Which, of course, it was. But again, I was a late bloomer when it came to epiphanies.
For now, I was just grateful to have more time with my son. Everything else? It was just another equation, a problem to solve. I would keep chipping away until I figured it out.
When she wasn’t making vague threats to my unnamed sire and his tender parts or trying to get me to attend meetings of the Newly Emerged Vampires Support Group, Jane was torturing me with assigned reading. Since I’d rushed into my decision, Jane was enforcing a strict course of study of vampire history, politics, and personal safety. Jane happened to own Specialty Books, a charming little shop downtown, so she had a wealth of instructional materials to school me on my new culture, including 50 Ways to Add Variety to Your Undead Diet; From Caesar to Kennedy: Vampires and Their Clandestine Political Influence throughout History; and Love Bites: A Female Vampire’s Guide to Less Destructive Relationships.
At the top of the stack was a slick paperback with a pale, cheerful woman holding a cherubic toddler on the cover. It was called My Mommy Has Fangs: A Guide to Post-Vampiric Parenting.
“I was a librarian when I was human,” Jane explained while I stared at the book with disdain. “Helping books find the people who need them is sort of my thing.”
“I would be insulted by the parenting book, but I feel like I don’t have much of a leg to stand on, in terms of dignity.”
“That’s true. But the first thing I want you to read is this,” she said, dropping a book titled The Guide for the Newly Undead, Second Edition on top of the stack. “This is your new Bible. Everything you need to know about being a vampire, all of the random questions you come up with at five A.M. and don’t want to bother anyone with, it’s all in here. It’s the cornerstone product at my shop. And it’s a second edition, so it has a feeding plan for once you get settled into your diet and a list of reliable online vampire vendors, both of which are pretty darn handy.”
I flipped through the stack of books, wondering how I was going to read or remember any of this information. I don’t think I’d studied this much for the CPA exam. “I was never good with homework,” I muttered.
“I’ve seen your desk, sweetie. I don’t believe that for a second,” she said, putting my laptop in my hands. “Now, by tomorrow night, I want a five-page essay on the structure of the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead and how it governs local vampires like yourself. The main focus of your essay should be how to stay off the Council’s radar.”
“You’re kidding. You do realize that I have to run a business from home while my child sleeps, right? A business that I need to keep running if I want to feed said child?” I laughed. But Jane did not smile. “You’re not kidding.”
“No, I am not,” she said, dropping the Guide for the Newly Undead in my lap. “Double-spaced, one-inch margins. You can find the time. You’re a multitasker.”
I stared down at my textbook. Despite the fact that I’d ruthlessly retrained my potty mouth after Danny and tried to replace the foul words with more intellectual terms from my word-of-the-day calendar, I let loose a “sonofabitch.”
Jane’s assigned reading list was illuminating and sort of horrifying. I was in junior high when a vampire tax consultant named Arnie Frink flung vampires out of the coffin onto an unsuspecting human public. Arnie sued his employer for the right to work overnight in his office, claiming to have porphyria, a potentially fatal allergy to sunlight. His tax firm denied his assertion that allergies, even if they did make his skin blister like bubble wrap, were a legitimate reason to let him have unsupervised access to the copy machine. And when the court sided with the firm, Arnie threw aside his layers of protective clothes, and, while his skin sizzled like bacon, declared in open court that he was a vampire, with a medical condition subject to the Americans with Disabilities Act, and they were stomping all over his rights.
After enduring several lengthy appeals and extensive testing by mental-health professionals, Arnie won his lawsuit and got a respectable financial settlement, evening hours, and his fifteen minutes in the media spotlight. And an entire planet full of people flipped the hell out. Humans burned, staked, and dragged vampires out into the sun without giving the undead any chance to defend themselves or prove that they weren’t murderous monsters. And if the deaths could reasonably be explained away as accidents, the authorities took on a stubborn “see no evil, hear no evil, believe total bullshit” policy.
The World Council, an elected group of ancient vampires, realized the stubbornness trend wasn’t going away and came forward, asking the world’s governments to recognize them as nonmythical beings who should not be set on fire simply for existing.