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surface in the living room was piled high with books. This was not unusual, but the familiar physics journals and academic monographs had vanished. In their place: Interview with the Vampire, Dracula, The Vampire in Romanian Legend, Vampire Nation, The Encyclopedia of the Undead, Love Bites, Fourteen Essays on Vampirism, Twilight, Undead and Unwed, Vampires of Stage and Screen, In Search of Dracula … everything from huge, leather-bound library reference volumes with cracked spines to shiny new paperbacks with luridly embossed covers. Mum must have checked out every book about vampirism from every library in a thirty-mile radius. I wasn’t quite sure what she was expectingto learn from texts like Marxism and the Vampire , but at least it was keeping her occupied. Even if I did have to keep surreptitiously straightening the piles.
    “Um, Baby Jane?” Dad said from his cross-legged position in front of the TV. He paused the DVD on a close-up of Angel’s game face, bumpy forehead and demonic eyes frozen in an expression of insane bloodlust. “Are you going to do this?”
    “I don’t think so, Dad.” But that reminded me …
    6) Lose my soul, no matter how much of a good idea it seems like at the time
    I tapped my fingers against the laptop, my gaze skittering back to the closed curtains hiding the living room windows. Despite my best efforts to distract myself, I kept imagining sinister silhouettes moving behind them, stalking toward me with stakes raised high....
    Mum turned a page. “Apparently, a virgin boy riding a pure-white virgin stallion can track down a vampire’s lair. Maybe we should phone local riding stables.”
    “Mum, I think we need to be more worried about vampire hunters tracking me back from the name on my headstone.” My head snapped up. “Or anyone else! My grave’s lying there wide open—”
    “No, it isn’t,” Dad interrupted. “I went back and filled it while you were asleep. I took the plastic grave marker away too.”
    “Hey, thanks—hang on, plastic?” Indignation filled me as I double-checked today’s date on the laptop clock. “You haven’t even bothered to get me a proper headstone? I was dead for nearly four months!”
    Even I felt the temperature in the room drop. Mum bent her head over her book. Dad’s shoulders hunched. “Three weeks,” he said, his voice going oddly thick. “You were … it’s been three weeks. The rest of the time … you were in a hospital. In a coma.”
    “Well, why didn’t you say so!” I yelled. They both jumped, twisting in my direction. I waved my hands in exasperation. “I’ve been going nuts trying to work out how I got vamped in a car crash, and now you tell me I was in the hospital?” My parents were staring at me. “Hospital,” I repeated as patiently as I could. “Where there’s blood. And needles.”
    Dad’s eyebrows shot up. “You think you got vampirism in the hospital, like an infection?”
    “It would make sense, right? All my sire would have to do is sneak in and drip some blood down my throat.”
    “The question is,” said Mum, “why?”
    Our eyes all went to the mobile phone, sitting innocently on top of The Lust of the Vampire . It continued to not ring.
    “How long until 5:08?” Mum asked.
    “Hours still,” I replied with a sigh. I’d tried calling back anyway, but had only got voice mail.
    “Well,” Dad said, turning back to Buffy . “At least it gives us time to research vampires.”
    “Zombies,” corrected Zack, wandering into the room with Toast in his arms. I aimed a glare at him, which he totally ignored as usual. “I’m telling you, we’re looking in the wrong place. We need to rent Day of the Dead and My Name Is Legend .”
    “Actually, I thought of a way to test that hypothesis,” Mum said, tipping the books off her lap as she stood. I twitched as they hit the floor in a jumbled heap, fighting off a weird desire to pick them up and stack them neatly. She started hunting among the piles