SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (11 page)

She sank down onto the side of her brother's bed. He moved his legs over to make room for her. "Do our kind ever fall in love? With another vampire, maybe?"

"I don't know."

"So we go through all the years to come without . . . without loving anyone?"

"Mentor didn't say that."

"I guess he wouldn't. I mean, Mom and Dad fell in love."

"Yeah, but they met before they changed," Eddie said carefully.

"Well? What did Mentor say? It isn't like our emotions died. How do we keep from, well, from falling in love?"

"You need to ask Mentor."

"I'm asking you!" She hit one of his legs with her fist. How come he was still a pesky kid brother? She wished he was thirty and smart.

"Well, I'm not thirty," he said, reading her mind. "But I am smart." He grinned widely. "Mentor said . . ." He paused.

She hit him again with her fist to jostle him.

"Stop it! That hurts. He said it's like the hunger. You don't want to ever kill someone, right?"

"Right. He told me that. How I might have to fight off the urge."

"You do the same thing about boys."

"I have to fight off falling in love?"

"Something like that."

"That's horrible! Mom and Dad found one another, and Grandma and Grandpa. Even Uncle Boyd and Uncle Daniel."

"I think they were all human and together before . . ." Eddie said.

"Oh. But Mom and Dad knew they might become vampire.”

"Now you have the gist of it," Eddie said.

"But if they'd already changed, they would still have gotten together, right?"

"I guess."

"You're saying then that I just have to stay away from humans. My only choice is someone like me."

"Ask Mentor."

Dell gave up. She rose from the bed and stomped out of the room to show her displeasure. She didn't want to talk about love and boys and marriage anyway. It had just come to her, that's all. What did he think, that she cared?

Eddie was sitting on the living room sofa holding his book bag when she entered the room.

"I wish you'd stop that." She meant how he appeared somewhere else all of a sudden. She'd left him on his bed and yet here he was in the living room.

"I can't help it if I can move instantaneously and you can't."

"I can't yet."

He grinned at her and unzipped his bag. "Give me a minute to flip through my history notes. I have a test tomorrow."

She found the remote and turned on the TV. "I hate TV," she said, feeling petulant and wanting to criticize everything around her.

"Then don't watch it."

She saw him open a notebook and begin turning the pages rapidly. In less than two minutes he closed it again and stuffed it back into the book bag.

She studiously ignored him. So what if she couldn't do anything with her powers yet? So what if there was no point in trying to talk to Ryan Major? She flipped the channel changer, going through various HBO cable channels. All the movies were either action flicks or romantic comedies. She was not in the mood for either.

"You're seriously pissed, aren't you?" Eddie asked. She changed the channel again.

"Look, there's more to it than what I said. You'll just have to talk to Mentor about these things."

"Okay!" She mashed the channel changing button hard and saw the CNN news come on. She left it there, watching pictures of a flood in Ohio.

"No point in getting mad at me. It's not my idea. I'm left out in the cold, too, you know."

Dell reconsidered. Her temper, like every other emotion, seemed set on a hair trigger. "I'm sorry. I know it's not your fault. All this takes getting used to, that's all."

"Not all of it sucks," he said. Then he laughed. "Sucks. Get it?"

She couldn't smile. Eddie's jokes weren't all that good to begin with.

"Anyway, take it easy, Weezy. Things will work out."

Weezy. That almost made her laugh. He liked to be playful with her, rhyming a name for her with whatever he was saying at the moment. She expected some day he'd get to say, "There's a hitch, Bitch."

"What are you smiling at?" he asked, glancing at the flood waters on the TV screen.

"Nothing." She was surprised he hadn't read her mind.

"Want to play Monopoly?" he asked.

"You always beat me. You always get the hotels first."

"Chess?"

"Not now. I always get checkmated."

"Well, I'm going out. Tell Mom and Dad I've already eaten."

She watched him go, this time the normal way, one step at a time. She heard the front door shut. She was left with CNN and a reporter in hip boots and a yellow rain slicker.

She couldn't wait to get back to school.

Chapter 9

The first day back at school Dell was as nervous as a goose stranded in the center of a freeway. Cheyenne, one of her friends from her neighborhood, was waiting for her at the front entrance before classes started. "I tried to call, but your mom said you were in bed. What's up?"

Dell was careful not to look her in the eyes. She said, "Oh, the usual, you know, cramps and stuff."

"Oh, yeah, that. Maybe you need hormone shots."

Surprised, Dell said, "Why would I need that?"

"Well, that's what my mom would say. She said she saw it on some TV show about girls who get bad cramps. Hormones are all screwed up. A couple shots—boom!—everything back to normal."

"Sounds drastic to me." In fact, she wondered about that. Would she menstruate? For what reason? She'd never have children if she could never have a boyfriend. Oh, God, she couldn't ask Mentor about that. She'd have to talk to her mother. She sighed aloud, and Cheyenne looked over at her.

"You all right?"

"I'm fine. Just a little tired."

They walked under a cool portico out of the hot spring sun, and then through the entrance doors into the building. School would end in three weeks, thank God. She didn't know if she could stand being indoors even that long. The long dark hallway illuminated by overhead fluorescent lights was oppressive to her, and the sounds of the lockers banging open and shut sounded like an orchestra's percussion section had gone cymbal-mad.

"You have your sunglasses on."

Dell touched the nosepiece. "They're almost clear. My eyes are bothering me."

"Listen, my mom said you could go blind if you have a seeing problem and you don't go to the optometrist."

"Come on, Cheyenne. You know how your mom is." Cheyenne's mom had been pushing odd cures and potions on her daughter's friends since they were in first grade together. Dell opened her locker and took out the books for her first class, English with Mr. Dupree.

Cheyenne nodded as she waited by Dell's locker. Her attention had strayed down the hallway where she looked for Bobby, her boyfriend. He sometimes walked her to her own locker where they could sneak a quick kiss behind the locker door. Dell envied her now more than ever. She didn't have to think in order to breathe. She would get married and have someone to love her forever. And she had a head of luxuriant short black hair that rivaled the darkest night. Dell's own wild, slightly kinky red-blonde hair was like a bright beacon signaling rocky shoals ahead whereas Cheyenne's hair was sexy and sleek.

Cheyenne didn't see Bobby yet, so she turned back to Dell, who was moving down the hall shoulder to shoulder with the other kids. She caught up with her. "My mom, yeah, my mom's got a cure for everything and that cure means doctors, new treatments, herbal therapy, or vinegar. Did I tell you she thinks vinegar is heaven's elixir? She takes two tablespoons of the stuff every morning. Never mind what I said. You look good in those sunglasses anyway. If you had on black clothes, you could almost be one of Loder's gang."

"Heaven preserve us!" Dell exclaimed, laughing.

Loder's group were outcasts in the predominately white, Christian, middle class Lyndon B. Johnson High. They wore only black, were into leather—even in this heat—always kept on their sunglasses, and she'd even heard some of them had split off into their own little cult and were into vampirism. She shuddered. She could show them vampire! She could bring a Predator into class that would make them cower and wet their seats.

She had a great loathing for kids who pretended they were searching for death and immortality. They were wayward children, totally disillusioned and, not only that, but they were silly. Black clothes and sunglasses weren't going to make them live forever. It was just . . . crazy. It was just . . . sad.

"Mr. Dupree's gonna notice, though," Cheyenne was saying. They both shared Dupree's first period. He wasn't a bad teacher, but he was pompous as hell. He made the kids who dressed strangely his scapegoats, quoting Byron and teasing them about being displaced in history by a few hundred years. "You should be over in seventeenth-century England at some castle," he often said in his booming voice and pointing at one kid or another. "Frolicking through stone halls and tossing plum seeds into a cold, dead hearth."

"Let him," Dell said, turning into Dupree's room. "He doesn't scare me."

As it happened, Dupree glanced only once at Dell in her seat in the middle of the classroom, blinked, then looked away. Dell had tried a little mind coaxing. She sent the message to him telepathically: Sunglasses are normal wear. Some students hate the glare off the windows. Keep your business to yourself. It surprised and amazed her that it worked.

It must have worked. He didn't even ridicule Brady or Chignon, the two kids in her class dressed today in tattered black jeans and shirts. He stuck to the program, talking about Texas literature—which was lame, in his opinion—and Southwestern authors in general. Their assignment was to read Larry King's Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, the play. Dell knew she could finish it in under five minutes and besides, she liked the assignment. She'd even been to LaGrange and seen the old tumbledown whorehouse when she was a little girl on a short vacation with her parents.

The day went fine except during History where she sat just one seat in front of Ryan Major. She felt him staring at the back of her neck until she turned around, her index finger going to the centerpiece of her sunglasses. She knew he could see her eyes. But it wasn't her eyes he was interested in. When she turned she watched his gaze fall from her face to her chest. She turned back around immediately and if she could have blushed, she would have. Was he looking at her breasts or had she accidentally stopped breathing? What if she'd forgotten to take breaths? Oh, God, what could he think if she had?

She tried to calm herself. She knew if she wanted, she could peek into his mind. Her history teacher was boring anyway, making the past so dry and brittle no one listened to him. Should she really pry into people's minds? Was it fair?

To hell with fair. She'd been granted supernatural powers and decades on Earth to use them. It would be stupid to ignore her abilities. She wanted to test them.

She narrowed her eyes to slits and turned inward. She visualized Ryan behind her. His forest-green pullover T-shirt, his new denim jeans, his hands crossed on his desk, a class ring on his right hand from North Dallas. Although he would graduate now from Lyndon B. Johnson, his ring would be from the other school. It must be hard for him to change schools that way, right at the end. She imagined his face, his eyes on her back as she carefully breathed. Easy, easy, she told herself. Slip in easy so he won't know.

And then she was there, reading his thoughts, not shocked by how jumbled they were. Her parents had explained about that. How it wasn't as easy to read people as she thought. The brain, they said, was a storm of activity and thoughts were like snowflakes in a blizzard, flying everywhere, each snowflake a connecting thought to another until the ground of the brain was covered with hills and valleys of thoughts layered and packed down like snow in drifts.

She heard Ryan's thoughts as if they were being whispered in her ear. She got a snippet of this and one of that. She was not gifted enough in mind reading to be able to follow the several streams of thoughts in their completeness. She caught tail ends and bits and pieces . . . wonder if it's satin . . . long hair, I like long hair, why do most girls cut off their hair anyway? . . . she's so still . . . like a statue . . . breathing so gently . . . wait, is she even breathing? . . .

He had wondered if her blouse was made of satin. Silk, she could have told him. She'd given up her usual sweatshirt and jeans today in favor of a sky-blue silk blouse and a short tropical-printed skirt. She was a different person. She felt like dressing differently now.

He liked her hair long. She resisted an urge to slide her hand behind her neck and lift her hair up to let it fall. She knew it would catch the light and shine if she did that. Her hair, as unmanageable as it was, was almost metallic, like crinkled gold foil, when caught in a certain light.

Though she could read what he was thinking, she knew it was morally irresponsible to act on that knowledge for personal gain or ego. So she did not reach out and lift her hair for his benefit. For a full two minutes. Then, smiling, feeling happy she had the power to play with people even if it was not exactly fair, she reached back and lifted her long hair, letting it fall softly across her shoulders and cascade down her back again. That would get his attention.

And he had wondered why she was so still and if he'd really noticed she wasn't breathing for a time.

God!

She had lapsed in her breathing. How dangerous it was out here in the public view where she must be completely human and normal again. She must not let that happen again. This one time Ryan (and anyone else behind her who might have noticed) would put it down to their imaginations. She must be breathing, they just couldn't see her doing it, that's all. But if she made this mistake very often, someone somewhere, maybe even Ryan, would call attention to it, or even ask her outright—Why aren't you breathing? How can you not breathe?

She tumbled away from contact with Ryan's mind and concentrated only on her breathing. She took a deep breath, in fact, and let it out in a little quiet whoosh. There. Let him see that. Let him not wonder and puzzle over things that were none of his business.