Accidental Sire(27)

"What else can we do?" I asked Jane. "I mean, we're fast, and we're strong. What else?"

Jane sank to the ground in front of us. She and Gabriel were a bit more graceful in their descent than we floppy youngsters were. "You'll still have those weird human moments of clumsiness, especially in your first few years. It's like your body forgets sometimes that you're not limited to human speed and reactions. But over time, you'll get even smarter, faster, stronger. Just be careful. Remember that you can hurt people around you, so you've got to watch yourself. Avoid sunlight, silver, getting poked with wooden objects. Other than that, who knows? You're sort of ahead of the curve in terms of special tricks. And you may develop a talent that's just for you. Like Ophelia and her phone frying."

Suddenly, remembering Jane's own special talent, I frowned.

Don't think anything rude, I told myself. Definitely don't think anything about Gabriel. Or the fact that you want to smash all of Jane's unicorns with a brick. Don't think-dang it!

"Did you tell her about the mind-reading thing?" Jane demanded. "Damn it, Ben! You know that makes people uncomfortable around me."

"I thought it was the fair thing to do," Ben said. "I would want to know."

"It's actually working against me," I told him. "Because I keep telling myself not to think about things I shouldn't think about, but in the process, I think about those things. Maybe my special talent is bad timing and inappropriate thoughts?"

Ben snickered. I gave him the finger, which made him laugh harder.

"Children," Gabriel said mildly, though he was smiling, too.

"Well, for the record, I don't go sneaking around in people's brains. Because that is rude, even if it would make my life a lot easier to know what the hell you're thinking."


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"Yeah, somehow that doesn't help," I told her.

"So the next few weeks, we're going to focus on your self-control, dampening your bloodthirst, and general vampire education. Eventually, you're going to be steady enough to go out into the world, have limited interactions with humans. And then we're going to get you back to your campus."

I tried not to pout, but honestly. "Homeschooling?"

"Homeschooling." Ben groaned.

"Don't look at me," Georgie said archly. "I graduated from self-control school centuries ago."

"You ate an entire circus once," Jane countered.

Georgie scowled. "The nets gave the trapeze artists an unfair advantage. Call me a purist."

"That's not the word I would use," I told her.





5




Make sure you know the basics before you start to teach your childe fancy feeding tricks.

-The Accidental Sire: How to Raise an Unplanned Vampire

If our next few weeks were a training montage in an '80s action movie, well, it would mostly feature ugly crying and blood spatters set to power chords.

I'd hoped that since we were apparently some new strain, we could somehow skip the weird adjustment period from human to vampire. But no, Ben and I struggled with our thirst, though it was slaked with less blood than Jane or Gabriel needed. We weren't used to our superhuman strength. And we never seemed to make it to our beds in time for sunrise, meaning we collapsed wherever we were.

It was like being a gawky teenager all over again, only instead of tripping over our own feet, we accidentally broke doorknobs off their moorings and suffered weird contusions-slash-carpet-burns.

Early on, Jane had found that keeping Georgie on a schedule was important to prevent her from committing mass murder, so she put Ben and me on the same routine. We woke up and drank breakfast as a "family," and then Jane left us to do our schoolwork while she did Council business in her study. The awesome news was that we typed and read faster than even Jane and Gabriel. Georgie, fascinated-slash-annoyed by the fact that we could do something she couldn't, ran us through typing-speed trials. I was the winner at 390 words per minute. But Ben was a faster reader, completing his copy of The Guide for the Newly Undead, Second Edition in an hour.

After homework, we got "yard time," when Jane literally let us run around the yard to let off some steam. Sadly, this was the most entertaining part of our day, testing our strength and speed. Every day, we ran laps around the cow pond, leaped from inadvisable heights, and tried to see the lights of town (such as they were) from the tops of the trees. We could not. 

Dr. Hudson gave us the undead version of heart monitors, bracelets that measured electrical activity in our brains, our metabolism, and other vital statistics. I took mine off as often as I could, because I didn't like anything to do with McDerpy on my skin. I suspected the bracelets might have also included a tracking chip, given how often Ben wandered just a little too close to the woods near his family's house.