Mere mortals, p.3
Mere Mortals, page 3
“I understand,” Reg said.
“You do?” I cocked my head at Reg, but he kept his eyes on the man across the table.
“I’ve read about it in some of our older texts. Your touch can make us mortal.”
My eyes fell on the slayer’s hands, and I couldn’t keep the awe out of my voice. “Really?”
“Really.”
“But you didn’t touch us,” I said. “You didn’t do this.”
“I did, in a way.” He nodded out the kitchen window to the white fence outside.
“The fence?” I asked. “But how?”
He shook his head. “That’s about enough for now, I think. You kids ought to eat those eggs before they go cold.”
But even Reg had lost his appetite in the presence of a slayer.
I protested, “You still haven’t told us—”
“I told you my name,” he said. “That’s what you asked for. Now, if that name gives you the heebie-jeebies, you can just call me Sal.”
“Sal,” I echoed, testing it out.
“Yes, Sal it is, I think,” Reg said, recovering from his shock and once again filling his face with food.
“At least around the house here,” Sal said. “But if you want to avoid questions you can’t answer, I suggest you call me Grandpa at school.”
“What?” I spluttered.
Reg choked on his eggs. “Did you just say—”
“School?!” I finished.
Sal laughed himself into a hacking cough that drowned out our protests, and he was still howling when he got up from the table and lumbered out the front door.
Reg pushed his plate away, finally losing his appetite, and we stared dumbfounded at each other for a long minute.
“School,” Reg whispered.
I dropped my head into my hands. “Maybe he’s trying to kill us after all.”
Four
The Girl in the Mirror
“This one?” I held up a black Gucci turtleneck.
“Eh.” Reg shrugged.
I tossed the turtleneck aside and yanked a black lace minidress out of my open suitcase. I checked the label. Prada. Perfect.
“This one?”
“It’s okay.” Reg yawned and stretched out on my bed—or more accurately, on the mountain of clothes that now covered my bed.
“Reg, this is important.” I stomped a foot and added the dress to the pile.
“It’s exhausting,” he said. “Don’t you own anything that isn’t black?”
I pouted, inspecting a pair of stretchy black jeans. Sal had given us all of a day to get used to the idea of going to school, and twenty-four hours later, I’d barely had time to unpack, let alone find the perfect thing to wear. I had an outfit for everything—ball gowns for impressing the sons of foreign dignitaries at important political galas, one-of-a-kind jackets to catch the eye of aloof rock stars, ultrashort shorts and tall boots to draw in the cowboys. And yes, most of it was black, because black was better for hunting. But an outfit for a first day of school? Now that was something I had simply never needed.
I held the jeans out for Reg to see. “What do these say to you?”
“They don’t say anything. They’re trousers.”
“Reg.”
He sighed. “What do you want them to say?”
“‘Fall in line, bitches. Your new queen has arrived.’”
“The leather skirt,” Reg said, pointing to the summit of Mount Wardrobe.
I dug back into the pile, pushing Reg out of the way.
“Careful, Charlie,” he teased, rolling off the bed and to his feet. “One might get the impression you’re almost excited to go to school.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, but I didn’t meet his eye.
“I must admit, Queen Bee is a role you were born to play.”
I conceded that with the tiniest of smiles.
“So why the dressing drama? You know you’ll look divine in anything you choose.”
I pounded a fist into the nightstand next to the bed and winced, annoyed that my hand felt dented instead of the hardwood.
“Reg, you can’t talk like that.”
“Like what?”
“Divine. You have to sound like a teenager.”
“I am a teenager, according to the Elders, and this is how I speak.”
“You have to talk the way teens talk today. Real teens. Human teens.”
“How am I supposed to learn to speak like the mortals when we’ve spent so little time among them?”
“Please. We are around humans constantly.”
“Hunting. Feeding. Not . . . mingling.”
“Television has been around for half your immortal life,” I pointed out, “and the internet for decades.”
“I’d rather read a book.” He grinned at me. “And I’d say the fact that I read at all means I’m probably going to be better at this school thing than you.”
“I read,” I huffed.
“Fashion periodicals don’t count.”
“They’re magazines, not periodicals. I swear, Reg, if you embarrass me with your old-fashioned lingo, I will pretend I don’t even know you. I will—”
“Relax.” Reg grabbed hold of an arm I hadn’t even realized I was flailing. “I’m just having a little fun with you. Even I call them magazines. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re nervous.”
I scoffed. “Nervous about what? You think I can’t handle a few small-town teenagers?”
“On the contrary. I’m certain they won’t be able to handle you. That’s why I can’t figure out— Oh, I see.” His face lit up in that annoying way it did when he thought he was the smartest person in the room. It was extra irritating that he usually turned out to be right.
“You see what?”
I propped my hands on my hips, not an uncommon pose for me, but it had the added bonus of preventing my arms from any further waving about.
“Charlie, you can absolutely control a bunch of middle-America adolescents.”
“I know.”
“No doubt, you will charm even the teachers into following your command.”
“Naturally.”
“And maybe all of that will make you feel a little less helpless about our situation.”
I opened my mouth a couple of times, searching for words. Reg didn’t have it—not exactly.
“I’m not helpless,” I said, convincing myself as much as him.
“Then why all the fuss?”
I massaged the hand that had pounded the table, wondering at the way it still pulsed with pain—a mocking reminder that actions have consequences. As if I didn’t already know.
The ache in my hand, the way colors screamed in the sunlight, the strange smells . . . after a century of certainty, I was unprepared for the barrage of new and unfamiliar. I would never admit it to Reg, but it was all a little overwhelming.
“I just feel like we’re trapped inside a kaleidoscope and I need something . . .”
“Black?” Reg held up the leather skirt.
“How can you be so calm?”
I vastly preferred this familiar, unflappable version of my brother to the rattled stranger I’d seen on our first night, but could he at least be a little disturbed by all this?
Reg waved a hand. “I’ve given it some thought, and I suspect this whole thing may be a bit of a ruse . . . a show of force, to ensure we learn our lesson. When the Elders decide we’ve been in time-out long enough, they’ll come back for us.”
And how long is a time-out to an Elder? A year? A decade?
A shiver ran through me. A century?
Reg interrupted my thoughts before I could consider the full weight of that possibility.
“Perhaps when we’re of age.”
“We’re over a hundred.”
“In human years,” he said. “Likely only a year or two away.”
It may as well have been a century.
I shuddered as I realized Reg might be right. Laws had changed since we were first made vampire, and it was no longer legal to turn children, thanks to the Treaty of Annis. According to the treaty, humans could not be given immortal life until they reached adulthood. The decision was validated over the years by scientific advancements and studies of the human brain and hormones. Not that the Elders needed validating. They only had to look at stories of the Ancients—some of them just small children when they were turned. Ten thousand years of temper tantrums were enough to prove the point.
Did the treaty rules apply to us now?
Reg caught the distress in my face and sighed. “Look, there’s nothing we can do about it right now, so we might as well enjoy ourselves.”
“You make it sound like a vacation,” I said.
“It is, in a way.”
“In that case, I want a refund.”
“Bah. Brooding is boring,” he said with a sparkle in his brown eyes.
Yes, definitely brown now.
I gasped and leaned in. “What’s happening to your eyes? They’re not black anymore.”
“Oh. Yes, they’re changing,” he said. “Same as yours.”
“Mine?”
“Of course. You don’t know? Charlie, haven’t you looked in a mirror?”
“No.”
What for? It’s not like my reflection was anything new. Vampires could see themselves in mirrors just fine, but the only reflection I’d ever needed was in the eyes of my victims . . . er, admirers.
Reg stood and held out a hand to help me up. “Come on. There’s a mirror in the washroom.”
I followed Reg, mumbling “bathroom” under my breath. I kept muttering until he practically shoved me in front of the mirror over the sink.
The eyes staring back at me were not my own. They were the palest blue and enhanced by a soft pink in the cheeks just below.
“Who is she?” I whispered, reaching out to touch the girl in the mirror.
Reg appeared in the mirror behind her. “Wonderful, isn’t it? It must be what we looked like before we turned.”
I blinked, and the girl in the mirror blinked as well. It was me, though I barely knew myself. Reg and I both had the same black hair, the same paper-white skin, but there was something else now too—a sort of light that wasn’t there before.
“Just when I thought it wasn’t possible for you to admire yourself anymore,” Reg said. “I think I’ve just lost you to your own reflection.”
“I’m not admiring myself.” My skin felt hot again, in that new unfamiliar way, and this time I saw the change, as the me in the mirror went from white to bright red, the rosy color in my cheeks spreading all over my face.
I stumbled backward.
I had seen many colors in the skin of vampires, all faded by the lack of blood flow but as varied as humans’—pale echoes of who they must have been in their first lives. But I had never seen anything like this warm the cheeks of our kin.
“Why, Miss Charlotte, I do believe you’re blushing.”
I swiped at Reg, but he dodged and slipped out of the bathroom. I chased him back to my room, where he held up the black dress like a hostage.
“Touch me, and the Prada dies!”
I tutted. “You’re an imbecile.”
“Oh, Charlie,” Reg corrected in his best impression of me. “Nobody says ‘imbecile.’ I’m a moron.”
“Yes,” I laughed. “You are.”
“And you’re stuck with me.” He tossed the dress at me. “For life.”
I caught the dress, fingers curling tight around the fabric.
“For life.” An uncomfortable lump formed in my throat, and I whispered, “Reg, what are we supposed to do now? Besides school . . . what’s next? If the Elders don’t come back for us . . . what do we do for the rest of our lives?”
Reg held out his hands, still bone white and delicately smooth.
“I, for one, plan to get a tan.”
An hour later, I met Reg and Sal in the kitchen, where they were picking over a pile of food.
“Are you guys eating again?” I asked. “The buffet never ends around here.”
Sal had fed us a smorgasbord of meats and vegetables the night before, to give us a taste of everything and gauge what we liked. Judging by the way Reg had stuffed his face, he loved it all. Personally, I had only nibbled on a piece of chicken and an ear of corn, which tasted fine enough but didn’t seem worth the hour I spent afterward picking kernel skin out of my teeth.
I was much more enamored of my new sense of smell than taste. The aromas that had been dulled down to nothing by the powerful scent of blood were now assaulting my nostrils at every turn. I had spent my first full day of sunlight walking the meadows around Sal’s cottage, literally following my nose. I collected one of every flower I could find, amazed that the smell never waned from the petals, no matter how much I sniffed them. When I’d brought the bouquet back to the cottage, Sal had made a snide remark about half the flowers being weeds, but he’d given me a glass vase to put them in and showed me where to set the vase on the windowsill to catch the most light.
I didn’t want to follow any instructions the old man gave me, and I definitely didn’t trust a slayer, but I had to concede he probably knew more about keeping things alive than I did.
On this morning, the sunshine beckoned us outside once again, but we were doomed to spend the day indoors pretending to be high schoolers. Fortunately for me, I thought with some superiority, I watched every teen show on TV. I knew exactly how to talk, how to dress and how to rule a school. But Reg? Now that was just hopeless.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” I asked, eyeing the flannel shirt and jeans he had on now.
“Yeah. So?” he said through a mouth full of bacon.
“So . . . it’s plaid,” I said. The problem was self-evident.
“I borrowed it from Sal,” Reg answered. “I’m trying to blend in until we can go shopping.”
“Dressing like some old farmer is not how you blend in with students.”
“I’m not a farmer,” Sal spoke up from the end of the table. “But I’ll give you old.”
He pressed a hand over a wooden box next to his plate and slid it toward us.
“What’s this?” I asked.
Sal gestured for me to open it.
“Your future.”
Five
Meet the Smiths
The box had the same intricate carvings as the kitchen chairs. Sal obviously had skilled hands, but I also remembered him saying his hands had something to do with the fence that had ruined our lives, so I wasn’t about to open Pandora’s box. Reg did the honors instead, and I peered over his shoulder.
“Cell phones,” Sal said. “I assume you know—”
“How to use a phone?” I interrupted. “Yes. Vampires are allergic to sunlight, not technology.”
Sal let out a long sigh, but I also thought I saw the corner of his mouth twitch up just a hair. “My number is in the contacts. And you’ll have each other’s numbers in there too. Under the phones you’ll find your new IDs.”
Reg and I each pulled a phone and a card from the box. “IOWA” was stamped on the top left of the stiff rectangle and below it, photos Sal had taken of us the day before. Driver’s licenses.
“We can’t drive.” Reg sounded almost apologetic.
“We didn’t need to,” I said. “We could always outrun a car.”
Sal was unsurprised. “Well, it won’t be the first time I’ve taught one of your lot to press a pedal and spin a wheel. But it would be suspicious for you to not have a license at your age.” He nodded at the cards in our hands. “You’ll see I guessed you around sixteen and seventeen. That’ll make Charlie a junior and Reginald a senior.”
“Excellent.” Reg plastered a smug smile on his lips.
“Why am I younger?” I complained. “I’m obviously more mature!”
“Obviously.” Sal’s bushy gray eyebrows shot up. “I think we can pass you off as siblings, but making you twins would draw too much attention. Best to keep a low profile.”
“Pass us off?” I repeated. “You don’t think we’re really brother and sister?”
“A hundred years ago? At your age? For all I know, you two were lovers.”
“Ew!” I shrieked, as Reg coughed up a “Gross!”
Sal looked amused as he stood and moved to the sink to wash the breakfast dishes. “You never know.”
“It’s highly unlikely,” Reg said, “given my personal proclivities.”
“I’m not his type,” I translated.
Sal glanced back at us, eyes wide with understanding. “I see.”
“I trust that won’t be a problem?” Reg asked.
Sal returned to the dishes. “The folks here are small-town, not small-minded.”
“Good,” I said. “Because if anyone so much as looks at my brother sideways, they will answer to me.”
“Of all the things to worry about . . . Most folks who come through here just carry on about death.” He paused. “And wrinkles. I hear a lot about the wrinkles too.”
“Sorry if our concerns are boring you,” I said.
“Refreshing change of pace, actually. Gets a little tiresome hearing them wail about dying like it’s right around the corner. I suppose it must be your age. Think you’re invincible and death is light-years away—just like human kids.”
“Eternally teen,” I muttered, quoting the Elders. I’d heard them say it a hundred times.
Eternally teen. Trapped in immaturity. More educated with age, but never any wiser.
It was something they talked about a lot when the clans signed the Treaty of Annis.
By the time Reg and I were made vampire, turning children was already out of fashion, but teenagers were still fair game. Reg and I were among the last teens turned before the treaty, and all we’d heard about every day for a century is what a big mistake that was.
If you asked me, the treaty was a form of discrimination. Maybe the Elders were jealous of our forever youth. Whenever they complained about our antics, it always just sounded to me like Reg and I were having a lot more fun than the old folks.
“Charlotte and Reginald Smith,” Reg read from our licenses.
Smith? I squinted at the name next to my photo. “But we’re Drakes!”
