by Molly Harper
“Why am I remembering all of this?” I hissed, twisting Nik’s shirt in my fists. “It’s like going through it all over again. It hurts.”
“It happens sometimes, when you make first contact with your sire,” Jane said, rubbing a hand over my back. “It will be over in a minute.”
And suddenly, I made the connection between the poison in my system and the way Nik spat out my blood and the pale, waxy pallor to his cheeks that I was just now noticing. Nik had been poisoned, too, trying to save me. Whatever was in my system could have killed him.
“You could have died, you jerk!” I cried, hitting his arm.
“Ow!” he yelped, rubbing at his arm. “It actually hurts when you hit now. Stop it. And yes, I could have died, but since you were dying, that means you took precedence.”
“You do not get to make decisions like that without talking to me first!” I exclaimed, poking him in the chest. “Wall colors and DVDs for movie nights and ill-advised haircuts, those are all judgment calls you can make without discussion. But making the choice to sacrifice yourself to save me without so much as a Post-it note? That’s not . . . And suddenly, I’m realizing that I basically did the same thing when I let you bite me and almost drain me, so my righteous indignation is sort of over the top. Sorry about the poking.”
Nik was laughing so hard by this point that bloody pink tears were rolling down his cheeks.
“Oh, and I found some information on the witch who probably cursed you. I’m going to need a little more to track her down, but I think if we do and we threaten her enough, we might be able to get her to remove the curse.”
“We will get to that,” Nik said. “For now, just drink.”
I decided to be a good girl and drain the cup, but only because I was starving.
“OK, so what happened?” I asked, wiping at my lip to avoid a blood mustache. “What happened to me?”
Iris sighed. “You’re going to need another mug of that blood.”
• • •
Jane, Gabriel, Andrea, Dick, and Jamie were circled around the parlor like some sort of war council. It seemed that they all had their own theories about how and why I was poisoned, and none of them jived with the “household accident” explanation that the Council was circulating among my coworkers. Of course, this explanation mentioned neither my poisoning nor my being turned into a vampire, just that I was hospitalized in unstable condition, which demonstrated the underhanded and unreliable nature of the Council’s public relations office.
“OK, Gigi, we’ve heard the Council’s version of what happened to you, but clearly, that was . . .” Cal paused for the right word.
“Bullshit,” Dick supplied.
Cal nodded. “From what Nik tells us, you were poisoned with something strong enough that it made your blood almost undrinkable, but we don’t know how. I’d like you to walk us through that night, everything that you can remember. I checked with the office security personnel, and there are no cameras pointed at your door. So we don’t know who might have slipped you the poison. So, please, did you accept food or drink from anyone?” Cal asked. “Did anything you ate or drank taste funny? Did you touch a package or some sort of testing sample that you weren’t supposed to?”
“You mean, did I pick up the envelope labeled ‘ricin’ and lick it? No. And no, I made my own breakfast and lunch from the same groceries I’ve used for the last few days. I brown-bagged my dinner, also made from those groceries.”
“Did you leave it in the office fridge?” Cal asked.
I nodded. “But it tasted fine to me. I didn’t have any symptoms for hours after eating. And other than my coffee order, I didn’t eat or drink anything else that day.” I frowned. “My coffee order . . .”
“What about your coffee order?”
I thought back to that cold cup of coffee I had glugged down before I left the office. And I could not believe that was the last human food I’d eaten. I felt so cheated. Iris, at least, got to choose a last meal. When Cal turned her, she was chewing on a limited-edition Godiva truffle.
“I sent the other programmers home early because I had some calls I needed to make. I went to the restroom around one a.m., and when I came back, my usual, a peppermint mocha, was waiting for me on the desk.”
“Was that normal?” Gabriel asked.
I shrugged. “Sammy, the coffee guy, leaves around one. Sometimes, if he has time, he’ll drop something off, because he worries about us driving home for the night uncaffeinated. If we’re not sitting at our desks, he’ll just leave it for us.”
“When did you drink it?”
“I was distracted while I was working, so I let it go cold. I drank it all in one swoop as I was leaving work,” I said. “Come to think of it, the coffee did taste funny. I thought maybe the milk had gone off, since I’d left it alone all night.”
“Does Sammy have any reason to hold a grudge against you?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It would be more likely that someone tampered with my coffee after Sammy dropped it off.”
Jane frowned. “So the question is, who do you know who wants you dead?”
“Besides Ophelia?”
“Besides Ophelia.” Iris nodded.
“Have you checked with Ophelia?” I asked. “Because this has her fingerprints all over it.”
Jamie rolled his eyes. “Ophelia and I have had several long, long, looooooong talks since she confessed to outsourcing the curse for you. She swears that she didn’t have anything to do with it. Sophie scanned her and says she’s telling the truth. So who, besides Ophelia, would want you dead?”
I shuddered at the thought of being scanned by enigmatic, elegant, “first name only” Sophie, a vampire bureaucrat and undead lie detector who literally ripped the truth from one’s lips using her scary vampire talent.
“Besides Ophelia?” I checked again.
“Besides Ophelia!” the others chorused.
“There’s Marty, but if he was going to drug me, I’m pretty sure I would wake up chained up in a holding cell in his basement.” I thought about it for a long moment. “Again, I’m going to have to go with Margaret. Even though she passed the first magic test, she’s never really warmed to me. In fact, she used the term ‘damaged goods’ to describe me. And Ophelia’s facing censure because of me; Margaret’ll want to get revenge. She worships Ophelia. Besides that, for a while there, I thought maybe she was the one who cursed Nik, so I may have been a little hostile toward her.”
“Did you stab her in the thigh with a silver stake, too?” Gabriel asked. When Dick slapped the back of his head, Gabriel grumped. “What? I’ve learned not to underestimate Gigi’s hostilities!”
“Would Margaret have had the opportunity to dose your drink?”
“I left my desk unattended a few times to run to the fax machine down the hall, visit the ladies’ room, that sort of thing. She could have dropped it into my coffee while I was out. And don’t lecture me about safety, Cal. I know not to leave my drink unchaperoned at a bar, but I thought I would be safe at my office.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Cal said, holding up his hands. Iris smirked at him. “I was going to say a little bit.”
“Any idea what the anonymous poisoner gave me?” I asked, making Iris clear her throat. Clearly, we had reached her portion of the “presentation.”
“Boy, are you lucky that you have a sister who’s an expert in this crap. I recognized the signs of nightshade poisoning in Nik that I saw in Cal that first day I tripped over him in his kitchen,” Iris said. Cal cleared his throat. She rolled her eyes. “I mean, when Cal heroically rescued me from walking in a straight line on my own two feet.”
She flipped open her now-familiar copy of The Natural versus the Supernatural. She showed me an illustration of a plant with flat, broad, tobacco-like leaves and weird brownish-purple flowers. “This
is deadly nightshade, atropa belladonna. Nightshade produces a bitter alkaloid poison called atropine, which, in small doses, is used in medications to slow heart rates and sometimes counteract nerve agents. In humans, nightshade poisoning causes dry mouth, dizziness, confusion, nausea, and a whole host of unpleasantness. In large doses, it can cause death within minutes.”
“What happens to vampires who ingest deadly nightshade?” I asked, giving Nik a pointed look.
Iris pulled out her own small press book, Bitten Botanicals: Rare Plants and Their Effects on the Undead. She opened to the first chapter, in which she described Cal’s tangle with bittersweet nightshade, deadly nightshade’s bitchy cousin.
“Let’s just say very bad and potentially immortality-ending things, so don’t yell at Nik anymore, OK?” Iris said.
“Oh, now you’re protective of Nik,” I muttered.
“No, you’re just really loud, and I have sensitive ears,” Iris said, shrugging. “We found you two in the parking lot. You were already, uh, you were out.” She cleared her throat and blinked a few times. “Um, Nik was fading fast. We brought you both home.”
“OK, so why didn’t the nightshade make me sick all over again when I drank Nik’s blood?” I asked.
“He poured it into you so quickly it hadn’t had time to enter his bloodstream yet. And afterward, we all took turns feeding both of you to help flush out your systems.”
“All of you?”
“We activated the vampire emergency phone tree. Me and Cal, Jane, Gabriel, Dick, Collin, Andrea, even Sam. Jamie insisted on feeding you every chance he got. We figured the more vampire blood you had running through your system, the better.”
I blinked away the tears that were gathering at the corners of my eyes. When I was dying, these people had stepped up to help me. I had their blood flowing in my veins. They were really my family now.
“Aw, honey, don’t cry,” Dick said. “I’m a sympathetic crier, and an ugly one at that. You don’t want to see that.”
“It’s true,” Gabriel assured me. “He looks like a weeping pug. Jamie put the footage of Dick watching Titanic on YouTube. It’s up to half a million hits.”
“I just really love you guys.” I sighed, wiping at my wet cheeks. My hand was stained pink. I’d forgotten that vampire tears contained small traces of blood. “Gross.”
“It takes some getting used to,” Andrea assured me. “You’ll be fine.”
Nik rubbed my back reassuringly as he tucked me against his side. Cal made a disapproving noise, which we both ignored. We could not, however, ignore the knock at the door, which Jamie jumped to answer. In fact, he didn’t seem surprised at all that we would get a visitor at this time of night.
“Jamie,” I said suspiciously. “Who’s at the door?”
“Ophelia wanted to stop by and see how you were doing. She promised me she’d apologize.”
“No, Jamie, don’t—gah!” I grunted as Jamie dashed to the door at vampire speed and admitted his evil girlfriend. While she was wearing a gorgeous red sundress and heels, Ophelia seemed deflated somehow, smaller and younger, but less tragic than she’d looked in the walk-of-shame ensemble.
“Ophelia, what are you doing here? Are you here to intimidate me as one of your newest constituents?”
“You’re not my constituent. At least, not for now.”
I smiled, because I very much enjoyed reminding her of her status as exiled from the Council. “Oh, right, because you tried to arrange for my cold-blooded murder.”
“No, because I falsified expense reports while I tried to arrange for your cold-blooded murder. I should have known better than to use Council funds to pay the witch who cursed Nik,” she said, even as Nik growled, low and deadly.
“So that means that you have no real authority over me?” I said, an evil, Grinch-ish grin spreading across my face. “You can’t really punish me?”
“No, but I can still—” Ophelia didn’t even manage to finish the sentence before I swung my fist in an upward arc and punched her nose hard enough to make it spurt blood. Jamie watched impassively as Ophelia collapsed to the floor.
She wiped at her nose, glaring at me. “I was saying that I can still fight back if you challenge me. I’ll consider that challenge issued.”
I scoffed. “Bring it. I’m just as strong as you are, and you haven’t had to fight in years.”
Jane dragged me away from Ophelia, while Gabriel and Dick held her arms. I looked to Jamie, feeling a bit guilty for punching his bloodmate right in front of him.
He shrugged. “She kind of had that coming.”
“I disagree.” Ophelia sniffed, wiping at the blood trailing from her nose.
Iris smiled sweetly as she helped Ophelia up from the floor. “For now, why don’t you remove your bony ass from my house, before I show you where she learned that right hook?”
Ophelia tried to pull the imperious “Who do you think you’re talking to?” eyebrow arch. Iris shook her head. “You tried to kill my sister, wench. Polite and respectful treatment stopped a couple of minutes ago. You’re lucky there are so many witnesses around.”
“I just wanted to stop by and see how you’re faring,” Ophelia said. “And as usual, you have Jamie’s attention, so you must be fine.”
“Ophelia,” Jamie growled.
“Oh, don’t start that again,” I cried. “Jamie and I are not interested in each other! I have a . . . special gentleman vampire friend . . .” I turned to Nik. “I’m sorry, I still don’t know what to call you. You’re too old to be my boyfriend.” I turned back to Ophelia. “Nik. I have a Nik. I don’t want Jamie. Jamie, do you want me?”
Jamie wrinkled up his face, as if I’d just offered him olive loaf with a lovely side of persimmon jelly. “Ugh, no.”
“This is the most uncomfortable conversation I have ever witnessed. And that includes all of Jane’s,” Dick whispered to Gabriel. “I don’t know where to look.”
Without warning, I threw my arms around Jamie’s neck and pulled him in for a kiss. It was the most awkward connection of lips ever experienced by man or vampire. His lips were cold and dry. Our teeth clacked together. And he nearly gouged me in the eye with the tip of his nose. I could hear Nik growling again behind me and Andrea whispering, “Easy now.”
Gripping Jamie’s collar, I pushed him away, and we both wiped at our mouths with the backs of our hands. Ophelia’s eyes were wide and as blank as saucers. Jamie’s expression had gone from “persimmon jelly” to “roadkill.” I felt Nik’s hand closing over my arms and dragging me away.
“Warn me when you’re going to do that!” Jamie exclaimed, wiping at his mouth. “No, scratch that, never do that again!”
“I literally feel like I just made out with my brother,” I said, gagging slightly. “What have you been eating?”
“Sometimes I like to stir my blood with a Slim Jim,” Jamie muttered. “Gives it flavor.”
“Gah,” I said, shuddering. “Good God. OK, Ophelia, do you see?” I waved a hand between me and Jamie. “This. Will. Never. Happen. We have no chemistry, no desire to be together in any way besides friendship. Ever. And if you have a problem with how much time Jamie spends with me and my family, you two need to sit down and talk that out. Jamie, I would also suggest you stop being obtuse and spend more time with your girlfriend, if that’s what she’s asking you to do. And if she’s not asking for it directly, you should do it anyway, because women are terrifying creatures who sometimes expect the men around us to read our minds.”
Ophelia nodded slowly. “I see that I have made a terrible error in judgment. And for that, I owe you an apology.”
“Yes, you do,” I said. “Just so you know, that doesn’t count as an actual apology. Now, you and Jamie, you go . . . wherever, to talk.” I grabbed Nik’s sleeve. “And you, you’re with me.”
Snagging a bottle of blood from the
coffee table, I dragged Nik by the hand, out the front door and through the yard. He cleared his throat. “Well, that was, er, decisive.”
I glugged blood from the bottle to try to rid myself of the Slim Jim aftertaste. “I hate that I had to do that to prove a point. And I’m sorry if it made you uncomfortable. I just get so sick of her bullshit.”
“No, it was quick thinking, and at least it settled any doubts I had about your relationship with Jamie.”
“Should I go find Ben and kiss him in front of you for good measure?” I asked.
“No,” Nik said, stopping me and pulling me into his arms. He kissed me, long and sweet. His lips, which had always felt cool to me, were just as warm as my own.
I threaded my fingers through his hair and pulled him closer. I laughed against his mouth, then sighed. “That was better than Slim Jims,” I assured him.
“Why, thank you.”
I tilted my head up, staring at the millions of tiny pinpricks of light in the velvety black night sky. I could see every crevice and bump in the moon’s surface, count every leaf on every tree branch. “Is this what you see, all the time?” I marveled.
He grinned, kissing my forehead. “And you will, too.”
“This is my life now.” I sighed. “Weird.”
“You will not be alone in this life. I will be with you.”
“Well, how nice of you to make that decision without any input from me,” I deadpanned. “Again.”
“Are you going to hit me in the nose, too?” he asked, covering said facial feature with his hand.
“Thinking about it.”
He sighed, clutching my hand to his chest, where his silent heart rested. “Gladiola Grace Scanlon—”
“Easy.”
“I throw myself on your mercy,” he said, dropping to his knees. “I was very, very wrong to have left you to try to protect you. I can see now that I cannot live without you. And I will spend the rest of my life trying to show you that you might feel the same way about me. I will grovel, if that is what you want.”
“This doesn’t count as groveling?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
