Suck It Up and Die (33 page)

The doctors conceded defeat and rushed off to write the papers they could still publish after what they had learned about Zoë’s ecdysis.

In one more sly move, Rachel fooled the media circus outside St. Vincent’s by announcing that Zoë was going home, and then sending Zoë’s parents in a convoy of security cars and an ambulance to the Zotz family apartment on the Upper East Side. Of course, Zoë wasn’t in the ambulance. Mr. and Mrs. Zotz had been convinced that Zoë’s mortal-to-immortal transition needed to be monitored by her own kind, so, not wanting to impede their daughter’s dream, they allowed Zoë to be smuggled to the Dredful apartment, where she would complete her metamorphosis.

The smuggling entailed a couple of Leaguers masquerading as demolition workers, Zoë being hidden in a roll of old carpet, and her three female escorts donning dusty overalls and hard hats, then carrying the carpet-cocooned Zoë to a construction van.

As the van drove to the Dredful town house, Rachel turned to Portia. “We’ve almost got half the problem home. Do you have any idea where the other half is?”

“Morning?”

“Yeah.”

Portia shook her head. “Not a clue.”

With the media misdirected from the Dredful apartment, and the Nesbits taking a long nap after their exhausting
fifteen minutes of fame, the Zoë transport squad had no problem secreting her into the town house.

When Cody arrived, he and Portia headed upstairs to check on Zoë in the guest room. She was still unconscious but looked comfortable. Cody had done the homework Portia had given him earlier and had brought the most quality-enhanced version of the clip of Morning feeding on Zoë that he had the electronic genius to generate.

In Portia’s bedroom, they loaded the DVD into her computer. She fast-forwarded to the part where Morning plunged his fangs into Zoë’s neck, and hit play. She waited for when he turned from feeding and stared up at the camera. She froze the frame. “Can we zoom in on that super tight?”

“Sure.” Cody took over the keyboard and zoomed onto Morning’s face. Despite the image getting grainier, his face was still distinctive enough to see two fangs and the ring of red blood around his mouth.

“Did you see him yesterday?” Portia asked.

“Yep, after I rode Zoë across the park.”

“Notice anything different about him?”

Cody threw a hand at the screen. “Yeah, he’s feeding on your best friend. If he was feeding on my best friend I’d stake up, find him, and punch him in the heart.”

She ignored his machismo. “Look at him closely.”

He leaned toward the screen. “I’m looking closely. That’s Morning McCobb.”

“If it is, there should be red on his chin, too.”

Cody’s brow furrowed. “Is that some kind of vampire thing? Rusty feeders make sloppy drinkers?”

“I’m not talking blood.” She pointed to Morning’s grainy but smooth chin. “Last night he had a chin pimple the size of a Jujyfruit. Where did it go?”

Cody shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe he was into poppin’ pimples before he popped Zoë.”

Portia stood up.

Cody raised his hands in apology. “Okay, okay, I know it’s not funny.”

“It’s not that.” She grabbed her jacket.

“Where are you going?”

“To find Morning.”

“I’m goin’ with.”

She plucked a Flip camera off her dresser and handed it to Cody. “No, you’re staying here and shooting the first-ever footage of a mortal-to-vampire transformation. It’s gonna guarantee you an A on your senior film project and get you into any film school you want.”

“If you put it that way.” He took the camera. “But who woulda thought it would end with Morning being Zoë’s blood daddy.”

“
If
Morning’s the daddy.”

Before he could ask what that meant, Portia was gone.

On the Williamsburg Bridge, in the middle of the walkway, Morning stood at the rail and gazed toward the Statue of Liberty. Despite the dragnet that had been thrown over the city, he felt safe in his disguise. He was dressed as a Hasidic mom, complete with wig, head scarf, thick glasses, dark dress, gray coat, and a baby carriage. The only thing missing was a baby.

Fixed on the distant statue, he realized that Lady Liberty’s words—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …”—would now never include “your vampires yearning to feed without bloodlust.” His failure had buried a stake in the heart of Birnam’s dream of Lifer and Leaguer living in peace. The Leaguer movement had been slain by footage of the world’s most harmless vampire sinking his fangs into every mortal’s worst fear: their daughter being skewered by a bloodsucking fiend. Along with the dream of a people,
Morning’s dream of becoming a firefighter was as dead as ash.

His gaze drifted to the steely water flowing past the bridge. He didn’t know if he still had the vampire strength to leap over the lanes of traffic, make the water, drown, and let the fishy underworld have the last feed. If he didn’t make the water, it would confirm he was mortal enough to land in traffic and be slammed around until he was road-kill. After that, he didn’t care if they tossed his body in the river or stuck his head on a pike and delivered it to Becky-Dell.

As he gathered the strength to hop on the rail and scale the anti-jumper fence, he saw a figure approaching on the walkway, coming from Manhattan. He recognized the loping gait. Portia. His first thought was she had been sent as a decoy to distract him before they lowered the hammer. His eyes darted high, low, left. There was no sign of a trap. He watched her draw closer. Her face was expressionless. She didn’t smirk or raise a brow at seeing him in drag. He wondered what she was thinking. After all, the night before she’d offered him “everything” and he’d run away; now he was wearing a dress. On second thought, he didn’t want to know what she was thinking.

She stopped next to him. Catching her breath, she snuck a peek at his chin. She had never been so happy to see a pimple in her life. Not that it made his innocence a slam dunk. She had other questions that needed answers. And she had to buy time. “Mind if I join you?” she asked.

“Free country,” he said.

She put her left hand on the rail and slipped her right into her jacket pocket. “You just made it a little less free,
for Leaguers anyway,” she said as she blindly fingered a text into her cell.

Morning nodded. “I know.”

She didn’t know if that was a confession or not. She only knew she needed to change the subject. Morning didn’t like to rush into things, unless it was a burning building. She also knew it from the night before in her living room. She was still trying to figure out what had triggered her episode of bodice-ripping lust combined with no-greater-wrath-than-a-teenage-girl-scorned. But that mystery could wait. The fate of the boy she was pretty darn sure was her eternal beloved couldn’t.

Her fingers finished the text and sent it, and she gave Morning a quick once-over. “Nice disguise. I almost didn’t recognize you. But Hasidic? I know you’ve always been into superheroes, but when you went looking for your own superhero alter ego, was a Hasidic mom the only one left?” She slapped her head with a sudden epiphany. “Wait, I get it, this
is
your superhero costume—Super Sadie, right?”

He shook his head in begrudging awe; she could riff even under the worst circumstances. “No, the last nail in my superhero coffin got banged in last night.”

“Yeah, looks that way. I’m curious about one thing.”

“Just one?” he asked with a scoff.

“Okay, maybe a gazillion, but let’s start with one before you”—she feigned shock and touched his arm—“wait, am I stopping you from jumping? I mean, is this a bad time?” She eye-rolled. “Well, of course it’s a
bad
time, but is it a bad time, you know, to talk, just before”—she arced a hand over the rail—“
wooooo-kerplosh
! Goodbye, Morning.”

He refused to laugh at her ditz routine, but he did
congratulate himself for falling in love with a girl who could even make fun of a suicide in progress. “If I gotta have a last conversation with someone, it might as well be with the only girl who knows my go-to place: the middle of the Williams Bird Bridge.”

She squashed the urge to tell him how romantic that was, and got back to detective mode. “How did you know not to be at St. Giles when the cops showed up to grab you?”

“I didn’t. When they busted down the front door I was in the basement making a sandwich. When they went to my room I went out the back door.”

“How did you know to run?”

“I got a glimpse of ’em as they tore up the stairs. When a SWAT team’s packing stake guns and flamethrowers you know who they’re looking for.”

Portia shook her head in confusion. “Back up a sec, you were making a sandwich? For who?”

“For me?”

“Since when did you start eating solid food?”

“Since early this morning.”

Her eyes widened. “But if you’ve turned mortal enough to eat food, then you couldn’t have been vampire enough to pop fangs—”

“I’m not re-mortalizing anymore.”

“What?”

“I upchucked the sandwich an hour ago.” He answered her confused look with an impatient frown. “Look, Portia, it’s complicated, and I’m running out of time.”

She bristled at the condescension in his voice. “Well, if you jump and kill yourself I’ll never know if the guy I fell in love with was the guy who jumped my best friend’s veins
and turned her into a vampire, or if it was someone else trying to frame you. So try me, Morning, ’cause ever since we met, I’ve handled ‘complicated.’ ”

He pulled back, impressed by her bluntness. A thought made him smile. “Is this the part where you get so wound up and passionate you rip off your shirt?”

She chuckled. “Touché. Now, c’mon, Morn, gimme a chance to understand.”

He dived in. To the explanation, not the river. “I was re-mortalizing, aging right along as long as I was pursuing my Lifer dream of firefighter. The minute that ended, when I heard on the radio this morning that I’d been expelled from the academy, the re-mortalization process slammed on the brakes. My body stopped producing
pneumabrotus
, and now it’s on its way back to being a vampire.”

“How do you know for sure?”

He rubbed his fingers across his chin and wasn’t surprised when he didn’t feel a bump. “Notice anything?”

Portia recoiled in shock. The pimple was gone. “But it was there a minute ago!”

“Exactly. The returning vampire in me healed it, and I have no idea how fast I’m going from re-mort to re-vamp. Which is why I need to jump while I still have enough mortal in me to die.”

She studied his jawline. “But the whiskers you’ve grown—they haven’t disappeared.”

“Yeah, wow,” he said flatly, “if I go back to all vampire I will have matured”—he held up his thumb and index finger mocking the half inch he’d grown—“this much.”

He started to boost himself on the rail, but she grabbed his arm and pulled him back. “We can get you out of this! Cody, Zoë, me, we all saw that pimple last night, but it’s
not on the chin of the ‘Morning’ on the video who turned Zoë. It was someone else, and you know it because you weren’t there. I mean, don’t you have an alibi, like Sister Flora or someone else at St. Giles?”

He answered flatly. “No one saw me come home, and the world’s not going to believe three kids who happen to be friends of the accused. The world’s gonna believe what they saw on the video: me plunging into the forbidden well.”

“But
you
know you didn’t do it. You know it was DeThanatos after he CDed into you!”

“Yeah.” Morning shrugged. “Too bad DeThanatos isn’t the confessing type.” He looked her in the eye. “Now, please, I gotta go, but I don’t want you here to see it.”

“But Morn,” she pleaded, “if you jump, it’s like a confession of guilt. Everyone’s gonna think you did it.”

“I’m tired of caring what people think. I’m tired of trying to convince people that vampires are just a minority with special needs when some of us aren’t.” She started to speak but he stopped her. “Portia, you and I had our shot at star-crossed love; for a while our stars lined up, and in the past few weeks we were even growing together. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. But now that’s gone again, and I can’t explain it, but when you’ve tasted life for a second time, I mean mortal life, it’s that much more”—his eyes scanned her face, looking for the right word—“breathtaking. I can’t go back to what I was. I can’t suck it up and be a vampire again. I only wanna suck it up and die.”

A tear tumbled down Portia’s cheek. She batted it away, refusing to break. She had to buy time. “Oh, so now I’m supposed to pour my heart out and tell you how much I
love you? Aren’t those the last words anyone would wanna hear before they threw their life away? Well, I’m not gonna do that cliché, not gonna do it. If you’re so set on jumping, then lemme help, lemme make sure you’re miserable to the max.” She fought the lump in her throat and plunged on. “Even if you were still changing into a mortal, I wouldn’t wanna be with you. Know why? ’Cause when you were a vampire one reason I fell for you was ’cause you never quit. But that’s what you’ve changed into: a quitter. And if you actually happen to survive your little suicide, you and I would be through anyway ’cause I can’t love a quitter!” She sucked in a breath.