The Dangers of Dating a Rebound Vampire (5 page)

Nik turned back to Cal, completely ignoring the question. “You said she was a bit of a genius. Does that mean she is also a little bit . . .” Nik made a hand gesture near his head that was considerably less flattering than the “little off” gesture Miranda had made for Collin.

“Oh, I'm crazy now?” Seething, I reached down and squeezed his thigh, right over the spot where I'd stabbed him with silver. He didn't even bother defending himself. In fact, he looked downright intrigued when I reached toward his thigh. But when I applied the pressure, he yowled and backed away. “Do you remember how you sustained this limp? Because that's how I left you, Skippy, with a gaping, difficult-to-heal silver wound.”

He looked almost amused by the fact that I'd left a big wound on his leg. “
You
stabbed me?”

“What?” Cal watched, his expression horrified, as a bright bloody patch spread across the leg of Nik's jeans.

“I told you, I stabbed him in the thigh with my hairbrush stake. Am I the only person in the room following this conversation?”

I heard several murmurs of “Possibly” and “Probably.” I was more worried about the intensity of Cal's glare, which, by rights, should have melted Nik's forehead.

“Cal, was this one of your training exercises gone wrong?” Iris demanded, as Cal slid between me and Nik and gently shoved me out of striking distance. “Did you send your friend to attack Gigi in a parking lot? I can appreciate that you want her to be prepared, but I think you've gone too far.”

“Of course I didn't!” Cal exclaimed. “Nik, did you attack Gigi in a parking lot?”

“No, I came here as soon as I rose for the evening,” Nik insisted, the faint Russian accent growing deeper. “She looks familiar, I will admit. But Cal, you know I would never hunt a random human, especially not this close to the Council office. It would be professional suicide.”

I would try not to focus on the “professional suicide” qualifier, I really would.

Cal checked his watch. “You just now rose at two
a.m.
?”

“I rose late. I have been working longer hours lately. I did not know I was going to need an alibi.”

“OK, how did you end up with that wound on your leg?”

“I do not know.”

“What
do
you know?” Cal asked.

Nik nodded toward me. “I know that I have seen her before. I do not know how or when or where, but I have seen her before.”

“Of course you have, you idiot. I sent you to her school months ago to ‘talk to' that boy in her class who wouldn't stop making unwanted advances on her!” Cal cried, exasperated.

“That was you?” I exclaimed.

“Oh, Cal, you didn't.” Iris sighed.

“I do not remember that.” Nik shook his head, still staring at me as if I was some precious, fascinating gemstone. A girl could get used to being stared at like that . . . minus the patchy memory and the occasional attempted mugging. And despite the situation, I could feel a little smile forming on my lips.

“Do you remember following me when I was home over Christmas break?” I asked.

Nik shook his head. “No.”

“What?” Iris exclaimed. “What the hell is going on here? Has
everyone
gone nuts?”

“Do you remember kissing me in front of Jane Jameson's bookshop?” I asked, ignoring my sister's growing distress.

“No, but I wish I did remember, truly,” Nik said, grinning cheekily. “You have certainly built up an elaborate pretend relationship between the two of us. I am sorry I missed it.”

“Gladiola Grace Scanlon!” Iris yelled, catching my arm as I surged forward to smack him. Or at least poke him really hard. “You were followed and kissed by a strange vampire, and you didn't think to tell anybody about it?” Damn it. She broke out my full birth name. That meant I was really in trouble.

“Let's just focus on the problem at hand,” I told Iris, my violent intent temporarily redirected.

Iris pointed her finger in my face. “We are so going to revisit this.”

Meanwhile, Cal had Nik pressed against the wall by his collar. “You kissed my little sister?”

My stake swung dangerously close to my vampire companions as I threw my arms into the air. “Oh, come on,
that
you believe, but I'm crazy when I say he attacked me?”

“I don't know if we should be here right now,” ­Andrea whispered to Dick.

“If we leave now, we'll miss a lot, and we'll just have to catch up later,” Dick whispered back.

“Everyone can hear you,” Jane hissed over both of them.

Suddenly, Nik started laughing and pointing at Dick, who was wearing one of the few shirts Andrea had missed in her legendary purge of his inappropriate T-shirt collection: “Home is where the pants aren't.” When he realized everybody was staring at him, Nik cried, “What? Is funny, yes?”

Jane slapped her hand over her face. “Oh, God, it's Russian Dick Cheney.”

Gabriel shuddered. “There are two of them.”

“Hey!” Dick exclaimed. “That hurts my feelings!”

“Let's get back to the point. Did you kiss my sister?” Cal demanded, shaking Nik back and forth hard enough to make fangs rattle.

“If you say that you don't remember kissing me, I will choke you out,” I told him.

The room went silent. Even Cal was looking over at me with a doubtful expression that I found insulting.

I amended, “I would try real hard.”

“All right, all right, yes, there is something going on here,” Nik said, clearing his throat and removing Cal's hands from their locked position around his neck. “And I do not understand what it is. But I do not think that choking me is going to help the situation.”

Somehow, the overly formal language, the precise pronunciation of every syllable without contractions or slang, the mark of someone who'd learned English as a second language decades before, reminded me so much of Cal it made me smile. That sort of sucked, because I was supposed to be all pissed off and bad­ass. It was hard to be badass when you were smiling like a goof.

Nik smiled back at me, a big, beautiful, open smile, and it set a whole flock of condor-sized butterflies loose in my stomach. And all that doubt about where Nik landed on the fairy-tale-monster line of violence didn't seem to matter so much anymore. In that moment, forgiving him for that little life-or-death scuffle in the parking lot seemed like a totally reasonable thing to do. Hell, climbing into his lap and nibbling his ears seemed like a totally reasonable thing to do.

I might not have been the authority on what was reasonable, at that moment.

Maybe Nik's secret vampire power was like Dick's “female persuasion”? Dick could persuade a woman to shave her own head and do the Macarena in the town square if he flirted enough with her, something he rarely put to use because he didn't consider it sporting.

“Why do I not remember you?” Nik asked me, as if we were the only ones in the room. He reached for my face, like he was about to cup my cheek, only to have his hand diverted by a slap from Cal. “I should remember you.”

“I don't know.” I chuckled, despite the incredible weirdness of the situation. “But could you maybe say hi from now on? Instead of the skulking and the lunging?”

Nik leaned just a tiny bit closer, his blunt white teeth dragging over that full bottom lip. “I think that could be arranged.”

Cal cleared his throat. And then I realized I was inappropriately infatuated with someone who shared an uncomfortable number of similarities with my surrogate brother-slash-father-figure, and my goofy smile melted away like magic. And then I remembered the parking-lot roughhousing, and I took another step back.

“This is a very sweet moment, but I would really like you to get out of my house,” Iris said, somehow outmuscling her husband and pushing Nik toward the door. “Cal will be in touch. Stay away from Gigi.”

“What if I do not want to leave?” Nik asked, his voice a low, threatening growl, as Cal hovered in front of Nik, preventing him from getting closer to me.

My eyes widened as a ripple of that same fear I had felt in the parking lot zipped down my spine. Jamie moved in front of me in a protective stance, while Iris leapt forward at her inhuman speed and practically tackled Nik to force him out the door. She slammed the door in his face. His beautiful, beautiful face. I would analyze my rapid shifts in attitude toward parking-­lot assailants at a later time.

“I do
not
understand what is happening right now.” I sighed.

“You are making very poor decisions,” Iris told me.

“You are not to see that boy again,” Cal said in an authoritative, fatherly tone that was frankly terrifying.

“I am not twelve,” I told him. “And he's hardly a boy. If he's an old friend of yours, that probably means he's, what, four hundred years old?”

Cal muttered something under his breath.

“What was that?” I asked.

“I said it's closer to five hundred,” he grumbled. “Give or take a decade.” And Iris buried her face in her hands.

“I told you we should have left earlier,” Andrea whispered to Dick. “Now it's super-awkward, and they're standing in front of the door.”

3

You are not Norma Rae. Sometimes standing up for what you believe in should take a backseat to survival.

—The Office After Dark: A Guide to Maintaining a Safe, Productive Vampire Workplace

I
would like to say that Cal, Iris, and I bade our trapped guests good evening and had a mature, thoughtful discussion about my options before forming a coherent plan for how to handle the Nik situation.

But instead, they sent me to my room.

This was what I got for not renting my own apartment for the summer.

The next morning, the whole hit-by-a-truck feeling still lingered. Because I couldn't explain what the hell had happened the night before or how it was going to affect me in the long term, I decided to just continue as if it hadn't. I restocked my purse with antivampire weapons, packed my own lunch, and drove to work early. Oh, and I downgraded to a business-casual outfit of a pair of khakis and a dark blue cardigan, because I would never wear poly-blend again.

I didn't know how to process all of the truth explosions lobbed at me in the parlor. There were so many elements to be upset over. Cal sending Nik to my college campus to threaten the mouth-breather from my history class. The fact that Nik couldn't remember coming to my college campus to threaten said mouth-breather. Nik taking this as an invitation to follow me around the Hollow while I was home for Christmas vacation. The fact that he couldn't remember following me around the Hollow while I was home for Christmas vacation. Nik attacking me in the parking lot. The fact that he couldn't
remember
attacking me in the parking lot. And he forgot the kissing. I couldn't seem to get past that.

This was not normal vampire behavior. What with their immortality and superhuman eye for detail, vampires had awesome memories. So why did Nik have a big blank spot when it came to me? I'd assigned all this meaning and excitement to my interactions with him, and he couldn't even recall anything beyond
Hey, I think your face is familiar-ish
. Was I really so unmemorable?

In the most basic terms, I was hurt and sad, and I felt very foolish. I'd used those few seconds with Nik, that first kiss of all kisses, the silly whirlwind romance of it all, to assure myself that breaking it off with Ben hadn't been a mistake. I'd told myself,
See? You're going to be OK. Mysterious hunky vampires dig you.
To find out that it was all some bizarre possible setup by my brother-in-law that resulted in a memory fugue state was, well, disappointing.

On top of that, I was not used to fighting with Iris, so my internal level was way off-bubble. Between the age difference and losing our parents at such an early age, Iris had always been more of a mother to me than a sibling. After a disastrous attempt to try to blend me into her life in the big city, Iris had given up college and the career she'd planned to bring me back to Half-Moon Hollow and live in our parents' old house. She'd even started Beeline, a “daytime concierge service” and event-planning business for vampires so her schedule would be flexible enough to work with mine.

I knew exactly how hard Iris worked to keep our parents' house, pay the bills, and make me feel I had some sort of normal life. There were times when seeing the dark circles under her eyes and the worry on her face made me feel so guilty I wanted to run away just to relieve her of the burden of me. And then I resented her, for making me feel that way, for taking our parents' place so readily. And then I realized what a stupid reaction that was, and I went through the whole guilt cycle again.

Tripping over Cal while dropping off a service contract at his house had seemed like some sort of karmic reward for her suffering. Cal, an investigator who occasionally worked for the Council, made her happy. She didn't have to prove herself to him. She didn't have to do anything for him. She just loved him, and that was enough.

My love for Iris and my gratitude to Cal helped keep us on the same wavelength through my teenage years. We rarely disagreed, and when we did, we'd always been able to work through it with lighthearted teasing and minor threats of Tasering.

I knew they had to be worried if they were acting so flipping loony. Now that Iris had leveled up to her vampire state, she hated the idea of me being out in the world without superpowers to defend myself. Every day that I walked around as my weak human beta version made them both twitchy, but Iris was still holding out the hope that I could have some sort of normal life, with kids and the white picket fence.

I didn't have a lot of experience, romantically speaking, but it seemed weird to be so focused on Nik. Was it because I'd suddenly made contact with him again after building up such an epic imaginary relationship in my head? Or because I'd been alone since breaking up with Ben and needed to latch on to any man who'd shown the slightest interest in me, even if it was lunge-y, bite-y zombie interest?

Was one option better than the other?

Defying Iris by continuing at my job wasn't like me at all. I hoped that at some level, it communicated to her how important this was to me. And the fact that I was still thinking about Nik at all was a sign either of my own desperate, self-destructive loneliness or that I could possibly be feeling the first twinges of grown-up emotions toward a completely unsuitable man.

And Nik was just that, a
man.
Ben was sweet and kind and an awesome boyfriend, but he was a
boy.
Even though John, the evil teenage vampire con man who'd duped me into helping him hurt Iris and Cal, had been a teenager for hundreds of years, he'd never matured past the petulant egomaniac stage. But here was Nik, a man, not a guy, not a boy, a
man
, with all of the power and appeal that implied. He'd been around long enough to see the world several times over. He'd been a witness to history.

And for a split second—well, two of them, actually—this man found me interesting enough to kiss me, and while I knew that I was, in general terms, pretty awesome, I just didn't understand why. Then again, he was interested in me in a sporadic fashion that he didn't even seem to remember, so . . .

OK, yeah, the universe made sense again.

I used my shiny new employee pass to get past several levels of security beyond the Council office's employee entrance. I felt very official and grown-up, flashing my little plastic badge around to get to the inner sanctum of vampire archival information. I sat at my bare, personality-free desk and took a deep breath.

“Focus on work,” I told myself. “Just focus on doing a good job, and everything else will work itself out.”

It occurred to me that my new life philosophy matched that of the super-tense Michael Bolton character in
Office Space
.

I logged into my department's server and opened my first window. Cracking my knuckles, I tried to picture the end result of what would be months, if not years, of work by myself and my coworkers, the largest, most comprehensive archive of vampires' living descendants in the history of the world.

No pressure.

Vampires had been dragged out of the coffin in 1999 by a cranky undead accountant named Arnie Frink. Recently turned and not quite comfortable with his daytime hours, Arnie requested evening hours so he could continue his job at the firm of Jacobi, Meyers, and Leptz. But the evil HR lady, as ignorant as the rest of the world about the existence of the undead at the time, insisted that Arnie keep banker's hours, because she had concerns about him messing with the copy machine.

Arnie countered with a diagnosis of porphyria, a painful allergy to sunlight, which would make him burn and peel and generally be unpleasant to work around, but the HR lady insisted that he could just wear a hat or something. So Arnie responded by suing the absolute hell out of Jacobi, Meyers, and Leptz.

When the allergy-discrimination argument failed to impress a judge, a sunblock-slathered Arnie flipped his proverbial feces in court, stood up, and yelled that he was a vampire, with a medical condition that rendered him unable to work during the day, thereby making him subject to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

After several lengthy appeals, not to mention a
lot
of testing by mental-health professionals, Arnie won his lawsuit and got a settlement, evening hours, and his own Internet following. When the furor died down, the international vampire community eventually agreed that it was more convenient to live out in the open anyway. Blood was easier to get when you could just ask someone for it, without the drama of stalking and body disposal.

An elected contingent of ancient vampires officially asked the world's governments to recognize them as legitimate, nonmythical beings, asking for special leniency in areas such as, say, income taxes that hadn't been paid in two hundred years. I don't remember much of that first year. I was too young to understand much beyond the snippets of stories I picked up before Mom rushed to turn off the evening news for being too scary. Iris called it a dark chapter in human history. Mobs of people dragged vampires out into the sunlight or set them on fire for no reason other than that they just didn't understand the new world they were living in. All I knew was that my classmates' mothers were feeding them garlic supplements with every meal, and all of my junior league soccer games got canceled because the government said we weren't allowed to leave the house after dark.

The same international contingent of vampires, who called themselves the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead, appealed to the human governments for help. In exchange for providing certain census information, the Council was allowed to establish smaller, local bodies within regions of each state in every country. The Council was charged with keeping watch over newer vampires to make sure that they were safely acclimated to unlife, settling squabbles within the community, and investigating “accidents” that befell vampires. We were fortunate enough to have one of these offices in our backyard, a coincidence that Iris took full advantage of when she started her vampire concierge business.

This familiarity was what made Iris nervous about my working for the Council. She'd witnessed the vampire officials' by-any-means-necessary style of management firsthand and the intimidation, cover-ups, and otherwise dirty dealings it involved. Well, she hadn't actually witnessed the dirty dealings—that was how you disappeared. But she'd seen enough that she didn't want her baby sister on the Council payroll, which, when you think about it, is a little hypocritical.

In the years since the Great Coming Out, a lot of vampires had taken on “reverse genealogy” as a hobby. Instead of searching for their ancestors, they searched for the children and grandchildren they'd never met. In many cases, they wanted to share the wealth they'd accumulated over the years or pass on heirlooms. Or they simply wanted to assure themselves that their loved ones had fared well without them. Personally, I think they just wanted to assure themselves that they had been human once, that they'd once lived in the daylight.

Dick Cheney did his own version of this when he lingered around the Hollow to keep an eye on the family started by his “youthful dalliance” with a laundress. He posed as a helpful but secretive uncle, providing discreet help with rent, food, and even college tuition when his several-times-great-grandson, Gilbert Wainwright, became the first of his family to even consider higher education. Oddly enough, Jane ended up working for Mr. Wainwright at his bookstore, Specialty Books, and continued to run it after Mr. Wainwright died. The undead circles in the Hollow ran like a really small social Venn diagram.

The Council wanted to limit the criminal activity that inevitably popped up whenever vampires started trending, so they'd started an international movement to establish a user-friendly private search engine of vampires across the country, allowing the undead—and only the undead—to track their living descendants. It would work like ancestry.com but with more shadowy vampire connections and not-quite-legal documents than would be available to nice, law-abiding humans.

That was where teams of programmers like myself came in, organizing the information and building the engine from the ground up. To keep too much sensitive information from being stored in the same location, we were working out of Council offices all over the country. Each team handled a different piece of the puzzle, working for a regional team supervisor, who answered to a big, scary board of national vampire officials.

The coding would be only half the job. Some teams worked on the security angle, making it difficult for unapproved users to access the records. Others set up the registration features or did graphic design. (We called them the “lame teams.”) Our portion of the puzzle involved finding the best way to link genealogical documents and make them easily searchable, and then, because we were interns and our eyesight was considered expendable, scanning, keynoting, and cross-referencing the aforementioned shadowy documents provided by vampire volunteers was an additional “side duty” for our team. Other materials would have to be culled from public records. And then, of course, the engine would have to be tested, launched, updated, and maintained over the years, which, for the right people, could be long-term, lucrative employment. And as someone who would like to move out of her sister's home in the near future, I considered long-term lucrative employment very important.