5
Make sure you know the basics before you start to teach your childe fancy feeding tricks.
—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire
If our next few weeks were a training montage in an ’80s action movie, well, it would mostly feature ugly crying and blood spatters set to power chords.
I’d hoped that since we were apparently some new strain, we could somehow skip the weird adjustment period from human to vampire. But no, Ben and I struggled with our thirst, though it was slaked with less blood than Jane or Gabriel needed. We weren’t used to our superhuman strength. And we never seemed to make it to our beds in time for sunrise, meaning we collapsed wherever we were.
It was like being a gawky teenager all over again, only instead of tripping over our own feet, we accidentally broke doorknobs off their moorings and suffered weird contusions-slash-carpet-burns.
Early on, Jane had found that keeping Georgie on a schedule was important to prevent her from committing mass murder, so she put Ben and me on the same routine. We woke up and drank breakfast as a “family,” and then Jane left us to do our schoolwork while she did Council business in her study. The awesome news was that we typed and read faster than even Jane and Gabriel. Georgie, fascinated-slash-annoyed by the fact that we could do something she couldn’t, ran us through typing-speed trials. I was the winner at 390 words per minute. But Ben was a faster reader, completing his copy of The Guide for the Newly Undead, Second Edition in an hour.
After homework, we got “yard time,” when Jane literally let us run around the yard to let off some steam. Sadly, this was the most entertaining part of our day, testing our strength and speed. Every day, we ran laps around the cow pond, leaped from inadvisable heights, and tried to see the lights of town (such as they were) from the tops of the trees. We could not.
Dr. Hudson gave us the undead version of heart monitors, bracelets that measured electrical activity in our brains, our metabolism, and other vital statistics. I took mine off as often as I could, because I didn’t like anything to do with McDerpy on my skin. I suspected the bracelets might have also included a tracking chip, given how often Ben wandered just a little too close to the woods near his family’s house.
After yard time, we had remedial vampire classes—sunscreen application, judging our bloodthirst, avoiding silver. We had to (slowly) read The Guide for the Newly Undead, Second Edition like it was Bible study so Jane could quiz us on chapter topics. Georgie would wear clothes from thrift stores saturated in several levels of human smell, in exchange for bribes of more Hershey’s Blood Additive and video games. This served two purposes. For one thing, it was very unsettling, feeling that crazy bloodthirst for a child-shaped person. The self-loathing gave you all kinds of negative reinforcement about not feeding from humans. And if that didn’t keep you from lunging, Georgie could be downright mean. She was a gouger and a hair puller.
Despite the gouging, Georgie was the most welcoming member of the “family.” She seemed to find my flailing newbie antics charming. Or at least amusing. She was . . . extremely freaking creepy. I would not lie. She had this flat, sarcastic way of speaking that just sounded wrong coming out of a cute little blond child. Also, the glassy sheen of her dead shark eyes made me think that she was secretly plotting my death. And I was pretty sure she was smart enough to get away with it.
Jane still watched me like she expected me to bolt with the family’s flatware. I maintained a polite distance from Gabriel. He was a perfectly nice guy, though he seemed permanently befuddled. He was the centered, steady yin to Jane’s clumsy, hyperverbal yang. But I’d been in enough foster placements to know that you didn’t get too cozy with the man of the house. Especially if your new foster mom already had some issues with trusting you.
Ben stretched my polite distance by miles. Not only would he not try to work around Jane’s Firewall of Death so we could contact our friends on campus, but he dedicated a lot of time to ignoring me. Maybe ignoring people who lived in the same house as he did was his special vampire talent.
Long gone was the adorable boy whose heady cookie-based flirting had left me weak in the knees. Oh, he wasn’t cruel, and he didn’t snub me to my face, but I could only take seeing so many smiles die on his lips when he saw me walk into a room. He went from happy and laughing at something Jane had said to completely dead-faced. So I stopped walking into rooms where I knew he would be. I wasn’t trying to be petulant about it. I just timed my day to be as Ben-free as possible. I did my homework in my room. During yard time, I ran at my own pace, which just happened to be fifteen yards behind Ben.
I decided not to let it bother me. I didn’t do romantic entanglements. I embraced casual sex and all its awesome, minimal emotional requirements. But I hadn’t done that very often, because the chances of turning up pregnant or contracting some weird disease were pretty high for my demographic.
I’d always prided myself on not investing in people who didn’t invest in me. Life was too short to attach yourself to people who didn’t really like you. If a friend reduced our interactions to nothing but texts and Facebook likes, I found new friends. If a guy didn’t call, I didn’t make up elaborate excuses about him “liking me too much.” I moved on to a guy who did call. Ben was no different. We’d had the beginnings of something that could have been special, but it had been destroyed by a forty-five-pound weight.
On the plus side, having little contact with the outside world or the people who lived two doors down from me meant that I threw myself at my school assignments like they were the only thing keeping me sane. Because they were. Which was sad. But my grades had never been higher.
Whether it was to keep us socialized or to give Jane a break, some of her vampire friends came to visit. It was mostly her friend-colleague hybrid Dick Cheney, who seemed super-defensive about his name when he first introduced himself for some reason. Dick came off as pretty sketchy when you first met him, like the kind of guy who lingered around campus asking girls if they wanted to go to his modeling school. But he was completely devoted to his wife, Andrea, in that googly-eyed, hung-the-moon way I’d only seen on the CW lineup.
After about two weeks of this, Jane trusted us enough to introduce us to the larger circle of vampire friends at a big potluck. Well, it was actually a test of our bloodthirst, dressed up as a potluck. Basically a training Trojan Horse.
It started with Jane’s vampire friends slowly filtering into the house. There were so many of them—pale, attractive, conspicuously coupled off—that I had a hard time keeping track of all the names. I’d met Dick and Andrea (indecently pretty, with clothes that looked like something on Mad Men). And then there were Miranda and her boyfriend-sire, Collin (uptight and British but yummy in that Michael Fassbender way that kind of made me understand why she put up with his constant grimacing). Then there was a tall dark-haired man named Cal (funny accent, cool vintage rock T-shirts) and his petite brown-haired wife, Iris (who seemed to want to mother me one moment and ground me the next).
Iris seemed particularly fond of Ben, given the way she tackle-hugged him the moment she ran through the door.
“I’m so happy to see you!” she cried, clutching his face in her hands in a grip that I frankly found terrifying. “I mean, so sad that you’re dead but so happy to see you!”
“I’m so glad I don’t need to breathe,” Ben wheezed as Iris enveloped him in another hug. “Because it would be an issue right now.”
“OK, sweetheart, put the boy down,” Cal said gently. “Being picked up like a toddler in front of loved ones is emasculating.”
“Little bit,” Ben agreed as Iris set him on his feet.
“Gigi and Nik would have come tonight, but they thought it would be sort of weird for you,” Iris said.
I leaned toward Miranda, who was seated near me on the couch. “Who’s Gigi?” I asked her.
“Iris’s little sister and Ben’s ex-girlfriend. They broke up a year or so ago, when Gigi was still human. It was . . . it was unpleasant for them both. And then awkward. But mostly unpleasant.”
“Oh.” I felt a small flash of sympathy for Ben. It did have to be super-awkward to have an ex mixed into a friend group that he clearly valued. People took sides or tried to “stay neutral,” which meant they took the side that wasn’t yours. And next thing you knew, there were parties you didn’t know about and hangouts you weren’t invited to, and then your Facebook friend list shrank dramatically, and you were left wondering what happened.
I liked Miranda. She was a new vampire, too. She’d worked for vampires for a long time before she was turned, so she seemed amused-slash-exasperated by many of their antics. And she seemed to understand how uncomfortable I was in this situation, sticking close by to fill me in on this person’s relationship to Jane or how that person related to everybody else. All while Fitz sat between us and thumped his tail against my thigh.
More and more people moseyed through the door. They all sat around the parlor, trying too hard to look casual as they drank different bottles of blood they’d brought with them. Andrea set up a couple of pots of different types of blood concoctions she’d made at home. Apparently, Jane was not trusted to cook, even when the food wasn’t solid. Her friends contended that the original meaning of “BYOB” was “bring your own blood.”
Something about their easy warmth made my chest ache in a way that wasn’t entirely pleasant. And it didn’t help that Ben already knew so many of them, leaving me feeling like the odd man out all over again. Dick made an effort to keep me engaged, talking to me about my schoolwork and whether I was happy with the assignments the professors were sending me—something he claimed was part of his job as Jane’s co-representative on the Council. His eyes just about glazed over with boredom while discussing nineteenth-century British literature, but I appreciated his effort.
“Jane gave you the Council-issued phone, right?” Dick asked. “She told you to keep it with you at all times?”
I pulled the bright pink KidPhone from my back pocket. “Would we call this a phone?”
“Yes,” Dick said. “Now, if you ever run into trouble, I want you to press the one button three times and then hold it down until it beeps. And then you want to get about ten feet away.”
“What’s going to happen if I do that?” I asked him. “Is it like a tracking beacon or something?”
Dick opened his mouth to answer, but just then the door opened again, and the whole room went still. Dick moved between me and the door. A ridiculously gorgeous redheaded woman swanned in, grinning broadly at the crowd.
“Hey, y’all!”
Wow, that was some accent. It was nasal to the point that it hurt my ears, which was tragic because she was one of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen.
I watched the redhead cross the room and could immediately tell that she wasn’t a vampire. Her skin tone was too healthy. And her heartbeat . . . she was calm, but it was thumping at a pretty steady rhythm. Heartbeat. Human. Was she human? Panicked, I clamped my jaw shut, willing my fangs to stay in my gums. But they never dropped.
Fitz huffed at the redhead, then laid his snout against my leg, which was a nice reminder to stay stuck to the couch like I was nailed to it.
The twangy newcomer didn’t smell right. She didn’t smell sweet or tangy or anything remotely good. She smelled . . . like a wet dog. A gross wet dog that had been rolling in something that had been dead for weeks.
Fitz looked up at me with his shiny brown eyes, as if he could hear my anticanine sentiments and was insulted by them. I shrugged.
Still, the stink coming off that stranger seemed wrong. Someone that attractive should have a regular bathing schedule.
I glanced at Ben, whose nose was wrinkled with distaste. Could he smell it, too?
Jane eyed us both carefully, looking confused when I sank against the couch and pressed my hand over my nose.
The newcomer walked closer to me. “You must be Meagan!” she cried, smiling cautiously. “So nice to meet you! I’m Jolene Lavelle.”
“Hi,” I said, waving awkwardly, not moving to shake her offered hand. Because her hygiene was in question, honestly.
Jolene looked to Jane, who shrugged. Jolene looked back over her shoulder. “Zeb, you comin’ in?”
A man with sandy-blond hair and bright blue eyes poked his head through the doorway. “Hi!”
Miranda glanced between me and the door. “Oh . . . no.”
It was immediately clear that Zeb wasn’t a vampire, either. He was tan and vital and healthy-looking. I could hear his slightly elevated pulse from the couch. But unlike his wife, he did not smell like wet dog. He smelled delicious, like fresh-baked apple pie and pumpkin spice lattes. I could practically see the blood throbbing through his delicate veins, under his skin, rich and warm and ripe.
My mouth watered. I could feel actual saliva seeping at the corner of my mouth, which was, frankly, gross. And my fangs dropped with a snick. Every muscle in my body was commanding me to jump forward, launch myself from the couch, bank off the wall, and tackle him. I could practically feel the skin of his throat give way under my fangs, flooding my mouth with hot red blood. But I gritted my teeth, stiffening and locking down my legs so they couldn’t propel me forward.
Ben was tensed on his chair, fingers gripping the armrests like they were lifelines. I reached over and wrapped my fingers around his wrist, his very, very tight wrist. It relaxed ever so slightly, but he didn’t move.
Zeb frowned at us. “Huh, well, that was anticlimactic. I was promised lunging, maybe even a minor flesh wound. It’s gotten kind of boring ever since everybody settled down and got seminormal. No one’s kidnapped me or hypnotized me or threatened to murder me in years. Between that and the kids starting school, I feel old.”
Jolene put her arm around Zeb’s shoulders. “Welcome to middle age, sweetie.”
“Your breath smells really nice, by the way,” Zeb told me.
“Good job, you two!” Jane said, rushing forward to pull Ben and me up from the couch, though I noticed that she stayed between us and Zeb. In yanking us to our feet, she knocked aside my grip on Ben’s arm. “I’m so proud!”
“What the hell, Jane?” I yelled.
“Zeb’s my best friend.” Jane said. “Has been since we were kids, and he’s one of the few humans left in our little circle of friends since Miranda was turned. I invited him over here to see how tight you’ve locked down your bloodthirst. The good news is, it’s pretty darn tight.”
“This was a test?” I yelped. “That’s freaking sick!”
“We’ve only been vampires for two weeks!” Ben cried.
“What? Zeb knows the risks, and there’s a whole room full of vampires here to protect him. Who better to test your control? And you did great!”
I frowned. “I still don’t like it.”
Jane shrugged. “Well, that’s fine, kids, but as your almost-sire, I reserve the right to test you as I see fit. And I did, and you were awesome, so accept it and say thank you for my vote of confidence.”
“I think that the ‘thank you’ part would be easier if you didn’t call us kids,” Ben told her.
“You’re under twenty, and just this evening I found you watching Thundercats in my living room,” Jane pointed out. “In your pajama pants.”
Ben frowned. “She’s got me there.”
“Still doesn’t explain why I get lumped together with the ‘kid,’ ” I grumbled. “So what does performing well on your creepy little test mean? Do we get a special treat? An outing to vampire Chuck E. Cheese’s? Access to telecommunications?”
“An internship!” Jane exclaimed, with a big cheesy grin on her face. I swear, she actually did jazz hands and everything.
“That seems more like a punishment,” I said.
“Speaking as someone who has done two unpaid internships, I agree,” Ben told her. “Is this about my browser history again?”
I gave Ben an extreme side-eye.
“It’s not a punishment,” Jane insisted. “It’s just that with all of the remedial vampire training and the number of hours one of you spends watching Thundercats, it occurs to me that maybe you don’t have enough to keep you occupied.”
“Really?” Dick asked.
“It turns out that when you read and type at lightning speed and you don’t have to sit in on lectures, college classwork doesn’t take all night,” I said. “Which you should blame on the increasingly lax standards of the American postsecondary educational system. Not on us.”
“Well, I can’t have you sitting around my house all night unsupervised and unoccupied. Idle hands are the devil’s opportunity to break my furniture and walls.”
“Your walls?” I asked.
“Jamie,” she and Ben said together.
“Wow.”
“So, instead of leaving you alone with my precious, vulnerable walls, we are going to find something fun and exciting for you to do.”
Ben’s voice brightened. “Like what?”
“You will be coming to work with me at the Council office,” Jane said. “This is a congratulations potluck!”
Ben and I both made disappointed noises, and Dick was doubled over laughing. But the good news was that this new development in employment was enough to distract me from how wonderful Zeb’s blood smelled.
“Like a Take Your Daughter to Work Day thing? We’re going to sit in your break room and color until it’s time to come home?” I asked.
“No, doing actual work, so you will earn college credit for your trouble, which will keep you both from losing whatever classes you aren’t able to take online,” Dick said. “So, Ben, we know you’re basically Bill Gates without the scary glasses. You can help with the database project. If you’re comfortable with that.”
Ben shrugged. “Er, sure. I can do that.”
“And you, Meagan, what were you studying at school?” Jane asked.
“I was—I am. I am an English major.”
“An English major,” Jane said, frowning. “What were you planning to do with that? Teach?”
“I really don’t like kids that much,” I told her. “I thought maybe grad school, teaching at a college level.”
“Hmmm.”
“I know, I was not preparing myself for life postvampire or postgraduation,” I admitted.
“How would you feel about being my personal assistant?” she asked.
“Woefully underqualified.”
She waved my concerns away with a flick of her hand. “It’s not that complicated. You manage my schedule, protect me from seeing people I don’t want to see, answer some phones. I only ask because my last secretary, Margaret, was disturbingly loyal to Ophelia. And she’d been sabotaging my schedule, not reporting phone calls, not sending my expense reports to the finance department. I had to fire her in a way that involved the human and vampire police . . . and animal control. I need someone I can trust.”
“And that person is me?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “Really?”
“Yes,” Jane said, smiling and patting my shoulder. “I think you’ll do great.”
The corners of my mouth pulled back into a frown.
Jane sighed. “And as a signing bonus, I’ll let you video chat with your friends. I know how hard you’ve been trying. You deserve to be rewarded.”
“That is sort of manipulative.”
She nodded. “Yes, it is. Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll take it.”
She patted my back. “Of course, if you screw up, I’ll make you work in the mail room.”
I shuddered. I’d heard about some of the mail room employees. They were not my people.
“Are we finished with this touching moment? Because I’m starving,” Jane said.
The other vampires in the room cheered.
We gathered around Jane’s dining-room table, where Jane ladled cups of blood from pots into fancy crystal punch cups. Jane raised her glass to our new jobs, which made that hesitant expression return to Ben’s face. I didn’t know what Andrea did to the blood, but it was one of my favorite things I’d tried since being turned, deep and fruity without being too sweet. Meanwhile, Jolene ate her weight in ribs, while Zeb ate . . . less than his weight in ribs. But smiled at Jolene like seeing his wife’s face smeared with barbecue sauce was the most adorable thing ever.
Despite the fact that the group was relatively huge, even I could see the obvious, loving connections among them all, the ease in the way they spoke to one another. They were family, the kind of family people chose to be with, instead of hoping for “unavoidable” overtime on holidays.
I wondered if I was going to have enough time here to feel like a part of it.
The very next sunset, Jane made good on her promise to let me video chat with Morgan and Keagan. She did insist that the conversation take place in her study, where she could supervise it, but I was so excited to talk to my friends I barely registered the invasion of privacy.
Jane’s study was a bit more weirdo-quirky than the rest of the house. There were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lining the room, every shelf stuffed with leather-bound first editions, mass-market paperbacks, softcover trades. And where there weren’t books, there were strange ceremonial bowls, a Ravenclaw mug with rusty-looking residue near the rim, Funko Pop! versions of Sansa Stark and Oberyn Martell, candles inscribed with symbols from Supernatural, a little framed quote from Persuasion, and, oddly enough, little pewter fairy statues, which she’d put in a glass case labeled with a small brass sign that said, “Unsellable Case of Shame.”
“You must do a lot of shopping on Etsy,” I said. I couldn’t help but notice that the space behind the desk, the area that would be visible to the laptop’s webcam, was blank wall space and a window covered with blackout curtains. Morgan and Keagan would be given no clues to where I was. And since they couldn’t see out the blocked window, they couldn’t even use the angle of the moon to triangulate my position, like they did on CSI. Not that Morgan and Keagan were that good at trigonometry, but I liked to think they could have pulled it off with help from the right Web site.
“I like to mix and match my fandoms.” Clearly excited by my heretofore unknown enthusiasm for something, Jane opened her laptop with a flourish. The Skype logo appeared. The familiar dink-dank-donk sounded as the computer attempted a connection. Ophelia’s pale, elfin face appeared on the screen, her features exaggerated by the very close company she was keeping with the camera.
“Ophelia!” I cried. “Sit back! You look like an old Busta Rhymes video.”
Ophelia rolled her eyes but moved away from the webcam. “Better?”
“Yes! How are you? I miss you!”
Ophelia gave me a pleased little smile, but she didn’t return the sentiment, because that wasn’t her thing. “I’m fine, other than straining my upper-body strength trying to hold back your friends so I can talk to you first.”
In the background, I heard Keagan squeal. “She’s so strong!”
“How are you adjusting?” Ophelia asked casually, as if she wasn’t restraining my friends.
“I’m sort of in control of my thirst, and I can outrun Fitz now without embarrassing myself. I’m living with Georgie, and she completely terrifies me but in a fun way.”
Ophelia’s brows rose. “That is a lot of information. Well, I have some people here who are yanking my arms off so they can talk to you.”
Ophelia stepped out of view so Morgan and Keagan could tumble in front of the camera like a couple of overeager puppies. Morgan yelped when Keagan knocked her aside. Keagan’s rounded cheeks nearly covered her baby-doll blue eyes as she grinned, waving both hands.
“Meagan!” Keagan shrieked. “Are you OK? We were so worried!”
“Back away from the mic, Keagan, you’re going to burst my eardrums,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said, moving away from the camera. “Are you OK?” she repeated.
“I’m OK,” I told her. “It’s not ideal, but it could be a lot worse.”
“Where did you go?” Morgan asked.
I raised my eyebrows. I hadn’t expected Ophelia to obey Jane’s order that she keep my location a secret. I was even more surprised that a little part of me appreciated it. I doubted very much that the Council would react in a nice, nonviolent way if the girls came busting into Half-Moon Hollow on a rescue mission. Sure, Jane was in charge of the region, but she could only spin a headline like “Coeds Torch Council Building in Freak Taser Incident” so far.
“I can’t tell you,” I said as Jane shook her head from behind the laptop screen. “I’m sorry. It’s all part of the agreement with the Council. I agree not to tell anyone where I am, they agree not to kill me in my sleep.”
“What agreement with the Council?” Morgan demanded.
“Morgan, I know you’re worried about me, but I don’t want to waste our chat time going over questions I can’t answer. All you need to know is that I’m OK. I’m safe. I’m adjusting to the whole vampire thing, and I’m trying to get back to campus as quick as I can. So what’s been going on with you two? What’s the campus gossip? What have I missed?”
“It’s been pretty quiet, really,” Keagan told me. “You know the drill. Now that everybody’s stopped freaking out over the first couple of weeks, it’s mostly frat parties, football games, and avoiding group projects.”
“You are now approaching an urban legend,” Morgan told me. “There’s a rumor that your turning didn’t take and you are now haunting the second floor. If girls see your reflection in the mirror, it means they won’t date again until they graduate.”
“Why would I be haunting the second floor? I lived on the fourth. Also, ouch, my legend sounds super-mean.”
“Urban legends are not known for accurate details,” she said with a shrug. “But you might be included on the haunted-campus tour they do to frighten freshmen! That’s exciting.”
I groaned. “They’re going to mash my story up with the ‘Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?’ girl, aren’t they?”
Morgan nodded. “Probably.”
“Well, your story’s way more interesting than Ben Overby’s,” Keagan chimed in. “You know, that boy you danced with at the party? Right after you were turned, he dropped out of school and joined the Peace Corps. It was weird.”
“Really?” I asked, lifting my brow in Jane’s direction. “The Peace Corps? Does anyone join the Peace Corps anymore?”
Jane shrugged.
“Yeah, something about using his computer geekery to create safe groundwater systems in Africa,” Morgan said.
“But how would he even . . .” I asked as Jane shook her head again, clearly discouraging my inconvenient curiosity. “Never mind.”
“I think it’s kind of romantic.” Keagan sighed. “He couldn’t stay in school, where he met you, after he watched you die. He was so clearly into you.”
“Yep, that’s a definite sign of someone being into you, throwing away their education and running away to a third world country,” Morgan muttered.
“You’re so pale,” Keagan said. “Gorgeous, don’t get me wrong. I mean, it looks like RuPaul’s Drag Race Understated Glam Squad got ahold of you. But pale. And you have circles under your eyes that kind of look like eyeliner but more shadowy. Aren’t you sleeping?”
“Yeah, just not when you’re sleeping.”
Morgan frowned. “But you’re OK? You’re not having foster-home flashbacks? Do they make vampire antianxiety meds? Should we airlift some to you? I mean, we would have to know where you are, but that could be arranged, right?”
Keagan elbowed Morgan on-screen. “Subtle, girl, come on.”
“I’m fine,” I promised, eyeing Jane carefully. “It’s different from when I was a kid.”
“Well, we miss you,” Keagan said. “Going for cheese fries at two A.M. isn’t the same without you!”
“Well, it definitely wouldn’t be the same if I did go, because I would throw up the cheese fries.”
“Good point,” Keagan said, grimacing.
“Also, we have to write our own essays now. It’s terrible. I’m failing Public Speaking. Do you know how embarrassing it is to fail Public Speaking?” Morgan grumbled.
I burst out laughing. “How am I responsible for you failing Public Speaking?”
“Because I have to spend the time I would spend practicing my speeches writing my own essays for Russian Literature.”
“Well, who told you to take Russian Literature?” I asked.
“Professor Romanov is so hot.” Morgan groaned. “It clouded my judgment.”
I snorted. “I’m sorry I’m not there to help you commit academic fraud.”
“Well, you should be.”
“I miss you guys.” I sighed.
“When are you coming home?” Morgan demanded.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It all depends on whether I can pass remedial vampire classes.”
Jane glanced at her watch and made a wrap it up gesture. I glanced at the clock at the bottom of the screen. Ben’s time slot to talk to his parents was coming up soon, and I knew Jane wanted to talk with him one last time about the reasons for not telling his parents where he was before he got on the video chat.
“I’ve got to go,” I told them, prompting a chorus of “Noooo!” from the other side of the screen. “But if I’m very good, I can call . . .”
I paused to glance at Jane, who whispered, “Next week.”
“I can call next week.”
“OK,” Keagan muttered, all pouty.
Jane whispered, “Your friend can e-mail you her essay at the Council address if I can screen the e-mail. AND the essay.”
I grinned. “And Morgan, e-mail me your essays so I can read them over and revise them. Not write them for you. Revise. I’ll send you the e-mail address.”
“Yay for academic semifraud!” Morgan cheered.
“Bye,” I said, shaking my head.
They yelled, “We love you!”
“I love you guys,” I said, throwing them a kiss. They waved at me, and I reluctantly clicked to end the call. I wiped at the eyes I hadn’t even realized were growing wet.
“You OK?” Jane asked.
I nodded. “Thank you,” I said. “I really needed to talk to them.”
“I know,” Jane assured me. I stood up, and she put her hand on my shoulder, gave it a squeeze. “I know you think I’ve been a little bit of a bitch through this whole process.”
“Because I’ve actually thought, Wow, Jane’s being a little bit of a bitch right now,’ and you read my mind?”
“Yes, and in some ways you’ve been right. I’ve had to be a bitch. I don’t like it. But that’s part of my job with the Council. I’m doing what I can to make life easier for vampires without committing overt acts of evil, as was the Council’s usual way. And if I have to be kind of mean to keep you safe, so be it. But I do understand what it’s like to have friends who mean more to you than family could. And I hope that someday you start to include some of us in that little circle.”
I nodded. “I’m trying.”
“You know, I happen to know a Russian guy who could probably help your friend out with that Russian Literature problem.”
“Nah,” I said, shaking my head. “This is the third class Morgan has registered for based on professorial hotness. She’s never going to learn until she hits rock bottom.”
“You’re a good friend.”
I’d never worked in an office before. I mean, I’d watched plenty of episodes of The Office, but I doubted very much that qualified me for the Undead American Workplace. However, I had spent a lot of time in nondescript government waiting rooms, which made me quite comfortable in the Council offices.
I knew exactly how to adjust to the gray carpet, gray walls, gray sofas, and gray laminate everything else as Jane escorted Ben and me from the elevator to the subterranean HR office. The good news was that being wards of the Council meant that we didn’t need to fill out the usual first-day forms or liability releases. We’d already been thoroughly documented. (And cheek-swabbed.) I mean, honestly, we were already vampires. What more could happen to us on the job?
Our orientation consisted of Jane telling us, “Do what you’re told. Don’t lie. Don’t take anything in the fridge that doesn’t belong to you. Don’t go below the third subfloor.” Short, sweet, to the point.
It did make me wonder what was located on the fourth subfloor, though.
I tugged at the collar of my sensible black cardigan as we waited in Jane’s office to be escorted to our posts. Ben sat to my left, his knee jiggling so hard the couch was vibrating. I wanted to reach out to steady his leg, to try to tell him that this was going to be OK. But he hadn’t welcomed much in the way of sire-ly advice from me so far. Also, the vibrations weren’t entirely unpleasant.
So, instead, I fussed with my cardigan. The Council office dress code was surprisingly strict. Jane had gone online and ordered me several sweater sets, pencil skirts, and flats in dark blue, black, and red. Yes, it was boring as hell, but . . . I was really having a hard time coming up with a bright side to a buttload of cardigans.
Poor Ben was stuck looking like his mom dressed him for school picture day in khakis and a navy-blue polo shirt. He grumbled, “I look like I’m about to be hazed at a private boarding school.”
I snorted. “You’re going to be sold for French clove cigarettes.”
Ben laughed, which made me give him a surprised side-eye. My shoulders jerked in quiet giggles while Ben laughed harder.
“It’s not that bad!” Jane said. “We had some complaints about the last batch of interns and their funny nerd T-shirts and rainbow-colored hair. Some departments tried to dress the same way . . . and there was some misunderstanding about the limits of appropriate humor. There are some really filthy T-shirts available on the Internet.”
Ben and I kept laughing, until he looked over and realized that we were laughing together, and it sort of trailed off into nothing.
Back to staring aimlessly around the room, then.
Just like her home, Jane’s office showed a bit more of her personality. And just like her home, most of the space was filled with bookshelves, which made her huge, ornately carved oak desk all the more classy. Her walls were studded with photos in frames of every size and color. Gabriel and Dick and Andrea and a little old man with two pairs of glasses propped on top of his head. I spotted Ben in a big group picture at what looked like a Halloween party. He had his arm around a pretty brunette with big blue eyes and a gorgeous smile. And he was beaming at her like she hung the moon. This must have been Gigi, the ex. I kind of hated her.
Dick didn’t have an office. From what I could gather from the conversations I’d heard over the last couple of weeks, they’d tried to give him one, but he rarely used it. He preferred to be “on the streets,” with his ear to the ground, searching for potential problems in the vampire community. And when he was in the office, some of what Jane called his “business contacts” in this weird, harsh voice came to visit and usually stole something. Gabriel said the Council lost a fortune in office supplies in the first month.
“Why are you so nervous?” I asked Ben now. “You know a lot of these people. This should be a cakewalk for you.”
“Yes, if the cake was made of misjudged relationship cues and regret.”
“That would be some bitter cake,” I said. He grimaced and nodded. “You’re seriously not going to explain that last comment?”
But before Ben could respond, a young vampire—also dressed in khakis and a navy polo—showed up to take him to the IT department. Ben turned back to Jane, pointed to his outfit and his coworker’s matching clothes, and made what could only be described as a murder face. As the office door shut behind them, I started giggling.
“Is my clone going to come escort me to my desk, too?”
“Yeah, he’s not going to let that twinsies thing go for a while.” After a moment of grim contemplation, Jane turned a bright smile on me. “Let’s get you started!”
She showed me her schedule on her computer, assigned me a username on the network, made me a secondary on her e-mail account, and did various techie chores to get me set up as her full-time minion. I searched through the drawers, finding a wealth of binder clips and Sharpies. There was also a laser pointer, which Jane immediately snatched out of my hand.
“What is this?”
“A correction laser. Margaret didn’t think Wite-Out was enough of a statement when she made a mistake.”
“What?”
Jane pulled out a piece of paper, aimed the laser pointer at it, and clicked the switch. A jet of red light shot out of the tip, burning a hole through the paper.
“Wow.”
“Margaret wasn’t much fun to work with.”
I pulled a face, which Jane ignored.
“Your most important task is protecting this.” Jane opened a document on my computer called “nopelist.xls.” It was an Excel spreadsheet of names, phone numbers, and “reasons for calling.” One column ranked each of the names with a one-to-ten “PITA Factor.”
“What’s the PITA Factor?” I asked. “Their ranking of favorite Mediterranean foods?”
“Their ranking as a ‘pain in the ass’ on a scale of one to ten,” Jane told me.
“Wow again.”
“Before you make an appointment for someone to see me, you check this list. If their name is on the list, they don’t get an appointment. Make any excuse you have to. You have to check my schedule. I’m booked up with meetings. I’m traveling. I’m having an emergency dental crown installed on a chipped fang. Whatever. Just make it believable, and shield me from the crazy. I deal with enough of it in the business I’m supposed to handle.”
“I will do my best.”
“And I’ll give you weekly updates, because the list grows like shower mold.”
“Ew. And that’s awful.”
“Heavy is the ass that sits in the big chair,” she said, shrugging.
“I am ninety percent sure that is not the expression.”
Jane waved me off as she walked back into her office. “Agree to disagree.”
From what I could see, the administrative job focused on keeping Jane on task and on schedule and preventing her from being annoyed. Also, I provided her with a chocolate-based coffee-blood concoction every night at two A.M. That was very important. To humanity.
Ben and I were still on a pretty short leash. We weren’t allowed to leave the building, for fear that he would attempt to contact his parents. We weren’t allowed in the few departments with human employees. And it was more than a little embarrassing that Jane insisted on driving us to and from work.
But still, I had a desk, a real grown-up desk at a real grown-up job. All of my previous jobs had involved name tags and grease traps, so this was definitely a step up. I stood at my dignified-though-less-ornate-than-Jane’s desk marveling at everything the Council was trusting me with—a computer, drawers full of pens, mailing supplies, Post-its, and petty cash. It was like gathering all of your school supplies together when you were in elementary school, to survey your bounty. And you always swore that everything would stay organized in your little backpack. But it never did, just like I was sure that my desk would be covered in paper-clip chains and discarded Faux Type O lids within a week.
But for right now, it was mine, and it was clean, and it was pretty awesome.
My computer didn’t send messages to nonapproved e-mail addresses, log on to nonapproved Web sites, or upload files to anything, and when I tried to get on Facebook, a red banner appeared on my screen that read “LOL, NO.”
But I could do word processing, which was fun.
It was eerily quiet, sitting outside of Jane’s office by myself, basically waiting for someone to walk down the hall and beg for an audience with her, but at least I didn’t have to share a wall in some cubicle farm, like the poor bastards in the accounting department. According to old episodes of The Office, that could lead to hostile Jell-O-based pranks.
Jane didn’t seem to have much for me to do on my first day, other than learning how not to electrocute myself while using the intercom system. I buried myself in first-day tasks. Organizing my desk. Figuring out the shockingly complicated phone system. Finding the break room. Learning the name of Sammy, the delightful Samoan coffee-blood mixologist. I was just coming back from my lunch break, catered by said delightful coffee guy, when I saw Ben walking down the hall with a tall brunette.
And he was more animated and cheerful than he had been in the entire time since he’d been turned. I recognized the brunette as the pretty girl he’d had his arm around in the picture in Jane’s office. This was clearly Gigi, the infamous ex. They were chatting and laughing, probably remembering all of the awesome times they’d had together.
She was even prettier in person. Big bright-blue eyes with long, sooty lashes. Plump, naturally pink lips. Dark hair that fell in waves around her shoulders. She had that effortless beauty that lit up any room when she walked into it.
I kind of hated her more now.
“This is Gigi,” Ben said. “She’s my boss over in programming. I’m going to be working on her project.”
It took all of my special vampire superpowers to control the muscles in my face.
Ben’s ex-girlfriend was his boss?
Ben was talking to me? Directly? With a smile on his face?
What the what?
“Hi!” she said brightly. “Nice to meet you!”
Did Jane put Ben in Gigi’s department on purpose? Did she want Ben to get back together with Gigi? Should I take that personally somehow?
And I still hadn’t spoken.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, stretching my hand forward to shake hers.
She smiled sweetly and shook my hand. At least she didn’t try to pull some weird territorial move where she squeezed my hand until the bones buckled. Did vampires do that? That seemed like a vampire thing to do.
And unlike Jolene, Gigi didn’t have a crazy nasal twang to balance out her incredibly above-average hotness. Her voice sounded like angels whispering to fluffy kittens.
“I can’t tell you how glad I’ll be to have someone my own age around at the family get-togethers. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love Jane, Gabriel, Dick, everybody. But after a while, I just want to talk to someone who knows that Tumblr isn’t for sipping scotch, you know?”
My brows drew together in what I was sure was a “skeptical Meagan is skeptical” face. Why was she being so nice to me? Did Ben not tell her that I was the one who turned him? So far, that hadn’t inspired warm, fuzzy feelings among his friends and family. I mean, at the very least, she should see me as some sort of threat just because I was a hot girl living in the same house as her ex.
My eyes narrowed a bit. Wait, was this because she was, like, a nine and a half, and I was circling around a nine-point-three? Because I hadn’t even tried wearing makeup over my new luminescent vampire skin. I could be a nine-point-eight. Easy.
And all this crazy-person math was preventing me from speaking.
“Oh, yeah, Jane’s friends are really nice,” I said, and then quickly added, “Old! I mean, they’re super-old. But nice.”
Oh, come on, why was I still speaking? Why?
Even Ben seemed to sense something was off, because he said, “OK, well, we’d better get to our lunch break if we’re going to finish that coding by the end of the night.”
God bless Ben Overby, conversational lifeguard.
Gigi gave an awkward little smile. “OK, well, we’d better get to it.”
I waved my fingers without actually moving my hand, because I was paralyzed by mortification. And off they went. I rolled my head back to scream silently at the ceiling tiles, Whyyyyyyyy?
Rubbing my hand over my face, searching for the embarrassment that should have been scorching my cheeks, I slumped back to my desk. And then tried to hide under it. Forever.
But because the space underneath my desk was too small for a leggy nine-point-three like myself, I had to be satisfied with hiding behind my monitor. Which I decided to use to e-mail Miranda, one of the few preapproved e-mail addresses listed in my contacts under “Transportation Contractors.” And one of the few people in Half-Moon Hollow I felt comfortable randomly e-mailing without a lot of How are you? preamble.
I opened the computer’s e-mail program, savoring the opportunity to message someone who was not one of my professors. My fingers hovered over the keyboard as I wondered what would be the least intrusive way to ask.
From: [email protected]
Hey Miranda,
If I asked you a weird, random question about people you know better than I do, would you answer it?
—Meagan
Before I could spend too much time talking myself out of it, I hit send.
Well, that was super-cryptic and sure to set off all sorts of alarms.
I waited, for far longer than anyone of my generation was used to waiting for anything. Ugh, this was why I needed access to instant messaging. Because Miranda had better things to do with her time, so I probably wouldn’t get an answer for hours. Just enough time for me to regret sending it and try to come up with an alternative plausible question that could inspire such a weird message.
Sighing, I looked up Jane’s calendar for the next week to try to figure out which of her days would be busiest and therefore involve the most fetching of chocolate-based coffee-blood concoctions.
Ping.
Before I could even open the calendar app, a new message popped up at the bottom of my screen. Apparently, Miranda didn’t have better things to do, because she had immediately sent back a response with the footnote “Sent through a mobile device.”
Hey Meagan,
It depends on who it’s about and how personal the question is.
—Miranda
Well, that seemed reasonable. I typed a quick response.
You mentioned Gigi and Ben had an awkward breakup. How awkward? Like “we can still be friends” awkward? Or “voodoo doll and restraining order” awkward?
—M
Maybe if I could make her laugh, she would forget that I was data-mining her friends’ painful romantic history. A few seconds later, she shot back.
Meg—
That is personal. But considering that you’re working with both of them, you should probably know, just to prevent foot-in-mouth disease.
It was awkward because Ben proposed to Gigi, and she said, “No, let’s break up instead.” At Christmas, around people with superhearing and mind-reading powers. And those situations lead to difficulty making eye contact.
—Miranda
My jaw dropped. Ben proposed to Gigi? In front of her family? He must have been crazy about her! And she was so put together. So nice. And she hadn’t freaked out and turned him into a nontypical vampire. Oh, and now they were spending eight hours a day together in a small room.
I sent a “Thanks” back, which I’m sure, in Miranda’s head, sounded like a squeak.
Maybe this job thing was some strategy on Jane’s part to get Ben and Gigi back together. It would make Ben more stable to be in a relationship with an established vampire whom Jane trusted, with a huge support circle. I didn’t blame Jane. I couldn’t help but feel a little hurt by it, but she was doing what she thought was best for Ben. Maybe she could match me up with someone she thought would make me slightly less tragic.
Miranda sent me back an emoji that looked like a tiny yellow face pitying me.
No. I was surprised to find that I didn’t really want to be set up with someone who would make me slightly less tragic. I wasn’t sure there was someone out there who could make me slightly less tragic. I liked Ben. I wasn’t crazy about the guy I’d been hanging out with for the last couple of weeks. But I’d liked the side of Ben I saw when I first met him. I wasn’t saying he was my one true Disney love, but I didn’t like the idea of having all this unresolved emotional business between us while he rekindled his failed engagement and I moved on with some faceless rebound vampire.
No matter how it turned out, I needed to work through this weird distance with Ben. I just had to get him to talk to me directly when his ex-girlfriend wasn’t around so we could get some closure. That should be easy enough, right?
Right?
It was not easy.
After our initial training-wheels day as Council interns, we were basically launched into our full workload.
As part of perfect Gigi’s group, Ben was working on some sort of giant vampire family-tree database thing to help vampires track down their living descendants. And while Gigi’s team had been responsible for programming a successful portion of it, other teams—located in other regional offices around the world—were not so successful. And now those teams didn’t exist anymore. I didn’t ask what happened to them, and Jane didn’t tell me. But now Gigi’s team had taken over the missing teams’ assignments to keep the project on track.
I got hit with paperwork. So much paperwork. The question of why recycling didn’t seem to be making much of an environmental impact was answered by the sheer amount of backlogged paperwork in Jane’s filing cabinet of shame. It took two vampires to wheel the laundry cart full of files up to my desk.
“Jane!” I called into her office. “What is this madness?”
“Uh, I’m on the phone!” Jane called. “Just blindly do the filing without questioning how I got so far behind. It totally piled up like that while I was selflessly taking care of you for the last few weeks. Just so busy . . . on this phone call.”
I glanced at the phones and saw that both of her lines were free.
“You’re not on the phone!” I turned to find her lifting the receiver to her ear and dialing. I shook my head.
It seemed that every piece of paper in the Council’s regional office had to cross Jane’s desk at some point. Why did vampires need to document so much? There was a form for unintentional vampire turnings like mine. There were forms for planned vampire turnings. There was a form to document accidentally killing your vampire colleagues at the Council and a different form for intentionally killing your vampire colleagues. There was a form for requesting reimbursement for having someone murdered. They didn’t mind if you outsourced someone’s murder, they just insisted that you keep your receipts if you wanted to be reimbursed for it.
You would think vampires would have learned over the years that a paper trail created complications. Maybe they were trying to stockpile blackmail material on one another? Forever? Also, why did they rely on paper so much? Did they have something against digital records?
And the problem with storing those files in an industrial-sized laundry cart was that the papers in the files shifted around and got mixed together. So now I had to organize and file, which had to be some sort of mental endurance test, like Psyche sorting through all those seeds to impress her hateful goddess mother-in-law.
Ha, and Morgan said that Greek mythology class would never apply in real life.
I rolled up the sleeves of my work-sensible cardigan and got to work sorting through my mega-hamper of files. The color-coding of the files made no sense, but I stacked them in colored piles on the floor anyway, just to move them out of the damn hamper.
This was still a better job than cleaning the dollar theater in my hometown. I couldn’t eat popcorn for years after that summer.
In the midst of all these files, I spotted a few familiar nuggets of information, like incident reports within Half-Moon Hollow involving Dick and his efforts to keep his former colleagues from selling counterfeit Beats by Dre headphones to innocent humans.
One file listed Ophelia’s progress in her “probationary period,” which I immediately tossed into the blue pile without skimming over it. “Nope. Nope. Nope.”
Another file listed all of the expenses paid to the University of Kentucky for services to undead students. As a semi-sort-of government agency, the Council subsidized counseling services, blood shipping and storage fees, sunproofing costs, and other expenses associated with housing undead students. I scanned the top sheet, and these fees seemed . . . excessive.
“So. Many. Zeros,” I muttered, blinking at the bottom “total” number.
I probably would have appreciated living in New Dawn more if I’d known how much that little social experiment was costing our undead taxpayers. Did we really have that many vampire students living in New Dawn?
I flipped through the pages, using my superhuman speed-reading. The numbers just didn’t seem right. There were eight student residence floors in the building and forty to fifty kids a floor, dead and undead, depending on the number of students who demanded a single room. But the reports listed services rendered to more than 235 vampires. That would only be possible if two-thirds of the building was occupied by vampire students. And trust me, as someone who walked around that noisy lobby during daylight hours, that was not possible.
But since I was not a math major, I wasn’t sure I was qualified to analyze Council spending. Also, as far as I knew, this was some creative attempt to cover the Council’s illicit spending on defense projects and Doomsday Preppers blood storage. And I definitely didn’t want to interfere with that. So I put those files in the scary red financial pile and forgot I’d ever read them.