Almost to Die For

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  About the Author

  Praise for the Novels of Tate Hallaway

  “[Hallaway’s] concise writing style, vivid descriptions, and innovative plot all blend together to provide the reader with a great new look into the love life of witches, vampires, and the undead.”

  —Armchair Interviews

  “What’s not to adore? . . . Tate Hallaway has a wonderful gift, Garnet is a gem of a heroine, and Tall, Dark & Dead is enthralling from the first page.”

  —MaryJanice Davidson, New York Times bestselling author of Undead and Unworthy

  “Tate Hallaway kept me on the edge of my seat . . . a thoroughly enjoyable read!”

  —Julie Kenner, USA Today bestselling author of Demon Ex Machina

  “Curl up on the couch and settle in—Tall, Dark & Dead is a great way to pass an evening.”

  —Lynsay Sands, New York Times bestselling author of Tall, Dark & Hungry

  “Will appeal to readers of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series.”

  —Booklist

  “This paranormal romance overflows with danger, excitement, and mayhem; however, whenever things become too stressful, a healthy dose of irony or comedy shows up to ease the way. Tate Hallaway has an amazing talent for storytelling.”

  —Huntress Book Reviews

  “Funny and captivating . . . in the style of the Sookie Stackhouse series [with] an intrepid and expressive heroine. . . . Look out, fans of the paranormal, there’s a new supernatural heroine in town. . . . Tate Hallaway is an author to watch!”

  —Romance Reviews Today

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  First published by New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, August 2010

  Copyright © Lyda Morehouse, 2010 All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Hallaway, Tate.

  Almost to die for: a vampire princess novel/Tate Hallaway. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-45882-2

  1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Vampires—Fiction. 3. Witches—Fiction. 4. Chick lit. I. Title. PS3608.A54825A79 2010

  813’.6—dc22 2010010401

  Set in Minion

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  For Shawn and Mason

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank my editor, Anne Sowards, for her vision for this series, and my tireless agent, Martha Millard, for making it happen. I also need to specially thank those who read the book in process, the Wyrdsmiths—Bill Henry, Doug Hulick, Kelly McCullough, and Sean M. Murphy, but particularly my friend and mentor Eleanor Arnason, who kept me company in my dark hours, and Naomi Kritzer, a great and true friend, who read the whole thing and made it so very much better.

  My family gets a mention as well. Shawn Rounds, of course, who not only supported me with many there, theres but also acts as my first-run copy editor and plot maven extraordinaire. My son, Mason, who is a great sounding board for the cool vampire and witchy stuff, and if you ask him, he’ll tell you quite seriously: he figured out the plot.

  To the staff at Amore Coffee in St. Paul, who supplied me with much-needed caffeine and who patiently listened to me whine about deadlines and the writer’s life, I must also give a huge thanks.

  And, of course, my parents, Rita and Mort Morehouse, without whom none of this, quite literally, would be possible.

  One

  Guess what? Today was my sixteenth birthday. Pretty cool, huh? Sure, if by “cool” you mean worst day ever . . . and it was only noon.

  I sat in Stassen High School’s cafeteria staring at “tuna surprise.” Let me tell you: it was a surprise all right. I was surprised it passed the health code. It was gray, for crying out loud. Food should not be gray.

  Also, my birthday might be tolerable if I lived somewhere exciting, but no, I’d be turning sixteen in nowheresville: St. Paul, Minnesota.

  I pushed the glutinous mush around its little container. At least the potatoes looked edible. My stomach growled, so I poked a forkful into my mouth. I sighed. What I really wanted was my turkey sandwich, or at least someone I could joke around with about the whole stupid situation.

  But no. I was sitting alone.

  Bea was supposed to be here. Sometime in middle school we had made a solemn blood vow. We’d always sit together at lunch so neither of us would ever have to look like that sad, lonely loser.

  Hello—yes, that’d be me! Loser in corner number one.

  On my birthday, no less.

  Bea—Beatrice Theodora Braithwaite to her mother—was my kind-of sort-of best friend. She was the only person in school with a more arcane name than I. Get a load of this: Anastasija Ramses Parker. Yeah.
You can see why most people just call me Ana.

  Anyway, Bea and I, we’ve known each other since second grade. That’s a lot of history. It’s hard not to be close to someone you borrowed your first tampon from, giggled your way through puppy-love crushes with, and survived that god-awful middle school sex education with. Though, honestly, I don’t always like her. We’re pretty different. Bea has diva tendencies, and I lean toward being a bookish shrinking violet. But we’ve been kind of thrown together by fate because she’s the only other True Witch at school.

  It’s a secret, but real magic exists. True Witches can make shit happen. Not just that New Agey feel-good stuff, but, like, things you’d notice: storms, sickness, dead cattle. You know, all the stuff we used to get burned at the stake for. That’s why we don’t talk about it.

  There were plenty of Wiccans at school and elsewhere, of course. It’s all the rage to be a teen witch, but Bea and I could do real magic.

  Or at least Bea could.

  I was supposed to be able to. I had the pedigree, but, well, something was off. Maybe it was the same off something that made one of my eyes ice blue and the other a deep mahogany brown.

  When a chair scraped the linoleum floor, I looked up expectantly. Perhaps Queen Bea had finally deigned to put in an appearance. Well, better late than never.

  Instead of Bea, it was Matt Thompson, hockey jock extraordinaire, and two of his cronies, Thing One and Thing Two, who sat down at my table. Between you and me, I had this secret crush on Thompson. He was pretty in that classic square-jaw, he-man way, okay? I appreciated the way his ultrashort, nut-brown hair curled at the tips, and the boy did have a way of fitting into a T-shirt and jeans that was pretty . . . noticeable.

  Too bad he was such an asshole.

  “If it isn’t Ana Parker, Witch Girl.” He made it sound like some kind of superhero moniker. His buddies chortled.

  I retorted with, “What do you want, Thompson? Did you get lost on your way to Caveman 101?” Which was a pretty snappy comeback for me, considering the quivering in my stomach. Guys like Thompson could smell fear, so I tried to hide mine under an air of contempt.

  His friends looked at each other with perfect Neanderthal, heavy-eyebrow frowns and shrugged as if they didn’t get the joke. Thompson, meanwhile, didn’t let it faze him. “How come you’re all on your lonesome, anyway? Couldn’t conjure up some friends? ”

  Oh, touché, you maestro of wit and repartee.

  Thing One and Thing Two, however, found his little pun absolutely hilarious.

  “Right. Ha. Ha,” I said. My tough-girl facade cracked a bit. These sorts of scenes never broke in favor of the geek. If I wasn’t careful, there was going to be a drink in my face or some other embarrassment in my future. Worse, I knew I’d fare much better if Bea were here as backup. Why were they still harassing me, anyway? Usually Thompson and his crew did flyby potshots and left Bea and me alone. Was this his sad, grade school way of flirting?

  “Careful, man,” said Thing One. “She might put a hex on us.”

  I wish. The sad thing was that these three boys were perfectly safe from little ol’ me. I was a dud in the magic department. But they didn’t know that. No one did, not even Bea. That was my own special secret. One I tried to keep from myself. If I wasn’t a True Witch, then I was just a plain old loser, wasn’t I?

  Ironically, I could tell that underneath the huff and gruff, the boys were a teeny bit nervous at calling me out. After all, if Bea were here, they might easily find a colony of spiders in their gym shorts, or locker combinations that no longer worked.

  For real.

  The only thing I had going for me was that I totally looked the part of a witch. I had long, wicked straight hair complete with a slight widow’s peak right in the center of my pale, pasty forehead. Okay, Bea said my complexion was porcelain, but I always felt ghostly white and washed out . . . except for my eyes. I hardly needed mascara for the thick lashes that made my mismatched eyes stand out. It was my biggest weapon against guys such as Thompson and his crew.

  So I turned my patented “spooky eye” on them. It was a look I’d perfected over the years. I squinted directly at Thompson with the ice-cold blue eye. I muttered under my breath about hex and flex and sex and T. rex and other rhyming words because, you know, people expect spells to rhyme.

  They looked nervous. Thing Two’s Adam’s apple bobbed. Glances flitted among them. Thompson tried to act as if he was unimpressed, but suddenly he saw someone he knew across the room. “Hey, there’s Yvonne. I need to talk to her about the band coming to her house party.” As he stood up to flee, Thompson mustered one last bit of nasty. “Too bad you’ll never be popular enough to be invited to a house party, freak.”

  “Boo!” I said.

  Thompson jumped and uttered a sound not unlike a squeak. Thing One—or maybe it was Two—actually snickered.

  Score one for the freak! I only wished I didn’t feel like he might be right about me. Thompson swaggered over to flirt with Yvonne Jackson, whom everyone figured he’d take to homecoming, since she was, after all, the captain of the cheerleading squad. So cliché. I watched them surreptitiously as I attempted to ingest the edible parts of lunch. He leaned in to talk to her, propping himself on the table with his elbows, which made his pecs bulge. She giggled. It was gross, really, but . . .

  Here I was, turning sixteen on the sixteenth, and was I having any kind of party? Would there be music and dancing or anything cool? Would I get any presents? No. Tonight, what I had to look forward to was a long, boring drive to a cabin in the far suburbs while Bea and my mom chatted on like the whole thing wouldn’t flop.

  The cabin was our “covenstead,” the place where our group of those capital-letter True Witches practiced magic in secret. Once there, I’d get to fail spectacularly in front of everyone when I was called on to perform a simple elemental spell as part of my official Initiation, or welcoming into the Inner Circle.

  Only there wouldn’t be any welcoming.

  Because after I fubared the ritual, my mother would cry. I’d be shunned, cast out of the coven, and I’d finish my days at Stassen High School just like this: sitting alone at lunch, while everyone—everyone, even Bea—thought I was a weirdo freak.

  It was going to be so awesome.

  And I still hadn’t even made it halfway through the day yet.

  Whee.

  Two

  I caught up with Bea right before sixth-period drama class. Even though I’m pretty shy most of the time, I love theater. I’ve been in every play since I scored the part of the crazy sister in The Madwoman of Chaillot in junior high. Of course, I’m usually typecast: one of the three Wyrd Sisters in Macbeth, the Wicked Witch of the West in Wizard of Oz, Medea in Medea, etc. But theater was the one place my odd looks actually played to my advantage.

  “Where were you at lunch?” I asked her. We’d stopped outside her locker, which was right next to Mr. Martinez’s drama class. She dropped her math book into the pile of detritus cluttering the floor of the tiny space. I wondered whether she’d find it again without sending in a search party. “I had to sit by myself.”

  “Aw, poor baby,” she teased. She patted my cheek patronizingly. “Ooo had to sit all by ooo-self.”

  Did I mention that I sometimes didn’t like Bea all that much? I shrugged it off. I mean, I knew she didn’t mean any harm. She always rallied on the side of sisterhood when it mattered. “Yeah, well, you missed me giving Thompson the evil eye.”

  “I heard about that, actually.” Bea smiled and looped her arm around mine as if I were escorting her ladyship to the ball. We must have looked quite the pair. She had on a black jumper over a pink-and-black-striped, long-sleeved shirt and matching leggings. She wore her hair in girlish pigtails that showed off the pink streaks in her dyed black hair.

  For myself, I’ll admit that I adhered to the Goth palette. It was black with black and black for me, though in deference to my birthday I’d jazzed up my usual slim jeans, tank top, and lo
ng-sleeved button-up with a heavy silver ankh necklace and my fancier boots.

  “What was it you heard?” I asked, pausing just outside the door to class.

  “That you hexed him. He tripped in chemistry class and spilled some kind of crazy acid all over the table. They had to get out the hazmat suits to clean it up. You go, girl.”

  I frowned at Bea’s exaggeration. I was sure there were no hazmat suits involved. More to the point, I knew I hadn’t hexed him. No magic had come out of me. I was certain. I might not have been able to perform a lick of real magic, but I’d always been able to keep my secret because I could feel spells working. I could tell when energy peaked and when anyone around me was using even the smallest amount.

  I’d done to Thompson what I’d done my whole life when it came to magic: I faked it.

  I let my hand slip from her arm. Bea, meanwhile, was smiling at me like the damned Cheshire cat. “I was wondering when you’d get off your high horse and finally zap somebody,” Bea said with a playful poke to my ribs. “The Wiccan Rede is for Wiccans, not True Witches.”

  It was Bea’s favorite thing to say in situations such as this. She didn’t really get behind “an it harm none” and all the do-unto-others parts of the Rede. She figured crap like “for the greatest good of all” was for people who couldn’t do at all. Zap the bad-dies. That was her motto.

  Me, I was less sure. I mean, karma has a way of biting you on the butt when you least expect it.

  Luckily I didn’t have to respond to Bea because the first bell rang. We hurried into class.

  THE ENTIRE CLASS WAS TAKING turns reading lines from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night while Mr. Martinez occasionally broke in to explain some ancient terminology or an obtuse (but usually raunchy) joke. I was normally totally into this class, but today my mind wandered.