Interview with the Vixen Read online

  Veronica is weirdly touched by this—first by him not screaming and running in fear from her, and second, from the acknowledgment that in this school, Veronica’s a power player. It makes her feel proud. “Good,” she says. “Because the last thing I can deal with right now is making sure you don’t freak out.”

  “But why are you here?” Dilton asks her now. “How come you were sleeping in school?”

  Veronica shakes her head. “It’s complicated,” she says, and then, like she needs to be reminded exactly how complicated, a new hunger pang erupts deep in her gut.

  She puts her hand on her stomach, as if that’ll quiet it, satisfy her thirst somehow.

  Except she knows what will satisfy it. She’s a vampire now, and vampires drink blood.

  Well, this is really not going to jibe with the whole vegan-for-the-planet movement the Environment Club is trying to get us all on board with, Veronica thinks. Although—technically, it doesn’t involve eating animals. Just humans.

  She shakes her head, trying to clear the thought. There’s no way she’s drinking human blood. Nuh-uh, not now, not ever.

  Dilton’s in the doorway, a pink flush to his skin, and if Veronica listens carefully, she can hear the blood rushing beneath it.

  Dilton’s eyeing her warily. “What is it?”

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Veronica says. She smooths her hands over the slippery costume skirt and locks eyes with Dilton. “I’m really hungry, and despite my personal objections, you look like a very tasty snack right now, Dilton. So if you can help me find something bloody to drink so I don’t have to chow down on you, I’ll tell you how I got to be this way. Deal?”

  She sees Dilton swallow hard, but he nods. “Deal,” he says. “I know just the place.”

  “MOM?” DILTON CALLS out as he unlocks the front door. His mom shouldn’t be there, he knows—her van isn’t in the driveway and according to the calendar up on the fridge, today she’s delivering three of her custom-made wedding cakes to three different venues. She should be gone until the evening, at least. But Dilton has gotten caught sneaking in from nefarious science projects enough to know he should never assume.

  “Mom?” he calls out again. “Are you home?”

  No answer.

  He swings the door open wide and ushers Veronica inside. “Come on,” he says. “We’re safe here.”

  “Thanks, Dilton,” Veronica says, and she sounds exhausted.

  Dilton isn’t surprised. Somehow, she’s gone from Veronica Lodge, Head Vixen and Human, to Veronica Lodge, Vampire, overnight. He hopes she’ll tell him how, but for now all he can think is that he, too, would be exhausted if he’d suddenly become an immortal, bloodthirsty monster—not to mention spending the night on the terrible student lounge couch.

  “And thanks for this,” Veronica says, holding up the now-empty bag of blood she sucked down on the drive over. “Who knows how much longer I could have lasted without it? I was truly so close to ripping your throat out. For which I am super sorry, of course,” she adds hastily. “And believe me, I would not have jumped you if I were in my right mind. But I better make sure I keep my levels topped up, huh? Can’t have that happening again.”

  Dilton gives a seminervous laugh. Sure, Veronica might be partly joking, but if she doesn’t manage to keep herself under control, Dilton actually might meet his end. And he really would prefer not to die right now. “It’s only pig’s blood,” he says. Pilfered from the bio lab, meaning there’s probably going to be a school-wide scandal on Monday morning when Ms. Lemon finds her stash depleted. But what else was he supposed to do? If there’s one thing Dilton knows for sure about vampires, it’s that they need blood to survive. Animal was the closest he could get without risking his own life—and he quite likes his life, so that was out of the question. He wasn’t sure if pig blood would be okay, but it seems to have done the job. At the very least, Veronica doesn’t want to kill him right now, and that’s good enough.

  “The bathroom’s at the top of the stairs,” he says, pointing. “And my mom’s room is on the right. Help yourself to something to wear.”

  “Will do,” Veronica says, and she tosses him the empty blood bag. “You’re a good guy, Dilton.”

  He waves off the compliment as Veronica goes upstairs, and only once she’s locked in the bathroom does he let out a giant sigh.

  “What the hell is happening?” he whispers under his breath. Vampires? Veronica in his house, drinking pig’s blood like it’s nothing?

  He makes his way to the dining table and sits, pulling his laptop from his backpack. It’s like he’s walked into an alternate version of Riverdale, where the paranormal is just … normal. He would never have believed it if he hadn’t seen Veronica transform in front of his eyes …

  Her face had been hers and yet not, an angry snarl instead of her trademark supercilious smile, her eyes deep red, her teeth stretched into fangs ready for ripping. And then, when she’d realized who he was, it had all shifted back.

  Dilton shakes his head as if to clear that image of Veronica from his mind and opens his laptop.

  It’s like he told Veronica earlier: He’s a scientist. He trusts the evidence.

  So it’s time to find some more evidence.

  From upstairs he hears the noise of the shower, and on his laptop he types. Best to start simple, he thinks. Vampire mythology, he writes, and hits “Search.”

  It doesn’t take long for Dilton to get sucked in. This is his favorite part of getting to know a new topic—diving deep into the research, both legitimate and slightly less so, and figuring out what’s really going on.

  Of course, all the stuff he finds at first is about movies and TV and vampire novels, especially the kind where the vampires inexplicably sparkle. (Sparkle? Why? he thinks incredulously. Is there some kind of compound in vampire blood that would cause that reaction with sunlight? What’s the logical, physical reasoning behind this phenomenon?) Even though it’s fiction, a lot of the myths are based in real legend, so Dilton reads all about the different methods of transformation and the various “rules”—vampires who can’t walk in the sun, who sleep in old-school coffins, et cetera et cetera.

  One article mentions a couple of words Dilton trips up on: moroi and strigoi. “Interesting,” he murmurs aloud, opening a new tab.

  Always follow the terms, he so often tells Veronica, and when the search loads, he smiles.

  This is more like it.

  The page he’s on is all about early Romanian folklore, and there are those terms again: STRIGOI all in caps on one side of the page, and Moroi smaller on the other.

  Dilton adjusts his glasses and cracks his knuckles. Time to get down to business.

  VERONICA WAKES UP disoriented, again, but this time it takes her only a second to realize where she is.

  Overflowing bookshelves? A desk littered with papers? Telescope set up to look right at the night sky?

  Oh, yeah. She’s definitely at Dilton’s.

  More specifically, she’s in his twin bed, sleeping off her previous night’s adventures. She sits up, blinking at the growing darkness outside Dilton’s bedroom window. She really only meant to lie down for a minute after her shower, but judging from the navy sky outside, it’s been more like hours.

  Oh well. A rested vampire is better than a grouchy, tired vampire, right?

  Veronica gets up and leaves Dilton’s room, calling out to him. “Are you up here?”

  “In the dining room,” Dilton’s voice calls back from downstairs.

  She makes her way down, taking each step with a little bounce. She feels surprisingly and blissfully refreshed. All it took was a shower, a nap, and an outfit change—she’s in a Riverdale Class of 1991 sweatshirt that hangs to mid-thigh, just covering the running shorts, and a pair of white socks pulled up to her knees, all pilfered from his mom’s dresser. She almost feels back to her old self.

  “Good evening,” Dilton says as she enters the cozy dining room, and he throws something in her dir
ection.

  Veronica catches it and almost immediately begins salivating. “I’m pretty sure throwing bags of blood around is against your mom’s house rules,” she says, and then she flicks her fangs out so she can use them to pierce the bag of her dinner.

  Okay, so maybe not quite like her old self.

  She sits beside Dilton at the table, trying not to spill on the lace-edged tablecloth as she sucks on the bag of pig’s blood like it’s a juice box. It does satisfy her thirst, but in the same way a low-fat frozen yogurt satisfies when what you really want is a hot-fudge sundae. Has all the look of being the real thing but only a vague shadow of the right taste. That’s why one of Veronica’s life rules is Eat the Damn Dessert.

  She’s not sure if she’s ready to Drink the Damn Blood just yet, though. So, for now, piggy will do.

  “You know, even a few hours ago the thought of drinking blood made me wanna hurl. But it’s actually not so bad.” She squeezes the last few drops out and tosses the empty blood bag in the trash. Then she concentrates on pulling her fangs back in. It still feels weird, but she has to master it. She can’t be running around town fangs out all the time.

  She turns to Dilton. “What do you think?” she asks, fanning her hands around her face. “Back to my usual self?”

  “Can barely tell you’re a vampire,” he deadpans, and then his face changes.

  Veronica knows what’s coming. “Oh, fine,” she says.

  “What?”

  “You’re gonna ask me how I got this way,” she says, and the look Dilton gives her is somewhere between ashamed and eager. Of course he’s eager to hear the story—it’s Dilton. The boy thrives on the weird and the wonderful. “Okay. I’ll tell you. But no interruptions, okay?”

  She tries to clear her throat, but there’s a big old lump in it.

  It’s not hard to know why. It’s one thing for her to think about her parents being dead; it’s another thing entirely to say it out loud to somebody else. It makes it real, and Veronica’s not sure if she’s ready for it to be real.

  But she takes a deep breath and starts from the beginning. “Reggie was supposed to pick me up at eight,” she says, toying with a loose thread on her borrowed sweatshirt. “So I went to see my mom and my dad. I went to say good-bye …”

  VERONICA DOESN’T ENJOY filling Dilton in, but she has to do it—has to tell him about the stranger vampire who’d killed her parents and would have killed her, too, if she hadn’t gotten away. All color faded from Dilton’s face when she told him how she’d found her parents’ bodies strewn across the study floor, how it had hit her that they were really dead.

  “I’m so sorry, Veronica,” he says gravely now, once Veronica finishes the first half of her story. “Your parents—I’m so sorry.”

  “Thanks,” Veronica says, with all the weight of a deflated balloon. It feels wrong to say thank you, but what else is there? Her parents are dead.

  They’re gone.

  It hits her so hard and so suddenly that Veronica feels like her heart’s going to explode. Maybe they weren’t perfect, and sure, she got frustrated with her dad and the way he treated her, but they were still her parents. They were the ones who tucked her in when she was little, and gave her everything she ever could have wanted, and raised her to be a Lodge through and through.

  And now, she thinks, a shocked emptiness in the rest of her mind, I’ll never get to talk to them again. I’ll never see my dad smile, or hear my mom’s laugh. That’s all over.

  “So”—Dilton shifts—“what are you going to do? Should we—should I go … get them?”

  The image of Dilton dragging her parents’ corpses out of the mansion, as creepy as it is, is maybe the only thing that could put a dent in her sudden melancholy. “What, and put them in your mom’s deep freezer?” Veronica manages to crack a small smile. “I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. But thanks for offering.”

  “It’s the least I can do,” Dilton says, and then they both paused, fixing each other with a strange look, and burst out laughing. Like he was just offering to pick up milk at the store or something, not the corpses of her mom and dad.

  My capacity for the absurd is truly being pushed to season-three Glee levels, Veronica thinks.

  What happened after all that is easier to talk about—her escape from the stranger, the crash, waking up in the woods to find that she was no longer human.

  Still, Dilton lets out a low whistle.

  “So it wasn’t Reggie that you hit?” he asks.

  And Veronica shakes her head. “Can’t have been,” she says. “There was nothing there when I went back to the road. Maybe …”

  She trails off, but Dilton reaches out and taps her elbow. “What is it?”

  “Maybe it was a hallucination or something,” she says. “I don’t know. It was like he was right there, except he wasn’t. Maybe the vampire … he wanted me to see that, or something. Can they do that? Make people hallucinate?”

  “Huh,” Dilton says, and he taps his finger against his lips thoughtfully. “Well …”

  He’s got a gleam in his eyes. It’s the same look he gets in class when he’s about to make a breakthrough on an experiment, or tell Veronica all about some weird cult video he found on some creepy secretive part of the internet.

  “Spit it out, Dilton,” she says. “What did you find?”

  “Well, while you were asleep, I did some research,” he starts. “So, when we think of vampires, we think of the movie kind, right? Or maybe the TV kind of more recent years. Get turned, feast on blood, can’t walk in the sun, you know the drill.”

  “Sparkly skin,” Veronica says, holding her arm out. Hmm. Time for some bronzer shopping, perhaps.

  “Right,” Dilton says with a laugh. “But if we dig back, we find the earlier discussion of vampires has similarities with what we think of now, but it’s more grounded in realism. Here’s the main thing I found: Eastern European tales of vampires talk about two different kinds. The first one is the moroi. They’re people who’ve died—or been killed, more likely—and then been revived with a vampire bite. The moroi are undead creatures, and some of the tales talk about them being more malleable and easily controlled.”

  “So they’re dead and then come back to life?” Veronica frowns. That doesn’t explain her change: The vampire’s bite didn’t kill her, nor did the crash, and yet she’s still here, a newborn vampire.

  “Not exactly,” Dilton says. “They’re alive, but not alive. Dead, but not dead. The undead.”

  Veronica arches an eyebrow. “So like zombies? You’re telling me moroi are like zombie vamps?”

  “Something like that,” Dilton says, his fingers flying over his keyboard. “Okay, and then you have the second kind: strigoi.”

  He says it with reverence, and Veronica shifts. When she speaks, it’s quieter. “Something tells me these ones are less zombie, more monster.”

  Dilton nods at her. “Strigoi are living vampires. The folktales say the first strigoi were souls who had been cursed, to live in immortality and to drink the blood of humans to survive. Some of that old stuff we’ve always heard is true, according to this. ‘Weakness against garlic, silver, holy water, and crosses.’ But that’s not all—they’re way more powerful than the moroi. First, they can exhibit a kind of telepathy, the tales say. They can control the moroi—make them bend to their will.”

  It’s starting to make a kind of sense to Veronica. “So instead of a shambling zombie-vamp gang,” she says, “a strigoi can turn moroi into … an army. With mind control.”

  “Right.” Dilton turns his laptop around so Veronica can see the images he’s found: crude, faded drawings of half-human, half-beast creatures, sporting fangs and wings and pointed ears. “In early myths, the strigoi were sometimes referred to as sorcerers or shape-shifters. Their other power, see, is their ability to appear in other forms—sometimes as animals, sometimes even as other people.”

  Bats, Veronica thinks. That old classic. “But they can only
use mind control on moroi?”

  “So far as I can tell, they aren’t able to fully control other strigoi,” Dilton says. “But they can be susceptible to a strigoi’s powers of persuasion. More mind tricks than mind control.”

  “Mind tricks,” she repeats. “Telepathy. Powers of persuasion …” She bites her lip—with her regular teeth, not her fangs. “So what I thought I saw could have been a hallucination. Or not a hallucination exactly—a vision. Whatever the stranger wanted me to see.”

  There’s something clawing at the edge of her memory, but she can’t focus on it. All she can think now is that the vampire that killed her parents—he’d wanted her to crash. She’d thought she was getting away, while really, she was playing right into his hands.

  I woke up in the woods, she thinks. But how did I get there? How did I change?

  Just like that, the memory snaps back.

  After the crash. Lying in the road, and feeling cold—colder than the fall night should have made her. The kind of cold you feel when your body is in shock, when you’re losing the blood your heart needs to keep you alive.

  Then—someone moving her, the sky shifting above her, and the cold transforming to a heat so burning, so searing hot, that she’d cried out in pain.

  “That’s it,” she says, quietly, to herself, like she’s forgotten Dilton is even there.

  “What’s it?”

  Veronica looks at Dilton sitting beside her. It’s so incongruous, to be discussing the finer points of vampire transformation in the dining room his mom’s clearly taken a lot of time and effort to decorate. To be talking about this in front of a row of school portraits chronicling Dilton’s growth from a curly haired, gap-toothed little kid to the serious (still curly haired) boy he is now.

  “I think I remember turning,” she says slowly. “It felt like … burning. Like I could feel a fire spreading through my body, and then I must have passed out again—or passed out for the first time, who knows—because when I woke up, I didn’t remember what had happened. I saw how I had healed, faster than any normal person should be able to, and then I saw my fangs and I knew what had happened.”