ReVamped (2 page)

2

I nearly balked when I saw the governmentally supplied apartment I’d been given as goth-girl Geneva Belfry. It reminded me of a postage stamp, and not the large commemorative kind either. My sink and shower were so close that I could brush my teeth and wash my hair at the same time. I guess undercover operatives posing as goth girls who’d divorced their parents didn’t exactly rate penthouse suites. But still, did it have to smell like feet?

At least it was stocked to the gills with the elixir of life—blood. The real thing, brown-bottled for my convenience. It was a far cry from the rush of drinking straight from the vein, but had the advantage of the Feds’ super-secret supplements. The blood was apparently infused with a sort of sunscreen potion that would allow us to stay awake during the day and even face brief bouts of sunlight, but for all we knew, it could be laced with tracers to help them track us or some kind of nanobots that could kill us remotely if we disobeyed orders. That wasn’t me but Bobby talking, when they’d first briefed us on the blood. Personally, I figured that if the government wanted to get to us, they would, one way or another. I wasn’t going to sweat it. I had bigger things to worry about, like what the hell I was going to wear. Because you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

I used to plan for the first day of school weeks in advance. My besties Becca and Marcy and I would put in hours of power-shopping and coordinating outfits, giving each other facials, manicures … the works. But Becca had been left behind in Ohio with the rest of the living, if you could call it that, and Marcy was off on a mission of her own. So, I was facing a new school all by myself with no one to play mirror for me, which barely mattered, really, because my wardrobe looked like something out of an old black-and-white horror film. There wasn’t a single gem-tone, sparkle, or spangle in the whole batch of government-issued threads.

After discarding a dozen outfits, I finally chose a baby doll T-shirt that at least had some form to it and expressed exactly the way I was feeling:
Bite Me
. The “i” in “Bite” was dripping blood. I paired it with a pleated skirt that wasn’t too hideous and a pair of fishnet stockings and examined my shoe selection. I nearly called the whole thing off right there—sneakers with flaming skulls, matte black high-tops, combat boots, platform Mary Janes. That they even
made
platform Mary Janes was a travesty of epic proportions.

I tried to think of the mission. Fashion faux pas were a small price to pay … right? I mean, I’d gone so far as flats when we went up against the vampire council, like, a lifetime ago. And no one had died … at least not due to the sorry state of my shoes.

Besides, with all the weirdness at school, probably no one would even notice what I wore. And at least my hair was already naturally black, so I didn’t have to put up with a bad dye-job to match my new secret self. I pulled my hair into two even ponytails like the goth girl from
NCIS
, who I was using as a model since she was kind of cool, if way too perky to live.

Makeup was going to be a problem. Before we were split up following training, Marcy and I had practiced putting makeup on ourselves, using each other for feedback. I’d gotten decent marks on eyeliner and lipstick, but mascara was a lost cause. Despite their advances, even the Feds couldn’t quite figure out why vamps didn’t have reflections, or find a way to reverse the effect. “It’s magic” didn’t satisfy even the people whose undercover ops involved remote viewing research, psychic phenomena, and the under-dead. Anyway, I figured it shouldn’t be a problem unless lurking in ladies’ rooms became a big part of my job description.

Cringing as I did it, I strapped on the platform Mary Janes and tried to own the look and my new name.
Geneva Belfry
, world-weary super goth, been there, done that, didn’t bother to buy the T-shirt. Piece of cake. Devil’s food.

I grabbed my death’s head backpack, basic black of course, left the apartment with its thrift-store furniture and funny smell, and started on my way to school in my governmentally supplied wheels, a white-and-primer-colored Nissan with a gazillion miles on it and a
Dracula Is My Co-Pilot
bumper sticker. If Agents Stick and Stuffed had a sense of humor between them, I’d have thought they were kidding, but I didn’t think they were big into irony.

The Feds had already transmitted their forged records to my new school, which I’d learned was, like, two hours from a city with actual culture—Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor,
Tiffany’s
. Who even knew that there was a whole state outside of New York City? Or that vast stretches of it were Edward Scissorhands suburbia or even, get this, farm and horse country. Wappingers Falls’ big claim to fame, Bobby’d told me with glee, was that it was mentioned in some
Law and Order
episodes as a place where suspects or their families lived. As claims to fame went, that was almost as lame as
Washington Slept Here
. I mean, if he’d done something really exciting, maybe, but sleep? I did it all the time. No one had ever put up a plaque.

Anyway, the main office of Maureen Benson High was located just off the entrance on the short side of the L. It took a moment for the woman behind the counter to stop chatting with a coworker and take my name. Her shockingly red head bobbed up and down as she examined me.

“Bite me?” she asked, looking pointedly at my shirt.

“No thanks,” I answered, “I’ve already eaten.”

“Tastes like chicken,” a voice behind me added, thick with masculine amusement.

I turned to see a guy also dressed in basic black—jeans, T-shirt, and combat boots—and wearing more chains than a bike rack. He had one piercing through his right brow, a thick chrome bar, and five more piercings marching up his left ear, and he was totally wicked hot. Instead of the blue eyes that were my usual weakness, his were a dark and intense brown to go with his dark brows and the out-of-control hair that half fell into his eyes. I wanted to run my fingers through it—just to test the thickness, of course, but that sort of thing tended to give guys ideas.

“Hey,” I said instead, loading it with just the right amount of
come here often?
to keep him interested. After all, I needed to start making friends … or at least contacts. Maybe even minions.

“Hey, yourself. You new?” Goth Guy asked.

The administration lady gave him the same hairy eyeball she was giving me, but went off in a huff when he refused to react.

“New to you,” I answered.

He smiled, slow and lazy and stunning. “Ulric,” he said, extending a hand.

The lady returned and handed over a form, which Goth Guy—Ulric—grabbed out of her hand before I could. I noticed his nails matched mine, matte black, but that wasn’t bonding enough to keep me from ripping my schedule back from him.

“There something you need, Toby?” the administration lady asked, a bite to her tone. I don’t think she was defending me so much as hoping she could clear her office of both of us at once.

He colored up until he matched the fake blood dripping down my shirt. “No one calls me that,” he answered through clenched teeth.

“Yes, they do,” she said, the homeroom bell punctuating her comment.

I did my best to pretend that I was totally absorbed in my schedule and not paying them any attention, and I absolutely did not let a smile flicker across my face.

“Anyway,” he said with a sneer, “I’m just here to meet the new blood. Saw you through the window,” he added to me in a whisper, with a shrug toward the Plexiglas office walls.

Administration lady huffed. “Well, as long as you’re here, you can show Geneva around.”

“You’ll write me a pass?” he asked.

“Is that what you were really after, Mr. Erickson?”

He shrugged, but she wasn’t really waiting for an answer and had already started writing a million miles a minute. She tore a pink sheet off something that looked like a doctor’s pad and handed it over to Ulric, who took it with one hand, took my arm with the other, and marched us out of there.

I shook off his hand outside the office and glared at him. Apparently he had enough ideas of his own, without help from me. Rarely a good thing—guys thinking for themselves.

“So,
Geneva
, eh? For real?” he asked, ignoring my death-ray glare, which, sadly, had no effect. My powers just didn’t roll that way. Stupid powers.

I sighed, but I figured he got that a lot. “For real. My parents named me after the place I was conceived.”

“Classy,” Ulric said, pushing hair out of his eyes.

It seemed a perfect lead-in to my cover story. “Yeah, just one of my many grievances against them.”
Grievances
—I’d learned that word straight out of the portfolio. My parents, the real ones, would be so proud. You know, if I weren’t dead to them and all.

“At least you got a cool name out of it.”

Whatever weirdness was going on in the school, Ulric sure didn’t seem affected. Not that I really knew him or anything, but so far he didn’t reek of mind control or zombification.

“So, you just moved here with your folks?” he asked.

“Yes and no,” I answered, distracted by the sight of Bobby and Rick being led around by a swimsuit-model type with a perky little ponytail and scarlet sheath dress I’d vault sales racks to possess. In short, she was a bleached blond version of me, pre-vamping. If Bobby saw me at all, he gave no sign of it. Even though I knew he was probably just playing up his cover identity, it killed me to see him watching that hypnotic little ponytail bobbing as the Prissy Princess led the way. After all, I already knew she was his type. What if our assignment dragged on and he got bored of not being able to be with me and—

“You know them?” Ulric asked.

I must have been staring.
Wow,
I thought to myself,
way to be subtle
.

I recovered quickly. “No. Just wondering how many flies she’s swatted with that tail.”

“Who, Hailee? Couldn’t say. She’s always got so many buzzing around her.”

I made a face.

“My thoughts exactly. So, what amazing sights do you want to see? The gym? The library? The place where we all hang out for smokes between classes?” he asked.

“No, no, and yes.”

Here’s the thing—I didn’t smoke. It colors your teeth and makes your clothes stink, totally negating the positive effects of scented body wash, but it wasn’t like I was going to die of lung cancer or anything if I did. By nature, I didn’t even have to inhale. If I needed to light up to be in with the in crowd, I could take it.

Ulric led me through the long arm of the L toward a door halfway down that was propped open—and probably shouldn’t have been—by a piece of cardboard. I patted myself on the back for learning already that the school was a long way from being secure. He didn’t even look around stealthily before pushing straight through, which was either smart, since they taught us in super spy school to always look like you had every right to be exactly where you were since it put people off their game,
or
incredibly stupid, because by being smart he raised my suspicions. I could only almost follow my logic myself. I could just see myself trying to explain it to Agent Stick-up-her-butt.

I’d call suspicion an occupational hazard, but I’d always had a strict guilty-until-proven-innocent policy of my own. Especially with guys. Especially after my very
ex
-boyfriend Chaz slammed my side of his car into a tree on prom night, leading to the whole death trip. It also didn’t help that my current boy toy, Bobby, hadn’t told me when we hooked up that he had a communicable blood disease—as in the need to drink it on a regular basis. Not that it had worked out too badly for me really.

Just outside the propped door was a rock garden nestled where the two wings of the school joined. Or a boulder garden, more like. Bright flowers had been planted around the stones, but they were struggling to hold their own. They looked like they’d been trampled a time or two. On the largest boulder sat a single figure with her back toward us. Not smoking. I could tell because (a) no smoke—kind of a dead giveaway—and (b) she was singing. Hard to do both at the same time.

The girl’s voice was haunting, and for a second she seemed to be a siren, sitting on a dangerous outcropping of rock, singing sailors to their doom. Damn, Bobby was rubbing off on me. That was a
him
thought if I’d ever heard one.