“Doesn’t apply to repeat offenders,” Zach smirked.
“Shut up, Zach,” I said. “Shouldn’t Zach have to join us for this? I mean, I don’t see why he isn’t as suspicious as I am.”
“Hello? Alibi?” Zach said, tossing his head annoyingly so his hair resettled in that shiny, perfect way it always does.
“Don’t you worry about Zach,” Olympia said. She steered me towards the den and Zach gave me a smug salute as he sauntered up the stairs. “Zach is not your problem, Kira.”
But she’s wrong about that. Zach is most definitely my problem, and with my luck, he always will be.
Because I’m the one who made him a vampire.
IMET ZACH ON the first day at my first new school. My previous school, not Luna. It was my first day as a vampire high school student. That was a year ago. Obviously we’d had to move away from my hometown in Michigan; I couldn’t exactly keep flitting around Ann Arbor after I’d supposedly died in a car accident. So Olympia relocated us all down South – apparently vampires are used to moving a lot, so no one in the family complained – and signed me up to redo junior year at a new school.
I’d never moved before. I’d lived my whole life in Ann Arbor and always known the same people. Plus I’d never had to deal with hiding a part of my identity before. But I tried to be like, OK, so we’re in Georgia. I can do this. I’m not just the new girl. I’m a vampire. I don’t have to be afraid of mean girls and gossip any more. I could snap their necks in half – er, not that I will or anything – but it’s nice to know that I can. Plus I’m going to live forever. I might as well start acting like it.
That was the pep talk running through my head for the thousandth time when I finally found my locker that morning, which took a while because there was a guy leaning on it and blocking the number. He grinned down at me. He smelled like testosterone and basketballs.
“Move,” I said.
“Ooo, feisty and gorgeous,” he said, not moving. “Just how I like ’em.”
“Ooo, beefy and stupid,” I said. “Add sweaty and we’ll have a trifecta.”
“I’ll have a trifecta with you any time,” he said, leering. I rolled my eyes. The equally thick-headed guy he was waiting for snickered and closed his locker, which was two over from mine.
“Good one,” the thick-headed guy said. “Let’s go.”
“You go on,” Zach said. “I think I’m about to get lucky.”
“Yeah, you are,” I said. His eyebrows waggled. “Lucky that I don’t want to get kicked out, so I’m not going to kill you today.”
“Oooooo,” Zach said, which maybe should have tipped me off that we’d hit the outer limits of his witty repartee. But just then the bell rang and the hall started to empty, which distracted me.
“Move. Now.” I gave him my best steely-eyed vampire glare.
“Or what?” he said, crossing his arms as the last couple of kids hurried into their classrooms.
“I’m glad you asked,” I said. In my head I was like, You know what, I’m a freaking vampire. I have super-strength, hardly anything can kill me, and if I get in trouble we’ll just move again. Why hold back?
So I threw him into a janitor’s closet and locked him in while I went to Chemistry.
He was sitting on an overturned bucket when I got back, listening to his iPod. He grinned like a pirate when I opened the door and slipped inside.
“I knew you’d come back,” he said.
“You’d have looked pretty silly if I didn’t,” I said.
“You needed another piece of this pie, didn’t you?” Zach pointed to himself with an oh, yeah expression.
“You’re much cuter when you don’t talk,” I said, and kissed him in the dark.
I didn’t really mean to encourage his alpha-male obnoxiousness. I mainly wanted to shut him up. And also I wanted to see what would happen. I’d never dated a guy like this. My one and only boyfriend back when I was alive was the sweet, sensitive type who took, like, three years just to ask me out.
Plus, when dealing with a guy like Zach, it was nice to have super-strength. Like, for instance, when I found his hands instantaneously roaming to my butt.
“OW!” he yelped as I flung him into a shelf of toilet paper.
“I make the rules,” I said. “Got it? You touch only what I want you to touch.”
“Can I have a list?” he said, recovering quickly. “With descriptive details, please?”
“Seriously, shut up,” I said. I pushed him into the wall, twisted his hands behind his back and held them there while I kissed him again. His kisses were very enthusiastic. And he didn’t try to free himself, so I figured he’d be easy to train.
He was really warm, and he tasted kind of salty and sweet at the same time. Before I knew what I was doing, my mouth went to his neck. I licked his skin lightly and he shuddered. I could feel my canine teeth sliding out. The blood in his veins pulsed under my tongue.
I realised I wasn’t in lust at all. I was hungry.
“You,” Zach whispered in my ear, “are the hottest, most psycho girl I’ve ever met.”
His voice stopped me just before my teeth grazed his skin. What was I doing?
I dropped his hands and jumped away from him as if he had holy water running through his veins. Olympia had warned me that it would be hard once I was around mortals all day long, especially attractive, young mortals. But it didn’t even occur to me that kissing could lead so quickly to wanting to bite someone. Especially someone whom I did not by any means want to turn into a vampire.
That was one of the rules Olympia had lectured me about over and over again: “You bite it, you bought it.” We were responsible for anyone we turned into a vampire. That’s how we survive. If we let new vampires wander loose with no idea of the rules, they’d be staked in no time and the rest of the world would soon catch on that we exist.
It is possible to bite someone and leave them alive, but it’s dangerous and hard to do – Olympia says once you start to drink, it’s almost impossible to stop yourself before your prey is dead. And even if you do stop, the victim probably will have figured out what you are, and that’s not great for us either.
I was lucky that Zach couldn’t see my teeth in the darkness of the closet. I covered my face and tried to force them back down to normal. Don’t think about feeding. Don’t think about feeding.
“Wait,” Zach said, groping for me with his hands outstretched. “Don’t stop. What happened?”
“I lost interest,” I said, stepping out of his reach. My fingers were trembling, but I kept my voice level. “Too bad for you. Now stay away from my locker.” And I got out of there as quickly as I could.
I probably should have guessed that this wouldn’t shut down Zach. If anything, it made him even more interested. I started finding him at my locker every morning when I got there, usually with chocolate. My guess is, he read in some men’s magazine that girls like chocolate, because he really stuck with that theory.
I ignored him for the first week. He loved it