Dinah looked at everyone. “Guys, chill. Please. So Kate went all psycho at a cheerleader at a party. Big deal.”
“It’s not just that,” Nicole hissed at the same time Amy cried, “It so is a big deal,” while Kate herself said, “I did not go psycho!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Dinah said, holding her hands up to calm them all. “Y’all acting crazy. Let’s all take a breath and enjoy the nachos.”
She took a chip from the bowl in front of her, but the other three just kept glaring at each other.
“You didn’t see it,” Amy said to Dinah. “You didn’t see what she did. How strong she was.”
“You’re angry with me because I’m strong?” Kate snapped back.
She could feel her own rage starting to boil. The last thing she wanted to do was lash out here, to unleash that strange fighting instinct in her that was powerful enough to bring a six-foot-tall man to his knees.
“I’m angry at you because you ditched me,” Amy countered. “Again.”
Kate was about to reply when Tony suddenly appeared at the table. Everyone sat back in their seats, glaring.
“Kate, hey,” Tony said, waving.
She was so not in the mood to talk to him right now. She looked up at him.
“Yeah?” she said, sounding more like Madison than herself.
“I was wondering if you wanted to go to that fair they’ve set up in Shoreline Park,” he said, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “I’m a bit of an amusement park geek, you see, and I figured maybe you might be up for it.” He rubbed his neck nervously.
Kate frowned. Tony was asking her on a date but she didn’t feel even the smallest hint of excitement. If anything, she found his presence irritating. Because just behind him she had a clear view of Madison’s table, filled with all the popular girls, and her sister was beckoning to her. Actually calling her over. The sight made Kate far happier than Tony asking her on a date ever could.
“I guess take some time to think about it,” Tony said as he realized she wasn’t really paying attention.
He wandered away looking crushed.
“Okay, it’s official,” Amy said. “You’re an alien who’s taken over Kate’s body. Tony just asked you on a date and you totally blew him off.”
But Kate wasn’t listening. Madison was beckoning to her more forcefully, smiling invitingly in a way Kate had never seen before. Her friends were joining in, all making gestures at Kate to come over.
“I mean, what the hell?” Amy added, her usually jokey tone having completely vanished. She sounded out and out incredulous. “Tony!”
Kate stood, ready to head over to Madison’s table. Amy, Dinah, and Nicole realized what had been distracting her and it dawned on them what was about to happen.
“Oh no,” Dinah said. “Now here I draw the line. You can ignore my texts but you do not go over to that table with those girls. No way.”
But her threat fell on deaf ears. Kate was drawn to Madison’s table like a moth to a flame.
“She’s ditching us for the cool kids!” she heard Nicole cry behind her as she walked away.
“Do you know what?” Amy said. “I’m actually done with her. I’m not putting up with her crap anymore. I’m wiping my hands clean.”
Kate should have felt something but she didn’t. She didn’t care at all. Her sister was extending the hand of friendship toward her for the first time ever and she was riding high on the sensation.
She drew up to Madison’s table. “Hey.”
“Sit,” Madison said, gesturing to a chair. “Jeez, how long did I have to beckon you over for? My hand is aching!”
Kate sat, a little disconcerted by Madison’s friendly attitude.
“So,” Madison said, gesturing to the rest of the table. “This is Holly, Jodi, Frances, and Isla. But you knew that already, right?”
Kate nodded. Everyone knew the popular senior girls.
Holly, a redhead with freckles that seemed to have been sprinkled across her face in such a way as to make her uniquely attractive, leaned across the table. “Clara usually sits there,” she said. “But she’s at home recuperating after the party.”
Kate tensed as an awkward silence fell. “I feel really bad about that,” she mumbled. “Things just got a bit out of hand.”
Holly’s face stayed in the same fake smiling position. “Oh, you should feel bad,” she said, “Clara’s going to have scars now for the rest of her life.”
Kate felt more and more uncomfortable. All the girls were smiling at her and speaking in the cheeriest tones, but the words coming out of their mouths were anything but friendly.
She looked over at Madison. “What’s going on?” she said.
Madison smiled her serene, disconnected smile. “Well, I was chatting to Clara over the weekend. You see, I don’t think I’d been given the full story.”
“Okay…” Kate said, picking the sides of her fingernails nervously beneath the table.
“You see, someone told me that she’d threatened you,” Madison continued, “which I was, like, totally not cool with. But then Clara told me why she’d threatened you.”
Kate frowned. “Because of Tony?”
Madison started slow clapping. Her fake smile finally faded from her face, only to be replaced by a mean glare that reminded Kate instantly of their mother.
“Tony’s mine,” Madison said through gritted teeth. “There’s no way in hell my scrawny, ugly, pathetic little sister is going to date the hottest senior guy at school. Prom’s coming up and he’s going to ask me. Got it?”
The insult was like a slap in the face. Kate had thought she’d finally gotten her sister on her side but that hope had been dashed because of a stupid crush.
“I’m the pathetic one?” Kate scoffed. “You’re the one with the crush on a boy who doesn’t even like you. Why don’t you let Tony decide who he wants to take to prom?”
Suddenly, Holly smacked her palm onto the table top, making Kate flinch. “Don’t talk to Madison that way,” she snapped.
Here we go again, Kate thought, Madison’s friends laying into me.
Jodi joined in. “You’re such a total leech, Kate. Like, why can’t you just stop being so jealous of your sister? Like, Madison is way better than you. Get over it.”
The red mist of anger began descending across Kate’s vision. She could feel her newfound power starting to pulse through her body, crackling along her nerves like electricity. She was about to lose it, in front of everyone in the cafeteria. Panic started to rise through her.
“If you so much as speak to Tony,” Frances said, “I’ll make your life a living hell.”
Frances was the biggest of the popular girls. Not only was she a cheerleader and in super good shape, she also did karate and kickboxing. If anyone could make Kate’s life a living hell, it was Frances.
But the logical, timid part of Kate’s mind that was telling her to back down seemed completely overpowered by another, new part of Kate’s mind, one that told her to fight, to stick up for herself, to kick ass.
She stood up, making her chair squeak loudly.
“Wanna say that again?” she challenged Frances.
Frances stood too and loomed over her. She had nearly a foot on Kate.
“You don’t want to fight me, kid,” she said.
Still in her seat, Madison now wore an expression of fear. She remembered the way Kate had brought down their dad on Saturday morning. If she could do that to him, she could do way worse to Frances.
“Hey,” Madison said, “let’s, like, cool it, okay?”
Frances looked confused. “I thought you wanted us to warn her off.”
“I do,” Madison stammered. “Just not, like, physically. Kate’s stronger than she looks.”
Holly, Isla, and Jodi all pulled disgusted expressions, like they thought Madison was wussing out and making excuses because she didn’t really want them to hurt Kate. Madison, realizing she was being perceived in a negative way, was caught in a b
ind.
“Or, like, whatever,” she said, flapping her hand. “Fight if you want. Just know that Kate can do some serious damage.”
Frances scoffed and turned her mean eyes back to Kate. “I doubt that.”
Kate really didn’t want to make a scene in the middle of the cafeteria. She desperately wanted a way to defuse the situation before that strange, powerful instinct overcame her and rendered her unable to make decisions.
There was only one thing for it. As Frances lunged for her, Kate ducked and took the girl’s feet out from under her. She fell back, landing on the floor with a thud.
Of course, everyone was looking, but at least they were looking at a cheerleader lying on her back rather than a cheerleader flying fifty feet across the room before smashing through the wall.
Holly and Jodi leaped up next.
“You’re going to pay for that,” Holly cried.
The two girls lunged at Kate. Kate’s arms jutted forward in a split second and she grabbed each one by the front of the T-shirt. She yanked them together so they bashed into one another. Their heads clunked together and they let out simultaneous oof noises. Kate let go of their T-shirts and they both sunk to the floor, rubbing their heads.
Isla seemed incensed. She jumped up from her seat, her eyes blazing with anger, and went for Kate, fingernails bared. Kate dodged her outstretched claws and elbowed her in the stomach hard enough to knock the wind out of Isla. She doubled over, coughing, and fell to her knees.
Kate stood there, looking at the four girls on the cafeteria floor. The whole place had gone completely silent, but at least she hadn’t revealed her super strength to everyone. At the most they’d think she’d been trained as a ninja.
Kate looked down at Madison, who was still in her seat, knowing better than to take Kate on.
“I thought you didn’t want to fight with me anymore,” Kate said, the pain evident in her voice.
Madison folded her arms and looked at her sister coldly. “I was just freaking out because of what happened with Dad.”
“So you didn’t mean it?”
Madison shrugged. Her mouth was poised. Kate thought she could see tears sparkling in her eyes.
“Fine,” Kate said. “Go back to being Mom’s trophy kid. Stay in your ivory frickin’ tower. See if I care. But don’t send your friends after me to do your dirty work.” She leaned down, her face close to Madison’s. “You know I could have hurt them, don’t you? You know what I could have done.”
Madison swallowed, but she didn’t say anything, just kept her calm composure as she stared straight ahead.
Kate backed off. She held her head high as she stepped over Jodi, Frances, Holly, and Isla, all groaning and whimpering on the floor, then walked out of the cafeteria, not looking at any of the hundreds of pairs of eyes that stared after her in disbelief.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Kate stomped away from the cafeteria, her heart pounding. She just couldn’t do this, pretend like everything was normal when it so wasn’t. Something had happened to her in that accident, something that Elijah—and only Elijah—could explain to her. She needed to speak to him so badly, but that weird instinct inside of her kept telling her he was gone, that he was nowhere near her at all.
She wandered the corridors searching for him but knowing she wasn’t going to find him. As she passed the reception area, she went back up to the desk.
“Hey,” she said to the receptionist, a pimply guy who looked so young he could only have graduated last year.
“Can I help?” the guy said.
“Yeah, I, um, have this friend who didn’t turn up at school today. I’m worried that he switched schools because of bullying.”
The guy frowned. “Why don’t you call him?”
“He doesn’t have a phone,” Kate said with a shrug. “He’s kinda elusive, you know? But anyway, if you could just check the computer for me that would be so helpful.”
The guy folded his arms. “You know I can’t do that. I can’t give you confidential information.”
“But he’s my friend,” Kate said, exasperated.
“If he was your friend,” the guy said, “then he probably would’ve told you in person.”
Kate had heard enough. She wasn’t in the mood to listen to disparaging put-downs. Overcome with irritation, she leaned forward and grabbed the guy by the front of his shirt and pulled him up off his seat so that his face was an inch from hers.
“I’m having a really bad day,” Kate hissed at him. “And you have the power to either make it a bit better or flip me over the edge. Believe me, you do not want to see me when I flip out. So why don’t you just type the name Elijah Ackerman into that computer of yours and make my day—and yours—a tiny bit better.”
She let go and the guy fell back into his seat. He looked terrified as his fingers quickly typed Elijah’s name into the system. Kate drummed her fingertips menacingly on the top while the computer loaded.
“He’s left the school,” the guy finally said with a quivering voice.
“Does it say why?” Kate demanded, feeling her insides churn with anguish.
The guy trembled. “Uh, yeah, it says his parents pulled him out because they’re moving to New York City.”
Kate slammed her fist onto the top then walked away, clutching her hair. Had they gotten to him, the parents he was trying to escape from? Had he been dragged back to that life he’d told her he didn’t want to live anymore, forced into an arranged marriage with a girl he didn’t love?
She turned back to the terrified receptionist. “Does it say where in New York they’re going?” she asked frantically.
The guy shook his head.
As if knowing would help. New York was a huge city. She couldn’t just show up there and expect to find him.
“What about school?” she asked. “Does it say where he’s transferred to?”
“Not yet,” the guy replied. “The system takes a little while to update, you know. He only left on Friday.”
Kate let a grunt of frustration escape from her throat. Elijah was gone. There was no one left to answer her questions.
She was just going to have find the answers herself another way.
*
Santa Barbara Public Library was another one of Kate’s favorite places in the city. She loved everything about it, right down to its cool architecture with huge arched windows that stretched from floor to ceiling and provided an awesome view of palm trees and the equally impressive law library across the street. Along with the mountains, museum, and beach, Kate had probably spent a good portion of her childhood in the library, working her way through fiction books. She’d loved vampire novels as a kid but she’d always accepted that they were fantasy, that it was all made up. It had never occurred to her to look into the mythology around which they’d been based.
Even now, as she went up to the folklore section, she felt like an idiot for even contemplating the thoughts that were in her mind. There were so many more logical explanations for what was happening to her body—like a chronic overdose of adrenaline caused by damage to her adrenal glands, a lack of sufficient iron causing her to crave bloody meat, a sudden onset of body dysmorphia causing her to perceive herself as a strange gray shape in the mirror—and she knew all of it could have been triggered by stress from the accident. But nothing could explain Elijah and the night they’d spent together on the roof of Ackerman House. There wasn’t a medical theory in existence that could tell her how he could disappear into thin air, or how his house could only be seen from a specific angle, or how he’d been able to transport her to her bed in the middle of the night.
It was all that stuff that led her, with trembling hands, to take down a book from the shelf called The History of Vampires. She took the book to a table and began to read all about the origins of vampires in folklore before branching off into the different European cultural subsections. She skipped all the bits about how popular fiction had changed perceptions of vampires and started t
o get a little frustrated with the book, which didn’t delve far enough into what she needed to know.
She shut the book. Maybe she was going about this the wrong way. She was starting with the concept of a vampire and working backward, trying to find something that fit into place. Maybe a better way would be to start with what she already knew about Elijah and work forward from there. She needed to broaden the search to all kinds of mystical species and demons before narrowing it down again using a few select criteria.
She found another book on the shelf that looked promising. This one was incredibly old, so old, in fact, the leather cover was starting to disintegrate. She began poring through the pages, reading about succubi and werewolves, fallen angels and witches. None explained Elijah.
Then finally she came to the vampire section. This book went into much greater detail than the other, breaking them down into subsections. She found a passage about North American vampires.
Evolving to their new North American climate, the younger generations of vampires lost their hypersensitivity to daylight, instead developing a new gene with special UV protection. This gave them greater abilities to interact with humans and keep to human timetables as, with the help of sun protection, they were able to utilize the daylight hours. It is now considered common practice for younger vampires to attend school, though their long life spans—approximately ten times longer than humans’—require changing locations on a frequent basis and avoiding excelling in any particular subject so as not to bring too much exposure to the species.
Due in part to the new gene, an exodus of vampire families headed to California sometime around the late 1800s. This state, which previously had no recorded vampire activity, and coven officials were careful to ensure these young, more liberal vampire families continued to follow vampire law and tradition, introducing a census. The mass migration was specifically organized to coincide with mating rituals, similar to that found in other species, whereby vampires mate with a life partner assigned to them by the clan. This is the cornerstone of vampire existence, and is known as The Breeding.