Kiss of the Vampire (The Vanderlind Realm Book 2) (11 page)

I again felt the strong wish for someone to confide in. Or even just talk to. Being a vampire was so damn lonely. Dorian was the only vampire I knew. A new thought occurred to me. Was that why I was obsessed with him? Just because there weren’t any other choices. If I had a selection of undead males to date, would Dorian still top my list?

My heart said, “Yes!” But then again, I didn’t have a selection so it was hard to judge.

I was trying to do things honestly: work at the diner, save my money, get my GED online, only feed off of scumbags, and not kill anyone. But I was making myself miserable in the process. I needed to get a bunch of money together, exact my revenge and get the hell out of Dodge. For some reason Chicago still sounded like a good destination. New York probably had more vampires, but it felt way too intimidating. I would move to Chicago, make some vampire friends, purge my heart of Dorian Vanderlind and get on with my death.

It was time to stop stalling and get started on with my revenge. I picked up my cell and punched in a number.

“Hello?” a chirpy girl voice answered. I could tell by the saccharin ring that it was Sheila.

“Oh. Hi,” I made my voice sound as ditzy as I could, but also a little unsure. “Is Tommy there?”

“Who is this?” Her voice was immediately suspicious.

“Uh…” I hemmed. “I just want to speak to Tommy.” And then I added, “Tommy Sherman.”

“Yeah, and I just want to know who this is,” Sheila demanded.

“Listen. I don’t know who you are. Tommy just gave me this number. Why are you answering his phone?” I said, allowing my voice to sound a little indignant.

“This isn’t my boyfriend’s phone. It’s my phone,” Sheila snarled. “And Tommy’s taken. Way taken. So don’t ever try to call him again. Got it?”

“If he’s taken,” I said, “then he shouldn’t be handing out his number.” I hung up with a smile curling my lips. That would get Sheila’s suspicions running hot. I was pretty confident that Tommy wasn’t the kind of guy to straight out tell a girl he wanted to break up. He seemed like the kind of guy who would avoid her, just hoping she would take the hint. It was a cowardly way to act, but not uncommon with males, according to my reading. And I was pretty confident that Sheila was the kind of girl who didn’t shy away from being confrontational. Especially if a guy was trying to blow her off. No one had my new cell number so Sheila would have no way to figure out who had called.

The sun was setting, so it was time to get out of bed. I was so much better looking as a vampire than I had been as a mortal, but I wanted to try to make myself even hotter before my date. Tommy Sherman was going to get the full heartbreak treatment.

Right away there were a few surprising things about my date that evening. First of all, Tommy was on time. Secondly, he didn’t just pull in the drive and honk his horn. He actually got out of his car, came up the walk and knocked on the front door. It would seem like rudimentary manners, but good manners weren’t something high on Tommy’s list of things to accomplish in his lifetime.

“Good evening Mr. Hale,” Tommy said when Uncle Kevin answered the door.

I had to do a double take. Tommy was being all formal and polite. It was almost like aliens had replaced his personality with a person who had been a teenager in the 1950s.

“Tommy,” Uncle Kevin said, giving him a hearty handshake. “Sorry, but Ashley isn’t here.”

The boy nodded, caught off-guard for a moment, but then managed to say, “Actually, I’m here for Haley.”

“Oh,” my uncle said, having the good grace to look embarrassed. “That’s great. What are your plans for this evening?”

“Probably just a movie,” Tommy said with a shrug. “And then maybe we’ll grab something to eat.”

And that was the biggest big surprise. Tommy was willing to take me out in public. When I was a mortal, he’d always insisted that we had to keep our dating a secret. He’d claimed it was because he’d just broken up with another girl and didn’t want her feelings to be hurt. But that wasn’t the truth. Tommy didn’t care about anyone’s feelings but his own. The truth was he wanted to keep our relationship hidden. He wasn’t sure if I was cool enough to be his girlfriend. He wanted to keep his options open in case something better came along. And like a dumb-ass, I’d gone along with it. When I was a mortal, I obviously didn’t have super-high self esteem.

Define irony: When your mortal date wants to take you to see a vampire flick. Yes, that was Tommy’s choice for a movie. And it wasn’t even one of those romantic vampire flicks where the pretty girl gets saved by the hot vampire. It was a movie about vampires fighting zombies over the last remaining survivors of the human race, or something like that. Very post-apocalypse.

“That’s not my first choice in a movie,” I told him when he suggested we see it.

Tommy frowned. “Why not? I hear it’s really good.”

I had to assume he’d heard it was good from some of his jock buddies and not from actual professional reviewers or anything like that.

“I just don’t like scary movies,” I told him.

“Yeah, but that’s the point,” he insisted.

“What?” He’d lost me.

“You always want to take chicks to see a scary movie because then they get frightened and they’re all over you,” he explained.

I found it telling that Tommy had revealed his master plan to me without pretense. I knew he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but still…

“Oh, come on,” he said. “If it’s awful, you can hate me.”

I already hated him, so it wasn’t much of a temptation. But a perverse part of me wanted to see how the vampires were portrayed. Were we given any remnants of humanity or were we just killing machines?

“Okay,” I finally agreed.

Tommy started his mother’s Mercury Sable. “The tickets are on me,” he said, displaying his high school version of gallantry.

I gave him my most dazzling smile. I could tell by the way his eyes lit up that making Tommy fall in love with me wasn’t going to be much of a challenge.

When we entered the theater lobby, the smell of popcorn was in the air. I suddenly realized something; I had been so focused on acquiring and drinking blood that I had completely forgotten about mortal food. And suddenly I desperately wanted to eat. Tommy must have noticed me drooling as I gaze in the direction of the snack bar because he asked, “Did you want to get something?” He looked a little uncomfortable and I could tell he was thinking about the contents of his wallet.

I almost said, “You paid for the tickets so I’ll get the popcorn,” or something like that. But then I quickly remembered that the whole point of our date was for me to make Tommy miserable while also falling madly in love with me. So instead I smiled and said, “I would kill for a tub of popcorn. And maybe some Sno-Caps.”

“Oh… kay.” Tommy gave me a pained smile as we got in line for the concession stand.

The popcorn smelled so good that I couldn’t wait to toss a handful into my mouth. But as soon as I did, I regretted it. The kernels felt like Styrofoam and tasted like cardboard. I grabbed a coke to try to wash it down, but that was even worse. It was like drinking hydrogen peroxide or something, all burning and gross. There was no way I could swallow any of it. I had to spit it out into one of the lobby trash cans.

“What’s wrong?” Tommy asked.

“Nothing.” I assured him. “I just bit my tongue.”

I was very disappointed and a little depressed. Movie popcorn used to be one of my favorite treats. And I still craved popcorn in theory, but actually trying to eat it was disgusting. It was kind of like a phantom limb for food memory. I wondered if I was going to spend eternity craving foods that I couldn’t eat. That would definitely suck. I was going to have to ask Dorian about it, if I ever got a chance to see him again.

I tried to turn my thoughts away from Dorian. I would just have to practice not loving him and eventually I would learn to not love him. Or at least I hoped I would learn. It seemed like a long, miserable road, but it was apparently the only road available to me.

“Come on,” Tommy said, taking my hand. “Let’s grab our seats before all the good ones are gone.”

Apparently there weren’t a ton of things for teenagers to do in small-town Ohio. It seemed like half of our high school class was in the theater. And most of them seemed to be whispering about Tommy and me.

“There they are,” I heard one girl say.

Her friend responded with, “Are they together? What happened to Sheila?”

“It’s a little thing called karma,” the first girl said with a gleeful laugh.

So I wasn’t the only person at Tiburon High who wanted to shove Sheila’s head in a bucket. That made me feel a little better.

“Who’s that chick?” I heard some guy ask.

“No idea, dude,” his buddy said in reply. “But I bet you she’s from out of town.”

“She’d have to be.”

Then there were a couple of boys trying to get Tommy’s attention. “Dude! Hey Sherman. Tommy,” they kept calling. I could tell my date was doing his best to ignore them.

Finally one of his buddies crossed the line by calling out, “Hey Tommy. You gonna hit that tonight or what?”

I immediately wanted to tear the guy’s throat out. But much to my surprise, Tommy leapt to my defense. “Shut up, Lenny,” he snarled. “Don’t make me beat your ass.”

I couldn’t believe Tommy was defending me. Especially after the way he’d been so awful about showing everybody the blood stain on the back seat of his mother’s car. I had to wonder what I would have thought of Tommy if I didn’t already know him and this was our first date. Probably I would find him rather gallant. It made me understand how women could date men who were obviously jerks. The jerkiness was just being temporarily concealed from them, even though the rest of the world could see it.

By the time the movie was about to begin, the theater was packed. I was beginning to realize that being crammed into a room with a bunch of young mortals was a horrible mistake. I could no longer smell the popcorn or distract my brain with thoughts of avenging myself on Tommy. I could only smell all the fresh, healthy bodies and think about how delicious their blood must taste. I dug my fingernails into the armrests and tried to breathe through my mouth.

Chapter 14

Dorian

Getting rid of Ilona without having to bed her had proved to be quite the challenge. I didn’t want to reveal my feelings for Haley, but I knew I was definitely skating on thin ice with Ilona, no matter what I said.

No one enjoys being rejected, Ilona in particular. The more I resisted her, the more she became adamant that we should be together. At least for old-time sake, she insisted. I knew the smartest thing I could have done was just accommodate her. It was obvious she was testing me for some reason and I think that sleeping with her would have allowed me to ace the test. But I couldn’t. My body rebelled against the very idea. Even if I was willing to take her to my room just to get her out of my hair, I wasn't even clear if I could perform. At least in a way that Ilona would find satisfactory. I cursed the day I had ever courted her in the first place. That had been easily thirty years ago. But some vampires had long memories.

I wasn’t even convinced that Ilona was all that attracted to me. If memory served, she had first pursued my cousin Jessie. But he had rejected her and then she had turned her attentions to me. What a fool I was to give in to a momentary flash of lust. I’d even teased Jessie for his prudishness. But he was the smart one. Ilona didn’t have the best reputation for being rational, for lack of a better term. I was just arrogant enough to assume I could handle it. And I could, for a short amount of time, until her craziness had started to shine through. But now I knew Ilona too well to just casually sleep with her. And I was in love with Haley. Not to mention desperate to protect my scion. Ever single word out of Ilona’s mouth further convinced me that she was up to no good.

There had been an incident when Ilona and I had been together. A situation with a mortal that was very telling of the vampiress and her volatile personality. I’d been at Ilona’s place in New York. She was dressing for a party we were to attend that evening and I was sitting on her bed, paging through a mortal fashion magazine. There was a series of photos that all featured the same young woman. I idly commented to Ilona that I thought the girl had “a good look.” I didn’t say she was beautiful or attractive or anything. I just thought she had a strong presence for fashion work.

Ilona snatched the magazine out of my hand and glared at the images. “Is that the kind of mortal you go for?” she demanded. “She fills you with desire?”

“No,” I assured her. “I don’t go for any mortals. You know I prefer the undead.”

“Right.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Just as long as you remember that.”

It was about two weeks later that I noticed an article in the news reporting on an up-and-coming model who had been murdered in a rather gruesome fashion. The police had no leads and were asking members of the public to come forward if they knew anything. I did a double-take when I saw the poor dead girl’s photo. It was the young woman who I had pointed out to Ilona.