by Molly Harper
As awful as communal showers were, they were better than being permanently dead.
“Fine.” I sighed. “I’ll arrange your little soiree. What is my budget, and how many virgins am I allowed to sacrifice?”
“Two hundred dollars. And I’m going to ignore the question about the virgins, because we both know it’s a ridiculous hyperbole you use to disguise your insecurities.”
“So three virgins, then. Excellent.” I smiled sweetly and rose from my chair. “And I don’t have any insecurities.”
“Ms. Jameson-Nightengale disagreed in the many, many letters she sent me,” Tina called after me as I flounced out of her office.
I tried not to flounce on principle, but it was hard to avoid when I wore my hair up in a ponytail. My hair was naturally flouncy.
Of course Jane gave Tina plenty of faux therapy fodder about me in her correspondence, since Tina was the Council’s appointed “supervisor” and my on-campus babysitter. Jane had all sorts of theories about the horrible trauma that had led to my “layered emotional baklava of neuroses and poor impulse control”—her words. And now that she was my pseudo-mother-in-law, she felt free to voice these theories to whoever would listen.
It didn’t bother me that Jane was analyzing my “issues.” It bothered me that she was right. I had insecurities—massive, honking insecurities. Those insecurities were what had condemned me to the University of Kentucky. I blamed Gigi Scanlon, who, in terms of being a thorn in my side, was second only to Jane Jameson-Nightengale. But Jane insisted that blaming Gigi was what had started this whole mess in the first place. Gigi had known Jamie from high school, but they only started spending time together after Gigi and her sister were adopted into Jane’s circle of benevolent weirdos.
Gigi was always there. If there was a holiday or a special occasion, she was there, along with Iris and Cal and Jane and all the rest. Some silly movie night, usually focused on bad adaptations of Jane Austen novels? She was there. A crisis, like those that seemed to happen to someone in their dysfunctional family every few months? She was there. And if she wasn’t there, Jamie was talking about her, what Gigi thought, what Gigi said, what Gigi did. And then there was Jane, who made no secret of her theory that Gigi would be a much better match for her foster son than I was. Was it any wonder that I thought Gigi was a threat to my relationship?
I still maintained that it was a perfectly reasonable suspicion. No two people that attractive could spend so much time together and remain “just friends.” Jamie had been leaving for college—with Gigi’s help on the applications, thank you very much. He was going to leave my region, going where I could not follow, thanks to my Council duties. He was going to join Gigi here at UK. He would be attending classes with Gigi, going to parties with Gigi, spending weekends with Gigi. And if by some miracle he didn’t end up bedding stupid, comely Gigi, I’d been afraid he would meet some other girl, one without so much baggage. I wasn’t proud of myself or my actions. I’d panicked, and I hadn’t been thinking clearly.
So I’d done what any rational woman who felt her man might wander would do. I had hired a witch to hypnotize Nikolai, a Council investigator with memory issues and a hearty appetite, to dispose of Gigi without his knowledge. But I’d gotten greedy. I had paid for the witch’s fees using Council funds. I had faked expense reports to justify the spending as Council-related mileage. I had no excuse, other than that I’d had a pretty expensive quarter—Georgie had spent a lot of money on Farm Heroes in-app purchases.
My scheme had blown up in my face in a big way. The witch’s spell hadn’t been as effective as she’d claimed it would be, not that they ever were. Nikolai had developed moon-calf eyes for Gigi—of course—and they had gotten embroiled in some torrid vampire romance the likes of which would make Stephenie Meyer gag. Gigi had ended up being stalked and poisoned by some mouth-breather I’d hired in her department. Gigi had died as a result of the mouth-breather’s poison, and Nikolai had turned her. Jane had pulled one of her annoying yet successful mind games that tricked me into confessing to my part in Gigi’s troubles. Then she and Nikolai had focused his considerable investigative powers on odd payments moving through the Council’s accounting offices. Trying to harm Gigi was a smudge on my record, but using Council funds to do it had gotten me dismissed from my seat of power and replaced. Replaced by Jane Jameson-Nightengale.
If I believed in such foolish notions, I might think that karma had served me a rather significant bitch-slap to the face. Jamie and I had many, many discussions about why this sort of behavior was inappropriate. He was mine, and I was his. But I’d underestimated his heart. I’d forgotten how easily he shared it with people. He wasn’t perfect. He was a man like any other, silly and petty and occasionally prone to overindulgence in video game nights, but even those tendencies were blunted by his absolute unwillingness to hurt people. And my lack of faith cut him deeply.
I was sorry, not so much because Gigi was hurt—because, as usual, she came out of the situation much beloved and smelling like the proverbial rose—but because I’d almost lost Jamie over my stupidity. He’d actually set boundaries with me. He’d insisted that I follow Jane’s ridiculous “sentence” to show that I regretted my actions. He made me apologize.
I supposed I should have thanked Jane for suggesting to the Council that I would benefit from postsecondary education. Whether she meant to or not, she’d given me an opportunity to spend unlimited time with Jamie, time I would never have had with him if I’d continued working for the Council.
But still, I was unsettled. Even with Jamie’s assurances, even with the valuable life lesson stomped into my face by Jane’s age-inappropriate purple Converse sneakers, I still wasn’t sure that Jamie and I were going to make it. And I knew it was my fault. I’d put a lot of unnecessary stress on the relationship. Yes, we were bloodmates, but I’d seen those relationships fall apart just like any other marriage could. It was supposed to be a lifetime commitment, but it was breakable, generally leaving the dumpee miserable throughout eternity. Also lonely, because other vampires tended to choose the dumper in the break-up. The dumper whined less at parties.
I groaned, running my hands through my hair until I yanked at the ends. These were not helpful thoughts. These thoughts would not calm me down to a state in which I could deal with my roommate in a way that wouldn’t leave her bruised all over again. I didn’t feel like going to the library and being with the humans who thought they were whispering. I didn’t want to go to the campus coffeehouse, because it was open-mic night, and the smell of that much desperation was dangerous to my delicate nasal passages. I couldn’t go back to my room, where Brianna was likely holding court with the harpy human enablers who flocked around her like a cloud of particularly dim fireflies. For someone who claimed to be a loner, she seemed awfully codependent on the wenches from the fourth floor. It wasn’t that I was afraid of Brianna’s gaggle. I just didn’t want to get called right back into Tina’s office.
I was debating whether my superhuman speed would be super enough for me to get in and out of my room unnoticed when I walked onto my floor and found Sidney standing outside my door. He was holding my laptop bag and wearing a knowing smile on his bearded face.
“You’re a peach, Sidney.”
He bobbed his pale, bald head. “I just couldn’t imagine her surviving a second round, champ.”
“If not for Tina, she wouldn’t have survived the first.” It surprised even me that I could exert the energy to joke with him, given my mood. But Sidney was, indeed, a big, fuzzy sweetheart of a man, and he had proven his usefulness. “If anyone asks, you didn’t see me. You don’t know where I went.”
“Fair enough.”
I took the elevator to the study lounge. The white-walled, soundproof study carrels were meant to help vampires concentrate on academics without being bothered by the constant barrage of stimuli from our superhuman senses. People had no idea how hard it
was to conjugate German verbs when a student ten feet away was grinding his teeth.
Jamie’s Facebook Messenger ID popped up on my phone screen.
He wrote, Heard there was a ruckus at your dorm after I left. You involved?
Once again, I appreciated the fact that Jamie avoided text-speak with me, out of respect for my absolute loathing of URs and LOLs. Honestly, when your thumbs moved as fast as ours, there was no excuse for improper grammar.
I typed back, Define ‘involved.”
Jamie: Did you or did you not try to strangle your roommate with her own spleen?
Me: No, silly.
Jamie: Ophelia.
Me: I just broke a FEW of her ribs.
Jamie: THIS IS NOT HOW YOU MAKE FRIENDS!
I sighed, frowning as I wrote back, I don’t want her to be my friend.
There was a long pause on his end before he finally responded, Do you need me to come over? Are you OK? Do you feel safe sleeping in the same room with her?
I smiled. There was the sweet man I loved. He was good at taking care of people. He knew what questions to ask and what to do. No, I’m not scared of Brianna. You go have fun with your friends.
With a much quicker response time, he shot back, OK, thanks. Call me tomorrow. Love you.
Rolling my eyes and shaking my head a bit, I opened the video chat application on my phone and clicked Georgie’s contact tab.
The flashing chat window opened, and my baby sister’s cherubic little face filled my screen. She beamed at me, and my cold, still heart melted. Georgie was the perfect killer, the grace and ruthlessness of creation’s greatest predators wrapped up in a package people wanted to protect. Her golden hair fell in perfect ringlets around a face that should have been cast in porcelain. Her pale pink lips were just the sort of pouty that friendly old people wanted to tease into a smile. The only flaw in her design was the pale gray eyes, glacial to the point that some had difficulty making eye contact with her. Over the years, Georgie had learned to keep her eyes downcast around humans, a tactic that led many of her victims to assume she was shy, only increasing her efficiency.
Honestly, everything I had learned about feeding and drawing in potential “donors” I had learned from watching Georgie hunt. Of course, we’d both had to learn to tamp down our more violent urges as forensic science improved. People stopped being so easy to dispose of, thanks to security cameras and bite-mark analysis. But blood banks and, later, artificial blood had eliminated the need for underhanded subterfuge. We were downright respectable these days, to Georgie’s everlasting mortification.
“Georgie, darling, how are you?”
Behind her, I could see Georgie’s room in Jane’s house. As always, I was surprised at the quiet dignity with which Jane had welcomed Georgie into her home. Most women would have taken the guest room where a little girl was going to be installed, hosed it down with Pepto-Bismol pink, and filled it with dolls and toys and oversized stuffed animals. Jane had repainted, but she’d gone with Georgie’s preferred slate blue, marrying it with lighter blue overtones and green accents. Leather-bound books, surely on loan from Jane’s extensive library, lined the shelves. A tank full of swirling, colorful tropical fish burbled in the corner. The effect was restful and charming, just the sort of space Georgie needed.
“Dismal. Jane is limiting me to an hour of video games per day,” she said, breathing her martyr’s sigh. “She made me go over some list of the one hundred greatest books in American and English literature and cried a little bit when she realized I’d only read nine of them. She says I’m ‘literarily anemic.’ And that I spend too much time playing video games. She’s trying to educate me, Fee.”
I felt a flush of genuine guilt. I’d stocked up on video games and controllers, beginning with the advent of Atari, because they kept Georgie quiet and occupied while I was running around completing Council business. Oh, sure, I’d done my best to get an extended education for her during our early years, securing the best tutors available for both of us. We’d attempted to study advanced economics, the sciences, literature. But Georgie kept eating the tutors, which explained the anemic areas of our instruction. After fifty years or so, it was easier just to hand her a stack of books and hope for the best. And now I could see that once again, I’d let my sister down.
“I’m sorry, Georgie,” I said quietly and sincerely.
“Oh, come on, it’s not as bad as all that,” Georgie told me. “We’re both getting polished up, right? Jane says that if I keep reading at the rate I’m going, she’ll let me enroll in some online college classes. And then we can compete to see who can get the most credits next semester.”
I laughed. “Have I ever mentioned that your competitive spirit is more like demonic possession?”
“I object to that!”
“The last time I beat you at Scrabble, you set fire to the board and buried the ashes in the backyard.”
“It was a faulty board.” Georgie sniffed. “No one should win with a word like ‘cookery.’ ”
“ ‘Cookery’ is a word!”
“For stuffy British people,” Georgie countered. “You should have told me we were playing the stuffy British version of the game. There were several unnecessary uses of the letter ‘u’ that could have served as an advantage to me.”
“So what is Jane doing for you, other than forcing you to read?” I asked.
“Oh, she took me to the fair the other night,” Georgie said. “Well, she and Gabriel and Dick and Andrea and Iris and Cal took me to the fair. I was very well supervised. At all times. From all angles. But I got to ride the Tilt-A-Whirl, and Cal won me a stuffed panda at the ring-toss game, so I suppose the evening wasn’t entirely wasted.” The pleased light in her eyes was not dimmed by her indifferent sniff. “It’s silly, really, that they treat me like a little girl.”
I tamped down a smile. I hated to admit it, but even before my sister had been removed to Jane’s home, I’d known my nemesis would take good care of her. For all of Jamie’s whining, Jane had done a commendable job of fostering him in his first years as a vampire. She was much more permissive than I would have been with a newborn, but Jamie was basically a Labradoodle with fangs. He didn’t need a firm hand. He needed a mother’s touch.
For so long, Georgie had been the only person who truly loved me, and vice versa. She had been shut off from the outside world for most of her vampire years. I’d kept her a secret in my home, both because of tensions I’d created with the Council by creating a vampire childe and because of the general uneasiness people felt around a tiny predator. We’d become too accustomed to the isolation, created what was probably an unhealthy dynamic in which we encouraged each other’s less altruistic tendencies, and believed it right and normal.
Even as humans, we hadn’t had much in the way of loving role models. Our parents hadn’t been what you’d call affectionate. They were so busy desperately trying to not die of something as simple as an infected hangnail that they didn’t have time for long heart-to-heart chats or fun family outings. And Georgie had never really had what would be considered a childhood, according to what I’d seen on TV and in movies. She’d never camped out in the living room in a tent made of blankets. She’d never gone to the movies and eaten so much popcorn that she threw up. She’d never had a single tea party for her dolls.
Of course, if someone suggested that she host that sort of tea party now, she’d probably remove their pancreas through their ear canal, but then again, she was with Jane, someone who might be able to get her to engage in those sorts of activities. Georgie always seemed too eager to impress me with her “maturity” to try.
Jane was doing exactly what Georgie needed. She was treating Georgie with respect but still giving her the experiences she’d never had as a child or even as a chronological adult. And she was giving her the moral education I’d neglected over the years, because, frankly, I’d lost
sight of so many of those little etiquette rules like “Draining your neighbors makes a bad impression” and “Just because your victim has something shiny, that doesn’t make it yours.” Maybe by the time I was finished with my degree, Georgie would be properly socialized to the point where I could take her out in public without worrying about an “incident.”
“So how’s the roommate?” Georgie asked casually. “Does she still have her eyebrows?”
“Only by the grace of Jamie’s good timing,” I grumbled. “We got into a fight and destroyed a desk, so now we have to prove how sorry we are by planning a party for our dorm—oh, I’m sorry, our residence hall.”
Georgie, who’d survived cross-oceanic travel before the steam engine and the advent of polyester, shuddered. “People are still correcting you on that?”
I nodded. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s a dormitory. People have called them dormitories for hundreds of years, and suddenly they want to complicate things? Anyway, the hall director has set a budget for us. It’s an insult to shoestrings. Enough to buy a couple of two-liters of soda and some Plasma Pop.”
“And did she tell you that you had to stick to that budget?”
I lifted my brow. “No, she did not. She just told me how much the school would give me to spend.”
“I’m ashamed of you for not thinking of this on your own.”
“I’m a little ashamed of myself,” I noted, shaking my head.
“I’m sending you a care package full of the usual necessities. Bottled blood, iTunes gift cards, and some drawings I did for you. Jane says that artistic expression is a healthy way for me to communicate my feelings, without having to be so gauche as to state them outright.”
