Almost To Die For Part 1

Almost to die for.

a vampire princess novel.

Tate Hallaway.

For Shawn and Mason.

Acknowledgments.

I'd like to thank my editor, Anne Sowards, for her vision for this series, and my tireless agent, Martha Millard, for making it happen. I also need to specially thank those who read the book in process, the Wyrdsmiths--Bill Henry, Doug Hulick, Kelly McCullough, and Sean M. Murphy, but particularly my friend and mentor Eleanor Arnason, who kept me company in my dark hours, and Naomi Kritzer, a great and true friend, who read the whole thing and made it so very much better.

My family gets a mention as well. Shawn Rounds, of course, who not only supported me with many there, theres but also acts as my first-run copy editor and plot maven extraordinaire. My son, Mason, who is a great sounding board for the cool vampire and witchy stuff, and if you ask him, he'll tell you quite seriously: he figured out the plot.

To the staff at Amore Coffee in St. Paul, who supplied me with much-needed caffeine and who patiently listened to me whine about deadlines and the writer's life, I must also give a huge thanks.

And, of course, my parents, Rita and Mort Morehouse, without whom none of this, quite literally, would be possible.

One.

Guess what? Today was my sixteenth birthday. Pretty cool, huh? Sure, if by "cool" you mean worst day ever . . . and it was only noon.

I sat in Sta.s.sen High School's cafeteria staring at "tuna surprise." Let me tell you: it was a surprise all right. I was surprised it pa.s.sed the health code. It was gray, for crying out loud. Food should not be gray.

Also, my birthday might be tolerable if I lived somewhere exciting, but no, I'd be turning sixteen in nowheresville: St. Paul, Minnesota.

I pushed the glutinous mush around its little container. At least the potatoes looked edible. My stomach growled, so I poked a forkful into my mouth. I sighed. What I really wanted was my turkey sandwich, or at least someone I could joke around with about the whole stupid situation.

But no. I was sitting alone.

Bea was supposed to be here. Sometime in middle school we had made a solemn blood vow. We'd always sit together at lunch so neither of us would ever have to look like that sad, lonely loser.

h.e.l.lo--yes, that'd be me! Loser in corner number one.

On my birthday, no less.

Bea--Beatrice Theodora Braithwaite to her mother--was my kind-of sort-of best friend. She was the only person in school with a more arcane name than I. Get a load of this: Anastasija Ramses Parker. Yeah. You can see why most people just call me Ana.

Anyway, Bea and I, we've known each other since second grade. That's a lot of history. It's hard not to be close to someone you borrowed your first tampon from, giggled your way through puppy-love crushes with, and survived that G.o.d-awful middle school s.e.x education with. Though, honestly, I don't always like her. We're pretty different. Bea has diva tendencies, and I lean toward being a bookish shrinking violet. But we've been kind of thrown together by fate because she's the only other True Witch at school.

It's a secret, but real magic exists. True Witches can make s.h.i.+t happen. Not just that New Agey feel-good stuff, but, like, things you'd notice: storms, sickness, dead cattle. You know, all the stuff we used to get burned at the stake for. That's why we don't talk about it.

There were plenty of Wiccans at school and elsewhere, of course. It's all the rage to be a teen witch, but Bea and I could do real magic.

Or at least Bea could.

I was supposed to be able to. I had the pedigree, but, well, something was off. Maybe it was the same off something that made one of my eyes ice blue and the other a deep mahogany brown.

When a chair sc.r.a.ped the linoleum floor, I looked up expectantly. Perhaps Queen Bea had finally deigned to put in an appearance. Well, better late than never.

Instead of Bea, it was Matt Thompson, hockey jock extraordinaire, and two of his cronies, Thing One and Thing Two, who sat down at my table. Between you and me, I had this secret crush on Thompson. He was pretty in that cla.s.sic square-jaw, he-man way, okay? I appreciated the way his ultrashort, nut-brown hair curled at the tips, and the boy did have a way of fitting into a T-s.h.i.+rt and jeans that was pretty . . . noticeable.

Too bad he was such an a.s.shole.

"If it isn't Ana Parker, Witch Girl." He made it sound like some kind of superhero moniker. His buddies chortled.

I retorted with, "What do you want, Thompson? Did you get lost on your way to Caveman 101?" Which was a pretty snappy comeback for me, considering the quivering in my stomach. Guys like Thompson could smell fear, so I tried to hide mine under an air of contempt.

His friends looked at each other with perfect Neanderthal, heavy-eyebrow frowns and shrugged as if they didn't get the joke. Thompson, meanwhile, didn't let it faze him. "How come you're all on your lonesome, anyway? Couldn't conjure up some friends? "

Oh, touche, you maestro of wit and repartee.

Thing One and Thing Two, however, found his little pun absolutely hilarious.

"Right. Ha. Ha," I said. My tough-girl facade cracked a bit. These sorts of scenes never broke in favor of the geek. If I wasn't careful, there was going to be a drink in my face or some other embarra.s.sment in my future. Worse, I knew I'd fare much better if Bea were here as backup. Why were they still hara.s.sing me, anyway? Usually Thompson and his crew did flyby potshots and left Bea and me alone. Was this his sad, grade school way of flirting?

"Careful, man," said Thing One. "She might put a hex on us."

I wish. The sad thing was that these three boys were perfectly safe from little ol' me. I was a dud in the magic department. But they didn't know that. No one did, not even Bea. That was my own special secret. One I tried to keep from myself. If I wasn't a True Witch, then I was just a plain old loser, wasn't I?

Ironically, I could tell that underneath the huff and gruff, the boys were a teeny bit nervous at calling me out. After all, if Bea were here, they might easily find a colony of spiders in their gym shorts, or locker combinations that no longer worked.

For real.

The only thing I had going for me was that I totally looked the part of a witch. I had long, wicked straight hair complete with a slight widow's peak right in the center of my pale, pasty forehead. Okay, Bea said my complexion was porcelain, but I always felt ghostly white and washed out . . . except for my eyes. I hardly needed mascara for the thick lashes that made my mismatched eyes stand out. It was my biggest weapon against guys such as Thompson and his crew.

So I turned my patented "spooky eye" on them. It was a look I'd perfected over the years. I squinted directly at Thompson with the ice-cold blue eye. I muttered under my breath about hex and flex and s.e.x and T. rex and other rhyming words because, you know, people expect spells to rhyme.

They looked nervous. Thing Two's Adam's apple bobbed. Glances flitted among them. Thompson tried to act as if he was unimpressed, but suddenly he saw someone he knew across the room. "Hey, there's Yvonne. I need to talk to her about the band coming to her house party." As he stood up to flee, Thompson mustered one last bit of nasty. "Too bad you'll never be popular enough to be invited to a house party, freak."

"Boo!" I said.

Thompson jumped and uttered a sound not unlike a squeak. Thing One--or maybe it was Two--actually snickered.

Score one for the freak! I only wished I didn't feel like he might be right about me. Thompson swaggered over to flirt with Yvonne Jackson, whom everyone figured he'd take to homecoming, since she was, after all, the captain of the cheerleading squad. So cliche. I watched them surrept.i.tiously as I attempted to ingest the edible parts of lunch. He leaned in to talk to her, propping himself on the table with his elbows, which made his pecs bulge. She giggled. It was gross, really, but . . .

Here I was, turning sixteen on the sixteenth, and was I having any kind of party? Would there be music and dancing or anything cool? Would I get any presents? No. Tonight, what I had to look forward to was a long, boring drive to a cabin in the far suburbs while Bea and my mom chatted on like the whole thing wouldn't flop.

The cabin was our "covenstead," the place where our group of those capital-letter True Witches practiced magic in secret. Once there, I'd get to fail spectacularly in front of everyone when I was called on to perform a simple elemental spell as part of my official Initiation, or welcoming into the Inner Circle.

Only there wouldn't be any welcoming.

Because after I fubared the ritual, my mother would cry. I'd be shunned, cast out of the coven, and I'd finish my days at Sta.s.sen High School just like this: sitting alone at lunch, while everyone--everyone, even Bea--thought I was a weirdo freak.

It was going to be so awesome.

And I still hadn't even made it halfway through the day yet.

Whee.

Two.

I caught up with Bea right before sixth-period drama cla.s.s. Even though I'm pretty shy most of the time, I love theater. I've been in every play since I scored the part of the crazy sister in The Madwoman of Chaillot in junior high. Of course, I'm usually typecast: one of the three Wyrd Sisters in Macbeth, the Wicked Witch of the West in Wizard of Oz, Medea in Medea, etc. But theater was the one place my odd looks actually played to my advantage.

"Where were you at lunch?" I asked her. We'd stopped outside her locker, which was right next to Mr. Martinez's drama cla.s.s. She dropped her math book into the pile of detritus cluttering the floor of the tiny s.p.a.ce. I wondered whether she'd find it again without sending in a search party. "I had to sit by myself."

"Aw, poor baby," she teased. She patted my cheek patronizingly. "Ooo had to sit all by ooo-self."

Did I mention that I sometimes didn't like Bea all that much? I shrugged it off. I mean, I knew she didn't mean any harm. She always rallied on the side of sisterhood when it mattered. "Yeah, well, you missed me giving Thompson the evil eye."

"I heard about that, actually." Bea smiled and looped her arm around mine as if I were escorting her ladys.h.i.+p to the ball. We must have looked quite the pair. She had on a black jumper over a pink-and-black-striped, long-sleeved s.h.i.+rt and matching leggings. She wore her hair in girlish pigtails that showed off the pink streaks in her dyed black hair.

For myself, I'll admit that I adhered to the Goth palette. It was black with black and black for me, though in deference to my birthday I'd jazzed up my usual slim jeans, tank top, and long-sleeved b.u.t.ton-up with a heavy silver ankh necklace and my fancier boots.

"What was it you heard?" I asked, pausing just outside the door to cla.s.s.

"That you hexed him. He tripped in chemistry cla.s.s and spilled some kind of crazy acid all over the table. They had to get out the hazmat suits to clean it up. You go, girl."

I frowned at Bea's exaggeration. I was sure there were no hazmat suits involved. More to the point, I knew I hadn't hexed him. No magic had come out of me. I was certain. I might not have been able to perform a lick of real magic, but I'd always been able to keep my secret because I could feel spells working. I could tell when energy peaked and when anyone around me was using even the smallest amount.

I'd done to Thompson what I'd done my whole life when it came to magic: I faked it.

I let my hand slip from her arm. Bea, meanwhile, was smiling at me like the d.a.m.ned Ches.h.i.+re cat. "I was wondering when you'd get off your high horse and finally zap somebody," Bea said with a playful poke to my ribs. "The Wiccan Rede is for Wiccans, not True Witches."

It was Bea's favorite thing to say in situations such as this. She didn't really get behind "an it harm none" and all the do-unto-others parts of the Rede. She figured c.r.a.p like "for the greatest good of all" was for people who couldn't do at all. Zap the bad-dies. That was her motto.

Me, I was less sure. I mean, karma has a way of biting you on the b.u.t.t when you least expect it.

Luckily I didn't have to respond to Bea because the first bell rang. We hurried into cla.s.s.

THE ENTIRE CLa.s.s WAS TAKING turns reading lines from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night while Mr. Martinez occasionally broke in to explain some ancient terminology or an obtuse (but usually raunchy) joke. I was normally totally into this cla.s.s, but today my mind wandered.

What Bea suggested about my magic working on Thompson sprouted this crazy hope inside my heart.

What if?

What if turning sixteen had clicked that off-something of mine into an on-something?

Part of me always wondered whether I'd missed some critical lesson that everyone else had gotten. Like, all I needed was some key to turn inside me, and then it would all make sense.

What if it had happened and I could finally really do magic?

I could hardly wait for the bell to ring so I could run home and try out a spell or two. I mean, I had been dreading this Initiation thing since I first realized the depth of my suckage in the witch department. Maybe . . . maybe tonight at the big ritual, things might not be as horrible as I'd always thought they would.

"Ms. Parker? Are you with us?"

I blinked. Mr. Martinez stood in front of my desk, frowning at me. He was a very trim guy, and he always looked sharp in a pressed white s.h.i.+rt and dark slacks and tie. But the sour expression on his face ruined the whole slick look, honestly.

"Uh," I said as I noticed everyone in cla.s.s staring at me. It must be my turn to read. I looked down at the page, but I had no idea where we were in the play.

"Uh, line?" It was what you said when you forgot what you were supposed to say during a stage rehearsal. As I hoped, I got a few laughs from the veteran actors in cla.s.s. Mr. Martinez, however, wasn't one of them. In fact, he looked at me like I'd deeply wounded him and that I'd blown my chances for a letter of introduction to Juilliard. Not that I knew what I wanted to do with my life or anything.

"Ana, I expected better of you. Could someone please cue our daydreaming Ms. Parker?"

Hands shot up around the room. Sucking up to Mr. Martinez was a tried-and-true path to audition callbacks. He called on Taylor. Taylor was my best nonwitch friend. She was a gamer, big into theater, and an all-around nerd. In short, my kind of people. Plus, she had the most amusing crush on Mr. Martinez, whom everyone else in the entire cla.s.s figured to be quite fabulously gay.

She was so getting the lead in the next production.

I, meanwhile, felt more and more like an idiot as the seconds ticked as I scanned the page for the line. Finally I found it and read it with a deep blush spreading across my face. I determined to pay better attention for the rest of the cla.s.s.

AFTER, THE THREE OF US girlfriends gathered to debrief about the day. Taylor couldn't meet us for lunch because she had it a different period. So, to catch up on everything, we had a tradition of walking one another to our lockers and sharing news, tidbits, and general gossip. Since Bea's was the closest, we always met there.

"Where was your head during cla.s.s, Ana? Mr. Martinez was right. You're usually an A student," Taylor said.

Taylor was a first-generation Somali and wore her head covered in a sparkly lame wrap. Her real name was something much more ethnic, but she insisted that everyone call her Taylor. Even though she kept her head covered, she didn't go for the whole longflowy-dress thing. Instead, she wore jeans, a long-sleeved knit sweater, and cowboy boots. If you couldn't already tell, Taylor was another outsider like us. Even though there were a ton of other Somali girls at school, Taylor was far too strange for them, with her love of graphic novels, video games, and all things geeky.

"I don't know." I shrugged.

Bea, meanwhile, had no comment, as her head was deep in her locker while she rummaged through her things, gathering up what she needed to take home.

"Seriously, you seemed lost in there. Is everything okay? " Taylor asked again.

"I've got a big night tonight," I said. "It's my birthday."

"Oh, are you having a party?" Taylor asked, her voice carrying that you-didn't-invite-me edge.

"A party? I wish," I said. "I have to do a . . ." Hmm, what to say here? We weren't supposed to talk about witchy stuff, but I didn't want to totally evade the question. That was far more suspicious. "A test?"

"You don't sound very sure about it," Taylor noted. She looked more hurt, like she figured I had to be lying about the party and her invitation to it.