Vampire Crush(19)

"Maybe I just think you should be a little nicer to the girl who shared eternal life with you."

He runs his hands through his hair, which I am quickly learning is his I-am-exasperated with-your-craziness tell. "Eternal life that I don't want," he stresses. "A girl that I don't want. If we're being completely honest, I want-"

I cut him off. "You should have thought of that before you let her give you an undead hickey. And while we're at it, what's so bad about eternal life? I mean, maybe it's time to focus on the positives."

"Besides sun headaches and the blood drinking and the insane company?" he says, and for the first time since we began, James is getting angry, honestly angry.

"And the superstrength," I counter, "and the mind reading and the coolness factor and the-"

"I don't want to talk about this anymore!" he interrupts, walking over to look out the window. "I don't even know how we got here. Let's talk about something else."

He's right. Time to change the subject. "Okay," I say. "What is Vlad doing here?"

James studies me for a few moments. "Vlad is looking for a girl," he says finally.

"I got that much," I say with hard-won patience. "What does this girl do? Fly?"

"No."

"Does he vant to suck her blood?"

James shrugs. "He hasn't really kept us in the loop."

Up until now, James has been nothing but an open book, keeping his gaze on me far more than my fluttery stomach can take. But now he's deliberately turned away from me. As he pretends to peer out over his backyard, it strikes me that I recognize this pose from when we were kids; this is James keeping a secret.

"What don't you want to tell me?" I ask.

Instead of answering, he walks across the room to the bulletin board that hangs over my dresser. Leaning forward, he points at the picture wedged in its corner. "Isn't this that karate class they asked you to resign from? Are you the small, scowling one?"

This source is obviously tapped. "It's late, and I am exhausted," I say, and it's not a lie. A weight has settled between my eyes, and the pillow on my bed is growing larger and more appealing. Like a giant fluffy marshmallow filled with Marshmallow Fluff.

"You're kicking me out?" James asks, surprised.

"You seem to be done talking."

A wave of irritation dims his features. "I didn't know that I was just here for information."

"You're not! It's just that I'm tired and I was attacked by vampires in the woods today and their leader seems to want me dead when he's not too busy being the most popular person in the world, and I would just like to go back to sleep and forget about it for a little bit," I finish, realizing that I'm not handling this well at all.

James watches me for a few moments. "Vlad's not the most popular person in the world," he says.

"What?"

"In the vampire world he's not popular at all. In fact, he's an outcast. Persona non grata. If there were vampire restaurants, they would have signs that say, ‘No Stakes or Vlad.'"

If James had said that Vlad liked to wrap himself in cellophane and sing show tunes for fun, I couldn't be more surprised. Considering his penchant for sticking his nose up in the air and acting better than everyone else, I assumed he was at the top of whatever food chain would take him.

"But why?" I ask.

James takes a seat in the desk chair, leans back, and looks at me with eyes that are too artificially wide to be innocent. "Do you still want me to leave?"

Well played, James, well played. For a brief second I wonder why he is so resistant to going home, although way back when, Marcie said that if he was over here more often they might as well adopt him.

"You can stay," I say.

"Good," he says, stretching and settling in. "The vampire world is built on hierarchy. Take the stupidity of high school, multiply it by eighteen, add a side of twisted, and you'll end up with something close to what living in vampire society is like. There are hundreds of families, and every single one can tell you who ranks above and below them."

"Vampire families? Like brother and sister?" I ask, thinking of Marisabel. Maybe they were siblings, kind of.

"Sort of. When you are made into a vampire you are reborn with the name of your maker, and you're pretty much stuck with it. You can marry out of it, but that hardly ever happens-apparently most vampires would set themselves on fire rather than marry down."

"Fifty dollars that Vlad's name isn't really ‘Smithson.'"

"Vlad doesn't have a name. He was made by an Unnamed. They're considered parasites in the vampire community, vampires that were made off the grid."

"So . . . then you're all Unnamed."

"Pretty much. All of us that Vlad made."

"Okay. But what does that actually mean? You don't get chosen first for dodgeball?"

"More like we have no rights at all. At best we're ignored, and at worst we're killed. That's why most Unnamed lay low; they're the ones hiding in empty houses and creeping out only at night."

In other words, exactly what James was doing before I lured him back to the exciting hallways of Thomas Jefferson. I look to James with a smile, expecting to find some sort of wry recognition, but he doesn't seem to have made the connection.

"Vlad doesn't seem like the laying-low type."

"He didn't for a long time-apparently when he was first made, he loitered a little too closely to the legitimate families and a lot of them wanted him dead. But then he cooked up this Danae scheme and has been working on that ever since."

I lean forward, excited now that we're getting to something that I might already have an inkling about. "The Danae," I say. "I know that Neville is a part of it, but what is it?"

"How do you know that Neville is a part of it?"

"He has a tattoo with a ‘D.' I've been investigating."

James doesn't look entirely thrilled by that revelation. "I don't know all that much about it," he says, "other than that it's a sort of vampire secret society with members all over the world. There are official vampire courts, but the Danae is what really pulls the strings. Kind of like a high-class Mafia."

"But then that means that Neville can't be Unnamed. Why is he slumming it with Vlad?"

"He claims that the Danae is interested in seeing where Vlad's search might lead. Vlad, of course, is thrilled. He thinks that if he finds this girl, they'll make him a member."

"That's weird."

"Yeah, that's kind of par for the course with Vlad."

"No, I mean about Neville being a representative of the Danae. Because in our interview, he seemed pretty bitter about them. He said he wished he could remove the tattoo," I say, but then shake my head. We're getting off track. All I really need to know is who this girl is and why finding her will be enough to break through the social barrier. But when I ask James why they would care about finding her, he hesitates again, and I wonder what it is that makes him so close-lipped on this one subject.

"I think I'm going to turn in," I say, faking a yawn.

James smiles. "I can see your belly button," he says, and I immediately put my arms down, embarrassed at my blatant attempt at manipulation. We sit in an awkward silence, until he relents.

"I really don't know that much about her," he says. "Vlad's only told us what he wants us to know. I know that she has some sort of star birthmark."

"You're kidding me. A star?" I ask. This sounds more like a My Little Pony than a person.

But James nods his head and confirms that yes, it's a star. "And I know that she's a sort of legend in the vampire community," he continues. "I know that there are certain beliefs about her blood."

"Beliefs like what?"

He hesitates again. "Some say that it can make a vampire's powers immune to the sunlight, some say that it's an aphrodisiac. And some say that it can reverse vampirism entirely. And that's it. That's all I know."

I wonder why he was so reluctant to tell me, but I'm glad that he did. "Thanks," I say. "We don't have much to work with, but if Vlad's working with the same amount of cluelessness I think we'll be okay."

"Be okay for what?"

"For beating Vlad to the punch. For finding the girl, warning her about whatever he's going to do with her." I stand up, my legs tingling after all this time on the floor. After nudging James's legs to the side with the tip of a toe, I grab my sophomore yearbook from the bottom drawer of my desk. "Vlad has rejected Caroline, so we only have three hundred more high school girls to go. You know, maybe Vlad knows something he's not sharing about finding her among the popular girls. He did home in on Caroline very quickly," I say, and then I realize that I've been chattering on without asking for advice from the person with insight into the vampire in question. "What do you think?"

James is silent. I turn to find him staring at me with a look that contains such a mix of guilt and shame that I can't help but ask him what's wrong.

"What if we let Vlad find her?" he suggests softly.

"I don't understand."

He doesn't respond, just continues to look at me, and suddenly I get it. "You think her blood might turn you back," I say in disbelief.

"It's just one girl," he says, but I detect a note of uncertainty that suggests he's been trying to talk himself into this way of thinking for a long time. "We don't even know what they'll do with her."