Making candy was a terrifying business. But bending to Iris’s insane holiday agenda was one of the many ways I was attempting to soften the blow of telling my sister that I was about to dig myself even deeper into the world of vampires. Any doubts I’d had about taking the job had pretty much evaporated when I opened the envelope containing the “undisclosed” portions of the Council’s salary and benefits proposal. It was a comfort to know that while I was selling out, I was doing it in a big way and in style.
Pretending to enjoy crafting confection seemed underhanded and sneaky, but it was on the advice of Cal, who knew exactly how to make underhanded and sneaky work without being obvious.
My brother-in-law experienced a strange mix of pride and horror when I showed him the enormous Council potential employee information packet/required liability waiver. (It took up two three-ring binders.) He got as far as the celebratory hug but then immediately informed me that he would not, in fact, tell Iris about it for me. I even pulled the wounded-baby-deer face, and it had no effect. His love and support only went so far, it seemed.
Cal did, however, give me a whole raft of advice on how he would handle the “buttering up” stage of informing Iris, including participating in her holiday rituals without complaint and traveling to a specialty story in Murphy to pick up her favorite dessert blood, Sangre Select. He also gave me a precisely folded list from his shirt pocket and slid it across the table.
“What’s this?” I’d asked.
“It’s a to-do list. I may not be happy about you taking the job, but that doesn’t mean I will leave you unprepared. I would like you to study these subjects before you begin working for the Council. I have arranged for you to work with several tutors near UK’s campus.”
I skimmed the list. “Small-blade defense, Brazilian jiujitsu lessons, crossbow proficiency?”
Cal shrugged his broad shoulders. “Given the mishaps that befell your sister during the early days of our relationship, I thought it would be better for you to build certain skill sets before your arrival in the Council office.”
“How do you even find a crossbow tutor? Troll Craigslist for retired Hunger Games participants?”
“Gigi, for my sake, please take this seriously. Working at the Council office means that you will stay local, which will make Iris happy. And I will be able to monitor your workplace safety and what Iris called the ‘general ooginess’ of your coworkers, which will make me happy. But there are so very, very many things about this situation that upset me. Humor my need to keep you safe.”
“I would like to think you two will grow out of this whole ‘treat Gigi like an incompetent child’ thing, but you never, ever will, huh?”
“Probably not, no,” he said, putting his arm around me and squeezing me to his side. “But to be fair, you should have seen this coming years ago.”
I leaned my head against his shoulder, thinking back to that night in high school when Cal scared the hell out of Ben before our date and then presented me with my very own bright pink Taser, which I’d dubbed Mr. Sparky. “Yeah, you’re right.”
So I was humoring both Iris and Cal with mock enthusiasm for homemade caramel and Brazilian martial arts. I hoped I was better at the martial arts, because so far, I was a failure as a confectioner. I had managed to melt chocolate chips in a double boiler without hurting anyone. I thought that should count for something.
Jane peered over the stove, waving her hand over the now-smoking pot. “Unfortunately, while the three of you have been standing there debating, your pot of sugary goodness has burned.”
Tess sighed, wrinkling her nose at the acrid, too-sweet smell of burned sugar. “Crap.”
“Even the best chefs get distracted, Tess,” Miranda assured her, using a hot pad to whisk the pot off the stove and drop it into the sink.
“And to be fair, you’re putting up with more distractions than usual,” Andrea added from under a surgeon’s mask as she stirred the caramels melting in yet another double boiler. After a particularly colorful incident in Tess’s restaurant involving key lime pie, Andrea was not taking any chances with the smell of the candy ingredients making her sick. Apparently, neither willpower nor nostalgia for desserts could overcome vampire physiology.
“OK, I am putting myself in time-out before I create more sucrose chaos.” I snagged a takeout container from the fridge and retreated to the table. Iris didn’t like the idea of my cooking dinner for myself (because of the danger to myself and others), so she’d arranged for Miranda to deliver dinner for me from a different restaurant each night. Even I could eat only so much of Tess’s magical mac ’n’ cheese without a marked difference in the way my jeans fit.
And while I had developed a taste for sushi at college, where you could get two amazing rolls for ten dollars around the corner at Jasmine Palace, the same quality was not to be found in Half-Moon Hollow. Tonight’s Philadelphia roll stuffed with canned salmon just didn’t tickle my tastebuds, so I was sticking with the veggie roll. Fortunately, I’d already talked Miranda out of picking up tikka masala for me the next day. I felt strongly that people should not buy Indian food from a gas station.
While I chowed down on veggies and rice, a lively debate broke out at the stove over whether the burned stock pot could be salvaged. This was the second batch of candy we’d ruined during Iris’s brilliant “candy exchange” using my mother’s recipes. Mom wasn’t a talented cook when it came to meat and potatoes—I mean, the woman made “moist-free pot roast”—but she was some sort of sugar savant. Every December, she would spend weeks making big batches of fudge, bourbon balls, and soda-cracker candy, which was saltine-covered toffee topped by a layer of chocolate and nuts. She’d divide the candy into pretty decorative tins and take it to neighbors, teachers, friends from church, and anybody she might owe an apology to for the previous year’s events.
I was failing at making my mom’s weird soda-cracker candy. Jolene brought a recipe for candied bacon truffles, which sounded disgusting but she swore were delicious. Miranda brought brownie mix and premade cookie dough, because, unlike the rest of us, she knew her limits. And Tess was just trying to keep us from hurting ourselves. Whatever edible product we managed to make would sustain the humans during the holiday celebrations. Anything left over would go to Jolene’s pack, who would eat anything.
That was another fun fact shared with me during the previous year. Jolene not only had the whole sultry, Angelina Jolie look-alike package working, but she was also a werewolf. Because all ridiculously hot women deserve superpowers, too. The karmic imbalance put me in a snit for about five minutes, before Jane pointed out that the trade-off Jolene made for these gifts was a twangy backwoods accent that could peel paint. Sometimes, when she got excited, she sounded like Dolly Parton on helium.
Werewolves, unlike vampires, were not “out” to the human community yet, still waiting to see how the vampires’ transition panned out. And even more unlike vampires, they enjoyed carbs, and fats, and proteins, pretty much all foods, as shifting back and forth between two feet and four was a real drain on the metabolism.
“Do we have to use the candy thermometer again?” I asked. “It frightens me.”
Tess nodded. “We’re supposed to make caramel for the chocolate turtles.”
“Screw it,” I huffed, tossing my takeout container into the trash. “I went to the store earlier and bought a three-pound bag of caramels. Let’s melt those bad boys in the microwave.”
Tess clutched at her chest as if to ward off palpitations. “I can’t believe you just said that in front of me.”
“We won’t tell the homemade-candy police, we promise,” Andrea told her.
Tess pouted more than a little as she plopped down at the table to unwrap the caramels. I couldn’t blame her.
“I never understood why it was necessary to individually wrap caramels when they were already in a bag. It’s one of life’s great, an
noying mysteries,” I muttered.
“Uh, because they are sticky, and if you didn’t wrap them, you’d just have one big lump of caramels,” Jane suggested.
“Mystery solved,” I said. Eager to put Tess in a better mood, I asked, “So, Tess, how’s the restaurant? The mac and cheese alone should keep your tables filled.”
“Great!” Tess enthused. “Folks seem to like having both vampire and human menu options. Word of mouth has spread around the vampire community, and we’ve gotten a few write-ups in Southern Living and Undead Epicure. And if the guy claiming to be a production assistant with Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives wasn’t a prank caller, we might end up with a segment on the Food Network. We’re packed every night. Jolene’s been on me about maybe opening a second location in Murphy, but I’m thinking about something a little smaller. Food trucks are all the rage now. So maybe I could open a truck with a limited Southern Comforts menu and warm blood on tap. We could set up at community events and the Main Street Square on summer weekends. It’s still a risk, but it’s not quite the same level of failure if I have to close down a food truck as it is to lose a restaurant.”
Jane grinned, nudging Tess gently (for a vampire). “And you and Sam?”
“Oh, Lord.” Miranda rolled her bottle-green eyes toward the ceiling.
“What?” Jane asked.
“You’ve got that unintentionally smug look that married people get when they’re weaseling marriage plans out of their single friends,” Tess told her.
“That’s not—I didn’t . . . smug?” Jane sputtered. Andrea gave her a hard stare. “OK, I was a little smug.”
“You were a smidge smug,” Jolene agreed.
“We’re happy with the way things are right now,” Tess said. “Unless I get turned into a vampire—which, given the fact that I make my living as a chef, isn’t all that likely—and live another hundred years, I don’t think I will ever see the day when Sam and I are simultaneously ready for marriage. His divorce left him really messed up, and my fiancé leaving me for a dental hygienist didn’t do me any favors in the trust department, either. Really, we’re both happy this way. We love each other. We enjoy living together. We don’t see the reason to bring paperwork and special jewelry into it.”
Unlike every girl on my dorm floor who made the same antimarriage speech, it sounded like Tess actually meant it. It was enough to give me hope that I might not be as romantically messed up as I believed. Maybe Tess was proof that waiting for the right guy and the right time was the mature, rational thing to do. Then again, Tess once injected Sam’s blood bags with essence of ghost chili to prove a point, so maybe she wasn’t the best role model.
Also, Miranda was twitching, actually experiencing facial tics, as she was unwrapping caramels. She wouldn’t look up, wouldn’t make eye contact, and her hands were doing this weird clenching thing that was not productive in terms of unwrapping candy.
“Miranda, are you OK?” Iris slid the caramels closer to her, then thought better of it and pushed them toward me. “Miranda . . . why do you look like you’re about to explode?”
Miranda attempted a casual shrug and failed miserably. “It’s nothing.”
Tess’s lips twitched as she measured out a second batch of butter and sugar into a saucepan. “Miranda.”
“Nothing!”
“Spill it, or we’ll have Jane poke through your brain,” Andrea told her.
Jane protested, “That’s— Hey, I wouldn’t use my— OK, yeah, I totally would,” Jane told Miranda. “Tell, or I will scan you like airport security.”
Miranda was so sheepish it was almost sad. “I maybe sort of found an engagement ring in Collin’s closet . . . behind some of his boxes . . . under some blankets. I just stumbled across it.” She covered her flushed cheeks with her hands. “Everybody in the room is staring at me right now, huh?”
“Yes,” we said, all at once.
“So, yeah, Collin and I could be getting married soon . . . Or I totally misinterpreted the ring I found, and Collin has a second family somewhere.” She turned to Jane. “You would see that coming, right?”
“ ‘Second family’ would probably come up, in terms of guilty, nagging thoughts,” Jane assured her.
The second round of butter-sugar mix came to a bubble on the stove, and Tess turned her attention to it. It was a convenient way to escape the most awkward conversation in the world. Andrea turned to the still-tweaky Miranda to say, “It will be fine. Collin will propose with a ring that I’m sure is very pretty.”
“Soooo pretty.” Miranda sighed. “It has little roses carved into the band and everything.”
Iris stretched her arm across the table and very deliberately, very gently squeezed Miranda’s hand. “I’ll help you plan a lovely vampire-friendly wedding that even your parents won’t be able to find fault with.”
Miranda snorted. “Good luck with that.”
“It will be perfect,” Iris promised.
“Someone change the subject before I start having a panic attack,” Miranda said.
“So, how’s Nola?” I asked, turning to Andrea. “Dick has to be a little disappointed not to have his baby girl around for the holidays.”
“Still making this face when he calls her his ‘baby girl.’ ” Andrea screwed her face into a parody of an embarrassing grimace. Nola was the granddaughter of Mr. Wainwright, Jane’s former boss and Dick’s several-times-great-grandson. She’d come to the Hollow a year or so before from her home in Ireland on a supernatural scavenger hunt of magical artifacts for her coven. She’d found much more in unexpected vampire ancestors and a local shapeshifter, Jed, with whom she lived whenever they were stateside. And when they weren’t on this side of the pond, Jed was traveling to Ireland to stay with Nola’s family.
Andrea continued, “Well, we’re learning that we have to share Nola with the other side of the family. The McGavocks were really nice about her spending Christmas with us last year, so it’s only fair that she travels to see them this year.”
“You’ve been reading books on how to be a reasonable, not annoying grandparent, haven’t you?”
She nodded. “Yes, I have. But Nola will be home this summer, so you’ll see her then.”
“You’ll be home this summer, Geeg?” Tess asked, brows raised. “No internship lined up yet?”
I glanced toward Iris. I had not had the chance to properly prepare Iris for my job announcement. And in front of all of her girlfriends was definitely not the way to do it. “Uh . . . not yet.”
Tess deftly poured the toffee mixture from the saucepan over a baking sheet lined with soda crackers, spreading it evenly on every square. “I’d think that the computer companies would be lined up to hire you,” she said.
“Uh . . .” I hesitated, shoving one of the spare uncandied crackers into my mouth to stall. I really needed to learn how to lie.
“It does seem sort of weird that you and your adviser haven’t come up with something,” Iris said. “Your supervisor at NetSecure gave you a glowing reference. Cal actually got weepy when he read it, he was so proud.”
Jane stared at me, eyebrows arched, and she chirped, “Right, well, you can always work at the store this summer if you don’t find anything else. Hey, Iris, what’s next on the candy list?”
This was one of the few advantages of hanging out with a mind-reader: she knew when to change the subject.
“Turtles and then Jolene’s bacon truffles,” Iris said, checking her carefully mapped-out candy timetable. She turned to Jolene. “You are sure that bacon truffles won’t actually kill people, right?”
“They haven’t so far,” Jolene said with a shrug.
As the others began crisping the bacon and melting even more chocolate, Jane leaned close and whispered, “I heard that. And it’s not the only advantage of spending time with me. I also provide sparkling conversation.”
I snickered. Jane patted my shoulder and moved to the stove to mourn the loss of bacon from her diet.
Meanwhile, Tess was staring at the toffee, waiting for it to set before she poured a layer of melted chocolate over it. “Does this look right, Iris?”
Shrugging, Iris eyed the candy and pinched a tiny bit off the edge of the concoction.
“Iris, no!” Jane cried as Iris stuck the candy in her mouth.
Iris blanched as soon as the caramel hit her lips. “Aw, damn it, I forgot,” Iris said, spitting the toffee into the wastebasket. She stuck her head under the faucet and ruthlessly rinsed the taste of toffee (or whatever rancid, rotten taste she sensed when her vampire tastebuds detected toffee) from her mouth.
I nicked a sliver off the toffee and tasted it. “It’s just right, Tess. Just like Mom used to make.” I turned to Iris. “And let that be a lesson to you about which family traditions should be abandoned. Soda-cracker candy is just weird.”
“Rookie mistake,” Andrea said, shaking her head.
“Shut it, you two,” Iris grumbled, staring glumly while Tess poured a thick sheet of semisweet chocolate over the barely hardened toffee. “I was just trying to give Geeg the sort of Christmas we had when we were kids.”
“I know, I know,” I said, putting my arm around her. I smiled when she didn’t flinch or duck her head away from me to avoid the temptation of my yummy human smell. “And I love you for it. But you need to relax, or you will carry on another one of the family’s traditions: Mom’s holiday meltdown moments.”
Iris laughed. “They were legendary. Remember the time she threw a pecan pie out the front door because Dad pinched a couple of nuts from the top?”
I cackled. “And she hit approaching carolers!”
“From our church! Mom didn’t know they were coming.” Iris giggled, wiping at her eyes before the pinkish tears could form on her lashes. She sighed. “OK, you’re right. I’ll try to dial it down. I think I’m just agitated because I miss chocolate. Of all the things I miss about being human, chocolate ranks at the top of the list.”