One Lucky Vampire(65)

“But you don’t know them?” she asked.

Jake shook his head. “They didn’t approve of my parents’ marriage. On my mother’s side it was because they were Jewish and my father was Catholic. On my father’s side it was a combination of that and the fact that as far as they were concerned my mother came from the wrong side of the tracks. My father’s family had money, my mother’s didn’t. Dad’s parents expected him to marry a nice girl from a comparatively rich, Catholic family, not a poor Jewish girl whose family didn’t even own their own home. So . . .” He shrugged. “After Dad died, Mom was pretty much on her own with me.”

Jake paused briefly, but when she didn’t comment, he said, “I guess she was struggling something fierce when she met Roberto, working two jobs to try to support us and taking night courses at university in the hopes of getting a better job, to better support us. I gather she had no time for romance and made Roberto work hard to win her.”

“He was immortal?”

Jake nodded. “And he turned her.”

“But not you?” Nicole asked with a frown.

“I was a child,” Jake said with a shrug. “I gather they frown on turning children.”

“But when they told you at eighteen, why didn’t she turn you then?” she asked.

“I gather that was the plan,” Jake admitted with a grimace, and then explained, “They told me on my eighteenth birthday. My mother thought it would be a grand gift to tell me all about immortals, and then offer to use her one turn to turn me into one.”

“But she didn’t,” Nicole said with certainty and then arched an eyebrow and asked, “You wouldn’t let her?”

Jake shifted uncomfortably, and then sighed and said, “You have to understand, I was a horror buff. I watched every monster movie ever made. They scared the crap out of me and I slept with a nightlight until I was twelve, but I had to watch them. I was crazy for horrors.” He shook his head slightly at the memory. He’d lost his taste for horror since then, but he’d been addicted to them then and that hadn’t really helped the situation. “Back when I was a kid, they didn’t have your Twilights and True Bloods. In every movie where vampires made an appearance, the vampire was the bad guy and the Van Helsing types were the good guys running around staking them and ridding the world of their evil.”

Jake grimaced. “So, essentially, on my eighteenth birthday, my mother told me that not only was my stepfather and his entire clan a bunch of bloodsucking fiends, but that she’d allowed him to turn her into one, and that the half brother I adored and looked out for was one too . . . and I’d been living with them all, unsuspecting all that time.”

“Seriously?” Nicole asked with suspicion. “Before they told you what they were, you didn’t have a clue?”

“They made sure I didn’t,” Jake said quietly. “I suspect they used some mind control to keep me unaware while they fed, or fudged my memory a bit here and there, not erasing anything, but adding things here or there to explain inconsistencies.” He shrugged. “I didn’t have a clue before then that I lived with what I thought were monsters.”

“And you didn’t agree to the change at that point,” Nicole said quietly.

It wasn’t a question, but he treated it as one. “No. I was shocked, horrified, repulsed. They were all suddenly monsters to me, and I didn’t want to be a monster too.”

“It must have been hard for you,” Nicole said quietly, moving to sit on the stool next to his.

Jake hesitated and then swung the seat slightly toward her and said judiciously, “Probably no harder than it is now for you.”

Nicole smiled wryly, but shook her head. Swinging her stool to the side and back with one foot, she said, “It’s a bit of a shock for me to find out such things exist. But for you . . .” She frowned and stopped swiveling to peer at him solemnly. “It was your family. You must have felt—I don’t know, alone?”

Jake nodded. He had felt alone. He’d also felt betrayed, abandoned, lost. “I guess at that point I felt like I was just finding out that I’d really been orphaned at four and had been living in a fantasy world all the years since Roberto came into our lives. In truth, I suppose I ran away emotionally that day, and my actual leaving seven years ago was just me physically following up on what happened emotionally years earlier.”

“Why didn’t you run away back then, at eighteen?” she asked curiously. “I mean if you felt they were monsters . . .”