Accidental Sire (Half-Moon Hollow #6)

“So, are we collecting little vampires now?” the man was asking over the newspaper. “Is this your way of answering your mother’s constant demands for more grandchildren?”

“Not . . . consciously,” Jane said, frowning as she slid the blood across the table to the little girl. “And Georgie, do not get used to chocolate breakfasts, OK? The last thing I need is for Ophelia to gripe at me because your fangs are rotting out. I am only doing this for a week, because you won that bet, fair and square. I still can’t believe that you beat me at Jane Austen trivia.”

“Well, Georgie did read the books in first edition,” the man said, stroking Jane’s arm while he gave her a bemused smile. He dropped the paper, and my eyes went saucer-size. This guy looked like he should be rolling around in the sand in a wet dress shirt, staring off into the distance, in a super-classy cologne ad. Chiseled features, a strangely pretty mouth, gray eyes that flashed silver with amusement, longish dark hair that curved around his ears. It was not that Jane wasn’t pretty, because she totally was. I just felt like she’d somehow restored the karmic balance for librarians everywhere.

I should probably stop having these thoughts about Jane’s husband, because that could not end well.

“No one likes a sore loser, Jane,” the little girl intoned, swiping the spoon from Jane so she could catch a few extra drops of chocolate syrup. “Also, my fangs will never rot out, because vampire fangs don’t rot.”

“You just wait until we do pop-culture trivia,” Jane countered. “I will destroy you and everything you love.”

The little girl’s angelic features sharpened as her eyes sparked with challenge. This expression looked familiar. That was Ophelia’s “I wish a bitch would” expression, which was really weird on the face of an eight-year-old. This was Ophelia’s sister, Georgie. I’d thought when Ophelia referred to Georgie as her sister that she meant she’d adopted the tiny vampire along the way as she’d terrorized most of Europe four hundred years before. But no, with Georgie’s extremely off-putting expressions and similar coloring, she had to be Ophelia’s actual biological sister. I would file this under information I would process at a later date when I wasn’t dealing with quite so much emotional trauma.

“Is the new girl going to sit down or just lurk in the doorway?” the little girl asked airily.

“Be nice,” Jane admonished her. “Come on in, Meagan. This is Gabriel and Georgie. You two, this is Meagan Keene.”

“Good morn—evening,” I said, waving my empty mug at them.

Gabriel stood and pulled out a chair for me. Which was weird.

“It’s nice to meet you, Meagan,” he said, pushing the chair in as I sat. Jane poured me another mug of blood from a big thermal carafe on the table. I supposed she was overfeeding me so I wouldn’t try to take down some innocent UPS man who rang the doorbell on the wrong damn night. “Jane has told us little to nothing about you.”

Somehow this vaguely rude greeting in Gabriel’s smooth, cultured voice made me laugh.

“But we will try to make you as comfortable as possible. Welcome.”

“Thanks.”

Georgie stared at me for a long, silent moment. “You smell familiar.”

“Uh, sorry?”

“You smell like Ophelia. It’s faint, but it’s there.”

I meant to tell her that made sense, since I’d spent a lot of time with Ophelia lately. But instead, I said, “Please don’t smell me.”

Which was an awesome way to make a first impression. But Georgie just snorted and returned to her chocolate blood.

“Have you checked on Ben this morning?” I asked Jane.

She nodded. “A med team from the Council stopped by first thing, while you were still out. No sign of activity but no sign of decomp, either.”

“See, you say that in such a cheerful way, but it’s still a super-creepy sentence.”

“Well, the med team is coming back in a few hours to check you out, too. No griping, please. For now, Ben’s door is very heavily secured, because we don’t know when or how he’ll wake up.”

“?‘How’?”

“Well, we’ve never seen a vampire turn after just being bitten. We don’t know if he’s going to be like you or if he’s going to be . . .” She paused to glance at Gabriel. “Different.”

“So take them both to the Council’s lab, where they will be contained and studied and not sleeping in my game room,” Georgie suggested.

“I’m sleeping in your game room?” I asked.

A shudder shook Georgie’s little shoulders. “No. I never go into the unicorn room. Never. But Ben is sleeping in my game room. And I don’t like it.”

I only hoped she meant actual games and not something creepy involving pliers and hitchhikers.

“Georgie,” Jane said, her tone intentionally patient, “we’ve talked about this. Ben’s a good friend of Iris and Gigi. And Meagan here is a friend of your sister’s. We don’t let friends of our friends languish in underground labs so you can play ‘Mario Kart’ whenever you feel like it.”

“Fine,” Georgie muttered, and drained her glass.

“Meagan, why don’t you check in with your classes?” Jane asked, pointing to my laptop bag on the kitchen counter. “I asked your professors to e-mail you some modified lesson plans.”

“It’s Sunday,” I noted. “Half the time when I contact my professors, I end up asking them in person to check their e-mail.”

Jane smiled and patted my head. “Sweetie, I’m scarier than you are.”

“Good point.” I took my laptop from the counter and opened up the Wi-Fi settings, finding one network labeled “Get Your Own Wi-Fi, Shirley.”

“Who’s Shirley?” I asked.

“The only neighbor I have close enough to try to leech off my Wi-Fi signal.” Jane sighed. “She’s eerily talented at guessing passwords.”

“Well, what did you expect with a password like ‘draculagirl’?” Georgie asked. “Honestly.”

“Well, now it’s just a string of nonsensical numbers and letters with one ampersand thrown in,” Jane said, writing the password down for me.

I logged on to my e-mail and found that I did have several weekly assignment lists for my classes waiting in my in-box. I had a lot of reading to catch up on, and my history professor did not accept “sternum was crushed by a flying barbell weight” as a good reason for turning in my midterm paper late.

I also found several (dozen) messages from Keagan and Morgan, plus Twitter and Facebook notifications, and Keagan had actually tried to reach me on my rarely used Tumblr account, which was just sort of sad. The general theme of their messages was “Are you OK? Where are you? Tell us where they’re keeping you, and we will bust you out!”

I replied to all that I was fine, I couldn’t say where I was, but I would Skype as soon as I was allowed. And when I hit reply, a big red “X” showed up on my screen, with the words “Unauthorized Contact” in a very confrontational font.

“Uh, Jane,” I said, “did you install nanny software on my computer?”

Jane’s lips pulled back in a grimace. “Only for when you try to e-mail someone who’s not one of your professors. Or log on to social media. Or type the words ‘Half-Moon Hollow’ anywhere.”