9
Try to avoid conflicts with other vampires until you can gauge their strength and control your own.
—From The Guide for the Newly Undead
The lager drinker had emerged from the bar to watch me get my ass kicked. How gallant.
“I’ll keep that in mind while I’m having my panties surgically removed,” I griped after snapping my jaw back into its socket.
I followed the sound of his laugh, focusing somewhat bleary eyes on the source of that smoky, smirky voice. It was one of those roguishly handsome faces, the ones that usually got me to do their homework in high school. Deep-set seawater-green eyes, high cheekbones, and a long patrician nose that had obviously been broken at some point. He was in his mid-thirties when he was turned, but the smile and the crinkles around his eyes gave him an impish quality. He was the first vampire I’d met whose smile actually reached his eyes. And he was the only one I’d met who wasn’t wearing leather in some form.
“Jane Jameson.”
He grinned. “Like the porn star.”
I gaped at him. “What? No, Jane Jameson.”
“Oh, not as fun,” he said, making disappointed clucking noises. He grinned and stretched out a long-fingered hand. “I’m Rich—”
The introduction was interrupted when my now-recovered opponent sprang up from the ground and lunged for my throat. I stepped out of the way as “Rich” caught the guy by his collar and jerked him back into a sleeper hold.
“Now, that’s not very nice, Walter,” Rich said, folding Whitesnake’s arm into a painful origami formation. I could hear the bone creak toward breaking.
“That bitch broke my fang!” yelped Whitesnake, whose mystique was somewhat shattered by being named Walter.
“That’s no way to talk to a lady. Now, say you’re sorry,” Rich said, the mock patience in his voice in direct contrast to the snap-crackle-pop of Walter’s ulna.
“Gah!” Walter yelled, which was not the response Rich was expecting, judging from the way he jerked Walter’s arm up. I’d never heard a bone break before. It was an experience I’d rather not repeat. Blech. I’d also rather not repeat what Walter screamed at Rich, which would guarantee me box seats in hell, as Aunt Jettie would say.
“That’s no way to talk to me, Walter,” Rich said, grabbing Walter by the scruff of his neck as the broken limb dangled. “You’ve been warned about robbing the Cellar. Norm’s been given permission to dust your hide with silver shot. He just doesn’t have the heart to do it, ’cause you don’t have the sense to duck.”
I protested that all this bone-breaking wasn’t necessary. I was fine, no harm done. And thanks to Walter, I was more than alert enough to drive home safely. Walter called me some very creative names and repeated his anatomically impossible instructions to Rich. Rich paused and watched Walter’s arm set itself, then he wrenched it again.
“Oh, come on, man,” Walter whined.
“I can keep breaking it,” Rich told him. “Now, do you have something to say to this lady?”
Even I was disturbed at the display of testosterone. “Really, this is just—oh, come on. What’s next? Screaming ‘Mercy is for the weak’?”
Rich actually shushed me, saying, “There’s a principle here.”
Walter mumbled something close to “I’m sorry.”
“What was that?” Rich combined the pain of a crooked arm with the indignity of a flicked ear. I could only hope the situation didn’t escalate to the dreaded purple nurple.
Walter shrieked, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
Rich smiled brightly at me. “Happy?”
“No!” I shook my head. “This is just wrong.”
Rich gave me a look telling me he knew that some small, petty part of me was enjoying this. He released a whining Walter, who rubbed his arm gingerly. “Walter, I want you to go home to your mama’s. Have a drink. And whatever you were planning to do with Norm’s money, don’t do it.”
Walter sneered at me, told Rich he hoped an important appendage rotted off, waited a beat, then took off running. Rich nodded to Walter’s retreating form. “That was Walter.”
Walter had problems, Rich told me. He was a living example that being a vampire made you stronger and faster but not necessarily smarter. Turned behind a bowling alley five years before, he still slept in his mom’s basement and made a living selling pirated Knight Rider DVDs. It wasn’t much of a living, because he robbed the Cellar at least once every few months. Norm didn’t even bother locking the safe anymore.
I dusted the parking-lot remnants off my jeans, glaring up at him. “So, I’m supposed to feel sorry for the guy who treats Norm like a human pi?ata and tried to pulverize my skull?”
He shrugged again. “No, but he’s not very bright, so you can’t hold it against him.”
I winced as several parts of my head fused back together. “And yet I think I will, anyway.”
“I like you.” Rich grinned and bowed over my hand in a courtly manner. “Richard Cheney.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking his hand under his nose, making it much more difficult for him to kiss. “Wait, Richard Cheney, as in Dick Cheney? You’re a vampire named Dick Cheney? Somehow, that makes you seem more evil.”
“I was Dick Cheney first. I was Dick Cheney before he came along, and I’ll be Dick Cheney after he’s dead.”
“Sore subject?” I asked.
He nodded. I glanced back at the abandoned bar, its neon sign spattering forlornly against the gathering humidity. “What about the bar?”
Dick made a gesture somewhere between a nod and a slouch. “I’ll close it up. Norm gave me a key for nights like this.”
“How often are you here?”
He laughed. “You’d better get home now, Stretch. Sun’s coming up soon.”
“Not a hot date for years, and suddenly I’m man bait,” I muttered as I opened the car door. Andrea was still napping. I poked her rubbery, inanimate cheek and amused myself by giving her funny faces. “Entrée into the vampire world, my foot.”
As dawn pecked at my windows, I tucked a lightly snoring Andrea in on my couch and asked Jettie to wake her in time to change for work. I knew I would wake up bright and early if invisible hands were yanking the pillow out from under my head.
I took a long, hot shower. It was more than a little nauseating when the gravel was forced out of my healing knee wounds and plinked into the enameled metal tub. I also washed a half-pound of grit from my hair and pulled a seven-inch sliver of windshield glass out of my shoulder.
“That can’t be good,” I muttered, tossing it into the wicker wastebasket. Apathetic about my nudity and the complications it could pose if I were confronted by a ragtag team of stake-wielding teenagers, I hung a thick quilt over the window and collapsed into bed. My last coherent thought was that I’d never retrieved my purse from the Cellar.
According to Jettie, Andrea left for work the next morning wearing an old church outfit of mine, which probably added up to the worst-dressed workday of her life. When I called her cell phone, she was driving two counties over to a client’s house. Amused by my tales of parking-lot fisticuffs, she gave me the background on Dick.
Richard Allan Cheney lived in an old Airstream trailer out on Bend Road. Sort of blew those romantic castle-and-cape fantasies out of the water, didn’t it? Andrea said the mobile life suited Dick’s restless spirit, to know that he could pick up and move any time he wanted. His only fear was a tornado coming along during the day and ripping the house off him.
Dick was an old friend of Gabriel’s, and when I say old, I mean 140-plus years. He was the last in a long line of dissolute men who were good with women and bad with fiscal responsibility. Dick’s parents died when he was eighteen, leaving him with a perfectly respectable house, a pitiful income, and the one servant the family hadn’t had to fire.
He was not exactly what Grandma Ruthie would call a “reputable person.” If you needed it, Dick could find it. But you shouldn’t ask where he got it. I’m not talking about your typical illegal-fireworks transactions. A werewolf once tried to stake Dick instead of paying him for a pistol that shot silver bullets. It was rumored that the werewolf was now a fur rug in Dick’s badly decorated living room. It’s a moot point to ask why the werewolf didn’t shoot Dick with the silver-bullet gun. Werewolves are sort of the crazy cousins of the supernatural world, Andrea explained, not great at making decisions.
Eager for a quiet night in, I dutifully read the chapters on finding blood sources and emergency sun protection from The Guide for the Newly Undead. The descriptions of spontaneous vampire combustion were going to give me nightmares for weeks. But now I knew not to trust a T-shirt pulled over my head to keep me from bursting into flames. (Coats, heavy-duty trash bags, and high-quality aluminum foil would do in a pinch.)
I nuked a bottle of Faux Type O and pored over my personal library for something that would settle me. As usual, I came back to my dear Jane. Whenever I get restless or stressed, I revisit Mansfield Park. Because I know that no matter how rough my life gets, at least I don’t have to wear a corset and live with a stone-cold witch like Mrs. Norris.
I propped my feet on the arm of my porch swing and settled in. I’d barely begun a proper scratching of Fitz’s ears when a set of brass knuckles came flying at me. I caught it a few centimeters from my forehead.
“That’s so cool,” I marveled. I turned to see Dick Cheney—the vampire, not the former vice president—climbing up onto my front porch. Fitz lifted his head as Dick sauntered past but dropped back into the scratching position without so much as a bark.
“I figured you might want them the next time you get into a bar fight,” he said. “I didn’t want to say anything last night, but you hit like a girl, Stretch.”
I gave him my best “don’t underestimate me” look and muttered, “A vampire girl.”
He sauntered over to the swing and made himself comfy, despite my objections when he stretched my legs over his ancient jeans. Not bothering to adjust the “I Know Tricks” T-shirt that rode over some impressive abs, he took particular pleasure in examining my brand-new cotton-candy-pink pedicure. “I do admire a woman who pays attention to her toes. So, what do you have planned for the evening? And where is that tasty friend of yours?”
I tossed the brass knuckles into his lap, drawing a wince from him. “She’s not here, and she won’t date you.”
He grinned, splitting the rugged planes of his face with brilliant white fangs. “She might if she knew me.”
“She does know you, and that’s why she won’t date you.”
He gave me his best panty-dropping smile. “I guess I’ll have to settle for you, then.”
Unable to decide whether that was an insult, I ignored him.
“There’s something familiar about you,” he said. “I can’t quite place it. But you’re different.”
“It’s my shampoo,” I said, a smidge too loudly. “It smells like mangoes, very memorable.”
“No, that’s not it,” he said, then squinted at me and gave up. He poked my side, instinctively aiming at my most ticklish places. “How come we haven’t met before? How old are you? What do you do when you’re not losing fights and quipping me half to death?”
“I grew up around here,” I said, slapping his hand away. “I was just turned last week. I’m a librarian.”
He stilled, as if I’d just told him I was the inventor of the tube top. “I watched a movie about a librarian once. Well, she was a librarian by day, a call girl by—”
I stopped him with a quick lift of an eyebrow. “If you finish that sentence, we cannot be friends.”
“You don’t talk like a librarian,” he said.
“I know,” I admitted. “I’m proof that just enough education can be dangerous. In the right setting, I can argue Faulkner and James Joyce with the best of them. But I think it’s going to take a couple of centuries to polish the Hollow off me. My sire’s pretty urbane. Maybe he can send me to vampire charm school or something.”
“I kind of like it.” He smirked and turned his attentions to the gardens. “I knew your family, growing up. Came to a couple of parties here at River Oaks. I was, uh, friendly with your several-times-great-aunt Cessie.”
I glared at him. Dick glossed over the subject. “The gardens were never this pretty, though. My mother used to have a garden like this. She liked to leave it kind of wild, but you could see the thought she put into it. She loved her roses.”
“So did my aunt Jettie,” I said. “I’m barely keeping them alive. I’m better at reading about gardening than the actual gardening itself. But Jettie liked it when I would tell her what the roses meant. You know, white roses mean purity. Red roses mean passionate love. Oddly enough, blue roses signify mystery, the real mystery being that there is no such thing as a naturally blue rose. Roses can’t produce a chemical called delphinidin, which makes flowers blue. So florists have to dip them in chemicals to turn them blue.”
Even as I was talking, a voice inside my head was yelling, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”
Dick seemed impressed but a little frightened. “You must really like flowers.”
“I like finding symbolic meanings in everyday things,” I said. “You know, the meanings in some Victorian floral guides conflicted, so sometimes couples sent each other mixed messages. I like the idea of some proper English lady breaking her parasol over a suitor’s head because he sent her yellow carnations, thinking it meant affection, but in her book it meant rejection and disdain.”
Dick stared at me a long time before saying, “You’re—”
“Jane?”
My head snapped up. Gabriel closed the fifty yards to my front door in a few strides. He did not look happy. And he was carrying my purse. My feet dropped to the porch. Fitz lifted his head and let out a huff but didn’t move. Dick remained in his casual, cozy pose, a smug grin spreading like molasses.
“Well, if it isn’t my good friend Gabriel. How are you, son?”
“What are you doing here?” Gabriel demanded.
Dick squeezed my shoulder in a chummy gesture. “We’re writing a vampire children’s book, See Dick and Jane Bite. What do you think?”
If looks could kill…well, Dick was already dead, so nothing would happen. But Gabriel was not laughing.
“See Dick,” Dick said, pointing at his chest. He then swept his hand dangerously close to mine. “Jane. Dick and Jane. Come on, you humorless jackass. That’s funny.”
“Do all vampires know one another?” I asked, fending off Dick’s languidly resting hand on my knee. It was obviously for Gabriel’s benefit. The last thing I needed was to be caught up in some bizarre undead-male pissing contest.
“Only vampires who were best friends from the cradle,” Dick replied. “But Gabriel here likes to pretend that we’ve always been archenemies. How do you two know each other? You didn’t lose a fight with him, too, did you?”
My response was not ladylike at all, which pleased Dick beyond an appropriate measure. After a beat, Dick scowled, leaned close, and sniffed my hair.
“You’re her sire?” Dick frowned. “Should have picked up on that. She’s not your type at all, Gabe. She can string a sentence together. And she’s not evil.”
“Thanks,” I said, ducking my head away. What was with vampires and hair smelling? Did that mean Gabriel had scented my hair? Like a cat? Note to self: Buy clarifying shampoo immediately.
Gabriel ignored Dick, focusing on me. “Jane, where did you go last night?”
“Not in love with your tone right now,” I told him.
“I’ll use a more cheerful tone when I have more cheerful news,” he said. “Where did you go last night?”
“The Cellar.”
He shot Dick the icy glare of death. “With whom?”
“With me,” Dick offered. “We had a very memorable encounter in the parking lot.”
“That’s not what it sounds like,” I said, elbowing Dick in the ribs.
“Jane, did you get into a fight with a vampire named Walter?”
I gave him my own lukewarm glare of malaise. “A lowlife, scum-sucking, old-man shaker named Walter, yes.”
“He’s dead,” Gabriel said.
Dick snorted. “Yeah, he’s dead. You’re dead. I’m dead. We’re all dead. I thought you knew this stuff.”
At this point, I think Gabriel was blocking out Dick’s mere presence with some sort of meditation exercise. “No, Jane, Walter is permanently dead. He was locked in the trunk of his car, and the car was set on fire.”
“He could have done that to himself!” I exclaimed.
Dick considered that for a moment and nodded.
Gabriel gave me the stern face. “This isn’t funny.”
I held up my fingers, measuring “this much” humor. “It’s a little bit funny. I thought we turned to ashes and dust when we’re permanently killed. How do they even know that it’s Walter in the trunk?”
“His wallet and other personal effects were found with him,” Gabriel said. “Your purse was found near the car.”
“I left it at the bar last night! What’s going on? Are the police going to come knocking on my door?”
“Suspicious vampire deaths are not investigated by the living authorities,” Gabriel said in a professorial tone that made me want to nibble on his earlobes until one of us lost consciousness.
Gabriel was still talking. “The victims are officially dead, anyway, so the humans figure why bother? Anytime a human kills a vampire, human law enforcement considers it self-defense, something the World Council has been trying to change for years. Either way, the Undead are strongly discouraged from killing one another without good reason. Losing a back-alley fight is not considered sufficient cause to set someone on fire.”
“Why would I set fire to someone I barely know? And then leave my purse next to the car so the authorities could be sure to track me down? And I didn’t lose the back-alley fight, I just didn’t win it,” I corrected. Gabriel stared. “Fine, I lost. But Dick came along and helped settle the disagreement. Walter walked away. I took Andrea home with me and went to bed…alone,” I added when Dick opened his mouth. “Dick can vouch for the fact that when I left that parking lot, Walter was alive.”
“I don’t think using Dick as a character witness is going to help you.” Gabriel said.
Dick considered that for a moment and nodded.
“She didn’t do anything, Gabe,” Dick said. “She was just trying to keep Norm from getting hurt. Even the Council will be able to see that.”
“Council?” I squeaked. But neither of them noticed, what with all the seething and male posturing.
“As your sire, I have to take you before the local council to answer some questions,” Gabriel told me. “I would suggest you put on some more suitable clothes.”
I looked down at my clothes. Apparently, pajama pants imprinted with little cupcakes were not suitable.
I ran inside to change into khakis and a respectable blouse, reluctant to leave Dick and Gabriel alone for fear they might say something interesting in my absence. When I came back out, it appeared that they hadn’t said anything at all. Gabriel was leaning against the porch railing, arms crossed and eyes narrowed at his old friend. Dick was stretched out on my swing, scratching my adoring dog. Fitz had roused himself enough to sit up and place his head on Dick’s knee.
“You’ll be fine, Stretch,” Dick assured me with a wink. “See you later.”
Gabriel glowered at Dick as he opened the door to his car, a rather sedate Volvo sedan. It was disappointing, despite the total destruction of every preconceived vampire notion I’d had in the last week. The car smelled of old leather and not much else. It was a refreshing change from my car, which smelled faintly of bacon cheeseburgers.
Dick didn’t bother leaving before we pulled away. He stayed stretched across my porch swing with my dog’s head on his knee. He even blew me a little kiss as I left. I’m sure it was meant to make Gabriel wonder whether he would still be there when I returned. I bounced between being annoyed and being somewhat flattered that he was using me to irritate Gabriel. I settled on annoyed.
I had no idea what awaited me at the council hearing. After the initial Coming Out chaos subsided, the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead appointed national and state-level commissions to look into suspicious vampire deaths and record the newly turned. Those state councils had local representatives to settle minor squabbles and determine what matters were worth the higher-ups’ attention. They were also granted authority to carry out sentences for the Council.
Gabriel drove in seething silence until we reached the edge of town. As we pulled to a stop on Gates Street, he tightened his fingers around the steering wheel and spat. “I can smell him on you.”
“Who?”
“You know who,” he snarled.
“Is this about Dick?” I finally asked.
He growled.
I crossed my arms, as much to put a barrier between our bodies as to communicate my exasperation. “So, it’s about Dick.”
Not to be obvious, but wasn’t it always?
He pulled me to face him in my seat, his face dangerously close to mine. “I need to make something very clear. I’m not your friend, Jane. I’m not Zeb. I can’t spend time with you if you’re going to be with someone else.”
“I want you to really, really listen to me, because I say this with all sincerity,” I whispered, pressing his hands between mine. “You are not a well man.”
“Don’t make a joke out of this,” he growled.
“I’m not kidding,” I growled back. “What the hell do you mean, you’re not my friend? And I haven’t been with anyone, thank you very much. You’d know that if you really paid attention with that nose of yours.
“Look, Dick was actually really helpful last night. He probably kept Walter from cracking my skull. And he came over tonight to make sure I was OK,” I told him. “That’s it. Nothing happened. I mean, he touched me, but not in the way you’re thinking. And smelling me to determine whom I have and haven’t been around is not an appropriate use of vampire powers. In fact, it’s kind of pathetic. Your light’s green.”
Gabriel finally noticed the changed traffic signal and punched the gas. He smoldered for a few beats before he burst out with, “You know he lost his family’s house in a card game, yes?”
“Dick lost his house to you in a card game.” I sighed.
Andrea had acquainted me with this interesting tidbit. Before they were turned, Gabriel and Dick spent much of their time bouncing between the card table (Dick’s hobby) and the horse auctions (Gabriel’s hobby). One night after several hands of poker and too much of Dick’s brandy, Dick wagered his family home against Gabriel’s prize stallion. Dick was too drunk to realize he was holding two eights, a seven, a jack, and a two, not a straight. Though Gabriel tried to give the house back, Dick was too proud to take it. This was fortuitous, as the Cheney manse was where Gabriel ran when his brothers staked him out.
Between the humiliation of Dick’s loss and Gabriel’s new “nights only” policy, let’s just say they were no longer BFFs. Petty grievances and snarky exchanges compiled until they went from not being able to stand each other to open hostility. Dick’s propensity for penis-related quips and juvenile pranks didn’t help. In the late 1960s, he peppered Gabriel’s entire house with silver filings. For more than a decade, Gabriel couldn’t sit without minor burns to his behind.
So, despite living within a ten-mile radius of each other for more than a century, they didn’t speak unless they had to. By the way, before you start making assumptions, Dick was not turned by the same woman who turned Gabriel. According to Andrea, Dick was turned ten years after Gabriel, after a particularly bad card game. The winner, a vampire from New Orleans named Scat, wanted to make sure Dick’s debt was paid off and figured giving him an extra few hundred years would help. Notice a gambling pattern here?
“You—you should not spend time with Dick Cheney.”
I nodded. “Especially if he’s holding a hunting rifle.”
He tipped his head back and roared in “I’m seriously reconsidering my ‘I don’t hit girls’ policy” frustration.
“Feel better now?” I asked.
“No!” Gabriel yelled as he turned into the Hollow’s mall area. Most of the city’s large-chain restaurants and businesses were clustered here, circling the wagons against cranky local merchants and customers who didn’t understand why any store would have a returns policy that required a receipt instead of just trusting the customer’s word. The neon signs seemed so bright it hurt to look directly at them, their aggressive reds and greens leaving little spots against my closed eyelids. We passed the full parking lot at Shenanigans, and I was struck by how different I was since the last time I’d driven down this road. The Jane who mourned a lost job and a half-lived life at that bar seemed happier, even in her misery, because she didn’t have to deal with angry sires and blood and a murder rap.
“How much trouble am I in?” I asked, finally breaking the quiet.
“I don’t know,” he admitted quietly. “I’ve never heard of one vampire killing another so soon after rising.”
“Do you honestly believe that I could do something like this? Why would I set fire to someone I hardly knew?”
“As opposed to someone you know well?” He snorted.
“I’ll take care of the sarcasm here, thank you,” I told him. “Honestly, do you believe I could do something like this?”
He waited for a distressing amount of time before saying “No.”
“Then why are you hauling me into court?” I demanded, ashamed of the whine that was creeping into my voice. “I thought vampires had this whole lawless-unholy-rebel thing going.”
“Some feel that way,” he said. “Others, like me, believe that if you’re going to assimilate into the modern world, you have to have some accountability for what you do.”
Well, that made me feel horrible.
He stared at the parking lot ahead, unable even to glance in my direction. “Just be respectful. Don’t talk back. Don’t volunteer any extra information. Don’t demonstrate your unique brand of humor.”
“Basically, don’t be me,” I grumbled. “If I wasn’t paralyzed by fear, I’d be offended by that.”