Accidental Sire (Half-Moon Hollow #6)

I’d never worked in an office before. I mean, I’d watched plenty of episodes of The Office, but I doubted very much that qualified me for the Undead American Workplace. However, I had spent a lot of time in nondescript government waiting rooms, which made me quite comfortable in the Council offices.

I knew exactly how to adjust to the gray carpet, gray walls, gray sofas, and gray laminate everything else as Jane escorted Ben and me from the elevator to the subterranean HR office. The good news was that being wards of the Council meant that we didn’t need to fill out the usual first-day forms or liability releases. We’d already been thoroughly documented. (And cheek-swabbed.) I mean, honestly, we were already vampires. What more could happen to us on the job?

Our orientation consisted of Jane telling us, “Do what you’re told. Don’t lie. Don’t take anything in the fridge that doesn’t belong to you. Don’t go below the third subfloor.” Short, sweet, to the point.

It did make me wonder what was located on the fourth subfloor, though.

I tugged at the collar of my sensible black cardigan as we waited in Jane’s office to be escorted to our posts. Ben sat to my left, his knee jiggling so hard the couch was vibrating. I wanted to reach out to steady his leg, to try to tell him that this was going to be OK. But he hadn’t welcomed much in the way of sire-ly advice from me so far. Also, the vibrations weren’t entirely unpleasant.

So, instead, I fussed with my cardigan. The Council office dress code was surprisingly strict. Jane had gone online and ordered me several sweater sets, pencil skirts, and flats in dark blue, black, and red. Yes, it was boring as hell, but . . . I was really having a hard time coming up with a bright side to a buttload of cardigans.

Poor Ben was stuck looking like his mom dressed him for school picture day in khakis and a navy-blue polo shirt. He grumbled, “I look like I’m about to be hazed at a private boarding school.”

I snorted. “You’re going to be sold for French clove cigarettes.”

Ben laughed, which made me give him a surprised side-eye. My shoulders jerked in quiet giggles while Ben laughed harder.

“It’s not that bad!” Jane said. “We had some complaints about the last batch of interns and their funny nerd T-shirts and rainbow-colored hair. Some departments tried to dress the same way . . . and there was some misunderstanding about the limits of appropriate humor. There are some really filthy T-shirts available on the Internet.”

Ben and I kept laughing, until he looked over and realized that we were laughing together, and it sort of trailed off into nothing.

Back to staring aimlessly around the room, then.

Just like her home, Jane’s office showed a bit more of her personality. And just like her home, most of the space was filled with bookshelves, which made her huge, ornately carved oak desk all the more classy. Her walls were studded with photos in frames of every size and color. Gabriel and Dick and Andrea and a little old man with two pairs of glasses propped on top of his head. I spotted Ben in a big group picture at what looked like a Halloween party. He had his arm around a pretty brunette with big blue eyes and a gorgeous smile. And he was beaming at her like she hung the moon. This must have been Gigi, the ex. I kind of hated her.

Dick didn’t have an office. From what I could gather from the conversations I’d heard over the last couple of weeks, they’d tried to give him one, but he rarely used it. He preferred to be “on the streets,” with his ear to the ground, searching for potential problems in the vampire community. And when he was in the office, some of what Jane called his “business contacts” in this weird, harsh voice came to visit and usually stole something. Gabriel said the Council lost a fortune in office supplies in the first month.

“Why are you so nervous?” I asked Ben now. “You know a lot of these people. This should be a cakewalk for you.”

“Yes, if the cake was made of misjudged relationship cues and regret.”

“That would be some bitter cake,” I said. He grimaced and nodded. “You’re seriously not going to explain that last comment?”

But before Ben could respond, a young vampire—also dressed in khakis and a navy polo—showed up to take him to the IT department. Ben turned back to Jane, pointed to his outfit and his coworker’s matching clothes, and made what could only be described as a murder face. As the office door shut behind them, I started giggling.

“Is my clone going to come escort me to my desk, too?”

“Yeah, he’s not going to let that twinsies thing go for a while.” After a moment of grim contemplation, Jane turned a bright smile on me. “Let’s get you started!”

She showed me her schedule on her computer, assigned me a username on the network, made me a secondary on her e-mail account, and did various techie chores to get me set up as her full-time minion. I searched through the drawers, finding a wealth of binder clips and Sharpies. There was also a laser pointer, which Jane immediately snatched out of my hand.

“What is this?”

“A correction laser. Margaret didn’t think Wite-Out was enough of a statement when she made a mistake.”

“What?”

Jane pulled out a piece of paper, aimed the laser pointer at it, and clicked the switch. A jet of red light shot out of the tip, burning a hole through the paper.

“Wow.”

“Margaret wasn’t much fun to work with.”

I pulled a face, which Jane ignored.

“Your most important task is protecting this.” Jane opened a document on my computer called “nopelist.xls.” It was an Excel spreadsheet of names, phone numbers, and “reasons for calling.” One column ranked each of the names with a one-to-ten “PITA Factor.”

“What’s the PITA Factor?” I asked. “Their ranking of favorite Mediterranean foods?”

“Their ranking as a ‘pain in the ass’ on a scale of one to ten,” Jane told me.

“Wow again.”

“Before you make an appointment for someone to see me, you check this list. If their name is on the list, they don’t get an appointment. Make any excuse you have to. You have to check my schedule. I’m booked up with meetings. I’m traveling. I’m having an emergency dental crown installed on a chipped fang. Whatever. Just make it believable, and shield me from the crazy. I deal with enough of it in the business I’m supposed to handle.”

“I will do my best.”

“And I’ll give you weekly updates, because the list grows like shower mold.”

“Ew. And that’s awful.”

“Heavy is the ass that sits in the big chair,” she said, shrugging.

“I am ninety percent sure that is not the expression.”

Jane waved me off as she walked back into her office. “Agree to disagree.”



From what I could see, the administrative job focused on keeping Jane on task and on schedule and preventing her from being annoyed. Also, I provided her with a chocolate-based coffee-blood concoction every night at two A.M. That was very important. To humanity.