16
Change is inevitable. It’s necessary for the growth of a relationship. But most of the time, it just plain sucks.
—Love Bites: A Female Vampire’s Guide to Less
Destructive Relationships
When I came to, I was tied up in the basement of a very old home. My mouth tasted like old pennies. And the back of my neck was stinging like crazy. I sat up. But the swishing sensation in my head made me flop back to the stone floor. The ceiling above was solidly constructed and oddly familiar. I looked around, recognizing several of the old boxes and crates.
“Crap,” I groaned.
I’d been abducted and taken to River Oaks. This was just embarrassing.
I made another attempt at sitting up, wincing at the raw hemp rope binding my wrists and ankles. Double crap. I leaned against a box of old Christmas decorations and squinted toward the low, small cellar window. It was dark outside. What time was it? Had I been out all day? Where was Emery? Where was Gabriel? He had to be frantic by now.
Through the fuzzy sensations lingering in my head, I tried to remember if I kept anything down here that could cut through the ropes. I scanned the room for the outline of gardening tools or a saw. In the dark, I could make out the faint pink glow of a polyester Halloween costume.
“Andrea!” I whispered at her prone form. “Andrea, are you OK? Please, answer me. Andrea?”
Andrea was clothed, thank goodness, and lying on an old table of my grandpa’s. Her clothes were stained with old blood. She looked as if she was sleeping, but there was no breath, no pulse that I could hear. She was so pale and small. My heart caught in my throat, the edges of my vision tinged a bright, angry crimson. Something was cutting into my lip. It took me a few seconds to recognize that it was my fangs and the blood welling into my mouth was my own, stoking an already scorching hatred for Emery.
“I’m afraid our Andrea is indisposed,” Emery said fondly, emerging from a corner to sit at Andrea’s shoulders. “She’s so beautiful, like a princess in a fairy tale.” He chuckled, stroking her hair. “Only, the prince’s kiss is what put her to sleep.” Emery’s smile was sudden, sharp, and vicious. “She was delicious, your Andrea. Well, she’s my Andrea now.”
“I’m going to kill you,” I promised.
Emery’s cool, calm Lestat demeanor changed at my harsh tone. “I did it for her!” he hissed. “For my mistress! To prove that I am worthy of her dark gift.” He seemed to compose himself. “To hurt you. Oh, how she loves to hurt you.” He smiled to himself. “Andrea was my very first kill. It was so much easier than I thought it would be. After drinking that horrible bottled blood, it was a pleasure. You must know. You have to have tasted her, at least once. Giving her my own blood wasn’t as easy, though. The mistress is right, it’s quite exhausting.”
“You turned her?” The division of my feelings tore a hole through my chest, shock and horror that Andrea had been forced out of her human life, relief that she wasn’t entirely gone, grief for Dick.
“The mistress promised her to me,” he said, running his hand along her still, white cheek. He smiled up at me. “And she said I could have you, as well. I have needs, Jane, needs I’ve denied for far too long. And since I’m not worthy of the mistress’s attentions …”
“Oh, just back up the crazy truck, there, Foot Boy. There will be no having . Got it?”
“You have such a … unique way with words, Jane.” A soft, feminine voice chuckled in the darkness. Cindy, our latte-loving teen good-luck charm, stepped into the dim light. The green was washed out of her now-dark hair. It was drawn back into a high, Victorian style, oddly in sync with her ornately embroidered black skirt and white silk blouse. She wasn’t wearing makeup, and her black nail polish had been removed. My instinct to protect the girl I’d grown so fond of jumped ahead of my logical thinking skills.
“Cindy, get out of here!” I cried. “You could get hur—oh, for God’s sake, you’re one of them, aren’t you?”
She tsk ed and shook her head sympathetically. “Poor Jane.”
“I trusted you. I was nice to you. I gave you free coffee!”
She smiled and pinched my cheek. “Yes, and it gave me time to watch you, to listen to you whine and complain to your friends when you thought I was reading. It’s amazing what people will say when they think no one’s listening. It made writing those letters so much easier.”
“Wait a minute, you’re Jeanine?” I gasped. “But I saw inside your head. You’re a newborn!”
Jeanine took out a vial of rewetting drops and moistened her eyes. She dabbed delicately with a lacy handkerchief. She flashed a simpering smile my way as Emery reverently lowered a red velvet ceremonial cape onto her shoulders. “I’m a very talented actress. I could have been one of the great ladies of the theater, if Grandmama had allowed me to pursue it. But theater people were barely better than circus folk at the time, you see. Really, you were disappointingly easy to fool. I knew you’d try to read my mind, so I came up with that story about poor little Cindy, the misunderstood, lonely newborn, looking for a place to belong. I let you see that much. I knew you wouldn’t be able to turn me away. You never even suspected me. Of course, at the end of the day, I had to flush the toxins from your wretched coffee out of my system, but it was worth it. I learned so much about you, Jane, and it helped me direct Emery in how to best … instruct you.”
“Where exactly did you two meet up, psychoticsingles.com ?”
Jeanine’s hand snaked out from under her cape, forcing the stun gun against my arm. The quick metallic sting of the current locked my jaw muscles. “Ow!” I grunted.
“There’s no reason to be rude, Jane. I don’t see why the two of us can’t be friends,” Jeanine said, smiling guilelessly. “I mean, honestly, we have so much in common. A love of reading, complicated relationships with our mothers, loving the same man. With Gabriel as a sire, we’re practically sisters. So let’s talk, the two of us. Just a couple of girlfriends.”
“I am not braiding your hair,” I growled.
In a cheerful voice, she said, “I’m just a good Catholic girl at heart, Jane. I’m very comfortable in churches, convents, monasteries. After Gabriel had so callously rejected my latest round of calls and letters, I traveled all the way to Guatemala, to rest in a little seminary high in the Sierra Madre de Chiapas. And one day, I wandered into the chapel to find Emery.”
“She was an answer to my prayers. I thought she was an angel.” He sighed. “My dark angel.”
“I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth,” I muttered, wincing when Jeanine gave me a light zap with the stun gun.
“Emery was so eager to please,” she said, stroking her fingers along the curve of his face. He leaned into her caress like an adoring spaniel. “So considerate. He promised to do anything he could to restore my health, even when it meant bringing me the blood of every student in the seminary. Imagine my shock when I found out he was from Half-Moon Hollow, the birthplace of my dear sire. Emery told me about his uncle’s bookshop, about a book he remembered from his boyhood, which described a ritual to ‘revampirize’ an ailing immortal.” She lifted the copy of The Spectrum of Vampirism, stained with my blood. “It was fate, you see, the book, Emery, Gabriel, all circling this silly little town. I wanted to leave immediately, but then he got a message from you, saying that his uncle had died. And he learned that you’d been given the store and all of its contents. That complicated matters for us. So, we waited and we watched.”
Her lip curled. “And I saw you with him, with my Gabriel. How could I help but reach out to him? You took my sire away. He stopped thinking about me when you came along.”
I narrowed my eyes, thinking of all the stress she’d put Gabriel through. “He stopped thinking about you a long time before that.” I let out a loud “Gah!” when she shocked me again. “OK, I will admit that was not a constructive thing to say.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve guessed what my special ability is, have you, Jane?” She preened, as if she hadn’t just sent thousands of volts into my body. “You might call it having a ‘one-track mind.’ If I focus on someone hard enough, I can find them anywhere. No matter where they are, no matter how hard they try to hide, I just have a knack for guessing where they’ll turn up next.”
“Your special power is you’re a supernaturally gifted stalker?” I panted. “Gabriel really did screw up by turning you.”
She ignored me, possibly because the stun gun still had to recharge after the last round. “I’ll admit Gabriel’s given me a challenge over the last few decades. He’s become very skilled at keeping his plans vague, at bouncing between this horrible little shanty town and the rest of civilization. I was always guessing with him. But you, oh, Jane, you were very easy to follow. You were a considerable help to me while Gabriel dragged you from city to city, hotel to hotel. You were practically a homing beacon. I didn’t even have to try, which was fortunate for me. I find travel to be so draining. It was all I could do to write those notes and leave them at your hotels before collapsing into a tea-tree and eucalyptus bath. They’re very restorative, you know. You might try it sometime, Jane. You’re looking a bit tired.”
“I’m not tired, I’m concussed.”
She chuckled, making calf-eyes at Emery as he lit several oil hurricane lamps I’d kept in storage for power outages. “Meanwhile, Emery stayed here. He wasn’t very happy with you either, Jane. You took over the store. You were handed everything his uncle had left in this world. He wanted to punish you. It’s another interest we share. So, I let my Emery indulge his need for petty revenge. I helped him learn to guard his thoughts around you. I let him play his little games with you. I even fed him a few ideas. Rifling through your purse and finding that silly little can of vampire mace was particularly inspiring.”
Suddenly, the disappearance of my mace made a lot more sense, though I had to wonder what sort of evil vampire ninja skills Jeanine had employed to get at my purse without anyone seeing. I grunted, wanting to smack myself on the forehead. I’d told her to help herself to coffee whenever she needed a refill. My purse was under the counter.
No more trusting teenagers, ever.
I smiled nastily. “Well, it backfired, because sending me a box full of silver is what brought Gabriel and me back together. So … thanks for that.”
A black sneer flickered across her features before she forced them back into her mask of serene control. I waited for her to shock me again, but the sting didn’t come. When I opened my eyes, Jeanine was holding the book in her hand, poring over whatever ritual she was convinced would turn her into a real girl.
“Are you sure this is the right book?” she demanded as Emery cowered before her.
“Of course, mistress,” he simpered.
She growled. “But there’s hardly anything in here. There’s no special ceremony for re-turning a vampire, just a footnote about whether it’s possible. The footnote says, ‘Highly unlikely.’”
Emery blanched at her tone, spluttering, “B-but-but I didn’t make any guarantees, mistress, I said I vaguely remember reading something as a child—”
“You said a little more than that, Emery. As I recall, you seemed sure that you knew how to cure me. You promised!” She stamped her foot.
I hissed out a hoarse laugh. “Emery is your go-to guy in this scenario? You’re the worst nemesis I’ve ever had. Mama Ginger has better plotting skills.”
“Emery,” she said absentmindedly. Emery reached out and backhanded me, his fingers striking my jaw with bone-buckling force.
Ow.
As I stretched my aching jaw, I realized Jeanine was trying to prevent hurting me too badly. The stun gun was enough to keep me in line, but she didn’t trust herself to really lash out. She needed me. And the only reason I could think of for keeping me alive would be to—
“Gabriel,” I groaned. “You want Gabriel here for whatever weirdo ritual you have planned. I’ve been relegated to bait. This is insulting.”
“Don’t be insulted, Jane,” she said, her lip drawn up into a bewildered pout. “It’s a compliment, really. Gabriel cares for you. He’s almost obsessed with your safety and happiness. As soon as he realizes you’re not at the shop, he’ll come running here looking for you. And your … predicament is just the incentive he needs to cooperate. Do you realize that I’ve been trying to contact him for decades, but the first time he ever responded in any way was when I told him I was going to talk to you, to hurt you? Personally, I don’t see the attraction.” Her rosebud features grew dark, petulant. “It’s not fair. He cared enough to turn you completely, to make sure you could take care of yourself, fend for yourself. He turned me into less. He made me into a ghoul.”
“You are not a ghoul. You’re a hypochondriac. You travel with a humidifier, for goodness sake.” When a lightning-quick flash of insane fury crossed Jeanine’s features, I had an idea. If there was no bait, there was no trap, no reason for Gabriel to be here. Jeanine would be left with no big evil plan. She wouldn’t be able to hurt him. And with me gone, Jenny would finally get the house. Now that my life seemed to be finally, truly coming to a close, I found I didn’t mind so much. Annoying her didn’t seem so important now. It really sucked that I was reaching some level of emotional maturity moments before imminent death.
I snickered loudly, making my voice as condescending and Courtney-like as possible. “You don’t even have the guts to come after me yourself. You had Foot Boy do your dirty work for you.”
Jeanine rolled her eyes but didn’t respond. I dug deeper into the bitchy-insult well, lowering my voice to a sly, sneering tone. “You know, Gabriel told me all about your little crush on him, when you were human. Following him around like a little puppy dog, making a nuisance of yourself. I pointed out that not much has changed, since you’re still doing pretty much the same thing. And we laaaaaaaughed. Did I mention we were lying in my bed, naked, at the time?”
Jeanine’s teeth ground together as she barked out, “Emery!”
Emery turned and really walloped me. Unfortunately, he did it at just the right angle, so that my temple barreled into the corner of a china crate. I slumped to the ground, my head spinning, blood seeping through the neck of my sweatshirt. I was vaguely aware of my arms being pinned under my back, the ropes biting into my wrists. So, instead of dying to protect my beloved, I was going to wake up with a headache and a serious case of pins-and-needles in my arms.
Overall, not my most well-thought-out plan.
As unconsciousness tinged the edge of my vision, I glared up at Jeanine. “I don’t like you.”
Jeanine grinned, patting my cheek. “I’m glad we’ve got that out in the open.”
From the dark, bottomless pit of oblivion, I heard shouting. I blinked a few times. I heard Dick’s pained howl and his voice moaning, “No, baby, no,” over and over. When my eyes could focus, I saw him in the corner, Andrea’s body pressed against his chest, his face buried in her neck.
Gabriel’s voice was louder, stern. “Stay down, Emery!”
I sat up, wincing at the numbness in my arms. I shook my head, trying to fling away the last fuzzy spots in my head.
“Gabriel?” I peered up, seeing Gabriel choking Emery against a wall as Jeanine stood nearby, wringing her hands. She looked so helpless and panicked. It seemed that faced with the object of her obsession and fury, our mutual sire, all of her high-flown evil plans had evaporated, and she was reduced to dithering like a flustered schoolgirl. I almost felt sorry for her.
But not really.
Gabriel dropped a barely conscious Emery at the sound of my hoarse whisper. Emery slumped against a stack of crates, toppling them over. I heard Jeanine gasp as one of the unlit hurricane lamps shattered near her feet, soaking her cloak in the lamp oil.
“Jane?” he murmured, probing my temple gently with his fingertips. Between the barely healed cuts on my arms, the head wound, and the drying maroon blood soaked into my sweatshirt, I imagined I wouldn’t be winning any beauty contests soon. Sadly, at this point, I think Gabriel was used to seeing me this way.
“I’m really sorry about this. Emery got me from behind.” I groaned. “That’s not what it sounds like.”
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Bored and annoyed, a little worried about Emery’s mental state. But yeah, I’m fine,” I grumbled, trying to push to my feet. “Nope, I was wrong, my head really hurts.”
“Come upstairs,” he said, taking my arm and supporting my weight. “Jeanine, I’ve called the Council here. You’ve gone too far this time. When they see …” Gabriel’s voice broke as he took in the sight of Dick huddled protectively over Andrea. “There’s nothing I can do to help you.”
“That’s not true,” Jeanine mewled. “You and I have a long-owed debt to settle, Gabriel.”
“I don’t owe you anything,” he growled, pushing past her and dragging me with him.
“All of this is your doing! Your fault. You made me what I am!”
The pitiful voice, the sight of Jeanine’s twisted baby-doll visage, were playing Gabriel’s guilt strings like a virtuoso. I could see the conflict play out on his face. After everything, he wanted to try to find a way to help her. He turned, leaving me to stand as my sense of equilibrium returned. “I shouldn’t have left you alone, Jeanine,” he said. “And I’m sorry for that. But I was afraid of you, afraid of the things you would do. I was ashamed of you. I thought that you would listen to Violette, that she could teach you.”
“She didn’t teach me anything!” Jeanine pouted. “It was just more rules! More rules than my Grandmama had. Don’t feed from the weak. Don’t kill for the sake of killing,” she said, mimicking a heavy French accent. “It was so much worse than my life. You left me with that. I didn’t have anyone to turn to. Please, just give me more of your blood. Make me whole. The Council will understand that I was sick and not in my right mind, that I had no choice but to do what I’ve done, especially when you talk to them.”
He took a deep breath. “I won’t do that, Jeanine. I won’t speak for you and I won’t give you another drop of my blood. There’s no such thing as a re-turning.”
“Yes, there is!” Jeanine screamed.
“Jeanine,” he growled.
I cleared my throat. “Gabriel, let’s not antagonize the crazy with the stun gun.”
“Jane, don’t help. Wait—she has your stun gun?”
I shrugged my shoulders, my expression apologetic.
“I can make you happy, Gabriel, if you just give me the chance. But now that you have her, you don’t even think of me,” Jeanine begged, her voice reedy and desperate. “Can’t you see what she’s done to me, by coming between us? I need you.”
Oh, Lord, it was Gabriel’s kryptonite, a lady in distress. But instead of reaching out to Jeanine, he simply shook his head.
“I can’t keep living like this,” Jeanine cried, real tears of blood streaming down her cheeks now. “I won’t keep living this half-life. I want the gift of immortality or no life at all!”
“I gave you the gift of immortality,” Gabriel said, his voice cold now. “And you’ve wasted it.”
With a mad cry, Jeanine sparked the stun gun and moved it to the hem of her cloak. “I’ll end it now. I’ll take you all with me.”
“You won’t do it. You’re terrified of death,” I told her. I thought reminding her of the immediate dusty consequences would make her drop the stun gun, but Jeanine seemed to take my words as a challenge. She sneered and pressed it down, the arc of electrical energy combusting the lamp-oil-soaked cloth with a bright orange glow. Within seconds, her clothes were engulfed. Gabriel threw me behind him. But Jeanine stood perfectly still, a shocked look freezing her face in a mask of horrified regret, as if she couldn’t believe what she had done in a toddler’s fit of temper. Her panicked hands beat at the flames as they licked up her clothes, toward her face. There was a horrible scream as Jeanine’s body seemed to disintegrate before our eyes. Her face turned gray, then black, then crumbled into dust. The flaming cloak crumpled to the floor.
I watched as the puddle of oil caught, the fire inching toward the piles of boxes and wooden crates. The flames speared higher and higher, until I thought they might be brushing against the ceiling. We would be trapped. River Oaks would burn. The cellar was going to catch like a Roman candle if—
I shrieked as a blue-white cloud exploded in my face. Dick was standing over Jeanine’s remains with the fire extinguisher I kept near the cellar steps. With tears streaking down his deadened, inanimate face, he sprayed foam over the remaining hot spots, dropped the red tank with a clang, and shuffled back to Andrea without a word.
The cold blast from the fire extinguisher seemed to revive Emery, who slowly pushed himself up from the floor. Gabriel sprang to his feet, putting himself between Emery and me.
“Mistress?” Emery mumbled. His dull, unfocused eyes caught sight of the pile of ashes and the red cape, absorbing what it meant. He howled, “No! No !”
Emery scanned the room for signs of Jeanine, for an explanation of what had happened. Seeing Dick crouched over Andrea, Emery cried, “That is my mate!” When he advanced on them, Dick looked up with what can only be called a predatory snarl and roared. Even I jumped back. Gabriel’s grip tightened around my arm.
“Emery, I think you should back away and sit still until the Council gets here,” Gabriel seethed.
Emery’s brow furrowed, even as he circled Andrea, trying to find a weakness in Dick’s defenses. “What council?”
“The Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead. The governing body of vampires who are going to lower the boom on you after what you’ve done,” I said.
Emery snorted derisively. “We’re vampires, Jane. We’re above the law, the constraints of human society. There are no rules for us anymore. It’s why I wanted to be a vampire in the first place.”
“Actually, there’s a whole butt-load of rules, Emery. The Council has rules for everything, especially when it comes to abducting and forcibly turning humans. It’s bad for our public image. All those months at the bookshop, and you never bothered reading anything, did you? You bought into Jeanine’s promise of a ‘dark gift’ without even thinking about it. And now, you’re going to get the Trial.”
“What’s the Trial?” Emery asked, his bravado suddenly gone.
“What you’ve done to Andrea is going to pale in comparison.”
As if on cue, Ophelia arrived at the top of the cellar with her Council posse: gaunt and grumpy Peter Crown, a Colonel Sanders lookalike improbably named Waco Marchand, and cool blond Sophie. I was never so glad to see bureaucrats in all my life. It was like a pale, elegant cavalry. Emery had lost all nerve at this point and was cowering behind a junk pile.
Ophelia, a 300-year-old teenager who was wearing skinny dark-wash jeans and a Jonas Brothers T-shirt, took in the sight of Andrea’s crumpled body, the pile of ashes on the floor, and my bloodied, chainsaw-massacre-survivor look.
“What did you do this time, Jane?” she demanded, rolling her eyes.
“This time, it really wasn’t me,” I protested.
“You always say that,” she pointed out.
“It was this newborn, Emery Mueller,” Gabriel said, dragging Emery up by the collar and pushing him toward Peter. “He kidnapped Andrea Byrne and turned her against her will. Under the direction of his sire, Jeanine, he also attempted to kill Jane with aerosol silver weeks ago, then assaulted and kidnapped her tonight.”
“That’s quite the rap sheet for a newborn,” Ophelia said, nudging Jeanine’s remains with her toe.
Gabriel cleared his throat. “When Dick … when he’s able to speak, he will corroborate my story.”
“I see,” she said, mulling that over as she scraped the ashes from her hot-pink Converse sneakers. “And I take it this is Jeanine?” Gabriel nodded curtly. “When I told you to take care of the matter, Gabriel, I didn’t mean to set her on fire.”
I raised my hand for permission to speak. “Actually, she did that to herself.”
“You’ve said that before, too,” Ophelia noted. I groaned, hoping Ophelia wasn’t going to sic Sophie on me. I’d just gotten over Sophie’s brain-scraping brand of interrogation from our last encounter at a Cracker Barrel.
Mr. Marchand nudged her with his elbow. “She’s never lied to us before, Ophelia. She’s no good at it.”
Ophelia sighed, “Fine. Emery Mueller, I hereby take you into the custody of this tribunal on the charge of forcibly creating a vampire. Your Trial is scheduled in two days.”
“Like a hearing?” Emery whispered. He seemed caught between being terrified of Ophelia and wanting to kiss her feet.
Peter smiled nastily. “No.”
Emery whimpered as Peter and Sophie dragged him away.
“I’d like to say I hope I don’t see you for a while, Jane, but somehow, I don’t think it will work out that way,” Ophelia said.
“That seems fair,” I grumbled.
Ophelia cast a long glance at Dick, a puzzled expression marring her beautiful face. “Let me know if you need … help over the next few days.”
With that, the Council swept out of the room in silence. I honestly didn’t care whether I ever saw Emery or Ophelia again. Gabriel and I slowly approached Dick. I laid a hand on his shoulder. Dick inhaled sharply, but he didn’t snap at us when we gently pried Andrea away from him. Dick allowed Gabriel to carry Andrea upstairs to one of the guest rooms. I washed her neck and face, trying to remove any traces that Emery might have left behind. When she woke, I didn’t want her to smell him. I cut the bloodied costume from her body and slipped a soft cotton nightgown over her head. Even though I knew I would be talking to her, laughing with her again soon, it still felt like funeral preparations.
I went downstairs and found Dick and Gabriel in my kitchen, an open bottle of Faux Type O between them. I had to try to swallow the lump in my throat twice before I could manage, “Dick, I’m sorry. It’s my fault. If I’d just—I didn’t even suspect Emery. I was so self-centered. I thought Jeanine was focused on me. It didn’t occur to me that she would go after my friends like this.”
Dick’s voice was raw, a harsh whisper between sips. “You couldn’t have guessed, Jane. None of us did. We’re going to lay blame at Emery’s feet, where it belongs.”
“Um, I was dead drunk when I was turned,” Dick said quietly, staring into his glass. “I can’t remember a thing. I just woke up, and there I was—no pulse, no breath. I, um, I need to know, Jane, does it hurt? To die, I mean? Does it hurt? Did she suffer?”
His eyes pinned me, tears slipping down his cheeks.
“No, it’s just like falling asleep,” I told him, tucking his hair behind his ear and giving him a sisterly kiss on the cheek. “It doesn’t hurt at all.”
“I’m going to stay here for a few days if that’s OK,” Dick said. “I don’t want to move her again.”
“You’re more than welcome,” I said. “I’ll lay out some sheets and some towels for you.”
I pushed away from the counter to do just that, but my arms and legs were suddenly so tired. I stumbled against the kitchen table and felt Gabriel’s hands on my arms, steadying me. “Sorry, I think the blood loss and head injuries are catching up with me.”
“I can take care of myself, Stretch,” Dick said. “Gabe, take her upstairs, and make her get some sleep. I don’t care what you have to do to convince her, I just don’t want to hear anything.”
I smiled at the half-hearted insinuation. To joke about my sex life, Dick must be feeling a little better. I let Gabriel lift me bridal-style and carry me up the stairs. Now it was my turn to be undressed and tucked into bed. When he slid under the sheets behind me, pulling me to his chest, I turned to him and buried my face against his skin.
“I lied,” I told Gabriel, wiping at my eyes. “When I said it doesn’t hurt to die. I lied. It’s agony. It was like drowning on dry land, being crushed, not being able to breathe. It hurts. But I couldn’t tell Dick that. I lied.”
“I know, sweetheart,” he said, brushing his lips along my brow. “I remember. Even without the added pain of being shot, taking that last breath, it hurts. But sometimes we have to lie to protect the ones we love.” I narrowed my eyes at him. He cleared his throat. “Though obviously, I will never be doing that again. But you did the right thing.”
“How will this affect Dick?” I asked him. “Will it be weird for him to be with a vampire he hasn’t sired?”
He shrugged. “It’s not a requirement. There are lots of vampires in very successful relationships.”
“Are they going to be OK or not?”
“It’s a violation,” Gabriel agreed. “Dick will be reminded of it every day. He’ll feel he failed her somehow, that he didn’t protect her. But he loves her. He will set it all aside to be with her.”
“It seems my life is just as uncertain and out of control as when I was human. I thought I’d changed, learned. I thought I was more in control. I’m scared of what’s to come, what I don’t understand yet.”
I closed my eyes as Gabriel murmured, “Jane, you can’t worry about the future so much that you miss out on the present. And I’ll be with you. No matter what.”
I slept that deep sleep that requires that you wake up with a patch of drool drying on your face. Vaguely, I remembered falling asleep with Gabriel, waking at one point when it was dark outside, and finding him awake next to me. I was hungry but far too tired to leave the bed, so he held his wrist to my lips and let me drink from him. There were a few more “sleepy patches,” in which I woke, fed, and went back to sleep. But now I was just confused and had serious bed hair.
“What time is it?” I asked, squinting in the twilight.
Gabriel stroked a thumb down my temple, where the flesh was smooth and unmarred now. “Six P.M. On Thursday.”
I bolted out of bed. “Holy crap, I slept for three days?”
“You were exhausted,” he said. “And you had a lot of healing to do.”
“Andrea?” I asked, slipping into some clean jeans.
“Rose late last night,” he said, smiling. “She was ravenous. She went through your entire supply of synthetic blood and the Hershey’s syrup. Dick says he owes you.”
“I think I’ll let it slide this once.” I snorted. “Just pry Dick off of my couch before tomorrow morning. I don’t want him getting too comfortable.”
Gabriel followed, laughing, as I tore out of bed and down the stairs. Andrea was standing in my living room, balancing my coffee table on one hand. There was a huge grin on her pale, angelic face. Dick looked like a human who’d been staring at the sun for too long, dazzled and dazed. I launched myself at her, knocking the table right onto Dick’s head as I hugged her. Dick was still smiling, even as he threw the wreckage over his shoulder.
“Hey!” She giggled, punching me on the arm. Gabriel, who had followed at a less frantic pace, snickered at Andrea’s display of newfound strength.
“Ow.” I rubbed my arm and glared at her. “I don’t think I’m going to like you having superstrength … or being all giddy. It’s disconcerting.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “I mean, let’s be honest. My entire life was leading to this. I’m lucky it didn’t happen long before. Of course, I would have much rather that you or Dick turned me when I had, you know, a choice in the matter. But when I think about it, what was I staying human for, anyway? Emery made the choice I should have made a while ago. My family doesn’t speak to me. Everyone I love is going to live forever. And how would my relationship with Dick work out in the long term without a change?”
“You’re really OK with this?” I asked, giving her a long, appraising look. She’d been merely beautiful in life. She was stunning now. Her skin was a perfect creamy pearl color that set off the fiery red of her hair. Her lips were soft and pink and full, curving over glistening white teeth. I searched her face for some sign of regret, of sorrow, but found nothing. There was a new exuberance to Andrea. It was if she’d finally figured out what she’d been missing all these years: fangs. “Because I had some … adjustment issues that you don’t seem to be having.”
Andrea shuddered delicately. “Well, the blood thing is gross. Even after spending so much time with you, I have to admit it’s weird drinking it myself. But look at all the pros. I can climb walls and lift tables, and, frankly, my ass has never looked better.”
“Ew.”
“I’m looking forward to eternity, Jane,” she said, sliding onto Dick’s lap. “Besides, at least now, vampires won’t see me as a snack.”
“I never saw you as a snack, baby doll.” Dick chuckled, kissing her neck.
“I love you so much,” she cooed, crushing him to her.
“Me, too, honey. Me, too.” Dick stroked his fingers over Andrea’s. I noticed that she was wearing the little ruby engagement ring he’d shown me on Halloween night. I felt a rush of relief for both of them. Emery may have turned Andrea, but Dick had marked her forever. She was his. It was that simple. And I felt sorry for whoever said otherwise.
But instead of giving voice to these emotionally mature thoughts, I took the “disgusted teenager” route. I groaned. “Ugh, are you two going to go through some sort of gross honeymoon phase? Because you’re going to have to do that somewhere else.”
“Maybe we should consider another trip,” Gabriel suggested. “The Southern Hemisphere should be far enough away.”
“Oh, calm down, both of you,” Andrea said, smirking. “You might as well get used to it.”
“Remind me to write a ‘PDA in the workplace’ policy for the shop,” I muttered to Gabriel.
“Now that all the newborn angst is settled”—Andrea shot me a stern look—“can we talk about why you don’t need a stun gun?”
I put up my hands in a defensive stance. “OK, in hindsight, it was not my wisest purchase.”