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“You can just wipe his memory?” I asked. “Can I do that? Because I’d kind of like to get my uncle Dave to stop telling the story about me flashing my panties at his wedding reception.”
Gabriel stared at me.
“I was three,” I explained. “Pink panties were a big deal.”
He snorted, an intriguing and undignified noise. “Yes, you might develop the talent. And you may be able to replace those memories with new ones of your own design. It ’s a handy trick when one needs humans to forget how they sustained neck punctures. Every vampire has different abilities, talents. Just as every human cannot carry a tune …” He trailed off as he read my horrified expression. He rolled his eyes, exasperated. “I’ll give him a good memory, with sports victories and beer drinking.”
“Thank you,” I said, wondering how my Zeb, my sweet, Doctor Who-watching Zeb, would react to memories of touchdowns and Budweiser.
“I will see you soon,” Gabriel said, taking a step closer to me. I stepped back. He let a frisson of disappointment pass over his features and hefted Zeb off the couch.
“Wait, I thought you had to be invited before you could go into someone’s house,” I said as Gabriel moved effortlessly to the door.
He shifted, jiggling Zeb. “It’s a common misconception. And under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t. It’s just rude.”
I closed the front door behind Gabriel and locked it. Then I unlocked it. What the hell could an intruder do to me, really?
Then again, I didn’t want some Buffy wannabe sneaking into my house and staking me. So I turned the lock again. Irritated with myself, I sank to the floor and scrubbed my hand over my face. “Three days ago, I was a law-abiding librarian. I had a dental plan and baking soda in my fridge. Now I’m unemployed, undead, and apparently kind of skanky.”
“Rough day, pumpkin?”
“Yeah,” I said, pressing the heels of my hands over my eyes to ward off a gathering headache.
My great-aunt Jettie appeared at my left and pushed my hair back from my face. “Don’t worry, honey, things will work out.
They always do.”
“Yeah.” I said, willing myself not to cry. Vampires, surely, didn’t blubber like little girls.
Aunt Jettie patted my head fondly. “There’s my girl.” I smiled up at her through watery eyes.
Wait. My great-aunt was dead. The permanent kind of dead.
“Aunt Jettie?” I yelped, sitting up and whacking my head against the wall behind me.
Note to self: Try to stop reacting to surprises like a cartoon character.
“Hey, baby doll,” my recently deceased great-aunt murmured, patting me on the leg—or, at least, through my leg. My first skin-to-ectoplasm contact with the noncorporeal dead was an uncomfortable, cold-water sensation that jolted my nerves. Blargh. I shuddered as subtly as possible so as not to offend my favorite deceased relative.
Aunt Jettie looked great, vaguely transparent but great. Her luxuriant salt -and-pepper hair was twisted into its usual long braid over one shoulder. She was wearing her favorite UK T -shirt that read, “I Bleed Blue.” The sentiment was horribly appropriate, all things considered. It also happened to be the shirt she died in, struck by a massive coronary while fixing a flat on her ten-speed. She looked nothing like the last time I saw her, all primped up in one of my grandmother’s castoff suits and a rhinestone brooch the size of a Buick.
Jettie Belle Early died at age eighty-one, still mowing her own lawn, making her own apple wine, and able to rattle off the stats for every starting Wildcats basketball player since 1975. She took me under her wing around age six, when her sister, my grandma Ruthie, took me to my first Junior League Tiny Tea and then washed her hands of me. There was a regrettable incident with sugar-cube tongs. Grandma Ruthie and I came to an understanding on the drive home from that tea —the understanding that we would never understand each other.
Grandma Ruthie and her sister Jettie hadn’t spoken a civil word in about fifteen years. Their last exchange was Ruthie ’s leaning over Jettie’s coffin and whispering, “If you’d married and had children, there would be more people at your funeral.” Of course, at the reading of Aunt Jettie’s will, Grandma Ruthie was handed an envelope containing a carefully folded high -resolution picture of a baboon’s butt. That pretty much summed up their relationship.>“Johnny Cash had all of the same talents and problems as Elvis—a poor upbringing in the rural South, exposure to gospel music throughout his childhood, a penchant for drug abuse,” I heard myself saying against the background of chatter and clinking glasses. “They had the same sort of influencing experiences, but Johnny Cash’s problematic relationship was with his father, not his mother. If he’d had the mommy issues that Elvis had instead of a compelling need to prove himself to his father, he wouldn ’t have been the badass man in black, the guy in Folsom Prison watching the train roll by. Elvis was a lot of things, but even with the karate and the gunplay, he was more unstable than badass.”
“But you’re forgetting one thing,” Gabriel had said, motioning for the bartender to bring me another cup of coffee.
I’d sipped the coffee and added far too much cream and sugar. “What’s that?”
“Johnny Cash had June Carter.”
I had smiled. “Good point.”
“The love of a good woman can save a man,” I remembered Gabriel saying. “Or it can drive him to fits of unspeakable madness.”
I had stared at him a long moment before bursting out laughing. “Well, now I know how to inscribe my next Valentine’s Day card.”
Gabriel didn’t seem accustomed to a woman laughing at him. It had taken him a few seconds, but then he was laughing, too.
