Hope you liked the first chapter. This is where the story starts to get a little more interesting. I made up the high school and their town. The guy's name is kind of random and a little cliché, but I've always wanted to name a character this, and he seemed perfect.

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Three days later, a storm rolled in. A big one too – I cleaned the kitchen in celebration. Aside from all of our absences, Cici and I were perfect students. We were always on time, we paid attention in class, and we turned everything in one time. Of course, these things aren't difficult when there's no such thing as sleep. I once read three books in one day: or rather, one day and one night.

Cici was dancing when she came down from her room on Wednesday morning. She had another mirror in her hand, and lucky for it, I was in a good mood today. I drummed my fingers on the table as Cici came to a bouncing halt in the kitchen doorway.

"Finally!" she said cheerfully, a divine smile flashing across her marble-pale face. "It's been ages since we've left the house!"

I noticed with concern that Cici's eyes had darkened to a morose shade of brown overnight. I didn't want to think of what my own eyes looked like – I hadn't fed for over four weeks.

"Yippee – school," I muttered. Cici wasn't fooled – her smile merely widened.

"Guess what?" she said in a bubbly voice as she delicately took a seat across from me at our 'breakfast' table.

I grunted. Cici seemed to take this as some sort of reply.

"We're getting a new student. Didn't you hear? There was an email sent out. He's from…oh where was it…California! Some sort of genius or something, won a scholarship to Middleton."

Middleton was the private high school we attended, located in a remote valley outside of Trent, our hometown. It was supposed to be one of the best in the nation, but I'd attended better.

"Hooray. Maybe he'll like you," I mused sarcastically. Cici grinned and flipped her hair, taking a surreptitious glance in her mirror.

"Anyway," she continued, unfazed by my black humor, "We should get going. What time is it?" She glanced at the antique grandfather clock standing solemnly in a corner. "7:56. Hm. Whatever, we have, like, two minutes." She shrugged and ran her fingers through her hair for the millionth time. I sighed and leaned back in my chair.

"We should be hunting," I murmured offhandedly after a moment. Cici looked up, her expression blank.

"I'm fine," she replied in a quiet voice. Though I'd establish long ago that Cicilia wasn't angry with me for condemning her to this life, she still liked to avoid addressing our 'little problem' as much as possible. I usually complied, always guilty, but my thirst was getting the better of me.

"No, you're not," I said in a voice like black silk. It was my favorite – I'd tried out a few over the years: icy, perky, even an English accent. None of them had quite the same effect on people as 'black silk'. Even Cici cowered a little when I put it on.

"I said I'm fine," she protested weakly.

"Your eyes look like tar," I accused, knowing full well that this would wound her more than anything else I could say. I didn't miss her hurried glance in the mirror. Cici's face fell as she noticed her eye color.

"But Ana…" she groaned. "It's finally raining! We can't miss school on a day like today, it's just stupid! Please? I'm fine, really, we'll go tomorrow!" She put on her puppy-dog face, glancing sideways at me with a slight frown.

I stared at her for a moment, imagining how my night-black gaze would bore into her soul… "Fine. Let's get going."

Immediately, Cicilia seemed to forget our tense conversation.

"Excellent! Wait, I have to get my bag." There was a whisper of wind as she disappeared, a light patter on the steps, and then she reappeared, carrying a huge pink backpack. I grimaced, hefting my own navy-blue bag, and then we dashed out of the house, as fleet as only vampires could be.

We arrived at school at exactly 7:59, and were sitting in the classroom just as the second bell finished ringing. It wasn't that far a walk to Middleton anyway, and a running vampire could travel from our rented Victorian in Trent to the school in less than three minutes.

"Ah – Cicilia, Anastasia – right on time, as always," greeted our math teacher, Mr. Kole. Cici was convinced that Mr. Kole had a crush on me, but I always laughed this off. He was handsome, to be sure, with short sandy blonde hair and sculpted muscles, but he was twenty-five and I was seventeen going on two hundred and thirty-three.

"Can I see your homework?" he asked, already preparing his delighted smile. I produced a piece of paper covered in a smooth, looping scrawl. He ran his gaze down the line of finished math problems, searching for any discrepancies. Of course not: I'd mastered Calculus when I was only one hundred and fourteen. Mr. Kole found one mistake amid Cici's heart-dotted writing. She pouted as he demonstrated how to correctly solve the problem, while I leaned back in my seat and sighed for the second time that day. Cici had forbid me to help her on any schoolwork, determined to pass high school for the first time on her own.

"Excellent, excellent work girls – keep it up!" Mr. Kole commended us, with a glowing grin in my direction. I made no attempt to return it, and after a moment he turned away, crestfallen, to check the other students' homework.

I leaned forward on the desk, my head in my hands. I could hear Cici shuffling around in her bag next to me. Around us, there was a circle of empty desks. Humans tended to avoid both Cici and I like the plague in close quarters, due to our unnatural aura of predatory malice. However, outside the classroom, there was usually a trail of besotted teenage boys following Cici a few safe steps behind.

"Now, I'd like to start out with some basics this morning…" Mr. Kole was saying as he set up the SmartBoard in front of us. I prepared to fabricate a nice, calm daydream to pass away the hour of hideously boring math, when suddenly I heard footsteps outside the door. Cici heard them too, many moments before the other dull humans in the classroom. I counted 57 seconds before the footsteps paused outside our door; 16 seconds as the person outside turned the doorknob, and 14 seconds as they slowly pushed open the door. All in all, a rather swift entry – for a human.

"Ah," exclaimed Mr. Kole, turning away from a math problem that he was copying onto the board. I turned to see who had come into the room, when a tiny gust of wind brushed past my face. It took me three seconds, exactly, to make one of the most momentous decisions of my life.

I had never smelled human blood more potent than that of the boy who had just walked into our classroom. Nor had I ever seen a face that I was more drawn too on a mortal creature than his. And in those three seconds, I fought an epic battle of willpower that came dangerously close to having a drastic, bloody outcome. It was one word from Cici that saved the boy's life.

"Ryan." It was a smooth, almost musical whisper that wound its way past the frontlines of my war. Right in the line of fire, it was a miracle that it didn't get torn apart in the heat of battle. But it didn't, and it took a millisecond for both sides to notice it and pause.

I made an almost imperceptible flick of my eyes toward Cici. Only she noticed.

"Ryan," she said again, answering my unspoken question. "His name is Ryan Delamere."

That one word saved his life. And so in three seconds, Ryan was almost murdered. Almost.

"This is our new student, Ryan Delamere. Ryan, can you introduce yourself?" Mr. Kole asked. I could see him watching me out of the corner of his eye, and the despairing expression on his face when he noticed how focused I was on the new kid's face. Little did he know, I was trying very, very hard to convince myself not to leap out of my seat and snap his neck first, then do in all the students before they had a chance to give me away.

"Anastasia, no," Cici murmured. Her voice only took on this amount of force when she was either very, very angry, or on the verge of tears. At the moment, I guessed it was a combination of both. "You can't. Please…" Ahh…there was the crying voice.

I had gripped the table so hard that my fingers had made four nice grooves in the wood. Without thinking too much about it, I scraped at the edges of the indents, making it look like some bored student had labored away at the table's edge with a pair of dull scissors.

"Er...hi," Ryan began. He stood awkwardly before the class, conscious of the many pairs of eyes staring at him expectantly. It wasn't every day we got a new student from California striding into Calculus. "My name is Ryan Delamere, I just moved to New Hampshire from San Francisco. I, er…I like to write." He glanced desperately at Mr. Kole, who plastered on a fake smile and gestured toward the circle of empty desks.

Cici was the only one who heard me swear violently a few times under my breath. If Ryan sat anywhere near us, I'd be hard pressed to stay calm. I'd stopped breathing the moment I first caught his scent, but if Mr. Kole asked me a question, I'd have to take a breath, and then there was no telling how Ryan's life story would play out – or not at all.

Slowly, as though time itself, even for me, had come to a halt, Ryan took seven steps toward me. Right around step four he glanced up, suddenly conscious of the empty space surrounding Cici and myself. At step five he happened to meet my gaze. His eyes widened, his cheeks went a few shades paler, and his knuckles turned white as he gripped his notebook close to his chest. I was aware of the effect my penetrating black stare had on mortals, but for the time being, I didn't care so much if he was scared out of his mind.

Ryan chose the desk closest to me, rather than sit on the other side of Cici. I wanted to march right over and punch him in the jaw for causing me so much discomfort. Of course, after I punched him in the jaw…my mind began to wander, and with a massive amount of effort I yanked myself back to reality.

Mr. Kole had started again, and luckily he was demonstrating a rather difficult problem, so other people asked a lot of questions and his attention was, for once, not directed at me. I spent the remainder of the class with my eyes staring intently at a minute stain on the corner of my desk, my hands clenched into fists beneath the table, my airways completely closed off. Not a sound escaped me for the duration of the class. Cici watched me out of the corner of her eye as she participated dutifully in the class discussion, but I could see that she was just as tense, prepared to leap up and incapacitate me if I showed even the slightest hint of loosing control. Unfortunately, I knew that if I made the decision to kill Ryan right here and now, she had no chance of stopping me.

It was the longest math class I'd ever sat through in my life. The second I saw the clock hand click towards 9, I was out of my seat, my bag in my hand, and out of the classroom before Mr. Kole had even begun to say we were free to go. I didn't care if he was angry: I needed to get out of the room and far, far away from Ryan Delamere.

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