3
Like any child, a new vampire needs boundaries. Just think of your newly turned vampire as a murderous toddler.
—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire
I wasn’t allowed to go back to my dorm room. I wasn’t allowed to leave the containment floors. I was led down yet another hallway into an enclosed parking garage. It was more than a little horrifying to watch Ben’s body being loaded into the hidey-hole in the back of a Council SUV and closed in under the lid inset in the floor, like he was inconvenient luggage. They didn’t wrap him in a body bag or anything, though, so I guessed I should be thankful for that.
I would miss New Dawn, a recently completed residence hall added to the far side of the UK campus, which had been built with coed, commingled living in mind. The college had been eager to be one of the first in the country to prove that all students, living and undead, could coexist in a safe, federally subsidized environment. Only three floors showed aboveground, containing the administrative offices required by the people who supervised vampires on campus. Below ground level, the floors alternated between living and undead students, then were sorted by male and female. Beyond the lack of “been lived in for decades” smell, the dorm featured a coffee bar in the lobby, super-fast Internet, private soundproof study pods, and a third-floor lounge containing board games from every decade since 1850 to encourage play among the students. I loved Board Game Nights.
The black vehicle with its heavily tinted windows was driven by a friendly, recently turned brunette named Miranda Puckett, who kept up a steady stream of conversation with Jane for the long drive. Mostly funny stories about an extremely uptight vampire named Collin whom Miranda appeared to be dating. I didn’t think Jane intended to ignore me, but it sounded like she and Miranda hadn’t caught up in a while.
Miranda drove us through a tunnel that seemed to go on for miles, until we finally emerged into the inky dark of Kentucky in October. Just before Ophelia had been “urged away” by the goon squad, she’d pulled me aside and told me that no matter how stupid or complicated things seemed at Jane’s, I needed to make my placement there work. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but since she didn’t follow it up with some sort of hyperbolic threat, I knew she was serious.
“Otherwise, you could end up staying in one of the Council’s holding cells,” she’d said. “You do not want to end up in one of the Council’s holding cells.”
With that piece of helpful advice echoing in my head, I leaned back against the headrest and stared out the window. The trees slipped past, melting into one giant dark shape. Headlights from other cars zoomed by. I blinked as headlights and the stuttering white of the center line became one long, syncopated pattern, flash dark flash dark flash dark.
All of the stress and worry of the last few hours seemed to drain out of me. I relaxed against the seat, from my toes to the top of my head. My eyes strained to keep up with the moving shapes in the distance.
Dark shapes. Dark shapes moving in front of my eyelids. I am lying in a small, dark box, with the hum of an engine nearby. I can’t move, but that doesn’t seem wrong. I’m not scared. Just tired. A familiar voice. I can hear someone talking and laughing, but that voice is muffled. It is nice, though, to hear something I recognize nearby as I bump along through black emptiness.
And suddenly, cold hands were shaking my shoulders. Screaming, I swung my fist and felt my knuckles collide with a cool, soft surface.
“Ow!”
My vision shifted into focus, and I was back in Miranda’s car. Jane was hovering over me, one hand shaking my shoulder and the other cradling her nose.
“You punched me. In my face.” She groaned, backing out through the car door. “In terms of trying to get into my good graces, that’s an interesting strategy.”
“I’m so sorry!” I cried.
“Sadly, this isn’t the first time I’ve been punched in the face,” she said, yanking her nose to the left with a crack, setting the cartilage. She shuddered. “It is the first time I’ve been punched by an unconscious person, which is more humiliating than I thought it would be.”
“I wasn’t unconscious,” I told her. “I wasn’t asleep. That was some sort of weird road hypnosis, like a creepy daydream I couldn’t escape. I’ve never done that before. Also, I don’t usually punch people in the face.”
“Are you someone who is easily hypnotized?” she asked, eyebrow arched. “Because I’ve run into that before, and no good comes of it. Only crying werewolf brides and visits to Precious Moments hell.”
“Was I supposed to understand that?” I asked.
“Not really. Well, we’re here,” she said, sweeping her hand to the house looming behind her in the purpling light of predawn. “Let’s get inside before the sun makes us burst into flames, shall we? That would be a bad way to start off.”
Jane’s house had a name, River Oaks. How fancy was that? It was one of those old houses that wasn’t quite movie-ready but looked cozy enough with its fieldstone walls and wide front porch. Even through the brightly lit windows, I could see that the inside was fully modern. Jane and her husband, Gabriel, had clearly sunk some serious money into renovations.
“Gabriel and Dick took Georgie to a gaming tournament in Murphy,” Jane said as Miranda opened the back hatch of the SUV. “It amuses her to see the smirks melt off the faces of college students when a girl who looks to be eight years old beats their asses at ‘Call of Duty.’ Also, she enjoys counting the cash prize in front of them. For that extra touch of demoralization.”
Miranda handed me my luggage while Jane opened the hidey-hole and lifted Ben’s limp body into her arms with very little effort. Ben looked so still and pale with his head resting against Jane’s shoulder. He could have been sleeping.
How angry was he going to be with me when he woke up? I’d known the guy for less than two days, but somehow the idea of him waking up pissed off at me made my chest constrict. Boys definitely didn’t date girls who bit them. Hell, I knew some guys who wouldn’t tolerate girls with funny-looking pinkie toes.
So yeah, I’d taken that sweet baby beginning of a possible relationship with Ben, bitten it, and killed it. I forced myself to look away.
“Jane!” Miranda called. “I’ve got to get going. Collin gets all grumpy if I don’t tuck him in.”
“Gross!” Jane yelled back. I somehow expected that to wake Ben up. But it didn’t. “Come into the shop for coffee this week!”
“Will do!” Miranda slammed the car door and sped down the tree-lined driveway.
“ ‘Tucking in’ doesn’t really mean tucking in, does it?”
“No, it does not,” Jane assured me.
“So who’s Dick? Does he live here, too?”
“Sometimes I think so.” Jane snorted as she entered a pass code into the keypad by the door. The massive oak door swung open and revealed an airy, brightly lit foyer flanked by a wide varnished-oak staircase. A large vase of sunflowers took up most of the space on a little round table under a small chandelier. I could see a large dining room off to the left with a huge antique table. That struck me as a little odd, since vampires didn’t eat, but I supposed there were creepier options in terms of vampire décor. The parlor to the right was cozier and done in warmer gold tones. The blue denim couches on either side of the fireplace looked well used. Despite being fancier than any place I’d ever lived, this house had definitely been lived in.
I heard the scratching of claws over wood and tensed. I whirled toward the noise, fangs dropped, just in time to see a muddy-brown blur streak around the corner.
“Meagan, don’t.”
All I could make out were big brown eyes, fur, and a lolling tongue. And slobber. So much slobber. The shape crashed into me, almost knocking me to the ground, while I scrambled under its weight.
And then the slobber was on my face.
“Aw, what the hell?” I exclaimed while the huge dog-type creature in my arms licked my face. It was the ugliest animal I’d ever seen, with fur the color of shower mold and these weird flaps that covered its eyes. “What is this?”
“That is my dog, Fitz,” Jane said.
“No, dogs are cute and sweet and do what you tell them to,” I told her. “That’s why people like them better than cats, right?”
“Have you ever had a dog?” she asked.
I shook my head. Very few of my foster homes had dogs, and in those that did, it was very clear that the dog belonged to the family, not me.
Jane said, “Well, just put him down and tell him no. If you do it often enough, he might figure it out.”
I plopped Fitz carefully on the floor. “You smell, and I don’t like tongue baths,” I told him. Fitz tilted his head up, letting his eye folds fall back so he could stare at me. Then he threw his tongue out again and licked my face.
“Ahhh!” I yelped, making gagging noises as I wiped my face.
Jane led the way upstairs, again carrying Ben like he weighed nothing. Fitz followed us, sniffing at my heels. “No, Dick’s more of a best friend–colleague hybrid. He and his wife, Andrea, work at my shop, and Dick and I both serve on the local Council. Dick works more behind the scenes, because that’s where he’s most comfortable. And less prosecutable.”
“That sounds . . . enmeshed.”
“You’re not wrong.”
Ben was laid to rest, so to speak, in the guest room two doors down from the one that would be my own. Jane set him down on the big brass bed and pulled a blue-and-white log-cabin quilt up to his chin. There was something distinctly maternal about the way she brushed his hair back from his forehead. And then she hit a button that brought two heavy-duty metal shutters sliding over the windows with a distinct click, which read more Bond villain than mom.
In terms of random guest rooms I’d been assigned to, mine wasn’t the ugliest I’d ever slept in. That title belonged to a basement rec-room-turned-bedroom that was wallpapered in green shag carpet. These walls were painted a light purple. The bed was wide, topped with a fluffy white duvet and throw pillows in different shades of purple. There was a neat desk next to the window that during night hours allowed me a beautiful view of the garden behind Jane’s house.
The room did have the highest rate of unicorn infestation of any room I’d ever slept in. Shelf upon shelf was filled with unicorn figurines—glass, pewter, brass, crystal, cheap ceramic, and I think one was made from smashed-up bits of other unicorn figurines. It was a Frankencorn. I could feel their beady little eyes following me around the room as I counted them. (Forty-two. Who has forty-two unicorns in their house, much less in one room?) I was going to have to turn all of them around before I went to sleep in here.
Jane must have spotted my horrified expression, because she said, “Yeah, I collected unicorns growing up, mostly from assorted relatives who were unaware that I was not perpetually five years old and a wannabe fairy princess.”
“How long were you ‘collecting’?” I asked.
“My uncle Corky gave me a unicorn-shaped candy dish for a wedding present.”
I shuddered.
“Believe it or not, this is the best of my collection. I threw the rest out.”
“Wow. If I stare too long at them, will they devour my soul?” I asked her.
She frowned at me.
I shrugged. “It’s a fair question.”
“The sun will be up in about an hour,” she said. “I recommend getting into bed and being ready to be unconscious for twelve hours, because it should hit you pretty hard.”
I shook my head. “I’m not tired. But I can just read or something. You did stick some of my books in my bag, right?”
Jane smirked at me, like I’d just said something really stupid. Probably because most kids my age had an iPad, and I was reading paper books like a broke jerk. “Suit yourself. Do you feel like you need to feed?”
“I think I’m OK, which is a little weird, because I didn’t really drink that much from Ben.”
“I’ll bring you something as soon as you rise. And if you’re not up yet when I come in, I’ll leave a bottle on the warmer next to your bed, in case you wake up thirsty again.”
I glanced at my nightstand, which did indeed have a one-bottle warmer, like something you’d use to heat formula bottles, next to my Moonrise alarm clock. Jane was a very considerate hostess/jailer.
“Which reminds me, do you think you’re going to prefer bottled blood or live feeding from a human donor for most of your feedings? And I’m asking you this without a hint of judgment, because I really need to know in order to make the right arrangements.”
I shuddered, remembering the sensation of my teeth sinking through Ben’s skin. “You know, I think I’ll stick to bottled for . . . ever.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “Get settled in. We’ll talk more when you wake up.”
I nodded.
“Fitz, get off the bed,” she commanded. The dog whimpered but rolled off the quilt and reluctantly joined her at the door.
Jane reached toward the light switch and pressed the button that brought down my own sunproof shades, shutting out my view of the garden. I shivered, feeling oddly claustrophobic, as if she’d shut my coffin lid. Jane gave me a little smile and closed the door. Fitz continued to sniff and scratch at the door from the hall but eventually gave up when Jane called him away.
I scrubbed my hands over my face. While Jane was a bit friendlier than she had been when I rose, things still felt pretty awkward with her. That whole “I hope we get along, but I think there’s a very real possibility you’ll try to make meth in my guest bathroom” vibe brought back unpleasant memories that weren’t exactly helped by the sight of my blue suitcase at the foot of my bed.
A contrary, almost petty part of my personality wanted to put off unpacking, just to prove I didn’t need Jane or her unicorn-ridden guest room. I didn’t need her generosity or her stupid bottle warmer. Hell, I could put off even opening the damn suitcase and just flop down onto the bed in what I was wearing.
But then I remembered that I’d basically murdered Ben in those pajamas.
Nope. Nope. Nope.
I slid open the zipper, splitting the faded, slightly dirtied canvas down the middle. I let my hands probe among the familiar clothes until I found my My Little Pony pajama bottoms and a pink tank top. I changed quickly, throwing my dirty clothes into the hamper Jane had provided. I wondered what the laundry situation would be here. I’d gotten used to being responsible for just my own clothes while I was in school. I wasn’t looking forward to being regarded as live-in part-time help, if that was how Jane planned on making me earn my keep, but I would do it and not complain. I figured I was skating on pretty thin ice anyway.
Frowning, I reached for the suitcase lid, and my own neat block printing caught my eye. Inside the lid, in black Sharpie, I’d written the names of the seven foster families I’d lived with over the years. A lot of foster kids I knew did something like it, keeping track of the names somewhere they couldn’t be spotted easily. One girl I knew wrote them on the inside of the butt of her jeans, an indirect way of telling her foster parents to kiss her ass. It was like a monument to ourselves, reminding us that we were badass, that no matter what life threw at us, it was just another entry on the list until we aged out and could control our own lives. But on the other hand, it was also a warning not to get too comfy where we were, that our situation could change overnight. And if we got too attached to the family we were living with, it would be that much harder to pack up and leave.
It took me a while to learn this lesson. I’d been crazy about the first family I was placed with, a really sweet couple in their late thirties named Tom and Susan. They painted my room a sunny yellow and let me pick out my own bedspread as a “welcome home” gift. Susan took me shopping for my first pair of real high heels, and Tom made blueberry pancakes on Sundays.
I’d hoped that I’d won some sort of foster-care lottery, finding the perfect adoptive family on my first try and riding out my three years with them until I turned eighteen. But two months after my placement, I was moved to another home for reasons I never quite understood. My social worker, a nice woman who always seemed to be rumpled and running late, couldn’t be bothered to explain it to me. Also, she sometimes called me Melanie.
There seemed to be very little logic to when and why I was moved, but it happened enough that I eventually stopped forming attachments. I was polite. I did any chores I was asked to do and rarely broke the house rules. But I didn’t join in Family Game Night with the Richardsons. I voluntarily went to the weekend respite-care home to avoid camping with the Freemans. With the other families, I generally stayed in my room and studied like hell so I qualified for scholarships.
But I supposed I was lucky. You heard so many horror stories about teenagers in the foster-care system. My foster families didn’t abuse me. They didn’t spend the money the state gave them on lottery tickets and cigarettes. But I didn’t exactly form lifelong loving relationships, either. I got shipped from one house to the other every couple of months, toting my things along with me in the same Chiquita banana box and old battered blue suitcase. For some reason, it was important to me to keep that same box, that same suitcase, in my closet, so I was always ready to go. It didn’t feel like they were tossing me out if I was ready to go.
My decent grades and my heart-wrenching story were enough to qualify me for several college scholarships. The rest I made up for in loans. And I even managed to get into the new vampire-friendly dorm. The campus became my home. The friends I made there became my family. No one could take them from me.
Holidays were the worst. There was nowhere safe to hide from movies, commercials, magazines that reminded me that other people were preparing to spend quality time with their loved ones, while I was scrambling to find somewhere to stay when the dorms closed. Last year, Keagan took me home with her, but it was so awkward. Half of her family tried too hard to make me welcome, and the other half asked me weird, pressing questions about where my parents were and why I wasn’t with them.
Summers were better. I was able to get grants to take classes during the break, and that included campus housing. Which was why I was getting ready to graduate a year early—at least, that was before my sternum got crushed by a barbell weight.
This was not how my life was supposed to turn out. I came from a happy home. My parents loved each other. Hell, they had planned me. And then I was brought up by a single mother who never once made me feel like a burden, despite the fact that she’d had to raise me alone from the moment my father died in Afghanistan. Mom was a hard worker, no-nonsense. She taught me how to make a mean banana bread and how to change my own oil, how to balance a checkbook and how to achieve a perfect smoky eye look.
Unfortunately, Mom passed away when I was fifteen. That was how people preferred that I say it. My mother didn’t die suddenly in a head-on collision after falling asleep behind the wheel on the way home from her second job. She “passed away.” It seemed like a ridiculously gentle way to put it.
I was supposed to have not a perfect life but a smooth one. I was supposed to be convincing my dad that there was a boy on planet Earth good enough for me to date. I was supposed to be worrying about how not to hurt my parents’ feelings while explaining that I couldn’t come home to visit every weekend. I was supposed to have people back home who cared whether I was turned into a vampire after a tragic Ultimate Frisbee accident.
Yeah, I was going to have a hard time letting that one go.
I bit my trembling bottom lip and took a completely unnecessary deep breath through my nose. “Suck it up, Keene. You were supposed to have those things, but you don’t, so deal with it. Just deal.”
Taking a Sharpie out of my purse, I carefully wrote “Jameson-Nightengale” on the inside of the suitcase lid. I took out a set of clothes for the next night, put them on the desk, and slid the suitcase under my bed. I could feel the sun approaching, like the strength was leaching out of my arms and legs. Every step was like moving through Jell-O. I’d been fine just a few minutes ago, and now I felt like I’d been tranq’d with bear Quaaludes. Was this what vampires went through every morning? No wonder so many of them seemed so cranky all the time. This sucked.
My arms were so heavy it was difficult to lift them when I checked the sunproof shades. Was there any chance they could open during the day? Those things were supposed to have solar locks on them, but what if Jane had cheaped out on the guest rooms? What if someone came into the room while I was asleep and hit the shade button instead of the light switch? What if I woke up a little pile of ash?
I slumped toward the door and twisted the lock into place. Now I just had to make it to the bed before the sun came up.
Wait.
No.
My body dropped to the floor. My arms, my legs, even my chest. There just wasn’t any strength in any part of me. In the eternity it seemed to take for me to fall, I thought, So this is what total loss of body control feels like. And the last sensation I felt was my face bouncing off the hardwood.
Ouch.
If I didn’t know that was going to heal, I would be very upset.
Jane was just a little too smug about finding me lying unconscious, facedown on the floor in my room. Well, technically, Fitz found me lying unconscious, facedown on the floor, but Jane was the one who brought me blood and patted me on the head in a pretty damned condescending manner. While Fitz licked my face, Jane invited me downstairs to meet “everybody” after I finished the donor blood in the “Librarians Do It Between the Covers” mug she gave me. And after chasing Fitz out, I changed into a nonpajama outfit, because that was not the first impression I wanted to make.
“ ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine,’ ” Jane said, in what was clearly an imitation of me, while she walked toward the stairs. “ ‘I don’t need to sleep when the sun rises. I won’t collapse on my face on the floor.’ ”
“I heard that,” I called after her, before taking a long gulp from the mug.
“You were supposed to!”
Walking into the Jameson-Nightengale kitchen was like entering some surreal undead version of a 1950s sitcom. I could hear Fitz barking outside over the jazzy orchestral sound track in my head. A dark-haired man sat at the kitchen table, reading a French newspaper while he sipped blood from an espresso cup. Jane was serving a little girl in jeans and a “District 12 Archery Team” T-shirt, mixing Hershey’s Special Blood Additive Chocolate Syrup into a tall glass of blood.
From across the room, I could tell it was real human-donor blood, A positive. Which was disturbing.
“So, are we collecting little vampires now?” the man was asking over the newspaper. “Is this your way of answering your mother’s constant demands for more grandchildren?”
“Not . . . consciously,” Jane said, frowning as she slid the blood across the table to the little girl. “And Georgie, do not get used to chocolate breakfasts, OK? The last thing I need is for Ophelia to gripe at me because your fangs are rotting out. I am only doing this for a week, because you won that bet, fair and square. I still can’t believe that you beat me at Jane Austen trivia.”
“Well, Georgie did read the books in first edition,” the man said, stroking Jane’s arm while he gave her a bemused smile. He dropped the paper, and my eyes went saucer-size. This guy looked like he should be rolling around in the sand in a wet dress shirt, staring off into the distance, in a super-classy cologne ad. Chiseled features, a strangely pretty mouth, gray eyes that flashed silver with amusement, longish dark hair that curved around his ears. It was not that Jane wasn’t pretty, because she totally was. I just felt like she’d somehow restored the karmic balance for librarians everywhere.
I should probably stop having these thoughts about Jane’s husband, because that could not end well.
“No one likes a sore loser, Jane,” the little girl intoned, swiping the spoon from Jane so she could catch a few extra drops of chocolate syrup. “Also, my fangs will never rot out, because vampire fangs don’t rot.”
“You just wait until we do pop-culture trivia,” Jane countered. “I will destroy you and everything you love.”
The little girl’s angelic features sharpened as her eyes sparked with challenge. This expression looked familiar. That was Ophelia’s “I wish a bitch would” expression, which was really weird on the face of an eight-year-old. This was Ophelia’s sister, Georgie. I’d thought when Ophelia referred to Georgie as her sister that she meant she’d adopted the tiny vampire along the way as she’d terrorized most of Europe four hundred years before. But no, with Georgie’s extremely off-putting expressions and similar coloring, she had to be Ophelia’s actual biological sister. I would file this under information I would process at a later date when I wasn’t dealing with quite so much emotional trauma.
“Is the new girl going to sit down or just lurk in the doorway?” the little girl asked airily.
“Be nice,” Jane admonished her. “Come on in, Meagan. This is Gabriel and Georgie. You two, this is Meagan Keene.”
“Good morn—evening,” I said, waving my empty mug at them.
Gabriel stood and pulled out a chair for me. Which was weird.
“It’s nice to meet you, Meagan,” he said, pushing the chair in as I sat. Jane poured me another mug of blood from a big thermal carafe on the table. I supposed she was overfeeding me so I wouldn’t try to take down some innocent UPS man who rang the doorbell on the wrong damn night. “Jane has told us little to nothing about you.”
Somehow this vaguely rude greeting in Gabriel’s smooth, cultured voice made me laugh.
“But we will try to make you as comfortable as possible. Welcome.”
“Thanks.”
Georgie stared at me for a long, silent moment. “You smell familiar.”
“Uh, sorry?”
“You smell like Ophelia. It’s faint, but it’s there.”
I meant to tell her that made sense, since I’d spent a lot of time with Ophelia lately. But instead, I said, “Please don’t smell me.”
Which was an awesome way to make a first impression. But Georgie just snorted and returned to her chocolate blood.
“Have you checked on Ben this morning?” I asked Jane.
She nodded. “A med team from the Council stopped by first thing, while you were still out. No sign of activity but no sign of decomp, either.”
“See, you say that in such a cheerful way, but it’s still a super-creepy sentence.”
“Well, the med team is coming back in a few hours to check you out, too. No griping, please. For now, Ben’s door is very heavily secured, because we don’t know when or how he’ll wake up.”
“ ‘How’?”
“Well, we’ve never seen a vampire turn after just being bitten. We don’t know if he’s going to be like you or if he’s going to be . . .” She paused to glance at Gabriel. “Different.”
“So take them both to the Council’s lab, where they will be contained and studied and not sleeping in my game room,” Georgie suggested.
“I’m sleeping in your game room?” I asked.
A shudder shook Georgie’s little shoulders. “No. I never go into the unicorn room. Never. But Ben is sleeping in my game room. And I don’t like it.”
I only hoped she meant actual games and not something creepy involving pliers and hitchhikers.
“Georgie,” Jane said, her tone intentionally patient, “we’ve talked about this. Ben’s a good friend of Iris and Gigi. And Meagan here is a friend of your sister’s. We don’t let friends of our friends languish in underground labs so you can play ‘Mario Kart’ whenever you feel like it.”
“Fine,” Georgie muttered, and drained her glass.
“Meagan, why don’t you check in with your classes?” Jane asked, pointing to my laptop bag on the kitchen counter. “I asked your professors to e-mail you some modified lesson plans.”
“It’s Sunday,” I noted. “Half the time when I contact my professors, I end up asking them in person to check their e-mail.”
Jane smiled and patted my head. “Sweetie, I’m scarier than you are.”
“Good point.” I took my laptop from the counter and opened up the Wi-Fi settings, finding one network labeled “Get Your Own Wi-Fi, Shirley.”
“Who’s Shirley?” I asked.
“The only neighbor I have close enough to try to leech off my Wi-Fi signal.” Jane sighed. “She’s eerily talented at guessing passwords.”
“Well, what did you expect with a password like ‘draculagirl’?” Georgie asked. “Honestly.”
“Well, now it’s just a string of nonsensical numbers and letters with one ampersand thrown in,” Jane said, writing the password down for me.
I logged on to my e-mail and found that I did have several weekly assignment lists for my classes waiting in my in-box. I had a lot of reading to catch up on, and my history professor did not accept “sternum was crushed by a flying barbell weight” as a good reason for turning in my midterm paper late.
I also found several (dozen) messages from Keagan and Morgan, plus Twitter and Facebook notifications, and Keagan had actually tried to reach me on my rarely used Tumblr account, which was just sort of sad. The general theme of their messages was “Are you OK? Where are you? Tell us where they’re keeping you, and we will bust you out!”
I replied to all that I was fine, I couldn’t say where I was, but I would Skype as soon as I was allowed. And when I hit reply, a big red “X” showed up on my screen, with the words “Unauthorized Contact” in a very confrontational font.
“Uh, Jane,” I said, “did you install nanny software on my computer?”
Jane’s lips pulled back in a grimace. “Only for when you try to e-mail someone who’s not one of your professors. Or log on to social media. Or type the words ‘Half-Moon Hollow’ anywhere.”
“You’ve cyber-gagged me?”
“Only for a little while,” Jane promised. “Until things have calmed down and you’ve proved that we can trust you.”
I wasn’t even going to pretend that being put on Internet training wheels didn’t hurt my feelings.
“And my phone?” I asked through gritted teeth. “Wait, where is my phone?”
Gabriel sighed and reached into his wallet, withdrawing a twenty and handing it to his wife. She snickered and stuffed it into her pocket. Georgie waggled her fingers, and Gabriel slid another twenty across the table and into her little paw.
“Uh, what was that?”
“We said that you’d ask for your phone within an hour of waking up, and he said you wouldn’t,” Georgie told me.
Gabriel was sulking. A lot.
“Gabriel is a little out of touch with today’s youth,” Jane told me. “Frankly, I was a little surprised that you didn’t ask for your phone last night.”
“I had a lot on my mind,” I told her. “So, seriously, where’s my phone?”
Again with the cringing from Jane. “Well, since it was in your back pocket when you were thrown against the building, it was crushed. And with all of your wounds, there was a lot of ‘you’ on it. It wasn’t salvageable.”
“That will not be covered under my protection plan,” I muttered.
“No, it won’t. But I got you a replacement,” she said, sliding a square chunk of plastic across the table.
“This is a KidPhone,” I said, lifting the phonelet with its three huge buttons. Seriously, it was one very small step up from one of those preschooler toy phones where the anthropomorphic eyes moved back and forth when you dialed. “It only calls three numbers.”
“Yes, V-one-one, the Council office, and my cell,” Jane said. “Keep it with you at all times. Prove that we can trust you in terms of contacting the outside world, and you’ll get a phone with four buttons.”
I pushed up from the table, pointing the block of princess-pink plastic at her. “Is this because I laughed when Ophelia fried your phone? If so, this is bull—”
I stopped suddenly as bubbles of some strange awareness rippled through my chest, making the hair on my neck stand up. My head snapped up toward the ceiling. I dropped the KidPhone and stumbled toward the stairs.
“What is this?” I whispered to Jane, who was watching me with bemusement.
“Ben’s rising,” she said, following me to the second floor. “I felt it with Jamie. You’re his sire, so you’re getting a sort of supernatural text alert as he wakes up . . . again, way, way ahead of schedule. But this only works when your childe is rising, and then it goes away.”
“That’s nice, but I wouldn’t get a supernatural text alert on my KidPhone, because it doesn’t get texts.”
Yeah, it was inappropriate to bitch about my phone at a moment like this, but honestly, I needed something to take my mind off my nerves. How angry was Ben going to be when he woke up? How many heavy objects was he going to throw at me? Was he going to try to bite me to get back at me? Would that mean I would be a double-weirdo vampire? Would we just keep waking up and biting each other in an ugly cycle forever?
“Let it go,” Jane said as we approached Ben’s door. She unlocked several dead bolts on the door and cracked it. “You should probably let him see me first.”
“So he can imprint on you like a baby duck?” I asked.
“No, so he doesn’t panic, because the last time he saw you, you were gnawing on his arm.”
I scratched the back of my neck. “Point taken.”
Ben was still lying across the bed, quilt pulled up to his chin. He hadn’t moved at all during the day, which made sense, I supposed. The dead didn’t develop restless leg syndrome.
Jane motioned me back. I stepped against the wall and watched as she moved toward the bed. Ben bolted upright and, seeing Jane hunching over him, swung out at her face.
“Why does everybody keep trying to punch me?”
“Maybe don’t stand right over new vampires as they wake up,” I whispered at her.
Gabriel appeared in the doorway, trying to lean against the frame all casual-like, though thanks to my newly keen eyesight, I could see every muscle was tensed. Georgie, on the other hand, seemed to be playing “Mario Kart” at an ear-splitting volume in her room.
“Ben, just stay calm,” Jane said in a soft, gentle voice. “It’s me, Jane. You know me. And you know I’m not going to hurt you. So just stay calm.”
Ben squinted at her, tilting his head. Once again, the vampire upgrade package was in full effect. Ben had been cute before, but now, well, he was still really cute. But there were dark shadows under his eyes, giving them a slightly dangerous glint. His skin, which had already been pretty damn nice, was perfectly smooth and had this pearly sheen to it. Also, his T-shirt seemed to fit a lot better than I remembered.
Damn.
Did being turned change your muscle mass? I poked my bicep. Nope.
“Jane, why are you talking to me like I’ve suffered a head injury?” Ben asked her. “Have I suffered a head injury? Is that why my head hurts?”
“No, Ben. I’m talking to you like this because I don’t want you to freak out and break my guest room like the undead Incredible Hulk.”
“Why am I in your guest room?”
Remembering how claustrophobic I’d felt when the shades were closed, I hit the button that raised them. And that was a mistake, because it took Ben’s attention off Jane and drew it to me. His green eyes narrowed, and his fangs dropped.
“You!” he grunted, throwing the blankets aside and hopping out of bed in one quick motion. He landed on his feet and stared down at his own body, as if he didn’t recognize it.
“Don’t freak out,” I said, reaching toward him.
Ben scrambled back and up the wall, hitting the ceiling and clinging to it like a spider. “What the hell?” he yelled. “How am I doing this?”
“Undead Hulk!” Jane grumbled at me.
“Ben, calm down,” I told him. “Wait—can I do that, too?”
“Probably,” Gabriel said.
“What the hell did you do to me?” Ben barked from his corner of the ceiling. “Am I a vampire? Are you telling me I’m a vampire right now?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What do you mean, you’re not sure? You bit me!”
“Yeah, but I didn’t give you any of my blood. A bite alone shouldn’t have turned you. And we shouldn’t have woken up after just one night, but we did. We’re basically vampire unicorns, which is sort of fun,” I said, wincing.
“Probably not what he wants to hear,” Gabriel murmured.
“I’ve been in that unicorn room for too long,” I muttered back.
“It’s been one night,” Jane retorted.
“Could we please stop talking about unicorns?” Ben shouted. “And could someone tell me how to get off of the ceiling? And why am I yelling so much?”
“It’s a traumatic situation,” I told him. “I went through the same thing when I woke up . . . last night. I’m probably not the person you want to hear this from right now.”
“No,” he shot back.
“I am really screwing up this sire thing,” I told Jane. “Maybe I should just go.”
“No, Meagan, stay where I can see you. Ben, just relax your hands and climb down,” Jane told him. “And Ben, I think that given the way you seem to feel about your sire, you should go with bottled blood for your first feeding. Is that OK with everybody?”
I lifted my eyebrows. “Wait, is it supposed to come from me?”
“Under ideal circumstances, yes, but I think we can all agree we waved bye-bye to ideal a while ago,” Jane said.
“I don’t want anything from her,” Ben insisted.
Well, that was hurtful.
Jane waved at Gabriel, who produced a warm mug full of blood from behind his back. He waved it in front of Ben’s face, and Ben slid off the wall with an “Oof.”
Ben reached for the mug and sniffed at it. His two sets of fangs slid out, and he winced, clapping his hand over his mouth. He jostled the mug, and Jane steadied his hand to keep him from dropping it.
“Was that two sets of fangs?” Gabriel said, peering at Ben’s mouth. “Do you have two sets of fangs? How did you—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Ben told him, covering his teeth with his lips. “And I don’t know if I want to do this. Is this donor blood?”
“No, I drained a drifter in a car-wash parking lot and saved it, just in case, because that’s how we’re doing things now,” Jane told him, clearly nearing the end of her patience.
Ben stared at her. Jane stared back.
“OK, fine.” Ben took a long gulp of the blood and then, after pausing to smack his lips, drained the whole mug. “Happy?”
“More or less,” Jane said.
“I need to be somewhere else,” Ben said, walking out of the room. Jane nodded at Gabriel, who followed him.
“Stay where you can see me? What am I, seven?” I asked.
Jane lifted a brow. “If a seven-year-old could accidentally start some sort of vampire epidemic with just one bite, then yes.”
“That was uncalled for.”
Jane pursed her lips. “Was it?”