4
Your vampire childe is going to resent you. Accept it. Save up for the centuries-long therapy.
—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire
I guessed I couldn’t blame Ben for not wanting me around while he and Jane had the vampire birds-and-bees talk. After all, he’d asked me to dinner, and I’d made him be the entree.
Still, it stung a little bit. I thought I’d prepared myself for how angry Ben would be. But to see that anger in his eyes, after knowing nothing but flirty banter from him, shook me up more than I would admit. I couldn’t help but feel I’d lost the beginnings of something important. And considering that he had centuries to hold on to his grudge—and that I’d sort of accidentally murdered him—I didn’t think we were going to make that dinner date.
I went to my room and tried to pretend I was starting on homework assignments. It was the distraction I needed to keep me from yanking my blue suitcase out from under the bed and throwing my clothes into it.
I opened a Word document on my laptop and, deciding to test the monitoring software Jane had installed on my computer, typed in the words “Half-Moon Hollow.” A scary blue filled my screen with bold all-caps, screaming at me, “THIS IS YOUR ONE AND ONLY WARNING. KEYLOGGER SOFTWARE HAS BEEN INSTALLED ON THIS LAPTOP. TYPE THAT PHRASE AGAIN, AND THE NEXT BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH WILL BE REAL.”
She couldn’t do that, right? She couldn’t install spyware on my personal computer! I mean, I knew she could do it, technologically—the Council hired the best and brightest minds available to work for their tech departments—but could she do it legally? I seemed to recall from our orientation at New Dawn that vampires operated under what was basically a feudal system of government, in which they did what the Council told them to or else. So I probably didn’t have much room to complain about her rigging my computer.
Despite Ophelia’s warnings, maybe it would be better if I were sent to stay somewhere else. Ben didn’t want me here. Jane was clearly more comfortable with Ben than she was with me. And I’d been in enough group-placement situations to know that you didn’t want to be the least favorite kid in the house. Been there, done that, lost my favorite jeans.
I could hear every word floating up from the kitchen as Jane informed Ben of what had happened to us and how it affected him. Yes, he was a vampire. No, he wasn’t a normal vampire, and she didn’t know why. No, she didn’t think Meagan had done anything on purpose to make him a weird vampire. Yes, his parents had been informed, and while they weren’t happy, they weren’t in a panic, either. Yes, he would be allowed to contact his parents by Skype. No, he would not be allowed to see them in person or tell them he was staying less than ten miles away from his childhood home. Yes, he would be staying with Jane for the foreseeable future. Yes, Meagan had to stay here, too.
At the mention of my name, I put on headphones and cranked up some bass-heavy music. Superhearing or no, I did not need to eavesdrop on whatever it was that Ben had to say about me. I did manage to finish some classwork my professors had assigned for the coming week.
I set up my desk, “accidentally” smashing two or three unicorns as I made space for my books and laptop. I finished the setup on the closely monitored online Dropbox folders where I was supposed to leave my homework assignments. I made a schedule for all of the reading I needed to complete that week and the homework deadlines. Taking those steps gave me the illusion of control, which gave me the illusion of feeling better. Sure, I couldn’t control where I lived, what I ate, or who I had to see over the breakfast table every evening, but at least my iCalendar was up to date.
Headphones still in place, I opened my copy of Moby-Dick and found my place. I didn’t particularly enjoy the book, but I did enjoy the assignment, comparing the original work with its unofficial adaptation, Jaws. I was part of a pod of three people reading the book and coming up with discussion points about this modernization, while other pods where comparing and contrasting Heart of Darkness with Apocalypse Now or Don Quixote with Defendor. This was why the professor, Dr. Cantley, was my favorite teacher this semester. He seemed to understand his students’ need to connect literature with new media, but he didn’t let us off with shallow analysis. We were expected to be astute as hell.
It seemed that despite not being able to participate in this week’s class discussion, I had to turn in my topic points anyway. And oddly enough, I found that doing my homework was sort of comforting. It was routine, normal. I could pretend I was still just a regular human girl, with normal friends and a normal sleep routine and enzymes that could process solid foods.
Aw, hell. I forgot about that. I would never eat food again. No more burritos. No more pizza. No more cheeseburgers. Actually, it was probably a good thing I was turned, because that diet was probably going to kill me within the next ten years. Also, I’d died before my eating habits and declining metabolism collided. But damn it, my last meal was fruit kabobs and crackers. If I’d known I’d never taste chocolate again, I would have maybe lived my last few human hours differently. Like at a Dairy Queen.
Pouting, I was about halfway through my assignment, noting that shark hunter Quinn’s obsessive fatalism, much like Ahab’s, doomed him from the first scene. Neither character would have had anything resembling a life after he destroyed his aquatic enemy, so it was for the best that they were both dragged down—
“Ow!” I yelped, rubbing at the spot on my temple where I’d been hit with one of those juggling Hacky Sacks. “What the hell?”
I turned around to find Jane standing in my doorway.
“Really? We’re throwing things at my head now?”
“I’m tired of trying to sidestep startled, punch-happy new vampires,” Jane told me. “The med team is here. I thought that you and Ben would be more comfortable if they collected samples here instead of making you go down to the Council lab.”
“You were wrong.”
Jane sucked a deep breath through her nostrils, as if she was officially out of effs to give. “This is not optional, Meagan. We need people who are much smarter than me to look at your various cells and explain why you’re able to do things that no vampire is able to do.”
“Ben just woke up. He barely made it through his first feeding. Shouldn’t we let him get on his feet before you start probing him?” I pouted for a second. “On second thought, he was kind of rude when he woke up—probe him all you want.”
“Charming. I was lucky to hold them off this long,” she said. “Even luckier arguing for you to stay with me instead of in a Council holding cell. Now, I know this is not how you wanted to spend your evening, but damn it, I’ve had a really long night, and it’s not even ten yet. I just can’t spend any more time explaining to newborns why they need to do what’s best for them. So please, please, just be a damn grown-up and get downstairs so you can drool into a tube.”
I sighed, slapping my laptop shut. “Awesome.”
Jane faked enthusiasm for my own fake enthusiasm. “Thank you for your cooperation.”
Jane was not kidding when she said a team was waiting for us. There were at least a dozen lab-coated vampires bustling around the first floor of the house, setting up equipment and making notes on their clipboards. Gabriel was following them around, snatching endangered knickknacks out of the way and frowning a lot. Georgie seemed more interested in whether she could swipe their shiny, sharp medical instruments. And since that meant that I could not be poked or prodded with those shiny, sharp medical instruments, I was on board.
Ben was waiting in the parlor, looking pissed off and nervous. He’d changed into a SEC Sweet Sixteen T-shirt and jeans and was nibbling at his thumbnail. The head scientist, whose name tag read “Dr. Hudson,” motioned for us to sit on the couch. And then he handed me a pamphlet entitled “So You’re About to Be Probed by the Council.”
“I was just kidding about the probing!” I cried. “What exactly are they going to probe?”
Ben was silent, staring straight ahead and gnawing his thumbnail while he bounced his knee at a pace so quick I could hardly see it. I reached out my hand, and despite the audible smack as his kneecap hit my palm, it didn’t hurt. I pressed his foot to the floor.
“It’s going to be OK. Jane wouldn’t let them hurt you.”
Ben shot a confused look my way, but he dropped it the moment Dr. Hudson cleared his throat to get our attention. He was a gangly man with dark blond hair who had been turned in his late thirties. I got the impression he was trying to come across as a kindly country doctor, with his plaid shirt and pleasant smile, but mostly he looked overeager and off-putting. He wasn’t McDreamy. He was McDerpy.
And he was right up in my face, making an uncomfortable amount of eye contact.
“Fascinating,” he said, in an almost reverential voice. “Just fascinating. I can’t tell you how excited I am to take cheek swabs from you.”
I shrank back in my seat, because the word “swab” made me super-uncomfortable. “Thank you?”
“What are you going to do to us?” Ben asked.
“Now, now, no reason to be alarmed,” he said, patting Ben’s knee, which Ben did not seem to enjoy. “We’re just here to do what you might call a basic vampire physical, if vampires required such a thing. We’ll use this to determine how you might be different. Now, for starters, Mrs. Jameson-Nightengale reports some anomalies in your anatomy and circadian rhythms.”
“Is that a nice way of saying we’re freaks?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m sure that’s not the case, my dear,” he assured me. “Now, could you please drop your fangs for me?”
“We haven’t really learned to do that on our own yet,” I said.
Ben shook his head in agreement.
“No problemo,” the doctor said, grinning as he pulled what looked like a plastic-encased bloody sock out of his coat pocket. He opened the plastic bag and waved it under our noses. It smelled stale but not entirely unappetizing, which was pretty gross if I thought too hard about it. It also smelled familiar, and it looked familiar . . .
“Is that my sock?” I asked.
“Yes, it was entered into evidence as part of the rather fetching ensemble you were wearing when you were turned.”
I wasn’t sure what was creepiest, the fact that they’d kept my sock, the fact that Dr. Hudson thought it would be appetizing to me, or the fact that he thought my sock was “fetching.” There were so many issues there.
But sadly enough, my fangs did drop at the scent of my then-human blood. And Ben’s did, too, making him slap his hand over his mouth like a high school sophomore putting a notebook over his crotch. Dr. Hudson’s cobalt-blue eyes went wide, and his grin ratcheted up a few more creep notches. He put his hands under my jaw, and I yelped at the frigid temperature of his skin.
“Sorry,” he said, though he sounded anything but, as he tilted my head this way and that. “Well, looky here. Two distinct fangs on each side. Absolute beauties.”
He stroked a thumb along my double canines in a manner that made me distinctly uncomfortable. He leaned closer. “And has anyone told you that your breath has an odd sulfurous quality to it? It’s intriguing.”
I clamped my lips shut and leaned away, even as he moved closer. “Actually, Ben mentioned that my breath smelled good right before I bit him. But Jane said that my bite mark smelled funny, like old bong water.”
“Well, that wasn’t very nice,” he said, giving Jane an exaggerated sad-puppy face.
Dr. Hudson moved over to Ben, who still had his hand over his mouth. He tugged Ben’s hand away and inspected Ben’s double fangs. He leaned close enough to make Ben crane his neck away and sniffed Ben’s lips.
Dr. Hudson recoiled. “Bong water, indeed,” he said.
My lips twitched, but I didn’t laugh, because I didn’t think that would improve my already flailing relationship with Ben.
Dr. Hudson took a few steps back and stared at us both for a moment. Suddenly, he yelled, “Dr. Gennaro!”
A tall dark-haired man in a natty blue pinstriped dress shirt and a lab coat walked into the parlor. “Yes?”
“Smell young Mr. Overby’s mouth,” he said.
Without even questioning why he should do this, Gennaro invaded Ben’s face space and sniffed. Gennaro leaned in close and immediately backed away, shaking his head. “No, no, no. One word, two syllables. AL-TOID.”
“And now Miss Keene?”
“I can smell it from here. Both of you need to embrace dental hygiene. Living in Kentucky is no excuse.”
“Watch it,” Jane warned him.
Dr. Hudson shot his colleague a frown and shooed him out of the room.
“Does vampirism kill off verbal filters along with the digestive enzymes?” I asked Jane.
“No need to take offense,” Dr. Hudson told me, patting my head. “I think we’ve discovered another little quirk in your physiology. Now, would you please allow me to swab you?”
“I’m sorry?”
But unfortunately, my question left my mouth open and gave him the opportunity to stick a cotton swab into it. Man, he was really rooting around for cheek cells. He took it out and sniffed at the swab.
“Just as I suspected. It’s your saliva that smells unpleasant when your fangs are down. Have you noticed a difference when their fangs are retracted, Mrs. Jameson-Nightengale?”
Jane shook her head. “No, not in general. Then again, I don’t go around sniffing their mouths, because that’s an invasion on several levels.”
“Would you be comfortable allowing a human subject to smell their mouths?”
“Not until their bloodlust is under control, no.”
Dr. Hudson gave Jane a look that clearly meant she had failed him, then turned back to me. “Well, I would theorize that since vampires frequently find smells that are delicious to humans to be disgusting, a human would enjoy the smell of your breath. So when you speak, a human will smell that enticing aroma and be drawn closer. It will take some more tests, of course, but I suspect that there are pheromones involved. It could be an adaptation, to draw in potential prey, and the reaction is about the preference of your intended victim. It would be fascinating to see how it works on humans.”
With no small amount of guilt, I thought back to last night in the dorm recovery room, when Ben couldn’t seem to stay away from me, even when he realized he was alone with a newborn vampire. Was that the influence of my flower breath? Did I lure him into certain bite-y death?
My insides twisted with guilt as Jane told Dr. Hudson, “Which will not be happening for quite some time, because it’s not safe to let them around humans.”
“Right, right.” Dr. Hudson waved away her concerns, while jotting some notes on his clipboard.
Unfortunately, Dr. Hudson’s uncomfortable oral fixation was only the beginning of his personal-space invasions. He whistled, summoning the rest of his science squad, who poured into the parlor in a flurry of white coats. The science vamps said very little as they took samples of my blood and made me spit in a test tube and took even more cheek swabs. I drew the line at letting them scrape off cells from my fangs. Jane agreed that the potential damage to my fangs—which were apparently the only body part that vampires didn’t grow back—was too risky. Dr. Gennaro had to content himself with dental molds and X-rays of our heads made with a portable scanning machine.
We didn’t have pulses. We didn’t have blood pressure. We did have to answer a stream of increasingly embarrassing questions about our turning, our prevampire diets, and our health histories. I didn’t like the way Dr. Hudson’s eyes gleamed with each new development. His gaze was greedy, like he was trying to figure out a way to smuggle us out of the house under his lab coat. Suddenly, I understood Jane’s plans to have us examined at her home, where she could keep an eye on Ben.
The exam went on for hours, until Jane finally stepped in, told Dr. Hudson that we’d been through enough for one evening, and invited his team to leave River Oaks. Like, now.
Dr. Hudson protested loudly, even as the other vampires packed up their equipment. They seemed to understand that Jane was in charge, while Dr. Hudson had science on the brain.
“Are you certain we couldn’t just pop them over to the lab and run some daytime tests?” he whined. “Just some sleep monitoring, noninvasive. Mostly.”
“Mostly?” Ben asked.
Jane shook her head emphatically. “No.”
“Just a quick sleepover,” Dr. Hudson pleaded. “There’s so much left for us to learn from them.”
“Don’t make me tell you no twice, Dr. Hudson. Take your equipment out of my house, and get me the results.”
“Well, at least let me leave some sample-taking kits so you can measure their daily data.”
Jane stared at him in a way that made me feel grateful that, so far, I’d only seen her mildly annoyed with me. Dr. Hudson slumped out of the room. Jane followed him out and closed the parlor door. We heard the scientists packing their gear into the vans parked in front of the house. We heard Jane explaining to Dr. Hudson that he had no right to use her two wards as guinea pigs and that if she caught him doing anything creepy with our tissue samples, she would see him get the “upsetting, scientist version of The Gauntlet.”
“And I want my sock back!” I yelled through the parlor door. The door opened, and Jane’s hand appeared, tossing the little plastic bag into the room with us. “Thank you!”
Ben and I sat in stunned silence, staring at my discarded sock. It looked so sad and gross, crime-scene evidence thrown into the middle of Jane’s cozy, comfortable parlor, that I started giggling. My hysterical guffaws became full-on belly laughs. And pretty soon I was doubled over, with tears streaming down my cheeks. Ben, I noticed, was not laughing.
At all.
“I don’t find much about this funny,” he told me. “I had a life before you bit me. I had plans. And they didn’t involve being turned into a vampire. This is not supposed to be me, OK? I’m the Stiles. I’m the powerless, normal human who sits on the sidelines and watches the people with superpowers do their thing, and then I help clean up the mess.”
I meant to apologize. I did. But instead, what came out of my mouth was “So why don’t you whine about it a little more, Ben? I didn’t understand what I was doing. I’d realized a grand total of three seconds before I bit you that I was a vampire! God, I know, this is not how you expected your life to be, but it’s not like you’re covered in boils or porcupine quills or something.” I can only blame this response on the sheer number of swabs I’d encountered in the last few hours.
He threw up his hands. “I know that. I know. I should have moved away. And I don’t know why I didn’t. I just couldn’t. And I know that’s not your fault. What I know in my head and the crazy gorilla rage in my gut every time I see you are two very different things. I can’t say I’m always going to feel this way. Because we seemed to be clicking before all this happened,” he said. “And you seemed like a really nice girl with a great laugh, and you loved Thai food and hiking and could sort of tolerate bowling. But now neither one of us can have Thai food because you bit me.”
“I know.”
“And we can’t go hiking, because hiking at night is dangerous. And hiking during the day would kill us both. Because you bit me.”
I pursed my lips. “OK.”
“And forget bowling, because vampires can’t handle the smell of rented shoes.”
“I’ve got it,” I told him.
“Because you bit me.”
“OK!” I spat.
“So for right now, I need some space from you.”
“That’s great, except I live two doors down from you, and we share a bathroom,” I shot back.
“I said I knew it didn’t make sense!” he exclaimed, throwing up his arms.
“Fine,” I ground out. And it took all I had not to turn my back on him and flounce away like a little kid.
Ben flopped down on the sofa and got comfy. “Look, Jane’s not going to let anything happen to us. It could be a lot worse, really.”
“That’s easy for you to say.” And when Ben gave me a blank face, I added, “Jane clearly loves you. But she seems to think of me as some sort of evil demon woman who defiled her favorite Half-Moon Hollow teen. If it came down to a choice between the two of us, she’s going to choose you, every time.”
“Why would it come down to a choice between the two of us?” he asked, frowning. “It’s not a game show.”
“Because having two fosters in a situation like this, with all of the drama and superpowers and bloodletting, it just won’t work. It never works,” I told him.
“Fosters?”
“Do you honestly think she would be slapping all of these rules on us if it was just you? No talking to our friends? No leaving the house? No Internet access?” I exclaimed. “If it was just you, you would have an iPad with Wi-Fi built in so you could chat with your friends anytime you wanted.”
“Yeah, she would have all these rules, especially with all of this extra-weird vampire stuff we have going on. Because Jane likes me, but she’s not crazy. New vampires can do some extremely stupid tricks when they’re not supervised. Jane pulled off most of them. It’s sort of a miracle she’s still around.”
“Well, didn’t Ophelia say you’re some sort of computer genius? Can you get around the firewalls she’s installed on my laptop?” I asked.
“I am a computer science major, about to graduate with honors, yes. And no, I probably can’t get around anything the Council installs on our laptops. Because I’ve met the people they hire for their IT department, and they make my programming look like a monkey bashed its fists against the keyboard. And I won’t do it, because I want to trust Jane. When she thinks we’re ready for Internet and phone privileges, she’ll give them to us.”
I groaned. “I liked it better when you said you wouldn’t talk to me. You are of no use to me. None.”
“Well, if I’m not talking to you, I guess I don’t have to tell you about the fact that Jane’s a mind-reader. And she’s been getting better and better at reading vampires’ brains.”
“Oh, shitballs,” I grumbled.
Because I’d had some seriously unkind thoughts about Jane since she’d shown up in my recovery room. Also, I’d had some different sorts of thoughts about Gabriel, and those I definitely didn’t want Jane to hear.
Ben opened his mouth to add something more, but Jane walked back into the parlor. Outside, we heard several vans pulling out of Jane’s driveway. I shrank away from her instinctively and tried to think of something besides my underlying hostility toward Jane and the seminude thoughts I’d had about her husband.
Wait, I couldn’t think about the fact that I’d had those thoughts, either.
Jane’s “brain scanner” didn’t seem to be on at the moment, or she had a really good poker face when it came to people who were living in her house having seminude thoughts about her husband.
Ack! Why couldn’t I stop thinking about it? Why?
Jane gave us a strained but cheerful smile and rubbed her hands together. “OK, kids. You’ve been very good little vampires. And it occurs to me that I haven’t been a very good surrogate sire, keeping you cooped up like this.”
“So we get our phones back?” I asked eagerly.
“No, better,” Jane assured me. “You’re going to get to go outside, in the yard.”
I tried not to pout. I really did. But I only had so much control over my bottom lip. Ben looked confused, too, so at least I wasn’t alone in that.
“Come on, you two!” We followed her out onto the huge front porch, where Georgie and Gabriel were arm wrestling. Georgie was winning. Jane shook her head, but there was a little smile on her face as she stepped out onto the grass. The night was cool and cloudless, the sort of weather you dreamed about in the choking heat of high bluegrass summer.
Would I miss that? Afternoons that stretched until nine thirty? The sensation of sitting in your car in August after a day spent in air-conditioning, feeling like you were sliding into a hot bath? Lying out at the beach? I mean, sure, I’d only been to the beach once, when I was seven, but I’d always meant to go again when I could afford it. And now I was never going to have that experience. How much fun could it be to go to the beach at night? Wasn’t that when sharks attacked?
I had a feeling that I would have a lot of these little moments over the next few months, realizing what I would be missing out on now that I was undead.
That would be fun.
“Close your eyes,” Jane told us.
When I didn’t immediately close mine—because this could all be some complicated ruse to allow Jane to drop some sort of net over me and let the scientists cart me away without damaging her furniture—she huffed out a breath.
“Really?”
“Fine.” I sighed, though I kept one eye open a tiny bit, just in case.
“I feel like I’ve neglected you in your first nights as vampires. A good sire would have helped you balance out all of the things you feel you’re missing now that you’re undead by showing you all of the awesome things that you can do. Since you’re both without a good sire right now, I want you to close your eyes. Forget about what you can’t see,” Jane told us, and I smarted from that “without a good sire” comment. “Listen to the wind rustling through the dying leaves. Listen for the heartbeats of all the animals hiding in the woods. Take a deep breath, and take in all of the scents in the air around you. Smoke from a neighbor’s bonfire. The drying grass, which someone was supposed to mow yesterday.”
Behind me, I heard Georgie groan while Gabriel snickered. “Told you,” he said.
Despite my net fear, cutting off one of my senses really did help me pick up on new scents and sounds. I could hear dozens of fluttering heartbeats in the distance, the dry rattle of leaves. I could smell smoke and decay and dry, cracking earth. Each new sensation was layered on top of the last one, but it wasn’t overwhelming. It just helped me figure out my surroundings. For instance, I could smell a skunk waddling around somewhere off to my left. I definitely wanted to avoid that. And I could hear a dog barking in the . . . wait, that wasn’t in the distance. That was getting closer.
“No!” I yelled as Fitz came flying out of the darkness and threw himself at me. I’d braced for it, but I still went crashing into Ben. We landed with an “Oof,” sprawling across the grass. With doggy kisses on my cheeks, I opened my eyes. It was like seeing the world for the first time. I could see every star in the sky, not just white pinpricks on a black backdrop but the actual halo of light surrounding a center of brilliant fire. I could see every leaf falling from the trees surrounding Jane’s house. I could see the outline of every blade of grass.
“Whoa,” Ben whispered.
“Ouch.” I grumbled, trying to roll Fitz off my chest.
“Fitz, off!” Jane told him sternly. “Go!”
Fitz went running off into the trees.
“Better go catch him,” Jane said.
“Is this a trick?” I asked. “Like entrapment? Are you going to shoot me if I run?”
Jane rolled her eyes and shooed me away. “Just run.”
I dug my toe into the ground and took off. It felt like I’d been launched out of a catapult across the lawn. I’d never been a runner. My legs were long but had never had much power when I was human. Now I was streaking across the lawn so fast I didn’t feel my feet touching the grass. Gabriel and Jane followed Ben and me closely, laughing at our childlike enthusiasm for sprinting. Georgie sped ahead, just because she could.
I was dead, but I’d never felt so alive, like every nerve ending from the tips of my toes to my scalp was firing at full blast. And I once drank a Surge soda at a Katy Perry concert. I felt connected to every muscle in my body as I moved, hurtling myself into the next moment.
The manicured lawn gave way to long-abandoned pastures, outlined with rotting wooden fences. Ben was beside me, whooping as he ran. He jumped into a tree, climbing from limb to limb and then hopping down from the top without missing a beat. Could I do something like that?
A smelly little cow pond was coming up, about the size of a backyard pool. I ran at the rickety old dock that barely touched its shore and sprang off the end, leaping over the pond. I landed, sinking in the damp earth up to my shins. I laughed, yanking at my legs until I freed my shoes from the mud.
“You OK?” Ben yelled, zipping past me.
I called, “Yeah, but my shoes will never recover.”
Gabriel stopped and helped me shove my muddy shoe back on my foot. Georgie skipped around us, doing back handsprings in the tall grass. She stuck her landing, arms raised in a V of triumph, and did a little bow.
“Ophelia did something similar once,” she told me. “But her foot was stuck in a person.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you are an extremely creepy little girl?”
Georgie shrugged. “Yes, but no one has seen them in so long that it doesn’t really matter.”
I started to laugh, which, I assumed, was not the reaction Georgie was expecting, because her responding giggle was more startled than amused.
“It’s a mad world, Meagan,” she said. “We have to use the weapons we’re given. People underestimate me because I’m small and cute. They just can’t imagine someone like me committing an act of violence. I use their ignorance to my advantage.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” I plopped down in the grass and pulled her to sit next to me. In the distance, Ben suddenly veered right, toward the woods. I couldn’t hear exactly what Jane was saying, but it didn’t sound like Woo-hoo! Run faster that way!
“What’s he doing?” I asked.
“Something that is making Jane curse, which isn’t good.”
Jane was following on Ben’s heels like a sheepdog, heading him in the other direction. Georgie pursed her lips, her fog-gray eyes making secret calculations. Meanwhile, I lay back in the grass and watched the tiny movements of the stars overhead.
“Oh, his house,” Georgie said, nodding in the direction Ben had been running. “His house is five miles that way.”
I sat back up. “Oh. That sucks.”
Georgie nodded. “Truly. I met Ben’s parents once. Nice people. Smelled delicious.”
I stared down at her and shook my head. “Dude, no.”
Georgie shrugged.
Meanwhile, Jane was practically dragging Ben back toward us, her arm wrapped around his shoulders. “Ben, honey, we’ve talked about this.”
“I didn’t mean to, Jane, I just thought—”
“You just thought you’d pop into your parents’ house for a surprise visit?” She sighed. “That’s a little advanced for your first night out, don’t you think?”
Ben’s heartbroken expression tested the limits of the term “puppy eyes.” “I just thought about my parents, sitting at home, not knowing where I am or how I am, and I just couldn’t resist the urge to run home.”
“I understand, Ben. But we can’t take a risk like that with you, not this early. I told you, we’ll let you see them as soon as it’s safe.”
“Well, at least no one got stabbed,” Gabriel told her.
I raised my hand as if I’d missed most of my Intro to Cryptic-Speaking Vampires class, which I had. “What?”
“I’ll tell you about Jane’s first week as a vampire sometime,” Georgie whispered. “It’s hilarious.”
Ben dropped down in the grass at Georgie’s side, looking miserable. I felt a familiar flash of guilt for making it impossible for him to live his nice, normal life. But, like with most emotions that made me uncomfortable, I just tamped it down. I’d move along to something else, until they popped up again at some angsty, inconvenient moment. Emotional maturity—I was doing it wrong.
“What else can we do?” I asked Jane. “I mean, we’re fast, and we’re strong. What else?”
Jane sank to the ground in front of us. She and Gabriel were a bit more graceful in their descent than we floppy youngsters were. “You’ll still have those weird human moments of clumsiness, especially in your first few years. It’s like your body forgets sometimes that you’re not limited to human speed and reactions. But over time, you’ll get even smarter, faster, stronger. Just be careful. Remember that you can hurt people around you, so you’ve got to watch yourself. Avoid sunlight, silver, getting poked with wooden objects. Other than that, who knows? You’re sort of ahead of the curve in terms of special tricks. And you may develop a talent that’s just for you. Like Ophelia and her phone frying.”
Suddenly, remembering Jane’s own special talent, I frowned.
Don’t think anything rude, I told myself. Definitely don’t think anything about Gabriel. Or the fact that you want to smash all of Jane’s unicorns with a brick. Don’t think—dang it!
“Did you tell her about the mind-reading thing?” Jane demanded. “Damn it, Ben! You know that makes people uncomfortable around me.”
“I thought it was the fair thing to do,” Ben said. “I would want to know.”
“It’s actually working against me,” I told him. “Because I keep telling myself not to think about things I shouldn’t think about, but in the process, I think about those things. Maybe my special talent is bad timing and inappropriate thoughts?”
Ben snickered. I gave him the finger, which made him laugh harder.
“Children,” Gabriel said mildly, though he was smiling, too.
“Well, for the record, I don’t go sneaking around in people’s brains. Because that is rude, even if it would make my life a lot easier to know what the hell you’re thinking.”
“Yeah, somehow that doesn’t help,” I told her.
“So the next few weeks, we’re going to focus on your self-control, dampening your bloodthirst, and general vampire education. Eventually, you’re going to be steady enough to go out into the world, have limited interactions with humans. And then we’re going to get you back to your campus.”
I tried not to pout, but honestly. “Homeschooling?”
“Homeschooling.” Ben groaned.
“Don’t look at me,” Georgie said archly. “I graduated from self-control school centuries ago.”
“You ate an entire circus once,” Jane countered.
Georgie scowled. “The nets gave the trapeze artists an unfair advantage. Call me a purist.”
“That’s not the word I would use,” I told her.