And for the record, yes, my own stun gun was used to incapacitate me.

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.