Vampire Beach Hunted (3 page)

‘I can’t believe you never told me you could cook,’ Jason said.

‘All the Devereuxs can cook,’ Sienna told him. ‘It’s a French thing.’

‘I don’t think I can wait a whole twenty minutes for dessert.’

‘You’re going to have—’ Sienna’s words turned into a laugh as Jason wrapped his hands around her waist and swung her up onto the table.

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t. There’s no way I can wait.’ He gently lowered her back on the shining wood and climbed up next to her. ‘How can I wait when it tastes so good?’ He licked a line from her earlobe all the way down her neck. Sienna’s laughter turned into a sigh of pleasure that made him crazy.

Jason slid the closest strap on her sundress down, kissed her bare shoulder and . . . heard footsteps! He jerked his head up.
Footsteps!

He scrambled off the table and swung Sienna down after him, just as his parents walked into the dining room.

‘Something smells amazing,’ his mother said.

‘What are you doing home?’ Jason burst out, before he realized that it didn’t sound entirely welcoming.

‘I couldn’t sit there one more second with those arrogant—’ Mr Freeman took a deep breath and started again. ‘Let’s just say that the dinner meeting was unproductive.’

‘Doesn’t sound like you got any dessert,’ Sienna said, throwing Jason a sly smile.

‘He hardly got any dinner!’ Mrs Freeman answered.

‘You two should eat the cake we have in the oven,’ Sienna told Jason’s parents. ‘Just take it out when the timer goes off. It’s really good warm.’

‘Yeah, dessert’s no good if you let it wait,’ Jason muttered.

‘What about you two?’ Jason’s mom asked.

‘We wanted to head over to Brad’s party for a while,’ Sienna answered.

Jason raised his eyebrows. Sienna gave him a small, rueful headshake. It was easy for him to interpret. Clearly, they weren’t going to get any privacy at the Freeman house that night, so they might as well hit the party.

‘You know, one of the last parties before everyone starts going away for the summer, then college,’ Sienna added.

‘Don’t even mention college,’ Mr Freeman said. ‘This one’s mother isn’t ready for him to fly the nest.’

‘Well, right now, I’m only going a few houses away,’ Jason said. ‘Enjoy the dessert.’

Somebody should
, he thought.

Three

JASON AND SIENNA
turned her Spider over to the valet. Sometimes Jason still had a hard time wrapping his head around the fact that just your basic DeVere Heights high school parties had valet parking. He wondered if there’d always be a little part of him that remained a guy from one of the flyover states.

Mingled cheers and groans came from one side of the Moreaus’ Spanish-style mansion as the two of them headed up to the house, hand-in-hand.

‘Want to go see whatever that’s about?’ Sienna asked Jason.

‘Why not?’ he replied and they veered toward the sound, circling around to the side of the house where Brad had recently convinced his parents to install a regulation-size b-ball court.

‘Should have known,’ Sienna said, as they spotted Brad and Van Dyke in what looked like a to-the-death game of one-on-one, the crowd about evenly divided between who they were cheering for. ‘Those guys. On the first day of kindergarten, Brad was so determined to prove he could go down the slide more times than Van Dyke, he made himself puke. They’ve been going at it ever since.’

‘Are they even going to survive at different schools next year?’ Jason watched as Van Dyke casually took a three-point shot from the back of the court – and got nothing but net.

‘They’ll have to text each other their swimming times and test scores just to function,’ Sienna predicted. The guy next to Jason – a junior – let out an amazed cry as Brad raced down the court and hurled the ball at the backboard when he was a little more than halfway down. He leapt into the air, flying up in time to smash the ball down into the net on the rebound.

Sienna frowned. ‘Not subtle,’ she said softly. It was true that neither Brad nor Van Dyke were giving exactly regular human performances on the court. More like Michael Jordan versus Shaq kind of stuff, only without being six and a half feet tall.

When Van Dyke actually dunked the ball by jumping up to the hoop and swinging from it, Sienna let go of Jason’s hand.

‘Enough.’ Sienna pushed her way courtside, Jason right beside her. ‘Brad, you’re out of Absolut!’ she called.

‘Time!’ Brad yelled to Van Dyke.

‘You couldn’t wait until I whipped Van Dyke’s butt to tell me that?’ Brad asked Sienna.

‘She’s doing you a favor,’ Van Dyke shot back, winking at a ga-ga soon-to-be-senior girl. ‘She could tell you needed to catch your breath.’

Sienna moved in close to Brad. ‘What I could tell is that you and your friend over there were showing off more than your basketball skills,’ she said, quietly enough so that only Brad and Jason could hear. ‘Take it down a notch, OK, before people notice that those moves you’re throwing down are just too good!’

Brad shoved his fingers through his sweat-soaked hair. ‘Got it.’ He turned toward the crowd. ‘This guy’s no challenge for me. Why don’t we get a real game going? Who else wants to play?’ he asked, shooting Van Dyke a pointed look. Van Dyke gave a small nod back: he’d got the message.

‘Want to play?’ Sienna asked Jason.

‘I think I want to see what Dani’s up to,’ Jason replied.

‘Next year she’ll be going to parties all alone without a big brother to protect her,’ Sienna reminded him.

‘I know. That’s why I want to make sure she’s learnt how not to be stupid while I’m still around,’ he answered. ‘And I might see if Adam made it.’

‘I think I’ll look around for Belle and Erin.’ Sienna gave him a long kiss. ‘That’s to make sure you don’t forget me until we find each other.’

‘As if.’ Jason wandered around to the lagoon-shaped pool in the back of the house. Aaron Harberts, one of the guys on the swim team who wasn’t vampirically enhanced, floated in the center, resting on a puffy plastic lounge chair, with a drink in both of the cup holders. A game of Marco Polo where everybody seemed to have their eyes closed – and to be doing a lot of friendly groping – was going on around him.

‘Freeman, do you know where I can get a pig?’ Harberts called out, wandering over to Jason.

‘A pig?’ Jason repeated. ‘A live pig?’

‘No. Dead.’ Harberts sounded a little offended. ‘But a whole one. I want to roast it. Brad said I could dig a pit over by the fruit trees. They’re barbecuing hot dogs and stuff at the bonfire down on the beach. But a roast pig. Wouldn’t that taste good right about now?’ he asked.

There’s a bonfire, a barbecue and bikini-clad chiquitas – the whole deal
, Jason thought.
Just the way Brad promised there would be at that first party he invited me to my first week at school. Who needs a pig?

‘How much and what have you ingested?’ Jason asked. Then he looked at the blissed-out expression on his friend’s face and guessed that a vampire had been feeding on Harberts’s blood. Being fed on by a vampire always led to a woozy, euphoric state, and Harberts was definitely in that place.

‘I don’t know,’ Harberts said cheerily. ‘But do you know about the pig?’

‘Sorry. Nope,’ Jason told him.

‘That’s OK,’ Harberts answered with a beatific grin. ‘I love you, man. You know that, right?’

‘I do,’ Jason assured him. Yeah, Harberts had definitely made a blood donation. He’d never told Jason he loved him before. Jason gave his friend a wave, then turned toward the French doors leading into the house. He followed the hard
click-clack
sound to the pool room. His little sister was a complete pool shark and he thought she might be there. But she was giving the suckers a break that night.

Jason joined a darts game featuring the desecrated yearbook photos of some of the most-hated DeVere teachers before checking out the kitchen, where he finally got himself some dessert – although not the one he’d wanted. Dani was holding court in one corner, leading a discussion of how she and the girls surrounding her were going to make this year’s Homecoming legendary. It was clear that Dani was going to be one of
the
seniors when the new school year started in the fall. Not that Jason had ever expected anything less.

She’s going to do fine without me
, he decided. Weirdly, the thought made him feel a tiny bit sad. He grabbed himself a beer from the ice-filled garbage can and wandered into the living room. Adam sat by himself on one end of the half-moon-shaped burgundy sofa, knocking and slapping the glass coffee table rhythmically with his hand. Jason dropped down beside him. ‘You really know how to party!’

‘I’m working on my new script,’ Adam explained. ‘Butthead,’ he added with a smile. ‘Brianna helped me figure out the part I was stuck on. She reminded me of the way they used Morse code in
Independence Day
and suggested I use it in my script. Of course, I’ll use it in a much more inventive way. That movie sucked.’

‘Of course,’ Jason said, mock-solemn as Adam started up his slapping and knocking again. ‘So that’s what that is?’ he asked, nodding at Adam’s hand. ‘Morse code? I don’t know how it works.’

‘Yeah. It’s basically a binary system, but not exactly, because the length of the pauses between the two sounds are part of the code,’ Adam explained.

‘I’m . . . not following you,’ Jason said.

‘There are two sounds in Morse, a long one and a short one. I’m using the slap for long and the knock for short. Each letter in the alphabet is represented by a sequence of slaps and knocks. For example, here’s SOS.’ Adam knocked on the table three times, slapped three times, then knocked three times again. ‘It totally solves the scene I was stuck on. My girlfriend is a genius.’

‘Your girlfriend, huh?’ Jason asked.

‘Well, OK, she’s not
technically
my girlfriend, I guess. Whatever it takes to make someone technically your girlfriend,’ Adam admitted. ‘But obviously I want her to be. I’ve never had the kind of conversations with anybody that I’ve had with Brianna. Seriously, I know you think I was exaggerating, but she’s a genius. And she gets all my movie references. I said she’s a genius, right? And her hair smells really good. I don’t know what it smells of, exactly, but it’s good. And she makes me laugh. Usually, I’m the guy who makes other people laugh, right?’

‘Even when you’re not trying,’ Jason agreed.

Adam kept right on talking. ‘But Brianna cracks me up all the time. And she’s
happy
. She’s just this happy person. And—’

‘I hate to interrupt this conversation,’ a girl said from behind them.

Jason turned around and saw Brianna leaning over the sofa’s high back, grinning down at them. ‘Especially because it was all about me,’ she added.

Adam flushed as Brianna walked around and sat down on the arm of the sofa next to him.
I’d probably have turned red if Sienna had heard me gushing about her a couple days after we met
, Jason thought.

At least Brianna was being cool about it. She turned to Jason, giving Adam a chance to recover himself. ‘Where can I get one of those?’ she asked, nodding at his beer. ‘I know there’s a massive bar over by the fireplace, but it seems to be mostly for mixed drinks.’

‘In the kitchen,’ Jason told her. ‘Down that hall to the right. There’s a big garbage can full of them by the door.’

Brianna laughed. ‘I’m glad that some things stay the same. I was starting to feel like I’d wandered into an episode of
My Super Sweet Sixteen
or something. Not that anyone here is that obnoxious. Just that’ – she lowered her voice – ‘rich.’

‘You know I’m not, right?’ Adam managed to say.

‘Dang! You mean you’re not going to finance my first film if I sleep with you?’ Brianna teased, standing up. ‘I’m going to get that beer and see what other trouble I can get into. I’ll be back.’

‘That was humiliating,’ Adam muttered as soon as Brianna was out of earshot.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Jason told him. ‘Come on, what girl doesn’t want to hear that a guy she likes thinks she’s great?’

‘You think she likes me?’ Adam asked.

‘She’s here. She was at the beach this afternoon hanging with you,’ Jason pointed out.

‘But do you think she—?’

‘Zach’s coming over to talk to us,’ Jason interrupted. The event was interruption-worthy. Zach Lafrenière didn’t usually approach people. People usually came to him. Charisma, Jason’s mom would call it. Mojo, Dani would say. Whatever you called it, it was part of what had got Zach on the DeVere Heights Vampire Council when he was still in high school. The youngest member ever.

‘Greetings.’ Zach set a bottle of wine and three goblets on the coffee table and sat down on the love seat across from Jason and Adam. A couple of people glanced their way. Jason got the feeling they’d like to come over, but Zach was putting out the vibe that he wanted privacy. He pulled a corkscrew out of one of the front pockets of his white linen shirt and opened the wine, then began to pour.

Under the soft party lights, the deep-red wine looked liked it had been made from liquefied rubies. It was almost transfixing.

‘You need to try this. It’s from my family vineyard. You can’t buy it commercially,’ Zach told them. There was something different about him. It took Jason a moment to realize that he wasn’t wearing his shades. Zach almost always kept his sunglasses on. It was as if he liked having a barrier between him and the world. But tonight he looked from Jason to Adam with his eyes unshielded. They were such a dark brown it was difficult to tell the irises from the pupils.

‘It’s made completely organically,’ Zach continued. ‘The plough is even pulled by a winch, so the heavy machinery doesn’t pack down the earth.’ He handed Jason one of the goblets, then passed one to Adam. The stem of the glass felt faintly warm under Jason’s fingers.

‘To friendship.’ Zach clinked Jason’s glass, then Adam’s.

I guess even Zach isn’t immune from a little end-of-high-school sentimentality
, Jason thought.