Suck It Up and Die (32 page)

He escaped and jumped to his feet. “I’m sorry, I wanna do this as bad as you. But tonight’s not right. I gotta be totally focused tomorrow. I gotta have my A-game.”

She sat up, spreading inviting arms. “That’s what I’m giving you. My
A
-game!” She peeled off her blouse and burst into song. “A-more-aaa!”

Morning wavered between laughing, leaping at the luscious opportunity, and leaving.

She reached back to undo her bra.

“Portia, don’t!” He knew if he saw any more he’d never leave, and the next few days would be haunted by so many flashbacks of ecstasy that his exams and field tests would have to be rated NC-17. “I—I gotta go,” he stammered as he headed through the kitchen to the door.

“You’re leaving?” she shouted, jumping to her feet.

He turned but kept going. “Yeah, but I want a rain check.”

She followed as he opened the door. The restraint-stripping effects of henbane boosted her shock to fury. “Rain check, my ass! I just offered you everything!”

He backed down the hall as she stalked after him. “And I want it,” he blurted. “I really do. But not tonight. I’m sorry.”

“Stop saying that!”

Heading outside, he stumbled down the steps to his bike.

She planted herself at the top of the stoop, oblivious to the bra exhibition she was giving the world. “You’re such a wimp! Why didn’t I get it when I saw that girl throw
herself at you, wanting your fangs in her neck, and all you could do was say, ‘I don’t take, I like to give.’ That’s your problem, Morn, all you do is give-give-give! When are you gonna show me some take-take-take? I mean, you’re still a vampire, right?”

He fumbled with the lock on his bike. He knew the sooner he got away, the better it would be for the both of them. “Portia, you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Oh, yes, I do!” she stormed back.

He jumped on his bike and started away.

She shouted after him. “I’m saying for once in your wimpy life you need to vampire up and grow a set!”

She spun, marched back inside, and slammed the door.

From the open window overlooking the stoop, Mr. and Mrs. Nesbit stared down with concerned bemusement. “Young love,” Mr. Nesbit clucked, “aren’t you glad we’re over it?”

Mrs. Nesbit gave him a playful punch. “Speak for yourself, buster.”

Above them, a falcon lifted off the roof peak and soared into the night.

Zoë rode her pedicab up Sixth Avenue. She had just dropped the night’s tour clients off at their hotel in SoHo. She spotted a familiar figure walking along the sidewalk. She pulled up beside him. “Hey, A.M., what are you doing out so late? I thought finals started tomorrow.”

Morning nodded with exasperation. “They do, but it’s been a crazy night. First I had a fight with Portia, then my bike got a flat.”

“Do you want a ride home?”

“It’s awfully late, and outta your way.”

Zoë flapped a hand. “Nah, you’re never out of my way. C’mon, get in.”

He hesitated. “Really?”

“Really.” He climbed in and Zoë got the pedicab going. “Besides, seeing how you’re a Leafer and going all mortal on me, I wanna spend as much time as I can with you while you can still grow a set.”

Morning let out a caustic chuckle. “Did you talk to Portia already?”

“No. What’s so funny?”

“That’s what Portia said. She said I was a wimp and I should ‘grow a set.’ ”

Zoë giggled as she turned onto Fifth Avenue. “Which ‘set’ do you think she’s talking about?”

He didn’t answer. They rode in silence for a while.

Sitting on her seat and coasting, Zoë turned back to him. “Seriously, which—” Her voice trailed off, her words swallowed by the look in Morning’s eyes. They were filled with desire: not just sexual desire, but the locked-on intensity of predator for prey. It sent a wave of fear and exhilaration through her. Trying to ignore it, she turned around and pedaled. But her knees felt weak. She could still feel his eyes on her.

She fumbled for the right words. “You know, Morning, Portia is my best friend. Maybe it’s my duty to find out what she meant by ‘set.’ It would just be an experiment to see what”—she couldn’t hold back a nervous giggle—“you know, pops up.” She turned back for his answer.

He gave her the slightest smile. “Yeah,” he said in a voice filled with invitation. “Let’s experiment.”

Zoë’s legs went so wobbly she wasn’t sure she could pedal to the tiny street she spotted up ahead. To give her strength and steel her resolve, she hummed the chorus from “Part of Your World.”

The pedicab turned and disappeared into a narrow lane called Washington Mews.

In the city where neon never sleeps, first light had begun to dim neon’s wash when the police raided St. Giles. Drake
Sanders had been tipped off and was there to scoop the arrest of Morning McCobb. The raid became a fishing expedition with no fish. Morning was nowhere to be found.

This didn’t stop the morning shows and newsstands from buzzing with the shocking news. Besides the predictable headlines—
MORNING SUCKS!
—the most vivid account was the video captured on a security camera in Washington Mews, where Zoë and her pedicab had been discovered.

It showed the following: Zoë dismounts her pedicab bike, steps back in a zombielike trance, gets into the cab, and sits beside Morning. She falls back and Morning buries his head in her neck. He turns once, as if he has heard a sound, and displays his blood-rimmed mouth. He resumes his feeding. When he’s done, he swings out of the cab, sleeve-wipes his mouth, and strides away. In the cab, Zoë remains motionless: unconscious or dead, it’s not clear.

The only good news the media had to report was that Morning’s midnight feed had not been fatal. Zoë was still alive, and she had gone from one extreme to the other: from the girl who got snubbed in the Tasting Room to the girl who got nearly chugged in Washington Mews. But no one could ascertain her condition, as she had been whisked away to an undisclosed location.

As the shocking day unfolded and the clip of Morning’s wet-work on Zoë rolled across the country in a tornado of pixels, several events swiftly followed.

The fire academy delayed the beginning of final exams until Captain Clancy could: (1) triumphantly expel Morning, and (2) train all the probies in stake whittling and stake delivery methods so if Morning dared set foot and fang back on the Rock, they could extinguish him like a fire in a trash can.

Becky-Dell used the tragic event to lambast the nation.
“Do you get it yet? There’s no such thing as a harmless vampire! They’re hardwired for bloodlust! If this is how the runt of the Leaguer litter acts, imagine what the rest of ’em are capable of. The true vampire agenda has shown its face and it is this: to sink their bloodlusting fangs into the necks of our daughters and sons!”

As Becky-Dell stoked the fires of public fury, hate crimes and vigilante violence against Leaguers spiked. A Leech Treat cart was pushed into the East River. A blood bar was stoned and so smashed up that a reporter proclaimed, “Never have I seen so much loss of blood without loss of life.”

Portia had awoken that morning with a splitting headache and a major memory gap from the night before. The last thing she could recall was Morning showing off his bicep. After that, everything was a blank.

She told her mother as much over breakfast, which included Rachel, who had taken refuge at their apartment rather than face the media and the MOPers who had surrounded the Diamond Sky building wanting Leaguer blood.

There was a smaller media contingent camped in front of the Dredful town house. They had not gotten a statement from Penny, but they did get an interview with Mr. and Mrs. Nesbit, who provided them with not only a scoop but also restored some of the data to Portia’s crashed memory.

Portia watched on the TV as the Nesbits, thirty feet away on the stoop, spilled to the press. They detailed Portia’s near-topless tirade against Morning the night before, right down to her banshee challenge that he should “vampire up and grow a set!”

The Nesbits’ account broke the dam on Portia’s memory. As her rant against vampire pacifists, her attempted seduction, and raging challenge to Morning came flooding back, she buried her face in her hands.

Rachel and Penny fixed her with disbelieving eyes. Rachel finally asked, “Portia, is that true?”

Still hiding her face, Portia nodded.

“Even being almost topless?” Penny demanded.

Portia raised her face, wet with tears. “Yes, I drove him to it! It’s all my fault!”

Rachel put a hand on her knee. “Portia, you’re not the real victim here. Zoë is.”

“And that’s why he chose her!” Portia blurted. “She’s been asking for it ever since she met Morning!”

Penny answered her outburst with a severe look. “You need to calm down and tell us exactly what happened.”

Portia sucked in a jerky breath, let it out, and collected herself. “Morning left here last night and—idiot boy that he is—jumped on the chance to kill two birds with one stone. He was gonna prove to me he was a taker
and
give Zoë what she’s always wanted, to be turned. But I never meant a set of
fangs
, I meant a set of—”

“That’s okay,” Rachel interrupted, “we know what you meant.” She turned to Penny. “The media doesn’t know it yet, but that’s exactly what happened. Zoë got turned.”

“Do you know where she is?” Penny asked.

Rachel nodded.

Portia jumped up. “We have to see her!”

Rachel pulled up her cell and hit speed dial. When someone answered, she said, “Security, we’re ready to go.”

After Zoë had been discovered at about one a.m. by a dog walker, she was taken to New York University Hospital and treated for extreme anemia. By the time Mr. and Mrs. Zotz got there, Zoë’s body had rejected a blood transfusion, two puncture wounds were found on her neck, and her blood work came back with numbers no doctor had ever seen. She was diagnosed as a vampire in the making. It was the first vampire-in-process doctors had gotten their hands on, and the war over Zoë’s ninety-five-pound biomass was launched among the doctors and scientists at NYU. The small group of doctors that won did so by kidnapping. They disguised Zoë as a corpse, smuggled her out of the hospital via the morgue, and moved her to a quickly assembled suite-laboratory in a boarded-up hospital once known as St. Vincent’s.

While Rachel had Leaguer spies keeping tabs on this, she also knew that when the Leaguer security detail got
them past the media and into the waiting car in front of the Dredful town house, she couldn’t stop the press from following them to Zoë’s secret location. Rachel wasn’t concerned. She had other plans.

After arriving at St. Vincent’s, the Leaguer bodyguards kept the trailing media from entering the former hospital, which was in a chaotic state of semi-demolition.

When Rachel, Penny, and Portia entered Zoë’s makeshift suite, the attending doctors ordered them out. The doctors claimed they had performed enough tests on Zoë to determine that she was “legally undead,” which didn’t make her a patient so much as a specimen in their laboratory. The bottom line, they crowed, was that Zoë belonged to them, and to the future of science.

Rachel countered with a barrage of visitors. First, Zoë’s parents threw themselves on their daughter’s unconscious body. They performed admirably as distraught parents, even though they now knew their daughter was in the process of achieving her lifetime dream: being turned. Then came the team of Leaguer lawyers, who threatened the doctors with malpractice suits for misdiagnosing their patient as “undead,” administering mortality-tainted blood to a transitioning vampire, transporting a living and ill patient through the germ swamp of a morgue, and performing medical procedures in an unlicensed building.

Rachel, in a shockingly coherent display, concluded the assault on the doctors. She informed them that, first, Zoë was not ill but in ecdysis, which, if they knew anything about the science of vampirism, or entomology, they would know that Zoë was in the process of slipping out of her mortal body and developing into the instar, or immortal body, of a vampire. And second, since Zoë was not
technically ill or in need of medical aid, this was strictly a family matter, and if the doctors didn’t give up Zoë peacefully, they would pay with their reputations and their licenses to practice in New York.