6
It’s important to document your childe’s milestones. But make sure you know the difference between “memorabilia” and “evidence.”
—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire
It was Friday night, and I was doing homework. This was a truly embarrassing moment in my social history.
Jane had actually left Ben and me alone in the house unchaperoned so she and Gabriel could run some errands. It felt like a test of her trust in us, like she and Ben would both fail if he ended up running home to his parents. There was very little pressure on me. I could only fail if I ordered up pay-per-view porn and imported blood by delivery.
I didn’t know if I’d have the energy to go out if I had anywhere to go. I’d spent the last three days obliterating Jane’s filing backlog and learning to lie through my teeth regarding her whereabouts. I’d gotten to know Sammy a little better and some of the nicer people in the accounting department. I avoided Gigi, Ben, and the IT department like they were carriers of the actual plague, which was difficult, since Gigi turned out to be even nicer than I’d first thought and frequently stopped by my desk to see if I needed anything.
And so, emotionally and physically drained, I was sitting at the kitchen table, working on a lit assignment, when Ben walked in and, upon seeing me, stopped as if he was considering turning back around and skipping breakfast. Whatever he was thinking, he ended up sighing and walking to the fridge to pour himself a mug of A negative.
He sat across the table from me, pointedly not making eye contact as he took a deep sniff of his breakfast. I rolled my eyes and continued typing. Because it was super-easy to create concise, thoughtful analyses of the great works of literature when there was a boy pointedly ignoring you right behind your laptop screen.
I had typed a grand total of four words when I finally slapped the computer shut and said, “So, are you going to just ignore me forever, or . . .”
“I’m not ignoring you,” he insisted.
“Are you aware of the definition of ‘ignoring’? Because I’m pretty sure that on dictionary-dot-com there’s a little picture of your face next to the term.”
“Funny,” he muttered.
“And in that picture, you’re making that judgy face,” I added.
He sighed.
“Just the cat-butt face of righteousness, all in this area,” I said, waving at his head.
“Is there a clinical term for what’s wrong with you?” he asked.
I shot back, “Is there a clinical term for permanent cat-butt face?”
He grinned, though I could tell that he didn’t want to. “Cat-butt face of righteousness?”
“Trademark pending.”
He sighed. “I know I’ve been a bit of a douche to you over the last few weeks.”
I scoffed. “A bit? You passed ‘a bit’ a while ago.”
“I’m sorry. I know. I know it’s been hard on you, adjusting to all of this, and I’ve made it harder. But it’s hard enough, the idea that I’m dead and this is my life now.”
“That sentence makes no sense.”
“I’m aware. This is my life now,” he continued. “And everything I hoped for, every plan I had, it’s all gone. Through no fault of my own. It’s like finding out you have a terminal disease, only the disease makes you live forever, while cutting you off from the world for most of the day. And there’s no cure, no treatment, no end in sight. Add to that, we’re some sort of weird new species of vampires that no one has ever seen. We’re freaks in a society that’s already pretty damn freaky. We’re the only two people in the world—as far as we know—who are like this. So we could be stuck together for the rest of our lives because the Council could decide that we’re too dangerous to let out into the world and put us in an underground cell together and throw away the key. Or they could just decide to stake us and be done with it. And you did this to me! You may not have meant to, but that doesn’t change the fact that you did. So pardon the hell out of me for resenting you just a little bit.”
“Has it occurred to you that I’m in the exact same situation?” I yelled back. “That all of my plans and goals just got shot to hell, too? I have no idea what I’m going to do with the rest of my eternal life. I don’t even have a nice family to fall back on when times get rough. I have exactly two, maybe three people in the world I can trust, and I wouldn’t want to put the burden of dealing with all of this newborn-vampire crap on them.”
“No, I guess it didn’t,” Ben murmured. “I’ve been a little wrapped up in myself.”
“A little?” I growled.
“OK, I said I was a douche. I’m sorry.”
I sighed and covered my face with my hands. This was getting us nowhere. “So what did you give up?” I asked. “Those plans of yours. What did you give up because of the vampire thing? Kids? A girlfriend? A career as a tanning model?”
“Tanning model? No. I don’t look good in orange,” he said. “Mine are a pasty people.”
I snorted, and he continued. “Job plans? Yeah. After graduation, I was supposed to move to California to work at a start-up that just took off. It’s an app that combines all social media into one stream, so instead of posting a photo to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram, you go to the app, which contains all of your accounts, make one post, and you’re done. It’s a great idea but a programming nightmare, so they need someone like me.”
“California . . . where it’s really sunny, most of the time,” I said, grimacing.
“Yeah, but vampires live in California, so it shouldn’t be that big of a deal. I just hope I can graduate on time. Get Jane’s approval to move, which, considering all of our ‘anomalies,’ seems unlikely.”
And there was the guilt again. I had completely derailed Ben’s life. He didn’t know me. He didn’t owe me anything. He was a sweet boy who had come to see me in my sickroom after knowing me for less than twenty-four hours. And it had bitten him on the ass. Or the wrist. I was literally the worst.
And Ben, who was oblivious to me mentally kicking my own ass, was still talking. “Kids? Yeah, maybe, I was thinking that kids would be something I would enjoy,” he said. “I come from a good family. I had good parents, a happy childhood. There was no reason to think that I wouldn’t be happy being a family guy, with a minivan in the garage and two-point-four kids.”
“And then I came along and took that sweet, sweet minivan plan away from you,” I said. “Sorry about that.”
“I’m starting to accept it. I mean, we can do all of these other things, pretty cool things, really, that we’re going to get in exchange. Like never aging, never getting sick. And hey, male pattern baldness runs in my family, so I probably owe you one.”
“That’s kind of sick.”
“The main thing is my parents. Their faces when they saw me on the video chat. Not being able to tell them I’m just a few miles away. It’s killing me. And what’s worse is that I don’t even know whether they’re going to be able to accept me once I am able to see them in person.”
“I’m sorry,” I murmured. But I noticed he hadn’t mentioned losing the life he’d planned with Gigi. Was that because now that they were both vampires, he thought they could get back together? Was he just being nice to me now because he was a nice person who didn’t want to be at odds with his unwanted roommate? Why didn’t he even mention her? Why was she such a taboo subject?
He sighed and gave me what passed for a smile. “What about you? You haven’t mentioned your parents. Kids. Plans. Pets. Baldness?”
“Nothing special.”
“Oh, come on. I told you all of my boring details. Share with the class. What are your parents like? What were you planning on doing after graduation? Were kids something you’d considered?”
“No!” I said, cackling. “Sorry, that laugh was too loud.”
I cleared my throat. This was the stuff we hadn’t talked about in our enchanting conversation in front of the dorm. No one wants to hear about your tragic past on the first pseudo-date. I’d deflected, turned the questions back on him, not only to avoid talking about myself but also because I’d liked hearing about his normal childhood, his normal high school experience, his loving parents.
As if he could hear my train of thought, he said, “Come on, that night, in front of the dorm, you didn’t talk much about yourself. I mean, you talked about the ‘now,’ about school and your friends and that sort of thing, but nothing before you got to UK. It was like you were hatched as a fully formed undergrad. Why was that?”
“You don’t want to hear this,” I said, shifting uncomfortably in my seat.
“I do,” he insisted. “I really do.”
“Kids? No, I wasn’t considering them at all. I mean, maybe in ten, fifteen years, but I did not feel in any way prepared to take care of another person. And maybe in a couple of years, I’ll feel differently, like something was taken from me, but for right now, I’m good. I mean, Jane never had biological kids, and she’s raising three of us right now. You never know what could happen. Graduation plans? I picked an English major because I like to read, but I don’t think I’d ever want to teach little kids. I’m not good with them. You’ve seen how I talk to Georgie. That’s how I usually talk to kids, even if they aren’t basically tiny, terrifying adults. I just don’t have that thing that makes you good with them. Which is yet another reason that not having any of my own is not a huge blow to me.”
I continued, “I thought maybe I’d go to grad school, eventually get a PhD if I could afford it, and end up teaching at a college. I loved college. I loved living on my own, making my own decisions, controlling my diet, my schedule, my room. I loved my classes and feeling like I was a part of something bigger, a community. I could see myself being very comfortable in that kind of environment for the rest of my life. But unless I get this pesky urge to drink every human I meet under control, that’s probably going to put my teaching career off for a while.”
Ben was frowning at me. “Did you have super-controlling helicopter parents or something?”
“What?”
“Your diet, your schedule, your room. Did your parents not let you make those decisions on your own when you were at home?”
I bit my lip. Well, this was it. I could play it off by being glib, or just put it out there and hope Ben didn’t feel sorry for me. I really hated the face people made when they heard the words “foster kid.” It was always the same, a tilt of the head, a furrow to the brow, and sometimes there was even a sad little “Aw.” And it changed the way people interacted with me. If I was having a bad day, well, I must have abandonment issues, because I was a foster kid. If there was one cupcake left, I should have it, because I probably didn’t have many treats growing up as a foster kid. It was better just to let people think I’d had an average upbringing so I didn’t get patronized.
But I was probably going to be stuck with Ben for a while, and he was probably going to hear something from Jane eventually, so I pursed my lips and said, “My dad was stationed at Fort Campbell. My mom was working at a gas station, earning some extra money while she took nursing classes at the community college. He came into the station to fill up his truck, and bam. He said it felt like he’d been hit by lightning the first time he saw her. He said, ‘Twenty-five dollars on pump twelve, a Slim Jim, and how do you feel about dogs, kids, and men who leave their socks on the floor but are otherwise pretty damn charming?’ Mom was laughing so hard she could barely write down her phone number.”
“So there’s a family history of being approached by extremely clever men?” Ben suggested.
“If the last few weeks are any indication of your ‘approach’ technique, you have a lot to learn about ‘clever,’ buddy,” I told him.
Ben pulled a face. “Good point. Please, on with the story of your much smarter and socially savvy father.”
“Dad apparently came from one of those old horse-farming families, the people who train racehorses for Churchill Downs? Well, they weren’t thrilled with their son joining the military in the first place. They were even less thrilled when he started dating a girl who worked at a gas station, a girl whose parents were . . . Mexican,” I said, whispering the last word dramatically. “I guess that’s the way they said it, because every time my mom told me the story, she whispered, ‘Mexican.’ Also, my mom’s parents were Guatemalan, so the Keenes weren’t even accurately racist. Anyway, they ran a background check and found out about Mom’s brief stint working as a waitress at Cheekies—you know, the sports bar where they wear the short shorts? Mom only worked there for a month, but they called her ‘that stripper’ after that, which made for a very awkward toast at my parents’ wedding. They were not the type of people who were so charmed by their new grandchild that it changed their hearts. He called to tell them I’d been born, and they actually told him he’d ‘never be free of that stripper now.’ He didn’t want me to hear them talk about my mother that way. He didn’t know what they would say to me, how they would try to manipulate me with gifts and money, like they’d tried to control him growing up. He did know that they would treat my mom like crap while he was deployed in Afghanistan, and there would be nothing he could do about it from thousands of miles away. So he cut them off entirely. They made a big scene at his funeral, called my mom some names, scared me until I cried. I thought that rich people were supposed to be above that kind of behavior. But I guess rednecks are rednecks, no matter how big their house is.”
“How old were you?”
“I was four. It was rough, but my mom got us through it. She just refused to give up. She worked so hard, gave up a lot. And there were some army friends of my dad’s who helped us sometimes when the car broke down or the roof leaked.”
“And you’re speaking of her in the past tense,” Ben noted sadly.
“I was fifteen. She was driving home from her second job and fell asleep at the wheel. Even though I had heard all the stories about my grandparents, I still kind of hoped that they would have a change of heart, would want to take me in after my mom died. But they told Family Services that they had no interest in me. They only wanted to know where they needed to sign so they wouldn’t have to take responsibility.”
“What about your mom’s family? Couldn’t they help?”
“Her parents were almost seventy by the time I was born. They were great, just good, sweet, loving people. They died when I was around ten, within a month of each other. When Mom died, it would have been possible to send me to the extended family back in Guatemala. But I’m pretty damned American. I didn’t think I would do well over there, so I went into foster care.”
Ben didn’t say anything. He just looked mildly horrified.
“Yeah, I know, I’m the saddest sad sack who ever sacked.”
He shook his head. “It just sucks that you’ve lost so many people.”
“It’s safe to say I have some pretty significant abandonment issues. Also trust. And impulse control, on occasion, but that’s only if a pumpkin spice latte is involved. Which I don’t think applies anymore, since I’m dead and can’t have pumpkin spice.”
“It does explain a lot about how you’ve reacted to Jane. Her trying to mother you.”
“Yeah, I don’t think you’re qualified to analyze all of this,” I said, waving a hand at my head.
“I won’t try,” he promised.
“So can we start over?” I asked. “Meagan Keene. Total stranger and your sire.”
“Yes,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand. “Ben Overby, occasionally judgmental doofus.”
“It’s nice to meet you.”
“You, too. So, how do you feel about expensive imported bloods?”
“Is that some sort of line? Is this your attempt to improve on your ‘approach’?”
Ben grinned. “No, but I just happened to see a bottle hidden in the back of the fridge with a great big gold bow on it, which probably means it was an expensive gift from a visiting vampire dignitary.”
“And it’s probably poisoned,” I noted. “There is no such thing as a free bottle of gourmet blood . . . and that is officially the weirdest sentence that has ever left my mouth.”
“Nah, I talked to one of the security guards at work, the ones who keep us from leaving the building like regular people? And he says that all of Jane’s and Dick’s gifts have to be scanned for poisons and contaminants before they’re delivered. After what happened to Gigi, they have a whole poison-scan policy.”
“What happened to Gigi?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you when we crack open that very expensive-looking bottle of blood.”
“Is this some sort of attempt to get me into trouble?” I asked. “Cat-butt face revenge?”
“No, I just don’t want Jane to feel like her job is too easy. We have to cause her a little trouble.”
“Fine.” I sighed. “But you’re taking the rap for this, Golden Child.”
“Don’t call me that, and I will accept full bottle-cracking responsibility.”
I never did get to hear what happened to Gigi. We’d just managed to pull aside the foil labeled “House of Rothschilde, Rh phenotype, 1968” and pop the cork when the kitchen door opened. Jane and Gabriel walked in, carrying shopping bags. They did that weird parent thing where they’re smiling and talking and then they see what you’re doing and that happy noise slowly dies off. When it’s not your parents doing it, it’s sort of hilarious.
“Is that the bottle of Rothschilde we were saving for our anniversary?” Gabriel asked.
“He did it,” I said, pointing at Ben, who was nodding.
“I did it.”
True to form, instead of laying down some serious sire discipline on Ben, Jane just rolled her eyes. “Pour everybody a glass, you reprobates. Consider it pregaming. We’re expecting company.”
“Company?” I asked, eyeing the bags, some of which were carryout from a restaurant called Southern Comforts.
“It’s girls’ night. Or, as Iris and Gigi refer to it, Tommy Night, in which they make Bloody Tom Collinses and then we watch something with Tom Hiddleston or Tom Hardy.”
“Oh, good, Gigi is coming,” I said, sipping the glass of blood Gabriel had handed me. It was dense and dark, with earthy hints of mushroom. I made a face and set the glass down. I was clearly not mature enough to appreciate vintage bloods. “I think I should maybe just go upstairs and finish my homework. Due diligence and all that. I’ve got a lot of reading to get done for my Econ class.”
“You’re working three weeks ahead, and you’ve read everything on the assigned reading list for the semester,” Ben said, wincing when I kicked him in the shin. “Ouch!”
“I’m very proud of your dedication to your studies,” Jane told me. “But I think we’ve let you get a little too isolated during your probation period. You need to get used to being out in the world again. Working in the office is a good start. But you have to get used to less rigid social situations, too. Jolene is coming. And Nola, Dick’s granddaughter, so it’s good aversion-therapy training. And I want you to meet Libby, our most recently turned vampire adoptee. I really think you two will get along.”
“Fine.” I sighed as Jane handed me several bottles of dessert blood and nodded toward the living room.
“And what will I be doing while you girls are ogling men named Tom?” Ben asked. “Because I do not think that’s the sort of training I need.”
“We are going to Dick’s to play cards,” Gabriel said. “Nik and Jed want to play poker. We need a fifth.”
Ben nodded while doing this weird lip-pursing thing. “Oh, good . . . Nik’s going to be there. Wait, I thought you and Dick stopped talking for almost a hundred years because of a bad hand of cards,” he said.
“We play for bottle caps now,” Gabriel said. “It makes things less hostile.”
Jane grimaced. “Does it?”
When we had girls’ nights back at the dorm, it involved a bag of Skinny Pop and Netflix. Jane and Company made more of an effort. Jane provided fancy bloods for the vampires and serious carbs from Southern Comforts for Jolene and Nola. (Seeing ooey-gooey bacon mac and cheese only to smell rancid cabbage when I opened the container was a form of emotional torture, I swear.) Jane put out special little napkins and sprayed Febreze around. She risked exposure to disgusting human food smells to arrange the snacks on pretty trays. This wasn’t an impromptu dorm-room hangout. This was Jane putting herself out to make sure her friends felt comfortable and welcome in her home. This was a grown-up gathering.
Speaking of grown-ups . . .
“Where’s Georgie?” I asked. “I thought she’d be here for the fancy blood alone.”
“She likes going to watch the card games. Especially when Dick loses. She learns new curse words.”
I busied myself with little straightening-up tasks as the guests filtered in. The prospect of seeing Gigi in a space where I couldn’t politely avoid her was intimidating. Not because she was mean or snotty. Heck, she’d been downright sweet every single time I’d talked to her. But being reminded that she was the one who got away from the boy with whom I shared an incredibly confusing emotional connection was just demoralizing.
But if anyone asked, it was because I was trying to avoid Dick’s pretty (human!) granddaughter with the weird Boston-Irish hybrid accent. Nola seemed like a nice girl. It was believable that I would want to avoid eating her.
Libby was a sweet-faced little blonde wearing a “Half-Moon Hollow Elementary Room Mom” shirt—which I did not expect. Nor did I expect Jane to introduce me to Libby as “the one I’ve been telling you about.” Which made the hiding-in-the-kitchen plan seem that much more reasonable.
I managed to skulk around the pantry, shuffling bottles and plates, until they started the movie, something involving a lot of piano on the sound track. Jane walked into the kitchen, saw me dawdling over fetching Jolene some wet wipes for her face—stored in a drawer marked “In case Jolene eats ribs”—and wordlessly shamed me into walking into the living room. I dropped onto the corner of the couch, far from Gigi and Nola, and watched that chick from the Pirates movies deliver classic English literature while doing duck face.
It seemed that costume dramas were the theme this evening, if the huge stack of DVDs on the coffee table meant anything. Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights. Sense and Sensibility. And Pride and Prejudice. There were a lot of versions of Pride and Prejudice. We seemed to be watching Pride and Prejudice right now, given how hard the male lead was glaring at the duck-faced Pirates lady.
I frowned. “You know, I’ve never really understood the Mr. Darcy thing.”
The entire room froze, which was odd.
Jane’s face was tense as she turned toward me on the couch. “Why’s that?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged, taking a drink of my blood. “Darcy insults Lizzie and blames it on being socially awkward. Assumes that she knows how he feels. And then he spews his feelings all over her and gets all butt-hurt when she not only has no clue how he feels but also doesn’t feel the same way. Oh, and he pours his heart out in a ‘Here’s why you’re wrong not to return my precious pants feelings’ letter.”
Jane sputtered, “But—he—what?”
“There’s even a meme about it,” I said. “Firthing: when you stand around staring intensely at someone you like but never man up and say something about it.”
Jane clenched her entire face. She went temporarily Muppet on me. I pressed my lips together and wondered what the hell I’d said.
Aw, hell. The Persuasion quote in Jane’s office. The stack of DVDs. Those weren’t the group’s DVDs, they were hers. Jane was a Jane-ite, a fanatical Jane Austen fan who bared her fangs at the merest criticism of Austen’s works.
“She insulted Colin Firth,” Iris whispered. She leaned toward Gigi, who had gone quiet and still, like a gazelle on the savannah.
Gigi whispered, “You cause a distraction. I’ll get Meagan out.”
Jane cleared her throat. “That is one way of looking at it. But if you read the books a little more closely, you will see that Mr. Darcy understands the errors of his ways very soon after the disastrous proposal and spends the rest of the book trying to make up for it. He’s a flawed character who becomes aware of his flaws and improves himself. It’s why he is Austen’s best hero.”
“I always liked Henry Tilney,” I said. Because I never knew when to stop talking.
Jane made the Muppet face again.
“How about we watch something nonhistorical?” Gigi suggested quickly. “How about Mad Max: Fury Road? You get Tom Hardy in leather, plus unexpected messages of badass feminism.”
“Oh, I do love Tom Hardy.” Nola sighed. “If more men in Great Britain looked like that, I never would have left Ireland.”
“Which would have made Jed very sad,” Libby noted. “Imagine the smoldering. No, seriously, just let me imagine it for a second, because I’m a single mom dating a single dad on an entirely different work and sleep schedule, and the last time we managed to have sex involved the back seat of my minivan while the kids were at a Little League practice.”
Suddenly, my inability to have kids didn’t seem all that b—wait, the last time I had sex was in a tiny single dorm-room bed, and my partner said we had to hurry because his roommate would be back from unloading his clothes from the laundry room any minute. And that was months ago. I had a single mom’s sex life without ever having a kid. That might actually be more tragic than the whole orphan thing.
I shuddered.
“Yep, Mad Max is a good idea,” Jane said. “I’m going to go get some more blood.”
“I’ll get it for you,” I told her, hopping off the couch. “As a peace offering.”
“Thank you,” Jane said, slowly breathing out of her nose. “Because now I’m going to have to Google ‘Firthing,’ and I think it’s going to make me really angry.”
“Those poor people on the Internet,” I muttered, walking out of the living room.
I poured Jane a generous helping from the very last of the Rothschilde, shaking my head at my own inability to make conversation like a normal person.
A soft voice behind me asked, “So you and Ben were friends at school?”
“Yipe!” I yelled, dropping the bottle. But thanks to my quick reflexes, I caught it before it hit the tile near Gigi’s feet. “What the hell?”
“Sorry,” she said, grimacing. “I thought you would hear me. Jane said your senses are off the charts.”
“They are, if I’m not berating myself for insulting my sire’s favorite things,” I told her. “Yes, uh, Ben and I met at school, at a party at my dorm.”
Gigi’s brows rose.
“What?”
She shook her head. “Oh, it’s nothing. It’s just when we were together, Ben never wanted to go to parties. We watched a lot of Netflix, hung out with his parents, that kind of thing.”
Gigi’s big blue eyes took on this wistful, faraway quality. Was she pining for the nights she spent on the couch with Ben or just pining for the days when she was still human and could eat the comfort food Jolene and Nola were throwing back? What the heck had happened to her to make the Council establish a poison-screening policy? Was that the sort of question you could casually ask someone at a girls’ night? Why did being a vampire have to make socializing so complicated?
“Um, I think Jamie made him go. Ophelia threw the party. It was a mixer for human and vampire students, you know, living-undead unity and all that.”
Gigi’s sleek sable brows rose more.
“It was a punishment for Ophelia, for beating up her roommate.”
Gigi nodded. “The world makes sense again.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You know, everybody makes these little comments about Ophelia. I mean, I get that she can be sort of difficult, but she’s been really nice to me. Even before I was turned, we were friends.”
Gigi poured herself a glass of blood from the warmer. “Yeah, I tend to hold grudges against people who hire witches to have me magically contract-murdered. I’m funny that way.”
My jaw dropped. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Girls! Tom Hardy’s sweaty and covered in sand, and you’re missing it!” Iris yelled from the living room.
“Coming!” Gigi yelled back, and gave me a little smile before walking out of the kitchen.
“Who says something like that and just walks out of the room?” I asked no one in particular. “Who are these people?”
With no more contract-murder info forthcoming, I delivered Jane’s blood and retreated to my couch corner to enjoy a non-Austen movie. Jane and Company kept up a pretty steady streaming commentary on Tom Hardy’s various disgruntled faces, Immortan Joe’s stick-on abs, and potential water-shortage solutions that didn’t involve humans as dairy cows. It was like watching the DVD extras but with more cursing and spilled blood. When I tossed in the occasional joke, Jane grinned broadly at me, like she wanted to take a picture and label it “Baby’s First Snark.”
Max was sitting back and letting Furiosa handle her postapocalyptic liberation like a boss when I heard a car pull into the driveway. I craned my neck to peer out the front windows. A tall, deliciously handsome blond man climbed out of a black SUV and jogged up the front steps. He knocked softly on the door and poked his head into the house.
“Permission to cross the border into feminine territory?” he asked in a slight Russian accent.
My eyes went wide. Was this the Russian guy Jane had talked about? The one who could help Morgan pass Russian Literature? Because I could take a summer class in Russian Literature.
“Nik, honey, I’ve told you, that’s a super-creepy way of putting it,” Gigi scolded, bouncing up from the couch and throwing herself into the hot Russian’s arms.
Oh, seriously, she was dating this one, too?
“Ew, older sisters present,” Iris called as he bent his head to drop butterfly kisses down Gigi’s neck. “I don’t need these visuals.”
“Consider it payback for all the times I walked in on you and Cal,” Gigi shot back, kissing the man’s full lips.
Iris shuddered and dropped a throw pillow over her face, while Nola cackled. OK, so Gigi had clearly moved on from Ben to this new Greek-statue-like gentleman with the nice hair and sexy accent. So where did that leave Ben? Was that why he had been so grumpy before we started working—having his proposal shot down in favor of statue man? And then why he was so excited to be at work? Because it meant that he got to spend time with his ex-girlfriend again?
I was living in a vampire telenovela, I swear.
“I thought you were playing cards over at Dick’s,” Jane said, pausing the movie.
“We were, and then Dick slammed a good hand on the table with a little too much enthusiasm, and Jed got hit in the eye with a bottle cap,” Nik said. All of us winced in unison. “Jed was startled and turned into a six-foot great white shark with legs.”
Nola groaned. “Not the mutant land shark again.”
Gigi snorted. “It’s one of his favorites.”
“Ben was not expecting to see the mutant land shark standing in front of him. He panicked and flipped the table at Jed, hitting him in the face with it, broadside.”
“I’d better go get my medical bag.” Nola sighed as she stood. She paused for a moment, snatched her glass off the coffee table, and glugged back the last of her drink.
I raised my hand. “Wait, what?”
Jane was suddenly alert, sitting up. “Is Jed OK? Did he bleed very much? Did Ben . . . OK, just tell me. Did Ben try to eat Jed?”
“No, no,” Nik assured her. “We would have called you if there were serious injuries. Gabriel and Dick are icing down Jed’s face now. And Ben handled it very well. As soon as he saw that Jed’s nose was bleeding, he ran upstairs and locked himself in a bathroom. He is very fast, by the way, even for a vampire. He’s still there, actually, waiting for you to give him the all clear to come out. Gabriel told him he’d be fine, but Ben wants to hear it from you, so he doesn’t get ‘docked points.’ He does realize you’re not actually keeping score on his performance, yes?”
“Aw, that’s great!” Jane cried. “And no, let’s let him keep believing there’s a point system. If it’s this effective, what’s the harm? Meagan, you’re sworn to silence.”
“Can we go back to ‘mutant land shark’?” I asked.
“We think maybe Ben wasn’t as tempted by the blood because Jed’s a shapeshifter,” Nik said.
“Can’t you just let me be proud for a moment without putting conditions on it?” Jane asked him.
“Wait! Wait! Wait!” I exclaimed. “What’s a shapeshifter?”
“It’s like Jolene’s werewolf thing, only Jed can make himself into whatever form he wants,” Gigi told me. “Jed’s family thought they were cursed for generations, but it turns out they have this weird supernatural recessive trait. Oh, I’m sorry, I’m being rude. Nik, you haven’t met Meagan Keene. She’s Ben’s sire and works with us down at the Council office. Meagan, this is my boyfriend and sire, Nik Dragomirov.”
“So pleased to meet you. Gigi has told me so much about you,” Nik purred, grinning at me.
And I would take the time to analyze what he meant by that after I processed the following.
“Jolene’s a werewolf?”