Tamara Summers - Never Bite a Boy on the First Date

HarperCollins Children’s Books

Cover Page

Title Page Never Bite A Boy On The First Date Tamara Summers HarperCollins Children’s Books

Prologue Prologue If you were dying… If you were sixteen and dying… If your blood was spilling out of you, calling to them, the creatures of the night, and you knew you were dying… If you saw their pale faces and the gleam of sharp teeth in the moonlight, and you felt your blood spilling warmly over your hands, and you knew beyond any doubt that you were dying… Wouldn’t you say yes? Yes, turn me. Yes, I want to live. Yes…make me one of you.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Copyright

About the Publisher

If you were dying…

If you were sixteen and dying…

If your blood was spilling out of you, calling to them, the creatures of the night, and you knew you were dying…

If you saw their pale faces and the gleam of sharp teeth in the moonlight, and you felt your blood spilling warmly over your hands, and you knew beyond any doubt that you were dying…

Wouldn’t you say yes?

Yes, turn me.

Yes, I want to live.

Yes…make me one of you.

THERE’S A MURDERER in my school. And this time it isn’t me, so I’m kind of ticked off.

The body was lying on the front steps of Luna High School, upside down. His blood was running all the way down the steps to the ground, like a red carpet laid out to welcome us inside. He was wearing a red-and-gold Luna Tigers football jersey and a startled expression. I guess being thrown out of a third-storey window would surprise me too. The broken windowpanes creaked ominously up above, and shattered glass sparkled in the blood around him, reflecting the morning sunlight.

We could smell the blood the minute we pulled into the parking lot. I heard Zach’s stomach growl – which, if you ask me, is a totally inappropriate reaction. And also ridiculous since he’d had, like, two gallons of blood for breakfast already.

At the bottom of the steps, a couple of policemen were speaking into their walkie-talkies and trying to fend off all the curious teenagers who were early for school. Mostly that included the swim team and kids whose parents have to get to work early. And students like me and Zach, who prefer to be indoors before the sun is too high in the sky.

Don’t worry, we’re not going to burst into flames or anything. That’s a myth. Go back and read Dracula , and you’ll see – the sun just drains his powers; it doesn’t kill him. Not that I’m saying Bram Stoker was an expert or anything, but he’s kind of right about that part. So I don’t die in a ball of fire the moment I step outside, which is a plus. But the bad news is that too much direct sunlight gives me a wicked headache, and then I have to lie in a dark room for a while to recover. It’s kind of like having a mild sun allergy. It gets worse for older vampires, who have less tolerance. We also cover ourselves in this crazy herbal sunscreen, which helps a little bit, although I think it makes me smell like basil.

Basically it sucks, since I no longer have to worry about skin cancer, so I should be able to tan as much as I want. Instead I’m stuck with the skin tone I had when I died. Not that we get a ton of sunshine in freezing Massachusetts anyway. Luckily for me, the pale look is coming back in. (It is coming back in, isn’t it?)

Right. Back to the dead guy.

There was one more thing we could spot from across the parking lot. The police wouldn’t know what they were looking at, but to vampires like us, the four big holes in his neck were a dead giveaway. (Ha ha! Hilarious pun! I know, I know, stake me now.)

Where in vampire legend does the image of two perfect little puncture wounds come from anyway? You see that everywhere, but it’s kind of physically impossible to do, and I should know – I have actually tried this experiment. Yeah, you’ve got your fangs up top, but you also have two sharp little fangs on the bottom, and the only way to really latch on and get all the blood you need is to bite with all of them, which leaves four tiny little puncture wounds – and that’s if you’re neat.

More often, as in this case, it leaves a bloody mess.

I’ve got those four little scars on my neck and my wrist – one set from Olympia (my vampire “mom”) and one from Crystal (my vampire “sister”). I hide the marks with my hair and my watch, and they kind of look like freckles now. Creepy freckles, but it could be worse.

I could be missing half my neck, like this guy.

“Gross,” Zach offered from the backseat, leaning forward to peer over my shoulder. I edged closer to the window, away from him, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Someone needs to work on her technique.”

Olympia parked the car and turned to stare at me with her big, dark, I know everything eyes.

“I didn’t do it,” I said immediately.

“Kira—” she started.

“I knew you would think it was me! That’s so unfair! I swear, I didn’t do it! Oh my God, make one mistake and suddenly every vampire attack is my fault.”

“You must admit it’s odd,” Olympia said. “Two vampire attacks in two towns in a row. Before you came along, I managed to go twenty-five years without seeing any vampire attacks in public like this.”

“OK, I agree it’s weird, but this wasn’t me,” I said. “I swear .”

It’s true, you don’t see a vampire attack every day. In fact, you hardly ever see one. All the rules about this were drummed into my head from the moment I woke up with fangs, and then re-drummed again after my little mistake last year.

“Besides, I’m not the eat-’em-and-leave-’em type, remember?” I added.

“Hey, that’s Tex Harrison,” Zach said, squinting through the windshield at the body.

“No way,” I said. We’d only been here a month, but even I knew Luna’s star quarterback. “How can you tell?”

“His football jersey,” Zach said. “Number nine? Hello?”

As if I would know that.

“See!” I said, turning to Olympia. “That proves I didn’t do it! I would never bite a Neanderthal like Tex Harrison. His blood probably tastes like beer and Cheetos.”

Olympia rolled her eyes. She does that a lot. Possibly just around me. I think she’s beginning to wonder if bringing a sixteen-year-old vampire into the gang was such a good idea. It’s still unclear whether I’m going to act sixteen for the rest of my immortal life. If you ask me, I’d say I’m already way more mature than I was a year ago, so I don’t think she has anything to worry about. I’m the one that has to worry, because it’s probably not going to be fun to be twenty-nine in a sixteen-year-old body…or fifty…or five hundred. If I have to go to high school over and over again for the rest of eternity, I will seriously decapitate myself.

Olympia always says, “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” meaning when I manage to actually get through an entire school year without some big, dramatic death (mine, for instance) forcing us to move. On the plus side, by the third time around, US History is a total breeze…although, sadly, not any less boring.