Secret Vampire (20 page)

"You can rest if you want," James said coolly.

Phil understood. James was the backhoe. He was
stronger than anyone Phil had ever seen. He pitched
up shovelful after shovelful of dirt without even
straining. He made it look like fun.

"Why
don't we have you on any. of the teams at
school?" Phil said, leaning heavily on his shovel.

"I prefer individual sports. Like wrestling," James
said and grinned, just for a moment, up at Phil. It was the kind of locker-room remark that couldn't be misunderstood from one guy to another. He meant
wrestling with, for instance, Jacklyn and Michaela.

And, just at that particular moment, Phil couldn't help grinning back. He couldn't summon up any
righteous disapproval.

Even with James, it took a long time to dig the
hole. It was wider than Phil would have thought nec
essary. When his shovel finally
chunked
on something
solid, he found out why.

"It's the vault," James said.

"What
vault?"

"The burial vault. They put the coffin inside it so it doesn't get crushed if the ground collapses. Get out
and hand me the crowbar."

Phil climbed out of the hole and gave him the
crowbar. He could see the vault now. It was made of
unfinished concrete and he guessed that it was just a rectangular box with a lid. James was prying the
lid off with the crowbar.

"There," James said, with an explosive grunt as he lifted the lid and slid it, by degrees, behind the concrete box. That was why the hole was so wide, to
accommodate the lid on one side and James on the
other.

And now, looking straight down into the hole, Phil
could see the casket. A huge spray of slightly crushed
yellow roses was on top.

James was breathing hard, but Phil didn't think it
was with exertion. His own lungs felt as if they were
being squeezed flat, and his heart was thudding hard
enough to shake his body.

"Oh, God," he said quietly and with no particu
lar emphasis.

James looked up. "Yeah. This is it." He pushed the
roses down toward the foot of the casket. Then, in
what seemed like slow motion to Phillip, he began
unfastening latches on the casket's side.

When they were unfastened, he paused for just an
instant, both hands flat on the smooth surface of the
casket. Then he lifted the upper panel, and Phillip
could see what was inside.

CHAPTER 12

Poppy was lying there on the white velvet lining, eyes shut. She looked very pale and strangely beauti
ful-but was she dead?

"Wake up," James said. He put his hand on hers.
Phillip had the feeling that he was calling with his
mind as well as his voice.

There was an agonizingly long minute while noth
ing happened. James put his other hand under Pop
py's neck, lifting her just slightly. "Poppy, it's time.

Wake up. Wake up."

Poppy's eyelashes fluttered.

Something jarred violently in Phillip. He wanted to
give a yell of victory and pound the grass. He also
wanted to run way. Finally he just collapsed by the
graveside, his knees giving out altogether.

"Come on, Poppy. Get up. We have to go." James

was speaking in a gentle, insistent voice, as if he were
talking to someone coming out of anesthesia.

Which was exactly how Poppy looked. As Phil
watched with fascination and awe and dread, she
blinked and rolled her head a little, then opened her
eyes. She shut them again almost immediately, but
James went on talking to her, and the next time she
opened them they stayed open.

Then, with James urging her gently, she sat up. "Poppy, "
Phil said. An involuntary outburst. His
chest was swelling, burning.

Poppy looked up, then squinted and turned imme
diately from the beam of the flashlight. She looked
annoyed.

"Come on," James said, helping her out of the
open half of the casket. It wasn't hard; Poppy was small. With James holding her arm, she stood on the
closed half of the casket, and Phil reached into the
hole and pulled her up.

Then, with something
like a convulsion,
he
hugged her.

When he pulled back, she blinked at him. A slight
frown puckered her forehead. She licked her index
finger and drew the wet finger across his cheek.

"You're filthy," she said.

She could talk. She didn't have red eyes and a
chalky face. She was really alive.

Weak with relief, Phil hugged her again. "Oh, God,
Poppy, you're okay. You're okay."

He barely noticed that she wasn't hugging him
back.

James scrambled out of the hole. "How do you feel, Poppy?" he said. Not a politeness. A quiet, prob
ing question.

Poppy looked at him, and then at Phillip. "I feel
...
fine."

"That's good," James said, still watching her as if
she were a six-hundred-pound schizophrenic gorilla.

"I feel
...
hungry," Poppy said, in the same pleas
ant, musical voice she'd used before.

Phil blinked.

"Why don't you come over here, Phil?" James said, making a gesture behind him.

Phil was beginning to feel very uneasy. Poppy was
... could she be
smelling
him? Not loud, wet sniffs, but the delicate little sniffs of a cat. She was nosing
around his shoulder.

"Phil, I think you should come around over here," James said, with more emphasis. But what happened
next happened too quickly for Phil even to start
moving.

Delicate hands clenched like steel around his bi
ceps. Poppy smiled at him with very sharp teeth, then
darted like a striking cobra for his throat.

I'm going to die, Phil thought with a curious calm.

He couldn't fight her. But her first strike missed. The
sharp teeth grazed his throat like two burning pokers.

"No, you don't," James said. He looped an arm around Poppy's waist, lifting her off Phil.

Poppy gave a disappointed wail. As Phil struggled to his feet, she watched him the way a cat watches
an interesting insect. Never taking her eyes off him,
not even when James spoke to her.

"That's your brother, Phil. Your twin brother. Remember?"

Poppy just stared at Phil with hugely dilated pupils.
Phil realized that she looked not only pale and beau
tiful but dazed and starving.

"My brother? One of our kind?" Poppy said,
sounding
puzzled.
Her nostrils quivered and her lips
parted. "He doesn't smell like it."

"No, he's,not one of our kind, but he's not for
biting, either. You're going to have to wait just a little
while to feed." To Phillip, he said, "Let's get this hole filled in, fast."

Phillip couldn't move at first. Poppy
was still
watching him in that dreamy but intense way. She
stood there in the darkness in her best white dress, supple as a lily, with her hair falling
around her face.
And she looked at him with the eyes of a jaguar.

She wasn't human anymore. She was something
other.
She'd said it herself, she and James were of
one kind and Phil was something different. She be
longed to the Night World now.

Oh, God, maybe we should just have let her die,
Phil thought, and picked up a shovel with loose and trembling hands. James had already gotten the lid back on the vault. Phil shoveled dirt on it without
looking at where it landed. His head wobbled as if
his neck were a pipe cleaner.

"Don't be an
idiot," a
voice said, and hard fingers
closed on Phil's wrist briefly. Through a blur, Phil
saw James.

"She's not better off dead. She's just confused right
now. This is
temporary,
all right?"

The words were brusque, but Phil felt a tiny surge
of comfort. Maybe James was right. Life was good,
in whatever form. And Poppy had chosen this.

Still, she'd changed, and only time would tell
how much.

One thing-Phil had made the mistake of thinking
that vampires were like humans. He'd gotten so comfortable with James that he'd almost forgotten their
differences.

He wouldn't make that mistake again.

Poppy felt wonderful-in almost every way.

She felt secret and strong. She felt poetic and full of possibility. She felt as if she'd sloughed off her old
body like a snake shedding its skin, to reveal a fresh new body underneath.

And she knew, without being quite sure how she
knew, that she didn't have cancer.

It was gone, the terrible thing that had been run
ning wild inside her. Her new body had killed it and
absorbed it somehow. Or maybe it was just that every cell that made up Poppy North, every molecule,
had changed.

However It was, she felt vibrant and healthy. Not
just better than she had before she'd gotten the can
cer, but better than she could remember feeling in
her life. She was strangely aware of her own body,
and her muscles and joints all seemed to be working
in a way that was sweet and almost magical.

The only problem was that she was hungry. It was
taking all her willpower not to pounce on the blond
guy in the hole.
Phillip.
Her brother.

She
knew
he was her brother, but he was also
human and she could sense the
rich
stuff, lush with life, that was coursing through his veins. The electri
fying fluid she needed to survive.

So jump him, part of her mind whispered. Poppy
frowned and tried to wiggle away from the thought.
She felt something in her mouth nudging her lower
lip, and she poked her thumb at it instinctively.

It was a tooth. A delicate curving tooth. Both her
canine teeth were long and pointed and very
sensitive.

How weird. She rubbed at the new teeth gently,
then cautiously explored them with her tongue. She
pressed them against her lip.

After a moment they shrank to normal size. If she
thought about humans full of blood like berries, they
grew again.

Hey, look what I can dot

But she didn't bother the two grimy boys who
were filling in the hole. She glanced around and tried
to distract herself instead.

Strange-it didn't really seem to be either day or
night.-Maybe there was an eclipse. It was too dim to
be daytime, but far too bright for nighttime. She
could see the leaves on the maple trees and the gray
Spanish moss hanging from the oak trees. Tiny moths

were fluttering around the moss, and she could see
their pale wings.

When she looked at the sky, she got a shock. There was something floating there, a giant round thing that
blazed with silvery light. Poppy thought of spaceships,
of alien worlds, before she realized the truth.

It was the
moon.
Just an ordinary full moon. And
the reason it looked so big and throbbing with light
was that she had night vision. That was why she
could see the moths, too.