Accidental Sire (Half-Moon Hollow #6)

While the lights were working, the warehouse was cold and empty and smelled like a basement. The windows just below the roofline had been spray-painted over. Scientific equipment occupied the one clean corner of the building. Chemistry setups bubbled, and machinery hummed. It felt . . . forced, like something a kid might expect a scientist’s lair to look like. Was Fortescue putting on a show for me? To impress me?

Fortescue kept the gun on my head, while Tina removed the cuffs and shoved me into a sturdy metal chair that was bolted onto the floor. She put another set of the silver-laced plastic cuffs around my wrists, clipping them to the chair slats behind my back.

“I need to prepare,” Dr. Fortescue told Tina as he slid into a pristine lab coat. He handed her his gun. “The auction begins in two hours. Shoot her if you have to but nowhere vital and nowhere near the face. It’s better to leave her pretty.”

He nodded to her and strode to the back of the warehouse to a door marked “Office.” Why did I get the feeling that he was really going in there to rock out to Dr. Feelgood to pump himself up?

I twisted my wrists until I could fit my hands through the slats in the chair. I could feel the outline of the phone through my jeans. And it was not budging.

“Auction?” I asked Tina. “Is he going to sell me?”

“No, of course not,” Tina assured me. “He wants proof that he can produce the kind of results he’s promising. You are that proof. He needs more funding, Meagan, to do his work. And if the Council isn’t going to give it to him, he has to find it somewhere.”

“But the Council did give it to him, in a way, didn’t they?” I asked her, trying not to move my arms too much as I nudged the phone up to the waistline of my jeans. “The money you embezzled, you handed it over to him, right?”

“I was his first investor,” she said, preening. “They say behind every great man is a woman with a plan. And I am that woman, Meagan. Everything Allan has he has because of me. Everything you are you are because of me.”

I lifted a brow. Was she monologuing now? Were henchmen allowed to do that? I should have watched more James Bond movies to prepare for this situation.

Wait, she was still talking.

“I’m the one who hired some nimrods willing to play Ultimate Frisbee on a college campus with a forty-five-pound weight every night for two weeks until you came out of the building. And paid another to stand by, ready to turn you.”

“That does sound like something Ophelia’s friends would do,” I admitted. “But why me? What did I do to you?”

“We needed someone without a family, no connections, someone without loved ones to cause problems if the turning process went wrong.”

Well, that hurt more than I would have expected it to.

I felt the bottom edge of the phone sliding out of my jeans. Now I just had to get it into my hand without making any noise.

“Of course, we didn’t expect the Council to swoop in and claim the prize. Jane Jameson-Nightengale is a little more committed to being a ‘responsible’ Council rep than I expected.”

“So why are you here now? Cashing in on your investment?”

Tina pouted, throwing a petulant look toward the office. “Allan’s gone rogue. He’s lost focus. Instead of creating more supervamps like yourself, he kept trying to tweak the formula for his drug/gene therapy, like a dog worrying a bone. He buried himself in his work, wouldn’t talk to me or return my calls. I mean, I funded that man’s research, the process to turn you, and he just ghosted me? I had to do whatever it took to get his attention back. I set fire to his lab, all of his files, his backup drives. I even cleared his cloud, thinking that if he lost his research, all of the test carriers I’d gleaned from Ophelia’s list, he’d have to return my calls. And I was right! I was, after all, the only one who could lead him to you, and then, when he found out that you’d made another supervamp, well, he just couldn’t get enough of me.”

She sighed. “Allan’s a misunderstood genius. He’s going to change the world. And if I help him, he’s going to name the drug after me. And then, when the drug/gene therapy is perfect, we’re going to be turned, and we’ll be together forever.”

Was there a level beyond batshit crazy? Because Tina just leveled up.

I flicked my hand, popping the phone loose from my jeans. It fell against the inside of my shirt, which kept it from clattering onto the metal chair.

“So you did all this—derailed my life, got Ben killed, crushed my freaking rib cage—for some guy?” I asked. “I don’t like to judge, but wow. That reeks of desperate.”

“No,” she scoffed. “I mean, it wasn’t just him, it was his research. Do you know what it’s like to want to be a vampire so badly and not be able to find a willing sire?”

“No, no, I don’t.” I shook my head, hoping it disguised the movement of dropping my KidPhone into my hand. I stroked my thumb over the one button, the Jane button. And then I searched for send. I could only hope that Jane could hear Tina’s blather. Or at least locate me with that triangulating thing they used on CSI.

“I wanted to be turned so badly it wasn’t fair. I’d spent my whole life studying vampires, trying to help humans understand what they were really like, the miraculous creatures you are. I wanted that for myself, to be special, eternal, beautiful. And I kept trying to find one who would turn me, but they all said I was ‘too eager,’ ‘too needy.’ Even the bottom-feeders refused.”

“That is . . . super-depressing, Tina,” I said, trying not to add an obvious amount of emphasis on her name. “If I’d known, back at the dorm, how badly you wanted to be turned, I could have maybe talked to Ophelia, helped her see how important this was to you. Really, Tina, maybe I could talk to Jane now for you. You know me. You don’t want to do this to one of your ducklings. You don’t have to help Dr. Fortescue.”

Please, Jane, please be listening. Please pick up on these brick-sized clues I’m dropping for you. I will never complain about the KidPhone again.

Tina waved the gun carelessly as she threw up her arms. “I don’t want to be a regular vampire anymore. I want to be special, like you. And Allan’s research will make it so much easier for people like me to be turned. No exchange of blood, no commitment, just a quick bite, and twenty-four hours later, you pop up better than ever.”

It hit me that after spending her pathetic life studying vampires, Tina didn’t understand them at all. She still saw them as some sort of supernatural nocturnal unicorns. She didn’t realize how much help newly risen vampires really needed. She didn’t realize how social some vampires were. She’d twisted what she’d learned about us into her own narrative, suited to her weird little fantasies about dark, mysterious creatures of the night.

When I got out of this, I was going to write a very sternly worded letter to my college about its screening process for people who work with student housing.

“Did Dr. Hudson have anything to do with this?” I asked.

Tina frowned. “Who?”

“The chief science officer for the Council office.”

“The pushy little vampire in the plaid shirt?”