by Molly Harper
But surely they would understand, right? I could make them understand, if I just explained about being sick and my son and—
Wait a second.
“I’m sorry, did you say Dick Cheney?” I asked, my words muddled by my fangs. I drew my bottom lip across the sharp edge of my left canine. My mouth filled with the coppery tang of my own blood, and I hissed. “Ouch. How do you make these things go back in?”
“Just give it a minute,” Jane said, nodding toward the bottle. “The blood will help. And yes, I did say Dick Cheney. You can hear Dick’s tragic name-related backstory some other time. Because right now, you are in a pant-load of trouble, sweetie.”
“How so?” I asked, my voice the very bell-like tone of innocence. Hoping to quell the burning in my throat, I took a long, deep pull from the bottle of Faux Type O. It was . . . not terrible. Sort of saccharine, like diet soda. You knew you weren’t getting the real thing, but it slaked your thirst temporarily. I could live on this, I supposed. I could drink fake blood every day if it meant I could be with Danny.
“Dumb is not your color, Mrs. Stratton,” the unfortunately named Dick Cheney chided. He was a handsome man, in a sly, can’t-take-me-home-to-Mama kind of way. His expression was guilty, somehow, and apologetic. And given his choice of outfits, I got the impression he didn’t take his position on the Council too seriously. How had someone like him been appointed to oversee all vampire dealings in western Kentucky?
“Please don’t call me that.” I sighed. “Please call me Libby.”
“Libby, then,” he said, his tone gentle. “Would you care to explain to us why you thought it was a good idea to advertise online for a ‘sire for hire,’ agree to meet a complete stranger at the Lucky Clover Motel, and let him turn you and bury you in a public park?”
I grimaced, feeling grateful that Dick had omitted the details. Thanks to the magic of modern pharmaceuticals, the mechanics of being turned were a little hazy for me. And yes, I did see now that this was a tactical error in terms of personal safety.
“We know about your illness, Libby,” Jane added. “Even if we hadn’t run a background check on you, you’ve been on my mama’s church prayer list for months. Plus, I’ve been reading your unusually loud thoughts for the last couple of minutes, and your story checks out, along with your not awesome but not megalomaniacal intentions.”
I turned to Dick. “She read my mind?”
He shrugged. “It’s a thing. Try not to picture people naked around her.”
Jane ignored us both. “Look, it’s not that I don’t sympathize. I do. But there’s a reason we don’t do bite-for-hire transactions. Money takes the deliberation out of the equation. It’s the equivalent of undead prostitution, which is a creepy thing even to say, much less do.” She looked to her companion, who had stayed silent during this diatribe. “A little help here?”
Dick shrugged and actually patted me on top of the head. “I can’t fuss at her. Look at her. She’s all brand-new and scared, like a little vampire kitten with big, sad cartoon eyes. Don’t you just want to hug her?”
“That’s sweet, but please don’t hug me,” I told him, shaking my head.
“Don’t hug her.” Jane sighed. “Dick, we’re supposed to be chastising her or giving her stern guidance or something. Stern guidance does not involve hugs.”
Dick mumbled something about “feeling sorry for Jamie.”
“So what was your plan?” Jane asked. “You get bitten, and a couple of days later, you let your son walk into your house to be alone all day, waiting for you to wake up? No preparation, just pray you can keep your thirst under control?”
“I had a plan,” I insisted. “Danny’s on a camping trip with his grandparents until Sunday, an end-of-the-summer thing before he starts school. I told my in-laws I needed time to recover after a treatment, which they were more than willing to believe. And since they told me they would have him home by four, that means I have until at least eight-thirty before they drop him off, because they’re always late bringing him back. I figured I would have some time to get over the bloodthirst before he comes home. I have a babysitter all lined up to stay with Danny during the day while I’m asleep. I’ve already set up a contract with Beeline to deliver blood to my house starting this week. I took a calculated risk.”
Jane harrumphed as if she was not all that impressed with my plans and/or backup plans. “If this was the result of your calculations, you suck at math.”
“OK, so it was a crappy plan, but I was frantic. I’m sorry. And don’t be too hard on my sire, whoever he may be,” I added reluctantly. “He lived up to his end of the deal, at least. And he didn’t hurt me. He shouldn’t suffer because he helped me. Besides, I’m not really sure how to contact him.”
“Oh, trust me, I’ve spoken to your sire. And he’s not going to contact you, period. If his judgment is this piss-poor, he doesn’t have the right to guide you through your transition.”
“I really hadn’t planned on contacting him anyway.”
“You say that because you don’t really understand the sire-childe relationship,” Dick told me, sounding more severe than he had during this whole disaster of a conversation. “You’re going to need guidance. And if your sire was anywhere around, you would instinctually look to him.”
“Even if he is an enormous asshat,” Jane added.
This made me smile, for some perverse reason. But given the irritated expression on Dick’s otherwise winsome face, I decided to ignore that and resolve the issues I could handle at the moment.
“So what happens now? Are you going to turn me in to CPS?” I asked. “Report me for potentially exposing my son to inappropriate displays of vampirism?”
“And set back vampire parents’ rights ten years because you took the half-assed route to being undead?” Jane said. “No, thanks. The courts are just now getting to the point where they give vampire parents fair consideration in custody cases. If you screw this up—if your story gets out about how you paid some random vamp to turn you so you could keep your son and you end up hurting him, or if you screw up and your in-laws, who as I understand it are already preparing for Danny to live with them full-time, end up taking custody of him anyway—it will be a public-relations nightmare I don’t even want to think about.”
If I’d been capable of blushing, my cheeks would have flushed with guilt. I hadn’t thought of the effects my actions would have on other vampire parents. I would be the first to admit that I’d had tunnel vision, only concerned about myself, my son. I forgot how quickly the media hopped on sensational stories about vampires behaving badly, anything to recapture the initial panic of the Great Coming Out. The idea that my actions might result in some other mother losing her children made my stomach twist with guilt.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to cause trouble for anyone else. I’ll admit that I was shortsighted. I apologize for that,” I said carefully. “And I know that a sincere apology is not followed by a ‘but,’ but I was desperate, and this seemed like the only option.”
“Well, you apologized,” Dick said drily. “Which puts you ahead of about fifty percent of our population.”
“What does this mean for me? A fine? Vampire jail?”
“No. We are going to take a very personal interest in your transition, Libby,” Jane said brightly. “You are going to go through Council bloodthirst boot camp. You will prove that you are in complete control of your thirst. And after that, we will monitor you every second until we are convinced that you will not cause a huge embarrassing news cycle for vampires everywhere. And then we will back off and let you live your unlife in a reasonably unsupervised fashion.”
“Sounds fair,” I conceded.
“I still kind of want to hug you,” Dick told me, patting my head again.
“You seem nice, but—” I shook my head. “Resist the urge.”
2
With your new nocturnal hours, two A.M. feedings won’t seem like such a burden. Morning carpool, however, will r
emain just as dangerous.
—My Mommy Has Fangs: A Guide to Post-Vampiric Parenting
I didn’t expect to just wake up, hop out of my coffin, and walk back into my life. I knew there was going to be an adjustment period. Still, it felt very weird to walk up my own dark front-porch steps, without any need of a light, to an empty house.
Even with Rob gone, the house had always been filled with noise and color. Danny, a classic only child, always managed to keep himself entertained, singing his original silly songs (usually set to “Old MacDonald”) and staging broad-scale action-figure battles that spread to several rooms of the house. But now the windows were dark and quiet. There was no bellowing cry of “MOM!” followed by the patter of sneaker-clad feet as I walked through the door.
I dropped my keys onto the little foyer table I’d refurbished years before when Rob’s parents built the house for us. As soon as Les and Marge heard that their son was thinking of proposing, they had built this sensible three-bedroom ranch on the edge of their property, claiming it was a good investment. I supposed it might have been profitable if they’d planned on renting it to someone, but they hadn’t. Rob just moved in a month before the wedding, no discussion, no debate. He started moving our wedding gifts into the new house. And who was I to argue with it? What kind of idiot turns down a new home? That I didn’t get to choose the fixtures or décor for . . . because Marge decorated it just like her house . . . so Rob wouldn’t have to feel like he’d left his childhood home. Hindsight would come back to bite me on the ass much later on that one.
Bit by bit, I’d reclaimed the house over the years, “losing” a dried flower arrangement here, dropping/destroying a porcelain angel figurine there. I blamed Danny for several of the angel figurines when Marge asked about them, which might have affected me, karmically speaking. Now it was a comfortable, if slightly shabby-chic, little country house. The sturdy, denim-covered, Danny-proof living-room furniture was centered around a big faux-stone fireplace with a gas flame. The adjacent bookshelves were covered in my paperbacks and framed family photos, mostly of Danny with me and his grandparents. My word-of-the-day calendar sat next to my laptop on the old whitewashed rustic dining-room table I used as a desk. An old blue-and-yellow patchwork quilt I’d purchased at an estate sale was thrown over the back of a cane rocker in the corner. Danny’s trucks lay abandoned on the blue rag rug that protected our hardwood laminate floors.
With my new vampire vision, I could see the thin layer of dust on the mantel, the lint bunnies under the couch. My housekeeping skills, which had never been Better Homes and Gardens level, had definitely fallen by the wayside since I’d gotten sick. Marge had tried, well, insisted on helping out at first, but it had made me so uncomfortable, her clucking her tongue as she helped “organize” my Tupperware cabinet, my closet, my mail, that I eventually told her I was back up to dusting my own baseboards.
It was a lie, but it bought me peace of mind.
I opened the front closet and saw that the packing boxes I’d put there a few days ago were still neatly stacked under our winter coats. I’d been organizing what I could, little by little, for months and stashing it in a storage unit near the county line. Each trip out there took so much out of me that I had to sleep the rest of the day, but I was ready to move. I’d even scoped out a few rentals I could afford. We had Rob’s insurance and death benefits we could depend on until Danny was eighteen, along with the income from my bookkeeping business. So while we weren’t rolling in money, we were comfortable.
Not to mention, I could move all of my own furniture one-handed now.
Once my in-laws found out not only that they were not going to get custody of their grandson after I died but that I was a vampire, I doubted very much that they would continue to let me live in their house rent-free. It was time for me to move on anyway. Maybe I should have moved to an apartment after Rob died, but Danny had just lost his father. I didn’t want to traumatize him with even more changes. Plus, my in-laws kept saying what a comfort it was to have Danny so close, which tugged at my guilt strings. And then I was diagnosed, and I wasn’t capable of moving a laundry basket, much less a household.
I had so much to do before Danny got home, a whole checklist of chores I’d worked up before going “underground.” Not to mention, it was two A.M., and I felt like it was the middle of the afternoon. I could probably burn through the whole list tonight: finish packing, find a new apartment, file for my undead identification card online, do this week’s payroll for my clients, and conquer my bloodthirst. OK, it was a little ambitious, but really, that’s how much energy I had running through my undead nerve endings.
Jane walked casually up the steps behind me, as if she wasn’t watching my every movement. It seemed that my supervision was going to begin immediately and run round-the-clock. I supposed I deserved that. The drive from the park had served as some sort of reboot on my brain, and I had come to understand exactly how badly this situation could have turned out if my local Council officials weren’t reasonably compassionate people.
The vampires’ governing body, known for its tendency to solve problems in a swift, ruthless, and untraceable fashion, could have decided that I’d gone too far in my sire-for-hire quest for immortality, no matter how noble my reasons. They could have decided to stake me the minute I rose, toss my ashes back into my little grave, and claim no knowledge of my ever having been turned. They could have locked me up in any one of the rumored underground facilities where “problematic” vampires were incarcerated. Or, worse, they could have made me move to Arkansas.
I’d taken a huge risk becoming a vampire in this way, but I couldn’t keep relying on reckless optimism and the kindness of bureaucrats. Now that my initial desperation had passed, I would not waste my immortality on rash decisions and my own (clearly flawed) judgment. I promised myself that I would be a model undead citizen, more considerate, more patient, more rational.
And that lasted all of five minutes before I walked past the long, narrow mirror that hung over the foyer table and caught sight of a beautiful willowy blonde. I stopped in my tracks, realizing that I was, in fact, looking at my own reflection. I promptly burst into tears, the big honking sobs you only saw on the Oprah network.
I hadn’t looked this pretty in years.
My skin, dry and sallow just a few days before, had taken on the pearlescent perfection of a fairy-tale princess’s. My eyelashes were thicker and darker, fringing my blue-green eyes and giving them a wider, wicked appearance, like I knew a secret and was going to use it to my advantage. The hair I’d lost during treatments was now full, thick, and lustrous, glimmering golden even in the harsh fluorescent lights. Over the last few months, it had become so brittle I’d been almost pathologically afraid of touching it. But now I could run my fingers through it like I was the star of my own personal shampoo commercial.
When I’d gotten sick, I’d told myself it was stupid to fuss about my appearance when I had so much more important stuff to worry about. But it had been a blow to know I was losing my looks on top of everything else. I’d never thought much about being pretty B.C. (before cancer). I wasn’t going to play modest. I’d always known I had a certain backwoods-girl-gone-good appeal. But now? I was the very best imagined version of myself, the girl who mentally dated Tom Hiddleston and accepted an imaginary Oscar.
“It’s a bit of a shock, huh?” Jane asked. I gingerly touched my fingers to my cheek, as if I was worried that touching my own face would somehow ruin an illusion. Her smile was wry, almost fond, as she placed a hand on my shoulder. “The first time I saw myself in the mirror, I thought of it as the bookworm’s jackpot, all of those little problems the women’s magazines promise to solve for us fixed in one big swoop.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Dick snorted as he hauled an enormous Coleman cooler through my foyer. “I was a prime specimen of manhood even before I was turned. Nothing about me changed, not one bit.”
“Except his modesty,”
Jane told me, her tone dry as sand. She pulled my hair back from my face and into a sort of half-updo. “I know the extreme makeover takes a bit of getting used to, but when you think about it, it makes sense. Predators have to attract prey to survive. And how could we could draw in a . . . well, I don’t like to use the word ‘victim.’ Let’s say ‘blood source’—with bacne and a unibrow?”
“I’ve been avoiding mirrors,” I confessed. “For months, I’ve looked away from the mirror because I couldn’t stand seeing that sick person looking back at me. This angry, bitter, frantic woman who was wearing my face. I didn’t even think about how I would look afterward. I was just looking for more time. To get this, on top of everything else . . . I’ll never be able to pay this back.”
Jane smiled at me, an honest, genuine smile that instantly set my nerves at ease. She squeezed my hand, and I felt Dick pat me on the shoulder. “I hate to step on your moment, but it’s not about payback, Buttercup,” he said. “It’s about making the most of the time you have now and adding something to the world instead of just taking.”
I mouthed Buttercup? to Jane, who shrugged. “Dick likes nicknames.”
“I know you disagree with how I went about it, Mrs. Nightengale, but believe me when I say becoming a vampire was the only solution for me. And I will work hard to learn everything you have to teach me.”