Drink, Slay, Love

  Pearl returned to him. She noticed puckered skin on his neck and knew Uncle Stefan had found him. Uncle Stefan was . . . an enthusiastic eater. She wondered if Brad had screamed.

  “Relax,” she told him as she ran her fingers through his greasy hair.

  His glassy eyes stared at her. He’d had enough vampire venom in his system over the past year to be completely compliant. He reminded her of a dog tied up in a yard. I should release him, she thought. Let the puppy run free.

  Pearl shook her head. Where on earth had that thought come from? He wasn’t a puppy; he was a walking Happy Meal. Had she really just worried about how her snack felt? Seriously? She must just be overtired. Pressing herself against Brad, she bent his head to expose his neck.

  In the distance, she heard a car. Dairy Hut must have a new customer. Brad would be missed if she didn’t quit dawdling. Distracted, she hesitated—and the kid flinched as if his body remembered the pain.

  Maybe I shouldn’t. . .

  Pearl stepped back. What’s wrong with me? First she’d seen a creature who didn’t exist. Now she was seeing weird reflections and hesitating over her favorite snack.

  She heard a yell. She was rattled by her bizarre reaction to Brad, and her reflexes were a second too slow. Turning, she saw the tall boy from inside the Dairy Hut leap out of a dumpster and toss a black sheet over her head. As the sheet fluttered around her, instinct (finally) kicked in, and she whirled, punching and clawing at the sheet.

  Car wheels squealed.

  Pearl yanked the sheet off her face as a pickup truck, driven by the chubby boy, slammed into her. For the second time in the same week, she blacked out.

  When she woke again, she was in a cage in the middle of a backyard. On one side was an empty swimming pool half hidden behind hip-high weeds. On the other was a pile of old bicycles, rusted grills, and other junk. Squatting on top of a picnic table were the two boys.

  “Time to burn, vampire,” Chubby said.

  He pointed toward the east.

  Pearl screamed and threw her hands in front of her face as a sliver of sun appeared on the horizon. She felt her skin . . . Okay, wait, she didn’t feel anything. She felt totally fine. Pearl lowered her hands. She should have burst into flame like any self-respecting vampire. But to the shock of everyone (Pearl, the boys, and quite probably the sun itself), she didn’t.

  Chapter

  FOUR

  Sunrise.

  It pooled on the horizon like liquid gold. Seconds later it spilled over the hills and houses and coalesced into a puddle of light. As it rose higher, molten light dripped from the curve of the sun as if it were wet. Sunlight painted the clouds, tinting them cute, cheerful colors like pink lemonade. Above, the sky paled into a blue that washed out the stars.

  Fumbling with the keys, the two boys unlocked the cage.

  “Oh, crap, crap, crap,” Chubby said. “You’re going to tell the police, aren’t you? So screwed. She’s so telling the police. And then they’ll tell my dad. Crap, I’m dead.”

  “You gotta understand,” Tall said as he yanked off the padlock, “we’re totally impressionable youth. Blame the video games. Corrupting our innocent, corruptible minds. Late-night TV, bad for the soul. Nearly bought a Bowflex last week, that’s how impressionable. I own a Snuggie! We aren’t the sorts to normally kidnap innocent girls.”

  “Just tell the police not to tell my dad, okay?” Chubby said.

  “‘Kidnap’ is a harsh word,” Tall said. “I prefer ‘protective custody.’ Really, when you think about it, we were protecting you. Or protecting someone from you, which is almost the same. Except for how it’s totally not.”

  “He’s had a rough time at work,” Chubby said. Bracing himself, he dragged the cage door open. It shrieked and whined. “Recession. He can’t take this right now. Last Tuesday he flipped about late garbage pickup. Tears, screaming, snot flying out of his nose all over the wall until it looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. Not a pretty sight.”

  Pearl felt the sun on her face. It felt like a warm breath.

  “Kind of funny when you think about it, us believing we had to protect a dude from you,” Tall said. “In a few weeks we can all grab a cheeseburger together and laugh about this. I mean, a hot chick like you couldn’t possibly be a vampire. Seriously, though, you might want to cut down on the black garb.”

  She walked out of the cage.

  “Not that you were in any way ‘asking for it,’” Tall said. “A woman can wear whatever she chooses without fear of being mistaken for a fiendish bloodsucking nightwalker. But have you thought green? Green would look great with your eyes.”

  “She’s got killer eyes,” Chubby agreed. “I mean, awesome eyes. And legs. Dude, did you say you own a Snuggie? Seriously?”

  Pearl waved her hand at the wannabe vampire slayers. “Shut up.”

  Both of them shut up.

  She tilted her head back to look at the sky. She’d seen daylight in photos and on Antoinette’s TV. But it couldn’t compare to this feeling of the sky widening above her as it brightened, as if the world were opening up like a flower blossom. Around her, color flowed into the buildings, into the rust on the metal scraps, into the green-brown grass of the lawn, into the feathers of the birds that clustered on the telephone lines.

  “You need a ride home?” Chubby asked, all solicitous.

  “‘Sorry’ doesn’t begin to cover this situation,” Tall said. “Anything we can do to make this up to you, you just say the word. Consider us your knights in shining armor, milady.”

  Pearl brushed past them, eyes fixed on the horizon. As it rose higher, the sun, now a semicircle, bleached whiter and brighter. “You’re still not shutting up.”

  “Do you need us to call anyone?” Chubby asked.

  As she picked her way across the yard between rusted spare parts and unloved lawn equipment, the two “hunters” trailed her like puppies. She considered biting them to keep them quiet, but she didn’t want the distraction from the sunrise. Plus there were two of them, which would make it awkward. She couldn’t bite them both simultaneously, and there were too many rusty tools around here that the other could use as weapons if she bared her teeth at one of them. She didn’t want to survive dawn only to be sliced up by Tweedledum and Tweedledee. It would be simpler to just walk out of here, eastward into the sun.

  “Think she needs an ambulance?” Chubby asked his friend. “We did, you know, hit her with a car. And she seems a little . . .” Elbows flapping, he imitated a drunken bird.

  “My sister would have been having hysterics,” Tall said. “Granted, she has hysterics when a squirrel threatens her personal space.” He caught Pearl’s elbow. “We should take you to a hospital. You could have internal bleeding. Or, I don’t know, a bruise or two.”

  Pearl fixed her gaze on his fingers.

  He peeled his fingers away from her elbow and held up his hands in surrender. “No touchy. Got it. Sorry.”

  She spoke slowly as if to a pet, “No touchy. No talky. I’m leaving now. You stay here. Don’t follow me. Stay. Comprende?”

  Both of them nodded as vigorously as bobble heads.

  Chubby cleared his throat. “Are you going to . . . tell?”

  Pearl smiled. “Just my Family.”

  Both of them exhaled in unison, as if this news was a relief.

  She wiggled her fingers in a wave and then strode away from them. She left the yard by squeezing between a fence and garbage cans piled high with empty pizza boxes. She inhaled the smell of stale pizza and was suddenly hungry—she’d been interrupted before her snack last night. She was tempted to turn around and revisit her two friends, but sunlight flooded the world in front of her and she kept walking toward it down the center of the street.

  The sun filled the horizon with pale yellow. Around her . . . look at the trees! The sun painted each bare branch in highlights. She’d always seen trees as a morass of shadows, but in the dawn light, the warm brown branches wove into a lacy pattern as d
elicate as anything Aunt Rose had ever embroidered. Pearl could see the nascent leaf buds, waiting for enough warmth to let them grow. Spinning in a circle in the street, she gawked at the trees, transformed into artwork.

  It was more than just the look of everything; the world even sounded different. From every direction, she heard the cacophony of birds. From the trees, the roofs, and the phone lines, they trilled and twittered and chirped and cooed until she felt like jumping out of her skin with the very loud wrongness of all of this.

  Vampires did not walk into the dawn.

  Or if they did, they didn’t come back. It was a euphemism for suicide. Walk into the dawn equaled cease to exist. Painfully. Her skin should have bubbled and blackened. Her insides should have boiled. Her eyes should have been seared out of her head. And all of this charmingly crusty splendor should have been followed by crumbling into charred dust. Yet, somehow, she’d missed this delightful fate.

  She lifted her face and tasted the sun as it poured over her. Dawn had a taste akin to the smell of a summer lawn mowed late enough to still smell fresh after dusk. It was crisp and sweet. She liked it. A lot.

  Behind her, a car horn blared.

  She decided not to step aside. If it were night, she might have skittered to the sidewalk. Vampires were supposed to be all sneaky in the shadows. But the rules had changed. Today she strode down the middle of the street into the arms of the dawn.

  A red Buick veered around her. The driver, a middle-aged man in a blue suit, shot her a glare, and Pearl smiled and waved and then laughed out loud. Her laugh startled a flock of birds above her. “Fly, my pretties, fly!” she called, and laughed again.

  Another car approached. She heard this one park on the street behind her, but she didn’t bother to turn around. These were only the first of many humans to wake. Soon the morning commute would begin. Inside all these houses, humans were stirring, little mice scurrying through their nests. Alarms beeping. Showers running. Coffee percolating. She pictured the humans brushing their teeth, bleary-eyed, dreams still clinging to their sticky skin. She wondered what a human tasted like first thing in the morning.

  Quit thinking about food in the middle of a miracle, she told herself.

  A car door opened and shut behind her. She heard footsteps. Trying to ignore the human and focus on the miracle, she deliberately did not turn around.

  A few seconds later a boy—peripheral vision said he was tall, male, weaponless, and about the same age as she was—matched her stride. “Hey, are you okay?” he asked.

  “Perfect,” she said. “You can leave me alone now.” Maybe walking down the middle of the street wasn’t the best idea. Skulking had its perks. You were never asked to chat and skulk at the same time.

  “Are you sure? You look like you need help,” he said. His voice was smooth and deep, older than he was. “Sorry to push, but, you see, I have this Good Samaritan hero-complex issue. And, in the interest of full disclosure, a bit of OCD. But don’t worry—I only alphabetize my own books.”

  About to reply, Pearl glanced at him. Words died in her throat, and she was left with sweet. She felt her fangs poke at her gums, and she sealed her lips shut, running her tongue over the fang tips, forcing them back in. Hands down, he was the yummiest-looking human she’d ever seen outside a magazine. He wore a brown suede coat over a white T-shirt and jeans, and he made even his clothes look delicious. She noticed he had car keys in one hand. Pearl glanced down the street and saw a blue Honda Civic parked under a maple tree. Its windshield flashed in the sunlight. Even an ordinary car that she’d never consider hijacking at night looked luminous in daylight. She looked again at the boy. Sunlight danced in his hair so it looked as if the black strands were laced with tiny gems. It was the sun that made him look so sumptuous, she decided. It erased all the shadows that she was used to, and it deepened all the colors into richer hues.

  She kind of wished she wrote poetry. This sun-bathed world and beautiful boy deserved to be captured in brilliant words. Hey, maybe she’d try a sip of a poet instead. “Do you write poetry?” Pearl asked him.

  He blinked at her for an instant, but then he struck an actor’s pose. “‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. But thy eternal summer shall not fade nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st.’”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “You didn’t write that.”

  “I can do haiku,” he said.

  “Never mind,” she said. She continued walking down the street, and he continued to walk with her. “Is there something you want?”

  “Just to help,” he said. He sounded so earnest that she half expected him to glow with sunlit sincerity. Humans are ridiculous, she thought.

  “Thanks, but I really don’t need any help to watch the sunrise. Managing fine on my own.” Pearl squinted as she looked into the sun. Streaks of white laced her eyelids when she blinked. A full, fat orb now, the sun squatted above the horizon like the mass of incandescent gas that it was. It blazed just like every book claimed it did.

  He withdrew a pair of sunglasses from his coat pocket and slid them onto his face. “Yellow sun, daybreak; covers the earth with new hope; new promises made.”

  Pearl cocked her head at him. “Seriously?”

  “You asked for a haiku,” he said. “Cheesy?”

  “I’d say so,” she said.

  “Parmesan-cheesy or Swiss-cheesy?”

  The ridiculously bright morning sun was filling every crevice and chasing away all the familiar shadows, transforming the world into a colorful Disney-esque tableau. She wondered what the rest of town looked like. Ooh, she wondered what the sunlight would look like through stained glass! “How far are we from the library?” she asked.

  “Library?”

  “You know, place with books. Smells like dusty prunes. Overemphasis on alphabetization. You’d like it.” It had stained-glass windows in the reading room. She wanted to see that place with sunlight streaming in. She’d only seen it on winter evenings, when the sun set before closing time.

  “Five miles,” he said. “Are you lost?”

  She considered it. She could walk, but then she’d miss the early sun through the windows. She could take this boy’s car . . . but she wasn’t one hundred percent sure where she was. She could lose time finding her bearings. All these cookie-cutter neighborhoods were a rabbit’s warren of cul-de-sacs, nestled between patches of trees. “You will drive me,” she said—and then, after they reached the library, she’d say hello to her chauffeur’s neck. Loving her new plan, Pearl spun on her heel without waiting for a response and strode toward the blue Honda Civic.

  “Can I take you home?” he asked, following her. “Or do you need . . . I don’t mean to pry, but what kind of trouble are you in?”

  It was actually a valid question. So far, she had no idea why she hadn’t burned to cinder. She quickly dismissed the thought that there was anything special about her. It was also equally unlikely that the sun had transformed its rays.

  Maybe the vampire aversion to sunlight was merely an urban legend. Maybe all vampires could walk in the sun. After all, when was the last time anyone had tested it? The whole vampires-and-sun thing could be as mythical as leprechauns and gold.

  The Family was going to be so stunned when they learned that all the hiding from day they’d done for centuries was unnecessary. It was going to rock their world. Some of them might burst into flames from the mere shock of the discovery.

  Pearl let a smile play on her lips. “Why do you think I’m in trouble?” she asked. “Do I look like trouble?” Brad would have melted into a puddle of ice cream if she’d trained that look on him, but this boy merely opened the car’s passenger door.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Fair enough,” she said with a light laugh. She scooted into the car. He closed the door and trotted to the driver’s seat. “And you? Are you dangerous?” she asked him as he settled into the seat and attached his seat belt.

  “Oh, e
xtremely,” he said. For a second she thought he meant it, but then he continued, “I’m a menace to road-crossing rodents everywhere. Also, I don’t like bullies, no matter how rotten their childhood.” Losing interest, she located the sun again. It had slipped behind a cloud, and the light had dimmed into a muted glow across the street. She nearly missed him adding, in a softer voice, “But I’m not dangerous to you.”

  “Hmm?” She glanced at him, all earnest and yummy.

  “My name’s Evan,” he said. “Evan Karkadann.”

  “Nice to meet you, Evan,” she said. “To the library, please.”

  He shifted the car into gear and peeled out. To her delight, he sped down the street at her favorite velocity: alarmingly fast. She upgraded her impression of him from “delicious breakfast” to “attractive lackey.” Too bad the Family didn’t keep lackeys. In the old days, before she was born, vampires used to keep humans as butlers, servants, and favorite snacks. Half a century ago the king outlawed it. He claimed lackeys drew hunters, but rumor had it that the king simply didn’t like humans, except to drink, of course. He didn’t trust them.

  Her discovery was brilliantly timed with the king’s arrival. She imagined Mother presenting the news at the ball, bringing Pearl forward. . . Certainly Mother would be happy with Pearl for freeing their kind from darkness, even if she had let herself be caught by Tweedledum and Tweedledee first.

  If the king were pleased enough, maybe he’d let her have a pet human.

  “Do you want to tell me what happened?” Evan asked.