Underdead (29 page)

We stared at each other, Kendra holding the stake with the comfort of an athlete, me crouched warily, knees flexed, ready to dodge her next move. Kendra broke the silence first.

She spoke almost lazily, as if we were discussing something no more important than tomorrow’s lunch menu. “When I saw you with the meter sticks, I realized you’d figured out how I’d altered the time of Bob’s death. I rather hoped you would have suspected Roger. Not that the man can make a simple machine to save his life, but you couldn’t be expected to know how he sat back and let me do all the work while he schmoozed with the parents and accepted all the awards.” She laughed again, a cruel bitter sound that sent shivers down my spine.

She gave the stake a meaningful caress. “I almost didn’t bring this with me, but I’m rather glad I did. You as good as told me you’d figured it
all
out when you didn’t let me in just now.” Her mouth twisted. “It’s a shame, I must say. Think how fitting it would be if Roger had gotten the blame because of all those years he had taken credit for my work.”

She rounded on me suddenly, her temper flaring. “And don’t think that officious little shit is going to come up and help you!” She regained control of her anger, though barely. Her fury bubbled just below the surface. “I told him I had things under control and sent him home. That worthless security guard is still resting in his booth after letting Roger out of the parking lot. It looks like it’s just you and me.” She advanced toward me, a cruel smile of pleasure sharpening her features.

My cell phone, sitting uselessly on the counter behind her, rang, and she laughed that my salvation was just out of reach.

I retreated until I was up against the windows, automatically shifting away from the one I had left open. “Why?” The word came out as a croak from my fear-parched throat.

“Why?” A fleeting look of sadness crossed her face and was gone, replaced by self-righteous condemnation. The sharp loathing in her eyes made me flinch. “It wasn’t supposed to go that way. Bob and I were in love. We were keeping it quiet, of course. I didn’t mind the secrecy, really. I knew he loved me, but Bob was very attractive. Women threw themselves at him. The students were easy, a kindly word to their parents stopped their nonsense. And that cloying little assistant coach of his took that job I arranged for her as I knew she would. None of them loved him the way I did. And then you came along!

“I saw the way you came on to him. Always over there between classes, pretending you wanted help, swinging your hair around.” She mimicked cruelly, “Oh, Bob, teaching’s
so
hard. My students
won’t
listen, can’t you help me?”

“We hadn’t been able to spend time together for weeks. Then finally, on Parents’ Night, Bob and I made plans to sneak off for a private drink together after our conferences were over. But you couldn’t stand it, could you? You couldn’t stand to see us happy together. So you tricked him into inviting you! You used some dark magic on him! You…horrible…vampire seductress!”

I gaped at her. A crazy image of myself as a red-haired Elvira rose unbidden in my head and I pushed it away. “Really, Kendra,” I said earnestly, willing her to believe me, “it wasn’t like that. Bob only invited me because he was being nice. I thought a bunch of people were going. I had no idea it was just the two of you.”

“Liar!” she shrieked, coming so close I could see spittle forming at the corner of her mouth. “Do you have any idea how I felt when I went up to meet him and found him in your room, leaving you directions for
our
date? You stole him away from me!

“Your Little Miss Innocent act doesn’t fool me! You were working on him long before you became a freak. Oh, I’ve seen you at work. Bob, that dark man everyone was goggling at during the Christmas party, even that detective is wound around your finger.” She let out a high-pitched laugh. “But you got yours, didn’t you? I saw you in that bar, with that man. I know what he did to you, what you are! And now you can go to hell where you belong!”

She raised the stake in both hands and aimed a sharp blow to my chest. I grabbed hold of her wrists and tried to push her away, but she was too strong. Little by little, the stake came closer. But my death wasn’t coming fast enough for her. She began to kick ruthlessly at my feet, knocking me off-balance until I was forced to let go of her in order to keep myself from falling out the open window. She raised the stake and stabbed again. This time, I grabbed hold of the stake instead of her wrists.

It was a losing move. I had lost my leverage, and she knew it. She immediately adjusted her grip to take advantage of her dominance. Within moments, I was hanging on the stake, clinging to it rather than pushing it away, desperately trying to keep myself from going out the window.

With a cruel shriek of victory, Kendra let go of the stake and I tumbled backward through the window clutching the useless piece of wood as I hurtled toward the ground two stories below.

As if moving in slow motion, I felt myself turning over in the air and I kicked with my hands and feet as if I could somehow fight my way to a soft landing in the hedge below. Then I felt the sharp stabbing pain of a hundred little knives and everything went dark.

Except it wasn’t quite dark. I could see the moon through the leaves of the trees overhead. The dawning realization that I hadn’t died brought not relief but confusion and fear
.
It didn’t feel like I had broken any bones. Was I paralyzed? A wave of horror and self-pity washed over me, overwhelming me so completely that it was several moments after my hand automatically reached up to brush away my tears that I realized I hadn’t been acutely injured, at least on the top half of my spine. After a moment of confusion and disbelief, I realized why.

Somehow, outrageously, amazingly, I had made the hedge. I tried moving one leg and was rewarded with a distant rustle as my foot popped out the side of the bush. The rest of me soon followed, and as I lay on the grass breathing air in gulps I realized that, save for a few nasty scrapes and some sore spots that would be lovely rainbow-colored bruises by morning, I wasn’t hurt.

I climbed slowly and painfully to my feet and looked up at the window in confusion. It didn’t make sense. I should be dead, or at least seriously maimed, but I was fine. I shouldn’t have landed in the hedge—it was too close to the wall. I should have landed a good five feet farther out. And even with landing in the hedge, I should have broken my neck. Kendra evidently agreed—she hadn’t even bothered to check to make sure I was dead.

“She pushed me out a
second-story
window,” I muttered aloud in disbelief. “How the hell did I survive that?”

“You levitated,” said a voice behind me.

Oh God. Natasha!
The thought went as fast as it had come. I already knew it wasn’t her. I turned to find Will leaning casually against the smooth trunk of a palm tree a few feet behind me, much in the same way he had stood against the wall in the club the first night I’d seen him. He was dressed, as usual, in black, and looked like another shadow in the night.

“Not very well,” he continued, stepping forward with that combination of strength and grace that was uniquely his. “But you did it. As I expected, you are coming along quite nicely.” He sounded pleased, satisfied, almost proud. As if I’d learned to ride a bike for the first time, all by myself.

I should have been glad to hear I had finally developed a
good
vampire trait. Thrilled even. I can levitate? Cool! But it wasn’t. I didn’t return his smile. I just stared at him, horrified. Everything had come together with an almost audible
thunk
. Gavin had said I was on a knife’s edge, and I had kidded myself I could choose to what side to stay on, that I could choose to remain normal, human, I didn’t have to succumb. But I realized now how naive that was. And I knew why Will hadn’t tried to turn me again. He didn’t need to bother—I was slowly, irrevocably turning into a vampire on my own. The holy water had effected only a surface change. It had provided a pleasant delusion, no more.

For the first time, I truly grasped the fact that I was turning into something I didn’t understand. Sure, I’d known it—I’d known it for months. But I hadn’t accepted it. The idea that I was slowly becoming a vampire had been unreal. A horrible dream, a strange celluloid fantasy, a joke even—it was just too absurd to believe.

I’d had to come up with logical explanations for everything that had happened so far, little white lies, little cover stories to tell my friends. Skin changes? Allergy. Garlic? Food poisoning. Blurry image in mirror? Everyone’s vision had to go sometime. But somewhere along the way, I had bought into them myself, just a little, just enough to keep the truth at bay.

But levitating out a second-story window was something I just couldn’t explain away. There was no soothing rationalization for the fact that I had just defied gravity. Everything else I could find a way to accept and still keep the whole vampire thing at a distance. But this? This was different.

I backed away from him, stumbling a little, my voice shaking as I spoke. “What did you do to me?”

His pleased smile faded abruptly and his handsome face looked cold and hard without it. The charming suitor had disappeared and a stranger stood in his stead. When he spoke, his voice was harsh, his accent pronounced. “You should count yourself lucky my essence flows in your veins. It saved your life tonight.”

A searing anger arose in me. “The hell it did! Kendra just tried to put this through my heart!” I held up the stake I still had, clutched tightly in my hand. “She thought I had lured away her boyfriend, that I had used some special trick to turn him against her because I was a vampire.” Her accusations reverberated through my head like a physical blow. I felt sick, disgusted, as if I wanted to run screaming from my own self, from the demon I was inexorably becoming.

“That’s absurd.” Will’s eyes glittered dangerously. He crept closer despite the stake I held before me until he seemed to tower over me, but I was beyond caring. What could he do to me now that time wouldn’t do on its own?

“That’s not the point,” I said. “Kendra used to be my friend. Now she thinks I’m a monster!” My voice dropped almost to a whisper as I spoke the truth. “And she’s right.”

Something changed in Will’s face. His eyes held sudden pain, as if he felt my own. “Jo—”

I backed away from his outstretched hand as if it were a skeletal claw reaching from the grave. I wondered if I’d ever really seen him before. Really seen him for what he was—something that preyed on humans to survive, whose nature it was to kill, as he had tried to kill me. Of course I hadn’t, I hadn’t wanted to look past the attractive packaging. It was so much easier to see only the wickedly handsome man who had picked me out of an envious crowd, who liked to read, and was considerate and had a sense of humor. Who was everything I wanted. But he was not that man. Not, in fact, a man at all.

“You changed me into something I don’t want to be.” My voice rose with every word, until I was shouting at him. “I didn’t ask for this! I don’t want to be this. I want to go outside during the day, to run, to hike, like a normal person. I want to enjoy food that is green and—and cooked! I want to go to sleep at night without worrying that I won’t recognize myself when I wake up in the morning!” It was like a dam bursting. All the stress I had been feeling for the past few months burst out like an erupting geyser. The pain from all the indignities I’d suffered just poured out of me. The face mask. The mockery. The lies. The beautiful days spent cowering indoors. I leaned back against the stucco wall of the science building, unable to bear any longer the sheer weight of it all. Tears streamed down my face in an uncontrollable torrent and I pulled in air with big gasping sobs.

Will stepped forward, hands outstretched. “Jo,” he said. He looked helpless, pained, as if he regretted every tear I shed, but I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. It was so far from enough as to be worth nothing to me.

“Get away from me.” I raised the stake, prepared to drive it through him. “Leave me alone!”

He stood for a moment, hands poised awkwardly in the air where they had been stilled by my rebuff. He gave me a long probing look, and then with a funny little nod, turned on his heel and left.

I slid down the wall, and sat there, still clutching the stake, hugging my knees, staring blindly in front of me. I heard sirens, and the sounds of several police officers running up the stairs behind me toward my classroom. I didn’t move. I couldn’t.

Moments later a dark torso leaned out the window I had gone out of, and panned the area under and around it with a flashlight. I had moved too far out of range for them to see me. I noted the fact dumbly, as if watching it all from a great distance.

Gavin and another officer ran down the stairs calling my name, scanning dark patches near the building with their flashlights over the side of the stairwell as they moved. A light swerved over me, quickly returned and held steady. “I’ve found her!”

Gavin pushed past him, came around the side of the building and knelt down next to me. “Go get the EMT,” he directed the officer sharply. His eyes remained fixed on me.

“Are you all right?” He touched me gently, as if I might break.

“I’m—fine,” I said, hiccupping against the tears that started anew. I couldn’t seem to stop them.

Gavin stared at me for a long moment, then murmuring something too low for me to catch, sat down on the ground next to me, put his arms around me and held me tight for a long, long time until I finally ran out of tears.

The EMT gently covered my scrapes with antiseptic and bandages, clucked over the many bruises I would have and then cheerily pronounced me otherwise free from harm. She handed me a cup of something hot and sweet, which after the first sip I recognized as Lipton filched from the faculty lounge just down the hall, sweetened with about five packets of sugar. It was disgusting, but I drank it anyway because she insisted and it was something to do, anything to keep myself from thinking.