CHAPTER 15
“You’ve, um, got a little, um . . .” Clayton pointed to his cheek. “Um, some . . . stuff. Right there.”
We were sitting around the table, Jenny protectively pacing behind me, and Clayton across from me. I grabbed a napkin off the table and dabbed at my mouth. “Better?”
“Better?” Jenny repeated, her voice rising. “Beth, you were drinking blood! And your teeth were pointed!”
“Um, yeah.” I kind of thought we were past that. I mean, wasn’t that the cause of the freak-out in the first place? Wasn’t that why Clayton had tried to kill me? Had my friend really just clued in here? And besides, my teeth weren’t pointed anymore.
“Why?” she asked, sliding into the chair at the head of the table.
I exchanged glances with Clayton. “Vampire,” I said. “Remember? Undead. All those names he called me.”
“Sorry ’bout that,” he said. Then he smiled. And it was a really nice smile. For a guy who’d tried to kill me a few minutes earlier, he was being awfully nice now.
Who knows? Maybe I misjudged him. Maybe Clayton’s not just out to push me off my GPA throne. I mean, I’d sure as heck been wrong about Stephen. So maybe I’d been wrong about Clayton, too.
“Hello?” Jenny said, waving a hand. “You wanna tell me how? How could you be at school one day, perfectly normal. And then be . . .” She trailed off, her hand floating up and down as she gestured to me. “This.”
“Stephen Wills,” Clayton said. “She already said.”
Jenny’s brow furrowed, like she was trying to figure out a really hard algebra problem. “So, Stephen’s the one who, um . . .”
“Made me?” I suggested.
“Well, yeah.” And then she started laughing, which wasn’t the reaction I was expecting.
“Jenny!”
“Sorry. I never thought I’d hear anyone say that Stephen Wills and you made it.”
“Ha-ha. You’re a real comedian, you know that?”
“Honestly! I’m sorry!” She looked contrite, so I forgave her. “It’s just, you know, funny.”
I made a face but decided not to press the point. Instead, I turned to Clayton “How did you know?” I demanded. “And why did you come here? And why did you say there’s still hope?”
He took one of those really deep breaths, then slipped off his flak jacket. He had on a black T-shirt and I noticed that his arms were actually quite buff. Not at all the skinny Clayton I remembered from seventh grade. “I’ll tell you,” he said, taking the stake out of his pocket and setting it on the kitchen table. “But I want to hear your story first. All the details. Who was there. What they said. What they did. Everything you remember.”
“And about the blood,” Jenny said. “I’m like totally jazzed that you didn’t bite me and all, but isn’t that what vamps do? So why were you sucking plastic?”
I made a face that I hoped conveyed just how unpleasant the idea of taking a bite out of a person was. Tempting, but definitely unpleasant.
At any rate, I told them. The whole thing. Lust and Bloody Marys and bites and all. Well, maybe not the lust part. I’d fill Jenny in on those details later, but I was so not talking about my love life in front of Clayton. That was not part of the bargain!
Anyway, I described waking up in the dirt, and burning my finger, and finally making it home only to be trapped outside, and then finally, finally getting inside.
“But then I got so thirsty,” I finished, “that I was on the verge of biting my mom. But I couldn’t do that. I mean, you know,” I said, looking at Jenny.
She nodded. There are at least a million reasons why it would be bad form for the vampire Beth to bite her mom. Jenny understood this. That is one of the reasons that we are such good friends.
“So I called my dad and asked him for the blood.”
Her eyes widened. “Your dad knows you’re a vampire and he didn’t tell you to go ahead and bite your mom?”
“Ha-ha,” I said. “And he doesn’t have a clue. I told him I was doing a science project and I needed it right away.”
“Ah,” Jenny said, as if that explained everything. Which, of course, it did. Then she shifted, eyeing me kind of sideways.
“What?” I asked.
“So, like, did it taste good?”
I glanced toward my bathroom and the bag of blood still in the sink. Oh yeah. It tasted like heaven.
I had a feeling that wasn’t the answer Jenny wanted, though. Plus, I saw Clayton looking at me all squinty-eyed. So I sat up a little straighter, then lifted a shoulder, trying for casual. “It didn’t make me gag.”
“You’re not gonna want fresh blood anytime soon are you?”
Aha. “God, Jenny! I already told you guys! I’m not going to bite your neck and suck your blood! The idea is totally repulsive! Now will you get with the program? I’ve got a lot of stuff to figure out here.”
They stared at me for a second, probably not quite sure if I was really a kinder, gentler vampire. Actually, I wasn’t sure myself. I’d never in a million years tell Jenny (and I sure wouldn’t tell Clayton!), but the truth was that the idea of fresh, flowing blood did sound sort of . . . I mean . . . well . . . let’s just say it made my teeth feel all tingly again. I kept my mouth firmly closed and stared at Jenny, daring her to call me a liar.
She didn’t. (Thank goodness.) Instead, she turned to Clayton. “So what’s the deal? Why is there hope? Can she be turned back?”
I leaned forward. “Can I?”
He leaned back in his chair and cocked his head. He looked very comfortable, very cocky, and, frankly, very cute. “Maybe,” he said.
The glow of cuteness faded. “Maybe?” I repeated. “Maybe doesn’t do me any good.”
He leaned forward, propping his elbows on the table. “Look, Beth, it’s not like I’ve got a lot of experience with this. But I do know that you’re in sort of a nether-region, at least until you draw living blood.”
I squinted at him, something tickling my memory. “And you know this how?”
He shrugged and didn’t quite look at me. “I just do.”
“Oh, no,” I said, shaking my head. I stood up, then started pacing my kitchen. “Just because you’ve seen a dozen or so vampire movies, you are not some sort of vampire expert.”
“I never said I was.”
“Oh.” I frowned. “Well, then why do you think that I’m not really a vampire until I kill?”
“First of all, I never said you weren’t a vampire. And second of all, I never said you had to kill.” He looked at me seriously. “Honestly, Beth, your attention to detail—”
“My details are just fine,” I interrupted. “For example, I remember the little detail about how you didn’t stop me from going with Stacy! I mean, you knew they were going to do this to me, and you let me go anyway. Care to explain that little detail?”
He looked a little sheepish, but the expression faded with a cocky lift of his chin. “I tried to warn you, but you went anyway.”
“Well, yeah! But I thought I was just joining the cheerleading squad, not a clan of undead athletes!”
“Look, I’m sorry. I tried, and I thought you were gonna listen. And then Stacy came along and—”
“I know,” I said. Honestly, I couldn’t blame Clayton. I’d gotten into this mess all by myself.
“If it matters, I did try to follow you. But I actually ended up with detention.”
I blinked at him. “You?”
“Ladybell found me in the girls’ locker room.” He shrugged, his face coloring pink.
I couldn’t help but smile at that. I mean, the idea that he’d actually followed me into the girls’ locker room made me feel all warm and fuzzy. “Thanks for trying,” I said, looking at my shoes.
“You’re welcome.”
“All right,” Jenny said. “We’ve established Clayton’s not a complete jerk. Can we now hear what he knows?”
“Right. Sure,” Clayton said. “You are a vampire.” That he directed straight toward me, his eyes warm and apologetic. “Sorry. No two ways around that. But you’re not necessarily stuck as a vampire. But if you feed off a live person, then you will be stuck.”
“And again I ask—you know this how?”
He made a face, and I could tell he didn’t want to reveal his source, but I also knew he could tell I was serious. “My grandpa,” he finally said.
“Your grandpa?” Jenny repeated.
“Yeah. He knows a lot about this stuff. He’s the one who gave me the stake.”
“So by knows a lot you mean he hunts vampires?” I was so not liking this man. I mean, unless he wanted to hunt Stephen Wills. And then I’d adopt him as my own grandpa.
“Yeah,” Clayton said. “I think he’s gonna want to meet you.”
“No way,” I said, shaking my head. “No way, no way, no way! I’m not getting staked by you or your grandpa!”
“He won’t stake you. Not after I tell him you’re okay.”
“And you’d tell him that?”
He looked at me for a second, then one shoulder lifted and dropped. “Yeah. Sure. I mean, I really do think you’re okay.”
And then, he smiled.
Wow. I mean, I know he was talking about okay in the vampire sense, but there was just something about his eyes. I mean, why hadn’t I ever noticed before how cute Clayton Greene was?
And then Jenny (who I honestly don’t think realized what was going on) popped the top on a Diet Coke she’d gotten from the fridge and said, “Well, she’s not going to see Gramps until you talk with him first, that’s for sure. You’re not taking my best friend to someone who might decide to kill her! I mean, who’d help me with trig if Beth wasn’t around?”
“I could help you,” Clayton said.
“Oh,” Jenny said. “Right. Well, okay then.”
“Guys!” I screamed, and they both laughed. I did, too. And for the first time in a long time I felt normal. I even felt alive.
It was nice. And it reminded me just how much I wanted to get un-undead.
I sat up straighter, shaking off the warm fuzzies. Time to get down to business. “Okay, so Clayton’s gonna tell his grandpa about me—”
“And when I’m certain he won’t drive a stake through your heart,” Clayton finished as I winced, “I’ll introduce you to him. He can fill you in on the whole not-being-a-vamp-anymore thing.”
“What can I do?” Jenny asked.
I looked her dead in the eye. “Help me think of a way to get back at Stephen Wills. I want revenge,” I said. “Against all of them.”