Chasing Sunrise

Twenty-Eight

"Liana, isn't it?" the girl asked me. "I don't believe we've met. I'm Darissa." She held out a hand.

I went for my phone but she grabbed my wrist, spun me around, and pinned me against the mirror, then fished my phone out of my pocket herself. My shoulder popped from the way she'd wrenched it, and I felt the cool glass of the mirror against my cheek and the back of my arm. Any attempt I made to break free or even push against her hurt like sunrise. She had me in a joint lock of some kind.

Corban was near, though. It was only a matter of time before he found me and it occurred to me that my fear would help him have the element of surprise. Any sensible person would be terrified right now, so if I went into a gibbering panic, I could tell myself it was all part of the plan, really.

"Now, now," she said, putting my phone in her pocket. "No need to call lover boy."

Was she talking about Evan, or did she know about Corban? Evan, I thought. It had to be Evan.

My knowledge that decapitation and sunlight could kill a vamp was useless, given I couldn't so much as scratch her with my fingernails. Buffy the Vampire Slayer I was not.

Darissa leaned in close and sniffed me.

Okay, that was weird.

"So it's true. You're only half turned."

I wasn't sure if she expected a reply, but I hoped not giving her one was some kind of assertion of power. Or was it acquiescing to her power? Why oh why hadn't I figured out that being a nerdy recluse would rob me of so many practical skills? I think I'd had some silly conceit that I was watching humanity from afar, when I'd actually spent my time afar reading textbooks and ignoring humanity.

"I'll make you a deal," she said. "You let me study you, and I let you live."

Now that I hadn't expected. "What?" I managed to gasp.

"Specifically, you let me study how it is you survive sunrise." She let go of me.

I collapsed into a heap, smacking my shoulder on the sink on the way down. It wasn't a terribly dignified moment, but I was well used to this kind of humiliation at this point in my life. Boarding-school hazings had prepared me.

She stood over me, eying me down her aquiline nose. "I've heard of your kind, but never one that lived more than a day. Even those, I've only heard of second and third hand." She flipped her hair back over her shoulder. "Do we have a deal?"

Since I couldn't think fast enough to respond immediately, I merely looked up at her in terror.

To say her appearance surprised me was an understatement. She had dyed hair and vampish beauty in the form of flawless, slightly olive skin and piercing gray-green eyes, but she didn't have much in the way of fashion sense. Maybe she was in disguise, but she wore a plain, rumpled t-shirt that showed a beige bra strap. Vampirism seemed more like a red or black bra kind of condition. Her jeans were ill fitting and bagged and sagged oddly, though her waist was plenty slim, and she wore hiking boots on her feet.

Hiking boots.

I supposed those would help her if she'd been chased around the desert by Corban, but again, vampirism seemed like a stiletto-heel kind of condition. Even a proud nerd like me never dressed this frumpily.

Darissa, I realized, was a kind of vampire I'd never imagined existed: a hard-core nerd-girl vamp.

Her glare down at me wasn't all cold derision. There was uncertainty in her stance, too, and the longer she let me wait before I replied, the more leverage I realized I had. The fact that she'd moved this quickly to nab me was another clue. She wasn't making threats or posturing. In fact, it was clear that she really wanted to research me, and once I'd picked up my badly scattered wits, it was obvious why.