The Accidental Sire (Half-Moon Hollow Series)
Author: Molly Harper
Date: 2017-07-24 00:00:00+00:00
Description: In Molly Harper's newest paranormal romantic comedy, Ben, Gigi's old boyfriend, must find a way to save his new love after a freak Ultimate Frisbee accident. But will she want to live after she finds out how Ben had to save her? In this exciting addition to Molly Harper’s beloved Half-Moon Hollow series, the focus is on Gigi’s ex-boyfriend Ben. When his new girlfriend is killed in a freak Ultimate Frisbee accident, he’s determined to save her, no matter the cost, even if it means bringing her into the darkness of vampire life!
Publisher: Pocket Star

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

For Caroline, who made dorm living tolerable

1

There is no such thing as a dignified accidental vampire transformation.

—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire

I was dead. And then I wasn’t.

I liked dead better.

I catapulted from absolute dark, inky silence to being completely and unfortunately aware. I blinked into the soft light of the cool, windowless room where I’d slept. And while it was perfectly nice, it was not my dorm room. Where was I? Why did my head hurt so bad? Like I could feel every vein in my head, and each one was angry.

I rolled over on the strange bed, with its crisp white sheets and hospital rails. Had I been in an accident? I didn’t recognize the room, but it certainly wasn’t a dorm room. I would know if my dorm housed a medical wing, wouldn’t I?

I bolted upright and immediately regretted it. My head felt like it was being clamped between Tom Hardy’s muscular thighs . . .

“Argh, I should be so lucky,” I mumbled, flopping back onto the bed. I was wearing my favorite purple Adventure Time pajamas. Someone had taken the time to braid my hair into pigtails.

Other than the headache, I felt OK. I wasn’t nauseated. In fact, I was hungry . . . well, no, I was thirsty. My tongue was dry and gritty, begging for something, anything, to drink. I would wrestle Morgan to the ground for one of her disgustingly healthy “green machine” smoothies. Usually I was of the opinion that kale was God’s way of making CrossFitters suffer karmic payback for all those humblebrag selfies.

My gums felt raw, like I’d lost teeth. I smacked my dry lips together and ran my tongue over my teeth. They were all there, which was a relief. It was hard to get dates with meth mouth.

I could see too much. I wasn’t wearing my contact lenses, but I could see every inch of this sterile, cold room. I could see every wrinkle in the thin cotton blanket. I counted every hole in the ceiling tiles. Also, everything smelled like industrial-strength cleaner. I closed my eyes and pressed my head into the blessedly scent-free pillow.

I remembered the party. Ophelia Lambert, a nice vampire girl from my world literature class, had arranged a human-vampire mixer. It was hands down the best party I’d ever been to. Ophelia had spared no expense turning our silly student lounge into a swanky nightclub, complete with fancy mocktails that dutifully complied with the campus’s no-alcohol policy. And I’d been dancing with a sweet guy Ophelia introduced me to . . . Ben. Ben Overby, a boy she knew from her hometown. I remembered dancing with him and his cute little jerks and kicks. I remembered that he kept his hands on my hips but in a respectful, nongropey way.

Ben had been sweet, sincere in a way that I hadn’t seen in ninety-nine percent of the boys I’d met so far this year. I felt like I could trust him when he smiled. I didn’t spend the whole dance trying to look for hidden double entendres when he spoke. He asked for my number as I walked him to the lobby, and I programmed it into his contacts list as “The Most Interesting Girl You Will Ever Meet.”

Now I heard a strange thrumming noise through the hospital-room door. Thump-a-thump-a-thump. I rolled my eyes. Some douchebro must have turned his car’s bass speakers all the way up to get that kind of reverb in here.

In a slightly less head-cringey development, I heard a single set of footsteps making their way closer to me. I heard the click of the door being pushed open. I could smell flowers, waxy and sweet, as a weak top note over a much stronger scent of soap and . . . moss? My eyes opened, but I didn’t move a muscle.

Ben, the boy I’d danced with the night before, was standing beside my bed, setting a pretty little bouquet of yellow gerbera daisies on the nightstand. He was so much cuter than I remembered. It was like I was seeing his face for the first time. Everything was so clear, the smooth tan skin of his oval face, the straight lines of his nose, the hints of gold and auburn in his hair, the distinct wrinkle forming between his—frankly, luminous—jade-green eyes.

“I know you won’t wake up for a while,” he said softly. “But I hated the idea of you being in here in this cold white room with no color. And it will be something nice for you to see when you first rise. I didn’t know what kind of flowers you liked, but Keagan said you liked yellow.”

“They’re perfect, thanks,” I told him.

“What the—!” Ben yelped, head whipping toward me as he stumbled back in alarm. He tripped over his own feet and landed hard on the white tile of the floor. “Ow!”

Ben winced as he cradled his arm against his chest. He’d scraped his knuckles when he landed, and the tiny wounds were weeping little ruby droplets of blood. I could see each of them in sharp detail, like he was bleeding in high definition.

Thump-a-thump-a-thump.

I opened my mouth to speak, but it immediately started to water. The whole room was filling with a scent that was better than fresh coffee or melting caramel or double-chocolate cheesecake brownies. I threw my legs out of the bed and stepped closer to Ben, inhaling that wonderful, beautiful scent as deeply as I could, as if I could drink it. That thump-a-thump-a-thump noise came back, faster now, and the sound was pleasing to some weird instinct deep within my brain.

That same raw sensation had me stretching my jaw as my teeth seemed to shift outward. My lip scraped across something sharp, and the taste of my own blood filled my mouth. I pressed my fingertip against the long, sharp canine poking out over my bottom lip and winced.

Oh, no.

Suddenly, memories of what had happened the night before came flooding into my brain.

I’d enjoyed dancing with Ben so much I hadn’t wanted to walk away from him. Something about him made me feel like he saw me, not body parts that happened to have a personality attached or a chance to brag to his friends. But me, as a person. And for a female undergrad at a state college, that was a pretty rare thing.

After the party, I’d walked Ben downstairs to the lobby, and we’d sat on a little bench outside the dorm, far from the smokers, enjoying the cool evening air. To my surprise, some vampires in the courtyard in front of New Dawn were playing Ultimate Frisbee. I kind of thought the undead were beyond Ultimate Frisbee, but I suppose teenage vampire boys are the textbook definition of arrested development.

We talked about our favorite foods. (Be breakfast food, or be nothing.) We talked about our fandoms. (I was a Ravenclaw, and he was a Hufflepuff, which almost ended the conversation right there.) We talked about our favorite obscure gummy candy. (I didn’t even realize there was such a thing as gummy bacon strips. I was thoroughly ashamed.)

It was almost two when he finally had to go home, but he grinned kind of sheepishly and said, “So, I was thinking that we’d skip the whole ‘will he call or won’t he’ drama by my just asking you out now. You know, cut out the middleman. And I’m not going to play around with some silly coffee date, either. I’m going straight to dinner. Maybe even a place with actual metal silverware.”

“A true gentleman draws the line at plastic sporks,” I told him, my lips quirking as I fought a smile. It was a charming, if wordy, way to ask me out, and I could appreciate that. “And just to take the pressure off, if you were to ask me out, there’s a pretty good chance I would say yes.”

The smile that broke over his face was blinding. “That’s good to know.”

I waited, in silence, while he stared at me.

“Oh, you want me to ask now?” he said. I pursed my lips and waggled my hand back and forth as he leaned closer. “Man, you’re pushy.”

I burst out laughing, even as his arms slipped around my waist. This was what girls my age were supposed to do. Flirt with nice boys and stay out late, not worry about bills and my hours getting cut. “I thought Hufflepuffs were supposed to be all forthright. This whole conversation reeks of Slytherin sass.”

“Oh, wow,” he said, his lips barely brushing against my own. “You are a nerd.”

“Still better than being a Hufflepuff,” I murmured against his mouth.

“You’re gonna have to let that go,” he said, his mouth closing over mine. As far as first kisses went, it was . . . pretty amazing. Sweet and slow and warm, with just a hint of tongue. I felt it all the way down to my toes, which were curling in my cute little black boots. We only broke apart when kids leaving the party came filtering out of the lobby and catcalled us.

“It’s not likely,” I said, when he pulled away.

“So . . . dinner,” he said. “In a place without sporks. When would be a good time for you?”

“Saturday would be good.”

“Six?” he asked. When I nodded, he gave me another quick peck on the lips. “Awesome. I will call you. And if I don’t call, you text me, call me a dumbass, and I will send apology cookies.”

“Cookies?” I asked as he backed away.

“Flowers are overdone,” he called back.

I giggled—honest to God giggled—but I managed not to do the awkward little wave my arm ached to give.

Suddenly, I heard a quick bark of warning, but before I could even respond, I felt a crushing blow against my chest. I was knocked off my feet and thrown into the wall behind me. I felt my head collide against the stone with a sick crack before I collapsed to the ground like a broken doll.

Ben screamed my name, but I couldn’t even lift my head. His voice grew closer, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I had never known pain like this in my life. My chest felt hot and wet, on the inside and the outside. I couldn’t feel anything below my waist. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move enough air through my throat to produce words. People gathered around me, staring down at my twisted body with expressions of horror on their faces.

Ben lifted something off my chest. It appeared to be a forty-five-pound barbell weight. The vampires were playing Ultimate Frisbee with a forty-five-pound weight. And they’d missed.

My brain was going dark, as if I was slipping away into some corner deep inside my head, where it didn’t hurt so much. I could feel the grass under my back getting slick and hot, while I got colder.

Ben was screaming for help, for someone to call 911. I managed to lift my arms enough to feel that my ribs were definitely going in the wrong direction. Tina Messinger, our dorm director, suddenly appeared over me, her frizzy brown hair forming a cloud around her head. Through the haze of pain and blood pounding in my ears, I heard her squeaky voice say, “This is bad. I can see her ribs poking out through her shirt. This is really bad.”

That was exactly what I needed to hear.

I opened my mouth to point out how unhelpful this was, but blood was bubbling up between my lips, making it hard to push air through to make sounds.

Please, help me. Please.

I didn’t want to die. I was too young. I hadn’t seen anything of the world. I’d barely left Kentucky. I’d barely lived.

“You’re going to be OK,” Ben told me, sternly, as if he could command me to get up and shake it off. He cupped my chin in his hand and moved my head gently so I was forced to meet his eyes. “Meagan, just keep breathing. Stay awake.”

I was trying. Couldn’t he see how hard I was trying? The tiny flow of oxygen I was drawing in through my nose seemed like a championship effort.

“Meagan,” Tina said, wiping at my mouth and smearing her hands with bright red. “I’m not a doctor, but you have a lot of injuries, and they are pretty bad. The chances of you surviving this . . . I don’t know if the ambulance will get to you in time. You signed your consent form before you moved in, but I have to ask you again: do you want to be turned?”

I nodded my head, or at least I thought I did. I couldn’t really feel much anymore.

Anything to make the pain go away. Anything to avoid dying. Please.

“Can I get a vampire volunteer?” Tina yelled. “I need a vampire to act as an emergency sire! Get over here, and present your Council card!”

My eyes fluttered shut, and I heard Ben cry for me to stay awake, to keep my eyes open. Everything felt heavy and cold, dragging me down into the darkness. Someone lifted my arms and slashed at my wrists, pain that barely registered against the agony in my chest. I was cold and tired, and I hurt so much. It seemed so much easier to just go to sleep, to let go and drift off, even as something cool and coppery dripped into my mouth.

The last thing I remembered was Ben yelling, “Meagan!”

The memory faded, and here was Ben again, standing in my hospital room, bleeding, and my fangs were out. Because I was a vampire. This was bad. This was so very bad.

“How are you already awake?” Ben asked, pushing to his feet and stumbling toward me as I backed away.

Thump-a-thump-a-thump.

“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head, clamping my lips around my teeth. “But I think you need to get away from me. Ben, you’re bleeding.”

“What?” He glanced down at his hand. “Oh.”

I slapped my hands over my fangs, but he didn’t move away like I expected. In fact, he stepped closer, edging me back until the backs of my legs bumped against the bed. That burning thirst crackled through my throat, making the act of swallowing painful.

Thump-a-thump-a-thump.

“But you’re OK?” he asked, the corners of his mouth lifting into a hopeful smile.

“I’m OK, but I think you’re in danger,” I told him, even as my nose followed that delicious scent and urged me forward. My lips parted, and I could feel my mouth water at the scent of him. I was lucky I wasn’t drooling down my chin.

“You smell nice,” he said, leaning in a bit closer to sniff delicately. “I think it’s your breath. It smells like vanilla and a little mint, maybe?”

I licked my lips. With all of his focus on my mouth, it was almost involuntary.

“You’re so beautiful. I mean, you were gorgeous before, but now? You should see yourself.” He reached his uninjured hand up to my cheek and stroked his thumb down the curve of my face. He leaned close, inhaling deeply through parted lips. My hands slipped around his waist as he pulled my face gently forward.

His lips were warm, so warm, and they tasted like every good thing, strawberries and chocolate and, oddly enough, the steaks my mom used to make on my birthday. I groaned, pulling him close—maybe a little too hard, because he gasped. I slipped my tongue along his open mouth, and he seemed to forget the discomfort quickly enough. He sank against me, and we fell against the wall with a chorused “ooof.”

“Were you saying something before?” he asked, blinking sort of sleepily, like someone who’d just woken from a stupor.

“I don’t know,” I mumbled against his lips, and lost myself in him for a few more moments. He cupped my face in his hands. I leaned into the caress like a cat, nuzzling my nose against his wrist. He smelled so good, and my throat was so dry. And every cell in my body had my neck straining forward, lips curled back from my fangs.

Thump-a-thump-a-thump.

I turned my head away. I couldn’t. I couldn’t hurt Ben.

But I was so thirsty, so thirsty and empty and in need of Ben’s blood. And that speeding heartbeat seemed to be taunting me, ringing in my ears, reminding me of what I desperately needed.

“Ben—” I lunged forward, sinking those sharp teeth into his wrist.

He yelled out in surprise, his arms contracting around me and scrabbling harmlessly at my back.

The most luscious, delectable flavor I’d ever tasted flooded my mouth. It was better than ice cream and brownies combined, warm and sweet and electric. I swallowed, and the ache that had tickled my throat since the moment I woke up faded away in an instant. I swallowed again, whimpering with pleasure, even as Ben’s fingers dug into my back.

I took a few more swallows. Now that the worst of my thirst seemed to have burned away, I loosened my grip on Ben’s arm. He relaxed against me, breathing harshly against my neck, as if he’d just run a marathon.

“Be careful.” He wheezed through gritted teeth. “Don’t take too much.”

Ben. My brain seemed able to focus now on something other than my thirst, and I could pick up Ben’s good, clean, mossy scent beyond the smell of his blood. Ben, the boy who had kissed me and teased me and asked me on an actual date instead of texting me for a hookup.

Thump . . . thump . . .

His heart rate was slowing, ever so slightly. If I kept drinking, his heart wouldn’t have enough blood to pump through his body. His blood pressure would drop. I would kill him.

Groaning, I forced myself to pull my fangs from his skin. It took all of my strength to push him away. He stared at me, eyes wide and pupils blown, as he gulped in greedy lungfuls of air. Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I eyed Ben carefully. He seemed fine, out of breath and a little pale but fine. And I could hear his heart rate returning to normal.

“I’m so sorry,” I told him. “I don’t know what I’m doing!”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, cradling his bitten arm against his chest. “It’s just a bite, right?”

“I suck,” I groaned, flopping onto my hospital bed.

“Well, yeah,” he said, with a laugh. “But that’s to be expected.”

I snorted. “That’s not funny, Ben.”

He shrugged. “It’s a little funny. And hey, you stopped, right? That’s crazy advanced for a newborn, stopping yourself mid-feeding without hurting anybody.”

“Yay for me,” I muttered.

Thump . . . Thump . . .

“I’m just glad you stopped. Otherwise, worst first date ever,” Ben intoned.

I sat up, tilting my head. “If this is your idea of a date, I do not want to know the rest of your romantic history.”

“It is a sordid and blood-soaked romp,” he deadpanned.

“No, it’s not,” I told him.

He grinned. “No, it’s not. But it is incredibly weird and a teeny bit sordid.”

“But you’re OK?” I asked him, standing again.

Thump . . . Thump . . .

He blew a raspberry. “Fine. Give me a cookie and juice, and I’ll be at a hundred percent.”

“Really? You’ve got blood-donation jokes right now?”

Thump . . .

Ben snickered and parted his lips to say something else, but suddenly his face went slack. The rosy glow faded from his cheeks, and they went ashen and pale. His eyes rolled up, and he dropped to the floor like a marionette whose strings had been cut. He flopped into a boneless heap, his head smacking dully against the tile.

“Ben!” I launched myself across the room to kneel over him. He wasn’t breathing. His heart rate had slowed to nothing. Why hadn’t I noticed? I hadn’t taken that much blood. Why had he collapsed?

“Help!” I screamed. “Help me! Please!”

I tilted his head back and tried to breathe some life back into him. But his chest rose once, and then nothing. Trying to remember something from the first-aid class I’d taken in high school, I crossed my hands over his heart and pushed down to start CPR. I felt something crack dully under my hands, and I shrieked.

I’d broken his ribs. I’d forgotten about my strength and broken his bones in my panic. “Help!” I screamed, before trying to breathe into his mouth again.

I glanced around the room—there had to be something in here to help me. There was no phone. There were no medical kits. But near the door, next to the light switch, was a bright red button labeled “V11.”

It looked like a nurses’ call button in a hospital room. V11 was the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead’s hotline for humans with vampire problems.

And I was up to my ass in vampire problems.

Scrambling to my knees, I slapped my hand against the call button and crab-walked back to Ben. An alarm roared to life, echoing down the hall. I left a bloody handprint on the wall panel.

He still wasn’t breathing, and his skin was paler and grayer by the minute. I couldn’t hear a heartbeat. His eyes were unfocused, staring off at the ceiling.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, cradling him in my lap. “I don’t know what’s happening.”

Twin drops of water fell onto Ben’s gray cheek, tinged with a hint of pink. Because vampire tears have the tiniest bit of blood in them. And I was a vampire.

This was bullshit.

Before I could release more of those tears, the alarm bell stopped, and the door burst open. I closed my eyes, expecting some sort of vampire SWAT team to come spilling into the room and stake me. Because they were going to kill me. The Council did not tolerate vampires who attacked innocent humans, no matter how newly risen. They were going to come in here and stake me. I could only hope they’d make it quick.

But the expected staking did not come. I cracked one eye open and saw a pretty brunette vampire in a purple Specialty Books T-shirt, standing in the doorway. The ID badge around her neck read “Jane Jameson-Nightengale.” Her jaw was slack, and she was shaking her head as she stared at me.

“Help me,” I whimpered.

She seemed to snap out of her stupor, glanced down at the dead boy in my arms, and yelled, “Holy hell, what did you do to Ben?”

2

Try to find other vampire sires who inadvertently fell into parenthood to mentor you.

—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire

Jane Jameson-Nightengale made some sort of hand motion behind her back, and I heard a bunch of clicks from the well-lit hallway behind her. She dropped to her knees beside Ben. “You’re not even supposed to be awake right now! How did you bite him?”

Jane’s hands slid over Ben’s neck and wrists, checking for a heartbeat. Her fingertips lingered against his skin at each of his possible pulse points for several moments. And every time she failed to find a pulse, her face crumpled just a little bit more. Who was Jane, and how did she know Ben?

“He’s not breathing. No pulse,” she whispered, whipping her head toward me. Her eyes flashed an angry amber. “He’s cold. He was only in here for ten minutes. Even with the blood loss, his body temperature shouldn’t be this low!”

“I don’t know what happened!” I cried. “I bit him, but I only took a little. I mean, I could hear his pulse drop a little as I drank, but I pushed him away, and he was fine. He was talking and laughing about me biting him one minute, and the next, he just flopped on the floor dead. Did he have a heart condition?”

“No, he’s perfectly healthy. None of this makes any freaking sense!” Shaking her head, Jane lifted Ben’s bitten wrist to her nose. “What the hell? Your bite mark smells funny.”

“Well, I haven’t brushed in a couple of days,” I said, shrugging. “I’ve been dead.”

“No, you haven’t brushed in twenty-four hours. I mean—never mind,” Jane told me. She yelled toward the door, to someone I couldn’t see. “Let’s get Ben into a secured containment room. Total lockdown, no one has access but me. Protocol: Jupiter Ascending.”

The expected vampire SWAT team—wearing uniforms marked with “UERT,” for undead emergency response team—swept into the room on swift, silent feet. They rolled a gurney into the room and gently lifted Ben’s body onto it. They covered him with a sheet and rolled him away before I could even object.

All but two of the vampire storm troopers marched out in formation, leaving Ophelia to appear in the doorway, looking shocked and annoyed. “Meagan, how are you awake?”

“I don’t know!” I yelled. “All I know is I died in the most embarrassing way possible, and then I woke up here.”

“Not the most embarrassing way possible,” Jane mumbled, crawling across the floor to grab my face in her hands. She gently, but firmly, pulled my chin down with her thumbs and looked at my mouth. She leaned slightly closer and inhaled.

“Your mouth smells like the inside of a head shop,” she told me.

“Wull, thass juss fackin roo,” I told her. Or at least, I tried to. Her thumbs kept me from pronouncing actual words. I guess my primal undead reptile brain did not appreciate her being this close to my face, because I felt that raw pressure in my mouth again and heard my fangs drop with a snick.

Jane blanched and sat back on her heels. “You have four fangs instead of two.”

“What?” Ophelia dropped to her knees and squinted at my extended teeth. Her own mouth fell open, and her brow wrinkled. “I have never seen that before.”

Jane pulled a compact from Ophelia’s purse and held it up to my mouth. And while I was fully aware that vampires could see their own reflections, it was definitely comforting to see my own face in the glass. And that it had stayed the same.

Or had it?

The girl in the mirror was gorgeous, frozen forever at twenty, with the sort of lineless, airbrushed perfection that only existed in magazine ads. I’d heard about this little quirk of vampire evolution, but I’d never seen the “before and after turning” comparisons. Vampires had to be beautiful to lure in blood donors. And while I was cute before, now I’d been upgraded to a full-on ten. My eyes, dark like my mother’s, almost glowed with flecks of amber and gold. My hair was braided, but I could glimpse reddish-gold highlights that hadn’t been there before. My normally olive skin had paled to a creamy tan, but it was luminous and smooth, without one blemish in sight. My lips were full and rosy, and oh, my God, I totally had two sets of fangs.

I carefully tapped the tip of my tongue against the expected major canine fangs. Right next to both of my canines were slightly smaller, but still very sharp, extended fangs that had replaced two of my premolars. Any vampire looked dangerous, but somehow those two little extra-sharp teeth made me appear even more threatening.

Ophelia pushed the mirror out of the way and put her hands on my face, manipulating my jaw back and forth as she examined my mouth.

“Do you mind? That’s my face!” I snapped at her. Literally. I tried to bite her, which she did not appreciate.

“Sorry,” Ophelia said, yanking her hand back and pushing to her feet. “I’ve never seen this before. Do you know how old I am? I have not said ‘I’ve never seen this before’ in a really long time.”

Jane stood and pulled me to my feet. She peered at my eyes and spread my brows and cheekbones apart with her fingers. I swatted her hands away. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Jane, respect boundaries, please,” Ophelia said dryly.

“What is going on, Ophelia? What’s wrong with me? Is Ben going to be OK?”

Jane shot a look at Ophelia but didn’t say anything. I got the impression that there was some sort of relationship between the two of them, but it wasn’t necessarily a friendly one. Now that I thought about it, I seemed to remember Ophelia ranting about someone named Jane sending her a “high-handed” e-mail and plotting some sort of revenge. But I was pretty foggy about the details other than having to Google what “high-handed” meant.

“We don’t know,” Jane said. “His heart has stopped, which could be a sign of the turning process. But it’s also part of the process of dying.”

“But I didn’t give him any of my blood,” I protested. “I drank a little bit of his, and that was it. I thought you couldn’t be turned into a vampire without blood.”

“Well, vampires aren’t supposed to be up and walking around twenty-four hours after being turned, either. That’s the only reason we allowed Ben into this room. You weren’t supposed to be a threat. But the rules seem to be changing,” she said, giving me a long, speculative stare.

Ophelia patted my shoulder in what I thought might have been meant as a comforting gesture. “We’ll know if his body doesn’t start to decompose over the next couple of days.”

I blanched, and the disgust at that image was enough to make me feel the most like myself I had since I’d woken. “That’s lovely, Ophelia, thank you.”

“Meagan, you’re a vampire now. You waved good-bye to ‘lovely’ yesterday.”

My hands dropped to my sides. “You keep saying that. I don’t know what you mean.”

Jane and Ophelia exchanged another long look.

“Stop giving each other secret face messages and send actual words in my direction!”

Jane sat on the edge of my hospital bed and leveled me with a serious look. “We don’t know what to tell you, Meagan. We’re flying blind here. I’m not even sure you’re a real vampire.”

What did that mean? Was I some sort of supernatural freak? A vampire-shark hybrid? My knees felt watery, and all that warm Ben blood threatened to come up.

Ophelia grabbed my shoulder and gave me a firm shake. “You will not faint, and you will not throw up. Vampires don’t faint.”

“OK,” I said, nodding frantically as I clapped my hand over my mouth. “OK.”

“Get her out of here,” Jane told Ophelia as she waved the remaining UERT members away.

“Where is ‘here,’ anyway?” I asked.

“We’re in a sublevel beneath the dorm,” Ophelia said.

She led me down a brightly lit white hallway. I saw doors marked “Sunblock Storage” and “Backup Blood Storage.” A UERT officer stood guard at every other door, staring silently as Ophelia took my hand and hustled me past.

“Are those guys always here?” I asked. “Like lurking under our dorm at all times, while we’re sleeping?”

“No. The UERT responds to emergency situations involving vampires. Your human police officers would not be up to the task,” Ophelia murmured. “Don’t say anything more until we’re behind closed doors.”

She yanked open a door marked “Interrogation.” That didn’t sound good.

The room looked comfortable enough, if a little small. It centered around a white laminate table and a couple of padded chairs, and featured lights that didn’t threaten the well-being of my corneas.

Ophelia pointed to the chair across the table. “Sit. Do you need anything else to drink?”

Wordlessly, I shuddered and shook my head.

She sat in the chair across from me.

“I’m really sorry about this, Ophelia. I don’t know what’s happening.”

“Vampires are supposed to take three days to rise, Meagan. Every historical text, every vampire I’ve ever talked to, every hieroglyph etched into cave walls has the same story. You’re bitten, you drink the vampire’s blood, you go to sleep for three days, you rise. You’ve been down for barely twenty-four hours. And it’s possible you turned Ben with just a bite. You are turning everything I know about vampirism on its ear, Meagan, and I don’t appreciate it.”

“Sorry.”

“I don’t understand. Other than your unusual method of dying—”

“Humiliating, and let’s never speak of it again,” I said.

“Just wait until you hear Jane’s,” she shot back with a smirk. “This makes no sense. Your turning was textbook. Tina called for a volunteer. One of the vampires stepped up and presented his ID card showing that he was one of the campus’s approved volunteer sires. I was still upstairs, directing the staff through cleanup after the party. Otherwise, I would have turned you without hesitation. I’m sorry about that. I would have been a good sire to you, and I think you would have been more comfortable with someone you knew. Nonetheless, your volunteer sire fed you enough blood that Tina was reasonably satisfied you were going to make the transition. Your sire disappeared into the crowd. Tina says his name was James Marsters, but she didn’t have time to take a scan of his ID. Also, he’s not showing up on any of the school rosters, and we have not been able to contact him for a signature on the Council reports.”

“That’s because James Marsters is the name of the actor who played Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was a fake ID,” I told her.

Ophelia frowned. “Yes, Jane said the same thing. I find myself equally annoyed with him for lying during such a crucial process and annoyed with you for knowing that when I didn’t,” she muttered.

And I laughed, despite the incredibly shitty situation, because I was going to have to start Ophelia on one of those Captain America “pop culture she should have been exposed to by now” notebooks.

“Did my sire have double fangs, too?”

Ophelia shook her head. “He only had to bite you once to drain the little bit of blood you had left. I saw the punctures. They were perfectly normal.”

“What about the morons who were playing Ultimate Frisbee with a forty-five-freaking-pound barbell weight?” I demanded.

“Thrown at vampire strength.” Ophelia shrugged. “They babbled something about needing the extra weight to make the game fair, and then they ran away, like the cowards they are. We’re looking at security footage now to help us identify them for questioning.”

“I cannot believe I died in a tragic Ultimate Frisbee accident. Who dies as an Ultimate Frisbee bystander?”

“Morgan and Keagan have been worried sick,” Ophelia said, ignoring my lame lament. “They’re not happy about the fact that they won’t be allowed to talk to you until your bloodthirst is under control. And they don’t know you’re awake already, which puts an extra wrinkle in things.”

She went on. “They stayed in my room last night and didn’t leave until this afternoon, which is, by the way, the first time I’ve allowed humans in my sleeping space during daylight hours in centuries. They insisted, despite my many, many, many attempts to make them leave. I think they just couldn’t face your side of the room without you in it. They’re still more pleasant roommates than Brianna was, even with the ‘hostage crisis’ element to the situation.”

Morgan and Keagan were my suite mates at New Dawn Residence Hall. I roomed with Morgan, and Keagan had a single next door, specially assigned by the housing office because of “problematic snoring.” She’d tried sleep-apnea masks, nose strips, and those jaw adjusters. But nothing could slow down her buzz-saw sleeping noises.

I hadn’t believed that such an adorable petite person could produce such a hellacious racket, but the first night we all spent in the dorm, I could have sworn Satan was chipping wood in the room next door.

Morgan had been difficult to read when we first moved in. She insisted that she was not a nice person, but she always treated me kindly. I thought she would find Keagan too perky to tolerate, but they got along like two peas in a pod. Morgan insisted that one day she would find Keagan’s dark, petty center, and on that day they would make the evening news.

The pair of them had become the glue that kept me cemented to University of Kentucky’s campus. And now they were six floors away from me, and I wasn’t allowed to talk to them. They might as well have been on the moon. The weird finality of what had happened to me—dying, coming back, biting Ben—all seemed to land on me at once. My life was over. Nothing would be the same for me. Again.

I flinched as Jane opened the interrogation-room door. Ophelia let go of my hand, and the sympathetic expression on her face hardened to one of boredom. Jane sat next to Ophelia and gave me a long appraising look. She opened a small notebook and set a UK Wildcats mug in front of me, with a coaster. It was filled with dark red blood that smelled like fresh-baked cinnamon rolls and every carb I ever wanted to eat.

Why wasn’t I more grossed out by that? Why?

I pushed it away without drinking. Because that was disturbing.

Jane sighed. “OK, Meagan, I’m trying very hard to set aside my personal feelings about the fact that you’ve apparently drained and maybe done a half-assed job of turning a young man I happen to like very much, leaving me to make a very upsetting phone call to his mother, who goes to church with my mother and will make my weekly coffee date with Mom a living hell. I really am trying. I understand that you’ve been through two traumatic experiences in the last hour or so, but we need to talk about the events that led to your turning and then waking up too damn quickly and biting a perfectly nice kid, all of which have resulted in a metric ton of irritating and unnecessary paperwork for me.”

“I can’t believe I’m the one saying this to you, Jane, but maybe you should take it easy on her,” Ophelia said.

“A living hell, Ophelia,” Jane growled. “And you’ve met my mother.”

Ophelia rolled her eyes.

Jane took a deep breath and said in a calmer, slightly sweeter tone, “I’ll start again. Meagan, my name is Jane Jameson-Nightengale, and I’m the head representative of the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead for western Kentucky. Now that you’re a vampire, you are under our protection, but you’re also subject to our laws. With me so far?”

I waggled my hand back and forth. “Ish.”

“Great. I’m here because Ophelia called me about your turning and the, um, strange circumstances. I was here taking her report when the V-one-one alarm went off. Let’s go through every step of what happened since you woke up this evening,” Jane said. “No detail is too small. Because I’m still trying to figure out whether I like you or not. You’re friends with Ophelia, so I’m leaning toward not.”

“My future mother-in-law.” Ophelia sighed, waving her hand at Jane.

And so I went through the whole horrifying morning (evening?) again, which was a treat. I told Jane everything I could remember about the night of the mixer and every moment since I rose, and her expression remained absolutely neutral throughout my story. And considering the number of broken bones and flesh wounds involved in that story, that was more than a little upsetting.

I got so caught up in verbally vomiting everything I could remember that I had a sort of out-of-body experience, where it felt like I was floating above myself, watching me making an idiot of myself. And my mind’s eye could see that I apparently hadn’t washed my eye makeup off after the mixer, so I had day-old mascara running down my cheeks.

Awesome.

I wasn’t sure whether it was my emotional state or the fact that Jane didn’t seem to like me and seemed to be holding my life in her hands, but I just couldn’t stop talking. I didn’t know much about the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead, but I knew that they sometimes used what most reasonable people would call over-the-top tactics to punish vampires who stepped out of line. And I was pretty sure killing a kid within an hour of waking up was nowhere near that line.

My life had not prepared me for this sort of hostile interaction with vampires. I was in preschool when an undead tax consultant named Arnie Frink launched vampires out of the coffin. The living residents of planet Earth were not thrilled to find out that vampires had been lurking in the shadows for the past . . . forever, and humanity had never realized it. Though, when they looked back, they were a little embarrassed they hadn’t seen the signs.

Maybe the embarrassment over the missed clues was what made them lash out. A lot of vampires “tripped” and “fell”—sarcastic air quotes intended—on pointy wooden objects. The World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead, an elected group of ancient vampires, saw that humans were getting more creative and awful in their vampire-dusting techniques. They came forward, asking the world’s governments to recognize them as people with feelings and a general desire not to be turned into ash. They also asked for special leniency in taxes and government documents to fake being alive. But mostly taxes.

Because a surprising number of vampires chose to live in small towns, the Council was allowed to establish smaller regional offices in each state to make sure that the undead didn’t pull shenanigans like murdering innocent students. The Council also offered mentors for young vampires like myself, to prevent said murder shenanigans.

Once humans stopped setting them on fire for fun, the international vampire community eventually agreed that with bottled blood and super-high-SPF sunscreen and not having to pretend to be human, it was more convenient to live out in the open anyway. They didn’t give Arnie a medal or anything. He already had the meme, after all.

I’d known more than my share of vampires growing up, because I was pretty poorly supervised. In general, they were cagey but friendly. They had not treated me with the snarky, barely restrained anger that Jane was directing my way at the moment.

At some point during my reflections, I had stopped talking and was now just staring at Jane and Ophelia like one of those creepy Big Eyes paintings.

“She is a babbler,” Jane observed to Ophelia, who nodded.

“So what’s going to happen to me?” I asked.

Jane pursed her lips. “Well, here’s my problem. Part of me wants to just punch you in your irritatingly symmetrical face for hurting Ben. But the other, more compassionate part of me understands that this wasn’t something you did on purpose and that you weren’t in control of yourself, no more than I was in control of myself when I was fresh out of the coffin and tried to eat my best friend. And then the more academic part of me wants to figure out what the hell is going on with you that you managed to turn so quickly. Not in a creepy ‘secured lab and dissection’ way, just super-close observation for six to eight months.”

“How many parts of you are there?” I asked.

“Oh, you haven’t earned the right to be snarky with me yet, sweetie, so cool your jets,” Jane told me. “I can’t tell you what’s going to happen long-term. But for right now, it’s pretty clear that you can’t continue your classes for the semester. We can’t have a newborn vampire who’s not in control of her thirst surrounded by a bunch of defenseless, delicious-smelling students. That’s the sort of thing that results in calls to my office. I hate that.”

Ophelia snorted softly. “So you’re going to be secluded with an older, supposedly stable vampire who will be able to help you gain control over your thirst.”

“I don’t see why the ‘supposedly’ was necessary, but yes, you will be staying with me,” Jane interjected. “Call it a probationary period, a chance to show the Council that, despite a shaky start, you are going to be a productive, trustworthy member of undead society.”

My face screwed up even further at the idea of having to prove myself to vampires. I hadn’t asked for this. I hadn’t wanted to be a part of their stupid undead society, and now they were judging me, trying to figure out whether I was good enough to fit into it? I’d had enough of trying to fit into new groups and new places. The vampires were cordially invited to suck it, as far as I was concerned.

But I didn’t think Jane would respond nicely to that particular invitation.

“And where will that be?” I asked.

“Half-Moon Hollow.”

“I’m sorry, where now?”

Having lived in mid-central Kentucky all of my life, I was pretty sure I’d heard of every little burg in that area. I’d heard of Possum Trot and Monkey’s Eyebrow, even Paducah, a town name that no one pronounced correctly on the first try. But I’d never heard of Half-Moon Hollow.

“Half-Moon Hollow. It’s the home of my former Council office,” Ophelia said. “I’ve lived there for the last fifty years. It’s basically a cultural wasteland, but there’s an interesting lace-tatting festival every spring. And the dollar movie theater is nice.”

“And it’s also the home of my current Council office,” Jane added, somewhat testily. “We’ll do our best to make you comfortable there. And if Ben survives the transition, he will also be comfortable there, since it’s his hometown. Your professors have been made aware of your situation, and you’ll be allowed to continue your course work online, so you won’t lose any ground academically. Ben, too, I imagine, since he’s only got a few classes left before graduation.”

“You told everybody I turned Ben into a vampire?” I asked, grimacing.

“No, we told half of the people who asked that he’s come down with a case of mono complicated by strep throat and MRSA. The other half were told he joined the Peace Corps. Misinformation is the best way to prevent panic. One student being turned as the result of a very public accident? That happens. Another student gets turned the next night under shadowy circumstances? Not so much.”

“I’m not sure about this,” I admitted. “It’s all happening really fast. A day ago, my biggest problem was midterms and paying my cell-phone bill. And now you’re telling me that I have to move my whole life to some armpit town in the middle of nowhere, away from everybody I know, and stay with strangers? I don’t know what to think.”

“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Jane told me. “And I’m sorry, but you don’t have a lot of time to mull it over. Also not much choice. It’s pretty much a ‘come quietly or I involve zip ties’ situation.”

I grunted and thunked my head against the conference table.

“I hate to admit it, but Jane and Gabriel did a tolerable job training Jamie,” Ophelia drawled. “And Jane’s caring for my sister, Georgie. I wouldn’t allow that unless Georgie was in at least adequate hands. Besides, I’ll come home on school breaks to visit, to check in on you.”

I asked, “Why do I feel like I’m being punished here?”

“You’re not being punished, but since you seem resistant to us trying to sugarcoat it for you, I can’t allow you out of my sight until we figure out what the hell has happened to you and what that could mean to the vampire community. I know vampires try to come off as all blasé and unflappable, but the older ones tend to freak out when they encounter something new. Some of them still aren’t sure this whole electricity thing is going to work. If word gets out that vampires can turn overnight and possibly turn other people with a bite, there would be, well, what’s the global vampire equivalent of a toddler tantrum at Kmart?”

I looked to Ophelia, who nodded.

“And humans? Forget about it. They were barely prepared for the Great Coming Out when they knew that turning was a complicated three-day blood exchange. No one can know where we’re taking you and Ben. Ophelia is sworn to secrecy, and Tina seems to be terrified-slash-in-awe of the number of UERT members we brought along, so she’s not going to ask too many questions. You’ll be able to talk to your friends and family over Skype, but you can’t tell them where you are. And I’m sorry if that doesn’t work for you, but as you are one of my newest constituents, I will be overseeing your transition into undead society and making sure that you are not somehow a threat to our way of life. In English, that means I am the boss of you. I will see to your feeding training, so you don’t go around biting people all willy-nilly. I will find you an appropriate support network, because you’re hanging out with Ophelia and clearly cannot be trusted to choose your own friends.” Jane paused to observe and ignore the profane gesture Ophelia made. “I will be checking your e-mail and your browser history and generally invading your privacy. And considering the fact that I am giving you the benefit of the doubt, rather than following the Council’s previous policy of ‘stake first, stake often, worry about the facts later,’ you will gladly cooperate.”

I nodded slowly. “OK, I guess I could maybe live with that . . . wait, my browser history?”

“Morgan told you that your obsession with weird Harry Potter fanfic ships would eventually come back to bite you,” Ophelia said with a snicker.

“This is not the time to judge my Dramione shipping,” I told her. I pointed my finger in her face. Ophelia made a halfhearted snap at it, clicking her teeth together far short of my digit.

Jane’s mouth dropped open as she stared at Ophelia. “You having what seems to be a normal, affectionate friendship unnerves me. I am officially unnerved. Anyway, I will also be getting in touch with your friends and family. I will need a list of names and contact info, including your next of kin, so I can notify them.” She cleared her throat, picking up her pen. “Also, I’ll need a list of those Dramione fanfic Web sites.”

Ophelia snickered.

“If they have any clue that I’m down here, my closest friends are probably upstairs, trying to chisel their way through your sunproof doors to get to me,” I told Jane. “I have a few other friends on campus, a few Facebook-contact-only friends back home, but no family. You probably noticed that the emergency contact space on my enrollment form was blank.”

“I thought maybe you were bad at paperwork or being snotty toward your parents or something. So you have no family?” Jane’s face softened for a second. “Not even a distant cousin who would count as next of kin?”

“My foster parents made it pretty clear that there was no need to keep in touch after the last check from the state cleared,” I told her.

Her lips pursed so hard that she seemed to be clenching them around her teeth. “Do you have any questions for me?”

“Oh, loads of them.”

“Can we start with the simple ones?” Jane asked.

“What was that whole ‘Protocol: Jupiter Ascending’ thing before? Of all the Channing Tatum movies, you picked the one where he’s a space werewolf with magical flying boots?”

Jane snickered. “Oh, as the highest-ranking Council official in western Kentucky, I have the right to name any security protocols I design myself. And I name mine after horrible movie bombs that the actors regret making. You know, because they wish those movies were secret.”

I nodded. “I respect that.”

“Great. Everything else you’re going to have to ask on the drive home, because sunrise is just a little too close for comfort,” Jane said. The door opened, and one of the UERT goons carried in my blue suitcase and my laptop bag. My chest constricted painfully at the sight of it, but I tried to write the sensation off as Ben-related heartburn. “Ophelia packed your bag for you. Anything else you need can be shipped to Half-Moon Hollow.”

“Can’t I say good-bye to Morgan and Keagan?”

“No. For one thing, you’re not supposed to be awake yet. And we don’t want you biting them, so we can’t trust you to say good-bye in person. “ Jane told me. “I don’t have room in my house for any more accidentally undead coeds.”

“Rude.”

Jane snapped her notebook closed. “Well, prove to me that you can be trusted around people without biting them, and I won’t have cause to make jokes at your expense.”

“Meagan, I’ll see you soon.” Ophelia reached across the table and squeezed my hand, which in the realm of Ophelia gestures was practically a bear hug. “If you need anything at all, you have my number. And I don’t give that number to anyone I don’t want to talk to.”

“She really doesn’t,” Jane muttered. “It took Jamie’s intervention and a court order before I got it.”

I stood and picked up my suitcase. Considering how light it was, I wondered if Ophelia had packed anything at all. I unzipped the suitcase and saw that it was crammed full of all my favorite jeans, pajamas, and sweaters. So why . . . oh, right, I had superstrength. That was weird.

“Just one more thing, Jane,” Ophelia said. “Can I see your phone?”

Jane lifted an eyebrow but handed Ophelia the device. Ophelia held the phone up to eye level and squinted with concentration. The phone crackled with a loud, staticky zhing noise and a burst of light.

Ophelia smiled brightly and handed Jane the smoking hunk of plastic.

“I see you’ve discovered your vampire talent,” Jane muttered.

Ophelia chirped, “Yes, I have. Jamie was right. I just needed to relax a little bit and focus on something other than Council business and raising Georgie, and it came to me, just in time for me to mess with you. Which is a side bonus.”

Jane tossed her smoking phone into a wall-mounted box marked “Hazardous Materials.” Her tone was as dry as the cafeteria’s toast. “I’m so thrilled for you.”

3

Like any child, a new vampire needs boundaries. Just think of your newly turned vampire as a murderous toddler.

—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire

I wasn’t allowed to go back to my dorm room. I wasn’t allowed to leave the containment floors. I was led down yet another hallway into an enclosed parking garage. It was more than a little horrifying to watch Ben’s body being loaded into the hidey-hole in the back of a Council SUV and closed in under the lid inset in the floor, like he was inconvenient luggage. They didn’t wrap him in a body bag or anything, though, so I guessed I should be thankful for that.

I would miss New Dawn, a recently completed residence hall added to the far side of the UK campus, which had been built with coed, commingled living in mind. The college had been eager to be one of the first in the country to prove that all students, living and undead, could coexist in a safe, federally subsidized environment. Only three floors showed aboveground, containing the administrative offices required by the people who supervised vampires on campus. Below ground level, the floors alternated between living and undead students, then were sorted by male and female. Beyond the lack of “been lived in for decades” smell, the dorm featured a coffee bar in the lobby, super-fast Internet, private soundproof study pods, and a third-floor lounge containing board games from every decade since 1850 to encourage play among the students. I loved Board Game Nights.

The black vehicle with its heavily tinted windows was driven by a friendly, recently turned brunette named Miranda Puckett, who kept up a steady stream of conversation with Jane for the long drive. Mostly funny stories about an extremely uptight vampire named Collin whom Miranda appeared to be dating. I didn’t think Jane intended to ignore me, but it sounded like she and Miranda hadn’t caught up in a while.

Miranda drove us through a tunnel that seemed to go on for miles, until we finally emerged into the inky dark of Kentucky in October. Just before Ophelia had been “urged away” by the goon squad, she’d pulled me aside and told me that no matter how stupid or complicated things seemed at Jane’s, I needed to make my placement there work. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but since she didn’t follow it up with some sort of hyperbolic threat, I knew she was serious.

“Otherwise, you could end up staying in one of the Council’s holding cells,” she’d said. “You do not want to end up in one of the Council’s holding cells.”

With that piece of helpful advice echoing in my head, I leaned back against the headrest and stared out the window. The trees slipped past, melting into one giant dark shape. Headlights from other cars zoomed by. I blinked as headlights and the stuttering white of the center line became one long, syncopated pattern, flash dark flash dark flash dark.

All of the stress and worry of the last few hours seemed to drain out of me. I relaxed against the seat, from my toes to the top of my head. My eyes strained to keep up with the moving shapes in the distance.

Dark shapes. Dark shapes moving in front of my eyelids. I am lying in a small, dark box, with the hum of an engine nearby. I can’t move, but that doesn’t seem wrong. I’m not scared. Just tired. A familiar voice. I can hear someone talking and laughing, but that voice is muffled. It is nice, though, to hear something I recognize nearby as I bump along through black emptiness.

And suddenly, cold hands were shaking my shoulders. Screaming, I swung my fist and felt my knuckles collide with a cool, soft surface.

“Ow!”

My vision shifted into focus, and I was back in Miranda’s car. Jane was hovering over me, one hand shaking my shoulder and the other cradling her nose.

“You punched me. In my face.” She groaned, backing out through the car door. “In terms of trying to get into my good graces, that’s an interesting strategy.”

“I’m so sorry!” I cried.

“Sadly, this isn’t the first time I’ve been punched in the face,” she said, yanking her nose to the left with a crack, setting the cartilage. She shuddered. “It is the first time I’ve been punched by an unconscious person, which is more humiliating than I thought it would be.”

“I wasn’t unconscious,” I told her. “I wasn’t asleep. That was some sort of weird road hypnosis, like a creepy daydream I couldn’t escape. I’ve never done that before. Also, I don’t usually punch people in the face.”

“Are you someone who is easily hypnotized?” she asked, eyebrow arched. “Because I’ve run into that before, and no good comes of it. Only crying werewolf brides and visits to Precious Moments hell.”

“Was I supposed to understand that?” I asked.

“Not really. Well, we’re here,” she said, sweeping her hand to the house looming behind her in the purpling light of predawn. “Let’s get inside before the sun makes us burst into flames, shall we? That would be a bad way to start off.”

Jane’s house had a name, River Oaks. How fancy was that? It was one of those old houses that wasn’t quite movie-ready but looked cozy enough with its fieldstone walls and wide front porch. Even through the brightly lit windows, I could see that the inside was fully modern. Jane and her husband, Gabriel, had clearly sunk some serious money into renovations.

“Gabriel and Dick took Georgie to a gaming tournament in Murphy,” Jane said as Miranda opened the back hatch of the SUV. “It amuses her to see the smirks melt off the faces of college students when a girl who looks to be eight years old beats their asses at ‘Call of Duty.’ Also, she enjoys counting the cash prize in front of them. For that extra touch of demoralization.”

Miranda handed me my luggage while Jane opened the hidey-hole and lifted Ben’s limp body into her arms with very little effort. Ben looked so still and pale with his head resting against Jane’s shoulder. He could have been sleeping.

How angry was he going to be with me when he woke up? I’d known the guy for less than two days, but somehow the idea of him waking up pissed off at me made my chest constrict. Boys definitely didn’t date girls who bit them. Hell, I knew some guys who wouldn’t tolerate girls with funny-looking pinkie toes.

So yeah, I’d taken that sweet baby beginning of a possible relationship with Ben, bitten it, and killed it. I forced myself to look away.

“Jane!” Miranda called. “I’ve got to get going. Collin gets all grumpy if I don’t tuck him in.”

“Gross!” Jane yelled back. I somehow expected that to wake Ben up. But it didn’t. “Come into the shop for coffee this week!”

“Will do!” Miranda slammed the car door and sped down the tree-lined driveway.

“ ‘Tucking in’ doesn’t really mean tucking in, does it?”

“No, it does not,” Jane assured me.

“So who’s Dick? Does he live here, too?”

“Sometimes I think so.” Jane snorted as she entered a pass code into the keypad by the door. The massive oak door swung open and revealed an airy, brightly lit foyer flanked by a wide varnished-oak staircase. A large vase of sunflowers took up most of the space on a little round table under a small chandelier. I could see a large dining room off to the left with a huge antique table. That struck me as a little odd, since vampires didn’t eat, but I supposed there were creepier options in terms of vampire décor. The parlor to the right was cozier and done in warmer gold tones. The blue denim couches on either side of the fireplace looked well used. Despite being fancier than any place I’d ever lived, this house had definitely been lived in.

I heard the scratching of claws over wood and tensed. I whirled toward the noise, fangs dropped, just in time to see a muddy-brown blur streak around the corner.

“Meagan, don’t.”

All I could make out were big brown eyes, fur, and a lolling tongue. And slobber. So much slobber. The shape crashed into me, almost knocking me to the ground, while I scrambled under its weight.

And then the slobber was on my face.

“Aw, what the hell?” I exclaimed while the huge dog-type creature in my arms licked my face. It was the ugliest animal I’d ever seen, with fur the color of shower mold and these weird flaps that covered its eyes. “What is this?”

“That is my dog, Fitz,” Jane said.

“No, dogs are cute and sweet and do what you tell them to,” I told her. “That’s why people like them better than cats, right?”

“Have you ever had a dog?” she asked.

I shook my head. Very few of my foster homes had dogs, and in those that did, it was very clear that the dog belonged to the family, not me.

Jane said, “Well, just put him down and tell him no. If you do it often enough, he might figure it out.”

I plopped Fitz carefully on the floor. “You smell, and I don’t like tongue baths,” I told him. Fitz tilted his head up, letting his eye folds fall back so he could stare at me. Then he threw his tongue out again and licked my face.

“Ahhh!” I yelped, making gagging noises as I wiped my face.

Jane led the way upstairs, again carrying Ben like he weighed nothing. Fitz followed us, sniffing at my heels. “No, Dick’s more of a best friend–colleague hybrid. He and his wife, Andrea, work at my shop, and Dick and I both serve on the local Council. Dick works more behind the scenes, because that’s where he’s most comfortable. And less prosecutable.”

“That sounds . . . enmeshed.”

“You’re not wrong.”

Ben was laid to rest, so to speak, in the guest room two doors down from the one that would be my own. Jane set him down on the big brass bed and pulled a blue-and-white log-cabin quilt up to his chin. There was something distinctly maternal about the way she brushed his hair back from his forehead. And then she hit a button that brought two heavy-duty metal shutters sliding over the windows with a distinct click, which read more Bond villain than mom.

In terms of random guest rooms I’d been assigned to, mine wasn’t the ugliest I’d ever slept in. That title belonged to a basement rec-room-turned-bedroom that was wallpapered in green shag carpet. These walls were painted a light purple. The bed was wide, topped with a fluffy white duvet and throw pillows in different shades of purple. There was a neat desk next to the window that during night hours allowed me a beautiful view of the garden behind Jane’s house.

The room did have the highest rate of unicorn infestation of any room I’d ever slept in. Shelf upon shelf was filled with unicorn figurines—glass, pewter, brass, crystal, cheap ceramic, and I think one was made from smashed-up bits of other unicorn figurines. It was a Frankencorn. I could feel their beady little eyes following me around the room as I counted them. (Forty-two. Who has forty-two unicorns in their house, much less in one room?) I was going to have to turn all of them around before I went to sleep in here.

Jane must have spotted my horrified expression, because she said, “Yeah, I collected unicorns growing up, mostly from assorted relatives who were unaware that I was not perpetually five years old and a wannabe fairy princess.”

“How long were you ‘collecting’?” I asked.

“My uncle Corky gave me a unicorn-shaped candy dish for a wedding present.”

I shuddered.

“Believe it or not, this is the best of my collection. I threw the rest out.”

“Wow. If I stare too long at them, will they devour my soul?” I asked her.

She frowned at me.

I shrugged. “It’s a fair question.”

“The sun will be up in about an hour,” she said. “I recommend getting into bed and being ready to be unconscious for twelve hours, because it should hit you pretty hard.”

I shook my head. “I’m not tired. But I can just read or something. You did stick some of my books in my bag, right?”

Jane smirked at me, like I’d just said something really stupid. Probably because most kids my age had an iPad, and I was reading paper books like a broke jerk. “Suit yourself. Do you feel like you need to feed?”

“I think I’m OK, which is a little weird, because I didn’t really drink that much from Ben.”

“I’ll bring you something as soon as you rise. And if you’re not up yet when I come in, I’ll leave a bottle on the warmer next to your bed, in case you wake up thirsty again.”

I glanced at my nightstand, which did indeed have a one-bottle warmer, like something you’d use to heat formula bottles, next to my Moonrise alarm clock. Jane was a very considerate hostess/jailer.

“Which reminds me, do you think you’re going to prefer bottled blood or live feeding from a human donor for most of your feedings? And I’m asking you this without a hint of judgment, because I really need to know in order to make the right arrangements.”

I shuddered, remembering the sensation of my teeth sinking through Ben’s skin. “You know, I think I’ll stick to bottled for . . . ever.”

“Fair enough,” she said. “Get settled in. We’ll talk more when you wake up.”

I nodded.

“Fitz, get off the bed,” she commanded. The dog whimpered but rolled off the quilt and reluctantly joined her at the door.

Jane reached toward the light switch and pressed the button that brought down my own sunproof shades, shutting out my view of the garden. I shivered, feeling oddly claustrophobic, as if she’d shut my coffin lid. Jane gave me a little smile and closed the door. Fitz continued to sniff and scratch at the door from the hall but eventually gave up when Jane called him away.

I scrubbed my hands over my face. While Jane was a bit friendlier than she had been when I rose, things still felt pretty awkward with her. That whole “I hope we get along, but I think there’s a very real possibility you’ll try to make meth in my guest bathroom” vibe brought back unpleasant memories that weren’t exactly helped by the sight of my blue suitcase at the foot of my bed.

A contrary, almost petty part of my personality wanted to put off unpacking, just to prove I didn’t need Jane or her unicorn-ridden guest room. I didn’t need her generosity or her stupid bottle warmer. Hell, I could put off even opening the damn suitcase and just flop down onto the bed in what I was wearing.

But then I remembered that I’d basically murdered Ben in those pajamas.

Nope. Nope. Nope.

I slid open the zipper, splitting the faded, slightly dirtied canvas down the middle. I let my hands probe among the familiar clothes until I found my My Little Pony pajama bottoms and a pink tank top. I changed quickly, throwing my dirty clothes into the hamper Jane had provided. I wondered what the laundry situation would be here. I’d gotten used to being responsible for just my own clothes while I was in school. I wasn’t looking forward to being regarded as live-in part-time help, if that was how Jane planned on making me earn my keep, but I would do it and not complain. I figured I was skating on pretty thin ice anyway.

Frowning, I reached for the suitcase lid, and my own neat block printing caught my eye. Inside the lid, in black Sharpie, I’d written the names of the seven foster families I’d lived with over the years. A lot of foster kids I knew did something like it, keeping track of the names somewhere they couldn’t be spotted easily. One girl I knew wrote them on the inside of the butt of her jeans, an indirect way of telling her foster parents to kiss her ass. It was like a monument to ourselves, reminding us that we were badass, that no matter what life threw at us, it was just another entry on the list until we aged out and could control our own lives. But on the other hand, it was also a warning not to get too comfy where we were, that our situation could change overnight. And if we got too attached to the family we were living with, it would be that much harder to pack up and leave.

It took me a while to learn this lesson. I’d been crazy about the first family I was placed with, a really sweet couple in their late thirties named Tom and Susan. They painted my room a sunny yellow and let me pick out my own bedspread as a “welcome home” gift. Susan took me shopping for my first pair of real high heels, and Tom made blueberry pancakes on Sundays.

I’d hoped that I’d won some sort of foster-care lottery, finding the perfect adoptive family on my first try and riding out my three years with them until I turned eighteen. But two months after my placement, I was moved to another home for reasons I never quite understood. My social worker, a nice woman who always seemed to be rumpled and running late, couldn’t be bothered to explain it to me. Also, she sometimes called me Melanie.

There seemed to be very little logic to when and why I was moved, but it happened enough that I eventually stopped forming attachments. I was polite. I did any chores I was asked to do and rarely broke the house rules. But I didn’t join in Family Game Night with the Richardsons. I voluntarily went to the weekend respite-care home to avoid camping with the Freemans. With the other families, I generally stayed in my room and studied like hell so I qualified for scholarships.

But I supposed I was lucky. You heard so many horror stories about teenagers in the foster-care system. My foster families didn’t abuse me. They didn’t spend the money the state gave them on lottery tickets and cigarettes. But I didn’t exactly form lifelong loving relationships, either. I got shipped from one house to the other every couple of months, toting my things along with me in the same Chiquita banana box and old battered blue suitcase. For some reason, it was important to me to keep that same box, that same suitcase, in my closet, so I was always ready to go. It didn’t feel like they were tossing me out if I was ready to go.

My decent grades and my heart-wrenching story were enough to qualify me for several college scholarships. The rest I made up for in loans. And I even managed to get into the new vampire-friendly dorm. The campus became my home. The friends I made there became my family. No one could take them from me.

Holidays were the worst. There was nowhere safe to hide from movies, commercials, magazines that reminded me that other people were preparing to spend quality time with their loved ones, while I was scrambling to find somewhere to stay when the dorms closed. Last year, Keagan took me home with her, but it was so awkward. Half of her family tried too hard to make me welcome, and the other half asked me weird, pressing questions about where my parents were and why I wasn’t with them.

Summers were better. I was able to get grants to take classes during the break, and that included campus housing. Which was why I was getting ready to graduate a year early—at least, that was before my sternum got crushed by a barbell weight.

This was not how my life was supposed to turn out. I came from a happy home. My parents loved each other. Hell, they had planned me. And then I was brought up by a single mother who never once made me feel like a burden, despite the fact that she’d had to raise me alone from the moment my father died in Afghanistan. Mom was a hard worker, no-nonsense. She taught me how to make a mean banana bread and how to change my own oil, how to balance a checkbook and how to achieve a perfect smoky eye look.

Unfortunately, Mom passed away when I was fifteen. That was how people preferred that I say it. My mother didn’t die suddenly in a head-on collision after falling asleep behind the wheel on the way home from her second job. She “passed away.” It seemed like a ridiculously gentle way to put it.

I was supposed to have not a perfect life but a smooth one. I was supposed to be convincing my dad that there was a boy on planet Earth good enough for me to date. I was supposed to be worrying about how not to hurt my parents’ feelings while explaining that I couldn’t come home to visit every weekend. I was supposed to have people back home who cared whether I was turned into a vampire after a tragic Ultimate Frisbee accident.

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 something 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.”

“No, Meagan, stay where I can see you. Ben, just relax your hands and climb down,” Jane told him. “And Ben, I think that given the way you seem to feel about your sire, you should go with bottled blood for your first feeding. Is that OK with everybody?”

I lifted my eyebrows. “Wait, is it supposed to come from me?”

“Under ideal circumstances, yes, but I think we can all agree we waved bye-bye to ideal a while ago,” Jane said.

“I don’t want anything from her,” Ben insisted.

Well, that was hurtful.

Jane waved at Gabriel, who produced a warm mug full of blood from behind his back. He waved it in front of Ben’s face, and Ben slid off the wall with an “Oof.”

Ben reached for the mug and sniffed at it. His two sets of fangs slid out, and he winced, clapping his hand over his mouth. He jostled the mug, and Jane steadied his hand to keep him from dropping it.

“Was that two sets of fangs?” Gabriel said, peering at Ben’s mouth. “Do you have two sets of fangs? How did you—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Ben told him, covering his teeth with his lips. “And I don’t know if I want to do this. Is this donor blood?”

“No, I drained a drifter in a car-wash parking lot and saved it, just in case, because that’s how we’re doing things now,” Jane told him, clearly nearing the end of her patience.

Ben stared at her. Jane stared back.

“OK, fine.” Ben took a long gulp of the blood and then, after pausing to smack his lips, drained the whole mug. “Happy?”

“More or less,” Jane said.

“I need to be somewhere else,” Ben said, walking out of the room. Jane nodded at Gabriel, who followed him.

“Stay where you can see me? What am I, seven?” I asked.

Jane lifted a brow. “If a seven-year-old could accidentally start some sort of vampire epidemic with just one bite, then yes.”

“That was uncalled for.”

Jane pursed her lips. “Was it?”

4

Your vampire childe is going to resent you. Accept it. Save up for the centuries-long therapy.

—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire

I guessed I couldn’t blame Ben for not wanting me around while he and Jane had the vampire birds-and-bees talk. After all, he’d asked me to dinner, and I’d made him be the entree.

Still, it stung a little bit. I thought I’d prepared myself for how angry Ben would be. But to see that anger in his eyes, after knowing nothing but flirty banter from him, shook me up more than I would admit. I couldn’t help but feel I’d lost the beginnings of something important. And considering that he had centuries to hold on to his grudge—and that I’d sort of accidentally murdered him—I didn’t think we were going to make that dinner date.

I went to my room and tried to pretend I was starting on homework assignments. It was the distraction I needed to keep me from yanking my blue suitcase out from under the bed and throwing my clothes into it.

I opened a Word document on my laptop and, deciding to test the monitoring software Jane had installed on my computer, typed in the words “Half-Moon Hollow.” A scary blue filled my screen with bold all-caps, screaming at me, “THIS IS YOUR ONE AND ONLY WARNING. KEYLOGGER SOFTWARE HAS BEEN INSTALLED ON THIS LAPTOP. TYPE THAT PHRASE AGAIN, AND THE NEXT BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH WILL BE REAL.”

She couldn’t do that, right? She couldn’t install spyware on my personal computer! I mean, I knew she could do it, technologically—the Council hired the best and brightest minds available to work for their tech departments—but could she do it legally? I seemed to recall from our orientation at New Dawn that vampires operated under what was basically a feudal system of government, in which they did what the Council told them to or else. So I probably didn’t have much room to complain about her rigging my computer.

Despite Ophelia’s warnings, maybe it would be better if I were sent to stay somewhere else. Ben didn’t want me here. Jane was clearly more comfortable with Ben than she was with me. And I’d been in enough group-placement situations to know that you didn’t want to be the least favorite kid in the house. Been there, done that, lost my favorite jeans.

I could hear every word floating up from the kitchen as Jane informed Ben of what had happened to us and how it affected him. Yes, he was a vampire. No, he wasn’t a normal vampire, and she didn’t know why. No, she didn’t think Meagan had done anything on purpose to make him a weird vampire. Yes, his parents had been informed, and while they weren’t happy, they weren’t in a panic, either. Yes, he would be allowed to contact his parents by Skype. No, he would not be allowed to see them in person or tell them he was staying less than ten miles away from his childhood home. Yes, he would be staying with Jane for the foreseeable future. Yes, Meagan had to stay here, too.

At the mention of my name, I put on headphones and cranked up some bass-heavy music. Superhearing or no, I did not need to eavesdrop on whatever it was that Ben had to say about me. I did manage to finish some classwork my professors had assigned for the coming week.

I set up my desk, “accidentally” smashing two or three unicorns as I made space for my books and laptop. I finished the setup on the closely monitored online Dropbox folders where I was supposed to leave my homework assignments. I made a schedule for all of the reading I needed to complete that week and the homework deadlines. Taking those steps gave me the illusion of control, which gave me the illusion of feeling better. Sure, I couldn’t control where I lived, what I ate, or who I had to see over the breakfast table every evening, but at least my iCalendar was up to date.

Headphones still in place, I opened my copy of Moby-Dick and found my place. I didn’t particularly enjoy the book, but I did enjoy the assignment, comparing the original work with its unofficial adaptation, Jaws. I was part of a pod of three people reading the book and coming up with discussion points about this modernization, while other pods where comparing and contrasting Heart of Darkness with Apocalypse Now or Don Quixote with Defendor. This was why the professor, Dr. Cantley, was my favorite teacher this semester. He seemed to understand his students’ need to connect literature with new media, but he didn’t let us off with shallow analysis. We were expected to be astute as hell.

It seemed that despite not being able to participate in this week’s class discussion, I had to turn in my topic points anyway. And oddly enough, I found that doing my homework was sort of comforting. It was routine, normal. I could pretend I was still just a regular human girl, with normal friends and a normal sleep routine and enzymes that could process solid foods.

Aw, hell. I forgot about that. I would never eat food again. No more burritos. No more pizza. No more cheeseburgers. Actually, it was probably a good thing I was turned, because that diet was probably going to kill me within the next ten years. Also, I’d died before my eating habits and declining metabolism collided. But damn it, my last meal was fruit kabobs and crackers. If I’d known I’d never taste chocolate again, I would have maybe lived my last few human hours differently. Like at a Dairy Queen.

Pouting, I was about halfway through my assignment, noting that shark hunter Quinn’s obsessive fatalism, much like Ahab’s, doomed him from the first scene. Neither character would have had anything resembling a life after he destroyed his aquatic enemy, so it was for the best that they were both dragged down—

“Ow!” I yelped, rubbing at the spot on my temple where I’d been hit with one of those juggling Hacky Sacks. “What the hell?”

I turned around to find Jane standing in my doorway.

“Really? We’re throwing things at my head now?”

“I’m tired of trying to sidestep startled, punch-happy new vampires,” Jane told me. “The med team is here. I thought that you and Ben would be more comfortable if they collected samples here instead of making you go down to the Council lab.”

“You were wrong.”

Jane sucked a deep breath through her nostrils, as if she was officially out of effs to give. “This is not optional, Meagan. We need people who are much smarter than me to look at your various cells and explain why you’re able to do things that no vampire is able to do.”

“Ben just woke up. He barely made it through his first feeding. Shouldn’t we let him get on his feet before you start probing him?” I pouted for a second. “On second thought, he was kind of rude when he woke up—probe him all you want.”

“Charming. I was lucky to hold them off this long,” she said. “Even luckier arguing for you to stay with me instead of in a Council holding cell. Now, I know this is not how you wanted to spend your evening, but damn it, I’ve had a really long night, and it’s not even ten yet. I just can’t spend any more time explaining to newborns why they need to do what’s best for them. So please, please, just be a damn grown-up and get downstairs so you can drool into a tube.”

I sighed, slapping my laptop shut. “Awesome.”

Jane faked enthusiasm for my own fake enthusiasm. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

Jane was not kidding when she said a team was waiting for us. There were at least a dozen lab-coated vampires bustling around the first floor of the house, setting up equipment and making notes on their clipboards. Gabriel was following them around, snatching endangered knickknacks out of the way and frowning a lot. Georgie seemed more interested in whether she could swipe their shiny, sharp medical instruments. And since that meant that I could not be poked or prodded with those shiny, sharp medical instruments, I was on board.

Ben was waiting in the parlor, looking pissed off and nervous. He’d changed into a SEC Sweet Sixteen T-shirt and jeans and was nibbling at his thumbnail. The head scientist, whose name tag read “Dr. Hudson,” motioned for us to sit on the couch. And then he handed me a pamphlet entitled “So You’re About to Be Probed by the Council.”

“I was just kidding about the probing!” I cried. “What exactly are they going to probe?”

Ben was silent, staring straight ahead and gnawing his thumbnail while he bounced his knee at a pace so quick I could hardly see it. I reached out my hand, and despite the audible smack as his kneecap hit my palm, it didn’t hurt. I pressed his foot to the floor.

“It’s going to be OK. Jane wouldn’t let them hurt you.”

Ben shot a confused look my way, but he dropped it the moment Dr. Hudson cleared his throat to get our attention. He was a gangly man with dark blond hair who had been turned in his late thirties. I got the impression he was trying to come across as a kindly country doctor, with his plaid shirt and pleasant smile, but mostly he looked overeager and off-putting. He wasn’t McDreamy. He was McDerpy.

And he was right up in my face, making an uncomfortable amount of eye contact.

“Fascinating,” he said, in an almost reverential voice. “Just fascinating. I can’t tell you how excited I am to take cheek swabs from you.”

I shrank back in my seat, because the word “swab” made me super-uncomfortable. “Thank you?”

“What are you going to do to us?” Ben asked.

“Now, now, no reason to be alarmed,” he said, patting Ben’s knee, which Ben did not seem to enjoy. “We’re just here to do what you might call a basic vampire physical, if vampires required such a thing. We’ll use this to determine how you might be different. Now, for starters, Mrs. Jameson-Nightengale reports some anomalies in your anatomy and circadian rhythms.”

“Is that a nice way of saying we’re freaks?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m sure that’s not the case, my dear,” he assured me. “Now, could you please drop your fangs for me?”

“We haven’t really learned to do that on our own yet,” I said.

Ben shook his head in agreement.

“No problemo,” the doctor said, grinning as he pulled what looked like a plastic-encased bloody sock out of his coat pocket. He opened the plastic bag and waved it under our noses. It smelled stale but not entirely unappetizing, which was pretty gross if I thought too hard about it. It also smelled familiar, and it looked familiar . . .

“Is that my sock?” I asked.

“Yes, it was entered into evidence as part of the rather fetching ensemble you were wearing when you were turned.”

I wasn’t sure what was creepiest, the fact that they’d kept my sock, the fact that Dr. Hudson thought it would be appetizing to me, or the fact that he thought my sock was “fetching.” There were so many issues there.

But sadly enough, my fangs did drop at the scent of my then-human blood. And Ben’s did, too, making him slap his hand over his mouth like a high school sophomore putting a notebook over his crotch. Dr. Hudson’s cobalt-blue eyes went wide, and his grin ratcheted up a few more creep notches. He put his hands under my jaw, and I yelped at the frigid temperature of his skin.

“Sorry,” he said, though he sounded anything but, as he tilted my head this way and that. “Well, looky here. Two distinct fangs on each side. Absolute beauties.”

He stroked a thumb along my double canines in a manner that made me distinctly uncomfortable. He leaned closer. “And has anyone told you that your breath has an odd sulfurous quality to it? It’s intriguing.”

I clamped my lips shut and leaned away, even as he moved closer. “Actually, Ben mentioned that my breath smelled good right before I bit him. But Jane said that my bite mark smelled funny, like old bong water.”

“Well, that wasn’t very nice,” he said, giving Jane an exaggerated sad-puppy face.

Dr. Hudson moved over to Ben, who still had his hand over his mouth. He tugged Ben’s hand away and inspected Ben’s double fangs. He leaned close enough to make Ben crane his neck away and sniffed Ben’s lips.

Dr. Hudson recoiled. “Bong water, indeed,” he said.

My lips twitched, but I didn’t laugh, because I didn’t think that would improve my already flailing relationship with Ben.

Dr. Hudson took a few steps back and stared at us both for a moment. Suddenly, he yelled, “Dr. Gennaro!”

A tall dark-haired man in a natty blue pinstriped dress shirt and a lab coat walked into the parlor. “Yes?”

“Smell young Mr. Overby’s mouth,” he said.

Without even questioning why he should do this, Gennaro invaded Ben’s face space and sniffed. Gennaro leaned in close and immediately backed away, shaking his head. “No, no, no. One word, two syllables. AL-TOID.”

“And now Miss Keene?”

“I can smell it from here. Both of you need to embrace dental hygiene. Living in Kentucky is no excuse.”

“Watch it,” Jane warned him.

Dr. Hudson shot his colleague a frown and shooed him out of the room.

“Does vampirism kill off verbal filters along with the digestive enzymes?” I asked Jane.

“No need to take offense,” Dr. Hudson told me, patting my head. “I think we’ve discovered another little quirk in your physiology. Now, would you please allow me to swab you?”

“I’m sorry?”

But unfortunately, my question left my mouth open and gave him the opportunity to stick a cotton swab into it. Man, he was really rooting around for cheek cells. He took it out and sniffed at the swab.

“Just as I suspected. It’s your saliva that smells unpleasant when your fangs are down. Have you noticed a difference when their fangs are retracted, Mrs. Jameson-Nightengale?”

Jane shook her head. “No, not in general. Then again, I don’t go around sniffing their mouths, because that’s an invasion on several levels.”

“Would you be comfortable allowing a human subject to smell their mouths?”

“Not until their bloodlust is under control, no.”

Dr. Hudson gave Jane a look that clearly meant she had failed him, then turned back to me. “Well, I would theorize that since vampires frequently find smells that are delicious to humans to be disgusting, a human would enjoy the smell of your breath. So when you speak, a human will smell that enticing aroma and be drawn closer. It will take some more tests, of course, but I suspect that there are pheromones involved. It could be an adaptation, to draw in potential prey, and the reaction is about the preference of your intended victim. It would be fascinating to see how it works on humans.”

With no small amount of guilt, I thought back to last night in the dorm recovery room, when Ben couldn’t seem to stay away from me, even when he realized he was alone with a newborn vampire. Was that the influence of my flower breath? Did I lure him into certain bite-y death?

My insides twisted with guilt as Jane told Dr. Hudson, “Which will not be happening for quite some time, because it’s not safe to let them around humans.”

“Right, right.” Dr. Hudson waved away her concerns, while jotting some notes on his clipboard.

Unfortunately, Dr. Hudson’s uncomfortable oral fixation was only the beginning of his personal-space invasions. He whistled, summoning the rest of his science squad, who poured into the parlor in a flurry of white coats. The science vamps said very little as they took samples of my blood and made me spit in a test tube and took even more cheek swabs. I drew the line at letting them scrape off cells from my fangs. Jane agreed that the potential damage to my fangs—which were apparently the only body part that vampires didn’t grow back—was too risky. Dr. Gennaro had to content himself with dental molds and X-rays of our heads made with a portable scanning machine.

We didn’t have pulses. We didn’t have blood pressure. We did have to answer a stream of increasingly embarrassing questions about our turning, our prevampire diets, and our health histories. I didn’t like the way Dr. Hudson’s eyes gleamed with each new development. His gaze was greedy, like he was trying to figure out a way to smuggle us out of the house under his lab coat. Suddenly, I understood Jane’s plans to have us examined at her home, where she could keep an eye on Ben.

The exam went on for hours, until Jane finally stepped in, told Dr. Hudson that we’d been through enough for one evening, and invited his team to leave River Oaks. Like, now.

Dr. Hudson protested loudly, even as the other vampires packed up their equipment. They seemed to understand that Jane was in charge, while Dr. Hudson had science on the brain.

“Are you certain we couldn’t just pop them over to the lab and run some daytime tests?” he whined. “Just some sleep monitoring, noninvasive. Mostly.”

“Mostly?” Ben asked.

Jane shook her head emphatically. “No.”

“Just a quick sleepover,” Dr. Hudson pleaded. “There’s so much left for us to learn from them.”

“Don’t make me tell you no twice, Dr. Hudson. Take your equipment out of my house, and get me the results.”

“Well, at least let me leave some sample-taking kits so you can measure their daily data.”

Jane stared at him in a way that made me feel grateful that, so far, I’d only seen her mildly annoyed with me. Dr. Hudson slumped out of the room. Jane followed him out and closed the parlor door. We heard the scientists packing their gear into the vans parked in front of the house. We heard Jane explaining to Dr. Hudson that he had no right to use her two wards as guinea pigs and that if she caught him doing anything creepy with our tissue samples, she would see him get the “upsetting, scientist version of The Gauntlet.”

“And I want my sock back!” I yelled through the parlor door. The door opened, and Jane’s hand appeared, tossing the little plastic bag into the room with us. “Thank you!”

Ben and I sat in stunned silence, staring at my discarded sock. It looked so sad and gross, crime-scene evidence thrown into the middle of Jane’s cozy, comfortable parlor, that I started giggling. My hysterical guffaws became full-on belly laughs. And pretty soon I was doubled over, with tears streaming down my cheeks. Ben, I noticed, was not laughing.

At all.

“I don’t find much about this funny,” he told me. “I had a life before you bit me. I had plans. And they didn’t involve being turned into a vampire. This is not supposed to be me, OK? I’m the Stiles. I’m the powerless, normal human who sits on the sidelines and watches the people with superpowers do their thing, and then I help clean up the mess.”

I meant to apologize. I did. But instead, what came out of my mouth was “So why don’t you whine about it a little more, Ben? I didn’t understand what I was doing. I’d realized a grand total of three seconds before I bit you that I was a vampire! God, I know, this is not how you expected your life to be, but it’s not like you’re covered in boils or porcupine quills or something.” I can only blame this response on the sheer number of swabs I’d encountered in the last few hours.

He threw up his hands. “I know that. I know. I should have moved away. And I don’t know why I didn’t. I just couldn’t. And I know that’s not your fault. What I know in my head and the crazy gorilla rage in my gut every time I see you are two very different things. I can’t say I’m always going to feel this way. Because we seemed to be clicking before all this happened,” he said. “And you seemed like a really nice girl with a great laugh, and you loved Thai food and hiking and could sort of tolerate bowling. But now neither one of us can have Thai food because you bit me.”

“I know.”

“And we can’t go hiking, because hiking at night is dangerous. And hiking during the day would kill us both. Because you bit me.”

I pursed my lips. “OK.”

“And forget bowling, because vampires can’t handle the smell of rented shoes.”

“I’ve got it,” I told him.

“Because you bit me.”

“OK!” I spat.

“So for right now, I need some space from you.”

“That’s great, except I live two doors down from you, and we share a bathroom,” I shot back.

“I said I knew it didn’t make sense!” he exclaimed, throwing up his arms.

“Fine,” I ground out. And it took all I had not to turn my back on him and flounce away like a little kid.

Ben flopped down on the sofa and got comfy. “Look, Jane’s not going to let anything happen to us. It could be a lot worse, really.”

“That’s easy for you to say.” And when Ben gave me a blank face, I added, “Jane clearly loves you. But she seems to think of me as some sort of evil demon woman who defiled her favorite Half-Moon Hollow teen. If it came down to a choice between the two of us, she’s going to choose you, every time.”

“Why would it come down to a choice between the two of us?” he asked, frowning. “It’s not a game show.”

“Because having two fosters in a situation like this, with all of the drama and superpowers and bloodletting, it just won’t work. It never works,” I told him.

“Fosters?”

“Do you honestly think she would be slapping all of these rules on us if it was just you? No talking to our friends? No leaving the house? No Internet access?” I exclaimed. “If it was just you, you would have an iPad with Wi-Fi built in so you could chat with your friends anytime you wanted.”

“Yeah, she would have all these rules, especially with all of this extra-weird vampire stuff we have going on. Because Jane likes me, but she’s not crazy. New vampires can do some extremely stupid tricks when they’re not supervised. Jane pulled off most of them. It’s sort of a miracle she’s still around.”

“Well, didn’t Ophelia say you’re some sort of computer genius? Can you get around the firewalls she’s installed on my laptop?” I asked.

“I am a computer science major, about to graduate with honors, yes. And no, I probably can’t get around anything the Council installs on our laptops. Because I’ve met the people they hire for their IT department, and they make my programming look like a monkey bashed its fists against the keyboard. And I won’t do it, because I want to trust Jane. When she thinks we’re ready for Internet and phone privileges, she’ll give them to us.”

I groaned. “I liked it better when you said you wouldn’t talk to me. You are of no use to me. None.”

“Well, if I’m not talking to you, I guess I don’t have to tell you about the fact that Jane’s a mind-reader. And she’s been getting better and better at reading vampires’ brains.”

“Oh, shitballs,” I grumbled.

Because I’d had some seriously unkind thoughts about Jane since she’d shown up in my recovery room. Also, I’d had some different sorts of thoughts about Gabriel, and those I definitely didn’t want Jane to hear.

Ben opened his mouth to add something more, but Jane walked back into the parlor. Outside, we heard several vans pulling out of Jane’s driveway. I shrank away from her instinctively and tried to think of something besides my underlying hostility toward Jane and the seminude thoughts I’d had about her husband.

Wait, I couldn’t think about the fact that I’d had those thoughts, either.

Jane’s “brain scanner” didn’t seem to be on at the moment, or she had a really good poker face when it came to people who were living in her house having seminude thoughts about her husband.

Ack! Why couldn’t I stop thinking about it? Why?

Jane gave us a strained but cheerful smile and rubbed her hands together. “OK, kids. You’ve been very good little vampires. And it occurs to me that I haven’t been a very good surrogate sire, keeping you cooped up like this.”

“So we get our phones back?” I asked eagerly.

“No, better,” Jane assured me. “You’re going to get to go outside, in the yard.”

I tried not to pout. I really did. But I only had so much control over my bottom lip. Ben looked confused, too, so at least I wasn’t alone in that.

“Come on, you two!” We followed her out onto the huge front porch, where Georgie and Gabriel were arm wrestling. Georgie was winning. Jane shook her head, but there was a little smile on her face as she stepped out onto the grass. The night was cool and cloudless, the sort of weather you dreamed about in the choking heat of high bluegrass summer.

Would I miss that? Afternoons that stretched until nine thirty? The sensation of sitting in your car in August after a day spent in air-conditioning, feeling like you were sliding into a hot bath? Lying out at the beach? I mean, sure, I’d only been to the beach once, when I was seven, but I’d always meant to go again when I could afford it. And now I was never going to have that experience. How much fun could it be to go to the beach at night? Wasn’t that when sharks attacked?

I had a feeling that I would have a lot of these little moments over the next few months, realizing what I would be missing out on now that I was undead.

That would be fun.

“Close your eyes,” Jane told us.

When I didn’t immediately close mine—because this could all be some complicated ruse to allow Jane to drop some sort of net over me and let the scientists cart me away without damaging her furniture—she huffed out a breath.

“Really?”

“Fine.” I sighed, though I kept one eye open a tiny bit, just in case.

“I feel like I’ve neglected you in your first nights as vampires. A good sire would have helped you balance out all of the things you feel you’re missing now that you’re undead by showing you all of the awesome things that you can do. Since you’re both without a good sire right now, I want you to close your eyes. Forget about what you can’t see,” Jane told us, and I smarted from that “without a good sire” comment. “Listen to the wind rustling through the dying leaves. Listen for the heartbeats of all the animals hiding in the woods. Take a deep breath, and take in all of the scents in the air around you. Smoke from a neighbor’s bonfire. The drying grass, which someone was supposed to mow yesterday.”

Behind me, I heard Georgie groan while Gabriel snickered. “Told you,” he said.

Despite my net fear, cutting off one of my senses really did help me pick up on new scents and sounds. I could hear dozens of fluttering heartbeats in the distance, the dry rattle of leaves. I could smell smoke and decay and dry, cracking earth. Each new sensation was layered on top of the last one, but it wasn’t overwhelming. It just helped me figure out my surroundings. For instance, I could smell a skunk waddling around somewhere off to my left. I definitely wanted to avoid that. And I could hear a dog barking in the . . . wait, that wasn’t in the distance. That was getting closer.

“No!” I yelled as Fitz came flying out of the darkness and threw himself at me. I’d braced for it, but I still went crashing into Ben. We landed with an “Oof,” sprawling across the grass. With doggy kisses on my cheeks, I opened my eyes. It was like seeing the world for the first time. I could see every star in the sky, not just white pinpricks on a black backdrop but the actual halo of light surrounding a center of brilliant fire. I could see every leaf falling from the trees surrounding Jane’s house. I could see the outline of every blade of grass.

“Whoa,” Ben whispered.

“Ouch.” I grumbled, trying to roll Fitz off my chest.

“Fitz, off!” Jane told him sternly. “Go!”

Fitz went running off into the trees.

“Better go catch him,” Jane said.

“Is this a trick?” I asked. “Like entrapment? Are you going to shoot me if I run?”

Jane rolled her eyes and shooed me away. “Just run.”

I dug my toe into the ground and took off. It felt like I’d been launched out of a catapult across the lawn. I’d never been a runner. My legs were long but had never had much power when I was human. Now I was streaking across the lawn so fast I didn’t feel my feet touching the grass. Gabriel and Jane followed Ben and me closely, laughing at our childlike enthusiasm for sprinting. Georgie sped ahead, just because she could.

I was dead, but I’d never felt so alive, like every nerve ending from the tips of my toes to my scalp was firing at full blast. And I once drank a Surge soda at a Katy Perry concert. I felt connected to every muscle in my body as I moved, hurtling myself into the next moment.

The manicured lawn gave way to long-abandoned pastures, outlined with rotting wooden fences. Ben was beside me, whooping as he ran. He jumped into a tree, climbing from limb to limb and then hopping down from the top without missing a beat. Could I do something like that?

A smelly little cow pond was coming up, about the size of a backyard pool. I ran at the rickety old dock that barely touched its shore and sprang off the end, leaping over the pond. I landed, sinking in the damp earth up to my shins. I laughed, yanking at my legs until I freed my shoes from the mud.

“You OK?” Ben yelled, zipping past me.

I called, “Yeah, but my shoes will never recover.”

Gabriel stopped and helped me shove my muddy shoe back on my foot. Georgie skipped around us, doing back handsprings in the tall grass. She stuck her landing, arms raised in a V of triumph, and did a little bow.

“Ophelia did something similar once,” she told me. “But her foot was stuck in a person.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you are an extremely creepy little girl?”

Georgie shrugged. “Yes, but no one has seen them in so long that it doesn’t really matter.”

I started to laugh, which, I assumed, was not the reaction Georgie was expecting, because her responding giggle was more startled than amused.

“It’s a mad world, Meagan,” she said. “We have to use the weapons we’re given. People underestimate me because I’m small and cute. They just can’t imagine someone like me committing an act of violence. I use their ignorance to my advantage.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” I plopped down in the grass and pulled her to sit next to me. In the distance, Ben suddenly veered right, toward the woods. I couldn’t hear exactly what Jane was saying, but it didn’t sound like Woo-hoo! Run faster that way!

“What’s he doing?” I asked.

“Something that is making Jane curse, which isn’t good.”

Jane was following on Ben’s heels like a sheepdog, heading him in the other direction. Georgie pursed her lips, her fog-gray eyes making secret calculations. Meanwhile, I lay back in the grass and watched the tiny movements of the stars overhead.

“Oh, his house,” Georgie said, nodding in the direction Ben had been running. “His house is five miles that way.”

I sat back up. “Oh. That sucks.”

Georgie nodded. “Truly. I met Ben’s parents once. Nice people. Smelled delicious.”

I stared down at her and shook my head. “Dude, no.”

Georgie shrugged.

Meanwhile, Jane was practically dragging Ben back toward us, her arm wrapped around his shoulders. “Ben, honey, we’ve talked about this.”

“I didn’t mean to, Jane, I just thought—”

“You just thought you’d pop into your parents’ house for a surprise visit?” She sighed. “That’s a little advanced for your first night out, don’t you think?”

Ben’s heartbroken expression tested the limits of the term “puppy eyes.” “I just thought about my parents, sitting at home, not knowing where I am or how I am, and I just couldn’t resist the urge to run home.”

“I understand, Ben. But we can’t take a risk like that with you, not this early. I told you, we’ll let you see them as soon as it’s safe.”

“Well, at least no one got stabbed,” Gabriel told her.

I raised my hand as if I’d missed most of my Intro to Cryptic-Speaking Vampires class, which I had. “What?”

“I’ll tell you about Jane’s first week as a vampire sometime,” Georgie whispered. “It’s hilarious.”

Ben dropped down in the grass at Georgie’s side, looking miserable. I felt a familiar flash of guilt for making it impossible for him to live his nice, normal life. But, like with most emotions that made me uncomfortable, I just tamped it down. I’d move along to something else, until they popped up again at some angsty, inconvenient moment. Emotional maturity—I was doing it wrong.

“What else can we do?” I asked Jane. “I mean, we’re fast, and we’re strong. What else?”

Jane sank to the ground in front of us. She and Gabriel were a bit more graceful in their descent than we floppy youngsters were. “You’ll still have those weird human moments of clumsiness, especially in your first few years. It’s like your body forgets sometimes that you’re not limited to human speed and reactions. But over time, you’ll get even smarter, faster, stronger. Just be careful. Remember that you can hurt people around you, so you’ve got to watch yourself. Avoid sunlight, silver, getting poked with wooden objects. Other than that, who knows? You’re sort of ahead of the curve in terms of special tricks. And you may develop a talent that’s just for you. Like Ophelia and her phone frying.”

Suddenly, remembering Jane’s own special talent, I frowned.

Don’t think anything rude, I told myself. Definitely don’t think anything about Gabriel. Or the fact that you want to smash all of Jane’s unicorns with a brick. Don’t think—dang it!

“Did you tell her about the mind-reading thing?” Jane demanded. “Damn it, Ben! You know that makes people uncomfortable around me.”

“I thought it was the fair thing to do,” Ben said. “I would want to know.”

“It’s actually working against me,” I told him. “Because I keep telling myself not to think about things I shouldn’t think about, but in the process, I think about those things. Maybe my special talent is bad timing and inappropriate thoughts?”

Ben snickered. I gave him the finger, which made him laugh harder.

“Children,” Gabriel said mildly, though he was smiling, too.

“Well, for the record, I don’t go sneaking around in people’s brains. Because that is rude, even if it would make my life a lot easier to know what the hell you’re thinking.”

“Yeah, somehow that doesn’t help,” I told her.

“So the next few weeks, we’re going to focus on your self-control, dampening your bloodthirst, and general vampire education. Eventually, you’re going to be steady enough to go out into the world, have limited interactions with humans. And then we’re going to get you back to your campus.”

I tried not to pout, but honestly. “Homeschooling?”

“Homeschooling.” Ben groaned.

“Don’t look at me,” Georgie said archly. “I graduated from self-control school centuries ago.”

“You ate an entire circus once,” Jane countered.

Georgie scowled. “The nets gave the trapeze artists an unfair advantage. Call me a purist.”

“That’s not the word I would use,” I told her.

5

Make sure you know the basics before you start to teach your childe fancy feeding tricks.

—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire

If our next few weeks were a training montage in an ’80s action movie, well, it would mostly feature ugly crying and blood spatters set to power chords.

I’d hoped that since we were apparently some new strain, we could somehow skip the weird adjustment period from human to vampire. But no, Ben and I struggled with our thirst, though it was slaked with less blood than Jane or Gabriel needed. We weren’t used to our superhuman strength. And we never seemed to make it to our beds in time for sunrise, meaning we collapsed wherever we were.

It was like being a gawky teenager all over again, only instead of tripping over our own feet, we accidentally broke doorknobs off their moorings and suffered weird contusions-slash-carpet-burns.

Early on, Jane had found that keeping Georgie on a schedule was important to prevent her from committing mass murder, so she put Ben and me on the same routine. We woke up and drank breakfast as a “family,” and then Jane left us to do our schoolwork while she did Council business in her study. The awesome news was that we typed and read faster than even Jane and Gabriel. Georgie, fascinated-slash-annoyed by the fact that we could do something she couldn’t, ran us through typing-speed trials. I was the winner at 390 words per minute. But Ben was a faster reader, completing his copy of The Guide for the Newly Undead, Second Edition in an hour.

After homework, we got “yard time,” when Jane literally let us run around the yard to let off some steam. Sadly, this was the most entertaining part of our day, testing our strength and speed. Every day, we ran laps around the cow pond, leaped from inadvisable heights, and tried to see the lights of town (such as they were) from the tops of the trees. We could not.

Dr. Hudson gave us the undead version of heart monitors, bracelets that measured electrical activity in our brains, our metabolism, and other vital statistics. I took mine off as often as I could, because I didn’t like anything to do with McDerpy on my skin. I suspected the bracelets might have also included a tracking chip, given how often Ben wandered just a little too close to the woods near his family’s house.

After yard time, we had remedial vampire classes—sunscreen application, judging our bloodthirst, avoiding silver. We had to (slowly) read The Guide for the Newly Undead, Second Edition like it was Bible study so Jane could quiz us on chapter topics. Georgie would wear clothes from thrift stores saturated in several levels of human smell, in exchange for bribes of more Hershey’s Blood Additive and video games. This served two purposes. For one thing, it was very unsettling, feeling that crazy bloodthirst for a child-shaped person. The self-loathing gave you all kinds of negative reinforcement about not feeding from humans. And if that didn’t keep you from lunging, Georgie could be downright mean. She was a gouger and a hair puller.

Despite the gouging, Georgie was the most welcoming member of the “family.” She seemed to find my flailing newbie antics charming. Or at least amusing. She was . . . extremely freaking creepy. I would not lie. She had this flat, sarcastic way of speaking that just sounded wrong coming out of a cute little blond child. Also, the glassy sheen of her dead shark eyes made me think that she was secretly plotting my death. And I was pretty sure she was smart enough to get away with it.

Jane still watched me like she expected me to bolt with the family’s flatware. I maintained a polite distance from Gabriel. He was a perfectly nice guy, though he seemed permanently befuddled. He was the centered, steady yin to Jane’s clumsy, hyperverbal yang. But I’d been in enough foster placements to know that you didn’t get too cozy with the man of the house. Especially if your new foster mom already had some issues with trusting you.

Ben stretched my polite distance by miles. Not only would he not try to work around Jane’s Firewall of Death so we could contact our friends on campus, but he dedicated a lot of time to ignoring me. Maybe ignoring people who lived in the same house as he did was his special vampire talent.

Long gone was the adorable boy whose heady cookie-based flirting had left me weak in the knees. Oh, he wasn’t cruel, and he didn’t snub me to my face, but I could only take seeing so many smiles die on his lips when he saw me walk into a room. He went from happy and laughing at something Jane had said to completely dead-faced. So I stopped walking into rooms where I knew he would be. I wasn’t trying to be petulant about it. I just timed my day to be as Ben-free as possible. I did my homework in my room. During yard time, I ran at my own pace, which just happened to be fifteen yards behind Ben.

I decided not to let it bother me. I didn’t do romantic entanglements. I embraced casual sex and all its awesome, minimal emotional requirements. But I hadn’t done that very often, because the chances of turning up pregnant or contracting some weird disease were pretty high for my demographic.

I’d always prided myself on not investing in people who didn’t invest in me. Life was too short to attach yourself to people who didn’t really like you. If a friend reduced our interactions to nothing but texts and Facebook likes, I found new friends. If a guy didn’t call, I didn’t make up elaborate excuses about him “liking me too much.” I moved on to a guy who did call. Ben was no different. We’d had the beginnings of something that could have been special, but it had been destroyed by a forty-five-pound weight.

On the plus side, having little contact with the outside world or the people who lived two doors down from me meant that I threw myself at my school assignments like they were the only thing keeping me sane. Because they were. Which was sad. But my grades had never been higher.

Whether it was to keep us socialized or to give Jane a break, some of her vampire friends came to visit. It was mostly her friend-colleague hybrid Dick Cheney, who seemed super-defensive about his name when he first introduced himself for some reason. Dick came off as pretty sketchy when you first met him, like the kind of guy who lingered around campus asking girls if they wanted to go to his modeling school. But he was completely devoted to his wife, Andrea, in that googly-eyed, hung-the-moon way I’d only seen on the CW lineup.

After about two weeks of this, Jane trusted us enough to introduce us to the larger circle of vampire friends at a big potluck. Well, it was actually a test of our bloodthirst, dressed up as a potluck. Basically a training Trojan Horse.

It started with Jane’s vampire friends slowly filtering into the house. There were so many of them—pale, attractive, conspicuously coupled off—that I had a hard time keeping track of all the names. I’d met Dick and Andrea (indecently pretty, with clothes that looked like something on Mad Men). And then there were Miranda and her boyfriend-sire, Collin (uptight and British but yummy in that Michael Fassbender way that kind of made me understand why she put up with his constant grimacing). Then there was a tall dark-haired man named Cal (funny accent, cool vintage rock T-shirts) and his petite brown-haired wife, Iris (who seemed to want to mother me one moment and ground me the next).

Iris seemed particularly fond of Ben, given the way she tackle-hugged him the moment she ran through the door.

“I’m so happy to see you!” she cried, clutching his face in her hands in a grip that I frankly found terrifying. “I mean, so sad that you’re dead but so happy to see you!”

“I’m so glad I don’t need to breathe,” Ben wheezed as Iris enveloped him in another hug. “Because it would be an issue right now.”

“OK, sweetheart, put the boy down,” Cal said gently. “Being picked up like a toddler in front of loved ones is emasculating.”

“Little bit,” Ben agreed as Iris set him on his feet.

“Gigi and Nik would have come tonight, but they thought it would be sort of weird for you,” Iris said.

I leaned toward Miranda, who was seated near me on the couch. “Who’s Gigi?” I asked her.

“Iris’s little sister and Ben’s ex-girlfriend. They broke up a year or so ago, when Gigi was still human. It was . . . it was unpleasant for them both. And then awkward. But mostly unpleasant.”

“Oh.” I felt a small flash of sympathy for Ben. It did have to be super-awkward to have an ex mixed into a friend group that he clearly valued. People took sides or tried to “stay neutral,” which meant they took the side that wasn’t yours. And next thing you knew, there were parties you didn’t know about and hangouts you weren’t invited to, and then your Facebook friend list shrank dramatically, and you were left wondering what happened.

I liked Miranda. She was a new vampire, too. She’d worked for vampires for a long time before she was turned, so she seemed amused-slash-exasperated by many of their antics. And she seemed to understand how uncomfortable I was in this situation, sticking close by to fill me in on this person’s relationship to Jane or how that person related to everybody else. All while Fitz sat between us and thumped his tail against my thigh.

More and more people moseyed through the door. They all sat around the parlor, trying too hard to look casual as they drank different bottles of blood they’d brought with them. Andrea set up a couple of pots of different types of blood concoctions she’d made at home. Apparently, Jane was not trusted to cook, even when the food wasn’t solid. Her friends contended that the original meaning of “BYOB” was “bring your own blood.”

Something about their easy warmth made my chest ache in a way that wasn’t entirely pleasant. And it didn’t help that Ben already knew so many of them, leaving me feeling like the odd man out all over again. Dick made an effort to keep me engaged, talking to me about my schoolwork and whether I was happy with the assignments the professors were sending me—something he claimed was part of his job as Jane’s co-representative on the Council. His eyes just about glazed over with boredom while discussing nineteenth-century British literature, but I appreciated his effort.

“Jane gave you the Council-issued phone, right?” Dick asked. “She told you to keep it with you at all times?”

I pulled the bright pink KidPhone from my back pocket. “Would we call this a phone?”

“Yes,” Dick said. “Now, if you ever run into trouble, I want you to press the one button three times and then hold it down until it beeps. And then you want to get about ten feet away.”

“What’s going to happen if I do that?” I asked him. “Is it like a tracking beacon or something?”

Dick opened his mouth to answer, but just then the door opened again, and the whole room went still. Dick moved between me and the door. A ridiculously gorgeous redheaded woman swanned in, grinning broadly at the crowd.

“Hey, y’all!”

Wow, that was some accent. It was nasal to the point that it hurt my ears, which was tragic because she was one of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen.

I watched the redhead cross the room and could immediately tell that she wasn’t a vampire. Her skin tone was too healthy. And her heartbeat . . . she was calm, but it was thumping at a pretty steady rhythm. Heartbeat. Human. Was she human? Panicked, I clamped my jaw shut, willing my fangs to stay in my gums. But they never dropped.

Fitz huffed at the redhead, then laid his snout against my leg, which was a nice reminder to stay stuck to the couch like I was nailed to it.

The twangy newcomer didn’t smell right. She didn’t smell sweet or tangy or anything remotely good. She smelled . . . like a wet dog. A gross wet dog that had been rolling in something that had been dead for weeks.

Fitz looked up at me with his shiny brown eyes, as if he could hear my anticanine sentiments and was insulted by them. I shrugged.

Still, the stink coming off that stranger seemed wrong. Someone that attractive should have a regular bathing schedule.

I glanced at Ben, whose nose was wrinkled with distaste. Could he smell it, too?

Jane eyed us both carefully, looking confused when I sank against the couch and pressed my hand over my nose.

The newcomer walked closer to me. “You must be Meagan!” she cried, smiling cautiously. “So nice to meet you! I’m Jolene Lavelle.”

“Hi,” I said, waving awkwardly, not moving to shake her offered hand. Because her hygiene was in question, honestly.

Jolene looked to Jane, who shrugged. Jolene looked back over her shoulder. “Zeb, you comin’ in?”

A man with sandy-blond hair and bright blue eyes poked his head through the doorway. “Hi!”

Miranda glanced between me and the door. “Oh . . . no.”

It was immediately clear that Zeb wasn’t a vampire, either. He was tan and vital and healthy-looking. I could hear his slightly elevated pulse from the couch. But unlike his wife, he did not smell like wet dog. He smelled delicious, like fresh-baked apple pie and pumpkin spice lattes. I could practically see the blood throbbing through his delicate veins, under his skin, rich and warm and ripe.

My mouth watered. I could feel actual saliva seeping at the corner of my mouth, which was, frankly, gross. And my fangs dropped with a snick. Every muscle in my body was commanding me to jump forward, launch myself from the couch, bank off the wall, and tackle him. I could practically feel the skin of his throat give way under my fangs, flooding my mouth with hot red blood. But I gritted my teeth, stiffening and locking down my legs so they couldn’t propel me forward.

Ben was tensed on his chair, fingers gripping the armrests like they were lifelines. I reached over and wrapped my fingers around his wrist, his very, very tight wrist. It relaxed ever so slightly, but he didn’t move.

Zeb frowned at us. “Huh, well, that was anticlimactic. I was promised lunging, maybe even a minor flesh wound. It’s gotten kind of boring ever since everybody settled down and got seminormal. No one’s kidnapped me or hypnotized me or threatened to murder me in years. Between that and the kids starting school, I feel old.”

Jolene put her arm around Zeb’s shoulders. “Welcome to middle age, sweetie.”

“Your breath smells really nice, by the way,” Zeb told me.

“Good job, you two!” Jane said, rushing forward to pull Ben and me up from the couch, though I noticed that she stayed between us and Zeb. In yanking us to our feet, she knocked aside my grip on Ben’s arm. “I’m so proud!”

“What the hell, Jane?” I yelled.

“Zeb’s my best friend.” Jane said. “Has been since we were kids, and he’s one of the few humans left in our little circle of friends since Miranda was turned. I invited him over here to see how tight you’ve locked down your bloodthirst. The good news is, it’s pretty darn tight.”

“This was a test?” I yelped. “That’s freaking sick!”

“We’ve only been vampires for two weeks!” Ben cried.

“What? Zeb knows the risks, and there’s a whole room full of vampires here to protect him. Who better to test your control? And you did great!”

I frowned. “I still don’t like it.”

Jane shrugged. “Well, that’s fine, kids, but as your almost-sire, I reserve the right to test you as I see fit. And I did, and you were awesome, so accept it and say thank you for my vote of confidence.”

“I think that the ‘thank you’ part would be easier if you didn’t call us kids,” Ben told her.

“You’re under twenty, and just this evening I found you watching Thundercats in my living room,” Jane pointed out. “In your pajama pants.”

Ben frowned. “She’s got me there.”

“Still doesn’t explain why I get lumped together with the ‘kid,’ ” I grumbled. “So what does performing well on your creepy little test mean? Do we get a special treat? An outing to vampire Chuck E. Cheese’s? Access to telecommunications?”

“An internship!” Jane exclaimed, with a big cheesy grin on her face. I swear, she actually did jazz hands and everything.

“That seems more like a punishment,” I said.

“Speaking as someone who has done two unpaid internships, I agree,” Ben told her. “Is this about my browser history again?”

I gave Ben an extreme side-eye.

“It’s not a punishment,” Jane insisted. “It’s just that with all of the remedial vampire training and the number of hours one of you spends watching Thundercats, it occurs to me that maybe you don’t have enough to keep you occupied.”

“Really?” Dick asked.

“It turns out that when you read and type at lightning speed and you don’t have to sit in on lectures, college classwork doesn’t take all night,” I said. “Which you should blame on the increasingly lax standards of the American postsecondary educational system. Not on us.”

“Well, I can’t have you sitting around my house all night unsupervised and unoccupied. Idle hands are the devil’s opportunity to break my furniture and walls.”

“Your walls?” I asked.

“Jamie,” she and Ben said together.

“Wow.”

“So, instead of leaving you alone with my precious, vulnerable walls, we are going to find something fun and exciting for you to do.”

Ben’s voice brightened. “Like what?”

“You will be coming to work with me at the Council office,” Jane said. “This is a congratulations potluck!”

Ben and I both made disappointed noises, and Dick was doubled over laughing. But the good news was that this new development in employment was enough to distract me from how wonderful Zeb’s blood smelled.

“Like a Take Your Daughter to Work Day thing? We’re going to sit in your break room and color until it’s time to come home?” I asked.

“No, doing actual work, so you will earn college credit for your trouble, which will keep you both from losing whatever classes you aren’t able to take online,” Dick said. “So, Ben, we know you’re basically Bill Gates without the scary glasses. You can help with the database project. If you’re comfortable with that.”

Ben shrugged. “Er, sure. I can do that.”

“And you, Meagan, what were you studying at school?” Jane asked.

“I was—I am. I am an English major.”

“An English major,” Jane said, frowning. “What were you planning to do with that? Teach?”

“I really don’t like kids that much,” I told her. “I thought maybe grad school, teaching at a college level.”

“Hmmm.”

“I know, I was not preparing myself for life postvampire or postgraduation,” I admitted.

“How would you feel about being my personal assistant?” she asked.

“Woefully underqualified.”

She waved my concerns away with a flick of her hand. “It’s not that complicated. You manage my schedule, protect me from seeing people I don’t want to see, answer some phones. I only ask because my last secretary, Margaret, was disturbingly loyal to Ophelia. And she’d been sabotaging my schedule, not reporting phone calls, not sending my expense reports to the finance department. I had to fire her in a way that involved the human and vampire police . . . and animal control. I need someone I can trust.”

“And that person is me?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Yes,” Jane said, smiling and patting my shoulder. “I think you’ll do great.”

The corners of my mouth pulled back into a frown.

Jane sighed. “And as a signing bonus, I’ll let you video chat with your friends. I know how hard you’ve been trying. You deserve to be rewarded.”

“That is sort of manipulative.”

She nodded. “Yes, it is. Take it or leave it.”

“I’ll take it.”

She patted my back. “Of course, if you screw up, I’ll make you work in the mail room.”

I shuddered. I’d heard about some of the mail room employees. They were not my people.

“Are we finished with this touching moment? Because I’m starving,” Jane said.

The other vampires in the room cheered.

We gathered around Jane’s dining-room table, where Jane ladled cups of blood from pots into fancy crystal punch cups. Jane raised her glass to our new jobs, which made that hesitant expression return to Ben’s face. I didn’t know what Andrea did to the blood, but it was one of my favorite things I’d tried since being turned, deep and fruity without being too sweet. Meanwhile, Jolene ate her weight in ribs, while Zeb ate . . . less than his weight in ribs. But smiled at Jolene like seeing his wife’s face smeared with barbecue sauce was the most adorable thing ever.

Despite the fact that the group was relatively huge, even I could see the obvious, loving connections among them all, the ease in the way they spoke to one another. They were family, the kind of family people chose to be with, instead of hoping for “unavoidable” overtime on holidays.

I wondered if I was going to have enough time here to feel like a part of it.

The very next sunset, Jane made good on her promise to let me video chat with Morgan and Keagan. She did insist that the conversation take place in her study, where she could supervise it, but I was so excited to talk to my friends I barely registered the invasion of privacy.

Jane’s study was a bit more weirdo-quirky than the rest of the house. There were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lining the room, every shelf stuffed with leather-bound first editions, mass-market paperbacks, softcover trades. And where there weren’t books, there were strange ceremonial bowls, a Ravenclaw mug with rusty-looking residue near the rim, Funko Pop! versions of Sansa Stark and Oberyn Martell, candles inscribed with symbols from Supernatural, a little framed quote from Persuasion, and, oddly enough, little pewter fairy statues, which she’d put in a glass case labeled with a small brass sign that said, “Unsellable Case of Shame.”

“You must do a lot of shopping on Etsy,” I said. I couldn’t help but notice that the space behind the desk, the area that would be visible to the laptop’s webcam, was blank wall space and a window covered with blackout curtains. Morgan and Keagan would be given no clues to where I was. And since they couldn’t see out the blocked window, they couldn’t even use the angle of the moon to triangulate my position, like they did on CSI. Not that Morgan and Keagan were that good at trigonometry, but I liked to think they could have pulled it off with help from the right Web site.

“I like to mix and match my fandoms.” Clearly excited by my heretofore unknown enthusiasm for something, Jane opened her laptop with a flourish. The Skype logo appeared. The familiar dink-dank-donk sounded as the computer attempted a connection. Ophelia’s pale, elfin face appeared on the screen, her features exaggerated by the very close company she was keeping with the camera.

“Ophelia!” I cried. “Sit back! You look like an old Busta Rhymes video.”

Ophelia rolled her eyes but moved away from the webcam. “Better?”

“Yes! How are you? I miss you!”

Ophelia gave me a pleased little smile, but she didn’t return the sentiment, because that wasn’t her thing. “I’m fine, other than straining my upper-body strength trying to hold back your friends so I can talk to you first.”

In the background, I heard Keagan squeal. “She’s so strong!”

“How are you adjusting?” Ophelia asked casually, as if she wasn’t restraining my friends.

“I’m sort of in control of my thirst, and I can outrun Fitz now without embarrassing myself. I’m living with Georgie, and she completely terrifies me but in a fun way.”

Ophelia’s brows rose. “That is a lot of information. Well, I have some people here who are yanking my arms off so they can talk to you.”

Ophelia stepped out of view so Morgan and Keagan could tumble in front of the camera like a couple of overeager puppies. Morgan yelped when Keagan knocked her aside. Keagan’s rounded cheeks nearly covered her baby-doll blue eyes as she grinned, waving both hands.

“Meagan!” Keagan shrieked. “Are you OK? We were so worried!”

“Back away from the mic, Keagan, you’re going to burst my eardrums,” I said.

“Sorry,” she said, moving away from the camera. “Are you OK?” she repeated.

“I’m OK,” I told her. “It’s not ideal, but it could be a lot worse.”

“Where did you go?” Morgan asked.

I raised my eyebrows. I hadn’t expected Ophelia to obey Jane’s order that she keep my location a secret. I was even more surprised that a little part of me appreciated it. I doubted very much that the Council would react in a nice, nonviolent way if the girls came busting into Half-Moon Hollow on a rescue mission. Sure, Jane was in charge of the region, but she could only spin a headline like “Coeds Torch Council Building in Freak Taser Incident” so far.

“I can’t tell you,” I said as Jane shook her head from behind the laptop screen. “I’m sorry. It’s all part of the agreement with the Council. I agree not to tell anyone where I am, they agree not to kill me in my sleep.”

“What agreement with the Council?” Morgan demanded.

“Morgan, I know you’re worried about me, but I don’t want to waste our chat time going over questions I can’t answer. All you need to know is that I’m OK. I’m safe. I’m adjusting to the whole vampire thing, and I’m trying to get back to campus as quick as I can. So what’s been going on with you two? What’s the campus gossip? What have I missed?”

“It’s been pretty quiet, really,” Keagan told me. “You know the drill. Now that everybody’s stopped freaking out over the first couple of weeks, it’s mostly frat parties, football games, and avoiding group projects.”

“You are now approaching an urban legend,” Morgan told me. “There’s a rumor that your turning didn’t take and you are now haunting the second floor. If girls see your reflection in the mirror, it means they won’t date again until they graduate.”

“Why would I be haunting the second floor? I lived on the fourth. Also, ouch, my legend sounds super-mean.”

“Urban legends are not known for accurate details,” she said with a shrug. “But you might be included on the haunted-campus tour they do to frighten freshmen! That’s exciting.”

I groaned. “They’re going to mash my story up with the ‘Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?’ girl, aren’t they?”

Morgan nodded. “Probably.”

“Well, your story’s way more interesting than Ben Overby’s,” Keagan chimed in. “You know, that boy you danced with at the party? Right after you were turned, he dropped out of school and joined the Peace Corps. It was weird.”

“Really?” I asked, lifting my brow in Jane’s direction. “The Peace Corps? Does anyone join the Peace Corps anymore?”

Jane shrugged.

“Yeah, something about using his computer geekery to create safe groundwater systems in Africa,” Morgan said.

“But how would he even . . .” I asked as Jane shook her head again, clearly discouraging my inconvenient curiosity. “Never mind.”

“I think it’s kind of romantic.” Keagan sighed. “He couldn’t stay in school, where he met you, after he watched you die. He was so clearly into you.”

“Yep, that’s a definite sign of someone being into you, throwing away their education and running away to a third world country,” Morgan muttered.

“You’re so pale,” Keagan said. “Gorgeous, don’t get me wrong. I mean, it looks like RuPaul’s Drag Race Understated Glam Squad got ahold of you. But pale. And you have circles under your eyes that kind of look like eyeliner but more shadowy. Aren’t you sleeping?”

“Yeah, just not when you’re sleeping.”

Morgan frowned. “But you’re OK? You’re not having foster-home flashbacks? Do they make vampire antianxiety meds? Should we airlift some to you? I mean, we would have to know where you are, but that could be arranged, right?”

Keagan elbowed Morgan on-screen. “Subtle, girl, come on.”

“I’m fine,” I promised, eyeing Jane carefully. “It’s different from when I was a kid.”

“Well, we miss you,” Keagan said. “Going for cheese fries at two A.M. isn’t the same without you!”

“Well, it definitely wouldn’t be the same if I did go, because I would throw up the cheese fries.”

“Good point,” Keagan said, grimacing.

“Also, we have to write our own essays now. It’s terrible. I’m failing Public Speaking. Do you know how embarrassing it is to fail Public Speaking?” Morgan grumbled.

I burst out laughing. “How am I responsible for you failing Public Speaking?”

“Because I have to spend the time I would spend practicing my speeches writing my own essays for Russian Literature.”

“Well, who told you to take Russian Literature?” I asked.

“Professor Romanov is so hot.” Morgan groaned. “It clouded my judgment.”

I snorted. “I’m sorry I’m not there to help you commit academic fraud.”

“Well, you should be.”

“I miss you guys.” I sighed.

“When are you coming home?” Morgan demanded.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It all depends on whether I can pass remedial vampire classes.”

Jane glanced at her watch and made a wrap it up gesture. I glanced at the clock at the bottom of the screen. Ben’s time slot to talk to his parents was coming up soon, and I knew Jane wanted to talk with him one last time about the reasons for not telling his parents where he was before he got on the video chat.

“I’ve got to go,” I told them, prompting a chorus of “Noooo!” from the other side of the screen. “But if I’m very good, I can call . . .”

I paused to glance at Jane, who whispered, “Next week.”

“I can call next week.”

“OK,” Keagan muttered, all pouty.

Jane whispered, “Your friend can e-mail you her essay at the Council address if I can screen the e-mail. AND the essay.”

I grinned. “And Morgan, e-mail me your essays so I can read them over and revise them. Not write them for you. Revise. I’ll send you the e-mail address.”

“Yay for academic semifraud!” Morgan cheered.

“Bye,” I said, shaking my head.

They yelled, “We love you!”

“I love you guys,” I said, throwing them a kiss. They waved at me, and I reluctantly clicked to end the call. I wiped at the eyes I hadn’t even realized were growing wet.

“You OK?” Jane asked.

I nodded. “Thank you,” I said. “I really needed to talk to them.”

“I know,” Jane assured me. I stood up, and she put her hand on my shoulder, gave it a squeeze. “I know you think I’ve been a little bit of a bitch through this whole process.”

“Because I’ve actually thought, Wow, Jane’s being a little bit of a bitch right now,’ and you read my mind?”

“Yes, and in some ways you’ve been right. I’ve had to be a bitch. I don’t like it. But that’s part of my job with the Council. I’m doing what I can to make life easier for vampires without committing overt acts of evil, as was the Council’s usual way. And if I have to be kind of mean to keep you safe, so be it. But I do understand what it’s like to have friends who mean more to you than family could. And I hope that someday you start to include some of us in that little circle.”

I nodded. “I’m trying.”

“You know, I happen to know a Russian guy who could probably help your friend out with that Russian Literature problem.”

“Nah,” I said, shaking my head. “This is the third class Morgan has registered for based on professorial hotness. She’s never going to learn until she hits rock bottom.”

“You’re a good friend.”

I’d never worked in an office before. I mean, I’d watched plenty of episodes of The Office, but I doubted very much that qualified me for the Undead American Workplace. However, I had spent a lot of time in nondescript government waiting rooms, which made me quite comfortable in the Council offices.

I knew exactly how to adjust to the gray carpet, gray walls, gray sofas, and gray laminate everything else as Jane escorted Ben and me from the elevator to the subterranean HR office. The good news was that being wards of the Council meant that we didn’t need to fill out the usual first-day forms or liability releases. We’d already been thoroughly documented. (And cheek-swabbed.) I mean, honestly, we were already vampires. What more could happen to us on the job?

Our orientation consisted of Jane telling us, “Do what you’re told. Don’t lie. Don’t take anything in the fridge that doesn’t belong to you. Don’t go below the third subfloor.” Short, sweet, to the point.

It did make me wonder what was located on the fourth subfloor, though.

I tugged at the collar of my sensible black cardigan as we waited in Jane’s office to be escorted to our posts. Ben sat to my left, his knee jiggling so hard the couch was vibrating. I wanted to reach out to steady his leg, to try to tell him that this was going to be OK. But he hadn’t welcomed much in the way of sire-ly advice from me so far. Also, the vibrations weren’t entirely unpleasant.

So, instead, I fussed with my cardigan. The Council office dress code was surprisingly strict. Jane had gone online and ordered me several sweater sets, pencil skirts, and flats in dark blue, black, and red. Yes, it was boring as hell, but . . . I was really having a hard time coming up with a bright side to a buttload of cardigans.

Poor Ben was stuck looking like his mom dressed him for school picture day in khakis and a navy-blue polo shirt. He grumbled, “I look like I’m about to be hazed at a private boarding school.”

I snorted. “You’re going to be sold for French clove cigarettes.”

Ben laughed, which made me give him a surprised side-eye. My shoulders jerked in quiet giggles while Ben laughed harder.

“It’s not that bad!” Jane said. “We had some complaints about the last batch of interns and their funny nerd T-shirts and rainbow-colored hair. Some departments tried to dress the same way . . . and there was some misunderstanding about the limits of appropriate humor. There are some really filthy T-shirts available on the Internet.”

Ben and I kept laughing, until he looked over and realized that we were laughing together, and it sort of trailed off into nothing.

Back to staring aimlessly around the room, then.

Just like her home, Jane’s office showed a bit more of her personality. And just like her home, most of the space was filled with bookshelves, which made her huge, ornately carved oak desk all the more classy. Her walls were studded with photos in frames of every size and color. Gabriel and Dick and Andrea and a little old man with two pairs of glasses propped on top of his head. I spotted Ben in a big group picture at what looked like a Halloween party. He had his arm around a pretty brunette with big blue eyes and a gorgeous smile. And he was beaming at her like she hung the moon. This must have been Gigi, the ex. I kind of hated her.

Dick didn’t have an office. From what I could gather from the conversations I’d heard over the last couple of weeks, they’d tried to give him one, but he rarely used it. He preferred to be “on the streets,” with his ear to the ground, searching for potential problems in the vampire community. And when he was in the office, some of what Jane called his “business contacts” in this weird, harsh voice came to visit and usually stole something. Gabriel said the Council lost a fortune in office supplies in the first month.

“Why are you so nervous?” I asked Ben now. “You know a lot of these people. This should be a cakewalk for you.”

“Yes, if the cake was made of misjudged relationship cues and regret.”

“That would be some bitter cake,” I said. He grimaced and nodded. “You’re seriously not going to explain that last comment?”

But before Ben could respond, a young vampire—also dressed in khakis and a navy polo—showed up to take him to the IT department. Ben turned back to Jane, pointed to his outfit and his coworker’s matching clothes, and made what could only be described as a murder face. As the office door shut behind them, I started giggling.

“Is my clone going to come escort me to my desk, too?”

“Yeah, he’s not going to let that twinsies thing go for a while.” After a moment of grim contemplation, Jane turned a bright smile on me. “Let’s get you started!”

She showed me her schedule on her computer, assigned me a username on the network, made me a secondary on her e-mail account, and did various techie chores to get me set up as her full-time minion. I searched through the drawers, finding a wealth of binder clips and Sharpies. There was also a laser pointer, which Jane immediately snatched out of my hand.

“What is this?”

“A correction laser. Margaret didn’t think Wite-Out was enough of a statement when she made a mistake.”

“What?”

Jane pulled out a piece of paper, aimed the laser pointer at it, and clicked the switch. A jet of red light shot out of the tip, burning a hole through the paper.

“Wow.”

“Margaret wasn’t much fun to work with.”

I pulled a face, which Jane ignored.

“Your most important task is protecting this.” Jane opened a document on my computer called “nopelist.xls.” It was an Excel spreadsheet of names, phone numbers, and “reasons for calling.” One column ranked each of the names with a one-to-ten “PITA Factor.”

“What’s the PITA Factor?” I asked. “Their ranking of favorite Mediterranean foods?”

“Their ranking as a ‘pain in the ass’ on a scale of one to ten,” Jane told me.

“Wow again.”

“Before you make an appointment for someone to see me, you check this list. If their name is on the list, they don’t get an appointment. Make any excuse you have to. You have to check my schedule. I’m booked up with meetings. I’m traveling. I’m having an emergency dental crown installed on a chipped fang. Whatever. Just make it believable, and shield me from the crazy. I deal with enough of it in the business I’m supposed to handle.”

“I will do my best.”

“And I’ll give you weekly updates, because the list grows like shower mold.”

“Ew. And that’s awful.”

“Heavy is the ass that sits in the big chair,” she said, shrugging.

“I am ninety percent sure that is not the expression.”

Jane waved me off as she walked back into her office. “Agree to disagree.”

From what I could see, the administrative job focused on keeping Jane on task and on schedule and preventing her from being annoyed. Also, I provided her with a chocolate-based coffee-blood concoction every night at two A.M. That was very important. To humanity.

Ben and I were still on a pretty short leash. We weren’t allowed to leave the building, for fear that he would attempt to contact his parents. We weren’t allowed in the few departments with human employees. And it was more than a little embarrassing that Jane insisted on driving us to and from work.

But still, I had a desk, a real grown-up desk at a real grown-up job. All of my previous jobs had involved name tags and grease traps, so this was definitely a step up. I stood at my dignified-though-less-ornate-than-Jane’s desk marveling at everything the Council was trusting me with—a computer, drawers full of pens, mailing supplies, Post-its, and petty cash. It was like gathering all of your school supplies together when you were in elementary school, to survey your bounty. And you always swore that everything would stay organized in your little backpack. But it never did, just like I was sure that my desk would be covered in paper-clip chains and discarded Faux Type O lids within a week.

But for right now, it was mine, and it was clean, and it was pretty awesome.

My computer didn’t send messages to nonapproved e-mail addresses, log on to nonapproved Web sites, or upload files to anything, and when I tried to get on Facebook, a red banner appeared on my screen that read “LOL, NO.”

But I could do word processing, which was fun.

It was eerily quiet, sitting outside of Jane’s office by myself, basically waiting for someone to walk down the hall and beg for an audience with her, but at least I didn’t have to share a wall in some cubicle farm, like the poor bastards in the accounting department. According to old episodes of The Office, that could lead to hostile Jell-O-based pranks.

Jane didn’t seem to have much for me to do on my first day, other than learning how not to electrocute myself while using the intercom system. I buried myself in first-day tasks. Organizing my desk. Figuring out the shockingly complicated phone system. Finding the break room. Learning the name of Sammy, the delightful Samoan coffee-blood mixologist. I was just coming back from my lunch break, catered by said delightful coffee guy, when I saw Ben walking down the hall with a tall brunette.

And he was more animated and cheerful than he had been in the entire time since he’d been turned. I recognized the brunette as the pretty girl he’d had his arm around in the picture in Jane’s office. This was clearly Gigi, the infamous ex. They were chatting and laughing, probably remembering all of the awesome times they’d had together.

She was even prettier in person. Big bright-blue eyes with long, sooty lashes. Plump, naturally pink lips. Dark hair that fell in waves around her shoulders. She had that effortless beauty that lit up any room when she walked into it.

I kind of hated her more now.

“This is Gigi,” Ben said. “She’s my boss over in programming. I’m going to be working on her project.”

It took all of my special vampire superpowers to control the muscles in my face.

Ben’s ex-girlfriend was his boss?

Ben was talking to me? Directly? With a smile on his face?

What the what?

“Hi!” she said brightly. “Nice to meet you!”

Did Jane put Ben in Gigi’s department on purpose? Did she want Ben to get back together with Gigi? Should I take that personally somehow?

And I still hadn’t spoken.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, stretching my hand forward to shake hers.

She smiled sweetly and shook my hand. At least she didn’t try to pull some weird territorial move where she squeezed my hand until the bones buckled. Did vampires do that? That seemed like a vampire thing to do.

And unlike Jolene, Gigi didn’t have a crazy nasal twang to balance out her incredibly above-average hotness. Her voice sounded like angels whispering to fluffy kittens.

“I can’t tell you how glad I’ll be to have someone my own age around at the family get-togethers. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love Jane, Gabriel, Dick, everybody. But after a while, I just want to talk to someone who knows that Tumblr isn’t for sipping scotch, you know?”

My brows drew together in what I was sure was a “skeptical Meagan is skeptical” face. Why was she being so nice to me? Did Ben not tell her that I was the one who turned him? So far, that hadn’t inspired warm, fuzzy feelings among his friends and family. I mean, at the very least, she should see me as some sort of threat just because I was a hot girl living in the same house as her ex.

My eyes narrowed a bit. Wait, was this because she was, like, a nine and a half, and I was circling around a nine-point-three? Because I hadn’t even tried wearing makeup over my new luminescent vampire skin. I could be a nine-point-eight. Easy.

And all this crazy-person math was preventing me from speaking.

“Oh, yeah, Jane’s friends are really nice,” I said, and then quickly added, “Old! I mean, they’re super-old. But nice.”

Oh, come on, why was I still speaking? Why?

Even Ben seemed to sense something was off, because he said, “OK, well, we’d better get to our lunch break if we’re going to finish that coding by the end of the night.”

God bless Ben Overby, conversational lifeguard.

Gigi gave an awkward little smile. “OK, well, we’d better get to it.”

I waved my fingers without actually moving my hand, because I was paralyzed by mortification. And off they went. I rolled my head back to scream silently at the ceiling tiles, Whyyyyyyyy?

Rubbing my hand over my face, searching for the embarrassment that should have been scorching my cheeks, I slumped back to my desk. And then tried to hide under it. Forever.

But because the space underneath my desk was too small for a leggy nine-point-three like myself, I had to be satisfied with hiding behind my monitor. Which I decided to use to e-mail Miranda, one of the few preapproved e-mail addresses listed in my contacts under “Transportation Contractors.” And one of the few people in Half-Moon Hollow I felt comfortable randomly e-mailing without a lot of How are you? preamble.

I opened the computer’s e-mail program, savoring the opportunity to message someone who was not one of my professors. My fingers hovered over the keyboard as I wondered what would be the least intrusive way to ask.

To: Miranda.puckett@fangmail.com

From: administration2@wcftetotu.org

Hey Miranda,

If I asked you a weird, random question about people you know better than I do, would you answer it?

—Meagan

Before I could spend too much time talking myself out of it, I hit send.

Well, that was super-cryptic and sure to set off all sorts of alarms.

I waited, for far longer than anyone of my generation was used to waiting for anything. Ugh, this was why I needed access to instant messaging. Because Miranda had better things to do with her time, so I probably wouldn’t get an answer for hours. Just enough time for me to regret sending it and try to come up with an alternative plausible question that could inspire such a weird message.

Sighing, I looked up Jane’s calendar for the next week to try to figure out which of her days would be busiest and therefore involve the most fetching of chocolate-based coffee-blood concoctions.

Ping.

Before I could even open the calendar app, a new message popped up at the bottom of my screen. Apparently, Miranda didn’t have better things to do, because she had immediately sent back a response with the footnote “Sent through a mobile device.”

Hey Meagan,

It depends on who it’s about and how personal the question is.

—Miranda

Well, that seemed reasonable. I typed a quick response.

You mentioned Gigi and Ben had an awkward breakup. How awkward? Like “we can still be friends” awkward? Or “voodoo doll and restraining order” awkward?

—M

Maybe if I could make her laugh, she would forget that I was data-mining her friends’ painful romantic history. A few seconds later, she shot back.

Meg—

That is personal. But considering that you’re working with both of them, you should probably know, just to prevent foot-in-mouth disease.

It was awkward because Ben proposed to Gigi, and she said, “No, let’s break up instead.” At Christmas, around people with superhearing and mind-reading powers. And those situations lead to difficulty making eye contact.

—Miranda

My jaw dropped. Ben proposed to Gigi? In front of her family? He must have been crazy about her! And she was so put together. So nice. And she hadn’t freaked out and turned him into a nontypical vampire. Oh, and now they were spending eight hours a day together in a small room.

I sent a “Thanks” back, which I’m sure, in Miranda’s head, sounded like a squeak.

Maybe this job thing was some strategy on Jane’s part to get Ben and Gigi back together. It would make Ben more stable to be in a relationship with an established vampire whom Jane trusted, with a huge support circle. I didn’t blame Jane. I couldn’t help but feel a little hurt by it, but she was doing what she thought was best for Ben. Maybe she could match me up with someone she thought would make me slightly less tragic.

Miranda sent me back an emoji that looked like a tiny yellow face pitying me.

No. I was surprised to find that I didn’t really want to be set up with someone who would make me slightly less tragic. I wasn’t sure there was someone out there who could make me slightly less tragic. I liked Ben. I wasn’t crazy about the guy I’d been hanging out with for the last couple of weeks. But I’d liked the side of Ben I saw when I first met him. I wasn’t saying he was my one true Disney love, but I didn’t like the idea of having all this unresolved emotional business between us while he rekindled his failed engagement and I moved on with some faceless rebound vampire.

No matter how it turned out, I needed to work through this weird distance with Ben. I just had to get him to talk to me directly when his ex-girlfriend wasn’t around so we could get some closure. That should be easy enough, right?

Right?

It was not easy.

After our initial training-wheels day as Council interns, we were basically launched into our full workload.

As part of perfect Gigi’s group, Ben was working on some sort of giant vampire family-tree database thing to help vampires track down their living descendants. And while Gigi’s team had been responsible for programming a successful portion of it, other teams—located in other regional offices around the world—were not so successful. And now those teams didn’t exist anymore. I didn’t ask what happened to them, and Jane didn’t tell me. But now Gigi’s team had taken over the missing teams’ assignments to keep the project on track.

I got hit with paperwork. So much paperwork. The question of why recycling didn’t seem to be making much of an environmental impact was answered by the sheer amount of backlogged paperwork in Jane’s filing cabinet of shame. It took two vampires to wheel the laundry cart full of files up to my desk.

“Jane!” I called into her office. “What is this madness?”

“Uh, I’m on the phone!” Jane called. “Just blindly do the filing without questioning how I got so far behind. It totally piled up like that while I was selflessly taking care of you for the last few weeks. Just so busy . . . on this phone call.”

I glanced at the phones and saw that both of her lines were free.

“You’re not on the phone!” I turned to find her lifting the receiver to her ear and dialing. I shook my head.

It seemed that every piece of paper in the Council’s regional office had to cross Jane’s desk at some point. Why did vampires need to document so much? There was a form for unintentional vampire turnings like mine. There were forms for planned vampire turnings. There was a form to document accidentally killing your vampire colleagues at the Council and a different form for intentionally killing your vampire colleagues. There was a form for requesting reimbursement for having someone murdered. They didn’t mind if you outsourced someone’s murder, they just insisted that you keep your receipts if you wanted to be reimbursed for it.

You would think vampires would have learned over the years that a paper trail created complications. Maybe they were trying to stockpile blackmail material on one another? Forever? Also, why did they rely on paper so much? Did they have something against digital records?

And the problem with storing those files in an industrial-sized laundry cart was that the papers in the files shifted around and got mixed together. So now I had to organize and file, which had to be some sort of mental endurance test, like Psyche sorting through all those seeds to impress her hateful goddess mother-in-law.

Ha, and Morgan said that Greek mythology class would never apply in real life.

I rolled up the sleeves of my work-sensible cardigan and got to work sorting through my mega-hamper of files. The color-coding of the files made no sense, but I stacked them in colored piles on the floor anyway, just to move them out of the damn hamper.

This was still a better job than cleaning the dollar theater in my hometown. I couldn’t eat popcorn for years after that summer.

In the midst of all these files, I spotted a few familiar nuggets of information, like incident reports within Half-Moon Hollow involving Dick and his efforts to keep his former colleagues from selling counterfeit Beats by Dre headphones to innocent humans.

One file listed Ophelia’s progress in her “probationary period,” which I immediately tossed into the blue pile without skimming over it. “Nope. Nope. Nope.”

Another file listed all of the expenses paid to the University of Kentucky for services to undead students. As a semi-sort-of government agency, the Council subsidized counseling services, blood shipping and storage fees, sunproofing costs, and other expenses associated with housing undead students. I scanned the top sheet, and these fees seemed . . . excessive.

“So. Many. Zeros,” I muttered, blinking at the bottom “total” number.

I probably would have appreciated living in New Dawn more if I’d known how much that little social experiment was costing our undead taxpayers. Did we really have that many vampire students living in New Dawn?

I flipped through the pages, using my superhuman speed-reading. The numbers just didn’t seem right. There were eight student residence floors in the building and forty to fifty kids a floor, dead and undead, depending on the number of students who demanded a single room. But the reports listed services rendered to more than 235 vampires. That would only be possible if two-thirds of the building was occupied by vampire students. And trust me, as someone who walked around that noisy lobby during daylight hours, that was not possible.

But since I was not a math major, I wasn’t sure I was qualified to analyze Council spending. Also, as far as I knew, this was some creative attempt to cover the Council’s illicit spending on defense projects and Doomsday Preppers blood storage. And I definitely didn’t want to interfere with that. So I put those files in the scary red financial pile and forgot I’d ever read them.

6

It’s important to document your childe’s milestones. But make sure you know the difference between “memorabilia” and “evidence.”

—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire

It was Friday night, and I was doing homework. This was a truly embarrassing moment in my social history.

Jane had actually left Ben and me alone in the house unchaperoned so she and Gabriel could run some errands. It felt like a test of her trust in us, like she and Ben would both fail if he ended up running home to his parents. There was very little pressure on me. I could only fail if I ordered up pay-per-view porn and imported blood by delivery.

I didn’t know if I’d have the energy to go out if I had anywhere to go. I’d spent the last three days obliterating Jane’s filing backlog and learning to lie through my teeth regarding her whereabouts. I’d gotten to know Sammy a little better and some of the nicer people in the accounting department. I avoided Gigi, Ben, and the IT department like they were carriers of the actual plague, which was difficult, since Gigi turned out to be even nicer than I’d first thought and frequently stopped by my desk to see if I needed anything.

And so, emotionally and physically drained, I was sitting at the kitchen table, working on a lit assignment, when Ben walked in and, upon seeing me, stopped as if he was considering turning back around and skipping breakfast. Whatever he was thinking, he ended up sighing and walking to the fridge to pour himself a mug of A negative.

He sat across the table from me, pointedly not making eye contact as he took a deep sniff of his breakfast. I rolled my eyes and continued typing. Because it was super-easy to create concise, thoughtful analyses of the great works of literature when there was a boy pointedly ignoring you right behind your laptop screen.

I had typed a grand total of four words when I finally slapped the computer shut and said, “So, are you going to just ignore me forever, or . . .”

“I’m not ignoring you,” he insisted.

“Are you aware of the definition of ‘ignoring’? Because I’m pretty sure that on dictionary-dot-com there’s a little picture of your face next to the term.”

“Funny,” he muttered.

“And in that picture, you’re making that judgy face,” I added.

He sighed.

“Just the cat-butt face of righteousness, all in this area,” I said, waving at his head.

“Is there a clinical term for what’s wrong with you?” he asked.

I shot back, “Is there a clinical term for permanent cat-butt face?”

He grinned, though I could tell that he didn’t want to. “Cat-butt face of righteousness?”

“Trademark pending.”

He sighed. “I know I’ve been a bit of a douche to you over the last few weeks.”

I scoffed. “A bit? You passed ‘a bit’ a while ago.”

“I’m sorry. I know. I know it’s been hard on you, adjusting to all of this, and I’ve made it harder. But it’s hard enough, the idea that I’m dead and this is my life now.”

“That sentence makes no sense.”

“I’m aware. This is my life now,” he continued. “And everything I hoped for, every plan I had, it’s all gone. Through no fault of my own. It’s like finding out you have a terminal disease, only the disease makes you live forever, while cutting you off from the world for most of the day. And there’s no cure, no treatment, no end in sight. Add to that, we’re some sort of weird new species of vampires that no one has ever seen. We’re freaks in a society that’s already pretty damn freaky. We’re the only two people in the world—as far as we know—who are like this. So we could be stuck together for the rest of our lives because the Council could decide that we’re too dangerous to let out into the world and put us in an underground cell together and throw away the key. Or they could just decide to stake us and be done with it. And you did this to me! You may not have meant to, but that doesn’t change the fact that you did. So pardon the hell out of me for resenting you just a little bit.”

“Has it occurred to you that I’m in the exact same situation?” I yelled back. “That all of my plans and goals just got shot to hell, too? I have no idea what I’m going to do with the rest of my eternal life. I don’t even have a nice family to fall back on when times get rough. I have exactly two, maybe three people in the world I can trust, and I wouldn’t want to put the burden of dealing with all of this newborn-vampire crap on them.”

“No, I guess it didn’t,” Ben murmured. “I’ve been a little wrapped up in myself.”

“A little?” I growled.

“OK, I said I was a douche. I’m sorry.”

I sighed and covered my face with my hands. This was getting us nowhere. “So what did you give up?” I asked. “Those plans of yours. What did you give up because of the vampire thing? Kids? A girlfriend? A career as a tanning model?”

“Tanning model? No. I don’t look good in orange,” he said. “Mine are a pasty people.”

I snorted, and he continued. “Job plans? Yeah. After graduation, I was supposed to move to California to work at a start-up that just took off. It’s an app that combines all social media into one stream, so instead of posting a photo to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram, you go to the app, which contains all of your accounts, make one post, and you’re done. It’s a great idea but a programming nightmare, so they need someone like me.”

“California . . . where it’s really sunny, most of the time,” I said, grimacing.

“Yeah, but vampires live in California, so it shouldn’t be that big of a deal. I just hope I can graduate on time. Get Jane’s approval to move, which, considering all of our ‘anomalies,’ seems unlikely.”

And there was the guilt again. I had completely derailed Ben’s life. He didn’t know me. He didn’t owe me anything. He was a sweet boy who had come to see me in my sickroom after knowing me for less than twenty-four hours. And it had bitten him on the ass. Or the wrist. I was literally the worst.

And Ben, who was oblivious to me mentally kicking my own ass, was still talking. “Kids? Yeah, maybe, I was thinking that kids would be something I would enjoy,” he said. “I come from a good family. I had good parents, a happy childhood. There was no reason to think that I wouldn’t be happy being a family guy, with a minivan in the garage and two-point-four kids.”

“And then I came along and took that sweet, sweet minivan plan away from you,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

“I’m starting to accept it. I mean, we can do all of these other things, pretty cool things, really, that we’re going to get in exchange. Like never aging, never getting sick. And hey, male pattern baldness runs in my family, so I probably owe you one.”

“That’s kind of sick.”

“The main thing is my parents. Their faces when they saw me on the video chat. Not being able to tell them I’m just a few miles away. It’s killing me. And what’s worse is that I don’t even know whether they’re going to be able to accept me once I am able to see them in person.”

“I’m sorry,” I murmured. But I noticed he hadn’t mentioned losing the life he’d planned with Gigi. Was that because now that they were both vampires, he thought they could get back together? Was he just being nice to me now because he was a nice person who didn’t want to be at odds with his unwanted roommate? Why didn’t he even mention her? Why was she such a taboo subject?

He sighed and gave me what passed for a smile. “What about you? You haven’t mentioned your parents. Kids. Plans. Pets. Baldness?”

“Nothing special.”

“Oh, come on. I told you all of my boring details. Share with the class. What are your parents like? What were you planning on doing after graduation? Were kids something you’d considered?”

“No!” I said, cackling. “Sorry, that laugh was too loud.”

I cleared my throat. This was the stuff we hadn’t talked about in our enchanting conversation in front of the dorm. No one wants to hear about your tragic past on the first pseudo-date. I’d deflected, turned the questions back on him, not only to avoid talking about myself but also because I’d liked hearing about his normal childhood, his normal high school experience, his loving parents.

As if he could hear my train of thought, he said, “Come on, that night, in front of the dorm, you didn’t talk much about yourself. I mean, you talked about the ‘now,’ about school and your friends and that sort of thing, but nothing before you got to UK. It was like you were hatched as a fully formed undergrad. Why was that?”

“You don’t want to hear this,” I said, shifting uncomfortably in my seat.

“I do,” he insisted. “I really do.”

“Kids? No, I wasn’t considering them at all. I mean, maybe in ten, fifteen years, but I did not feel in any way prepared to take care of another person. And maybe in a couple of years, I’ll feel differently, like something was taken from me, but for right now, I’m good. I mean, Jane never had biological kids, and she’s raising three of us right now. You never know what could happen. Graduation plans? I picked an English major because I like to read, but I don’t think I’d ever want to teach little kids. I’m not good with them. You’ve seen how I talk to Georgie. That’s how I usually talk to kids, even if they aren’t basically tiny, terrifying adults. I just don’t have that thing that makes you good with them. Which is yet another reason that not having any of my own is not a huge blow to me.”

I continued, “I thought maybe I’d go to grad school, eventually get a PhD if I could afford it, and end up teaching at a college. I loved college. I loved living on my own, making my own decisions, controlling my diet, my schedule, my room. I loved my classes and feeling like I was a part of something bigger, a community. I could see myself being very comfortable in that kind of environment for the rest of my life. But unless I get this pesky urge to drink every human I meet under control, that’s probably going to put my teaching career off for a while.”

Ben was frowning at me. “Did you have super-controlling helicopter parents or something?”

“What?”

“Your diet, your schedule, your room. Did your parents not let you make those decisions on your own when you were at home?”

I bit my lip. Well, this was it. I could play it off by being glib, or just put it out there and hope Ben didn’t feel sorry for me. I really hated the face people made when they heard the words “foster kid.” It was always the same, a tilt of the head, a furrow to the brow, and sometimes there was even a sad little “Aw.” And it changed the way people interacted with me. If I was having a bad day, well, I must have abandonment issues, because I was a foster kid. If there was one cupcake left, I should have it, because I probably didn’t have many treats growing up as a foster kid. It was better just to let people think I’d had an average upbringing so I didn’t get patronized.

But I was probably going to be stuck with Ben for a while, and he was probably going to hear something from Jane eventually, so I pursed my lips and said, “My dad was stationed at Fort Campbell. My mom was working at a gas station, earning some extra money while she took nursing classes at the community college. He came into the station to fill up his truck, and bam. He said it felt like he’d been hit by lightning the first time he saw her. He said, ‘Twenty-five dollars on pump twelve, a Slim Jim, and how do you feel about dogs, kids, and men who leave their socks on the floor but are otherwise pretty damn charming?’ Mom was laughing so hard she could barely write down her phone number.”

“So there’s a family history of being approached by extremely clever men?” Ben suggested.

“If the last few weeks are any indication of your ‘approach’ technique, you have a lot to learn about ‘clever,’ buddy,” I told him.

Ben pulled a face. “Good point. Please, on with the story of your much smarter and socially savvy father.”

“Dad apparently came from one of those old horse-farming families, the people who train racehorses for Churchill Downs? Well, they weren’t thrilled with their son joining the military in the first place. They were even less thrilled when he started dating a girl who worked at a gas station, a girl whose parents were . . . Mexican,” I said, whispering the last word dramatically. “I guess that’s the way they said it, because every time my mom told me the story, she whispered, ‘Mexican.’ Also, my mom’s parents were Guatemalan, so the Keenes weren’t even accurately racist. Anyway, they ran a background check and found out about Mom’s brief stint working as a waitress at Cheekies—you know, the sports bar where they wear the short shorts? Mom only worked there for a month, but they called her ‘that stripper’ after that, which made for a very awkward toast at my parents’ wedding. They were not the type of people who were so charmed by their new grandchild that it changed their hearts. He called to tell them I’d been born, and they actually told him he’d ‘never be free of that stripper now.’ He didn’t want me to hear them talk about my mother that way. He didn’t know what they would say to me, how they would try to manipulate me with gifts and money, like they’d tried to control him growing up. He did know that they would treat my mom like crap while he was deployed in Afghanistan, and there would be nothing he could do about it from thousands of miles away. So he cut them off entirely. They made a big scene at his funeral, called my mom some names, scared me until I cried. I thought that rich people were supposed to be above that kind of behavior. But I guess rednecks are rednecks, no matter how big their house is.”

“How old were you?”

“I was four. It was rough, but my mom got us through it. She just refused to give up. She worked so hard, gave up a lot. And there were some army friends of my dad’s who helped us sometimes when the car broke down or the roof leaked.”

“And you’re speaking of her in the past tense,” Ben noted sadly.

“I was fifteen. She was driving home from her second job and fell asleep at the wheel. Even though I had heard all the stories about my grandparents, I still kind of hoped that they would have a change of heart, would want to take me in after my mom died. But they told Family Services that they had no interest in me. They only wanted to know where they needed to sign so they wouldn’t have to take responsibility.”

“What about your mom’s family? Couldn’t they help?”

“Her parents were almost seventy by the time I was born. They were great, just good, sweet, loving people. They died when I was around ten, within a month of each other. When Mom died, it would have been possible to send me to the extended family back in Guatemala. But I’m pretty damned American. I didn’t think I would do well over there, so I went into foster care.”

Ben didn’t say anything. He just looked mildly horrified.

“Yeah, I know, I’m the saddest sad sack who ever sacked.”

He shook his head. “It just sucks that you’ve lost so many people.”

“It’s safe to say I have some pretty significant abandonment issues. Also trust. And impulse control, on occasion, but that’s only if a pumpkin spice latte is involved. Which I don’t think applies anymore, since I’m dead and can’t have pumpkin spice.”

“It does explain a lot about how you’ve reacted to Jane. Her trying to mother you.”

“Yeah, I don’t think you’re qualified to analyze all of this,” I said, waving a hand at my head.

“I won’t try,” he promised.

“So can we start over?” I asked. “Meagan Keene. Total stranger and your sire.”

“Yes,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand. “Ben Overby, occasionally judgmental doofus.”

“It’s nice to meet you.”

“You, too. So, how do you feel about expensive imported bloods?”

“Is that some sort of line? Is this your attempt to improve on your ‘approach’?”

Ben grinned. “No, but I just happened to see a bottle hidden in the back of the fridge with a great big gold bow on it, which probably means it was an expensive gift from a visiting vampire dignitary.”

“And it’s probably poisoned,” I noted. “There is no such thing as a free bottle of gourmet blood . . . and that is officially the weirdest sentence that has ever left my mouth.”

“Nah, I talked to one of the security guards at work, the ones who keep us from leaving the building like regular people? And he says that all of Jane’s and Dick’s gifts have to be scanned for poisons and contaminants before they’re delivered. After what happened to Gigi, they have a whole poison-scan policy.”

“What happened to Gigi?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you when we crack open that very expensive-looking bottle of blood.”

“Is this some sort of attempt to get me into trouble?” I asked. “Cat-butt face revenge?”

“No, I just don’t want Jane to feel like her job is too easy. We have to cause her a little trouble.”

“Fine.” I sighed. “But you’re taking the rap for this, Golden Child.”

“Don’t call me that, and I will accept full bottle-cracking responsibility.”

I never did get to hear what happened to Gigi. We’d just managed to pull aside the foil labeled “House of Rothschilde, Rh phenotype, 1968” and pop the cork when the kitchen door opened. Jane and Gabriel walked in, carrying shopping bags. They did that weird parent thing where they’re smiling and talking and then they see what you’re doing and that happy noise slowly dies off. When it’s not your parents doing it, it’s sort of hilarious.

“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 from 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 would 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.

And whatever trust-based (or literature-based) issues we might have had at home, Jane was one of the least insane people I’d ever worked for. She was fair, made her expectations clear, and said thank you when you met them. She was very different from Mitch at the Chicken Shack, who once threw a bucket of drumsticks at me when I forgot to clean out the grease trap.

As promised, the “nope list” did grow every week. On this particular night, Jane was out of the office, meeting with other representatives. I was burning through the unfiled files, wondering what it said about me that my workload seemed to move twice as fast when my boss wasn’t around. Did that mean I was a good employee or a bad one?

The phone rang, and the caller ID showed an unfamiliar area code. I cleared my throat and used my most professional tone of voice to say, “Council Representative Jameson-Nightengale’s office, this is—”

But whoever was on the line was already talking. Well, ranting. He was ranting.

“I want an appointment with Mrs. Jameson-Nightengale immediately,” the voice demanded. “I’ve called and called, and my patience is at an end. This is unacceptable. If I have to park my car outside your office and wait for her in the parking lot, that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Well, I wouldn’t advise you to do that,” I deadpanned. “Can we start from the beginning, sir? What is your name?”

“You know very well that this is Dr. Allan Fortescue, PhD!” he shouted, emphasizing each letter of his postgraduate degree.

Also, how would I know that?

I glanced down at the caller ID. Oh. Yep, there it was, “Allan Fortescue, PhD.” How did he even get the phone company to put “PhD” on his phone line anyway?

On a hunch, I opened Jane’s “nope” spreadsheet and searched for the name Fortescue, while he continued to rant about his “research” and the hope he was providing to the undead community at large, despite our lack of support.

Yep, there he was again. With an asterisk. You had to really screw up to earn an asterisk from Jane.

“And I’m assuming you’re hoping to schedule an appointment with Representative Jameson-Nightengale?” I asked, working hard to keep the annoyance out of my voice.

“Yes, this is my fourth attempt to make an appointment, and every time, I’ve been told that her schedule is full. This is unacceptable!” he shouted. In the background, I heard a loud thump, like he’d slammed his fist against a table for emphasis. “I demand that you schedule an appointment within the next three days.”

I paused to let him think that I was checking Jane’s schedule. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Fortescue, but her schedule is booked solid, just so many meetings and then her travel schedule.”

I took a breath, hoping I sounded sincerely apologetic when I said, “She won’t be available until next month, at least. I’m so sorry.”

Also a lie. I was not sorry.

“Unacceptable!” he yelled.

“You keep saying that word. That doesn’t change the fact that the representative’s schedule is full.”

“Next Tuesday?” he demanded.

“She’s on the road.”

“Friday?”

“In meetings all night,” I replied, biting my lip. I really had to get better at lying if I was going to be a good administrative assistant.

He suggested, “The seventeenth?”

“She’s taking a personal day. For a doctor’s appointment.”

“Vampires don’t need doctors.”

“It’s an elective procedure,” I said, squinching up my face, hoping he wouldn’t hear the uncertainty in my voice. Thank God this wasn’t a video call.

“Unacceptable!” he yelled, and then hung up on me so hard that my sensitive ears rang.

“I guess it was unacceptable,” I muttered, making another note on Jane’s “nope” spreadsheet with a PITA ranking of eight. And I added another asterisk with the words “babbling loony.”

I glanced at the clock and wondered if it was too early in the workday to get another one of Sammy’s delicious coffee concoctions. The calendar app on my computer rang out a little ding of alarm to remind me that McDerpy—Dr. Hudson, I had to remember to call him Dr. Hudson—had asked me to report to the R&D floor at one A.M. to go over my cheek-swab test results. I definitely didn’t have time for coffee. But if Dr. Hudson broke out another swab, I swear, I was having two bloody macchiatos.

I shut down my computer and followed the Council’s strict security procedures, pushing my file cart into Jane’s office and double-locking the door. I walked to the elevator and realized that this was the first time I’d been allowed to use it on my own. I could use it to go to the top floor, walk out onto the street. Maybe go somewhere (gasp) completely unsupervised. And for just one second, my hand hovered over the “Ground Level” button. But alas, I couldn’t do it. Jane trusted me. She’d trusted me enough to leave me unattended in the office. I couldn’t pay her back by pulling a Shawshank.

Sighing over my own lame-ass integrity, I hit the button marked “R&D Subfloor.” I stepped out of the open doors, shivering at the lower subterranean temperatures. The R&D subfloor looked more like a hospital than an office. Slick gray tile, bare white walls, extremely unflattering fluorescent lighting. The hall was completely empty, no reception desk, no helpful medical minion to point me in the right direction. And all of the doors were shut tight.

Frowning, I walked past several doors marked “Hematology,” “Dermatology,” and “NO.” I wasn’t sure what “NO” was all about, but I’m sure it wasn’t good. It did sound like something Jane would put up on a door, though. And that made me smile.

I closed my eyes and tried to listen for any signs of “life” on the floor. But I didn’t hear one heartbeat, not one breath. Clearly, this was a vampire-only floor, which actually made me a bit more comfortable. At least I didn’t have to worry about my bloodlust. At the far end of the hallway, I heard the faintest murmur of conversation.

I followed it until I found Dr. Hudson waiting in what looked like any exam room in any doctor’s office in America—more gray tile, more white walls, jars upon jars of swabs and cotton balls. Ben was sitting on the end of a hospital bed, looking pretty uncomfortable. That probably had to do with Dr. Hudson and his gleeful expression as he polished a scary array of shiny medical instruments. Or possibly the fact that Dr. Hudson was wearing red suspenders and a red-and-white plaid shirt that looked like it was made from a picnic blanket.

I don’t know if the shirt-suspenders combo was his way of trying to make us feel at ease, but combined with the fact that he was somehow simultaneously grinning and whistling, it was anything but comforting. And then he saw me walking through the door, and the grinning and whistling increased. How could whistling be so sinister?

“Miss Keene!” he exclaimed. “Welcome, welcome! I was just explaining to young Mr. Overby that we’ve found all kinds of interesting tidbits in your test results, enough to warrant considerably more testing.”

“More testing?” I would say I tried not to whine when I said it, but that would be a lie.

“Righty-o!” he exclaimed.

“Like what?” I asked, edging toward Ben. Because while I was not necessarily on awesome terms with my childe, I definitely felt more comfortable with him and his lack of shiny sharp objects.

Dr. Hudson’s smile ratcheted up that much further. I was honestly worried that at some point the two corners of his mouth were going to touch behind his head. “For starters, your iron and hemoglobin counts are far above a normal vampire’s. Your DNA shows an alarming number of extra genes thrown into the mix, which may explain some of your more interesting traits.” He stared at me intently.

“Alarming?” Ben asked.

Dr. Hudson was doing this weird little shoulder-shimmy-nod thing that made him look like a psychotic bobblehead. “It’s fascinating, just fascinating, like a puzzle. I just want to take you apart, see what makes you tick, and put you back together.”

Ben and I stared at him, silent and horrified, both imperceptibly inching farther away from him. Dr. Hudson didn’t seem to realize he’d just said something incredibly creepy and moved from staring at me to rolling a covered medical tray to the bedside.

I cleared my throat. “What kind of DNA?”

Dr. Hudson winked at me. “Oh, a whole cocktail of goodies—animal, vegetable, and mineral.”

What sort of undead uber-nerd had sired this guy, and how could I ask him to take Dr. Hudson back? Like to a cellular level? And what did he mean by—what kind of minerals had DNA? What the hell were we?

When I didn’t respond with the expected girlish giggle, he added, “Just a little science joke. So, kids, we’re just going to expose you to some of our better-known weaknesses and see how you react. Now, Miss Keene, please have a seat.”

Ben raised his hand. “Can we get back to ‘vegetable’?”

“Yes,” I agreed, pointing to Ben as I climbed onto the hospital bed next to him. The papery mattress cover crinkled under my butt, but honestly, the fact that the Council was worried about hygiene was the only comforting thing in this room. “I would like to talk about that.”

Dr. Hudson waved his hand dismissively. “I submitted an initial report to Mrs. Jameson-Nightengale. I’m sure she’ll explain it to you.”

The idea that he couldn’t be bothered to give us details about our own DNA irked me. Dr. Hudson, for all his zip-a-dee-doo-dah cheer, was not a good guy. Hell, I wasn’t even sure he was a decent scientist. Because he whipped the cover off the tray, flourishing it like something in an infomercial, to reveal a small silver cylinder, a big wooden cross, a tube marked “Minced Garlic,” a couple of jars of liquid I didn’t recognize, and—

“Is that a wooden stake?” I asked, nodding to the pointy object in question.

Dr. Hudson shrugged, as if it was totally expected to find a wooden stake in a medical lab. “Well, sure, we have to know how you respond to being staked. That’s one of our key questions, isn’t it?”

I shook my head. “But it would be answered pretty definitively if we, say, burst into a cloud of dust. Which, even in the name of scientific discovery, seems a little excessive.”

“Yeah, I don’t think we should just get stabbed in the heart experimentally,” Ben agreed. “That’s kind of like claiming that someone’s a werewolf just because they die when you shoot them in the heart with a silver bullet. A bullet to the heart is going to kill pretty much anybody.”

“Let’s just see where the tests take us,” Dr. Hudson said, walking across the lab to check some machine making beeping noises.

“He’s going to try to do it anyway, isn’t he?” I asked, lowering my voice.

Ben nodded. “I’d say there’s about a ninety percent chance.”

“Do we have to stay for this? I mean, it’s reasonable to walk out of a medical appointment if you think your doctor’s going to try to scientifically murder you, right?”

“Jane told us to cooperate,” Ben whispered. “I think that means sticking around until he actively tries to murder us.”

“Can we take our first step toward meaningful friendship by being ‘not getting staked in the heart’ buddies?” I asked him.

“I’ll watch your chest if you’ll watch mine.” He grimaced, and while I could see him struggling not to glance down at my cleavage, he totally did. “That came out wrong.”

It was a long and unpleasant evening. First, Dr. Hudson exposed us to things that didn’t affect regular vampires. We were able to see ourselves in mirrors. We were able to hold crucifixes with no problem. He spritzed a small amount of holy water on our arms. Nothing. Having minced garlic rubbed on our wrists didn’t have any effect other than smelling gross to our super-sensitive noses.

“Now we move on to the more effective antivampire measures,” Dr. Hudson said, just a little too much excitement bubbling through his already upbeat voice. He took a shiny chrome canister from the tray. “This is a very weak solution of colloidal silver, just one percent, mind you, to test your sensitivity to silver. Based on responses from other vampires, it should inflict minimal damage, something like a moderate sunburn.”

“You sprayed this on other vampires to test it out?” I asked. “I feel so sorry for your interns.”

“It was a sacrifice they were willing to make for science. Now, shall we allow ladies first?” Dr. Hudson asked, motioning for me to roll up my sleeve.

I chewed on my lip. “Is this because I joked about your interns?”

“No,” Ben objected. “You should use it on me first.”

“No, actually, that makes sense,” I told Ben. “I’m patient zero. Whatever is wrong with us happened to me first. Maybe it will affect me differently from how it affects you.”

“I don’t like it,” Ben said.

“Duly noted.” I nodded, rolling up my sleeve. “But I get to determine whether I get sprayed with potentially dangerous chemicals. Because feminism.”

“I don’t think that’s applicable here,” Ben said as I held out my arm and took a deep breath. Ben took the other hand and gripped it tight.

“For science,” I said, blowing out a long breath. I gave him a little smile.

Dr. Hudson took the cap off the canister and spritzed the faintly grayish liquid against my forearm. At first, it just felt cool, like being hit with regular water.

“Nothing,” I said, jerking my shoulders. “Maybe we’re immune to—oh, holy crap balls!”

The skin of my arm puffed up like bubble wrap, peeling and turning an angry red. I hissed as the damage spread, growing from the size of a quarter to the width of my palm in seconds. The room filled with the smell of singed toast. The silver was dissolving my skin like wet tissue, and I was terrified that I would eventually see bone.

“Fascinating,” Dr. Hudson said, craning his neck to see how far the damage spread. “Just fascinating.”

This was not the response I hoped for.

“What the hell?” Ben yelled, his own hands smoking lightly from the microscopic mist of silver that had drifted over his skin. “Rinse it off now!”

“Oh, of course,” Dr. Hudson said, though he sounded vaguely annoyed.

The doctor took a bottle of distilled water, held my arm over a basin, and rinsed away the silver. It didn’t help. The burn continued to spread up my arm to my bicep, eating away at my skin. It was more tolerable than having my sternum crushed by a Frisbee weight but only by a little bit.

“It’s not stopping!”

“Screw this.” Ben reached into the refrigerator unit by the supply cabinet and pulled out a bag of donor blood. He grabbed Dr. Hudson by the collar of his lab coat. Dr. Hudson showed little to no reaction, jotting down his notes as Ben dragged him around. “Is this clean?” Ben demanded. “You haven’t screwed around with it? No silver or garlic or LSD or anything?”

Dr. Hudson shook his head. Ben tore off the top of the plastic bag and poured it into my mouth, splashing whatever missed my mouth down the front of my shirt. The burn stopped spreading, but it still stung like a bitch. Ben reached into the fridge and took out another unit of donor blood.

“Hold on, that’s AB negative, very rare!” Dr. Hudson cried. “And it’s my lunch!”

“Shut up!” Ben snapped, while I bit into the plastic directly this time and sucked down the blood like Satan’s Capri Sun, made of pure deliciousness, deep and rich, chocolaty with undertones of cherry. AB negative was officially my favorite blood type. Also, my arm was no longer burning, which was lovely.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, watching as the skin slowly smoothed out and reverted to an angry pink. It went nicely with the bright, bloody smear on the back of my hand.

“One more?” Ben asked, holding my arm in his hands, examining it.

I glanced down at my skin, which was now smooth and unblemished and a regular human color. A pale human but human. I shook my head. “I’m OK now. Thanks.”

I glanced down at Ben’s hands, which had stopped smoking but still looked stippled and red. Ben released my arm and stepped between Dr. Hudson and me.

“Well, I guess we can mark down yes for an allergy to silver,” Dr. Hudson said, smiling brightly. “Honestly, your sensitivity to silver is astounding. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“You’re a dick,” I told Dr. Hudson as Ben handed me a wet cloth to clean my face.

Dr. Hudson jerked his shoulders and continued scribbling.

“You’re telling me that was a weak solution?” Ben growled.

“One percent concentration,” Dr. Hudson told him, showing me the label on the canister. “Most vampires wouldn’t have had a reaction like that. Look.”

He held out his own arm and pressed the button on the atomizer.

“Don’t!” I cried. And then I remembered the pain in my forearm and shrugged. “Never mind, Dr. Hudson. Go ahead.”

The silver spray dripped off his skin, and while it did turn just a little pink, Dr. Hudson didn’t have nearly the same damage. He smiled and waved his intact limb at me, as if his lack of burns should somehow make me feel better. Clearly, this was a weird “neo-vamp” symptom that didn’t affect regular vampires. But what if Ben was somehow even more sensitive to silver than I was? What if Dr. Hudson sprayed him and Ben lost his arm?

“See?” Dr. Hudson chuckled, wiping the silver off with a wet wipe. “Easy peasy.”

“You’re not spraying Ben with that,” I told him very sternly. “He had a reaction just from the blowback from spraying me. Let’s assume we both have the same reaction.”

“But you were correct. You could have very different levels of response,” Dr. Hudson protested. “We need to collect complete data.”

“No,” I insisted, a rumbling growl creeping into my voice. “We are not guinea pigs. We’re human b—well, we’re people! You can’t just torture us and claim it’s for science like that’s a get-out-of-war-crimes-free card.”

“Mrs. Jameson-Nightengale was very clear that she wanted comprehensive tests,” he said, staring at me with blue, derpy eyes that had gone cold and calculating, like he was trying to figure out how long he could keep me down on the lab floor without anyone noticing. “She said she wanted results, damn the consequences.”

My eyes narrowed, and I picked up on the tiniest twitch of a vein near Dr. Hudson’s temple. No. He was lying. That couldn’t be true. And the twitchy vascular system was his tell. Jane wouldn’t risk Ben like that. And while she wasn’t pulling for permanent custody of me, I knew she wouldn’t set me up to be tortured. She wasn’t that cold.

Quicker than I’d ever moved before, I stepped around Ben and moved very close to Dr. Hudson. I snagged the stake from the medical tray and pressed the point to his throat. My voice reached a low, gravelly octave I’d never heard come out of my mouth. “You. Will. Not. Spray. Him. With. That.”

“You’re a little off the mark,” Dr. Hudson told me, just a little smugly, as he glanced down at the stake. “I know you probably haven’t taken anatomy, but you’re going to have to move it a little lower. That won’t kill me.”

“But it will keep you from whistling for a while,” I shot back, pressing just a bit harder.

Dr. Hudson’s nostrils flared, but he placed the silver canister back on the tray. “Righty-o, we’ll just move along.”

“No, we’re done,” Ben told him, grabbing my uninjured arm and pulling me toward the door. “We won’t submit to any more tests without Jane being here. This is insane.”

“Oh, I don’t think we have to worry Jane about this,” Dr. Hudson chirped. “After all, we do need to know how you handle sunlight.”

We turned to see Dr. Hudson quickly slide on a pair of heavy rubber gloves and one of those masks that welders use. Another lab vamp-lackey, whom I recognized as Dr. Gennaro through his own welder’s mask, walked briskly through the lab’s rear door, holding a weird lantern with a purplish lens.

“What is that?” Ben asked as I grabbed the doorknob and rattled it. The hallway door had locked behind me. Why hadn’t I noticed that before? When it wouldn’t budge, I resorted to yanking on the doorknob to try to force it off the frame. I threw my weight against it, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Help!” I screamed. “Help!”

“This is a UV lamp,” Dr. Hudson told us in his “professor teetering on the edge of a complete nervous breakdown” voice. “Think of it as a suntan in a box.”

Ben and I locked gazes and threw ourselves across the room at lightning speed. Ben swiped the stake from my hand somewhere near the bed, which I didn’t appreciate, because it left me weaponless. He launched himself at Dr. Hudson but overshot with his super-strong legs and smacked against the wall. The hit apparently dazed him, because on his next try, Dr. Gennaro stepped between them and knocked the stake aside.

Ben threw him to the tiled floor, but Dr. Gennaro swept his legs out from under him. Ben’s head hit the floor with a thud. The stake clattered to the floor and slid under the bed. I picked up the nearest heavy object—a bedpan—and swung it at Dr. Hudson’s head. But I missed, because Dr. Gennaro kicked the backs of my knees, folding my legs under me, and I flopped to the floor like a fish.

Ben groaned. “My head.”

“This is embarrassing,” I told him. “We have to learn how to fight.”

I chucked the bedpan at Dr. Hudson, but he easily sidestepped it, because unwieldy metal objects are really hard to throw, even with vampire agility. My back hurt too much from the collision with the tile to do much more than fling my leg up and drop my foot down heavily on Dr. Gennaro’s crotch. He curled up in agony on the floor, which made me a little happier.

In a voice I’m sure he thought was soothing, Dr. Hudson said, “Now, we’re only going to expose you to a low setting for five seconds. The skin damage should be minimal.”

He turned on the lantern. The lab was filled with warm, bright light. I ducked my head under my shirt and braced myself for the heat, for the pain. I heard Ben let loose a short yelp and felt his arms wrap around me, the cloth of my shirt trapped between my face and his chest. I closed my eyes, buried my face against him, and waited to turn to ash.

Nothing.

I pulled down my shirt and found that we were intact. We were both absolutely fine. Our cheeks weren’t even pink. Gennaro, however, had lost a sleeve in his scuffle with Ben, and his bared arm was covered in small, shallow blisters. Also, his carefully slicked-back hair seemed to be smoking.

“That was a bit of an overreaction, don’t you think?” Dr. Hudson asked dryly as he lifted his welder’s mask.

“No, I don’t think that it was an overreaction,” I said, scrambling to my feet and helping Ben up. “But I still think you’re a dick.”

I moved closer, sort of pacing back and forth, as if I could find a way to sneak around Dr. Hudson.

Meanwhile, he was inspecting my face and hands with that sinister, gleeful expression. “No visible damage or distress. Pupils normal. But that could be a result of your interference, pulling your clothes over your face to protect yourself—not very helpful, I might add. I think we’ll prepare for five seconds at medium intensity.”

“What?” I cried as Dr. Hudson pulled his facial protection back into place.

A lot of things happened at once.

Dr. Gennaro shouted, “No!” And started smoking.

Ben scrambled under the bed—to find the stake, I guessed.

I grabbed the small fire extinguisher mounted on the wall and whacked the butt against the doorknob. But it didn’t budge. That was one very strong doorknob.

“Ben!”

“I can’t reach the stake!” Ben yelled.

I turned on Dr. Hudson, raising the fire extinguisher above my head. I didn’t want to brain the good doctor, but I didn’t feel he’d left me much choice. And he looked completely unconcerned about the fact that I was holding this giant can over his head. He was adjusting the knobs on the lamp like it was a camera and he was getting ready to take my picture. I was much more comfortable pointing a stake at his throat. I should not have let Ben take the stake from me like some horror movie “last girl.” If the sunlamp didn’t evaporate me, I would start carrying a spare stake in my sock or something.

Just then, there was a loud thump from the hallway and a woman’s voice shouting curse words.

Dr. Hudson’s head whipped toward the sound. Ben took advantage of his distraction and kicked out at the lamp of horrors, knocking it against the wall and smashing it.

Dr. Hudson frowned at Ben. “Well, that was rude.”

The door flew open, and Jane came storming into the lab. Seeing my bloodstained shirt and Ben’s whole “recently wrassled with an overcoiffed lab rat” look, she shot a poisonous glare Dr. Hudson’s way. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m running some standard tests,” Dr. Hudson said, all casual-like. Because that’s what you’d expect of a sociopath who thinks evaporating someone in the name of research is OK.

“He wanted to try staking us,” Ben said, climbing to his feet. “Just to see what would happen.”

And because I was more than a little irritated with this whistling scientific tool, I held up my injured arm. “He burned me with silver, Jane. He burned me real bad.”

“What?” Jane exclaimed, holding my arm up to take a closer look at the new, shiny pink skin. She sent another filthy glare at Dr. Hudson. “Are you insane? How could you?”

“You asked me to find the limits of the kids’ abilities.”

Jane swept the instruments off the tray and sent most of them bouncing off the wall. “Did I really have to specifically tell you that meant ‘without stabbing or burning them’?”

Dr. Hudson didn’t reply, but given his expression, I would say yes.

“My methods might be a little invasive, but we can’t stop now. We were just getting to the interesting bits. For all her additional strengths, Miss Keene has an acute anaphylactic reaction to even a weak concentration of silver. And Mr. Overby had a reaction to just a light secondhand misting. Their reaction to UV rays remains a question, because certain parties continue to interfere with the testing.”

“Yes, pardon the hell out of us for not standing still while you try to give us a certain-death suntan,” Ben shot back. “What makes you think you have the right to do something like that?”

Dr. Hudson whirled on Ben, practically screaming at us. “These tests fall under the purview of my position as chief science office with this Council office! I decide which protocols are reasonable and the level of acceptable consequences. Not you. You are the test subjects. You are expected to participate in these experiments cheerfully.”

Gone was the Mr. Rogers of scary vampire medicine, replaced by a very cranky man in a picnic shirt who did not like having his authority questioned. But honestly, this version of Dr. Hudson was less creepy than the McDerpy persona.

Ben didn’t have a chance to respond, even with his superspeed. Jane drew up to her full considerable height and got right up in Dr. Hudson’s business. “And as your local Council representative and your boss, I approve all of your experiments. And your budget. And whether you get a Christmas bonus or not. And I’m telling you right now that you are not to do any sort of tests on my wards, Meagan Keene and Benjamin Overby, without my consent and supervision. Do you understand me?”

Dr. Hudson’s jaw set in a stubborn line, but he said, “Yes.”

“You don’t approach them. You don’t contact them. You don’t even look in their direction without written permission. And if you do, I will use every person in Dick Cheney’s contacts list to make sure you spend the rest of your unnaturally long life scrubbing out expired blood-storage units at the Red Cross. Get me?”

Dr. Hudson nodded. Hell, I knew I would have agreed to anything Jane asked me to do. I’d never heard her sound so scary.

“I need verbal confirmation that you understand completely, Dr. Hudson,” Jane barked in the scariest, most authoritative voice I’d heard her use yet.

Dr. Hudson seethed. “Yes.”

Jane’s smile was downright frosty. “Excellent.” She turned to Ben and me. “Come on, kids, let’s get you home. Gabriel’s making dinner, which means it’s safe to drink.” She hooked an arm around each of us and gently pushed us out of the lab. She looked over her shoulder. “You are skating on very thin ice, Dr. Hudson.”

The moment we cleared the door, she nodded silently—but very emphatically—toward the elevator. Then she popped her head back into the lab and said, “And for God’s sake, clean up Gennaro and get some blood in him. He’s smelling up this whole level.”

Ben held the elevator door open until Jane was safely inside. She slapped the button for the ground level and waited for the doors to slide closed, then threw her arms around Ben. “Are you OK?”

He nodded, relaxing into her arms a little, like he’d finally dropped his fight-or-flight response. “I won’t lie. It was scary as hell. But we’re OK. Meagan managed to get a few good shots in. I was basically useless, which is humiliating.”

“Not true,” I began, letting loose a surprised “Oof” when Jane let Ben go and wrapped me in the tightest embrace I’d had in years. I froze, my arms sticking out at weird Frankenstein angles. It was like I’d temporarily forgotten how hugs worked. It took an embarrassing number of seconds for my brain to communicate to my arms to unclench them and let them drape around Jane’s back. And then I did this strange, awkward little pat thing, because I honestly didn’t know what else to do.

“Ben did just fine. I mean, we both need vampire self-defense lessons something awful, because our fight skills are embarrassing. But he did get blood into me when I was burned. He showed quick thinking.”

I decided not to mention the whole “I had the stake, but you snatched it out of my hand” thing. It seemed like a dick move. And behind Jane’s back, Ben gave me a surprised, warm smile that made my knees go all wobbly.

“I’m sure you were both appropriately badass.”

“This is above my pay grade, I’m sure, but can I make some sort of formal suggestion that you fire Dr. Hudson?” I asked. “I think he’s crossed the line from scientist to full-on lulu. I don’t like the idea of coming to work every day and knowing he’s in the building.”

“He’s got a pretty ironclad contract with the Council. I can’t fire him unless he disobeys my direct orders, which is why I was so careful with my wording just now.” Jane finally stepped back, examining my arms and my still-slightly-bloody chin. “I can’t believe he did this. I thought my introductory ‘I’m your new boss’ memo made my stance on living and/or undead experimentation pretty clear when I took over the job.”

“Must have been one hell of a memo,” Ben muttered.

“It was twenty-three pages long,” Jane said, preening just a little bit, as the elevator dinged and opened on the lobby level. Gigi was waiting there with my purse and Ben’s messenger bag. And of course, she did not look like she’d just gotten into a bloody wrestling match with evil nerds. Wearing a super-cute combination of skinny jeans and a boyfriend jacket, she looked like she’d just stepped out of Girls Who Would Make a Better Girlfriend Than You Magazine.

“Hey, Jane, why did you need—? Oh. My. God. What happened to you?” Gigi’s perfectly glossed mouth dropped open in shock. “Meagan, are you OK?”

“No, no, I am not,” I told her, in a voice I meant to be much friendlier, but I was pretty much done with everything at this point.

What I did not expect was for Gigi to step into the elevator, hit the emergency stop button, and wrap her arms around me. Was it Ninja-Hug Meagan in the Elevator Day? Did I miss a note on Jane’s calendar? I couldn’t quite relax the Frankenstein arms, but I did give her a sort of flipper pat on her shoulder.

“Whatever it was, don’t let it scare you away, OK?” she said, leveling those big blue eyes at me. “We need more nonpsychos working in this office.”

I snorted. “Thanks.”

Ben was staring at the two of us with a strange, conflicted expression on his face.

“Ben, not the time,” Jane told him, shaking her head.

“What?” Ben exclaimed. “My ex-girlfriend is in close contact with my . . . sire lady person friend. These thoughts can’t be helped.”

“Try harder,” Jane scolded.

“Oh, Ben!” Gigi scowled, slapping at his arm.

Meanwhile, my jaw dropped as I stared at Ben’s “sorry not sorry” face.

“OK, well, Ben, you are done for the night. I’ve shut your computer down and clocked you out,” Gigi said, handing him his bag. “Jane, I’ve shut you and Meagan down for the night, as you requested in your cryptic and completely misspelled text—which makes way more sense now. Meagan, it seems that we’re still hugging with one arm.”

“I didn’t know whether to say something or not,” I told her. “As Ben’s sire lady person friend.”

Ben groaned.

“Good luck with that,” Gigi said, jerking her head toward him, making me snicker.

“I have Jane to take over the weirdest of the siring duties,” I said with a shrug.

Gigi’s dark brows rose. “No, I mean, you and Ben—”

“Thank you, Gigi. I think we’re abusing the emergency stop function at this point,” Jane interjected. “We’re going home for the night. If anyone asks, you didn’t see us.”

Gigi gave a little salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

If Gigi wasn’t careful, I was going to end up liking her. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

8

Don’t be offended when your childe clings to remembrances of his or her former life. It’s not a criticism of your siring. It’s proof that you chose the right sort of human to bring over to the “dark side.”

—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire

I thought Gabriel would try to make the house somber and soothing, like a spa, to make us feel better after the hellacious night we’d had. But we drove down the River Oaks driveway to find the whole house lit up. Bright, jazzy music was floating out of the kitchen. And Georgie was bouncing on her toes in the foyer, looking like Satan’s favorite pixie.

Gabriel came strolling out of the kitchen, wearing an apron that read “Bite the Cook,” with three steins full of blood in hand.

“Please don’t hug me,” I told him.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Gabriel deadpanned. “Jane said you might need a little TLC. This is a mix of donor blood and pulverized marrow—don’t ask what kind. It’s guaranteed to help heal up any of the injuries you might have sustained tonight.”

Jane accepted her mug with a kiss from her hubby. “I get one, too?”

“Yes, because Gabriel worries that you work too many hours and don’t feed properly,” Georgie informed her.

“She’s not wrong,” Gabriel said, ruffling Georgie’s hair. Georgie scowled and rubbed a hand over her head, but she sidled just a step closer to him. “This is just the appetizer course. Go upstairs and wash up. We’ll sit at the table in a few minutes.”

I downed my entire stein of blood while jogging up the stairs to my bedroom. Georgie hounded me, skipping up the banister with no apparent fear of falling. She hopped off at the landing and followed at my heels. Finally, I turned around and stopped her in her tracks.

“What’s up, Georgie?”

“There’s a package on your bed,” Georgie informed me. “It’s from Ophelia. It arrived after you left for work. I can’t tell what’s in it, and it’s driving me slightly mad.”

“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 has 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.

I giggled silently against the skin of his jaw. His feet were so cold against my legs, but I didn’t dare make a noise. Jane and Gabriel had superhearing.

I wrapped my legs around his hips, throwing my head back as my own wet, willing flesh came into contact with his hard length. He was ready underneath those basketball shorts. His hands drifted lazily down my sides and squeezed at my hip bones, a reassuring little touch. I liked that he didn’t push. That he seemed to enjoy every step as much as I did. He wasn’t rushing to the finish line.

This felt right. Not because I was his sire or because we were the only two super-rare vampires in this tiny little weirdo boat but because his lips were the only ones I wanted to be kissing. Everything about our relationship was complicated except for this. I wanted him, and he wanted me. This was the moment I’d wanted, that night in front of my dorm. This was where I’d hoped that flirting and fun would lead before everything went awry and I went into foster survival mode, and hmm, what was that thing he was doing with his tongue?

Ben climbed up the mattress to stretch completely over me. His hips cradled into mine as his hands spanned my waist, sliding under my butt and arching me up as he pressed between my thighs. I rolled my hips, chasing the sensation of feeling him against me. I moaned into his mouth, which seemed to spur him on, making his kisses more urgent. I tugged at his hair, breaking from his lips to kiss along the curve of his jaw.

He flicked his tongue against the skin behind my ear. I threaded my fingers through his hair, scratching my nails along his neck. My feet stroked his legs. I couldn’t seem to touch enough of him. I wanted it all, every inch of skin. I wanted to touch it, to taste it, to make him feel all the things he was making me feel.

His mouth tasted like cinnamon and sin. It was want, pure and simple.

We didn’t have much time before sunset. And that meant he was going to be in my bed when the others got up.

I rolled, pinning him down with my hips. My fangs sneaked out of my mouth, scraping against his nipple. He hissed but gripped at my shoulder, keeping me in place. I pressed those sharp points against his skin, testing and teasing until he was panting.

Panting myself, I slipped my own hand into the elastic of his shorts, pulling at them. He pulled back, watching me as I tugged at his clothes, his lips wet and parted. He nodded, pressing his forehead against mine and lifting his hips so I could pull his shorts all the way off. I’d just managed to get his underwear below his ass when something thumped against my door.

We both froze.

Fitz whimpered from the hall, scratching at my door. I could hear Jane’s voice, just outside, saying, “Is she not awake yet, buddy? Why don’t you give her a few more minutes? She had a rough one last night.”

My eyes locked with Ben’s, and I mouthed, Don’t think anything.

Fitz whimpered again, and I could hear his paws crawling up the door.

Jane sighed. “Aw, OK, buddy, but let her sleep. No chewing on her blankets.”

The doorknob turned, and Ben scrambled out from under me. He landed noiselessly on my floor and rolled under my bed. Jane opened the door just enough for Fitz to wriggle through and shut it behind him. The gray-brown blur of dog sprang across the room and landed on my bed with a flump, nearly dislodging me from the sheets.

“No, Fitz, off the bed,” I whispered as he attempted to cover my face in slobber. “Off.”

Fitz rolled to the floor, sniffing and searching until he found Ben. He yapped happily when Ben crawled out from under my bed. All traces of sexy times had disappeared. Ben looked ashamed and a little panicked.

“I’m really sorry,” he said. “This was a bad idea. I don’t know what came over me.”

“It’s OK,” I told him. “I wanted to.”

“I shouldn’t have,” he said. “Let’s just, uh, let’s just forget this happened, OK?”

Somewhere inside me, there was a witty retort that demanded to know what exactly Ben meant by that and required him to act more like a damn grown-up and less like my dad had just caught him rifling through my panty drawer. But what my brain came up with was “Uh . . .”

And with that, Ben stuck his head out into the hallway and checked for our housemates. I guessed the coast was clear, because he slipped past the door without another word and closed it quietly behind him. I flopped back onto the bed. Fitz propped his head on the mattress, huffing at me, trying to get my attention.

I rolled toward him, rubbing the top of his massive head. “What the hell just happened?”

Because dogs could not shrug, Fitz settled for licking my face.

Ben didn’t withdraw from my life. He didn’t avoid me. He did exactly what he’d asked me to do, which was pretend that the whole making-out-after-sleeping-on-top-of-me thing didn’t happen. He was perfectly friendly. He let me have the last Hemo Pop for breakfast when we ran out. He let me ride shotgun in Jane’s car on the way to work. He even held doors open for me. But he didn’t make eye contact. Our conversation was stilted and weird, like the sort of small talk you would make during a job interview.

I spent most of my time trying not to think about what had happened, because Jane did not need those visuals in her head. Also, I didn’t want to be grounded for having a boy in my room.

To avoid this mental pitfall when I was sitting just a few feet outside my psychic foster mom’s office door, I threw myself into work. I’d managed to tame my laundry cart of files. But more paperwork crossed my desk every night, and some of it was pretty damned interesting.

It was enough to keep me distracted and thinking of something besides Ben’s thrusty hardness, especially when a bright red—as in alarmingly red—folder with Ophelia’s name in bold block printing was delivered while I was on my lunch break.

At this point, I’d pretty much lost my qualms about looking through sensitive paperwork—though I will say that the sheer redness of the folder made me pause for just a second. The top sheet of the file was marked “Ophelia Lambert—Rehabilitation Progress.”

The report was pretty bland, discussing Ophelia’s progress on UK’s campus and her “lack of proven murders.” Who the hell wrote this? Did Ophelia have some sort of social worker she had to report to every week? I tried to imagine that vampire paper pusher. And it made me laugh.

Wait a minute.

I opened my “mystery drawer” full of loose papers that I had not yet figured out how to file. Most of them were reports that had fallen out of file folders when they were tossed into the giant laundry cart. I remembered a two-page printed e-mail with Ophelia’s name at the bottom, an e-mail that included a lot of cursing. Maybe that was supposed to go in this file? I shuffled through the papers until the all-caps cuss words jumped out at me.

I set the e-mail aside, just in case Jane wanted me to add it to Ophelia’s file. As I was shuffling Ophelia’s papers around, another monthly expense report from Tina slid out onto my desk. This one listed even more vampire students than the last. That didn’t make any sense. Students weren’t allowed to change their room assignments at this point in the year, so why was Tina requesting more money?

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was underestimating the number of students in my building. I mean, I’d been pretty busy with classes and having a life. Was this the sort of thing I should even be worrying about right now?

I frowned at the report and its overwhelming numbers, blinking out at my keen eyes like they were written in red neon.

It was either that or think about Ben and what he’d meant by “This was a bad idea.”

“Right.” I picked up my receiver and dialed Keagan’s cell, taking advantage of Jane’s absence to make a not completely kosher phone call. My suite mate worked evening shifts at the front desk at New Dawn to earn a student stipend—a whopping hundred dollars per month. It was enough to cover Keagan’s cell-phone bill and keep her dad off her back about our generation’s “poor work ethic.”

Keagan’s voice growled into the phone. “If this is a telemarketer or that creep from my Psych class, I swear to God, I’m going to hang up.”

And that was when I remembered that the Council phones had a “ghost” area code that wouldn’t allow Keagan to see that I was calling from inside the state.

“Keagan, is that how you normally greet people on the phone? You were such a nice girl when I lived in your suite. Maybe I should move back.”

“Meagan! Are you allowed to call me right now? Are you OK? Wait, are you calling me from a landline?” she said. “Ew. Just because you’re working for moldy old vampires doesn’t mean that you have to use their technology.”

“I am calling you for a semiofficial reason, so I don’t think I’m violating the spirit of Jane’s rules. And also, I’m pretty sure you just used vampire hate speech. Like if we weren’t friends, I would file a complaint with the campus Anti-Deadism League and get you fired from your little front-desk job.”

“Well, it’s a good thing we’re friends, then,” she drawled. “I would hate to lose my lucrative future in customer service.”

“Sweetie, you hate customers. And service. You’re just too Southern to say anything about it,” I said, laughing, even when I saw Ben and Gigi come walking down the hall.

Ben caught sight of my wide grin and smiled back, like it was a reflex. And then he seemed to remember his sudden departure from our thrusty high jinks, and his face fell into a mask of detached politeness.

Gigi, on the other hand, was still waving and grinning. Honestly, that girl’s friendliness was starting to freak me out. I gave her a little waggle of the fingers and pointed to my phone receiver. Ben got no waggle. We would both have to get used to disappointment.

And because my vampire quickness allowed me to multitask like a boss, I balanced the receiver under my chin, opened my e-mail program, and started a new message to Ophelia. I made it short, something that wouldn’t ping on the Council’s “keywords sensors” on my communications.

Hey Ophelia,

I have a quick question for you about some paperwork. Can you give me a call? I’m sure that Jane gave you the number for my KidPhone.

—Meagan

OK. That should have satisfied my curiosity, right? That should have settled this growing sense of unease in my chest. But it didn’t. Something just short of anxiety gnawed away at me, making me feel like I was squirming inside my skin. So I pressed forward with my somewhat underhanded questioning of my friend.

“That is true. You would be doing me a favor.” Keagan sighed. “I’m assuming you’re calling me for some reason other than just distracting me from my very important mail-sorting duties?”

“Yes. Does Tina still make you run daily census reports?” I asked, picking up a stack of Post-its and my favorite red pen.

Keagan snorted. “Yes, at the end of every shift, I e-mail Tina a list of residents, sorted into living and undead columns on an Excel spreadsheet. Because there’s a huge chance of that number suddenly changing overnight . . . except for that day a few weeks ago when we suddenly had one kid jump into the vampire column. Sorry, that was insensitive.”

“Eh, coming from you, kinda borderline.”

“Thanks. Is there some reason you’re grilling me about random tasks from my job description?” she asked.

“I was hoping you might be able to do one for me?”

“What? A census report?”

“Yes, and I need you not to ask me any questions about it.” I winced, waiting for my friend to blast me for putting her in an awkward position and asking too much of her.

“OK.”

“Really?” I took the phone away from my face and gave it a skeptical brow lift.

“Yeah, it’s not like you’re asking me for names and social security numbers here, Meg. I’ve got to do this tonight anyway. You’re just preventing me from procrastinating.” I heard her clicking the keys on her desktop keyboard. “OK, we have one hundred eighty-three vampire students on the roster. And one hundred twenty-one human students.”

I wrote the number on my Post-it and glanced back at Tina’s most recent report. Tina was padding both columns by about thirty students. “You’re sure about that?”

“Nope, I just picked those numbers out of a hat. Because that’s how I make my own fun.”

“Fair enough, smartass.”

“And my work here is done.” I could practically hear Keagan raising her arms in a V of sarcastic victory.

“Can you do me a favor? Don’t tell anyone that I called and asked about this?”

“Yes, I can do this very vague and mysterious thing you’re asking me to do. Mostly because I don’t think anyone will be all that interested.”

“I’m serious, Keagan.”

“I know. I can tell. Are you OK, Meg?”

“I’m sure it’s just a problem with paperwork, but it’s part of my job to track these things down, so . . .”

“Gross. Your job is even more boring than mine.”

“That’s the glamorous life of the vampire.” I sighed. “So what’s going on with you? I feel like we haven’t talked much lately. And most of our conversations have boiled down to ‘Miss you so much . . . ah, I don’t know what to talk about with you now because our lives are so separate.’ ”

“It’s not that exciting around here—tests, classes, the usual. Nothing compared to dramatic death and vampire transformation scenes.”

“So gimme the campus gossip not included in that care package. Which I did appreciate quite a bit, by the way.”

“Uh, some girl freaked out at the haunted house fund-raiser and punched Carson in the nuts when he jumped out in front of her.”

“Carson probably did something to deserve it,” I said, remembering the time the handsy junior cornered me in the research library and tried to charge me a “hug tax” to get out of the stacks. I ended up knocking several volumes of Shakespeare analysis onto his feet to get past him.

“Probably,” she reasoned. “Professor Greene walked out of a class in protest after some guy turned in a three-hundred-word PowerPoint presentation instead of the twenty-page research paper he was supposed to do. Oh, and you know that fire off campus? The fire department went through the rubble and found three bodies in the basement.”

“Oh, no! Were they kids from school?”

“Not sure yet. Morgan is super-involved in the story for the school newspaper, so I’m getting so many details that I am having nightmares. The medical examiners haven’t identified them. But the coroner told Joanie—you know, the hyper girl who covers the police blotter—that the bodies didn’t have any ash or soot in their lungs, so they probably died before the fire. But that’s not even the weird part. The bodies were chained to the wall! Like something out of some creepy Eli Roth movie.”

“Ugh, that’s awful.” I shuddered but straightened in my chair when I saw Jane and Dick coming down the hall. “And I know this is a terrible moment to hang up on you, because you’re clearly distressed that your roommate is sharing autopsy reports with you. But I have to go, because my boss is coming. I love you, buh-bye.”

I dropped the receiver onto the cradle.

“Hey, Jane!” I said, smiling an “I wasn’t just making a somewhat personal phone call on company time” smile. I handed her a stack of phone-message slips, which she accepted with a hesitant frown. “Hi, Dick.”

Dick grinned at me and ruffled my hair, because he seemed to see me as some sort of vampire niece who would put up with this. I scowled at him, but that was short-lived when his “An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away, But Only If You Have Good Aim” T-shirt made me laugh.

“Is that Ophelia’s progress report?” Jane asked, picking up the nuclear-red folder. She opened the file and scanned the papers inside.

“And this is where I bow out, because I’m not an impartial party when it comes to Ophelia.” Dick excused himself, kissing Jane’s cheek and ruffling my hair one more time before retreating to the break room.

“Yeah, do you remember an e-mail that Ophelia sent you a week or so before I was turned?”

Jane peered over the folder at me. “A profanity-filled rant where she told me it was none of my blanking business who she blanking had contact with when it wasn’t on the blanking campus that she rarely blanking left since I wouldn’t let her own a blanking car and if I had blanking questions I could blanking well call her myself? And then explicit instructions to go blank myself? And then, oddly, with the list of her contacts in the area attached?”

I read over the e-mail. “That sounds about right.”

“Yes, it was memorable. But I sent her back a response saying I had no clue what she was talking about. She didn’t reply, and I figured she was either embarrassed, which wasn’t likely, or had realized she was mistaken and had already moved on to the next person on her curse-out list.”

“And you didn’t punish her for being disrespectful to you?”

Jane waggled her hand. “Eh, considering Ophelia’s previous interactions, the ‘go blank yourself’ e-mail was actually pretty cordial.”

“Really?” I winced, mentally counting the number of creatively employed four-letter words. “So I’m assuming that this e-mail should be included in her rehab progress file?”

Jane nodded. “Yes, just mark it ‘Informational only, not for sentence consideration.’ ”

I gave her a little salute. “That sounds vaguely official. Do you want to include some note about what led to the ranty e-mail?”

“I don’t know what led to the ranty e-mail.”

“But I remember her talking about it. She said you sent Tina an e-mail asking for a list of her known associates in the area around the college. She was . . . not pissed, really, I think she was kind of hurt that you would be suspicious when she was making every effort to behave well.”

Jane frowned. “I never sent Tina an e-mail like that.”

“If you didn’t ask her for the list of Ophelia’s contacts, who did?”

She shrugged. “It’s probably some shady business associate of Ophelia’s trying to make new Facebook friends or something. Just make a note in the file about your recollections of the situation.”

“Will do.”

“Oh, and speaking of shady friends, I noticed that you added another asterisk to the nope list?” Jane held up a sheaf of paper from my out-box. “And a note. Dr. Fortescue has a PhD in ‘babbling loony.’ ”

“I stand by my statement,” I told her primly.

“I didn’t know you could get a degree in ‘babbling loony.’ ”

“It’s one of those lesser-known majors,” I said. “Like French literature or pottery.”

“This guy will not stop.” She sighed even while she laughed. “He’s been calling me for months. And he doesn’t seem to get that I don’t have room in my schedule for every babbling loony who has something to sell us. He’s like a telemarketer who just won’t give up. And I say that as a former telemarketer who gave up very easily.” When I arched my brows, she shook her head. “Long story.”

“Well, you might want to let security know that he’s threatening to show up and wait for you in the parking lot so you’ll have to listen to him.”

Jane snorted. “Well, let him try. Parking-lot fisticuffs in this town tend to go badly for nonvampires.”

“How about I let the security office know that he’s planning on waiting for you in the parking lot?”

Jane smiled indulgently at me. “I’ll let them know. Trust me, I’ve learned not to take chances with these things.”

“Thank you. I feel better now.”

Jane put her hand on my shoulder. “No, thank you. You’re doing a really good job here, Meagan. My schedule has never been so well organized. Your e-mails are clear and concise, without overloading me with information. And you always remember to stock my office mini fridge with those single-serve packets of Hershey’s Blood Additive that I like so very much.”

I grinned at her. “Thanks, Jane.”

The elevator dinged. She smiled warmly. “And to reward you for all that hard work, I think you deserve to go on a little outing.”

I groaned. “Every time you use that voice, I end up learning a life lesson.”

I turned to see Libby, the sweet blond soccer-mom vamp. She sped up as she approached Jane, practically skipping as she threw her arms around her.

“Hey!” she cried. “It’s official! Thanks to all of the clients you recommended me to—Southern Comforts, Sam Clemson’s contracting business, the free clinic, and Gabriel’s random businesses—I have replaced all of the customers I lost after I was turned, plus at least twenty percent. And because vampires value honest bookkeepers, I can charge them more money. I’m financially solvent! I can afford to buy Danny the brand-name macaroni and cheese and everything!”

“Aw, congratulations, sweetie! I’m so happy for you.” Jane sighed, squeezing Libby tightly.

“And Meagan! It’s so good to see you, too,” Libby said, pulling me up from my chair and dragging me into a long embrace.

“You . . . are a hugger,” I said, patting her back and shooting Jane an exasperated look. Jane just snickered. “Everybody in the Hollow just loves to hug.”

“I thought we could go for coffee,” Libby said. “There’s a really cute place across the street that does vampire-friendly mixed drinks.”

I glanced toward Jane. “I’m not sure I’m allowed to leave the building. And it might make Sammy jealous if I drink someone else’s caffeine.”

Jane shook her head. “As long as you stay with Libby, I’m happy. Just take the rest of the night off. You earned it. Libby’s going to drive you home.”

An outing? Without Jane’s or Gabriel’s supervision? No strained conversation with Ben on the drive home? Yes, please. I didn’t care if Libby tried to recruit me into a multilevel marketing scam, I was on board. I locked down my computer and grabbed my purse.

Libby looped her arm through mine. “Come on, my treat.”

I cast an uncertain glance over my shoulder as Jane waved cheerfully and walked into her office.

“Jane thought it might be a little easier for you to relax around me,” Libby said as she hit the elevator’s ground-level button.

“Why?”

“I had my own interesting transition into vampire life, which Jane had to jump in and oversee. Let’s just say that finding a sire and arranging to be turned on supernatural Craigslist is not an appropriate life choice, even if you are terminally ill. Jane had to take me on to foster, too, because she didn’t trust my sire. Which turned out to be a good thing, because he wasn’t all that trustworthy. And I found his presence to be kind of romantically confusing. Also, my human boyfriend wasn’t crazy about him.”

I soundlessly mouthed, Wow.

Libby laughed, then led me out of the Council building and across the street to a cozy little coffee shop called Perk-U-Later, chatting all the way about the boost in clients that Jane’s recommendations had granted her at-home bookkeeping business. There were other similarities in our histories. Libby grew up not knowing who her father was, raised by a single mother who worked all the time, feeling isolated from other kids by nature of having to grow up faster than they did. The difference between us was that Libby was grown when her mother died, and she’d had something of an adult human life before she herself died. She’d married (unhappily), had a son (happily), and been widowed (no comment) before she’d been diagnosed with the late-stage cancer that forced her into vampirism. She’d chosen this unlife because she couldn’t leave her son behind without parents. I liked to think that if the semitruck had given my mom options, she would have made the same choice. Libby’s history made me trust her a bit more, despite this strangely forced coffee-based playdate.

Of course, the minute she brought up Danny, she pulled out her phone to show me pictures of her son, a sunny, towheaded boy grinning goofily into the camera from a pumpkin patch. I scrolled through several shots, most of them featuring her little boy being adorable. In the final picture, Danny was dressed as a matador and had his arm slung around a little boy in a simulated sumo fat suit. I held the phone up.

“Context is important,” Libby said, nodding. “School play.”

“Ah.”

I dragged my finger across the screen and found a shot of Libby and Danny and Danny’s de-sumo’d friend sitting on some porch steps. A big blond man with a thick beard and full tattoo sleeves peeking out from under his T-shirt had those arms wrapped around Libby and the boys. They were positively beaming at the camera, like an ad for the Council for “Nontraditional but Happy Supernatural Family Values.”

I turned the camera toward her and smirked. “Nicely done.”

“Well, some aspects of vampire life have been a little easier than others. That’s Wade. Good Lord, that man. Makes up for every argument with my late husband over our nonexistent sex life, diaper changes, living less than a mile away from his parents—just everything.”

“How do you do it?” I asked. “You have the same sort of background I do, and you make it look so normal. The kid, the human boyfriend, after-hours business. I always feel like I have this ‘Tragic Backstory’ stamp on my forehead.”

“I choose to make it normal.”

“Because the power has been inside of me all along?” I asked, pausing to sip my bloodychino. “All I have to do is click my heels three times?”

“No, smartass. I choose to make it normal by not dwelling on the things I can’t change, like my relationship with my mother or my husband, and focusing instead on what I can do to make my life better—for me and for Danny. I understand the feeling that it’s safer to pull up the rope ladder and isolate yourself, but you can’t do that now. Vampires, for all our solitary ‘children of the night’ crap, are social creatures. We need that support system, and you just happened to land right in the middle of one of the best support systems you could ask for. You should take advantage of it. Even if it makes you uncomfortable.”

“I will try.”

Libby gave me a speculative look. “Well, I think it’s time you headed home.”

“I know, I know, you’ve got to drive me.”

“Actually, no, I think you should walk back alone. I’ll tell Jane that after we talked I drove you home.”

“I’m sorry, what?” I coughed up part of my coffee back into the cup. Classy. “Is this a trick?”

“I know what it’s like not to trust yourself, not to be trusted. I think you need to take a walk. Be out in the world and prove to yourself that you can get from point A to point B without hurting anyone or getting hurt yourself.”

“Still feels like a test,” I told her. “Jane will be pissed if she finds out.”

“Well, if Jane asks, I have some parenting experience I’m going to fall back on to justify my decision. Or I will run. Running also sounds good.”

I stood, hooking my purse over my shoulder. “Thanks, Libby.”

Libby’s hand shot out, catching my wrist before I could walk away. “If you screw me over here, I will deploy my mom guilt in ways you can’t even imagine.”

“Thank you for the warning.”

9

New vampires need quiet time to themselves to help gain perspective. But don’t call it “time-out.” They find that very insulting.

—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire

I didn’t feel completely safe until I’d gotten several blocks from the office, and not just because I didn’t want Jane to see me wandering around unchaperoned. Dr. Hudson was still lurking out there somewhere with his medical instruments of terror.

The farther I walked, the more I felt the weight on my shoulders slip away. I’d forgotten what it was like to choose which direction I would walk, how quickly I would get somewhere. The stars above seemed to twinkle a little brighter. The air smelled . . . well, OK, it still smelled like car exhaust and doughnut grease, but still, it was nice to be outside.

I had about twenty miles before I reached River Oaks. When I left the city limits, I sped my pace up to a jog, heading off the county road and cutting across the woods. I grinned to myself as the few remaining leaves on the trees brushed over my head. I carefully picked my way over the roots and fallen limbs I could spot so easily in the dark.

I felt like Little Red Riding Hood, skipping through the woods. But the Big Bad Wolf could suck it. He was no threat to me. I was the apex predator here, in the dark. Unless Jed did that mutant shark thing again. Because I was sure sharks trumped vampires.

Libby had been right. I needed this. I needed a little bit of space, some time to think, without worrying about whether Jane could hear me. In the distance, through the trees, I could see a weird, rounded shape against the branches. A water tower? What kind of weird-ass town put their municipal water supply out in the middle of nowhere?

Still, I bet the view from up there was pretty fantastic, even better than the sights we saw from the tops of Jane’s trees. I climbed up the rusty rungs of the ladder, taking two steps at a time without much effort. I could feel the tower swaying ever so slightly as I moved around the catwalk. I could see the whole town from up here, every tiny glowing light, like a little galaxy.

I rounded the tower, pleased to see an old-fashioned drive-in theater, the screen just visible on the horizon. It was close enough that I could see Brendan Fraser’s face smiling at me through the darkness. I gasped, sinking to the metal grate and hanging my arms over the rail.

Just as I got comfortable, my purse started buzzing. It had been so long since I’d carried a cell phone I almost panicked. I couldn’t remember how the damn thing was supposed to work. The fact that it was basically a preschooler’s toy phone complicated matters. I hit the giant green button to accept the call. Ophelia’s voice came echoing out of the receiver.

“Hello? Meagan? I do not appreciate you ignoring my attempts to respond to your maddeningly vague e-mail. You could at least pick up the phone.”

“Hey, Ophelia, sorry. I’m just struggling with my Fisher-Price phone.”

Ophelia snorted. “Jane did issue you the KidPhone, then? I told her that was too cruel, even to me.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’d think with buttons as big as those, I’d be able to use it, yadda, yadda. Why am I doing your snarky work for you?” I sighed. “And thanks for calling me back. I know my e-mail was vague, but I didn’t want to set off the Council alarms.”

“Ooh, subversive. You surprise me, Meagan. Fine, I’ll bite. Why am I calling you?”

“I was going through your probationary file.”

“Intrusive,” she commented.

“And I saw this e-mail that you sent Jane, a little bit before I was turned.”

“Meagan, I send out a lot of e-mails.”

“I believe you told Jane that it was none of her blanking business who you blanking had contact with when it wasn’t on the blanking campus?”

“Oh, yeah, I do remember that. I took particular delight in using the f-word as all of the parts of speech.”

“Good for you, but can you tell me what Jane did to deserve such a display of profane grammar?” I asked.

“Tina asked me for a copy of all my contacts in the area. She said Jane asked her for it. I sent my masterwork of obscenities . . . And now that you mention it, Jane responded in an e-mail that she didn’t know what I was talking about. I thought she was simply being obtuse, but then . . . I got distracted with Jamie and the mixer and your situation, and I forgot all about it. That’s not like me.”

“You’ve had a lot on your mind,” I told her.

“I juggled illegal business transactions, working for a shadow government, and raising my sister alone, while looking completely fabulous. I think I can handle my freshman year.”

I tried for a placating tone. “You are a total badass. I want to be you when I grow up.”

“Of course you do. Everybody wants to be me.” She sniffed.

“And so modest, too.”

“Meagan, if I’ve taught you anything during our too-brief friendship, it’s that modesty is for losers,” she said. “I’m assuming Jane has you documenting my rudeness in triplicate, so the Council can hold it over my head?”

“Actually, no, it’s just not adding up. There’s a missing link in the communication chain, and it’s driving me crazy.”

“Well, if I can help in any way, let me know. It’s been downright tedious without you here. I mean, I enjoy Keagan and Morgan’s company, but . . . I got used to your being around, that’s all.”

I grinned into the darkness. That was as close as I would ever get to Ophelia saying she missed me.

“Meanwhile, if you need me to come to the Council office for any reason, please just say the word. Between midterms and the police presence on campus, I could use a little space.”

“Police presence?”

Ophelia sounded exasperated. “Ever since that building burned off campus. The remains found in the basement were vampire, apparently. So the police, naturally, are focusing on the most concentrated population of vampires in the area. And because of my history, they’ve taken a particular interest in questioning me. They seem to think I had something to do with it.”

“You . . . didn’t have anything to do with it, did you?”

She deadpanned. “Meagan.”

“I’m just asking!”

“I would never leave that sort of evidence, honestly. It’s like you barely know me.” Ophelia’s voice trailed off. On the other end of the line, I heard a door open, followed by two distinct thumps, like shoes hitting the floor, and the rasp of a zipper. Ophelia gave a little gasp.

“Augh, Jamie is there, isn’t he?” I groaned. “You have to warn me when you start messing around like that! So I can immediately hang up!”

“Then you should probably hang up now,” Ophelia whimpered.

“Gross. When you’re done, tell the girls I said hi.” I hit the big red end button and dropped the phone into my bag. And then I bathed my hands in sanitizer, because that would make a big difference.

“I need new nonpervert friends,” I said to myself, sighing and bumping my head against the railing.

So Tina told Ophelia that Jane asked for a list of Ophelia’s contacts. Jane didn’t know who asked for Ophelia’s contacts list but knew it wasn’t her. Ophelia sent it but didn’t know why anyone would want it. Jane and Ophelia had no reason to lie. That left Tina, the same Tina who seemed to have trouble counting vampires, who couldn’t possibly be as adorably clueless as she pretended to be. But why would she want a list of Ophelia’s contacts? Maybe she wanted to have some sort of intervention-style confrontation with Ophelia about her rude treatment of the roommate who kept stealing Ophelia’s body wash?

Why wouldn’t this problem just unknot itself?

I grumbled, focusing on the screen in the distance. My mom had loved this movie. Mrs. Winterbourne. It wasn’t even one of Brendan Fraser’s big hits, but it was her favorite of his because it was just so dang sentimental, with its twists and turns and impossibly happy ending. We’d curl up on the couch on her rare nights off and enjoy a good mid-’90s romantic comedy and some microwave popcorn.

Even though I couldn’t hear the dialogue, it was nice to sit here and watch something that reminded me of home, listening to the wind move through the leaves. I was relaxed. I was untroubled. I was not worried about someone dumping liquid silver on me in the name of science, which was a nice change of pace.

It lasted all of ten minutes.

I felt, then smelled Ben, all bay leaf and citrus, before I sensed the minute vibrations of him climbing up the ladder. I heard him grunt quietly as he leaped from the ladder to the platform. I rolled my eyes and leaned my forehead against the metal railing, praying to Oprah for strength.

“Oh, come on.” I sighed. “I was just having a really nice, relaxing moment here. I don’t need you or your emotional yo-yoing.”

Ben looked honestly hurt by that. “Emotional yo-yoing?”

“I like you. You’re awesome,” I said, mimicking him. “I think I hate you. Go away. But maybe not. Let’s make out! Nope, let’s pretend it never happened and just smile a lot!”

“Well, that sounds nothing like me.” Ben snorted.

I gave him dead-face.

He slid down to sit next to me on the platform.

“What are you even doing here?” I asked.

“Libby told Jane that she’d let you loose. I overheard because I may have dropped by your office to look for you. And then I followed your trail.”

“If you say ‘by smell,’ I swear I will hit you.”

I made a mental note to use either more deodorant or less scented body wash.

“No. It was weird. I could sense that this was where you were going. I could even see the water tower in my mind. Feel the cool metal ladder rungs in my hands.”

He could see inside my head? That was uncomfortable. Was this the first time? Or was it a full-time ability and this was the first time he’d mentioned it?

“Is that a normal vampire thing?” I asked. “Or some sort of special neovamp trick?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I want to ask anybody. Who knows what sort of experiments they’d do on us if they thought we were psychic, too?”

I sighed again, leaning my forearms against the railing. “We’d end up in one of those Men Who Stare at Goats scenarios.”

He looked at the drive-in screen. “Mrs. Winterbourne?” he asked. I lifted a brow, and he added, “I’ve seen it a few times. Edgar Beane, the guy who owns the drive-in? He never quite moved past 1998 in terms of his cinematic interests. And Brendan Fraser is a particular favorite of his.”

“So you’re just going to brazen your way through this? Pretend the awkward away?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I can’t expect you to just sit by while I figure out what’s going on in my own head. It’s not fair. And I’ve been a dick to you while I’ve tried to work through it.”

He looked to me, as if he expected me to argue, Oh, no, you haven’t been that bad! And my face remained impassive, because he had been that bad. I made a little hand-waving motion, as if to say Go on.

“I have feelings for you, very strong feelings,” he said.

At this, I pulled my head back and leaned away from him, making him raise his hands and say, “I’m not saying I’m crazy in love with you or making a doll out of the hair you leave in the drain or anything. But strong ‘liking you’ feelings, like thinking about you all the time. Like, when we’re at work, instead of concentrating on my coding, I’m sitting there at my desk wondering how you’re doing. If you’re having a good night, or if some wackaloon is yelling at you over the phone and what sort of placating yet still pretty insulting thing you’re going to say to him. When we’re at home, I have to concentrate on finding things to do to keep me from seeking you out, to keep from knocking on your door to talk to you, because I know you need to retreat into your safe corner. And I realize everything I’m saying is making me sound like a freaky stalker, and I’m sorry. I haven’t really felt like this about someone for a while, and at first, I wasn’t sure if it was because you’re my sire. I mean, Jane married her sire. Iris married hers. Miranda is going to marry hers. I didn’t want to be with you just because my vampire hindbrain told me I had to. So after I finally figured out that I didn’t have a reason to be pissed off at you for this whole vampire thing, I still kept my distance.”

I stared out into the night, focusing on Brendan Fraser’s goofy-handsome mug.

God, I hoped he was kidding about the hair-in-the-drain thing. Gross.

“And I am supposed to react to this how?”

“With a forgiving heart and a forgetful brain? I will settle for a permanent blackout of all memories connected to me interrupting what was a very enjoyable make-out session by freaking out and running away like a little girl.”

“Why did you run away like a little girl?” I asked. “Which made me feel just awesome, by the way. Super-attractive and desirable.”

“No, no,” he said, shifting his body toward mine, bending his knee so his shin brushed against my ass. “I want you. I want you on a level that would definitely not help my stalker status. But we started kissing, and I realized that I am not comfortable doing any of that in that house, with a mind-reader sleeping down the hall and people who have known me for years. So between that and the general ‘sire feelings’ freak-out, I ran.”

“Is this sudden avalanche of confessional feelings a result of the epic love story that is Gigi and her chiseled Russian boyfriend, and you realizing they’re never going to break up?” I asked.

Ben scoffed. “No. If anything, being around Gigi reminded me why we weren’t all that great together. We’re too damn similar.”

“You proposed to her,” I noted.

“Because I was afraid I would lose her otherwise. I could feel her pulling away from me, trying to find a way out without hurting my feelings. I panicked. She was my first love, and we made sense, and I didn’t think I would ever find someone else who . . . Well, anyway, when I asked her, she broke up with me, and rightly so, because fear is a terrible reason to ask someone to spend the rest of her life with you.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I told him.

“I want to find a way for us to get back to the people we were sitting out in front of the dorm . . . before you were crushed by a flying free weight. Because I liked those people. They were good together.”

“Our meet-cute is not like other people’s meet-cute.” I sighed. “I like you, too. But I’m torn between those feelings of like and knowing that there’s a very good chance you could freak and run out on me. Or just decide to be a dick again and make me feel so uncomfortable in my own temporary home that I think I can’t move without weirding someone out. I don’t like either option.”

“And if I promised I wouldn’t do that again?” he asked. “That I wouldn’t run away or shut down?”

“That’s really easy to promise and twice as easy to forget,” I countered. “I need to feel anchored somewhere, Ben. I need to feel like I can’t be kicked out of my home, even if it’s only home for a little while. I don’t want to risk what I have at Jane’s. No matter how cute you are.”

“What if I said that if it ever got awkward again, I would ask Jane to send me to some other vampire for fostering?”

I shook my head. “Jane wouldn’t do that.”

“She would if I asked her.”

He was offering to make sure I was safe, comfortable. It was more than I’d been offered by any of my previous potential romantic partners, who considered covering pizza to be a big gesture. I wasn’t sure Jane would honor his request, but it meant a lot that he was willing to give up his own comfort to guarantee mine.

Yes, he’d been a jerk, but he was apologizing. And his olive branch was more trunk-sized. While it didn’t make up for everything, it was something to consider.

“I can’t ask you to do that.” I sighed again. “You don’t have a lot of places you feel safe, either. Besides, we’re under such heavy restrictions that if you lived somewhere else, we’d never see each other.”

“Aw, your self-restraint is so sweet,” he said, bumping me with his shoulder. “I can’t promise you much, but I will do everything I can to make sure you don’t feel uncomfortable or unwelcome in Jane’s house, even if this doesn’t work out.”

“This is not a commitment,” I told him. “This is like a tryout, to see if we would be any good at dating if and when we’re ever released into the wild. If it goes well, great. Maybe once we’re back on campus, we can be a couple who likes each other but doesn’t live together. If it goes badly, we’re just going to have to learn to coexist in the house in a way that doesn’t make me want to throw a van at you.”

“I think we can make this work. I just have to get past the whole hang-up about Jane’s house.”

“So I guess we have to establish a rule: nothing in the house,” I said cheerfully. “Nothing under Jane’s roof. Too many weird emotional strings attached there.”

He grimaced. “Which is a problem, since we spend most of our time under house arrest.”

“What are you going to do about it?” I asked, tilting my head.

“Find a way for us to date without being able to leave the house? Jane’s property is pretty big. We could sneak out to the cow pasture.”

“Anything that involves the word ‘pasture’ is not going to end in a good-night kiss for you.”

“It strikes me that there are plenty of beds on the R and D floors.”

“You know, when I thought about having sex with you, creepy lab facilities didn’t really play into it,” I told him.

“Yes, but you did think about it!” he quipped. “There has to be somewhere that two healthy adult types can find some time alone together.”

This was the same feeling I’d had when we’d spent most of the night talking outside my dorm. This was the Ben I remembered. And somehow, despite the fact that I’d seen him every day for the last several weeks, I’d missed him.

“You’re taunting a desperate man here, Meagan.”

I leaned closer, just enough that my lips almost brushed against his. “You’re going to have to try a little harder, Ben.”

And with that, I slid under the metal railing, turned in midair, and grabbed the ladder in free fall. Ben’s eyes went wide, but he relaxed the moment he saw me dangling from the rungs.

“I deserve that,” he said.

I pulled myself back up on the ladder until I was at eye level with him. I gave him a quick kiss. “Yes, you do.”

10

Your childe may surprise you with his or her interests. Remember that a vampire with hobbies is forty percent less likely to have a “rampage” incident.

—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire

Jane’s bookshop was a colorful, comfortable, quirky paradise. My inner book nerd rejoiced at the squashy purple chairs, the pretty knickknacks, the cozy smell of coffee and blood percolating behind the maple coffee bar. Crystals and silver figurines and geodes took up space along the upper shelves, displayed to catch the eye but high enough that they didn’t make the place look cluttered.

The book selection covered a little bit of everything: classic literature, graphic novels, straight-up occult studies, and a huge array of vampire self-help books. That made sense, given the number of vampires who circulated through the door.

I absolutely loved it.

It was safe for me to be there. While plenty of people would recognize Ben if he sat in the middle of Specialty Books working on his laptop, no one outside of Jane’s trust circle would recognize me. It reminded me of Pages, the little independent bookshop in my hometown where I spent a sad number of Friday nights in high school. While Ben was spending tonight working in the IT office, I’d gotten permission from Jane to take the night off so I could do a history assignment that had me stumped. Dr. Baker was a stickler for punctuality and punctuation, so my usual trick of turning in a first draft would not fly.

My IM pinged, and a little speech bubble popped up on my screen: Whatcha doin’?—complete with a Phineas and Ferb meme. I smiled. Jane had loosened the Internet policies ever so slightly after Ben and I had both come home from our “night walk” without incident. While the specter of Dr. Hudson and his science still made her nervous, Jane was giving us way more online freedom. We were allowed to talk to our friends as long as we understood that we still couldn’t reveal our location to anyone. Ben was even working up to an in-person visit with his family. All in all, everything was coming up pretty rosy for us.

Seriously, we just had a formatting meeting where we spent thirty minutes debating the “least historically offensive” fonts, Ben wrote. Please give me some news of the world outside. Is it beautiful there? Details, please, on the assignment you are working on. Use footnotes if you can. Citations are sexy.

And so I was having fun with Ben. Now that he’d made the monumental gesture of admitting that he (gasp) liked me, I’d put the burden completely on him to try to find some way for us to spend time together away from the house, a damn near impossible task. And until he did that, I was standing just a little closer to him as we both fished our breakfast out of the fridge in the evening. I was making a lot of direct eye contact. I was suggesting late-night study sessions. I was generally vexing him.

Hard at work, being very productive and studious, I have no time to talk nerdy to you, sir.

He sent me a little pouty emoji. You’re killing me, Smalls.

I sat back in my perfectly comfortable chair and rolled my shoulders. I scanned the bookshelves with my superior vision, taking in each spine. A few titles even I recognized—Fifty Ways to Introduce Variety to Your Undead Diet, Love Bites, The Office after Dark: A Guide to Maintaining a Safe, Productive Vampire Workplace. My eyes lit on a bright green softcover volume titled The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire.

I scanned the back cover, which featured bullet points listing all the super-helpful tips unwilling undead parents could find inside. “Addressing the sire-childe power dynamic!” “Feeding difficulties and how to fix them!” “A how-to guide to interacting with your childe’s biological family!” This would be helpful if and when I ever met Ben’s family, which raised the question, did I want to meet Ben’s family?

Maybe the book could tell me.

“Andrea!” I called. “I’m taking this! Can you tell Jane I owe her eighteen ninety-five?”

“Jane opened an account for you. You’ll still have about eighty bucks before you hit your limit for the month.”

“Wow, that’s really nice of her. As soon as I’m done with the Skype chat I have scheduled with Morgan and Keagan, I’m going to go on an eighty-one-dollar shopping spree. And that is more exciting than it should be, which is an indication of my social life, really.”

“Honey, I once saw Jane weep while hugging a first edition of Sense and Sensibility. By that standard, you’re downright tame.”

“Good point,” I agreed, checking the time on my laptop screen. “My Skype thing is scheduled in about fifteen minutes. Would it be OK if I went into Jane’s office for it?”

“Sure, hon. Jane has lifted her online embargo, right? I don’t have to watch you to make sure you’re not contacting people you shouldn’t be talking to?”

“No, I understand the rules,” I said. “I know what I should and shouldn’t say, who to talk to and who to shout ‘I’m an Internet ghost!’ at and then shut off the webcam. I know the drill.”

“Behave, or I will wax your eyebrows while you sleep,” Andrea told me.

“That’s a very respectable threat,” I assured her.

Jane’s office was a little less organized than the shop. It was a small space dominated by a large, dark wooden desk and yet more framed photos. I’d gotten the impression that Jane needed these reminders of loved ones and good times around her in times of stress, considering that the highest concentrations of the photos were in locations where she either dealt with Council business or dealt with vendor issues and customer-service stupidity.

It would be nice, I thought, to have that kind of life, to have that support system Libby spoke of, to have all of those photos to put in my space to remind me that there were people out in the world wanting good things for me. But first, I had to graduate from school, get a job, and do the things I needed to do to establish that kind of life for myself.

After opening my laptop on Jane’s enormous desk, I worked on my paper for a while, keeping a Skype window open for my friends’ call. I was making pretty decent progress on my essay question when I heard the familiar Skype chime. Grinning, I hit the green accept button.

But instead of my friends, Tina’s face appeared in my screen. My mouth dropped open. I hadn’t even realized that Tina was on my list of accepted contacts. I’d never had problems with her as a dorm director. While she seemed to have good intentions, Tina seemed just a little too eager to be the “cool adult” in her charges’ lives, whether they were vampire or living. That sort of intensity could be off-putting.

No, wait. I remembered that in the first few weeks of school, Tina had added everybody in the dorm as a contact. I was pretty sure she didn’t have any friends on social media, and I felt too guilty not to accept the request.

Weird.

“Hi, Tina.” I cleared my throat. “I didn’t expect— This is a pleasant surprise!”

“Pleasant.” That was the word for it, right?

“Hey! Meagan!” she said, leaning just a little too close toward the camera. “How’s it going? Jane’s been sending me reports, but I wanted to talk to you face-to-face. I just figured out that your cell phone isn’t working. So how are you? Are you happy with your placement? Are your professors being responsive? I can contact them if you’re not getting enough help with your assignments.”

“Actually, yeah, the classes are going really well. And Jane’s great. Ben’s great. Everything is great.” Before being turned, I probably would have offered Tina much more information, details to prove that I was studying hard, meeting expectations, earning the extra attention the school was giving me. But somehow I held back. I had enough people here in the Hollow monitoring my progress. I didn’t need to add weekly Skype chats with Tina to my regimen of supervision.

“Good! I’m so glad. We miss you around the hall. New Dawn just isn’t the same without your cheerful presence.”

I kept my face pleasant, but I couldn’t help but wonder where this was coming from. I was pretty sure that Tina hadn’t spoken to me directly before I was turned. It’s not like she’d sent me a care package to Jane’s house. Hell, I’d barely thought of her, with the exception of those wonky financial reports she’d sent us.

Wait.

I couldn’t ask about the financials, because I couldn’t quote the numbers out of my head, and I still didn’t know whether the number fudging was Council-sanctioned or not. But I could ask her about the other weird discrepancy that came up in my paperwork overload. It would satisfy my morbid curiosity and show Tina that I was a semi-grown-up professional with work duties—who didn’t need adult “friends” checking in on her via invasive social media, thank you very much.

I smiled brightly. “Actually, Tina, I’m glad you called, because I had a question for you.”

Tina’s face practically glowed with pleasure. “Shoot. I’m here for you, anything you need.”

“You know that I’ve been working at the Council office to fill my hours, acting as Jane Jameson-Nightengale’s personal assistant?”

Tina’s expression faltered just the tiniest bit. “No, I didn’t know that.”

“And last month, you asked Ophelia to submit a list of her contacts in the area.”

Tina nodded. “Yes, I got an e-mail from Jane asking for a list of her contacts.”

I pursed my lips. Because Jane specifically said she’d never sent Tina such an e-mail. Something was weird here. And some suspicious itch at the back of my head wouldn’t let me drop it.

“Well, Ophelia responded to that request by sending Jane a pretty rude e-mail.”

Tina cringed. “Well, that’s not good.”

“Yeah, the response e-mail has to go into her disciplinary file,” I said, deliberately leaving out the part where Jane considered the e-mail too minor to punish Ophelia. “We have to document every little thing around here. You know how vampires are about keeping records.”

“Sure.”

“So can you send me a copy of your e-mail?” I asked. “I would print it off from our system, but somehow it got deleted from our server. Our IT department tends to purge anytime someone’s Internet activity gets the least bit suspicious.”

“I’m not sure I still have it,” Tina said. “I empty my in-box pretty often.”

Tina’s expression faltered for just a microsecond. I couldn’t tell if it was annoyance or fear that rearranged her face. From what I’d seen while living at New Dawn, Tina jumped at any chance to prove her loyalty and usefulness to any vampire who crossed her path. Why was she being so slow to jump on an opportunity to do a favor for the head-vampire-bitch-in-charge? Or was she afraid because she’d deleted the e-mail and thought Jane would be upset with her for not saving what could be an important communication?

“Well, just give your in-box a look and see if you can find it,” I said.

“Sure thing!” Tina chirped. “So you know, if you need anything—anything at all—you can always call me.”

“Just make sure Morgan and Keagan are doing OK, and Ophelia. They play it tough, but they’re basically people-shaped marshmallows.”

“I will,” she said. “Talk to you soon, Meagan.”

“Thanks, Tina.”

Andrea was nice enough to drive me home to River Oaks, which gave me time to mull over my conversation with Tina. My chat with Morgan and Keagan had been fun and far less perplexing—student government scandals, Homecoming, follow-up stories on the off-campus fire that amounted to no one knowing where the unidentified bodies came from and no one coming forward to claim missing relatives. But Tina’s information I didn’t know how to process. If Jane hadn’t asked her for the list of Ophelia’s contacts, why would Tina make the request? Could someone else at the Council office have done so through Jane’s e-mail account without her knowing? The Council seemed to have pretty tight IT security, and Jane made it a point not to leave her computer or her office door unlocked. Maybe this was something I should discuss with Ben before I went to Jane with my suspicions. Because that was all I had right now, suspicions, and I didn’t want Jane to think I was some hyperreactive Nancy Drew wannabe and therefore unqualified for this job. Not because I loved my job so much but because I had no idea what she would reassign me to.

I came through the door and called, “I’m home!” before I even thought about it. Georgie and Gabriel were still waiting for Jane and Ben to return from work.

“Dinner’s ready. We’ll sit down as soon as our wayward workaholics get here,” Gabriel told me, taking my bag.

“Did you get all of your homework done?” Georgie asked slyly, bouncing on her toes at the foot of the stairs.

“You know, you could enjoy the fact that I have homework a little less,” I responded, taking the stairs two at a time.

“It’s a cool, breezy fall evening, ripe with potential prey, and you spent your night at a bookstore, typing an essay on the economics of preindustrial England and its impact on literary culture. No, I don’t know if I could enjoy that more,” Georgie tossed back as I cleared the landing.

“Keep it up, and I’ll tell Jane what happened to the creepy china shepherdess in the parlor,” I whispered, just loudly enough for Georgie to hear.

Her jaw dropped. “That was an accident! Well, not so much an accident as a happy coincidence, but— You promised you wouldn’t tell!”

“Did I?” I whispered.

“Georgie, please stop teasing Meagan and set the table,” Gabriel called from the kitchen.

Georgie pointed an imperious finger at me. “This isn’t over!”

Laughing, I hustled into my room. Jane and Gabriel had clearly sunk a lot of money into renovating their upstairs bathrooms, putting luxurious showers even in the guest bath. I turned on the overhead rain shower and combined it with the body jets, sighing as the hot water washed over my skin. This was definitely superior to the communal showers back at the dorm.

I reached for my loofah and the body wash that Iris had mixed up for me, a soothing blend of jasmine and cassis meant to calm my nerves. She’d made something for Ben, too, but he was sticking to some body gel he liked because the commercials made him laugh. I flipped the cap of Ben’s bottle and sniffed. It wasn’t quite his scent, but it held a little bit of him, and I inhaled deeply.

Yeah, I had it bad for this guy.

This was embarrassing.

I stepped out of the shower and slipped into my fluffy blue terry robe; the first adjustment one made to dorm living was never going to bathe without outerwear. Outside, tires crunched over the gravel driveway. Downstairs, I could hear Gabriel on the phone, speaking German with someone. Georgie was taking advantage of her limited video-game time. I opened the door a bit to let the steam vent from the room.

“I’m just going to run upstairs,” Ben called.

I chewed on my lip, considering my reflection, and then dropped the robe.

I walked out of the bathroom with just a towel wrapped around my chest, steam billowing around me like something out of a 1980s rock video.

Ben had a carry-out blood cup in his hands and was sipping the dregs through a straw. He dropped it onto the floor, making the tiniest splash on the hardwood.

“Hey, are you just getting back from work?” I asked brightly, adjusting my towel.

He cleared his throat. “Uh, yeah.”

“Long day?” I leaned against the doorframe and tilted my head, drawing attention to the long line of my neck. Because apparently, I was sort of mean to boys who liked me and spent weeks jerking my emotional chains about it.

“Mmmm-hmm,” he mumbled.

“Well, dinner will be ready in a few. I’ll see you downstairs,” I said, passing by him.

And just by the way his mouth hung open, I could tell that the steam that followed me down the hall carried the floral sweetness of my body wash and my own natural aroma, the scent of his sire.

“Did you find a way for us to spend unsupervised time together yet?” I asked.

He shook his head, and a series of nonsensical clicks and syllables came tumbling out of his mouth.

I sighed and shrugged my shoulders, feeling the towel slip just a bit. “That’s too bad.”

Glancing over my shoulder, I caught sight of Ben’s face, which would have been the perfect gif for “mental grabby paws.” I smiled sweetly and closed my bedroom door with a snap behind me. I covered my face with my hands, laughing silently.

That was the most evil thing I’d done since becoming a vampire. It wasn’t much on the grand scale of undead evil, but it was mine, and I would claim it. I pressed an ear to the door, hoping to hear if Ben had any sort of response.

“Oh, you want to play naked. I can play naked,” he grumbled.

I laughed even harder, pressing my fist into my mouth.

I heard Ben’s shoes drop to the floor, as if he was stripping out in the hallway to prove his point. I was rolling.

And then I heard Gabriel’s voice. “I don’t want you to play naked. I would like you to put more clothes on, for the sake of my own well-being. Now. Put several more layers of clothing on now. Right now.”

“Uh, we don’t have to tell Jane about this, right?” Ben asked after a long pause.

“We will never mention this again,” Gabriel told him. “This never happened. You’re just lucky Jane went out back to walk Fitz.”

I heard footsteps and assumed Gabriel was taking the stairs back to the kitchen.

Ben’s voice sounded just outside my door. “You’re not even sorry, are you?”

“Nope!”

11

Allow your childe the freedom to develop his or her problem-solving skills. But keep the Council’s “emergency disposal and cleanup” number handy, just in case.

—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire

Somehow Ben being left without pants or dignity in front of Gabriel wrung quite a bit of forgiveness out of my battered little heart. I felt like we were on even playing ground after that particular dinner, which involved the least amount of eye contact I’d seen out of either man since we’d moved in.

So when I found the little yellow Post-it on my desk asking me to meet Ben on the library subfloor, my response was to smile. I supposed that after he’d sacrificed his honor on the altar of semipublic nudity, he deserved some sort of rendezvous, even if it was on the office grounds.

I’d enjoyed the anticipation and the teasing until this point, but I was also ready for a little bit of fun. We’d been working hard for the Council. We’d kept our grades up. We’d been nice little vampires. Now it was time to do something a little naughty.

Fortunately, I’d worn some of my nicer panties today, black and purple lace, and a bra that more or less matched. I told Jane I would be taking my coffee break and made for the elevator. I pressed the button for the library floor and surreptitiously checked my breath. More than acceptable, thanks to the little bottle of Fang-Brite Mouthwash I kept in my desk drawer.

The doors opened to reveal a space with dark wood paneling and row upon row of oak bookshelves. I suspected that Jane had redecorated this floor because she couldn’t stand the idea of a bare, industrial space being called a library. She took all things book-related pretty seriously.

I scanned the rows of shelves but didn’t spot Ben anywhere. What should I do if I ended up waiting for him and some other vampire found me loitering on a floor where I really didn’t have an excuse to be? I heard the elevator ding and ducked behind the nearest shelf. I watched through the empty shelf space as Ben emerged from the elevator. He looked confused, staring at a yellow Post-it as if it contained cheat codes for how to never get caught in a communal area with your pants around your ankles by your foster sire.

I stepped out into the open and smiled. “Really? A Post-it on my desk? Are you morally opposed to the traceability of instant messages or trying to be ironic?”

Ben frowned and held up his own little yellow square. “You asked me to meet you here.”

“No, I didn’t. You asked me to meet you.”

Just then, Ben’s face shifted into an expression of horror. In his dark pupils, I could see the reflection of a white-gloved hand reaching over my shoulder. Before he could say anything, Dr. Hudson appeared behind Ben, latex gloves in place as he jabbed a needle into Ben’s neck. I opened my mouth to protest but felt a sharp sting in my own neck. I reached out to Ben, clutching at his arms as a wave of fatigue dragged me to my knees. Ben dropped to the floor with me, his head sagging against my shoulder.

“Just relax,” Dr. Hudson told us. “Let the drugs do their work, and this will be much more pleasant for you both.”

“I’m gonna rip your head off,” I told him. “And jam it up your own butt.”

“It will be fascinating to watch you try,” Dr. Hudson assured me as my eyelids drooped. The world tilted and faded to black, and I felt nothing.

I was standing with my face propped against a metal grate.

Why was my face propped against a metal grate?

I blinked the gummy remnants of makeup from my eyes and shook my still-fuzzy head. I coughed, rolling my sore shoulders against freezing, wet metal. Where the hell— I was outside? Why was I outside? And why was I asleep at night?

I heard a light snort beside me. Ben was standing with me. We were side by side in an upright metal mesh box, just wide enough for us to stand but too shallow for us to sit down. It was like a double coffin, which was not a comforting thought.

We’d been propped up in a huge, open tobacco field. The sky was lightening to purple with orange streaks. The plants were in full leaf, almost ready to be harvested, bouncing gently in the predawn breeze. And the air smelled pleasantly of smoke and earth.

If I weren’t certain that the rising sun was about to make me burst into flames, it would be a nice, calming scene, like something out of a Thomas Kinkade painting.

How did we get here? And who the hell put us in this box? Why did I keep waking up in weird places? Why was my head so fuzzy? Maybe it was time to reevaluate my life choices.

“Ben?” I tapped my hand against his. “Ben, wake up.”

“Ten more minutes, Mom,” he grumbled, wiping his hand over his face.

I sighed and stuck my finger in his ear, yanking on the lobe. He grumbled and tried to roll but woke when he found that he was standing, and, well, he was in a freaking metal box.

“What the hell?” he exclaimed.

“We’re in a box,” I told him.

“I can see that,” he said, glancing around. “Why are we in a box?”

We both struggled as much as we could in the confined space, banging our shoulders against the walls and rattling the door. Even with both of us throwing our weight around, the box remained upright.

“I honestly don’t know. I’m just glad it’s not made of silver,” I huffed. “This isn’t your ‘clever’ plan for finding a way for us to spend time away from River Oaks together, is it? Because this is not what I meant.”

“No,” he told me. “Phone. Do you have your phone? We could call for help.”

I searched my pockets and looked down at the empty cage around my feet. “Nope. I’m getting the feeling we’re not supposed to be able to call for help.”

“Maybe this is some sort of training exercise from Jane?” Ben said. “Like survival training, when they drop soldiers on the top of a mountain and expect them to get home safe?”

“I don’t think Jane would lock you up in a Saw murder box just to teach you life skills. The woman made you chocolate breakfast blood yesterday with a little chocolate syrup smiley face. That’s the vampire equivalent of cutting the crusts off your PB and J.”

“She likes you, too, you know,” Ben insisted. “You just don’t let her get close enough to make those little gestures.”

“Not the time, Ben.” I grunted, pushing at the door. Even with my superstrength, I couldn’t make it budge. I craned my neck to get a look at the latch. It was sealed with a padlock.

“Maybe we screwed up paperwork for the Council or something?”

“That seems extreme, even for the Council,” Ben said. “Besides, what are the odds we both screwed up paperwork that badly? You’re actually pretty good with the paperwork, from what I hear.”

“Good point,” I said through gritted teeth as I unleashed the full force of my biceps on the door. And suddenly, I remembered standing outside the elevator with Ben. The flash of movement behind him. A needle and the sting in my neck.

“Dr. Hudson,” I growled. “He lured us to the library and injected us. We were betrayed by Post-its.”

Ben groaned, smacking his forehead against the cage. “I told you. Only trust instant messages.”

“Yeah, yeah. Also, have you noticed that the sun is coming up?” I said, nodding at the horizon. “And we’re in a box that offers no sun protection.”

“I did notice that.”

I wriggled my hips so I could work my feet up on the door. I braced my back against the wall of the box and pushed. The metal groaned and gave a bit but definitely not enough for either of us to squeeze out.

“The padlock,” I said, nodding to the metal loop that was keeping the door pinned to the cage. “Think we can break it?”

“It’s a Master Lock,” he muttered as he propped his own butt against the back wall. “Who seals up a death trap with an unbreakable lock? That’s just a douchey thing to do.”

We put our feet against the door, extended our legs, and pushed as hard as we could. There was a loud groaning noise as the door buckled. Breathing hard—out of habit, really, and not need—we dropped our feet to the ground. I shoved at the door, but the latch and the lock were still pretty much intact. Maybe it was a special supernatural-strength Master Lock?

“I’m guessing Dr. Hudson was mad about not being able to complete his ‘research’ on us. Remember, Jane busted in before he could expose us to UV rays? Maybe this is his way of finding out once and for all how we react to sunlight,” I said.

“I am going to find that man. And then I’m going to shove a stake up his—”

Grunting, I pushed with my feet again. “I got it, I got it. More pushing, less anatomical threats.”

In the distance, the purple of the sky was giving way to orange, and I could feel the warmth of the sun coming over the horizon. It wasn’t unpleasant, really. And sort of a refreshing change of pace from the constant nighttime cycle we’d been through over the last few months. Though the fact that I almost welcomed the sunrise was a little concerning, in terms of my frame of mind.

“One more time,” I told Ben.

He nodded, and we braced our feet against the door. I linked my fingers with his, as if I could gather some extra vampire mojo just by touching him, and then we pushed with all of the strength in our legs. The door buckled, and the box frame twisted, giving us enough room to slide out. Ben gently pushed me through the opening, cupping his hand over my head so I didn’t smack it against the frame.

When he was out, too, I turned and saw that the padlock was still intact. Goddamn Master Locks. Growling, Ben kicked at the cage. It didn’t budge. I brushed the dirt from around the bottom of the cage and saw that posts on each corner had been buried to stabilize it. And the stamp on the bottom bar of the cage read “Titanium alloy—Made in the USA.” Dr. Hudson had put quite a bit of planning into this crazy vampire trap.

“We’ve got maybe five minutes before sunrise, and we’re in possibly the largest tree-free space in western Kentucky. These tobacco leaves are nice but not wide enough to shade us all day as we lie here unconscious. And on fire.”

“Fair enough,” Ben said. He grabbed my hand and dragged me toward the distant tree line. It was only a mile or two away but seemed to be moving farther from us with every step. There was something wrong with my legs. I couldn’t move fast enough. And the more the sun peeked over the horizon, the slower I moved. It was that same moving-through-Jell-O sensation I’d experienced my first morning at Jane’s house. And add to that, we’d just busted our way out of a metal death box, so our muscles were tired.

“What’s wrong with my legs?” Ben moaned. “I feel so weak and tired. I feel like my dad after Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Fight it,” I told him, dragging him along. The sun was coming up. The sky was a beautiful coral, and I could feel the beginnings of warmth on my face. I couldn’t help but think that if I had to die, at least I would see those colors, I would feel that warmth, and I wasn’t alone. Ben’s fingers were laced through mine, and it felt right to be linked to him in this way when it could all be gone in a few moments.

We skidded to a stop, still too far from the trees to dive to safety. The top curve of the sun was visible, a beautiful, glowing, golden orb peeking over the edge of the world. It was like standing on a cliff, waiting to fall off, knowing this would be my last moment alive.

Ben yanked me close, cupping my face in his hands, and crushed his mouth to mine. I sobbed into his kiss, holding him tightly against me. I threaded my fingers through his hair, trying to memorize the silky sensation against my skin. If I was going to die, this was the last thing I wanted to feel. Ben’s arms around me, anchoring me to him.

That warm light washed over my face, and I braced myself for the pain.

Nothing.

The eyes I’d squeezed shut slowly opened. And Ben was standing in front of me, whole and perfect.

“Why are we not on fire?” I asked him.

Ben shook his head, but before he could answer, his eyes rolled back, and he passed out. He landed in the dirt with a thud, sprawling over a couple of crushed tobacco plants.

“Huh,” I mumbled, before toppling over and landing facedown on his chest.

If this was death—real, final death—it wasn’t so bad. It was dark and cool, and I could smell freshly mown grass and Ben’s spicy cologne.

I opened my eyes to see an expanse of stars above me, brilliant little pinpricks of light against velvety blue. I was tucked into Ben’s side, my face buried against his chest. His hands were curving around my ass, squeezing lightly, which led me to believe that he was OK. Surely he wouldn’t devote the energy to sleep-groping unless he was a hundred percent.

Probably.

I sat up slowly and looked around. We were still in the tobacco field, which was good . . . right? No one had shown up while we were sleeping to move us to the next level of the Saw killer trap. But we were still in the tobacco field, which meant that Jane didn’t know where we were. That she’d gone to bed at dawn not knowing whether we were safe. And it occurred to me that the idea of causing Jane that sort of worry hurt me.

I would think about what that meant at another time, when I wasn’t pondering how the hell I was going to trek across Half-Moon Hollow to get to Jane’s house. I leaned over Ben, who was still pretty much asleep, and kissed his mouth. He slowly came to life underneath me, moving his hands over my back and moaning softly into my mouth. I nipped his top lip, dragging my teeth across the flesh and sliding my tongue against his.

“We need to get moving,” I told him.

His eyes fluttered open, and he started, like he was still caught in the memory of running from the rising sun. He sat up so quickly I had to roll aside to keep from being head-butted. He covered my body with his and whipped his head around. “What? Why aren’t we little piles of ash?”

“Why are you questioning it? Let’s just be grateful that we’re not little piles of ash,” I teased him. “So we’re not exactly sunproof. We can’t function in sunlight, but we don’t burn. Good for us!”

“It’s kind of like a time-specific narcolepsy,” Ben offered.

“Exactly. And I think we need to get moving before Dr. Hudson and his evil science squad show up to see the results of their experiment.”

“Do we have to leave right now?” he asked, sliding his hands down the cradle of my hips. “We didn’t die. We’re away from the house. This is the quietest, most private place we’ve found in weeks.”

I laughed as Ben bent his head to kiss me. “I’m not going to have sex with you in a tobacco field. That is sad.”

“It’s not exactly the romantic location I had in mind, but . . .” He paused to kiss me again, planting his hand in the dirt above my shoulder so he could arch his hips against mine. Our tongues tangled, all lazy and soft, while his free hand skimmed over my breasts, sliding my shirt ever so slightly up over my belly. I could feel him, hard, between my legs. And we’d been waiting for so long, and I wanted him so much. And if he stopped this time, I might have to test our vulnerability to stakes myself.

OK, fine, I was going to have sex in a tobacco field. It was still less weird than that time I’d made use of a storage closet with Brandon Ross at the haunted house at my high school’s fall carnival. And this time I wouldn’t have anxieties about getting pregnant to the tune of Monster Mash.

Oh, my God, brain, please stop and focus on the kissing.

During my disturbing mental sidetrack, Ben had wriggled my shirt off. His mouth was cool and wet against my neck, and his tongue was doing wondrous little flicks against my jugular. I sighed, dragging my fingers through his hair and pulling at it to keep him there. His hand wandered up to my hips and dragged down my zipper, tracing over a seam that was growing wetter by the second. He applied just a little bit of pressure with his thumb, and I was bowing up off the ground, moaning.

Between those tight little circles and the long, drugging kisses, my orgasm practically sneaked up on me, going from a pleasant throb between my thighs to dropping over the edge, plunging headlong into endless, tingly space in no time at all. It felt different as a vampire. Every sense was heightened. Every sensation was stronger. And I basically ripped Ben’s pants open as I held on to him and rode out the waves of release.

The button popped off and hit me in the eye, and I didn’t even care. Because I got a look at what had been lurking in Ben’s pants and decided that while Gigi might have ended up with a gorgeous Russian vampire . . . she was an idiot.

But I wasn’t about to bring up Ben’s pretty ex-girlfriend/almost-fiancée right now, because talk about a mood killer.

But honestly, she was an idiot.

What was Ben doing with his fingers now?

I threw a leg over his hips and crouched above him, wrapping my hand around him and dragging my fist up and down. He made this great whimpering noise, clutching at my thighs. His fingernails scraped lightly at my hips, snagging my underwear. As I rubbed my thumb over a particularly sensitive spot, he yanked, and the elastic snapped. The shreds of my underwear fluttered to the dirt.

And while I liked that pair a lot, I couldn’t complain, as he let me guide him inside me, full and thick and . . . warm. It had been so long since I’d felt warm I almost didn’t recognize it. But Ben was warm to me, and I bent to kiss him, to slide my tongue along his lips as he moved inside me. He wrapped his arms around me, pinning me to his chest. I couldn’t seem to get close enough. Nothing seemed like enough. It didn’t satisfy this need thrumming through my whole body.

I could feel my fangs drop, scraping against my bottom lip. I dragged them gently across Ben’s throat, making his hips stutter and his head drop back. He moaned, and his own fangs slid out. He planted his feet in the dirt and rose to meet my thrusts as I traced the line of his jugular with my sharp little double canines and bit down. His hands clutched at my back with crushing force, and I felt his fangs sink into my neck. I expected pain, but instead I felt that delicious coil of pressure between my legs spike.

His blood filled my mouth, cool and sweet and savory all at once. It was every fantastic flavor I’d ever tasted, and it was mine. The more I drew into my mouth, the more Ben drank, and this heavy cord of sensation seemed to drag through me.

This orgasm didn’t catch me off guard. I could feel it building from the tips of my toes, tightening my thighs, making my nipples draw into hard points against his chest. He took one last long drink at my neck, and I yelled, feeling every cell inside me expand and contract in one rippling wave.

Ben shouted nonsense against my neck, slumping to the ground underneath me. I laughed, melting on top of him in a boneless heap.

I wasn’t moving.

For a year.

Eventually, Ben persuaded me that my yearlong-nap plan wasn’t valid, because Dr. Hudson was eventually going to show up. And given his tendency toward neck injections, we didn’t want to be around when that happened.

After shrugging into our clothes (using my hair clip to make an emergency button for Ben’s damaged pants), we stumbled home, coming up with increasingly elaborate plans to hurt Dr. Hudson as we traipsed through the woods. Our best plans involved a jar of honey, a grizzly bear, a rubber duck, and a pair of gardening shears. The walk seemed to take longer with the soreness between my legs, but it was kind of pleasant spending this time with Ben. I was used to boys sliding out of my bed before the sweat dried and promising to text me, which they never did. I’d never had a guy walk me home, his fingers wrapped in mine as we hopped over fallen trees and little creeks.

After we agreed on the honey-bear-duck-shears plan, we talked, just talked, about nothing related to the Council or school or Jane. We didn’t talk about my parents or his, our pasts. We just talked about movies we liked, foods we used to enjoy, which professors we’d loved and which ones we’d created accounts on Rate My Professors just so we could warn people about them. It was nice having the sort of conversation we might have had if we’d stayed human, like a glimpse of an alternate universe where we were just two normal college kids, not the next generation of neovampires who might or might not make it to see the next year, depending on whether Dr. Hudson managed to get the drop on us.

We ran the final mile to River Oaks, as fast as our blood-deprived bodies would allow. I was going to drink a gallon of Faux Type O when we finally got inside. Unfortunately, my plans for a Thanksgiving-style throwdown were interrupted by Jane sweeping across the lawn at top speed and clotheslining both of us into a hug—a hug that ended with the three of us rolling into a sort of Twister people-ball sprawling across the grass.

“Someone’s elbow is lodged in my left boob,” I grumbled. “Ben, is that you?”

“Sadly, no.” Ben’s voice was muffled, because he was facedown in the grass.

“Jane, please move your elbow,” I muttered as we untangled ourselves and sat up, but Jane would not be distracted by my chest pain.

“Don’t ever do that to me again!” she yelled, throwing her arms around us and, frankly, squashing us to her in a damned unreasonable fashion. “Where have you been?”

“Sleeping in an open field,” Ben said sheepishly. He glanced at me. “That sounded less lame in my head.”

“But hey, turns out we don’t burst into flames in the sun, so no harm done,” I added brightly.

Jane spluttered. “You—what—why? What would possess you to do such a thing? And what was your plan if you did happen to burst into flames like every other vampire in existence? Did you think about how it would have affected those of us who live with you and are responsible for you, if something had happened to you? People who care about you? And oh, my God, you’re making me sound like my mother, which is probably the most unforgivable part of all!”

Jane held up both of her hands and took three very deep breaths through her nose. Over her shoulder, I saw Gabriel and Dick come out the front door of River Oaks to watch the proceedings.

“OK, back up,” Jane said. “I’m trying to remain calm, even though I have spent the last sixteen hours or so absolutely terrified for you and worried sick.”

“Wouldn’t you have to be calm in the first place to remain—”

Jane shot me a look that made me shut my mouth immediately.

“So please explain to me how you ended up ‘sleeping in an open field’ instead of, say, calling your foster sire and letting her know that you needed help getting home?” Jane asked.

I sighed. “Dr. Hudson lured us to a secluded floor of the office with misappropriated Post-its. He injected us with what I suspect to be vampire-strength horse tranquilizers and locked us in a wire mesh box out in the middle of a tobacco field. We think it was an experiment to test how sunproof we are, since he didn’t get to complete his initial tests. Also, we’re hoping that it was an experiment and not Dr. Hudson being a raging sociopath.”

Jane’s face drained of what little color it had. “He did what?”

“It’s true,” I said. “I saw him sneak up behind Ben and inject him, right before I went down.”

“Turns out that when the sun comes up, we just sort of drop wherever we are, even if we’re fully exposed. I mean, we’re unconscious, and I imagine that if someone wanted to kill us, they could. But still, we don’t burst into flames, which is fun.” Ben jerked his shoulders.

“Yaaaay for us,” I cheered wanly.

“He locked you in a box and left you for dead?” Jane cried, her eyes bright with unshed tears and hot, seething anger. She threw her arms around us again, squeezing us tightly together. “I’m going to—I can’t think things violent enough to meet my need for bloody vengeance, but I’ll call Ophelia and get some ideas from her.”

And then she launched into a very long, profane rant that eventually dissolved into angry tears.

“Can we just focus on the fact that we found another cool thing that we can do?” I asked.

“No!” Jane sobbed, tucking her face into my neck. “I couldn’t find you. I passed out for the day, not knowing where you were or whether you were safe. I didn’t know if I would ever see you again! I didn’t— You can’t do that to me again, OK?”

I put my arms around Jane and patted her awkwardly. “OK.”

Ben gave me a little “I told you so” smirk, nodding toward our foster sire. I rolled my eyes and continued patting Jane’s back. She sniffed and wiped at her cheeks.

Her voice went from weepy to steely in a matter of seconds. “Listen to me, both of you. You are not to speak to Dr. Hudson again. If you see him, come get me or an undead emergency response team. If you can’t get away from him, keep him monologuing. Evil smart guys love to talk about their brilliance. That will give me time to get to you. With a UERT. I cannot emphasize the UERT part enough. Understood?”

“What’s going to happen to him?”

“He is going be fired and disciplined. If he approaches you, he’s doing so at his own peril.” Jane pushed to her feet and took out her cell phone. She dialed angrily, which cracked the screen of her phone.

“Which is going to hurt him more, being fired or being disciplined?” I asked as she stomped toward the house.

“Disciplined,” she growled.

Ben pulled me to my feet, and I finally grasped the sheer number of cars that were parked out in front of Jane’s house—Iris’s bright yellow Dorkmobile, Miranda’s black SUV, Jolene’s minivan, Nola’s sensible sedan. A big truck with a “Clemson Construction” logo on the door rounded out the collection. I guessed that belonged to Sam Clemson, who specialized in undead-friendly home renovations.

Ben and I approached the porch, only to be treated to another sneak-attack hug from Dick and then Gabriel, who threw himself around Dick’s side and wrapped his arms around all three of us.

“I’m so glad you’re all right,” Dick said, and didn’t add any sort of funny quip or defensive joke. That meant this was serious.

“I’ve never been so happy to see Jane tackle people in our yard,” Gabriel said. “Which happens more than you would think.”

I laughed as Gabriel stroked an easy hand over my hair.

“From now on, you’re both wearing tracking chips. I don’t care if we have to implant them under your skin,” a tiny female voice said from somewhere near my waist. I looked down to find Georgie’s arms wrapped around me.

“You’re going to microchip me, like Fitz?” I asked her, even as I heard Jane growling into her phone inside the house.

“Yes, I am,” Georgie told me.

“This is becoming awkward, isn’t it?” Gabriel asked.

“Yes, it is,” Ben said, and we all broke apart. Georgie dragged me through the front door, where I found everybody Jane knew huddled in the parlor. Their cell phones were all plugged into various chargers, as if they’d been making so many calls that they’d drained their batteries. Zeb was holding a stack of neon-green “Have You Seen These Vampires?” fliers featuring the photos Ben and I had used on our employee badges. So I looked especially tragic.

Iris and Sam’s girlfriend, Tess, appeared to be passing out mugs of blood to the vampires, while Cal stood in the corner cursing into his phone in . . . Greek, maybe? Andrea had a rolling whiteboard, the kind you would see on Law and Order, where someone had written “Potential B&M Locations” and listed “Lucky Clover Motel,” “Got lost in the Council office subfloors,” “Bus station,” and “Ben’s parents’ house.” Hell, Gigi was on her laptop, typing furiously as maps scrolled across her screen. Gigi’s cute Russian boyfriend, Nik, was pinning photos of various Council employees up on a wall marked “Suspects.”

At first, people froze when we walked through the door, and then they cheered, rushing forward as if they were going to hug us, too.

“I’m really grateful, but I’m kind of hugged out right now. Yipe!” Fitz bounded forward from the back of the house, pounced, and knocked me onto my back, pinning me to the floor by my chest and covering my face in doggy kisses. I took it for about a minute, because it was nice to know my favorite dog missed me, and then I stood, brushing off the slobber and sheddings with as much dignity as I could. “Thank you for putting together this missing-persons command center, though. I really appreciate it.”

“We’re sorry we put you through this,” Ben said. “If we could have called, we would have.”

“We found Meagan’s purse and both of your cell phones under the sink in the R and D subfloor’s break room,” Nik said. “We tried to follow your scent, but whoever moved you managed to cover your trail quite effectively. I heard Georgie’s suggestion of chipping you. Is not a bad idea.”

“Honey, no,” Gigi told him. From her body language, I could see that she wanted to walk over to us, but she respected the “no hug” boundary, which I appreciated. “We do not chip our friends. Because . . . of privacy? Wait, why don’t we chip our friends again? It would save a lot of time.”

“It really would,” Jane said, nodding. “I mean, Libby and Wade put about two hundred miles on her minivan driving circles around the county, trying to use her ‘mothering instincts’ to track you down. That kind of mileage adds up.”

“You will not chip us,” Ben told her sternly. “We are not badly behaved cocker spaniels.”

“I’ve got something special cooked up for you,” Tess promised, bustling into the kitchen. “Twice the iron, none of the aftertaste.”

I wanted to respond, but the sheer volume of people and activity in the room finally struck me. All of these people had come to look for us. I mean, sure, I’d had some nice conversations with some of them. They were all very kind. Libby was clearly awesome. But I would never have expected them to put themselves out for me like this, to drop everything they were doing to look for me, just in case I was in trouble. I didn’t feel connected to them like that. But how much of that was my own reluctance? And they weren’t just here for Ben; they seemed just as pleased to see me as they were to see someone they’d known for years. These were good people. I needed to stop shutting them out. But I couldn’t express any of that, because a lump the size of a small boulder was lodged in my throat.

“The Lucky Clover?” I asked Andrea. “That place across town with the creepy half-filled pool? Really?”

“Things happen there,” Andrea said with a shrug. “Tacky things. Naked tacky things.”

“Speaking of which,” Georgie piped up. “You two reek of—”

I clamped a hand over her mouth. “Manure. We reek of manure, you know, from the field.”

Ben nodded. “Uh-huh. We slept in a field. Lots of fertilizer.”

“I’m going to go shower,” I said, hand still firmly clamped over Georgie’s mouth. It was a good thing she didn’t have to breathe.

“Me, too,” Ben announced as I jogged up the stairs. “I mean, not at the same time as Meagan. I’ll wait until she’s done. Not out in the hallway or anything. I’ll give her space while she’s naked. Like normal.”

I stopped on the steps, out of view of the others, and mouthed, What are you doing?

Ben threw up his hands and grimaced. I shook my head and hustled up to the second floor.

“I’m just going to go upstairs now,” Ben said.

“What is wrong with you?” I hissed as he reached the second landing.

“I don’t know! I panicked!”

“I am in charge of all emergency postsex moments from now on.”

“Agreed.”

12

Holidays are a volatile time for new vampires. They will miss their biological families and their traditions. Try focusing on the things they won’t have to put up with anymore—gravy-pushing aunties, “whose pie is better” debates, holiday weight gain.

—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire

Dr. Hudson was taken into Council custody with very little effort from Jane. He hadn’t tried to hide, even after he arrived in the field and found his murder box empty. He just went back to his lab and continued working. Like, Oh, well, my attempts to incinerate the not-quite-interns failed. Guess I should find some other way to be super-creepy and cheerful.

He clearly didn’t think he’d done anything wrong, given the disjointed rantings he aimed at Jane as she had the undead emergency response team frog-march him to the “containment floor.” He was a scientist! He was only doing what others didn’t dare, bringing vampires into the new millennium! Jane was denying him greatness!

We were not present for said rantings, as Jane put us in Protocol: The Ladykillers, which involved us staying at River Oaks, surrounded by Jane’s family of choice and most-trusted UERT officers, watching horror movie remakes with Georgie. Because Prom Night made her laugh. But one of the nicer UERT guys, Ray McElray, let me watch the video of Dr. Hudson being tased, which felt pretty good, even after the fifth time I watched it. Ben made a still of Dr. Hudson slumped to the floor with his ass in the air while he drooled and peed his pants. I saved it as my laptop’s wallpaper.

Jane came home and assured us that it would be safe for us to return to work, that Dr. Hudson was secured in a holding cell under the interrogation floors, seven levels below our offices, and that he would be left there to think about his actions for a decade or two. While locked in a metal mesh box, standing upright, surrounded by pictures of clowns, and with heavy metal–polka fusion played at top volume.

“I’m not even going to ask if that’s really necessary,” Ben said.

“Agreed,” I told Jane.

“Yes, well, you try to put my kids in a death box and stake them out for the sun, I tend to take that a little personally.” Jane sniffed, patting our heads.

I would not allow myself to feel that little tingle of warmth in my chest at hearing her call me one of her kids. I just wouldn’t. I ducked my head and tried to keep the stupid smile off my face.

“I mean, having Georgie around is like having a child of my own, only I’m pretty sure an actual child would be ninety-two percent less terrifying,” Jane said. “But you, Ben, you are the low-maintenance childe I don’t remotely deserve. You are a genuinely good kid, and you have to know how much I appreciate that. And Meagan, you are the little sister I always wished I had. Kind, levelheaded, bright, and a total smartass. Also, because my mom would have been so distracted by your puppy-eyed adorableness that she wouldn’t have even noticed me. High school would have been a completely different experience. This is as schmaltzy as I’m going to get. I love you both. Good night.”

And the stupid smile would not go away, especially after the household went to the grave for the day and Ben sneaked into my room, snuggling against my back as we drifted off to sleep.

Jane loved me. And not just in the “Aw, you make my life easier and fetch me coffee” way. She fought for me, protected me, cared for me. She treated me like part of her family. And I wanted that. I wanted to belong to her family. I just wasn’t sure how to do that.

Work became almost routine again, without the threat of medical experimentation hanging over our heads. With Dr. Hudson in violation of his contract, he no longer had any privileges in the science department, and Jane was able to reassign his staff to Council outposts all over the world. Dr. Gennaro ended up sampling bat guano in the Amazon. Considering his participation in the whole “death test” thing with Dr. Hudson, I didn’t feel sorry for him.

The good news was that Jane was allowed to completely restaff the science department with noncrazy people. After she made them sign nondisclosure agreements the thickness of my geography textbook, she allowed them to perform another round of blood analysis and various tests of our endurance.

Hudson’s analysis of our blood had been spot-on, but the new scientists, led by a Dr. Denise Oxmoor, were doing a more complete analysis of our DNA to try to explain why we had so many animal and plant bits inside us. And while we didn’t need another test to know that silver was a horrible, no-good, very bad idea, we knew that UV exposure up to direct, high-noon levels couldn’t hurt us. Dr. Oxmoor and her assistant had to hide behind a special lead shield while we were exposed to tanning-bed lights. But now that we knew we wouldn’t explode into dust, the experiment was far less stressful. And the more we were exposed to the light, the less dramatic the drop-unconscious-to-the-ground reaction became. We could stay conscious. We were slow, I would admit, but we were up and moving around, more and more efficiently with each exposure. Dr. Oxmoor speculated that within a year or two, we might be able to move around during the day completely unscathed and undetected.

It was fun testing the limits of our “above-average vampire-ness.” We were thirty percent stronger than the average vampire. I managed to flip a car by its bumper, and it landed on its tires, but I had to think about guys who posted “Make me a sandwich” memes on Facebook to work up the rage for it. We ran forty percent faster. We read faster and swam faster—which was a way more fun test. Who knew the Council complex had an indoor pool below the interrogation levels? We could go around eighteen hours without feeding, but we got super-cranky and then passed out wherever we stood. (Ben ended up facedown in the ten-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle being used to test his mental acuity.) We could scent blood from three hundred yards, where the average vampire maxed out at one hundred. We could not fly but not for lack of Ben trying . . . by jumping off the top of the Council offices. Fortunately, his ankles healed right up.

Unfortunately, knowing that her “kids” had superpowers and could beat her up seemed to freak Jane out a little. That was what I was attributing my recent raise to, since previously I wasn’t really getting paid for my hours at the Council office. Also, I was named Employee of the Month for preventing Jane from using the copy machine. Apparently, there had been an incident. I’d been awarded a slot on the plaque for “preventing serious damage to company property and coworkers.” Ben got a bonus for helping Gigi complete a special section of her project early, and Sammy named a quadruple espresso with plasma drizzle the “Overby Overdrive.” So yeah, I think we scared Jane pretty badly.

The weeks seemed to melt together. Ben and I completed our assignments online. I maintained the high B average required by my scholarships, but Ben edged me out with a low A. Morgan and Keagan didn’t call as often, with exams and holiday plans and all manner of distractions taking up their schedules. I missed them, but I was spending a lot of time with Ben, so I couldn’t exactly claim I was holding up my end of the friendship.

Ben sneaked into my room just before sunrise more often than not, and we weren’t even having sex the majority of those nights. He just wrapped himself around me and fell asleep with his face tucked into my neck. It was an adjustment for me to sleep with someone else. Hell, I went on a camping trip with my boyfriend freshman year, and I made him sleep in a separate sleeping bag with a cooler between us. I’d never trusted someone enough to let him that close. It was nice being able to relax like that with another person, to be still with him, and to know that he wouldn’t hurt me.

Of course, on those days when he slept with me, Ben woke just before sundown to haul ass back to his room. Jane was cool and slightly scared of us, but she still had the power of yelling really loudly.

Before we knew it, it was Thanksgiving week, and Jane was going into a cleaning frenzy, getting the house ready for Jamie to come home from school. Of course, Jane was hosting a meal, because no one else seemed to have a house large enough to accommodate everybody. To my surprise, Ophelia was planning to stay here at River Oaks, rather than at the house in town that she’d shared with Georgie. I was pleased to see my friend again, but I noticed that talking about her made Georgie a little . . . edgy. Edgier than usual for Georgie, like “cut off from her Nintendo DS for twenty-four hours” edgy.

We sat on the porch, waiting for Jamie’s pickup truck to roll down Jane’s gravel drive. Georgie was rocking on her heels, biting her lip, and unbraiding and rebraiding her hair. I tried to ignore these tells for as long as I could, because I didn’t know if we had the kind of relationship where we had heart-to-heart talks. But honestly, I could only watch her pigtail herself so many times.

“Hey, Georgie, can we talk about whatever’s bothering you before you braid yourself bald?”

Georgie scoffed. “I’m not bothered. You’re bothered.”

“Georgie, you’re braiding my hair now, and I don’t think you even realize it.”

She yanked her fingers out of my hair and grimaced. “It’s difficult,” she admitted. “I feel like a different person when Ophelia is around. With Jane and Gabriel, I’m allowed to be the child I never was as a human. Ophelia always treated me as an equal, which I appreciated, but . . .”

“It’s a lot of responsibility to put on a kid, asking her to be a grown-up before she’s ready,” I said, nodding.

“Exactly,” Georgie said. “And Ophelia and I tend to feed off each other, egging each other on to be more cruel, more threatening. With Jane and Gabriel, I’m . . . reserved.”

“This has been a filtered version of you?” I asked, frowning at her.

“My point is that I don’t want to slip back into that pattern with Ophelia, but I don’t want to hurt her feelings by behaving differently around her. I’m not sure what to do.”

“Has it occurred to you that Ophelia may have changed while she was away at school?” I asked her. When Georgie’s little brow crinkled, I added, “Oh, yeah, undergrads coming back home for the first time? They make a point of being as obnoxiously different as possible. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ophelia came back with a nose ring, drinking soy blood substitute.”

Georgie cackled, bending at the waist and propping her hands against her thighs. “Is it wrong that I’m hoping for that now?”

“No, and here she comes,” I said, nodding at the headlights bouncing along the driveway. “Jane! They’re”—a Jane-shaped streak whizzed past us as Jamie’s truck slowed to a halt—“here.”

Jane had her arms around Jamie before he was fully out of the car. He was lucky his seatbelt didn’t get caught around his neck as Jane let loose her nonsensical joyous squeals.

Ophelia emerged from the truck in full eye roll. I laughed and hugged her lightly. Georgie hesitated a bit but eventually wound her arms around her sister’s waist.

“I missed you.” Ophelia sighed, bending her head into Georgie’s hair.

“I was promised that you’d have a nose ring,” Georgie said.

Ophelia looked up at me, and I shook my head.

Ben and Gabriel emerged from the house for manly shoulder pats.

“It’s good to see a familiar face,” Ophelia told me, putting her hand on my shoulder. “I have a feeling that after this ‘holiday’ dinner, you and I will be hiding in the basement with a bottle of scotch.”

“You are really overestimating my ability to handle my liquor, even when I was alive,” I told her.

Ophelia wrinkled her nose. “Yes, Morgan and Keagan told me about the Jaegermeister incident.”

“I still contend that the mascot should have moved out from under the balcony when he heard me say I felt sick. Also, having a Jaegermeister incident in college is practically a rite of passage.”

Jane had finally stopped squealing long enough to coolly greet Ophelia. She sighed, wiping at her wet eyes. “OK, welcome home! We’re all set up for you. Ophelia, I have you in the extra twin in Georgie’s room, first door on the left. Jamie, I just put fresh sheets in the yellow room across from the bathroom.”

“But that’s my room,” Ben said, frowning.

“Yeah, I thought you would double up with Meagan, seeing as how you sneak into her room most mornings anyway and then hustle back into your room as if we don’t know what’s going on,” Jane said.

Ben turned a whiter shade of pale. “Sorry, what?”

Gabriel shrugged. “Yeah, we’ve known for a couple of weeks.”

I made a weird death-rattle noise in my throat, like that chick in The Grudge. “Oh, that isn’t good.”

“Wait, they get to share a room, but we don’t?” Ophelia asked.

“Yes, because I just made things so awkward they will never have sex under my roof again.” Jane turned on us, smiling. “Didn’t I?”

Ben could only grimace.

“I know I should be upset about this because I have these confusing maternal feelings, but I also know that you’re technically not related and can’t get pregnant,” Jane said. “So I’m just going to ask you not to do anything that I will walk in on. Because there is not enough therapy in the world.”

“Maybe this wouldn’t seem so weird if we lived out on our own,” Ben noted.

“Don’t push it,” she told him.

“If it makes you feel better, we’ve never had sex sex under your roof, mostly just—” I said as Ben stared at the sky. Jane shook her head. “Right, not helping. Never mind.”

I woke up to the smell of turkey roasting in Jane’s kitchen . . . and it was awful, like hot herb-y garbage. There were only a handful of solid-food-eating guests, but Tess had spent the afternoon preparing a full Thanksgiving feast. There were werewolves coming, and they counted as three or four guests each.

As soon as the sun set, the house was flooded with people. All of the partners and children who hadn’t been available to show up for previous get-togethers arrived in full force. I met Libby’s boyfriend, Wade, and his son. Nola and her adorable redneck fiancé, Jed the shapeshifter, brought smoked ribs and some cabbage-based Irish food I suspected would have smelled disgusting even without my vampire nose. Jane’s human BFF Zeb’s kids shifted from two to four feet and started chasing each other around on the front lawn, which no one seemed to register as a weird thing. I, on the other hand, was shocked enough to do a blood spit take, which is super-gross and ruined a really nice silk blouse that Andrea was wearing. She was nice about it, despite having to change into Dick’s “I’m smiling because punching you in the face is socially unacceptable” shirt, which he kept in his trunk.

I worried for a second that I might be a danger to Libby’s human son, Danny, or to the Lavelle twins. But frankly, the half-werewolf cubs smelled like wet dog, and Danny smelled like little-boy sweat and garlic, not exactly appetizing.

I was looking forward to a holiday for the first time in a very long time. For once, I didn’t feel like I needed to hover around the edges of the room. I wasn’t intruding on some hapless foster family’s holiday gathering. I was part of the group. I was in the mix, stirring the blood blends as Tess directed and lighting candles in Jane’s ornate harvest-themed centerpieces.

“Look at you, being a joiner,” Libby said, sidling up to me at the sink as I was washing dishes before dinner.

“Yeah, it’s nice,” I said, smiling. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a group of people this large where I actually knew and liked most of them? I mean, even when my mom was still alive—” I took a quick breath and tried not to let my voice suddenly go quiet and sad. “When my mom was alive, holidays were still pretty small. When my grandparents were with us, it was the four of us, with a pretty small turkey and chuchitos, because my Guatemalan grandpa insisted that Anglo people food was too bland. And when it was just me and my mom, sometimes we scarfed down a turkey sandwich before she ran in to do a holiday shift. Anyway, I don’t think I’ve ever been to a holiday meal this loud before. And they’re not even watching football in there; they’re just talking. I’ve never met people who liked to talk so much.”

“And if you let them, I bet they’ll talk to you.”

“I’m working on it.” I laughed. “I even talked to Collin earlier about Dickens versus Fielding, and he looked like it physically hurt to have a conversation with me.”

“Yeah, Collin’s got some issues with people and proximity,” Libby said, picking up a towel and drying the dishes I’d just rinsed. “It’s nothing personal. He’s just trying not to see your future.”

“Oh, sure. That makes sense,” I said, pursing my lips. “Speaking of proximity, did you bathe your kid in garlic?”

“Well, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you’re a new vampire, and you’re under a lot of stress . . . and yes, I bathed my son in minced garlic. I put it in his shampoo. I had to roll down the car windows on the way over here. But this is what you do when you’re a parent. You lose your mind, just a little bit.”

“You’re insane,” I told her.

“But I did it because I care, so it shouldn’t be counted against me.”

“I don’t think that’s how that works.”

Libby cleared her throat. “I know that sometimes it’s easier to just take care of everything yourself, to close in, protect yourself. But eventually, that’s not enough. You’re not enough. You need other people.”

“Needing people is hard,” I told her.

“Yeah, and it occasionally blows up in your face. You lose friends, lose relationships, get your feelings hurt. But other times it’s pretty freaking awesome.”

“I know,” I said. And then I made a lot of ugly crying faces as my eyes burned with unshed tears. “It’s really . . . I love those weirdos in there.” I gestured toward the dining room. “Like way more than I ever thought I could, and it’s great, and it makes me feel all light and happy inside, like I’ve swallowed the freaking sun. Which is super-weird, considering that I’m basically a creature of darkness now. But . . .”

“But what, hon?”

“Is it weird that I still miss my mom?” I asked.

“No,” Libby assured me. “I had a crap relationship with my mom, and I still miss her. You two were really close, right?”

I nodded. “When I was on my own, I used to try to imagine how different my life would be if she had lived. I mean, it wouldn’t have been a fairy tale. We would have lived in a tiny two-bedroom apartment, and our car would have been at least ten years old—before we got it. But we would have been together. And I would have had somebody to take pictures of me when I was getting ready for graduation or prom. I probably would have gone to prom, which would have been very different from spending the evening working at Taco Bell. Anyway, that was what I thought about when I felt really sorry for myself. And now there are times I feel so guilty for not wanting it as much anymore.”

“Aw, Meagan,” she said. “That’s normal. That’s what’s supposed to happen. This is totally normal.”

“Really?”

“Of course.”

Suddenly, I heard a commotion by the front door. I heard Ben’s voice, raised, and I bolted toward the living room at a speed that left me sick to my stomach. Two people I didn’t recognize were moving toward Ben, who was standing stock-still with his hands clenched at his sides. I skidded to a stop between Ben and the middle-aged couple standing in Jane’s foyer, leaving two deep burn marks in Jane’s hardwood floors.

Jane grimaced. “Honey, we’ve talked about hard braking on the parquet.”

The couple at the door took two steps back, clearly frightened by the sudden appearance of a vampire. They were human. I could hear their heartbeats hammering in their chests. And I could smell the turmoil rolling off them in a stinky emotional potpourri—hope, anxiety, fear, uncertainty. I’d never smelled such fragrant humans. Humans that smelled a little like Ben.

I stared closer at the couple. The woman had Ben’s green eyes, though they were bracketed by worry lines. The man had Ben’s mouth and his straight nose. These were Ben’s parents. Jane had clearly invited them as some sort of holiday surprise. Which meant I was crossing quite a few boundaries.

“Oops,” I murmured, and realized that my fangs were down. “Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Overby. I’m going to move now, slowly, away from you. I’m sorry.”

Ben snickered. “Mom, Dad, this is my girlfriend, Meagan. Meagan, meet Bob and Kim Overby.”

“Just call me Bob,” Mr. Overby told me in a shaky, hesitant voice as I stepped backward, behind Ben.

Jane quietly shooed everybody else into the kitchen, leaving the living room open for our incredibly uncomfortable conversation.

“I was interrupting a hug, wasn’t I?” I asked, willing my fangs to go back into my gumline.

Mrs. Overby began crying softly, and Ben stepped forward to hug her so delicately he barely touched her.

His father patted his back and ruffled his hair. “Missed you, son.”

OK, now I was getting a little misty. I needed to get out of here. I crept quietly toward the kitchen door to join the others. Also, did Ben call me his girlfriend back there? Why was I just now hearing that?

We weren’t to that stage yet, right? I mean, sure, we lived together and worked together and spent most of our free time talking about our favorite fandoms. We ate most of our meals together. And we slept together most nights.

Holy hell, I was Ben Overby’s girlfriend. That sneaky little vampire.

Just as I reached the kitchen door, Mrs. Overby asked, “So were you turned around the same time as Ben?”

I stopped. Did this mean Ben and Jane hadn’t told the Overbys how involved I’d been in their son’s transition? I looked to Ben, who had a completely neutral expression on his face.

“Um, yes, right before,” I said. “But we met before we were turned.”

“Well, that’s nice.” Mrs. Overby sniffled. “That he has someone he knows with him.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Overby. I know this has to be a shock, and then not being able to see him for so long . . .”

She interrupted me before I could confess. “We knew this was going to happen eventually. I mean, we weren’t hoping for it. We’re not particularly happy about it. But no one can spend that much time around vampires and not end up getting bitten somehow.”

Mrs. Overby was trying to put a happy face on it, but she still sounded a little bitter. It was going to take quite a bit of persuasion to recruit her to the Meagan fan club. Or just the “not stab Meagan through the heart with a wooden stake when no one is looking” club. I’d never met the parents of a boy I was dating—was “dating” the right word? How did you get your special man friend’s parents to like you? Were there Jezebel.com articles about this sort of thing? Maybe I should call Keagan. She was pretty stable, romantically speaking. I mean, I couldn’t ask Ophelia, because she had obviously failed at securing Jane’s affections.

Mr. Overby added, “We’re trying to focus on the positives. Ben will never get sick. He probably won’t die in some silly car accident or something. In some ways, it sets our minds at ease.”

“And in some ways, it’s awful,” Mrs. Overby confessed. “He’s never going to have kids, never going to be able to go out during the day.”

“But if it means that we can keep seeing Ben, we’re going to focus on the positives,” Mr. Overby said pointedly.

He glared at his wife, who stared back at him, and then she turned to me and smiled brightly before asking, “How long have you two been seeing each other?”

Oh, right, because Ben called me his girlfriend earlier. I had sort of blocked that out for a second.

My mouth dropped open, but I couldn’t seem to find an answer that didn’t make me sound like a son-turning, tobacco-field hussy. Ben also seemed hesitant to answer. And we were saved by the proverbial bell when Jane came out of the kitchen in a beeline for the front door and locked it, punching the code for the scarier parts of the security system to come online. Huge outdoor lights shone from the trees onto the house just before large metal shutters slid over the windows. Several dead bolts clicked into place, and the front door made this shhhup sound as it hermetically sealed itself. Ben’s parents clutched at each other in alarm.

“Jane, what’s going on?” Ben asked. “Are we at war or something?”

Jane’s mouth was set in an angry line. “Dr. Hudson has escaped Council custody.”

13

It is possible to be overprotective of your vampire offspring. If your childe disappears suddenly or starts threatening you with silver spray when you go in for a hug, it’s time to loosen the reins a bit.

—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire

It took logical thinking, Gabriel, and an enormous bottle of what Dick called vampire Prozac to talk Jane into dialing the cancel code into the security system. For one thing, there were too many people in the house to maintain our “panic room” state. Danny had school on Monday. Also, Jolene had some pretty serious Black Friday plans, and given her werewolf strength, I was pretty sure she could kick the metal window shades out if she wanted.

Ben’s parents were freaking out and started to demand that Ben go home with them immediately. Gabriel ended up doing something to their memories, using his special vampire talent, to keep them from remembering the whole systematic lockdown thing. Instead, they would recall a perfectly lovely evening with their well-adjusted vampire son, before suddenly developing the urge to visit some relatives in Florida. And by relatives, he meant Council-approved security agents who would be able to protect them if Dr. Hudson showed up. Gabriel’s power frightened me, and I hoped it didn’t work on other vampires.

Dr. Hudson had managed to escape from his cell using a stolen ID badge, a tiny bit of plastic explosive tucked inside his shoe, and a spork. We weren’t sure how the spork came into play. The UERT was still looking into that. Jane drove us to the office for safekeeping, and we were followed by the entire convoy of vampires, because Gigi insisted she would be able to crack open the security system and make it her digital bitch. Cal and Nik thought they could Sherlock Holmes some clues out of the polka torture cell using their special vampire gifts. Ophelia seemed to think she knew the building better than anyone else and could see some minute evidence that we wouldn’t. And Georgie, Dick, and Gabriel just didn’t want to be left out.

I was starting to wonder why everybody got special vampire talents but me, and then I figured not being set on fire by the sun was probably talent enough.

When Jane reviewed the security feed, the footage of the hallway outside Dr. Hudson’s cell skipped ever so slightly at around ten P.M. While this seemed like a fairly innocuous thing to me, Gigi and Ben noticed that after the skip, a paper pinned to the bulletin board moved in the draft from the air-conditioning in exactly the same way every three minutes. Someone had looped the video with a blank section of footage after ten P.M., so we wouldn’t be able to see who approached Dr. Hudson’s cell door or in which direction they ran. The parking-lot feed showed a laundry cart being wheeled out to a van labeled “Markham Linen Services” at 10:07. The man pushing the cart wore a baseball cap pulled down over his face. He jumped into the driver’s seat and peeled the van out of the parking lot at 10:08. The problem was that the Council didn’t use a linen service.

When Gigi and Ben had failed to track who had logged into the security system to loop the video feed, Jane put her hands on the conference-room table, where our laptops, notebooks, and security logins were spread around messily. “OK, so you two are going to be locked down in the containment unit until further notice, for safety and so I can sleep during the day.”

“The containment unit that Dr. Hudson was kept in to punish him for torturing us?” Ben asked.

“The containment unit that someone managed to sneak into, diddle with the security videos, and then bust him out of?” I added. “That doesn’t seem kind of ass-backward to you?”

Jane thunked her head on the table. “You’re right. It’s counterintuitive. Also, the tech guys haven’t been able to stop the polka loop, so it would probably drive you insane.”

“This might be a bad time to note that the security system was accessed internally, so whoever broke Dr. Hudson out probably had help from someone who works for the Council,” Ben said.

“Why would you tell her that?” I asked.

“To keep from sleeping in the polka torture cell,” Ben told me.

“Fair enough.” I slumped back into my comfy conference chair and stared at the ceiling. Who could have helped Dr. Hudson’s liberator into the building? I didn’t have any enemies here. The only person who had reason not to like me was Gigi, and she’d been nothing but sweet. Heck, people let me skip ahead of them in line for the copier because I was willing to take on Jane’s schedule. Maybe it was someone on her “nope list”? Had some weirdo I’d banned from contacting Jane busted into the Council office and released Dr. Hudson so he could continue his medical poking and prodding?

But before I could pull up the nope list on my tablet, Ben slid a stack of papers in front of me. Really boring, science-y papers. I frowned.

“Cal has been helping me look into Dr. Hudson’s research history,” Ben said. “About twenty years ago, he wrote a paper for the Journal of Vampiric Medical Advancement called ‘The Next Stage in Vampire Evolution,’ where he talked about splicing vampire DNA with samples from a snake.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Ophelia cried. “I hired Hudson. I don’t recall anything about reptile research on his CV.”

“You hired a mad scientist, what a shocker,” Jane muttered as she scanned the papers, only to be elbowed in the ribs by her husband.

I skimmed the contents of Ben’s packets, speed-reading and absorbing the dry-as-toast academic info. My Introduction to Anatomy course had not prepared me for this. “He wanted to find a way to fix vampires’ sensitivity to sunlight. Snakes don’t get sunburned because they’re cold-blooded and covered in scales. So why not throw some reptile alleles into the genetic cookie dough and see what bakes?”

“Apparently, one slightly bitter cookie,” Cal said, frowning at me.

“Talk to me when you’re a test-tube vampire, Cletus,” I retorted.

Cal turned on Gigi and Ben. “You told!”

Gigi shrugged. “Some people find you intimidating. I thought that hearing your ridiculous birth name would help her relax.”

“Focus, children, please,” Nik said blithely, flipping through science journals.

“I didn’t know about any of this,” Ophelia swore, turning to Jane. “Hudson never mentioned a word of this to anyone while he worked under me.”

“Well, it takes time for the crazy to percolate.” Jane sighed.

“Dr. Hudson’s theory is not well regarded,” I said, holding up a review of his work that called Hudson a “card-carrying member of the nutcase brigade.”

“But,” Ben said, “it just seems a little too convenient that he did studies on mixing up our genes with snake juice, and the preliminary report he turned over to Jane mentioned rattlesnake genes. Also, every time he talks about the ‘genius’ who created us, he gets a creepy look in his eye. Like intellectual masturbation.”

“Gross,” I noted.

Jane shuddered.

“Do you think Dr. Hudson had something to do with us being turned?” I asked Jane. “Like maybe he had some connections in Lexington and somehow arranged for me to be turned by his dosed volunteer vampire sire? So he could experiment on me when you brought me back to the Hollow? Ben was just collateral damage.”

“It seems unlikely,” she said. “Why would he choose you, specifically? How could he know you would be brought back to the Hollow?”

“I didn’t say it was logical, I just asked if it was plausible,” I said.

“I’ll look into it,” Jane said, still sounding skeptical. “For now, let’s get the two of you back to the house. You are officially relieved of your on-site Council duties until further notice. It’s too dangerous having you here, possibly near Dr. Hudson’s accomplice. Not to mention the danger of traveling back and forth every night. You can do whatever work you can complete from home. Gigi, make Ben a list. Meagan and Ben, you should know that a few days into his incarceration, Dr. Hudson made some pretty specific threats against anyone you loved, if that’s what it took to get you back into his lab. So you will be assigned a UERT detail to guard the house. Ben, your parents will also be assigned a detail in Florida. Meagan, please call your friends Morgan and Keagan, and tell them that the men in black suits following them around the college day and night are Council personnel, so please don’t report them to campus security as stalkers. Please don’t tell me this is unnecessary. We have to protect the people close to you so they can’t be used against you.” She paused, as if she was waiting for us to argue.

I shook my head. “No, this is a logical plan. I will cooperate.”

Jane sagged in her chair. “Damn it, I had a whole speech prepared about how much I care about you and how I just want to protect you. There was love and drama and more than a smidge of guilting. My mother could have written this speech. It was a work of passive-aggressive mastery.”

“You can give it to us on the ride home,” I promised.

On the ride to River Oaks, while Jane delivered her masterwork of guilting, I texted Keagan and Morgan to ask for a three-way Google hangout. Despite it being two in the morning, they both agreed readily. I sprinted past the UERT members standing guard on the porch to get to my laptop and set it up in the still festively decorated dining room.

I opened the application to find one window showing Keagan propping her chin on her hands, drowsily bobbing her head up and down. Morgan was bundled up in coat and hat, the Best Buy sign behind her casting a yellow glow over her dark hair.

“Morgan, what are you doing?” I asked, making Keagan snap awake.

Morgan rolled her eyes. “My dad likes to be the first one in line for Black Friday sales.” She sighed. “It’s a tradition.”

“Please tell me you’re carrying pepper spray,” Keagan said with a yawn.

“Two cans,” Morgan swore, holding both up in front of her cell phone.

“Hey, Meg, it’s not that I’m not thrilled to see your face, but it’s two in the morning, and I’ve had enough carbs to put the Cake Boss in a coma. I am losing my sparkle.”

“OK, so happy Thanksgiving. I miss you both, and . . . you’re going to be assigned a Council security detail, day and night, on campus, because I’m in a little bit of trouble and you’re considered potential emotional liabilities. OKthanksbye.”

I reached to close my laptop lid, and both girls yelled, “Wait!”

“Are you OK?” Keagan demanded.

“Tell us where you are!” Morgan cried. “Do we need to come down there? Because I will leave this frozen wasteland of a mall parking lot and come down there. I will make that sacrifice for you. Because I love you.”

“What kind of trouble are you in?” Keagan asked, fully awake now.

“I didn’t do anything. A scientist who works for the Council got a little aggressive with his swabs and got fired over it, and now he’s pretty mad about it and made some threats against the people I love, and since that’s you . . . you’re going to have vampires and Council-approved humans following you around to keep you safe.”

“Oh, sweetie.” Keagan sighed.

“Will they be hot vampires and Council-approved humans?”

“Morgan!” Keagan cried.

“I haven’t been on a date in weeks,” Morgan shot back.

“Which is more important than the safety of our aggressively swabbed friend how?” Keagan asked.

“Please word that differently,” I told her. “Anyway, the Council will send official notice on Monday, but if you see Tina when the dorm reopens this weekend, you might want to tell her that Council personnel will be landing on campus. They might even take advantage of the vampire-friendly features at New Dawn—Why are you two looking at me like that?”

Both of my friends had “bad news” expressions on their faces, like my skinny jeans were anything but and they didn’t have the heart to tell me.

“Meagan, Tina’s gone,” Morgan said carefully.

“As in she’s supervising a different building?”

“No, Meg, she died about a week ago.”

“What?” I yelled. “Why didn’t anybody tell me? Ophelia!” I turned to see Ophelia and Jamie snuggled up on the couch in the parlor. “Why didn’t you tell me Tina died?”

“Oh, right, sorry. Tina died in a car accident last week,” Ophelia said.

“Why would you not tell me that?”

“Honestly, I didn’t think you and Tina were that close,” she said. “If Morgan or Keagan had died, I would have told you. Does that help?”

“Thank you, Ophelia,” Keagan called. “That’s really nice . . . for you.”

“OK,” Morgan said. “Tina’s car got stuck on some train tracks, and she didn’t pull off in time. The wreckage was awful. It burned for hours. Our photo guys got some really detailed gory shots, but the editor refused to print them because it seemed insensitive.”

I Googled “Tina Messinger wreck” on my tablet and pulled up a Lexington Herald-Leader news article about the crash. I cringed at the sight of the twisted wreckage of the car. “These were the ‘sensitive’ shots?”

Morgan nodded. “Yes, our guy got splashes of blood on the sidewalk. We didn’t use those.”

“Why do you ask these questions?” Keagan sighed.

“Was she in a car accident or a ‘car accident’?” I asked, turning to Ophelia.

“You know, the sarcastic air-quote fingers aren’t necessary,” Ophelia said.

“You did say you were annoyed with her over the whole contacts list thing,” Keagan supplied.

“Keagan, you’re supposed to be the nice one!” Ophelia grumped.

“Nice doesn’t mean stupid.” Keagan snorted.

“OK, I love you both, but I’m going to hang up and yell at Ophelia for her inability to tell important details from useless stuff she doesn’t think I’m interested in,” I said. “Morgan, if you turn up on YouTube for snatching a vegetable steamer out of a child’s hands, I will share it on every available social media platform. Keagan, get your sparkle back.”

They waved at the screen as I shut down my programs and turned on Ophelia.

“You didn’t think our dorm director dying in a fiery crash was worth sharing?”

“It slipped my mind,” she said with a shrug. “You spent ten minutes at dinner detailing the outfit you wore to tell your economics study group to go on the Mammoth Cave tour and ignore the warnings against wandering. And why are you so interested in what happened to Tina?” When Jamie shot her a significant look, she added, “Other than her being a person you knew and would naturally be interested in.”

“Other than her being a person I knew and would naturally be interested in, I’m pretty sure Tina was the one who asked for your contacts and claimed it was Jane. But I don’t know why, and I can’t prove it.”

Ophelia’s lips pursed. “Why would she do that?”

“I just said I don’t know why,” I reminded her.

“It was rhetorical.” She pulled her phone from her back pocket. “I’m going to make some calls.”

I stared after her. Jamie came over and put a comforting hand on my shoulder. “I know it can be confusing when she just walks out in mid-conversation like that.”

I pouted as Jane called us to the dinner table. “No, I just remember what it was like having a grown-up cell phone.”

I dragged myself up the stairs. I was so very tired, and I had who knew how many weeks of not going to work, the one place I was allowed to go regularly, to look forward to. I slumped into my room and kicked off my shoes, nearly hitting Ben, who was sitting at the foot of my bed.

“Hey. How are you doing? I haven’t even asked how you’re handling the reunion with your parents, who seemed like perfectly nice but reasonably distraught people from the five minutes I talked to them.”

He shrugged. “It went better than I thought it would, to be honest. They get points for not freaking out, calling me a demon, and disowning me, which is how I’ve seen it play out for other members of Jane’s Newly Emerged Vampires Support Group. I get points for not freaking out and biting them. So points all around.”

“Not weird for you, then? Seeing them months after you died and introducing me as your girlfriend . . . after not talking to me about calling me your girlfriend.”

“Oh, no, that was weird as hell. And as for calling you my girlfriend, I probably overstepped there. I’m sorry. But I’m not planning to see anyone else. I like you, maybe more than like you, but I don’t think either one of us is ready to say more. I’m not saying we’re forever, which takes on a whole new meaning for me recently, but I don’t see myself wanting to date anyone else anytime soon. I would like it if you, also, did not date anyone else. This sounded so much better in my head.”

“I’m sure it did.” I kissed him, a quick peck on the lips. “And I agree that I don’t want to date anyone else, either.”

Ben grinned. He was nice enough not to mention my deliberately leaving out the bits about my feelings. “Excellent.”

I nodded toward a pretty silver-wrapped box he was holding. “What do you have here?”

“Something for you,” he said.

“It’s a little early for Christmas presents,” I said, opening the box to find a stack of CD cases, each labeled with a year, starting with 1996 and ending the year my dad died.

“What is this?”

“I took those videos from your dad, and I converted them to DVDs for you. I was going to give them to you before dinner. You know, because holidays are about family, and I wanted to give you a piece of yours back. But then Jane had me cleaning the bathrooms and moving furniture, and then I got ambushed with a reunion with my parents and Jane put the house in DEFCON 1. And I lost track of it.”

“Aw, Ben. Thank you.” I pulled his shirt, yanking him close and kissing him fiercely.

“It was no troub— No, I’m not even gonna lie. It took me weeks to track down the right sort of converter to transfer VHS tapes to DVD. It was a huge pain in the ass. But I wanted you to have them, because I like you so very much.” He handed me several thumb drives. “Here are the digital files, if you want to upload them to your cloud.”

“You are seriously overestimating my technical ability, but it doesn’t mean I appreciate the gesture any less.”

“Do you want to watch one?” he asked. “We could play it on your laptop.”

I was hesitant. I hadn’t watched these videos in years. I’d never shown anyone the tapes, not even Morgan or Keagan. It was very likely I would ugly-cry my way through any one of these DVDs. But Ben had done such a nice thing, and I kind of wanted to share this with him. I scanned through for one of the least emotionally stressful years. I popped the DVD into the slot on the side of my laptop and clicked play.

Ben was propped against the mountain of pillows, leaning against the headboard. I lay back, snuggling against his side. My dad’s handsome face filled the screen. The sight of his bright blue eyes, the straight nose I’d inherited, and the strong, square jawline made my chest go heavy and empty at the same time. My memories were so fuzzy now; I couldn’t tell what was a true memory and what was recalled from watching the tapes.

“I still think this is a bad idea. There is potential for some serious emotional warping here,” my mom’s voice said off-screen. My breath caught in my throat, and I could feel the tears gathering in my eyes. I missed her voice so much. I missed that exasperated, fond tone where you could tell she was smiling even if you weren’t looking at her. This was a mistake. I was going to end up full-on ugly, running-mucus crying in front of Ben. There was no coming back from that.

Dad waved her off. Ben put his arm around me and gave me a little squeeze as Dad said, “Meggie’s a gorgeous girl. Boys are going to be all over her. She needs to know which ones to toss and how to pick the very, very small number that will be worthy of keeping.”

“She’s three,” Mom protested.

“Baby doll, I’ve told her how to change her own flat tire and how to survive in the woods with just a knife and some duct tape. What kind of father would I be if I didn’t give her a survival guide for the jungles of the datin’ world?” He paused and looked directly into the camera. “Or not dating, sweetheart. Not dating is definitely an option you should consider. Lots of girls are becoming nuns nowadays. Don’t let the fact that we’re not Catholic stop you.”

“Jim.” Mom sighed, and a heavy silence filled the air. “I still think you’re jinxing yourself, making these tapes.”

All of the humor drained from his face for a moment. “It’s important, Nita. These are things Meagan needs to know, life lessons. How to be a successful, functional grown-up.”

“Fine.” Mom sighed again. “But fifteen years from now, when she shows these at your retirement party and your army buddies laugh at you, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.”

My lips twitched at this funny little everyday moment between my parents, the teasing and gentle arguing. I only half listened as Dad went down the list of “automatic disqualifiers” for any boy who hoped to deserve me—no drunks, no druggies, no Creed fans—as I focused on the bantering. They sounded a little like Jane and Gabriel, exasperated but so in love it didn’t matter who ended up saying “I told you so.” I’d missed these nuances, watching the tapes as a kid. As a semiadult, I could imagine what my life might have been like having them both as I grew up.

“Now, Meggie, sweetheart, if you learn anything from this little conversation, I hope it’s this. Love isn’t always pretty. It doesn’t always fit with what you thought you wanted or needed. It’s not always easy. Lord knows, it hasn’t always been smooth going between your mom and me, mostly because of some idiot thing I decided was an awesome idea.”

“The food dehydrator for my birthday?” Mom noted.

“You said the commercial looked interesting!” he exclaimed. He turned his face to the camera and frowned, as if to say, See?

“My point is that you can’t expect love to be all kisses and flowers all the time. It can be hard and ugly and end up with a food dehydrator smashed in your backyard. But at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, is this the person you can’t do without? Not just in that butterflies-in-the-stomach kind of way but when you’re scared and alone, is his face the first thing you think of? And when you get good news, is he the first person you want to tell? If he is, maybe you’ve found the person you want to be with. He won’t deserve you, of course. And I’ll spend all of my time reminding him that he’s not good enough for you, which will be fun for me. But if you’re happy, I’ll be happy for you. Of course, if you’re not happy, I will have purchased a wood chipper by the time you’re sixteen. And I’ll take care of the problem, no questions asked.”

“Well, that’s not going to scar her forever, threatening to Fargo her future husband,” my mom said.

“Like you’re not going to be standing behind me with a shovel in your hand,” Dad shot back.

Mom rounded the camera stand, throwing her legs over Dad’s lap as he wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed her soundly. Dad laughed and leaned his forehead against her neck. “You should turn the camera off before this gets weird.”

Mom laughed, reached toward the camera, and hit the power button. The screen went blank. I shook my head. It was a little emotionally scarring but only because of that last bit. Tears had soaked through the front of my shirt, and I used the hem to mop up my cheeks.

I turned toward Ben to thank him, hoping he wasn’t completely uncomfortable listening to my parents tell me what was acceptable in a partner. But he’d fallen asleep. All sweet and stupid, with his mouth hanging open. I couldn’t blame him. I would have fallen asleep, too, if I was watching videos of someone else’s parents. Plus, he was probably exhausted from all the parental reunions and emergency situations.

No drunks. No druggies. No Creed fans.

Ben seemed to fit most of my dad’s requirements. Our relationship had not been pretty. It was definitely not smooth. I didn’t think that was possible when your first date involved a crushed sternum. It wasn’t what I’d pictured for myself—living with my boyfriend with a bunch of vampire housemates, working for a shadow government. I didn’t know if we had gotten to the “can’t live without you” phase. But I could get there.

I was totally going to check him for a Creed tattoo, just in case.

Working from home didn’t mean that Jane’s schedule was any less busy. She just spent a lot more time teleconferencing. Dick worked from River Oaks, too, out of “solidarity,” but I suspected it had more to do with worrying about our safety and the gourmet blood blends Tess was delivering on a regular basis. I sat at the dining-room table and answered the calls rerouted to Jane’s landline and answered her e-mails and spent a lot of time apologizing for the lack of face-to-face Jane time. Jane was in her kitchen, stress-drinking and commanding the search team that was sweeping the Hollow for Dr. Hudson.

Ophelia sat at the other end of the dining-room table, typing furiously into her laptop and answering her phone every ten minutes or so. She answered in a different language every time, so it was difficult to guess what she was working on. Maybe it was a really complicated homework assignment? Frankly, the fact that she could yell at people in so many languages made her either ten times more awesome or ten times more intimidating. Fitz was completely oblivious to this, dozing at my feet.

Ben shuffled out of the kitchen and set a mug of bloodychino in front of me, kissing me on my head. He’d spent most of the early evening holed up in Jane’s library/office with a bunch of thumb drives and papers Gigi had sent home with Dick. He dropped a stack of papers in front of me.

“You look tired,” I told him, stroking my thumb along his cheek.

“I would say you’re wrong, but I did fall asleep a minute into your dad’s video last night, which is embarrassing.” He smiled sheepishly. “Sorry about that. After all that fuss I made, I fell asleep. I was exhausted, I guess.”

“It’s OK. It was just a bunch of advice on car repairs,” I said, shaking my head.

“Yeah?”

“My dad wanted to make sure I knew how to jump-start a battery, change a tire, that sort of thing,” I said. “Thanks for doing that for me. It’s the most thoughtful thing anyone’s ever given me.”

“You’re welcome.” He leaned forward and was about to kiss me when Ophelia suddenly started yelling in German. And she sounded very angry. Even angrier when she stood up and knocked her chair back.

“That doesn’t sound good,” Ben said, grimacing, as Ophelia stomped outside and continued her conversation on the porch.

I pursed my lips. “No, it does not. So what are you working on right now?”

I leafed through the papers he had dropped onto the table.

“Oh, just reading through the personal papers and files from Dr. Hudson’s office. Jane said I could read over them since I read faster than she does. I’m hoping I can catch some sort of clue, like a Post-it that says, ‘I have a remote cabin on the lake and run there when the Council officials are looking for me. Here are the coordinates.’ ”

“That would be a helpful but oddly worded Post-it to leave for oneself,” I said. “But Dr. Hudson has used Post-its for evil purposes before.”

“True.”

The phone rang, and I reached for the receiver. “I wish I could help you with your speed-reading. But I have three conference calls to reschedule and a copier-paper vendor to yell at.”

“Good luck with that,” he said, ducking his head for a quick kiss before grabbing his papers. I answered the phone, listening as a Council rep out of Buffalo requested a meeting with Jane the next week. I opened her schedule on my laptop and glanced down. Ben had dropped one of his papers on the floor.

I picked it up, giving the Buffalo rep a string of “Yes, ma’ams” and “Mm-hmms” while scanning the paper. It was the bibliography for one of Dr. Hudson’s bonkers academic articles. Most of his work seemed to be based on legitimate genetic research, but then there were a few journal articles with titles like “Genetic Chameleons: Vampires and Their Magical DNA Adaptability” and “Better Vampires through Chemistry.” All of them were written by an Allan Fortescue, PhD, Professor of Biology, University of Kentucky.

“Hello?” the Buffalo rep called testily.

“S-sorry,” I stammered. “Yes, I have you confirmed on Mrs. Jameson-Nightengale’s schedule for Tuesday at three A.M. She’s looking forward to talking to you.”

The Buffalo rep hung up without thanking me. I stared at the bibliography. Why did the name Fortescue seem familiar? Just because he was a professor at my college? Had I heard the name on campus? I hadn’t taken any classes with him, but that didn’t mean that I hadn’t glimpsed his name on a door plate or in the campus newspaper.

I opened my Internet browser and went to the college’s Web site. No matter how I searched, I could not find a Dr. Fortescue in any of the science departments. I even tried the political science department. Nothing.

I chewed on my thumbnail, listening to Ophelia continuing to rant from the porch. I felt sorry for the German speaker on the other end of the line. I called Morgan’s cell phone, using Jane’s “ghost phone.”

“What is it with you using landlines now? Are you becoming Amish? Is that where you are? Pennsylvania Dutch country?”

“Yes, I’m becoming Amish. It’s like that old movie Witness but with more fangs.”

Morgan snorted. “Are you calling because you need me to order you a fancy new bonnet on the forbidden Internet?”

“No, I’m calling you because I am going to ask you to use your remote access to the school’s intranet to find some information you probably shouldn’t be looking up.”

I could hear her typing, so I guessed I had caught her near her laptop when I called. “That’s fine.”

“No, you could probably lose your job over this. This will be considered an abuse of the newspaper staff’s access to the school’s internal servers.”

“Yeah, probably, but I’d rather go out for helping a friend than, say, playing ‘Candy Crush’ on my workstation, which is probably how I’ll be fired.”

I nodded. “That’s true. Can you look up someone called Allan Fortescue? F-O-R-T-E-S-C-U-E? Allan with two Ls. The name seems really familiar, but I can’t put my finger on where I would know it from.”

“Ummm . . . he’s showing up on the personnel server but not as a current employee. Dr. Fortescue was let go about three years ago for being a complete wackadoo. He attempted to publish a bunch of journal articles with reputable academic publications, claiming that he could find a way to change vampires’ genetic makeup through chemical intervention, whatever that means. His supervisors asked him to drop the research interest a couple of different times. He was written up for insubordination, showing up to class late, or skipping classes altogether without making them up. He earned himself a rating of negative two on Rate My Professor.”

“I didn’t know they did negative numbers,” I said.

“They do when you forget to give a final in two of your classes and then count the grades as zeros.”

“Ooooh.” I winced. “Any forwarding address on his file?”

“According to the HR rep who handled his exit interview, he wrote, ‘I will see you all in hell.’ ”

“So, a no, then.”

“Is that helpful?” she asked.

“No. But I appreciate the effort. Just clear your browser history and blame Joanie the hyper girl if anyone asks.”

“I’m using Joanie’s login.” Morgan snorted. “I would say it’s for plausible deniability, but honestly, she ate the last of my emergency desk ramen last week. She has this coming.”

“Agreed.”

“Welp, I have to go, because my mom is trying to force me into meaningful bonding moments at least every forty-five minutes. And it’s been forty-three. She has not handled empty-nest syndrome well.”

“You love it.”

“I do,” she admitted.

“See you, weirdo.”

“Talk soon,” she said, just as Ophelia came back into the dining room, a troubled expression on her face.

She flopped into her chair and stroked her hand over face. Ophelia never flopped. This was bad.

“Hey, sweetie.” I slid my still untouched coffee toward her. “Why the face?”

“My friends, they’re all gone,” she said, frowning.

“Is this an existential crisis about your origin story, or am I seriously misinterpreting?”

Ophelia lifted a brow.

I shrugged. “It’s a reasonable question.”

“My vampire friends in the Lexington area, the friends who were listed on the information I gave to Tina. Four of them are missing. Disappeared from the face of the earth. None of my contacts has any clue where they might be. And that’s not like, well, at least two of them.”

“Are you sure they didn’t just duck out because they owe somebody money or something?”

“I’m sure,” she said.

“When was the last time you heard from any of these vampires?”

“Michael I spoke to a week or so before I arrived on campus. We’d meant to meet up for dinner, but he traveled a lot for his business, and that made scheduling complicated. David I met every once in a while for . . .” She paused and glanced toward her boyfriend, who was playing video games in the parlor with Georgie. “Uh, coffee, but that was before Jamie. Clara? I hadn’t spoken to her in years—or Joanna, for that matter. I only included them on the list because of proximity. And I haven’t seen Marco in a century. Honestly, I’m not sure I would recognize him if I saw him.”

“And you think that their sudden disappearances may have something to do with their being on the list? And Tina’s sudden death? And maybe the vampire remains in that weird basement fire off campus?”

“It seems rather coincidental,” she said. “And I’m ashamed of myself for not connecting the dots to the basement fire before you did. I’ve been so distracted and tired. You were right, being a freshman is harder than I thought it would be. Do you realize I had to study to pass some of my classes this semester?”

“How did you think you were going to pass your classes?”

“Life experience,” she said, grimacing.

“Even Environmental Chemistry? You thought you would just absorb information about atmospheric pollution over the centuries?”

She shrugged.

I patted her hand. “I love you. Never change.”

“What do we do now?” she asked. “I am not used to being in this position. I’m used to taking charge, calling out the Council’s resources, sending hired muscle and sometimes swords after the problem.”

“We’re going to have to tell Jane.”

Ophelia flopped. Again. She frowned toward the kitchen. “Do we have to?”

I asked, “Do you have a Council UERT hidden on your person?”

“No!” Jamie called over the pew pew of his video game. “I would have noticed that.”

“So yes, we’re going to have to tell her.”

“Does that mean you’re going to tell her your suspicions about Tina and the inaccurate undead-student audits?” Ophelia asked, tilting her head while she stared me down.

“How did you know about that?”

Ophelia rolled her eyes. “Oh, please, you give Keagan one wine cooler, and she’ll give you her social security number and iCloud password.”

14

If you’re a poor communicator, consider writing down your feelings and suggestions for your childe in a letter. If you’re a poor writer, consider an informative drawing.

—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire

Jane was of two minds about our news. She was glad that we told her. She wasn’t thrilled that I had held on to my suspicions about Tina until I could prove something, because, as she put it, “That never works in the Hollow.”

“I’m breaking out the whiteboard again,” Dick said. “Andrea says we need to justify keeping it in the cellar, otherwise we’re considered hoarders.”

“OK, we need to establish a timeline. Pool all of the information we have. There’s something missing here,” Jane said, helping Dick haul the rolling whiteboard up the cellar stairs. Gabriel, Jamie, and Ben had joined us, like woodland creatures gathering around Bambi’s informational birth. Ben sat next to me at the dining table, but Fitz wedged himself between our chairs, pressing his cold, wet nose into my palm.

“It’s OK, buddy,” I assured him. “You’re the only one I’ll let sleep on my feet.”

“I should be insulted, I think,” Ben said, attempting to scratch Fitz’s ears. Fitz wouldn’t have it and edged Ben’s hand aside with his nose.

“Here, gimme that.” Dick took the dry-erase marker from Jane. “I love you, Stretch, but your handwriting is serial-killer chicken scratch.”

“You do have lovely penmanship,” Jane conceded. “So what happened first?”

I raised my hand. “I was smooshed by a flying free weight.”

“No, before that,” Jane said.

Dick made a little dot about halfway across the board and wrote, “Meagan got smooshed.”

“Tina told me she received an e-mail from Jane, saying that she wanted me to send her a list of my Lexington contacts,” Ophelia said.

“An e-mail I didn’t send,” Jane said, nodding. “But I received a vile, profanity-laced response anyway.”

“I sent the list to Tina,” Ophelia added, blithely ignoring Jane’s jab. “And then threw a fabulous party for my fellow New Dawn students.”

“I had an extremely flirty conversation with the most interesting girl I would ever meet,” Ben added.

I grinned at him.

“Extremely flirty conversation?” Gabriel deadpanned. “You animal.”

“Meagan got smooshed!” Jamie shouted, arms raised.

I turned to glower at him. “You could sound less thrilled about that.”

Even Ben turned on Jamie. “Dude.”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Jamie groused. “I feel left out.”

“Meagan got smooshed,” Jane repeated, smiling indulgently at her undead firstborn. “And then?”

“Tina said it would take too long for the ambulance to get to Meagan and that she needed to decide whether to be turned, right then,” Ben said. “She yelled for a vampire to step up and sire her. A volunteer stepped out of the crowd. I didn’t recognize him, but I figured he was a guest at the party.”

“He showed Tina a fake ID card. Sired Meagan,” Jane said as Dick scribbled. Jane slid a photo to Ophelia. “Ophelia, do you recognize him?”

Ophelia shook her head. “No, I don’t. But . . . that could be Marco,” she said, tilting her head at the photo. “He had this horrible handlebar mustache when I saw him last. Made him look like the leader in a vampire barbershop quartet. But that’s gone in this photo, so maybe?”

“OK, so someone who is maybe on the list you gave Tina turned Meagan after Tina picked him out of the crowd,” Dick said. “And then Meagan woke up within twenty-four hours, unlike every vampire before her. And then she bit Ben, turning him without giving him her blood, again, unlike every vampire before her.”

“I regret nothing,” Ben insisted, shaking his head.

I laughed, but when I looked into Ben’s big green eyes, I could see that he was perfectly serious. He didn’t regret being bitten by me. I wrapped my arms around him and kissed him hard.

I thought back to what my dad had said in the tape about dating (or not dating). Love wasn’t always pretty. It wasn’t always smooth. Nothing about my relationship with Ben had been smooth. But at the end of the day, he was the first person I thought of when I was upset. He was the first person I wanted to tell.

It was possible that I was in love with Ben. That I wanted to be with him for the rest of my unnaturally long life.

Now, how did I tell him that?

Also, this was a super-weird time to have such a realization, surrounded by my family while we discussed murder timelines.

The room exploded into a series of “aws” and “ews.”

“Enough of that, or I’ll get the hose!” Dick exclaimed. “What next?”

“We brought Meagan and Ben into our home for wayward youthful vampires,” Gabriel interjected.

“Nice.” I snickered.

“Just after we smuggled you to the Hollow, a fire took place off campus. At first, the authorities assured us that no one was injured, and then vampire remains were found in the basement,” Jane said.

“Ophelia was questioned by the police about those remains,” Jamie said, to Ophelia’s mortification. She smacked his arm without even looking at him.

“Dude,” Ben said again. “Please stop helping.”

“Their investigation was unsubstantiated and inconclusive,” Ophelia spat.

“You should have that tattooed on your forehead to save time,” Jane told her.

Ophelia shot her a rude gesture I only recognized because my World Literature professor had an inappropriate sense of classroom boundaries.

“Do we know who owns the building Ophelia was suspected of burning?” Jane asked.

Ben opened his laptop. In a weird flash, I saw a picture of a campus map in my head. Ben was going to look up the house in some sort of real estate database—which he wasn’t supposed to be able to log into, but he knew his mom’s work password. He just needed to know the street address. He was trying to remember the exact location of the building and picture it in relation to the campus.

How the hell do I know all of this?

I glanced at Jane, who did not seem to be aware of any sort of psychic turmoil in the room. I opened Morgan’s campus newspaper article about the fire on my tablet and highlighted the street address. I showed it to Ben.

“Thanks,” he said, smiling. “You saved me the trouble of looking it up.”

“You kids and your newfangled devices,” Gabriel harrumphed.

“The building is owned by a rental company. The renter is listed as New Life Endeavors Inc. for the last three years,” I said. “It’s an LLC registered through Delaware, which is not super-helpful. You don’t have to include the names of the applicants on public paperwork.”

“Sort of a dead end there. What else do we know about the building?” Jane asked.

I bit my lip. “Remains of three vampires were found in the basement. But they still haven’t been identified.”

“Four of the friends on Ophelia’s list are missing and cannot be accounted for,” Jamie said.

“The list that was given to Tina, whom Meagan also suspects of padding the undead-student numbers to scam extra funding from the Council,” Dick said. “Which is pretty smart, when you think about it, using our own paperwork against us. We tend to think humans are too scared of us to steal from us, so we get a little lax . . .” Dick realized Jane was frowning at him. “OK, Tina was clearly wrong, and stealing is not a nice thing to do.”

“And now Tina is dead after a mysterious car accident,” I said, steering the conversation back on track. “Which seems convenient.”

Jane and Dick took a step back to observe the neatly lettered timeline Dick had created.

“Great, so we think that Tina arranged for you to be turned by a friend of Ophelia’s. And then that friend, possibly more than one friend, may be the remains in the basement. And that she might have paid that vampire to turn Meagan with money she stole from the Council?” Jane tilted her head as she stared at the whiteboard.

“Why would she do any of this?” Gabriel asked.

“Tina has what I would call an unhealthy reverence for vampires. I mean, subservient and fawning to the point that even I can’t enjoy it,” Ophelia said. “I don’t doubt she’s involved, but I doubt she came up with this on her own.”

Jane’s cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She checked the screen. “I’ve got to take this. I’ll be right back.”

“So we’re dealing with a Renfield?” Ben suggested. When no one responded, Ben hunched his shoulders and raised his voice to a tinny whine. “Yes, oh, mysterious and powerful master of the dark, let me do your bidding while I munch on these tasty bugs!”

“Never do that again,” I told him.

“Fine, but you get my point,” Ben said.

“That was the least sexy thing I’ve ever seen you do.”

He threw his hands up. “OK, I won’t do it again.”

“Really, really unattractive,” I added, smirking.

“I’ve got it!”

“Now that we’ve established that Ben is no longer sexually attractive to Meagan,” Gabriel interjected, “I think we need to focus on trying to find Tina’s Dracula.”

“And how do we do that?” Jamie asked.

“Well, who would be our prime suspect?”

“Dr. Hudson,” Ben said. “He’s been way too excited about our ‘special-ness.’ Proud, like he had something to do with it.”

“Also, he’s the only one we can think of,” I agreed.

“Well, all of the Council’s resources are already devoted to looking for Dr. Hudson, so way to go, us,” Dick said.

Jane reappeared at the door, a grim expression on her face. “The resources of the Council have located Dr. Hudson, or at least a seedy motel room registered in Dr. Hudson’s name. The UERT is standing by; we should get there ASAP. Ray’s going to fire up the helicopter. He’s very excited.”

“Helicopter?” Dick said. “Where’s this seedy motel?”

“Cooter Holler. We’re going back to the Possum’s Nest Lodge.” Jane sighed.

“Aw, man. Really?” Dick groaned.

“Apparently, it’s on some sort of sleazy vampire Zagat guide for best places to hide out.”

Dick grumbled as he slid into his jeans jacket. “Finn isn’t sleazy. He’s just . . . OK, he’s a little sleazy. But the motel has to be a coincidence.”

“I’m going with you,” Ophelia said, rising to her feet. “I hired Dr. Hudson. I once made him cry over a misfiled requisition form. He’s terrified of me.”

“Where she goes I go,” Jamie said. “There are fewer casualties that way.”

“Georgie, you’re in charge.”

“What?” Gabriel, Ben, and I were all equally offended.

“I just want to see what happens,” Jane said, shrugging.

“I’m standing right here,” Gabriel said, raising his hand.

“And you didn’t tell me for two weeks after you first suspected Ben and Meagan were hooking up, so clearly, your judgment is impaired.”

Jane stood in front of Ben and me, gripping our arms gently. “You two stay put. Don’t do anything silly or heroic. I would be seriously annoyed if I came back to find you injured or maimed.”

“Understood,” I said, giving a little salute.

The vampires not under house arrest poured out of the front door, toward the thumping sound of helicopter blades. A black military-issue helicopter landed on the front lawn and whisked Jane and Company away.

“That is normal,” Ben said. “Just another day in the life of Ben Overby.”

“Our life is weird.” I sighed.

“But awesome,” Ben countered, kissing me. “You have to admit, it’s a little awesome.”

“I admit nothing,” I said, kissing him back.

“Well, this is getting gross,” Georgie said with a gag. “Overby, in the parlor for ‘Halo,’ now. I can’t witness that sort of spectacle for too much longer without losing my lunch.”

Ben wiggled his eyebrows. “Duty calls.”

Gabriel pointed to their retreating backs. “I should go with them. Georgie’s on her last budgeted controller, and she can get . . . enthusiastic in two-player mode.”

“I’ll just finish up some of Jane’s paperwork, get things organized for tomorrow,” I told him.

“You’re the best assistant she’s ever had, you know,” Gabriel said.

I slid into my impromptu desk chair at the dining table. “Really?”

“Well, the last one was criminally insane, so you were bound to be a step up.”

“You’re an undercover smartass, aren’t you, Gabriel?”

He nodded and walked toward the parlor, calling over his shoulder, “Yes, I am.”

I finished all of my filing and reports, with my ears perked to see if I could hear Gabriel’s cell phone ring with news from Jane. And I kept staring at Dick’s timeline. Something was bugging me, like an itch at the back of my mind. Despite the very detailed, organized timeline, something was missing. And I had this weird sense of foreboding, like somehow missing that thing was going to come back and bite me on the ass.

Fitz whined, pawing at the back door. I craned my neck to see him sitting by the door, thumping his tail against the floor. I tucked my KidPhone into my coat pocket. I stuck my head into the parlor.

“I’ll let Fitz out to run a little bit,” I told Ben. “We haven’t had any good bonding time in the last couple of days. I think he’s taking it personally. You stay here, continue to let Georgie own your ass at ‘Halo.’ ”

“All your base are belong to me,” Georgie said, without looking up from the enormous flat-screen.

“Just be careful,” Ben warned me. “Stay within sight of the UERT guys. They’re all around the perimeter. Which, again, is a totally normal thing to say to your girlfriend before she walks her dog.”

“Awesome life,” I reminded him, kissing him.

“Weird, awesome life.”

I stretched my arms over my head as we walked out to the back garden. Fitz bolted into the woods, barking. I waved to the UERT member standing near the kitchen door. “I’m just taking him for a walk. We won’t go past the cow pasture.”

He nodded. “Stay alert, miss.”

I took off after Fitz, whistling for him. Despite the punishing pace I was keeping, I felt my limbs relax. I smiled against the wind, gleeful to finally be out of the house, alone, just for a little bit. I’d been cooped up under the Council’s watchful eye for way too long. OK, it was only a couple of nights, but the UERTs made it drag.

My generation had a short attention span.

Fitz came flying out of the tree line, leaping at me. I dodged at the last minute, and he rolled into the grass.

“Ha!” I shouted as Fitz lumbered to his feet. “You missed! You finally missed!” He gamboled toward me and took another running leap. “Sonofabitch.”

Fitz’s paws landed on my shoulders, knocking me flat on my back. His big, warm, sandpapery tongue slapped across my cheeks. “Aw, Fitz. I love you, but you’re murder on my laundry. And my eye makeup.”

We rolled around on the grass for a while. My attempts to escape the tongue proved to be futile. But I knew, eventually, that it was time to go back. Ben was probably getting all twitchy with worry.

It had been a good idea to get out of the house. That weird, itchy nagging at the back of my head was all but gone.

But now it was there again, because I was thinking about it again. I lay back in the grass, staring at the stars.

What was wrong? Was it Dr. Hudson? His research? His banana-balls crazy colleague Dr. Fortescue, who seemed to drop off the face of the earth after telling my college’s administration to go eff themselves?

Fortescue. The first time I’d heard the name was when that lulu from the nope list called. The guy who’d screamed at me, demanding a meeting with Jane, claiming to have made huge strides in research that would benefit vampires.

“Oh, crap.” I jumped to my feet so quickly it startled Fitz into a sharp bark. “Come on, buddy, we need to call Jane.”

We’d moved farther into the back property than I’d realized. I couldn’t even see the lights of River Oaks. I jogged toward the house, Fitz nipping at my heels, barking happily, completely ignorant of my distress. I hit the Jane button on my phone, but it went to voice mail.

I could just see the porch lights shining in the distance, welcoming me home, when I sensed something off. I could smell something out of place in Jane’s garden. Instead of the fragrant night-blooming flowers Iris had planted for her, I could smell something antiseptic. Like bleach. It reminded me of the R&D floor at the Council—

My head snapped up, and I scanned the dark yard. Dr. Hudson? Had that bastard managed to sneak out of Cooter Hollow before Dick and Jane got to him? A cloud slid over the bright half-moon, making it harder for me to spot any movement.

And then there was an odd noise, something you didn’t hear very often around River Oaks.

Thump-a-thump.

Suddenly, Fitz sent up a howl somewhere in the dark. His bark was more aggressive than anything I’d ever heard from him before. He actually sounded like he was capable of hurting someone.

“Fitz.” I jammed the phone into the back of my jeans, missing my pocket entirely and wedging it between my butt and the belt loops. I ran toward Fitz’s bark, tripping over something soft and cold. I landed on my face in the grass and scrambled to my feet. I nudged the squishy object aside with my foot and realized it was a body. One of the UERT members. He was missing his tactical gear, and there was a bullet hole near his chest. His skin was crackled and discolored from silver poisoning.

“Shit!” I hissed.

Thump-a-thump.

Wait.

Why wasn’t anyone responding to Fitz’s bark? Were all of the UERT guys dead? Were Ben and Georgie and Gabriel OK?

“Fitz!” I yelled, dashing after him as he ran toward the house. “Hold on!”

Just as I got close enough to the house to call for help, I saw the outline of a man, backlit by the floodlights in Jane’s eaves. He was wearing UERT gear, but the antiseptic smell rolling off him was damn near gagging me. Dr. Hudson? He seemed too stocky to be Dr. Hudson.

Fitz skidded to a stop between us. He growled, ears bent back and hackles raised as he advanced on the man, the human whose heartbeat seemed so out of place at Jane’s house. The man raised his arm, and I could see a flash of metal in his hand.

“Fitz, don’t,” I commanded him. “Stay.”

But Fitz was already gathering for the leap, ready to launch himself at the shadow.

Psst!

“No!” I screamed as the shot hissed out through a silencer. Fitz yelped and slumped to the ground. “Dr. Hudson, you asshole!”

I dropped to my knees, pressing my hand against the wound in Fitz’s chest. His blood spilled, sticky and warm, over my hand as he whimpered. “Fitz, please, just—please.”

The asshole in question slid the tactical screen from his helmet. “I’m not Dr. Hudson, but I’m sure that sort of language isn’t necessary, Miss Keene.”

“Dr. Fortescue?” I asked, tears streaming down my cheeks. That explained the heartbeat. The very human mad scientist was holding a pistol, pointing it at my chest. And I suspected it was loaded with silver bullets, given the UERT member’s reaction.

He grinned, cherubic cheeks spreading over teeth that were too white and perfect. “The one and only.”

I took a deep breath to scream for help, but I heard the hammer on the pistol cock back.

“I wouldn’t do that, Miss Keene.”

“You think you can shoot me before I get to you?” I asked, my fangs sliding out. I had to be strong, be brave. Fitz’s breathing was slowing to nothing underneath my hands. But I had to make Dr. Fortescue think I was badass enough to kill him where he stood. “I can hear your heartbeat. I’ve got news for you, pal. That gun won’t work on me. It will sting, but I’ll still get to you before you can get off more than one shot.”

“Yes, but these are silver bullets, which will affect you. Given your reaction to silver, do you really want to take the chance?” He smirked when I recoiled. So much for my poker face. “Now, come along.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“You’re my intellectual property, my dear. I’ve come to collect what’s mine.”

“What?”

“It was my work that turned you into the remarkable specimen you are today. There would be no you without me. You would have died on that lawn, your bones crushed and your organs jellied. Then again, you wouldn’t have had your bones crushed and your organs jellied if I hadn’t arranged that, too, but details, details.”

“What?”

“Your little accident,” he said. “I arranged it.”

Even though I knew my “accident” had likely been a setup to put me in the position of being turned, it was pretty infuriating to hear it out loud. I did not like Dr. Fortescue.

“I needed you to be in distress when I had one of my ‘carriers’ nearby save the day.”

“Carriers?”

“Oh, I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll get to that later. You know, I was hoping for the matched set, but I guess I’ll have to settle for just you.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

At this point, I was being intentionally obtuse. Like Jane said, when faced with a villain, keep him monologuing. Maybe Ben would come out to check on me. If he wasn’t dead inside with a lot of people I loved.

That wasn’t a helpful thought. I needed to focus on something else, something that would help me get some sort of control of this situation. Ophelia. What would Ophelia do? OK, no, I wasn’t capable of doing what Ophelia would do in this situation. The gouging alone would be problematic for me. Georgie. What would Georgie do?

Georgie told me once that people underestimated her because of her cuteness, and that was their mistake. They thought she was vulnerable, helpless. They relaxed their guard, and then she moved in for the kill.

“Your little friend, Ben Overby. I was hoping to collect him, too. It would have been interesting to see how his test results compare to yours. But you are the purer of the two samples, so I’ll content myself with you.”

Playing dumb was my only option. How did he know about Ben? Jane had been so careful to keep Ben’s turning private. Damn it. I supposed Dr. Fortescue had met up with Dr. Hudson at some point. I hated Dr. Hudson.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please, just let me go, and we’ll talk to Jane, and I’m sure we can get this whole misunderstanding worked out.” I widened my eyes to creepy Internet kitten levels. And I blew my floral neovamp breath toward him in a long, slow exhale. He was going to be putty in my damn hands.

Or I would overcorrect and end up with another science-vamp stalker.

He jabbed the gun toward me, making a tsking noise. “Please don’t insult my intelligence, Miss Keene. I will tolerate a lot from you but not that.”

“What makes you think that I’m coming with you?” I asked him.

Fitz’s breathing was barely audible now, his chest making weak little movements under my palms.

Stall, stall, stall. Please, someone, come outside and look for me.

I stared at the long barrel of the gun, flexing my fingers. Could I grab it? If I got shot in the hand, would the silver poisoning spread throughout my body? Was he buying the whole innocent act?

Dr. Fortescue pressed the barrel of the gun against my temple, forcing me to stand. “Make one quick movement, and I will shoot you in the head.”

That would be a no, then.

Dr. Fortescue nudged me backward, forcing me toward the back of the property. I glanced over my shoulder at Fitz’s still form. I checked the windows of the house, still bright. I couldn’t see anyone moving inside. Did that mean they were dead? Would I ever see Ben again?

“Hands behind your back, if you please,” he said, holding the gun on me. He tossed me a pair of zip-tie cuffs that burned the moment they touched my skin.

“Put them on,” he said pleasantly. “No dawdling. I don’t want to have to threaten to shoot you in the head twice in one night.”

“I’m going to kill you,” I told him, hissing as the silver-laced plastic slipped over my wrists. “And it’s going to hurt.”

He smiled at me like a doting father. The expression made my stomach turn. “Oh, I don’t see why we have to get off on the wrong foot. You are my crowning achievement, Miss Keene. Imagine vampires not having to wait for three days to rise. Imagine simplifying the transaction of blood so they don’t have to give so much of themselves to make a childe. Imagine how grateful they will be. How they will reward me.” He jammed the gun into my back, forcing me to walk faster.

“So you did this because you want to make vampire friends?”

“No, I did this because I’m the only man who can.” Again with the gun jabbing. The gun jabbing was seriously getting on my nerves. “I was the only one with the vision to advance thousands of years of evolution.”

“How did you find me?” I asked as we reached the little gravel road near the cow pasture. “No one outside the Council is supposed to know where I am.”

“I helped him there.”

I turned and saw a woman in a poncho, her frizzy hair standing around her head like a halo.

I knew only one person who thought a poncho was an OK fashion statement.

Tina.

15

There will be times when you think you’ve hit rock bottom in terms of vampire parenting. Remember, it can always get worse.

—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire

“You’re supposed to be dead,” I told her.

“Well, I’m happy that you’re wrong,” Tina chirped. “It’s really good to see you, Meagan. I feel so lost when one of my birds is out of the nest.”

“Whose body was in your car?”

“Ophelia’s friend Clara. It’s so convenient, vampires crumbling into ash when they’re burned. It’s so messy that the authorities can’t tell whether they’re dealing with human remains or not. You splash a little blood around the scene of a wreck, and they don’t bother checking too close.”

She talked about it like she was giving me instructions on how to warm up a casserole. So Tina was batshit crazy, then. Good to know.

Tina opened the back door of the SUV they’d parked in the cow pasture. Dr. Fortescue jabbed me with the gun again. At this point, I was counting the jabs so I would know how many times to kick him in the face later. While Fortescue held the gun on me, Tina looped another plastic-silver cuff around a metal hook, securing me to the headrest of the front seat. I slid into the back seat, feeling the bulk of the KidPhone against my spine. Dr. Fortescue hadn’t thought to pat me down, thank goodness.

Maybe the KidPhone had some sort of emergency locator beacon?

“Yes, Ms. Messinger has become a very useful companion in my scientific endeavors. My special cocktail wouldn’t transform a vampire on its own. It has to be filtered through a sire’s bite, changing the newly made vampire from the moment of transformation but having no real effect on the sire. The magic of vampirism, it’s a mystery,” he said, with a manic gleam in his eyes. “I needed a vampire who would agree to be dosed, for a fee, and would have no moral quandaries about siring a child he had no intention of mentoring.

“That’s where Ms. Messinger came in, providing a list of Ms. Lambert’s associates. Given Ms. Lambert’s own moral flexibility, we were sure we could find someone among her acquaintances who would serve the purpose. We didn’t expect so many of them to be so mercenary, but each of them assisted our agenda in his or her own way. And then, of course, Ms. Messinger used her admin privileges on the university’s intranet to sort through your friends’ messages and locate you. Her support has expedited the process considerably.”

I cast a serious side-eye at Tina, who was climbing into the front seat. I should have known her earnestness was a cover for serious evil.

Fortescue shrugged out of his stolen tactical gear and tossed it onto the seat next to me. He’d been wearing a nice shirt and tie under all that Kevlar. I used my high-resolution night vision to scan the discarded jacket for anything I could use to free myself. Fortescue climbed into the driver’s seat and started the car. Tina played with the radio stations until she found contemporary adult and began humming along to a Nickelback song.

Evil.

“You will not inject me with drugs, conk me over the head, or otherwise cause me to lose consciousness,” I told Dr. Fortescue.

“Of course not,” he said, smiling at me. “Why would I hurt my prize specimen?”

Why couldn’t I be targeted by scientists who were less crazy? And now that my adrenaline was starting to fade and I was still, I felt the burning against my wrists much more acutely.

“What is this crap?” I hissed as the car lurched forward.

“A special polymer I developed. It’s laced with silver filaments. Terribly expensive to make but, as you can see, very effective. Just one of the many developments I’ve been trying to share with the Council. But they refuse to recognize the contributions I could make. The foolish gatekeepers refuse to put me into contact with the right representatives. They’ll see. They’re all going to see. I’m finally going to get the recognition I deserve.”

Did that mean he wasn’t aware that I was the gatekeeper who kept him out of contact with Jane? Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Should I hold on to that piece of information, just in case I needed to push him over the edge and make him put me out of my misery later?

I leaned my head against my arms. This whole situation sucked beyond the telling of it. Every bump and jolt from the road brought me into contact with the cuffs. It was agony, boiling up my arms, prickling up my neck. But I didn’t want him to know exactly how sensitive I was to silver.

I bit down on my lips and didn’t let any noise escape, even as the burns spread up to my shoulders. What if it burned through my wrists? What if I lost my hands? I tried to think of something else, anything to distract me from the pain lancing up my arms. Thinking about losing my hands probably wasn’t the best idea, then. OK. I could go to my happy place. Unfortunately, my happy place had turned into a water tower, watching a silly movie with Ben. Ben. I loved Ben.

Was he OK? Were Gabriel and Georgie safe? Dick and Jane? What if Dr. Fortescue had lured them into some sort of trap at the motel? What if that was why she didn’t pick up her phone? If I died, would I be with my parents, or did vampires get a ticket straight to hell?

No. Ben was fine, I told myself. He would be fine. He had people who loved him, who would get him through losing me. Jane, Gabriel, all of their little family. They were all OK. My thoughts turned to each of their faces, of the last time we were all together, how we laughed. I would miss them all so much.

The car slowed to a stop, and I popped up my head. I’d been concentrating on Ben so hard that I really hadn’t felt the pain in my arms. A break that was now over, because there was the pain again.

Ow.

Dr. Fortescue parked in front of a huge abandoned warehouse. Because where else would a supervillain in the backwoods establish his headquarters? Tina opened my door and cut my cuffs loose from the headrest. I slid out of the car, careful to keep my jacket tucked over the phone in my jeans.

While the lights were working, the warehouse was cold and empty and smelled like a basement. The windows just below the roofline had been spray-painted over. Scientific equipment occupied the one clean corner of the building. Chemistry setups bubbled, and machinery hummed. It felt . . . forced, like something a kid might expect a scientist’s lair to look like. Was Fortescue putting on a show for me? To impress me?

Fortescue kept the gun on my head, while Tina removed the cuffs and shoved me into a sturdy metal chair that was bolted onto the floor. She put another set of the silver-laced plastic cuffs around my wrists, clipping them to the chair slats behind my back.

“I need to prepare,” Dr. Fortescue told Tina as he slid into a pristine lab coat. He handed her his gun. “The auction begins in two hours. Shoot her if you have to but nowhere vital and nowhere near the face. It’s better to leave her pretty.”

He nodded to her and strode to the back of the warehouse to a door marked “Office.” Why did I get the feeling that he was really going in there to rock out to Dr. Feelgood to pump himself up?

I twisted my wrists until I could fit my hands through the slats in the chair. I could feel the outline of the phone through my jeans. And it was not budging.

“Auction?” I asked Tina. “Is he going to sell me?”

“No, of course not,” Tina assured me. “He wants proof that he can produce the kind of results he’s promising. You are that proof. He needs more funding, Meagan, to do his work. And if the Council isn’t going to give it to him, he has to find it somewhere.”

“But the Council did give it to him, in a way, didn’t they?” I asked her, trying not to move my arms too much as I nudged the phone up to the waistline of my jeans. “The money you embezzled, you handed it over to him, right?”

“I was his first investor,” she said, preening. “They say behind every great man is a woman with a plan. And I am that woman, Meagan. Everything Allan has he has because of me. Everything you are you are because of me.”

I lifted a brow. Was she monologuing now? Were henchmen allowed to do that? I should have watched more James Bond movies to prepare for this situation.

Wait, she was still talking.

“I’m the one who hired some nimrods willing to play Ultimate Frisbee on a college campus with a forty-five-pound weight every night for two weeks until you came out of the building. And paid another to stand by, ready to turn you.”

“That does sound like something Ophelia’s friends would do,” I admitted. “But why me? What did I do to you?”

“We needed someone without a family, no connections, someone without loved ones to cause problems if the turning process went wrong.”

Well, that hurt more than I would have expected it to.

I felt the bottom edge of the phone sliding out of my jeans. Now I just had to get it into my hand without making any noise.

“Of course, we didn’t expect the Council to swoop in and claim the prize. Jane Jameson-Nightengale is a little more committed to being a ‘responsible’ Council rep than I expected.”

“So why are you here now? Cashing in on your investment?”

Tina pouted, throwing a petulant look toward the office. “Allan’s gone rogue. He’s lost focus. Instead of creating more supervamps like yourself, he kept trying to tweak the formula for his drug/gene therapy, like a dog worrying a bone. He buried himself in his work, wouldn’t talk to me or return my calls. I mean, I funded that man’s research, the process to turn you, and he just ghosted me? I had to do whatever it took to get his attention back. I set fire to his lab, all of his files, his backup drives. I even cleared his cloud, thinking that if he lost his research, all of the test carriers I’d gleaned from Ophelia’s list, he’d have to return my calls. And I was right! I was, after all, the only one who could lead him to you, and then, when he found out that you’d made another supervamp, well, he just couldn’t get enough of me.”

She sighed. “Allan’s a misunderstood genius. He’s going to change the world. And if I help him, he’s going to name the drug after me. And then, when the drug/gene therapy is perfect, we’re going to be turned, and we’ll be together forever.”

Was there a level beyond batshit crazy? Because Tina just leveled up.

I flicked my hand, popping the phone loose from my jeans. It fell against the inside of my shirt, which kept it from clattering onto the metal chair.

“So you did all this—derailed my life, got Ben killed, crushed my freaking rib cage—for some guy?” I asked. “I don’t like to judge, but wow. That reeks of desperate.”

“No,” she scoffed. “I mean, it wasn’t just him, it was his research. Do you know what it’s like to want to be a vampire so badly and not be able to find a willing sire?”

“No, no, I don’t.” I shook my head, hoping it disguised the movement of dropping my KidPhone into my hand. I stroked my thumb over the one button, the Jane button. And then I searched for send. I could only hope that Jane could hear Tina’s blather. Or at least locate me with that triangulating thing they used on CSI.

“I wanted to be turned so badly it wasn’t fair. I’d spent my whole life studying vampires, trying to help humans understand what they were really like, the miraculous creatures you are. I wanted that for myself, to be special, eternal, beautiful. And I kept trying to find one who would turn me, but they all said I was ‘too eager,’ ‘too needy.’ Even the bottom-feeders refused.”

“That is . . . super-depressing, Tina,” I said, trying not to add an obvious amount of emphasis on her name. “If I’d known, back at the dorm, how badly you wanted to be turned, I could have maybe talked to Ophelia, helped her see how important this was to you. Really, Tina, maybe I could talk to Jane now for you. You know me. You don’t want to do this to one of your ducklings. You don’t have to help Dr. Fortescue.”

Please, Jane, please be listening. Please pick up on these brick-sized clues I’m dropping for you. I will never complain about the KidPhone again.

Tina waved the gun carelessly as she threw up her arms. “I don’t want to be a regular vampire anymore. I want to be special, like you. And Allan’s research will make it so much easier for people like me to be turned. No exchange of blood, no commitment, just a quick bite, and twenty-four hours later, you pop up better than ever.”

It hit me that after spending her pathetic life studying vampires, Tina didn’t understand them at all. She still saw them as some sort of supernatural nocturnal unicorns. She didn’t realize how much help newly risen vampires really needed. She didn’t realize how social some vampires were. She’d twisted what she’d learned about us into her own narrative, suited to her weird little fantasies about dark, mysterious creatures of the night.

When I got out of this, I was going to write a very sternly worded letter to my college about its screening process for people who work with student housing.

“Did Dr. Hudson have anything to do with this?” I asked.

Tina frowned. “Who?”

“The chief science officer for the Council office.”

“The pushy little vampire in the plaid shirt?”

I nodded. “Kind of derpy?”

“Yes, we had to do something about him. He kept getting in our way,” she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “Every time we would approach you, we’d find him hiding out near Jane’s house, keeping those vampire security guards all stirred up, trying to get to you two. Allan took care of him, left him in a little pile of ash in some B and B in Cooter Holler.”

I tried to feel bad about Dr. Hudson dying, but honestly, the man had left me to die in a tobacco field. So . . .

“You’re not spilling all of our secrets, are you, Tina?” Dr. Fortescue asked, shooting his cuffs as he walked out of the office. His chubby cheeks were red and flushed, his dark eyes were bright and gleeful, and his dark hair had been smoothed back. So either he’d been in there drinking, or he had been in there rocking out to old-school Mötley Crüe. I didn’t smell any whiskey, so I was betting on hair metal.

“Just a little girl talk,” Tina chirped. “I’ve missed my little chats with Meggie. She’s the same sweet girl she was when she lived in the dorm.”

“Dr. Fortescue,” I said loudly, hoping that Jane was listening. “Or should I call you Allan? I never had you in classes at UK, so I’m not sure what to call you.”

“Dr. Fortescue is fine. I didn’t spend years getting two PhDs to be called Allan by an undergrad.”

“Fine.” I nodded.

Prick.

“You are such a beautiful specimen,” he breathed, leaning close, tracing his fingers over the curve of my cheek. I twisted my arm, putting stress on the plastic cuff even as it burned my skin. “The future of vampirism, wrapped in a perfect package. I had no idea how lovely you would be when Tina suggested you.”

He was a prick and a close talker. Ew.

“I wanted a male, of course, so we might test aggression levels. But I see now what a missed opportunity that would be. My only regret is that I lost the chance to observe you in your first weeks. But we’ll make up for lost time together.”

I squirmed away from his touch, because it felt like my spine was about to crawl out of my throat. The pain of the silver burns somehow gave me the anger I needed to twist my arm further. I felt the plastic cuff give just the tiniest bit, a tear in the oh-so-special polymer that would help rip it open. Clearly, Dr. Fortescue had not accounted for hybrid-vampire superstrength when he created his devil cuffs.

To cover the noise, I growled, “Take your hands off me, or I will bite them off.”

He grinned at me, those scary Chiclet teeth even brighter in the cheesy fluorescent light. “Well, you’re going to have to bite me eventually. You’re going to turn me.” He glanced at Tina. “My companion has a notion to wait until I perfect the process. But I just can’t wait! And there’s something rather poetic about being turned by my first creation. Symmetry, Miss Keene. I enjoy symmetry.”

“I won’t do it.”

“I won’t give you a choice.”

He shoved his arm toward my mouth. I tucked my lips over my teeth. He pinched my nose shut. I yanked my arm as I struggled. The plastic gave way just a bit more. I didn’t need to breathe, so it wasn’t as if he could smother me.

“Imagine the contributions I could make to your kind if I had unlimited time,” he insisted. He took the gun from Tina. “Why are you being so selfish?”

I refused to answer. I wouldn’t let him trick me into opening my mouth.

“You will bite me, or I will shoot you in the head. Do you understand?”

I jerked one last time and felt the plastic cuff break. Remembering what Dick had told me about my phone, I put my thumb on the one button, prepared to hold it down until I heard the beep. My problem would be getting ten feet away. Because I still didn’t know what would happen when I heard the beep.

Just then, I heard a door swing with a creeeeaaaaak, followed by the patter of little Mary Janes on the floorboards. Georgie wandered into the room, her eyes wide and guileless. She was dressed in her favorite pink sweater and jeans, with her golden hair in pigtails. She could not have looked more harmless or adorable, though I picked up a dangerous flash of silver in her eyes as she passed through a beam of moonlight.

I had never been so relieved to see a tiny vampire in all my life. Because if Georgie was OK, that meant Ben and Gabriel were OK. And some sort of rescue effort was being made. I wouldn’t have to have Dr. Fortescue’s hand on my face much longer. He was starting to palm-sweat at gross levels.

Georgie’s pale bottom lip trembled. “Have you seen my mommy? I’m lost.”

I swear, it took iron control over every single muscle in my face to keep from smirking. The cavalry had arrived. The cavalry was wearing pigtails and was scary as hell.

“Now, what is a little girl like you doing out this late?” Dr. Fortescue demanded. “Get out of here.”

Real humanitarian, Dr. Fortescue.

“We were Christmas shopping downtown, and we got separated. Do you have a phone I can use?” Georgie asked. “Please, I need help finding my mommy.”

Fortescue sighed heavily, as if being forced to help a lost child was the most inconvenient thing that had ever happened to him. Tina rushed forward and cooed over Georgie, stroking her hair and pressing Georgie’s face into her poncho. I grimaced, but Georgie kept a brave face.

Under Tina’s arm, hidden from Dr. Fortescue by Tina’s poncho, I could see Georgie flash four fingers. Then three and two. I pressed the one key, and just as Georgie flashed one, I heard it beep.

I threw myself sideways and tossed the phone at Dr. Fortescue. He jerked, fumbling for the phone. In his panic, he fired at me, but the bullet went out through a window just as my pink-and-purple plastic phone exploded near his feet. He shrieked, and Tina screamed, running forward to pat out the small fire eating through his pants.

The warehouse exploded in shards of glass. Gabriel, Jane, Ben, Dick, Andrea, Cal, Gigi, and Nik all burst into the room, fangs out and growling. I let out a joyful whoop at the sight of them. I yanked my hands free of the chair and ran for Ben. Jane rushed forward and slapped the gun out of Dr. Fortescue’s grip with one hand and bitch-slapped him with the other. Tina screamed and ducked behind a crate, only to be routed by Gigi and Andrea, who dragged her out into the open by her armpits. I threw my arms around Ben and kissed him for all I was worth.

“I’m so glad you’re OK!” I cried.

He tucked his face into my neck, cradling my head in his hands. “I was so scared.”

“I love you,” I told him. “I love you. I’m so sorry I had that realization in the middle of the team murder-timeline meeting. But I do, and I didn’t know how to tell you, and I’m basically an emotional wreck, and you should be prepared to deal with that for a while.”

His whole face lit up. “I can handle that.”

And we were kissing again, which totally took the focus off the burning in my wrists.

I heard Jane clear her throat. “Hey, kids, I’m thrilled about this show of emotional maturity, but if I could have your attention for a moment?”

“Sorry,” I told Jane, wiping at my mouth with the back of my hand.

Despite the backhand to the face, Dr. Fortescue was just crazy enough to smile at the approaching vampires.

“Mrs. Jameson-Nightengale!” he cried, shaking her hand vigorously. “I’m so delighted to finally meet you! And young Mr. Overby, too. What a coup. I was so hoping we would meet. You will, of course, join Miss Keene in my collection of specimens.”

“Is he for real?” Ben asked.

“Oh, yeah, he waved bye-bye to rational thought a long time ago,” I muttered out of the side of my mouth.

“As you can see, Jane—may I call you Jane?—my formula, the formula I attempted to discuss with you several times, is a complete success. Mr. Overby and Miss Keene are perfect specimens, examples of what vampires could be with scientific intervention. I would think, after the appropriate trials, you would want to start introducing the inoculations to the populace within two years.”

“OK, you totally misinterpreted that dramatic bursting-into-the-room thing,” Jane said. “We’re here to arrest you. Also, you shot my dog. So I’m inclined to rip your head off when you least expect it and use it for bowling. But I’m going to do one worse. I’m going to let those two”—she paused to point at Ophelia and Georgie—“come up with your punishment.”

The Lambert sisters’ shared grin was so terrifying it was almost enough to keep me from walking across the warehouse and punching Dr. Fortescue in the gut. But not quite. So I did.

“You thought I didn’t have a family. I have the most screwed-up, dysfunctional, awesome family in the world. So suck it.”

“Was that necessary?” Jane asked.

“Yes, it was.”

“OK, take the lulus into custody.” Jane sighed. “Put them in the SUV, and I’ll drive them to the Council office.”

“Use these, and make them extra tight.” With a pair of tongs, I tossed two pairs of the silver-plastic cuffs at Jane. She slipped on a pair of latex gloves and looped the plastic around Tina’s and Fortescue’s wrists. Cal and Nik dragged them toward the door.

“Glad you’re OK, beda,” Nik said, ruffling my hair as he passed.

“What did he call me?” I asked Gigi.

“ ‘Trouble’ in Russian, so you know he meant it affectionately,” Gigi said, her lips twitching in an attempt to stifle her smile.

“It’s fitting,” Andrea said. “And probably going to be much nicer than any nickname Dick gives you.”

Dick shrugged. “True.”

Dr. Fortescue thrashed against Cal’s hold as he dragged him out. Tina just wailed.

“But my research! My contributions! My accolades! They belong to me!” the doctor screamed.

“Yeah, good luck with all that,” I muttered as Jane threw her arms around me in a bear hug.

“I know this is not your fault and you were the victim of misdirection and bad circumstances, but please don’t do that to me again,” she whispered into my hair.

“I will do my best not to get abducted by a mad scientist a third time,” I promised.

“See that you don’t,” she said, blinking away tears and pushing my hair back from my face.

“By the way, you couldn’t have told me you’d put an explosive device in my phone?” I asked Dick. “What if I’d been holding it near my head when it went off?”

“I told you to get ten feet away!” he exclaimed. “What did you think that meant?”

“A high-pitched alarm? A smoke bomb? Not a regular bomb!”

“Well, we didn’t know you were going to set it off as we jumped in!”

“Georgie was giving me a countdown!”

“Yes, the countdown to when they were jumping through the windows, not the countdown to set off the bomb I didn’t even know about!” Georgie cried.

“Oh, yeah, that makes more sense,” I agreed. “By the way, why did you all jump through the windows instead of the highly trained UERT guys?”

“Well, Dr. Fortescue killed a couple of them outside our house. Between that and the creepy concrete possums in front of the Possum’s Nest, they declined the honor of rescuing you.”

“Hurtful but understandable,” I said, nodding. “How did you find me?”

“After we found the ashy blood smear in the Possum’s Nest, I got your missed call, and we took the chopper home. I arrived to panic and chaos because you were missing, Fitz was bleeding out, and UERT members were dead. I felt this searing pain in my arms and in my head. I could see the warehouse, what you were seeing. And there aren’t that many abandoned warehouses in the Hollow. Between that and the tracker in your phone, plus the information you relayed through your intentional butt-dial, you made it pretty easy for us.”

“So that’s my vampire power? I can put pictures in other vampires’ heads if they’re mind-readers?”

“No, I was able to see it because I was near Ben, and he felt it and saw it. I think your talent is specific to each other, like walkie-talkies—which is limited but fun. We can run some nonpainful tests if you’d like.”

“I’m almost afraid to ask.” I sighed. “But Fitz?”

“Is in surgery. Iris got him to a great emergency vet who was willing to work late. He says Fitz has a really good chance. Now I just have to explain why I used a Council helicopter to medevac my dog to Lexington.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed, throwing my arms around Jane. “Oh, thank God. I thought he’d died right in front of me.”

Jane stiffened at her first voluntary hug from me. She relaxed against me and patted my back. “This is nice,” she said.

“All this because they wanted the quick route to being undead,” Gabriel mused, sneering at the lab setup.

“Was it really so hard to find someone to turn them?” I asked Jane, breaking away from her.

Jane shrugged. “Sometimes vampires can sense the desperation in someone, and they don’t want to shackle themselves to such a needy, clingy childe. Or maybe the doctor just annoyed most of the vampires he came into contact with, which is just as likely. Maybe he just did it to satisfy his own twisted curiosity.

“The question is, what do we do with it? You two need to decide whether you want that research to be used. Dr. Oxmoor said she would be willing to trash all of her papers. And I believe her. Before she worked for us, she worked for the CDC’s committee on medical ethics. She’s seen what can happen when research goes wrong.”

“Is it really up to us?” Ben asked. “What sort of good could come from more neovamps?”

“An answer to our sensitivity to daylight,” Jane said. “Less traumatic transition periods. Stronger, faster, smarter vampires, which in the right hands would be great . . .”

“But with the wrong person,” I finished for her, “a vampire who can turn a bunch of people with just a nip and possibly walk around during the day, faster and stronger than other vampires, would be a disaster.”

“Exactly.”

“Burn it,” I said. “It ends with us. There are natural checks and balances that keep vampires in this spot on the food chain. We don’t need to mess with that.”

Ben nodded. “I agree.”

“You know, you’ll have to keep what you are a secret from anyone we don’t know and trust,” Jane said. “For the rest of your lives. You won’t be able to tell anyone about your lack of reaction to sunlight. The way you were turned. You definitely won’t be able to sire more neovamps.”

“We understand,” Ben assured her.

“But that doesn’t mean that you can’t find your purpose in other ways,” she said. “Think about it. You can do things that none of us can do. There are things you could accomplish for the Council—secretive, nonevil things—that would be helpful to the entire vampire community. Daytime missions, security, influencing certain human agitators to suddenly move to another hemisphere.”

“Like spies?” I guessed.

“Or superheroes?” Ben asked, his eyes alight.

“Something like that,” Jane said, nodding. “If that’s something that interests you, I’d like to discuss it with some of the more trustworthy upper-level Council reps, to determine where you could be useful, on an as-needed basis. It wouldn’t be your full-time gig, just an on-call situation. I would make it a condition that your work would only start after you graduate. I want you two to have your degrees to fall back on. Besides, who knows what sorts of abilities you’ll develop over the next few years? You would have to remain under my supervision and work from my office, so you don’t have to move away from home. You two have already had enough upheaval in your lives. You’re part of my family. And I will not let anyone take advantage of my family. But I’m not about to hold you back from your potential, either. I just want you to reach that potential in a safe, well-supervised way . . . close to me.”

I wasn’t crying. There was dust in my eyes. “I’m up for it,” I said, a little sniffily . . . because of the dust. “There has to be some good that comes out of all this.”

I looked to Ben, to see if he was in agreement, but he was already nodding enthusiastically.

“Do we get secret identities?” Ben asked, hopeful. “By night I’m your trusted computer programmer, but by day I’m moving very slowly to save the world?”

“Nerd,” I whispered fondly.

How he could kiss me while grinning I’ll never know. But he did a good job of it. “She’s crazy about me, Jane. Honestly.”

Jane pulled a face. “Gross. Not in front of me, kids.”

16

There will come a time for your childe to leave your nest. This is one of the few natural steps left in a vampire’s rather unnatural existence. Let your childe go with as little fuss and emotional scarring as possible.

—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire

All of Dr. Fortescue’s research and any evidence that his drugs had been used on Ben and me were destroyed in the Council’s crematory, along with Dr. Oxmoor’s notes on us. Gigi had cracked Fortescue’s storage cloud and uploaded a devastating virus, deleting his work from cyberspace permanently. And wherever Fortescue was being held, he was in no condition to remember his own name, much less complicated chemical formulas. Jane said it was better that I didn’t know what the Lambert sisters planned for him. It was also better for me not to question why the Council needed a crematory.

In Jane’s defense, Fortescue had hurt Fitz. He deserved a pantload of retribution.

Fitz survived his ordeal with a few stitches and one of those embarrassing lampshade collars. While the wound had been bloody, the impact of the bullet had been mostly absorbed by one of the folds in his coat. He had passed out from blood loss, but thanks to Iris’s resources and the quick thinking of Jane’s late-night vet, he would make a full recovery. He had already reclaimed his spot at the foot of our bed.

The Council agreed to let Ben and me graduate before taking advantage of our superpowers. They were so eager to use our special skills that they agreed to all of Jane’s conditions, including the part-time status and Jane’s supervision. And if anything happened to her, Dick would be our go-between with the Council.

It took weeks of negotiations, three reams’ worth of paperwork, a solemn blood oath that we would not harm our fellow students, and approval by the university president, but we were finally allowed to return to campus for the spring semester. Jane figured that if we hadn’t lost our cool and attacked humans during two scientific abductions and working for the Council for three months, it wasn’t going to happen.

I was ready to get back to class, to normal. But everything would be different now. I had a boyfriend. The way I spent time with Morgan and Keagan would have to change. But it would be good. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up. I liked to read. I liked to talk about books. I didn’t think I wanted to teach. But I had all the time in the world to figure it out.

I would have a single, because I wasn’t allowed to room with humans anymore, but I was sort of looking forward to a private room. Besides, Ben would spend a lot of his nights with me anyway. He had to take one more class—a lab course he couldn’t take online—and he was out. I got the feeling that he was only going back so his parents could watch him walk the stage at graduation.

We’d had a very low-key Christmas and were now packed up and ready to head back to campus. Ben’s parents had come by for a quick presemester visit, but they were still a while away from welcoming him home for weekends. A Council-issued SUV was loaded with our stuff, and Ben and I were bundling up to drive over the rare half inch of snow causing so many night commuters to panic on the news. Ophelia and Jamie had run—ahem, driven, they’d driven—home a few days before. Ophelia and Jane had hit their limit of togetherness.

“It’s going to be weirdly quiet around the house without you.” Jane sighed. “I’m going to miss you both. But I’m going to take the opposite approach from my mother’s when I left for college, which is to save the crying breakdown for after you leave.”

“We appreciate that, Jane,” Ben said, hugging her.

“Call me when you get there,” she told him. “And just call me anyway. I’ve gotten used to talking to you. I don’t expect daily calls, but weekly would be nice.”

“Got it.” Ben gave her a little salute and approached Gabriel for a manly handshake.

Jane took a deep breath and hugged me. “You come back anytime. This is home for you now, got it?”

I nodded. “Next summer, I would like to come home and work at your bookshop,” I told her. “And eventually, I would like to buy in as a partner, using the money the Council is giving me for reparations for Dr. Hudson’s kidnapping and general douchery.”

“We’ll talk about it,” she said. “Silent partner.”

“That’s unlikely.” I snickered.

Georgie was lingering near the door, frowning at us all. I approached her slowly.

“I will not miss you,” she told me. “I won’t even notice that you’re gone.”

“Me, neither. I will definitely not call you or Skype with you. And I will not insist that you send me pictures of Fitz every other week.”

“Understood,” she said. “We will have a distant and resentful relationship from here forward.”

“Got it.”

Cobra-quick, she slid her arms around me and squeezed. I patted her head.

“So you’ve got your laptop, your phone charger?” Gabriel asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Warm socks?” Jane asked. “Backup blood supplies?”

“Yes.”

“I just worry,” she said. “Those dorms can get cold.”

“And I have a thermostat,” I told her. “Right there in my room.”

Jane hugged me again. “The unicorn room will always be yours.”

“Will the unicorns still be there if I come back?”

“Don’t push it.”

Ben and I slid into the car. We laughed as we buckled our seatbelts and made various pre-road-trip adjustments to the radio.

Ben cleared his throat. “You know, when most boyfriends and girlfriends leave for college together, they don’t leave from the same house.”

“Don’t make it weird,” I told him.

“It’s always going to be weird,” he said. “You know, once we get home, we can come back to Jane’s for a visit, any weekend you want.”

I leaned over, stretching the seatbelt as far as it would go, to kiss him. “We’re not going home,” I told him. “We’re leaving it.”

“That was cheesy,” he murmured against my lips.

“That’s me, a big sentimental cheese ball.”

“That’s what I’ve always loved about you.”

Can’t get enough of Molly Harper’s Half-Moon Hollow series?

Rare-book expert Anna Whitfield is delivering a package to Half-Moon Hollow when her plane goes down, and a sexy vampire comes to her rescue. He’s clearly got ulterior motives, but does he want to date her . . . or devour her?

Where the Wild Things Bite

Widow Libby Stratton arranged to be turned into a vampire after she was diagnosed with late-stage cancer. But she’s struggling with her transition, and finds out the hard way that it sucks to be the only vampire member of the PTA . . .

The Single Undead Moms Club

Gigi Scanlon is no longer an innocent teen. She’s all grown up and looking for love, and her family and friends worry she’ll go for the sexy, alluring vampire instead of a nice, safe human. But sexy and alluring, with a penchant for biting, could be just what Gigi wants . . .

The Dangers of Dating a Rebound Vampire

ORDER YOUR COPIES TODAY!

Read on for a sneak peek of Molly Harper’s next book

SWEET TEA AND SYMPATHY

A Southern Eclectic novel

Coming soon from Gallery Books!

Margot Cary leaned her forehead against the warm truck window as it bounced along the pitted Georgia highway. She closed her eyes against the picturesque landscape as it rolled by. Green, green, green. Everything was so effing green here.

Green was not her lucky color. It certainly hadn’t blessed the opening of the botanical garden’s newly completed Wesmoreland Tropical Greenhouse. Maybe it had been a mistake to carry the green theme so far. Green table linens, green lanterns strung through the trees, down to emerald-green bow ties for the catering staff. Weeks later, she still remembered the terrified expression on one waiter’s face when she caught him by the arm before he carried his tray of crudités into the party space.

Despite her glacial blond beauty, the younger man practically flinched away from her touch as she adjusted his tie. Margot would admit that she’d been a bit . . . demanding in organizing this event. She had taken every precaution to make sure that this evening’s black-tie opening was as smooth as Rosaline Hewitt’s recently Botoxed brow. She’d commissioned a silk-leaf embroidered canopy stretching from the valet station to the entrance to prevent the guests’ hairstyles and gowns from being ruined by the summer rain. She’d researched each invitee meticulously to find out who was gluten-free or vegan and adjusted the menu accordingly. She’d arranged for two dozen species of exotic South American parrots to be humanely displayed among orchids and pitcher plants and a flock of flamingos to wade through the manufactured waterfall’s rocky lagoon.

She was not about to have all of that preparation undone by a cater waiter who didn’t know how to keep a bow tie on straight.

“Go,” Margot said, nodding toward the warm, humid air of the false tropical jungle. He moved silently away from her, into the opulently lit space.

Margot turned and tried to survey the greenhouse as it would appear to the guests, the earliest of which were already filtering into the garden, oohing and aahing. Calling it a greenhouse seemed like an understatement. The glass-paneled dome reached four stories into the sky, allowing the tropical plant specimens inside plenty of space to stretch. Carefully plotted stone paths wound through the flower beds, giving the visitor the impression of wandering through paradise. But knowing how much Chicago’s riche-est of the riche enjoyed a nice soiree, the conservators had been smart enough to add a nice open space in the middle of the greenhouse to allow for a dance floor. She’d arranged elbow-high tables around the perimeter, covered in jewel-tone silk cloths. Gold LED lights cast a hazy sunset glow over the room, occasionally projecting animated fireflies against the foliage. And since society’s ladies would never do something so inelegant as visit a buffet, the waiters had been informed to constantly circulate with their trays of canapés in a non-obvious, serpentine pattern around the enormous shrimp tower in the middle of—

Wait.

“No,” Margot murmured, shaking her head. “No, no, no.”

She snagged the next waiter to walk through the entrance and took his tray. The sweet-faced college kid seemed startled and alarmed to have the chief planner for this event grabbing him by the arm. “You, get two of your coworkers and very quickly, very quietly, very discreetly get that shrimp tower out of here. If anyone asks, just tell them that you’re taking it back to the kitchen to be refilled.”

The poor boy blanched at the brisk clip to her tone and said, “But—but Chef Jean was very specific about—”

“I don’t care what Chef Jean was specific about,” she said. “Get it out of here now.”

The waiter nodded and pulled away from her into the gathering crowd.

Margot stepped forward into the fragrant warmth of the greenhouse, careful to keep her expression and body language relaxed. She was aware that, while professionally dressed in her black power suit, she was not nearly as festive as the guests in their tuxedos and haute couture gowns, but she was perfectly comfortable. She’d attended hundreds of events like this growing up. She would not be intimidated by some plants and a pretentious wannabe Frenchman. She pressed the button of her earbud-size Bluetooth and whispered, “This is Margot. I need to speak to Jean.”

She could tell by the way her words were echoing in her own ear that the head chef of Fete Portable had taken his earpiece out—despite Margot’s repeated requests to keep a line of communication open with her—and set it on the stainless steel counter in the makeshift kitchen. She blew out a frustrated breath. Jean LeDille was not her preferred caterer for high-profile events, but the de facto hostess of tonight’s opening—Melissa Sutter, first lady of Chicago and head of the botanical garden conservators’ board—had insisted on using him. So far he’d been temperamental, resistant to the most basic instruction, and a pain in Margot’s Calvin Klein–clad ass. And when she was done with this event and had secured her partnership at Elite Elegance, she would have Jean blacklisted from every Chicago party planner’s contact list. Theirs was a close-knit and gossip-driven circle.

Someone in the kitchen picked up the earbud and said, “Ms. Cary, he says to tell you he’s unavailable.”

Margot gritted her perfect white teeth but managed a polite smile to the head of the opera board and his wife as they passed. Jean wouldn’t be able to get a job making a clown-shaped birthday cake by the time she was done with him.

“So I guess I’ll just have to make myself available to him, then.”

Margot’s assistant, Mandy, a sleek brunette who reminded Margot of a Russian wolfhound in four-inch heels, fell in step behind her. “Make sure that tower is gone. You have two minutes.”

“On it,” Mandy snapped, and peeled off after the hapless waiters.

Margot pushed through the heavy plastic doors that separated the greenhouse from the kitchen tent. Far from the muted music and golden-green light of the greenhouse, the tent was ruthlessly lit with fluorescents and heating lamps. Jean’s shouts filled the air, demanding that the canapé trays be restocked tout de suite.

Jean was a stocky, balding man with thick, dark eyebrows and an unfortunate mustache. His chef whites were splattered with various sauces and he sneered—actually sneered—at Margot as she walked into his kitchen.

“What are you doing in ma’ kitchen?” he demanded in an exaggerated French accent. “I tell you before. No outside staff when I am creating.”

“Jean, would you explain to me why there is a shrimp tower in the middle of my venue?”

“I was overcome by the muse this morning. I decide to build you a shrimp tower. Only four hundred dollars extra. I do you favor, eh?”

“Wait. Is that shrimp salad on the crostini?” Margot asked, stopping a waiter before he left with his tray of appetizers. “Because we agreed on poached quail eggs. Mrs. Sutter, the hostess of tonight’s event, whom you’ve cooked for on several occasions, is allergic to shrimp. As in, she can’t even be around people who are eating shrimp because she might come into contact with the proteins. I wrote it on everything. Everything.”

Margot motioned to the field refrigeration unit where she had taped a neon-green sign that read PLEASE REMEMBER THAT MRS. SUTTER IS HIGHLY ALLERGIC TO SHRIMP.

Jean waved her off. “I do not read the cards. My sous chef reads the cards.”

“Jean. Drop the French accent that we both know is about as real as that ridiculous hairpiece and tell me what you are feeding the mayor’s wife.”

The chef, whose real name was John Dill, shrugged and in his natural, Midwestern voice said, “The market didn’t have enough quail eggs, so I took the shrimp. It’s not a big deal. If she’s allergic, she’ll know not to touch it. People make too much of their food allergies anyway.”

“It’s just lovely to know that someone with that attitude is making food for innocent bystanders,” Margot snapped. She called out loud enough for the entire kitchen staff to hear, “Eighty-six the shrimp crostini. Throw them out and take the bags out of the tent. All of you wash your hands—twice—and any utensils that have touched the shrimp—also twice. I need one uncontaminated staff member to make a special shrimp-free plate of food for Mrs. Sutter so we can feed her tonight without poisoning her. Get it done, now.”

Jean was seething, but Margot didn’t give a single damn. Mandy popped through the plastic curtain, a stricken expression on her angular face.

“There’s a problem with the tower,” she said. “It’s too heavy to move. But they’re working on disassembling the shrimp trays to bring them back in before people notice.”

“I don’t care if it’s made of concrete. I need it—” Margot’s response was cut short by a strange honking ruckus from the greenhouse, followed by screams and crashing . . . and running?

One of Margot’s golden eyebrows rose. “What is that?”

Mandy grimaced. “Don’t flamingos eat shrimp?”

Margot dropped her clipboard and her headset to the ground and scrambled through the plastic curtain. “Oh, no.”

The flamingos were making a run at the shrimp tower, pink wings flapping, pecking at the waiters who were attempting to remove the shellfish. The guests were falling all over one another trying to get away from the shrimp-frenzied birds and in the process had knocked over several cocktail tables and the votive candles on top. Those candles had set fire to the tablecloths, which set off the greenhouse’s sprinklers and alarms. The parrots did not appreciate the clanging alarms or the sudden scramble of people. They broke free from their perches and were flying around the greenhouse, leaving “deposits” on the guests in protest. Oh, and Mrs. Sutter was purple and covered in hives.

Margot gave herself ten seconds to surrender to the panic. She let her stomach churn. She let her ice-cold hands shake. She allowed herself to hear everything and nothing all at once. In her head, she saw her career going up in flames with the tablecloths. The promotion and partnership she’d worked for were disappearing before her eyes in puffs of smoke. Everything she’d planned, everything she wanted in life, was slipping out of her fingers because of some misplaced shellfish.

And then Margot put a lid on her anxiety and did what she did best. She put out fires metaphorical and literal. She called an ambulance and the fire department, grabbed the EpiPen from Mrs. Sutter’s purse, and jabbed her in the thigh. Hell, she even took off her pumps and wrangled the shrimp-seeking flamingos back into the lagoon.

But the damage was done. The news photographers who’d prepared themselves for a boring evening shooting glamour poses gleefully snapped photos of society matrons in soaked designer gowns and runny makeup dashing for shelter from the sprinklers. A guest who happened to be a member of PETA started screaming at Margot for mistreating the flamingos while trying to herd them away from (attacking) the guests. And a conservators’ board member handed her an invoice for the thousands of dollars in rare orchid species that had been trampled in the melee.

The next morning, an exhausted Margot sat slumped in the offices of Elite Elegance as her boss, Carrington Carter-Shaw, slapped newspapers with headlines like FLORAL FIASCO and REAL-LIFE ANGRY BIRDS! on her desk. One particularly cheeky tabloid had printed a picture of Margot beating the smoldering remains of a matron’s hairpiece with a wet napkin under the headline FLOWER POWER F***-UP!

“How could you let this happen?” Carrington cried, her carefully blown-out dark hair dancing around her heart-shaped face. “We’re the laughingstock of the Chicago social scene. Guests from last night are trying to stick us with dry-cleaning bills, medical bills—Michelle Biederman claims a parrot flew off with her two-karat diamond earring! The mayor’s office has contacted us—twice—to call our business license into question. I had to move three guys from the mail room just to handle the incoming phone calls. Margot, you’re my star! My rock! You can make a backyard potluck birthday party look like a black-tie gala. You’re the planner I call when it’s clear in the first meeting that the client is absolutely batshit insane. What happened?”

Margot wanted to blame the untested Chef Jean and his “inspired” impromptu shrimp, but ultimately the fault rested with her. She’d lost control of the party. She’d lost control of the food. She’d lost control of two dozen species of birds.

“I don’t know,” Margot mumbled, shaking her head. She took a prepackaged stain wipe out of her Prada clutch and dabbed at a questionable blotch on her lapel. “It all happened so quickly. I—I know, at this point, the partnership is off the table—”

“Partnership?” Carrington scoffed. “Honey, I can’t even keep you on staff. You’re professional poison. I’m going to have to fire you and do it in a very public manner—I mean, picture the polite urban equivalent of putting you in stocks in the town square and pelting you with rotten fruit—so people know that our company is safe to use again.”

Margot let loose a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. She nodded. In some way, she’d been expecting this. She knew it would be rough for a while and she would have to put off some bullet points in her five-year plan, but she could handle this. She had contingency funds and a secret contact list of important people who owed her favors.

Margot cleared her throat and tried to straighten her rumpled suit jacket. “And what, you’ll shuffle me out to one of the branch offices in the suburbs and I’ll organize bar mitzvahs until this all blows over?”

Carrington frowned. “No, Margot. Fired. As in employment permanently terminated. The partners are willing to give you a three-week severance in recognition of the work you’ve done for us. And I’ll write you a positive recommendation letter. But that’s it.”

“But I’ve worked here for almost ten years. I’ve put in eighty-hour weeks. Ninety during the holiday party season. I don’t have a social life because I’m always here. I haven’t been on a date in more than eight months.”

“Yes, I know. That’s why you get the third week of severance pay. Really, Margot, I think we’re being more than generous here, considering the fallout from this fiasco.”

As Margot walked out of Elite Elegance’s plush offices with a banker’s box full of her belongings and a severance check in hand, she told herself that it would be okay, that this was what backup plans were for, that this situation couldn’t possibly get worse.

It got worse.

Stage one of Margot’s plan had been to retreat to her apartment to regroup, polish up her résumé, and compose a list of companies she could apply to, but her unit’s new tenants kept stopping by to measure for new flooring and curtains. Just a week before the “Floral Fiasco,” she’d given up her lease in preparation to move to a newly purchased condo in Wicker Park. Between the down payment she’d saved and the raise she was supposed to get with her promotion, she would have been able to afford it. But the day after she was fired, she’d gotten a call from the mortgage officer handling her condo loan. Mrs. Meade had seen the news about the greenhouse incident and her firing, and informed Margot that without a job, the mortgage company could not guarantee her loan. The only good news was that the mortgage company was willing to return 70 percent of her down payment. So now, with her lease running out and her condo being sold to someone else, Margot was effectively homeless.

And still, it got worse.

Without a job, she couldn’t get an apartment in a decent building. And the buildings where she could get an apartment were not places where she wanted to live. And she could not find a job. Anywhere. Receptionists laughed and hung up when she called the best event-planning companies in Chicago. Receptionists from second- and third-tier event-planning companies in Chicago also laughed at her. She couldn’t get the companies in New York or Los Angeles to call back. Hell, she couldn’t get companies in St. Louis to return her calls. She still had her savings, but thanks to MasterCard and her monthly expenses, they were dwindling quickly.

Her friends weren’t returning her calls or messages, either. And she couldn’t turn to her adoptive father for help. Gerald hadn’t spoken to her since her mother’s funeral three years before. And she’d promised herself that she wouldn’t take a dime after her parents made their last tuition payment. She still had the shreds of her pride.

The shreds were costing her. She was three days away from living in the storage unit where she’d moved her stuff, sitting at her breakfast bar—because it was the only table space she had left—actually filling in a JobLink profile, when a Skype notification popped up on her laptop. The message said it was from “hotsy-totsy45.”

Margot frowned. She used this account for after-hours and long-distance consultations with clients. She definitely would have remembered a client nicknamed hotsy-totsy45. Leaning back from the screen, she clicked decline.

Blowing a long breath out through her nose, Margot continued to fill out the JobLink form. Another notification from hotsy-totsy popped up.

“Still a ‘no,’ creep,” she muttered, clicking decline again.

But hotsy-totsy would not be denied. And given the amount of chardonnay Margot had consumed just for the sake of not having to move it out of her apartment, it wasn’t surprising that her hand slipped a bit and she clicked accept.

“Damn it!” she grunted, trying to close the chat window before it opened. She did not want to witness the latest in creative junk shots currently being embraced by the Internet’s weirdos. But instead of the expected random nudity, Margot’s screen was filled with the face of an adorable little granny lady with a cloud of snow-white hair and Dalmatian-print reading glasses balanced on the tip of her nose.

“Hello?”

A brilliant smile lit up the granny lady’s face, showing teeth too white and too even to be original parts. “Well, hello there! It took me a little while to track you down, but here you are!” the lady crowed in a Southern drawl so pronounced that Margot had trouble processing what she was saying at first. “You look just like I thought you would. A lot like your mama, mind, but you got a bit of your daddy in there, too. Of course, I thought you’d be a little more polished up, but I’m guessing you haven’t left your house in a while.”

Margot caught sight of her appearance in the little preview window in the corner of the screen and winced. She looked like someone who was unemployed. She was wearing a grubby Northwestern sweatshirt. Her carefully highlighted blond hair was piled into a haphazard topknot. She was wearing her thick-rimmed black glasses, making her hazel eyes look owlish and too big for her face. She hadn’t worn makeup in days, so her skin had taken on a cheesy appearance in the blue light of the computer screen.

“I’m sorry, do you know my parents?” she asked. As friendly as this lady might be, she didn’t exactly look to be Linda and Gerald’s speed. Linda McCready, a nobody from nowhere with traces of a Low Country accent and a toddler daughter in tow, had managed to snag Gerald Cary, MD, while she was working as the records clerk in the hospital where the handsome British expat practiced surgery. She had spent considerable time and energy clawing her way into the upper middle circles of Chicago society. Linda Cary would have gone blind before she wore Dalmatian reading glasses.

“Well, your mama and I were never close, but your daddy is my nephew, so I guess you could say I know that sad-sack face of his pretty well,” the woman said with a chuckle.

Margot’s jaw dropped. Her stepfather had adopted her when she was four years old. But considering that he was from just outside London, it was unlikely he had relatives in Georgia. “You know Gerald?”

“No, honey, your daddy. What do you young people call it—your ‘biological father.’ Stan McCready. I’m your great-aunt Tootie.”

“Beg pardon?” Even Margot couldn’t be sure which part she was questioning—the “biological” bit or the ridiculous nickname. Even in the South, people knew better than to name their children Tootie, right?

“I’m Stanley McCready’s aunt, honey.”

Stanley McCready. Margot slumped on her bar stool. She’d never met her father’s family. Linda had made no secret of her “unfortunate” first marriage to a man named McCready, but she’d referred to it as a youthful mistake she’d corrected when Margot was barely three years old. Stanley was a heavy drinker, Linda insisted, a train wreck of a man who couldn’t provide for them. After Linda left, he’d almost immediately given up his rights to his daughter without so much as a court motion.

Margot didn’t know where he lived. She couldn’t remember what he looked like. Her mother had never even shown her a picture, insisting that it would be disloyal to Gerald. Neither Mr. McCready nor his family had bothered to contact her in thirty years, which was fine with Margot. She didn’t have room in her life for an irresponsible drunk who couldn’t be bothered to send so much as a birthday card. And frankly, she resented the idea that her father’s family only reached out now, when she was at her lowest.

And it wasn’t even her father, just some wacky great-aunt with a ridiculous name.

“You know, I thought you’d have that nasal-sounding Chicago accent, but you sound like you should be having tea with the queen. So proper and prim. I suppose that’s your mama in ya. Did she make you take those diction lessons?”

“No, I just like using all the letter sounds.”

The woman snorted a bit and said, “My point is, honey, I’ve been looking for you for weeks now, after I saw the video of your party on YouTube. I spotted you and knew you had to be Linda’s daughter.”

“YouTube?” Margot winced. “How many hits did it get?”

“Hundreds of thousands! Honey, you’re your own meme!” Tootie exclaimed. Suddenly, a window popped up in the corner of Margot’s screen, showing one of the press photos of Margot herding the flamingos away from the shrimp tower with giant print reading NO CAN HAZ SHRIMP, FLAMINGOZ! NO CAN HAZ!

Margot buried her face in her hands. She’d spent most of her twenties carefully policing her own social media posts so as not to damage her professional reputation. And now this. Also, her great-aunt seemed to be awfully tech savvy for a woman in her eighties.

“Well, thanks for contacting me and mocking me with age-appropriate Internet humor . . . and dredging up a bunch of unresolved emotional issues,” Margot muttered. “But I’m going to have to sign off now.”

“Oh, sure, honey, I’m sure you’re busy with your job search. How’s that going?”

“I’ve submitted quite a lot of résumés,” Margot said, trying to sound casual.

“Any interviews yet?” Tootie pressed.

Margot floundered a bit while searching for an answer. “It’s early yet. You don’t want people to think you’re too eager.”

“Not one call back, huh?”

Margot pursed her lips. “Not one.”

“Well, that’s just fine, because I have a proposition for you.”

Margot’s instinct to say no right that second was quelled when the bank paperwork that showed her checking account balance caught her eye. “What sort of proposition?”

“We need an event planner here at the family business. We’d be willing to provide room, board, and a generous salary.”

“How generous?”

“Well, now, you’ve got to remember that the cost of living is much lower here as opposed to the big city,” Tootie cautioned.

“How generous?” Margot asked again, and Tootie’s blue eyes sparkled behind those reading glasses.

“Here, I’ll send you the compensation package the family put together.”

Another box popped up on Margot’s screen. She clicked on the file and grimaced at the salary, which was about one-quarter of what she’d made at Elite Elegance. “How much lower is the cost of living there? Also, where is ‘there’?”

“Did you notice that the package includes health insurance?” Tootie asked. “When does your coverage run out?”

“Soon,” Margot grumbled. “Also, I noticed you didn’t answer the question about location.”

“And I’m guessin’ from the packing boxes in the background that your lease runs out pretty soon, too. So really, I could see why you would want to stay where you would be homeless and at risk of huge medical bills, in a city where you could be mugged or run down by a taxi or have a windowpane fall on you from twenty stories up. That’s far preferable to coming down to Georgia, to a town where the crime rate is next to zero.”

Margot had never passed the Mason-Dixon Line, not even to Florida. Her mother had always insisted on family vacations to Lake Geneva, to New York, to France. Anyone could go to Disney World, she’d told Margot; Linda was trying to give Margot the world. Margot didn’t know how well she would function in a rural environment, much less a place where she would constantly hear the banjo music from Deliverance in the back of her head.

“But my life is here. My friends are here. I need to stay where the jobs are. And right now, that’s in Chicago.”

“So you lay low for a few months in God’s country, get to know your kinfolk, get that city air out of your lungs, and then relaunch yourself at people who will have forgotten your foul-up once someone else messes up worse. It will be good for you,” Tootie told her.

Margot stared at the offer. Tootie had thought of everything: financial compensation, meals covered, a clothing allowance, and health insurance. She’d even attached a picture of a small cabin on the edge of a lake, labeled housing. And another photo of a huge family posed in front of a lakeside dock. Tootie stood with an older man, holding his hand. Two couples in their fifties stood behind them next to a man with deep frown furrows barely touched by his lopsided smirk. His arm was thrown around a twenty-ish girl with purple-streaked hair in pigtails wearing a black T-shirt with a pink radiation symbol on it. Another couple stood on the far left, a man in his thirties with curly reddish-blond hair hugging a laughing blonde. The sun was setting behind the family and they looked so happy together, so at ease with one another. And it felt like a punch to the chest. These people didn’t miss her at all. They didn’t feel a Margot-shaped hole in their family, they’d just moved on without her. It shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did. She’d spent a lot of time on visualization exercises so it wouldn’t hurt. And yet . . .

She cleared her throat. “The whole family put this together? Even my . . . even Stan?”

“Everybody,” Tootie said emphatically.

Margot skimmed the top of the document and caught sight of the letterhead, which read McCready Family Funeral Home and Bait Shop.

“Funeral home? Wait, you run a funeral home? And a bait shop?”

“Well, it’s more of a full-service marina, but yes! For four generations now! You’re part of a Lake Sackett institution, hon.”

“Why would a funeral home–slash–bait shop need an event planner?”

“Well, the baby boomer generation is dropping like flies around here, so we’ve got more business than we can handle. We’ve needed to add another planning consultant for a while now, and when I saw your video and looked up your background, I knew you’d be perfect.”

“I’m an event planner. For major society parties, galas, charity balls, that sort of thing.”

“Well, a funeral is a kind of event. And some of the considerations are the same—timing, speeches, music, food, and such.”

“Oh, I just don’t think I could—”

Suddenly, the lights flickered out and her refrigerator died with a whine. Because she’d shut off utilities in preparation for the move to the condo that was supposed to have taken place the week before. But she had nowhere to go. And no health insurance.

She pursed her lips. “When can I start?”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MOLLY HARPER is the author of two popular series of paranormal romances, the Half-Moon Hollow vampire novels and the Naked Werewolf shifter trilogy. She is also the author of the Bluegrass series of contemporary ebook romances. A former humor columnist and newspaper reporter, she lives in Kentucky with her husband and children, and is currently working on the next Southern Eclectic novel. Visit her on the web at mollyharper.com.

FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Molly-Harper

MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

SimonandSchuster.com

BOOKS BY MOLLY HARPER

In the World of Half-Moon Hollow

Accidental Sire*

Where the Wild Things Bite

Big Vamp on Campus*

Fangs for the Memories*

The Single Undead Moms Club

The Dangers of Dating a Rebound Vampire

I’m Dreaming of an Undead Christmas*

“Undead Sublet” in The Undead in My Bed

A Witch’s Handbook of Kisses and Curses

The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires

Driving Mr. Dead*

Nice Girls Don’t Bite Their Neighbors

Nice Girls Don’t Live Forever

Nice Girls Don’t Date Dead Men

Nice Girls Don’t Have Fangs

The Naked Werewolf Series

How to Run with a Naked Werewolf

The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf

How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf

The Bluegrass Series

Snow Falling on Bluegrass*

Rhythm and Bluegrass*

My Bluegrass Baby*

Also

Better Homes and Hauntings

And One Last Thing . . .

Available from Pocket Books

*ebook only

We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

Pocket Star Books

An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2017 by Molly Harper White

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Pocket Star Books ebook edition July 2017

POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

Interior design by Carly Loman

Cover design by Emma A. Van Deun

Cover photographs by Stocksy/Jojo Jovanovic (woman); Shutterstock/Molotok289 (man); Shutterstock/Stefano Cavoretto (necklace)

ISBN 978-1-4767-9441-9

Table of Contents

- Dedication
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- ‘Sweet Tea and Sympathy’ Excerpt
- About the Author
- Copyright