Fang Girl (4 page)

“Xanthe, you’ve got to eat,” Dad said earnestly. “At least try a little.”

“Daaaaad! Honestly, I’m not hungry.” It was true—I wasn’t. But I
was
abruptly exhausted, as though all the muscle pain I should have experienced while running had finally caught up with me. I dragged my leaden gaze over to the microwave clock.

5:46
A.M.
Dawn.

“It’s … sunrise,” I slurred. My knees gave way underneath me, and I slumped against the kitchen cabinets. I’d missed my chance to call Lily … but there was still something terribly important I had to say now, something my clueless family needed to know.... “Gotta sleep.” I struggled to scrape my thoughts together; I could feel my brain cells switching off. “Sunlight … hide …”

My eyelids clanged down like steel shutters, and I was dead to the world.

I
woke up in pitch blackness, lying on my back and utterly convinced that I was still six feet underground in my coffin and had hallucinated the entire previous night due to oxygen deprivation.

“Aaaaaaaaaugh!”

I flailed for a moment before my brain kicked in with three simple observations: first, I was wrapped in a fluffy fleece blanket that certainly had not been included in my grave goods; second, I’d just sat up, which I wouldn’t have been able to do in a coffin; and finally, the air reeked of hay.

The first two let me deduce that I was not, in fact, buried alive. The third made my brain stall.

A knock came from the other side of the—door? wall?—to my left. “Janie?” Zack called. “Are you alive again?”

“Yeah.” I struggled out of the clinging blanket, banging my elbows against the walls on each side in the process. Something light and metallic clinked against the top of my head when I tried to stand up, making me duck again. I reached up and found—coat hangers? “You guys put me in a closet?”

“Well, it’s not like we have a convenient crypt, you know. It was the only place we could think of where you would be totally out of the sun.” He paused. “Um, by the way, you haven’t gone insane with bloodlust, have you?”

“Uh …” Actually, I was feeling rather light-headed. My stomach was one big, growling void. “Give me a minute here, okay?” I closed my eyes, trying to make the hunger go away. It was only a signal from my body, that’s all.... I could tune it out.

Warmth spread outward from my chest and down into my stomach. The cramping ebbed away. I opened my eyes. “I’m fine now.” I pushed at the closet door; it flexed, but didn’t open. “Hey, what’s up with this?”

“Oh, we duct-taped you in,” Zack said cheerfully.
“To make sure all the light was blocked out. Hang on.”

Something sneezed on my foot.

“There’ssomethingaliveinhere,”
I observed with all possible calm and flung myself forward shoulder-first with full vampiric strength. Plywood burst under the impact, sending me sprawling onto the horrible floral-patterned carpet in my parents’ bedroom.

“Yes,” said Zack. He was wearing pajamas, with a long strip of tape stuck to one leg. “That would be toast.”

“Toast,” I repeated. “Sneezing toast.”

“Not toast,
Toast
!” He ducked into the closet, and reemerged clutching a large wire cage. “I named her myself. Isn’t she the greatest?”

I got to my feet, gathering up the shredded remains of my dignity, and peered through the bars. A fuzzy brown-and-white ball of fur looked back at me with round, black eyes. Its pink velvet ears quivered. “It’s a guinea pig,” I concluded in the face of the evidence before me. Well, that explained why the closet had smelled of hay. “Zack, why is it a guinea pig?”

“Dad got her for you.” Zack gazed fondly down at the little fluffball. “I guess if you aren’t going to eat her, I can keep her!”

I rubbed at my forehead. It was way too early in the night for this conversation, and the terrible clashing colors of the room decor were giving me a migraine. “Dad got me a … guinea pig?”

“For breakfast,” Zack said. “That’s why I named her Toast. You aren’t going to eat her, are you?”

“No!”

“Woot!” Zack hugged the cage to his chest, carrying it off in the direction of his bedroom. “I hope you don’t want to eat Marmalade or Sugar Puff either!”

“Marma—oh, never mind.” Shaking my head, I sought refuge from the weirdness by retreating to the bathroom. My headache eased in the plain, white-tiled room, vanishing to nothing as I sorted through toiletries in search of something that would wash away grave dirt. After forty-five minutes of scalding water and an entire bottle of shampoo, I felt halfway human again. Or, to be more accurate, totally vampire.

The mirror had fogged up; I wiped it clean and squinted at my blurred reflection. My first reaction was relief that I
had
a reflection—I’d been worrying about how vampires applied eyeliner. My second reaction was … disappointment. My skin, though slightly paler, hadn’t turned a shimmering alabaster. My brown
eyes had not become exotically golden or blood-scarlet. My face looked a little gaunter, but I hadn’t magically acquired elegant cheekbones and an aristocratic nose. My nondescript hair was still, well, nondescript.

I looked, all in all, the way I always had. Perfectly normal.

Except my acne was gone. That counted as a miraculous transformation into astounding inhuman beauty, as far as I was concerned.

My mouth seemed ordinary enough when it was closed. I drew my lips back from my teeth, leaning close to the mirror. The canines were definitely bigger and sharper. They crowded together, slightly askew, with the top set overlapping the lower. When I tried opening and closing my mouth, I could feel the edges of them sliding against each other like chisel blades. But they certainly weren’t monster-movie fangs. Anyone looking at my teeth wouldn’t immediately think “vampire,” just “typically awful British dentistry.”

Crap
. Three years of braces down the drain.

Someone knocked softly on the bathroom door. “Xanthe?” Dad said. “Are you okay in there?”

“Fine.” I tied my robe shut and went out. “I don’t look all that different, do I?”

He pulled me into a brief hug. “You’re still my girl. Are you hungry? We got, um—”

“Yes, I already met Toast.” I sighed. “Please tell me that Marmalade and Sugar Puff aren’t a rabbit and a hamster.”

He dropped his gaze sheepishly and mumbled, “Chinchilla.”

I shook my head. “I hope the pet store gives refunds.”

“We got some other things to try as well.” He trailed after me as I headed toward my room. “We’ll work something out.”

“What, did you rob a blood bank or something?” I opened the door to my room. “Let me get some clothes and—
Jesus Christ, what did you people do in here
?!”

My bedroom—my private sanctuary, my castle,
my room
—was a complete mess. Incredible, utter chaos. Stuff was strewn everywhere. Books were stuffed willy-nilly on the shelves, in a shrieking clash of sizes and colors. Papers were scattered all over the desk, my bed was askew, and my sheets were as wrinkled as an elephant’s backside. Even the walls were wrong, my movie posters hanging drunkenly at odd angles. The sight made me feel like I was being stabbed in the eyeballs.

Dad looked utterly bemused. “We haven’t touched it, sweetie.”

“It never looked like this before! Did you let Zack in here?”

He backed up, putting his hands into the air. “Honestly, it’s exactly as you left it! I’ll, er, I’ll go see about breakfast, shall I?” He fled downstairs.

I glared around the room in disgust. It was obvious that
someone
had messed things up. “I’m going to kill you, little brother,” I muttered. Savagely, I tugged my bedclothes straight, then folded the sheets back with surgical precision. I threw everything from my shelves onto the floor, and started sorting them into categorized piles. Holiday souvenirs and various trinkets went back on first, in straight rows from smallest to largest. Books on the next shelf, arranged first by genre, then by author within genre—but that looked wrong, so I re-sorted them by size. Much better. Next the underwear drawer.

I was busily rearranging my socks in neat rows ordered by color when it occurred to me that what I was doing was just possibly, slightly, rather unusual.

I looked around. My room looked as though it had been cleaned by an extreme OCD sufferer who’d been flushing her medication for the past month.

Okaaaaay.

I had a pair of black socks in my hand. I stared down into the drawer, seeing the empty space where it should go, next to all the other black socks. The space called out to me, begging me to put the socks there. They
wanted
to go there. The laws of space and time and the entire universe
demanded
that they go there.

My hand trembled. I threw the black socks down amid the row of pink ones, slammed the drawer shut, and leaned against it. After a moment, I moved cautiously away, and sat down on the edge of my bed, knotting my hands together. I started counting.

I held out until “eight” before leaping off the bed, yanking open the drawer, and moving the black socks into the right place.

Right. Possibly, I might have a small problem here.

“Janie?” Zack called from the other side of the closed door. “Dad says breakfast’s ready.”

“Coming!” With a last disconcerted glance around my unnaturally neat room, I hastily got dressed. My wardrobe was somewhat lacking in leather catsuits or velvet evening wear, so I made do with a pair of black jeans and a black tank top. I reckoned black was
always
acceptable.

Zack met me on the landing. “You look very vampiric,” he said brightly.

“Thanks. You look …” Zack also seemed to have made an attempt at “vampire”—or at least, “vampire’s brother”—from his eclectic wardrobe. In his case, this meant boots with two-inch soles, baggy black trousers mostly made out of zippers, a white shirt with enough ruffles to furnish six brides, a black brocade vest that was probably older than the two of us combined, and a pair of heavy brass goggles pushed high up on his forehead. “You look very you,” I concluded. We started down the stairs together. “Listen, has there been anyone lurking around here during the day? I think there are guys after me.”

“Vampire hunters? Awesome!” He deflated at my glare. “Um, no. Haven’t seen anyone, and Dad and I were here all day—I called in sick to school. Mum went to work.”

“Work? She went to work the day after I
rose from the dead
?”

“It was important,” Mum said, coming out of the living room. “We needed research materials.” Her eyes were bloodshot, but she regarded me critically. “Why do you look so funereal?”

“Mum, I’m a vampire. I have to be Goth now.”

She gave me her familiar disapproving, why-must-you-always-follow-the-herd look. “If the other vampires
turn out to be man-eating killers, will you do that too?”

Yep, I’d only been animate again for twenty-four hours, and I’d already managed to disappoint my mother. Business as usual, then. From the kitchen, I heard the clatter of pots and pans and muffled swearing. “Dad had better not be boiling a bunny in there.”

“I heard that!” he yelled. “Come and look.”

“We have to deduce your diet,” Mum said seriously, taking my hand. She paused, glancing down at it. “At least you’re warmer now. That has to be a good sign.”

I didn’t feel either warm or cold and hadn’t since I’d woken up in my coffin. “I think I’ve finally reached room temperature,” I said as she dragged me into the kitchen. “It’s—whoa.”

The table was covered in food. There were three thick steaks, ranging from totally raw to well done. A raw chicken sat next to a cold, cooked one. The halogen light gleamed off silver mackerel scales—
raw
mackerel, with the heads and fins still on. There were sausages, eggs, and bacon; a couple of hamburgers in freshly toasted buns; cakes, muffins, cookies, raw and cooked carrots, spinach, shepherd’s pie, a pepperoni pizza, a goldfish in a small tank, chips, salad, bread, raw ground beef, oatmeal, cornflakes, and, amid it all, a
very nervous-looking rabbit in a cage.

“Try what looks good,” Dad said anxiously, watching my face.

“Okay,” I said, pulling out a chair and sitting down in front of the mound of edibles. My eye was caught by the steaks, and my mouth started to water. “First of all, can we please get rid of the bunny and the fish? No,” I said as Zack started to lift the platter of mackerel, “the live fish. Good grief, what were you thinking, Dad?”

“That shouldn’t be there anyway,” Mum said, dropping a tea towel over the tank to hide it from view. “That’s a different experiment. Now, Xanthe …” Her voice fell into the same sort of tone she used with new undergraduates in their very first lab session. “Take small bites to start with. We have no idea how your digestive system works now, so we don’t want—
Xanthe
!”

“Buf ish tastgh sho
ghud
,” I said around a huge mouthful of meat. It really was the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten—so fresh and sweet with an amazing juicy tang.

“But what if you’re allergic?” Mum dived for my plate. We spent a moment wrestling over the remaining half of the steak, but I had vampiric strength and twenty-four hours of hunger on my side. I stuffed the
rest frantically into my mouth, chewing at superspeed to wolf it all down.