Fang Girl (2 page)

Then I guessed I’d have to start my new life. Unlife. On the plus side, there would probably be stylish
clothes and amazing psychic abilities and really hot guys in leather trousers. On the negative side, I’d probably never see sunlight again, or eat chocolate, and I might slowly spiral into a sinkhole of angst and despair until someone staked me. And I didn’t have any money. Or a change of underwear. Or a way to have a shower. And—my stomach rumbled—it was looking increasingly likely that I was going to have to eat raw sheep.

And I wasn’t going to be able to see my family ever again.

My vision went a bit misty, and my lower lip started to tremble. I blinked the tears back. Vampires didn’t cry. Vampires were
cool
. Deliberately, I thought of all the things I’d be leaving behind. No more constant moving. No more always being the new girl, trying to break into social cliques. As a vampire,
I’d
be the queen bee with a constant circle of admirers. No more worrying that my exam results wouldn’t be good enough to get into university, or whether I was getting fat. I was going to be slender and gothically beautiful
forever
.

Well, I was going to be fifteen forever. That kind of sucked. Why couldn’t I have been turned next year?

Never mind, I told myself firmly. I was a vampire. This was going to be great. I’d get to hang out with
other vampires, who would be effortlessly elegant and would treat me like an adult. No more fights with my mother over my spending habits. No more annoying little brother stealing my eyeliner. No more embarrassing dad wearing yellow spandex in public and making me go out with him on bike rides. No more, no more.

I stopped, tears streaking my face.

“Well, screw
that
,” I said, and punched my home number into the mobile phone.

T
he phone rang eight times, which was just long enough for me to have second thoughts. I was a
vampire
. What was I doing? But even as my thumb hovered over the
END CALL
button, there was a click on the other end. My dad’s mumbling, sleep-slurred voice said, “Mmfgh?”

“Daddy?” Despite myself, the words came out high and trembling, a little-girl voice.

“Wha?” I could picture my dad flopped face-first into his pillow, phone mashed against one cheek. It usually took four cups of tea or two espressos to haul him up to full consciousness. “Whozit?”

I swallowed hard, forcing my voice back down into
its usual register. “Dad, it’s me.” Silence, so long that I wondered if he’d fallen asleep again. “Dad?”

“I’m asleep,” he said, sounding wide-awake. “I’m dreaming.”

“Um, no, Dad, it’s really me. Look, I know this is going to sound really crazy, but I don’t have time for long explanations, so please just bear with me. See, the thing is—” I stopped. There was a strange sound, like broken static, coming from the phone. I took it away from my ear to glare at the screen, but the signal bar showed full strength. “Dad? Can you hear me? There’s some sort of interference—”

“Who is this?” My mother’s familiar sharp tone made my stomach flip with habitual guilt, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong (rising from the dead didn’t count, in my opinion). Her voice came through crystal clear, though that weird sound was still in the background. “What did you say to my husband, arsehole?”

“Mummy?” Again, the little-girl squeak. God, I sounded so pathetic. I was glad there weren’t any other vampires around.

For the first time in my life, I witnessed my mother at a complete loss for words. Figured that I’d have to be
dead to experience it. In the pause, I realized that the dry, harsh sound in the background had to be Dad, crying. Another first—but a much less pleasant one.

“Xanthe?” whispered my mum.

For once, my stupid first name didn’t make me wince. “Hi,” I said, unable to come up with anything less inane. “Um.”

When my mother spoke again, she sounded as calm as a frozen river. “You are a sick, sick person, and I am phoning the police.”

“No, wait—crap!” I stared at the phone in disbelief. She hung up on me! My own mother! I tried redialing, but all I got was the shrill beep of the busy tone. I started entering Dad’s mobile number—but then a much better idea occurred to me.

This time the phone barely managed one ring before it was picked up at the other end. All the commotion down the hallway must have woken him up. “Hey,” I said in greeting.

There was only the briefest of pauses before “Hey, Janie.”

I grinned.
Nothing
fazed my little brother. “Hi, Zack.” Perhaps my parents had subconsciously had to admit that “Xanthe Jane Greene” might have been a mistake,
because when it came to naming their next child, they’d gone for the slightly more normal “James Zachariah Greene.” Unfortunately, this had turned out to be the wrong way round again. “Look, first of all, if Mum catches you and makes you hang up, you gotta ring me back, okay? She threw an absolute fit when I tried to talk to her.”

“Well, you are meant to be dead,” he pointed out reasonably. “Are you, by the way?”

“Sort of. It’s complicated.” I hesitated, trying to find a good way to put it, but in the end I just blurted out, “I think I’m a vampire.”

Another fractional pause. “Awesome.”

“Well, yeah. But I nearly got stuck in my grave, and I only escaped because a woman who I think is another vampire came to dig me up, only she seems to have been chased off by vampire hunters, and now I’m in a sheep field. Where the heck did you guys bury me?”

“It’s not a sheep field,” Zack said, sounding rather wounded. “It’s a real pretty countryside spot, with views and song sparrows and—and, you know, all that ecological stuff. We thought you’d like it.”

“I’m sure it’s very attractive. Just not from six feet under.” I swiveled on my heels, scanning the dark
countryside. “To be honest, it would have been more useful if you’d buried me somewhere near a bus stop. Can you get Mum or Dad to come pick me up?”

“Hang on, I’ll go look.” I heard the creak of his bedroom door. “Um, I’m not sure they should be driving right now, actually.”

“Great. Now what?” I rubbed my forehead with one muddy hand, trying to think. It was a good thing Zack was taking this so well.... “Hang on. You and your weird Goth friends wouldn’t have had anything to do with this, would you?”

“Steampunk,”
he corrected me, indignant. “It’s totally different!”

“Zack,” I said warningly. “Did you feed me to a vampire?”

“No!”

“It’s just that you don’t seem to be surprised by the whole coming-back-from-the-dead thing.”

“You’re my big sister. I knew you couldn’t really be gone forever,” he said, with a twelve-year-old’s utter, simple certainty in the order of the world. “Uh, hang on a sec.” An earsplitting burst of static made me wince. Evidently a scuffle was going on—I could hear Zack whining, “But, Muuuum!”

“James, you give that here right now!” My mother’s voice got louder as she claimed possession of the phone. “Right. Now listen here,” she snarled in my ear. “I don’t know what kind of sick—”

“In January you were home sick for nine days and I made you a special playlist and lent you my iPod,” I said, speaking as fast as I could. “Your favorite soup is parsnip and Stilton. Um, um.” I grasped for something else that only I would know. “And behind the set of old
Good Housekeeping
cookbooks you have a collection of erotic bondage novels that I’m not supposed to know about—” I heard a crash. “Mum?
Mum?
”

“Hi,” said Zack’s voice cheerfully. “She’s out cold. What did you tell her?”

“Nothing. Is Dad there?”

There was a rustle, then, “Xanthe? Baby?” said Dad. He sounded quavery, lost.

“It’s really me, Dad. Um, I don’t know how to break this to you gently, but I seem to be a vampire.”

“Okay,” said Dad quite calmly. I guessed that he’d gone into shock. “I’m going to come and pick you up. Where are you?”

“At my grave, where else?”

“I’m coming right over.”

“Gre—
no, wait
!” Crap, how could I have forgotten? “Dad, listen, you can’t come! I probably have bloodlust!”

“What?” he said, utterly bewildered.

“I’m a brand-new vampire, remember? I might flip out and eat you if I smell your tasty blood.”

A pause. “Should I phone for a taxi?”

“I don’t want to eat a taxi driver either!” Accidentally eating my own dad on my first night as a vampire would be a spectacularly gothic start to my undead career, but I really didn’t need to cope with
that
much angst straight off. “Anyway, I can run over to you. I’ve got amazing vampire superpowers now, of course. I don’t need a lift.” But that didn’t solve the bloodlust problem. I frowned, thinking … and it hit me.

“Hey, Dad? Can you put Zack back on?” There were some things that you couldn’t ask a parent, and this was one of them. “Hi, Zack. I need you to look something up for me.”

W
hen your parents move around as much as mine do, you get a hands-on practical in Darwinian theory: adapt or die. I’d never attended the same school for more than two years at a time, as my mum chased research grants around the country, so I’d had to get used to being the perpetual newcomer. There’re only two ways to survive that, and I’d long ago learned which one was preferable—shut up, keep your eyes open, and blend in like a chameleon on speed.

Starting at a new school was like diving down into a vast coral reef, with thousands of different creatures going about their business in an intricate network of relationships. The trick was not to make a splash when
you entered, to approach without attracting too much attention. That way you could study the situation, see who went where and what they ate and how they interacted. If you did it right, you could fit yourself right in, and all the life would carry on around you with barely a ripple.

If you did it wrong, of course, you got sharks.

Lorraine was a shark. The skinny, mean sort that makes everything else on the reef creep around in terror, because you could never tell if she was going to ignore you or bite your head off. I’d managed to piss her off on my very first day—three different teachers had made Lorraine sit next to me instead of her best friend, which from my point of view was about as helpful as your diving instructors handing you a couple of raw steaks before pushing you into the water. After that, it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d bought Lorraine a naked boy toy and her own Porsche; she hated me, and the rest of the school avoided me like the freshly bleeding sacrificial goat I was.

Which was why I was clinging to the wall outside her window, trying to break into her bedroom. I reckoned that if I did turn out to have bloodlust, I’d be doing the world a favor.

I’d been worried about mystic barriers blocking my way—I had no idea how to convince Lorraine to invite me in, seeing as how I wasn’t a brooding stud-muffin in a leather coat—but it turned out that I should have been more concerned about the double glazing. The window was slightly open, but locked in position. I squeezed my hand through the gap, my wrist twisting as I scrabbled for the catch. My fingernails brushed the plastic; I stretched as far as I could, flattening myself as if I could slip my whole body sideways through the crack.

And somehow I
did
. One second I was straining to reach the handle; there was a weird sensation like a whole-body sneeze, and then I found myself teetering on the sill on the other side of the window. I nearly face-planted straight onto Lorraine’s sleeping form. Grabbing the wall for support, I cast a wild glance backward. Sure enough, the window was still only cracked open two inches.

Ah. So my secret vampire power was teleportation. Win!

Lorraine was curled into a tight ball under her purple satin duvet. Without her makeup, she looked pale and weirdly young, like a little sister version of herself. She did not, I had to admit, seem at all delicious. I stared at her neck until my eyes started to water, but it
did not become a luscious, peach-skinned column, or an inviting white satin veil over sensual red delights. It was, well, a neck. No more enthralling than I would have found it when alive. I leaned in close, until my face was only centimeters from her skin. Feeling a little dumb, I opened my mouth, trying to work out how to extend any retractable fangs I might be hiding. Closer … closer …

“MWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!” announced the mobile phone from my pocket.

I hurled myself down onto Lorraine as she opened her mouth to scream. “Shut up, shut up!” She went deathly still underneath me, her eyes fixed on my teeth. “I’m not going to …” I paused. It was true: I really didn’t want to hurt her. Even with my nose practically pressed into her skin, she just smelled of kiwi shampoo and tea-tree oil face wash, with a slight undertone of sweaty socks. It would have taken a truly sick vampire to be provoked into an animalistic hunger by
that
scent.

Still, I had to be sure.

Our biology lessons hadn’t included anything as practical as how to locate the jugular vein. Besides which, even if I did manage to find it, chowing down on a major vein sounded like a great way to kill her, or at
least make a terrible mess.

So I bit her ear. She already had four piercings; one more couldn’t hurt.