Accidental Sire (Half-Moon Hollow #6)

Morgan had been difficult to read when we first moved in. She insisted that she was not a nice person, but she always treated me kindly. I thought she would find Keagan too perky to tolerate, but they got along like two peas in a pod. Morgan insisted that one day she would find Keagan’s dark, petty center, and on that day they would make the evening news.

The pair of them had become the glue that kept me cemented to University of Kentucky’s campus. And now they were six floors away from me, and I wasn’t allowed to talk to them. They might as well have been on the moon. The weird finality of what had happened to me—dying, coming back, biting Ben—all seemed to land on me at once. My life was over. Nothing would be the same for me. Again.

I flinched as Jane opened the interrogation-room door. Ophelia let go of my hand, and the sympathetic expression on her face hardened to one of boredom. Jane sat next to Ophelia and gave me a long appraising look. She opened a small notebook and set a UK Wildcats mug in front of me, with a coaster. It was filled with dark red blood that smelled like fresh-baked cinnamon rolls and every carb I ever wanted to eat.

Why wasn’t I more grossed out by that? Why?

I pushed it away without drinking. Because that was disturbing.

Jane sighed. “OK, Meagan, I’m trying very hard to set aside my personal feelings about the fact that you’ve apparently drained and maybe done a half-assed job of turning a young man I happen to like very much, leaving me to make a very upsetting phone call to his mother, who goes to church with my mother and will make my weekly coffee date with Mom a living hell. I really am trying. I understand that you’ve been through two traumatic experiences in the last hour or so, but we need to talk about the events that led to your turning and then waking up too damn quickly and biting a perfectly nice kid, all of which have resulted in a metric ton of irritating and unnecessary paperwork for me.”

“I can’t believe I’m the one saying this to you, Jane, but maybe you should take it easy on her,” Ophelia said.

“A living hell, Ophelia,” Jane growled. “And you’ve met my mother.”

Ophelia rolled her eyes.

Jane took a deep breath and said in a calmer, slightly sweeter tone, “I’ll start again. Meagan, my name is Jane Jameson-Nightengale, and I’m the head representative of the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead for western Kentucky. Now that you’re a vampire, you are under our protection, but you’re also subject to our laws. With me so far?”

I waggled my hand back and forth. “Ish.”

“Great. I’m here because Ophelia called me about your turning and the, um, strange circumstances. I was here taking her report when the V-one-one alarm went off. Let’s go through every step of what happened since you woke up this evening,” Jane said. “No detail is too small. Because I’m still trying to figure out whether I like you or not. You’re friends with Ophelia, so I’m leaning toward not.”

“My future mother-in-law.” Ophelia sighed, waving her hand at Jane.



And so I went through the whole horrifying morning (evening?) again, which was a treat. I told Jane everything I could remember about the night of the mixer and every moment since I rose, and her expression remained absolutely neutral throughout my story. And considering the number of broken bones and flesh wounds involved in that story, that was more than a little upsetting.

I got so caught up in verbally vomiting everything I could remember that I had a sort of out-of-body experience, where it felt like I was floating above myself, watching me making an idiot of myself. And my mind’s eye could see that I apparently hadn’t washed my eye makeup off after the mixer, so I had day-old mascara running down my cheeks.

Awesome.

I wasn’t sure whether it was my emotional state or the fact that Jane didn’t seem to like me and seemed to be holding my life in her hands, but I just couldn’t stop talking. I didn’t know much about the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead, but I knew that they sometimes used what most reasonable people would call over-the-top tactics to punish vampires who stepped out of line. And I was pretty sure killing a kid within an hour of waking up was nowhere near that line.

My life had not prepared me for this sort of hostile interaction with vampires. I was in preschool when an undead tax consultant named Arnie Frink launched vampires out of the coffin. The living residents of planet Earth were not thrilled to find out that vampires had been lurking in the shadows for the past . . . forever, and humanity had never realized it. Though, when they looked back, they were a little embarrassed they hadn’t seen the signs.

Maybe the embarrassment over the missed clues was what made them lash out. A lot of vampires “tripped” and “fell”—sarcastic air quotes intended—on pointy wooden objects. The World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead, an elected group of ancient vampires, saw that humans were getting more creative and awful in their vampire-dusting techniques. They came forward, asking the world’s governments to recognize them as people with feelings and a general desire not to be turned into ash. They also asked for special leniency in taxes and government documents to fake being alive. But mostly taxes.

Because a surprising number of vampires chose to live in small towns, the Council was allowed to establish smaller regional offices in each state to make sure that the undead didn’t pull shenanigans like murdering innocent students. The Council also offered mentors for young vampires like myself, to prevent said murder shenanigans.

Once humans stopped setting them on fire for fun, the international vampire community eventually agreed that with bottled blood and super-high-SPF sunscreen and not having to pretend to be human, it was more convenient to live out in the open anyway. They didn’t give Arnie a medal or anything. He already had the meme, after all.

I’d known more than my share of vampires growing up, because I was pretty poorly supervised. In general, they were cagey but friendly. They had not treated me with the snarky, barely restrained anger that Jane was directing my way at the moment.

At some point during my reflections, I had stopped talking and was now just staring at Jane and Ophelia like one of those creepy Big Eyes paintings.

“She is a babbler,” Jane observed to Ophelia, who nodded.

“So what’s going to happen to me?” I asked.

Jane pursed her lips. “Well, here’s my problem. Part of me wants to just punch you in your irritatingly symmetrical face for hurting Ben. But the other, more compassionate part of me understands that this wasn’t something you did on purpose and that you weren’t in control of yourself, no more than I was in control of myself when I was fresh out of the coffin and tried to eat my best friend. And then the more academic part of me wants to figure out what the hell is going on with you that you managed to turn so quickly. Not in a creepy ‘secured lab and dissection’ way, just super-close observation for six to eight months.”