Vampire Island (4 page)

All night, Maddy worked, right until she heard Hudson get up.

The next day was perfect with a cloudless, chilly sunshine. As soon as school let out, Maddy headed to the von Krik house. She gave a courtesy knock before using the skeleton key to let herself in.

The von Kriks were slumped together in their darkened den playing backgammon. As soon as she saw Maddy, Nicola started to suck on her necklace beads.

“Ahoy, neighbors,” Maddy chirped. “Miss me?”

“Of course not. We’ve been terribly busy,” said Nicola at the same time that Nigel said, “Little Madison, how did you get into our house?”

“The door was open. Look, I brought gifts.” Maddy held up her shirt-cardboard portraits—one for each Krik. She was very happy to see that the cardboards truly captured the Kriks’ likeness. So she was hurt by Nicola’s next question.

“Who are these people?” Nicola’s voice was thin with mistrust.

“Surprise! They are you.” Maddy waved the cardboards closer. “I drew you each a portrait.”

At that, both von Kriks hissed. Their spindly hands covered their faces. “You made us so ugly,” whimpered Nigel. “So old. Worse than our portraits in the attic!”

“Old and ugly? Not at all. Look again, in the natural light.” Maddy knew that purebloods were a hundred times more sensitive to light than hybrids. She ran to a window and yanked open the dusty drapes. Sunlight flooded in. She held up the portraits again.

The von Kriks writhed. Nigel dropped to the ground. Nicola hid her face with a pillow. “Close the drapes!”

“What’s the matter?” As if she didn’t know.

“We’re allergic to sunshine!” Nigel kicked his brittle legs.

“We have polymorphic light eruption disorder!” Nicola wrung her bony hands.

“Sunshine is loaded with vitamin D. It’ll make you feel
so
good.” Maddy cackled. “Should I bring you some water? You’re both looking a touch dehydrated.” She allowed herself another tiny cackle. A light-headedness was beginning to fill her head, a wonderful feeling that she had experienced as a hybrid in the Old World the first time she’d too enthusiastically bitten and slayed a wild duck. That had been a splendid night, a feast for all. For most fruit hybrids, slaying was extremely distasteful work, even for the tiny amount of blood they needed to stay eternal. But not for Maddy. After that duck, Maddy had taken over the family hunting—of mice, rats, birds, and once even a deer. Maddy never imagined that she could possibly feel quite so untamed again as that breathless night in the Old World.

Until now.

Now Maddy watched as Nigel rolled under the sofa. Nicola was coughing up phlegm. Both von Kriks were moaning and wheezing and looked to be extremely uncomfortable. She knew she should stop holding up the portraits, but the von Kriks seemed to bring out her most deadly, secret slayer’s instinct.

“Ahem!”

Maddy whipped around. Uh-oh. Snooks. And by the grim look in his lizard eye, Maddy knew he’d figured out she meant the von Kriks nothing but real harm.

Lexie

D
ylan finally answered Lexie’s text sonnet with one line. It was not yes. It was not no.

It was:
LEX U R XLNT
.

By then, everyone knew that Dylan Easterby and Mina Pringle were going to the Midwinter Social. Together.

Whenever Lexie thought about her dumb sonnet, she wanted to drop and roll and roll until she’d rolled herself under a rock, where she would then live out the rest of her human life as a love-spurned hermit.

Dylan’s kindness only added to her misery. Like the way he always called out “Hey, L.L.,” in homeroom. Or, when he was standing beside her in chemistry lab, “Look, I’m nexty Lexty.” Or when, after lunch, he’d offered her a section of his tangerine. “And all my tangerine seeds, too. I know you collect ’em.” The crowning humiliation was when Dylan downloaded Lexie’s phone number with her own personal ring tone from a Dead Ringers tune.

“He just did that because he pities me,” Lexie confided to her best friend, Pete Stubbe. “He thinks I’m an oversized octopus.”

“More like you’re overreacting. No doubt Mina asked Dylan to the Social first, and Dylan said yes because he’s a gentleman, not a cad.” Pete’s deep yellow eyes and thick thatch of silvery blond hair gave him an unusual look. This, plus his shyness, caused most kids to keep their distance from him. To Lexie, though, Pete was good old Pete, who always saved her a seat, and who loved famous duels as much as Lexie loved doomed poets. They’d been best friends for years, even though Pete’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Stubbe, didn’t like Lexie, no matter how polite she was to them.

“‘I look at the hand you held, and the ache is hard to bear,’” Lexie quoted, even though Dylan had never held her hand.

“You and I could go to the social together,” Pete said, his voice cracking. These days, Pete’s voice tended to pitch like a ship in the high seas, rolling low one moment and squeaky high the next. Right now it was squeaking, and he didn’t seem too happy about it. “If nothing better comes up for you, that is.”

“Thanks.” Lexie hoped her smile didn’t look as dreary as she felt. Maddy’s advice niggled at her. If she’d acted battier, would she have won Dylan’s heart? Would she have shaken his knees? Was it too late for tricks?

Wednesdays after school, karate class was in the gym. Lexie had a passion for karate, and not just because Dylan and his friends took it. In the Old World, self-defense meant either a well-placed bite or a speedy takeoff. But karate called for real New World–y skills, as taught by their very cool music teacher, Ms. Katz—Sensei Katz during class—who was a black belt.

On Wednesday, Lexie walked into the gym (or dojo, as it was called during karate hours) to find Mina and her friend Lucy encamped in the stands. Lexie frowned. These days Mina seemed to follow Dylan everywhere, clinging like a staticky sock to his smallest activity.

Centuries change, mused Lexie, but drippy girls never do.

Lexie waved to Pete, who was also in the bleachers and reading his favorite book,
The Three Musketeers
. Then she took her place on the mat. She ignored Mina, though she bet her lemonheaded enemy was laughing over Lexie’s long feet.

Sensei Katz stood in front and led the class creed. “I seek to adjust to every situation, good or bad, which I may meet in my daily life!” Lexie usually shouted this motto to get her energy up. Except this afternoon, with Mina watching from above, her voice sounded whispery-crickety in her own ears—which she imagined poinging out like teacup handles through her knife-flat black hair.

“Let’s start with side thrust kicks,” instructed Sensei.

“Eee-ah!”
Dylan kicked one out right then. Not good, but a bunch of kids clapped anyway.

From somewhere in the city, Maddy had located Lexie and was bouncing a message: “Do it, Wimpus Leximus. Don’t worry about the Argos—I’m sure they have better things to do than hang out at beginner karate class. How about trying the ol’ knee trick?”

The knee trick was an easy one because all the Livingstones’ knees bent both backward and forward. Nothing special, unless you were a pureblood human. Then it might be considered a feat.

Lexie caught Dylan’s eye. Though he was far away and surrounded by his usual posse, he saw her and smiled. Oh, those teeth. Not a snaggly one in the bunch. Yes, she’d do it! A knee trick was essentially harmless. And on the remote chance an Arg was creeping around the dojo, looking for a hybrid crime, Lexie would simply explain that her knee had popped by accident.

Lexie tried to echolocate Maddy, but her sly sister had moved off.

“Ichi, ni, san, shi,”
Lexie counted in Japanese, winding up her nerve as she waited her turn. Her knees had not bent backward in so long that she cringed to hear them crack as she rotated.

On Lexie’s turn, Sensei Katz pointed.
“Ki-ai!”
Lexie shouted. Her knee jerked, under-dipped, and pivoted, the heel of her foot brushing her nose as she twisted into a whip-smooth side thrust kick that she retracted so quickly, it might not have even happened, except that it did.

Anyone who saw it burst into wild finger-pointing and whoops. Those who hadn’t jumped up and down and demanded to know what they’d missed.

Sensei Katz was at Lexie’s side in a flash. “Okay, Lexington, don’t move. Can you feel approximately where it snapped? Can you indicate the fracture?”

“I don’t think I fractured anything.” Through lowered eyes, Lexie stole another quickie look at Dylan, who appeared positively awestruck.

Now Sensei was kneeling and tapping a finger to Lexie’s knee. “You’re not in…tremendous pain?”

“No, not really. See, I’m double-jointed in both my knees.”

“Yeeks,” said Sensei. “So you are.” She looked a touch afraid. She tapped Lexie’s knee a couple more times before she straightened up and shook her head wonderingly. “Don’t do that again, okay? I’m liable.”

“That was wild,” said Dylan. But he seemed sparked, just as Maddy had promised. “Cripes, Lex. Just thinking about your knees makes mine hurt.”

“Yow, I wish I was double-jointed,” said Alex.

“And could catch a peso at the speed of sound,” added Dylan.

“No, the peso was only traveling at a rate of thirty-seven miles per hour,” Lexie corrected. The guys looked impressed.

Lexie could feel Mina fuming in the stands. Worry gnawed the pit of her stomach. Mina was sharper than the other kids. If anyone was onto the fact that Lexie had performed a humanly impossible feat, it was Mina.

When Pete caught up with Lexie afterward to walk her home, he seemed less astonished. As in, not at all. His yellow eyes were coolly disapproving, and he didn’t acknowledge Lexie’s showstopping kick. Not that Lexie expected him to—but she didn’t think Pete needed to keep his nose stuck in
The Three Musketeers
for the whole walk, either. Of course, Pete had always been protective of her, to the point where sometimes Lexie wondered if he knew her secret. Other times, she suspected Pete was a fellow hybrid, too—though her friend was much too discreet to reveal an Old World connection.

“Are you mad?” she asked as they turned the corner to her apartment.

Out poked Pete’s nose. “More like alarmed. No love is worth breaking your knees over.”

“Come on, don’t be grouchy—I know, let’s pit stop at Candlewick for a Garden of Diva fruit blend, with a scoop of bee pollen,” Lexie bribed. “We can put it on our house account.”

“Some other time. Bye, Lex. See ya tomorrow.”

Lexie watched Pete go. He was probably right. Love was driving her crazy, and Pete was a voice of reason. On the other hand, Lexie speculated, if every person in the world listened to their voices of reason, there probably wouldn’t be a single poem.

But love was scary. Love made doomed poets jump overboard cruise ships, or drink poison, or stick their heads in ovens.

For poetic bat types, there were different rash options.

“I can’t waste another night dreaming about Dylan,” Lexie told her sister later that evening as she changed into a tracksuit, no sneakers, and stuffed some clothes into her bed to make a Lexie-sized lump. Unlike Hudson, the girls did not have special outdoor night-flight privileges, since neither of them could transform. But that didn’t mean they weren’t skilled. “It’s time to take action. I’ll be gone an hour, maybe more. I need to get downtown and profess my love.”

Maddy’s eyes widened. “Are you for real?”

“‘Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real.’” Lexie quoted the words of doomed rap poet Tupac Amaru Shakur, whose very name was a poem Lexie liked to recite. “You’ve got to cover for me, sis.”

“No problem. Got your back. I’m your number-one coconspirator. I’ll never squeal. My word is gold.” Maddy was always happy when people other than herself were breaking rules.

After their parents had gone to bed, and with Maddy standing guard, Lexie swung out the window, inching her way to the fire escape, which she took down to the sixth floor, the best point from which to plunge. While Lexie had not been blessed with Hudson’s shape-shifting powers, she did not have his clumsiness, either. In fact, she possessed amazing night stealth. Under the cover of darkness, Lexie was strong as a bodybuilder and agile as a trapeze artist. She could hurdle fences, swing under bridges, run for miles, and roost on the narrowest ledge.

The Easterby family lived downtown on the west side. Lexie had memorized the address a long time ago. One good thing about this city, thought Lexie as she rushed downtown, is that no matter what time of day or night it is, everyone is too busy to look up. Whether rushing across town for dinner or uptown to the acupuncturist, people rarely stopped to inhale the polluted air or enjoy the smoggy skyline. And being invisible suits me fine, Lexie decided as she swung and dropped. Since it was so cold, she headed through the theater district. All those bright, hot lights would warm her. Plus, she liked getting a close-up view of the billboards.

At the intersection, Lexie leaped on top of a truck heading south. She made it downtown in minutes. From there it was only a few more vaults to Dylan’s apartment complex. She scaled the side of the building, pulling herself up and up and up, until she reached the fourth floor. Slithering around to Dylan’s bedroom window of Unit 4F was no problem.

Seeing Dylan was.

“Oooh.” Standing in his underwear, Dylan was practicing his side snap and roundabout kicks while his chunky little brother, Charlie, sat on the rug watching him. So much Dylan, all at once, made Lexie realize that spying on a half-naked cavorting person was a very compelling hobby, indeed. Especially if that person was Dylan Easterby.

Lexie pressed her unclipped toenails into the window ledge until she found her balance. She would just peep for a minute. Then leap back down to the sidewalk and toss a few pebbles to his window. When Dylan pushed it open and looked down, that’s when she would speak her love—either in lofty verse or regular words, whichever popped into her mind first.

The funny thing about spied-on Dylan was that he didn’t seem to be his same, assured schoolkid self. His face was tense from frowning and his hair stuck sweatily to his ears as he muttered “coil kick, recoil, recover” along with his bad kicks.

Oh, no. Had she ever noticed how truly pitiful he was at karate?

When Charlie gave Dylan’s last kick a double thumbs-down, Lexie started to laugh, promptly losing balance and pitching backward. Quickly, she veered forward to steady herself—a little too forward.
Smack!
went Lexie’s braces against the windowpane. Startled, Dylan spun around. And that was how Lexie found herself staring love-struck into the wide eyes of the boy she adored, at the same time Dylan’s mouth made a surprised O before shaping her name.
Lexie?

Then her footing failed completely. Lexie dropped backward, bull’ s-eye into a large metal garbage can, a landing slightly softened by the garbage bags piled up inside.

The window shoved open. Dylan’s head poked out. “Lexie? Lexie! Where are you, Lex?”

“O, Dylan, if thou dost love,” whispered Lexie from in the trash, “pronounce it faithfully.” She couldn’t help but tingle—in a way, this was such a feverishly dramatic reenactment of the balcony scene in
Romeo and Juliet,
the most doomed story of all. “And I, too, have night’s cloak to hide me,” she reminded herself. Same as Romeo.

“Stay put. I’ll get you out of there.” Dylan’s head ducked back inside.

Then Lexie caught a whiff of herself. Not good. Frankly, stinky. It occurred to her that being rescued out of a large metal garbage can wasn’t at all the perfect moment for love-professing.

“Haste, haste,” Lexie whispered as she struggled to rescue herself.

“Lex, Lex!” Dylan was already outside. How had he moved so fast?

With a rattling clatter, Lexie tipped over the can. She winced in pain as she stumbled to her feet. Ugh, she was covered top to bottom in slimy bits of apple peel and coffee grounds and eggshell and other goopy scraps of damp, discarded grossness.

“Tupac Shakur,” Lexie whispered, for strength. Then she started to run down the alley, as far from Dylan as she could get, and as fast as her long yam feet could take her.