Accidental Sire (Half-Moon Hollow #6)

“I would expect nothing less,” I told her as I scanned the newspapers Keagan had included in my coffin-sized care package. I blew through several issues as Georgie continued to rummage through the box, using my newfound speed-reading to absorb the usual front-page fare. Student groups were protesting in front of the president’s office for their cause of the week. The administration was drumming up funds for the campus endowment, which had always sounded vaguely dirty to me. Campus police were investigating a string of suspicious laundry thefts from the dorms. (Why was it always panties? Why?) A building near, but not on, campus caught fire. I scanned the article, but honestly, the weirdest thing about it was that it had been included in the paper at all. There were no injuries, and the fire didn’t cause any damage to surrounding properties. It must have been a slow news day.

“Videotapes?” Georgie asked, holding up the ancient-looking VHS cassettes. “You must be the one person I know who actually possesses videotapes. Is it an ironic hipster thing?”

I smiled, taking the tapes from Georgie’s hands. I rubbed a fingertip over my dad’s neat block printing on the peeling label. “To Meagan, On Boys and Dating. (DON’T!)”

I’d carted these videos in my little blue suitcase from home to home for years, before hiding them in the back of my dorm-room closet. It was silly, really, just tapes my dad made over the years. Some of them were videos Mom shot of us when I was little, him teaching me to ride my bike, him trying to braid my hair, which turned out to be so bad that he had to cut parts of it out. And some of the tapes were long conversations he’d had with the camera, addressing me as an older girl who needed her daddy’s advice about boys and life and car maintenance and other great mysteries. Ever the organized officer, he had them all labeled by subject. Every time he was deployed, he was afraid that he wouldn’t come back, that he wouldn’t be there for me, and he felt the need to leave a library of parental information behind. Of course, that turned out to be a smart move. And the tapes had been a source of comfort to me over the years. I hadn’t watched them since early high school, because none of my foster families had a VCR. But honestly, it was enough to know that I had them.

A knock at the door caught our attention. Ben was poking his head into my room. And I realized it was the first time he’d walked in here since we’d moved into the house. I felt oddly vulnerable, with this guy standing in my bedroom, looking at a box of my most personal possessions. I hadn’t felt this weak and open when he saw me burned by silver.

“Hey, Jane’s asking for us downstairs,” he said. “Are those VHS tapes? I haven’t seen any of those since I was a kid.”

“Yeah, my dad made them for me. I just never had the chance to switch them over to DVD. Also, the knowledge of how to switch them over to DVD.”

Ben grinned. “Yeah, that would be an important part of the process. Uh, Jane says dinner’s ready, so we should probably get down there.”

Georgie pocketed my iPod and skipped down the stairs, leading us to a rather formally set dining-room table. But really, this was the first time the five of us had sat down to dinner together, just the residents of River Oaks. We’d had rushed breakfasts as Jane and Ben and I peeled off to go to work. We’d had larger gatherings with Jane’s extended “family.” But never just us. Gabriel had gone all out, with the big china mugs of blood on little saucers, candles in real crystal candlesticks, and flowers gathered from the backyard.

There was no silverware. For that, I was grateful.

“So, what exactly happened to you in the lab?” Georgie asked, sipping her blood. It left a little blood mustache on her top lip, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to tell her about it.

“No shop talk until after dinner,” Jane said. “Let’s just try to have a nice, normal meal that doesn’t involve discussions of bloodshed and felony assault.”

“What does that leave us to talk about?” Georgie asked, frowning while Jane motioned to her own top lip. Georgie wiped her mouth with a napkin.

“How are things at the shop?” Ben asked Jane gamely. “You haven’t had much time to work there since you took over the Council position.”

“Actually, it’s doing pretty well. I miss it. I wish I had more time there, but I’m lucky to have Andrea to run the day-to-day operations.”

“What kind of shop do you have, Jane? Also, how have we not talked about this?”

“It’s a bookshop, some occult books, but lately we’ve moved into a more general-interest, vampire-friendly mode, if for no other reason than people kept trying to kill us for the rarer occult items. And we haven’t talked about it because most of our conversations revolve around Council business. I’m far too used to the people around me knowing about that part of my life, and I realize that is a big oversight on my part. I’ll take you to the shop sometime this week, if you’re interested.”

“Sure,” I agreed immediately. “I’m getting a little sick of my textbooks. I could use a good read.”

Jane beamed at me. “So, Georgie, it’s your night on dishes, which means the arguments against our ‘ridiculous draconian expectation’ for you to do chores begin right about . . . now.”

Georgie cleared her throat. “Since we last spoke, I have done some research on the topic, and it turns out that today’s parents are actively discouraging their children from doing chores. The prevailing theory is that the expectation to contribute to the household heaps additional stress onto the kids, who are already overscheduled and overstimulated.”

Ben and I locked eyes over the rims of our cups, grinning at Georgie’s carefully organized, completely bullshit argument. She kept up this passionate discourse against dishpan hands throughout dinner and the carefully spiced dessert blood Gabriel had prepared.

“While your arguments might be compelling to a small percentage of blogger moms, I think I’m going to point out that you still have about six months of dishes to wash before you replace the flat-screen you pulverized when you failed level 829 in ‘Candy Crush’ and launched your phone at the wall. Try again next week, Georgie,” Jane said, pointing at the kitchen.

Georgie slumped away from the table, dirty dishes in hand, grumbling all the way.

“Now that dinner is officially over, here is Dr. Hudson’s preliminary report, which he had Gennaro slip under my door as he was getting ready to go all Jersey Shore tanning bed on you.”

“Are you doing this now so Georgie won’t be able to hear?” I asked.

“No, I can hear you just fine,” Georgie called from the kitchen.

“She can hear us just fine,” Jane said, rolling her eyes a little as she slid a thick file folder across the table. “But now I can tell myself that we did have some uninterrupted family time.”

Gabriel laughed but glanced over the report as Jane spread it out on the table. “Now, from what I can decipher from Dr. Hudson’s science-speak, which I’m pretty sure he made more complicated than necessary just to be a dick—”

“Right?” I exclaimed.

She snickered. “You’ve got a lot of different genes thrown in there with yours, which is fun,” she said. “Rattlesnake and shark and even a little lizard, plus some botanical samples.”

“He was serious about the vegetables?” Ben groaned. “I was really hoping he was just going for a quip.”