Author: Molly Harper

My parents’ car was parked outside the house when we got to River Oaks, but I couldn’t find them anywhere. Jettie materialized next to me and started talking at a speed only birds could understand. Thrilled to see someone I knew for sure wasn’t trying to kill or frame me, I tried to hug her and fell through her. Fortunately, Dick came in a few seconds later, so Jettie was the only one who saw it. Distracted, Jettie let her guard down enough to allow Dick to see her. He tried to introduce himself but was ignored in favor of more gibbering at me.

My phone rang. I shushed Jettie and picked it up. I could hear someone sobbing softly in the background. I recognized that sound. It was my mother.

“Mama?” I yelled. I checked the caller ID, but the number was blocked. “Mom?”

“Jane, hi, shug, how are you?” Missy cooed from the other end of the line. “I was just talking to your folks!”

“Missy, let me talk to them,” I said in as cool a tone as I could manage. “Let me talk to them right now.”

“Oh, now, shug, they can’t come to the phone, they’re a little tied up,” she said, chuckling at her own little joke.

“Right now, you crazy bitch.”

“Language, Jane, language. You know, maintaining your composure is the first step in any negotiation.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind when I’m not dealing with a freaking sociopath!” I yelled into the phone. “Now let me talk to my parents!”

“I think you’ll want to be more cordial, Jane, honey, or I might not feel quite so hospitable toward your parents,” she said, her voice constricting like the coils of a snake. “Now, we’re going to meet at my place in an hour. If you don’t arrive promptly and in a more cooperative mood, I may have to do something drastic. Some of your daddy’s favorite parts may just find themselves removed. Then he might end up being turned and, by horrible coincidence, locked in a concrete box until he goes mad with thirst.”

“Please, just let him go.”

“That’s nothing compared with what I’ll do to your mother,” she said. “Jane? Are you listening?” she asked when I didn’t respond immediately. “Jane!”

“I’m thinking!”

I could hear Mama’s squeals of indignation from the other end of the line. If we all survived, I was pretty sure I would never hear the end of this.

So, suddenly, the mysterious deaths and explosions and my poor standing with the council made a lot more sense. It took me thirty-five minutes and a smashed chair or two before Dick and Jettie would let me out of the house. Dick insisted on coming with me, and I couldn’t help but be grateful for it. Missy had not, after all, made the clichéd supervillian demand that I come alone. I might have called Gabriel, but I didn’t want to have to explain how I managed to stumble into another life-threatening situation in such a short time. Every man has his limits.

When I arrived at Missy’s, I tried to close the car door as quietly as possible, but Missy still yelled, “We’re around back, shug!”

I was starting to hate being called “shug.”

Dick had agreed to lurk around the front yard until he heard the sounds of a struggle. I found my parents on Missy’s back deck, surrounded by twinkling Christmas lights and Japanese paper lanterns. While they were bound and gagged, Missy had taken the time to set out a nice cheese tray and a chilled chardonnay. And there was a covered presentation easel set up behind them. Maybe this was all an elaborate setup to get me to buy one of her stupid prefab houses.

“Jane!” Missy chirped. “So nice to see you.”

My father looked groggy and confused. Mama looked ready to chew through the gag and start screaming at somebody.

“You guys OK?” I asked.

“Have a seat. Can I get you something to drink?” Missy offered sweetly, the picture of Southern charm. I hoped that if we lived through this, it would serve as a lesson to Mama that having fancy cocktail napkins and coordinated clothing did not necessarily make you a well-adjusted person.

“No, thank you.” I sat next to my dad and squeezed his taped hands.

Ahem-ing pointedly, Missy motioned to the shackles attached to my chair. I reluctantly snapped them around my wrists and jangled them, hoping Dick could discern the noise—surely he had to recognize it.

“Well, aren’t you the tricky one?” Missy said, pouting prettily. “Do you know how much trouble I’ve gone to just to get your attention? I used my powers to track you, followed you around. I lured that idiot Walter back to the scene of your pathetic fight, killed him to get the council to watch you. I played those stupid pranks on you, watched your house to make you feel uneasy, painted your car, put a little something extra in your doggie’s bowl. Hell, I even shot at you.”

“Shot me,” I corrected her as Mama shrieked under her gag. “You actually shot me, and it hurt, quite a bit.”

“Aw, shug, don’t take it personally. It’s not like I left any permanent scars. I just wanted to make you desperate enough, paranoid enough, to want to leave town. Whether it was to get away from the council or whoever you thought was out to get you, I didn’t care. I figured, since you don’t like your sister anyway and we’re such good girlfriends, you’d sell me the property and leave. But you just wouldn’t budge. So I stepped it up, set my precious Dickie’s trailer on fire, framing you for his murder so I could challenge you. But then he intervened, and the council let you walk away scot-free. Nothing has worked, Jane. Nothing. Do you have any idea how frustrating that is?”

“I knew it!” I yelled. “I knew all that random stuff couldn’t happen to one person!”

“Well, subtlety has never been my strong suit,” she said, smirking as she sipped a virulently pink cocktail.

From inside the model home, I heard a voice call, “Missy? Are you out back?”

“It seems our last guest has arrived.” Missy smirked. “I believe you two know each other.”

“Jenny?” I yelled as my sister stepped out on onto the deck. “Run, Jenny, get out of here!”

“Why?” Jenny asked. “Wait, why are y’all tied up? Missy, what’s going on here?”

“You know her?” I demanded.

“Yes, I know her. Missy’s in my Thursday night scrapbooking group.”

“Oh, of course she is.” I groaned.

“This isn’t what we talked about, Missy,” Jenny said, staring at our bound parents.

“What do you mean, what you talked about?” I demanded. “You do know she’s a vampire, right?”

“Oh, sure.” Jenny rolled her eyes. “Like I’d spend Thursday nights scrapbooking with a vampire.”

In the calmest tone I could muster, I said, “Jenny, I’ve been waiting for a really long time to say this to you. You’re a moron.”

Jenny ignored me. “Jane, what exactly have you gotten us into?”

“I’ll answer that,” Missy said sweetly, just before punching Jenny.

“I’m not going to say that bothered me,” I told Missy as she hog-tied my dazed sister.

“I thought as much.” Missy offered a vicious grin as she shoved the gag into Jenny’s mouth. She turned to me and put on her “sales face.” “Jane, have you ever had a vision?”

“I had a reaction to antibiotics when I was five and saw tigers jumping out of the walls,” I offered.

“A vision,” Missy repeated, obviously annoyed. “The ability to anticipate future events and possibilities. The ambition to better oneself through the pursuit of an ideal, a goal. Vision, honey. So few people have it, living or undead. Even fewer appreciate it. Imagine my irritation when I see someone like you with a beautiful piece of property like River Oaks.” She tinkled, her laugh hard-edged. “Did you know that I own every little bit of property surrounding your acreage? I’ve been buying it up, a piece at a time, for almost ten years now. In fact, I own quite a bit of property in this end of the state. The old-money vampires can’t seem to hold on to it. Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that I tricked them into selling or killed them in battle.”

Missy bent so we were nose to nose, tilting her head so she could give me a winning smile.

“Real estate is the one thing you can always count on, Jane. It’s eternal, just like we are. Gold, jewels, stocks, bonds, they can fail you. But the one thing people can’t live without is land.”

“Do you realize you based your whole evil life philosophy on a quote from Lex Luthor?” I asked. “How has the council not caught on to this?”

“Oh, the council’s not nearly as all-seeing as it likes to believe.” She sighed, toying with the tiny umbrella in her glass. “I have little helpers who claim the property for me, for a fee, and a few low-level council minions who turn a blind eye to loose ends, for a fee. I guess subtlety is my strong suit.”

“You want to move into River Oaks?”

“Oh, no, I want to knock River Oaks into the ground,” she said, standing with some ceremony and whipping the cover off the easel. “Jane, I give you my vision.”

A disturbingly pert sign read, “Half-Moon Meadows, a gated community for the undead,” and showed a pale, sophisticated-looking couple enjoying a glass of blood on their front porch. Different graphics showed sketches of a clubhouse, a trendy bar, a blood bank, a spa, a dentist’s office.

“What. The. Hell.” I gaped. Jenny made similarly distressed noises.

“Isn’t it fabulous?” Missy squealed. “I had planned to start a gated suburb for the living, but then I was turned, and I was struck by the lack of specialized housing for vampires. Realtors just can’t resist a hole in the market, Jane. Half-Moon Meadows will be the first community of its kind. Vampires from all over the world will come to our corner of paradise for a community that provides for their every need, every whim. If they never want to venture out into the living world again, they won’t have to.”

When I didn’t applaud her brilliance, Missy continued, “My Deer Haven complex is just the beginning. All I need is your teeny little plot right in the center there,” she said, pointing to an aerial view of the planned development. “I tried to talk your aunt Jettie into selling, but the old bat was so stubborn! When she died, I spent months trying to come up with the right way to approach you, to get you to sign it over. And then you were turned. It was a sign, Jane. I had a reason to meet you, the means to follow you, a way to cause…complications for you. Hell, I even went to Thursday night scrapbooking parties just to cozy up to your sister. Jenny is not a fan of yours, by the way.”

I glared at my sister, who refused to meet my gaze.

Missy sneered. “Get a couple of margaritas in her, and she becomes quite the Chatty Cathy. She’s been coming to me for advice on how to whisk that house out from under you, what with my real-estate expertise and all. She came here tonight thinking I’d come up with some way of forcing you into signing it over for tax reasons. You know, she’s been feeding me information about you for months. Your schedules, your habits, your friends’ names, your favorite foods. Of course, she didn’t realize all of that had changed, because she’s too damn dumb to figure out you’re a vampire, but it was a good start.

“And now, it’s time for the final act, Jane. I tried playing nice. I tried playing dirty. And now I’m going to play rough. I’ll say you came after me in a jealous rage over Dickie, and I had to kill you in self-defense. And if the council doesn’t believe that, I’ll just keep talking until I find a story they do believe. You’d be amazed at what I can do to sell a story.”

For a long time, I stared at Missy, unable to absorb what she’d said. “Let me get this straight. You tried to kill me so you could build a tacky planned community? That is just evil. I’m so going to kick your ass…just as soon as I’m untied. And then, maybe, I’m going after Jenny.”