"The only neighbor I have close enough to try to leech off my Wi-Fi signal." Jane sighed. "She's eerily talented at guessing passwords."
"Well, what did you expect with a password like ‘draculagirl'?" Georgie asked. "Honestly."
"Well, now it's just a string of nonsensical numbers and letters with one ampersand thrown in," Jane said, writing the password down for me.
I logged on to my e-mail and found that I did have several weekly assignment lists for my classes waiting in my in-box. I had a lot of reading to catch up on, and my history professor did not accept "sternum was crushed by a flying barbell weight" as a good reason for turning in my midterm paper late.
I also found several (dozen) messages from Keagan and Morgan, plus Twitter and Facebook notifications, and Keagan had actually tried to reach me on my rarely used Tumblr account, which was just sort of sad. The general theme of their messages was "Are you OK? Where are you? Tell us where they're keeping you, and we will bust you out!"
I replied to all that I was fine, I couldn't say where I was, but I would Skype as soon as I was allowed. And when I hit reply, a big red "X" showed up on my screen, with the words "Unauthorized Contact" in a very confrontational font.
"Uh, Jane," I said, "did you install nanny software on my computer?"
Jane's lips pulled back in a grimace. "Only for when you try to e-mail someone who's not one of your professors. Or log on to social media. Or type the words ‘Half-Moon Hollow' anywhere."
"You've cyber-gagged me?"
"Only for a little while," Jane promised. "Until things have calmed down and you've proved that we can trust you."
I wasn't even going to pretend that being put on Internet training wheels didn't hurt my feelings.
"And my phone?" I asked through gritted teeth. "Wait, where is my phone?"
Gabriel sighed and reached into his wallet, withdrawing a twenty and handing it to his wife. She snickered and stuffed it into her pocket. Georgie waggled her fingers, and Gabriel slid another twenty across the table and into her little paw.
"Uh, what was that?"
"We said that you'd ask for your phone within an hour of waking up, and he said you wouldn't," Georgie told me.
Gabriel was sulking. A lot.
"Gabriel is a little out of touch with today's youth," Jane told me. "Frankly, I was a little surprised that you didn't ask for your phone last night."
"I had a lot on my mind," I told her. "So, seriously, where's my phone?"
Again with the cringing from Jane. "Well, since it was in your back pocket when you were thrown against the building, it was crushed. And with all of your wounds, there was a lot of ‘you' on it. It wasn't salvageable."
"That will not be covered under my protection plan," I muttered.
"No, it won't. But I got you a replacement," she said, sliding a square chunk of plastic across the table.
"This is a KidPhone," I said, lifting the phonelet with its three huge buttons. Seriously, it was one very small step up from one of those preschooler toy phones where the anthropomorphic eyes moved back and forth when you dialed. "It only calls three numbers."
///
"Yes, V-one-one, the Council office, and my cell," Jane said. "Keep it with you at all times. Prove that we can trust you in terms of contacting the outside world, and you'll get a phone with four buttons."
I pushed up from the table, pointing the block of princess-pink plastic at her. "Is this because I laughed when Ophelia fried your phone? If so, this is bull-"
I stopped suddenly as bubbles of some strange awareness rippled through my chest, making the hair on my neck stand up. My head snapped up toward the ceiling. I dropped the KidPhone and stumbled toward the stairs.
"What is this?" I whispered to Jane, who was watching me with bemusement.
"Ben's rising," she said, following me to the second floor. "I felt it with Jamie. You're his sire, so you're getting a sort of supernatural text alert as he wakes up . . . again, way, way ahead of schedule. But this only works when your childe is rising, and then it goes away."
"That's nice, but I wouldn't get a supernatural text alert on my KidPhone, because it doesn't get texts."
Yeah, it was inappropriate to bitch about my phone at a moment like this, but honestly, I needed something to take my mind off my nerves. How angry was Ben going to be when he woke up? How many heavy objects was he going to throw at me? Was he going to try to bite me to get back at me? Would that mean I would be a double-weirdo vampire? Would we just keep waking up and biting each other in an ugly cycle forever?