2
With your new nocturnal hours, two A.M. feedings won’t seem like such a burden. Morning carpool, however, will remain just as dangerous.
—My Mommy Has Fangs: A Guide to Post-Vampiric Parenting
I didn’t expect to just wake up, hop out of my coffin, and walk back into my life. I knew there was going to be an adjustment period. Still, it felt very weird to walk up my own dark front-porch steps, without any need of a light, to an empty house.
Even with Rob gone, the house had always been filled with noise and color. Danny, a classic only child, always managed to keep himself entertained, singing his original silly songs (usually set to “Old MacDonald”) and staging broad-scale action-figure battles that spread to several rooms of the house. But now the windows were dark and quiet. There was no bellowing cry of “MOM!” followed by the patter of sneaker-clad feet as I walked through the door.
I dropped my keys onto the little foyer table I’d refurbished years before when Rob’s parents built the house for us. As soon as Les and Marge heard that their son was thinking of proposing, they had built this sensible three-bedroom ranch on the edge of their property, claiming it was a good investment. I supposed it might have been profitable if they’d planned on renting it to someone, but they hadn’t. Rob just moved in a month before the wedding, no discussion, no debate. He started moving our wedding gifts into the new house. And who was I to argue with it? What kind of idiot turns down a new home? That I didn’t get to choose the fixtures or décor for . . . because Marge decorated it just like her house . . . so Rob wouldn’t have to feel like he’d left his childhood home. Hindsight would come back to bite me on the ass much later on that one.
Bit by bit, I’d reclaimed the house over the years, “losing” a dried flower arrangement here, dropping/destroying a porcelain angel figurine there. I blamed Danny for several of the angel figurines when Marge asked about them, which might have affected me, karmically speaking. Now it was a comfortable, if slightly shabby-chic, little country house. The sturdy, denim-covered, Danny-proof living-room furniture was centered around a big faux-stone fireplace with a gas flame. The adjacent bookshelves were covered in my paperbacks and framed family photos, mostly of Danny with me and his grandparents. My word-of-the-day calendar sat next to my laptop on the old whitewashed rustic dining-room table I used as a desk. An old blue-and-yellow patchwork quilt I’d purchased at an estate sale was thrown over the back of a cane rocker in the corner. Danny’s trucks lay abandoned on the blue rag rug that protected our hardwood laminate floors.
With my new vampire vision, I could see the thin layer of dust on the mantel, the lint bunnies under the couch. My housekeeping skills, which had never been Better Homes and Gardens level, had definitely fallen by the wayside since I’d gotten sick. Marge had tried, well, insisted on helping out at first, but it had made me so uncomfortable, her clucking her tongue as she helped “organize” my Tupperware cabinet, my closet, my mail, that I eventually told her I was back up to dusting my own baseboards.
It was a lie, but it bought me peace of mind.
I opened the front closet and saw that the packing boxes I’d put there a few days ago were still neatly stacked under our winter coats. I’d been organizing what I could, little by little, for months and stashing it in a storage unit near the county line. Each trip out there took so much out of me that I had to sleep the rest of the day, but I was ready to move. I’d even scoped out a few rentals I could afford. We had Rob’s insurance and death benefits we could depend on until Danny was eighteen, along with the income from my bookkeeping business. So while we weren’t rolling in money, we were comfortable.
Not to mention, I could move all of my own furniture one-handed now.
Once my in-laws found out not only that they were not going to get custody of their grandson after I died but that I was a vampire, I doubted very much that they would continue to let me live in their house rent-free. It was time for me to move on anyway. Maybe I should have moved to an apartment after Rob died, but Danny had just lost his father. I didn’t want to traumatize him with even more changes. Plus, my in-laws kept saying what a comfort it was to have Danny so close, which tugged at my guilt strings. And then I was diagnosed, and I wasn’t capable of moving a laundry basket, much less a household.
I had so much to do before Danny got home, a whole checklist of chores I’d worked up before going “underground.” Not to mention, it was two A.M., and I felt like it was the middle of the afternoon. I could probably burn through the whole list tonight: finish packing, find a new apartment, file for my undead identification card online, do this week’s payroll for my clients, and conquer my bloodthirst. OK, it was a little ambitious, but really, that’s how much energy I had running through my undead nerve endings.
Jane walked casually up the steps behind me, as if she wasn’t watching my every movement. It seemed that my supervision was going to begin immediately and run round-the-clock. I supposed I deserved that. The drive from the park had served as some sort of reboot on my brain, and I had come to understand exactly how badly this situation could have turned out if my local Council officials weren’t reasonably compassionate people.
The vampires’ governing body, known for its tendency to solve problems in a swift, ruthless, and untraceable fashion, could have decided that I’d gone too far in my sire-for-hire quest for immortality, no matter how noble my reasons. They could have decided to stake me the minute I rose, toss my ashes back into my little grave, and claim no knowledge of my ever having been turned. They could have locked me up in any one of the rumored underground facilities where “problematic” vampires were incarcerated. Or, worse, they could have made me move to Arkansas.
I’d taken a huge risk becoming a vampire in this way, but I couldn’t keep relying on reckless optimism and the kindness of bureaucrats. Now that my initial desperation had passed, I would not waste my immortality on rash decisions and my own (clearly flawed) judgment. I promised myself that I would be a model undead citizen, more considerate, more patient, more rational.
And that lasted all of five minutes before I walked past the long, narrow mirror that hung over the foyer table and caught sight of a beautiful willowy blonde. I stopped in my tracks, realizing that I was, in fact, looking at my own reflection. I promptly burst into tears, the big honking sobs you only saw on the Oprah network.
I hadn’t looked this pretty in years.
My skin, dry and sallow just a few days before, had taken on the pearlescent perfection of a fairy-tale princess’s. My eyelashes were thicker and darker, fringing my blue-green eyes and giving them a wider, wicked appearance, like I knew a secret and was going to use it to my advantage. The hair I’d lost during treatments was now full, thick, and lustrous, glimmering golden even in the harsh fluorescent lights. Over the last few months, it had become so brittle I’d been almost pathologically afraid of touching it. But now I could run my fingers through it like I was the star of my own personal shampoo commercial.
When I’d gotten sick, I’d told myself it was stupid to fuss about my appearance when I had so much more important stuff to worry about. But it had been a blow to know I was losing my looks on top of everything else. I’d never thought much about being pretty B.C. (before cancer). I wasn’t going to play modest. I’d always known I had a certain backwoods-girl-gone-good appeal. But now? I was the very best imagined version of myself, the girl who mentally dated Tom Hiddleston and accepted an imaginary Oscar.
“It’s a bit of a shock, huh?” Jane asked. I gingerly touched my fingers to my cheek, as if I was worried that touching my own face would somehow ruin an illusion. Her smile was wry, almost fond, as she placed a hand on my shoulder. “The first time I saw myself in the mirror, I thought of it as the bookworm’s jackpot, all of those little problems the women’s magazines promise to solve for us fixed in one big swoop.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Dick snorted as he hauled an enormous Coleman cooler through my foyer. “I was a prime specimen of manhood even before I was turned. Nothing about me changed, not one bit.”
“Except his modesty,” Jane told me, her tone dry as sand. She pulled my hair back from my face and into a sort of half-updo. “I know the extreme makeover takes a bit of getting used to, but when you think about it, it makes sense. Predators have to attract prey to survive. And how could we could draw in a . . . well, I don’t like to use the word ‘victim.’ Let’s say ‘blood source’—with bacne and a unibrow?”
“I’ve been avoiding mirrors,” I confessed. “For months, I’ve looked away from the mirror because I couldn’t stand seeing that sick person looking back at me. This angry, bitter, frantic woman who was wearing my face. I didn’t even think about how I would look afterward. I was just looking for more time. To get this, on top of everything else . . . I’ll never be able to pay this back.”
Jane smiled at me, an honest, genuine smile that instantly set my nerves at ease. She squeezed my hand, and I felt Dick pat me on the shoulder. “I hate to step on your moment, but it’s not about payback, Buttercup,” he said. “It’s about making the most of the time you have now and adding something to the world instead of just taking.”
I mouthed Buttercup? to Jane, who shrugged. “Dick likes nicknames.”
“I know you disagree with how I went about it, Mrs. Nightengale, but believe me when I say becoming a vampire was the only solution for me. And I will work hard to learn everything you have to teach me.”
“I’m glad you said that,” Jane told me. “Because we don’t have a lot of time.”
I’d been wrong. Turned out the Council did give a gift basket, full of samples of different synthetic bloods, SPF 500 sunscreen, iron supplements, Razor Wire fang floss, and a contact sheet for every vampire-friendly blood bank in the area.
Unfortunately, Jane’s idea of “training” me involved treating me like a recalcitrant cat. She fed me a steady diet of bottled blood hourly. I would work on my client accounts between feedings, to distract myself from my thirst and so my business wouldn’t suffer. At random times, Jane would wave a bag of donor blood under my nose. I was shocked by how good it smelled, like fresh-baked warm bread and toasted marshmallows and every good thing you could imagine wanting to eat all rolled into one. Despite being so full I was sloshing, my mouth still watered, and my fangs dropped so quickly it was almost painful. And every time they did, Jane would shoot me in the face with a spray bottle full of cold water.
“Aaah!” I cried. “Damn it, Jane!”
“It’s like aversion therapy,” she said with shrug, shooting me in the face again.
“Are you trying to keep me from craving human blood or climbing on the couch?” I grumbled, wiping at my face “And ow, ow, ow, why is it burning?” I swiped at my cheeks, wincing at the stinging sensation rolling across my skin. And then my palms started to burn. “What the hell, Jane?!”
“It’s a point-zero-zero-one percent solution of colloidal silver. Vampires are highly allergic to silver. To humans, it’s perfectly harmless. In fact, you find it in a lot of health-food stores. But to vampires, depending on the concentration, it can be a minor annoyance, like a sunburn that takes a few minutes to heal—or it can melt your face off and kill you. Trust me, I know.”
“God, you can be scary,” I told her.
“Really?” Jane asked. “Thanks! I’ve been working on being diabolical. I only got appointed to the Council because the last lady who had my job screwed up big-time, and I think the bureaucracy was trying to give me some sort of ironic punishment, like Sisyphus but with more paperwork. I worry sometimes that people don’t take me seriously as head of the Council. And it’s dangerous when other vampires don’t take you seriously as head of the Council.”
I stared at her.
“Not the point,” she conceded.
I discovered there was a whole range of synthetic bloods beyond Faux Type O. It was a little like coffee—there was the cheap stuff and the expensive stuff, the stuff you only pulled out when company was coming over. Until we were sure how I would react around humans, neither one of us was willing to risk my trying donor blood. I promised myself it would be a treat, like rewarding myself with a box of Vosges exotic truffles at the end of tax season—only this was a treat I was deadly afraid of and probably wouldn’t indulge in for several years.
My first sunrise found me falling into the deepest slumber I’d ever experienced. And for the first time in months, I didn’t worry about whether I’d wake up. I was amazed at how quickly the sun pulled me into unconsciousness. I’d no sooner slid under the yellow log-cabin quilt on my bed than I tumbled into oblivion.
I discovered that the undead dream. Instead of the blank slate I expected during my dead sleep, I had a very active subconscious. I saw myself stretched across the scratchy polyester bedspread of the Lucky Clover Motel, ignoring the potential parasites that lurked in the bedding as I waited for my sire to arrive. I’d taken a healthy dose of over-the-counter sleeping pills to stave off the pain of turning, so my impressions of him were pretty hazy. I could remember parts of his face but not the whole. I remembered high, sculpted cheekbones and deep, bittersweet-chocolate eyes fringed with long lashes. A smile that was warm, even a little naughty. As I faded in and out, he stroked his cool hands down my face and told me everything was going to turn out like it should, that I was safe and would always be safe. He kissed me, long and deep, cradling me against his chest like I was something precious. And then he bit my wrists, letting the blood drain from me while he dripped his own into my mouth. I latched on to that arm, clutching it to my mouth as I swallowed huge mouthfuls of his thick, slightly sweet blood.
I was dying, not in the slow slide I’d taken over the last few months but plummeting off the cliff into the unknown. My pulse echoed in my ears, beat by beat. I couldn’t draw breath. The man held me close, whispering that death was always difficult, but when I woke, I would be like him. And I would be strong and beautiful and fierce. And he would be there, taking pleasure in every new step I took.
When I woke at sunset, it wasn’t the blood but this man’s kiss I tasted on my lips. I could smell him, that expensive scent of amber, and feel his cool hands on my skin. I was left wanting with a bone-deep ache. For the first time in my life, I understood the word “yearning,” beyond mocking it in romance novels. Because for the first time, I felt like I was being denied something beautiful, something that was mine. Unfortunately, I was also pretty sure my brain had concocted that thing from a mix of sedatives and oxygen deprivation.
I wasn’t a fairy-tale sort of girl. I’d never been able to afford that sort of whimsy. There was no dream prince. There was no true love’s kiss. At the end of the story, the newly married princess went home to her husband’s castle to deal with dental bills, laundry arguments, and a dowager queen unwilling to give up her throne.
Sometimes I felt like I was too harsh with Rob, or at least his memory. Weren’t widows supposed to put their dead husbands up on a pedestal? Wasn’t I supposed to have some sort of little shrine on my nightstand devoted to him, with a big eight-by-ten photo and votive candles? It wasn’t that I disliked Rob. In fact, I liked him very much in the beginning. He wasn’t a bad husband. He just wasn’t a good one.
By the end, we were more roommates than anything else. Rob had a lot of hobbies—hunting, fishing, softball, basketball with his friends. When we were first married, I appreciated the space. Marriage was difficult for me. I was used to having quiet time for myself.
When we were first married, I bucked Stratton family tradition and continued working at a local accounting firm, Freegate and Swanson. But after Danny was born, I liked working from home, so I opened my own business. (To be honest, I poached a bunch of clients from Freegate and Swanson when I left. It wasn’t my fault that my bosses had so little faith in my “work-from-home mom” scheme that they didn’t make me sign a noncompete clause.) So my world slowly shrank down to Danny, Rob, e-mails from clients, and other moms. The freedom allowed me to make my own hours. I could stay home with Danny when he was sick. I could do a monthly payroll statement at two in the morning, which was sometimes the only time I had to think without a toddler crying in my ear or a baseball game blaring on the TV.
It was fortunate that I could tailor my schedule this way, because I was raising Danny alone long before Rob was gone. I was the one who got up with Danny in the middle of the night when he was throwing up. I was the one who went to parent-teacher conferences, doctor appointments, the meeting with the Sunday-school teacher when Danny walked out of the “Adam and Eve” lesson and told the congregation that they spent the whole morning talking about naked people. I thought that as Rob matured a little bit, got a little more comfortable with Danny, he would dial in, get more involved. He always said he would spend more time with “his boy” when Danny was old enough to throw a ball, shoot a gun, do something interesting. Until then, the dirty diapers, the two A.M. feedings, the teething cries—they were my problem.
I felt so disconnected from everything—except Danny. It was like a cocoon around my heart had opened up. I found my happiness in my son, his sweet, funny little soul, his crazy imagination. I found solace in volunteering at his school, taking him to story time at the library, making his Halloween costumes. I knew that one day he would grow up, marry, have a family of his own. But for the time being, I was enjoying motherhood and hoped that he would choose a spouse more wisely than his mother had. And when Rob died, I didn’t really mourn him so much as the life we could have had, the husband he could have been.
I did not discuss these singularly depressing thoughts, since Jane was a pretty talented mind-reader and probably already knew. Also, she kept mentioning how much she disliked my “unethical, shameless jackass” of a sire. Every night. I considered this a bad sign, since Jane seemed to have a pretty high tolerance for sketchy people. Jane herself had been mistaken for a deer by a drunk hunter, gotten shot, and been turned by a passing vampire to keep her from dying. All that, and she still found my story a little scandalous.
Jane clearly thought of Dick Cheney as like a brother, and I was pretty sure that before being turned, I would have hidden in the ladies’ room to avoid Dick at a rest stop.
But as I got to know him during his numerous visits to check on Jane and monitor my progress, I saw that despite the shifty exterior, Dick truly cared about Jane, and because Jane cared about my progress, so did Dick. They had history. Not only was Dick the best childhood friend of Jane’s husband, but on Jane’s first night out as a vampire, Dick was the one who stopped the disastrous parking-lot fight that almost got Jane’s skull crushed. Dick was also married to Jane’s friend and business partner, Andrea, and occasionally worked at Jane’s bookshop to keep an eye on “his girls.” Jane said these sorts of multilevel entanglements were common in vampire relationships.
“Just wait until you meet Gabriel, Zeb, and the rest of the bunch,” she said as we sipped a particularly iron-rich Maxwell House International Coffee Café New Orleans blend of blood and caffeine. “You’ll see how enmeshed we really are.”
For some reason, that warmed my still heart. Despite my bumpy start, Jane was going to introduce me to her family. And given the way she talked about them all, with that fond, exasperated tone only a mother could understand, I knew how important they were to her. Maybe I would be able to find a community among vampires that I’d never had as a human. Oh, sure, I had acquaintances, women I knew from church and the PTA, but I didn’t have a lot of close friends. Or any close friends, really. I told myself it was because I didn’t have time, but I suspected that I simply wasn’t good at making them. My childhood hadn’t exactly prepared me for sister-friends.
I was a classic adult child of a single parent. I never met my dad. Mom never said much about him, other than to tell me that they hadn’t had a lot of time together but he’d been the love of her life. I appreciated that she never threw him in my face as I was growing up. She never blamed me for her expulsion from one of the Hollow’s nicer subdivisions to the Garden Vista trailer park. She never accused me of ruining her life. She just didn’t share that life with me. We were more like roommates, moving in circles around each other, carefully avoiding long conversations or anything that might make the other uncomfortable.
My father was just another topic Mom didn’t discuss. I didn’t think about it much until we studied genetics in high school, and I had to leave half of my personal Punnett square blank. I didn’t know what color my father’s hair or eyes were. I didn’t know what color his parents’ hair or eyes were, so I had no idea whether my deep-set blue-green eyes came from his side of the family. I was pretty certain the blond hair and fair skin came from my mom’s side. But since her parents kicked her out when she announced that she was pregnant and then moved from the Hollow to “get away from the shame,” I hadn’t had much of a chance to study their genetic traits.
My father, like so much of my childhood, was an equation I’d had to figure out on my own, and when the answer didn’t come, I’d set it aside for consideration some other day. There were times when I felt rootless, like not knowing more about my parents meant I lacked an identity. But I tried to turn the problem on its side and see that lack of detail as setting me free from the constraints of someone else’s expectations. The only limitations put on me were the ones I put there. Oddly enough, I seemed to have put a lot of them on myself without even realizing it, but that was an epiphany I wouldn’t have until much later in life.
I realized that my life story sounded pretty pitiful, a lonely waif child left to languish in a single-wide. But I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I knew what some of the other kids in my neighborhood were going through. By comparison, I had it relatively easy. I didn’t get smacked around. I didn’t have a fully functioning meth lab in my bathroom. Mom may not have been a font of praise and maternal wisdom, but she worked hard to provide what she could for me. I learned how to do things on my own, how to take care of myself, and that’s more than a lot of my classmates graduated from high school knowing.
And then she was gone, leaving me alone. While I was used to being alone, I wasn’t used to feeling alone. Without the only family I knew, I was adrift, ripe for the picking, when I met Rob a year or so later, at the Qwik Mart, of all places. He was looking for flowers to buy his mom for her birthday and asked me what kind he should get. I told him not to buy his mother gas-station flowers. (That should have been a clue, really.) Rob was a few grades ahead of me, so I didn’t really know him. And I hadn’t been into extracurriculars or school dances, so he didn’t recognize me.
I’d thought I was lucky to catch Rob’s attention. I’d never dated before. Between homework and a part-time job that helped keep up with our bills, I didn’t have time. And I was so afraid of ending up like my mother that I practically hid from boys when they tried to speak to me. To end up with a man who not only wanted to marry me but also had a ready-made family looking for a daughter seemed too good to be true.
Which, of course, it was. But again, I was a late bloomer when it came to epiphanies.
For now, I was just grateful to have more time with my son. Everything else? It was just another equation, a problem to solve. I would keep chipping away until I figured it out.
When she wasn’t making vague threats to my unnamed sire and his tender parts or trying to get me to attend meetings of the Newly Emerged Vampires Support Group, Jane was torturing me with assigned reading. Since I’d rushed into my decision, Jane was enforcing a strict course of study of vampire history, politics, and personal safety. Jane happened to own Specialty Books, a charming little shop downtown, so she had a wealth of instructional materials to school me on my new culture, including 50 Ways to Add Variety to Your Undead Diet; From Caesar to Kennedy: Vampires and Their Clandestine Political Influence throughout History; and Love Bites: A Female Vampire’s Guide to Less Destructive Relationships.
At the top of the stack was a slick paperback with a pale, cheerful woman holding a cherubic toddler on the cover. It was called My Mommy Has Fangs: A Guide to Post-Vampiric Parenting.
“I was a librarian when I was human,” Jane explained while I stared at the book with disdain. “Helping books find the people who need them is sort of my thing.”
“I would be insulted by the parenting book, but I feel like I don’t have much of a leg to stand on, in terms of dignity.”
“That’s true. But the first thing I want you to read is this,” she said, dropping a book titled The Guide for the Newly Undead, Second Edition on top of the stack. “This is your new Bible. Everything you need to know about being a vampire, all of the random questions you come up with at five A.M. and don’t want to bother anyone with, it’s all in here. It’s the cornerstone product at my shop. And it’s a second edition, so it has a feeding plan for once you get settled into your diet and a list of reliable online vampire vendors, both of which are pretty darn handy.”
I flipped through the stack of books, wondering how I was going to read or remember any of this information. I don’t think I’d studied this much for the CPA exam. “I was never good with homework,” I muttered.
“I’ve seen your desk, sweetie. I don’t believe that for a second,” she said, putting my laptop in my hands. “Now, by tomorrow night, I want a five-page essay on the structure of the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead and how it governs local vampires like yourself. The main focus of your essay should be how to stay off the Council’s radar.”
“You’re kidding. You do realize that I have to run a business from home while my child sleeps, right? A business that I need to keep running if I want to feed said child?” I laughed. But Jane did not smile. “You’re not kidding.”
“No, I am not,” she said, dropping the Guide for the Newly Undead in my lap. “Double-spaced, one-inch margins. You can find the time. You’re a multitasker.”
I stared down at my textbook. Despite the fact that I’d ruthlessly retrained my potty mouth after Danny and tried to replace the foul words with more intellectual terms from my word-of-the-day calendar, I let loose a “sonofabitch.”
Jane’s assigned reading list was illuminating and sort of horrifying. I was in junior high when a vampire tax consultant named Arnie Frink flung vampires out of the coffin onto an unsuspecting human public. Arnie sued his employer for the right to work overnight in his office, claiming to have porphyria, a potentially fatal allergy to sunlight. His tax firm denied his assertion that allergies, even if they did make his skin blister like bubble wrap, were a legitimate reason to let him have unsupervised access to the copy machine. And when the court sided with the firm, Arnie threw aside his layers of protective clothes, and, while his skin sizzled like bacon, declared in open court that he was a vampire, with a medical condition subject to the Americans with Disabilities Act, and they were stomping all over his rights.
After enduring several lengthy appeals and extensive testing by mental-health professionals, Arnie won his lawsuit and got a respectable financial settlement, evening hours, and his fifteen minutes in the media spotlight. And an entire planet full of people flipped the hell out. Humans burned, staked, and dragged vampires out into the sun without giving the undead any chance to defend themselves or prove that they weren’t murderous monsters. And if the deaths could reasonably be explained away as accidents, the authorities took on a stubborn “see no evil, hear no evil, believe total bullshit” policy.
The World Council, an elected group of ancient vampires, realized the stubbornness trend wasn’t going away and came forward, asking the world’s governments to recognize them as nonmythical beings who should not be set on fire simply for existing.
After the United Nations officially condemned vampire hate crimes, the international vampire community eventually agreed that it was more convenient to live out in the open anyway. Bottled blood might have been less exciting, but it eliminated the need to dispose of bodies and explain away heavy-duty foil over their windows.
And in exchange for providing census information and agreements not to launch supernatural war against humanity, the Council was allowed to establish smaller regional offices in each state in every country. Selected local Council members were charged with supervising newer vampires to make sure they didn’t attract negative attention from the human community, presiding over squabbles within vampire circles, and investigating “accidents” that befell their constituents.
Unlike my classmates, whose mothers rushed to shut off the news when they felt the Coming Out reports got too scary, I was unsupervised and therefore glued to my TV screen. And honestly, as scary and sensationalist as some of those reports were, I didn’t have a problem with vampires. In my teen years, I followed the government-imposed curfews but only because I didn’t particularly want to be arrested. As an adult, after the curfews had been abolished, I didn’t let a potential encounter with the undead affect my schedule. I figured that if a vampire was going to make a snack of me, he or she would have done it already. I doubted they would have waited until they were living out in the open to chow down on my neck. So I didn’t let it bother me. I was a woman. I was already hyperalert while walking around in dark environments.
And really, I hadn’t run into that many vampires over the course of my lifetime. They didn’t frequent trailer parks or PTA meetings. Sure, I’d visited Specialty Books on a few occasions (because it was the only store in the Hollow that carried my favorite urban fantasy novels), but I’d only dealt with Jane’s manager, Andrea. It took me three visits before I realized that she wasn’t just a super-pale, incredibly attractive human woman. So really, I didn’t have moral quandaries about changing my life status.
But now it felt like I was having a small panic attack every few minutes. My fangs kept dropping at inopportune moments. I misjudged my strength and reduced a coffee mug to porcelain rubble when I tried to pick it up, and I was sure I would crush Danny’s skull just as easily if I hugged him.
What was I going to do when he was older? How strange and sad was it going to be when we were the same age? Or, worse yet, when he was physically older than me? I was going to outlive him, unless he decided he wanted to be turned. Oh, no, what would I do if Danny wanted to become a vampire?
I would ground him. Forever.
My future seemed more uncertain now than when I’d been diagnosed. And one evening, I had a particularly exhausting night, overslept, and didn’t wake up until ten P.M., which, if Danny had been home, would have been well after his bedtime. This sparked a whole existential “What good am I?” shame spiral that made Dick none too subtly skulk out of the house to safer, less weepy pastures.
“What if I can’t do this?” I wailed as Jane looked on with an amused expression. “What if I’ve completely screwed up? What if I can’t be around my own son and this was all for nothing? What kind of idiot am I? How am I going to take care of him? He’s a child. He belongs to the day. He needs someone who can take him to the park and the beach and other places where the sun is. What did I think was going to happen? That he would just adjust to my schedule and become nocturnal? How selfish was I, doing this to him? And all I’m left with is eternity, watching my boy grow up without me—”
Yet again, Jane raised the spray bottle and shot me in the face with it.
“Damn it, Jane!”
“Well, it’s better than slapping you!” she exclaimed.
“I don’t see how that could possibly be true,” I told her.
“You are a mother who didn’t want to let her little boy grow up without her. That is not selfish. You may have gone about this in an absolutely batshit-insane way, but your heart was in the right place. I say this as someone who, by the universe’s divine wisdom, did not have children, because I’m not sure I could keep small humans alive. You are a fantastic mother. You put Danny’s needs first, always. Everything else is just logistics and clever scheduling. You will figure it out.” Jane put her arm around me. “Did you freak out like this when you were pregnant?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I was weirdly calm.”
“Well, then you’re due for a good meltdown,” she said. “You’ll get through this. Every vampire I know has a moment of doubt after they’re turned. ‘What if I can’t handle this?’ ‘What if my personality changes completely?’ ‘What if I massacre a whole village?’ And those are all legitimate concerns. If you didn’t worry about that sort of thing, I would be concerned about your sense of decency. You know, you might feel a little better about this if you attended a meeting of the Newly Emerged Vampires. They talk about this sort of thing all the time. You might feel less alone.”
“I’m not much of a joiner,” I told her. “I never have been. But . . . other than that, I’m not sure who I am. For years, I was Rob Stratton’s wife. And then I was Danny’s mom. But eventually, he’s going to grow up, and I will be . . . not obsolete but less vital in his life. And I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself after that.”
“I can see that,” Jane said. “I’m going through the same thing with Jamie, obviously on a much smaller scale, since I didn’t raise him from birth. But with him leaving for college, the house seems so empty. I didn’t realize how much he was distracting me from the calm that descended over our house in the last year or two. I mean, when I first became a vampire, it was total chaos. It seemed like someone new was trying to kill me every year or so. And I got used to it. Chaos became my lifestyle. Gathering my friends together, figuring out how to get ahead of the crisis, eventually getting my ass handed to me in some capacity. And without that, I kind of worry that Gabriel and I are going to turn into my parents. After my dad retired, it got kind of ugly around the house. Mama was used to having the house to herself all day, and suddenly Daddy was there, giving her suggestions about how she could improve her housekeeping skills. We’re lucky it didn’t turn into some backwoods episode of Dr. Phil. And that was only because my sister intercepted Mama’s application tape.”
“Well, you’ll always have young idiot vampires like me to boss around, and you work for one of the most terrifying organizations in the world, which has to be just lousy with infighting and potential archenemies,” I told her.
She grinned. “Thanks, that actually makes me feel better.”
“No problem.”
“But this conversation isn’t about me, it’s about you and your quarter-life crisis. You need to sit back and think about all the time you have left and then consider how you want to spend it. Because, unlike how it is for most people, time is something we have in unlimited supply. Look, it’s all manageable,” she told me. “OK, sure, the first night I was turned, I tried to attack my best friend. But I’d shrugged off my sire and didn’t have any guidance. I didn’t even try to dull my thirst. You’re preparing. And preparing is half the battle.”
Jane walked up behind me and placed a firm, cool hand on my shoulder. “You’re going to be OK,” she told me, her voice so quiet that even my superhuman ears strained to hear it. “You’re going to be strong. You’re going to welcome your little boy home, listen to his stories, put him in a bath, and tuck him in for bed. You are more than your thirst. You are a mother first, and then a vampire.” Jane jerked her head toward the door. “Come on.”
“What?” I huffed as she led me out onto the front porch.
“I’ve been so focused on keeping you contained for our conditioning that I’ve denied you an important rite for any newborn vampire,” she said, slipping out of her wedge sandals. I followed her, already barefoot, onto the grass.
“You’re looking at the world with brand-new eyes,” she said. “You can feel every blade of grass against the soles of your feet. Listen to the wind rustling through every leaf on every tree. Listen to the heartbeats of the animals in the woods. Look up at the sky.”
“Trust me, Jane. I’ve done the ‘new senses’ appreciation bit. I haven’t stared at the craters in the moon so hard since I tried that special brownie for the chemo side effects.”
“Can you just let me have a surrogate-sire moment here?” she grumbled.
“Sorry.”
“Now, I want you to bend your knees, dig your toes down in the grass.”
I bent, prepared for some sort of tai chi meditation technique that would help me stop having such a histrionic reaction to every damn thing. “OK.”
“Now, jump,” Jane told me.
“What?”
“Jump.”
Frowning, I pushed up from the ground with my feet . . . and jetted fifteen feet into the air. I shrieked, flailing all the way down to the ground. I landed on my ass with a hard thunk.
“What the hell was that?” I cried, splayed out on the grass.
“Vampire vertical leap,” Jane said. “Go on, have some fun.”
“You’re not going to tag me or put some sort of tether on me?” I asked.
“Do you plan on running away?”
“No.”
“OK, then, go run.”
Unsure of whether this was some sort of trick, I bent at the knees again and leaped. I was a bit more prepared for the sudden change in altitude and landed with some grace about ten feet away from Jane. She gave me an amused little wave and sat on my porch step.
I leaped again, taking off at a full run for the swing set I’d built for Danny when he was three. I ran straight up his slide, jumped nimbly onto the top bar, and with perfect balance walked across the length without stepping on a single swing bolt. I stopped at the end and, praying that my vampire bones would heal quickly if necessary, jumped off the swing set with a flip and a twist.
Landing on both feet and raising both arms in a gymnast’s “I stuck it” gesture, I laughed aloud. I hadn’t felt like walking the length of the driveway in months, much less running laps around my yard for the pure joy of being able to move so freely. I jumped. I flipped. I did a back handspring that ended in a disastrous face-plant, but without emergency-room bills to worry about, it didn’t bother me to watch the bones in my wrist reset on their own. After almost an hour, I jogged back up the porch steps to join Jane, who handed me a mug of warmed blood.
“Feel better now?” she asked.
“That was pretty awesome,” I conceded.
“No more freak-outs?”
“No more freak-outs,” I promised.
“Good. Now, get your stuff together, because your in-laws’ truck is coming down the road.”
A few seconds later, Les and Marge’s F-250 pulled up in the driveway. Danny was home. He was about to run out of that truck smelling like woodsmoke and bug repellent, and the first thing he was going to do was throw himself at me and tell me all about his weekend. The panic welled up inside me like lava. Oh, God, what if I couldn’t do this? What if I hurt him? What if—
“Did you just tire me out so I wouldn’t have the energy to bite anybody? Like you’d do with a puppy?” I asked Jane.
“I regret nothing,” she told me, shaking her head.
The truck door flew open, and my son came barreling across the lawn, a short fireball of crackling blond energy. And even at his insane first-grader’s speed, my vampire eyesight could track every movement he made as if it was a freeze frame. And he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Even in the moonlight, I could see every wavy blond hair on his head, every golden eyelash. I could see every tiny freckle on his sun-kissed skin. And my eyes, my own blue-green eyes, looking back at me, expectant and absolutely sure of my love.
My Danny.
Deep in my soul, beyond my consciousness and my heart, I knew with absolute, concrete certainty that I would never be able to hurt my son. And that little bit of fear, at least, melted away into nothing as he launched himself through the air at me.
“Hey, Mom!”
I caught him and cradled him against me as gently as if he was made of spun glass. I looked at Jane, who was all smiles, leaning against the door frame, arms crossed, as if she had no cause to leap across the porch at any second to stop me from biting Danny.
I buried my face in Danny’s hair and discovered that my darling boy did not smell as beautiful as he looked. Phew. Sweat, sunscreen, citronella, smoke, fried fish, singed sugar, and an undercurrent of exhaust. Danny stank to high heaven, something I wouldn’t have noticed before. Human mothers had to overlook a lot of interesting odors. It was going to take time to adjust to my vampire nose.
“Hi, baby,” I said, putting all the strength I had into not recoiling.
Danny shivered. “Your cheek is cold, Mom.”
“Sorry,” I said, leaning back and looking at him, taking in every detail all over again. “It’s the air-conditioning. You’re a big, tough outdoorsman now. You’re not used to modern conveniences.”
“You’re so weird,” Danny huffed, though he was grinning broadly. I laughed and pressed my forehead to his as the last sliver of fear evaporated from my chest. I made Danny smile. He called me weird. This was a very normal interaction for us. We were going to be OK.
“Danny, get down!” Marge yelped as she climbed out of the truck. “You know your mama’s not strong enough to hold you like that.”
Oh, right, because I was supposed to be seriously ill. I made a big show of struggling under Danny’s weight, letting my knees buckle as I wobbled and set his feet gently on the ground.
“Did you have fun with Papa and Mamaw?” I asked, grinning at him.
“Yeah, we went fishing and made s’mores and went riding on Papa’s four-wheeler.”
Well, that explained the smell of exhaust.
I gave Les Stratton the extreme side-eye. My father-in-law was still a strapping man at sixty, with a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair and Rob’s brown eyes. If I ever wondered what my husband might have looked like if he’d survived to old age, all I had to do was look at Les.
That was a rather gross thought.
“Les, I’ve asked you not to put him on an ATV. He’s small for his age. It’s not safe,” I told him.
Les dismissed my concerns like he always did. “Ah, Robbie and I used to do it all the time at his age. It’s fine. Trust me. When you’ve been at parenting as long as I have, you’ll be able to tell the difference between real danger and worrywartin’. Besides, I have to teach the boy how to be a man.”
It struck me that Rob had learned much of how to be a husband from Les. Dismissal. Condescension. And when that failed, falling back to the old “I’m a man and therefore know better than you, silly woman” stance. There were times I really wanted to punch my father-in-law in the kidneys.
Of course, if I did that now, I would probably kill him. Still, something to consider.
At the moment, I simply wanted them away from the house before they figured out that there was something different about me. So I was willing to let his mansplaining go . . . for now.
“What do you say to Mamaw and Papa for taking you camping?” I prompted Danny.
“Thank you!” Danny picked up his backpack and ran into the house, going past Jane without a second look. He’d gotten used to all sorts of people coming into the house to help care for me. We were going to have to do something about his stranger awareness.
Marge patted my cheek, and I was overwhelmed by the scent of White Shoulders. White Shoulders and blood—warm, delicious, sweet blood that would taste like the cinnamon Marge always sprinkled on top of her coffee. I could sense it, pulsing through her veins, throbbing at the juncture of her neck and shoulder. My mouth watered at the thought of sinking my fangs into her neck and drinking deep. I could almost feel the warm tide of it slipping past my lips.
“Libby,” Jane said in a warning tone. It seemed that Jane did not appreciate the violent slide show going on in my head.
My fangs dropped. My mouth clamped shut, and I took a tiny step back. An expression of hurt crossed Marge’s features. I concentrated on unappetizing thoughts and willed my fangs to go away. Roadkill. The smell of Danny’s sandals at the end of the summer. James Franco’s paintings.
“You must have gotten your rest while we were gone,” Marge said. “You’re looking much better. Still a bit peaky, mind, but better. Your skin doesn’t look so dull. And did you do something new to your hair?”
“I had it done,” I said, nodding, letting the buttery waves bounce around my face. I couldn’t help it. Marge had been after me to “spruce myself up” for months. Because “you’re looking a little frumpy” is just what someone with a terminal disease wants to hear. “Do you like it?”
“Was it Tammy, over at the Beauty Mark?” Marge asked, peering closer at my face, as if she was trying to figure out what sort of moisturizer I was using to give my skin that flawless undead porcelain glow. If I said yes, that my new look was the result of Tammy’s work, Marge would be in her chair the next day, grilling my poor hairdresser.
“You using a new makeup, too?”
“Uh . . .”
But I was saved by the nosy father-in-law. Les gave a sort of chin nod at Jane, who was hovering by the front door. “Who’s this?”
It made sense that Les was giving Jane the “I think I recognize you from church, but I’m not quite sure” look most Hollow residents did when we ran into someone new. Heck, I barely recognized Jane when I crawled out of my grave. She was a few years ahead of Rob and me in school. And Jane’s appearance had changed quite a bit since she’d dropped out of the Hollow’s “daytime” social circles.
“Oh, this is Jane, from the PTA. We’ve got the Pumpkin Patch Party coming up, lots to plan,” I explained airily. It seemed that once you had no pulse or blood pressure, lying came a lot easier. Yay for me and my already slippery morality.
“School hasn’t even started yet,” Les noted. “And you haven’t been able to help at the school in months.”
“PTA business never stops,” Jane supplied helpfully. “And Libby has been feeling better lately. I’ll bet in the next few weeks, you’ll see a real turnaround. Right, Libby?”
I stared at Jane, who was smiling as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth—which, given her lower body temperature, was plausible. She seemed to be enjoying this just a little too much.
“It’s not fair to give her false hope,” Marge admonished Jane.
“I am feeling better,” I told Marge, and before she could object, I called after Danny. “Honey, come tell Mamaw and Papa good-bye, and then it’s time for bed!”
“I can stay, give him a bath and help put my baby down to sleep,” Marge offered, still eyeing Jane.
“I’ll be fine,” I assured her. “I need to get used to doing things on my own again.”
My mother-in-law edged toward the truck, wearing her suspicious face, but for once in our relationship, she chose discretion over interrogation. Vampirism might have some benefits I hadn’t even considered yet.
“You know, it’s at times like these that I’m grateful my in-laws died a century before I met their son,” Jane said, waving cheerfully as the truck backed out of my driveway. “Next time, marry an orphan, sweetie.”
“No one likes a gloater, Jane.”