LEGIONS OF THE DARK (VAMPIRE NATIONS CHRONICLES) (11 page)

He laughed, passing her by, heading for his room. "Yeah, it's a joke. I don't remember what I thought about. Girls, maybe."

She had to remember he'd changed two years before, so he was fourteen now even though he didn't look it. He was definitely in the girl stage. Some things stayed the same.

"I have some questions," she said, following on his heels.

He plopped down on his twin-sized bed, swinging his feet up, and put his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. "Shoot."

He closed his eyes and didn't respond for several seconds. Finally, he said, "Mentor discussed that with me. He'll get around to it with you, too."

She had been afraid of that. Ryan Major's face floated into her mind. The boy who had just transferred to her school and who, before she'd changed, she had been hoping to find a way to meet. He didn't even know her yet. And now he probably never would. Some other girl, a cheerleader no doubt, would snag his attention and Dell would be lonely. All of her life! All of her many lives!

She sank down onto the side of her brother's bed. He moved his legs over to make room for her. "Do our kind ever fall in love? With another vampire, maybe?"

"I'm asking you!" She hit one of his legs with her fist. How come he was still a pesky kid brother? She wished he was thirty and smart.

"Well, I'm not thirty," he said, reading her mind. "But I am smart." He grinned widely. "Mentor said . . ." He paused.

Dell gave up. She rose from the bed and stomped out of the room to show her displeasure. She didn't want to talk about love and boys and marriage anyway. It had just come to her, that's all. What did he think, that she cared?

Eddie was sitting on the living room sofa holding his book bag when she entered the room.

"I wish you'd stop that." She meant how he appeared somewhere else all of a sudden. She'd left him on his bed and yet here he was in the living room.

She found the remote and turned on the TV. "I hate TV," she said, feeling petulant and wanting to criticize everything around her.

"Then don't watch it."

She saw him open a notebook and begin turning the pages rapidly. In less than two minutes he closed it again and stuffed it back into the book bag.

She studiously ignored him. So what if she couldn't do anything with her powers yet? So what if there was no point in trying to talk to Ryan Major? She flipped the channel changer, going through various HBO cable channels. All the movies were either action flicks or romantic comedies. She was not in the mood for either.

"You're seriously pissed, aren't you?" Eddie asked. She changed the channel again.

"Look, there's more to it than what I said. You'll just have to talk to Mentor about these things."

"Okay!" She mashed the channel changing button hard and saw the CNN news come on. She left it there, watching pictures of a flood in Ohio.

"No point in getting mad at me. It's not my idea. I'm left out in the cold, too, you know."

Dell reconsidered. Her temper, like every other emotion, seemed set on a hair trigger. "I'm sorry. I know it's not your fault. All this takes getting used to, that's all."

Weezy. That almost made her laugh. He liked to be playful with her, rhyming a name for her with whatever he was saying at the moment. She expected some day he'd get to say, "There's a hitch, Bitch."

She watched him go, this time the normal way, one step at a time. She heard the front door shut. She was left with CNN and a reporter in hip boots and a yellow rain slicker.

The first day back at school Dell was as nervous as a goose stranded in the center of a freeway. Cheyenne, one of her friends from her neighborhood, was waiting for her at the front entrance before classes started. "I tried to call, but your mom said you were in bed. What's up?"

"Well, that's what my mom would say. She said she saw it on some TV show about girls who get bad cramps. Hormones are all screwed up. A couple shots—boom!—everything back to normal."

"Sounds drastic to me." In fact, she wondered about that. Would she menstruate? For what reason? She'd never have children if she could never have a boyfriend. Oh, God, she couldn't ask Mentor about that. She'd have to talk to her mother. She sighed aloud, and Cheyenne looked over at her.

"You all right?"

"I'm fine. Just a little tired."

They walked under a cool portico out of the hot spring sun, and then through the entrance doors into the building. School would end in three weeks, thank God. She didn't know if she could stand being indoors even that long. The long dark hallway illuminated by overhead fluorescent lights was oppressive to her, and the sounds of the lockers banging open and shut sounded like an orchestra's percussion section had gone cymbal-mad.

"Come on, Cheyenne. You know how your mom is." Cheyenne's mom had been pushing odd cures and potions on her daughter's friends since they were in first grade together. Dell opened her locker and took out the books for her first class, English with Mr. Dupree.

Cheyenne nodded as she waited by Dell's locker. Her attention had strayed down the hallway where she looked for Bobby, her boyfriend. He sometimes walked her to her own locker where they could sneak a quick kiss behind the locker door. Dell envied her now more than ever. She didn't have to think in order to breathe. She would get married and have someone to love her forever. And she had a head of luxuriant short black hair that rivaled the darkest night. Dell's own wild, slightly kinky red-blonde hair was like a bright beacon signaling rocky shoals ahead whereas Cheyenne's hair was sexy and sleek.

Cheyenne didn't see Bobby yet, so she turned back to Dell, who was moving down the hall shoulder to shoulder with the other kids. She caught up with her. "My mom, yeah, my mom's got a cure for everything and that cure means doctors, new treatments, herbal therapy, or vinegar. Did I tell you she thinks vinegar is heaven's elixir? She takes two tablespoons of the stuff every morning. Never mind what I said. You look good in those sunglasses anyway. If you had on black clothes, you could almost be one of Loder's gang."

"Heaven preserve us!" Dell exclaimed, laughing.

Loder's group were outcasts in the predominately white, Christian, middle class Lyndon B. Johnson High. They wore only black, were into leather—even in this heat—always kept on their sunglasses, and she'd even heard some of them had split off into their own little cult and were into vampirism. She shuddered. She could show them vampire! She could bring a Predator into class that would make them cower and wet their seats.

She had a great loathing for kids who pretended they were searching for death and immortality. They were wayward children, totally disillusioned and, not only that, but they were silly. Black clothes and sunglasses weren't going to make them live forever. It was just . . . crazy. It was just . . . sad.

"Mr. Dupree's gonna notice, though," Cheyenne was saying. They both shared Dupree's first period. He wasn't a bad teacher, but he was pompous as hell. He made the kids who dressed strangely his scapegoats, quoting Byron and teasing them about being displaced in history by a few hundred years. "You should be over in seventeenth-century England at some castle," he often said in his booming voice and pointing at one kid or another. "Frolicking through stone halls and tossing plum seeds into a cold, dead hearth."

"Let him," Dell said, turning into Dupree's room. "He doesn't scare me."

As it happened, Dupree glanced only once at Dell in her seat in the middle of the classroom, blinked, then looked away. Dell had tried a little mind coaxing. She sent the message to him telepathically: Sunglasses are normal wear. Some students hate the glare off the windows. Keep your business to yourself. It surprised and amazed her that it worked.

It must have worked. He didn't even ridicule Brady or Chignon, the two kids in her class dressed today in tattered black jeans and shirts. He stuck to the program, talking about Texas literature—which was lame, in his opinion—and Southwestern authors in general. Their assignment was to read Larry King's Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, the play. Dell knew she could finish it in under five minutes and besides, she liked the assignment. She'd even been to LaGrange and seen the old tumbledown whorehouse when she was a little girl on a short vacation with her parents.

The day went fine except during History where she sat just one seat in front of Ryan Major. She felt him staring at the back of her neck until she turned around, her index finger going to the centerpiece of her sunglasses. She knew he could see her eyes. But it wasn't her eyes he was interested in. When she turned she watched his gaze fall from her face to her chest. She turned back around immediately and if she could have blushed, she would have. Was he looking at her breasts or had she accidentally stopped breathing? What if she'd forgotten to take breaths? Oh, God, what could he think if she had?

She tried to calm herself. She knew if she wanted, she could peek into his mind. Her history teacher was boring anyway, making the past so dry and brittle no one listened to him. Should she really pry into people's minds? Was it fair?