Accidental Sire (Half-Moon Hollow #6)

Ping.

Before I could even open the calendar app, a new message popped up at the bottom of my screen. Apparently, Miranda didn’t have better things to do, because she had immediately sent back a response with the footnote “Sent through a mobile device.”

Hey Meagan,

It depends on who it’s about and how personal the question is.

—Miranda

Well, that seemed reasonable. I typed a quick response.

You mentioned Gigi and Ben had an awkward breakup. How awkward? Like “we can still be friends” awkward? Or “voodoo doll and restraining order” awkward?

—M

Maybe if I could make her laugh, she would forget that I was data-mining her friends’ painful romantic history. A few seconds later, she shot back.

Meg—

That is personal. But considering that you’re working with both of them, you should probably know, just to prevent foot-in-mouth disease.

It was awkward because Ben proposed to Gigi, and she said, “No, let’s break up instead.” At Christmas, around people with superhearing and mind-reading powers. And those situations lead to difficulty making eye contact.

—Miranda

My jaw dropped. Ben proposed to Gigi? In front of her family? He must have been crazy about her! And she was so put together. So nice. And she hadn’t freaked out and turned him into a nontypical vampire. Oh, and now they were spending eight hours a day together in a small room.

I sent a “Thanks” back, which I’m sure, in Miranda’s head, sounded like a squeak.

Maybe this job thing was some strategy on Jane’s part to get Ben and Gigi back together. It would make Ben more stable to be in a relationship with an established vampire whom Jane trusted, with a huge support circle. I didn’t blame Jane. I couldn’t help but feel a little hurt by it, but she was doing what she thought was best for Ben. Maybe she could match me up with someone she thought would make me slightly less tragic.

Miranda sent me back an emoji that looked like a tiny yellow face pitying me.

No. I was surprised to find that I didn’t really want to be set up with someone who would make me slightly less tragic. I wasn’t sure there was someone out there who could make me slightly less tragic. I liked Ben. I wasn’t crazy about the guy I’d been hanging out with for the last couple of weeks. But I’d liked the side of Ben I saw when I first met him. I wasn’t saying he was my one true Disney love, but I didn’t like the idea of having all this unresolved emotional business between us while he rekindled his failed engagement and I moved on with some faceless rebound vampire.

No matter how it turned out, I needed to work through this weird distance with Ben. I just had to get him to talk to me directly when his ex-girlfriend wasn’t around so we could get some closure. That should be easy enough, right?

Right?



It was not easy.

After our initial training-wheels day as Council interns, we were basically launched into our full workload.

As part of perfect Gigi’s group, Ben was working on some sort of giant vampire family-tree database thing to help vampires track down their living descendants. And while Gigi’s team had been responsible for programming a successful portion of it, other teams—located in other regional offices around the world—were not so successful. And now those teams didn’t exist anymore. I didn’t ask what happened to them, and Jane didn’t tell me. But now Gigi’s team had taken over the missing teams’ assignments to keep the project on track.

I got hit with paperwork. So much paperwork. The question of why recycling didn’t seem to be making much of an environmental impact was answered by the sheer amount of backlogged paperwork in Jane’s filing cabinet of shame. It took two vampires to wheel the laundry cart full of files up to my desk.

“Jane!” I called into her office. “What is this madness?”

“Uh, I’m on the phone!” Jane called. “Just blindly do the filing without questioning how I got so far behind. It totally piled up like that while I was selflessly taking care of you for the last few weeks. Just so busy . . . on this phone call.”

I glanced at the phones and saw that both of her lines were free.

“You’re not on the phone!” I turned to find her lifting the receiver to her ear and dialing. I shook my head.

It seemed that every piece of paper in the Council’s regional office had to cross Jane’s desk at some point. Why did vampires need to document so much? There was a form for unintentional vampire turnings like mine. There were forms for planned vampire turnings. There was a form to document accidentally killing your vampire colleagues at the Council and a different form for intentionally killing your vampire colleagues. There was a form for requesting reimbursement for having someone murdered. They didn’t mind if you outsourced someone’s murder, they just insisted that you keep your receipts if you wanted to be reimbursed for it.

You would think vampires would have learned over the years that a paper trail created complications. Maybe they were trying to stockpile blackmail material on one another? Forever? Also, why did they rely on paper so much? Did they have something against digital records?

And the problem with storing those files in an industrial-sized laundry cart was that the papers in the files shifted around and got mixed together. So now I had to organize and file, which had to be some sort of mental endurance test, like Psyche sorting through all those seeds to impress her hateful goddess mother-in-law.

Ha, and Morgan said that Greek mythology class would never apply in real life.

I rolled up the sleeves of my work-sensible cardigan and got to work sorting through my mega-hamper of files. The color-coding of the files made no sense, but I stacked them in colored piles on the floor anyway, just to move them out of the damn hamper.

This was still a better job than cleaning the dollar theater in my hometown. I couldn’t eat popcorn for years after that summer.

In the midst of all these files, I spotted a few familiar nuggets of information, like incident reports within Half-Moon Hollow involving Dick and his efforts to keep his former colleagues from selling counterfeit Beats by Dre headphones to innocent humans.

One file listed Ophelia’s progress in her “probationary period,” which I immediately tossed into the blue pile without skimming over it. “Nope. Nope. Nope.”

Another file listed all of the expenses paid to the University of Kentucky for services to undead students. As a semi-sort-of government agency, the Council subsidized counseling services, blood shipping and storage fees, sunproofing costs, and other expenses associated with housing undead students. I scanned the top sheet, and these fees seemed . . . excessive.

“So. Many. Zeros,” I muttered, blinking at the bottom “total” number.