Josie Griffin Is Not a Vampire (12 page)

“Yes, it’s an Infiniti M hybrid.” Helios ducked his head and bit the side of his lip. “Not my first choice.”

“Dang, man,” I said, slowly walking around the rolling curves of its fender. “What was your first choice then? A Rolls-Royce?”

“I’d rather have something a little less”—he opened the door for me—“ostentatious.”

The new car smell enveloped me as I slid onto the soft gold leather seat. “Then why did you get it?”

“My father,” he said from the driver’s seat. “You know, the whole golden chariot thing.” He pressed a button and the dashboard lit up, but no sound came from the engine. “He just can’t let go.”

All I could do was laugh.

“After I wrecked my Mercedes, I asked him to get me something simpler and this is what he came up with,” Helios told me as we silently glided out of the garage.

“How’d you wreck the Mercedes?”

We pulled onto Meridian Street. He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other poised on the console between us. I could feel the warmth emanating from his bronzed skin. “A fight with my father, a little too much nectar of the gods, and a race with the setting sun. We think we’re in charge of our destinies. That we won’t make the same mistakes as our fathers and our father’s father, but…” he trailed off and sighed. “In the end, it’s all so passé.”

After seeing him get mad on the basketball court, I could only imagine what that fight was like. “Is that why you’re in the group?”

“Sort of. I was supposed to lose my license.” He grimaced. “That wasn’t the first time I had a car problem. I tend to speed,” he confessed, eyebrows up. “My mother pulled a few strings and got me into the group instead.”

“We should have a side support group for people with car issues,” I joked. “Auto Anger Management.”

“You smash them and I crash them,” he said with a grin.

I watched the trees, buildings, and billboards whiz by the window as I laughed. “This baby has speed,” I said, patting the dashboard. “I’m lucky to get Gladys up to sixty-five. And then she rattles like a skeleton on a roller coaster.”

Helios slowed down and took a ramp to I-465, the highway that circled the city. “I haven’t opened her up yet,” he said as we merged into traffic. The streetlights spilled into the car and I noticed that Helios’s face glowed. He looked at me and smiled. It was the first time I’d seen him look genuinely happy and it sent shivers up and down my back. The left lane was open. I felt like we could merge onto a moonbeam and drive straight to the large yellow moon slowly rising in the east. “Want to see how fast it’ll go?” he asked, but he didn’t wait for an answer.

As the car rocketed forward, I fell back into the cradle of my seat. We zipped past the other cars, which looked like tired dogs meandering down a country lane. I reached for the dashboard. “Helios!” I said, but I was laughing. “You’re going to get busted.”

“Relax,” he told me. He was more at ease here than I’d ever seen him. His shoulders were down, his mouth was soft, and his eyes sparkled. We hugged a curve to the left and my whole body leaned toward him from the centrifugal force. I caught sight of the speedometer, which read eighty-five miles per hour.

“Seriously,” I told him. “If you get a ticket…”

He turned toward me. Our faces were inches apart and the moon swathed us in its glow. “But doesn’t it feel good?” He nearly hummed.

“Yes,” I said, melting in his gaze. The number on the dash crept toward ninety and my heart inched up toward my throat. “But you have to slow down.”

“Is that really what you want?” he asked, but I couldn’t answer. He straightened out the wheel and released his foot from the gas. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t.” I rearranged myself in my seat. “I thought it was a blast. But if you got caught…”

“Ah, yes. Realizing the consequences. The key to managing my anger.” He shook his head. “The only problem being that my kind are not known for controlling their impulses. Look at my ancestors. Warring and fighting. Trapping one another. Creating monsters to stir up trouble. All the way back to Zeus. That guy is a complete megalomaniac!”

As soon as the words left his mouth a heavy cloud passed over the moon and a flash of heat lightning brightened the sky. Helios rolled his eyes and shook his fist, then yelled, “Oh whatever!” He muttered, “I can never get a freakin’ break.” He turned to me. “The whole all-knowing, all-seeing thing gets old so fast.”

I laughed and shook my head as he crossed three lanes and exited from the highway. We stopped at a red light on the surface street under a looming Zombie Apparel billboard. The girls stared down at us like scarecrows in halter tops and micro-miniskirts. “Do you like those ads?” I asked, pointing up at the Zombie Love Attack!

Helios craned his neck to see then he shook his head. “They look like those girls who follow Johann around,” he said. “All skinny and weird. Hollow-eyed
and kind of stupid. I like girls with a little more spunk and a little more meat on their bones.” He looked me up and down and grinned. “Like you.”

I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or not. “Uh, thanks, I think.”

The light turned green, but we didn’t move because Helios had turned in his seat to stare at me. “That was a compliment,” he assured me.

I was liquid. A little puddle sloshing around in the seat. My head fell to the side and my mouth went limp. My lips tingled and all I wanted to do was kiss him. But, just as I tilted toward him, my phone beeped. I jumped, breaking the spell between us. Helios exhaled and leaned away. The stoplight turned yellow and Helios gunned it.

As we moved through the intersection, I scrambled to get my beeping phone out of my bag. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I muttered. “I don’t even want to answer it. Somebody’s texting me. Which is totally weird. Nobody texts me anymore,” I rambled on, embarrassed and disappointed. I opened the phone and saw a message from Kayla—

“Oh my god,” I mumbled, thinking of tiny little Sadie out on the streets alone. I immediately texted back—

“Everything okay?” Helios asked.

“I don’t know.” My phone beeped again.

I texted back, WHO? because I had no idea what she was talking about. Her parents, maybe, or her ex-boyfriend. Then, I looked up. “Where are we?” I asked Helios.

“On the west side. Sorry for the detour. I’ll take you home.”

“No, wait.” I turned and leaned on the console between us. “I know this is kind of weird, but I have a friend who needs me to pick her up.”

He glanced at me, eyebrows flexed.

“She’s on the south side. Near Tarren’s house.” Kayla hadn’t texted back so while I talked, I punched in the words, B there soon! then I hit
SEND
.

He frowned. “I don’t want to go all the way back downtown. Tell her to call someone else.”

“Seriously?” I ask, surprised by how cold he’s gone all of the sudden. “But she doesn’t have anyone else. Look, it’s a long story,” I pleaded. “It’s just that, she’s one of the girls where I’m doing my community service and something’s wrong. Girls keep disappearing and now she’s worried.”

The relaxed and happy speeding Helios was gone. Now that stony mask he wore during group therapy was back in place. “Why is it any of your concern?”

“Because,” I said, then I hesitated. “She’s my friend.”

Helios frowned. “You’ve only been working there for a week, Josie.”

“But I’ve known these girls longer than that. I have a blog and.…” I shook my head impatiently. I didn’t have time to explain empathy to Mr. Greek God. “I need to go there. If you can’t help me, then just drop me off here.”

Helios scoffed. “And then what? You’ll take the bus?”

“Maybe. I don’t know!” I looked out the window, searching for a way to get to Kayla.

“You shouldn’t wander around the Southside at night alone,” he told me.

“No kidding, Sherlock,” I muttered. “But I can’t ignore her. She asked me for help.” We stopped at a red light. I looked at him and pleaded with my eyes. “Come on, Helios. What else have you got to do?”

“Play Wii,” he said drily.

I punched him on the shoulder. “This will be much more interesting, I promise.”

“How, exactly, will this be interesting?”

I grinned at him. “Speeding isn’t the only way to get a thrill. How about sneaking a girl out of a shelter. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?”

“No,” he said. “What if I get caught?”

“You didn’t get caught speeding,” I pointed out.

He closed his eyes and sighed. The light turned green and the person behind us honked. “I don’t like
putting myself in harm’s way,” he said, and I laughed. “What?” he demanded.

“Some Greek god you are!” I said.

That seemed to touch a nerve because he immediately did a U-turn and headed south.

“So you’ll do it?” I asked.

He gripped the wheel with both hands and focused on the road. “That depends on what we’re doing exactly.” He glanced at me again. “You do have a plan, don’t you?”

I thought about this. What was I going to do? How could I sneak Kayla out of HAG? And then what? It wasn’t like I could take her home with me. Or even if I could, that didn’t change that other girls at HAG were missing. And of course, there was the problem of how I was going to either get in to HAG or get Kayla out. “Well,” I said, biting my lip. “How good are you at acting?”

Helios shrugged. “Greeks know their tragedies.”

“Good,” I said as I texted my plan to Kayla. “Because you’re going to be Kayla’s cousin from southern Indiana.”

n
othing could be more out of place than Helios’s sparkling gold car parked right in front of sucky old HAG, except, of course, Helios himself striding in through the smudgy front door of the building. I wished I could see what happened inside. I bet Maron did a giant double take then tugged her shirt down to expose yet more cleavage when he walked in. And the girls probably swarmed him like bees to ice cream, but who could blame them? I was hoping Kayla got my text and played along with the story of her “cousin” coming to get her so she could visit her ailing grandmother in the hospital.

I watched the door from behind Helios’s tinted windows, then looked at the clock on the dashboard, then watched the door, then looked at the clock. Five minutes passed. How could it be taking this long? Had something gone wrong? Should I call Helios? Or text Kayla? Or burst inside wielding a bat then drag my friends out
before Maron had them both cleaning toilets for eternity? Ten minutes went by and I was ready to drive the car through the front door, but I knew I had to control myself. Then, just as I was about to explode from impatience and worry, the HAG door swung open. Helios had his arm looped through the crook of Kayla’s elbow as if they’d known each other forever, but both of them looked a little shaky and uncertain as they hurried toward the car.

As soon as Kayla slid across the backseat, she reached up and wrapped her arms around my neck. “Oh my god! Oh my god!” she moaned. She had me in a death grip. “You’re such a genius and a lifesaver. How did you ever think of having a gorgeous guy pose as my cousin?! It was brilliant.”

“Kayla,” I croaked and squirmed. “Let go. You’re hurting me!”

She gave me one final squeeze then she fell back against the seat. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for rescuing me.”

I rubbed my neck, wondering what had gotten into her. This was more than just freaked out—this was terrified.

Helios slid into the driver’s side. A trickle of sweat ran down the side of his face, which was uncharacteristically pale. “Easy as baklava,” he said, but there was the slightest quiver in his voice. As if the Sun God’s hard-as-marble composure had cracked a bit.

Before I could ask if he’d been nervous, Kayla shot
forward, grabbed for me, and began shouting, “Go! Go! Go! Maron and that creepy lady are coming outside!” She banged the back of the seat.

Helios jammed the car into gear and squealed away from the curb. I turned to see Maron and Atonia under a streetlight, pointing at the car. “Holy crap!” I ducked down, head below the window’s edge. “Do you think they saw me?”

Helios sped around the corner. “No way,” he said, checking and rechecking the rearview mirror. “Nobody can see through these windows. They’re way too dark.” He looked at me. “Right? They are dark, aren’t they? There’s no way they could have seen us.”

I inched my way back up again. “I hope to the high heavens not. That creepy lady was my social worker.”

We hit the highway and Helios floored it. Once we were moving, he took a deep breath and wiped a hand across his brow. “Whew! Glad that’s over.” He reached over to pat my knee. “Don’t worry. I’m sure she didn’t see you.” He seemed almost as shaken up as I was and let his hand linger on my thigh as if to comfort both of us.

My heart was still racing and I wanted to intertwine my fingers with his while I took deep breaths to calm down, but Kayla stuck her head between us. “Wow, you two are criminal masterminds. Helios just strode in there like he owned the place and told Maron that I had to leave with him right away. Like it was a matter of life and death because our poor sick granny was going to croak any second. I didn’t even have time to get my stuff
together,” she said. “I just grabbed his arm and headed for the door.”

“But what happened earlier today?” I asked. “Where did Sadie go? Who’s coming after you? And why were you so freaked out when you texted me?”

Kayla slumped in the backseat, thin and pale. “Oh, Josie,” she said with tears rimming her tired eyes. “You’ll think I’m crazy if I tell you.”

I glanced at Helios who lifted one eyebrow. “Believe me, Kayla,” I said. “I’ve heard all kinds of weird stuff lately that you couldn’t even hope to top. Just tell me what happened.”

She took a deep breath. “Sadie was really freaked out. Something spooked her after Rhonda left. She kept saying that the devil was after her, but she’s from a really religious family down in southern Indiana so I thought she was one of those crazy Bible kids, you know, who take all that stuff way too seriously. She stopped eating, though, and she was getting real, real skinny. I kept telling her that she had to eat, but she said she couldn’t.”