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For all the readers who asked,
“But what about Jamie and Ophelia?”
1
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Vampires are solitary creatures, trained over the centuries to survive by secrecy and isolation. Expecting them to live in a dormitory situation is a recipe for bloodshed and disaster.
—Big Vamp on Campus: Strategies to Successfully Integrate the Undead into Postsecondary Education
Four hundred years spent sowing terror and discord across the globe, and now I was forced to use a communal shower.
This was what happened when you got overconfident. Ophelia Lambert, acknowledged teen queen of vampires in the western Kentucky region, humbled by hubris. Since my time as a simple precolonial schoolgirl, I’d built up my personal empire of secrets kept and favors owed. I’d developed a perfectly respectable network of lackeys and informants. I’d developed skills that made experts in the none-too-gentle arts of torture twitch with envy, even while they cowered in fear. I rose to power in the infancy of the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead, when it was a ragtag group of vampires meeting in secret dungeons by torchlight. I remembered it being a hell of a lot more fun back then, before we had to play “domesticated” for the humans.
Despite my body’s permanent adolescence and slight stature, I was seen as death incarnate. I’d been called the Terror of Amsterdam as an endearment. And then I lost it all. Because I’d filed inappropriate expense reports.
The Council’s financial department was incredibly unforgiving when it came to undeserved reimbursements.
The Terror of Amsterdam was now the Al Capone of vampires. A terrifically violent logistical genius brought down by pencil pushers. Personally, I thought this was unfair on both counts, as poor Alphonse had been a bit of a softy—particularly generous with women and children—and had trusted his taxes to his accountants. I’d done my own paperwork. Let that be a lesson to me. Never leave a paper trail.
Paper trails led directly to shared shower facilities.
I shuddered as I stepped into the chamber of horrors just a few doors down from my own (again, shared) bedroom. The slap of my rubber flip-flops echoed off the beige tiles, making the room seem much larger than the eight shower stalls provided for the thirty female vampire students living in the wing. I didn’t necessarily need the flip-flops. Vampires couldn’t contract athlete’s foot, but honestly, it was the principle of the thing.
New Dawn Hall, a recently completed residence hall added to the far side of the University of Kentucky campus, had been built with coed, commingled living in mind. The college was eager to be one of the first in the country to prove that all students, pulsed and nonpulsed alike, could coexist peacefully in an environment that nurtured such relationships, attracting the growing undead student population and their generously distributed federal loans.
I supposed New Dawn was a pleasant enough place to sleep between classes. The building was unique in that only three floors showed aboveground, containing a special cafeteria catering to dead and undead tastes, a study room including soundproof pods, and the administrative offices required by the people who “supervised” us on campus.
Below ground level, the floors alternated between living and undead students, male and female, like a layer cake of “living” space. My undead floormates tried not to take it personally that the doors leading to the human floors were made of silver-reinforced steel three times the thickness of the vampires’ doors. They tried to see it as a protection for the humans, much as the carefully crafted HVAC system (funneling the human students’ rather pungent odors out of the building) were a protection for the vampires. Living belowground was supposed to make the humans appreciate how it felt for us vampires to be without the sun. Of course, they could walk out into the sun anytime they wanted, but being without windows certainly seemed to make them edgy.
There were some perks. Every window on the aboveground floors was equipped with light-tight shutters that activated at the slightest hint of ultraviolet light. A barista in the lobby prepared all the donor or bottled blood a vampire could need before night classes. The main lounge on the second sublevel featured board games from every decade since 1850 to encourage play among the various age groups.
I hated it. I hated it all so much. I’d lived on my own for nearly four centuries, going and doing as I pleased, sharing my space with no one but my little sister, Georgie. The only things that made life tolerable were the little luxuries I allowed myself under my new Council-approved personal budget.
I squeezed my little bottle of imported, hand-blended body wash, personally prescribed for my scent by the parfumeur in Paris I’d used for more than a century. It was sinfully expensive, but the scent reminded me of the deep, misty woods that had surrounded our home in the old country, one of the few pleasant associations I had with that godforsaken patch of dirt. Also, Jamie liked to follow the elusive traces of amber and floral notes until his nose was buried in the creases behind my neck, my knees, and any number of more interesting locations, so it was worth every penny. It was important for any woman to have a signature scent, but for a vampire, maintaining that air of mystery and allure was barely scratching the surface of essentials.
Unfortunately, when I squeezed the bottle, a watery, weak green substance splattered against my bath puff, leaving the faintest hint of scent. The normally thick, luxuriant foam was replaced by what could only technically be considered lather in that there was a bubble or two.
I hissed an irritated, unnecessary breath through elongating fangs.
Brianna.
My campus-assigned roommate, Brianna Carstairs, was a recently turned wannabe goth from West Virginia who called herself Galadriel Nightshade. She actually referred to herself as a “night childe,” in a totally unironic fashion.
Having been turned by her boyfriend in some sort of prom night pact gone tacky, Brianna was eighteen years old, with all of the entitlement you’d expect of someone who called growing up in a gated community outside a place called Shepherdstown her “living hell.” In addition to her deplorably messy feeding habits and a tendency to lose any object she was not currently holding and then accusing me of stealing it, Brianna also helped herself to anything on my side of the room. Whether it was my Fang-Brite toothpaste or my vintage Chanel purse, if she felt she needed it more than I did, she took it. I once laid out an outfit on my bed to wear to my evening classes, only to turn around and find her wearing it!
And now she’d used most of my hideously expensive imported body wash and thinned it out with water, hoping I wouldn’t notice. Like I was some insipid suburban parent too stupid to keep track of the levels in her vodka bottle. This time, she’d gone too far.
I rinsed off the thin bubbles and slapped my fuzzy pink robe around my damp body. My superhuman grip twisted the metal shower stall handle into a useless coil as I burst out of the tiny cubicle. As angry and righteous as any conquering queen, I strode down the hallway, terry cloth clutched at the neck. I would have my revenge. I would grind fiberglass into dust and sprinkle it into her sheets. I would inject colloidal silver into her blood supply so she would flail helplessly as her esophagus melted. I would tie her to a chair and make her watch Highlander 2: The Quickening on a constant loop with her eyes ta
ped open.
When Jane Jameson-Nightengale had insisted on sending me to the college for my rehabilitation, I’d begged the Council’s upper echelons to let me live in off-campus housing. There were any number of lovely, vampire-friendly apartment buildings near campus. But no, I’d been informed that learning to live in harmony with humans in less luxurious circumstances would encourage personal growth. And I’d been denied a private room, because the Council (Jane) thought that sharing a nine-by-nine cell with another person would be yet another opportunity to build my character.
I had enough damned character. What I didn’t have was my body wash.
I threw open the bathroom door, face in full snarl. Several of the girls from my floor, female vampires ranging from eighteen to one hundred and eighty, were scattered around the hall, chatting happily, discussing assignments or even the upcoming Wildcats basketball season. But when they saw the furious expression on my face, they all stopped talking and ducked into their rooms, like a herd of antelope scattering when they sensed a lion coming near. Doors clicked shut. Whispers echoed through cheap pressboard. Good. It was nice to know I hadn’t completely lost my touch.
I turned the corner toward room 617 and nearly mowed down a tall masculine body, a tall masculine body that happened to smell very familiar: fresh-cut grass and leather.
Jamie.
I relaxed against him. Sweet, affable Jamie Lanier, with his all-American farm-boy good looks and easy smile, had caught my eye a few years before, when he was still human. Our courtship had been the stuff of teenage vampire movies. I’d watched him from afar, coveting his sun-drenched beauty and his open, sincere smile. He was so unlike anyone I’d ever wanted, so genuinely kind and warm. A decent person. I hadn’t met a good person in such a long time that it took me months to realize that his kind nature wasn’t a carefully constructed ruse.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t realized that my sister, Georgie, had noticed the change in my habits. I hadn’t realized that she’d followed me out to spy on me while I spied on Jamie. My sister was less than ten years old when a now perfectly treatable illness forced me to choose between losing her and facing the dire consequences of turning a child into a vampire. Her small size had made it difficult for her to see over the steering wheel when she tried to drive during her surveillance. She’d hit Jamie in the process, right in front of Jane Jameson-Nightengale’s stupid bookshop, and Jane turned him.
Jane’s presence in Jamie’s life as his impromptu sire and mentor made getting to know him much more difficult. She and I had never quite seen eye to eye on, well, anything. Because of our history and . . . reasons, so many reasons. Still, I had worked around her and found that Jamie was noble and sweet and genuine enough to overcome even my cynical nature. I liked that about him. I was mercenary enough for both of us. I’d tried relationships with alpha-male types, and they never worked out. They spent all their time trying to prove they were smarter, stronger, more formidable than I was, when their time would have been better spent proving that they were worth my time in bed.
I’d taken full advantage of my appearance throughout my long life. I was tall and willowy, with long golden waves that framed my cameo-oval face. In the New World, I’d wandered into villages pretending to be a poor lost lamb, separated from my family, needing shelter for the night. In the nineteen fifties, I wore poodle skirts and ankle socks, keeping dirty old men in flannel suits mesmerized with the swing of my ponytail while I eyed their jugulars. With Jamie, I’d had to play to my sneakier, more underhanded skill set, approaching him as a concerned older vampire, hoping to make his transition easier.
I’d tamped down my more aggressive tendencies, presenting Jamie with a younger, more vulnerable version of myself. The girl who had befriended an ancient vampire on the ship taking her family to the New World and let him change her to avoid dying of some now easily treatable disease. I wanted him to see the sweetness I’d worked so long to hide in order to keep my enemies at bay.
After spending time with Jamie, I saw the depths hidden behind the sunny exterior. He had pain he never revealed to anyone. At first, I’d thought he was angry over his life being cut short in its prime, but the reaction of his neighbors to his condition and the abandonment by his family were his greatest hurts.
Being with Jamie helped me make contact with the goodness I thought I’d lost long ago. In some ways, only detectable to Georgie, he made me a better person. Coincidentally, he also made me a desperate person, hence hiring the witch to put the magical hit on someone I saw as a rival, leading to my dismissal from the Council and my exile to postsecondary Siberia and Georgie’s fostering with Jane for the foreseeable future. It was all one big circle.
Jamie’s quick reflexes landed me in the protective cradle of his arms. He peered down at me with his wide, bright smile.
“Hey, babe . . . Uh, you’re not wearing clothes,” he said, steadying my shoulders as we untangled limbs and terry cloth.
“I’m aware of that,” I growled, though I could feel my fangs receding just from the comfort of Jamie’s presence. He chuckled and gave me a kiss softer than I deserved in my bloodlust. I lifted a self-conscious hand to my mussed hair, curled slightly by the shower steam.
I supposed I should be grateful that I’d managed to sling on my robe despite my fit of pique. At least I wouldn’t become a dorm oddity like Naked Jason, the sophomore who insisted on walking to his floor’s shower room wearing nothing but the towel slung over his shoulder. And when the dorm staff tried to intervene, he claimed that he was a nudist and that trying to force him to wear clothes in his home environment was a violation of his civil rights.
“You OK?” Jamie asked, as another boy I’d barely noticed before bent to pick up the shower things I’d dropped.
“No, I am not OK,” I told him. “Brianna used my body wash and added so much water it barely qualifies as soap. So I’m going to get some duct tape, wait for her to fall asleep, and apply it to her eyebrows until she can’t make surprised expressions anymore.”
“You said the same thing when she drank your last Faux Type O.”
“And if you hadn’t kept me from going to the hardware store, I would have pulled it off,” I grumbled. “Literally. I would have pulled off her eyebrows. And kept them as trophies.”
“Yes, and it would have been amazing, but hey, look who I ran into,” he said in that oh-so-subtle manner he had when changing subjects. He slung an arm around a tall human boy with sandy hair and bright green eyes. He was smart enough to take a step away from me when I gave him a halfhearted smile.
I liked him already.
I recalled his face from somewhere but clearly hadn’t cared enough when we met to commit his name to memory. This was a common problem when you’d lived for a few hundred years. And people got so offended when you didn’t remember meeting them at some lame party two centuries before that I’d perfected the art of pretending to know who the person was but being too aloof too refer to him or her by name.
But Jamie knew about this trick, like he knew about and/or blithely ignored most of my tricks. So he rolled his eyes a bit and nudged me. “Ben Overby, remember? Gigi’s ex.”
Right, Gigi Scanlon. The reason I was sequestered in this educational exile in the first place.
“Oh.” I tried not to make a disdainful face at the cute little human. He couldn’t help his horrible taste in women. “Lovely to see you again, Ben.”
“Nice to see you, too,” he said, with a cautious little smile. What was it about Half-Moon Hollow that fostered such “aw, shucks” harmless charm in its young men? There must be some affable Y chromosome in that very shallow gene pool. Ben had the same sort of sincerity as Jamie, highlighted by a healthy pink flush to his cheeks. Was he so intimidated by me that he was blushing? Or did he not appreciate my adorable but oblivious beau’s reference to him as “Gigi’s ex”?
One reason I could enjoy . . . and the othe
r I could enjoy and use to my advantage. I smiled sweetly, and Ben relaxed his shoulders ever so slightly.
“I ran into Ben in the laundry room at my building. Turns out he lives two floors down from me. We thought we’d stop in and see you, and give you this book, before we head over to the gym to meet the guys.”
As Jamie handed me a textbook from our shared biology class, I tried not to let my irritation show. He had been spending a lot of time with “the guys” lately, a group of equally genial but somewhat oblivious humans and vampires living in his apartment building. They hung out at Jamie’s apartment, watching sports and talking about sports and going online to play fantasy versions of sports. All sports. All the time. I tried not to begrudge Jamie these friendships, even if they did take up most of his nights since the semester started. After all, he’d lost contact with so many of his high school friends after he was turned into a vampire. And being sequestered at Jane’s house during his first year or so with fangs, he’d only had middle-aged vampires for company. He was making up for lost time, trying to adjust to this new college experience that human children found intimidating enough even without vampire-related issues.
I was trying to be understanding about the situation. But honestly, so much sports.
Also, I didn’t really need the reminder that Jamie was allowed to live in a nice, vampire-friendly, off-campus apartment. Yet another step on Jane’s part to keep her childe separated from me.
“Jamie, sweetheart, you do remember that we don’t need to go to the gym, yes? Our bodies never change form, and we have superstrength.”
Jamie shrugged. “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a good workout.”
I shook my head. I loved him, but sometimes I didn’t understand him.
“I am not spotting for you,” Ben said, in a tone that implied he’d learned the hard way. “And I came to see my friend Jason, who lives on one of the human floors.”