AllFreeNovel
Share Us
—
Sick of researching blind, I stopped by Specialty Books on my way home. I loved Jane’s quirky little shop, which had belonged to Gilbert Wainwright, Jane’s deceased employer. Working at the store was Jane’s first job after she was turned, and when Mr. Wainwright willed the shop to her, she’d expanded, remodeled, and turned the chaotic rat trap of an occult bookstore into the little gem of oddball charm that it was today.
The scent of coffee and old paper greeted me at the door. I passed the antique leaded-glass and maple counter with its old-fashioned register and a large display of Jane’s cornerstone product, The Guide for the Newly Undead. The wide coffee bar matched the shiny maple shelving system, Jane’s pride and joy. Any customer could walk into the store and find any book on any subject—from Sasquatch to Santeria—purchase it, and then safely navigate his or her way back out of the store. None of these conveniences was encouraged by the previous system, according to Jane.
The interior was a mix of the mystical and the quirky. I had searched the Home Depot high and low, but I’d never been able to find that same restful shade of midnight blue on the walls. Andrea Byrne-Cheney, Jane’s assistant manager, had mixed several different colors to come up with it, then added a sprinkle of twinkling silver stars to keep the place from being “too serious.”
A handful of customers sat in comfy purple chairs near the back, arguing over John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer. Jolene sat at the bar, sipping a cappuccino and wolfing down a croissant the size of my head. Andrea was mixing synthetic blood in some sort of frozen coffee concoction, which I did not think would work out well. Jane sat at the counter balancing ledgers, exuding that typical newlywed glow, all dewy and bright-eyed and annoying. Her face lit up with a happy grin when she saw me, and she circled around the counter to envelop me in a hug.
Yep, newlywed vampires were huggers.
“What brings you here?” she asked. “Oh, my gosh, did I not pay this month’s invoice?”
“Nope, we put you on automatic withdrawal, remember? After you made up for one missed payment with two payments, duplicated by Gabriel’s payment, because he didn’t think you paid me.”
“We’re still working on the joint-accounts thing,” Jane muttered sheepishly.
I chuckled. “Those sorts of mistakes I can handle.” I pulled out several extra-large sachets stuffed with rosemary and lavender from my garden, combined with bay leaf, cloves, and cedar chips. “I’ve been meaning to bring these by. You said you needed something extra-powerful to cover up the smell of Jamie’s sneakers?”
“I do not understand how someone who technically does not sweat can have swamp feet!” Jane exclaimed, clutching the sachets to her chest like a shield. “It’s starting to permeate the second floor!”
I squeezed her shoulder as she pressed the sachets to her nose like they were an olfactory lifeline. “Welcome to life with a teenager. Dealing with weird smells will occupy a good portion of your time.”
Jane stashed the little cloth parcels behind the bar while Andrea brought the espresso machine roaring to life. “I was afraid you were here to give me more cryptic messages about my food supply and then not follow through with an explanation. You know unanswered questions drive me nuts,” Jane said.
“I’m sorry about that,” I told her.
“Thanks for calling me and including me in your one-woman recall, jerk,” Andrea muttered.
“I told Jane to call you, too!”
“You know she doesn’t remember anything until she’s awake for at least an hour!” she grumbled. “Don’t play with my well-being all willy-nilly.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, are you here to tell me why I tossed out an entire case of Faux Type O, other than that it amused you and Ophelia to jerk me around?” Jane asked.
“No.” I mouthed a quick thanks as Andrea set one of her delicious cappuccinos in front of me.
“Oh, did you try to attend another chamber meetin’?” Jolene snickered. “Because I want to hear about it.”
“I had to try it once!” I insisted. “Despite your many, many … many warnings. I’m a local business owner. I had to at least try to join the Chamber of Commerce.”
Much like Jane, I had been summarily tossed out of the Half-Moon Hollow Chamber of Commerce, a semiproductive civic group infested by perky women named Courtney. But while Jane had lasted several months, I was asked to leave after one meeting. When the Courtneys found out that my business was catering to vampires, they couldn’t get me out of the meeting house fast enough. In fact, after the Head Courtney found out that I was a friend of Jane’s, they’d done everything they could to cause problems for me in town. I’d tolerated their attempts to get my business license pulled. I’d even laughed when they tried to get my suppliers to blacklist me … because they didn’t really know my suppliers well and ended up offending them and rallying them to my side. But when they approached the teachers at Gigi’s school to determine whether my sister was a “disruptive influence” on the other kids, Jane visited the Chamber office … and would not tell me what was said. All I knew was that Head Courtney couldn’t look me in the eye when I saw her at Walmart.>“Lao Tzu?”
He shook his head, holding up one of Gigi’s magazines. “Cosmo Girl.”
12
Just because advice comes from an older vampire doesn’t mean it’s good advice. Sometimes ancient vampires survive on pure dumb luck.
—The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires
Sighing heavily and hauling my butt out of the Dorkmobile, even I had to pause and admire Mr. Marchand’s sweeping plantation house. Given that he was additionally immortalized as a Civil War memorial statue downtown, I could only assume that he’d been living there for several hundred years. While Jane’s place, River Oaks, was more English farmhouse than Tara, and Gabriel had taken the time to update his place with all of the modern conveniences of rain gutters and aluminum siding, Mr. Marchand had perfectly preserved his little piece of prewar heaven in the true Georgian style—tall white columns, a porch complete with a cupola, freshly whitewashed walls. Except for the elegant little sedan parked in the pea-gravel drive, it would have looked like a sketch from one of Mr. Jameson’s history books.
I’d never actually seen Mr. Marchand’s house. He usually asked me to drop anything he needed by the Council office. And it was highly unusual for me to visit a vampire’s home after dark, but I needed his signature on a Council form ASAP.
Earlier, at sunset, Ophelia had called to inform me of a paperwork snafu in the Council’s finance department, where there always seemed to be paperwork snafus. Mr. Marchand was head of the finance committee. If I didn’t get his approval on an expenditure form and mail it by the next day’s post, I wouldn’t be able to invoice the office for about six months of work. I’d actually secured his signature a few months before, but the form listed him as head of the budget committee, which—believe it or not—was a pretty important typo. And the World Council just looooooved to find reasons not to pay their bills based on technicalities. It gave them a sense of superiority over us lowly humans.
