Never Bite a Boy on the First Date Read online

  Tamara Summers

  Never Bite a Boy on the First Date

  For Rachel A., because you’re

  awesome, and because I bet you could

  solve a murder, juggle three boys, and

  fit through a cat flap, no problem. :-)

  And for Kari, because obviously.

  Contents

  Prologue

  If you were dying…

  Chapter 1

  There’s a murderer in my school. And this time it…

  Chapter 2

  Of course, I’m not a mind reader. Though I hear…

  Chapter 3

  I met Zach on the first day at my first…

  Chapter 4

  Tragically, I am now stuck with Zach until he decides…

  Chapter 5

  If I’d had a heartbeat, it would have skidded to…

  Chapter 6

  I spent the rest of the night trying to make…

  Chapter 7

  Well, my job here is done, I thought. I was…

  Chapter 8

  I’d heard that Luna High had an indoor pool somewhere…

  Chapter 9

  The door swung shut behind us before I could tell…

  Chapter 10

  After Milo dropped me off at home, I hung up…

  Chapter 11

  The next day was Friday, which I love just as…

  Chapter 12

  What does one say to that?

  Chapter 13

  One of the things I like about living in Massachusetts…

  Chapter 14

  I needed a strong dose of normalcy when I got…

  Chapter 15

  I dove into the closet, which I realized right away…

  Chapter 16

  Believe it or not, Daniel and I managed to have…

  Chapter 17

  If it turns out that heaven is getting to relive…

  Chapter 18

  I decided I was well within my rights to skip…

  Chapter 19

  I thought about going home and getting back into bed,…

  Chapter 20

  Milo gently led me over to the bed and we…

  Chapter 21

  It was midnight, and I didn’t want to go home.

  Chapter 22

  “That’s impossible,” I said. I tried to pull away from…

  Chapter 23

  A cold wind blew dead leaves in my face as…

  Chapter 24

  For a heart-stopping moment, I thought it was Milo. I…

  About the Author

  Other Books by Tamara Summers

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  If you were dying…

  If you were sixteen and dying…

  If your blood was spilling out of you, calling to them, the creatures of the night, and you knew you were dying…

  If you saw their pale faces and the gleam of sharp teeth in the moonlight, and you felt your blood spilling warmly over your hands, and you knew beyond any doubt that you were dying…

  Wouldn’t you say yes?

  Yes, turn me.

  Yes, I want to live.

  Yes…make me one of you.

  Chapter 1

  There’s a murderer in my school. And this time it isn’t me, so I’m kind of ticked off.

  The body was lying on the front steps of Luna High School, upside down. His blood was running all the way down the steps to the ground, like a red carpet laid out to welcome us inside. He was wearing a red-and-gold Luna Tigers football jersey and a startled expression. I guess being thrown out of a third-story window would surprise me, too. The broken windowpanes creaked ominously up above, and shattered glass sparkled in the blood around him, reflecting the morning sunlight.

  We could smell the blood the minute we pulled into the parking lot. I heard Zach’s stomach growl, which, if you ask me, is a totally inappropriate reaction. And also ridiculous, since he’d had, like, two gallons of blood for breakfast already.

  At the bottom of the steps, a couple of policemen were speaking into their walkie-talkies and trying to fend off all the curious teenagers who were early for school. Mostly that included the swim team and kids whose parents have to get to work early. Plus students like me and Zach, who prefer to be indoors before the sun is fully up.

  Don’t worry, we’re not going to burst into flames or anything. That’s a myth. Go back and read Dracula, and you’ll see—the sun just drains his powers; it doesn’t kill him. Not that I’m saying Bram Stoker was an expert or anything, but he’s kind of right about that part.

  So I don’t die in a ball of fire the moment I step outside, which is a plus. But the bad news is that too much direct sunlight gives me a wicked headache, and then I have to lie in a dark room for a while to recover. It’s kind of like having a mild sun allergy. It gets worse for older vampires, who have less tolerance. We also cover ourselves in this crazy herbal sunscreen, which helps a little bit, although I think it makes me smell like basil.

  Basically it sucks, since I no longer have to worry about skin cancer, so I should be able to tan as much as I want. Instead, I’m stuck with the skin tone I had when I died. Not that we get a ton of sunshine in freezing Massachusetts anyway. Luckily for me, the pale look is coming back in. (It is coming back in, isn’t it?)

  Right. Back to the dead guy.

  There was one more thing we could spot from across the parking lot. The police wouldn’t know what they were looking at, but to vampires like us, the big holes in his neck were a dead giveaway. (Ha ha! Hilarious pun! I know, stake me now.)

  Where does the image of two perfect little puncture wounds come from anyway? You see that everywhere, but it’s kind of physically impossible to do, and I should know—I have actually tried this experiment. Yeah, you’ve got your fangs up top, but you also have two sharp little fangs on the bottom, and the only way to really latch on and get all the blood you need is to bite with all of them, which leaves four tiny little puncture wounds—and that’s if you’re neat.

  More often, as in this case, it leaves a bloody mess.

  I’ve got those four little scars on my neck and my wrist—one set from Olympia (my vampire “mom”) and one from Crystal (my vampire “sister”). I hide the marks with my hair and my watch, and they kind of look like freckles now. Creepy freckles, but it could be worse.

  I could be missing half my neck, like this guy.

  “Gross,” Zach offered from the backseat, leaning forward to peer over my shoulder. I edged closer to the window, away from him, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Someone needs to work on her technique.”

  Olympia parked the car and turned to stare at me with her big, dark, I know everything eyes.

  “I didn’t do it,” I said immediately.

  “Kira—” she started.

  “I knew you would think it was me! That’s so unfair! I swear, I didn’t do it! Oh, my God, make one mistake and suddenly every vampire attack is my fault.”

  “You must admit it’s odd,” Olympia said. “Two vampire attacks in two towns in a row. Before you came along, I managed to go twenty-five years without seeing any vampire attacks in public like this.”

  “Okay, I agree it’s weird, but this wasn’t me,” I said. “I swear.”

  It’s true, you don’t see a vampire attack every day. In fact, you hardly ever see one. All the rules about this were drummed into my head from the moment I woke up with fangs, and then re-drummed again after my little mistake last year.

  “Besides, I’m not the eat-’em-and-leave-’em type, remember?” I added.

  “Hey, that’s Tex Harrison,” Zach
said, squinting through the windshield at the body.

  “No way,” I said. We’d only been here a month, but even I knew Luna’s star quarterback. “How can you tell?”

  “His football jersey,” Zach said. “Number nine? Hello?”

  As if I would know that.

  “See!” I said, turning to Olympia. “That proves I didn’t do it! I would never bite a Neanderthal like Tex Harrison. His blood probably tastes like beer and Cheetos.”

  Olympia rolled her eyes. She does that a lot. Possibly just around me. I think she’s beginning to wonder if bringing a sixteen-year-old vampire into the gang was such a good idea. It’s still unclear whether I’m going to act sixteen for the rest of my immortal life. If you ask me, I’d say I’m already way more mature than I was a year ago, so I don’t think she has anything to worry about. I’m the one who has to worry, because it’s probably not going to be fun to be twenty-nine in a sixteen-year-old body…or fifty…or five hundred. If I have to go to high school over and over again for the rest of eternity, I will seriously decapitate myself.

  Olympia always says, “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” meaning when I manage to actually get through an entire school year without some big, dramatic death (mine, for instance) forcing us to move. On the plus side, by the third time around, U.S. History is a total breeze…although, sadly, not any less boring.

  “Is he going to wake up like us?” Zach asked. “I mean, will he be a vampire? Should we stake out his grave?”

  Olympia winced at his choice of words. She’s a little sensitive about things that can kill us. Hardly anything in our house is made of wood, for instance.

  “It depends,” Olympia said. “If he was bitten before he died, then yes, he’ll become a vampire.” She pointed at the river of blood dripping down the steps. “But judging from that, he was killed first and then bitten. Otherwise the vampire would have drained much more from him before tossing him out the window. My guess is that the vampire decided to have a snack after throwing him through the glass, but she—”

  “Or he!” I protested.

  “—was probably interrupted, since there’s still so much blood inside the corpse, too.”

  “This,” I said, “is a seriously sick conversation.” I haven’t entirely adjusted to the whole yum, blood, yum aspect of being a vampire. My body wants it, but my head is still like, Ew, that is BLOOD, time to faint.

  “I’ll have to talk to Wilhelm about this,” Olympia said with a sigh. Wilhelm is my vampire “dad.” (He prefers the word “patriarch.” If you call him Dad, even ironically, he will flail his pale arms around and make outraged huffing noises through his moustache.) He mostly lies in his coffin, brooding and issuing proclamations about how degenerate the world is today. Apparently things have gone way downhill since, like, the Middle Ages.

  “Well, tell him I said I didn’t do it,” I said.

  “Who else could it be?” Zach said. Very helpful. Thanks, Zach.

  “It could be you,” I suggested. “Whoever said you had good impulse control?”

  That was kind of a low blow, I’ll admit. He flushed angrily, which was only possible, by the way, because of that two-gallons-of-blood breakfast I mentioned earlier.

  “I was on a blood run with Bert last night,” he said icily.

  “That’s true,” Olympia agreed. “They were gone for hours.”

  “Where were you?” Zach asked.

  Out by myself, as usual, which he totally knew. If I’d known he was out, I might have stayed home and watched TV instead. But I’m in Zach-avoidance mode, which means lots of long, solitary midnight walks until I’m sure he’s asleep. (He’s still on a more human schedule than the rest of us.) Doesn’t make for a great alibi, unfortunately.

  “At the cemetery,” I said with a sigh. I know—I’m such a cliché. But it’s really peaceful at night. I like looking at the gravestones and trying to guess whether any of their inhabitants came back as vampires, too. Also, moonlight makes us stronger, which is handy when you have to put up with physics and gym the next day. I’m sure vampires back in Transylvania in Wilhelm’s day never had to suffer like this.

  “If it wasn’t one of us,” Olympia said, “that would mean there’s another vampire in this town.” Probably more than one, in fact. We mostly travel in families, just like regular, non-bloodsucking folks. It’s easier to blend in that way.

  I scanned the growing crowd of students in the parking lot for anyone who looked suspicious. Or, you know…hungry.

  Mostly everyone just looked sleepy. I mean, it was six o’clock in the morning. Dead body or not, that’s way too early for anyone to be awake. I felt that way as a human, and I definitely feel that way as a vampire. This is when I should be going to bed and sleeping away all the daylight, but Olympia believes in acting as much like a human as possible. Trust me, I fall asleep the minute I get home from school. I wake up with the darkness and do my homework at three o’clock in the morning.

  Most of the faces around us looked tired, like they’d been up late, too.

  But there was one guy, though….

  Okay, I’ll admit it. He caught my attention mostly because he was hot. I mean, sure, I’m a bloodsucking vampire, but I am also still a teenager in a new school; hence, I am always on the lookout for hotties. This one looked like he might be part Japanese, like me. But he had to be part something else, too—maybe Polynesian? Hawaiian?—because his hair was dark and curly, and frankly he looked as if he ought to be surfing, or at least starring in a movie about surfing. He was leaning against a black car a few feet away from the police barricade, all casual and whatever: Oh, look, a murder…whatevs. He had one of those cute little rope necklaces around his neck, and he was wearing sunglasses.

  But with my vampire super-sight—all charged up from last night’s moonlit saunter—I could see his eyes through the dark lenses, and that’s how I could tell that he was staring intently at the body. It wasn’t the Whoa, dude, there’s a dead guy on our steps kind of staring everyone else was doing.

  It was more like I know exactly what that is.

  Chapter 2

  Of course, I’m not a mind reader. Though I hear that’s a nifty power which, like mesmerizing people, you can use only after a lot of practice and about a thousand years as a vampire. (Just in case that’s true, I’m careful not to think any of my more “degenerate” thoughts around Wilhelm.) So I couldn’t be sure what the hot guy’s expression meant. But I certainly wanted to know.

  “Maybe I should go investigate,” I said, my hand already on the door handle.

  “Wait,” Olympia said. “Let’s observe for a moment first.” I assume her high level of caution is how she’s managed to survive seven hundred years, but it drives me bats. (Ha ha ha! More vampire puns! Okay, okay, I’ll stop.)

  Well, I don’t know what she was observing, but I kept my “observational” eyes on Mr. Hot. Could he be a vampire? He seemed a lot more tan than me, but maybe he was just born with darker skin.

  The problem is that vampires don’t look particularly unusual most of the time. I think my canine teeth are maybe a teeny bit longer, but they only get really long and pointy and obvious right before I bite someone. Zach’s normal smile, for instance, is toothy and obnoxious, but not in a Look out! He’s going to bite! kind of way. It’s more like Look out, he’s going to hit on you, and then you’ll discover that he never flosses! And if you ask me, dental hygiene should rank pretty high on a vampire’s to-do list. Sure, we can’t get cavities, but Zach proves that bad breath can be eternal.

  Other than his meaty breath, I don’t think there are any clues about Zach that would make someone think he’s a vampire. He looks like any other doofy seventeen-year-old jock, all muscles and shiny, sandy-blond hair and stupid jokes about body parts. None of that dark, pale, brooding vampire stuff that you read about. He’s tall, but that’s where the resemblance to Dracula ends.

  My new best friend Vivi thinks Zach is dreamy, which I find faintly horr
ifying. (Despite the fact that I once felt the same—which is even more horrifying.) But I can’t convince her of how wrong she is, because she thinks I’m just like, “Ew, that’s my brother,” when of course the truth is that he’s not my brother at all. And I am definitely an expert on his long-term dateability potential.

  Zach has no problem with the blood-drinking part of being a vampire, by the way. He mixes it into his morning health shakes with raw eggs and protein powder and all kinds of other unmentionable goop that he says will make him more buff. No one’s had the heart to tell him that vampires pretty much stay the same shape they were in when they died. Crystal will never lose that last five pounds; Bert will always look like a teeny-weeny accountant, despite being in reality stronger than any of the men in town. That growth spurt I was sort of hoping for in my senior year is never going to happen—but on the other hand, I can eat as much ice cream and as many cheeseburgers as I want, which I’ll admit almost makes up for the fact that I still have to drink blood to survive.

  Anyway, if I can’t even tell that Zach’s a vampire, I don’t see how I’m supposed to spot a vampire who’s a total stranger. I can’t exactly walk down the halls of my high school peering at everybody’s teeth.

  Even with super-sight, I couldn’t see anything special about my hot guy’s canines, although he did smile helpfully—and very cutely, I might add—at a couple of people who went past him. But once his friends had passed by, he went back to staring at the body in that intense, thoughtful, totally hot way.

  “That one,” Olympia said suddenly. But she wasn’t pointing at my guy. She was pointing at a tall, thin, pale guy in a hooded sweatshirt who was slouching up the sidewalk toward the school. He hadn’t even noticed the body yet. His blue eyes were focused on the ground.