Secret Vampire

British Library

ISBN 0 340 687517

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire

Copyright © 1996 Lisa J Smith

First published in 1996 by Pocket Books,
a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First published in Great Britain in 1997
by Hodder Children's Books
a division of Hodder Headline plc
338 Euston Road, London NW I 3BH

The right of Lisa J Smith to be identified as the Author of
the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

109.87654321

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means without the prior written
permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The Night World . love was never so scary
.

The Night World isn't a place. It's all around us. It's a secret society of vampires, werewolves, witches, and other creatures of darkness that live among us. They're beautiful and deadly and irresistible to humans. Your high school teacher could be one, and so could your boyfriend.

The Night World laws say it's okay to hunt humans. It's okay to toy with their hearts, it's even okay to kill them. There are only two things you can't do with them.

1) Never let them find out the Night World exists.

2) Never fall in love with one of them.

These are stories about what happens when the rules get broken.

CHAPTER 1

It was on the first day of summer vacation that Poppy found out she was going to die.

It happened on Monday, the first
real
day of vacation (the weekend didn't count). Poppy woke up feeling gloriously weightless and thought,
No school.
Sunlight was streaming in the window, turning the sheer hangings around her bed filmy gold. Poppy pushed them aside and jumped out of bed
 
and winced.

Ouch. That pain in her stomach again.-Sort of a gnawing, as if something were eating its way toward her back. It helped a little if she bent over.

No, Poppy thought. I refuse to be sick during summer vacation.
I refuse.
A little power of positive thinking is what's needed here.

Grimly, doubled over-think positive, idiot!-she made her way down the hall to the turquoise-and gold-tiled bathroom. At first she thought she was going to throw up, but then the pain eased as suddenly as it had come. Poppy straightened and regarded her tousled reflection triumphantly.

"Stick with me, kid, and you'll be fine," she whispered to it, and gave a conspiratorial wink. Then she leaned forward, seeing her own green eyes narrow in suspicion. There on her nose were four freckles. Four and
a
half, if she were completely honest, which Poppy North usually was. How childish,
how-cute!
Poppy stuck her tongue out at herself and then turned away with great dignity, without bothering to comb the wild coppery curls that clustered over her head.

She maintained the dignity until she got to the kitchen, where Phillip, her twin brother, was eating Special K. Then she narrowed her eyes again, this time at him. It was bad enough to be small, slight, and curly-haired--to look, in fact, as much like an elf as anything she'd ever seen sitting on a buttercup in a children's picture book--hut to have a twin who was tall, Viking-blond, and classically handsome .. - well, that just showed a certain deliberate malice in the makeup of the universe, didn't it?

"Hello, Phillip," she said in a voice heavy with menace.

Phillip, who was used to his sister's moods, was unimpressed. He lifted his gaze from the comic section of the L.A.
Times
for a moment. Poppy had to admit that he had nice eyes: questing green eyes with very dark lashes. They were the only thing the twins had in common.

Phillip said flatly, and went back to the comics. Not many kids Poppy knew read the newspaper, but that was Phil all over. Like Poppy, he'd been a junior at El Camino High last year, and unlike Poppy, he'd made straight A's while starring on the football team, the hockey team, and the baseball team. Also serving as class president One of Poppy's greatest joys in life was teasing him. She thought he was too straitlaced.

Just now she giggled and shrugged, giving up the menacing look. "Where's Cliff and Mom?" Cliff Hilgard was their stepfather of three years and even straighter-laced than Phil.

"Cliff's at work. Mom's getting dressed. You'd better eat something or she'll get on your case."

"Yeah, yeah ..." Poppy went on tiptoe to rummage through a cupboard. Finding a box of Frosted Flakes, she thrust a hand in and delicately pulled out one flake. She ate it dry.

It wasn't
all
bad being short and elfin. She did a few dance steps to the refrigerator, shaking the cereal box in rhythm.

"I'm a ... sex pixie!" she sang, giving it a footstomping rhythm.

"No, you're not," Phillip said with devastating calm. "And why don't you put some clothes on?"

Holding the refrigerator door open, Poppy looked down at herself. She was wearing the oversize T-shirt she'd slept in. It covered ' her like a , minidress. "This
is
clothes," she said serenely, taking a Diet Coke from
the fridge.

There was a knock at the kitchen door. Poppy saw who it was through the screen.

"Hi, James! C'mon in."

James Rasmussen came in, taking off his wraparound Ray-Bans. Looking at him, Poppy felt a
pang-as always. It didn't matter that she had seen
him every day, practically, for the past ten years. She
still felt a quick sharp throb in her chest, somewhere
between sweetness and pain, when first confronted with him every morning.

It wasn't just his outlaw good looks, which always
reminded her vaguely of James Dean. He had silky
light brown hair, a subtle, intelligent face, and gray
eyes that were alternately intense and cool. He was
the handsomest boy at El Camino High, but that
wasn't it, that wasn't what Poppy responded to. It
was something
inside
him, something mysterious and
compelling and always just out of reach. It made her
heart beat fast and her skin tingle.

Phillip felt differently. As soon as James came in, he stiffened and his face went cold. Electric dislike
flashed between the two boys.

Then James smiled faintly, as if Phillip's reaction
amused him.
"Hi."

"Hi,"
Phil said, not thawing in the least. Poppy
had the strong sense that he'd like to bundle her
up and rush her out of the room. Phillip always
overdid the protective-brother bit when James was
around. "So how's Jacklyn and Michaela?" he
added nastily.

James considered. "Well, I don't really know."

"You don't
know?
Oh, yeah, you always drop your
girlfriends just before summer vacation. Leaves you
free to maneuver, right?"

"Of course," James said blandly. He smiled.

Phillip glared at him with unabashed hatred.

Poppy, for her part, was seized by joy. Goodbye, Jacklyn; goodbye Michaela. Goodbye to Jacklyn's
elegant long legs and Michaela's amazing pneumatic chest. This was going to be a wonderful
summer.

Many people thought Poppy and James's relation
ship platonic. This wasn't true. Poppy had known for years that she was going to marry him. It was one of her two great ambitions, the other being to see
the world. She just hadn't gotten around to in
forming James yet. Right now he still thought he
liked long-legged girls with salon fingernails and Ital
ian pumps.

"Is that a new CD?" she said, to distract him from
his stare out with his future brother-in-law.

James hefted it. "It's the new Ethnotechno release."

Poppy cheered. "More Tuva throat singers-I can't
wait.
Let's go listen to it.
But just then her
mother walked in. Poppy's mother was cool, blond,

and perfect, like an Alfred Hitchcock heroine. She
normally wore an expression of effortless effi
ciency. Poppy, heading out of the kitchen, nearly
ran into her.

"Sorry-morning!"

"Hold on a minute," Poppy's mother said, getting
hold of Poppy by the back of her T-shirt. "Good
morning, Phil; good morning, James," she added.
Phil said good morning and James nodded, ironi
cally polite.

"Has everybody had breakfast?" Poppy's mother
asked, and when the boys said they had, she looked
at her daughter. "And what about you?" she asked,
gazing into Poppy's face.

Poppy rattled the Frosted Flakes box and her
mother winced. "Why don't you at least put milk
on them?"

"Better this way," Poppy said firmly, but when her
mother gave her a little push toward the refrigerator,
she went and got a quart carton of lowfat milk.

"What are you planning to do with your first day of freedom?" her mother said, glancing from James to Poppy.

"Oh, I don't know." Poppy looked at James. "Lis
ten to some music; maybe go up to the hills? Or drive
to the beach?"

"Whatever you want," James said. "We've got all
summer."

The summer stretched out in front of Poppy, hot
and golden and resplendent. It smelled like pool chlo
rine and sea salt; it felt like warm grass under her back. Three whole months, she thought. That's forever. Three months is forever.

It was strange that she was actually thinking this
when it happened.

"We could check out the new shops at the Vi
llage
---”
was beginning, when suddenly the pain
struck and her breath caught in her throat.

It was bad-a deep, twisting burst of agony that
made her double over. The milk carton flew from
her fingers and everything went gray.

CHAPTER 2

Poppy!" Poppy could hear her mother's voice, but she couldn't see anything. The kitchen floor was obscured by dancing black dots.

"Poppy, are you all right?" Now Poppy felt her
mother's hands grasping her upper arms, holding her
anxiously. The pain was easing and her vision was coming back.

As she straightened up, she saw James in front of
her. His face was almost expressionless, but Poppy
knew him well enough to recognize the worry in his
eyes. He was holding the milk carton, she realized.
He must have caught it on the fly as she dropped
it--amazing reflexes, Poppy thought vaguely. Really amazing.

Phillip was on his feet. "Are you okay? What
happened?"

"I-don't know." Poppy looked around, then
shrugged, embarrassed. Now that she felt better she
wished they weren't all staring at her so hard. The
way to deal with the pain was to ignore it, to not
think about it.

"It's just this stupid pain-I think it's gas
trowhatchmac
all
it. You know, something I ate."

Poppy's mother gave her daughter the barest frac
tion of a shake. "Poppy, this is not gastroenteritis.
You were having some pain before-nearly a month
ago, wasn't it? Is this the same kind of pain?"

Poppy squirmed uncomfortably. As a matter of
fact, the pain had never really gone away. Somehow,
in the excitement of end-of-the-year activities, she'd
managed to disregard it, and by now she was used
to working around it.