and it occasionally manages to sneak in through the blinds on the top floor. Our deal is that I get the rooms to the left of the staircase and he gets the rooms to the right. He’s not supposed to come over to my side, although you can imagine how well he obeys that rule.

Bert and Crystal have a room on the first floor. They’ve both been vampires for less than a hundred years, so they still do some human things like sleep in a bed, although their mattress is rock hard. I guess one day they’ll switch over to coffins, like Olympia and Wilhelm, who sleep behind a hidden door in the basement in parallel caskets of ancient stone. Allegedly one day I’ll want to sleep in a coffin too, but I am highly dubious about that theory. I like my bed to be as fluffy as possible, with about seventeen pillows and a down comforter. Wilhelm thinks this is a sign of my “moral decrepitude” and “debilitating laziness”. I think it’s a sign of I just like sleeping, dude.

In fact, when I got upstairs, that’s exactly what happened – pretty much right away. I mean, I tried to start my investigation. I got as far as Googling Tex Harrison and finding out that he kept a blog on his My Space page. But it turned out to be all about sports and how awesome the Luna Tigers are and what an awesome quarterback he is and blah blah Patriots and Red Sox, plus a detailed rundown of his daily workout regimen and everything he’s ever eaten. Ever. Can you really blame me for falling asleep?

When I woke up, I was lying across my bed in a mountain of pillows. My vampire instincts told me that it was dark outside. I rolled over and saw Zach standing in my doorway. Really “lurking” is the most appropriate description.

“Go away,” I said, throwing a pillow at him.

“You forgot to lock your door again,” he said.

“You forgot to not be an ass again,” I said. “Stay on your side of the house.”

“I hear you’re going to solve Tex’s murder,” he said with a smirk. “Looks like it’s going well so far.”

“Um, hello? All the best detectives do their work in the dark,” I said.

“I can think of better things to do in the dark,” he said, waggling his eyebrows.

That was my cue to leave.

“Have some blood before you go out!” Olympia called from the kitchen as I stomped past.

“No thanks!” I called back, grabbing my keys. I slammed the door behind me and started running. I never used to like running, but it turns out it’s a lot more fun when you’re nearly as fast as a car. And it doesn’t make me tired any more, at least as long as the moon is out. Plus it’s a lot safer to run unnaturally fast at night – not so many people out on the street.

I made it to the high school in about ten minutes. It looked all gloomy and shadowy in the moonlight, the brick and concrete merging into silvery edges. Most of the glass had been swept up, but I could see a few tiny shards they’d missed, still shimmering on the steps. I guess the police had been busy, because even the crime scene tape was gone. They probably really wanted school to get back to normal the next day.

They’d done a pretty good job of cleaning up; only the smell of blood still lingered, a whisper of what had happened here, and I’m guessing that only a vampire nose would pick that up. Even the broken window above was covered with a black tarp, one corner flapping a little in the wind.