Vamplayers (9 page)

I see the gap, heave two more right away, and take Tristan out with a sound pounding on each shoulder.

Whack-slam!

Thwack-slap!

He falls, laughing.

Several beautiful girls, Alice included, rush to help him off the court.

“Dang,” Cara says, “this dude’s good.”

“I know, right?”

“You think,” she says, eyebrows arching, “he could be our man?” “You tell me.”

We watch him limp off, either acting like he thinks a human would to throw us off the scent or actually feeling pain.

“Well,” she grumbles, picking up a few balls for our last assault, “he’s either really good or really bad, you know?”

“I do.” I juggle a few balls to stay loose.

Alice takes to the court, standing defiantly, but the wind has left her sails.

Despite the cheers from the beautiful people’s side, she lobs two easy balls at us. When we catch them, Alice waves in defeat, turning her back to us without a word and retreating to her side.

Cara and I exchange questioning glances, but too soon we are deluged by our team. They’re hugging us, cheering, Grover and Zander at the head of the pack.

Zander hugs me amidst the furor, and it’s so warm, so soft, so good I never want to let him go.

“Ahem.” Grover squeezes in closer. “Group hug!”

Is that disappointment I see in Zander’s eyes? Or relief?

Chapter 12

“
W
hat is up with that girl?” Cara says later as we lounge in our dorm suite, nursing our dodgeball wounds and getting group dissed by one Sister. Cara’s done for the night but looks ready to party in her tight red jeans and sporty white pullover.

“I dunno,” I say around a straw full of fresh O negative from the care package we found on our doorstep, return addressed Afterlife Academy and containing a short good-luck note from Dr. Haskins. “I’ve seen her go undercover before, but this is deep undercover. Even for her.”

Cara shakes her head, reaching for a second bag of A positive. She drinks it carefully, almost daintily, to avoid spilling any of the red stuff on her jersey-style white top. “If we’re right, if Tristan is the Vamplayer and Bianca is his most obvious target, then I can understand Alice’s enthusiasm for infiltrating the beautiful people here at Nightshade. But it’s the Sisterhood of Dangerous Girlfriends, plural, not the Dangerous Girlfriend, singular. Am I right?”

I nod. She’s so fired up, I’m tempted to give her a fist bump across the coffee table. “Maybe she’s so eager to stay First Sister, she’s just trying to show us both up.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time. Remember that school last year in Kentucky, or was it Nebraska, where she thought she had the Vamplayer identified in our first week, only she didn’t tell us and ended up calling the Saviors on some poor goth punk wannabe?”

“Was he the guy who peed his pants when they busted through the boys’ locker room ceiling?”

“No, girl, that was in Florida last year. Where you been?”

I shrug. “Or how about that time she thought she saw fangs on a guy, called the Saviors, and they came crashing in on a dramatic reading of
Laurel and Hardy Meet Dracula?”

She snickers, finishes her last bag of blood, and sighs. Her long legs stretch over the armrest and dangle, crossed at the ankles. She fidgets slowly, steadily, stirring dust bunnies on the dark, rich, almost ancient hardwood floor beneath her feet.

It’s dusk, the day mostly done, but soft white light from the wrought iron sconces sift shadows through the common area.

Cara stands and walks two bags of blood toward Alice’s empty, still-made bed to place there like the vampire equivalent of mints on her pillow.

There is a soft knock at our door, two quick raps. Alice herself swoops in, a manic and almost unwelcome ball of energy in our formerly peaceful scene.

“Girl,” Cara says, tossing the bags of blood at her, “where you been, who are you, and what did you do with our First Sister? Inquiring minds want to know.” She says it as a joke, but there is half a bite to it.

Alice ignores it. Her clothes are askew and a little dirty, her hair a mess, her eyes dull and glassy, her skin extra pale—and not the cool, healthy vampire kind of pale.

Cara and I exchange
What the
—
?
looks and continue to quietly judge her.

She seems hard, tough, like she’s been burning the candle at both ends again.

Cara and I treat every mission like a campaign: a careful, considered, weeks-long journey toward a final destination. Alice sees everything as a sprint: get in, get the Vamplayer, get out. It’s rarely that easy, but every time Alice forgets and thinks she can crack the case in seventy-two hours or less. I guess some Sisters never learn.

She ignores the straw that comes with every bag of blood, snaps her head back, releases her fangs, and drains it the old-fashioned way or, as Dr. Haskins would say, the rude way.

Watching Alice suck crudely at the plump plastic bag, siphoning off the platelets, the red rush, the slow burn, is a little like watching a hungry dog gnaw on a bone, growling a little, sniffing, snuffling, drooling, greedy: both are best left to their privacy.

I try to give her that privacy (and myself a break), but there’s something different about the way Alice goes to town on the first bag and then, very quickly, the second. I just can’t look away.

It happens so fast, and it’s hard to tell anyway from this angle, but I could swear Alice’s fangs look longer all of a sudden. I mean, okay, maybe it’s an optical illusion, but they look
twice
as long as usual.

She seems greedier too, hungrier somehow than Cara and me combined. We’ve both gone without blood as long as she has, and Cara managed to suck lazily on her bags looking, if anything, elegant. And me? Well, I could have gone another day or two before getting really, truly blood hungry.

But here Alice is going to town like she hasn’t been fed in weeks. Months, maybe. She finishes her bags, drops them to the floor—another no-no they teach us the first day at the Academy—and flops in the recliner with a satisfied belch. “Now that hit the spot.”

I nudge her dirty bare feet off the coffee table. “What’s gotten into you? You’re not with your stupid friends anymore, so quit showing us how bad you can be. You’re with your Sisters, remember? Drop the frat boy act, will ya?”

“Someone got up on the wrong side of the grave this morning, huh, Cara?” Alice says, avoiding eye contact with me and seeking support from her Second Sister.

She doesn’t get it. “Make that two graves, Alice. Lily’s right. Why are you suddenly acting the fool?”

Alice twirls around in her chair like a two-year-old full of sugar sitting on her first big girl barstool. “It’s called acting, ladies, and maybe if you two did a little more of it, Bianca would accept you into her fold as well.”

“Okay, fine,” I say. “We applaud your ability to cozy up to Bianca so quickly, but let us know what’s going on, all right? You staying out all night and dodging us all day is not okay.”

“Yeah,” Cara says, “where were you anyway?”

Alice smirks. “Nowhere special. The rugby team had a pool party, and Bianca thought it would be fun if I tagged along. That’s all.”

“A pool party?” I know I sound like a den mother but can’t help myself. Does a gothic castle like Nightshade even have a pool, let alone parties? “An
all-night
pool party?”

“An all-night,
naked
pool party. Only it wasn’t a pool. There’s this lake out behind the school. Unfortunately you couldn’t see much in the murky waters, but I saw enough to know I can’t wait for another all-night naked rugby team pool party.”

“Fine, great,” Cara says, and I can’t tell if she’s mad because Alice is being her usual reckless self or because she wasn’t invited to skinny-dip with a bunch of thick necks. “We’re really glad you’ve been accepted so quickly, but protocol states you need to check in every two hours or—”

”Protocol-schmotocol.” Alice leaps out of the chair like a long-legged gymnast and disappears into her room. We hear her rifling through her drawers and closet, apparently for her third outfit of the day. “How am I supposed to check in every two hours when my phone is with the rest of my clothes a hundred yards away? This isn’t about protocol, Cara. It’s about politics, plain and simple.”

“No,” Cara says from the doorway, “it’s about survival. What if one of those guys you were skinny-dipping with was the Vamplayer? What if he’d turned you or, worse, drained you? We didn’t hear from you for nearly twelve hours. Alice, that’s far too long to be safe.”

I hear the familiar sound of metal hangers sliding across the rusty bar in her tiny closet.

“What if they’d gotten to you?” Cara says. “How would we even know?”

“How can we help you if we don’t even know where you are?” I add, knowing I’m piling on, more concerned for Alice’s safety than her feelings.

“Okay, okay.” Alice still sounds unconvinced. “I’ll call next time. Sheesh. Last I checked, you guys were supposed to be my Sisters, not my mothers.”

There is a knock at the door.

Cara and I both freak, scrambling to gather one of the flattened blood sacks at Alice’s feet like an empty beer can after a frat party.

“Are you expecting someone?” I say, tossing Dr. Haskins’ special delivery box into my room.

The door swings open.

“Bianca, baby,” Alice gushes, dramatically tossing a scarf around her bare shoulders and bounding from her room, nearly knocking Cara over in the process. She’s wearing short shorts, a tube top, and wedge heels. (Hey, you can take the vampire out of the girl, but you can’t take the girl out of the vampire.)

“Come on in!” she says unnecessarily.

Bianca’s already middoorway by now. The nerve! She’s wearing a sangria pencil skirt with a gold chain belt that cinches her size-two waist, a sheer white blouse with skinny arms over a black bra, and a severe black choker studded with rhinestones. It sounds gaudy and would be on most chicks, but Bianca works it something fierce.

I stand by my own doorway trying to look casual and note one last blood bag on the floor by Alice’s easy chair. I shoot Cara a glance.

She spots it, quickly kicking it under the couch before Bianca can see it as well.

”This is cozy,” Bianca says unconvincingly, slipping all the way into the suite and sliding the door shut behind her with a click that resonates with finality.

The way she says
cozy,
stretching it out into several syllables with a sneer (obviously her specialty), she makes it sound anything but.

“You’ve met my suite mates, Cara and Lily, haven’t you?” Alice’s tone is almost subservient, as if Bianca is some great-aunt with an even greater bank account and we’re just scullery maids tidying up the place.

“If by
met
you mean
got slaughtered on the dodgeball court,
then, yes, I’ve met them.”

We all laugh.

Bianca rests her hand against a chair and waits while Alice finishes up in the bathroom. It’s the first time we’ve been face-to-face without her nose all up in Tristan’s armpit or her hands flinging dodge balls at me.

I can see why Tristan and Alice are enamored with her. It’s not merely her flowing red hair, her angular pale face, her long elegant neck, or even longer sexier legs, to say nothing of her narrow waist and big boobs. Yes, she’s got all the working parts. They’re all fantastic and they all blend well together, but it’s more than the sum of her parts. There’s just something about her.

By the way Cara’s checking her out, I can tell she can spot it too. We’re not scoping her out in any type of official Sister capacity. This is purely girl stuff.

Whatever Bianca has going for her, it’s working. I can’t put a name on it, exactly, other than to say it’s pretty powerful stuff. It’s something the “it girls” in every school have. And trust me, we’ve seen and saved hundreds by now. It’s not that they’re the most beautiful, though Bianca is certainly gorgeous, but there are dozens of girls who are, say, hotter. They might have longer legs, better abs, more striking eyes or cheekbones. But they lack her presence, her command of a room, her strength of personality.

I can see why Tristan chose her, why he’s seducing her, and why of all the girls at Nightshade it’s Bianca he’ll try to turn into a Vampress. She has what he needs: access. She has the connections, the friends, the parties, the hookups, the influence, and of course the respect of just about everybody at Nightshade. Everybody who counts, anyway.

Once Tristan turns her, tells her what he needs from her, it will be nothing for her to turn the rest of the school, regardless of what she’s selling. If a girl like Bianca says, “Hey, gang, we’re going to an all-night rave in this abandoned barn and the only price of admission is that I have to bite your neck on the way in,” forget about it. It would be standing-room-only vampires in ten minutes or less.