Typical.

My sister had decided to take her love of scrapbooking to another level. The scary level. She started a company called Elegant Memories, a personalized and customized scrapbooking service using specialty handmade papers made from the hairs of Turkish virgins or something. Of course, she was accepted into the fold like a Borg returning to the Collective.

The fact that I could correctly make a reference to the Borg was probably part of the reason I was not being accepted into the Collective.

I spent most of the meeting plotting ways of getting Jenny out of the chamber. (Shaving her head came up, or telling Head Courtney that Jenny was a natural brunette. Somehow all of my solutions were hair-related.) And then I switched to trying to find ways of getting me out of the chamber, which was less productive, since I was interrupted by—

“Jane?” Head Courtney repeated sternly.

“Huh?”

“I asked how the prize collections were going.”

Crap. Head Courtney had sent me a strongly worded e-mail listing the acceptable prize options for the Fall Festival: gift baskets, gift certificates of no less than $100 each, vacation packages. Very few businesses (that were not chamber members) were willing to give up such treasures for what was essentially a children’s carnival. So far, a doctor’s office had given me oversized promotional pens advertising a drug for erectile dysfunction, and I’d charmed a local beauty shop out of a gift certificate for a free lip waxing.

“Not well, actually. I managed to get a few things, but with the number of participants you’re talking about, it’s just not going to be enough. I was thinking maybe we need to change our focus for the carnival prizes. I was thinking we might aim for smaller items, so we would have plenty of small, inexpensive prizes instead of a few big prizes. Things like stuffed animals and candy, you know, things that kids would like to win.”

Since this was supposedly a kids’ carnival and all.

Head Courtney’s lips pressed together in a tight, pissed-off line. “Jane, I must not have explained your assignment thoroughly enough in the repeated e-mails I sent you.”

“It’s not that. I just think—”

Head Courtney snapped, “I didn’t tell you to think, I told you to gather prizes for the Fall Festival.”

I had a brief, colorful fantasy of latching onto her neck and drinking her dry. But I reconsidered instantly. I’d read somewhere that Botox turns the blood bitter and astringent. Instead, I smiled thinly and said, “That’s kind of condescending.”

Head Courtney sniffed. “Maybe you’re not chamber material after all, Jane.”

A way out! A way out!

I started to reach for my purse, “If you really feel that way …”

Toady Courtney stood up and whispered to Head Courtney, something along the lines of, “But none of us wants to do it, either.”

Dang it.

Head Courtney cleared her throat. “Since you’re struggling with your very simple assignment, Jenny is going to be joining your committee.”

“What?” Jenny cried.

“Why?” I yelled. “Why would you do that?”

“Jenny has the organizational and people skills necessary to complete the task.”

Damned if she didn’t have a point there.

Jenny spluttered. “Courtney, I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Now, Jenny, new chamber members are expected to make sacrifices. You want to make a good impression, don’t you?”

“But-but-but,” Jenny stammered.

OK, that made me giggle a little.

Nice Courtney leaned over and whispered, “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” I assured her. “Absolutely nothing.”

Jenny and I were assigned a meeting schedule, a color-coded chart to record our progress, and little pamphlets with suggestions on what phrases to use to wheedle, I mean, encourage donations. If we didn’t collect at least two hundred items by the next meeting, we would both be given twenty demerits.

Eventually, I was going to have to ask Nice Courtney what that meant, exactly.

9

It’s normal to “relapse” into old patterns. The important thing is to try to avoid hurting bystanders.

—Love Bites: A Female Vampire’s Guide to Less

Destructive Relationships

I was not invited to the McClaine clan baby shower. After my participation in Zeb and Jolene’s disastrous wedding events, I was considered a bit of an event jinx by Jolene’s family. So, they held it at noon, outdoors, at the McClaine family farm.

I’m not sure if my absence made the party better or worse for Jolene.

Apparently, because the McClaines are such a fertile family, baby showers aren’t so much gift-giving occasions but a recycling of the most recent babies’ clothes, blankets, and so on, for the use of the new arrival. They do wrap the items for the new mother to open, though.

There was cake. There was a corsage of roses made from tiny baby socks. There were hostile cousins who still resented Jolene as the golden child of the pack, despite her humbling experience at her wedding rehearsal, when Zeb dumped her while under the influence of posthypnotic suggestion.

It’s a long story.

As Jolene’s pregnancy progressed, the McClaines had stepped up their campaign to keep Zeb and Jolene’s home from being built. The pack had scared off every construction crew in three counties, showing up during the day to “supervise” the work. When the more obtuse crews didn’t pick up on the subtle intimidation, the pack would use scary subliminal wolf behavior to scare them off—prolonged stares, low growls, and, in one instance, peeing on a plumber’s van. The Lavelle house was basically a concrete pad and some framework that had been up for so long it was starting to buckle under the elements. Jolene and Zeb had no choice but to hire Buster Dowdy, the laziest contractor in this end of the state. He frequently spent his billable hours at the site, in the back of his truck, drinking beer and napping.

The climax of the shower was a weird diaper-related shower game in which the prize was being allowed in the delivery room when Jolene’s babies were born. Jolene had not been informed of this, and she vehemently protested when her cousin Lurlene, the current president of the We Hate Jolene Club, was named the lucky winner.

“Stop laughing!” Jolene cried later, as she told me and Andrea how she tried to explain that watching her deliver twins wasn’t something Jolene was willing to raffle off. We were an odd combination—the vampire, the human, and the weeping werewolf. But it felt right, somehow, for us to be sitting in the trailer’s tiny guest room, sorting through baby clothes and comforting Jolene. Andrea and I were now a safety net for her.

Jolene wailed, “It’s not funny! They just do not get why I don’t think that was a wonderful way to end the shower. Aunt Vonnie said that they were trying to help keep me from abandoning family tradition altogether, since my human husband is insisting I go to some silly hospital instead of having a home birth, like every other woman in the family for the last thirty generations. And then Lurlene got to pretend that her feelings were hurt because I wouldn’t let her ‘share’ in this moment and ‘help’ me through labor. We both know damn good and well that Lurlene doesn’t give two sniffs about being there— Stop laughing!”

“I’m sorry,” I cried, trying to stifle the giggles that were so clearly pissing off the hormonally imbalanced and extremely swollen werewolf. “It’s indignant laughter … on your behalf.”

Jolene sniffed as she tried to fold a tiny pink sleeper for the fourth time, finally bunching it into a ball and tossing it into a laundry basket. “And then Mama said they had a surprise for me, and I thought, ‘Oh, Lord, what now?’ and they covered my eyes and led me across the pasture, and surprise! There’s a brand-new trailer sitting there with ‘The Lavelles” already burned onto one of those little wooden porch signs? Mama said the family wanted to help me and Zeb, since they’d heard how much trouble we’d been having with building the new house. They took me inside, and it was so big.” She looked around the cramped confines of the camper. “It was one of those big double-wides, with a gas fireplace and a master bathroom with separate shower. They already had it all decorated, and …” She sighed. “It was so pretty and new and clean. Did I mention it was new?”

Andrea smiled gently and patted Jolene’s hands. “A few times. So, are you going to be moving in?”

“No,” Jolene said, fully tearing up now. “Because then they showed me the nursery, and they already had it all set up. They’d already picked out all this Noah’s Ark stuff, quilts and a crib set and this big mural thing on the wall. I mean, they’d done everything. And they hadn’t even asked me. They never ask me. They always just assume that they’re doing what’s best for me. Aunt Vonnie started talking about how silly it was for me to want to move off the farm anyway, since I was going to need so much help with the babies, and how it would just be so much easier for everybody this way. And I realized it was never going to change. I’d be stuck there, and they’d just be constantly coming in without being invited and taking over everything and treatin’ Zeb bad. And I lost it.”

“What exactly does ‘lost it’ mean?” I asked, knowing full well that werewolf family arguments usually devolved into full-scale riot situations.

“I told them no. For the first time, I really, completely, no doubt about it, said no. No to the nursery, no to the trailer, no to the little wooden sign. Just no. I told them I knew that the reason we were having so much trouble finishing the house was that they were scaring off all the contractors. I told them I wasn’t going to move back to the farm ever, no matter what they did. I told them they’d be lucky if Zeb and I told them when we were going to the hospital to have the babies, much less allowed them to barge into the delivery room. I told them I would raise my babies how I saw fit and that if they wanted to visit after the twins were born, they would have to call before coming over, otherwise we weren’t answering the door.”

Andrea’s jaw was hanging freely at this point. All I could do was mouth, “Wow.”

Jolene sighed. “Yeah. And Mama burst into tears. Aunt Lola kept asking everybody what I really meant. Aunt Vonnie said that if I felt that way, then she guessed I didn’t want their shower gifts. I told Aunt Vonnie to take her used Diaper Genie and shove it up her ass sideways.”

“Ouch,” I said, putting an arm around her shoulders. “I know that was hard. But I’m proud of you.”

Andrea nodded. “And it certainly explains why your shower haul is so skimpy.”

“I didn’t take anything.” Jolene sniffed, wiping at her cheeks. “I just left.”

“This whole situation sucks now, but it’s going to do you a lot of good in the long run. I’m sure Zeb will appreciate not having to live on the farm,” I said, rubbing Jolene’s back.

“I’ve never understood why people pick Noah’s Ark for a nursery theme anyway,” Andrea said breezily, folding a tiny pair of socks.

“Really.” I snorted. “I mean, who wants reminders of a natural disaster, literally of biblical portions, on their baby’s walls? What are you supposed to say, ‘Oh, drowning sinners, isn’t that precious?’”

Jolene looked up at me through glassy eyes. “You’re weird.”

“I hear that a lot.”

My concerned and vigilant friend’s letters increased in frequency. Once a week, then twice a week. It was creepy. And they rarely varied from the theme of Gabriel hurt me, he’ll hurt you. He made promises to me. Ruined me forever. You’re a big fat idiot for trusting him.

OK, that last part was implied.

One night, I sat at the shop counter, sorting through them as Dick sipped an Americano and read a Tales from the Darkside comic. I tried to divide the letters into piles, based on threat level. But I kept getting the “I hate him,” “I love him,” and “He’ll hurt you” piles mixed up with the larger “I can make your life a living hell if you don’t listen to me” pile. I sighed and rubbed my eyes. There was also a disturbingly large pile of photos of yours truly taken with a telephoto lens.