Vampires Don't Sparkle! Read online

  Vampires Don’t Sparkle!

  Mia Archer

  Beymer Books

  Contents

  The Story So Far…

  1. School Lunch

  2. Saved by the Bell

  3. Rescue

  4. Geekpire

  5. Chase

  6. Sneaking Away

  7. Vampire Hunter

  8. Dead Girl

  9. Living Dead Girl

  10. Stacy the Vampire Slayer

  11. The Other Side

  12. Angry Girlfriend

  13. Out of Town

  14. On Our Own

  15. Armed and Dangerous

  16. Band Geeks

  17. Vampires

  18. Dead Girl

  19. Undead Girl

  20. Deception

  21. After School

  22. Blood Ritual

  23. Waking Up Dead

  24. Local PD

  25. Geekpire

  26. Vampire Disposal

  27. Geekpire

  28. Cheer Chase

  29. Girl on Girl

  30. Lovers’ Lane

  31. Head Cheerleader

  32. Exorcising the Demon

  33. Still Sucking

  34. Yearbook

  35. Pep Rally

  36. Dead Again

  37. Vampire Killer

  38. Head Vampire

  39. All In Your Head

  40. Back to School

  41. New Students

  42. Full Moon

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  Also by Mia Archer

  Vampires Don’t Sparkle!

  By Mia Archer

  Copyright 2019 Mia Archer

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Individuals pictured on the cover are models and used for illustrative purposes only.

  First digital edition electronically published by Beymer Books, August 2019

  Thanks for downloading this story and supporting me!

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  Created with Vellum

  The Story So Far…

  What you have on your ereader is the sequel to A Date With Death. “A sequel?” you might be asking yourself right now. “Why would I read a sequel if I haven’t read the first one?”

  The good news is this book works as a standalone or as a sequel! I’ve written the Gwen Reaper series so that each entry stands on its own, but with some plot threads that go from book to book.

  If you haven’t read A Date With Death and would like to give it a try, click here to give it a read!

  If you just want the basics so you’re up to speed for this book then keep reading!

  Gwen is a grim reaper. The family business is ferrying recently deceased souls to the other side. She didn’t want to go into the family business, but it’s not like fate gave her much choice.

  In A Date With Death she went toe-to-toe with a former friend turned necromancer who was trying to take over the school by stealing people’s souls and turning them into zombies. Along the way she fell in love with the girl of her dreams, Stacy, and ended up saving the day and the school.

  There you go! Nice and quick. Now on to the new story!

  1

  School Lunch

  “I’m not sure what I think of this whole yoga pants thing,” Arnold said.

  I looked up at him and hit him with a warning glare. Not that it did much. It didn’t help that Stacy turned to look where he was looking and saw a girl walking past wearing, sure enough, a pair of yoga pants that looked like it wouldn’t exactly be cutting mustard when it came to the school dress code.

  Not that anyone was stopping her. I didn’t know the girl, but I could see why she would be a distraction. I also thought it was weird I’d never seen that girl before. She had dark hair down to her shoulders and looked pretty fair skinned, and when she turned to look at me she smiled a thin little smile that said she knew what I was doing.

  I blushed and looked away. I also noticed that Stacy didn’t do the same, so I reached over and smacked her.

  She blinked a couple of times and looked at me. Then it was her turn to blush as she realized what I’d caught her doing.

  “Sorry about that,” she said. “There was something about that girl.”

  “I’m going to forget I heard you say that,” I said with a sniff.

  “Whatever you goof,” she said, leaning in for a kiss. “You know you’re the only one for me.”

  I turned to look at everyone else around the table. The living people around the table, that is. Not that they thought it was all that weird to see me having conversations with people they couldn’t see.

  After everything that happened at homecoming that cat was sort of out of the bag. Oops. There was no going back. They knew there was something up with me.

  The fact that one of the coaches had totally been taping the game that night and that recording had totally caught a girl in black robes with a scythe leaping over a crowd of zombies to do battle with a necromancer, and that video had somehow leaked to the Internet when some enterprising student realized what they had, probably didn’t help.

  I did like some of the remixes people had done with the video though. I was particularly fond of one that used music from some old cartoon called Metalocalypse or something weird.

  “Right,” I said, clearing my throat. “Sorry about that.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” Zach said with a shrug. He turned to have a look at the girl as well. She had the kind of figure that was built for distraction. Then he turned back to me and grinned.

  “Can’t say I blame you for being distracted by something as hot as that.”

  “Would you please not do that when I’m sitting right here?”

  I turned to look at Tiffany. Who was sitting across the table from Lisa. That’d been an interesting interaction. The two couldn’t stand each other, and it’d been a fun little dance the first couple of times it became apparent Zach and Tiffany were a thing to see how far Nicole could get from her while sitting at the same table.

  They couldn’t stand to sit next to one another, but at the same time sitting across from each other meant they were as far as they could get from each other with the limits of what the table offered, while at the same time they could see each other by looking across the thing.

  “Chill out baby,” Zach said, sliding a hand around her. A hand, I might add, that moved down and copped a quick feel before he moved it back up fast enough that he probably thought no one would notice.

  At least he wasn’t hitting on me anymore. Puke.

  “So anyway,” Stacy said. “We were talking about the pep rally coming up?”

  There was a collective groan from the living people at the table.

  “Come on you guys,” Stacy said. “We have to make sure this is perfect. The basketball team went on to regionals last year, and I think we have a really good chance of something even more major happening this year!”

  That only brought more rolling eyes and groans from around the table. It’s not that basketball was something they didn’t care about so much as basketball was one of those things that people only pretended to care about so they could hang out in the bleachers and talk to their friends and socialize and gossip and do whatever else it was people did in the student section I never hung out in because I didn’t care about all that crap.

  At least I hadn’t cared about it before me and Stacy became an item. These days I at least pretended to care because the hot girl I was dating cared about it.

  I think there was more to the awkwardness
though. Like the fact that any time we started talking about sports it naturally had people thinking about homecoming and what everyone wanted to pretend hadn’t happened there. The weird looks I was getting from everyone around the table was proof enough of that.

  I sighed. It was time for me to play the good girlfriend, as much as I hated to do this. I plastered a smile on my face that definitely felt forced and put my arm around Stacy.

  “I’m totally onboard with figuring out what we’re going to do with this pep rally thing,” I said. “So what’s the plan Stacy?”

  I turned to her. She wasn’t talking. Her mouth went a mile a minute when she was talking to me about her plans when we were on our own, and I figured the verbal diarrhea would’ve been forthcoming, but she was staring across the room.

  I frowned. She looked like she’d seen a ghost.

  No, scratch that. Not exactly the best phrasing since she could totally see ghosts after her own time spent on the other side thanks to a necromancer who tried to become popular by killing everyone in the school and raising them as zombies.

  She looked like she’d seen something that worried her, and a ghost wasn’t something that worried her all that much now that she could see them.

  “What’s wrong?” I whispered, leaning in close.

  Everyone else at the table was suddenly pretending they couldn’t see us. Which was pretty much what they did whenever they thought there was something going on that had anything to do with the paranormal.

  That or they were glad to have an excuse to not talk about this big pep rally that would hail the conquering heroes who hadn’t even conquered anything yet considering they had yet to actually win a game.

  “Seriously babe,” I whispered when Stacy didn’t say anything. “What’s going on here?”

  “It’s him,” she hissed.

  “Who?” I asked.

  She hit me with a look that said I was being an idiot. I was more than willing to admit that I could be an idiot, but I wasn’t sure I deserved that look.

  “Him,” she said. “Tall, dark, and sparkly?”

  My eyes went wide as I realized what she was talking about. It took all my self control not to whip my head around and have a look at the dude who’d been trying to put the moves on my girl.

  So I took a fry off my tray. Tried to act totally casual and everything as I chewed on it and turned to look across the cafeteria in the same direction Stacy had been staring.

  It was hard to miss the dude. If it weren’t for the pale skin then the faint sparkling he gave off would’ve been a sure tipoff that there was something slightly off about the guy. Even then I might’ve thought he was just a dude who was very secure with himself and the liberal application of glitter lotion if it weren’t for the hair.

  He looked like he was trying to cosplay the hottest trend of a decade ago, but there was a feeling I got from the dude as I looked at him. I wasn’t sure if it was a real thing or my imagination, but there was something about him that screamed “vampire!”

  That was the thing about supernatural creatures. They didn’t always look like what people expected them to look like. Mostly because if there was anyone who ever had an encounter with a supernatural creature it was usually short lived and usually resulted in whatever mortal was having that encounter running straight into their mortality.

  I was different though. I was a reaper. I was an avatar of Death on this world, tasked with ferrying the spirits of the recently deceased to the other side.

  Only I’d discovered there was more to it than that when I’d taken on a childhood acquaintance who turned into a necromancer and tried to take over the school. I’d discovered that we also took on supernatural things that tried to cause too many unnatural deaths, and I was itching for a fight with this particular vampire who’d been hitting on Stacy in biology class over the past week.

  I tried to tell myself it wasn’t jealousy that he’d been moving in on my girl, but honestly. I was kidding myself if I thought that’s not what it was.

  Only there was something about this guy that seemed a little off. A little wrong, even for the image of a vampire.

  “Is he reading a D&D book?” I asked, squinting to try and get a better look.

  “A what?” Stacy asked.

  I opened my mouth to explain what D&D was, then decided better of it. That was something I knew about because Graham had always been going on about it, and the fact that king dork and former necromancer Graham had been my chief source for all things D&D told me everything I needed to know about how the conversation would go if I brought it up with my girlfriend Ms. Popularity.

  “Never mind,” I said. “He’s just reading something I totally wouldn’t expect to see in the hands of an undead Casanova.”

  “An undead what?” she asked, sounding more and more excited. “Is that like a special breed of vampire or something? Does he have special powers?”

  I rolled my eyes, but I was careful to do it while I was facing away from Stacy.

  “Something like that,” I muttered, not pulling my attention away from the dude.

  “You’re sure he’s the guy?” I asked.

  “Positive,” Stacy said.

  “Great, then we’re going to do something about this guy,” I said, though I had no idea what the hell I was going to do about a vampire.

  I still barely had any idea what I’d done to fight off a necromancer, and I’d never gotten any lessons in fighting vampires from my dad or any of the other reapers. Then again I hadn’t had any lessons in fighting necromancers and I’d stumbled my way through that well enough.

  “I thought you’d never say something,” Stacy said, reaching into her purse and pulling out a stake. “Lets…”

  “What the hell are you doing?” I hissed.

  She looked at me and blinked, stake still firmly in hand. She looked down at the weapon and then back to me. She blinked a few more times, clearly confused.

  “I mean, I thought that would be pretty obvious right? You said we need to take care of a vampire, and…”

  “Put that thing away and stop acting crazy!” I said, wondering where she even got a stake like that. “We have to be cool about this.”

  “Like hell I’m going to be cool about this,” she growled. “That asshole was sniffing at me like I was a Twinkie or something, and I’m going to show him what we think of creepers who suck the blood of the living around here!”

  “That’s really not a…”

  I sighed. Looked at everyone else around the table for support, but I should’ve known there wouldn’t be any support from any of them. No, they were all pointedly looking away from me. Like they all had better things to do than get in the middle of something that was so obviously supernatural. When I turned back Stacy was gone. Damn it!

  Other people at other tables were looking at us like we were crazy, they’d clearly heard mention of the V word, but they turned away when they saw me looking at them.

  They all knew who was in that video that’d leaked to the Internet, even if no one was actually willing to come up to me and say anything about it.

  I sighed. I had to stop Stacy before she did something stupid like kill a guy who wasn’t actually a vampire and just enjoyed putting a little product and sparkly body lotion on from time to time.

  So I stood and moved to follow her. I just hoped I got to her before she decided to find out whether or not the guy was a vampire by ramming a stake through his heart.

  2

  Saved by the Bell

  Thankfully we were saved by the bell. Or rather the dude who may or may not be a vampire was saved by a bell. And it’s not like he was saved by a bell either. Not really.

  No, it was more like a tone that sounded over the intercom to let everyone know that it was time to leave the lunch room.

  Which meant that before Stacy could get to the guy who may or may not be a vampire, the jury was still very much out on that, people were standing up all around her and getting in her way so
she couldn’t get to the vampire.

  The maybe vampire. The potential vampire? The maybesforatu? Whatever. The glittery dude who might be a bloodsucker. Yeah, that sounded right.

  “Damn it!” Stacy said.

  “I see him making his way to the exit,” Arnold said, hovering close to Stacy. Where “close” was defined as beside her and back just enough that he could get a good look at her ass while he was kissing it. Or maybe he was looking down her shirt. It was hard to tell sometimes.

  I rolled my eyes as I got up to him and flicked at him with a little tendril of death magic. He grabbed his own ass and let out a little wail that had a few people passing through the area looking around in discomfort. As though they’d heard an unpleasant reminder that there was another side waiting for them when they expired and didn’t care for the reminder.

  Then they saw me moving through the crowd near them and they suddenly had other places to be. I was getting that a lot lately, and I still wasn’t sure if it was frustrating or useful.

  More useful now, because they got out of my way which made it easier to get to Stacy before she did something monumentally stupid that we were both going to regret.