Drink, Slay, Love

  “How cute,” Jadrien said. “You called for reinforcements. Let me guess: text messaging? What will kids think of next?” He clenched his fists so that his muscles tensed under his shirt, and he turned toward the Honda Civic.

  Evan stepped out of the car but didn’t close the door. He held his hands palm out as if to show he came in peace. He nodded at Jadrien. “Hi, I’m Evan. Bethany, Pearl, need a ride?”

  “Yes!” Bethany squeaked.

  At the same time Jadrien said, “Thanks, man, but I have them all taken care of.”

  Bethany darted toward Evan’s car. Pearl sensed Jadrien decide to intercept Bethany. Before his muscles could begin his lunge, Pearl struck with her foot flat into Jadrien’s rib cage.

  He flew backward.

  “Pearl, come on!” Bethany yelled. “Into the car!”

  Pearl ignored her. Concentrating on Jadrien, she said to Evan, “Go.”

  From the car, Bethany called, “Run, Pearl!”

  “Can you take him?” Evan asked her.

  “Yes,” Pearl said.

  Jadrien picked himself off the pavement. Out of the corner of her eye, Pearl saw Evan back toward the car, smartly not turning away from Jadrien. Her opinion of Evan rose a notch. Without moving, Jadrien watched them as if they were putting on an amusing play.

  Evan climbed into the driver’s seat.

  Pearl could hear Bethany protesting, “We can’t leave her!”

  “She can handle him,” Evan said, earning another point from Pearl—he not only hadn’t underestimated Jadrien, but he wasn’t underestimating her. Evan floored it to zoom out of the parking lot. The tires squealed as he rounded the corner and then disappeared.

  Conversationally, Jadrien said, “You know I could have caught that car.”

  She rolled her eyes. “If I let you.”

  He smiled. “Right. Because you’re that much stronger and faster. How can you be so certain I haven’t been letting you win in the training room?”

  He said it with so much surety that her breath caught in her throat. For a full ten seconds, she didn’t breathe as she ran through the latest match in her head. Had there been an intentional mistake, a moment when he’d chosen to be too slow? She shook herself. He was playing mind games, and she was letting him. “Clever,” she said. “Almost believed you there.”

  Jadrien said nothing. He circled her slowly as if she were a work of art that he wished to examine from all angles. She rotated, watching him. She kept her arms limp by her sides and her knees a little bent, as if they were in the dojo.

  He halted after one revolution. “Why?”

  She opened her mouth to make a snappy retort and then stopped. It was a valid question.

  “You and I, we could have taken both of them easily,” Jadrien said. “Helped ourselves to a snack and then had a nice joyride in their car. A mere two weeks ago you wouldn’t have hesitated. In fact, it would have been your idea.”

  She thought of the unicorn in the parking lot, and her hand automatically went to her breastbone. “I haven’t changed,” she said. “I just . . . I have to think long term. I’m on a complicated hunt.”

  Jadrien shook his head. “You let two suspicious humans leave. I don’t buy it, Pearl. You aren’t hunting. I’ve seen you hunt. You’re relentless. You’re spontaneous. You’re all the things that I love about you.” Closing the distance between them, he cupped her face in his hand. “You’re changing, Pearl. Whatever happened that night by the Dairy Hut . . . You’re losing your taste for the hunt.”

  “No,” she said. It was nearly a whisper, as much to herself as to him.

  “If you don’t hunt . . .” He caressed her face. Leaning in, his lips brushed against hers. “. . . I can’t be with you. You know that, right? I’m a hunter. I deserve to be with a hunter. Everyone expects it of me. I have a reputation to maintain, you know, and a future to consider.”

  “I’m still a hunter,” she said. Her voice was stronger. She was still herself. Just because everything had become more complicated . . . The unicorn hadn’t changed who she was.

  “Prove it,” he said. “Hunt with me. Your choice of prey. It doesn’t need to be those two new shiny friends of yours. It could be your ice-cream boy. Just bite him. Suck a pint or two. Show me you’re still you, that we’re still us. Please, Pearl.” He kissed her. “Make someone bleed. For me.”

  Pearl peered through the window of the Dairy Hut.

  “You don’t need it to be vacant,” Jadrien said into her ear.

  “I hate standing in line,” she said. She also hated that she felt nervous and that Jadrien could undoubtedly smell her nervousness on her skin. She should never have agreed to this. The very idea that she had to prove her vampireness was insulting. She should have rejected the whole premise by attacking Jadrien right there in the school parking lot. If she’d done that, then by now they could have been tucked away somewhere, getting sweaty for nonviolent reasons.

  She watched a family buy heaping sundaes for each kid, including for a toddler who dug into his face-first before they’d finished paying.

  “How can you like humans?” Jadrien asked. “Makes me want to shower just watching them. They’re filthy animals. Varmints. We do the earth a favor by culling their numbers.” The family left the store and headed for an SUV that was large enough to squash a rhinoceros. “Yet still they breed.”

  Smeared with chocolate sauce, the toddler howled as the parents strapped him into his car seat. The two older children raced around the SUV in an impromptu game of if-I-catch-you-I-punch-you. Laughing, the parents shooed them inside. They sealed the door and smiled goofily at each other.

  “Disgusting,” Jadrien said. “Someday we won’t skulk in the shadows. We won’t fear these vermin. We will put them in their rightful place as our chattel, our sheep.”

  Pearl gawked at him. She’d never heard him talk like this.

  He sang softly, “‘You may say I’m a dreamer. . .’”

  “Humans will always outnumber us,” Pearl said. She couldn’t believe he bought into the rule-the-world crap that radical vampires spouted. “We might be their predators, but if we come out of the shadows, then the advantage shifts to the humans.” Besides, who really wanted to rule the world? Talk about too much pressure. Just high school was bad enough.

  “Exactly why it’s a lousy idea for you to pal around with them,” Jadrien said. “Until we’re ready to rule the world, we have to stay in the shadows.”

  She began to reply and then stopped. She could stay in the shadows voluntarily. She could choose to give up the sun. She’d tell her parents that the hunt was too difficult for a lone vampire in daylight. Humans were too aware in the day. They ran in packs. She’d quit attending high school, and no one outside the Family would ever know—aside, of course, from the hundred nearest-and-dearest buddies that Jadrien elected to tell.

  Okay, so that wouldn’t work. Too many vampires knew. Someone would tell the king, and he might not see her “ability” as an asset. He might see it as a sign of betrayal, especially if the Family failed to deliver his dinner and someone with loose lips reported that it was her fault.

  She wondered if Jadrien’s loose lips could help her. He could report back that nothing had changed about her. Of course, that first required her proving that nothing had.

  There was no reason that she should hesitate. She’d done this dozens of times. Out of all her meals, Brad was her most dependable snack. Pretty much all he needed was a little cleavage.

  Pearl pushed through the door. The bell rang, and the sound was so familiar that it calmed her. She knew this hunt. She flashed a smile at Brad, the kind that was aimed at one person and one person alone. As he always did, he faltered in the act of closing the cash register.

  “Um, can I h-help you?” Brad asked.

  Her smile froze as she saw her reflection in the glass over the ice cream. Behind her, she heard the door ring again. Jadrien. Oh, great, she had an audience. She slid sideways, away from the gla
ss, so that he wouldn’t see her reflection.

  “Two scoops of vanilla,” she said. “And you.”

  He blinked. “Excuse me?”

  She winced at herself. She was off her game. She told herself it was because she wasn’t used to an audience, especially a judgmental one. Pearl faked a laugh and tried to channel Bethany’s cute innocence. “I don’t like to eat alone, but you see, I’m new here, and I don’t know anyone so I was trying to very awkwardly ask if you’d like to have some ice cream with me?”

  “Uh, s-sure, I guess,” he said. “I’m not really hungry.”

  “I’m hungry enough for both of us.” Smiling sunnily, she rounded the counter and hooked her arm through his. “Be my friend for the night?”

  “I . . . uh . . . have other customers.”

  The bell rang as Jadrien exited.

  She looked at the empty store. “No, you don’t. Please come outside with me.”

  For the first time she wondered why Brad always agreed. Perhaps he was lonely. Or maybe he just liked that she was female. She wondered if any girls ever saw him as more than the ice-cream scooper, an extension of a spoon.

  Pearl wanted to slap herself. She should not be thinking about Brad as anything other than a snack. Certainly Uncle Stefan hadn’t when he’d savaged Brad’s neck. The boy still bore scars that looked like a knot of rubber bands in his skin. She wondered how he’d explained that to himself the next morning. She wondered if his family had asked about it.

  He scooped the ice cream fast and let her lead him out the back door.

  Outside, the night was cool. Stars speckled the sky, and the moon was a crescent above the dumpsters. “This, uh, is where I take my breaks,” he said. “It’s not very . . . nice. I mean, we could go out front. But I’m not really supposed to . . .”

  “This is fine,” she said. She took the cup of ice cream out of his hands, and then she sat cross-legged on the stoop by the door. She patted the step beside her. Obediently, he sat. “Do you attend Greenbridge High?” She hadn’t noticed him there. Granted, it was a large school.

  He shook his head. “Left. It wasn’t . . . meeting my needs.” He was trying to sound suave and failing. He looked up at the sky and tried again. “Just seemed so pointless, you know? It’s not as if I’ll ever be anything or anyone. Dad says I’m a waste of space . . . so I made some room in the school. If you look at it the right way, it was downright altruistic.”

  She studied him. If she were really channeling Bethany, she’d be advising him to seek counseling. Evan, too, would have prompted him to talk more and offered some wisdom. Zeke and Matt would have joked him out of his funk and had him laughing. But Pearl wasn’t them. More important, she didn’t want to be them. As she’d told Daddy, she knew who and what she was.

  “Hold still,” she told him.

  And then she leaned toward him and bit his neck.

  He jerked back as her fangs sank through his skin. Her fangs tore the skin as he moved, and she clamped both her hands hard on his shoulders. In seconds, the venom in her fangs hit his bloodstream, and he quit struggling. His breathing slowed, and she felt his muscles relax under her fingers.

  Warm blood spilled into her mouth. She hadn’t had fresh in so long that her head began to buzz. She licked with her tongue to catch the stray drops, fast like a cat with milk. Her veins heated, and she felt her skin start to burn. Her head swirled. It was hard to focus.

  She felt his heartbeat, each pulse sending a wave of fresh blood into her mouth. It poured down her chin. His breathing was soft and shallow. She thought of the breathing of the students in school. She seemed to hear them echoed in the breathing of this boy.

  A part of her knew that she should detach. She’d proved her point. She was still a predator. But that part was a whisper underneath the beat of his heart. She heard a thousand heartbeats under the thrum. Lub-dub, lub-dub. She heard voices, all the students in the school, talking to her all at once. She heard Bethany and Evan and Zeke and Matt and Sana, all telling her, Stop, stop, stop.

  A hand shook her shoulder. “Enough, Pearl.”

  But it wasn’t enough. She had to swallow them all. She had to drink them all down so they stopped talking to her, so she stopped hearing them. She didn’t want to listen. She was a vampire. She didn’t want to hear human voices inside her. She didn’t want to care.

  She shouldn’t care.

  And she shouldn’t walk in sunlight or have a reflection.

  “Stop, Pearl,” a voice said. She didn’t know whether the voice was inside or outside. But she heard it, and she knew it was right. She had to stop it. She had to stop listening. She had to stop the breathing. She had to stop the heartbeats. Only then would she have herself back. Only then would she have peace.

  Brad slumped down, slipping out of her grasp. She felt his skin tear as he fell, her fangs clamped on his veins. Blood poured over her chin and neck, and she opened her eyes to see the last of his lifeblood spill out of him and over the sidewalk.

  He lay silent.

  Chapter

  EIGHTEEN

  Blood filled her mouth, her throat, her nose. It blinded and deafened her. She tasted it, and she breathed it. Filling her, it spread through every inch of her body until she felt saturated. She felt as if she held an ocean inside her, and she felt as powerful as that ocean. She was the tides and the currents, and waves crashed inside of her. Her skin couldn’t possibly hold it all in. She felt as if she’d burst.

  “Pearl.”

  The voice was distant.

  Mother’s voice.

  It cut through the red haze. Her voice sliced through the waves. “You part the Red Sea,” Pearl said, and then she laughed in a high-pitched cascade.

  “She’s blood drunk,” Mother said. “Clean her.”

  Dimly, Pearl felt her clothes peeled from her, but she didn’t care. The blood thrummed so close to the surface that her skin felt hot. Cold water hit her. It slammed against her throat, her chest, her stomach, her legs. It drenched her hair and dripped over her face. She laughed again as the drops sizzled on her skin.

  She heard other voices and began to be able to separate them: Daddy, Uncle Felix, Aunt Lianne, and Uncle Stefan. Uncle Stefan barked orders. Gradually, the blood receded like the tide pulled back from her mind. She saw the parking lot of Dairy Hut. She saw her cousins scrubbing the step where she had drunk from Brad.

  “Every drop gone,” Uncle Stefan said. “It must be untraceable.”

  Through the back-door window, Pearl saw Daddy inside with Uncle Pascha. Both of them held gasoline containers. She saw Brad. He was slumped across a table. His cheek was pressed against the plastic surface. His arm hung limp over the side. His eyes were open and very, very dead.

  A dozen memories flashed through her mind. She saw him as he was a few hours ago, talking about high school. She saw him on the day Zeke and Matt had caught her. She saw him on the day the unicorn had staked her. She saw him again and again: standing behind the ice-cream counter captivated by her, scooping ice cream with shaking hands, and then following her behind the store . . . all the way back in her memories to the first time she’d waltzed into the Dairy Hut. But she couldn’t remember what he’d said or what she’d said that first time. She couldn’t remember if he’d been different before he’d met her. This night, his last night, was the first time she had talked to him really and the first that she’d listened to him.

  And she’d killed him.

  All of a sudden, the red haze dissipated. She shivered as the water prickled her skin, ice cold. Inside, she felt herself begin to scream. Silent and without end.

  “You killed him,” Uncle Stefan said, as if echoing her thoughts. He was suddenly in front of her, though she hadn’t seen him move. Last she’d seen he’d been in front of the dumpsters. “You’ll bring police attention, press attention, human attention here, before the Fealty Ceremony. You have failed the Family at this most important of times.”

  “She can’t hear you,” Mother said
. “She’s lost in the blood.”

  “She’s lost to us,” Uncle Stefan said. “She must be destroyed. She’s a danger.”

  “She will be contained,” Mother said.

  “We can’t afford this kind of disaster at this time. All eyes will be on us.”

  Daddy joined the conversation, minus the gasoline container. “We know. It will be dealt with, Stefan.”

  “With fire? You risk us all for her mistake.”

  “Fire will destroy all evidence of her,” Daddy said. “And no vampire hunter in the world would expect us to use it.”

  Pearl held very still. For some reason they thought she was unaware. She wondered why she was aware, but shoved that mystery away with all the others to be addressed later. Right now . . . this was bad. Very, very bad.

  She watched without even flickering her eyes as Mother, Daddy, and Uncle Stefan went inside to finish laying the stage for covering up her mistake. The cousins added bleach to the step and then dirt to disguise the area. Uncle Pascha spread gasoline throughout the store as Pearl attempted to stave off panic. She’d never seen or heard of vampires using fire to cover a scene before. Fire was anathema to them. One lick of flame, and a vampire could burst into a blaze as fast as if touched by sunlight. The fact that they were willing to risk it . . .

  Pearl didn’t wait to see what would happen next. She had to flee. She didn’t let the decision show in her face or register in her muscles first. She simply ran.

  Vaulting over the nearest dumpster, she bolted into the woods between the houses. She left her clothes behind. She left everyone behind. Full of fresh blood, she had more power in her than any other vampire in Connecticut. She let it fuel her as she ran faster and faster, beyond the speed of a human, beyond the speed of a car, until she felt as if she’d melded with the wind.

  Her cousins fell quickly behind her.

  She laughed out loud as the blood surged through her. Stolen blood. Lifeblood. At this moment she felt as if she was the most powerful and fastest being on the face of the planet. She couldn’t be stopped.