Yeah, I was going to have a hard time letting that one go.
I bit my trembling bottom lip and took a completely unnecessary deep breath through my nose. “Suck it up, Keene. You were supposed to have those things, but you don’t, so deal with it. Just deal.”
Taking a Sharpie out of my purse, I carefully wrote “Jameson-Nightengale” on the inside of the suitcase lid. I took out a set of clothes for the next night, put them on the desk, and slid the suitcase under my bed. I could feel the sun approaching, like the strength was leaching out of my arms and legs. Every step was like moving through Jell-O. I’d been fine just a few minutes ago, and now I felt like I’d been tranq’d with bear Quaaludes. Was this what vampires went through every morning? No wonder so many of them seemed so cranky all the time. This sucked.
My arms were so heavy it was difficult to lift them when I checked the sunproof shades. Was there any chance they could open during the day? Those things were supposed to have solar locks on them, but what if Jane had cheaped out on the guest rooms? What if someone came into the room while I was asleep and hit the shade button instead of the light switch? What if I woke up a little pile of ash?
I slumped toward the door and twisted the lock into place. Now I just had to make it to the bed before the sun came up.
Wait.
No.
My body dropped to the floor. My arms, my legs, even my chest. There just wasn’t any strength in any part of me. In the eternity it seemed to take for me to fall, I thought, So this is what total loss of body control feels like. And the last sensation I felt was my face bouncing off the hardwood.
Ouch.
If I didn’t know that was going to heal, I would be very upset.
Jane was just a little too smug about finding me lying unconscious, facedown on the floor in my room. Well, technically, Fitz found me lying unconscious, facedown on the floor, but Jane was the one who brought me blood and patted me on the head in a pretty damned condescending manner. While Fitz licked my face, Jane invited me downstairs to meet “everybody” after I finished the donor blood in the “Librarians Do It Between the Covers” mug she gave me. And after chasing Fitz out, I changed into a nonpajama outfit, because that was not the first impression I wanted to make.
“ ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine,’ ” Jane said, in what was clearly an imitation of me, while she walked toward the stairs. “ ‘I don’t need to sleep when the sun rises. I won’t collapse on my face on the floor.’ ”
“I heard that,” I called after her, before taking a long gulp from the mug.
“You were supposed to!”
Walking into the Jameson-Nightengale kitchen was like entering some surreal undead version of a 1950s sitcom. I could hear Fitz barking outside over the jazzy orchestral sound track in my head. A dark-haired man sat at the kitchen table, reading a French newspaper while he sipped blood from an espresso cup. Jane was serving a little girl in jeans and a “District 12 Archery Team” T-shirt, mixing Hershey’s Special Blood Additive Chocolate Syrup into a tall glass of blood.
From across the room, I could tell it was real human-donor blood, A positive. Which was disturbing.
“So, are we collecting little vampires now?” the man was asking over the newspaper. “Is this your way of answering your mother’s constant demands for more grandchildren?”
“Not . . . consciously,” Jane said, frowning as she slid the blood across the table to the little girl. “And Georgie, do not get used to chocolate breakfasts, OK? The last thing I need is for Ophelia to gripe at me because your fangs are rotting out. I am only doing this for a week, because you won that bet, fair and square. I still can’t believe that you beat me at Jane Austen trivia.”
“Well, Georgie did read the books in first edition,” the man said, stroking Jane’s arm while he gave her a bemused smile. He dropped the paper, and my eyes went saucer-size. This guy looked like he should be rolling around in the sand in a wet dress shirt, staring off into the distance, in a super-classy cologne ad. Chiseled features, a strangely pretty mouth, gray eyes that flashed silver with amusement, longish dark hair that curved around his ears. It was not that Jane wasn’t pretty, because she totally was. I just felt like she’d somehow restored the karmic balance for librarians everywhere.
I should probably stop having these thoughts about Jane’s husband, because that could not end well.
“No one likes a sore loser, Jane,” the little girl intoned, swiping the spoon from Jane so she could catch a few extra drops of chocolate syrup. “Also, my fangs will never rot out, because vampire fangs don’t rot.”
“You just wait until we do pop-culture trivia,” Jane countered. “I will destroy you and everything you love.”
The little girl’s angelic features sharpened as her eyes sparked with challenge. This expression looked familiar. That was Ophelia’s “I wish a bitch would” expression, which was really weird on the face of an eight-year-old. This was Ophelia’s sister, Georgie. I’d thought when Ophelia referred to Georgie as her sister that she meant she’d adopted the tiny vampire along the way as she’d terrorized most of Europe four hundred years before. But no, with Georgie’s extremely off-putting expressions and similar coloring, she had to be Ophelia’s actual biological sister. I would file this under information I would process at a later date when I wasn’t dealing with quite so much emotional trauma.
“Is the new girl going to sit down or just lurk in the doorway?” the little girl asked airily.
“Be nice,” Jane admonished her. “Come on in, Meagan. This is Gabriel and Georgie. You two, this is Meagan Keene.”
“Good morn—evening,” I said, waving my empty mug at them.
Gabriel stood and pulled out a chair for me. Which was weird.
“It’s nice to meet you, Meagan,” he said, pushing the chair in as I sat. Jane poured me another mug of blood from a big thermal carafe on the table. I supposed she was overfeeding me so I wouldn’t try to take down some innocent UPS man who rang the doorbell on the wrong damn night. “Jane has told us little to nothing about you.”
Somehow this vaguely rude greeting in Gabriel’s smooth, cultured voice made me laugh.
“But we will try to make you as comfortable as possible. Welcome.”
“Thanks.”
Georgie stared at me for a long, silent moment. “You smell familiar.”
“Uh, sorry?”
“You smell like Ophelia. It’s faint, but it’s there.”
I meant to tell her that made sense, since I’d spent a lot of time with Ophelia lately. But instead, I said, “Please don’t smell me.”
Which was an awesome way to make a first impression. But Georgie just snorted and returned to her chocolate blood.
“Have you checked on Ben this morning?” I asked Jane.
She nodded. “A med team from the Council stopped by first thing, while you were still out. No sign of activity but no sign of decomp, either.”
“See, you say that in such a cheerful way, but it’s still a super-creepy sentence.”
“Well, the med team is coming back in a few hours to check you out, too. No griping, please. For now, Ben’s door is very heavily secured, because we don’t know when or how he’ll wake up.”
“ ‘How’?”
“Well, we’ve never seen a vampire turn after just being bitten. We don’t know if he’s going to be like you or if he’s going to be . . .” She paused to glance at Gabriel. “Different.”
“So take them both to the Council’s lab, where they will be contained and studied and not sleeping in my game room,” Georgie suggested.
“I’m sleeping in your game room?” I asked.
A shudder shook Georgie’s little shoulders. “No. I never go into the unicorn room. Never. But Ben is sleeping in my game room. And I don’t like it.”
I only hoped she meant actual games and not s
omething creepy involving pliers and hitchhikers.
“Georgie,” Jane said, her tone intentionally patient, “we’ve talked about this. Ben’s a good friend of Iris and Gigi. And Meagan here is a friend of your sister’s. We don’t let friends of our friends languish in underground labs so you can play ‘Mario Kart’ whenever you feel like it.”
“Fine,” Georgie muttered, and drained her glass.
“Meagan, why don’t you check in with your classes?” Jane asked, pointing to my laptop bag on the kitchen counter. “I asked your professors to e-mail you some modified lesson plans.”
“It’s Sunday,” I noted. “Half the time when I contact my professors, I end up asking them in person to check their e-mail.”
Jane smiled and patted my head. “Sweetie, I’m scarier than you are.”
“Good point.” I took my laptop from the counter and opened up the Wi-Fi settings, finding one network labeled “Get Your Own Wi-Fi, Shirley.”
“Who’s Shirley?” I asked.
“The only neighbor I have close enough to try to leech off my Wi-Fi signal.” Jane sighed. “She’s eerily talented at guessing passwords.”
“Well, what did you expect with a password like ‘draculagirl’?” Georgie asked. “Honestly.”
“Well, now it’s just a string of nonsensical numbers and letters with one ampersand thrown in,” Jane said, writing the password down for me.
I logged on to my e-mail and found that I did have several weekly assignment lists for my classes waiting in my in-box. I had a lot of reading to catch up on, and my history professor did not accept “sternum was crushed by a flying barbell weight” as a good reason for turning in my midterm paper late.
I also found several (dozen) messages from Keagan and Morgan, plus Twitter and Facebook notifications, and Keagan had actually tried to reach me on my rarely used Tumblr account, which was just sort of sad. The general theme of their messages was “Are you OK? Where are you? Tell us where they’re keeping you, and we will bust you out!”
I replied to all that I was fine, I couldn’t say where I was, but I would Skype as soon as I was allowed. And when I hit reply, a big red “X” showed up on my screen, with the words “Unauthorized Contact” in a very confrontational font.
“Uh, Jane,” I said, “did you install nanny software on my computer?”
Jane’s lips pulled back in a grimace. “Only for when you try to e-mail someone who’s not one of your professors. Or log on to social media. Or type the words ‘Half-Moon Hollow’ anywhere.”
“You’ve cyber-gagged me?”
“Only for a little while,” Jane promised. “Until things have calmed down and you’ve proved that we can trust you.”
I wasn’t even going to pretend that being put on Internet training wheels didn’t hurt my feelings.
“And my phone?” I asked through gritted teeth. “Wait, where is my phone?”
Gabriel sighed and reached into his wallet, withdrawing a twenty and handing it to his wife. She snickered and stuffed it into her pocket. Georgie waggled her fingers, and Gabriel slid another twenty across the table and into her little paw.
“Uh, what was that?”
“We said that you’d ask for your phone within an hour of waking up, and he said you wouldn’t,” Georgie told me.
Gabriel was sulking. A lot.
“Gabriel is a little out of touch with today’s youth,” Jane told me. “Frankly, I was a little surprised that you didn’t ask for your phone last night.”
“I had a lot on my mind,” I told her. “So, seriously, where’s my phone?”
Again with the cringing from Jane. “Well, since it was in your back pocket when you were thrown against the building, it was crushed. And with all of your wounds, there was a lot of ‘you’ on it. It wasn’t salvageable.”
“That will not be covered under my protection plan,” I muttered.
“No, it won’t. But I got you a replacement,” she said, sliding a square chunk of plastic across the table.
“This is a KidPhone,” I said, lifting the phonelet with its three huge buttons. Seriously, it was one very small step up from one of those preschooler toy phones where the anthropomorphic eyes moved back and forth when you dialed. “It only calls three numbers.”
“Yes, V-one-one, the Council office, and my cell,” Jane said. “Keep it with you at all times. Prove that we can trust you in terms of contacting the outside world, and you’ll get a phone with four buttons.”
I pushed up from the table, pointing the block of princess-pink plastic at her. “Is this because I laughed when Ophelia fried your phone? If so, this is bull—”
I stopped suddenly as bubbles of some strange awareness rippled through my chest, making the hair on my neck stand up. My head snapped up toward the ceiling. I dropped the KidPhone and stumbled toward the stairs.
“What is this?” I whispered to Jane, who was watching me with bemusement.
“Ben’s rising,” she said, following me to the second floor. “I felt it with Jamie. You’re his sire, so you’re getting a sort of supernatural text alert as he wakes up . . . again, way, way ahead of schedule. But this only works when your childe is rising, and then it goes away.”
“That’s nice, but I wouldn’t get a supernatural text alert on my KidPhone, because it doesn’t get texts.”
Yeah, it was inappropriate to bitch about my phone at a moment like this, but honestly, I needed something to take my mind off my nerves. How angry was Ben going to be when he woke up? How many heavy objects was he going to throw at me? Was he going to try to bite me to get back at me? Would that mean I would be a double-weirdo vampire? Would we just keep waking up and biting each other in an ugly cycle forever?
“Let it go,” Jane said as we approached Ben’s door. She unlocked several dead bolts on the door and cracked it. “You should probably let him see me first.”
“So he can imprint on you like a baby duck?” I asked.
“No, so he doesn’t panic, because the last time he saw you, you were gnawing on his arm.”
I scratched the back of my neck. “Point taken.”
Ben was still lying across the bed, quilt pulled up to his chin. He hadn’t moved at all during the day, which made sense, I supposed. The dead didn’t develop restless leg syndrome.
Jane motioned me back. I stepped against the wall and watched as she moved toward the bed. Ben bolted upright and, seeing Jane hunching over him, swung out at her face.
“Why does everybody keep trying to punch me?”
“Maybe don’t stand right over new vampires as they wake up,” I whispered at her.
Gabriel appeared in the doorway, trying to lean against the frame all casual-like, though thanks to my newly keen eyesight, I could see every muscle was tensed. Georgie, on the other hand, seemed to be playing “Mario Kart” at an ear-splitting volume in her room.
“Ben, just stay calm,” Jane said in a soft, gentle voice. “It’s me, Jane. You know me. And you know I’m not going to hurt you. So just stay calm.”
Ben squinted at her, tilting his head. Once again, the vampire upgrade package was in full effect. Ben had been cute before, but now, well, he was still really cute. But there were dark shadows under his eyes, giving them a slightly dangerous glint. His skin, which had already been pretty damn nice, was perfectly smooth and had this pearly sheen to it. Also, his T-shirt seemed to fit a lot better than I remembered.
Damn.
Did being turned change your muscle mass? I poked my bicep. Nope.
“Jane, why are you talking to me like I’ve suffered a head injury?” Ben asked her. “Have I suffered a head injury? Is that why my head hurts?”
“No, Ben. I’m talking to you like this because I don’t want you to freak out and break my guest room like the undead Incredible Hulk.”
“Why am I in your guest room?”
Remembering how claustrophobic I’d felt when the shades were closed, I hit the button that raised them. And that was a mistake, because it took Ben’s attention off Jane and drew it to me. His green eyes narrowed, and his fangs dropped.
“You!” he grunted, throwing the blankets aside and hopping out of bed in one quick motion. He landed on his feet and stared down at his own body, as if he didn’t recognize it.
“Don’t freak out,” I said, reaching toward him.
Ben scrambled back and up the wall, hitting the ceiling and clinging to it like a spider. “What the hell?” he yelled. “How am I doing this?”
“Undead Hulk!” Jane grumbled at me.
“Ben, calm down,” I told him. “Wait—can I do that, too?”
“Probably,” Gabriel said.
“What the hell did you do to me?” Ben barked from his corner of the ceiling. “Am I a vampire? Are you telling me I’m a vampire right now?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What do you mean, you’re not sure? You bit me!”
“Yeah, but I didn’t give you any of my blood. A bite alone shouldn’t have turned you. And we shouldn’t have woken up after just one night, but we did. We’re basically vampire unicorns, which is sort of fun,” I said, wincing.
“Probably not what he wants to hear,” Gabriel murmured.
“I’ve been in that unicorn room for too long,” I muttered back.
“It’s been one night,” Jane retorted.
“Could we please stop talking about unicorns?” Ben shouted. “And could someone tell me how to get off of the ceiling? And why am I yelling so much?”
“It’s a traumatic situation,” I told him. “I went through the same thing when I woke up . . . last night. I’m probably not the person you want to hear this from right now.”
“No,” he shot back.
“I am really screwing up this sire thing,” I told Jane. “Maybe I should just go.”