Vampire Innocent (Book 10): A Vampire’s Guide To Adulting

by Cox, Matthew S.

  I fidget. “Are you warning me not to become part of their society?”

  “Bollocks. Who knows? Feels bad to me, but it’s in my blood to be on the outside. Not so for you. Maybe it’ll work out. Just saying be careful.”

  “My plan exactly.” I give him side eye. “So, how did those swords break?”

  “Cracked them together a little too hard. They’re not made for sparring. Renaissance festival props. The plastic bit holding the tang in the handle cracked.”

  “Oh. So, umm, how is she?”

  “Taking to it quite well.”

  I continue fidgeting at my hair. “She’s really into it. More than anything else she’s tried as a hobby. Is there anything to worry about here? What’s driving her?”

  “You assume I’ve looked into her mind?”

  “I do.”

  He laughs.

  “You’d look for the same reason I’m tempted to. You’d want to make sure she’s okay. And you haven’t promised her you wouldn’t peek.”

  “Aye. Little bit of jealousy. She feels like ‘the normal one’ in your family. No magic, no pet imp, no fangs—and no, the lass does not want to be a vampire.”

  I breathe a sigh of relief.

  “So she thinks becoming a master sword fighter is going to…”

  “Give her a sense of not being helpless if bad vampires or other strange things try to hurt your family.” Dalton lets a long, slow—somewhat worrisome—sigh out his nose. “The girl’s honestly more upset over not being able to help protect you, Sophia, or Sam than afraid for her life. She doesn’t want to be forced to hide somewhere and watch everyone else.”

  Wow… umm… okay. Saw a bit of it in her while she fought the imps off Sophia in the mirrorverse. “She’s not going to be able to keep up with a vampire, especially as a kid.”

  “I know. Sierra’s not training to go hunt supernatural things. It’s mostly for confidence. Ideally, she’ll never need to fight ‘monsters.’”

  I lean back against the sofa, staring at the ceiling. Yeah. Ideally is right. At least she’s still ordinary. No magic. Mystics won’t be after her. Being ordinary won’t shield her from any vampires I piss off, though. Not second guessing my decision to go home, but it’s definitely why I’m playing nice with Arthur Wolent.

  Gotta protect my family.

  Saturday afternoon, I wake to the chaos of multiple tween girls in the house.

  From the sound of it, my sisters, plus Nicole, Megan, and another voice I don’t recognize are upstairs. A hint of mustard hangs in the air, no doubt from lunch two-ish hours ago. Thanks, Ashley. At least, I assume she fed them.

  Speaking of Ashley, almost the instant I think of her, she screams.

  Uh oh. Not good.

  Still wearing the long T-shirt I slept in, I drag myself out of bed and go up to the kitchen, opening the door at the top of the stairs before thinking to check the weather. Luck is with me—it’s a bright day but not too bright. As in, I don’t begin emitting smoke right away. Ouch. Okay, focus. Vampires grow in power as they age. Aurélie didn’t start off being able to knock an entire room into Derpville. Years ago, she’d have needed to concentrate to charm one person.

  Charm is her primary vampire power.

  Sun tolerance is mine.

  Maybe I can work on it. Build it up. Treat the sun like iocaine powder. Surely I cannot trust the daystar in front of me. Never start a land war in Cottage Lake when vampires are involved—or something. I doubt walking around the Sahara Desert in broad daylight will ever happen for me, but maybe the day will come where I can tolerate Seattle being sunny.

  Unlife goals.

  I stagger across the kitchen and down the hall to the living room, the source of the shriek. Ashley’s standing in the open front door staring out at the driveway… where her little VW Jetta is sitting on top of the Tahoe. At least Mom’s truck is back to normal size—and the windows aren’t even smashed. Can’t say as much for the roof, though. Pretty sure it’s well past being ‘scratched.’

  The unknown voice belongs to Veronica. Apparently, Sophia invited her over. Nicole and Sierra barely look away from the PlayStation at the fuss outside. The other girls appear to be doing stretches from dance class. Snacks, nail polish, phones, and tablets litter the living room. Two tablets and a phone all play different movies or TV shows. I have no idea how anyone follows any of it. It’s like the destructive aftermath of a party from every Eighties college movie, only ‘tween edition.’

  “Sarah!” yells Ashley. “I don’t know what happened.”

  Shit. I stagger over and lean on her, muttering, “Soph shrank the Tahoe by accident. It was sitting in the driveway. You probably didn’t notice it, parked on top of it, and the magic wore off during the night.”

  “I swear I didn’t see it.”

  “Yeah. You had some help not noticing it.” Thanks, Blix. Not sure this is better than some kid stealing it as a toy. “Uhh, Soph? Is there anything you can do about this?”

  She’s balancing on one foot, left leg up behind her, both hands gripping her ankle. She holds the pose for a few seconds more, then relaxes and walks over, completely calm until she looks outside at the Jetta perched atop the Tahoe—at which point, she gasps, covering her mouth with both hands. “Eep! Oh, no!”

  Please don’t be one of those situations where every attempt to fix a problem only makes it progressively worse. Please. I cross my fingers, making wishes upon wishes.

  “Umm. I got an idea.” Sophia steps outside, then whispers, “close the door so the others don’t see.”

  Ashley and I follow her.

  Sophia raises her arms toward the automotive mess. “Ash, if what I’m about to try works, hop in your car and move it fast.”

  Remind me to hug Blix. If not for whatever he did to make people not notice the Tahoe, I’m sure the police would’ve been here already. Especially with Mr. Niedermeyer on the lookout for every possible thing to complain about.

  It’s good Sophia is so humble and self-deprecating. It’s impossible to pick on her for stuff like her appearance. She laughs at herself for being ‘twig Barbie.’ Not to sound too condescending, but when she gets angry, she’s adorable. Sophia knows it too, so she doesn’t stay angry for long before she ends up laughing at herself—the growling hamster, as Sierra calls her.

  She makes an angry, determined face while focusing on the Jetta humping Mom’s Tahoe.

  Weird pink-purple light erupts around us, globs of darker glow whizzing around like comets. It looks the same as when she rewound time after messing up the conversation with Mom about keeping Klepto. Loud rushing swoosh noises come from the loose globs of raw magic energy. Ashley might be screaming, hard to tell.

  The Tahoe abruptly shrinks out of sight, allowing the Jetta to drop back down onto its tires.

  Ashley bolts forward, jumps into her car, backs it to the end of the driveway, and ducks down out of sight behind the steering wheel for some reason.

  Sophia drops her arms at her sides; the magical weirdness vanishes in an instant.

  Mom’s truck blows up like one of those inflatable emergency rafts with a ripcord, springing up to full size so rapidly it bounces a few inches off the ground. Cool. No damage. Only… we have a new problem.

  Ashley’s gone. She doesn’t seem to be in her car anymore.

  “Ash?” I call.

  “This is not cool!” yells a little girl voice from the Jetta.

  “Oops,” whispers Sophia.

  The car door opens. A little red-haired girl of about six, wearing Ashley’s sweater like a dress, climbs out, then leans back into the car to grab a skirt and underpants off the floor. The child furiously shakes the clothes at us. “Are you freakin’ kidding me!?”

  Sophia stares at her. “Is that what I look like when I get mad?”

  “Kinda.”

  “She’s adorable.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like seriously.” Sophia blinks. “She’s super angry but it’s making me wanna
just hug her.”

  Ashley stomps up to us, bare feet clapping on the driveway. “Don’t laugh at me. Why am I so small? What happened to my boobs?”

  “Umm, you’re a little kid.” I pat her on the head.

  She growls. “Really?”

  “Something went screwy with the time fabric.” Sophia taps a finger to her chin. “Mr. Anderson warned me not to monkey around with time haphazardly since odd things can happen. But this doesn’t count as haphazard. Mom would’ve been super pissed if Ash’s car crushed the Tahoe.”

  “Grr!” yells mini-Ashley. “How long am I going to be stuck like this?”

  “Damn, I hope it wears off before I need to go to San Diego. Ash is supposed to be babysitting you guys, not the other way around.”

  Mini-Ashley punches me in the hip. “Not funny!”

  “Aww, but you’re adorable.” I scoop her up.

  She taps her foot on air. “This is totally messing up my plans. I can’t work or go to college this small.”

  “We can’t let the others see her like this.” Sophia backs toward the front door. “Smuggle her in though the kitchen. I’ll meet you downstairs. Give me a sec to distract everyone.” She darts inside.

  Ashley’s anger gives way to nervousness. “Please tell me I’m not stuck as a little kid again. It’s not fair! I just got done being a kid. I don’t wanna go back to not being allowed to do anything. I’m so little, Mom’s gonna make me go to bed at seven.”

  “Relax. Your mother’s not dumb. Your mind is the same, right?”

  “I dunno. I’m about to start crying uncontrollably.”

  “Yeah and? That doesn’t mean you’re mentally six. It means you’re mentally Ashley.”

  She raspberries me.

  I set her on her feet and lead her around the house to the backyard, up onto the deck. After a momentary delay, Sophia runs over to unlock it, letting us inside. We hurry down to the basement. Unused to being the size of a six-year-old, Ashley trips on the stairs, but I’ve got her hand, so she doesn’t fall far, dangling from my grip by one arm.

  “Dammit this sucks!” wails Ashley.

  We retreat to my bedroom. I can’t help myself and take a few photos of her. Gawd she was an adorable kid. Sophia stands there watching Ashley run around trying to grab the phone away from me, attempting not to laugh.

  “Okay.” Sophia claps once to get our attention. “I got it.”

  Ashley stops chasing me, twisting to look up at her. The ‘I’m going to wallop you with a pillow’ glare is so Ashley it hurts.

  “It’s gonna wear off on its own. Time is an amazingly strong force with a bunch of self-correcting powers.” Sophia nods. “Mystics have been trying to make themselves younger for like ever, and it doesn’t usually work.”

  “You are forgetting the first fundamental law of magic,” I say.

  Sophia blinks at me. “Don’t use it for anything I can easily do by mundane means?”

  “No, the other first fundamental law.” I smile. “Maybe it’s Murphy’s first fundamental law of magic. Nothing works as well as a screw up. People have been deliberately trying to make themselves young again, so it didn’t work. This is an accident. Kinda like how they invented floating bar soap. Tons of awesome things are really the products of errors.”

  Ashley face palms. “Are you seriously telling me I’m legitimately little again? Ugh. That’s horrible.”

  “Not exactly. Could be worse.”

  She smirks. “I’m not dead?”

  “No… you could end up being frozen at this age forever.”

  Ashley falls over backward dramatically, then wails. “Noooooo!”

  “She is totes adorbs,” says Sierra.

  “Yeah.”

  Ashley snarls.

  Sophia and I giggle, causing her to snarl again. I’m sure she did it on purpose, so we laughed. That’s Ashley. She loves doing cute, silly things to make people laugh.

  “It’s incredibly unlikely she’s frozen and not going to grow up.” Sophia grimaces. “She might be stuck having to grow up again, but I don’t think so. Just like the Tahoe, she’s gonna pop back to normal soon.”

  Ashley sits up. “How soon is soon?”

  “Are we about to do the ‘when will then be now’ routine from Spaceballs?” I ask.

  Sophia laughs.

  The red hair wildly draped over her face, the sweater-turned-dress, the expression of such a little girl being completely done with the world is too much. I take another picture of her.

  “Stop it!” Ashley whines at me.

  “Chill.” I take another pic. “We’ll tell people it’s a filter or something.”

  “Not fair. I want embarrassing pictures of you as a kid. You have an unfair advantage.”

  I fold my arms and raise one eyebrow. “You forget my father took gigabytes of photos.”

  “Umm.” Sophia shifts her jaw side to side. “Sometime between any minute now and like three hours, she should go back to normal.”

  “Three hours?” wails Ashley. “Augh!”

  “But you shrank the Tahoe.” I scratch my head. “You didn’t really ‘shrink’ Ash as much as rewound time in a highly localized manner.”

  “No. I rewound time around the cars to a point before Mom’s Tahoe blew up to normal size, so Ashley could move her car before either one of them got damaged. Then I let time snap back to where it belonged. I don’t know how it affected Ash. She probably got slapped in the face by a temporal ripple when the time stream crashed back to normal. But… time’s gonna fix itself. She just needs to be careful because it’ll happen fast and she won’t have any pants on when she gets tall again.”

  Ashley blushes.

  “Wrap yourself in a blanket or stay in Sarah’s room.” Sophia looks at me. “I don’t want to risk trying to undo it in case I make it worse by accident.”

  “Wow.” I snicker. “Okay. Umm. So the babysitter’s become the babysit-ee.”

  “No way.” Ashley shakes her head. “My body is small but I’m still the same inside.”

  “We can’t let Nicole, Megan, or Veronica see you like this, though. If this doesn’t wear off by sunset, we’ll have to figure something out for when I run to Cali.”

  Sophia gasps, lip quivering. “You’re not going to my recital tonight?”

  “Oh, dammit.” I rake a hand up through my hair. “I forgot to take you to the store—and forgot the recital was today. Ack!” I pull her into a hug. “Of course I’m going to your recital. The message can wait.” I sigh out my nose. Screw it. I’ll fly commercial. No way will I have enough time to attend her dance recital and fly ten hours under vampiric power in the same night before the sun burns me out of the air.

  “I kinda wanted to go, too,” says Ashley.

  “You still can go. My old dresses and stuff are in the attic. We can find something for you to wear.” Sophia grins.

  “Eep!” Ashley blushes. “What if I go back to normal?”

  “Then you pull a Hulk smash and rip out of the dress.” I laugh.

  “Umm. No thanks. I’ll hide in your room until normal returns.” She shivers.

  “You’re going to be waiting a long time.” I wag my eyebrows.

  Ashley flops flat on her back again. “Ugh. Why is life so crazy?”

  “Are you sure this is going to wear off?” I ask.

  Sophia nods. “Yep. Eventually.”

  “At least the cars are no longer messed up. I think Soph’s right. Better to wait this out. Each time we try to fix things, they get weirder.” I grab a unicorn plush from my bed and hand it to her.

  “Seriously?” She stares up at me. “Are you setting me up for more embarrassingly cute pictures?”

  “Yes, but I also know you still cling to unicorn plushies to feel better.”

  Ashley makes the cutest ‘I’m mad at you for being right’ face while hugging a plush almost as big as she is now.

  Click.

  “Oh, pose with the giant teddy bear!” chirps Sophia. “It�
��s bigger than she is!”

  Ashley narrows her little eyes at me. “Only if you swear you’ll never blackmail me with these.”

  I hold up a hand. “Promise. Besides, once you go back to normal, no one will believe it’s you. You’re not six.”

  “Fine.” She stands, turns to face the bear, and whistles. “Wow, it’s huge!”

  A ‘that’s what she said’ joke almost happens. But I can’t. She looks too innocent.

  16

  Last-Minute Rush

  Some psychiatrist would probably have a field day analyzing me squeeing over Ashley.

  We more or less grew up together. She’s always lived just down the road from here, but we didn’t actually start hanging out as best friends until fifth grade after she transferred—got kicked out—of Catholic school and ended up in my class. Fifth grade was what… about ten or eleven years old? So it’s not like I’ve never seen her as a kid before… but it’s totally different being little together. A six-year-old doesn’t think of another kid the same age as adorable. They’re just another kid. Wow. No wonder my parents used to let us get away with so much stuff. The way mini-Ashley is giving me a ‘please fix this’ stare almost causes physical pain because I can’t wish her back to normal right away.

  I’m sure the Littles wielded the same powers of cuteness at this size, too, but I hadn’t noticed back then.

  Sophia can’t help herself and conducts a brief experiment to determine the nature of the effect by tempting Ashley with dolls. She doesn’t behave like a kid, merely has the appearance of one. So we’re not dealing with a ‘simple chronological upheaval.’ As if a chronological upheaval of any kind would be simple. My sister’s official opinion on what happened here is ‘no damn idea.’

  Ash might be teeny, but she’s still got the brain of an eighteen-year-old. I don’t need to worry about leaving her on her own even though it does kinda feel weird to do. However, she needs to stay out of sight and can’t reach anything in the kitchen, so I end up scrambling to arrange dinner for everyone while simultaneously helping Sophia, Megan, and Veronica get their hair ready for the performance. The girls wanted to eat a little early so they don’t end up having gas or getting sick during the recital.