“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 fr
om 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 woul
d take the time to analyze what he meant by that after I processed the following.
“Jolene’s a werewolf?”
7
One of the most important qualities in a sire is a protective instinct for his or her childe. But you can go overboard.
—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire
After Jed’s face was sufficiently iced and Ben was coaxed out of the bathroom, Jane had yet another “explain the facts of the supernatural world” talk with me, where she explained that yes, werewolves and shapeshifters were a thing. Yes, vampires knew about werewolves but not shapeshifters, as Jed and his family were some sort of supernatural rarity. And no, I shouldn’t talk to humans about either, because nobody believed in shapeshifters anyway, and the werewolves were still waiting to see how well the whole Coming Out thing worked for the vampires before they made their debut.
Keagan, who was firmly planted on Team Jacob in the Great Twilight Debate, would have been so happy to know werewolves were real. But from what I gathered, they were less “dreamy dudes with soulful eyes and an aversion to wearing shirts” and more “rednecks who lived a little too close to their families and settled almost every argument with bloodshed.”
Ben’s resistance to draining a perfectly nice mutant land shark seemed to score extra points with Jane, even if she did insist that she wasn’t keeping track. We were allowed more frequent video chats and more unsupervised time. After the shark scare, Ben was less eager to run home and see his parents in person, so our yard time was less restrictive, too.
I was carving out a niche at work. I was slowly but surely working through my laundry cart of backlogged files. Sammy the coffee god learned my usual order, a bloody macchiato with a double shot of platelet syrup, and had begun leaving it on my desk for me every evening. I liked admin work. Jane gave me a series of objectives. I met them. There wasn’t a lot of critical thinking involved, but I had a sense of accomplishment, seeing all of those tasks checked off at the end of the day.