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“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.>“Ohhhh, how’s my buddy? How’s my Fitz? Did you miss me?” Cooing like an idiot, I rolled him over and scratched his belly.
Fitz was the apparent result of a one-night stand between a Great Dane and a loofah. His coat was the color of that stuff that grows in your shower. He was so big that his paws rested on my shoulders when he stood on his hind legs. Loose folds of skin hung over his eyes, so he viewed most of the world with his head tipped back. Fitz ’s one claim to distinction is that I named him after Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy from Pride and Prejudice.
I have Jane Austen issues.
“I’m so, so sorry I went away without telling you, but I’ll make it up to you, I promise,” I said, scrubbing behind his ears. His eyes lolled back as he leaned into the scratch, which meant I was forgiven.
It was then that Zeb, my best friend, the fric to my frac, the Shaggy to my Velma, fumbled through his screen door, swaying under the weight of dozens of crucifixes. “Back!” he shouted. “Back!”
Fitz and I both cocked our heads as I marveled at the sheer number of chains around Zeb’s skinny neck. Gold plate, silver, rhinestone, Day-Glo orange plastic. Zeb advanced on me, holding an old rosewood cross his grandma McBride used to keep nailed to her wall. “Back, demon! Out of my sight!”
“Oh, for goodness sake.” I rolled my eyes.
Nonplussed, Zeb shook the cross like a shoddy flashlight and waved it at me again. “The power of Christ compels you!”
