Vampires Never Get Old - Zoraida Cordova Page 0,88

she’s pretty sure the sharpened stick and the strands of silver in her bag wouldn’t go over well.

“Cal’s got a crush,” says Apollo.

“Do not,” she mutters. Jules isn’t a crush; She’s a target. And okay, maybe the first thing that caught her eye were those lips, the color of pomegranate seeds. Maybe there was, for a brief moment, the beginnings of a crush, but then she noticed the way the girl stuck to the shade, cringing away from the merest glimpse of sun between clouds. The way she picked at her food without eating. Last week, she found the bottle of capsules in the girl’s bag, cracked one open in the bathroom sink and watched the dark red substance ribbon into the drain. And today, in the hall, she dropped a silver bangle, waited around the corner and watched as the girl reached to grab it, then recoiled when the silver met her skin.

And now she’s sure.

Juliette Fairmont is a vampire.

Theo rises to clear his plate. “Eat up, stick,” he says, kicking her chair.

“Don’t call me that.”

“A ghost passing gas could knock you over.”

Cal’s fingers tighten around her knife.

“Theseus Burns,” warns Mom, but Apollo’s up now, too, and Cal can feel the shift in the room, the energy winding tight as wire. “Where are you going?” she asks.

“Hunt,” answers Theo, the way someone might say drugstore or market or mall. As if it’s nothing. No big deal. Just another night.

Cal’s heart quickens. She knows better than to ask if she can come. A question begs an answer, and the answer is usually no. Better to stick with statements.

“I’m coming with you,” she says, already on her feet, fetching her boots from the hall. She’s learned to keep a set of gear downstairs. Last time she jogged up to her room to grab her stuff, they were already gone.

“You finish your homework?” asks Mom.

“It’s Friday.”

“Not what I asked.”

Cal doesn’t stop lacing her boots. Her brothers are walking out the door. “Math and physics, yes, English, no, but I’ll do it first thing in the morning.” Her mom wavers. The front door swings shut. Cal shifts from foot to foot.

At last, her mom sighs.

“Fine.” And she says something else, something about being careful, but Cal doesn’t catch more than a glimpse as she surges out the door. An engine revs, and she half expects to see the taillights on the pickup, two red eyes gleaming as the truck drives away.

But it’s there, idling, in the drive, and Cal beams, because they waited.

“Wipe that grin off your face,” says Theo. “And get in.”

* * *

Up front, Theo raps his fingers on the steering wheel, and from the safety of the back seat, Cal stares at the tattoos that wind around his right forearm, mirrored by the bands that circle Apollo’s bicep. Cal runs a fingertip along the inside of her elbow, counting down the weeks until she turns seventeen.

Apollo was fifteen when he made his first kill, took down a shape-shifter with a crossbow at thirty feet.

Theo was twelve. She’ll never forget the sight of him, smiling through a sheen of oily gore as he trailed Dad back to the campsite on a family trip. They’d gone off, just the two of them, to study marks on the trail and had come across a full-grown wendigo. He and Mom had a big fight about it after, but Theo just kept grinning as he held aloft a monstrous claw, a prize Dad made him toss into the fire. He has a strict rule about keeping things like that. The only trophies he approves of are the black tattoos, anonymous reminders of victories past.

Their bodies read like a map. A ledger.

And hers is still blank.

“Wake up, stick.”

Cal blinks as Theo cuts the engine, kills the lights. She squints into the dark and suppresses a low groan at the sight of the cemetery gates.

They’re parked outside a graveyard, which rules out the wilder monsters that show up in woods or bars, places with plenty of food. Not a nest of vamps, either—they’re more likely to hole up in mansions than mausoleums.

No, a graveyard means they’re hunting ghouls.

Cal hates ghouls.

She’s really not fond of dead things in general. Zombies, specters, wraiths—it’s the emptiness, the hollowness that unnerves her. Theo says they’re easiest to hunt because they don’t beg. Don’t plead. Don’t trick you into caring.

But they also don’t stop.

They are voids, insatiable, relentlessness. They don’t feel pain, or fear. They don’t get tired. They come, and they