06 Love Bites - My Sister the Vampire (7 page)

Ivy was used to being around vampires, but the vampires that she knew weren’t so hoity-toity. She missed Franklin Grove; she missed Brendan, she missed Sophia . . .

And to top it all off,
she thought,
I’m hungry!
The food was delicious, but the portions were tiny.

‘Is everything to your satisfaction, my dear?’ asked the Count, wiping a drop of wine from his moustache. ‘You seem unsettled.’

Ivy didn’t want him to think she was too selfish to appreciate all the effort they were going to for them.

‘I think it might be jet lag,’ she offered.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Sometimes the only thing that will revive me after a long flight is a sleep in my own coffin.’ Then he whispered, ‘And a formal dinner can put me in a coma!’

Ivy grinned at her grandfather’s rebellious streak. She couldn’t help but love him as he chuckled to himself.

He leaned in closer. ‘After dessert, I could distract everyone while you and Olivia slip away?’

‘What’s that, Nicholas?’ the Countess said with an arched eyebrow.

‘Nothing, dear Caterina.’ He cleared his throat.

‘I want the girls to join our important guests for petits fours and coffee in the parlour after dinner,’ the Countess said.

‘Mother,’ Mr Vega said, ‘if Ivy is tired, she can be excused.’

The Countess pressed her lips together. Clearly, that wasn’t an option.

Ivy stared at the table, resisting the urge to fiddle with the cutlery. She’d already drawn enough attention to herself, causing tension between their dad and his mom.

This isn’t quite happy families,
Ivy thought.
Not yet.

‘This place is so amazing,’ Olivia said as she fell back on to her four-poster bed.

The heavy velvet curtains blocked out the bright moonlight and her long-sleeved pink flannel pyjamas made her feel cosy and warm. She didn’t even mind the flock of bats she’d seen flying across the moon when she was closing the curtains.

‘Wasn’t Prince Alex a surprise?’ she said, remembering how much laughing they’d done after dinner when Olivia told him about the first time she and Ivy had switched places.

‘He was the only person not horrified by my use of cutlery,’ Ivy replied, tying her hair back into a ponytail. ‘How did you know how to do it?’

‘I saw it in a movie,’ Olivia replied. ‘You just work from the outside in. And you’re supposed to curtsy, like, all the time around royals.’

‘I figured that,’ Ivy said. ‘My ribs ache from all your elbowing.’

‘Just trying to help my socially inept sister,’ Olivia said, chuckling. ‘We need to send you to finishing school.’

‘Ha ha,’ Ivy said. ‘They’re probably all talking about me and my uncivilised manners as they go home in their horse-and-carriages.’

Olivia laughed. ‘No one uses horse-and-carriages any more, not even vampires!’

‘Well, they don’t even have cell-phone signal out here,’ Ivy complained.

It was true. Olivia had practically hung out
of the window when they’d first come upstairs trying to get even one bar on her new phone, with no luck.

‘You can’t deny that some people in the room really didn’t approve of us and our dad,’ Ivy went on.

Olivia remembered the look that the Queen gave her. ‘You’re right, but we can’t please everyone.’

Ivy grinned. ‘Especially the Ice Queen.’

Olivia laughed. She crossed her eyes, looking down at her nose. ‘My country is too warm. Fetch me a slab of ice.’

‘Fetch me an iceberg!’ Ivy put on a nasal voice and snapped her fingers impatiently.

The girls giggled together. They certainly were a long way from home.

‘But at least Grandmother and Grandfather are so nice,’ Olivia said.

Ivy shifted the mattress on her four-poster bed to reveal the shiny black coffin. Olivia knew that it was how vampires normally set up their rooms – a mattress for studying or, in Ivy’s room, throwing clothes on, with a coffin tucked away underneath.

‘The Count and Countess are just like I imagined them.’ Ivy climbed into her coffin. ‘I’m so glad we’ve been able to start putting our family back together again.’

‘Me, too,’ Olivia said and yawned. She snuggled into her pillow and pulled the blanket over her. ‘Goodnight, Ivy.’

‘Goodnight, Olivia.’

Even though it was the middle of the night, Ivy pushed open her luxurious coffin lid. It was a velvet-lined Interna Three, the best coffin money could buy. But she still couldn’t sleep.

She was so
hungry.
‘Petty fors’ had turned out to be delicious little chocolates. Ivy had only managed to swipe three of them. She could have eaten the whole tray.

As quietly as she could, she climbed out of the coffin and headed downstairs. Now that everyone was in bed, the house was colder, but the light of the moon and her uber-vamp eyesight meant that she could make out everything clearly.

The mansion was silent until her bare foot made a step creak. She quickly hopped to the next one, which creaked even louder.

It’s like I’m walking on a giant, badly tuned piano,
she thought. The portraits on the wall seemed to be frowning at her.

Finally, after four creaky flights she made it downstairs and snuck down the hall into the kitchen.

She paused, listening at the door. There was
no sound inside.
I’m sure I can unearth something in this huge kitchen,
she thought as she went in.

Her head filled with images of the wagyu burgers that Alex had described.
Mmm,
she thought, but then pushed them from her mind.
Nothing fancy, just filling.

She tried the huge walk-in refrigerator. The doors opened to reveal shelves full of delicious-looking things to eat.

Ivy didn’t want to get in more trouble by messing up a recipe or taking something she shouldn’t but, to her delight, she found a box of four pieces of cold meat-lovers’ pizza tucked away behind a jar of Platelet Paste and a stack of sausages. There was a note scrawled on it that read, ‘For N, C mustn’t see.’

Ivy chuckled to herself. Her grandfather Nicholas was trying to hide pizza from her grandmother Caterina.
I’ll never tell,
Ivy thought,
as long as you don’t mind me taking a piece or two.

She pulled off two pieces and grabbed a carton of blood orange juice. Back in the relative warm of the kitchen, she sat on a stool in the dark and gobbled down her midnight feast. In the silence, Ivy looked around. The kitchen was immaculate but old. Copper pots hung from the ceiling and there were embers in the big fireplace in the middle.

As she licked the last bit of sauce off her fingers, she decided to leave a note, in case the Count wondered what had happened to his pizza. There were a few pens in a canister on the countertop, so she grabbed one, slipped back into the walk-in fridge and wrote, ‘Ivy’s stomach says THANK YOU!’ and drew a little smiley face with fangs.

She hurried out of the kitchen but before she could head towards the stairs to her bedroom,
she heard a gasping noise. Ivy froze.

Someone else is awake!
In an instant, she was back in Operation-Night-Stalker mode.
Who could it be?
She pressed herself against the wall – keeping a careful eye out for vases – and crept towards the noise. There was a door slightly ajar, so Ivy peered in through the crack.

Tessa, the maid, was sitting on a stool, crying softly. Ivy remembered how short the Queen had been with her.

‘Tessa, are you –’ Ivy’s words dried up as a strong hand clamped down on her shoulder. She whirled around. ‘Horatio!’ she gasped. He looked frightening in the night-time gloom.

‘You should not skulk in the dark, Miss Ivy,’ he said. ‘You might scare me.’ He chuckled.

‘Me? Scare
you?’
Ivy said, her heart still racing.

He began to walk her back towards the staircase and Ivy glanced back over her shoulder
at the door Tessa was behind, hoping she would be OK.

‘Your father did once,’ he admitted. ‘He and his brothers always try one trick or another. Little Karl . . . Charles . . . was most ingenious. One night, he hid behind armour and played taperecorded sounds of dogs barking. When I fled, he followed, playing other sounds like scratching and growling.’ The giant butler shook his head. ‘I do not like dogs.’

Ivy smiled.

‘Happy times,’ Horatio said.

Ivy touched him on his gigantic forearm. ‘It will be happy times again.’

Horatio nodded. ‘Now, it is well past casket-time. You should be sleeping.’

Ivy gave him a quick hug and began the long climb up to her bedroom.

As she crept back into her coffin, Ivy
wondered why poor Tessa had been crying all by herself.
I’ll talk to her tomorrow,
she vowed. She knew what it was like to feel lonely and unhappy.

Olivia watched out of the car window for any sign of the palace. It had snowed overnight and there was a coating of white over everything.

‘This is quite an honour,’ the Countess said. She sat in the front seat of the luxurious eight-seater car, wearing a high-collared ebony jacket over her embroidered dress and short black gloves.

Olivia had chosen her light pink turtleneck and floor-length grey skirt with a wide grey belt and hoped she wasn’t under-dressed. Her blue pea coat was on the seat next to her, in case they were outside at all.

‘Yes!’ came an exclamation from Ivy, who was sitting beside her in her black sweater, pinstripe fitted skirt and multi-buckle boots. She
was frantically pressing buttons on her phone. ‘Cell-phone signal!’

Olivia’s new phone buzzed in her bag. There were two texts from her mom, which she sent a quick reply to, explaining that there wasn’t a good signal at the house, and a third text from Jackson. It just said, ‘See ya.’

She re-read it seven times.

What does that mean?

Did he send that before she left? Was it a friendly goodbye? Or was it some horribly casual way of breaking it off? It seemed cryptic. No smiley faces, no ‘Love, Jackson’. Olivia rubbed her forehead, feeling a headache coming on.

What if she didn’t see him soon? She didn’t even know what town he was going to next. She wanted to ask Ivy about it, but she couldn’t in a car full of adults.

The first chance she had, she would talk to
Ivy about this. Her twin would know what to do. She went back to gazing at the Transylvanian countryside as it sped past the car. Dark, forbidding forests and heavy grey skies. It was so unfamiliar and just made her think how Jackson was thousands of miles away.

‘Holy Water!’ Ivy whispered to Olivia.

As they drove up the semi-circular gravel driveway, Ivy realised that the Queen’s estate made her grandparents’ house look like a shed. The two of them peered up at the sculptures of eagles with their wings spread, perched on the top of the stone turret above the entrance.

‘It’s incredible,’ Olivia whispered back, but she wasn’t really looking. Ivy wondered if her sister’s mind was somewhere else.

Horatio pulled to a stop and climbed out to open the car door. Ivy emerged to see four
uniformed staff waiting at the ornate iron doors to greet them.

As she stepped out of the cold wind into the grand entrance, there was no sign of the royal family, but an older woman was calling out to a man who was adjusting light kits and reflectors at the bottom of a sweeping gilded staircase.

‘Perfect, daaahling!’ she said and swept her floor-length blue coat behind her. The golden flower embroidery on it flashed in the light. Her stark white curls were tamed by a wide clip with an enormous blue and green peacock feather.

Ivy knew that incredible style. ‘Georgia Huntingdon!’ she said.

The woman whirled around and her blood-red lips split into a wide smile.

‘Ivy, darling!’ She floated over and air-kissed her on both cheeks. ‘And Olivia!’

Olivia looked startled to see the editor of
VAMP
magazine.

‘As soon as I heard you two were in Transylvania, connecting with your noble roots,’ Georgia purred, ‘I simply
had
to capture the event.’

‘And we were happy to let her,’ the Countess said, air-kissing Georgia.

Mr Vega cleared his throat. ‘I wish you had consulted me first, Mother,’ he said quietly.

The Countess looked horrified to have upset her son. ‘Oh, darling, I –’

But she was interrupted by a voice from the top of the red-carpeted staircase.

‘I thought the palace would be the perfect backdrop for a photo shoot,’ said Prince Alex, who was watching them from above. He bowed to his guests before stepping lightly down the stairs. He wore a black suit jacket over a white
T-shirt and jeans – he somehow looked modern and classical at the same time.

Ivy realised that everyone else had dropped into a little curtsy or bow and she hurriedly followed suit.

As usual, one step behind,
Ivy thought.
At least Georgia is familiar, like a little piece of home.

‘Welcome to the palace,’ Alex said to everyone, his glance lingering on Olivia.

Olivia curtsied again. ‘It’s an honour.’

‘The honour is mine,’ he said and reached out to kiss her hand.