Underdead (25 page)

I reminded myself again that Will was a vampire, not a prospective boyfriend.

“How did you find out so quickly?”

He moved closer to me and I had to force myself to ignore how his proximity made my pulse race.

“Natasha.”

For some reason, that scared me more than the bullet had. “She was there?”

“I asked her to keep an eye on you.”

It was my turn to look outraged. “Who gave you the right to that?”

He looked surprised at my reaction. “I was concerned about your safety.”

And you sent her?
“Concerned!” I sputtered. “
You
want me
dead
, remember?”

Will took a deep breath. “You’re wrong. I don’t want you to die. Quite the opposite, in fact.” He slowly reached out a hand as if to reassure me, but abruptly stopped short of the door frame.

I looked in surprise at his hand, which had been rebuffed as if by a force field. I spoke slowly, disbelievingly, though I couldn’t hide a small note of triumph and relief. “It’s true, isn’t it? If I don’t invite you in, you can’t come in. Not even a part of you.”

He shrugged indifferently, but I could feel frustration radiating from him. His eyes glittered. “Why don’t you come outside and find out?”

I caught my breath. I felt an almost physical pull, so intense was my desire to step forward out of the safety of the doorway.

“I don’t understand,” I said gripping the doorway to keep myself back, my voice barely above a whisper. “Why didn’t you—take me—the other day? You had the chance.”

Will looked offended. “I am a man of honor. I’m not a mindless slave to my desire.”

I couldn’t believe him. “How can you say that after what you did to me the first time that we met?”

Will regarded me silently for a long while, but his face was closed and his eyes gave nothing away. “That was different,” he said finally.

What was that supposed to mean?

“Do they know who shot at you?”

“No. I’m hoping they can trace the bullet.”

The dog had started barking again. Will stared pensively in its direction, though I didn’t think he really heard it. “It’s not always that easy,” he said, unwittingly echoing Gavin.

“It should be this time. How many people buy silver bullets?” Will’s blue eyes jerked up to meet mine. He looked stunned. And angry. He turned and left without a word.

*

Maxine gave me the day off after the shooting incident, or rather, banned me from the premises, lest she lose what control of the students—and parents—she still had. This gave me an entire three-day weekend to think over what had happened and come up with the vital clue that would lead me to the identity of my would-be killer. But I didn’t want to think about being shot at, or about Bob’s murder, or about vampires, or Natasha or the confusion I felt about Will. What I wanted to do was forget about it all, which I did with a fair amount of success, at least at first.

I spent the first day and a half curled up in the fetal position, occasionally unfurling myself when nature called or the hunger pangs got too strong to ignore. That wasn’t often—I’d just replenished the cookie jar with a quadruple batch of chocolate chocolate chip, and I still had a few bags of the mini candy bars I’d bought for classroom prizes.

I can eat a lot of chocolate when I’m upset, even in the fetal position. If I thought about it—which I didn’t because the whole point of drowning one’s sorrows in chocolate is to avoid exactly such unpleasantness—it was just typical that being part vampire had killed my ability to enjoy just about anything healthy while my taste for chocolate had, if anything, mushroomed.

Gavin showed up Saturday afternoon and banged on the door until I let him in. He was dressed more casually than I was used to seeing him. He wore jeans that molded nicely over his long, muscular legs and a yellow short-sleeved shirt that revealed well-defined arms and showed off the slight tan that my mother would have called a
healthy glow
. His short brown hair was damp from the shower and he looked tired but calm, with the sort of relaxed energy that comes after a long, hard workout. I remembered he had told me he was in training for a biathlon, and I wondered with a stab of pure envy if it had been today.

While I was trying to control my jealousy, he took in my baggy sweat pants, faded orange Beaker t-shirt, and hair that hadn’t seen a comb in two days and probably more than resembled Beaker’s broom-like coif. His face showed no emotion, though a muscle jerked in his cheek as he asked, “Have you even left the house since Thursday night?”

I couldn’t tell if he was judging me or not, and decided I didn’t care. “What do you want, Gavin?” I left him to lock up or not, and flopped on the couch. I noticed that I had the little tip of a Hershey’s kiss stuck to the front of my shirt, which was a little embarrassing as I had finished off those yesterday.

He sat across from me on the edge of the old club chair I had liberated from my parents’ garage. It was a deep, overstuffed monstrosity in cracked cherry-brown leather, the sort of thing that could swallow you whole if you let it, which Gavin didn’t. “You didn’t come by the station yesterday to sign your statement.”

“Oh.” I rubbed a chocolate stain lightly with a tissue and got hundreds of tiny white balls stuck to the front of my shirt for my efforts. I frowned and tried to brush them away, but they seemed to have melded to the fabric. “I was busy.”

“I see that.”

I pulled my attention away from my shirt and met his eyes, which were carefully wiped of any expression. “Look. I’m sorry if you’re a little behind in your paperwork. I didn’t feel like driving over there yesterday, okay? I didn’t sleep particularly well Thursday night. I got shot at, remember? By some freak with a silver bullet, who apparently knows my secret and will probably tell everyone, so I’ll probably lose my job and my friends. But that’s okay I suppose, ‘cuz Will stopped by after you left, and invited me to live with him and the rest of the…”

“Will stopped by?” Gavin’s Buddha-like inscrutability deserted him completely. “Here? Why?” He spoke accusingly, his eyes searching my face like lasers.

“How the hell do I know?” I crossed my hands over my chest and shrugged them and my shoulders in one large, defiant movement. “He’d heard about the shooting and just showed up.”

“He heard about the shooting?” His voice was just short of a yell.

Mine wasn’t. “Are you going to repeat everything I say?”

Gavin pursed his lips so tightly they turned white. “How did he know about the shooting?”

“Natasha told him. Apparently she was there.”

“I see.” Gavin’s voice was soft and the shuttered look was back on his face. “Did he try to—recruit you?” He stumbled over the words, as if in self-mockery at employing a euphemism.

“No.”

His light gray eyes focused intently on mine. “Why?”

My anger gave way to confusion. “I—I don’t know.”

He didn’t reply. His eyes didn’t leave my face. Under such close regard, I shifted uncomfortably in my chair.

“I wonder,” he said finally. He looked away, as if he couldn’t bear looking at me, and I felt oddly bereft. “Has he given you no indication of his plans? Told you nothing to explain why he hasn’t sunk his teeth into your jugular again, given the chance? And he’s had plenty of chances, hasn’t he?”

“What are you trying to say, Gavin? That it’s my fault? Do you think I’m encouraging him somehow?”

“I don’t know. Are you?” His eyes met mine again, searching, probing.

My mouth dropped open, but for a moment I was too outraged to reply. Hot tears of righteous anger pricked my eyes, spurred on by a resentful part of me that secretly worried he might be right. “Maybe he just likes me.” I threw the words at Gavin. “Some people do, you know.”

Gavin leaned forward. He was close enough to touch me, but didn’t give me the comfort of a friendly hand on my shoulder. He wanted me to face what he had to say, to feel its cruelty. “No. Vampires aren’t ‘people’, Jo. They’re not nice or altruistic. Stop thinking of Will as a person! He’s not. He’s a vampire. He takes what he wants destroying lives, families…” He abruptly stopped talking and stared fixedly at the floor while he struggled to regain his composure.

“You don’t know that,” I began.

His head snapped up to look at me. His face was mottled with anger and his eyes were pure silver. “Yes, I do! A vampire killed my sister!” He stood up, as if the seat could no longer hold such raw energy, and turned away.

Silence enveloped the room like a mantle of ice.

After a long while, I spoke. “I’m sorry,” I said inadequately. A slight movement of his shoulders indicated he heard me.

“Was it…Will?” I ventured tentatively.

Gavin was silent for so long I wasn’t sure he would answer me. “No.” He stared unseeingly at the bookshelves, at something only he could see, something he wanted to avoid but couldn’t stop his mind from playing out now that it had started. His voice was low and harsh. “A different group. Up near San Francisco.”

After a brief silence, he continued in a different voice, as if he’d shoved the image back into the compartment where he kept it locked. “That was several years ago.” He turned from the window, sat back down on the chair opposite me, and reached for his briefcase, suddenly all business. He pulled out a thin sheaf of papers and a pen and handed them to me. “Here’s your statement from the other night. Why don’t you read it over and sign it.”

I wanted to say something, but knew anything I could say would be so inadequate as to be insulting. The last person he’d want to hear sympathy from would be someone like me, with ties, however unwanted, to those who had done it. I accepted the papers without comment, gave them a quick read, signed, and handed them back.

“Thank you,” Gavin said. He stowed them in his briefcase and walked to the door. I followed him.

He barely looked at me as he stepped out. “I’ll step up the surveillance on your home. If Will comes around again, we should be able to protect you. Whatever you do, don’t invite him in.”

“I won’t,” I said, stung anew by the implication that I would willingly do something so foolhardy. As before, a little voice deep inside reminded me that, if only for a moment, I had considered doing just that, so intense had my desire been to be with Will.

Gavin’s eyes met mine squarely, as if binding me to my promise. “Good.”

I had thought the pregnancy rumor tough to weather but then I hadn’t gambled on the notoriety of getting shot at. My students, for once, were hanging on every word I said, but I didn’t kid myself it was my scintillating lecture on rocks that commanded their attention. When, after five minutes or so, I didn’t naturally segue into the exciting thrill that is being shot at, they brought it up.

“I am not going to discuss what happened last week. Don’t bother asking about it. I’m not going to answer any questions unless they have something to do with this unit.”

A hand shot in the air.

“Yes, Carlos?”

“Ms. Gartner, can you make a bullet out of rock?”

I cursed my own stupidity. Had I learned nothing in six months of teaching? “That’s hardly—”

Another hand went into the air.

“Er—”

“Can a bullet go through metamorphic rock, like it did your car door?”

After that, it escalated in a free-for-all. They stopped bothering with the hand raising altogether.

“Where does a bullet rank on the Moh’s hardness scale?”

“If someone shot you with a bullet made out of rock, would it hurt as bad?”

I closed my eyes. Oh God. Somebody kill me now.

By lunchtime, I had a raging headache and I was off people. I would have preferred to have hidden in my room, but between pilfering from churches, hiding from vampires, and dodging silver bullets, I hadn’t got a chance to do something so mundane as go to the supermarket to stock up on snack food, and I was too hungry to skip a meal.

Getting to the cafeteria was one of the queerest experiences of my life. Usually, the high schoolers didn’t pay me the slightest bit of attention. But today as I cut through their locker area, a bubble of space and silence seemed to surround me. No one pushed past me to rush to a class across campus, no overloaded backpacks jostled me. The cell phones were quiet, the laughter absent, the conversations muted. I almost pinched myself to make sure I hadn’t died without my knowledge and was haunting the hall as a ghost.

All that for fishwiches. I bypassed the hot food line, opting instead for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a salad. I wouldn’t eat much of the sandwich, just enough to tide me over until I could sneak out for a burger during a free period, and probably none of the salad, but it would give me something to do while everyone else ate.

I sat down at my usual table with Alan, Kendra, and Becky and pretended I didn’t notice the abrupt shift in the conversation to sports. I asked Kendra how the boys’ soccer team was situated for the finals match later that week.

“Well, my money’s on us, of course, but it’s not going to be an easy win. The boys are going to have to work for it.”

“I hear some middle school kid is working out with the team,” Alan said, licking tartar sauce off his fingers.

“No way.” I put down my sandwich uneaten. “Maxine caved on Chucky?”

“Huh?” Becky said.

“She didn’t really cave,” Kendra said. “Rachel—Bob’s former assistant coach—put in a good word for him. She’s agreed to coach the team next year, and knows Chucky from summer league. He’s allowed to practice with the team, but I don’t get to play him, which is a shame because he’s good.”

“Ah, not cave but compromise,” Becky said, swishing a limp fry in the pool of ketchup on her plate.

“Is he good enough to start?” asked Alan.

“Yup,” Kendra said.

“Against high school seniors?” Becky said.

“Well, you have to keep in mind that he’s a wing. He doesn’t have to be big. He has to have good ball control and he has to be fast, and he’s both.”

Becky asked, “How’s the team taking it?”

Kendra frowned and gave a little shrug. “Mixed, frankly. Josh, the captain, loves it—Chucky gives the defense someone new to practice against. But Josh will do anything to win, and keep in mind he plays sweeper. The forwards are a little less thrilled.”