“So, you are afraid of the crosses?” he said, holding a neon orange plastic monstrosity up in a protective gesture.
“No, I’m afraid of people who look like Mr. T.” I shook my head. “Is there a gumball machine in town left intact?”
“Well, I remembered enough of last night to know I might need some insurance,” he said, taking off the necklaces but keeping the rosewood cross in his lap.
I plopped down next to him, wondering what to say next. Does Hallmark make a
“Sorry I tried to drink your blood and touched you in a vaguely inappropriate manner” card? I settled for “How much do you remember?”
“It’s pretty foggy. I remember you having big front teeth and being really strong, me offering to buy you pizza, and then for some reason, me scoring the winning touchdown in a pickup football with the guys, followed by a round of beers at Eddie Mac’s. And I’ve never been to Eddie Mac’s.”
“And you don’t have any guys,” I pointed out, glad that Gabriel had managed to wipe the least flattering portions of the evening.
“So, you’re a vampire,” said Zeb, always eager to fill verbal space.
I shrugged. “Yup. Is that going to be a problem for you?”
“I don’t know yet. I don’t know what you’re capable of, which is scary. The whole blood-drinking thing is weird,” he said, giving me his honesty face. I hated that face. It usually meant I was getting bad news or the truth. Sometimes they were one and the same, which sucked.
“I would never hurt you, Zeb. I was just kidding about sucking the life out of you, really,” I said. I didn’t reach out. I couldn’t stand the possibility that he would shy away from me. Instead, I countered with hurtful sarcasm. “Besides, my drinking blood’s not nearly as weird as that time I caught you shaving your legs.”
“I was curious!” he yelled. I burst out laughing. Being Zeb, he made his “I’m not responding in order to spare our friendship” face, which was more agreeable. He said, “Besides, I did that once. You’re going to be drinking blood for the next thousand years or something. You’ll never die, never eat, never grow old, never have kids.”
“Thanks, I hadn’t thought of that one,” I muttered. Like so many elements of my new nature, the thought of never having children hadn’t occurred to me yet. It was still one of those things far off in Somedayland, after I got married and learned how crock pots worked. Now, children weren’t possible, which was yet another thing my mother could be pissed at me about.
“I was so scared for you, Janie,” he said. “You just disappeared. I thought you were in a car wreck, murdered, or, worse, that you’d finally taken Norman Hughes up on his offer to elope. So you were dead…or married to a guy born without sweat glands.
And when I found out that you were dead but you weren’t, well, I didn’t know what to think. I mean, it’s kind of cool. I have a friend who’s got superpowers. But I feel left behind and, well, terrified.”
“It’s still me, just different,” I said lamely.
“How did it happen?” he asked. “Most of the people you read about being turned meet vamps in clubs or over the Internet…Ew, did you…?”
“Yes, I met a vampire on the Internet, went to his evil love den, and let him turn me, because I’m that brainless,” I huffed, slapping his shoulder. “Look, I don’t want to tell the whole long sordid story, OK? Someday, when I’m very drunk, I’ll tell you. The bottom line is, I had no choice. It was either vampirism or lying dead in a ditch. Though over the last day or so, I’ve been wondering whether I should have gone for door number two.”
“Aww, don’t say that,” Zeb said, tentatively wrapping his arm around me. “I’m glad you’re alive. Really, I am. I love you, Jane. Otherwise, I would have sold that ugly mutt to the carnival days ago.”
Fitz growled.
“He’s stupid, not deaf,” I reminded Zeb, who scratched Fitz into a forgiving mood.
“There has to be cool stuff, too,” he said. “From what I remember through the beer and fog, you’re strong. And you heal up pretty quickly. And being newly unemployed, that opens up a lot of new job opportunities for you. Crime fighter. Bulletproof-vest tester. Naomi Campbell’s personal assistant.”
“Funny.” I grimaced. Zeb was looking around, scanning the porch for something.
“You want to stab me again, don’t you?”
He didn’t look at all ashamed. “Think of it as testing the limits of your new abilities.”
I groaned. “I’ve created a monster.”
“I don’t think someone who recently crawled from the grave should be throwing around labels like ‘monster,’” he said, making sarcastic little air-quotes fingers.
“It wasn’t a grave.” I sniffed. “It was a comfy four-poster.”
When we were kids, Mama used to ask, “If Zeb wanted to jump off the roof, would you do it, too?” And as it turned out, the answer was yes.
Before you start to judge, I had my reasons, including wanting to keep the one living person who knew about my new after-lifestyle happy. But I also wanted to see what I could do. Despite the assumption that all tall people are great at basketball, volleyball, and other net-related sports, I’ve never been a particularly athletic person.
(See previous episode involving me falling facedown in a ditch.) So, testing my newfound ability to leap cow pastures in a single bound was intriguing. But I did feign reluctance right up until the point where I jumped off the second story of my house.
Nothing happened. OK, I got a massive headache. But that was it.
The previous generations who had owned River Oaks refused to sell the now unused farmland surrounding the house, so my nearest neighbor was about five miles down the road and not likely to hear suspicious noises. This turned out to be a fortunate decision, as Zeb screamed like a girl when I hit the lawn headfirst.
As pretentious as it is to live in a house with its own name, River Oaks is just an old family home. Two stories, built in the semi-Colonial style out of gray fieldstone. It’s more of an English country cottage than Tara, though a traditional Southern wraparound porch was added sometime in the early 1900s. There’s a library, a formal dining room, a formal parlor, a living room, a pantry big enough to store winter rations for a family of ten, and a solarium, which is a fancy way of saying sun porch. We do love our porches in the South.
Jettie inherited the house sometime in the late 1960s from her father, Harold Early, whom she cared for in his old age. This did not sit well with Grandma Ruth, who had already packed up her house after Great-grandpa’s funeral in anticipation of moving in.
Beyond steam-cleaning out the old-man smell, Jettie supervised most of the electrical and plumbing modernizations to the house. While Harold preferred the soft glow of a hurricane lamp, Aunt Jettie was a stickler about having access to an automatic dishwasher and a long hot bath. She also repainted and refinished almost every surface in the house, so now it felt like an actual home. But her real legacy was in the garden. Jettie planted seemingly random splashes of pansies, heavily perfumed roses, fat and sassy sunflowers, whatever struck her fancy. If you stared at the blooms long enough, you could almost make sense of it. But as soon as you started grasping the pattern, it slipped out of focus. And because many of the plants were low-maintenance, even my special plant-murdering powers hadn’t killed them. Yet.
While the Half-Moon Hollow Historical Society was willing to forgive Aunt Jettie for plumbing updates and paint, she scandalized the lot of them when she took River Oaks off the town’s spring tour of Civil War homes. An annual tradition, the tour features little old ladies in hoop skirts leading bored high-school students and overenthusiastic Civil War buffs around the five known authentic antebellum homes in the Hollow.
The historical society isn’t so much a club as a hereditary social mafia. There are only fifty active memberships, which are passed down from mother to daughter among the older families in Half-Moon Hollow. When my great-grandmother Lillie Pearl died in
1965, it fell to either Jettie or my grandmother to take the Early family slot. Guess which one took the bait? Grandma Ruthie was right at the front of the hoop-skirt pack, but she had no real control over the house. As soon as River Oaks was in Jettie’s name, she told those “corset-wearing imbeciles” to take their tour and shove it.
Considering the community’s reaction, you would have thought Jettie had declared kittens the other white meat. Her rusted rural-route mailbox was flooded with hate letters.
There were editorials in the Half-Moon Herald imploring Jettie to reconsider. Her coupons were refused at the Piggly Wiggly. It was the final nail in the coffin of Grandma Ruthie and Aunt Jettie’s relationship and the chief reason Jettie left the farmland, the house, and its contents to me when she died.
As much as it upset certain members of my family, owning River Oaks allowed me to move out of the Garden View Apartments. There was neither a garden nor a view. I had both at River Oaks. In fact, Jettie’s rose garden was what broke my fall from the second story during our “What Can Kill Jane?” series of experiments. In retrospect, the roof jump should have been planned more carefully. Seeing my head bent at a 157-degree angle seemed to upset Zeb.
“Uggghhhh, stop with the caterwauling,” I groaned as Zeb rushed over. I sat up gingerly, waiting for the gashes and bruises on my forehead to disappear. I rolled my neck, popping the vertebrae back into place. That was the dumbest experiment so far. We tossed a toaster in the bathtub with me. It tickled. Zeb hit me with his car. I left a two-foot dent in the grille. Zeb wanted me to eat Pop Rocks and drink a Coke. But considering the pot-pie episode, I declined, and he suggested the roof jump.
Fitz thought me lying on the grass, groaning, was part of a fun game and ran over to lick my rapidly healing face. Zeb batted the canine tongue bath out of the way and shook me.
“Are you OK? How many fingers?”
“Too many.” I squinted.
“What day is it?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I said. “I find that both sad and liberating.”
“What’s the dot on an ‘i’ called?”