Clair de Lune, Tome 3 : La Lune de glace

Chapter 1

Normal Sucks

“YOU DID what? Are you out of your goddamn mind?”

I held my cell away from my ear and let my older brother Colin scream to his heart’s content. It was too late. There was nothing that Colin, his vampy friends, or any of the rest of my family, could do….

I was gone.

“CHARLIE…? CHARLIE…? Charlie Fitzgerald?” Huh? Oh crap. I looked up from where I’d been staring blankly at the fake wood grain on my desk, inscribed by years’ worth of kids who were as bored as I was in their final months of high school. My teacher was standing there with his hand stretched out, eyebrows raised. “Do you have last night’s assignment with you?”

“Yes, of course.” I grabbed my homework from where it was folded in the back of my book and handed it to Mr. Carlson, my history teacher. He took it and deposited it with the rest of the papers in his inbox before he strolled to the front of the room and powered up his LCD projector.

“Okay, guys, there were some pretty wretched scores on the Jamestown unit. Maybe you were just easing into the year, but it’s October now and quite a few of you need to pull your grades up on this unit or else your first report card will be grim.”

I wanted to gag.

If there was anything in the entire world more boring than US history, I couldn’t name it. The subject was lame when I had to learn it in fifth grade, just as lame in junior high school, and now that I was a senior in high school—and ready to get as far away from school as I could—it was torture of the worst kind. I couldn’t think of how many times I’d had the same argument with my mother about graduating from school. It wasn’t as if I needed to get into some prestigious college, or any college for that matter. I’d known what I wanted to do with my life since I was a little boy. The choice was easy.

I wanted to be a vampire hunter.

Yes, you heard right. I said vampire hunter. And here’s where you think: “Sure kid, doesn’t everyone who ever watched a few episodes of Buffy have fantasies about staking bloodsuckers and roundhousing demons?” And you’d probably be right. But, you see, it’s different for me. Because I’ve known for years that vampires, and vampire hunters, really exist. Sounds crazy, right? I swear to effing God it’s not.

My family, the Fitzgeralds, are one of the oldest hunter families in the world. There are a few others—my cousin Noah’s family, the Harpers, are one of them—and we’re all aware of each other. We’ve been active for centuries, slaying supernatural dragons (and from what I heard, actual dragons back in the day) and it was so my turn to grab a piece of the action.

If you want to get into technicalities, I wasn’t even supposed to know hunters existed, let alone that my family was among the chosen few. Well, at least I wasn’t supposed to know as early as I managed to find out. My brother Colin hadn’t been told formally until he was seventeen; neither had any of the cousins… at least, I think that’s the way it always worked. I suppose it was for our safety. I thought it sucked.

I’d learned about the family business when I was nine or ten by overhearing a conversation that was not meant for junior ears. I guess that’s one of the nice parts about being the ignored youngest brother to superstars Colin the Fantastic and Callum the Magnificent. I heard all sorts of things I wasn’t supposed to know about, like hunting vampires, killing werewolves and banshees, everything that was way better than anything in my boring, lameass life.

And that’s how I’d decided years before that I was going into the family business as soon as I could.