8
Don’t be offended when your childe clings to remembrances of his or her former life. It’s not a criticism of your siring. It’s proof that you chose the right sort of human to bring over to the “dark side.”
—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire
I thought Gabriel would try to make the house somber and soothing, like a spa, to make us feel better after the hellacious night we’d had. But we drove down the River Oaks driveway to find the whole house lit up. Bright, jazzy music was floating out of the kitchen. And Georgie was bouncing on her toes in the foyer, looking like Satan’s favorite pixie.
Gabriel came strolling out of the kitchen, wearing an apron that read “Bite the Cook,” with three steins full of blood in hand.
“Please don’t hug me,” I told him.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Gabriel deadpanned. “Jane said you might need a little TLC. This is a mix of donor blood and pulverized marrow—don’t ask what kind. It’s guaranteed to help heal up any of the injuries you might have sustained tonight.”
Jane accepted her mug with a kiss from her hubby. “I get one, too?”
“Yes, because Gabriel worries that you work too many hours and don’t feed properly,” Georgie informed her.
“She’s not wrong,” Gabriel said, ruffling Georgie’s hair. Georgie scowled and rubbed a hand over her head, but she sidled just a step closer to him. “This is just the appetizer course. Go upstairs and wash up. We’ll sit at the table in a few minutes.”
I downed my entire stein of blood while jogging up the stairs to my bedroom. Georgie hounded me, skipping up the banister with no apparent fear of falling. She hopped off at the landing and followed at my heels. Finally, I turned around and stopped her in her tracks.
“What’s up, Georgie?”
“There’s a package on your bed,” Georgie informed me. “It’s from Ophelia. It arrived after you left for work. I can’t tell what’s in it, and it’s driving me slightly mad.”
“You’re that interested in my mail?” I asked.
“No, but I’m just so bored since I conquered ‘Skyrim.’ ” She sighed. “I feel like my life has no purpose.”
“And your purpose is to . . .”
“Snoop,” she stated. “In a dedicated fashion.”
“Well, I can respect that. Come on, kiddo.”
“I’m nearly four hundred years older than you,” she countered.
“Well, stop wearing jumpers and Peter Pan collars, and I’ll consider a more mature label. You look like one of those twins from The Shining.”
“You stop acting like yoga pants are an acceptable alternative to real clothing, and we’ll talk.”
“Fair enough.” I pushed the door of my room open. The box on my bed was massive, taking up half of the queen mattress. It was addressed to me care of the Council’s Newport, Kentucky, office and then appeared to have been routed through the Council’s interoffice mail. Maybe someone mailed themselves to me? Keagan joked around about it sometimes in our video chats. But there were no holes punched in the cardboard, so . . .
Oh, no. What if Ophelia forgot to punch holes in that box and she suffocated inside?
How was this even my life? That I was worried about finding my friend’s dead body in a box that she attempted to mail to me herself?
Georgie, who had none of my possible-dead-friend-inside-a-box reluctance, used her sharp little fingernail to slice the tape open with surgical precision. I arched a brow and stared her down.
“I’ve been waiting for hours,” she told me, popping the box open. “Hours, Meagan.”
To my relief, Keagan was not inside the box. But she had sent me a bunch of stuff from my dorm room. It was great to have everything I needed. My flash drives. The stuffed sock monkey I’d secretly slept with since I was four. My iPod. All of my fall boots, something only Keagan would see as essentials. Every issue of the twice-weekly campus newspaper. Morgan, who worked on the newspaper staff, was convinced that it was a vital source of information for any student. Keagan clearly included them to please her.
The girls had improvised a card from one of the index cards Morgan used as study gear. “Dear Meg, Ophelia is helping us send a few things from home to help you feel more comfortable and catch up on campus gossip. We miss you! Talk soon. Love, K & M.”
I chewed my lip as I surveyed all of the little things that would help me feel more at home here at Jane’s. It was really thoughtful of the girls to send me a vampire care package, but it also meant that Keagan and Morgan didn’t think I would be coming back to campus anytime soon. This felt like good-bye.
“This was not nearly as interesting as I hoped it would be,” Georgie said, pursing her lips. She plucked my iPod Touch from the box. “But I will take this and use it to psychoanalyze you based on your playlists.”
“I would expect nothing less,” I told her as I scanned the newspapers Keagan had included in my coffin-sized care package. I blew through several issues as Georgie continued to rummage through the box, using my newfound speed-reading to absorb the usual front-page fare. Student groups were protesting in front of the president’s office for their cause of the week. The administration was drumming up funds for the campus endowment, which had always sounded vaguely dirty to me. Campus police were investigating a string of suspicious laundry thefts from the dorms. (Why was it always panties? Why?) A building near, but not on, campus caught fire. I scanned the article, but honestly, the weirdest thing about it was that it had been included in the paper at all. There were no injuries, and the fire didn’t cause any damage to surrounding properties. It must have been a slow news day.
“Videotapes?” Georgie asked, holding up the ancient-looking VHS cassettes. “You must be the one person I know who actually possesses videotapes. Is it an ironic hipster thing?”
I smiled, taking the tapes from Georgie’s hands. I rubbed a fingertip over my dad’s neat block printing on the peeling label. “To Meagan, On Boys and Dating. (DON’T!)”
I’d carted these videos in my little blue suitcase from home to home for years, before hiding them in the back of my dorm-room closet. It was silly, really, just tapes my dad made over the years. Some of them were videos Mom shot of us when I was little, him teaching me to ride my bike, him trying to braid my hair, which turned out to be so bad that he had to cut parts of it out. And some of the tapes were long conversations he’d had with the camera, addressing me as an older girl who needed her daddy’s advice about boys and life and car maintenance and other great mysteries. Ever the organized officer, he had them all labeled by subject. Every time he was deployed, he was afraid that he wouldn’t come back, that he wouldn’t be there for me, and he felt the need to leave a library of parental information behind. Of course, that turned out to be a smart move. And the tapes had been a source of comfort to me over the years. I hadn’t watched them since early high school, because none of my foster families had a VCR. But honestly, it was enough to know that I had them.
A knock at the door caught our attention. Ben was poking his head into my room. And I realized it was the first time he’d walked in here since we’d moved into the house. I felt oddly vulnerable, with this guy standing in my bedroom, looking at a box of my most personal possessions. I hadn’t felt this weak and open when he saw me burned by silver.
“Hey, Jane’s asking for us downstairs,” he said. “Are those VHS tapes? I haven’t seen any of those since I was a kid.”
“Yeah, my dad made them for me. I just never had the chance to switch them over to DVD. Also, the knowledge of how to switch them over to DVD.”
Ben grinned. “Yeah, that would be an important part of the process. Uh, Jane says dinner’s ready, so we should probably get down there.”
Georgie pocketed my iPod and skipped down the stairs, leading us to a rather formally set dining-room table. But really, this was the first time the five of us had sat down to dinner together, just the residents of River Oaks. We’d had rushed breakfasts as Jane and Ben and I peeled off to go to work. We’d had larger gatherings with Jane’s extended “family.” But never just us. Gabriel had gone all out, with the big china mugs of blood on little saucers, candles in real crystal candlesticks, and flowers gathered from the backyard.
There was no silverware. For that, I was grateful.
“So, what exactly happened to you in the lab?” Georgie asked, sipping her blood. It left a little blood mustache on her top lip, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to tell her about it.
“No shop talk until after dinner,” Jane said. “Let’s just try to have a nice, normal meal that doesn’t involve discussions of bloodshed and felony assault.”
“What does that leave us to talk about?” Georgie asked, frowning while Jane motioned to her own top lip. Georgie wiped her mouth with a napkin.
“How are things at the shop?” Ben asked Jane gamely. “You haven’t had much time to work there since you took over the Council position.”
“Actually, it’s doing pretty well. I miss it. I wish I had more time there, but I’m lucky to have Andrea to run the day-to-day operations.”
“What kind of shop do you have, Jane? Also, how have we not talked about this?”
“It’s a bookshop, some occult books, but lately we’ve moved into a more general-interest, vampire-friendly mode, if for no other reason than people kept trying to kill us for the rarer occult items. And we haven’t talked about it because most of our conversations revolve around Council business. I’m far too used to the people around me knowing about that part of my life, and I realize that is a big oversight on my part. I’ll take you to the shop sometime this week, if you’re interested.”
“Sure,” I agreed immediately. “I’m getting a little sick of my textbooks. I could use a good read.”
Jane beamed at me. “So, Georgie, it’s your night on dishes, which means the arguments against our ‘ridiculous draconian expectation’ for you to do chores begin right about . . . now.”
Georgie cleared her throat. “Since we last spoke, I have done some research on the topic, and it turns out that today’s parents are actively discouraging their children from doing chores. The prevailing theory is that the expectation to contribute to the household heaps additional stress onto the kids, who are already overscheduled and overstimulated.”
Ben and I locked eyes over the rims of our cups, grinning at Georgie’s carefully organized, completely bullshit argument. She kept up this passionate discourse against dishpan hands throughout dinner and the carefully spiced dessert blood Gabriel had prepared.
“While your arguments might be compelling to a small percentage of blogger moms, I think I’m going to point out that you still have about six months of dishes to wash before you replace the flat-screen you pulverized when you failed level 829 in ‘Candy Crush’ and launched your phone at the wall. Try again next week, Georgie,” Jane said, pointing at the kitchen.
Georgie slumped away from the table, dirty dishes in hand, grumbling all the way.
“Now that dinner is officially over, here is Dr. Hudson’s preliminary report, which he had Gennaro slip under my door as he was getting ready to go all Jersey Shore tanning bed on you.”
“Are you doing this now so Georgie won’t be able to hear?” I asked.
“No, I can hear you just fine,” Georgie called from the kitchen.
“She can hear us just fine,” Jane said, rolling her eyes a little as she slid a thick file folder across the table. “But now I can tell myself that we did have some uninterrupted family time.”
Gabriel laughed but glanced over the report as Jane spread it out on the table. “Now, from what I can decipher from Dr. Hudson’s science-speak, which I’m pretty sure he made more complicated than necessary just to be a dick—”
“Right?” I exclaimed.
She snickered. “You’ve got a lot of different genes thrown in there with yours, which is fun,” she said. “Rattlesnake and shark and even a little lizard, plus some botanical samples.”
“He was serious about the vegetables?” Ben groaned. “I was really hoping he was just going for a quip.”
“Well, technically, pumpkins and tomatoes are fruits, and lavender is an herb, but yeah, you’ve got some tiny traces of plant DNA in your systems.”
I glanced down at my hands, searching for any sign of pumpkin orange. Nope, I was still pretty pale. But it did make sense that we had plant genes, what with our magical human-baiting floral breath. Maybe the extra fangs were the result of the shark DNA? Sharks had rows and rows of teeth, right? Did that mean that ours would grow back if we broke them off?
Wait.
“Gene therapy isn’t supposed to work like that,” I said. “You can’t just inject someone with DNA samples and expect to affect their genetic code.”
Ben turned to me, eyebrows raised.
“I read!” I cried.
“Well, vampire biology is a little different from human,” Jane said. “Plus, there are chemical traces in your bloodstream that Dr. Hudson can’t explain. So we’re not just talking gene therapy. We’re talking pharmacology, too.”
I scanned the report at high speed, catching a lot of very scary words involving complicated chemical terms I didn’t understand. “So the vampire who bit me had weird drugs in his system?”
“Something that transferred over to you when his blood went into your system.” Jane nodded. “We’re assuming he was a carrier, like a lab-created plague rat, since he had normal fangs. The mojo from his blood marinated in your system for twenty-four hours and was passed on to Ben somehow when you bit him. It’s like you carry a vampire virus in your spit. Maybe if you hadn’t bitten him right when you woke up, it would be different, but . . . well, who knows?”
“A spit virus? So, in theory, we could set off the zombie apocalypse,” Ben said, just a little too brightly.
“Please stop saying things. Every time you say something, I feel worse.” I sighed. “What does all this mean?”
“I’m going to have to say something to answer that,” she noted. I gave her a distinct bitch brow, so she continued, “You are not some anomaly in the natural progression of vampirism. You were created. Someone took the time to design you and planned to turn you.”
Ben managed to frown and clear his throat at the same time. “Well, that’s . . . terrifying.”
“The good news is that if someone designed you, there are steps that lead to you. Testing stages. Failed experiments.”
“And being called a failed experiment shouldn’t offend us . . . why?” I asked.
“I know. That was insensitive. But failed experiments generally leave evidence behind. Maybe we can find some of that evidence and figure out who cooked you up,” Jane said.
“Will that help us in any way? We’re still going to be freaky undead chimeras,” Ben grumbled.
“No, it won’t help you, but it will stop Dr. Frankenvamp from making more.”
“Again, hurtful,” Ben noted.
“True enough. I’m just saying, you two turned out great, but who’s to say the next batch will have your restraint? Or that whoever is mixing up super-neovamps isn’t going to add even more special features? Like a weird tail or something.”
I tried not to internally aww over the fact that Jane not only said I turned out great but also called us super-neovamps. The “weird tail” comment helped.
“The additional good news is that our insisting that you couldn’t tell anyone where you went after you were turned means that whoever designed you doesn’t know how to find you. And that person doesn’t even know that Ben exists. See? There was a reason for our strict, somewhat paranoid secrecy.”
We both stared at her, skeptical faces in place.
“Just let me have this one, OK, kids?”
So I was a neovamp with pumpkin powers. After showering off the remains of a very stressful, bloody evening, I lay on my bed, waiting to drop off to sleep, trying to imagine how I would frame this conversation with Morgan and Keagan. I mean, I was already stretching the boundaries of quirks you can accept about your friends pretty thin. Morgan didn’t like the fact that Keagan shouted out Internet-mined spoilers to horror movies while Morgan was watching them. Pumpkin powers might be beyond her limits.
A soft knock on my door caught my attention. I propped myself up on my elbows and saw Ben leaning against my doorframe. The sunproof shades were already covering my windows, so he was backlit by the hall lights. I could barely make out the wolf logo on the Half-Moon Hollow High T-shirt he was wearing with some old basketball shorts.
“Ben, what are you doing? The sun’s coming up in just a few minutes.”
“I can’t sleep,” he whispered, closing the door behind him. “I’ve tried. I just—I’m freaking out. I know we’ve only been vampires for a few weeks, but I’d definitely started taking the whole ‘live forever’ thing for granted. And then tonight we almost get killed with silver and sunlight, and I see my whole life flash before my eyes, and it is so freaking boring, except for the very last bit. And then Jane tells us that we’re basically alone in this thing. That you and I are the only ones like us, and we’ve got reptile and fruit parts in us. It’s just—how am I supposed to sleep after that?”
I threw my covers back and scooted to the end of the bed, meeting him there. I was grateful I was wearing some of my more forgiving pajamas. Soft cotton pants covered in dancing jelly beans with a loose blue T-shirt.
“You’re going to sleep, because that’s what we need to do,” I told him. “Because we have to get up tomorrow night and start all over again. We’ve got to go to work and do our jobs and act like a coworker three floors down didn’t try to murder us, because that’s what Jane needs us to do. And so far, as much as I hate to admit it, the things Jane has asked us to do have worked.”
“But all that stuff Jane said about shark genes and pumpkins—”
“Doesn’t change anything,” I told him. “We’re not normal. We knew we weren’t normal when we got here. Having the specifics? That doesn’t change anything. You’re still you. I’m still me. We just have some extra flavors swirled in, like those little chunks of chocolate in Cherry Garcia.”
Ben opened his mouth to protest but seemed to think better of it and nodded. “Thank you.”
I smiled, even as I felt the heavy pull of the sunrise, dragging away my energy and focus. “Now, get back to your room and get to bed before the sun comes up and—”
Suddenly, Ben’s eyes rolled back, and he sagged forward, landing on top of me and face-planting in my cleavage. I fell back on my bed, with Ben still on top of me.
“That happens,” I muttered, thunking my head back on the mattress. I tried to raise my arms to push him off me, but they were so heavy and fatigued that they basically just flopped against his back. And the last thought that flitted through my head before dropping off was about how very awkward it was going to be when Ben woke up with his face buried in my cleavage.
I woke up with a solid weight on top of me. Eyes still closed, I patted up that weight’s back, running my hands through silky, soft hair. Ben was still on top of me, and it was, indeed, very awkward having his face tucked into my right breast and his hand curled possessively around my left breast. He looked very content. And I had to snort. Men did not change, from the cradle to after the grave.
Hesitantly, I took my fingertips and traced the curve of his cheek, his strong, square jaw. He really was adorable, even with those big green eyes closed. His full mouth was relaxed and soft. He lifted his head and blinked at me.
I grinned at him, fully prepared to make a joke about his boob-burrowing, but before I could speak, he bent his head to kiss me. He drew back, those eyes sweeping over my face, as if he was gauging my reaction, so I leaned up and kissed him back.
I giggled silently against the skin of his jaw. His feet were so cold against my legs, but I didn’t dare make a noise. Jane and Gabriel had superhearing.
I wrapped my legs around his hips, throwing my head back as my own wet, willing flesh came into contact with his hard length. He was ready underneath those basketball shorts. His hands drifted lazily down my sides and squeezed at my hip bones, a reassuring little touch. I liked that he didn’t push. That he seemed to enjoy every step as much as I did. He wasn’t rushing to the finish line.
This felt right. Not because I was his sire or because we were the only two super-rare vampires in this tiny little weirdo boat but because his lips were the only ones I wanted to be kissing. Everything about our relationship was complicated except for this. I wanted him, and he wanted me. This was the moment I’d wanted, that night in front of my dorm. This was where I’d hoped that flirting and fun would lead before everything went awry and I went into foster survival mode, and hmm, what was that thing he was doing with his tongue?
Ben climbed up the mattress to stretch completely over me. His hips cradled into mine as his hands spanned my waist, sliding under my butt and arching me up as he pressed between my thighs. I rolled my hips, chasing the sensation of feeling him against me. I moaned into his mouth, which seemed to spur him on, making his kisses more urgent. I tugged at his hair, breaking from his lips to kiss along the curve of his jaw.
He flicked his tongue against the skin behind my ear. I threaded my fingers through his hair, scratching my nails along his neck. My feet stroked his legs. I couldn’t seem to touch enough of him. I wanted it all, every inch of skin. I wanted to touch it, to taste it, to make him feel all the things he was making me feel.
His mouth tasted like cinnamon and sin. It was want, pure and simple.
We didn’t have much time before sunset. And that meant he was going to be in my bed when the others got up.
I rolled, pinning him down with my hips. My fangs sneaked out of my mouth, scraping against his nipple. He hissed but gripped at my shoulder, keeping me in place. I pressed those sharp points against his skin, testing and teasing until he was panting.
Panting myself, I slipped my own hand into the elastic of his shorts, pulling at them. He pulled back, watching me as I tugged at his clothes, his lips wet and parted. He nodded, pressing his forehead against mine and lifting his hips so I could pull his shorts all the way off. I’d just managed to get his underwear below his ass when something thumped against my door.
We both froze.
Fitz whimpered from the hall, scratching at my door. I could hear Jane’s voice, just outside, saying, “Is she not awake yet, buddy? Why don’t you give her a few more minutes? She had a rough one last night.”
My eyes locked with Ben’s, and I mouthed, Don’t think anything.
Fitz whimpered again, and I could hear his paws crawling up the door.
Jane sighed. “Aw, OK, buddy, but let her sleep. No chewing on her blankets.”
The doorknob turned, and Ben scrambled out from under me. He landed noiselessly on my floor and rolled under my bed. Jane opened the door just enough for Fitz to wriggle through and shut it behind him. The gray-brown blur of dog sprang across the room and landed on my bed with a flump, nearly dislodging me from the sheets.
“No, Fitz, off the bed,” I whispered as he attempted to cover my face in slobber. “Off.”
Fitz rolled to the floor, sniffing and searching until he found Ben. He yapped happily when Ben crawled out from under my bed. All traces of sexy times had disappeared. Ben looked ashamed and a little panicked.
“I’m really sorry,” he said. “This was a bad idea. I don’t know what came over me.”
“It’s OK,” I told him. “I wanted to.”
“I shouldn’t have,” he said. “Let’s just, uh, let’s just forget this happened, OK?”
Somewhere inside me, there was a witty retort that demanded to know what exactly Ben meant by that and required him to act more like a damn grown-up and less like my dad had just caught him rifling through my panty drawer. But what my brain came up with was “Uh . . .”
And with that, Ben stuck his head out into the hallway and checked for our housemates. I guessed the coast was clear, because he slipped past the door without another word and closed it quietly behind him. I flopped back onto the bed. Fitz propped his head on the mattress, huffing at me, trying to get my attention.
I rolled toward him, rubbing the top of his massive head. “What the hell just happened?”
Because dogs could not shrug, Fitz settled for licking my face.
Ben didn’t withdraw from my life. He didn’t avoid me. He did exactly what he’d asked me to do, which was pretend that the whole making-out-after-sleeping-on-top-of-me thing didn’t happen. He was perfectly friendly. He let me have the last Hemo Pop for breakfast when we ran out. He let me ride shotgun in Jane’s car on the way to work. He even held doors open for me. But he didn’t make eye contact. Our conversation was stilted and weird, like the sort of small talk you would make during a job interview.
I spent most of my time trying not to think about what had happened, because Jane did not need those visuals in her head. Also, I didn’t want to be grounded for having a boy in my room.
To avoid this mental pitfall when I was sitting just a few feet outside my psychic foster mom’s office door, I threw myself into work. I’d managed to tame my laundry cart of files. But more paperwork crossed my desk every night, and some of it was pretty damned interesting.
It was enough to keep me distracted and thinking of something besides Ben’s thrusty hardness, especially when a bright red—as in alarmingly red—folder with Ophelia’s name in bold block printing was delivered while I was on my lunch break.
At this point, I’d pretty much lost my qualms about looking through sensitive paperwork—though I will say that the sheer redness of the folder made me pause for just a second. The top sheet of the file was marked “Ophelia Lambert—Rehabilitation Progress.”
The report was pretty bland, discussing Ophelia’s progress on UK’s campus and her “lack of proven murders.” Who the hell wrote this? Did Ophelia have some sort of social worker she had to report to every week? I tried to imagine that vampire paper pusher. And it made me laugh.
Wait a minute.
I opened my “mystery drawer” full of loose papers that I had not yet figured out how to file. Most of them were reports that had fallen out of file folders when they were tossed into the giant laundry cart. I remembered a two-page printed e-mail with Ophelia’s name at the bottom, an e-mail that included a lot of cursing. Maybe that was supposed to go in this file? I shuffled through the papers until the all-caps cuss words jumped out at me.
I set the e-mail aside, just in case Jane wanted me to add it to Ophelia’s file. As I was shuffling Ophelia’s papers around, another monthly expense report from Tina slid out onto my desk. This one listed even more vampire students than the last. That didn’t make any sense. Students weren’t allowed to change their room assignments at this point in the year, so why was Tina requesting more money?
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was underestimating the number of students in my building. I mean, I’d been pretty busy with classes and having a life. Was this the sort of thing I should even be worrying about right now?
I frowned at the report and its overwhelming numbers, blinking out at my keen eyes like they were written in red neon.
It was either that or think about Ben and what he’d meant by “This was a bad idea.”
“Right.” I picked up my receiver and dialed Keagan’s cell, taking advantage of Jane’s absence to make a not completely kosher phone call. My suite mate worked evening shifts at the front desk at New Dawn to earn a student stipend—a whopping hundred dollars per month. It was enough to cover Keagan’s cell-phone bill and keep her dad off her back about our generation’s “poor work ethic.”
Keagan’s voice growled into the phone. “If this is a telemarketer or that creep from my Psych class, I swear to God, I’m going to hang up.”
And that was when I remembered that the Council phones had a “ghost” area code that wouldn’t allow Keagan to see that I was calling from inside the state.
“Keagan, is that how you normally greet people on the phone? You were such a nice girl when I lived in your suite. Maybe I should move back.”
“Meagan! Are you allowed to call me right now? Are you OK? Wait, are you calling me from a landline?” she said. “Ew. Just because you’re working for moldy old vampires doesn’t mean that you have to use their technology.”
“I am calling you for a semiofficial reason, so I don’t think I’m violating the spirit of Jane’s rules. And also, I’m pretty sure you just used vampire hate speech. Like if we weren’t friends, I would file a complaint with the campus Anti-Deadism League and get you fired from your little front-desk job.”
“Well, it’s a good thing we’re friends, then,” she drawled. “I would hate to lose my lucrative future in customer service.”
“Sweetie, you hate customers. And service. You’re just too Southern to say anything about it,” I said, laughing, even when I saw Ben and Gigi come walking down the hall.
Ben caught sight of my wide grin and smiled back, like it was a reflex. And then he seemed to remember his sudden departure from our thrusty high jinks, and his face fell into a mask of detached politeness.
Gigi, on the other hand, was still waving and grinning. Honestly, that girl’s friendliness was starting to freak me out. I gave her a little waggle of the fingers and pointed to my phone receiver. Ben got no waggle. We would both have to get used to disappointment.
And because my vampire quickness allowed me to multitask like a boss, I balanced the receiver under my chin, opened my e-mail program, and started a new message to Ophelia. I made it short, something that wouldn’t ping on the Council’s “keywords sensors” on my communications.
Hey Ophelia,
I have a quick question for you about some paperwork. Can you give me a call? I’m sure that Jane gave you the number for my KidPhone.
—Meagan
OK. That should have satisfied my curiosity, right? That should have settled this growing sense of unease in my chest. But it didn’t. Something just short of anxiety gnawed away at me, making me feel like I was squirming inside my skin. So I pressed forward with my somewhat underhanded questioning of my friend.
“That is true. You would be doing me a favor.” Keagan sighed. “I’m assuming you’re calling me for some reason other than just distracting me from my very important mail-sorting duties?”
“Yes. Does Tina still make you run daily census reports?” I asked, picking up a stack of Post-its and my favorite red pen.
Keagan snorted. “Yes, at the end of every shift, I e-mail Tina a list of residents, sorted into living and undead columns on an Excel spreadsheet. Because there’s a huge chance of that number suddenly changing overnight . . . except for that day a few weeks ago when we suddenly had one kid jump into the vampire column. Sorry, that was insensitive.”
“Eh, coming from you, kinda borderline.”
“Thanks. Is there some reason you’re grilling me about random tasks from my job description?” she asked.
“I was hoping you might be able to do one for me?”
“What? A census report?”
“Yes, and I need you not to ask me any questions about it.” I winced, waiting for my friend to blast me for putting her in an awkward position and asking too much of her.
“OK.”
“Really?” I took the phone away from my face and gave it a skeptical brow lift.
“Yeah, it’s not like you’re asking me for names and social security numbers here, Meg. I’ve got to do this tonight anyway. You’re just preventing me from procrastinating.” I heard her clicking the keys on her desktop keyboard. “OK, we have one hundred eighty-three vampire students on the roster. And one hundred twenty-one human students.”
I wrote the number on my Post-it and glanced back at Tina’s most recent report. Tina was padding both columns by about thirty students. “You’re sure about that?”
“Nope, I just picked those numbers out of a hat. Because that’s how I make my own fun.”
“Fair enough, smartass.”
“And my work here is done.” I could practically hear Keagan raising her arms in a V of sarcastic victory.
“Can you do me a favor? Don’t tell anyone that I called and asked about this?”
“Yes, I can do this very vague and mysterious thing you’re asking me to do. Mostly because I don’t think anyone will be all that interested.”
“I’m serious, Keagan.”
“I know. I can tell. Are you OK, Meg?”
“I’m sure it’s just a problem with paperwork, but it’s part of my job to track these things down, so . . .”
“Gross. Your job is even more boring than mine.”
“That’s the glamorous life of the vampire.” I sighed. “So what’s going on with you? I feel like we haven’t talked much lately. And most of our conversations have boiled down to ‘Miss you so much . . . ah, I don’t know what to talk about with you now because our lives are so separate.’ ”
“It’s not that exciting around here—tests, classes, the usual. Nothing compared to dramatic death and vampire transformation scenes.”
“So gimme the campus gossip not included in that care package. Which I did appreciate quite a bit, by the way.”
“Uh, some girl freaked out at the haunted house fund-raiser and punched Carson in the nuts when he jumped out in front of her.”
“Carson probably did something to deserve it,” I said, remembering the time the handsy junior cornered me in the research library and tried to charge me a “hug tax” to get out of the stacks. I ended up knocking several volumes of Shakespeare analysis onto his feet to get past him.
“Probably,” she reasoned. “Professor Greene walked out of a class in protest after some guy turned in a three-hundred-word PowerPoint presentation instead of the twenty-page research paper he was supposed to do. Oh, and you know that fire off campus? The fire department went through the rubble and found three bodies in the basement.”
“Oh, no! Were they kids from school?”
“Not sure yet. Morgan is super-involved in the story for the school newspaper, so I’m getting so many details that I am having nightmares. The medical examiners haven’t identified them. But the coroner told Joanie—you know, the hyper girl who covers the police blotter—that the bodies didn’t have any ash or soot in their lungs, so they probably died before the fire. But that’s not even the weird part. The bodies were chained to the wall! Like something out of some creepy Eli Roth movie.”
“Ugh, that’s awful.” I shuddered but straightened in my chair when I saw Jane and Dick coming down the hall. “And I know this is a terrible moment to hang up on you, because you’re clearly distressed that your roommate is sharing autopsy reports with you. But I have to go, because my boss is coming. I love you, buh-bye.”
I dropped the receiver onto the cradle.
“Hey, Jane!” I said, smiling an “I wasn’t just making a somewhat personal phone call on company time” smile. I handed her a stack of phone-message slips, which she accepted with a hesitant frown. “Hi, Dick.”
Dick grinned at me and ruffled my hair, because he seemed to see me as some sort of vampire niece who would put up with this. I scowled at him, but that was short-lived when his “An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away, But Only If You Have Good Aim” T-shirt made me laugh.
“Is that Ophelia’s progress report?” Jane asked, picking up the nuclear-red folder. She opened the file and scanned the papers inside.
“And this is where I bow out, because I’m not an impartial party when it comes to Ophelia.” Dick excused himself, kissing Jane’s cheek and ruffling my hair one more time before retreating to the break room.
“Yeah, do you remember an e-mail that Ophelia sent you a week or so before I was turned?”
Jane peered over the folder at me. “A profanity-filled rant where she told me it was none of my blanking business who she blanking had contact with when it wasn’t on the blanking campus that she rarely blanking left since I wouldn’t let her own a blanking car and if I had blanking questions I could blanking well call her myself? And then explicit instructions to go blank myself? And then, oddly, with the list of her contacts in the area attached?”
I read over the e-mail. “That sounds about right.”
“Yes, it was memorable. But I sent her back a response saying I had no clue what she was talking about. She didn’t reply, and I figured she was either embarrassed, which wasn’t likely, or had realized she was mistaken and had already moved on to the next person on her curse-out list.”
“And you didn’t punish her for being disrespectful to you?”
Jane waggled her hand. “Eh, considering Ophelia’s previous interactions, the ‘go blank yourself’ e-mail was actually pretty cordial.”
“Really?” I winced, mentally counting the number of creatively employed four-letter words. “So I’m assuming that this e-mail should be included in her rehab progress file?”
Jane nodded. “Yes, just mark it ‘Informational only, not for sentence consideration.’ ”
I gave her a little salute. “That sounds vaguely official. Do you want to include some note about what led to the ranty e-mail?”
“I don’t know what led to the ranty e-mail.”
“But I remember her talking about it. She said you sent Tina an e-mail asking for a list of her known associates in the area around the college. She was . . . not pissed, really, I think she was kind of hurt that you would be suspicious when she was making every effort to behave well.”
Jane frowned. “I never sent Tina an e-mail like that.”
“If you didn’t ask her for the list of Ophelia’s contacts, who did?”
She shrugged. “It’s probably some shady business associate of Ophelia’s trying to make new Facebook friends or something. Just make a note in the file about your recollections of the situation.”
“Will do.”
“Oh, and speaking of shady friends, I noticed that you added another asterisk to the nope list?” Jane held up a sheaf of paper from my out-box. “And a note. Dr. Fortescue has a PhD in ‘babbling loony.’ ”
“I stand by my statement,” I told her primly.
“I didn’t know you could get a degree in ‘babbling loony.’ ”
“It’s one of those lesser-known majors,” I said. “Like French literature or pottery.”
“This guy will not stop.” She sighed even while she laughed. “He’s been calling me for months. And he doesn’t seem to get that I don’t have room in my schedule for every babbling loony who has something to sell us. He’s like a telemarketer who just won’t give up. And I say that as a former telemarketer who gave up very easily.” When I arched my brows, she shook her head. “Long story.”
“Well, you might want to let security know that he’s threatening to show up and wait for you in the parking lot so you’ll have to listen to him.”
Jane snorted. “Well, let him try. Parking-lot fisticuffs in this town tend to go badly for nonvampires.”
“How about I let the security office know that he’s planning on waiting for you in the parking lot?”
Jane smiled indulgently at me. “I’ll let them know. Trust me, I’ve learned not to take chances with these things.”
“Thank you. I feel better now.”
Jane put her hand on my shoulder. “No, thank you. You’re doing a really good job here, Meagan. My schedule has never been so well organized. Your e-mails are clear and concise, without overloading me with information. And you always remember to stock my office mini fridge with those single-serve packets of Hershey’s Blood Additive that I like so very much.”
I grinned at her. “Thanks, Jane.”
The elevator dinged. She smiled warmly. “And to reward you for all that hard work, I think you deserve to go on a little outing.”
I groaned. “Every time you use that voice, I end up learning a life lesson.”
I turned to see Libby, the sweet blond soccer-mom vamp. She sped up as she approached Jane, practically skipping as she threw her arms around her.
“Hey!” she cried. “It’s official! Thanks to all of the clients you recommended me to—Southern Comforts, Sam Clemson’s contracting business, the free clinic, and Gabriel’s random businesses—I have replaced all of the customers I lost after I was turned, plus at least twenty percent. And because vampires value honest bookkeepers, I can charge them more money. I’m financially solvent! I can afford to buy Danny the brand-name macaroni and cheese and everything!”
“Aw, congratulations, sweetie! I’m so happy for you.” Jane sighed, squeezing Libby tightly.
“And Meagan! It’s so good to see you, too,” Libby said, pulling me up from my chair and dragging me into a long embrace.
“You . . . are a hugger,” I said, patting her back and shooting Jane an exasperated look. Jane just snickered. “Everybody in the Hollow just loves to hug.”
“I thought we could go for coffee,” Libby said. “There’s a really cute place across the street that does vampire-friendly mixed drinks.”
I glanced toward Jane. “I’m not sure I’m allowed to leave the building. And it might make Sammy jealous if I drink someone else’s caffeine.”
Jane shook her head. “As long as you stay with Libby, I’m happy. Just take the rest of the night off. You earned it. Libby’s going to drive you home.”
An outing? Without Jane’s or Gabriel’s supervision? No strained conversation with Ben on the drive home? Yes, please. I didn’t care if Libby tried to recruit me into a multilevel marketing scam, I was on board. I locked down my computer and grabbed my purse.
Libby looped her arm through mine. “Come on, my treat.”
I cast an uncertain glance over my shoulder as Jane waved cheerfully and walked into her office.
“Jane thought it might be a little easier for you to relax around me,” Libby said as she hit the elevator’s ground-level button.
“Why?”
“I had my own interesting transition into vampire life, which Jane had to jump in and oversee. Let’s just say that finding a sire and arranging to be turned on supernatural Craigslist is not an appropriate life choice, even if you are terminally ill. Jane had to take me on to foster, too, because she didn’t trust my sire. Which turned out to be a good thing, because he wasn’t all that trustworthy. And I found his presence to be kind of romantically confusing. Also, my human boyfriend wasn’t crazy about him.”
I soundlessly mouthed, Wow.
Libby laughed, then led me out of the Council building and across the street to a cozy little coffee shop called Perk-U-Later, chatting all the way about the boost in clients that Jane’s recommendations had granted her at-home bookkeeping business. There were other similarities in our histories. Libby grew up not knowing who her father was, raised by a single mother who worked all the time, feeling isolated from other kids by nature of having to grow up faster than they did. The difference between us was that Libby was grown when her mother died, and she’d had something of an adult human life before she herself died. She’d married (unhappily), had a son (happily), and been widowed (no comment) before she’d been diagnosed with the late-stage cancer that forced her into vampirism. She’d chosen this unlife because she couldn’t leave her son behind without parents. I liked to think that if the semitruck had given my mom options, she would have made the same choice. Libby’s history made me trust her a bit more, despite this strangely forced coffee-based playdate.
Of course, the minute she brought up Danny, she pulled out her phone to show me pictures of her son, a sunny, towheaded boy grinning goofily into the camera from a pumpkin patch. I scrolled through several shots, most of them featuring her little boy being adorable. In the final picture, Danny was dressed as a matador and had his arm slung around a little boy in a simulated sumo fat suit. I held the phone up.
“Context is important,” Libby said, nodding. “School play.”
“Ah.”
I dragged my finger across the screen and found a shot of Libby and Danny and Danny’s de-sumo’d friend sitting on some porch steps. A big blond man with a thick beard and full tattoo sleeves peeking out from under his T-shirt had those arms wrapped around Libby and the boys. They were positively beaming at the camera, like an ad for the Council for “Nontraditional but Happy Supernatural Family Values.”
I turned the camera toward her and smirked. “Nicely done.”
“Well, some aspects of vampire life have been a little easier than others. That’s Wade. Good Lord, that man. Makes up for every argument with my late husband over our nonexistent sex life, diaper changes, living less than a mile away from his parents—just everything.”
“How do you do it?” I asked. “You have the same sort of background I do, and you make it look so normal. The kid, the human boyfriend, after-hours business. I always feel like I have this ‘Tragic Backstory’ stamp on my forehead.”
“I choose to make it normal.”
“Because the power has been inside of me all along?” I asked, pausing to sip my bloodychino. “All I have to do is click my heels three times?”
“No, smartass. I choose to make it normal by not dwelling on the things I can’t change, like my relationship with my mother or my husband, and focusing instead on what I can do to make my life better—for me and for Danny. I understand the feeling that it’s safer to pull up the rope ladder and isolate yourself, but you can’t do that now. Vampires, for all our solitary ‘children of the night’ crap, are social creatures. We need that support system, and you just happened to land right in the middle of one of the best support systems you could ask for. You should take advantage of it. Even if it makes you uncomfortable.”
“I will try.”
Libby gave me a speculative look. “Well, I think it’s time you headed home.”
“I know, I know, you’ve got to drive me.”
“Actually, no, I think you should walk back alone. I’ll tell Jane that after we talked I drove you home.”
“I’m sorry, what?” I coughed up part of my coffee back into the cup. Classy. “Is this a trick?”
“I know what it’s like not to trust yourself, not to be trusted. I think you need to take a walk. Be out in the world and prove to yourself that you can get from point A to point B without hurting anyone or getting hurt yourself.”
“Still feels like a test,” I told her. “Jane will be pissed if she finds out.”
“Well, if Jane asks, I have some parenting experience I’m going to fall back on to justify my decision. Or I will run. Running also sounds good.”
I stood, hooking my purse over my shoulder. “Thanks, Libby.”
Libby’s hand shot out, catching my wrist before I could walk away. “If you screw me over here, I will deploy my mom guilt in ways you can’t even imagine.”
“Thank you for the warning.”