by Molly Harper
“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.