“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to cause trouble for anyone else. I’ll admit that I was shortsighted. I apologize for that,” I said carefully. “And I know that a sincere apology is not followed by a ‘but,’ but I was desperate, and this seemed like the only option.”
“Well, you apologized,” Dick said drily. “Which puts you ahead of about fifty percent of our population.”
“What does this mean for me? A fine? Vampire jail?”
“No. We are going to take a very personal interest in your transition, Libby,” Jane said brightly. “You are going to go through Council bloodthirst boot camp. You will prove that you are in complete control of your thirst. And after that, we will monitor you every second until we are convinced that you will not cause a huge embarrassing news cycle for vampires everywhere. And then we will back off and let you live your unlife in a reasonably unsupervised fashion.”
“Sounds fair,” I conceded.
“I still kind of want to hug you,” Dick told me, patting my head again.
“You seem nice, but—” I shook my head. “Resist the urge.”
2
With your new nocturnal hours, two A.M. feedings won’t seem like such a burden. Morning carpool, however, will remain just as dangerous.
—My Mommy Has Fangs: A Guide to Post-Vampiric Parenting
I didn’t expect to just wake up, hop out of my coffin, and walk back into my life. I knew there was going to be an adjustment period. Still, it felt very weird to walk up my own dark front-porch steps, without any need of a light, to an empty house.
Even with Rob gone, the house had always been filled with noise and color. Danny, a classic only child, always managed to keep himself entertained, singing his original silly songs (usually set to “Old MacDonald”) and staging broad-scale action-figure battles that spread to several rooms of the house. But now the windows were dark and quiet. There was no bellowing cry of “MOM!” followed by the patter of sneaker-clad feet as I walked through the door.
I dropped my keys onto the little foyer table I’d refurbished years before when Rob’s parents built the house for us. As soon as Les and Marge heard that their son was thinking of proposing, they had built this sensible three-bedroom ranch on the edge of their property, claiming it was a good investment. I supposed it might have been profitable if they’d planned on renting it to someone, but they hadn’t. Rob just moved in a month before the wedding, no discussion, no debate. He started moving our wedding gifts into the new house. And who was I to argue with it? What kind of idiot turns down a new home? That I didn’t get to choose the fixtures or décor for . . . because Marge decorated it just like her house . . . so Rob wouldn’t have to feel like he’d left his childhood home. Hindsight would come back to bite me on the ass much later on that one.
Bit by bit, I’d reclaimed the house over the years, “losing” a dried flower arrangement here, dropping/destroying a porcelain angel figurine there. I blamed Danny for several of the angel figurines when Marge asked about them, which might have affected me, karmically speaking. Now it was a comfortable, if slightly shabby-chic, little country house. The sturdy, denim-covered, Danny-proof living-room furniture was centered around a big faux-stone fireplace with a gas flame. The adjacent bookshelves were covered in my paperbacks and framed family photos, mostly of Danny with me and his grandparents. My word-of-the-day calendar sat next to my laptop on the old whitewashed rustic dining-room table I used as a desk. An old blue-and-yellow patchwork quilt I’d purchased at an estate sale was thrown over the back of a cane rocker in the corner. Danny’s trucks lay abandoned on the blue rag rug that protected our hardwood laminate floors.
With my new vampire vision, I could see the thin layer of dust on the mantel, the lint bunnies under the couch. My housekeeping skills, which had never been Better Homes and Gardens level, had definitely fallen by the wayside since I’d gotten sick. Marge had tried, well, insisted on helping out at first, but it had made me so uncomfortable, her clucking her tongue as she helped “organize” my Tupperware cabinet, my closet, my mail, that I eventually told her I was back up to dusting my own baseboards.
It was a lie, but it bought me peace of mind.
I opened the front closet and saw that the packing boxes I’d put there a few days ago were still neatly stacked under our winter coats. I’d been organizing what I could, little by little, for months and stashing it in a storage unit near the county line. Each trip out there took so much out of me that I had to sleep the rest of the day, but I was ready to move. I’d even scoped out a few rentals I could afford. We had Rob’s insurance and death benefits we could depend on until Danny was eighteen, along with the income from my bookkeeping business. So while we weren’t rolling in money, we were comfortable.