ReVamped (7 page)

By the time the questioning wound down, I was eying Hunky Cop’s neck like a junkie with the midnight munchies. It was his own fault, really. The coffee he’d had right in front of me probably qualified as cruel and unusual punishment. If he’d been drinking mochachinos, he would have gone down. My willpower only stretched so far.

And, of course, I had to decline even the sodas they offered us because of my blood-only diet. But I probably looked totally tough to the others, like “I don’t want nothin’ from you, Copper.”

Finally, Bella moaned, “
Now
can we see Bram?”

The cops took pity on us. “You go with them,” Crinkly said to his partner. “I want to talk to the girl a second.”

He meant me. I’d faced down worse, though, than a cop in a no-Macy’s town. I wasn’t worried.

Bella, Lily, and Ulric all looked at me to be sure I was okay with that, and I nodded them on.

“Go,” I added. “I’ll be right there.”

Hunky Copy ushered them out, Ulric shooting me backward glances until the door closed behind them.

“Girl,” Crinkly said, calling my attention back to him. “
Geneva
. You’re new here, so possibly you don’t understand the way things work. If someone’s knocking your friend around, you get her out of there. You don’t break some guy’s jaw and another’s arm.” He looked stern, implacable,
serious
.

“Yes, sir,” I answered, even though it hurt to say it. I’d do it again in a second if I had to, and I knew it.

“Good. Anything else happens and your name comes up, I’m locking you away until I can find something to stick you with—jaywalking, underage drinking, fake ID. I don’t like it when trouble rolls into my town.”

He sounded like he was straight out of the old west, but I was smart enough not to crack a smile.

“Understood.”

And finally,
finally
he led me to the others. To Bram.

Ulric tapped Lily on the shoulder, and they both shifted away from Bram’s bedside far enough to make room for me. I thought Ulric needed a second, anyway. He pretended to cough into his sleeve, but I saw him use it to wipe away a tear. I was touched that they’d give up a place for me at the bedside when I really didn’t belong. I was new and I’d failed Bram. I knew it, even if they didn’t. Super-vamp powers came with super responsibility … or something like that. Admittedly, what I remembered most about
Spider-Man
was that upside-down kiss. Oh, and Toby Maguire’s totally hot blue eyes.

But I wasn’t thinking about that right then. I was thinking about kohl-lined chocolate brown eyes and how really awesome it would be to see them open.

“Bram?” I whispered.

His still-perfectly-shaped head didn’t move.

“He’s breathing on his own at least,” Bella said in a hushed voice. “That’s good.”

I didn’t know what it was about hospitals that made everybody—even me—speak in whispers.

Bella was right. An oxygen tube fed into Bram’s nostrils, a heart monitor blipped away and an IV dripped, but he was breathing on his own. There was some kind of doohickey on one index finger that fed stats into yet another monitor, which beeped at intervals. It was a regular medical musical.

“Will he be okay?” I asked, turning to Officer Crinkly.

“That’s for a doctor to say.”

“But you know,” I accused him. “You’ve talked to them.”

He refused to say more, except to ask, “Do you want to see the other kids? The ones you put here?”

I shook my head. I’d had enough. The antiseptic smell of the hospital and the boop-boop of the equipment were overwhelming. It felt like my head might just explode.

None of the others wanted to see the bully boys either. Not surprising. I squeezed Bram’s hand. Lily and Bella gave him a kiss on the forehead—very, very gently—and Ulric teased him about how unconscious guys got all the action. I almost smiled at that. I thought that if Bram were awake, he’d smile too.

7

We went quietly, but as soon as I hit the daylight, I knew I was in trouble. My skin started to burn and itch at the sting of the sun, and I realized that I hadn’t had any of my fortified blood with its sunscreen potion since late last night. It shouldn’t have been a problem. I’d gone longer without blood, but the whole awake-during-daylight thing apparently took more out of me than usual, and I hadn’t been compensating. I hadn’t even realized I needed to. Yet another thing to discuss with my keepers.

Ulric, seeing me wince, took it for emotion—or at least a good excuse to snake an arm around me. The flesh he touched, now shaded, nearly sang with relief.

“You okay?” he asked.

I gave him a sidelong glance. “
I’m
fine, but if
you
need a hug, knock yourself out.”

“Really?”

“Hug only. Bust a move and you’ll pull back a bloody stump. Capisce?” It wasn’t until it was out of my mouth that I realized I was perfectly capable of making it happen. After what Ulric had seen, he probably realized it, too.

“I always knew you were trouble,” he said, as though proud of it.

I smiled feebly and hurried to get to the car, out of the sun and his embrace that much sooner. Not that the hug felt bad. That was the problem. I was seriously in need of some distance. I was with Bobby. Ulric was an assignment, nothing more.

Lily’s phone beeped at her as we got into the car, letting her know she’d missed a message at some point. She checked it as I pulled out.

“Gavin and Byron are fine. The police must have finished with them just before they came for us. They’re hanging out at Gavin’s place,” she reported. “They want us to come by.”

“I’m done in,” I said, “but I’ll drop you all there.”

I was relieved, actually. One stop rather than three meant I could get to Agents Stick and Stuffed and my doctored blood that much the sooner. Get some answers, report on Rick’s rage, maybe even feel Bobby’s arms around me. I needed that in a way that my totally self-sufficient self didn’t want to face.

Once the goth trio disappeared—into a remarkably normal looking whitewashed brick house—I drove like I was headed for a BOGO sale at Bloomies. Probably I should have driven in some kind of crazy, evasive pattern, just in case the police were tailing me or something, but the direct route meant I had a better chance of making it to Stick and Stuffed before I burst into flame. Already my eyeballs were on fire. Note to self: invest in some serious shades, maybe Dolce & Gabbana.

I called ahead to beg Agents S&S to raise the garage door for me so that I could drive right in, but it was Rick-the-rat who answered the phone, snarled at me, and hung up again. I was so relieved to see the doors slide upward at my approach, though, that I almost didn’t want to hurt him.

As darkness closed in on me, I said an instinctive “Thank you, God!” even though I was pretty sure he’d blocked my calls when I went over to the dark side. I prepared to face Rick, who was glaring from the doorway of the house that he and Bobby shared with the Feds like one big, happy, dysfunctional family.

“We have to talk,” I said, glaring back at him.

“Right,” he sneered.

“No kidding,” I continued. “
All
of us.”

He called into the house, “Good thing you’re all here. Her royal highness has summoned us to an audience. All hail the royal slayer of innocents.”

I brushed past him, accidentally swinging an elbow toward his solar plexus. All the air
ooph
ed out of him.

“First of all, I didn’t
slay
anyone,” I informed him. “And second, your guys were attacking
my
peeps, so don’t even try playing the innocent card.”

Three sets of eyes were staring at me as I entered the eat-in kitchen, which was right off the garage. Agent Stuffed had barricaded himself behind a wall of two laptops, a printer, and a stack of paperwork a mile high. Couldn’t be much actual eating being done at that table, not without getting crumbs in the keyboard. Agent Stick poked her head out of the fridge to stare and then blink, shake her head, and stare again. But it was Bobby and his baby blues that really arrested my attention. He was looking at me like I’d just stepped out of a slasher film carrying a bloody chain saw.

“What?” I asked.

“You … you’re kind of, um,
hot
,” Bobby said, rising from his place at the table beside Agent Stuffed.

I blinked. “Well, duh, but—”

“No, I mean you’re smokin’, as in an actual fire hazard. And your skin is kind of, ah, peeling.”

My hands flew up to my face, and I screamed. My skin felt like the outside of a fire-roasted marshmallow.

Agent Stick—Maya—shut the door of the fridge, grabbed a towel from the bar on the front of the stove, and took it to the sink to run cool water on before handing it to me. “Here, try this. I’ll start you a cold shower.”

Hands covering my deformity, I followed her out of the room. “Don’t listen to a word Rick says before I get back!” I commanded.

Behind me I heard Rick laugh and vowed to kill him dead. Really dead. Like Rasputin’s third-time’s-the-charm level dead. Yeah, we’d heard all about Rasputin in spy school. He was the crazy Russian padre who’d advised the last czar and played faith-healer to his son. Assassins tried to take him down during the Russian Revolution. If only they’d staked him or cut off his head instead of poisoning, shooting, and drowning him, the Russians
still
might not know about vampires, and we wouldn’t have had to waste so many spies and resources in that Cold War. The U.S. might even now be a true superpower, instead of just must-see TV for the rest of the world. Anyway, Rick was dead, dead, dead … as soon as I dealt with my really bad chemical peel.

“What happened?” Maya asked, running the water and unable to meet my eyes for long. I was that hideous.

“Too long in the sun. What the hell’s going on with that? I used to only need blood every couple of days or so. Now … look, if I need more to keep from becoming a crispy critter,
you need to say so
.”

“Interesting,” she answered.

“
Interesting
? Is that all you have to say?”

Now she met my eyes. “Look, the potion is experimental. Virtually hot off the presses. Possibly we have to refine—”

“So we’re guinea pigs?” I … well, I didn’t screech. I was brought up better than that.

“We’ve done some trials, of course,” she said coolly, “but it was impossible to be sure of optimum dosages without a field test. So much depends on metabolism, exertion, exposure—”

“Great. Lovely. And, hey, if your test subjects burn up, it’s instant cremation. No messy funeral costs, no covering up the body. Clean. Efficient. Probably even eco-friendly.”

She didn’t even blink. Just showed me to the towels and first aid supplies and let herself out.

Ten minutes later, I’d painfully scrubbed the charred skin from my face, and what was left was a newly grown, baby-fine layer so sensitive the very air hurt it. I couldn’t imagine applying cream. Just like a peek-a-boo blouse, the new skin exposed veins and muscle, ligaments, whatever. I was totally hideous. I could only hope I’d dropped the others off
before
I’d reached the point of extra crispy.

I wrapped a towel around my body, bathhouse style, wrapped another around my head like a turban, and tried to keep my knees from buckling as I let myself back out into the hallway, pressing Maya’s dishtowel to my face again to hide it from prying eyes.

“Got blood?” I asked as I hit the kitchen.

Bobby handed me a mug, pre-warmed, as I sat down beside him, totally without meeting his eyes.

“You’re kind of, ah, under-dressed,” he said. “But I like it.”

“My clothes smell like barbecued me,” I grumped. “Another set for the incinerator. At this rate, by Friday all I’ll have left is my birthday suit.”

“Excuse me?” Agent Stuffed asked.

“Never mind.” I took a sip of the blood, which tasted like Ghirardelli hot chocolate to me right about then. A tingle shot all the way through me, part pain from the healing and part pleasure. I closed my eyes for a second to let the ripple of sensation pass. When I opened them again, everyone was staring.

“So, what shall we talk about first?” I asked. “The fact that the Feds are using us as lab rats for their daylight draught, Rick attacking me today at the hospital, or the weirdness at Red Rock?”

Bobby looked at Rick the way I looked at anyone standing between me and the last size six Manolo Blahniks in fire-engine red. “You attacked her?” he growled. “It
better
have been part of your cover.”

Coming from Bobby, the Neanderthal thing was so … so totally sweet. It wasn’t that I liked macho crap, it was just that I couldn’t imagine Bobby pulling it for anyone but me.

“Whatever,” Rick answered. “She started it.”

“Me?” I asked, incredulous. “How exactly did
I
start it?”

“Children, don’t make me separate you three,” Agent Stick cut in, just like a real mom. “We’ve got bigger problems. Gina, we did some checking after you reported to Bobby yesterday. Read this.”

Agent Stuffed—I was going to have to remember to think of him as Sid before I slipped up in his presence—passed us each a file, which I opened reluctantly, given that the last file had gotten me into all this. It was like a rap sheet on Red Rock. “The events you describe … ” Agent … Sid … went on to summarize what was right there in front of us. “You talk about a power-boosted, out-of-control feeling—well, I researched the location, and Red Rock lies along the same ley line as your school. What’s more, it’s what we call a node. Think of it like a geyser—mostly quiet, but every once in a while it goes off, flares up, like it’s doing now.”

I looked at the dossier. As recently as thirty years ago, it had been the meeting place for some kind of coven. All fun and games, I guessed, until the leader was arrested for the negligent homicide of her own daughter, who’d gotten into her mother’s spell supplies, some of which, like deadly nightshade, had earned their names. Red Rock had made it into the news. Way, way back before that, it had been sacred to the Hopewell Indians, a spot for special ceremonies calling on the Great Sky Father. Clearly a place of power.

“So it’s flaring now?” I asked, shooting a quick glance at Rick. There had to be more to all this. Rick hadn’t been at Red Rock last night with his new buddies. I’d have seen him.

Sid nodded.

“Our equipment still shows the disturbance centered around the school, but it could be radiating outward, activating other hot spots,” Maya said.

“
Or
,” Sid drew the word out, looking at each of us in turn, “the partying brought the place to life—libations poured with every drink spilled. Cuts, nicks, or other forms of bloodletting. Good way to wake a place of power.”

“Good to know,” I said, a lot more flippantly than I felt. I mean, sheesh, when I’d joked about using the force and turning to the dark side, I’d thought I was kidding. Now I had to watch out for
places
as well as people? And what did it mean that Red Rock had
my
blood? I’d walked around barefoot, cut my feet on rocks as I ran to Bella’s aid.

“So, what do we do?” Bobby asked, ever practical.

“Stay away,” Sid said fiercely. “Let it settle. Keep other kids away.”

“Wow, way to be proactive,” I mumbled.

Sid and Maya both glared.

“What does all this have to do with Rick?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Sid admitted. “Rick?”

The man … boy … of the hour looked
pissed
. “How should I know? At lunch some of the guys and I were talking, and we just got more and more worked up, until Red and I decided to cut out, head over to the hospital—”

“Looking for a fight?” I asked.

“What? No! Just checking on our fallen, you know? And then I saw you and all this rage—” His fists clenched, vibrating with barely leashed fury.

We were all staring at him.

“What?” he asked again. “I didn’t
do
anything. She’s still … not breathing … isn’t she?”