Interview with the Vixen Page 3

  LIGHT.

  Moon. Moonlight.

  Cold.

  Cold and dark and moonlight—

  Look up.

  No.

  Look away, move away, get away, gotta get away, gotta move—

  But it hurts; it all hurts. Every move is like a stab of glass. A stab of icy, icy cold, like midwinter—but winter’s far away still, isn’t it? Isn’t it … ?

  Crawl.

  Crawl over dirt, over stones, crawl, crawl, keep moving—

  Follow the way—

  Follow the moon.

  Crawl, you can make it.

  No, no, I can’t. Not yet.

  Sleep now …

  DARK.

  Moon dark—where is it now, where did it go?

  Moon gone.

  Wait—

  Who’s there? Is somebody there? Help me! Help—

  Cold gone.

  Good.

  No more cold. Warm.

  Hot, hotter, hottest, nonono—

  Burning burning burning—

  Nonono, make it stop. Please please please …

  TREES.

  They are the first thing she notices when she wakes.

  Veronica blinks, once, twice, a feeling like grit deep in her eyes.

  Where am I? How did I get here?

  Last thing I remember—

  Veronica winces. Her memory, her mind—there’s nothing there but a void. She remembers … cheer practice. Yeah, there was practice, and Betty and Archie were there, and then—

  I came home, right? I must have. But then—how did I end up out here?

  She shakes her head; that’s as much as she can recall. Whatever happened between practice and now is gone.

  She shivers as coldness registers. Cold and damp.

  There’s an ache deep inside her and a burning in her throat.

  She stretches, testing her body.

  Head: hurts if she moves too fast, but yes.

  Hands: yes.

  Feet: whatever shoes she was wearing are gone, but yes.

  (Oh, I hope I wasn’t wearing my favorite black heels, the ones with the pearl ankle straps—)

  Every part of her is here and accounted for.

  She feels the ground beneath her: loamy, rain—or maybe dew—dampening her fingers. And then Veronica sits up, a long, guttural moan as she gets there.

  Now that she can see herself, she checks herself again and sucks in a breath. In her left arm there’s a piece of glass maybe four or five inches long, embedded deep inside her flesh.

  Last thing I remember—

  It comes back in a tidal wave: her parents, the monstrous stranger, her escape.

  And then—

  The crash.

  Lying on the side of the road.

  And—

  “Reggie,” she says, and her thin, scared voice winds into the emptiness of the woods around her. “Daddy. Mom.”

  They’re gone, aren’t they? Her parents, most definitely. And Reggie?

  If I survived, then maybe he did, too, she thinks, but it’s a shaky lie she’s telling herself to cover the fear: the fear that Reggie is dead just like her parents.

  Just like—

  Veronica puts her hand to her neck, to the bite mark she now shares with her parents.

  She feels around, pressing at first softly and then harder all around her throat.

  The puncture wounds are gone.

  “That’s not possible,” she whispers to herself. Wait. Is she losing it?

  She looks at the piece of glass stuck inside her arm. A small, sensible part of her brain tells her not to touch it, leave it for the EMTs who are surely coming to rescue her, but then the rest of her takes over.

  The marks on her neck are gone. Thinking about it, she doesn’t even hurt that much. She was thrown from her car, in a head-on collision; she shouldn’t even be able to move, right?

  Veronica touches the glass, biting her lip reflexively as she waits for the pain to course through her. And it comes, a pain does come, but it’s not the lightning bolt it should be. Closer to the sting of a blunt razor clumsily nicking an ankle than the blackout jolt of dislocating her shoulder on a cheer stunt gone wrong.

  As before, in her father’s study looking over her parents’ bodies, Veronica finds herself knowing, deep down, what this means.

  As before, she tells herself this isn’t real.

  It can’t be. It’s impossible. Im-pos-si-ble. As in, things that can’t exist, as in completely not even close to being real, as in no one will ever believe Veronica if she tells them what she thinks she is now.

  No. Not what she thinks. What she knows her lack of pain and her healed bite mean.

  But she wants to test, to be sure.

  Without any fanfare, she rips the glass shard from her arm. “Ahh!” Veronica makes the noise, but it’s a show, really, because just like before, it only hurts as much as a mosquito sting.

  And then she watches, equal parts fascinated and horrified, as the gaping wound in her arm begins to stitch itself closed right in front of her eyes.

  “Holy …” Veronica swallows and watches as the mess of blood and layers of open skin shift and throb, flesh knitting back together, the ooze of her insides vanishing until there’s nothing. Only a smear of red that, when she wipes at it roughly, reveals perfect, unmarred skin beneath it.

  Her stomach still aches, but it’s not from the crash, or the struggle with the stranger back at the house. It’s as if it’s turning inside out, roiling with hunger.

  There’s the burning in her throat, too.

  Veronica sits there, afraid to move, because if she moves then the night continues on and she has to deal with her new reality. That’s what this is, isn’t it? Reality. No dream, or nightmare, or concussion-induced hallucination.

  All she has to do is add up the pieces.

  First: She was bitten by a monster with razor-sharp fangs.

  Second: She feels no pain.

  Third: There’s that ache in her stomach and the fire in her throat that she knows is an insatiable hunger-thirst.

  Fourth: She’s capable of almost-instant healing.

  Veronica squeezes her eyes shut. There is one more thing she needs to check, but she can’t, yet.

  She doesn’t want to.

  Instead, she gets to her feet and begins the climb up to the road. “Reggie,” she calls, and somewhere in the canopy above her a bird calls back. “Reggie! Can you hear me? I’m coming for you!”

  But when Veronica makes it roadside she stops, confused.

  Only her car sits in the middle of the road. There’s glass everywhere, and the hood is crumpled, clear signs of an accident but—Reggie’s car is gone. And Reggie himself is nowhere to be seen.

  I hit him, Veronica thinks. She knows she did; she saw him when she did it.

  Or she—she thinks she saw him, at least.

  But if I hit him, where is he?

  “Reggie!” She calls his name once more into the dark, but she gets back the same silent answer as before. She turns it over in her mind. Maybe it wasn’t Reggie. Maybe it wasn’t anybody at all—perhaps it was only a deer that she hit.

  Please, Jesus and god and mother Meghan Markle, let it have been a deer.

  Veronica stands barefoot on the wet road, lost. Right leads back to home, to her parents’ bodies, most likely to the vampire who attacked her. Left leads to town, some kind of civilization.

  Any other night, any other accident, Veronica’s choice would be simple: go home and call for help.

  But what help will come for her now? How can she go home when that’s where the danger lies?

  Another bird—maybe the same one that called to her—wheels through the sky above her, a dark shape against an even darker night. Veronica watches it for a moment and then looks to the ground.

  She takes a deep breath.

  Reggie isn’t around to help, so there’s no more putting it off. She has to know now, once and for all.

  She cr
ouches and picks up one of the larger fragments of her windshield. She raises it slowly, the dread of what version of herself she’s about to see sitting like a block of cement, deep in the pit of her stomach.

  When Veronica finally finds her reflection—Oh, she thinks, well, that myth clearly isn’t true; good to know—she exhales.

  Okay. Other than a few leaves in her hair and a smear of blood on her cheek, she looks normal.

  A voice whispers in the back of her mind: The stranger looked normal, too. Until he smiled.

  That’s the true test, Veronica knows.

  She aims a smile at herself.

  The her who smiles back bears straight white teeth, the result of two years of painful orthodontia, and Veronica can’t quite believe it. She has no fangs; there is nothing abnormal there at all.

  She touches a thumb to her teeth, running the fleshy pad of her finger along the edges as if to confirm what she’s seeing.

  No fangs.

  Could that mean she’s … wrong?

  Maybe the stranger isn’t what she thought, and maybe the bite on her neck was just the kind of thing a weirdo creep like him would do. And maybe the bite’s no longer there and her arm healed instantly because … because … well, she’s been taking a lot of vitamins, lately. Collagen supplements could totally turn her into a superhuman wound-repellant machine, right?

  Veronica exhales, and then a twist of hunger slices through her. It’s physical, like a tear through her torso, and she folds over for a second before straightening back up, catching herself in the glass again. Then it slips from her fingers as she freezes.

  Her skin is its usual honey color, but instead of her usual deep brown, her eyes are red. And instead of her perfect teeth, there they are: long, terrifying, sharp.

  Fangs.

  All the better to eat you with, Veronica thinks, and then she begins to laugh, the only response she has to this new, now confirmed, information about herself.

  I, Veronica Lodge, am a vampire.

  What now?

  REGGIE COMES TO in the middle of the road. He knows he’s in the middle of the road because it’s clear in his mind what just happened, even though it probably should be blurry, he thinks—but it’s the opposite of that.

  Veronica’s car coming at him. The screaming of metal on metal. Flying through the air.

  Help.

  He tries, but the word won’t come. His voice won’t come.

  Help, is what he wants to say. Somebody please help me.

  He’s not sure if he’s hurt badly or just bad enough. Won’t be playing in the next game, that’s for sure.

  Where’s Veronica?

  He’d turn his head to look for her, if he could. If he wasn’t afraid of what the movement might do to him.

  For a moment he’d thought he had finally done it, gotten Veronica to take him seriously. But now, somehow, he’s lying in the middle of an empty road, and Veronica’s somewhere nearby, hurt. She must be hurt, and there’s nobody around to help them.

  Reggie blinks fast, trying to clear the grit—maybe glass—that’s lodged itself in his eyes.

  And then he feels a weight on his tender belly.

  When he focuses, he sees: It’s just a bird. A bird, black and shiny-eyed, has landed on him, for some unknown reason.

  Go away, he wants to say, and then—no, don’t go. Bring help. But it’s just an ordinary bird, he knows, not some kind of magic message-carrying creature.

  It’s watching him. Staring at him.

  It’s just a bird. How can a bird stare? But it is, Reggie thinks. Its small eyes are fixed on his and then it hops—no, doesn’t hop; it takes two very deliberate steps with its hooked claw feet, along his body.

  And then Reggie knows for sure he’s in a bad state, because the bird begins to … transform?

  Reggie’s eyes roll back as he feels the ground move beneath him—even though that’s not possible. Or maybe he is the one moving, being dragged into the brush out of harm’s way.

  His eyes refocus, and the bird—

  It had begun to transform, he could’ve sworn it did. But now it’s still sitting there on his chest. Watching him with those pitch-black eyes.

  But Reggie is still moving, the trees above blurring as someone keeps dragging him farther into the woods, off the road and out of the way of harm. Help, he thinks, but it’s relief now, rather than a cry of pain. Somebody’s here, somebody’s helping him.

  He looks up to see the face of his savior, but there’s nothing above him except dark sky and the canopy of ancient trees.

  And then he feels the fire.

  It starts somewhere below, burning through his neck and then racing, impossibly fast, down his arm and across his chest. Then it’s everywhere.

  Reggie would panic if he could move, but now he’s truly trapped, somehow. Locked inside his body as the fire takes over, and if he didn’t think he was dying before, he’s pretty certain of it now.

  Veronica, he thinks, Veronica, don’t let me die.

  “SCOOT OVER.” BETTY sets the bowl of popcorn on the table and takes her place on the couch, close enough to Archie to smell the coconut scent of the product he swears he doesn’t use in his hair. Like he just looks so carefully, perfectly disheveled every single day by complete accident. “Ready?”

  “Are you?” Archie unpauses the movie, right as the killer clown’s face fills the screen.

  Betty lets out a small scream and burrows into Archie’s shoulder. “Warn me before you do that!”

  He laughs. “You always pick these scary movies, and then you can’t handle them,” he says. “I’m starting to think this is just a ruse.”

  “How dare you, Archie Andrews.” Of course it is, Betty thinks. What better way to spend a Friday night than letting a boy like Archie protect you from the big, scary movie? Like she needs protecting. Straight boys can be simple, though: Give them a damsel in distress and they’ll try their best to rescue her.

  Her mind flashes to Ronnie, out with Reggie tonight instead of where she really wants to be, which is in Betty’s exact place. She feels a little bad—but only a little. It’s not her fault that Ronnie likes Archie, too, and it’s not her fault that Archie said yes to hanging out tonight.

  Betty pretends to watch the movie but sighs to herself. So why do I feel so guilty right now?

  She sits up and grabs the remote, pausing the movie again. “Archie,” she says, “do you think Ronnie’s mad at me?”

  “What for?”

  “Hanging out with you tonight.”

  Archie makes his thinking face, which is to say that he taps his finger against his lips and looks up at the ceiling as if he’s a scientific genius pondering a tricky experiment and not a teenage boy ricocheting between two different girls.

  “Well,” he says after a minute, “me and her went out a couple weeks ago. And she’s out with Reggie tonight. So why would she be mad at you? After all, we’re all just friends. Aren’t we?”

  Betty’s mouth drops open. Just friends?

  Just? Friends?

  First of all: to Betty, there is no such thing as Just Friends. Just does not belong in front of Friends because friends are the most important thing in the world; people are always throwing that phrase around as if to be someone’s friend means nothing at all. Betty would do anything for her friends because, besides her family, they are her greatest, most valuable thing.

  And second of all? Well—unless Archie’s out there making out and cozying up on the couch with everybody else he calls his friend, then what he has with Betty and Veronica is not as casual as he’s acting like it is.

  This is typical Archie, she thinks, folding her arms tightly and staring past Archie at the living room window that looks out onto the dark street. He can’t ever decide between us, so he plays it like it doesn’t even matter, and then Ronnie and I are the ones who—

  A face appears in the window.

  “Oh my god!” Betty jumps, slipping back on the couch, squeezing her eyes
shut. “Archie!”

  “What?” He laughs, the noise irritating now. “The movie’s not even on.”

  “Not the movie,” Betty says, eyes still closed tightly. “There’s somebody outside!”

  She feels the couch shift as Archie moves and laughs again, but it’s gentle this time. “There’s no one there, Betty. I think you just got some residual clown scare going on.”

  Betty cracks open one eye. “Really?” Then she opens both eyes fully and looks out the window. It’s dark, only the shadow of trees waving in the wind and the soft glow of the streetlights. No face, no person there.

  But— “I swear, there was somebody there,” she insists. “I know what I saw, Archie.”

  He runs a hand through his hair, mussing it just so. “If you say you saw something, I guess you saw something,” he says. “You want me to go outside and check?”

  Betty has visions of Archie creeping around the house with a baseball bat in his hands, failing to see the trap the murderer has set for him. “No!” She grabs him. “Let’s just—close the curtains and ignore it.”

  “Okay,” Archie says. “It’s probably just someone playing a prank. Trying to scare us.” He gets up and crosses the room to pull the curtains shut over the window, closing out the night. “Better?”

  “Much,” Betty says, but the itchy feeling of being watched doesn’t leave her.

  You’re being paranoid, Betty, she thinks. Nobody’s out to get you. There’s no one outside. Monsters aren’t real.

  There’s a rustle outside the window—a branch? Someone wandering around holding a knife? No, no, stick with the branch idea—and Betty flinches.

  No. Monsters are not real.

  If she thinks it enough times, maybe she’ll just start believing it.

  VERONICA WIPES HER nose with the back of her hand, leaving Betty’s house behind her as she continues her walk into town.

  She’s been walking for hours. She didn’t know where to go—home was obviously out of the question, so she went to the next best place she could think of.

  But when she got to Betty’s, she saw Archie and Betty cuddled up together on the couch, framed perfectly, and they looked so warm and disgustingly happy together that it only made Veronica feel worse. What was she going to do, knock on the door and say, Hey, B, sorry to interrupt your date! Long story but I’m a vampire now, can I stay over? I’d go home but my parents are dead and there may or may not be another vampire waiting to kill me, too. Also if you know what I should do about my dead parents feel free to let me know. Sorry about the blood.