3
Vampirism adds an additional layer of challenge to parenting, an already challenging prospect. As your child develops from a baby to a toddler to the child who makes you cringe when he gets near a microphone in public places, so you must develop, too.
—My Mommy Has Fangs: A Guide to Post-Vampiric Parenting
It’s going to sound super-creepy, but I spent my first night with Danny watching him curled up on his bed in his Spider-Man pajamas. I sat on the floor with my hand on his chest, watching it rise and fall. It was as if I’d never seen my son before, and I couldn’t stop looking at him.
Jane was just down the hall, going over some inventory reports for her shop, keeping one ear open for any suspicious “bite-y” sounds. But really, sitting there in the dark, quiet home, listening to my son breathe, it felt like any night before I died. It felt strange to me that my life had changed in such a major way, but Danny hadn’t noticed a difference. I wondered if it was the blessing of being so young or if I had managed to cling to the most stubborn parts of my humanity. I hoped that was it.
What if no one else saw the change in me, either? Part of me wanted that, like somehow I could pretend nothing had happened and keep people from finding out that I was a vampire now. That was reasonable, right?
OK, no, no, it wasn’t. I knew that I was going to have to tell them eventually. But I wanted to get Danny settled into our new routine, get him in school, and demonstrate that I could take care of him even with my new “condition.” So when my maternal fitness inevitably came into question, I would have some parental street cred built up. My son was never going to have a normal life. First he was poor Danny whose father had died. And now he was poor Danny whose mother was a monster. I contemplated starting a savings account for his therapy as soon as there was some extra money in the budget.
Besides, I knew how Half-Moon Hollow residents talked about their neighbors who’d been turned. Like it was something the new vampires brought on themselves. Like it was something that could never happen to them. Frankly, it was the same way my classmates whispered about girls who got pregnant in high school. I didn’t want the whispers to affect Danny. I didn’t want people to stop talking when I walked into the same Walmart aisle.
I supposed there was some advantage to gaining a reputation as a creature of the night. There wasn’t much about my appearance that was intimidating to vampires or humans. My wardrobe consisted mostly of jeans, weather-appropriate cardigans, and Keds. Would it damage my position if the other vampires saw me dressing that way? Would they not take me seriously? I mean, Jane wore pretty dresses, but she was still somehow quite intimidating. And Dick dressed in jeans and smartass T-shirts, but there was still this edge of menace, as if no matter the time of night, he would know exactly how and where to hide your body.
Should I go out and buy leather pants and boots? I didn’t want to be picked off because other vampires perceived me as weak.
No. Moms should not wear leather pants, even when they had a good reason.
I watched my son’s chest rise and fall. Our usual babysitter, Kaylee Dickson, would come over early in the morning as planned to keep Danny all day. I’d left her a note stating that I’d had a particularly bad reaction to a treatment and would probably sleep most of the day. That was the story I planned to stick with for most of the first week. There was no reason to freak her out.
Kaylee was a sweet girl, sixteen and possessed of all the scatterbrained, optimistic charm that involved her not asking a lot of detailed questions about why I only needed her during the day. But she was also fiercely protective of Danny, was an excellent storyteller, and had gone on a vegan health-food kick after reading The Jungle for her advanced English class, so Danny couldn’t con so much as a Fruit Roll-Up out of her. He’d survived the whole summer on Tofurky and carob cookies.
I’d timed my turning carefully, just as summer was ending but before Danny started school, so I would have some time to adjust before his classes began. Kaylee was already coming over in the mornings to help him with breakfast and getting dressed. She’d agreed to keep doing that after school started and then drive Danny to the elementary school.
Wait.
I pulled my cell phone from my pocket, ignoring the multitude of missed calls and e-mails that had come in while I was underground, and checked the calendar. I opened my Internet browser and pulled up the school’s Web site.
I had to register Danny for first grade in two nights. It was inevitable, I supposed, that when you made a change like this, something would slip through the cracks, but I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten about school registration—the annual refiling of paperwork that I’d already filled out the previous year, just so the school district had updated parent signatures. It was my belief that this practice was a conspiracy by notary publics to keep their industry afloat.
School registration—a big, crowded school building full of people and their smells and their noise and their tempting blood. And kids running around. And people who would try to recruit me into volunteering for stuff. This did not bode well, in terms of what sort of vampire parent I was going to be.
I rubbed Danny’s back and gave myself a cross between a pep talk and a “come to Jesus” scolding. I knew this sort of thing was coming. It was all part of raising a child. Dang it.
Danny ran ahead of me in the hallway, his lime-green T-shirt disappearing into the crowd of people milling around in the school’s maze of classrooms. The school staff had gone all out with the decorations this year, festooning the hallway in blue, gold, and white streamers, balloons, and tissue puffs. A huge mural of Happy the Half-Moon Howler Pup had been added to the entrance over the summer, his blue sweater stretching over a chest puffed up with Howler pride. Beyond that, not much about the building had changed since I was a student here.
I could only be grateful that my illness had gotten me off of the PTA’s social committee the previous spring, so I wasn’t obligated to organize this insanity. I’d tried to come up with several different scenarios in which I could register Danny for school without leaving the house before sunset—calling the school and claiming I was too sick to come in and asking the administrators to just fax all of the permission slips and registration documents over for a signature, or asking Les and Marge to take him and sign the documents for me. But those didn’t paint me as a very good parent, and I didn’t want Les and Marge to gain any foothold as potential legal guardians. Frankly, I was surprised they hadn’t shown up for registration just to make sure they made contact with Danny’s new teacher . . . who wasn’t in the classroom or anywhere that I could see.
So far, I’d managed to duck my in-laws’ calls for two days. I texted to assure them that I was fine. Danny was fine. We were both resting up for the beginning of the school year.
Danny, a social bumblebee by nature (he refused to be called a butterfly, too girlie), was in heaven, darting back and forth between his kindergarten classrooms to talk to his former teachers. Every former classmate he saw was treated to a big hug and an interrogation about his or her summer. I hung back, pleased to watch him play tiny politician while I wrestled with my senses. This was a considerable development from the skirt-hugging kid who had only started morning preschool a few months before Rob died.
I was not in top shape for this little outing. For days, I’d been having recurring dreams about my blurry-faced sire. At first, it was just a repeat of my turning, the same sweet nothings he’d whispered to me while I was dying. And then it progressed to new, more intimate scenarios. Sitting on my kitchen counter while he stood between my thighs. Cuddled up on the swing on my front porch. Sprawled across a large, unfamiliar bed while he traced every vertebra of my spine with his fingertips and spoke soft nonsense to me. But I never saw his face. It was like I was compelled not to look him in the eye. Even while he held me, he kept his face tucked into the crook of my neck or buried in my hair. It was warm and lovely and made me so happy, knowing that there was someone who cherished me this much. And naked. We were usually naked.
It was confusing, feeling that much for someone who was a virtual stranger. I knew that it wasn’t real. I didn’t know this man. He didn’t know me, much less love me. But to be yanked out of that sweet illusion every sunset into a world where I was unsteady and uncertain was disorienting. At least, that was the rationalization I used for being so damned late for Danny’s school registration.
We were coming in late, driving in Jane’s sunproof vampire-mobile she called “Big Bertha, Jr.,” during the final (increasingly sunless) minutes of the registration window. At this point, most of the parents had finished their paperwork and were standing around socializing while their kids ran around like feral cats. As usual, the sight of all those complete family units, mothers and fathers herding their kids around in tandem, made my chest a little tight for Danny’s sake. Danny had never seen his dad put up a tent in the backyard for a campout. He would never know what it was like to have his dad coach his Little League team. He would never be a big brother. While I’d survived being a fatherless only child, I’d hoped for something better for my son. Now I simply hoped that having one parent who whole-assed it was better than one absent parent and another who less-than-half-assed it.
Considering that this was my first crowd situation since I’d been turned, I thought I was doing pretty well. While the combination of sights, smells, and sounds was overwhelming, I distracted myself by cataloguing all of the odors in my head. Paste and new crayons and floor wax and kid sweat. I’d glutted myself on bottled blood as soon as I rose for the night. I even swigged a sample of HemoBoost on the drive over. (Definitely not a repeat purchase. It tasted like a combination of old dirty pennies and that stuff you find dried on the corners of your mouth in the morning.) Thanks to that vurpy experience, I was more nauseated than hungry. My fellow parents were safe.
Jane was trailing behind me at a casual pace. And when people questioned the presence of a childless vampire at a school event, she simply responded that the Council was looking into opportunities to partner with the county’s schools and provide support. It seemed plausible enough, and Jane was generally known as a reasonable, non-murdery citizen, so they accepted the explanation.
Miss Steele hadn’t put a lot of effort into decorating like the other teachers had, but the room was clean and organized and chock-full of informational posters about addition, subtraction, nouns, and verbs. Miss Steele herself was nowhere to be found, but that wasn’t unusual. There were so many different parents with so many different needs, and teachers spent a good deal of registration night running around the building, chasing down paperwork.
Dorothy Steele had been a first-grade teacher when I attended Half-Moon Hollow Elementary School. Approaching ancient even then, she hadn’t been a cuddly nap-time and handprint-turkey sort of teacher. She’d been stern, no-nonsense. But I left her class with impeccable penmanship and a thorough knowledge of my times tables, material far above my grade level. Without her, I might never have achieved the math proficiency I needed for accounting. But telling her so probably would have irritated her. Miss Steele had never been one for emotional displays.
I settled into the tiny child-sized chair in front of the desk marked “Danny” on a cheerful fire-engine-shaped name tag and marveled at the sheer number of labeled folders waiting for me. Basic information forms asking for address, phone number, e-mail, Social Security number, Twitter handle, and shampoo preference. Forms to authorize Danny’s lunchtime food choices and put money in his account. Forms to approve his use of the school’s Internet. Forms to enroll him on the bus route. Forms that promised that I would not hold the school responsible if one of his classmates pushed him off the top of the monkey bars and broke his collarbone. (It was a pretty specific form, in terms of liability.)
I spent thirty minutes filling out the papers, signing my name over and over again as Danny’s sole legal guardian. Instead of putting Marge’s and Les’s names down as Danny’s emergency contacts, I wrote down the name of the local Council office daytime liaison. It felt wrong, but considering my uncertainty about my in-laws, I couldn’t risk them being able to come retrieve Danny from school while I was out for the day.
This had been so much easier last year, when all I had to worry about was keeping Danny occupied while I tried to fill out his mountain of kindergarten paperwork. I still hadn’t explained to Danny that I’d been turned. I just couldn’t seem to gather my nerve. There was no good time to work that into a conversation. Hey, sweetie, could you turn off Ninja Turtles long enough for Mommy to tell you that she’s one of the undead and your life has changed forever?
For right now, I was in a holding pattern, adjusting to my new life, and it was working for me. I felt like I was balancing a house of cards on my palm and any movement would bring it down.
“Mom, look what we got!”
I turned to find a blue-frosted “HMHES” cupcake being shoved into my face. Now, under normal preturning circumstances, my main concern would be getting blue frosting out of my sweater. But since human food smells absolutely repellent to vampires, I was far more focused on the fact that Danny was waving what smelled like a freshly deposited cow pie directly in front of my face. I gasped, whipping my head back away from the treat. The overreaction merited a few curious looks from other parents, so I worked to maintain control over my gag reflex.
“Mom, what’s wrong?” Danny asked. “Don’t you want a bite?”
I would rather watch one of those “eyebrow waxing gone wrong” videos on YouTube than take a bite of that thing. I wheezed, “It’s all yours, sweetie.”
“You’re not on a diet, are you?” Danny said, shaking his head. “Katie Hannan’s mom is always on a diet, and Katie says she never smiles anymore.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t repeat the things your friends say about their families,” I told him.
Breathing through my mouth, I finally noticed the little boy in a camo hoodie and scuffed sneakers standing behind Danny.
“Who’s this?”
“This is my new best friend, Charlie,” Danny said, slinging his arm around the boy’s shoulder. Charlie kept his cupcake-free hand tucked into his pocket but seemed pleased by Danny’s show of bro-fection. Charlie had wide, mischievous brown eyes and sharp features, the sort of impish face that would get him labeled the class troublemaker for years to come. He had an admirable blue frosting mustache on his upper lip.
“It’s nice to meet you, hon. Are you new here?”
Charlie shook his head. “No, ma’am. We moved here after my birthday. My birthday’s in February. Dad says I can have a party at the Knight’s Castle this year.”
Well, that explained why I’d never met Charlie. I hadn’t been able to volunteer at the school since the early spring semester. It also revealed that Charlie’s father was a very brave man. The Knight’s Castle was a medieval-themed indoor play complex with inflatable bouncy houses, video games, a snack bar, and, for that extra level of noise and stink, pony rides.
I pulled a wet wipe from my purse and dabbed at his frosting facial hair. I’d expected him to object, or at least wriggle a little, but again, he seemed pleased by the attention, tilting his face from side to side to make sure I’d cleaned away everything.
Danny was bouncing on his toes, though I couldn’t tell whether it was from excitement or in an attempt to hide the fact that Charlie towered a full head over him. “Charlie says I’m invited to his party this year, Mom. Can I go?”
“You’re handing out invitations already?” I asked Charlie, who shrugged and dug his toe into the floor.
“Danny already invited me to his party,” Charlie said.
“Of course he did.” Danny issued invitations to his next birthday party all year round. He planned his cake, theme, and color scheme at least nine months in advance. “And I hope you can come.”
“Mom, Miss Lisa is doing story time in the library. Can I go?”
God bless Lisa Stewart, the school librarian. With her endless patience and carefully organized arsenal of distracting stories, she’d taken pity on us all. She was the one who’d recognized Danny’s above-average reading level and encouraged him to find authors like Aaron Reynolds and Chris Gall to appeal to his sense of humor. Those books had helped Danny stay entertained during the worst nights of my treatment. I would be forever grateful.
“Can I go, Mom?”
“Sure, baby.” He scampered off with Charlie, and I was reminded, once again, that no matter how messed-up the consequences, I’d made the right choice being turned. I could be gone right now instead of watching my son making a new friend. I organized the paperwork carefully and retrieved the three-page list of school supplies he would need for the year.
I took a deep, unnecessary breath before walking out into the hall, fortifying myself for the onslaught of human noise and smells. Several of the parents called out to me, waving, smiling, telling me how glad they were to see me up and around. Mark Walsh, the school principal, who had been instrumental in keeping me in touch and informed about Danny’s academic and emotional status even when I was too fatigued to make a damn phone call, stopped me to remind me that the staff was there to help us with anything we needed in the new school year.
Jane was leaning against the wall, texting, waiting for me by the nurse’s office. She was frowning as she peered down at the screen.
“Council business,” she told me, shoving the phone into her pocket. “Are you done?”
“No, now I have to go to the cafeteria and find all of the right people to give the right pages to and then commando-roll out of the fire exit before I get recruited for the homework helper program. I love helping kids understand math, but I’m not willing to let the sun evaporate me in order to do it,” I said quietly.
“That seems reasonable,” Jane said. “Maybe we can find some online tutoring program for you to help with if you find you miss it a lot.” She shuddered as a rowdy group of kids stampeded by, waving blue “Go, Howlers, Go!” foam fingers. “You know, there are times when I’m really glad the childe I got had already graduated by the time I turned him. I’m not sure I would have survived all this. You’re well suited to it, though. You haven’t flinched once.”
I grinned. “Thanks, Jane.”
“Libby!”
Casey Sparks, a petite brunette with a sassy pixie cut, was bustling down the hall toward me.
“Friend or foe?” Jane whispered.
“Friend,” I whispered back, adding, “Ish.”
Of all the parents I knew through school, I was probably closest to Casey. We’d worked together on the raffle committee for the Pumpkin Patch Party, the school’s annual fall festival and biggest fund-raiser of the year for the PTA. Working that thing was like serving in the armed forces together. It changed a woman.
Casey and I occasionally met for coffee, and when I got sick, she’d brought some casseroles over to the house. With my symptoms and her four kids, that was about as much as either of us had time for. And honestly, I didn’t know how to offer more.
Casey threw an arm around my shoulder and squeezed me tight. I hugged her back with a fraction of my strength for fear of hurting her. Leaning away from the potential temptation of her pulsing throat, I ran through the list of things I was supposed to be doing—breathing, blinking, smiling—and tried to do them at a regular, human pace.
“They must have the air-conditioning cranked up pretty high—your hands are freezing!” she exclaimed.
My smile stretched tight. Actually, the air-conditioning was struggling under the body heat of so many people walking through the building while the doors were standing open. Everybody else’s forehead had a fine sheen of sweat. I supposed Casey was trying to be polite about my less-than-stellar immune-system-slash-everything-else. “Well, the system must be catching up from being off over the summer.”
“Wow, you’re looking really good,” Casey said, holding my hands and stepping back so she could survey me. “That new treatment seems to be a little easier on you. Have you been taking supplements or something?”
Remembering the horse-pill iron supplements I’d choked down that morning, I said, “Yep, vitamins and supplements. Health shakes. That sort of thing.”
Synthetic blood was a sort of smoothie, right? A meaty, metallic smoothie.
“Well, you look great. So did Danny get Mrs. Roberts this year?” she asked. The highly coveted first-grade teacher was a miracle worker with behavioral problems. Her class reading-comprehension test scores were through the roof. And she’d managed to make the first grade’s Earth Day play interesting three years in a row. All the parents wanted their kids to be in Mrs. Roberts’s class, so much so that the school stopped taking assignment requests as a matter of policy.
“No, he got Miss Steele,” I said quietly, nodding toward the empty classroom. “I’m sure he’ll be fine. I was when I was in her class. How about Peyton? How is she liking her last year of Sunnyside?”
Peyton was Casey’s youngest, a pink-obsessed princess obsessed with the Little Mermaid. She had cried, cajoled, and attempted bribery to get her mother to let her skip a year at Sunnyside preschool, Danny’s “alma mater,” so she could join her oldest siblings at big-kid school. Casey was a stronger woman than I, because I don’t know if I would have been able to say no to that level of cuteness. Or whining.
“Mrs. Bloom,” Casey said, her pink-glossed lips bending into a frown.
I winced. Danny and Mrs. Bloom had not gotten along well when she’d been his teacher. Mrs. Bloom seemed to be of the opinion that four-year-olds should be seen and not heard, which was an odd stance for someone who spent all day talking to four-year-olds. “Well, I’m sure it will be fine.”
“When Danny had Mrs. Bloom, you told me I should pray for her retirement or a falling cartoon safe before Peyton got to the four-year-old class.”
“I think I said cartoon piano, but OK. And maybe she was just having an off year when Danny had her.”
“I don’t think you’re allowed to have an off year,” Casey said. “A week, sure. Maybe a month. But not a year.”
“It will be fine,” I said. “Just ask Peyton a lot of questions when she gets home so you’re prepared for the phone calls.”
It felt wrong to be gossiping about teachers in what amounted to “faculty housing.” But I also knew that this happened in every hallway in every school in America. For every wonderful, talented, dedicated teacher out there, there was the one who triggered the fight-or-flight response during parent-teacher conferences.
“If you’re feeling up to it, let’s meet up for coffee once the kids are in school,” Casey said.
“Sure.”
As she walked away, I bit my lip. I hoped she liked drinking decaf at night. I relaxed a little, now that I didn’t have to play human quite so convincingly. I was suddenly so tired. Tired and kind of depressed that no one here knew me well enough to see how much I’d changed. The last time I was here, I looked like the walking dead, dang it, and now I was practically a mom supermodel, and people seemed to think it was because of some magic herbal pill. I just needed a few minutes. A few minutes of peace and quiet and fewer smells.
“You’re looking pretty tired, hon. Why don’t you take a little break?” Jane suggested, nodding toward the closet near the music room marked “Janitorial Supplies.”
“Thanks. I’ll be right back,” I said.
I ducked into the closet, using just a teensy bit of my vampire strength to wrench the doorknob’s fifty-year-old lock off of its pins. Promising myself that I would send the school a check to replace it, I leaned my forehead against the cool wood door and tried some of the relaxation techniques the nurses had suggested at the chemo center. I pictured warm, yellow sunlight filtering through the ceiling and relaxing my frazzled nerves. I pictured a warm beach, sand shifting underneath my back as my toes curled and uncurled under the grainy surface. I imagined the scents of coconut suntan lotion and ocean salt wafting toward my nose. I felt a pretend breeze against my skin. And I heard a voice, low and loving, calling my name. I’d heard the voice before, whispering in my ear while I was unable to breathe. He told me that everything was going to be all right, that this was part of it, and when I woke up—
Suddenly, the door popped open and smacked me in the forehead, knocking me back on my heels.
“Oof!” I cried, clutching my face. Thank goodness I had rapid healing powers, because I was pretty sure I’d just sustained a concussion.
“Are you OK?” a gruff voice demanded.
“What the hell— Who are you?” I demanded.
“I’m the guy with the keys to this closet. Who are you?”
My eyes went wide. This was the school janitor? What happened to Ernie Houser? When I attended Half-Moon Hollow Elementary, the janitor had been a sweet old man who had a fluffy white walrus mustache and whistled “My Old Kentucky Home” through the gap in his front teeth.
The contemporary school janitor was made from a slightly different mold. Tall, lean, almost wiry, with respectable cords of muscles rippling over arms covered in a swirling cloud of colorful tattoos. His face was long and lean, with sharp features only softened by a scruff of white-blond beard and longish darker blond hair that brushed against the collar of his T-shirt. His eyes were a defiant blue. If Thor had a pissed-off, tattooed younger brother, he would be the guy blocking my exit from the supply closet. And yeah, he might have fit the bill for some of my more tawdry biker fantasies, but given the way he was glaring at me, I got the distinct impression that he didn’t want me touching him or his . . . hog.
“I came in here for a fresh shirt,” he said, nodding toward the flannel shirts hanging neatly from hooks on the closet wall. “The air conditioner was on the fritz . . .” He stared down at the ruined doorknob. “What the hell did you do to the door?”
“Nothing!” I exclaimed, but I hid my hands behind my back as if it would keep me from being caught red-handed.
“What are you even doing in here?” he demanded. “You don’t have any good reason to be in here, damaging school property. What the hell is wrong with you parents? Ya know, just ’cause you pay taxes doesn’t mean you own the school!”
My mouth was hanging open in response to his rudeness. I was sure my vampire impression of Munch’s The Scream was super-attractive. “I got turned around.”
“Well, turn back around and get out.” He jerked his thumb toward the open door behind him as he shrugged out of his sweat-stained gray Half-Moon Hollow Howlers T-shirt and into a blue cotton uniform workshirt with “Wade” stitched on the breast pocket.
My jaw dropped. Who the hell was this guy, and who did he think he was, bossing me around? Nobody had talked to me like this in . . . well, I couldn’t remember the last time someone talked to me with such an irritated tone, certainly not since I became a tragic terminally ill widow. I’d been treated with kid gloves lined with cotton balls for the past two years.
And holy Hades, he had even more tattoos underneath the shirt. Even with my super-vision, I couldn’t take in the details in the brief glimpse I got. Still, I got a good look at the big picture, and the picture was pretty damn nice. Long, sinewy arms, a broad chest, and a flat stomach tapering to hip bones that jutted out just a few inches above the waistline of his worn jeans.
How perverse was it that between the pretty face, the tattoos, and the surliness, I was actually beginning to feel the faint stirrings of attraction? Fine, they weren’t so much faint stirrings as a deep, reverberating echo between my thighs, like a super-dirty version of those Tibetan meditation bells. It was certainly stronger than anything I’d felt in years. For a while, I hadn’t been certain that all of my parts were still in working condition. Was this a side effect of vampirism? Unprecedented skankiness in response to hostility?
And I had been staring at him this whole time, which was starting to become awkward.
“Are you always this grouchy?” I asked.
“Only when nosy soccer moms invade my damn space! Now, get out!”
“Just as an FYI, in case the policy manual is outside your reading-comprehension level, most school employees don’t strip in front of parents.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I regretted them. Why had I said that? That was mean. But my insult hadn’t even fazed “Wade,” who was waving me toward the door. “Keep walking, Bree.”
“My name isn’t Bree.”
He scoffed. “Your names are always ‘Bree’ or ‘Krissy’ or ‘Elizabeth.’ And then you slap it on everythin’ you own, including those stupid little stick figures you stick on the backs of your minivans.”
“It’s Libby,” I shot back.
“Which is short for Elizabeth. Thanks for proving my point.”
Actually, it was short for Liberty, because I was born on the Fourth of July and the pain meds made my mom all weepy and patriotic. But Sassy Janitor didn’t need to know about that.
“Do us all a favor and try to develop a nicer attitude before the kids come back to school.”
“I don’t need to. The kids know better than to go where they’re not wanted!” he shot back as I walked out to find a bemused Jane standing outside the closet.
I would not walk down the hall of an elementary school flipping double birds at a school employee, even if that hallway was empty. That was not something classy mothers did, living or undead.
“You couldn’t have stopped him from going into the closet?” I asked drily.
“I was distracted by text messages,” she said, sounding not at all apologetic. “You have a thing for tattoos, huh?”
“Don’t read my mind without my permission!” I hissed quietly. “That’s just rude!”
“Hey, I only got half of the picture before you managed to shut me out. How did you do that, by the way? Meditation exercises?”
“Do what?”
“Shut me out of your head,” she said. “The only other person who can do it is Nola, and she has an unfair magical advantage.”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” I said. “Let’s just get out of here before I make a bigger scene.”
“Eh, there’s so much background noise no one really noticed the muffled voices coming from the closet.”
I stopped in my tracks, turning on my heel and shouting toward the now closed closet door, “And my face is fine, by the way! Thanks for asking, jerk.”
Danny was still happily rolling about on the magic story-time carpet in the library when I found him, completely engrossed in Miss Lisa’s narration of Pete the Cat: Rockin’ in My School Shoes. Jane took a deep breath as we entered the library, as if she missed the smell. Afterward, I tried to give her some space as we walked to the car. She looked a little weepy. Danny filled up the silence with chatter about his new friend Charlie, Pete the Cat, Charlie, the cafeteria, Charlie, the music room, and Charlie. Charlie was apparently the source of all things cool. He had a dog named Ratchet and a collection of snakeskins and arrowheads.
“So I take it you’re excited about this year, buddy?” I asked him as I buckled his seatbelt.
“Yup. Charlie and I are going to be in the same class. We’re going to play pirates at recess. But close the door, Mom. I don’t want anybody seeing that I still use a Bubble Guppies booster seat.”
I nodded and saluted as I closed the door. The poor kid had always been a little sensitive about being smaller than the rest of the kids in his class. He considered his continued use of a preschool-brand booster to be on par with thumb sucking or needing a sippy cup. But he hadn’t outgrown it yet, and booster seats weren’t cheap.
“I’m proud of you,” Jane told me. “That was a lot of sensory input, and you handled it beautifully. And you didn’t even show any signs that you’d been turned. Do you know how hard that is? I barely got through a first visit with my mama, and she kept trying to force-feed me pot pie!”
“Thank you, vampire Yoda,” I said. “Do I get my ‘first outing’ merit badge?”
“No, but I’m going to ignore the fact that you’re sassing your mentor. You should consider that a gift.”
“I do,” I told her solemnly.
“Drive safe,” she called as she walked toward her tank of a car, an SUV she called Big Bertha, Jr. “I need to swing by my place, and then I’ll see you at the house.”
“I always drive safe. It’s a minivan.” Just as I turned toward the car, which had been moved to the school while I slept by a helpful human Council employee, I tracked a flash of hot pink in my peripheral vision. My head whipped toward the movement, a predatory instinct that made me more than a little uncomfortable. About twenty feet away, Ashlynne Carson, the little sister of one of Danny’s classmates, was chasing her wayward “Welcome Back to School” balloon as it floated toward the parking lot. Ashlynne’s mother, Candace, was busy talking to Mr. Walsh and didn’t see her daughter in danger. And Nina Paltree was backing her huge Yukon out of its space and had no clue that Ashlynne was behind her. In fact, it seemed like no one was watching Ashlynne at the moment.
Without thinking, I sprinted the short distance at top speed. I caught Ashlynne under her arms and scooped her up, springing to the side, out of the path of the car. It would have been a graceful rescue had my foot not caught on the curb and sent me sprawling across the sidewalk. I wrapped my arms around Ashlynne’s squirming body, rolling across the pavement and taking the brunt of the impact on my back.
“Ow,” I grunted as Ashlynne and I rolled to a stop.
“My balloon!” the little girl wailed. “You made me miss my balloon! I want my balloon!”
“Everybody’s a critic,” I mumbled.
It seemed that while no one had seen me barrel across the parking lot at superhuman speeds, everybody had seen me take a dive on the pavement. Typical. Candace scrambled across the sidewalk and pulled Ashlynne from my arms. I could barely make out her “thank you”s through her alternate sobbing and fussing at her daughter. Nina drove the Yukon away, unaware of the drama left unfolding behind her.
A few other parents huddled around Ashlynne and her mother, while Principal Walsh and Casey ran to help me.
“Libby! Are you OK?” Mr. Walsh helped me to my feet. With every movement, I discovered new bits of gravel buried in my knees and palms.
“I’m fine,” I assured him, even as I hissed in pain. Once again, vampirism did not stop the pain response. If anything, I think my sensitive nerves felt it more acutely.
“I’ll go get Nurse Anne,” he called over his shoulder, jogging into the school building.
“Oh, careful, hon,” Casey said, turning my hands over. “You’ve got some pretty good scrapes on your hands. Let’s get you to the nurse’s office, and she can clean those . . .” We watched as the wounds on my palms closed on their own. The bits of gravel skittered across the pavement as the healing flesh pushed the rocks out of my skin. “Up.” I watched the color drain from my friend’s face as she backed away from me.
“Casey . . .” I began.
“Don’t.” Casey held up her cross necklace as if that would ward me off. (It wouldn’t.) “I knew you seemed too healthy. You moved too fast. You were too pret— I knew something was wrong.”
“There’s nothing wrong,” I told her.
“Oh, sure, nothing’s wrong,” she scoffed. Her head snapped toward Mr. Walsh, who was following Ashlynne and Candace into the school.
“Casey,” I said, with a little more warning in my tone than was probably wise.
“I don’t know anyone who is a vampire,” she said. “And I don’t want to know you.”
And with that, I watched as the closest thing I had to a friend climbed into her car and drove away.