The Goosebumps book where vampires need more than blood.
Freddy Martinez and Cara Simonetti aren't afraid of anything. They're also two of the neighborhood's most popular babysitters, despite their penchant for scaring their charges with monster stories. Then one day, the two discover a hidden door in Freddy's basement. A door that leads to a room where the vampire Count Nightwing is sleeping. When they accidentally awaken him by opening his bottle of Vampire Breath, the pair are taken back in time to the Count's castle, where he intends to make them vampires too... just as soon as he can find his backup bottle of Vampire Breath so he can remember where he left his fangs! While he searches, Freddy and Cara search for the bottle too, in the hopes of using it to escape back to their own time before it's too late.
It was adapted into the seventeenth episode of the second season of the 1995 TV series.
It was reissued in the Classic Goosebumps line in 2011.
The book provides examples of:
- Bookcase Passage: While fighting in the basement, Freddy and Cara accidentally tip over a cabinet of chinaware, knocking it out of the way and revealing a secret door to a tunnel.
- Bookends: The book begins and ends with werewolves. It starts with Freddy telling a werewolf story and ends with Cara drinking "Werewolf Sweat"
- Blood Knight: Freddy and Cara really like fighting to prove how tough they are, and even get into a fight early in the book.
- Covers Always Lie:
- The cover shows Nightwing having hair, while in the book he is bald.
- Also, the bottle to Vampire Breath is shown to be green on the cover of the 2005 reprint, even though it is blue. The original cover actually has it as blue, which was changed for some reason.
- Creepy Basement: Freddy's basement, which happens to have a vampire in it.
- Decoy Damsel: Gwendolyn, who passes herself off as a normal human and who's a slave to the vampires. She's also revealed to be a vampire herself when she thinks she has Freddie and Cara alone.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Freddy and Cara's relationship almost seems like a G-rated BDSM thing. At one point Cara punches Freddy so hard he sees stars, and he likes it.
- Door Dumb: A variant involving a window. Freddy and Cara are trying to escape from the castle, and they come across a window. They try lifting it up, and when failing to do so, they grab a nearby skillet and are prepared to smash it open. But then Freddy notices that the window pushes outward, so he drops the skillet and swings the window panes open for him and Cara to escape.
- Exact Words: When Freddy and Cara meet Gwendolyn, she claims she knows a way out. But once she leads the two to a seculed area, she reveals she's a vampire and her definition of "a way out" was to let her bite and turn the two.
- Get Back to the Future: This is Freddy and Cara's goal after they're kidnapped into the past.
- Haunted Castle: Count Nightwing lives in an old creepy one, which the characters need to survive.
- Macguffin Melee: Upon finding the one remaining, unused bottle of Vampire Breath in Count Nightwing's larder, Freddy and Cara then starts playing "Monkey in the Middle" with it, which consists of Freddy and Cara tossing the bottle at each other while keeping it out of Nightwing's hands.
- Mandatory Twist Ending: At the very end, Cara and Freddy find a bottle of "Werewolf Sweat"... and it transforms Cara.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Vampires in this setting don't survive on blood alone, they also drink the namesake, which seems to be the source of most of their abilities.
- Secret Path: There's one hidden in Freddy's basement, which leads to the room where Count Nightwing and his coffin are kept.
- Tickle Torture: Freddy likes to use this on his babysitting charges. And on Cara.
- Time Travel Episode: Vampire Breath not only helps vampires with their memories, it lets them travel through time.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Count Nightwing is Freddy's grandfather, meaning that Freddy is a vampire himself. His fangs just haven't grown in yet, and won't for another hundred years.
- Undead Child: Gwendolyn, the only kid vampire seen in the book.
- Vampire Episode: The book marks the first appearance of a regular-ish vampire in the series.
- Vampires Sleep in Coffins: Count Nightwing does, and also keeps his spare bottle of Vampire Breath. There are also over two dozen other vampires in his castle, all of whom sleep in coffins.
- Villainous Rescue: The two children accidentally fall out of a window, and would have been squished many stories below if Count Nightwing had not come swooping in via flying in his bat form to save them.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: Freddy and Cara are friends who spend a lot of their time fighting, and sometimes it gets physical.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: Vampires can turn into bats in this setting, as demonstrated by the ones in Count Nightwing's castle, who transform and fly off into the night soon after they awaken.
- Wham Line: "Daddy!" says Freddy's mother when Freddy calls her for help. She saves them from Count Nightwing by revealing to him that Freddy is his grandson, and she's happy to see her dad up and about. Oh, and she knows where his fangs are.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: We don't see what becomes of Gwendolyn when she confronts Count Nightwing as Freddie and Cara use the opportunity to run when they have the chance. It's implied either Nightwing disposed of her or she fled when she realized he was too powerful.
- Would Hurt a Child: Count Nightwing tries biting Cara. He then realizes he doesn't have his fangs. Likewise he has no problems fighting Gwendolyn either, but then again she is a vampire too.
