The Vampire's Special Child (The Vampire Babies Book 2)

by Amira Rain

The hallway was so slippery with tile cleaner that I almost wiped out, too. All because someone doesn’t even have the ability to read the words ‘Sparkle Fresh tile cleaner’ in big bold blue letters on the front of a can, because someone is a complete illiterate who spends her days playing paintball instead of doing something more productive, like, oh, I don’t know. Maybe learning how to read. Meanwhile, all of us other family members are busting our tails just trying to keep everyone on the farm safe.”

  Glaring at Mel, Jen slowly rose from her barstool and spoke in a quiet voice. “I can help keep everyone safe.”

  Leaning with her elbows on the island, Mel snorted. “How? By shooting up all the Warrens with paintballs? Sorry, Jen, but here in reality, that just won’t work. One thing that might work against the Warrens, though, is if you move in with them. You could probably annoy them all to death within a week. Which would still be a quicker death than shooting little paintballs at them.”

  Jen suddenly began striding out of the kitchen. “I don’t need this.”

  Twisting around in her high chair, Chrissy called out to her with cries of “Ah-Zhen!” but Jen didn’t even turn around.

  Once she’d disappeared from view down the hallway, I asked Mel if she thought she’d been a little “hard” on Jen. However, I really wanted to say “rude” or “excessively mean.”

  Standing up from her lean over the island, Mel just shrugged. “Maybe if she’d ever learn how to act properly, I wouldn’t have to be so hard on her.”

  “She’s always going to act a little ‘differently,’ though…and I think you know this. She just has a really unique personality, which is probably never going to change. So, are you just going to spend the rest of your life at odds with her? And keep in mind that since you’re a vampire, the ‘rest of your life’ is eternity…which might be the same for Jen someday, too.”

  Mel scoffed. “Oh, God forbid. Jen as a vampire? With her total lack of impulse control? She’d probably have half the citizens of Sweetwater completely drained dry of blood just on her first day.”

  With that, Mel breezed out of the kitchen, leaving me to wonder if she and Jen were ever going to find any kind of common ground or peace in their relationship.

  However, I soon had bigger problems to deal with once Carol came downstairs to take Chrissy from me.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I’d just left the house and was making my way to the day’s construction site, where a new fence was going to be constructed by the woodland east of the property, when I received a text. Hardly able to believe my eyes, I saw that it was from my former best friend Kayley. We hadn’t spoken at all, or communicated in any other way, since the day of our fight in the women’s clinic parking lot over a year earlier. I had, however, heard from an acquaintance that Kayley never missed a chance to say nasty things about me, such as when I’d posted a single wedding picture of Hayden and me, with him in his tux, and me in my white dress, holding Chrissy, on one of my social media pages not long after the wedding.

  The acquaintance of mine, whose name was Amy, soon sent me a message that said that Kayley was “still acting like a complete bitch” about me, telling Amy that she gave me and Hayden a year before we got divorced. I’d responded to Amy by saying that I found it funny that Kayley was still thinking about me, because I never thought about her at all, which was pretty much true. With a new baby, a husband, and an increasingly busy life, I never had time to.

  Wondering what Kayley could have to say to me, I quickly opened her text and read it. Hey. Just wanted to let you know that your Aunt Pam was in a car accident. She’s pretty much fine, but she has a broken collarbone, a broken arm, and she had to get twenty-seven stitches in the side of her head. My mom just wanted you to know, and by the way, my mom is forcing me to send this text. I’m not voluntarily doing it.

  Already mentally debating about whether or not I should call Pam to check on her, I sent a one-word response back to Kayley. Thanks.

  All morning while supervising construction of the new fence, even digging several posts myself, I debated whether or not to call Pam. On one hand, I figured, she’d made it crystal clear that she and John wanted nothing more to do with me. I figured this probably extended even to phone calls to check on their own well-being. I also felt like I didn’t even really want to call Pam.

  After all, by any standard, she’d treated me horribly ever since she’d found out I was pregnant. Really, she’d been treating me pretty horribly even before then, too, as had John. Also, neither one of them had contacted me after I’d had Chrissy, even though I knew they had to have heard through the grapevine when I’d had her.

  When she was only a week or so old, I’d run into a former high school teacher of mine who’d moved to Sweetwater, and since she’d always had a reputation as a gossip, I knew that she’d probably immediately started spreading the word on social media that she’d seen me with my new baby. And because she and Pam had many friends in common, I just figured that Pam had to have heard. But yet, she hadn’t contacted me, not that I’d really expected her to, anyway.

  All this made me feel like I really didn’t want to contact her. On the other hand, though, I kept thinking about how for better or worse, she was my family member. Technically, anyway. I also kept thinking about how I should be somehow “better” than her. She may not have contacted me, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t, or shouldn’t, contact her, I thought.

  Especially since she’d been so badly injured. If I didn’t contact her, I felt like this would somehow be a reflection of my own character, making me into a person who was just as hard-hearted as she was.

  By the time I took a break for lunch, I was no closer to deciding what I was going to do. While I sat beneath a tree eating a sandwich without really tasting it, Mark had a seat next to me, asking what had me looking like I was “a million miles away.”

  After quickly filling him in about Kayley’s text, and telling him some details of my family backstory as it related to John and Pam, I told him that I just couldn’t figure out what to do. Surprising me somewhat, Mark asked me what my mom would do, and without hesitation, I told him that my mom would give Pam a call to make sure that she was okay and to see if she needed anything.

  “No doubt. See, that’s just the type of person my mom was. She could get pretty feisty sometimes, and I know that she could give as good as she got with Pam, but at the end of the day, she had the ability to just be mature and be a caring family member…pretty unlike John and Pam.”

  “Well, then, it sounds like you need to decide whether or not you’re going to follow in your mom’s footsteps in this situation, as far as being a mature, caring family member, or if you’re going to take your own path, even if that means never contacting your aunt and uncle ever again.”

  I contemplated Mark’s words, soon realizing that I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t at least check in with Pam by text or something. I wanted to be a mature and caring woman at the end of the day like my mom had been, but even more than that, I just simply didn’t want to be the type of family member who didn’t even check in when another family member was in a serious car accident.

  Not to mention that I felt in some way that I had to live my life, and conduct my family dealings, in a way that could be an example to Jen and Mel or something. Lord only knew that they both needed an example of how to be mature and caring despite not having many warm feelings for the family member in question.

  Mark soon left to head back to his office, and after finishing my lunch, I typed out a brief text to Pam. I was sorry to hear that you were in a car accident. Are you doing all right? I hit send and jammed my phone back in my pocket before I could second-guess myself or change my mind.

  Late in the afternoon, I received a brief text response from Pam. I’m fine. Home from the hospital. Thank you for asking.

  The response was just as warm as I’d expected it to be, which was to say, not warm at all. However, it was civil, and it didn�
��t contain any demand for me to not contact Pam ever again or anything, which was something. Also, she had thanked me for asking how she was doing, which maybe seemed to contain at least a little hint of warmth. Which might have been even more than a little hint if she weren’t in terrible pain from her injuries, which I could only guess that she was.

  Rereading the text again, I mentally asked myself what I was doing studying Pam’s words how I was. It wasn’t like I wanted a real family relationship with her again or anything, not that we’d ever even had one in the first place. Then, what are you doing, Sydney? I really didn’t know. I supposed I just wanted to understand if her civil response to me meant that she possibly wanted more contact from me in the future.

  I knew one thing for sure, which was that I wanted to talk to Hayden about it all. However, when I called him that evening on my way back to the house from the fence-building site, the call went straight to voicemail.

  Pocketing my phone, I figured that maybe this was for the best. It wasn’t like he didn’t have enough on his mind lately without having to deal with my conflicted feelings about my relationship with my aunt, or my non-relationship as the case was. I wouldn’t bother him, I resolved. Instead, I’d talk to Jen when I got back home.

  Over the course of our friendship, I’d discovered that as wacky and as childlike as she could be sometimes, she was honestly pretty good at giving advice when it pertained to interpersonal matters. Her answers were usually pretty brief, simple, and sometimes comically obvious, but she had a creative way of thinking about certain things that could just cut right through everything else.

  However, when I got home to the house, I wasn’t able to talk to Jen about my family issues. Although I found her right away in the kitchen, where she was sitting up to the island eating cereal out of an enormous mixing bowl, I’d barely said two words to her when Mark arrived home from work, looking extremely tense with a deep crease between his eyes. Jen and I both said hello, and he issued a terse hello in return, then took a seat on a barstool next to Jen, frowning hard.

  “Excuse me…Jennifer?”

  I didn’t think I’d ever heard him address Jen as “Jennifer” before.

  “Can you please tell me why some teen magazine staff writer called my law office today, saying that she was trying to hunt down ‘bacon bathtub girl,’ also known on the internet as ‘at Jen C. MacGregor?’”

  Jen snorted, setting the serving spoon she’d been eating with beside her enormous cereal bowl. “Dad, just let me ask you a question first. Do you think breakfast in bed is ‘basic?’ Keep in mind that if you say yes, which you almost have to if you’re being honest, you can’t blame me for any of my actions on the day that I took the ‘bacon bathtub’ picture.”

  Mark frowned even harder. “I’m your father. I think I can blame you for whatever I want.”

  “Okay, Dad. Okay. Here’s the story of the ‘bacon bathtub’ picture. See, me and Wanted were in the bathtub one morning, just eating our breakfast so nicely, but then Mel busted in and threatened to push my head under the water and hold it there for five minutes if I didn’t take a selfie right then and there.”

  Mark spoke through gritted teeth. “And did she have a gun to your head when you posted that picture online later?”

  Jen slowly nodded. “Yes, Dad. She did. I was so scared.”

  Mark soon began telling Jen how she’d “embarrassed the family” and how she’d promised him never to post any picture online that would do so. Jen retorted that she’d tried to get clarification from Carol about what was considered “embarrassing,” but that Carol had been too busy to respond.

  Nostrils flaring slightly, Mark shook his head. “No, don’t you even dare, Jennifer. You’re not going to blame this on Carol.”

  “Well, who can I blame it on, then?”

  Mark gave Jen what I would have called a “death glare.”

  “You’re not going to blame it on anyone but yourself, young lady. I told you what our family rules are regarding online pictures, and you went ahead and disregarded those rules.”

  “But—”

  “You know full well what ‘generally embarrassing to our family’ means. I gave you examples when we talked about the rules, and you could have shown me your bathtub picture first if you weren’t sure. So, as a consequence, I’m grounding you from—”

  “No, Dad!”

  “Going into Sweetwater for three days.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. No grandparents, no paintball, no nothing.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. You’ll work with Sydney on the fences and think about how you can display better judgment in the future.”

  “But stopping me from going into Sweetwater, that’s…well, Dad, I think this is cruel and unusual punishment.”

  Glancing over at me, almost as if to say, “Can you believe this?” Mark scoffed. “Jen, you’ve lived such a life of parental indulgence that I don’t think you’d recognize ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ if you tripped over it.”

  With her arms folded across her chest, Jen hopped off her barstool, scowling. “Fine, Dad. I’ll serve my three days of grounding, and I won’t post anymore breakfast-in-the-bathtub’ pictures on the internet again.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “I do have just one question about all this, though.”

  “And what’s that?”

  Jen drew in a great lungful of air before issuing a string of words in a near-shout. “Why is everyone being so mean to me today?”

  Without waiting for a response, she began tearing out of the kitchen, breaking into sobs as she went. For a moment, I thought about chasing after her, but then thought better of it, figuring that maybe she just wanted to be alone, and that maybe Mark wanted that, too, so that she could think about her actions. However, when I shifted my gaze from the hallway to him, I found him wearing an expression of pain and seeming regret, like maybe Jen’s dramatic-sounding sobs had wounded him to his core.

  “Maybe I was too hard on her.”

  Mark was typically such a softie with Jen that I’d almost anticipated him having this kind of reaction to her emotional exit, even though I didn’t think the punishment he’d issued Jen was “cruel and unusual” at all.

  I told him that I thought he hadn’t been too hard on her, and that she was probably simply still a little wounded from her fight with Mel earlier that morning. Once I’d told Mark all about that, he frowned hard.

  “Now I really think I was too hard on Jen, considering what she already went through today. I think I’m just a little stressed. First of all, in the office, we have three cases simultaneously about to go to trial, and then to add to all that, I just spoke to Hayden on the way in, and he reported that one of his scout patrols told him this afternoon that the Warrens have added a few dozen additional fighters to their ranks…vampires who were cast out of a coven somewhere in Utah, I think he said.”

  Now I felt silly and a little selfish for even having thought to burden Hayden with my uncertainty and dilemma about the possibility of contacting Pam again. Clearly, Hayden had bigger things on his plate, as did I, and as did everyone else on the farm.

  The following day, Jen began serving her “sentence,” assigned to help me and the rest of the fence-building crew, which included several vampires strong enough to make quick work of things once we really got going. Despite this, I still helped not just with planning, but with physically installing fence posts as well, determined to do all I could do to help defeat the Warrens.

  Jen, on the other hand, seemed determined to make some kind of a game out of fence-building, hiding behind lengths of fencing and then seeing how long it took for someone to find her. She also enjoyed hiding behind all the earthworks the crew and I had recently made various places around the property, for the purpose of giving us a strategic advantage in the fight against the Warrens by way of spots for hiding and surveillance. Additionally, Jen spent a lot of time exploring the forestland around the pro
perty, saying that with all the time she’d spent in Sweetwater lately, she’d forgotten how “cool” her own “backyard” was.

  During Jen’s second day of playtime disguised as “service work,” a Warren scout was caught in the “backyard” of the property, although fortunately, he was caught before he got anywhere near Jen. It was actually a guard patrol that Hayden was leading that caught him, and the other members of the fence crew and I arrived on the scene just in time to see Hayden begin to execute the scout by driving a knife into his chest.

  Hayden then used the same knife to decapitate the man, although I didn’t see more than a second of this. With my stomach churning, I’d already turned to walk back to the fence construction site, knowing what was coming.

  Maybe twenty minutes later, Hayden emerged from the woods, covered in blood, and found me, asking if I was all right. I said I was, and he apologized for what I’d had to see. I replied that it was nothing that I hadn’t seen before, and that I was glad that he’d taken out another Warren.

  “My only regret right now is that I want to kiss you, because I’ve missed you so much, but that’s not really possible.”

  Hayden had wiped the blood from his face with his shirt while coming out of the woods, but that really hadn’t cleaned his face enough for me to be able to kiss him. Not only did he still have smudges of blood still all over his face, but he had a cut above one eye still freely bleeding down his face.

  A little nauseated by the sight of blood, as I usually was, I still took a little step closer to examine his wound. “Does it hurt?”

  He shook his head. “It’s nothing, and it’ll be healed within a few minutes. I won’t even have a scar.”

  I still hadn’t fully gotten used to the idea that vampires recovered from injuries very quickly. It still just seemed so unbelievable, even though I’d seen it happen with my own eyes. A few months earlier, Sam had his face nearly sliced to ribbons while in a fight with a Warren spy. Just an hour or two later, his wounds had completely healed, not leaving even the trace of a scar. He’d once even been shot in the head while coming to the aid of a mugging victim in Downtown Moxon. It had been kind of a big deal, although not because Sam had been permanently injured in any way.