Fang Girl (5 page)

“Neat,” my brother observed. “You went straight for the raw one.”

I paused on the last mouthful, looking down at the remaining two steaks.

Oh. Ew.

“I’ve got a theory,” Zack said, pulling up a chair for himself and selecting a jam tart. “I think we’re completely wrong. You’re obviously not a vampire.”

We all looked at him.

My brother pointed at me. “You,” he said in tones of utter certainty, “are a
zombie
.”

A
s a vampire, I solemnly swear I will not:

1) Angst

2) Suck

3) Summon a dark goddess

4) Fall in love with a vampire hunter

   a) Or a werewolf

   b) Or anyone evil, no matter how hot

   c) Or anyone of a species not approved of by my vampire elders, because no one is worth that sort of stress

5) Accept any gifts, give any gifts, carry any messages, take part in any mysterious rituals, etc. etc.

“Here’s another one,” said Mum, sticking a Post-It into the massive tome in her lap. “Running backward while carrying a lit candle in one hand and a live tortoise in the other. Makes vampires flee in terror.”

“Thanks, Mum.” I didn’t bother to look up from my laptop. I’d given up making notes on any of her findings over an hour ago—Eastern European vampire folklore was turning out to be utterly cracktastic. “Can I remind you that we’re looking for ways to stop vampire
hunters
, not vampires?”

When Mum had said she’d gone to work to get research materials, she wasn’t kidding. Every surface in the living room was piled high with books. This was not unusual, but the familiar physics journals and academic monographs had vanished. In their place:
Interview with the Vampire, Dracula, The Vampire in Romanian Legend, Vampire Nation, The Encyclopedia of the Undead, Love Bites, Fourteen Essays on Vampirism, Twilight, Undead and Unwed, Vampires of Stage and Screen, In Search of Dracula
… everything from huge, leather-bound library reference volumes with cracked spines to shiny new paperbacks with luridly embossed covers. Mum must have checked out every book about vampirism from every library in a thirty-mile radius. I wasn’t quite sure what she was expecting
to learn from texts like
Marxism and the Vampire
, but at least it was keeping her occupied. Even if I did have to keep surreptitiously straightening the piles.

“Um, Baby Jane?” Dad said from his cross-legged position in front of the TV. He paused the DVD on a close-up of Angel’s game face, bumpy forehead and demonic eyes frozen in an expression of insane bloodlust. “Are you going to do this?”

“I don’t think so, Dad.” But that reminded me …

6) Lose my soul, no matter how much of a good idea it seems like at the time

I tapped my fingers against the laptop, my gaze skittering back to the closed curtains hiding the living room windows. Despite my best efforts to distract myself, I kept imagining sinister silhouettes moving behind them, stalking toward me with stakes raised high....

Mum turned a page. “Apparently, a virgin boy riding a pure-white virgin stallion can track down a vampire’s lair. Maybe we should phone local riding stables.”

“Mum, I think we need to be more worried about vampire hunters tracking me back from the name on my headstone.” My head snapped up. “Or anyone else! My grave’s lying there wide open—”

“No, it isn’t,” Dad interrupted. “I went back and filled it while you were asleep. I took the plastic grave marker away too.”

“Hey, thanks—hang on, plastic?” Indignation filled me as I double-checked today’s date on the laptop clock. “You haven’t even bothered to get me a proper headstone? I was dead for nearly four months!”

Even I felt the temperature in the room drop. Mum bent her head over her book. Dad’s shoulders hunched. “Three weeks,” he said, his voice going oddly thick. “You were … it’s been three weeks. The rest of the time … you were in a hospital. In a coma.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so!” I yelled. They both jumped, twisting in my direction. I waved my hands in exasperation. “I’ve been going nuts trying to work out how I got vamped in a car crash, and now you tell me I was in the hospital?” My parents were staring at me. “Hospital,” I repeated as patiently as I could. “Where there’s blood. And needles.”

Dad’s eyebrows shot up. “You think you got vampirism in the hospital, like an infection?”

“It would make sense, right? All my sire would have to do is sneak in and drip some blood down my throat.”

“The question is,” said Mum, “why?”

Our eyes all went to the mobile phone, sitting innocently on top of
The Lust of the Vampire
. It continued to not ring.

“How long until 5:08?” Mum asked.

“Hours still,” I replied with a sigh. I’d tried calling back anyway, but had only got voice mail.

“Well,” Dad said, turning back to
Buffy
. “At least it gives us time to research vampires.”

“Zombies,” corrected Zack, wandering into the room with Toast in his arms. I aimed a glare at him, which he totally ignored as usual. “I’m telling you, we’re looking in the wrong place. We need to rent
Day of the Dead
and
My Name Is Legend
.”

“Actually, I thought of a way to test that hypothesis,” Mum said, tipping the books off her lap as she stood. I twitched as they hit the floor in a jumbled heap, fighting off a weird desire to pick them up and stack them neatly. She started hunting among the piles of books on the crowded coffee table. “I need you to do something for me, Xanthe.”

I eyed her warily. “What?”

She flashed a wry grin at me, brandishing aloft a sterile lancet. “I vant to suck your bloooood.”

“What? No!” I jumped out of my chair as she advanced on me.

“Come on,” she cajoled, chasing me round the sofa. “For science!”

“Your mother knows what she’s doing,” said Dad with what I felt was unwarranted optimism. “She just needs a few drops, that’s all.”

“Well … all right.” I submitted to the needle, looking away squeamishly as it stabbed into my skin—though, actually, I didn’t even feel it. In a few seconds, it was all done. “What are you going to do, take that into the university and get a colleague to run tests on it?”

“No,” Mum said over her shoulder as she swept out of the room. “I’m going to perform animal experiments.”

Zack and I looked at each other. Then, with a cry of
“Not the bunny!”
we pelted after her. We got tangled up with each other in the doorway; by the time we burst into the kitchen, my mother was standing by the table with a calm expression and a clean needle.

“Marmalade!” Zack snatched the rabbit up and clutched it to his chest, probably causing it more distress than Mum had. “Mum, how could you try to turn my bunny into a zombie?”

“Vampire,”
I snarled. “And, yeah!”

“I haven’t touched the rabbit,” Mum said. “That would probably have required more blood. I thought it was best to start small.” She moved to one side.

The goldfish lurked sullenly at the bottom of the tank, looking distinctly peeved.

“You mean,” I said, “if this works, I’m going to be the sire to a vampire goldfish?” I shook my head in despair. “Thanks, Mum. You do realize you’ve probably ruined my undead social life?”

“I’ve decided what to name the fish.” Zack was hunched over, peering through the glass in fascination.
“Braaaaaaains.”

After he’d fled to his room to avoid a painful demise, I turned back to Mum. She was staring bleary-eyed at the coffee machine, waiting for it to percolate. “Mum, you’ve had, like, six cups tonight already. You know that stuff’s not good for you.” Or the rest of us. Mum got more focused and less practical with each caffeine hit.

“I need it.” She rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “Your father and I have been awake since the middle of last night.”

“Go to bed, then.” I cut across her as she started to protest. “Look, I’m a solitary creature of darkness, remember? I need you to watch over things during the day—you can’t do that and stay awake all night too.” I
herded her out. “I’ll wake you up if my sire calls. Or if a howling mob brandishing torches storms the house.”

As my parents got ready for bed, I wandered around, turning off lights and double-checking that all the windows and doors were locked. Still no sign of vampire hunters. I fetched myself a snack of—sigh—raw ground beef, resisting the urge to check all the windows again. I had to find something to take my mind off the possible assassins closing in on me, but what did a vampire
do
all night?

When Dad poked his head into my room to check on me, I was sitting at my desk, spooning raw ground beef with one hand while I flicked through my favorite websites on my laptop. Well, there was only so much melancholic lounging a girl could do.

Dad peered over my shoulder. “You’re Googling your own obituaries?”

“I meant to look for vampire hunter organizations, but I got distracted. This is awesome!” I eagerly scrolled down the forum thread. “Look, Fang-Girls.net held an online fan auction in my memory—see, ‘The JaneX Memorial Fund.’ They’re raising loads for charity! And look at all these tributes on my profile page!”

I yanked my fingers back as Dad firmly shut the
laptop lid. “This can’t be psychologically healthy, Baby Jane. Why don’t you go and read a nice wholesome vampire novel instead?”

“I don’t need to research vampires, Dad. I’ve been reading about them all my life.” I looked out at the dark garden. Apart from the breeze ruffling the leaves of the big oak tree outside my window, all was still. I stared hard into the shadowed branches. Just the place for a stalker to lurk, clutching a stake and a cross....

“You sure you’re going to be okay by yourself?” Dad said, breaking my train of thought. “I could stay up.”

“You look deader than I do, Dad.” I shooed him away, opening the lid of my laptop again. “Go to bed.”

He cast me a stern backward glance from the doorway. “No more morbid Googling, Xanthe Jane. Promise?”

“Yeah, whatever.” Making sure he could see the screen, I pulled up the BBC News website. The state of the world hadn’t changed much while I’d been dead. Blah, blah, riots somewhere, economy crashing, political scandal, blah, blah, blah. I clicked randomly through headlines without reading, and after a second I heard my dad’s footsteps moving down the hall. My hearing sharpened as I concentrated; I could hear the
rustle of the sheets being pulled back, and the creak of the springs as my parents got into bed. Straining my senses to the utmost, I could even catch the soft sound of their breathing. I waited until they’d both slipped into a deep, easy rhythm.

Then, of course, I went straight back to Fang-Girls.net.

I’d never thought of myself as a Big Name Fan or anything, but literally hundreds of people had posted messages about how great I’d been as a moderator, and how insightful my commentaries had always been, and how much fun I’d been in the role-playing chatroom, and what a tragedy it was that I’d never finish my epic, multi-fandom, crossover crackfic saga (though there were not, in my opinion, nearly enough comments expressing this latter regret). With the number of times my family had moved, I’d always found it easier to maintain friendships online than in person; I’d never even met most of these people, but I’d still been a part of their lives. And they’d missed me when I went away.

For a while, at least.

People may have been sad about my accident, but … fandom went on. My smug glow evaporated as I realized just how
much
it had gone on in my absence. Four months was like a year, in internet terms. While I’d been
in my coma, whole flamewars had broken out and died down again; at least three new fangroups had formed, mainly over characters I’d never even heard of; several prominent bloggers had flounced off the site over some imagined insult, only to come creeping back again a couple of weeks later. There were masses of squee over a trailer for a new vampire film; twenty-eight of my favorite fanfic authors had new stories up; there had been six vampire-related conventions in various parts of the world, dutifully blogged about by hundreds of fans; new pictures, new book announcements, new reviews, new arguments, all new, new, new....

It was a good thing I was an immortal vampire (
not
a zombie), because it was going to take me at least two years to catch up with all the gossip. My fingers automatically hovered over the keyboard … then hesitated. Normally—if I’d been on holiday or something—I would simply post asking people to let me know the juiciest happenings, but I could hardly do that now. Sure, I could make a new account, a new user name … but then it wouldn’t feel like being
me
. I was dead to all these people. All my friends.

Great. Now my mood was hovering dangerously close to angst. I determinedly clicked over to the fanfic
forum. Nothing like some imaginary angsty vampires to distract you from your problems, even when you’re a
real
, angsty vampire.

I was settling down to the latest installment of my favorite long-running fanfic novel (thirty-four chapters, and still going strong) when there was a bing. I nearly fell off my chair in my haste to grab the phone—but it was still dark. My laptop beeped again. A chat window had popped up.