Fashionably Dead (5 page)

I knew I was being vain, but I glanced toward the mirror again wondering if I just had to warm up or something . . . Nothing. Shit.

She circled me. “I gotta say, your body’s jammin’. Rock hard abs. Legs are still long. Your boobs are definitely bigger and your butt’s higher. Overall you’re beyond hot.” She smiled and squeezed my hands. “What do you feel like?”

Well, that explained my girls trying to escape from my bra. “I feel really strong and fast,” I said. “I can hear really well and I can smell things.”

“Do I smell?” Gemma did a quick pit check.

“You smell good, like rain and orchids.”

“Ooooh, cool.” She was delighted. “What does Pam smell like?”

“Pop Tarts and cotton candy. Gem,” I paused, “do I have an aura anymore?” One of Gemma’s hobbies was reading auras. She could read people before they opened their mouths. She had a gift for it.

“No.”

“Is that okay?” I whispered.

“I think so.” She hugged me. She felt warm and comfortable.

“Does Pam have one?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Gemma answered reverently, “it’s a pearly white with shots of purple and pink in it. It’s the most beautiful aura I’ve ever seen. It’s truly angelic.”

“Do you mean to tell me that foul mouthed Oprah doppelganger really is my Guardian Angel?”

“Yep,” Gemma giggled.

“Somebody up there must really hate me,” I moaned.

“Yep.”

Chapter 4

It was my first full day of being dead and it sucked.

I wavered between total freakout and dead calm mode . . . it just depended on the minute. Right now I was calm. I dutifully sat on the couch, pen and notebook in hand. I was wearing my favorite worn-in red tag Levis, a totally cool vintage Tony the Tiger T-shirt and some killer Prada flats. Being dead had a few advantages. I filled out my jeans and my T-shirts like a Playboy centerfold. The girls were amazing. I was a full C cup and they stood at attention even without a bra, which was a good thing considering none of my bras fit anymore. Of course I was also dead, couldn’t breathe and had no idea if my hair was alright because I had no fucking reflection. On the flip side, my vision and hearing had also sharpened to the point I felt bionic. Not to mention my sense of smell. I’d almost passed out when I walked by my garbage can earlier. Why in the hell could I smell things if I couldn’t breathe?

Sitting here with Pam felt a little like high school, getting lectured and taking notes, but this was different. This was a class I had no desire to take.

“What did I just say, Asswipe?” Pam asked me.

“Um . . . something about how to bite mortals to drink their blood.”

“Go on,” Pam replied, putting several Piggly Wiggly grocery bags on the coffee table in front of her.

“Well, after that I’m not sure ‘cause I got so gacked I tuned you out.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, you’re gonna end up killing somebody,” Pam said, slapping her big meaty Oprah hand to her forehead.

“No, I won’t,” I told her. “I’ll just keep drinking from you.”

“You can’t,” she yelled. She really had volume issues. “You have to drink from mortals. If you only drink from immortals, like me, you’ll get too strong too fast and you’ll be a danger to yourself and everyone else.”

Pam, being the cruel, hateful, thoughtless Angel that she was, reached into the Piggly Wiggly bag and pulled out my favorite snack in the whole world. She dug into the bag of tortilla chips and double dipped into the extra hot salsa with gusto. This was evil, considering food now tasted like sawdust to me and I couldn’t swallow it anyway. The only thing I could consume was blood. Apparently as I got older I would be able to ingest other liquids. According to my Vampyre Manual, fine bourbon laced with blood is quite the
in
thing for Vamps of a certain age. I watched Pam crunch and secretly hoped she’d choke, not that it would kill her. She was an Angel—an immortal, gonna live forever Angel with a foul mouth and an attitude problem.

“Shouldn’t another Vampyre be teaching me this crap?” I snarkily asked.

“Well, considering you don’t know any other bloodsucking losers, and we can’t find the idiot who thought changing you was a good idea, you’re shit out of luck,” she replied, spitting teeny tiny pieces of tortilla chips the entire time she spoke.

Speaking of the idiot who changed me, we’d already gone looking for her. For the twentieth time Pam made me go through everything that took place between me and the big blonde Amazon.

Exactly two day ago, I sat on the dirty sidewalk bemoaning my lack of willpower and wondering if I was on crack thinking it was a good idea to get hypnotized to stop smoking. It only got worse from there. The big blonde Amazon took me into her office and killed me. The End.

And then apparently I drove home and slept for thirty-six hours straight.

Pam kept digging for more details, but I had none. That’s when she insisted we visit the murder scene, hoping to jog my pathetic-ass memory. Her words, not mine. The ride over and back to the strip mall had certainly been a fun-filled hour and a half.

Gemma, Pam and I went after sundown. Pam wasn’t quite sure how I would do in sunlight. To no one’s great surprise the door wasn’t there. There was no evidence whatsoever. This confused me and made me nervous. Something wasn’t right. Pam wanted some Chinese takeout, but we forbade her. No one was going to eat cat in my car.

The real highlight of the car trip though was Pam’s backseat driving. After having threatened to pull over and put her out of the car eight times, I’d finally had it. I pulled over and turned around, ready to punch her in her big ol’ Oprah mouth and she disappeared. That’s right, she started glowing and just disappeared.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, freaking out. “Where in the hell did she go?”

“No clue,” Gemma said, looking under her seat.

“Do you think she bailed and went back to Heaven?”

“No,” Gemma replied thoughtfully. “I think she’s actually having fun down here.”

Turns out, Pam had teleported back to my house. She said I drove like a blind person on crack and she couldn’t take it. She napped for about four hours after that. Just so happens, teleporting really wears a gal out. All in all . . . just another weird day in my brand new weird fucked up life.

“All right, back to work,” Pam said with a mouthful of chips. “Tell me the history, or whatever your sorry ass can remember.”

“Give me a little credit here,” I snapped as I wracked my brain, desperately trying to remember the bizarro History of the Vampyre. Shit. “There are, um, ten Dominions,” I began, “each run by a Warrior Prince or Warrior Princess.”

“What else?” Pam asked.

“Ease up,” I told her. “The Dominions are territories. Basically they divided up the whole world into ten sections and the King gave a section to each of his ten children. Wait, I thought he had eleven children.”

“He did—one died.”

“Oh, okay,” I said wearily, praying this would be over soon.

“Name the Dominions,” Pam said.

I stretched my arms up over my head, yawned and brought them back down about face level. I began to massage my hands, left palm facing me. “Okay,” I said, “let me see . . . there’s North America, South America, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, Europe, and Asia is divided into four Dominions since it’s so large and diverse.”

“Give me your hand,” Pam said.

“No.”

“Give. Me. Your. Hand.”

I gave her my hand and she slapped me upside the head. I was busted. Thank God I was a Vampyre or else she would have given me a concussion instead of just a headache.

“You’re cheating!” she shouted.

“I can’t remember all this junk,” I said shamefully and looked down at my palm where I’d written all the answers to the questions I knew she’d ask.

“Damn it to hell,” Pam bellowed. “This is not high school. This information could mean the difference between life and death for you.”

“I’m already dead,” I snapped.

“Yeah, but you could be deader—like for real dead. How would you like that, little missy?” Pam demanded.

“Not much,” I admitted morosely.

“Did you even read the manual? Do you have any idea what can kill you?”

“I think so,” I whispered. I started to ease my way out of the room. I knew Pam was coming for me again, and she had a mean right hook.

“Don’t,” Pam said quietly. A quiet Pam was a scary Pam.

I flopped down on the couch, ready to get ripped a good one. I was an A student in high school and college. For some reason, I couldn’t absorb this stuff. Maybe it’s not that I couldn’t, it’s that I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to be a Vampyre. Vampyres were freaks of nature. Vampyres didn’t even exist. I did not want an expletive-spewing Angel to be my main food source.

I wanted to eat chips and salsa and smoke and see my reflection. I wanted to go out in broad daylight and not have to wear a shitload of sunscreen, long sleeves, long pants, a hat and huge sunglasses. I wanted to have kids someday, but that was no longer an option, what with no functioning internal organs.

I did not want to have to worry about being staked through the heart with silver or being decapitated. Let’s not forget about burning to death . . . wouldn’t want to leave that little nugget out. Those are the three real ways to kill a Vampyre. What about holy water, crosses, sunlight, and garlic? All bullshit . . . they’d just make a Vampyre laugh or piss them off. All Hollywood fairytales, although there was some truth to the sunlight myth. While it wouldn’t kill a Vamp, it could burn their skin quite badly. Who wants to look like a bloody piece of meat even for a short while?

I never really needed or wanted to know where every major artery in a human was so I wouldn’t nick it with my razor sharp fangs, inadvertently killing same said human.

Mostly I really did not want my mother to find out. I was sure in her mind this would definitely be an insurmountable hurdle to my having a big career like hers. Like that was ever going to happen. I didn’t want a big career like hers. I had absolutely no idea what I really wanted other than good friends, great sex and some Prada that was in season. At almost thirty, I worked as an art teacher at the senior citizens’ center and had just received a crazy large inheritance from my Nana. I would have preferred to have my Nana instead of her money, but that wasn’t the way the world worked.

Ask anybody who knew me . . . I was a good person. I was fun, but not extremely motivated unless it involved high fashion, art, or my friends. I’d recently heard my neighbor describe me as very smart, tall, single, financially irresponsible, quite pretty, boyfriend-less and kind. Great. I knew people in town were taking bets on how long it would take me to run through my inheritance money. Hell, they probably had good cause considering the amount I dropped on new clothes recently. The thing I was best at was shopping, but no one was lining up to pay me to do that . . . Holy shit, I was totally depressing myself.

“What would your Nana say?” Pam asked.

That stopped me. My eyes flashed and I could feel my fangs descend. “How dare you bring my Nana into this.”

She had no right to . . . My body jerked and I had a strange deja vu. I looked at Pam for a very long moment. I stared into her Angel eyes, searching for something . . . that I found. My body relaxed and I started to feel lightheaded as I moved towards her. My fangs rescinded. I felt calm and centered.

“She’d say ‘Buck up, Princess, it could be worse’,” I told her quietly. I paused, my eyes never leaving Pam’s for a second. “She sent you to me.”

Pam said nothing. She just smiled. I reached for her and gently took her face in my hands. I touched my forehead to hers and let my bloody tears flow freely.

“Did she want you to tell me anything?” I asked hopefully.

“She loves you and she always will.” Pam caught me as I collapsed and she rocked me like a baby until I cried myself out.

“I still don’t want to be a Vampyre, but I can learn now,” I whispered.

“I know you can, honey,” she said. “I know you can.”

Chapter 5

She was going to die if I didn’t help her. The voice inside the tomb was not weak or sickly. It was strong and melodic and very insistent.

“Astrid, you have to help me,” she begged.

“How do you know my name?” I asked, thrown by the familiarity.

“Because you are part of me,” she replied. “Push the stone, Astrid. Help me, please. You’re the only one.”

“Why does it have to be me? I’m not strong enough,” I insisted. Then I started to cry. I should get help. Big men or the police or a crowbar.

“You are strong enough,” she said simply. “There’s not much time left.”

In that moment I knew she was right. I was strong enough. She was going to die if I didn’t get her out. Now.

I walked slowly toward the tomb, my hands outstretched. I could feel the tingling in my fingertips. It quickly spread down my arms, through my chest and into my legs. My heart was pounding inside me, my stomach felt twisted and it was hard to breathe. The wind picked up and blew my hair wildly around my head. I was inches away.