Suck It Up and Die (21 page)

He nodded in approval. “My side did as well. Trudi launched a new website: Takebackthebite.com.”

Becky-Dell spread her hands. “What’s the point? I’ll have the BVA shut that down too.”

“Appearances are everything,” he answered. “Which reminds me, I need to tell you our next move. It involves a juicy invitation.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “A juicy invitation? It better not be from you to me.”

He laughed at her paranoia tinged with flirtation. “Please, Ms. Wallace, keep me focused on the mission.”

She answered with a self-satisfied smirk. “So, what’s this juicy invitation?”

“It’s for someone with an itch for exsanguination.”

“Drop the vampire-speak,” she said, back to her scowling disapproval. “Speak American.”

“A need to bleed.”

At St. Giles, Morning sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the earth-shattering text on his phone.

His eyes scanned the text until the screen became the black mirror of his mind.
Why are all my dreams turning to crap?
he fretted.
I’m one demerit away from being expelled, and now my eternal beloved, who turned into my eternal befriended, can’t even meet me for breakfast!

He tossed the phone on his desk and threw himself on the bed. Even if he could have slept, he was tempted to turn his alarm off. Then he could just get it over with.
I’d be late for school, Clancy would expel me, and I could go back to what I was doing before I met everyone who screwed up my life: Birnam, Portia, Clancy, the whole dream-crushing bunch. I’d spend my pathetic eternity reading every superhero comic book ever written, and seeing every TV show and movie made about ’em
.

Despite his misery, a phrase from Portia’s text kept bumping in his mind like a blind bumping against the window on a windy night.
Gotta earn my death!
He wondered if there was a vampire equivalent.
Earn my slaying?
He tried to imagine what it would be like if—with a stake in his heart and facing the fires of annihilation—he had a moment to look back on his vampire life and ask,
Any major regrets?

The answer came in a flash.
Portia. I’d regret not seeing her every chance I got. But does it count as a regret if you can’t control it?
The answer was obvious.
No, Portia has a will of her own
.

He narrowed his regrets to the actions he could control. The first that flashed in his mind was Prowler. He imagined the grizzled firefighter learning that Morning had been expelled from the academy. Why? Because of the lamest screwup of all: he hadn’t shown up for class. The disappointment he imagined on Prowler’s face was the big regret Morning had been looking for.

He wasn’t going to get expelled because of a self-inflicted wound. He was going to get his ass out of bed in the morning and go to school. He was going to go down fighting. He was going to suck it up and
earn his expulsion
!

In another bed, on the Upper East Side, Zoë held the thick white card and read it for the umpteenth time.

She had fingered the card for so long one edge had begun to fray. As she nervously flicked the splitting edge, it separated further. She peeled away the back of the card. It was another invitation, identical to the top one. And this one also split. Zoë stared at three invitations. Whether the cards had been accidently stuck together or DeThanatos had wanted her to have three, she didn’t know. All she
knew was that in less than forty-eight hours, she was going to have her first cozy encounter with a vampire. She held the invitation to her chest, closed her eyes, and softly sang a bit of her favorite song. “Bloodlustin’ free—wish I could be / Part of that world.”

The alarm jarred Morning awake. He was still wearing his clothes from the day before.

He pulled on fresh pants and a new shirt, which he buttoned up and tucked in. He checked himself in the mirror over his dresser. Noticing something sticking from the shirt near the top button and thinking it was a loose thread, he plucked at it. “Ow!” He yelped from the sting on his chest. He undid the button and pulled the shirt apart.

He stared in shock. It was no loose thread. It was a dark, squiggly chest hair. And there wasn’t just one, there were three. Sure, he had body hair where a sixteen-year-old should, but this was his first
chest hair
!

The door to his room suddenly opened. He spun around as he fumbled for his top button. “Jeez, Sister—”

Zoë stood in the doorway with a backpack slung over her shoulder. “Oops, sorry, A.M. Sister Flora said you’d be dressed already and it was okay to come up.”

“How would she know?” Morning snapped. “Does she have a camera in here?”

“O-kay”—Zoë shrank back in mock fear—“someone woke up on the crappy—” Her mouth froze when her eyes fell on the squigglies escaping from Morning’s shirt. She raised a finger, pointing at his chest. “Is that what I think it is?”

Realizing his shirt was still undone, Morning quickly buttoned it, covering his new bodily additions. “It’s nothing. What are you doing here?”

Zoë decided to give him a breather before she got back to the mysterious sighting on his chest. She swung the backpack off her shoulder. “One, I’ve got some daily doses of red stuff, and I was hoping I could start a blood stash here.”

“You’ve already got a stash in Portia’s locker and at her house,” he protested. “Why do you need one here?”

“If the Take Back the Bite movement dooms the VRA, I’m thinking prohibition of blood products will be next. And if I’m flipped by the time they start yanking blood products off the shelves, I’m gonna be prepared.”

Morning eyed her suspiciously. “What makes you think you’re gonna get turned anytime soon?”

For a second Zoë was tempted to tell him about her Tasting Room invitation, but she knew he would try to talk her out of it. “Even if I’m still a Lifer,” she said, unzipping her backpack, “I’ll be able to sell this stuff to blood-starved Leaguers.” She turned the pack upside down and a dozen cans and plastic containers of blood products tumbled onto Morning’s bed. “Who knows, you might even need it.”

“You know I only drink Blood Lite.”

“You say that now.” She felt the long object still zipped up in her backpack’s outside pocket. “The second reason
I came— Wait a minute, it’s your turn. Since when do you have
chest hair
?”

Her verbal pirouette caught him off guard, but only for a second. “I always had a little.”

“No you didn’t. Last summer, at the beach, I checked out your chest—I was amazed that it was as bony as mine,” she interjected by way of explanation, “and there wasn’t a chest hair in sight.”

“Yes there was,” Morning claimed. “You just didn’t see ’em ’cause they’d been bleached by the sun.”

“Nice try, A.M., but I know what I saw, and I know vampires don’t do growing.” Zoë threw a glance back at the doorframe to see if the markings she’d noticed on a previous visit were still there. She tossed the backpack on the bed, grabbed Morning, and shoved him toward the door.

“Hey!” Morning protested. He resisted, but she was amazingly strong for being so small and bony.

She slapped a hand on top of his head and held it against the frame. He scooted away, but too late. Her fingers touched the doorframe where Sister Flora had marked Morning’s height until he had been turned at sixteen. Zoë’s fingertips rested a half inch above the last mark.

“You’re growing more than chest hair.” Her wide eyes moved to his. “What’s going on?”

He wished he knew. He wanted to brush off the chest hair as a stress thing: Lifers got hives, maybe vampires got werewolfie and broke out in stress hair. He
had
been under lots of stress. But the height thing was different. Lately, he’d noticed his pant legs did seem shorter. He had dismissed it as laundry shrinkage. Until now.

He shut the door against eavesdroppers. “I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe I’ll find out today from Birnam, but you can’t tell
anyone
about this. Especially Portia.”

“Sure, fine,” Zoë conceded as her mind rocketed through the possible repercussions of this development. “But if for some bizarre reason your body’s, like, rejecting immortality, and you’re growing again, don’t you get what that means? You and Portia could—”

He didn’t let her finish. “I don’t know if I’m rejecting immortality. For all I know I have that disease where people age super fast and I’ll be ninety-five next week. You have to promise you won’t tell her.”

“Okay, okay, but I’m still trying to wrap my brain around this. I mean, whoever heard of a vampire turning mortal? It could be a new species. Right now, you’re turning into a
Liger
: half Lifer, half Leag—no, that’s taken: half lion, half tiger. I got it! You’re a
Leafer
: half Leaguer, half Lifer!” She sprang toward him. “How much do you think you’ve changed? Can you still grow fangs? C’mon, give it a try.”

He waved his hands in exasperation. “You can’t grow fangs on cue. You have to be inspired.”

Zoë pulled down her collar and thrust her neck at him. “Do anything for you?”

He stepped back. “Zoë, I don’t have time for this.”

“Not even if you think of Portia?”

He slipped around her. “Put your stash wherever. I gotta get to school.” He opened the door and took off.

Taking up her backpack, Zoë unzipped the side pocket and pulled out a croquet stake. It was the other reason she had come. She placed it on Morning’s pillow. “Porsche, you’re still my best bud, but you’re a total wimp for not doing this yourself.” She straightened up, lost in thought. “And you have no clue what you’re doing, especially now.”

Morning got through the day at the academy without collecting his death demerit, as he had named it. After school, he headed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By late afternoon, the Medieval Gallery was practically empty. Morning wandered through the rooms filled with paintings of Christ and statues of saints. Passing through a special exhibit on the Crusades, he noticed an old man sitting on a bench with his forehead resting on a cane. Morning didn’t give him a second glance as he headed for the next room.

The old man muttered, “What’s the rush, sonny?”

Morning turned back. Above the man’s white beard was a gaunt face, ash white and deeply grooved with wrinkles that ran up his forehead and mingled with his thin white hair. He looked like an albino prune. Morning answered the man as he backed toward the next room. “Just looking for someone.”

The man spoke again, his voice stronger. “You found him.”

Morning stopped; he recognized the voice, but it didn’t match the face. The old man’s intense eyes, fixed on him, sparked recognition. “Mr. Birnam?”