The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires (24 page)

And suddenly, I was very glad that Ben didn’t know that Cal was a vampire. He might have soiled himself.

Gigi descended the stairs wearing formfitting jeans, a black T-shirt with a deep V neck, and a pretty pink floral scarf knotted at her throat. She smiled sweetly when she saw him. “Ben!”

Ben relaxed slightly, as if having one more witness in the room made him feel safer. “Gigi, you look great!” Cal shot him a hard look. Ben stammered, “I—I mean, really pretty. Um, very attractive, in a completely respectable, nonpervy way.”

Gigi turned to me, a confused expression marring her carefully made-up face. I shrugged. “You all set?”

Ben’s happy grin nearly cracked his cheeks, but I wasn’t sure whether it was my sister’s influence or the idea that he was getting away from my “friend.” Gigi asked, “Can I borrow your gray jacket? The theater’s always cold.”

I nodded, ducking into the kitchen to grab it for her. I felt a hand close around my arm and yank me back. “Yipe!”

Stupid vampire speed.

“What are you doing?” I whispered, shrugging Cal off as he skulked behind the refrigerator door and watched Ben’s every move. The poor kid could hardly produce a sentence without stammering or blushing. And Cal was staring at Ben like the boy was directly responsible for the discovery of karaoke.

“I don’t think I like that boy.” He growled, glaring for effect, just in case I hadn’t figured out his oh-so-subtle interpersonal cues.

“He’s a sweet kid,” I insisted, folding the gray blazer over my arm.

“He’s a teenage boy,” Cal said, his dark eyes narrowed. “They’re all sexual deviants under the surface. I should know. I was a teenage boy once.”

“Thousands of years ago,” I countered.

“Times may change, but testosterone does not.”

“I’ll be sure to write that on Gigi’s Affirmation of the Day Calendar.” I snickered, closing my refrigerator door and starting for the living room. Cal hooked his arm through mine and dragged me back.

“OK, this is becoming annoying.” I huffed, reaching into the fridge for a ginger ale.

“You know, in my time, girls Gigi’s age were already married and bearing their second or third children. Girls didn’t ‘date.’ Their marriages were arranged by their families. Personally, I think we should go back to that system.”

“Yes, taking away their right to choose whom to spend the rest of their lives with would be a huge step in the right direction,” I retorted. “This is so not the subject for you to expound on. No matter what you say, you’re bound to piss me off.”

“I should distrust any young man who thinks he’s good enough to court her.” Cal touched my arm again, lightly this time, his voice quiet and steady. “She’s a good girl with a sweet disposition. I wouldn’t want anyone to take advantage of that. I don’t think I’ll rest easy tonight until she’s safe at home, maybe under lock and key.”

I tugged on his shirt, pulling him close and giving him a brief hug.

When he was gone—because he would leave the moment he could; he’d made that much clear—I would be alone again. But for that moment, it felt so good to have someone to share my family with. Yes, he was obnoxious and high-handed, but he was also decent and very good to Gigi, when he didn’t have to be. He made me laugh, which was something previous lovers hadn’t bothered with. And he listened when I had a good idea.

Of course, he pitched a fit if those ideas put me in harm’s way, and he’d written some really hurtful things about me. I was going to have to let go of that if I was going to survive the next week or so. Cal didn’t know me then, and now he did. And I think he was aware that if he said anything like it again, he was in for a whooping.

“And if I happened to imply that should anything happen to Gigi while in his care, it would take every law-enforcement resource available in this backward little hellhole of a state to determine what I’ve done to his body, well, that might just lessen the chance of his doing something regrettable.”

“See, you took a nice moment, and you took it too far.” I sighed, burying my face in his shoulder.

Gigi stuck her head through the doorway. She snickered and said quietly, “Iris, dismount the vampire and get out here.”

I straightened, holding the jacket out to Gigi. “Ixnay on the ampirevay,” I muttered, glancing toward Ben.

Gigi smirked. “You know that pig Latin went out with scrunchies and Smurfs, right?”

I warned her, “Easy.”

“We’re leaving.”

“Back by eleven,” I reminded her, then cut her off at the first sign of a groan. “Complain, and it will be ten-thirty … and if you’re not in that door on time, I’ll show up at the Dairy Freeze in my bathrobe, yelling your full legal name.”

“You wouldn’t.” She hissed.

“Try me. Now, have a good time.” I kissed her forehead. Gigi snatched the jacket from me, pulling Ben by the collar as she bustled out the door.

“Good night, Miss Iris,” Ben called as Gigi yanked him along.

Cal cleared his throat. “Remember what I said, Ben.”

Ben flushed red, then white, as he disappeared into the shadows of the porch.

You should set up a deadline for your vampire guest to depart your house. Vampires are creatures of habit. Unless you specifically order them off of your couch, they will not leave.

—
The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires

“M
ust you torture the boy?” I asked, turning on Cal as we heard Ben’s car engine start.

“Yes, it’s a rite of passage,” he said, nodding emphatically while I flopped onto the couch. “Your threat to show up at the drive-in wearing your bathrobe was particularly inspired.”

He sat on the opposite end of the couch, relaxing into the cushions. It struck me as odd that we hadn’t shared this room since his first night in the house. It seemed so long ago that I was staring down at a pale, gaunt stranger whom I didn’t quite trust.

I wasn’t sure I trusted him entirely now.

I cleared my throat and slipped my feet into his lap, hoping that maybe treating him like furniture would make him less intimidating. “For a teenage girl, fear of embarrassment is far more powerful than fear of consequences.
Gigi didn’t believe I would do it until last year, when I actually pulled into the Dairy Freeze parking lot twenty minutes after her curfew. I didn’t even have to get out of my car. My mere presence was enough to make her jump into Sammi Jo’s car and beg her to floor it.”

“Were you wearing the bathrobe?”

I nodded, grinning. “Over my T-shirt and jeans.”

“You’re going to make a fantastic mother someday,” he said, chuckling.

“I think taking care of one so early in life may have scared me off of having more. I have a child,” I said, nodding toward Gigi’s school bag, slung across the foyer table. “I’ve raised her, just as much as my parents raised me. I’ve loved her, lost sleep worrying about her, taken care of her when she was sick, suffered through embarrassing but informative anatomical conversations. If that doesn’t make her mine, I don’t know what would. And at least I got to skip the messy-diaper-and-two-
A.M
.-feeding phase.”

Cal seemed to be mulling that information carefully, so I added, “Now that we’ve hashed out my numerous issues, what are you doing tonight?”

Cal frowned. “More research. I’ve been trying to track Blue Moon and its various dummy fronts. Whoever set this up knows exactly how to put up as many paper shields as possible.”

“What about the employees at the synthetic-blood plant? Surely they didn’t just agree to put experimental additives in their product without so much as a meeting.”

“The arrangements were made by one employee, Margaret
Rimes, Nocturne’s director of product development—not unusual considering it was a relatively minor change to the formula. Her notes show that she met with the Blue Moon representatives at their offices.”

“The abandoned office park?”

“Most likely dressed up with rented furnishings,” he agreed. “Ms. Rimes seemed pleased with the company’s work. Her supervisors stated nothing seemed amiss about her reports.”

“What does Ms. Rimes have to say about it?” I asked.

“Nothing. Ms. Rimes died in a car accident a month ago. She lost control of her car. It flipped and rolled one hundred yards down an embankment, then caught fire.”

“Let me guess, this took place late at night on a remote stretch of highway? Because it’s sounding less and less like an accident.”

“Convenient car accidents can solve a lot of problems.”

“Later, I’m going to Google how to check my brakes for tampering,” I muttered. “Give me the lab results. I had to take a lot of organic chemistry in college, so there’s a good chance I’ll understand some of it. It might help to have fresh eyes.”

“Please, take it.” He shoved the files in my direction unceremoniously. We sat there, sprawled on the couch, reading paperwork. I’d broken out several of my mother’s books to try to interpret the different lab reports. And then I broke out some Twizzlers, which Cal insisted I put away, because seeing me “orally toy with sucrose-based whips” was too distracting.

I told him he should be happy I didn’t go for the Blow Pops.

He made me face in the opposite direction.

Despite this refreshing change of perspective, I couldn’t make much sense of the lab reports. The analysis of the poisoned vampire’s blood showed compounds I’d never heard of and chemical traces that didn’t make sense. For instance, there were healthy amounts of silicic acid and saponins, consistent with extract of lungwort. But lungwort had astringent properties used to treat lung infections. Then there were traces of thymol, a natural antifungal that served as the active ingredient in most mouthwashes. Apparently, our culprit wanted the vampires disabled with healthy, minty-fresh breath.

I could not think of any possible reason for lungwort or balm plants to be used in a poison that was supposed to drive vampires crazy. The chemist who came up with this was either brilliant or brilliantly disturbed.

I flipped to the last page of the report and zoned in on one word. Aconitine. Huge amounts of aconitine. My first botany professor spent three days talking about the elegant “Queen of Poisons” derived from aconite, also known as wolfsbane or monkshood.

Dr. Bailey had been a big murder-mystery fan. He went on and on about the various people who had tried to bump off loved ones and not-so-loved ones with aconitine … Victims experienced numbness and tingling in the extremities, and if the dose was large enough, they felt burning pain followed by paralysis, then lung and
heart failure. Dr. Bailey used aconite as an example of why we had to respect all plants, even the pretty ones, because they could be the deadliest.

Some ancient cultures used aconitine in battle to tip their spears and arrows, a sort of double whammy for those who survived wartime impalement. Cal should have found this interesting. But he seemed to be concentrating awfully hard on tax paperwork for Blue Moon, and if I interrupted, he might try to explain it to me.

Shudder.

After a few hours, my eyes started to cross over the tiny text. I stood, cracking my stiff neck and stretching my arms.

I wondered if Jane had this sort of thing in her shop, Specialty Books. She had an alarming range of titles, including werewolf relationship guides, biographies of the “real” Sasquatch, and remedial books for poorly trained witches. The copies of
World War Z
, a treatise on surviving the zombie apocalypse, were shelved in the nonfiction section under “self-help.” When I asked whether that was a joke, she sort of chuckled nervously and didn’t answer.

The problem with Jane is that I can never tell when she’s kidding.

“This is all starting to look the same.” I moaned. “I think we’re going about this in the wrong way. I’m looking up each chemical on the ingredients list to pin down which of them could cause specific symptoms. But botanical compounds work together. It may not be a one-to-one effect.”

“What if you looked up the individual symptoms and worked from there?”

“That’s a good idea,” I replied. “Except for the part where all of my resources refer to human symptoms. I would imagine that vampires are affected differently, since you’re … um, well, there’s just no other way to put it—you’re dead.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted.

“I am your detail girl,” I said, yawning widely. “I think I know where I can get some more relevant books. I could go online, but frankly, I don’t want to trust this to some wacko running a blog out of his mama’s basement.”

Cal growled and tossed his paperwork aside. Under the cursing and muttering, I could make out “clever bastard” and “goddamn invisible.” I shrank back into the couch cushions. When he saw me moving away from him, he closed his eyes. He stretched his hand out tentatively and stroked it up my calf.

“Why don’t you go up to bed?” he said. “You’ve been up all day, and you’ve spent the last three hours staring at chemical nonsense. You must be exhausted.”

“I want to stay up and wait for Gigi. And I don’t want to leave you unattended, in case you get ideas about ambushing Ben in the driveway.”

“The damage wouldn’t be permanent!” he protested.