The World Council, an elected group of ancient vampires, realized the stubbornness trend wasn’t going away and came forward, asking the world’s governments to recognize them as nonmythical beings who should not be set on fire simply for existing.
After the United Nations officially condemned vampire hate crimes, the international vampire community eventually agreed that it was more convenient to live out in the open anyway. Bottled blood might have been less exciting, but it eliminated the need to dispose of bodies and explain away heavy-duty foil over their windows.
And in exchange for providing census information and agreements not to launch supernatural war against humanity, the Council was allowed to establish smaller regional offices in each state in every country. Selected local Council members were charged with supervising newer vampires to make sure they didn’t attract negative attention from the human community, presiding over squabbles within vampire circles, and investigating “accidents” that befell their constituents.
Unlike my classmates, whose mothers rushed to shut off the news when they felt the Coming Out reports got too scary, I was unsupervised and therefore glued to my TV screen. And honestly, as scary and sensationalist as some of those reports were, I didn’t have a problem with vampires. In my teen years, I followed the government-imposed curfews but only because I didn’t particularly want to be arrested. As an adult, after the curfews had been abolished, I didn’t let a potential encounter with the undead affect my schedule. I figured that if a vampire was going to make a snack of me, he or she would have done it already. I doubted they would have waited until they were living out in the open to chow down on my neck. So I didn’t let it bother me. I was a woman. I was already hyperalert while walking around in dark environments.
And really, I hadn’t run into that many vampires over the course of my lifetime. They didn’t frequent trailer parks or PTA meetings. Sure, I’d visited Specialty Books on a few occasions (because it was the only store in the Hollow that carried my favorite urban fantasy novels), but I’d only dealt with Jane’s manager, Andrea. It took me three visits before I realized that she wasn’t just a super-pale, incredibly attractive human woman. So really, I didn’t have moral quandaries about changing my life status.
But now it felt like I was having a small panic attack every few minutes. My fangs kept dropping at inopportune moments. I misjudged my strength and reduced a coffee mug to porcelain rubble when I tried to pick it up, and I was sure I would crush Danny’s skull just as easily if I hugged him.
What was I going to do when he was older? How strange and sad was it going to be when we were the same age? Or, worse yet, when he was physically older than me? I was going to outlive him, unless he decided he wanted to be turned. Oh, no, what would I do if Danny wanted to become a vampire?
I would ground him. Forever.
My future seemed more uncertain now than when I’d been diagnosed. And one evening, I had a particularly exhausting night, overslept, and didn’t wake up until ten P.M., which, if Danny had been home, would have been well after his bedtime. This sparked a whole existential “What good am I?” shame spiral that made Dick none too subtly skulk out of the house to safer, less weepy pastures.
“What if I can’t do this?” I wailed as Jane looked on with an amused expression. “What if I’ve completely screwed up? What if I can’t be around my own son and this was all for nothing? What kind of idiot am I? How am I going to take care of him? He’s a child. He belongs to the day. He needs someone who can take him to the park and the beach and other places where the sun is. What did I think was going to happen? That he would just adjust to my schedule and become nocturnal? How selfish was I, doing this to him? And all I’m left with is eternity, watching my boy grow up without me—”
Yet again, Jane raised the spray bottle and shot me in the face with it.
“Damn it, Jane!”
“Well, it’s better than slapping you!” she exclaimed.
“I don’t see how that could possibly be true,” I told her.
“You are a mother who didn’t want to let her little boy grow up without her. That is not selfish. You may have gone about this in an absolutely batshit-insane way, but your heart was in the right place. I say this as someone who, by the universe’s divine wisdom, did not have children, because I’m not sure I could keep small humans alive. You are a fantastic mother. You put Danny’s needs first, always. Everything else is just logistics and clever scheduling. You will figure it out.” Jane put her arm around me. “Did you freak out like this when you were pregnant?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I was weirdly calm.”
“Well, then you’re due for a good meltdown,” she said. “You’ll get through this. Every vampire I know has a moment of doubt after they’re turned. ‘What if I can’t handle this?’ ‘What if my personality changes completely?’ ‘What if I massacre a whole village?’ And those are all legitimate concerns. If you didn’t worry about that sort of thing, I would be concerned about your sense of decency. You know, you might feel a little better about this if you attended a meeting of the Newly Emerged Vampires. They talk about this sort of thing all the time. You might feel less alone.”
“I’m not much of a joiner,” I told her. “I never have been. But . . . other than that, I’m not sure who I am. For years, I was Rob Stratton’s wife. And then I was Danny’s mom. But eventually, he’s going to grow up, and I will be . . . not obsolete but less vital in his life. And I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself after that.”
“I can see that,” Jane said. “I’m going through the same thing with Jamie, obviously on a much smaller scale, since I didn’t raise him from birth. But with him leaving for college, the house seems so empty. I didn’t realize how much he was distracting me from the calm that descended over our house in the last year or two. I mean, when I first became a vampire, it was total chaos. It seemed like someone new was trying to kill me every year or so. And I got used to it. Chaos became my lifestyle. Gathering my friends together, figuring out how to get ahead of the crisis, eventually getting my ass handed to me in some capacity. And without that, I kind of worry that Gabriel and I are going to turn into my parents. After my dad retired, it got kind of ugly around the house. Mama was used to having the house to herself all day, and suddenly Daddy was there, giving her suggestions about how she could improve her housekeeping skills. We’re lucky it didn’t turn into some backwoods episode of Dr. Phil. And that was only because my sister intercepted Mama’s application tape.”
“Well, you’ll always have young idiot vampires like me to boss around, and you work for one of the most terrifying organizations in the world, which has to be just lousy with infighting and potential archenemies,” I told her.
She grinned. “Thanks, that actually makes me feel better.”
“No problem.”
“But this conversation isn’t about me, it’s about you and your quarter-life crisis. You need to sit back and think about all the time you have left and then consider how you want to spend it. Because, unlike how it is for most people, time is something we have in unlimited supply. Look, it’s all manageable,” she told me. “OK, sure, the first night I was turned, I tried to attack my best friend. But I’d shrugged off my sire and didn’t have any guidance. I didn’t even try to dull my thirst. You’re preparing. And preparing is half the battle.”
Jane walked up behind me and placed a firm, cool hand on my shoulder. “You’re going to be OK,” she told me, her voice so quiet that even my superhuman ears strained to hear it. “You’re going to be strong. You’re going to welcome your little boy home, listen to his stories, put him in a bath, and tuck him in for bed. You are more than your thirst. You are a mother first, and then a vampire.” Jane jerked her head toward the door. “Come on.”
“What?” I huffed as she led me out onto the front porch.
“I’ve been so focused on keeping you contained for our conditioning that I’ve denied you an important rite fo
r any newborn vampire,” she said, slipping out of her wedge sandals. I followed her, already barefoot, onto the grass.
“You’re looking at the world with brand-new eyes,” she said. “You can feel every blade of grass against the soles of your feet. Listen to the wind rustling through every leaf on every tree. Listen to the heartbeats of the animals in the woods. Look up at the sky.”
“Trust me, Jane. I’ve done the ‘new senses’ appreciation bit. I haven’t stared at the craters in the moon so hard since I tried that special brownie for the chemo side effects.”
“Can you just let me have a surrogate-sire moment here?” she grumbled.
“Sorry.”
“Now, I want you to bend your knees, dig your toes down in the grass.”
I bent, prepared for some sort of tai chi meditation technique that would help me stop having such a histrionic reaction to every damn thing. “OK.”
“Now, jump,” Jane told me.
“What?”
“Jump.”
Frowning, I pushed up from the ground with my feet . . . and jetted fifteen feet into the air. I shrieked, flailing all the way down to the ground. I landed on my ass with a hard thunk.
“What the hell was that?” I cried, splayed out on the grass.
“Vampire vertical leap,” Jane said. “Go on, have some fun.”
“You’re not going to tag me or put some sort of tether on me?” I asked.
“Do you plan on running away?”
“No.”
“OK, then, go run.”
Unsure of whether this was some sort of trick, I bent at the knees again and leaped. I was a bit more prepared for the sudden change in altitude and landed with some grace about ten feet away from Jane. She gave me an amused little wave and sat on my porch step.
I leaped again, taking off at a full run for the swing set I’d built for Danny when he was three. I ran straight up his slide, jumped nimbly onto the top bar, and with perfect balance walked across the length without stepping on a single swing bolt. I stopped at the end and, praying that my vampire bones would heal quickly if necessary, jumped off the swing set with a flip and a twist.
Landing on both feet and raising both arms in a gymnast’s “I stuck it” gesture, I laughed aloud. I hadn’t felt like walking the length of the driveway in months, much less running laps around my yard for the pure joy of being able to move so freely. I jumped. I flipped. I did a back handspring that ended in a disastrous face-plant, but without emergency-room bills to worry about, it didn’t bother me to watch the bones in my wrist reset on their own. After almost an hour, I jogged back up the porch steps to join Jane, who handed me a mug of warmed blood.
“Feel better now?” she asked.
“That was pretty awesome,” I conceded.
“No more freak-outs?”
“No more freak-outs,” I promised.
“Good. Now, get your stuff together, because your in-laws’ truck is coming down the road.”
A few seconds later, Les and Marge’s F-250 pulled up in the driveway. Danny was home. He was about to run out of that truck smelling like woodsmoke and bug repellent, and the first thing he was going to do was throw himself at me and tell me all about his weekend. The panic welled up inside me like lava. Oh, God, what if I couldn’t do this? What if I hurt him? What if—
“Did you just tire me out so I wouldn’t have the energy to bite anybody? Like you’d do with a puppy?” I asked Jane.
“I regret nothing,” she told me, shaking her head.
The truck door flew open, and my son came barreling across the lawn, a short fireball of crackling blond energy. And even at his insane first-grader’s speed, my vampire eyesight could track every movement he made as if it was a freeze frame. And he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Even in the moonlight, I could see every wavy blond hair on his head, every golden eyelash. I could see every tiny freckle on his sun-kissed skin. And my eyes, my own blue-green eyes, looking back at me, expectant and absolutely sure of my love.
My Danny.
Deep in my soul, beyond my consciousness and my heart, I knew with absolute, concrete certainty that I would never be able to hurt my son. And that little bit of fear, at least, melted away into nothing as he launched himself through the air at me.
“Hey, Mom!”
I caught him and cradled him against me as gently as if he was made of spun glass. I looked at Jane, who was all smiles, leaning against the door frame, arms crossed, as if she had no cause to leap across the porch at any second to stop me from biting Danny.
I buried my face in Danny’s hair and discovered that my darling boy did not smell as beautiful as he looked. Phew. Sweat, sunscreen, citronella, smoke, fried fish, singed sugar, and an undercurrent of exhaust. Danny stank to high heaven, something I wouldn’t have noticed before. Human mothers had to overlook a lot of interesting odors. It was going to take time to adjust to my vampire nose.
“Hi, baby,” I said, putting all the strength I had into not recoiling.
Danny shivered. “Your cheek is cold, Mom.”
“Sorry,” I said, leaning back and looking at him, taking in every detail all over again. “It’s the air-conditioning. You’re a big, tough outdoorsman now. You’re not used to modern conveniences.”
“You’re so weird,” Danny huffed, though he was grinning broadly. I laughed and pressed my forehead to his as the last sliver of fear evaporated from my chest. I made Danny smile. He called me weird. This was a very normal interaction for us. We were going to be OK.
“Danny, get down!” Marge yelped as she climbed out of the truck. “You know your mama’s not strong enough to hold you like that.”
Oh, right, because I was supposed to be seriously ill. I made a big show of struggling under Danny’s weight, letting my knees buckle as I wobbled and set his feet gently on the ground.
“Did you have fun with Papa and Mamaw?” I asked, grinning at him.
“Yeah, we went fishing and made s’mores and went riding on Papa’s four-wheeler.”
Well, that explained the smell of exhaust.
I gave Les Stratton the extreme side-eye. My father-in-law was still a strapping man at sixty, with a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair and Rob’s brown eyes. If I ever wondered what my husband might have looked like if he’d survived to old age, all I had to do was look at Les.
That was a rather gross thought.
“Les, I’ve asked you not to put him on an ATV. He’s small for his age. It’s not safe,” I told him.
Les dismissed my concerns like he always did. “Ah, Robbie and I used to do it all the time at his age. It’s fine. Trust me. When you’ve been at parenting as long as I have, you’ll be able to tell the difference between real danger and worrywartin’. Besides, I have to teach the boy how to be a man.”
It struck me that Rob had learned much of how to be a husband from Les. Dismissal. Condescension. And when that failed, falling back to the old “I’m a man and therefore know better than you, silly woman” stance. There were times I really wanted to punch my father-in-law in the kidneys.
Of course, if I did that now, I would probably kill him. Still, something to consider.
At the moment, I simply wanted them away from the house before they figured out that there was something different about me. So I was willing to let his mansplaining go . . . for now.
“What do you say to Mamaw and Papa for taking you camping?” I prompted Danny.
“Thank you!” Danny picked up his backpack and ran into the house, going past Jane without a second look. He’d gotten used to all sorts of people coming into the house to help care for me. We were going to have to do something about his stranger awareness.
Marge patted my cheek, and I was overwhelmed by the scent of White Shoulders. White Shoulders and blood—warm, delicious, sweet blood that would taste like the cinnamon Marge always sprinkled on top of her coffee. I could sense it, pulsing through her veins, throbbing at the juncture of her neck and shoulder. My mouth
watered at the thought of sinking my fangs into her neck and drinking deep. I could almost feel the warm tide of it slipping past my lips.
“Libby,” Jane said in a warning tone. It seemed that Jane did not appreciate the violent slide show going on in my head.
My fangs dropped. My mouth clamped shut, and I took a tiny step back. An expression of hurt crossed Marge’s features. I concentrated on unappetizing thoughts and willed my fangs to go away. Roadkill. The smell of Danny’s sandals at the end of the summer. James Franco’s paintings.
“You must have gotten your rest while we were gone,” Marge said. “You’re looking much better. Still a bit peaky, mind, but better. Your skin doesn’t look so dull. And did you do something new to your hair?”
“I had it done,” I said, nodding, letting the buttery waves bounce around my face. I couldn’t help it. Marge had been after me to “spruce myself up” for months. Because “you’re looking a little frumpy” is just what someone with a terminal disease wants to hear. “Do you like it?”
“Was it Tammy, over at the Beauty Mark?” Marge asked, peering closer at my face, as if she was trying to figure out what sort of moisturizer I was using to give my skin that flawless undead porcelain glow. If I said yes, that my new look was the result of Tammy’s work, Marge would be in her chair the next day, grilling my poor hairdresser.
“You using a new makeup, too?”
“Uh . . .”
But I was saved by the nosy father-in-law. Les gave a sort of chin nod at Jane, who was hovering by the front door. “Who’s this?”
It made sense that Les was giving Jane the “I think I recognize you from church, but I’m not quite sure” look most Hollow residents did when we ran into someone new. Heck, I barely recognized Jane when I crawled out of my grave. She was a few years ahead of Rob and me in school. And Jane’s appearance had changed quite a bit since she’d dropped out of the Hollow’s “daytime” social circles.