Re-Vamped! (4 page)

As
Olivia delicately pressed the two glass slides together, her ring sparkled up
at Ivy.

Maybe
the rings are some sort of clue,
Ivy thought. Ivy pulled the microscope over and slid her ring under the lens.
Bringing it into focus, she followed the etchings with her eye, turning the
ring slowly. Maybe she’d find something written there, between the tiny rivers.

Something
caught her eye as she rotated the ring, but it wasn’t on the band. It was
actually in the emerald: a tiny blurry shape that looked like it was floating
in the field of bright green.

“What
is it?” Olivia whispered. “Let me see!”

“I
don’t know,” Ivy said softly. “Probably just a flaw in the stone.” She kept
trying to adjust the position of the ring and the microscope’s focus, but she
couldn’t make the blob out clearly.

Her
sister poked her impatiently. Ivy pulled the ring out from under the microscope
and held it up. She squinted, trying to see whatever it was with her naked eye,
but she couldn’t.

She
turned the ring over. When she brought it right up to her nose, she could just
barely make something out. She brushed one finger lightly over the exposed
underside of the stone and felt tiny marks.

There’s
something carved on the bottom of the emerald!
Ivy realized.

“What
do you see?” Olivia asked eagerly.

Without
answering, Ivy quickly put the ring back under the microscope lens, upside down
this time. She turned the knob to refocus the microscope until . . .

She
could see a tiny symbol, clear as night: it was the shape of an eye, with a
V
inside it.

“I can
tell that you see something!” Olivia whispered urgently. Shoving Ivy over, she
held her ponytail out of her way with one hand as she looked into the eyepiece.

“A
symbol!” Olivia squealed as Ivy carefully drew the insignia in her notebook.

“Something
wrong, ladies?” Mr. Strain called.

Olivia
looked up. “Sorry, Mr. Strain,” she said, smiling. “It’s just that there’s more
to my . . . cheek than I ever realized!”

Ivy
took her ring out from under the lens. Olivia replaced it with her own and bent
back down over the eyepiece.

“Does
yours have the same mark?” Ivy whispered.

Olivia
nodded excitedly. “What do you think it is?”

“A
jeweler’s mark, maybe?” Ivy guessed.

Olivia
looked up at her quizzically.

“Maybe
the jeweler put this tiny symbol into his work,” Ivy went on quietly, “the way
a painter signs a painting. We might be able to use this mark to find the
person who made the rings or cut the stones.”

Olivia’s
eyes flickered as she caught on. “And that person might have a record of our
parents’ names!”

“I’m
pretty sure that it’s a vamp jeweler,” Ivy said, taking a turn to look through
the microscope at Olivia’s ring. “I can tell from the symbol. Vamp businesses
often hide tiny marks in their signs and logos and stuff to identify themselves
as vampiric. They don’t always use a
V
, but they often do.”

Mr.
Strain appeared in front of their desk. “That does not look like a cheek
slide,” he said sternly.

“We
were just fooling around,” Olivia said with a panicked glance at Ivy.

“Right,”
Ivy agreed. “We were being ...ha ha . . . cheeky.” Olivia giggled nervously as
she returned her ring to her finger.

Ivy
didn’t have a chance to talk to Olivia again until they were heading home.
“Maybe we’ll find out that our biological mother is a master jeweler!” Ivy said
a few blocks from her house, her hands jammed in her pockets to protect them
from the cold. “Maybe she made our rings herself.”

“That
would be cool,” agreed Olivia. Just then, Ivy’s cell phone rang. “Dad,” she
announced, glancing at the caller ID display and flipping open the phone.

“Hello,
Ivy,” her father’s smooth voice intoned. “Will you be joining me for dinner
tonight? I am preparing hemoglobin stew with parsnips.”

“Hi,
Dad,” Ivy said. “I’m glad you called. Olivia’s coming over this afternoon to,
uh . . .” Olivia mimed reading a book and taking notes. “Do some research,” Ivy
finished. “She’s dying to meet you.”

There
was a long silence on the other end of the phone. “It is fine for Olivia to
come over, but I am afraid I must leave for an appointment with a client,” her
father said at last.

“Can’t
you change it?” Ivy pleaded. “No,” her father said simply. “My regrets,” he
finished and hung up.

Ivy
sighed, her warm breath forming a frosty cloud in the air. “The good news,” she
told her sister, “is that the computer will be free.” She kicked a rock into a
pile of frozen leaves. “The bad news is that my dad won’t be there.” She
couldn’t help feeling disappointed.
Why isn’t my dad more eager to meet my
twin sister?
she thought.

“That’s
okay,” Olivia said, swinging her book bag onto her other shoulder and putting
her arm through Ivy’s. “We’ll cross paths one of these days.”

“He’s
already two hundred years old,” Ivy said with a roll of her eyes. “ ‘One of
these days’ could be two decades from now!”

Olivia
had been to Ivy’s a handful of times before, but the mansion at the top of the
hill still blew her away. From the outside, the place looked like something out
of a Civil War epic—or an old black-and-white vampire movie.

The
inside was just as glamorous. She’d seen Ivy’s basement crypt bedroom with its
huge closet. And she’d helped to decorate the gothic third floor ballroom for
the All Hallows’ Ball, so she wasn’t expecting Mr. Vega’s study to be a pile of
old decorating magazines on top of a bangedup filing cabinet. Still, Olivia
couldn’t keep from being impressed when Ivy opened the door to the study on the
second floor.

All
four walls were lined with bookshelves. There was a huge mahogany desk crowned
by a flat-screen computer monitor, and across the room was an enormous globe in
the middle of a rug that looked like a starry sky. Next to it, on top of a wide
pedestal, stood a gray model with tiny paintings on the walls.

And
 then
Olivia looked up, and realized that the dark-wood bookshelves lining the walls
stretched up for another story, and there was a narrow walkway—like a
balcony—to enable browsing up there.

This
place is awesome!
she thought.

Ivy
dragged a second high-backed blacklacquer chair behind the desk and motioned
for Olivia to sit beside her as she powered up her dad’s computer.

The
screen lit up with a black-and-white photograph of Ivy in profile, looking
thoughtful, the outline of tree branches against a sunset sky behind her.

“I
wish my father would change his background,” Ivy said with a sigh.

“But
that’s such a good picture of you!” Olivia exclaimed.

“Look
at my nose,” her sister scoffed. “It’s huge.”

“Hey,”
Olivia countered with mock offense. “You better be careful what you say about
our nose!”

Ivy
grinned. “Are you ready for the Vorld Vide Veb?” she asked.

Olivia
nodded and Ivy clicked on an icon of a moon in the corner, and the screen went
black, except for three big Gothic letters in the center:

“Can
anyone access this?” Olivia asked. Ivy shook her head. “Your computer needs a
special chip just to get this far.”

Ivy
carefully started clicking on the letters: the upper left tip of the first
V
,
then the bottom of

the
first
V
met the upper left of the second
V
. “What are you doing?”
Olivia asked.

“You’ll
see,” said Ivy. Her seventh click, on the

upper
right-hand corner of the third
V
, prompted her for a user name and
password. After Ivy had typed them in, a question appeared on the screen:
How do you like your coffee?

“Wow!”
Olivia remarked, impressed by the site’s security. “They really know a lot
about you.”

Ivy
chuckled. “It’s a riddle,” she explained. “It’s different every time. Want to
guess?”

Olivia
read the question again. “With sweetener?” she tried.

“You
are such a bunny,” Ivy teased. Then she typed in the letters
B-L-A-C-K
.

The
screen flashed, and a search engine called Moonlight appeared on screen.
Illuminate the darkness,
it said underneath the entry box.

“Is
there
anything
vampires don’t have their own secret version of ?” Olivia
asked in amazement.

“A
cruise liner,” Ivy replied as she typed in JEWELERS’ MARKS. “Vamps don’t really
like water.”

There
were 272,000 results, and the first one was the Web site for the Vampire
Jewelers Association (VJA), which offered
one of the most comprehensive
registries of jewelers’ marks in the underworld.
Ivy clicked on the link,
and seconds later she and Olivia were scanning the marks of thousands of
vampire jewelers. Some looked like cat’s whiskers, some like tiny coffins, lots
incorporated a
V
in some way—but none looked like the symbol on their
rings.

After
the VJA site, they tried the listing on the Antique Jewelry Guild site.
Eventually, there was only one page of symbols left to see. Ivy took a deep
breath and clicked.

The
page filled with marks.

Not
one even vaguely resembles the insignia on our emeralds,
Olivia thought disappointedly.

Ivy
sighed. “If it’s not a jeweler’s mark, it could be anything.”

Determined
to remain upbeat, Olivia suggested they try searching for something else. Ivy
went back to the Moonlight page.

“Type
in ‘human-vampire relationships,’ ” Olivia instructed, so Ivy did.

Results
flooded the screen:

Crossbreed
Born with Four Heads

Mixed
Offspring Eats Self to Death

Monstrous
Hybrid Stalks Sewers

Bat
Baby Terrorizes Hospital!
“W-what is all this?” Olivia stammered. “Tabloid headlines,” Ivy answered
wearily. “Vamp rags are full of over-the-top stories about what happens when a
human and a vamp try to have a baby.”

“They
have bat babies?” Olivia said in disbelief.

“Of
course not,” Ivy dismissed. “Here’s something that doesn’t sound insane,” she
went on, running her cursor over a link near the bottom of the screen: “Genetic
Barriers to Crossbreeding: A Scientific Study.” Ivy clicked and ended up on the
Web site for something called the
Vampiric Journal of Biomedical Sciences
.

Olivia
read the summary of the article aloud. “ ‘This V-Gen-sponsored study compares
the genetic makeup of vampires and humans in order to objectively assess the
possibility of successfully bearing healthy crossbreed offspring. Findings
suggest that the significant differences between vampire and human DNA amount
to an insurmountable obstacle of a magnitude similar to that found between
canines and felines.’ ” Olivia looked at her sister. “Is it just me, or does
this say that you and me are about as likely as puppies born to a cat and dog?”

Ivy sighed.
“That’s what it says,” she agreed. “But we’re obviously
not
impossible,”
she went on. “I mean, we exist and we’re sisters!” She scanned the screen and
then gasped suddenly. “No way!”

“What?”
Olivia asked.

“This
article was written by Marc Daniels. That’s Brendan’s father’s name!”

“Are
you sure?” Olivia asked, peering at the screen. She pointed to a line at the
end of the research report. “Is Brendan’s dad head researcher of V-Gen?”

Ivy
shrugged. She quickly went back to the main search page and typed in V-Gen. The
top result said,
V-GEN—a leading vampire pharmaceutical company based in
Franklin Grove.

Olivia
and Ivy both stared at the screen for a long moment, taking in the indisputable
fact that Brendan’s father was the same Marc Daniels who had written the
article.

“We
have to talk to him,” Olivia said at last.

Ivy
bit her lip. “Judging from his research, he’s not really on our side,” she
said.

“Maybe
we can change his mind,” Olivia proposed.

“Even
if we could, Olivia,” responded Ivy, “I can’t talk to my boyfriend’s father
about how babies are made.”

“Sure
you can!” Olivia laughed. “He’ll understand. Come on, Ivy. We have to get
answers! Ask Brendan tomorrow if he’ll introduce us to his dad.
Please
.”

“I am
not going to bring this up at school,” Ivy declared decisively, and Olivia’s
heart sank. Then Ivy added quietly, “I have a date with Brendan on Friday. I’ll
ask him then.”