"Tina said it would take too long for the ambulance to get to Meagan and that she needed to decide whether to be turned, right then," Ben said. "She yelled for a vampire to step up and sire her. A volunteer stepped out of the crowd. I didn't recognize him, but I figured he was a guest at the party."
"He showed Tina a fake ID card. Sired Meagan," Jane said as Dick scribbled. Jane slid a photo to Ophelia. "Ophelia, do you recognize him?"
Ophelia shook her head. "No, I don't. But . . . that could be Marco," she said, tilting her head at the photo. "He had this horrible handlebar mustache when I saw him last. Made him look like the leader in a vampire barbershop quartet. But that's gone in this photo, so maybe?"
"OK, so someone who is maybe on the list you gave Tina turned Meagan after Tina picked him out of the crowd," Dick said. "And then Meagan woke up within twenty-four hours, unlike every vampire before her. And then she bit Ben, turning him without giving him her blood, again, unlike every vampire before her."
"I regret nothing," Ben insisted, shaking his head.
I laughed, but when I looked into Ben's big green eyes, I could see that he was perfectly serious. He didn't regret being bitten by me. I wrapped my arms around him and kissed him hard.
I thought back to what my dad had said in the tape about dating (or not dating). Love wasn't always pretty. It wasn't always smooth. Nothing about my relationship with Ben had been smooth. But at the end of the day, he was the first person I thought of when I was upset. He was the first person I wanted to tell.
It was possible that I was in love with Ben. That I wanted to be with him for the rest of my unnaturally long life.
Now, how did I tell him that?
Also, this was a super-weird time to have such a realization, surrounded by my family while we discussed murder timelines.
The room exploded into a series of "aws" and "ews."
"Enough of that, or I'll get the hose!" Dick exclaimed. "What next?"
"We brought Meagan and Ben into our home for wayward youthful vampires," Gabriel interjected.
"Nice." I snickered.
"Just after we smuggled you to the Hollow, a fire took place off campus. At first, the authorities assured us that no one was injured, and then vampire remains were found in the basement," Jane said.
"Ophelia was questioned by the police about those remains," Jamie said, to Ophelia's mortification. She smacked his arm without even looking at him.
"Dude," Ben said again. "Please stop helping."
"Their investigation was unsubstantiated and inconclusive," Ophelia spat.
"You should have that tattooed on your forehead to save time," Jane told her.
Ophelia shot her a rude gesture I only recognized because my World Literature professor had an inappropriate sense of classroom boundaries.
"Do we know who owns the building Ophelia was suspected of burning?" Jane asked.
Ben opened his laptop. In a weird flash, I saw a picture of a campus map in my head. Ben was going to look up the house in some sort of real estate database-which he wasn't supposed to be able to log into, but he knew his mom's work password. He just needed to know the street address. He was trying to remember the exact location of the building and picture it in relation to the campus.
How the hell do I know all of this?
I glanced at Jane, who did not seem to be aware of any sort of psychic turmoil in the room. I opened Morgan's campus newspaper article about the fire on my tablet and highlighted the street address. I showed it to Ben.
"Thanks," he said, smiling. "You saved me the trouble of looking it up."
"You kids and your newfangled devices," Gabriel harrumphed.
"The building is owned by a rental company. The renter is listed as New Life Endeavors Inc. for the last three years," I said. "It's an LLC registered through Delaware, which is not super-helpful. You don't have to include the names of the applicants on public paperwork."
"Sort of a dead end there. What else do we know about the building?" Jane asked.
I bit my lip. "Remains of three vampires were found in the basement. But they still haven't been identified."
"Four of the friends on Ophelia's list are missing and cannot be accounted for," Jamie said.
"The list that was given to Tina, whom Meagan also suspects of padding the undead-student numbers to scam extra funding from the Council," Dick said. "Which is pretty smart, when you think about it, using our own paperwork against us. We tend to think humans are too scared of us to steal from us, so we get a little lax . . ." Dick realized Jane was frowning at him. "OK, Tina was clearly wrong, and stealing is not a nice thing to do."