Accidental Sire (Half-Moon Hollow #6)

Ben stretched my polite distance by miles. Not only would he not try to work around Jane’s Firewall of Death so we could contact our friends on campus, but he dedicated a lot of time to ignoring me. Maybe ignoring people who lived in the same house as he did was his special vampire talent.

Long gone was the adorable boy whose heady cookie-based flirting had left me weak in the knees. Oh, he wasn’t cruel, and he didn’t snub me to my face, but I could only take seeing so many smiles die on his lips when he saw me walk into a room. He went from happy and laughing at something Jane had said to completely dead-faced. So I stopped walking into rooms where I knew he would be. I wasn’t trying to be petulant about it. I just timed my day to be as Ben-free as possible. I did my homework in my room. During yard time, I ran at my own pace, which just happened to be fifteen yards behind Ben.

I decided not to let it bother me. I didn’t do romantic entanglements. I embraced casual sex and all its awesome, minimal emotional requirements. But I hadn’t done that very often, because the chances of turning up pregnant or contracting some weird disease were pretty high for my demographic.

I’d always prided myself on not investing in people who didn’t invest in me. Life was too short to attach yourself to people who didn’t really like you. If a friend reduced our interactions to nothing but texts and Facebook likes, I found new friends. If a guy didn’t call, I didn’t make up elaborate excuses about him “liking me too much.” I moved on to a guy who did call. Ben was no different. We’d had the beginnings of something that could have been special, but it had been destroyed by a forty-five-pound weight.

On the plus side, having little contact with the outside world or the people who lived two doors down from me meant that I threw myself at my school assignments like they were the only thing keeping me sane. Because they were. Which was sad. But my grades had never been higher.

Whether it was to keep us socialized or to give Jane a break, some of her vampire friends came to visit. It was mostly her friend-colleague hybrid Dick Cheney, who seemed super-defensive about his name when he first introduced himself for some reason. Dick came off as pretty sketchy when you first met him, like the kind of guy who lingered around campus asking girls if they wanted to go to his modeling school. But he was completely devoted to his wife, Andrea, in that googly-eyed, hung-the-moon way I’d only seen on the CW lineup.

After about two weeks of this, Jane trusted us enough to introduce us to the larger circle of vampire friends at a big potluck. Well, it was actually a test of our bloodthirst, dressed up as a potluck. Basically a training Trojan Horse.

It started with Jane’s vampire friends slowly filtering into the house. There were so many of them—pale, attractive, conspicuously coupled off—that I had a hard time keeping track of all the names. I’d met Dick and Andrea (indecently pretty, with clothes that looked like something on Mad Men). And then there were Miranda and her boyfriend-sire, Collin (uptight and British but yummy in that Michael Fassbender way that kind of made me understand why she put up with his constant grimacing). Then there was a tall dark-haired man named Cal (funny accent, cool vintage rock T-shirts) and his petite brown-haired wife, Iris (who seemed to want to mother me one moment and ground me the next).

Iris seemed particularly fond of Ben, given the way she tackle-hugged him the moment she ran through the door.

“I’m so happy to see you!” she cried, clutching his face in her hands in a grip that I frankly found terrifying. “I mean, so sad that you’re dead but so happy to see you!”

“I’m so glad I don’t need to breathe,” Ben wheezed as Iris enveloped him in another hug. “Because it would be an issue right now.”

“OK, sweetheart, put the boy down,” Cal said gently. “Being picked up like a toddler in front of loved ones is emasculating.”

“Little bit,” Ben agreed as Iris set him on his feet.

“Gigi and Nik would have come tonight, but they thought it would be sort of weird for you,” Iris said.

I leaned toward Miranda, who was seated near me on the couch. “Who’s Gigi?” I asked her.

“Iris’s little sister and Ben’s ex-girlfriend. They broke up a year or so ago, when Gigi was still human. It was . . . it was unpleasant for them both. And then awkward. But mostly unpleasant.”

“Oh.” I felt a small flash of sympathy for Ben. It did have to be super-awkward to have an ex mixed into a friend group that he clearly valued. People took sides or tried to “stay neutral,” which meant they took the side that wasn’t yours. And next thing you knew, there were parties you didn’t know about and hangouts you weren’t invited to, and then your Facebook friend list shrank dramatically, and you were left wondering what happened.

I liked Miranda. She was a new vampire, too. She’d worked for vampires for a long time before she was turned, so she seemed amused-slash-exasperated by many of their antics. And she seemed to understand how uncomfortable I was in this situation, sticking close by to fill me in on this person’s relationship to Jane or how that person related to everybody else. All while Fitz sat between us and thumped his tail against my thigh.

More and more people moseyed through the door. They all sat around the parlor, trying too hard to look casual as they drank different bottles of blood they’d brought with them. Andrea set up a couple of pots of different types of blood concoctions she’d made at home. Apparently, Jane was not trusted to cook, even when the food wasn’t solid. Her friends contended that the original meaning of “BYOB” was “bring your own blood.”

Something about their easy warmth made my chest ache in a way that wasn’t entirely pleasant. And it didn’t help that Ben already knew so many of them, leaving me feeling like the odd man out all over again. Dick made an effort to keep me engaged, talking to me about my schoolwork and whether I was happy with the assignments the professors were sending me—something he claimed was part of his job as Jane’s co-representative on the Council. His eyes just about glazed over with boredom while discussing nineteenth-century British literature, but I appreciated his effort.

“Jane gave you the Council-issued phone, right?” Dick asked. “She told you to keep it with you at all times?”

I pulled the bright pink KidPhone from my back pocket. “Would we call this a phone?”

“Yes,” Dick said. “Now, if you ever run into trouble, I want you to press the one button three times and then hold it down until it beeps. And then you want to get about ten feet away.”

“What’s going to happen if I do that?” I asked him. “Is it like a tracking beacon or something?”

Dick opened his mouth to answer, but just then the door opened again, and the whole room went still. Dick moved between me and the door. A ridiculously gorgeous redheaded woman swanned in, grinning broadly at the crowd.

“Hey, y’all!”