Accidental Sire (Half-Moon Hollow #6)

My IM pinged, and a little speech bubble popped up on my screen: Whatcha doin’?—complete with a Phineas and Ferb meme. I smiled. Jane had loosened the Internet policies ever so slightly after Ben and I had both come home from our “night walk” without incident. While the specter of Dr. Hudson and his science still made her nervous, Jane was giving us way more online freedom. We were allowed to talk to our friends as long as we understood that we still couldn’t reveal our location to anyone. Ben was even working up to an in-person visit with his family. All in all, everything was coming up pretty rosy for us.

Seriously, we just had a formatting meeting where we spent thirty minutes debating the “least historically offensive” fonts, Ben wrote. Please give me some news of the world outside. Is it beautiful there? Details, please, on the assignment you are working on. Use footnotes if you can. Citations are sexy.

And so I was having fun with Ben. Now that he’d made the monumental gesture of admitting that he (gasp) liked me, I’d put the burden completely on him to try to find some way for us to spend time together away from the house, a damn near impossible task. And until he did that, I was standing just a little closer to him as we both fished our breakfast out of the fridge in the evening. I was making a lot of direct eye contact. I was suggesting late-night study sessions. I was generally vexing him.

Hard at work, being very productive and studious, I have no time to talk nerdy to you, sir.

He sent me a little pouty emoji. You’re killing me, Smalls.

I sat back in my perfectly comfortable chair and rolled my shoulders. I scanned the bookshelves with my superior vision, taking in each spine. A few titles even I recognized—Fifty Ways to Introduce Variety to Your Undead Diet, Love Bites, The Office after Dark: A Guide to Maintaining a Safe, Productive Vampire Workplace. My eyes lit on a bright green softcover volume titled The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire.

I scanned the back cover, which featured bullet points listing all the super-helpful tips unwilling undead parents could find inside. “Addressing the sire-childe power dynamic!” “Feeding difficulties and how to fix them!” “A how-to guide to interacting with your childe’s biological family!” This would be helpful if and when I ever met Ben’s family, which raised the question, did I want to meet Ben’s family?

Maybe the book could tell me.

“Andrea!” I called. “I’m taking this! Can you tell Jane I owe her eighteen ninety-five?”

“Jane opened an account for you. You’ll still have about eighty bucks before you hit your limit for the month.”

“Wow, that’s really nice of her. As soon as I’m done with the Skype chat I have scheduled with Morgan and Keagan, I’m going to go on an eighty-one-dollar shopping spree. And that is more exciting than it should be, which is an indication of my social life, really.”

“Honey, I once saw Jane weep while hugging a first edition of Sense and Sensibility. By that standard, you’re downright tame.”

“Good point,” I agreed, checking the time on my laptop screen. “My Skype thing is scheduled in about fifteen minutes. Would it be OK if I went into Jane’s office for it?”

“Sure, hon. Jane has lifted her online embargo, right? I don’t have to watch you to make sure you’re not contacting people you shouldn’t be talking to?”

“No, I understand the rules,” I said. “I know what I should and shouldn’t say, who to talk to and who to shout ‘I’m an Internet ghost!’ at and then shut off the webcam. I know the drill.”

“Behave, or I will wax your eyebrows while you sleep,” Andrea told me.

“That’s a very respectable threat,” I assured her.

Jane’s office was a little less organized than the shop. It was a small space dominated by a large, dark wooden desk and yet more framed photos. I’d gotten the impression that Jane needed these reminders of loved ones and good times around her in times of stress, considering that the highest concentrations of the photos were in locations where she either dealt with Council business or dealt with vendor issues and customer-service stupidity.

It would be nice, I thought, to have that kind of life, to have that support system Libby spoke of, to have all of those photos to put in my space to remind me that there were people out in the world wanting good things for me. But first, I had to graduate from school, get a job, and do the things I needed to do to establish that kind of life for myself.

After opening my laptop on Jane’s enormous desk, I worked on my paper for a while, keeping a Skype window open for my friends’ call. I was making pretty decent progress on my essay question when I heard the familiar Skype chime. Grinning, I hit the green accept button.

But instead of my friends, Tina’s face appeared in my screen. My mouth dropped open. I hadn’t even realized that Tina was on my list of accepted contacts. I’d never had problems with her as a dorm director. While she seemed to have good intentions, Tina seemed just a little too eager to be the “cool adult” in her charges’ lives, whether they were vampire or living. That sort of intensity could be off-putting.

No, wait. I remembered that in the first few weeks of school, Tina had added everybody in the dorm as a contact. I was pretty sure she didn’t have any friends on social media, and I felt too guilty not to accept the request.

Weird.

“Hi, Tina.” I cleared my throat. “I didn’t expect— This is a pleasant surprise!”

“Pleasant.” That was the word for it, right?

“Hey! Meagan!” she said, leaning just a little too close toward the camera. “How’s it going? Jane’s been sending me reports, but I wanted to talk to you face-to-face. I just figured out that your cell phone isn’t working. So how are you? Are you happy with your placement? Are your professors being responsive? I can contact them if you’re not getting enough help with your assignments.”

“Actually, yeah, the classes are going really well. And Jane’s great. Ben’s great. Everything is great.” Before being turned, I probably would have offered Tina much more information, details to prove that I was studying hard, meeting expectations, earning the extra attention the school was giving me. But somehow I held back. I had enough people here in the Hollow monitoring my progress. I didn’t need to add weekly Skype chats with Tina to my regimen of supervision.

“Good! I’m so glad. We miss you around the hall. New Dawn just isn’t the same without your cheerful presence.”

I kept my face pleasant, but I couldn’t help but wonder where this was coming from. I was pretty sure that Tina hadn’t spoken to me directly before I was turned. It’s not like she’d sent me a care package to Jane’s house. Hell, I’d barely thought of her, with the exception of those wonky financial reports she’d sent us.

Wait.

I couldn’t ask about the financials, because I couldn’t quote the numbers out of my head, and I still didn’t know whether the number fudging was Council-sanctioned or not. But I could ask her about the other weird discrepancy that came up in my paperwork overload. It would satisfy my morbid curiosity and show Tina that I was a semi-grown-up professional with work duties—who didn’t need adult “friends” checking in on her via invasive social media, thank you very much.

I smiled brightly. “Actually, Tina, I’m glad you called, because I had a question for you.”