Vampire Island

1
CREEPING UP ON THE KRIKS

2
EYES LIKE METEORS

3
NIGHT EXPLORER

4
KILLER INSTINCT

5
MASK OF NIGHT

6
PLASTIC POLICEMAN

7
O HAPPY DAY!

8
DOOMED TO DOOM

9
AN OLD HOUND KNOWS THESE THINGS

10
TEA FOR YOU

11
TRICK OF THE MOON

12
MILES TO GO

MADISON LIVINGSTONE’S

LEXINGTON LIVINGSTONE’S

MY LIFE, SO FAR
BY HUDSON LIVINGSTONE’S

Maddy

W
hy are so many vampires moving to New York City? It seemed to Maddy that every weekend another van was unloading locked coffins, crystal chandeliers, velvet drapes, and twine-wrapped packages marked
FRAGILE—GOBLETS
or
ANCIENT MAPS—DO NOT BEND
. Of course, it’s hard to spot true nightcrawling, bloodsucking vampires from your basic nightcrawling, strange neighbors, like the ones who just moved across the street from the Livingstone family. As Maddy knew, a good spy has to keep an eye out for clues.

“I wish the von Kriks would
do
something.” Maddy was kneeling on the family room window seat, watching the von Krik townhouse through her binoculars.

“You need a better hobby than spying.” Hudson, at age nine, was two years younger than Maddy but stood eye-to-eye with her, which made him bossy. Hudson was also intensely gorgeous, and so the Livingstone family’s no-mirrors rule was especially hard on him.

“Unless it’s naked people,” piped up thirteen-year-old Lexie from under the card table. “Cavorting nudes would be compelling, spywise.” Lexie knew hard words like
cavorting
and
compelling
because she was poetic.

Maddy, who was not gorgeous and not poetic, but very bold, focused the lens. “The man’s got popcorn. The woman is knitting.”

“Knitting’s a useful hobby. As long as you don’t give homemade scarves for Christmas.” Hudson snapped a piece of the Caspian Sea into his jigsaw puzzle. Hudson loved puzzles. Whenever he finished one, he put it in the freezer. Since none of the Livingstones ate frozen foods, it was perfect storage space.

“‘And if my stocking hung too high, / Would it blur the Christmas glee, / That not a Santa Claus could reach, / The altitude of me?’” quoted Lexie, who loved the words of doomed poets. Today she was dressed in white, in tribute to doomed poet Emily Dickinson, as she held her breath and reenacted the tragic drowning death of doomed poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. This game always dragged on too long, since Lexie could hold her breath indefinitely.

“Purebloods like to sleep in extra darkness. Betcha that’s why those Kriks stashed their coffins under the dining room table.” Just saying the word
coffins
made Maddy’s teeth sharpen. She had never slain a vampire before—not in the Old World and certainly not in this one. But the urge had been passed on to her, which made her different from the rest of her family. For example, she was the only Livingstone who drank a morning mug of tomato or pomegranate juice, pretending it was fresh blood. Her parents worried, but Maddy knew her instincts would be helpful one day.

Meantime, spying on the von Kriks seemed like exciting practice.

“Those aren’t coffins,” corrected Hudson. “They’re valuable Victorian clothes trunks. You’ve got vampires on the brain. Any of our species is quite rare. There are fewer of us than peregrine falcons or southern sea otters.” He sniffed. Hudson was proud of his lineage.

Maddy knew the real problem was that neither Crud nor Hex—as she sometimes called her brother and sister—minded a rainy puzzles-and-poets afternoon. But Maddy was edgy with energy. “Idea! Let’s use our ancient family skeleton key to break into the von Krik house.”

“Bad plan, Mad.” Hudson sighed. “If the Kriks aren’t vamps, all you’ve done is bothered two nice people on their weekend. But on the chance they
are
, a pure vampire bloodline is stronger than our fruit-bat, vampire-hybrid mix. They’d eat you alive, which would pretty much ruin Valentine’s Day.”

“And don’t forget.” Lexie rolled out from under the table. “If you angered a couple of purebloods and they caused a commotion, the Argos would make us leave town.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Mention of the Argos always irked Maddy. In her four years in this city, she’d never met one single Arg face-to-face, and she only half believed that these stealthy New World peacekeepers kept constant check on pureblood and hybrid behavior.

“And if we’re exiled, how would Mom and Dad find jobs they like as much as dog walking? Or find a rock band to play in as cool as the Dead Ringers?” Lexie continued. “Don’t forget, New York orthodontists are the best.”

“Think about it, Mads,” added Hudson, bossy as usual.

Maddy didn’t want to think about it. Of course Crud and Hex would say those things. First, because no student in the history of P.S. 42 Elementary got as many valentine flowers and chocolates as handsome Hudson. Second, Lexie was very worried that, despite her new braces, her adult fangs would stay snaggly forever.

Maddy kept spying. The man picked popcorn off his sweater. The woman squinted at her knitting, which looked suspiciously scarf-ish. “If I slayed them—in self-defense, of course,” Maddy clarified, “then the name Livingstone would go down in history.”

Hudson snorted. “We’ve been around almost four hundred years. It’s
already
down in history.”

“You better not bug them,” said Lexie, rolling back under the table. “The Argos see all.”

Maddy dropped her binoculars. “Later, blisters. I got some spying to do.”

Lexie’s drowning hand rippled good-bye. Hudson snapped in another puzzle piece and softly cheered himself on.

The rarely used skeleton key was hidden by the front door underneath the never-ever-used phone book. Maddy pulled it out and stared at the engraved name Lvyngstone, then sniffed its rust-encrusted scent. The key was a relic from the Old World, a place her parents rarely spoke of since the Night of the Flight to Manhattan four years ago, a swift departure for reasons not fully understood—at least not by Maddy. What she did know was that the Old World had become increasingly dangerous with pureblood predators, and unsafe for families such as the Livingstones. In escaping to the neutral terrain of the New World, the Livingstones had traded the carnivorous privilege of eternal life in order to become a normal New World family and to age naturally.

For the most part, the New World was an improvement on the Old. For one thing, time flowed faster. So now Maddy got one year older per year, instead of per century. That meant she celebrated real birthdays, with candles and kazoos and new sneakers for her ever-lengthening feet.

But not all had worked out as planned. The Night of the Flight was also the last time that Maddy’d had use of her night wings. They’d disappeared the moment she’d touched down in New York. Sometimes, she could feel the itch between her shoulders, and it made her wistful. And if life was more peaceful here, it was also more secretive. For example, every day, Maddy had to pretend to be a regular, human eleven-year-old girl instead of an ancient, fruit-bat vampire girl. Every night, she did peculiar things such as brush her teeth and sleep on a feather mattress instead of swooping over moonlit fields in search of plump mice to bite.

And then there was her urge. Crud and Hex didn’t have Maddy’s bloodthirsty passion for sniffing out nightwalkers. In the apartment elevator, she jammed on her mother’s sunglasses and tucked her three essentials—pencil, notebook, and asthma inhaler—deep into her pocket.

Outside, rain had made the city soggy. It dripped from awnings and raincoats and umbrellas.

“Hi, Maddy! Tell your parents I got a fresh haul of grapefruit and guava this morning.” Big Bill, the owner of the Candlewick Café, was unloading a crate of vegetables from a truck parked curbside.

“Okay.”

A Japanese water beetle was crawling alongside a cucumber crate. Instantly Maddy’s tongue shot out and snapped the bug into her mouth. Juicy, with a twist. Yum. She spat its jumbly leftovers over her shoulder, then cast Bill a guilty look. What if he’d been watching? Nobody liked to see girls eat bugs, or spit out bug parts. But it was so rare to find a ripe beetle in winter.

It wasn’t an accident that the Livingstones’ apartment was twelve flights up from the Candlewick Café, a popular health food restaurant. Vampires, even vegan hybrids such as the Livingstone family, have strong and demanding thirsts. Seeded fruits are the staples of a healthy fruit-bat diet, and were served daily at the Candlewick, where the Livingstones kept an account. Still, sometimes Maddy could not resist a crawly creature. Only sometimes, though.

The von Kriks had just moved into the biggest townhouse on the block. Its tombstone-thick gray walls were surrounded by an arrowhead-spiked gate and guarded by stone gargoyles. The lion-head door knockers looked real enough to roar, but there was also a side entrance. Maddy checked that Big Bill was not on the lookout before she swooped down the alley.

The skeleton key worked like a charm. In the next moment Maddy was crouched in the von Krik pantry. Her heart pounded. She loved being a sneaker-upper and hider-inner almost as much as a spying-onner. Her ears picked up the sound of clacking knitting needles. Her extra-sharp nose caught a whiff of burnt popcorn.

Back in the Livingstone apartment, the others continued talking to Maddy by echolocation.

“Watercolors might be another good hobby for you, Mads,” said Hudson. “You’re not too bad at art.”

“It is
so
rude to enter a house uninvited,” added Lexie. “Especially a vampire home. That’s a sure way to annoy them.”

Maddy pushed up her sunglasses and bounced back a message. “Stalking Old World nightwalkers is more important than listening to your nerdy advice.” If vampires lived in this house, Maddy wanted to know about it. Just because she was small and had mild asthma didn’t mean she wasn’t crafty.

She whipped out her notebook and pencil. Time for the official prowl.

“Glamorama!” she whispered. From the chessboard marble front hall to the gold-gilded parlor, each huge, creaky room dwarfed its old-fashioned furnishings. Was this a clue? Vampires always inherited deeds and property, but rarely held cash or credit cards. Which was why they tended to stick with the inherited, antique decor.

Old,
Maddy jotted, because she wasn’t sure about the spelling of
antique.
Her hyperextended tongue quickly check-licked the marble mantelpiece—dusty. Then she got down on all fours and licked the jewel-toned carpet—musty. She picked a vase off the grand piano and let her tongue roll down to touch bottom. No clues, but it had a nice dried-water, mushroomy taste. She jotted:

This last notation was not a clue, but Maddy really liked to write her name. In the dining room the drapes were drawn and the swimming pool–length table was covered in a stiff cloth. Maddy snapped on a light switch. Nothing happened.

The pencil slipped from her fingers. She cringed as it rolled along the marble tiles. As she bent to reclaim it, Maddy noticed that her fingernails had shaped themselves into ten clear diamond-hard spears. Of course, all of her defenses were up. Because while plenty of houses contained no silver, no modern art, and some lumpy antiques, almost every home was wired with working electricity.

All homes…except for pureblood vampire homes.

Maddy recircled the rooms, her fingers reaching for switches.
Snick, snap, click.
No, no, no. Not a single wattage. Not a flickering pinpoint.

Above, she heard the clomp of von Krik feet across the carpet. Time to dash. But she’d come so far, she just had to find out more! Maddy darted to the dining room. In a snatch, she whipped back the tablecloth to see the truth she’d suspected all along.

Coffins!

“What is your business here?” The voices were so close and sudden that Maddy shrieked, covering her mouth so her quick-dropped fangs wouldn’t show, as she stared into the coldly incredulous faces of both von Kriks.