I realized that I had the perfect birthday to discuss: Eve’s eighteenth, on which she had to make the choice to either be a good little Morganville resident, sign her Protection agreement, and fit in . . . or be Eve. I think you already know the answer, but it’s fun getting there.
A little factoid—the Glass House address is a combination of the numbers of my first dorm apartment in college and a book by Stephen King: 716 Lot Street (as in ’Salem’s Lot).
Eighteenth birthdays in Morganville, Texas, are usually celebrated in one of two ways: one, getting totally wasted with your friends or, two, making a terrifying life-or-death decision about your continued survival.
Not that there can’t be some combination of the two.
My eighteenth birthday party was held in the back of a rust-colored Good Times van, circa way before I was born, and the select guest list included some of Morganville’s Least Wanted. Me, for instance—Eve Rosser. Number of people who’d signed my yearbook: five. Two of them had scrawled C YA LOSER. (Number of people I’d wanted to sign my yearbook? Zero. But that was just me.)
And then there was my best friend, Jane, and her kid sister, Miranda. Jane was okay—kind of dull, but seriously, with a name like Jane? Cursed from birth. She did like some cool things, other than me of course. Wicked eighties make-out music, for instance. Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab perfume, particularly from the Dark Elements line, although I personally preferred the Funereal Oils.
Miranda—a tagalong to Jane—was a kid. Well, Miranda was a weird kid, who’d convinced a lot of people she was some kind of psychic. I didn’t invite her to the party, mostly because I didn’t think she’d be loads of fun, and also she wasn’t likely to bring beer. Her BPAL preferences were unknown, because she didn’t live on Planet Earth.
Which left Guy and Trent, my two excellent beer-buying buddies. They were my buddies because Guy had a fake ID that he’d made in art class and Trent owned the party bus in which we were ensconced. Other than that, I didn’t know either one of them that well, but they were smart-ass, funny, and safe to get drunk with. Guy and Trent were the only gay couple I actually knew, gaydom being sort of frowned upon in the heartland of Texas that was Morganville.
We were all about the ironic family values.
The evening went pretty much the way such things are supposed to go: guys buy cheap-ass beer, distribute to underage females, drive to a deserted location to play loud headbanger music and generally act like idiots. The only thing missing was the make-out sessions, which was okay by me; most of the guys of Morganville were gag-worthy, anyway. There were one or two I would have gladly crawled over barbwire to date, but . . . that was another story.
Jane bought me a birthday present, which was kind of sweet, especially since it was a brand-new mix CD of songs about dead people. Jane knows what I like.
I was still a mystery to Guy and Trent, though. Granted, Morganville’s a small town, and all us loser outcast freaks had a nodding acquaintance, but . . . Goths didn’t much mix with other identity groups. The Goth population was even smaller than the few gays, given the town’s prominent undead demographic. They have no sense of humor.
Oh, I forgot to mention: vampires. Town’s run by them. Full of them. Humans live here on sufferance, heavy on the “suffer.”
See what I mean about the ironic family values?
I could tell that Guy had been trying to think of a way to ask me all night, but thanks to consuming over half a case of beer with his Significantly Wasted Other, he finally just blurted out the question of the day. “So, are you signing or what?” he asked. Yelled, actually, over whatever song was currently making my head hurt. “I mean, tomorrow?”
Was I signing? That was the Big Question, the one all of us faced at eighteen. I looked down at my wrist, because I was still wearing my leather bracelet. The symbol on it wasn’t anything people outside Morganville would recognize, but it identified the vampire who was the official Protector for my family. However, I was no longer in that select little club of people who had to kiss Brandon’s ass to continue to draw breath.
I also would no longer have any kind of deal or Protection from any vampire in Morganville.
What Guy was asking was whether I intended to pick myself a Protector of my very own. It was traditional to sign with your family’s hereditary patron, but no way in hell was I letting Brandon have power over me. So I could either shop around to see if any other vampire could, or would, take me, or go bare—live without a contract.
Which was attractive, but seriously risky. See, Morganville vampires don’t generally kill off their own humans, because that would make life difficult for everybody, but free-range, non-Protected humans? Nobody worries much what happens to them, because usually they’re alone, and they’re poor, and they disappear without a trace.
Just another job opening at the Chicken Shack fry machine.