“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 ha
s 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.