The Count glowered at her. ‘Did or did not your grandmother make it clear that no vampire was to leave their home tonight?’
Horatio slipped into the room, carrying a tray of steaming hot chocolate with whipped cream. Ivy turned to him gratefully. ‘Oh, thank y–’
‘This is no time for hot chocolate!’ the Count bellowed. With a wave of his arm, he sent Horatio out of the room, still carrying the tray.
Uh-oh. Ivy exchanged a nervous look with Brendan. If even Grandpa is turning down sweet treats, then things really are bad.
‘I have never in my life been so disappointed,’ the Countess said heavily. ‘It was bad enough for you to leave Wallachia Academy without any consideration for our feelings, but to flout our authority so blatantly tonight – at such a time! It is unbelievable. All I can think is that you refuse to consider yourself a part of our community.’ She shook her head, her expression weary. ‘Ivy, you have seriously let us down . . . again.’
Ivy’s throat burned as emotion choked her. She opened her mouth to say something, anything . . .
But Brendan was already speaking: ‘Wait a minute.’ He fixed the Countess with a fearless glance. ‘None of you has stopped to ask Ivy what she was really doing tonight. She wasn’t turning her back on the community. She was saving it.’
The Count glowered at him. ‘What are you talking about, young man?’
‘Sure, she took a risk, but only because she was so close to finding out the truth,’ Brendan said. ‘And she got it too. Ivy found out who the blogger is! She set up a stake out and even got photos.’
The Countess gasped. Her hand flew to her throat. Horatio edged back into the room, still holding his tray of chocolate – obviously he must have been listening from outside.
Ivy’s father put one hand on her shoulder. Gently, he asked, ‘Ivy? Will you please tell all of us who our arch-enemy is?’
Arch-enemy ? Ivy swallowed hard. It wasn’t like her dad to use such grand terms. ‘Arch-enemy’ sounded historical, dramatic . . . dangerous.
She took a deep breath. ‘Our arch– I mean, the blogger is . . . Holly.’
China rattled as Horatio lost his grip on his tray. He caught it just in time, but none of the gathered vamps said a word. They looked too stunned to speak.
Finally, Charles shook his head. Speaking slowly, as if he were still processing the information, he said, ‘Olivia’s friend? The person we let into our home? But that’s not – she couldn’t –’
‘Just look.’ Ivy showed him the photos on her camera, and her grandparents and Horatio all gathered round to see for themselves.
‘There’s no denying it, then,’ Charles said sadly, as he gazed down at the last photo.
The Countess still looked oddly fragile with shock. ‘How are we going to confront this girl?’
‘We can’t,’ Ivy said. She’d been thinking as hard as she could all the way home. No, she didn’t like Holly, but she loved Olivia . . . and there was a better way to handle this, one that didn’t involve arch-enemies and anger. Of course she wasn’t going to let the vampire community stay in fear, but sometimes misdirection was better than attack.
She lifted her chin and looked her grandparents in the eyes. ‘I’m not sure we confront her, when we still don’t know why she’s doing this. But we could find out.’
Her father frowned. ‘And how are we supposed to do that?’
‘Well,’ Ivy said. ‘There’s someone Holly really, really likes . . . Olivia.’
Ivy didn’t tell her dad or grandparents the part that really scared her. If they were going to ask Olivia for her help, she would have to make a choice about who mattered most to her – Ivy or Holly. And for the first time since they had met, Ivy couldn’t be sure where Olivia’s loyalty would lie.
Chapter Nine
Olivia was still asleep when her cell phone rang the next morning. It had taken her hours to finally drop off – she couldn’t stop worrying about what Ivy was up to. She woke only just in time to grab the phone and mumble, ‘Wha– ?’
‘We need you over here right now,’ Ivy said. Her voice sounded tense. ‘Emergency meeting at my house. Please.’
Olivia bit back all the anxious questions she wanted to ask. Before anything else, she needed to see that her twin was safe after last night’s adventure. ‘I’m on my way.’
She scrambled into a pink vest and a pair of white Capri pants. Barely five minutes later she was fully dressed and ready to go.
Her adoptive parents both stared at her as she raced downstairs. ‘My goodness,’ Mrs Abbott said. ‘We don’t usually see you up so early on a weekend.’
‘I got a call from Ivy,’ Olivia explained, and forced a smile. ‘She’s cooking me a special breakfast.’
‘That’s nice, dear,’ Mrs Abbott said.
Mr Abbott beamed at her over his newspaper. ‘As Henry David Thoreau once said: “Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation.”’
‘Um,’ Olivia said. She remembered the tension in Ivy’s voice, and thought of the emergency meeting waiting for her. I think there might be plenty of perturbation, actually. ‘I’ll try,’ she told her adoptive dad. ‘But I should really hurry now, or the breakfast might burn.’
Both of her parents smiled indulgently and waved her off as she ran out of the house and jumped on to her bicycle. As she cycled to her twin’s house at top speed, worries swirled through her head. What could have gone wrong last night to make Ivy sound so worried and upset even now? Had she been exposed as a vampire in front of the blogger? Worse yet, had she been hurt?
By the time she reached the Vega house, Olivia was feeling so frantic she jumped off her bike and left it sprawled on the lawn, in too much of a rush to prop it up neatly. She let herself in the front door and hurried inside to find the household in utter chaos.
She stopped in the dining-room doorway, staring in disbelief. A plate of smoked kippers sat ignored in the centre of the table while the Count and Countess were hunched over a laptop with Ivy. Olivia would never have believed that the rigidly proper Countess would allow computers at the table during a meal!
Meanwhile, Horatio seemed to be having a nervous breakdown in the kitchen. Olivia could hear Lillian making soothing noises, but his voice rose above hers in a near-wail: ‘If this bread doesn’t finish baking in the next five minutes the whole meal will be ruined!’