The Vampire Book of the Month Club (7 page)

“What are you, some reporter angling for a story? If so, call my literary agent.”

I start to get up, but he stops me with a cold hand on my forearm.

I look desperately around the room, but everyone is either (a) absorbed with their dates or (b) absorbed with themselves—this is Beverly Hills, after all. Suddenly, even the giddy teenybopper clerks who were undressing Reece with their eyes are now fumbling over themselves, frothing up some steamy milk for Eazy Billz, a rapper who's just barged in with his entourage of nine.

“I'm not a reporter,” Reece says in a new tone, not a particularly nice one. “I'm not a fan either. I'm a collaborator, a fellow writer, and I have an idea for your next book.”

“Wow.” I try to snatch back my wrist—and fail. “Now I've heard it all.”

He yanks me down from my half-standing position, and I hit the chair hard. It screeches against the rough tile floor, but no one notices, since everyone is murmuring about Eazy and his latest platinum album.

Suddenly, I'm scared.

Beverly Hills or no, I've read enough news stories to know that bad things happen, even to good girls.

Yes, we're in a clean, comfy, well-lit place, but just outside that door, two streets away, is a sketchy alley where anything could happen.

There is no Wyatt to save me, no Abby to tell me to run, no Scarlet Stain to leap through the ceiling tiles and impale this creep on one of her tailor-made daggers, swords, or maces. It's just me and my horrible, no-good, rotten instincts.

With all the commotion in the room, all the stargazing and self-importance, Reece could literally drag me up by my arm, zip me out of the store, whisk me somewhere dark and lonely, and no one, not a soul, would think twice or remember a single detail.

I can just hear the police interrogation now:

“What, Officer? Nora who? No, I don't know who was sitting there.”

“She might have had red hair, maybe blonde. Brown?”

“Are you sure it was a girl sitting there, 'cause I could have sworn it was a guy!”

A tremor passes through my body but never gets farther than my forearm, maybe because Reece still has my wrist clamped tight.

“Sit down and listen,” he barks above the din. “It's very simple. You have a deadline; I have an idea. You are running out of stories, and I have one that will spark your creativity like a firecracker in a pile of dead leaves. We
will
work together. It's just that simple. Be it now or later, our . . . partnership is inevitable.”

I stare back at him, my mind reeling, palms sweaty, heart racing.

How
does he know I'm on a deadline?

How
does he know all my ideas have dried up?

What's more, how did he know to find me here tonight?

There are too many questions, too many coincidences, for this to be anything good . . . or natural.

At last I wrench my hand free and stand, though it takes everything I've got—and then some. I storm past saying, “Abby was right. You
are
a stalker.”

“Abby should watch her tongue, then, shouldn't she?” He stands, his face inches from mine. His eyes are even darker, his lips thin and gray as he adds, “Or she'll end up like Bianca.”

T
he TV is glowing and blaring when Abby gets home that night after another late shoot on the
Zombie Diaries
set.

She gives me the universal, big-eyed, openmouthed, hands-in-the-air
What's up?
sign—I almost never watch regular TV, so she
must
be shocked—and I point to the live feed currently spilling across the fifty-five-inch flat-screen in reply.

“Bianca's missing,” I say simply, the pit of my stomach empty from half-crying ever since I left Reece at the Hallowed Grounds café.

“Oh my God,” she says, sitting next to me on the couch and instinctively reaching for my hand. “When? How?”

“They don't know,” I answer, wincing as she touches the bright-red spot where Reece held my wrist just hours earlier. “She was supposed to make a shareholder's meeting at her dad's corporate offices after school, and when she didn't show, her father told the cops. They started digging, calling her teachers at home, even some of her classmates. No one's seen her since homeroom.”

“But that's crazy. You're
sure
she wasn't in food and culture class today?”

I shake my head. “She wasn't in any of our classes today. Not one.”

“Except for homeroom,” she says, voice barely above a whisper. She's clutching my hand. I wince again, and this time she notices. She takes her hand away, and although I rush to cover the bruise with the sleeve of my white hoodie, she sees it and gasps. “What
is
that? Who
did
that?”

I cover it. “Nothing, Abs. Nobody.”

“Nobody nothing,” she says in her best acting-like-a-concerned-parent voice. “I can see the finger marks from here. You tell me who did that, or I'll call Wyatt and—”

“No, no, don't call Wyatt. He already thinks I'm stupid enough as it is. It was . . . Reece, OK? It was Reece, and I don't care what you think or how wrong it is not to say anything. I just don't want anyone to know. OK?”

“Reece did that?” she stands up, pacing between the cluttered coffee table and the TV. “When? How?
Why
? Why would a guy you've only just met do something as . . . violent as that?”

“I was down at the Hallowed Grounds after school, trying to get some writing done, and he just . . . showed up.”

“I told you that dude was a stalker,” she says triumphantly, looking at the half-empty box of chocolates on the edge of the coffee table. With one swipe, she slides it off the table and into the wastebasket.

“He was all crazy. Apologizing for flaking out on me today at school one minute, then threatening me the next.”

“Threatening you how?” The TV grabs Abby's attention, blasting Bianca's yearbook picture on the local news.

It's the photo from last year, the same one they've been running on every station now since I returned from the café, barred the door, and started flipping channels just to get Reece's angry, accusatory voice out of my head. “Nothing, really. He just . . . He says he has this idea for a book, a Better off Bled book, and that we're going to write it together . . . or else.”

“Or else what?”

I look past her bouncing knee to the TV screen, which still shows a close-up of the quite gorgeous, quite missing Bianca Ridley.

“Or else . . . he said . . . I'd wind up like
her
.”

A
bby and I are clustered with a few other kids in homeroom the next morning, figuring out the wording for a Missing poster we want to post around the school halls, when none other than Bianca Ridley walks through the door and takes her old seat, like nothing ever happened.

Nobody says anything. Nobody can.

We're all . . . well,
shocked
would be an understatement.

A kind of awkward silence fills the room until Bianca just starts chatting with her posse, whispering and snapping gum and twisting her hair like six kids aren't sitting in front of her with a notepad full of words like
missing
and
foul play
and
parents
and
very concerned
.

Finally Mrs. Armbruster stands up, lowers her knuckles to the top of her desk like a drill sergeant about to drum out a new cadet, juts her jowly but lovable face forward, and says, “Bianca Ridley, you had us all in a state. Do you know everyone in Beverly Hills is out looking for you right now? What do you have to say for yourself?”

And Bianca, still snapping her gum, twisting her hair, looks at us all and says, “Um . . . that it's nice to be loved?”

Mrs. Armbruster wrinkles her nose, adjusts her bifocals, opens her mouth to say more, and then, nonplussed, just sits back down.

That's that.

I mean, what do you say, really?

Go to the principal's office
?

You've got detention, missy
?

Write “I will not pretend to be missing and freak everyone out including people who don't even like me” on the board five hundred times
?

I turn around, look her up and down, and say, “Bianca, what
happened
to you? We all thought you were . . . dead.”

“What for?” she says, and suddenly I notice she's not quite as perfect as the day before.

Her hair's a little unkempt, her lipstick's mussed, her shirt's buttoned wrong, and her super-short skirt is super crooked.

“Can't a girl take a mental-health day without some goody-goody putting out an APB?” She sneers at me, Abby, and the class in general.

“Yeah, well, warn somebody next time you want to fall off the planet,” Abby says.

“Don't blame
me
.” She looks over our heads and at the door. “Blame him.”

We turn to find Reece standing in the doorway, wearing a black distressed jacket with the off-white stripes down the sleeves, his jeans tight, his boots untied, his white T-shirt straining against an Olympian's chest. He breezes in our direction, walks right past Abby and me, sits next to Bianca, and . . . plants one square on her lips.

Right there, in front of the whole class, Mrs. Armbruster included. OK, she's already sleeping again, but still. What if she weren't?

“Ew.” Abby groans, turning around.

I wish I could do the same, but I'm transfixed.

A writer word, I know, but the only one that works in such an extreme situation.

I literally can't take my eyes off them.

And I'm far from a voyeur. I mean, gross, but . . . this is more than sexual.

This is, like, behavioral.

It's like watching two gorillas in a zoo and trying to figure out what separates them from Homo sapiens.

“What are
you
looking at?” Bianca asks once they've finally come up for air. She's lining her lips with a fresh coat of gloss from her (real) diamond-studded compact.

“Are you two insane?” I say. “I mean, clinically? As in rubber-room-for-two-bound? Have you lost your frickin' minds? You don't just go missing one day and come back the next and start dating and expect everything to be fine. It's . . . it's . . .
antisocial
.”

Bianca looks at Reece, and Reece looks at Bianca, and they have quite a laugh over that one.

“Hey, look,” Bianca says, acting bored, “I explained it to my parents, my parents called the cops, I got a stern talking-to by Principal Chalmers on the way into school today, all's right with the world. If they've forgiven me, then what's the big deal? So turn around and face the front if you know what's good for you.”

Reece pats her hand. “Now, now, Bianca, don't snap at Nora. It's not
her
fault sour grapes taste so bitter.”

“Sour grapes!” I say, soliciting a
harrumph
out of Mrs. Armbruster, but I don't turn around to acknowledge it. I just lower my voice a smidge and ask, “Who would want to go out with a schizophrenic, moody stalker
creep
like him in the first place, Bianca?”

“Hmm, judging from the veins sticking out in your neck, you would!”

And they laugh and laugh, Bianca and Reece and her pretty little minions, taking up the whole back row of homeroom like this is some comedy club downtown and I'm the last-minute amateur about to get yanked offstage by a giant hook lurking in the wings.

Finally I turn, but not before Reece reaches out a cold hand, patting my soft, warm shoulder, and says quietly, just so I can hear, “Ignore me if you must, but know this much: this isn't over.”

B
ianca deteriorates throughout the day.

It's nothing major you can point at, like a word written on her forehead or a brand on her wrist or a tattoo on her ankle, but gradually, she just generally . . . morphs . . . into something other than Bianca.

It's kind of like watching an ice sculpture melt.

If you sit there and watch minute by minute, you can barely notice the difference, but if you look away and then look back after an hour or two, what was once a lovely, long-necked swan is now kind of just a shapeless hunk of ice sitting in a bowl of water.

She's still Bianca; don't get me wrong. Same witchy ways, same sharp tongue, same radiant beauty, same kicking clothes. She just turns cold and hard and inhuman by degrees as the day unfolds.

In AP English, she digs her nails into the desk all through class. While we're all struggling through the first chapter of
Crime and Punishment
, her book lies there unopened, and she's scritching-scratching at the top of her desk like a starving artist in her studio. She doesn't look up, doesn't wonder if anybody's watching, doesn't fear the teacher catching her, doesn't seem to care who sees her. It's like she's in her own little world and finishing whatever she's started on her desk is the most important thing on the planet.

After class she stands quickly, blows splinters off her palms, and breezes out of class, one knee-high stocking firm just beneath her shapely knee, the other pooled like an old lady's second skin above her fashionably clunky heels.

Bianca is not herself. I mean, this witch freaks and sends one of her minions to the drugstore across the street for replacements if she gets a run in her stocking, let alone if one of her stockings runs down her leg like elephant skin.

But I'll give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she's not feeling so well and just doesn't notice—not likely for an evil superpower like Bianca, but possible.

I make sure she's gone, swing by her desk, and read these words scratched precisely into the surface: