2
Try to find other vampire sires who inadvertently fell into parenthood to mentor you.
—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire
Jane Jameson-Nightengale made some sort of hand motion behind her back, and I heard a bunch of clicks from the well-lit hallway behind her. She dropped to her knees beside Ben. “You’re not even supposed to be awake right now! How did you bite him?”
Jane’s hands slid over Ben’s neck and wrists, checking for a heartbeat. Her fingertips lingered against his skin at each of his possible pulse points for several moments. And every time she failed to find a pulse, her face crumpled just a little bit more. Who was Jane, and how did she know Ben?
“He’s not breathing. No pulse,” she whispered, whipping her head toward me. Her eyes flashed an angry amber. “He’s cold. He was only in here for ten minutes. Even with the blood loss, his body temperature shouldn’t be this low!”
“I don’t know what happened!” I cried. “I bit him, but I only took a little. I mean, I could hear his pulse drop a little as I drank, but I pushed him away, and he was fine. He was talking and laughing about me biting him one minute, and the next, he just flopped on the floor dead. Did he have a heart condition?”
“No, he’s perfectly healthy. None of this makes any freaking sense!” Shaking her head, Jane lifted Ben’s bitten wrist to her nose. “What the hell? Your bite mark smells funny.”
“Well, I haven’t brushed in a couple of days,” I said, shrugging. “I’ve been dead.”
“No, you haven’t brushed in twenty-four hours. I mean—never mind,” Jane told me. She yelled toward the door, to someone I couldn’t see. “Let’s get Ben into a secured containment room. Total lockdown, no one has access but me. Protocol: Jupiter Ascending.”
The expected vampire SWAT team—wearing uniforms marked with “UERT,” for undead emergency response team—swept into the room on swift, silent feet. They rolled a gurney into the room and gently lifted Ben’s body onto it. They covered him with a sheet and rolled him away before I could even object.
All but two of the vampire storm troopers marched out in formation, leaving Ophelia to appear in the doorway, looking shocked and annoyed. “Meagan, how are you awake?”
“I don’t know!” I yelled. “All I know is I died in the most embarrassing way possible, and then I woke up here.”
“Not the most embarrassing way possible,” Jane mumbled, crawling across the floor to grab my face in her hands. She gently, but firmly, pulled my chin down with her thumbs and looked at my mouth. She leaned slightly closer and inhaled.
“Your mouth smells like the inside of a head shop,” she told me.
“Wull, thass juss fackin roo,” I told her. Or at least, I tried to. Her thumbs kept me from pronouncing actual words. I guess my primal undead reptile brain did not appreciate her being this close to my face, because I felt that raw pressure in my mouth again and heard my fangs drop with a snick.
Jane blanched and sat back on her heels. “You have four fangs instead of two.”
“What?” Ophelia dropped to her knees and squinted at my extended teeth. Her own mouth fell open, and her brow wrinkled. “I have never seen that before.”
Jane pulled a compact from Ophelia’s purse and held it up to my mouth. And while I was fully aware that vampires could see their own reflections, it was definitely comforting to see my own face in the glass. And that it had stayed the same.
Or had it?
The girl in the mirror was gorgeous, frozen forever at twenty, with the sort of lineless, airbrushed perfection that only existed in magazine ads. I’d heard about this little quirk of vampire evolution, but I’d never seen the “before and after turning” comparisons. Vampires had to be beautiful to lure in blood donors. And while I was cute before, now I’d been upgraded to a full-on ten. My eyes, dark like my mother’s, almost glowed with flecks of amber and gold. My hair was braided, but I could glimpse reddish-gold highlights that hadn’t been there before. My normally olive skin had paled to a creamy tan, but it was luminous and smooth, without one blemish in sight. My lips were full and rosy, and oh, my God, I totally had two sets of fangs.
I carefully tapped the tip of my tongue against the expected major canine fangs. Right next to both of my canines were slightly smaller, but still very sharp, extended fangs that had replaced two of my premolars. Any vampire looked dangerous, but somehow those two little extra-sharp teeth made me appear even more threatening.
Ophelia pushed the mirror out of the way and put her hands on my face, manipulating my jaw back and forth as she examined my mouth.
“Do you mind? That’s my face!” I snapped at her. Literally. I tried to bite her, which she did not appreciate.
“Sorry,” Ophelia said, yanking her hand back and pushing to her feet. “I’ve never seen this before. Do you know how old I am? I have not said ‘I’ve never seen this before’ in a really long time.”
Jane stood and pulled me to my feet. She peered at my eyes and spread my brows and cheekbones apart with her fingers. I swatted her hands away. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Jane, respect boundaries, please,” Ophelia said dryly.
“What is going on, Ophelia? What’s wrong with me? Is Ben going to be OK?”
Jane shot a look at Ophelia but didn’t say anything. I got the impression that there was some sort of relationship between the two of them, but it wasn’t necessarily a friendly one. Now that I thought about it, I seemed to remember Ophelia ranting about someone named Jane sending her a “high-handed” e-mail and plotting some sort of revenge. But I was pretty foggy about the details other than having to Google what “high-handed” meant.
“We don’t know,” Jane said. “His heart has stopped, which could be a sign of the turning process. But it’s also part of the process of dying.”
“But I didn’t give him any of my blood,” I protested. “I drank a little bit of his, and that was it. I thought you couldn’t be turned into a vampire without blood.”
“Well, vampires aren’t supposed to be up and walking around twenty-four hours after being turned, either. That’s the only reason we allowed Ben into this room. You weren’t supposed to be a threat. But the rules seem to be changing,” she said, giving me a long, speculative stare.
Ophelia patted my shoulder in what I thought might have been meant as a comforting gesture. “We’ll know if his body doesn’t start to decompose over the next couple of days.”
I blanched, and the disgust at that image was enough to make me feel the most like myself I had since I’d woken. “That’s lovely, Ophelia, thank you.”
“Meagan, you’re a vampire now. You waved good-bye to ‘lovely’ yesterday.”
My hands dropped to my sides. “You keep saying that. I don’t know what you mean.”
Jane and Ophelia exchanged another long look.
“Stop giving each other secret face messages and send actual words in my direction!”
Jane sat on the edge of my hospital bed and leveled me with a serious look. “We don’t know what to tell you, Meagan. We’re flying blind here. I’m not even sure you’re a real vampire.”
What did that mean? Was I some sort of supernatural freak? A vampire-shark hybrid? My knees felt watery, and all that warm Ben blood threatened to come up.
Ophelia grabbed my shoulder and gave me a firm shake. “You will not faint, and you will not throw up. Vampires don’t faint.”
“OK,” I said, nodding frantically as I clapped my hand over my mouth. “OK.”
“Get her out of here,” Jane told Ophelia as she waved the remaining UERT members away.
“Where is ‘here,’ anyway?” I asked.
“We’re in a sublevel beneath the dorm,” Ophelia said.
She led me down a brightly lit white hallway. I saw doors marked “Sunblock Storage” and “Backup Blood Storage.” A UERT officer stood guard at every other door, staring silently as Ophelia took my hand and hustled me past.
“Are those guys always here?” I asked. “Like lurking under our dorm at all times, while we’re sleeping?”
“No. The UERT responds to emergency situations involving vampires. Your human police officers would not be up to the task,” Ophelia murmured. “Don’t say anything more until we’re behind closed doors.”
She yanked open a door marked “Interrogation.” That didn’t sound good.
The room looked comfortable enough, if a little small. It centered around a white laminate table and a couple of padded chairs, and featured lights that didn’t threaten the well-being of my corneas.
Ophelia pointed to the chair across the table. “Sit. Do you need anything else to drink?”
Wordlessly, I shuddered and shook my head.
She sat in the chair across from me.
“I’m really sorry about this, Ophelia. I don’t know what’s happening.”
“Vampires are supposed to take three days to rise, Meagan. Every historical text, every vampire I’ve ever talked to, every hieroglyph etched into cave walls has the same story. You’re bitten, you drink the vampire’s blood, you go to sleep for three days, you rise. You’ve been down for barely twenty-four hours. And it’s possible you turned Ben with just a bite. You are turning everything I know about vampirism on its ear, Meagan, and I don’t appreciate it.”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t understand. Other than your unusual method of dying—”
“Humiliating, and let’s never speak of it again,” I said.
“Just wait until you hear Jane’s,” she shot back with a smirk. “This makes no sense. Your turning was textbook. Tina called for a volunteer. One of the vampires stepped up and presented his ID card showing that he was one of the campus’s approved volunteer sires. I was still upstairs, directing the staff through cleanup after the party. Otherwise, I would have turned you without hesitation. I’m sorry about that. I would have been a good sire to you, and I think you would have been more comfortable with someone you knew. Nonetheless, your volunteer sire fed you enough blood that Tina was reasonably satisfied you were going to make the transition. Your sire disappeared into the crowd. Tina says his name was James Marsters, but she didn’t have time to take a scan of his ID. Also, he’s not showing up on any of the school rosters, and we have not been able to contact him for a signature on the Council reports.”
“That’s because James Marsters is the name of the actor who played Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was a fake ID,” I told her.
Ophelia frowned. “Yes, Jane said the same thing. I find myself equally annoyed with him for lying during such a crucial process and annoyed with you for knowing that when I didn’t,” she muttered.
And I laughed, despite the incredibly shitty situation, because I was going to have to start Ophelia on one of those Captain America “pop culture she should have been exposed to by now” notebooks.
“Did my sire have double fangs, too?”
Ophelia shook her head. “He only had to bite you once to drain the little bit of blood you had left. I saw the punctures. They were perfectly normal.”
“What about the morons who were playing Ultimate Frisbee with a forty-five-freaking-pound barbell weight?” I demanded.
“Thrown at vampire strength.” Ophelia shrugged. “They babbled something about needing the extra weight to make the game fair, and then they ran away, like the cowards they are. We’re looking at security footage now to help us identify them for questioning.”
“I cannot believe I died in a tragic Ultimate Frisbee accident. Who dies as an Ultimate Frisbee bystander?”
“Morgan and Keagan have been worried sick,” Ophelia said, ignoring my lame lament. “They’re not happy about the fact that they won’t be allowed to talk to you until your bloodthirst is under control. And they don’t know you’re awake already, which puts an extra wrinkle in things.”
She went on. “They stayed in my room last night and didn’t leave until this afternoon, which is, by the way, the first time I’ve allowed humans in my sleeping space during daylight hours in centuries. They insisted, despite my many, many, many attempts to make them leave. I think they just couldn’t face your side of the room without you in it. They’re still more pleasant roommates than Brianna was, even with the ‘hostage crisis’ element to the situation.”
Morgan and Keagan were my suite mates at New Dawn Residence Hall. I roomed with Morgan, and Keagan had a single next door, specially assigned by the housing office because of “problematic snoring.” She’d tried sleep-apnea masks, nose strips, and those jaw adjusters. But nothing could slow down her buzz-saw sleeping noises.
I hadn’t believed that such an adorable petite person could produce such a hellacious racket, but the first night we all spent in the dorm, I could have sworn Satan was chipping wood in the room next door.
Morgan had been difficult to read when we first moved in. She insisted that she was not a nice person, but she always treated me kindly. I thought she would find Keagan too perky to tolerate, but they got along like two peas in a pod. Morgan insisted that one day she would find Keagan’s dark, petty center, and on that day they would make the evening news.
The pair of them had become the glue that kept me cemented to University of Kentucky’s campus. And now they were six floors away from me, and I wasn’t allowed to talk to them. They might as well have been on the moon. The weird finality of what had happened to me—dying, coming back, biting Ben—all seemed to land on me at once. My life was over. Nothing would be the same for me. Again.
I flinched as Jane opened the interrogation-room door. Ophelia let go of my hand, and the sympathetic expression on her face hardened to one of boredom. Jane sat next to Ophelia and gave me a long appraising look. She opened a small notebook and set a UK Wildcats mug in front of me, with a coaster. It was filled with dark red blood that smelled like fresh-baked cinnamon rolls and every carb I ever wanted to eat.
Why wasn’t I more grossed out by that? Why?
I pushed it away without drinking. Because that was disturbing.
Jane sighed. “OK, Meagan, I’m trying very hard to set aside my personal feelings about the fact that you’ve apparently drained and maybe done a half-assed job of turning a young man I happen to like very much, leaving me to make a very upsetting phone call to his mother, who goes to church with my mother and will make my weekly coffee date with Mom a living hell. I really am trying. I understand that you’ve been through two traumatic experiences in the last hour or so, but we need to talk about the events that led to your turning and then waking up too damn quickly and biting a perfectly nice kid, all of which have resulted in a metric ton of irritating and unnecessary paperwork for me.”
“I can’t believe I’m the one saying this to you, Jane, but maybe you should take it easy on her,” Ophelia said.
“A living hell, Ophelia,” Jane growled. “And you’ve met my mother.”
Ophelia rolled her eyes.
Jane took a deep breath and said in a calmer, slightly sweeter tone, “I’ll start again. Meagan, my name is Jane Jameson-Nightengale, and I’m the head representative of the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead for western Kentucky. Now that you’re a vampire, you are under our protection, but you’re also subject to our laws. With me so far?”
I waggled my hand back and forth. “Ish.”
“Great. I’m here because Ophelia called me about your turning and the, um, strange circumstances. I was here taking her report when the V-one-one alarm went off. Let’s go through every step of what happened since you woke up this evening,” Jane said. “No detail is too small. Because I’m still trying to figure out whether I like you or not. You’re friends with Ophelia, so I’m leaning toward not.”
“My future mother-in-law.” Ophelia sighed, waving her hand at Jane.
And so I went through the whole horrifying morning (evening?) again, which was a treat. I told Jane everything I could remember about the night of the mixer and every moment since I rose, and her expression remained absolutely neutral throughout my story. And considering the number of broken bones and flesh wounds involved in that story, that was more than a little upsetting.
I got so caught up in verbally vomiting everything I could remember that I had a sort of out-of-body experience, where it felt like I was floating above myself, watching me making an idiot of myself. And my mind’s eye could see that I apparently hadn’t washed my eye makeup off after the mixer, so I had day-old mascara running down my cheeks.
Awesome.
I wasn’t sure whether it was my emotional state or the fact that Jane didn’t seem to like me and seemed to be holding my life in her hands, but I just couldn’t stop talking. I didn’t know much about the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead, but I knew that they sometimes used what most reasonable people would call over-the-top tactics to punish vampires who stepped out of line. And I was pretty sure killing a kid within an hour of waking up was nowhere near that line.
My life had not prepared me for this sort of hostile interaction with vampires. I was in preschool when an undead tax consultant named Arnie Frink launched vampires out of the coffin. The living residents of planet Earth were not thrilled to find out that vampires had been lurking in the shadows for the past . . . forever, and humanity had never realized it. Though, when they looked back, they were a little embarrassed they hadn’t seen the signs.
Maybe the embarrassment over the missed clues was what made them lash out. A lot of vampires “tripped” and “fell”—sarcastic air quotes intended—on pointy wooden objects. The World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead, an elected group of ancient vampires, saw that humans were getting more creative and awful in their vampire-dusting techniques. They came forward, asking the world’s governments to recognize them as people with feelings and a general desire not to be turned into ash. They also asked for special leniency in taxes and government documents to fake being alive. But mostly taxes.
Because a surprising number of vampires chose to live in small towns, the Council was allowed to establish smaller regional offices in each state to make sure that the undead didn’t pull shenanigans like murdering innocent students. The Council also offered mentors for young vampires like myself, to prevent said murder shenanigans.
Once humans stopped setting them on fire for fun, the international vampire community eventually agreed that with bottled blood and super-high-SPF sunscreen and not having to pretend to be human, it was more convenient to live out in the open anyway. They didn’t give Arnie a medal or anything. He already had the meme, after all.
I’d known more than my share of vampires growing up, because I was pretty poorly supervised. In general, they were cagey but friendly. They had not treated me with the snarky, barely restrained anger that Jane was directing my way at the moment.
At some point during my reflections, I had stopped talking and was now just staring at Jane and Ophelia like one of those creepy Big Eyes paintings.
“She is a babbler,” Jane observed to Ophelia, who nodded.
“So what’s going to happen to me?” I asked.
Jane pursed her lips. “Well, here’s my problem. Part of me wants to just punch you in your irritatingly symmetrical face for hurting Ben. But the other, more compassionate part of me understands that this wasn’t something you did on purpose and that you weren’t in control of yourself, no more than I was in control of myself when I was fresh out of the coffin and tried to eat my best friend. And then the more academic part of me wants to figure out what the hell is going on with you that you managed to turn so quickly. Not in a creepy ‘secured lab and dissection’ way, just super-close observation for six to eight months.”
“How many parts of you are there?” I asked.
“Oh, you haven’t earned the right to be snarky with me yet, sweetie, so cool your jets,” Jane told me. “I can’t tell you what’s going to happen long-term. But for right now, it’s pretty clear that you can’t continue your classes for the semester. We can’t have a newborn vampire who’s not in control of her thirst surrounded by a bunch of defenseless, delicious-smelling students. That’s the sort of thing that results in calls to my office. I hate that.”
Ophelia snorted softly. “So you’re going to be secluded with an older, supposedly stable vampire who will be able to help you gain control over your thirst.”
“I don’t see why the ‘supposedly’ was necessary, but yes, you will be staying with me,” Jane interjected. “Call it a probationary period, a chance to show the Council that, despite a shaky start, you are going to be a productive, trustworthy member of undead society.”
My face screwed up even further at the idea of having to prove myself to vampires. I hadn’t asked for this. I hadn’t wanted to be a part of their stupid undead society, and now they were judging me, trying to figure out whether I was good enough to fit into it? I’d had enough of trying to fit into new groups and new places. The vampires were cordially invited to suck it, as far as I was concerned.
But I didn’t think Jane would respond nicely to that particular invitation.
“And where will that be?” I asked.
“Half-Moon Hollow.”
“I’m sorry, where now?”
Having lived in mid-central Kentucky all of my life, I was pretty sure I’d heard of every little burg in that area. I’d heard of Possum Trot and Monkey’s Eyebrow, even Paducah, a town name that no one pronounced correctly on the first try. But I’d never heard of Half-Moon Hollow.
“Half-Moon Hollow. It’s the home of my former Council office,” Ophelia said. “I’ve lived there for the last fifty years. It’s basically a cultural wasteland, but there’s an interesting lace-tatting festival every spring. And the dollar movie theater is nice.”
“And it’s also the home of my current Council office,” Jane added, somewhat testily. “We’ll do our best to make you comfortable there. And if Ben survives the transition, he will also be comfortable there, since it’s his hometown. Your professors have been made aware of your situation, and you’ll be allowed to continue your course work online, so you won’t lose any ground academically. Ben, too, I imagine, since he’s only got a few classes left before graduation.”
“You told everybody I turned Ben into a vampire?” I asked, grimacing.
“No, we told half of the people who asked that he’s come down with a case of mono complicated by strep throat and MRSA. The other half were told he joined the Peace Corps. Misinformation is the best way to prevent panic. One student being turned as the result of a very public accident? That happens. Another student gets turned the next night under shadowy circumstances? Not so much.”
“I’m not sure about this,” I admitted. “It’s all happening really fast. A day ago, my biggest problem was midterms and paying my cell-phone bill. And now you’re telling me that I have to move my whole life to some armpit town in the middle of nowhere, away from everybody I know, and stay with strangers? I don’t know what to think.”
“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Jane told me. “And I’m sorry, but you don’t have a lot of time to mull it over. Also not much choice. It’s pretty much a ‘come quietly or I involve zip ties’ situation.”
I grunted and thunked my head against the conference table.
“I hate to admit it, but Jane and Gabriel did a tolerable job training Jamie,” Ophelia drawled. “And Jane’s caring for my sister, Georgie. I wouldn’t allow that unless Georgie was in at least adequate hands. Besides, I’ll come home on school breaks to visit, to check in on you.”
I asked, “Why do I feel like I’m being punished here?”
“You’re not being punished, but since you seem resistant to us trying to sugarcoat it for you, I can’t allow you out of my sight until we figure out what the hell has happened to you and what that could mean to the vampire community. I know vampires try to come off as all blasé and unflappable, but the older ones tend to freak out when they encounter something new. Some of them still aren’t sure this whole electricity thing is going to work. If word gets out that vampires can turn overnight and possibly turn other people with a bite, there would be, well, what’s the global vampire equivalent of a toddler tantrum at Kmart?”
I looked to Ophelia, who nodded.
“And humans? Forget about it. They were barely prepared for the Great Coming Out when they knew that turning was a complicated three-day blood exchange. No one can know where we’re taking you and Ben. Ophelia is sworn to secrecy, and Tina seems to be terrified-slash-in-awe of the number of UERT members we brought along, so she’s not going to ask too many questions. You’ll be able to talk to your friends and family over Skype, but you can’t tell them where you are. And I’m sorry if that doesn’t work for you, but as you are one of my newest constituents, I will be overseeing your transition into undead society and making sure that you are not somehow a threat to our way of life. In English, that means I am the boss of you. I will see to your feeding training, so you don’t go around biting people all willy-nilly. I will find you an appropriate support network, because you’re hanging out with Ophelia and clearly cannot be trusted to choose your own friends.” Jane paused to observe and ignore the profane gesture Ophelia made. “I will be checking your e-mail and your browser history and generally invading your privacy. And considering the fact that I am giving you the benefit of the doubt, rather than following the Council’s previous policy of ‘stake first, stake often, worry about the facts later,’ you will gladly cooperate.”
I nodded slowly. “OK, I guess I could maybe live with that . . . wait, my browser history?”
“Morgan told you that your obsession with weird Harry Potter fanfic ships would eventually come back to bite you,” Ophelia said with a snicker.
“This is not the time to judge my Dramione shipping,” I told her. I pointed my finger in her face. Ophelia made a halfhearted snap at it, clicking her teeth together far short of my digit.
Jane’s mouth dropped open as she stared at Ophelia. “You having what seems to be a normal, affectionate friendship unnerves me. I am officially unnerved. Anyway, I will also be getting in touch with your friends and family. I will need a list of names and contact info, including your next of kin, so I can notify them.” She cleared her throat, picking up her pen. “Also, I’ll need a list of those Dramione fanfic Web sites.”
Ophelia snickered.
“If they have any clue that I’m down here, my closest friends are probably upstairs, trying to chisel their way through your sunproof doors to get to me,” I told Jane. “I have a few other friends on campus, a few Facebook-contact-only friends back home, but no family. You probably noticed that the emergency contact space on my enrollment form was blank.”
“I thought maybe you were bad at paperwork or being snotty toward your parents or something. So you have no family?” Jane’s face softened for a second. “Not even a distant cousin who would count as next of kin?”
“My foster parents made it pretty clear that there was no need to keep in touch after the last check from the state cleared,” I told her.
Her lips pursed so hard that she seemed to be clenching them around her teeth. “Do you have any questions for me?”
“Oh, loads of them.”
“Can we start with the simple ones?” Jane asked.
“What was that whole ‘Protocol: Jupiter Ascending’ thing before? Of all the Channing Tatum movies, you picked the one where he’s a space werewolf with magical flying boots?”
Jane snickered. “Oh, as the highest-ranking Council official in western Kentucky, I have the right to name any security protocols I design myself. And I name mine after horrible movie bombs that the actors regret making. You know, because they wish those movies were secret.”
I nodded. “I respect that.”
“Great. Everything else you’re going to have to ask on the drive home, because sunrise is just a little too close for comfort,” Jane said. The door opened, and one of the UERT goons carried in my blue suitcase and my laptop bag. My chest constricted painfully at the sight of it, but I tried to write the sensation off as Ben-related heartburn. “Ophelia packed your bag for you. Anything else you need can be shipped to Half-Moon Hollow.”
“Can’t I say good-bye to Morgan and Keagan?”
“No. For one thing, you’re not supposed to be awake yet. And we don’t want you biting them, so we can’t trust you to say good-bye in person. “ Jane told me. “I don’t have room in my house for any more accidentally undead coeds.”
“Rude.”
Jane snapped her notebook closed. “Well, prove to me that you can be trusted around people without biting them, and I won’t have cause to make jokes at your expense.”
“Meagan, I’ll see you soon.” Ophelia reached across the table and squeezed my hand, which in the realm of Ophelia gestures was practically a bear hug. “If you need anything at all, you have my number. And I don’t give that number to anyone I don’t want to talk to.”
“She really doesn’t,” Jane muttered. “It took Jamie’s intervention and a court order before I got it.”
I stood and picked up my suitcase. Considering how light it was, I wondered if Ophelia had packed anything at all. I unzipped the suitcase and saw that it was crammed full of all my favorite jeans, pajamas, and sweaters. So why . . . oh, right, I had superstrength. That was weird.
“Just one more thing, Jane,” Ophelia said. “Can I see your phone?”
Jane lifted an eyebrow but handed Ophelia the device. Ophelia held the phone up to eye level and squinted with concentration. The phone crackled with a loud, staticky zhing noise and a burst of light.
Ophelia smiled brightly and handed Jane the smoking hunk of plastic.
“I see you’ve discovered your vampire talent,” Jane muttered.
Ophelia chirped, “Yes, I have. Jamie was right. I just needed to relax a little bit and focus on something other than Council business and raising Georgie, and it came to me, just in time for me to mess with you. Which is a side bonus.”
Jane tossed her smoking phone into a wall-mounted box marked “Hazardous Materials.” Her tone was as dry as the cafeteria’s toast. “I’m so thrilled for you.”