"...and he's staring at me like I just crapped on his shoe right in the middle of class."

We all burst out laughing as we walked to the senior carpark.

"Jeez, I seriously thought you must have grabbed him under the table or something," Mick, another friend of Jessie's, grinned at me as he held my car door open for me. I smiled as I waved at Jessie and Angel as they pulled out of the lot.

Mick lent on the top of the car door as I slid onto the seat. "So, Ella..."

"Yeah?" I dropped my keys, and bent down to retrieve them.

"I was thinking..." He began, brows drawn together.

"Wow." I feigned shock. He smirked back.

"I was thinking about the prom."

My head shot up so fast that I bashed myself with the steering wheel.

"Shit!" Wincing, I sat up. Mick was looking at me with his eyebrows raised. "Oh! Not you." I said quickly. Then I recalled his last words. "Wait, prom?"

"Yeah." He raised an eyebrow. "You know, tuxedos, fluffy skirts, gatecrashers, spiked punch and the Geography teacher puking in the bushes."

I didn't know what to say. I had never been invited anywhere before. Mike carried on like he had never noticed my reaction.

"So I was wondering if you'd mind putting in a good word for me with Jessie."

My expectations popped like a balloon.

"Oh." I said. "I guess so."

Mike smiled, letting me close my car door. "Ta, Ella." I leant out the window.

"But if you turn into a sleaze before the ball, this fairy godmother will deny this conversation ever took place."

"You're a mate, Ella." He said. "Listen, a few of us are going down to the reservation at the end of the week, just for a bit of a get together."

"The reservation?"

"Yeah. Old man Black owns the place, but he's pretty cool for an old guy." I vaguely recalled the Black clan. Chuck had mentioned them in his brief history of Fawkes. "As long as we clean up after ourselves, he's got no problem."

"Cool."

"I'll give you a call."

Suddenly I heard a loud engine roar into life somewhere off to the side, and both Mike and myself turned in the direction of the noise. I leant out the window further to see. Who owned the noisy engine surprised me entirely.

Eddie Collins was behind the wheel of a beat-up old pickup that looked like it should have been left in the eighties whence it came. The only thing that stopped me laughing out loud was the fact that the old beast could have sliced through my more modern Ford like it was made of paper.

Eddie didn't spare me a glance as he drove past. Mike snorted.

"With his old man a doctor, you'd think he'd be able to afford something a little more classy than a load of spare parts held together with rust and prayers." He commented. "Catch you 'round, Swain-o."

I didn't sit at that table in biology again. The next day I was waved over to join Jessie and Angel at their table and that unofficially became my spot until the end of the year. I had been fully integrated into the pack. I was actually starting to feel good about myself, and it had been a long time since I could say that.

And then Eddie Collins came back on the scene.

It all started innocently enough, in the line for the cafeteria. We bumped shoulders and I mumbled sorry without looking up.

"It's alright."

It was him. I dared a glance at him, gauging his mood. He looked relaxed in t-shirt and jeans, and he eyed me curiously with apparently no hint of his previous antagonism.

"Hi, Ella."

Up until now, I had been fairly confident he had no idea what my name even was. I looked him full in the face, staring straight into those strange eyes.

They were not black, like I had first thought, nor were they brown, hazel or any other variation upon. As a matter of fact, they were the deepest, darkest, most gorgeous blue I had ever seen. Coupled with dangerous, dark good looks, instantly Eddie Collins went from being That Asshole to I-Can't-Believe-He's-Actually-Talking-To-Me.

"Hello." I said formally.

"I was looking for you in Biology today."

"I skipped first period. Why, were you looking forward to inflicting some more psychological trauma?"

For a moment his serious expression flickered and he might have even smiled, but I blinked and missed it. The canteen line moved forward minutely.

"I wanted to apologise."

"Okay." I said.

"Okay." He said.

"I'll accept your apology that you were being a jerk and we shall resume the status quo by ignoring the very fact of each other's existence."

There. The conditions whereupon I would accept Eddie's truce. I was routinely attracted to bad boys, but there was something about this guy that set alarm bells off in my head.

"I accept your conditions, madam."

"Truce."

"Truce."

We briefly shook hands to seal the deal, and then I swiftly lost sight of him. I rubbed my chin, my eyes narrowing. Something was going on here, something that merited further research.

And then something even weirder began to happen. Seemingly innocently, Eddie began to turn up at all the places that I came to frequent, and hung around me for longer than I was entirely comfortable with. If I heard another 'Oh, Ella, what a surprise,' I was going to rip his tongue out through his ribcage. I couldn't shake the feeling that he was following me, staking me out sizing me up. In my mind the youngest Collins brother fit the stereotype of a serial killer a little too well, and the image of being stuffed into a barrel of acid and left to slowly decompose was never far from my thoughts.

It was Jessie that gave me the idea when I shared my woes. "Well, why don't you counter-stalk?"

I couldn't believe how brilliant the idea was, and how it had managed to allude me for so long. I decided I was going to be a counter-stalker.

I was going to find out who the Collins' family were.

So, between assignments and papers, that week I began to amass every scrap of information about the Collins family that I could find. Public honours Carl Collins had been awarded, sporting presentations Emmett had received, acknowledgement to contributions to art for Alice, and even cooking prizes for Esme Collins. Every new piece of information lead to the looming conclusion that they were the perfect Brady Bunch blended family.

I could smell a rat.

But from the smattering of information I was able to locate, I had managed to cobble together a rough timeline.

Dr Collins had moved the family to Fawkes from Canberra two years ago, and that in itself was highly suspicious as he left a high paid specialist position in the city to become a GP in the country. He wasn't Esme's first husband, and the lady of the house seemed content with the life they now lead, immersing herself in the Country Women's Association and town activities.

The couple seemed entirely too wholesome to be real.

The kids were a different story entirely. Alice was the artistic rebel, and had taken part in several student protests since she started school. Emmett and Rosalie were both all attitude, and although they were good students, the pair of them were known for telling off the people they had a problem with. Jasper was in a world of his own, studious and distancing himself from most people aside from Alice.

I could barely find anything out about Eddie. It seemed that the whole time he had been in Fawkes, he hadn't done anything remarkable or stood out in any way. I even resorted to peeking at my father's police rap sheets, but apparently my stalker was also incredibly boring.

I sat at my desk staring at Eddie's rap sheet, my eyes tired. I scratched my head, and absently moving Chuck's last police incident report beside it. I leant back, crossing my hands behind my head, not really expecting anything to emerge. I looked down for a moment. And then I looked.

"Oh my God," I gasped.

For the last two years, at least, an average of five Fawkes residents had been reported missing roughly every two months. Thirty people a year. But that wasn't what froze me to my seat.

Each incident corresponded exactly with the frequent trips the Collins family took away from Fawkes.

I stared at the papers, horrified, pictures of bodies stuffed in barrels dancing through my head.

That night was the night of the party.

I popped another soda open. New Girl had been unanimously selected to be the designated driver for this function. As most of my peers were well on their way to getting hammered, I praised Chuck's brilliance in suggesting to cover the seats with sheets of plastic before I left the house.

I stood up, drink in hand, stepping over some of the prone-but-breathing forms of my classmates. You wouldn't believe it now, but it had actually started as a reasonably tame get-together. But then the younger people of the reservation dropped in to see what we were doing, and the elder ones among them brought beer.

Approve or not, it was easy to guess what would happen next. I sat down near a dark-skinned boy who I noticed had been resolutely sticking the soft drinks the whole night.

"Hi. I'm Ella Swain."

He glanced at me, and flashed a smile. "Jack Black." He said. "Cute and deadly."

I liked him immediately.

As we talked about random, unimportant things, the party formed itself into a ring about the fire, and one by one my group of friends began telling each other scary stories that they had apparently had not grown out of yet. Each trying to spook the others.

About halfway through a ripping yarn about wraithlike vampires and swashbuckling werewolves, Jack snorted with something akin to contempt. I turned my attention back to him. "You have something better, Wolf Man?" I asked, semi-seriously.

Jack gave a cheeky smile. "You bet your sweet ass I do."

That was when he stood up and clapped his hands to get everybody's attention. I grabbed at his shirt to try and get him to sit down, but he just grinned at me and winked.

"Thanks for your attention, everybody." He began. "Not to interrupt the festivities, but I just realised that Ella hasn't been here very long. She doesn't know our ways. Shouldn't we tell her the true history of the town? The shockingly supernatural aspects and all?" Jack was cheered on. I covered my eyes.

"It all began before Fawkes was even a town." Jack's voice rang out through the trees. "Many a bloody skirmish was fought upon these lands, but there was one ongoing battle that had cost more lives than any other."

Although all the others had doubtless heard this urban legend before, they all sat with baited breath, waiting for Jack to speak. "This war was between the lycanthropes and the vampires."

I let my breath out in a whoosh. A cute, younger man, and he probably has posters of Buffy all over his bedroom walls. Just my luck.

"It was a time where men lived by the sword and died by the sword. Many lives were lost, and not just those of the two warring races. These armies would have fought to the last man, the last child, but in the end it was not either werewolf or vampire that won. It is said that since then Fawkes has been a safe haven for beasts of the supernaturally inclined."

"Who won?" I asked, but my question was drowned out in the sudden rushing of conversation. Jack bowed with a flourish, grinned at me once more, and then vanished among the trees.

I sat there, among my friends, unbearably alone, certain that Jack had been trying to pass me on a message of some kind. Or perhaps I was just being paranoid.

And then it hit me.

Impossibly pale for living under the Australian sun, the I-will-disembowel-you looks, the lack of records, the searing eyes on the back of my neck, like he was looking for the right place to bite...

One could not mistake the sound of Eddie's truck for that of anything else. I waited by the gate, armed with all I knew. The town reeked of mystery, and I was seriously hoping that I had figured part of it out.

Eddie got out, gave a casual wave to his sister Alice, and then proceeded up the front steps, where I was quick to accost him.

"Eddie."

He looked up at me. I couldn't read his expression, but something akin to fear flashed through those dark blue eyes. "Ella."

"Could I have a word?"

"Um..." He stepped away from school a little. For the first time I had met him, he actually looked a little awkward. As soon as he felt sure that no one was watching us, he turned his attention back on me. "Okay."

"I think I've figured out what this is about." I began. I could tell by his face that he was still playing the confused card.

"What what is about?" He asked.

I snorted disbelievingly. "You."

"Me?"

"Following me about, trying to put me off the scent."

"The scent of what?"

"Don't tell me you don't know about the disappearing people. Why are you stalking me?" I demanded.

"What?" He exclaimed. "Ella, this is a town of three thousand people, of course you're going to see the same people more than you'd like."

I was going to get to the bottom of this, even if I had to kick it out of him. "You've been following me around!" I accused. "Staking me out like you're figuring out the best angle of attack."

"Don't be rid-"

"What are you?!"

Finally something inside Eddie snapped. He seized my wrist and pulled me behind the gym. "You want to know what I am? Fine." He said through gritted teeth. "But first, you tell me what you are, you with your eyes that change colour all the time, and your weird mood swings, why you can pluck thoughts out of other people's heads, and why, why does everyone in the school adore you when you've only been here a week?"

He released my wrist. His grip would have bruised a normal person. I stood there, horrified, knowing that in trying to uncover his secrets, he had uncovered mine.

"You know what I am." Eddie said in an ugly voice. "And I know what you are. You are scum."

He turned and walked away, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

The Collins family weren't vampires like I had originally thought, originally hoped.

They were vampire hunters.

And, quite frankly, I was scared to death.

Hi, I'm Ella Swain, and I'm a vampire.