Stake That (9 page)

Wow. Mom must really have a thing for this guy. She would never go to a slaughter house with just anyone. It’s go-ing to be sad to disappoint her. Not that she’ll be disap-pointed when she finds out he’s a thousand years old and undead. Oh, well.

“Then what did you do?”

“He took me out to this elegant club where they had an old-fashioned band and dancing. He waltzes like a dream.”

Hm. Probably ‘cause he was around when they invented the dance and has had a thousand years of practice.

“But you hate waltzing. And classical music. In fact, isn’t your saying, ‘If it’s not Jefferson Airplane, it’s crap’?”

She narrows her eyes. “Rayne, I’m an adult with a wide variety of interests. I had a good time. Don’t spoil it because you feel uncomfortable I went on a date.”

Sigh. Here she goes. Her voice sounds all tight. I knew she’d jump to that conclusion.

“I’m fine with you having a date. I just want to make sure he’s treating you right.” And doesn’t spend his days sleeping in a coffin… .

“Well, you don’t have to worry. He’s the perfect gentle-man. You’ll see, tonight.”

“Tonight?” Sunny’s eyes and my eyes meet across the table. I’m sure mine are as wide as hers. Mom laughs. “Yes, tonight. I invited him over for dinner. I promised I could cook him a tofu steak that’s just as deli-cious as one made from the slaughter of innocent animals.”
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Wow. I bet the vamp is really looking forward to that! But tonight! That doesn’t give Sunny and me any time to plan. Unless …

I break out into a coughing fit.

“Oh, man,” I say between chokes. “I’ve had this horrible cough. Just horrible. And I don’t feel very well either.”

“But you were just—?” Sunny starts in. I kick her under the table. Hard. Her eyes light up. And her coughs start coming.

My mom looks from one hacking daughter to the other. “Are you two okay?” she asks. “It’s not the hash, is it?”

It probably would be the hash if either of us had actually shoveled any of it into our mouths, which in hindsight may have made the sickness a tad more authentic, but too late now.

“No. It’s just, I think I’m coming down with something.”

“Maybe you should stay home from school,” Mom says, looking worried. “Neither of you sound too good.”

“No, I want to go to school,” I say, pausing to slump in my chair and close my eyes. “I really hate missing school.”

“If you’re sick, you need to stay home,” Mom commands, reaching over to feel my forehead with the back of her hand. “You feel warm, Rayne.” It’s amazing what the power of sug-gestion can do to a parent. “You, too, Sunny,” she says, switch-ing to my twin.

“But I love school, Mom,” Sunny whines. Gah! Overkill, much? I kick her under the table again. For someone starring in the school play, she’s not much of an actress.

“Mom’s right, Sun,” I interject, to stop her performance. “If we go to school, it might get worse. We could be contagious even. One day of rest now can save us from a weeklong absence down the road.” Mom takes a bite of her hash and nods. “Unfortunately, I can’t stay home to take care of you guys,” she says, as if that would be something either of us would want. “I’ve got to get to work.”

“It’s okay, Mom,” I say, patting her on the arm. “We’ll probably be sleeping most of the day anyway.”

“I hope so.” She rises from her seat, kisses both of us on the tops of our heads, and brings her mostly untouched plate over to the sink. Evidently this time even she didn’t like her recipe, not that she’d ever admit that to us. “There’s OJ in the fridge and some veggie burgers in the freezer if you get hungry later.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Do you think I should cancel having my friend come over?” she asks, scraping her leftovers into the compost bin. “I mean, if you two are sick …”

“No, no,” Sunny says, before I can kick her a third time. “We’ll feel better by then, I’m sure.”
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Great. Way to buy us more time, Sun.

“Okay. Well, you let me know,” Mom says, sounding re-lieved. “Call me at work if you take a turn for the worse and would rather just lay low.”

So she goes to work and now Sunny and I are home alone. Sunny rinses our breakfast plates and I run up to my room for my secret stash of strawberry Pop-Tarts. After toasting, we rendezvous in the living room, me on the couch, Sunny on the lounger.

“So what are we going to do?” my sister asks, mouth full of Pop-Tart. “He’s coming over tonight. That doesn’t give us much time.”

“Right.” I break my pastry in half, licking the strawberry filling. “What about calling Magnus? Certainly he could rec-ognize a fellow vamp.”

“Yeah, but it’s daytime. He won’t be up and about ‘til well after dinner.”

“Oh, yeah. Duh.” I smack myself on the forehead. That was stupid.

“What about you?” Sunny asks. “Aren’t you the knower of all things vamp? The proud graduate of Vampire School? Won’t you be able to tell on sight whether the guy sleeps in a coffin or not?” I shrug. “Not necessarily. A vampire can cast what’s called a ‘glamour’ on themselves to make them look human if they need to. That’s how they can walk among us and no one’s the wiser. And I doubt the guy’s going to show up to dinner sporting his fangs.”

“Great.” Sunny sighs.

“What are we going to do then?” “What about that movie you were talking about again?
The Lost
Boys?”

“Yeah. We could rent that ”

“No time. Netflix takes at least a day to deliver.”

Sunny laughs. “You ever hear of a video store, Rayne?”

D’oh. “Oh. Right. Forgot about those.” Stores that you can go into and rent DVDs instead of having them mailed to your door. How cute and retro. “Do they still exist?”

“I think there’s a Blockbuster downtown.”

“Okay, cool.” I pull my feet out from under me. “So you go run to the Blockbuster and rent every vampire movie you can find. I’ll go on the Internet and research what I can from here.”

“It’sa plan.”

It wasn’t exactly a plan, but it was a start. Operation Date with Dracula was on.

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POSTED BY RAYNE MCDONALD @ 12 P.M.

THREE COMMENTS:

CTU-in-TrainingGrrl says …

Wait—you mean Jack Bauer was in movies before he became a CTU agent? Vampire movies? Whoa. I’ve got to update my Netflix queue ASAP!!

StarrMoonUnit says …

Can you post the recipe for hippie hash? That sounds de-lish! I mean, I’ve had hippie brownies before and mmmmm….

Rayne says …

Hey, CTU girl, you are aware that
24
is just a TV show, right? I mean, it’s not even a reality one. It’s got, like, a script. Jack Bauer is some dude named Kiefer Sutherland and evi-dently he’s been in a billion movies and even dated Julia Roberts back in the day. Sorry to disappoint. And P.S., StarrMoonUnit? Hate to disappoint you as well, but there’s actually no hash in the hippie hash… .

TUESDAY, JUNE 5, 10 P.M.

The Not-So-Lost Girls

The doorbell rings at six o’clock and Sunny and I are ready. In fact, if Dracula himself were to bust through the door, I think we’d actually have a chance of defeating the guy. First up, we’re both wearing necklaces made out of garlic under our hoodies. We’ve got holy water (which we snuck in and “borrowed” from St. Patrick’s Church down the road) locked and loaded into
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our Super Soaker Triple Shot water guns. I’m wearing rosary beads and Sunny’s got on her cross necklace. In short, together we’re every vampire’s worst nightmare.

“Can you get the door?” Mom asks from the kitchen. While we’ve been preparing, she’s been running around trying to get the meal together. I felt bad not helping her, but we had too much to do on our end. I did agree to stir the vegan mari-nade (not sure why tofu needs to be marinated, but whatever) while Mom went upstairs to change. That gave me a chance to add a few cloves of garlic to the mix.

“Girls?”

“I’ll get it, Mom.” Sunny jumps up, ready to oblige with the door opening.

“Wait!” I cry. “Didn’t
The Lost Boys
teach you any-thing?” According to the movie, the boys’ plan to determine whether their mom’s BF was a vamp was foiled because they invited him into the house. Evidently if you let a vampire in, you’re powerless against him. “We must learn from the les-sons the bad eighties movies teach us.”

“Uh, right,” Sunny says, sitting back down. The doorbell rings again. She picks up the DVD case and skims the back. “Though did you really think it was that bad? I thought it held up kind of well, considering it was made, like, twenty years ago.”

“Sunny! Rayne! Answer the door!” Hm. Mom’s not sounding as sweet and patient anymore. Sunny sets down the case. “Anyway, what if Mom lets him in? Does that mean the house is still safe for him? That anything we do won’t work?”

I scratch my head. “I don’t know. The movie never ad-dressed that possibility. Maybe we should go to the door and refuse him entrance. Just to make sure. Then if Mom lets him in, she’ll be the only one rendered powerless.”

“Good idea.”

We jump up from our seats and rush to the door. We stare at it for a moment, then at each other, both wondering what we would find on the other side. Would he be elegant and poised? Would he try to hypnotize us with mesmerizing eyes? What if he had one of the hounds of hell with him, like the boyfriend in the movie, ready to attack? Or maybe he’d be full-on vamped already, having decided to skip dinner and go right for our necks … as dessert.

You never knew with an evil vampire, now did you?

“Okay, let’s do this,” I say. I take a deep breath, then wrap my fingers around the handle and pull it open, revealing the man on the other side of the door.

Sunny looks at the guy, then at me, one eyebrow raised in doubt. I know what she’s thinking. The guy doesn’t exactly look like a creature of the night. Out of his tux, he looks more like … well, an accountant. Maybe it was the lighting in the Blood Bar that made him look so commanding. Or the tux. Dressed in a pair of beige slacks and a button-down shirt, I gotta admit, he just doesn’t give off the same ghoulie glow.

Or maybe it’s the pocket protector that’s throwing us off.

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He’s also … tanned looking. But, of course, that could totally be faked with Jergens. There’s this girl at school, Denise, who always looks like she’s been vacationing in the Bahamas, but it’s totally bogus. The girl has never been south of Jersey.

In short, the guy looks nothing like a blood sucker. But that could be his clever disguise. One thing I’ve learned in the vamp world—no one is as they seem. The former Master of the Blood Coven, Lucifent, looked like the little boy from
The Sixth Sense.
The former slayer, Bertha, resembled a hippo more than Sarah Michelle Gellar. And, of course, Jareth, who is uber-hot and channeling Jude Law, is in actu-ality the most annoying, uptight, jerky vampire in the known universe.

Not that I’ve been thinking of Jareth. In fact, I’d nearly-forgotten he even exists up until this moment. I’m not even disappointed that he had a council meeting tonight and couldn’t meet me at the Blood Bar. In fact, I’m relieved. Very relieved not to have to see him again… . Sorry, tangent. Back to what happened.

“Hi. I’m David,” Mr. Accountant Nerd says, incidentally (or not so incidentally) giving the same name as Kiefer’s char-acter in
The Lost Boys.
He’s carrying a bouquet of dark red roses. The color of blood, I might add. “You must be Sun-shine and Rayne?”

Hm. He knows our names. Very interesting. Then again, I guess Mom could have told him… .

“I’m Sunny. She’s Rayne,” Sunny says, helpfully. I wonder for a moment whether she’s been hypnotized to do his bidding and tell him all, then I decide it’s just typical Sunny, being overly friendly. David looks from me to Sunny and back again. “Urn, would you like to invite me in?” he asks, looking a little doubtful.

Ah-ha! I shoot Sunny a triumphant glance. He used the exact words! He asked to be invited in! I knew it! I knew he Bras a vampire.

“It’s pretty wet out here,” David adds.

Whoops. I’d been so wrapped up in what he looked like I hadn’t even noticed the torrential downpour the guy is stand-ing in. Guess at least we could rule out him being a witch. He so would have melted by now.

Still, that doesn’t mean the plan has changed any.

“Actually, no. We can’t invite you in,” I say, trying to sound as apologetic, but firm as possible. “We are not invit-ing you in.”

“Right,” Sunny adds. “In fact, we personally, Rayne and I, are denying you entrance to our house. If someone else wants to let you in—like Mom or something—well, we can’t stop her. But that doesn’t mean we’re inviting you in. It’s her decision. Which is separate from ours.”

“Right. What she said,” I agree. “We cannot invite you in toour house. Nothing personal. We just… won’t. Can’t.”

“What’s going on out here?” Mom comes up from be-hind us. She surveys the scene. Us blocking the door like two identical sentries. David standing outside in the rain with his wilted roses. “Girls? Why are
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you standing in front of the door?”

Caught. We jump aside, both with matching guilty ex-pressions.

“The girls were just saying that it was up to the lady of the house to invite me in,” says Mr. Smooth, tossing us a lit-tle wink.