Birth of the Vampire (The Vanderlind Realm) (20 page)

“I have something for you,” I told her, reaching into the breast pocket of my leather jacket.

“No, thanks,” she said, dodging around me and hurrying toward the store.

I have to admit, I was a little stunned. I wasn’t used to females avoiding me like a bad stench. Haley needed to listen to me, but I wasn’t about to go chasing after her. Instead, I took the cap off the flask and let the fragrance do the work for me. I knew she had to be hungry if all she was doing was sucking the juice out of slaughtered animal meat.

She immediately whipped her head around and asked, “What is that?”

I took a healthy pull from the flask before telling her, “Blood.” Her eyes bulged a little, and I could tell her mouth was watering.
 “Would you like some?” I offered.

“No,” she insisted, but that didn’t stop her from snatching the flask from my hand and gulping down its contents.

I watched with some fascination. Her transformation from mortal to vampire was quite remarkable. She’d been perfectly acceptable as a human—not tempting but not repellant. As a vampiress, I found her to be completely bewitching. Not that I was attracted to her in that way. Her transformation into a creature of the night had obviously left her completely insane, and I’d had enough crazy in my life.

“You cut your hair,” she said after she’d sated her appetite and emptied the bottle.

I felt a small wave of pleasure that she’d noted the change in my appearance. “It’ll grow back,” I told her, in case she favored men with longer hair.

In an abrupt change of topic, she asked me, “Are you a vampire?”

“Yes,” was the only thing I could think to say in reply.

Haley took this information in and after a moment asked, “Am I?”

“Yes,” I said again.

She thought this over some more. “So when I was in that car crash, you decided that instead of letting me die you would turn me into a vampire?”

“Yes,” I said for the third time. “I have given you the gift of eternal life.”

Haley frowned. “Gee, thanks. Just what I always wanted … to live forever.”

“Pardon me?” I said, not quite sure I’d heard her correctly.

“Being seventeen sucks enough as it is,” she informed me. “But you turned me into a vampire, and now I’m stuck being seventeen forever. Isn’t that how it works?” She made some sort of expletive that I didn’t quite catch. Then grumbling to herself, she said, “Now I’ll never be old enough to get into a bar.”

“I don’t think you quite understand the gift I’ve given you,” I said.

“Oh, I think I do, Dorian. And I wouldn’t go around calling it a gift,” she said, practically growling at me. She was obviously furious. “Weren’t you the one complaining at Blossom’s party that life got super boring when it went on forever?”

“I wouldn’t say complaining,” I told her. “But it is true that life does tend to lose a bit of flavor when you have it in unlimited supply,” I had to admit.

“Then why did you save me?” she asked, folding her arms and glaring at me.

“Would you rather be dead under that tree you collided with?”

I had her there. She couldn’t think of an immediate reply. So I pressed my advantage by telling her, “Haley, you are a vampire. And I am your maker. You may not fully appreciate the great gift I have given you right now, but I assure you that someday you will learn to appreciate being a member of the undead.”

She gave me a funny look. “How old are you?”

I returned her look. “Why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering,” she said with a shrug. “You don’t really talk like a modern person.”

“I speak perfectly correctly for this time period,” I insisted. A vampire had to update his speech patterns when mingling with humans in order to blend in.

“If you insist,” she said, not sounding at all like she agreed with me.

I decided to ignore her comment. After all, I wanted to convince her that I was to be her mentor, not get in an argument about the authenticity of my speech patterns. “As I was saying,” I continued firmly. “As your maker, I will guide you through your transition from ordinary human to ruler of the night.”

“Yep.” She nodded. “That’s exactly how teenagers talk right now. You nailed it.”

Doing my best to ignore her snide remarks, I said, “There are many things you need to learn before you begin your new life.”

“Like what, for example?” she asked, looking interested.

“Like the fact that you don’t wander around town using your influence to make mortals obey your every whim,” I snapped.

“My influence?” She raised a finely shaped eyebrow. “Is that what it’s called?”

“Yes,” I said, “and it’s to be used with discretion.”

“Well, my car is trashed. How else am I supposed to get around?” she asked me.

“You could always fly,” I told her, pointing out the obvious. “That’s how I usually do it.”

“Fly,” Haley said. The idea had obviously never occurred to her. “Yeah, right.”

“There are so many wonders of the undead world that I will show you,” I said. I knew many humans who would have sacrificed ten years of their mortal lives to see the marvels that were at Haley’s fingertips if she was only willing to stop being stubborn.

For a moment, I thought she looked tempted, but then her face hardened. “I don’t have any money, you know. I’ve got to get my GED at least, or I’m never going anywhere, so …”

“Money is not an issue,” I assured her. The Vanderlinds had so much wealth, we were on the cusp of being vulgar. “And as far as schooling, I will be giving you an education.”

She frowned even more. “I’ll think about it,” she said and started trying to walk past me to enter the store.

I couldn’t believe my ears. I was offering her the world, and she had to think about it. “What do you mean by that?” I exclaimed.

Haley gave me a flat look. “It means, I’ll think about it.”

Chapter 31

Haley

I climbed into my bed with a cooler full of meat at my side and a blanket blocking the crack at the bottom of the door. I’d explained to the cashier at the Stop-n-Save that all the steak was on sale, and she rang me up for the price of ground chuck. I knew Dorian had said not to use my “influence,” but I wasn’t exactly flush with cash, even after scamming most of the customers at the diner. So I did what I had to do. The way I looked at it, getting a discount on meat was better than me attacking some random vagrant and making him my midnight snack.

I lay on my back, a slab of raw meat in my hand, and stared at the ceiling. I had a lot to think about.

There was a possibility that a gorgeous vampire had just offered to share his life with me while showing me some fabulous hidden world and sharing some important tips on being a bloodsucker.

Or I had completely lost my mind.

I hated to admit it, but the insanity version sounded more likely. First of all because vampires didn’t exist. And secondly because insanity ran in my family. Like ran marathons.

And then there was the flying thing. Was Dorian just my subconscious trying to get me to jump off a roof or something? Is that what he meant by fly? And what did he mean by, “I will be giving you an education”? It sounded kind of sexy in a way.

That was probably the strongest indication that I was nuts. Super hot, wealthy men did not offer to spend extended periods of time with me. That was for romance novels; that wasn’t for me. I was probably so crazy that I had convinced myself I couldn’t handle the sun and needed blood to survive just to make my life even more miserable. Maybe it was my way of avoiding going to Chicago while simultaneously making it impossible for me to go back to high school. That actually made a lot of sense.

I had to just get over it. I had to deal with my breakdown and get on with my life. It was time to become sane again. I sat up in bed. The sun had been threatening to rise as I’d shut the door to my room and put the blanket in place. I didn’t know how long I’d been lying there, but I knew it had to be at least above the horizon.

“I am not a vampire. I am not a vampire. I am not vampire,” I told myself as I set down my steak on the bedside table. I kneeled on the floor in front of my door and took a couple of deep breaths. “I am not a vampire,” I said again with conviction as I whipped back the blanket and a tiny bit of light seeped into the closet I called my room.

“Gah!” I wailed as my flesh started burning and my head started throbbing. I quickly jammed the blanket back in place.

If I wasn’t a vampire, then my brain was doing a pretty good job of tricking me into thinking I was.

I lay back on my bed and stared at the ceiling some more. I wanted to cry but fought back the urge. Vampires don’t cry. Vampires are badasses that don’t care about other people’s feelings and don’t have any feelings of their own.

I blinked rapidly to fight back the tears that were welling in my eyes. I desperately wished I had someone I could talk to. Someone that actually cared about me because I was feeling pretty scared and definitely all alone. If I really was a vampire, then I kind of sucked at it.

I spent the day lying perfectly still and focusing on deep breathing. At some point, I realized that I didn’t actually have to breathe anymore. I discovered I could hold my breath longer than was humanly possible, but I kept making my lungs expand and contract. It was kind of a habit.

I went into a sort of state that wasn’t exactly sleeping. I was still aware of being awake, but I felt like I was in some kind of trance. Maybe it was deep meditation of some kind. I couldn’t tell, but at some point, I came back into consciousness with the knowledge that the sun had gone down.

I got out of bed, hesitated, and then slowly peeled back one corner of the blanket from the base of the door. My room remained dark. It was safe to get up. I had to be at work in a little over an hour, and there was a lot to figure out before then.

I had to get this vampire versus crazy thing settled. If I was a vampire, fine. I would figure out how to live as a vampire. But if I was crazy, then this was the end of the line. I had seen crazy up close and personal. I was not doing crazy.

I climbed up to the attic of Kevin’s house and pried open one of the small windows. It took a few moments, but I was just barely able to wiggle through.
Just jump. Just jump. Just jump
, I kept telling myself as I struggled. I hesitated a moment, perched on the sill. I was either going to end up a bloodstain on Uncle Kevin’s driveway, or I was going to fly. A moment later, I was falling.

As the air rushed past me and the ground got closer, I inhaled the fragrance of the frosty night. I could almost hear the snow as it drifted all around me in big, puffy flakes. I could see the stars as they twinkled so brightly. I remembered something I’d read a few years earlier about people who had jumped off of bridges and survived. Every single one of them had said that on the way down, they had realized that all of their problems and miseries weren’t worth killing themselves over. Every single one of them had said that after they’d jumped, they’d discovered that they wanted to live. The article had actually scared the crap out of me because I couldn’t stop thinking about all the people who had jumped and then died. They probably had the same regrets on the way down. Even if I was crazy, there was still so much of life to enjoy. I just had to keep myself from getting locked up or killing anyone. How hard could that be?

Then I realized I had been falling for a long time for someone who had only jumped off a modest two-story house. Looking around, I realized I wasn’t falling. I wasn’t exactly flying either. It was more like I was gently drifting toward the ground. I felt both relieved and a little terrified. Relieved that I was going to live. I didn’t know what to make of being a vampire. At least I’d firmly established that I did not want to die. No matter how miserable I felt at times, there was always a chance things could get better. I definitely wanted to live. And I also felt a little stupid for jumping out the attic window. If I’d wanted to check to see if I could fly, I could have always jumped off a chair.

Once I had drifted to the ground, I tried leaping into the air a few times to see if I could fly on command, but I had no luck. It was something I would have to work on later. I had a lot of things to get done. If I was going to make anything of my life after death, I had to get organized. I needed a car, and I needed a computer. The library only stayed open late on Thursday nights, so that really wouldn’t give me enough time to get my GED online. Even if I had one of the library’s computers all to myself. And if getting people to give me a ride was taboo, then I really needed a way to get around without running through the streets like a maniac because the flying thing was kind of tricky.