Fangs for Nothing (Vampire Hunting and Other Foolish Endeavors) Read online

  My brain was screaming, “No way in hell,” but I forced my mouth to say, “I’ll think about it.”

  As I was turning to go, she flashed me a seductive serpent smile. “Well, I hope I see you there.”

  Chapter 12

  I staggered away from the Sarducci booth and into the crowd of the market, my head swimming. I knew that Lydia was absolutely not interested in me, but somehow, looking into her smoldering eyes, I could almost believe that she was. I texted Xander that I was done. A few moments later, I got a response that they were in the café.

  “Where’s your barbeque sauce?” Lana asked as I plopped down into the open chair next to her. My eyes sank to my empty hands, and my mind went totally blank for a moment. “I… uh… they were sold out by the time I got up there.”

  “Oh, well that’s not good,” Lana sympathized. “Will your grandma be angry?”

  I shrugged in a nonchalant way, as if to say, “She’ll get over it.”

  “You getting anything?” Xander gestured toward the counter. There was a menu posted behind it.

  “Yeah.” I got up. “I think I’ll see what kind of tea’s available.” I haven’t succumbed to the coffee overlords like almost everyone else in our high school, but my head still felt a little swimmy, and I wanted some kind of stimulant.

  “I’ll go with you.” Xander got to his feet. I felt my face flush like we were thirteen-year-old girls who couldn’t go ten feet without each other. But still, I needed to tell him what I had found out, so we headed over to the counter together. “What did the new, hot Lydia have to say?” Xander said in a low voice.

  “She invited us to a party.”

  “Oh?” Xander sounded interested.

  “Under the bridge,” I informed him.

  “Oh.” Xander completely changed his tune.

  “Yeah. That guy. The one that was biting on her. She says his name is Short Vincent, and he’s a friend of hers.”

  “Short Vincent like the street?”

  “I guess.”

  “And he was biting on her because…”

  “She said it was a joke.”

  “Some joke.” Xander cocked an eyebrow and looked over at me. “Do you want to go to this party?”

  I shook my head. “Not if you paid me.”

  “Good.” He grinned with mild relief. “I mean, I’m happy to be your wingman and everything, but at a certain point, there’s just being stupid.”

  Next we took Lana to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s kind of cool seeing Mick Jagger’s flag cape or Keith Moon’s platform shoes, but it’s also embarrassing in some weird way. Like you’re rifling through some rock star’s donation bag for the thrift store. Either way, it’s something that you only do when you have out-of-town guests. Anyway, most visitors seem to really like it, so it felt like a safe bet.

  Although she appeared to be enjoying herself, Lana was playing it completely cool, not giving Xander too much attention. That would definitely pique his interest. I’m so used to Xander being the unwitting girl hog that I only felt fleeting pangs of envy when I thought about how great it would be to have a girl that was as pretty and nice as Lana and who actually liked me. But besides that, I had to admit, I was enjoying playing tour guide and showing off my city.

  By the time we were done at the Rock Hall, everyone was starving, so we grabbed some sandwiches from a deli and headed down to the flats to hang out by the river. Yes, the infamous Cuyahoga River.

  We strolled on a footpath along the river, looking for a place to picnic. Xander had acquired a piece of gum from somewhere and was chewing it for all he was worth. Have you ever noticed that no one ever looks attractive when they chew gum? And this is one of the rare times when Xander was not the exception. People look like cows when they’re chewing gum. Especially the people who open their mouths a little when they chew and make that smacking noise that’s so annoying when you’re trying to take a math test or something. That’s why I’ll only chew gum when I’m by myself. Usually when I’m doing my homework or messing around on the computer. But I never chew gum in public. Okay, I’ll do it on an airplane, but that’s only for takeoffs and landings. Still, Xander was chomping away. I guess when you’re that good looking, you can afford to do some things that are unflattering.

  As we stopped to watch a tugboat toot past, Xander somehow lost control of his gum. It popped out of his mouth and landed splat on the pavement. Completely unfazed by this turn of events, Xander plucked the gum off the ground and popped it back in his mouth. “Ten-second rule,” he cited nonchalantly.

  Lana recoiled, horrified. “Wwwhat?” she stammered.

  “It’s the ten-second rule.” Xander shrugged.

  “What’s that?” Lana couldn’t hide the sheer look of revulsion on her face.

  “You know. When you drop food on the ground, if you pick it up in under ten seconds, it’s still clean.”

  “Oh.” Lana gave it some thought, her mouth curling down at the corners, repulsed at the mere thought of it. “We don’t have a ten-second rule where I’m from.”

  “Really?” Xander was completely at ease, not at all embarrassed by her obvious disgust of his actions. “Why not?”

  This made Lana laugh. “It’s San Francisco. We’ve got ten thousand homeless people and three hundred thousand dogs living in a seven-by-seven–mile city. There really isn’t a square inch of ground that isn’t covered in pee every single day. And quite possibly something worse.”

  “Yeah, we’ve been there,” Rini snarked. “We stayed in the Mission.”

  “Hey, it’s not that bad,” I interjected, making a feeble attempt to stand up for Lana. “Downtown was pretty nice.”

  “No, seriously,” Lana continued. “The sidewalks are disgusting. If you drop anything on the ground that isn’t a diamond or a baby, you just leave it.”

  Xander smiled at her, still happily chomping away. “You’ve got a point.”

  Lana smiled up at him and it was obvious they were sharing a moment. Rini felt it too. I could see her dark eyes darting back and forth between them. I felt bad for her. I mean, for a girl like Rini, having a crush on Xander had to be about as frustrating and painful as a straight girl having a crush on a gay guy. He might agree to be your prom date, but as far as his tongue ever being in your mouth, there was just no way.

  We found a free park bench by the water and broke out our sandwiches. It was the perfect summer day—hot, but not too humid. The sun was bright; the sky was blue; the grass and flowers and trees were having a good old time with photosynthesis. “Wow, it’s nice down here,” Lana remarked in a somewhat amazed voice.

  “You sound surprised,” Rini said, using her surly voice. Her pissy mood had not abated since the market. If anything, it was only getting worse.

  “Well, I am kind of surprised,” Lana admitted. “I mean, a little.”

  Rini folded her arms and gave Lana the death-ray glare. “And why is that?”

  “Well,” Lana said, hesitantly, “I mean, it’s Cleveland, right? Your city doesn’t exactly have a reputation for being clean. I mean, didn’t the Cuyahoga River catch on fire?”

  Lana had no idea that she’d just tripped a giant Rini landmine. I saw it coming. I should have done something to prevent it, like throw my body between them. But Rini had a couple of hot buttons that were easily pushed, and one of them was people ripping on Cleveland. “Um, Lana…” I hazarded, but it was too late. Rini had already gone into attack mode.

  “You can sit here in this beautiful park, by this nice, clean river and say, ‘Didn’t the river catch on fire?’” Rini made her voice go up a mincing octave when imitating Lana, as if her own voice was normally round and sonorous. “Well, yes, the river did catch on fire. Half a century ago.”

  “We’ve got to stop this,” I said in a low voice to Xander.

  He shrugged. “Lana started it.”

  “But just so you know.” Rini was on the warpath, and there was little chance of me being able to throw on t
he brakes. “Back in the fifties and sixties, a lot of rivers caught on fire. Rivers in Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania. Hell, even in Maryland. If you lived near an industrial city, your river caught on fire. That’s what water did back then. It burned.”

  “Okay, fine,” Lana said, a bit defensively, but I didn’t blame her in the least. “But why does everyone only associate Cleveland with a burning river?”

  Rini gave her a steady glare. “I’ll tell you why. It’s because in 1969, America was just figuring out that it’s better to live green than wallow in your own chemical filth, and Time Magazine was doing a story on it. Cleveland had the bad luck of having the Cuyahoga catch on fire right then, and Time included it in the article. But the fire was kind of small and unimpressive, so Time faked some photos from a completely different fire.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know that.” Lana momentarily conceded. “But still, water shouldn’t burn. I mean, that’s pretty disgusting.”

  “Hey, I’m not saying it isn’t gross to have a river catch on fire,” Rini continued. “But all the other places where rivers went up in flames were able to just forget about it and point to Cleveland as being the only culprit.”

  “And Cleveland’s fire helped force Congress to pass the Clean Air and Water Act,” Xander chipped in. It figured he would take Rini’s side. “All of America is cleaner today because Time Magazine made a scapegoat out of this town. But do we ever hear a thank you?”

  “No.” Rini’s one word rhetorical answer was bristling with sharp edges.

  “Guys, lay off,” I snarled. “You’re really being uptight.” Two against one wasn’t exactly fair. And how was Lana to know? Cleveland was like a high school girl that got a little too crazy her freshman year. Even if she went completely chaste and became a straight “A” student by her senior year, she still gets called a slut.

  “No, that’s okay, Sherbie,” Lana said to me. Then she turned back to Rini. “Listen, I obviously put my foot in my mouth, and I’m sorry. I was just trying to say that it’s really nice here, and I somehow made you super mad. If you’re done ripping my head off, can we just drop it and still be friends?”

  I was stunned. Most people would have gotten mega-defensive if they’d been verbally attacked for paying a compliment, but Lana just rolled with it. She had to be the most confident teenage girl I’d ever met in my life. Rini was totally thrown. I could tell she had been ready to go to the mat in defense of Cleveland’s tortured reputation, but Lana had completely knocked the wind out of her sails. “Yeah, sure,” Rini said in a much quieter voice. Then after a long moment she added, “And I’m sorry, too.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Lana shrugged.

  “I didn’t mean to jump down your throat or anything,” Rini explained. “But when you’re from Cleveland, you’ve got to listen to every idiot in America running their stupid yaps about your hometown when they don’t even realize that our city took a bullet for the whole country.”

  Lana raised her hands in a mock defensive gesture. “Hey, I love Cleveland. I’m a total convert. From here on out, I will go forth and spread the good word. I swear.”

  I held my breath as Rini stared at her for a second. “Okay,” she finally said, breaking into this smile-sneer combo thing that she does. “Let’s drop it. I wouldn’t want to give you Stockholm syndrome or anything.” And then I knew everything was going to be fine. There aren’t many teenage girls on the planet that are capable of standing up to Rini when she’s on a tirade, so I had to imagine she was at least a little impressed. And besides, Lana couldn’t help the whole crush on Xander thing. He was a force of nature.

  We all contemplatively chewed our sandwiches for a few minutes. Finally, Lana broke the silence with, “So what’s there to do in this town if you’re underage?”

  I turned toward her. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know.” She twitched a shoulder in a small shrug, probably afraid to show too much of an opinion about anything or Rini would fly at her throat again. “Isn’t there some place in every town where underage drinkers go? I mean, not even to drink, necessarily, but just to hang out?”

  “Sure, we used to go to the airport observation parking lot. You know, where people go to watch the planes land,” I told her. “But the cops shut it down a few weeks ago.”

  “That’s cool,” Lana nodded. “In San Francisco, we usually just hang out at the beach.”

  “Yeah, there are a couple of small beaches around here that sometimes get popular.” I shot a look over at Rini and Xander to see if they had any information to throw into the conversation, but apparently they didn’t. “I don’t know if any of them are taking off right now.”

  Lana was surprised. “Cleveland has beaches?”

  “Sure. Because of Lake Erie,” I explained. “But they’re small,” I quickly added. “Very small.”

  “Which micro-beach is the current hot spot?” Lana asked. No one had mentioned anything lately, and girls found ways of getting the word to Xander on where they were hanging out. We all kind of shrugged. “Oh, come on,” Lana chided. “Where’s the last cool place you hung out?”

  “Under the bridge,” Rini blurted. Xander and I both stared at her, surprised. For someone who had spent the last two days saying she didn’t want to talk about the bridge, it was odd that she brought it up out of the blue and to someone who wasn’t even there.

  “What’s under the bridge?”

  Chapter 13

  I took in my reflection using the full-length mirror in Xander’s room. “This is a bad idea. I look like an idiot.”

  “You look fine,” he told me as he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. “You look better than fine. You look great. You should wear stuff like this more often.”

  “As soon as I marry a wealthy widow, I’ll get right on it.”

  Xander ignored my snarkiness. “You can always have some of my stuff.”

  The offer was generous but also ridiculous. Xander towered over me. “Everything’s too big on me.”

  “That shirt isn’t.”

  I checked my reflection again. The shirt was slightly too big, but I wasn’t swimming in it or anything. “This is just a fluke.”

  “Fine.” Xander shrugged. “You can have all my flukes.”

  “Nah, that’s all right. Thanks, but don’t worry about it,” I told him. I didn’t put it past Xander to start buying things that were too small for him in some vain attempt to improve my wardrobe. I appreciated the offer, but I was also happy prowling the thrift stores for hidden treasure.

  The girls were off at Rini’s house getting ready. Rini said she was pretty sure she had a dress she hadn’t altered yet that would look great on Lana. I tried untucking the shirt Xander had loaned me to see if it would work any better.

  Nope. Untucked it looked like I was wearing a Gothic circus tent. Sighing, I tucked the shirt back in and wondered for the zillionth time what the hell we thought we were doing. Back by the river, Lana had been grilling us about what there was that was fun to do in Cleveland, and I guess we were all feeling a bit pressured to make our town sound cool. For absolutely no reason, Rini mentioned the bridge, and then out of nowhere, all she could do was talk about under the bridge. She blabbed about the old streetcars and the party and the band and the art. It was like she had instantly come down with diarrhea of the mouth. I thought common sense would keep her from talking about the vampire, but I was wrong. When she began describing the faux water, I interrupted her with, “Um, Rini? That’s something that should probably be kept just between us.” I glanced over at Lana. “No offense,” I told her. “It’s just, you know, something private.”

  “Yeah,” Xander added. “Let’s not bring all that up right now.”

  Rini completely dismissed our protests. “Oh, please. We have to tell someone. If we don’t talk about it then we’re never going to figure out what really happened.”

  “You can tell me,” Lana cajoled. “What is it?”

  I glanced over at Xande
r while Rini started to blab about the vampire’s secret lair. “What’s going on with her?” I asked in a low voice. “She’s grouchy and doesn’t want to talk about anything for days, and now suddenly, all she wants to do is share.”

  Xander slowly shook his head in consternation. “I have no idea.” Then bunching up his eyebrows with a new thought, he hazarded, “Maybe it’s because Lana’s a girl?”

  “A vampire?” Lana exclaimed. Rini had obviously reached the big reveal.

  “I’m not kidding,” Rini assured her. She reached forward and squeezed Lana’s hand all confidential like. “And he was gorgeous.”

  “I wouldn’t say gorgeous,” Xander scoffed.

  “Yeah,” I said. “His skin was all weird. Like he was made out of wax or something.”

  Rini glanced at us over her shoulder and snarked, “Like you guys would know if he was hot. You’re straight boys.” She turned back to face Lana. “Like I was saying, completely and totally undead hot.”

  “So then what happened?” Lana was transfixed.

  “He was sucking on some girl’s neck.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “No,” Rini went on. “Xander and Sherbie freaked, so we got the hell out of there.”

  I folded my arms and glared at Rini. “Yeah, like you weren’t freaked.”

  “Not as much as you,” she fired at me. “He seemed totally cordial. We could have stayed and talked to him.”

  “Sure,” I fired right back at her, “while he was using Lydia Sarducci as a drink box.”

  “Wait a minute.” Lana held up her hands as if to physically hold back our words. “You knew the girl? The one that the,” and when she said the next word, she said it in a whisper, “vampire was feeding off of?”

  “Um, yeah,” was all I could manage to reply.

  Lana gave me a stunned look. “Well, what happened to her? Did you just leave her there? Have her parents reported her missing?”