Vampire Beach: Initiation (12 page)

"I said truly great," Jason protested. He led the way into the basement: five bowling lanes with electronic scoring, vintage video games, two pool tables, jukebox with accompanying disco ball and strobe lights, and
tiki
bar. Not your regular rec room.

But even with all the toys, without the vampires
-
meaning without the most popular of the popular
-
there was something missing from the party. Some kind of... shimmer. Or maybe it was just lack of Sienna that was making the party feel flat to Jason.

Which meant his whole life would feel flat from now on, he reflected, because Jason got the impression that Sienna didn't plan on being around him much.

In the middle of his second bowling match, Jason caught sight of Sienna just as he released the ball. So they had returned. Jason forced his attention to the pins and watched his ball take out all but two: a seven
-
ten split.
Nasty.

"Goalposts!"
Harberts
yelled. "That's a shot for you, my friend." He handed Jason a shot glass of tequila.

Nasty, but not without benefits,
Jason thought. He downed the shot. The sensation was not unlike staring into Sienna's eyes: a long burst of fire from mouth to gut.

Sienna looked away, wrapping her arms around Brad, and Jason felt cold in spite of the tequila. Seeing Sienna all over Brad sucked the pleasure out of every
thing.

Jason didn't want to be there anymore. He worked it out carefully in his head: one beer when they'd first arrived, and now one shot
-
he was okay to drive. He
wondered where Tyler was. He hadn't seen him in
hours.

"Your turn,"
Harberts
told him.

Jason grabbed the closest bowling ball, sent it down the lane without aiming, and managed to knock down one of the pins. He decided to name it Brad. Even though Brad had done nothing to deserve being slammed to the ground by a bowling ball
-
except be lucky enough to have Sienna as his girlfriend.

"Take over for me," Jason called to Craig Yoder, a guy from his history class.

"You've got some catching up to do."
Harberts
tossed Craig the blue
Cabo
Wabo
bot
tl
e as Jason made his way over to the stairs. He took them three at a time and followed the sound of whoops and whistles through the house and out onto the back patio. Tyler usually managed to locate
-
if not create
-
the epi
center of a party. It seemed like the place to start the search. Maybe he'd find Adam, too. He'd wandered off after the first game of bowling ended.

No Tyler on the patio. Although Jason thought his friend would have liked to be there to see Belle right that second. She was shaking her moneymaker down the top of the adobe wall that ran around the court
yard. Guys lined the wall below her, arms up.
Wanting to be the one who caught her if she fell.

Dominic stood at the edge of the crowd, arms crossed over his chest, watching Belle and her entourage, blue eyes narrow. Did any of those guys realize an armful of Belle almost certainly came with a gutful of her boyfriend
’
s fists? Jason wondered.

He made his way deeper into the backyard and over to the pool. Who wouldn't want to be hanging in an outdoor pool in November?
Especially when Maggie was floating on a lounge chair in the center, her long, golden
-
brown hair trailing in the water.

As Jason watched, Maggie used her fingertips to slowly paddle down to the shallow end of the pool and over to Kyle
Priesmeyer
, one of the divers on the swim team. She reached up, looped her hands around his neck, and pulled his head down for a kiss. The lounge chair rocked, but didn't capsize, and Kyle stretched out on top of Maggie.

Jason knew that Maggie had begun to feed on Kyle. And the guy was oblivious.
To anything but the pleasure.
Jason shook his head and continued his search for Tyler.

He hurried back into the house to check the mini
-
party kitchen, which included Adam earing a slice of white pizza and trying to explain why reincarnation was complete bull. Just the kind of conversation you could only take seriously when wasted.
But still no Tyler.

"Jason, back me up here," Adam called, waving him toward die group. "A whole
but
tl
oad
of people would have to be walking around soulless for reincarnation to be possible, correct?
Because if there are a finite number of souls that keep coming back, and no new ones, there aren't enough souls to go around, because of population growth."

"Have you seen Tyler?" Jason asked, ignoring the question.

"But, no," a girl with bangs and an intense expres
sion said. "All the souls available
aren't inhabiting
bodies all the time. The number of people on earth thousands of years ago tells you nothing about the total number of souls. There's no correlation."

"Tyler?" Jason said again.

"Haven't seen him since before we went upstairs," Adam answered. He broke away from the group and crossed over to Jason. "But you know what I
have
seen?" He lowered his voice.
"A lot of our special friends circling Zach."

"You can see that every day at school," Jason point
ed out.

"It's more than the usual Zach
-
adoration. And it's more than him being the birthday boy," Adam said, taking a bite of his pizza. "And he's still smiling. And the smiles are somehow vampire
-
related, because whatever is making him smile, they all know about it."

"Huh," Jason said, not wanting to encourage Adam.

"Yeah.
Big huh."
Adam tossed his pizza crust in the trash. "And even though I know the vampires have funded a massive percentage of our Malibu goodness, it kind of freaks me out to think of them behind closed doors, making plans. I mean, shouldn't our kind have a delegation?"

Jason shrugged.
"If they're planning their annual croquet tournament, no.
If they're coming up with, uh"
-
he glanced around to make sure no one was listening
-
"some kind of meal plan, yeah. But I thought we decided that they can handle themselves."

"Yeah.
I know," Adam agreed. "I guess I should
-
"

"Adam, did you consider the animal and insect population in your theory?" called out a junior in desperate need of a growth spurt.

"Insects?
So every mosquito has a soul, is that what you're telling me?" Adam asked, returning to the
debate.

"I'm going to keep looking for Tyler," Jason mut
tered. He grabbed a soda on his way out.

He took a swig as he headed for the family room. Sometime during the party, it had become
make
-
out central. He did a Tyler scan.
Didn't see him.
Jason turned away. But then, through the sliding doors lead
ing to one of the house's many decks, he caught a flash of dark blue sweatshirt, like the one Tyler had been wearing tied around his waist.

Jason hurried across the room, careful not to step on the couple stretched out in front of the fire. Evid
ently
in Malibu, sixty
-
five degrees was consid
ered fireplace weather.

He opened the door and saw Tyler leaning against the deck's wooden railing, staring down at the ocean. "There you are," Jason said. "I've been looking for
you.”

Tyler whipped around.
"Oh, hey."

Jason shook his head. "You haven't even been here a week and you're going native."

"What?"
Tyler asked.

"You've got your hoodie zipped up to your neck like it's freezing," Jason said.

"Ocean makes it cold out here," Tyler answered, his hands jammed into the front pockets.

"What are you doing out here by yourself, anyway? I was looking for you in the party hot spots. You
know,
the Tyler zones."

"I wasn't out here
by myself
until a few minutes ago," Tyler said. He turned toward the ocean, then immediately turned back to face Jason. "You know what I mean? Huh? Huh?
Huh, huh, huh?"

Jason laughed. "So who was she?"

"It wasn't a name kind of situation," Tyler replied.

"Well what'd she look like?" Jason asked.
Did
she have
anything
unusual
about
her?
he
added silently.
Like
fangs?

"What? You're not getting any, so you need some vicarious thrills? Is that it?"

Jason decided that it didn't seem like Tyler had been fed on. He was talking fast, and his eyes were darting back and forth. After Erin had bitten him at Belle's party, Jason remembered that he had hardly been able to move. He'd felt drunk and
floaty
and, to be all California surfer about it, mellow. Tyler defi
nitely wasn't mellow.

But had there really been a girl out there with him? Jason wondered darkly. Or had Tyler been hanging out with his friend Ritalin? He
was
all twitchy.

"You ready to get out of here?" Tyler asked.

"Sure." Jason had thought he might have to pry Tyler out of the party with a crowbar. His friend was a close
-
the
-
party
-
down kind of guy. He was glad he didn't have to persuade Tyler to leave. But it did put some more checks in the Tyler weirdness column. "Let's go tell Adam we're heading out."

Jason led the way back to the kitchen. The reincar
nation talk had switched over to
-
with Adam in the group, what else?
-
movies
.

"We're thinking about taking off," Jason told
him.

"You're not staying for the screening? We're talking Tarantino here. Are you feverish?" Adam asked.

"Nah.
Just like to leave the party at the peak," Jason told him. It didn't really make sense, but whatever. "See you at school."

"See you," Adam said.

As they got close to the front door, Jason spotted Sienna and Brad lingering in the hallway, standing close together. His heart suddenly felt as if it had tripled in weight. "See you guys later," Jason forced himself to say.

"You're leaving?" Brad asked.
"Party foul.
The sec
ond wind is about to hit. I can feel it."

Sienna didn't say a word. She didn't even look at Jason as he slapped hands with Brad and made his way out the door.

Tyler hurried toward the bug, his hands still shoved in his pockets. Jason followed him. He glanced back once, and saw Sienna kissing Brad again, her hands sliding up under his shirt.

Td
let
her
drink
every
drop
of
blood
in
my
body
if
she
kissed
me
like
that
to
do
it,
Jason thought.

“O
kay, boys, spill!" Aunt Bianca ordered Jason and Tyler the next morning. "What kind of depravity went on at that party last night?"

Stellar.
The last thing Jason wanted to talk about was the party. It just reminded him of his
screwup
with Sienna. And Tyler was no help. He just sat there gazing at his sausages as if they held the secrets of the universe. His foot, propped on the chair leg, bounced about a million miles an hour.

"That juicy, hmm?"
Bianca asked. "You can't even come up with one thing you're willing to share?"

"Bowling," Jason answered. He scooped a second helping of scrambled eggs out of the frying pan and onto his plate,
then
sat back down at the kitchen table. "You know, it's a gateway activity. A high percentage of teens who've tried it move on to miniature golf. And once you go there, you can't get back without rehab."

"Bowling?
You left
Zach's
party to go bowling?" Dani shook her head in disgust.

"The
Lafrenière
s have a bowling alley," Jason said. "We didn't have to leave."