11
While most vampires develop special abilities, some do not. If you run into vampires who do not have gifts, it is not wise to mock them. They still have vampire strength.
—From The Guide for the Newly Undead
The Hollow’s vampire grapevine works even faster than the human gossip lines. After word of my super-secret council tribunal got out, my nights were suddenly filled with calls and visits from my new underworld buddies.
Dick called, but he just left dirty voice-mail messages. Let’s just say if I’m ever in the market for a massage involving canola oil and marabou feathers, I’m covered.
Missy called, but her message was more of the lowdown-dirty girl variety, instead of plain old dirty.
“Jane, honey, I’m sorry if I’m breaking up, but I’m in my car, and you know how the Bottoms are. It’s the Land That Cell Phone Towers Forgot.” Her tinkling laugh rattled my ear through the receiver. Even from across the living room and muffled through the phone, Fitz’s head cocked up at the shrill sound.
“You’re where?” The Bottoms were low-lying areas of McClure County near the river, mostly swampland and marshy pastures, hardly the kind of property that would interest the Hollow’s top vampire real-estate agent.
“The Bottoms, honey, the Bottoms. There’s a little farm down here I’m trying to get my hands on. Just between you and me, the owners don’t know how much the property’s going to be worth in a few years. So it’s up to me to talk them into retiring and letting me take the property off their hands so they can move in with their kids in Florida.”
That struck me as sort of evil, but in the great spectrum of possible vampire evildoing, probably not that bad.
“The reason I called, honey, other than to check on one of the Hollow’s latest undead additions, is to invite you over to my place for my famous Mojito Mixer Monday!”
When my confused silence buzzed over the line, Missy informed me that she hosted this bastion of undead yuppiedom twice a month, featuring imitation Cuban cocktails and real vampire professionals. It was a chance for the local undead to make connections, meet potential pets, and become more established in the Hollow’s “night life.” Missy had a rotating guest list that included a mix of newbies and long-established vampires. I could only guess that her Rolodex was a dark, scary place.
“Everybody’s going to love you! We’ve never had a librarian in the mix before. It will be so interesting. And Dick Cheney’s going to be there. He’s a close personal friend. He mentioned that he met you the other night. He says you have a great personality!”
“Isn’t that like saying I’m stump-ugly in man language?”
“Come on, shug, we have to get you out there. You’ve got to network!” She wheedled in her syrupy voice.
Considering that my social interactions with other vampires so far had amounted to a beating and a cranial route canal, I did my best to decline politely. “I really appreciate the invitation, but cocktail parties aren’t my thing, Missy. Also, I don’t have a job at the moment, so networking with me would probably be a waste of time.”
“Are you enjoying the gift basket?” Missy asked sweetly.
“Loved it. I’ve been meaning to write a thank you note,” I said, gritting my teeth at the rather obvious social strong-arming tactic. Missy was not so subtly reminding me that she’d done something nice for me, and here I was being rude, when all she was asking me to do was attend a nice party. This was the way Southern women worked—all peaches and cream laced with arsenic.
“Oh, honey, don’t worry about it. I know you haven’t had time,” she said. “The first few weeks are so hectic. Working out your feeding schedule, sleeping arrangements. I’m surprised you’re as together as you are.”
Grr.
“Are you suuuuure you couldn’t make it on Monday?” Missy asked. “It’s just a little party. I just want to see you make some new friends, that’s all.”
“I’ll think about it,” I promised.
“I’ll send you an e-vite. You’ll love it, shug. Byeeee!” She giggled before hanging up.
I looked down at Fitz, who was lying on his back, flipping his ears back and forth over his eyes. Not for the first time, I envied the simplicity of his life. “How exactly did she get my e-mail address?” I asked.
Andrea broke our contact embargo and called. Her council questioning was far friendlier than my own, by the way. Ophelia even paid for Andrea’s pancakes. When someone is a link in your food chain, you tend to be more polite to them. Sensing my boredom and distress, Andrea offered to brave the wrath of the council and bring over some dessert blood and her favorite girlie movie. But I had only sat through The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood once in my prevampire days. I considered it a sort of afterlife resolution never to suffer through that again. We settled for ice cream (for her) and Queen of the Damned (for me).
We’d gotten as far as the concert scene when one of Andrea’s clients texted her. He’d been attacked by several quarrelsome “business associates” outside a Dairy Queen and needed an emergency transfusion. As she slid into her strappy black sandals and downed some iron supplements, Andrea admitted a stunted social life was an occupational hazard for blood surrogates.
And my excuse was what, exactly?
I made good use of my free time. I made a strong effort to read every page of the Guide for the Newly Undead, twice. I made arrangements with a company that sold and delivered synthetic blood in bulk, so I wouldn’t have to run out to Wal-Mart every week. I experimented with various fake-blood concoctions that would add some variety to my diet. There were a few bright spots, but it was generally a progression of entertaining and spectacular failures. Let’s just say that tomato juice, Tabasco, and blood should not be mixed. Bleh.
I even looked up meditation exercises to try to find ways to focus my energy and harness my chi and all that stuff. All right, so I probably didn’t take it as seriously as I should have. But I found out I can stand on my head for extended periods of time.
I spent a lot of time with Aunt Jettie or dodging Aunt Jettie. Now that I was aware of her presence, she felt free to move objects at will and follow me anywhere in the house. Undead senses or not, I still got startled when someone suddenly appeared behind me in the shower. We had a long chat about boundaries and the ready availability of exorcism rites on the Internet.
On a more menacing note, it was very subtle, but a few times, I thought I felt someone watching the house. If I stayed still enough, I could sense someone standing at the edge of the woods, and the presence was downright jarring. But by the time I got to the backyard, whoever it was had vanished.
One night, I was reading, and I thought I saw a dark shape move outside my parlor window. I immediately reverted to frightened-single-woman instincts and ran for my phone. I had dialed nine and one when I realized, Hey, I have superpowers, and ran out the back door. The scent was faint, bitter, and somehow vegetable, like bad asparagus. This is going to sound crazy, but it smelled like greed. I filed that away under “Weird New Jane Thoughts” while I searched my garden for the covetous intruder. I followed the scent to the edge of the trees that lined my yard. Whoever was there was long gone. I had to start running faster. This was embarrassing.
I spent the rest of the night on the porch with an antique hunting rifle from Grandpa Early’s collection, just hoping that whoever it was would show up again. Did I know how to shoot? No, but there was always the chance I could club the intruder with the rifle or maybe throw a bullet at him. Besides, it was much safer than letting Fitz run loose to patrol for trespassers. I couldn’t risk my mysterious visitor hurting him. Also, the last time I did that, I lost Fitz for about two weeks.
Zeb finally came by for a visit while I was installing my spanking-new security lights. He watched in awe as I deftly balanced on one foot on a wobbly ladder, handing me the wrong tools and cracking jokes about the probability of me electrocuting myself again. (His guess: 97 percent. He wanted to leave some room for the possibility of me falling off the ladder while electrocuting myself.) But he was very evasive and made vague excuses for not seeing me over the last few weeks. He didn’t tell me about the new girl he was dating, and considering how long it had been since Zeb’s last date, this was worth a mention…or possibly a billboard. I had to extract the information from his brain.
A startling development in my fabulous vampire powers was being able to put together mental pictures while Zeb was talking to me. The signal was patchy at best, like trying to watch scrambled pay-per-view. There was a tingly buzzing right behind my ear, then an image would spring into my mind. Zeb told me he spent Friday night reading the Bible to his grandma. I saw him at an Italian restaurant with an unbelievably pretty girl with sleek auburn hair and almond-shaped green eyes. She was laughing, actually laughing, at what Zeb was saying. And I could detect no drunkenness or mental defect on her part, so I could only assume she knew she was dating him. In my vision, he reached for her hand and knocked over a water glass. Then the picture faded out.
“So.” I sat on top of the ladder, crossed my arms, and gave him a smirk. “How is your grandma?”
“Fine.” Zeb sighed. “Driving my grandpa slowly insane gives her a reason to live. My mom, on the other hand, is focusing on driving me insane…which is not as fun.”
“Still wants to know when we’re getting married, huh?” I asked. Zeb made a miserable face. Ginger Lavelle had never quite shaken those images of Zeb and me playing house when we were little. OK, me forcing Zeb to play house when we were little. She convinced herself long ago that no matter how much we protested or dated other people, we would eventually see things her way and give her the daughter-in-law and grandbabies she’d always wanted.
“Actually, she’s decided she’s mad at you for not following her professional advice.”
“She gave me poufy bangs. I looked like a TV evangelist,” I cried, hopping down from my perch and giving the newly installed lights a testing flick. Zeb winced at the sudden flood of light.
“Well, since you so coldly and callously tossed her aside as your personal cosmetologist, she has decided that you are not worthy of the Lavelle name, and I should instead marry Hannah Jo Butler. Hannah Jo gladly lets Mama give her perms that make her look like an electrocuted poodle.”
“Well, thank God you have someone to make these decisions for you,” I deadpanned as I sat down on a porch step.
“I begged God for a brother, a sister with a lazy eye, anything to distract her, but no. I had to be the only child to the heat-seeking missile of motherhood. Hannah Jo keeps showing up at my house with pies, saying my mother sent her over. She’s been at Sunday dinner every weekend for the last two months. Mamaw is making a Christmas stocking with her name on it.”
“What happened to my stocking?” I demanded.
“She ripped your name tag off and is hot-gluing Hannah Jo’s on in its place,” Zeb admitted.
“Well, good luck to the both of you,” I grumbled.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call over the last couple of days. I lost my cell phone.”
I arched an eyebrow. “And you haven’t been able to find your land line, either?”
“Um, nope.” He laughed nervously. “I guess that means it’s time for spring cleaning.”
“It’s September, Zeb.”
Zeb looked down and to the left, a sure sign of lying, and another image came up. Zeb was walking this girl to the door of a neatly kept trailer. He obviously wanted to kiss her and leaned about twenty degrees in but hesitated and pulled back. So, the girl grabbed him and pressed him into a full-on lip-lock.
I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy. I do not have warm, squishy feelings for Zeb. But I am used to being the only woman under fifty in his life. Also, here were two young, vital people, starting what could be a bright future together. They could get married, have children, grow old together. I couldn’t do any of those things. I was wallowing in the depths of self-pity and general melancholy when the picture changed again. In the midst of his (fictitious) description of a Sunday spent hanging out with his parents, I saw Zeb trying to round to second base.
“Ew!” I yelled, vainly attempting to wipe the image through my forehead.
“It’s not that bad,” he insisted. “Better since my dad stopped drinking homemade persimmon wine.”
“No, you big liar, ew to the image of your over-the-sweater action!” I cried. “You were out with a girl this weekend. I saw the whole thing in my head.”
“You read my mind?” he exclaimed. “That’s just…well, it’s extremely cool. But I don’t think I’m comfortable with you knowing what’s going on inside my head.”
“No one’s comfortable with knowing what’s going on inside your head.” I snorted. “I didn’t mean to invade your mental privacy. Really. I’m sorry. But why’d you lie to me, Zeb? I’m glad you’re going out with someone. Seriously. Is she nice? What’s her name? Where’s she from? What’s she like? Are you going to answer my questions, or do I have to whack you with a stick until delicious candy surprises fall out?”
Zeb sighed, rubbing his temples. “I don’t want this to be weird.”
“I can’t make any guarantees, but let’s give it a shot.”
“Janie, I’ve been going to meetings, and they’ve been really helpful.”
“All right, then.” That was out of left field. Beyond the occasional overindulgence in wine coolers, Zeb had never had what I would see as a drinking problem. And after seeing what running a backyard meth lab did to his cousins, he never touched drugs. “Do you mean, like, therapy?”
“It’s more of a support group for people who are dealing with alternative lifestyles.”
“Oh.” I thought for about a second before it struck me. “Ohhhh.”
How could I have been so blind? I’d been friends with Zeb for twenty years. Why hadn’t I noticed the lifelong lack of a serious girlfriend? His conflicted feelings about his father? His strange obsession with Russell Crowe? He was the only person in the state of Kentucky who actually saw A Good Year.
I threw my arms around Zeb and hugged him tight. It was the first time I’d touched him since turning that he hadn’t stiffened his spine and gotten all awkward. “Oh, Zeb, why didn’t you tell me?”
Weird pause amid the hugging. “I just did.”
“You could have told me years ago. I would have accepted you, not matter what. It wouldn’t have changed anything. I love you.”
Weirder pause. “Accepted what?”
“You being, you know—” I said, trying to find the most sensitive way to handle this life change without hanging umpteen million crosses around my neck and stabbing him. I tried to learn from our mistakes. “But what about the redhead? Wait, is she a he? Because, if so, she’s pretty convincing.”
Zeb made a sound somewhere along the lines of “Wrok!” Then, “What? No.”
Well, now I was confused. “You mean, you’re not gay?”
“No! Why would you think that?” he cried.
“You said alternative lifestyles.”
“No, your alternative lifestyle, you tool,” he grunted, waving in the general direction of my head, which I guess meant my fangs. Or maybe my brain; sometimes it interfered with the way I was supposed to live my life. “Jane, I’ve joined a group called Friends and Family of the Undead. It’s a support group for people whose loved ones have been turned into vampires. We meet every week and talk about how to deal with our feelings about your new lives. You know, being unsure of our safety around you. Making you feel welcome in our lives and our homes. Stuff like that.”
I stared at him. “Why didn’t you just tell me that?”
“I didn’t want you to feel like I was so upset about your change I had to seek psychological help, even though, well, I did,” he said. “But it’s been great. There aren’t a lot of people who understand what going through this is like. It helps to talk about it. I think you should come with me sometime. It might help you talk to your parents.”
“Umm, I don’t know if I’m ready for something that public.”
“It’s anonymous,” he insisted. “It’s a lot like AA, without the drinking. One of the rules is that you can’t talk about what’s said at the meetings or who’s there.”
“This is the Hollow, Zeb. Twelve steps of confidentiality mean nothing. Remember that time Flossie Beecher started a Sex Addicts Anonymous group and ended up having to change her phone number?”
“No one will know you’re there because you’re a vampire,” he said. “You could just be there because someone you know has been turned into a vampire.”
“If I come to one of these meetings, can I meet the mysterious redhead?” I asked.
“As a matter of fact, that’s where I met the mysterious redhead,” he said, grinning. “She belongs to the group. Her name’s Jolene.”
There was a tone in his voice I hadn’t heard before—fondness, pride. Zeb was talking like a man in love. This did not bode well. Women do not usually respond favorably to their boyfriends having female best friends. Pretty soon, Zeb would break our movie nights to hang out with Jolene and their other “couple friends.” Our code of inside jokes would be broken by a woman who insisted on knowing what the hell we were talking about. I would slowly be phased out until I was that girl Zeb used to hang out with before he “grew up.”
I smiled brightly. “Well, now I guess I have to go.”