Accidental Sire (Half-Moon Hollow #6)

I’d hoped that I’d won some sort of foster-care lottery, finding the perfect adoptive family on my first try and riding out my three years with them until I turned eighteen. But two months after my placement, I was moved to another home for reasons I never quite understood. My social worker, a nice woman who always seemed to be rumpled and running late, couldn’t be bothered to explain it to me. Also, she sometimes called me Melanie.

There seemed to be very little logic to when and why I was moved, but it happened enough that I eventually stopped forming attachments. I was polite. I did any chores I was asked to do and rarely broke the house rules. But I didn’t join in Family Game Night with the Richardsons. I voluntarily went to the weekend respite-care home to avoid camping with the Freemans. With the other families, I generally stayed in my room and studied like hell so I qualified for scholarships.

But I supposed I was lucky. You heard so many horror stories about teenagers in the foster-care system. My foster families didn’t abuse me. They didn’t spend the money the state gave them on lottery tickets and cigarettes. But I didn’t exactly form lifelong loving relationships, either. I got shipped from one house to the other every couple of months, toting my things along with me in the same Chiquita banana box and old battered blue suitcase. For some reason, it was important to me to keep that same box, that same suitcase, in my closet, so I was always ready to go. It didn’t feel like they were tossing me out if I was ready to go.

My decent grades and my heart-wrenching story were enough to qualify me for several college scholarships. The rest I made up for in loans. And I even managed to get into the new vampire-friendly dorm. The campus became my home. The friends I made there became my family. No one could take them from me.

Holidays were the worst. There was nowhere safe to hide from movies, commercials, magazines that reminded me that other people were preparing to spend quality time with their loved ones, while I was scrambling to find somewhere to stay when the dorms closed. Last year, Keagan took me home with her, but it was so awkward. Half of her family tried too hard to make me welcome, and the other half asked me weird, pressing questions about where my parents were and why I wasn’t with them.

Summers were better. I was able to get grants to take classes during the break, and that included campus housing. Which was why I was getting ready to graduate a year early—at least, that was before my sternum got crushed by a barbell weight.

This was not how my life was supposed to turn out. I came from a happy home. My parents loved each other. Hell, they had planned me. And then I was brought up by a single mother who never once made me feel like a burden, despite the fact that she’d had to raise me alone from the moment my father died in Afghanistan. Mom was a hard worker, no-nonsense. She taught me how to make a mean banana bread and how to change my own oil, how to balance a checkbook and how to achieve a perfect smoky eye look.

Unfortunately, Mom passed away when I was fifteen. That was how people preferred that I say it. My mother didn’t die suddenly in a head-on collision after falling asleep behind the wheel on the way home from her second job. She “passed away.” It seemed like a ridiculously gentle way to put it.

I was supposed to have not a perfect life but a smooth one. I was supposed to be convincing my dad that there was a boy on planet Earth good enough for me to date. I was supposed to be worrying about how not to hurt my parents’ feelings while explaining that I couldn’t come home to visit every weekend. I was supposed to have people back home who cared whether I was turned into a vampire after a tragic Ultimate Frisbee accident.

Yeah, I was going to have a hard time letting that one go.

I bit my trembling bottom lip and took a completely unnecessary deep breath through my nose. “Suck it up, Keene. You were supposed to have those things, but you don’t, so deal with it. Just deal.”

Taking a Sharpie out of my purse, I carefully wrote “Jameson-Nightengale” on the inside of the suitcase lid. I took out a set of clothes for the next night, put them on the desk, and slid the suitcase under my bed. I could feel the sun approaching, like the strength was leaching out of my arms and legs. Every step was like moving through Jell-O. I’d been fine just a few minutes ago, and now I felt like I’d been tranq’d with bear Quaaludes. Was this what vampires went through every morning? No wonder so many of them seemed so cranky all the time. This sucked.

My arms were so heavy it was difficult to lift them when I checked the sunproof shades. Was there any chance they could open during the day? Those things were supposed to have solar locks on them, but what if Jane had cheaped out on the guest rooms? What if someone came into the room while I was asleep and hit the shade button instead of the light switch? What if I woke up a little pile of ash?

I slumped toward the door and twisted the lock into place. Now I just had to make it to the bed before the sun came up.

Wait.

No.

My body dropped to the floor. My arms, my legs, even my chest. There just wasn’t any strength in any part of me. In the eternity it seemed to take for me to fall, I thought, So this is what total loss of body control feels like. And the last sensation I felt was my face bouncing off the hardwood.

Ouch.

If I didn’t know that was going to heal, I would be very upset.



Jane was just a little too smug about finding me lying unconscious, facedown on the floor in my room. Well, technically, Fitz found me lying unconscious, facedown on the floor, but Jane was the one who brought me blood and patted me on the head in a pretty damned condescending manner. While Fitz licked my face, Jane invited me downstairs to meet “everybody” after I finished the donor blood in the “Librarians Do It Between the Covers” mug she gave me. And after chasing Fitz out, I changed into a nonpajama outfit, because that was not the first impression I wanted to make.

“?‘I’m sure I’ll be fine,’?” Jane said, in what was clearly an imitation of me, while she walked toward the stairs. “?‘I don’t need to sleep when the sun rises. I won’t collapse on my face on the floor.’?”

“I heard that,” I called after her, before taking a long gulp from the mug.

“You were supposed to!”

Walking into the Jameson-Nightengale kitchen was like entering some surreal undead version of a 1950s sitcom. I could hear Fitz barking outside over the jazzy orchestral sound track in my head. A dark-haired man sat at the kitchen table, reading a French newspaper while he sipped blood from an espresso cup. Jane was serving a little girl in jeans and a “District 12 Archery Team” T-shirt, mixing Hershey’s Special Blood Additive Chocolate Syrup into a tall glass of blood.

From across the room, I could tell it was real human-donor blood, A positive. Which was disturbing.