Authors: Helen Keeble
Fang Girl
HELEN KEEBLE
To Eljas Oksanen, who read every draft
Chapter 1
J
ust because I like vampires doesn’t mean I’m stupid. Okay, so my bookcase groans under the weight of paperbacks with moody black-and-red covers. So I’ve seen every episode of
Buffy
and
The Vampire Diaries
three times over. So I hang out a lot at Fang-Girls.net—
the
fansite for all things vampire. But despite all that, I don’t mistake fantasy for reality. I never, not once in all my fifteen years, thought vampires were actually real.
Until, of course, I woke up dead, six feet underground, in my coffin. That’ll convince pretty much anyone.
“Oh, crap,” I said, rubbing my forehead where I’d banged it against the lid while trying to sit up. I
performed a quick inventory. Yep—coffin, churning thirst, not breathing, fangs. I could practically hear the ominous music swelling as I reached the inevitable conclusion. I was a vampire, a creature of the night—
Hang on. I
could
hear ominous music swelling. At least, slightly tinny and rather repetitive ominous music, reverberating in the close confines of the coffin. From my vast store of vampire-related trivia, I identified it as the opening theme from Francis Ford Coppola’s
Dracula
movie, as interpreted by ringtone.
I was a vampire, and … someone was trying to call me?
When my parents had said that not even death could pry me from my mobile phone, I’d thought they were joking. I wriggled around in the narrow coffin until I could reach the ringing handset. I instantly knew it wasn’t mine—my phone was small and sleek, with a USB stick dangling on the charm strap. This felt like a brick, bristling with extra battery packs. The glow of the screen seemed dazzlingly bright in the darkness, making my eyes water.
UNKNOWN CALLER
, it said. I stabbed the
CALL
button. “Uh …” How did you start a conversation when you were dead? “Hello?”
“Xanthe Jane Greene,” said a woman’s voice, undercut by the crackle of interference. “At last.”
So she knew me. I, on the other hand, had never heard her before. “Who are you? What’s going on? Why—?”
“Time enough for all that, my darling!” She laughed—an amazing laugh, soft and supple, like a cat arching into my hand. “We have all the time in the world. And as for who I am … I’m your dearest friend, of course.” Somewhere above my head came the scrape of a shovel biting into earth. “Don’t worry, darling. I’ll soon have you out.”
In my books, only two sorts of people ever dug up vampires … and I was pretty certain that someone looking to plant a stake through my chest wouldn’t phone to chat first. Which meant—“You’re my sire, right?”
“Indeed.” The sounds of digging were getting closer. Her voice dropped into a low purr. “And you are my masterpiece. I’ve been looking forward to this day for—oh, blast. Not
now
!” There was a clatter, as though she’d dropped the shovel. The phone went dead.
“What? What?” My dry voice cracked. I hammered at the lid. There was a bit of give to it now, but before I could brace my legs to push properly, the whole coffin shook under the weight of someone jumping down onto it.
“Listen, darling.” The woman’s voice was clearer now, with nothing between us but the coffin lid and a
thin layer of dirt. “I’ve got to lead this idiot off. Find somewhere to hide, and I’ll contact you as soon as I can. Wait for me!”
“But—” The coffin lid rattled as she sprang back out of my grave. I heard the muffled sound of running footsteps—two pairs—followed by the unmistakable crack of gunfire. I froze, huddled in a ball with the phone clutched between my hands.
Then—silence.
If there were two sorts of people who came to dig up vampires, I was guessing that the other sort had just turned up. Vampire hunters. There were
always
vampire hunters. And even now one of them could be dusting my sire.
I squirmed until my feet were planted solidly against the top of the coffin. It creaked, resisting me—then, it flew open, and a whole load of earth fell right into my mouth. I’d intended to burst forth with a dramatic cry and fangs agleam, but it ended up being more of a splutter and a stagger.
Coughing and spitting, I struggled out of my grave. I did not immediately catch fire, turn to dust, or have an acrobatic blonde Buffy-wannabe put a stake through my chest. So far, the first day—night—of my unlife was off to a good start.
Blinking watering eyes, I risked a quick glance around, expecting a crossbow bolt or a silver bullet to come whizzing toward me at any second. The ground rolled away before me, covered with close-cropped grass and sheep droppings. A couple of small trees overhung the collapsed pit of my grave. A full harvest moon rode high among thin streaks of cloud, casting a fine bright light that let me see for miles across the low, gentle slopes of the South Downs.
Both vampire hunters and other vampires were conspicuous by their absence.
“Baa,” said something behind me. I was running before I’d even properly registered the sound. And by running, I mean
running
. I shot down the hill as if rocket propelled. Wind roared past my face, carrying with it the sharp, rich scents of earth and grass. A wonderful sensation of warmth spread outward through my chest from my silent heart. No hunger, no thirst; no lungs heaving; no ache of muscles or burn in my joints. I was barely making an effort.
Ah yes. Vampiric superspeed. Of course.
Awesome
.
Some little part of my brain was leaping up and down, trying to point out that not many vampire hunters said
“baa,” but I was having too much fun running to stop now. I quickened my pace, and it was as easy as shifting gears on a bicycle. When I looked down at my feet, they were flickering over the ground almost too fast to see, and—
I ran straight into the wooden fence at the foot of the field.
It didn’t knock the breath out of me, seeing as how I wasn’t breathing to start with, but I did have to spend a few minutes lying flat on my back, convincing myself that I wasn’t dead. Or rather, deader. Sitting up, I prodded at my ribs, but nothing seemed broken. I was lucky that it had been a rail fence, rather than barbed wire, or I would have shredded myself into vampire linguine. I was even luckier to have caught myself across one of the horizontal rails—a foot to the left, and I would have hurled myself onto an upright support. Staking myself on my first night as a vampire would have been terminally embarrassing.
“Baa,” said the sheep again. It had ambled down the hill after me, and was now regarding me from some way off as if waiting to see what entertaining thing I would do next. I could make out every detail about it, down to the fine hairs on its ears.
I stared hard at the sheep, trying to see if I could view the movement of its blood through its skin, or sense the beating of its heart, or see the aura of its warmth glowing against the night. It stared back at me, looking resolutely like an ordinary sheep. I guess I wasn’t that sort of vampire. Or maybe sheep didn’t have auras.
I ran my dry tongue over my weird teeth. Sheep
did
have blood, and I was suddenly very, very thirsty.
That’s when it truly hit me: I was a vampire. A real, live—well, actually not—bloodsucking vampire.
Holy
crap
. I put my head between my knees—I wasn’t sure if that could help with shock if you weren’t alive, but it was worth a try—and tried to sift back through my memories. I was pretty sure I would have remembered being bitten by a vampire, but the last thing I could recall before waking up in the grave was … sitting in the backseat of Alice’s mum’s Volvo. I wasn’t really friends with Alice—I wasn’t really friends with anyone down here yet, as my family had only moved in two weeks ago—but we both played the violin and sat next to each other in the orchestra, and her family lived down the road from mine, so her mum had offered to give me a lift back from practice. We’d been coming up one of the twisty little country lanes, and I was trying
to make Alice like me by laughing at all her jokes and agreeing that the boy she liked probably fancied her back, and then—a sudden lurch, my seat belt abruptly strangling me, and—nothing.
I must have died in a car crash.
In all my books, movies, and TV shows, I’d never heard of someone becoming undead through being hit by a vampire’s
car
. Not even in fanfic.
But however it had happened, I was definitely a vampire. I stood up and dusted myself off, then looked around. On the other side of the fence, a narrow country lane snaked away, leading from the Downs toward the south coast. I could hear the distant roar of cars on the main road. Lacking any better option, I started to walk toward the sound. Vampires were urban creatures, after all, and the nearest thing to urban around here was the grubby seaside town of Worthing. It wasn’t much, but it was better than an open sheep field. I could go and hide in … in the sewers, I guessed, since there were only two places feral vampires tended to hang out, and Worthing was really, really short on decadent Goth nightclubs. I’d hole up and wait for my sire, and then … then …