by Molly Harper
Andrea sniffed and turned on her heel toward the ritual-candle section. I snickered and taunted Dick. “So much trouble!”
“Shut it, you,” he grumbled before pitching his voice into an apologetic whine. “Andrea, baby! I didn’t mean it like that!”
Realizing that I’d left my cell phone in Big Bertha, my trusty, weathered station wagon, I made my way out of the shop with a little skip in my step and a tune on my lips. Dick had managed to distract Andrea from her “Our wedding was special” tirade with more good news. After reviewing last quarter’s sales, he’d found that Specialty Books was actually showing a profit for the first time since my former boss, Mr. Wainwright, opened it sixty years before. Even with the stuff destroyed when his nephew, Emery, repeatedly broke into the shop, we were ahead of our projections for the quarter. Most of the increase was rooted in online sales, a result of Zeb’s redesigning the shop’s Web site.
And yes, I was letting Dick handle the bookkeeping. It turns out that ruthlessly calculating profits from underhanded back-alley deals actually makes one pretty good with math. And now that I knew where he slept on a permanent basis, I trusted him not to steal from me.
I danced around the front of my decades-old Ford station wagon and saw that Jamie Lanier, our dairy delivery guy, was pulling up to the curb in his Half-Moon Dairy truck. I smiled and waved as I opened my driver’s-side door.
“Hey, Miss Jane!” he hollered over the blaring of his earbuds as he unloaded his hand truck.
I cringed at his use of “Miss,” which clearly indicated that Jamie still thought of me as the old lady who used to babysit him every summer. Again I say, this is the drawback of living in your hometown. Local hunks have to start off somewhere, and generally, it’s as the kid who would only eat smiley-face pancakes from ages five to seven.
And good Lord, Jamie was a hunk. He had the all-American, apple-pie look that they probably used as a template when they made GI Joe dolls. And the color palette wasn’t bad, either—warm, tanned skin and olive-green eyes that twinkled at me from under the fringe of his wavy dark blond hair. He loomed four inches over even my tall frame, and I found myself stammering and blushing like a schoolgirl every time he stood less than an arm’s length from me.
Did I mention that he was just about to graduate? From high school? Which would make me the dirtiest old lady in the world.
Andrea enjoyed my discomfort each week when Jamie delivered dairy products for the coffee bar, which, again, made me question the value of having girlfriends.
I leaned into my car, searching for the charger cord that tethered my phone. Honestly, it was the only way I could find the damn thing most days.
My head cocked toward the sound of tires screeching. I straightened up to see an old rusted-out black sedan with dark-tinted windows barreling down the street, heading straight for Jamie’s truck. Backing out of the rear gate, his hand truck loaded with crates, Jamie had no clue that he was walking right into the path of the oncoming car.
“Jamie!” I screamed.
Jamie froze and whipped around just as the car struck him. The force of the chrome bumper striking his knees slammed him to the pavement. Jamie barely let out a yelp as his head made a sick cracking noise against the pavement. I screamed again at the wet thump of the tires rolling over his torso, the snap of breaking ribs.
The car swerved toward me. I felt paralyzed, unable to help myself as Jamie lay bleeding on the street. I stared through the darkened windows, trying to make out any shape or feature behind the tinted glass. But the rapid approach of the car’s grille caught my attention. I shoved my palms against the top of Big Bertha’s doorframe and launched myself onto the roof, just before the black car smashed into my driver’s side. The open door snapped off, flying toward the shop’s display window. I landed on my feet as the glass shattered behind me. My heels screeched on the metal roof as I pivoted to watch the strange car speed away.
It fishtailed as it turned the corner to Hesler Street, and although grease and dirt were caked over the plate in a way far too effective to be coincidental, I could just make out a Y and a 7 at the end of the license-plate number.
Dick and Andrea bolted outside, with Dick protectively shoving Andrea behind him as they ran. “Stretch?” Dick yelled.
“Call nine-one-one!” I shouted, leaping off the car and landing near Jamie’s crumpled body. His eyes were wild, unfocused. A scarlet slick flowed from his mouth as he gave weak, gasping coughs. His legs were bent all wrong. A thick pool of blood spread beneath him, soaking through my jeans as I knelt on the pavement.
“Jane? Hurts,” he whimpered.
“Jamie,” I whispered. “Just hold on, OK? We’ll get an ambulance here. You’re going to be just fine.”
Dick, who was kneeling on Jamie’s left side, shook his head. “He’s lost too much blood. Feel his pulse. Listen to his breath. You hear that wet, sucking sound? There’s a lot of internal damage. Even if the ambulance was here already … he won’t make it.”
Dick gave me a meaningful look, and his fangs descended with a soft snick. I snarled and mouthed so only he could hear, “We are not feeding on him!”
“We’re going to turn him, Stretch,” Dick said, exasperated.
“But—”
“Turn me,” Jamie murmured, his voice wet and rough over the crimson bubbles that kept forming under his lips. “Please. Don’t want to die.”
Turn him? I’d never even seen it done, except in my hazy memories of my own crossover into the world of the undead. I looked to the older vampire. “Dick?”
“No, you,” Jamie said, his voice fading with every word. “I trust you. I know you.”
“Should I call?” Andrea asked, holding up the shop’s cordless phone.
His fingers pressed against Jamie’s pulse point, Dick shook his head. He turned to me. “Jane, we need to do something quick.”
“I’ve never turned anyone. I don’t know what to do!”
Dick grabbed my wrist and sank his fangs into my flesh. I yowled as the blood poured from the wound. I glared at him as he pressed the gaping wound to Jamie’s slack mouth. A cascade of red rolled past his chin onto the pavement with little pattering noises. My eyes popped wide when Jamie latched onto my wrist and drew strong swallows of my blood. I brushed his matted, damp hair away from his forehead and slid my legs under his back to let him rest against me.
I was thankful that Jamie seemed less conflicted than I had been when I was turned. Not the least bit hesitant, he was taking blood from me as if he’d been born a vampire. With every draw of my blood, Jamie relaxed a bit more, his strength ebbing from his limbs. He was reaching the last phase, the death of his human body.
Hoarse wheezing sounds filled the street as Jamie struggled to draw breath through his nose. He was suffocating, drowning on dry land as his lungs stopped functioning. He broke away from my wrist, gasping, desperately trying to fill them with air. I remembered that feeling. You can’t think. You’re barely even aware of the pain. All you can focus on is the crushing emptiness in your chest.
“Shh,” I whispered, cupping my free hand to his cheek. His fading green eyes searched mine, for assurance, for answers. I gave him a shaky smile. “This part is never easy, but it will be over soon. And when you wake up, you’ll be like us.”
I pushed my healing wrist against his mouth, letting him take one last weak pull before his eyes fluttered closed. His arms went slack at his sides. His head lolled back against my arm.
Dick squeezed my shoulder gently as we knelt there on the cold pavement and listened to Jamie’s young heart beat its last.
Click through
for a sneak peek
of Iris’s story
THE CARE AND FEEDING OF STRAY VAMPIRES
by Molly Harper
Available August 2012 from Pocket Books
The thing to remember about a “stray” vampire is that there is probably a good reason he is friendless, alone, and wounded. Approach with caution.
&n
bsp; —The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires
How did an internal debate regarding flavored sexual aids become part of my workday?
I was a good person. I went to church … on the “big days.” I was a college graduate. Nice, God-fearing people with bachelor’s degrees in botany should not end up standing in the pharmacy aisle at Walmart debating which variety of flavored lube is best.
“Ugh, forget it, I’m going with Sensual Strawberry.” I sighed, throwing the obscenely pink box into the basket.
Diandra Starr—a poorly-thought-out pole name if I’d ever heard one—had managed to snag to the world’s only codependent vampire. My client Mr. Rychek. When she made her quarterly visits to Half-Moon Hollow, I was turned into some bizarre hybrid of both Cinderella and the Fairy Godmother; waking up at dawn to find voicemails and e-mails detailing the myriad needs that must be attended to at once. Mr. Rychek seemed convinced that Diandra would flounce away on her designer platform heels unless her every whim was anticipated and met. No demand for custom-blended bath salts was considered too extravagant. No organic, free-trade food requirement was too extreme. And the lady liked her sexual aids to taste of summer fruits.
I surveyed the contents of the cart against the list. Iron supplements? Check. Organic almond milk? Check. Flavored lube? Check.
I did not pretend to understand the dynamics of human–vampire relationships.
Shopping in the “special dietary needs” aisle was always an adventure. An unexpected side effect of the Great Coming Out in 1999 was the emergence of all-night industries, special products, and cottage businesses, like mine, that catered to the needs of “Undead Americans.” Companies were tripping over one another to come up with products for a spanking new marketing demographic: synthetic blood, protein additives, dental care accessories, lifelike bronzers. The problem was that those companies still hadn’t figured out packaging for the undead, and tended to jump on bizarre trending bandwagons—the most recent being a brand of plasma concentrate that came pouring out of what looked liked Kewpie dolls. You had to flip back the head to open it.
It’s just as creepy as it sounds, if not more so.
Between that and the sporty, aggressively neon tubes of Razor Wire Floss, the clear bubble-shaped pots of Solar Shield SPF-500 sunblock, and the black Gothic boxes of Forever Smooth moisturizing serum, the vampire aisle was ground zero for visual overstimulation.
I stopped in my tracks, pulling my cart to an abrupt halt in the middle of the pharmacy section as I recalled that Rychek’s girlfriend was a vegan. I started to review the label to determine whether the flavored lube was an animal by-product. But I found that I honestly didn’t care. It was 4:20, which meant I had an hour to drop this stuff by Mr. Rychek’s house, drop the service contracts by a new client’s house in Deer Haven, and then get to Half-Moon Hollow High for the volleyball booster meeting. Such was the exotic and glamorous life as the Hollow’s only daytime vampire concierge.
My company, Beeline, was part special-event coordinator, part concierge service, part personal organizer. I took care of all the little details vampires didn’t have time for, or just didn’t want to deal with themselves. Though it was appropriate, I tried avoiding the term “daywalker” unless dealing with established clients. It turns out that if you put an ad for a daywalker service in the yellow pages, you get a lot of calls from people who expect you to scoop Fluffy’s sidewalk leavings. And I was allergic to dogs, and their leavings.
On my sprint to the checkout aisle, I cast a longing glance at the candy aisle and its many forbidden, sugary pleasures. With my compulsive sweet tooth, I did not discriminate against chocolate, gummies, taffy, lollipops, or even those weird so-sour-the-citric-acid-burns-off-your-taste-buds torture candies. But between Gigi’s worries about the potential for adult-onset diabetes in our gene pool and my tendency toward what I prefer to call “curviness,” I only broke into the various candy caches I had stashed around the house under great personal stress. Or if it was a weekday.
Placating myself with a piece of fruity sugarless gum, I whizzed through the express lane and loaded Mr. Rychek’s weekend supplies into what my sister, Gigi, in all her seventeen-year-old sarcastic glory, called the Dorkmobile. I agreed that an enormous yellow minivan was not exactly a sexy car. But until she could suggest another way to haul cases of synthetic blood, Gothic-themed wedding cakes, and, once, a pet crate large enough for a Bengal tiger, I’d told Gigi that she had to suck it up and ride shotgun in the Dorkmobile. The next fall, she’d used her earnings from the Half-Moon Hollow Country Club golf course snack bar to buy a secondhand VW bug. Never underestimate a teenager’s work ethic if the end result is averted embarrassment.
I used my security pass to get past the gate into Deer Haven, a private, secure subdivision inhabited entirely by vampires and their human pets. It was always a little spooky, driving through this perfectly maintained, cookie-cutter ghost-suburb during the day. The streets and driveways were empty. The windows were shuttered tight against the sunlight. Sometimes, I expected tumbleweeds to come bouncing past my car. Then again, I’d never seen the neighborhood awake and hopping after dark. I made it a policy to be well out of my clients’ homes before the sun set. With the exception of the clients whose newly legal weddings I helped plan, I rarely saw any of them face-to-face. I allowed my wedding clients a little more leeway because they were generally too distracted by their own issues to bother nibbling on me. And, still, I only met with them in public places with a lot of witnesses present.
Though it had been nearly ten years since the Great Coming Out and vampire–human relations were vastly improved since the early pitchfork-and-torch days, some vampires were still a bit touchy about humans’ efforts to wipe out their species. They refused to let any human they hadn’t met in person near their home while they were sleeping and vulnerable.
After years of working with them, I had no remaining romantic notions about vampires. They had the same capacity for good and evil that humans do. And despite what most TV evangelists preached, I believed they had souls. The problem was that the cruelest of tendencies can emerge when a person is no longer restricted to the “no biting, no using people as food” rules humans insist upon. If you were a jerk in your original life, you’re probably going to be a bigger undead jerk. If you were a decent person, you’re probably not going to change much beyond your diet and skin-care regimen.
With vampires, you had to be able to operate from a distance, whether that distance was physical or emotional. My business was built on guarded, but optimistic, trust. And a can of vampire pepper spray that I kept in my purse.
I opened the back of my van and hitched the crate of supplies against my hip. I had pretty impressive upper body strength for a petite gal, but it was at times like these, struggling to schlep the crate up Mr. Rychek’s front walk, that I wondered why I’d never hired an assistant.
Oh right, because I couldn’t afford one yet.
Until my little business, Beeline, started showing a profit margin just above “lemonade stand,” I would have to continue toting my own barge and lifting my own bale. I looked forward to the day that heavy lifting wouldn’t determine my wardrobe or hairstyle. On days like this, I tended toward sensible flats, twin sets, and pencil skirts in dark, smudge-proof colors. I liked to throw in a pretty blouse every once in a while, but it depended on whether I thought I could wash synthetic blood out of it. (No matter how careful you are, sometimes there are mishaps.)
And the hair. It was difficult for human companions, blood-bank staff, and storekeepers to take me seriously when I walked around with a crazy cloud of dark curls framing my head. Having Diana Ross’s ’do didn’t exactly inspire confidence, so I twisted my hair into a thick coil at the nape of my neck. Gigi called it my “sexy librarian” look, having little sympathy for me and my frizz. But since we shared the same unpredictable follicles, I was biding my time until she got her first serious job and realized how difficult it was to be considered a profession
al when your hair was practically sentient.
I used another keyless entry code to let myself into Mr. Rychek’s tidy little town house. Some American vampires lived in groups of threes and fours in what vampire behaviorists called “nesting,” but most of my clients, like Mr. Rychek, were loners. They had little habits and quirks that would annoy anyone, human or immortal, after a few centuries. So they lived alone and relied on people like me to bring the outside world to them.
I put the almond milk in the fridge and discreetly tucked the other items into a kitchen cabinet. I checked the memo board for further requests and was relieved to find none. I only hoped I could get through Diandra’s visit without being called to find a twenty-four-hour emergency vet service for her hypoallergenic cat, Ginger. That stupid furball had some sort of weird fascination with prying open remote controls and swallowing the batteries. And somehow, Diandra was always shocked when it happened.
As an afterthought, I moved Mr. Rychek’s remote from the coffee table to the top of the TV.
One more stop. I had just one stop left before I could put in my time at the booster meeting, go home, and bury myself in the romance novel I’d squirreled away inside the dust jacket for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. If Gigi saw the bare-chested gladiator on the cover, the mockery would be inventive and, mostly likely, public.
My new client’s house was conveniently located in the newer section of Deer Haven, at the end of a long row of matching beige condos. As usual, I had to count the house numbers three times before I was sure I was at the right door, and I wondered how wrong it would be to bookmark my clients’ doors with big fluorescent yellow bumblebees.
Entering the security code provided on his new-client application, I popped the door open, carrying my usual “Thank you for supporting Beeline” floral arrangement inside. Most vampires enjoyed waking up to fresh flowers. The sight and smell reminded them of their human days, when they could wander around in the daylight unscathed. And they didn’t have to know I’d harvested the artfully arranged roses, irises, and freesia from my own garden. The appearance of an expensive gift was more important than the actual cost of said gift.