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“Sam Clemson,” I said.
Andrea and Jane both tilted their heads and gave me the “aw” face. “Poor Sam.” Jane sighed.
“Why ‘poor Sam’?” I asked. “I mean, other than he’s married to a ring-tailed bitch.”
Silence. My comment was met with complete, stone-faced silence. I bit my lip, afraid that I’d offended my new acquaintances. But then Jane burst out laughing and exclaimed, “Thank you!” while Andrea rolled her eyes.
Andrea said, “Lindy’s not that bad.”
“She tricked Tess into renting her house without telling her Sam was sleeping in the basement,” Jolene informed her.
“Oh, then she’s an evil she-beast,” Andrea conceded. I chuckled, and she shrugged. “My opinions are very adaptable. They have to be when you’re married to a vampire named Dick Cheney.”
Jane’s T-shirt made much more sense now.
“I actually meant ‘poor Sam,’ as in he was one of the vampires we were talking about, the ones who don’t get a choice about whether they were turned or not,” Jane said. “You know Sam was a contractor, right?”
I shook my head. “Actually, I don’t know anything beyond Sam’s the cranky guy who lives in my basement.”
“Sam was pretty well known around here for being a trustworthy guy,” Jolene said. “He did quality work at a fair price, and you didn’t have to worry about him raiding your jewelry box while you were out. We hired him to finish up our house after some, uh, other companies failed to do the work they’d been paid for.”
Jane smirked but didn’t elaborate. “Sam and Lindy moved here about six months before Sam took a job for an old-school vampire who’d just moved into the area. The vampire—his name was Hans something—asked for a light-proof sleeping compartment to be added to his bedroom closet. When Sam finished it, the vampire decided he didn’t want a human knowing where his evil lair was and drained him.”
“I thought it was illegal to forcibly turn a human.”
“Technically, he didn’t turn him. Hans just drained him until it would be impossible for Sam to survive and dumped him in the woods behind his house to let nature take its course. Fortunately, Hans was already under surveillance for some suspicious feeding activity over in Murphy. When the head of the local Council, Ophelia, saw him tossing Sam’s body, she stepped in and had one of her Council goons turn him. Ophelia would do just about anything to avoid scandal for the vampire community. Draining innocent human temp workers would qualify as a PR disaster.”
“Of course, Lindy pitched a fit, told everybody in town that Sam had gone off the deep end, had an early midlife crisis, fooled around with some vamp-tramp, and got himself ‘infected,’” Jolene said. “Oh, and because of the physical trauma he’d been through, it took Sam nearly five days to transform into a vampire, which is practically unheard of. The Council admitted that it was possible that Sam might not make it through the transformation to vampire, and Lindy managed to get some judge to declare him too dead and/or incompetent to handle his own affairs, which was a legal first. There was no will, and Lindy got everything. She controls every bit of their money until the divorce goes through. Sam gets an allowance for his blood and utilities.”
I mulled that over for a moment. Part of me felt sort of bad for him, in love with a woman who couldn’t see him as the same person she’d married, just because his diet and waking hours had changed. And then I remembered the previous Tuesday, when he’d hidden every product I had that contained caffeine—after keeping me up until 3:00 A.M. with the melodious screams of a jigsaw. My sympathy was short-lived.
“Honestly, I think he just hasn’t adjusted to unlife yet,” she said. “Sam seems like a do-it-yourself kind of guy. And those first few months as a vampire, all you need is help. You feel like you’re losing your connection to the human world and your place in it. You need someone to help you figure out your new schedule, how to feed without hurting your human donor, to vampire-proof your house. Sam went through all that alone.”
A strange, hot sensation twisted in my belly. What if Sam felt like that? What if he was lost and alone? Here I was making life that much more difficult for him, taking away from what little time he had left in his own home. I felt something shift inside me, a little spark of empathy I’d been missing for a while.
I jumped to my feet, nearly knocking over the little café table and our coffees. “I’ve got to go.”>Because she had no answers for me, Jolene simply led me over to the booth where most of the Half-Moon Hollow Volunteer Fire Department was having lunch and introduced me to the cooks, Anna and Joe Bob. They were more than happy to discuss the ins and outs of the smokers, the hickory wood used to smoke and flavor the meat as it cooked, and the base for the sauces. Joe Bob promised to show me which cuts of pork shoulder worked best and how to keep the ribs from drying out before they cooked completely.
“We’re firing up another batch at dawn if you wanna come by,” Anna offered cheerfully, her round, cherubic cheeks smudged with soot from the smoker. “You could see the whole shebang from start to finish.”
“I would love to!” I exclaimed, clapping and hopping up and down like a cranked-up game-show contestant.
“Are you going to keep doing that?” she asked, lifting her eyebrow.
I bit my lip and stopped with the hopping. “No.”
“We’ll get along just fine, then.”
Now, That’s a Spicy Vampire!
5
It was a matter of timing. Sam never left the basement door unlocked while he was awake. So in the window of time between his warming up his “wake-up” blood and showering, I managed to slip into the basement to do my dirty work and ducked out the front door before he saw me.
Jolene had invited me to join her book club for the evening, despite the fact that I hadn’t read The Night Circus. I’d expected a bunch of frustrated housewives slugging back wine in some well-appointed suburban living room. And while there was wine, the group was made up of open, friendly gals who met at a funky little bookshop called Specialty Books.
The interior of the shop was a cheerful mix of paperback pop culture and antique tomes. The walls were painted a cheerful midnight blue, with a sprinkle of twinkling silver stars. There were comfy purple chairs and café tables arranged around the room in little conversation groups. The leaded-glass and maple cabinet that held the cash register displayed a collection of ritual knives and candles that I didn’t quite understand. I was OK with not understanding.
The store had an impressive selection of cookbooks, everything from Introducing Variety to the Undead Diet to Food Gifts for Faerie Folk. I found a deeply discounted title on drinkable sauces for vampires, but Jane, the shopkeeper and book club organizer, warned me against it. It turned out the recently turned French chef–author had not bothered to test his recipes, and his use of eggs, flour, and purees had made several hapless vampire customers quite ill. Jane only kept the book on the shelves because it was something of a cookbook cautionary tale.
