Accidental Sire (Half-Moon Hollow #6)

Before I could release more of those tears, the alarm bell stopped, and the door burst open. I closed my eyes, expecting some sort of vampire SWAT team to come spilling into the room and stake me. Because they were going to kill me. The Council did not tolerate vampires who attacked innocent humans, no matter how newly risen. They were going to come in here and stake me. I could only hope they’d make it quick.

But the expected staking did not come. I cracked one eye open and saw a pretty brunette vampire in a purple Specialty Books T-shirt, standing in the doorway. The ID badge around her neck read “Jane Jameson-Nightengale.” Her jaw was slack, and she was shaking her head as she stared at me.

“Help me,” I whimpered.

She seemed to snap out of her stupor, glanced down at the dead boy in my arms, and yelled, “Holy hell, what did you do to Ben?”





2




Try to find other vampire sires who inadvertently fell into parenthood to mentor you.

—The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire

Jane Jameson-Nightengale made some sort of hand motion behind her back, and I heard a bunch of clicks from the well-lit hallway behind her. She dropped to her knees beside Ben. “You’re not even supposed to be awake right now! How did you bite him?”

Jane’s hands slid over Ben’s neck and wrists, checking for a heartbeat. Her fingertips lingered against his skin at each of his possible pulse points for several moments. And every time she failed to find a pulse, her face crumpled just a little bit more. Who was Jane, and how did she know Ben?

“He’s not breathing. No pulse,” she whispered, whipping her head toward me. Her eyes flashed an angry amber. “He’s cold. He was only in here for ten minutes. Even with the blood loss, his body temperature shouldn’t be this low!”

“I don’t know what happened!” I cried. “I bit him, but I only took a little. I mean, I could hear his pulse drop a little as I drank, but I pushed him away, and he was fine. He was talking and laughing about me biting him one minute, and the next, he just flopped on the floor dead. Did he have a heart condition?”

“No, he’s perfectly healthy. None of this makes any freaking sense!” Shaking her head, Jane lifted Ben’s bitten wrist to her nose. “What the hell? Your bite mark smells funny.”

“Well, I haven’t brushed in a couple of days,” I said, shrugging. “I’ve been dead.”

“No, you haven’t brushed in twenty-four hours. I mean—never mind,” Jane told me. She yelled toward the door, to someone I couldn’t see. “Let’s get Ben into a secured containment room. Total lockdown, no one has access but me. Protocol: Jupiter Ascending.”

The expected vampire SWAT team—wearing uniforms marked with “UERT,” for undead emergency response team—swept into the room on swift, silent feet. They rolled a gurney into the room and gently lifted Ben’s body onto it. They covered him with a sheet and rolled him away before I could even object.

All but two of the vampire storm troopers marched out in formation, leaving Ophelia to appear in the doorway, looking shocked and annoyed. “Meagan, how are you awake?”

“I don’t know!” I yelled. “All I know is I died in the most embarrassing way possible, and then I woke up here.”

“Not the most embarrassing way possible,” Jane mumbled, crawling across the floor to grab my face in her hands. She gently, but firmly, pulled my chin down with her thumbs and looked at my mouth. She leaned slightly closer and inhaled.

“Your mouth smells like the inside of a head shop,” she told me.

“Wull, thass juss fackin roo,” I told her. Or at least, I tried to. Her thumbs kept me from pronouncing actual words. I guess my primal undead reptile brain did not appreciate her being this close to my face, because I felt that raw pressure in my mouth again and heard my fangs drop with a snick.

Jane blanched and sat back on her heels. “You have four fangs instead of two.”

“What?” Ophelia dropped to her knees and squinted at my extended teeth. Her own mouth fell open, and her brow wrinkled. “I have never seen that before.”

Jane pulled a compact from Ophelia’s purse and held it up to my mouth. And while I was fully aware that vampires could see their own reflections, it was definitely comforting to see my own face in the glass. And that it had stayed the same.

Or had it?

The girl in the mirror was gorgeous, frozen forever at twenty, with the sort of lineless, airbrushed perfection that only existed in magazine ads. I’d heard about this little quirk of vampire evolution, but I’d never seen the “before and after turning” comparisons. Vampires had to be beautiful to lure in blood donors. And while I was cute before, now I’d been upgraded to a full-on ten. My eyes, dark like my mother’s, almost glowed with flecks of amber and gold. My hair was braided, but I could glimpse reddish-gold highlights that hadn’t been there before. My normally olive skin had paled to a creamy tan, but it was luminous and smooth, without one blemish in sight. My lips were full and rosy, and oh, my God, I totally had two sets of fangs.

I carefully tapped the tip of my tongue against the expected major canine fangs. Right next to both of my canines were slightly smaller, but still very sharp, extended fangs that had replaced two of my premolars. Any vampire looked dangerous, but somehow those two little extra-sharp teeth made me appear even more threatening.

Ophelia pushed the mirror out of the way and put her hands on my face, manipulating my jaw back and forth as she examined my mouth.

“Do you mind? That’s my face!” I snapped at her. Literally. I tried to bite her, which she did not appreciate.

“Sorry,” Ophelia said, yanking her hand back and pushing to her feet. “I’ve never seen this before. Do you know how old I am? I have not said ‘I’ve never seen this before’ in a really long time.”

Jane stood and pulled me to my feet. She peered at my eyes and spread my brows and cheekbones apart with her fingers. I swatted her hands away. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Jane, respect boundaries, please,” Ophelia said dryly.

“What is going on, Ophelia? What’s wrong with me? Is Ben going to be OK?”

Jane shot a look at Ophelia but didn’t say anything. I got the impression that there was some sort of relationship between the two of them, but it wasn’t necessarily a friendly one. Now that I thought about it, I seemed to remember Ophelia ranting about someone named Jane sending her a “high-handed” e-mail and plotting some sort of revenge. But I was pretty foggy about the details other than having to Google what “high-handed” meant.

“We don’t know,” Jane said. “His heart has stopped, which could be a sign of the turning process. But it’s also part of the process of dying.”

“But I didn’t give him any of my blood,” I protested. “I drank a little bit of his, and that was it. I thought you couldn’t be turned into a vampire without blood.”

“Well, vampires aren’t supposed to be up and walking around twenty-four hours after being turned, either. That’s the only reason we allowed Ben into this room. You weren’t supposed to be a threat. But the rules seem to be changing,” she said, giving me a long, speculative stare.