At the sound of the phone slamming in my ear, I turned to Sandy, my jaw slack. She patted my hand. “All right, honey, that wasn’t a great call, but you get those sometimes. And it takes everyone a few calls to develop a rhythm. When someone is rude, the best thing to do is to take a deep breath and make another call.”

So I made another call, and another. I was hung up on, had an air horn blown directly into my ear, and was called a bitch in three languages. Every time I dialed a number, I prayed the phone would ring unanswered. After four hours, when Chester Zimmerman of Piedmont, North Dakota, told me to commit unspeakable acts upon my own person with a cheese grater, I turned to Sandy, defeated.

“I don’t think I’m comfortable with this.”

“And they can tell, honey,” Sandy said, patting my hand again. “You just need to relax your voice and speak in a more natural, confident tone.”

I reached for my headset and realized I would rather attempt strangling myself with the phone cord than dial another number.

“I just don’t think this is going to work for me.”

Sandy smiled, despite the tension pulling at the corners of her mouth. “Well, we have other sales divisions you can try.”

“I don’t—”

“Oh, come on, Jane, nobody likes a quitter! I want to find a place for you here.” She pulled me out of my seat and motioned for me to follow her to another door, where we found another smoke-filled cubicle farm. “Greenfield Studios is just one sales arm of Greenfield Enterprises. Our sales force also sells Revita-Water, the new miracle cure that ‘they’ don’t want you know about.

Revita-Water’s scientifically calibrated balance of electrolytes and nutrients, plus a selection of health supplements and ephedra -

free diet aids, will prevent almost any illness, from cancer to fibromyalgia to Lyme disease. But the main benefit is this amazing product’s ability to reverse vampirism! Studies show that people who drink Revita-Water as part of their daily health regimen will not turn if they’re bitten. Just between you and me, police departments and emergency services are buying Revita-Water in huge batches for protection when the vampires finally launch their antihuman campaign. It practically sells itself.”

I stared at her. Apparently, Sandy had not yet noticed that I’d left the life-status box blank on my application. But now I knew where the company policy stood on vampires. “Beg pardon?”

“All right, so it doesn’t actually cure vampirism,” Sandy whispered. “But there’s nothing to prove that it won’t help people get healthy enough to outrun the filthy bastards. You know, I never thought, at my age, I’d have to worry about being attacked by vicious, bloodsucking monsters in my own home, but that ’s the state of the world today. People are looking for protection, for assurance. And Greenfield Enterprises is here to fill that need.”

Sandy wasn’t saying anything in the way of antivampire ranting that I hadn ’t heard before. Heck, my grandmother had said worse over Christmas dinner. But I’d never heard it as a vampire, and I found it hurt more than I thought it would. Being in such a small, crowded room, I’d been keeping my mind “clenched,” for lack of a better word, to keep the other women’s thoughts from bouncing around in my skull. But I imagined a little window in her head sliding open and was given a psychic slapping for my efforts. The fears and worries of every sad-eyed woman in the room came pouring into my head from all sides. Unpaid bills, cars with shoddy brakes, kids suspended from school, husbands who wouldn’t get off the couch and earn a paycheck, the soul-sucking drudgery of having to show up for this job every night and not having any other choice.

I shook the buzzing sensation out of my head and concentrated on Sandy. She may have hated vampires with a frantic and paranoid passion, but she sure liked me. She saw me doing well at Greenfield Enterprises. In fact, she saw me wearing the headset with pride, becoming a star employee, moving up in the ranks, and taking over the damned office so someone named Rico would finally let her retire. She had no idea I was a vampire; in fact, the thought never occurred to her.

I’d never been part of any minority before, unless you counted those who thought Timothy Dalton made a decent James Bond, and I didn’t particularly like people assuming that they could make rude comments about said minority because they thought I was “safe.” It was humiliating, and, worse, it really pissed me off.

“Or if you prefer something more tropical,” Sandy said, reaching toward a door labeled Greenfield Coastal Time Share Sales.

“Sandy, I’m going to have to stop you right there,” I said. “I am not going to be a good fit here. I’m sorry to have taken up your time. This has been a very enlightening experience. Please don’t call me, ever.”

“But we need a girl like you, Jane. You have the voice. With some practice, you could clear one hundred dollars, two hundred dollars a night,” she said. “We have girls quit without notice all the time because they can ’t stand the work or they just decide they don’t want to come in that night. Someone like you isn’t going to do that. You’re one of those nice, responsible girls.

You’re going to show up on time and ready to work. You won’t call ten minutes before your shift and tell me you can’t come in because you’ve been arrested. And you won’t try to live in your van out in the parking lot. You’ll serve as a good example to the other girls.”

“So, you need me to class up the joint?” I asked, my eyebrow arched. “That’s new.”

“Exactly.” Sandy sighed.

“Thanks, but I’m still going to say no,” I said, hustling toward the nearest fire exit. “After all, working here might interfere with my participation in the antihuman campaign.”

Sandy stared at me in bewilderment, so I flashed my fangs, rolled my eyes, and stalked out of the building. The words

“bloodsucking monsters” and “filthy bastards” rang in my skull, and my cheeks burned as I stomped back to Big Bertha. I swore that if I found blood on her, I was going to go back to River Oaks, pack up, and move to Tibet.

I had one of those out-of-body automatic driving experiences, where I put the keys in the ignition, and the next thing I knew, I was turning Big Bertha around the corner to Gabriel’s road. I pulled into his driveway, climbed the stairs, and stared at the house. My hand froze in midair as I started to knock on his door.

This was nothing new. I’d been to Gabriel’s house before. Of course, I’d behaved like a screaming harridan when I was there before…and here I was, coming to his door with problems again.

I chewed my lip and considered running back to my car. Then again, Gabriel was always going on about his responsibility in leading me through my vampire growing pains. Oh, let’s be honest, I was there to get a few sympathy kisses and maybe an elder-vampire platitude or two. Something like “It’s always darkest before the dawn…and we never really see that, so why worry?”

Before I could knock, the door swung open, and Gabriel was there.

“Jane!” Gabriel exclaimed with a grin that faltered at the sight of my expression. “What’s wrong?”

I tilted my head and have him a long, appraising look. “I know this is a long shot, but did you ever read a book called Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day?”

“No, but the title does lend itself to inference.” Gabriel nodded.

“Well, whatever you’re inferring, add cigarette smoke and desperation.”

“That explains the smell,” he said, sniffing my hair. “Where have you been?”

“Working.”

“You found a job? That’s—”

“As a telemarketer.”

He made the “ouch” face. “Oh.”

“For a company that sold, among other sleazy and dubious products, a vitamin tonic they claimed would reverse vampirism.”

Gabriel scoffed. “Well, that’s ridiculous. No one’s ever been able to accomplish that.”

“Not the point.”

“Sorry.”

“I agreed to sell this crap. Well, actually, I agreed to try to ensnare innocent families into booking appointments in questionable locations with complete strangers wielding cameras. But I was just terrible at it, because the customers could apparently smell my fear through the phone and just hung up on me, or they told me to drop dead, and we both know that horse is already out of the barn. It was hell, OK? I took a job in the stinkiest pit of minimum-wage hell.”

Gabriel gave me a blank look. “Why didn’t you ask more questions about the job before you took it?”

“I was just tired of not working. I wanted a job. Any job. Anything to make me feel useful and productive…and not doomed to move back in with my parents.”

“Jane, if it’s a question of money, I could—”

I touched a finger to his lips. “Don’t. Don’t make an offer that will change our relationship. I appreciate the thought, but I’m not comfortable when you blur that daddy/boyfriend line.”

“The offer, which you wouldn’t let me make, still stands.”

“Thank you. Anyway, when I could not lure people into these said appointments, my new boss told me all about the other stuff I could sell, including this antivampire snake oil. And then she told me that vampires are filthy, vicious creatures who are going to overthrow the human government in some bloody coup we’ve been planning for years.”

“I take it she didn’t know you were a vampire?” he said as I shook my head.

“Not only was I subjected to the general abuse that telemarketers receive—and, I now realize, deserve just the tiniest bit—

but I got treated to my very first hate speech.”

“Oh, you’ll hear much worse over the years,” he said, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and pressing me to his side. “I once had a drunk in a tavern tell me a delightful joke about two vampires, a priest, and a—”