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Gabriel kissed my slack mouth and asked, “No response?”
“Yay?”
11
While most vampires develop special abilities, some do not. If you run into vampires who do not have gifts, it is not wise to mock them. They still have vampire strength.
—From The Guide for the Newly Undead
The Hollow’s vampire grapevine works even faster than the human gossip lines. After word of my super-secret council tribunal got out, my nights were suddenly filled with calls and visits from my new underworld buddies.
Dick called, but he just left dirty voice-mail messages. Let’s just say if I’m ever in the market for a massage involving canola oil and marabou feathers, I’m covered.
Missy called, but her message was more of the lowdown-dirty girl variety, instead of plain old dirty.
“Jane, honey, I’m sorry if I’m breaking up, but I’m in my car, and you know how the Bottoms are. It’s the Land That Cell Phone Towers Forgot.” Her tinkling laugh rattled my ear through the receiver. Even from across the living room and muffled through the phone, Fitz’s head cocked up at the shrill sound.
“You’re where?” The Bottoms were low-lying areas of McClure County near the river, mostly swampland and marshy pastures, hardly the kind of property that would interest the Hollow’s top vampire real-estate agent.
“The Bottoms, honey, the Bottoms. There’s a little farm down here I’m trying to get my hands on. Just between you and me, the owners don’t know how much the property’s going to be worth in a few years. So it’s up to me to talk them into retiring and letting me take the property off their hands so they can move in with their kids in Florida.”
That struck me as sort of evil, but in the great spectrum of possible vampire evildoing, probably not that bad.
“The reason I called, honey, other than to check on one of the Hollow’s latest undead additions, is to invite you over to my place for my famous Mojito Mixer Monday!”
When my confused silence buzzed over the line, Missy informed me that she hosted this bastion of undead yuppiedom twice a month, featuring imitation Cuban cocktails and real vampire professionals. It was a chance for the local undead to make connections, meet potential pets, and become more established in the Hollow ’s “night life.” Missy had a rotating guest list that included a mix of newbies and long-established vampires. I could only guess that her Rolodex was a dark, scary place.
“Everybody’s going to love you! We’ve never had a librarian in the mix before. It will be so interesting. And Dick Cheney’s going to be there. He’s a close personal friend. He mentioned that he met you the other night. He says you have a great personality!”
“Isn’t that like saying I’m stump-ugly in man language?”>I must have made my “that sucks” face, because Gabriel assured me, “There’s always been a pecking order, a demand for reason. Even more so now that we’re trying to appear civilized for the humans.”
“This is a stupid system.”
“Yes, so much less civilized than your corporate takeovers and mega-chains,” he said, hefting the box. “Where would you like this?”
“Not in my house,” I said. “Take it to the mudroom, and I’ll burn it later.”
Once again displaying that amazing vampire dexterity, Gabriel shifted the box to one arm and reached for the nearest doorknob. It would have been impressive had he not opened the door to the wrong room.
“No, don’t go in there!” I cried as Gabriel stepped into my library.
“You have a lot of unicorns,” he said, his voice shadowed in both awe and horror.
One of the few things I’d done to make the house my own was installing my collection of unicorn figurines on the library shelves. My late grandma Pat, who had been the oatmeal-cookies-and-Ivory-soap type, bought me a unicorn music box when I was six. I played that thing until the little motor wouldn ’t tinkle “You Light Up My Life” anymore. So, unicorn figurines, music boxes, and stuffed animals became the gift for unimaginative relatives to get me for birthdays, Christmases, Valentine ’s Days, graduations, Arbor Days. In fact, I’d just received two ceramic unicorn bookends the previous Christmas from my uncle.
For reasons even I couldn’t explain, I could not throw the little suckers away. The majestic sweep of their horns, their imperious painted eyes, held some sort of strange, unholy thrall over me. So, I stashed them in the library, where nobody goes but me. Except, of course, for the one person I really didn’t want to see them.
“A lot of unicorns,” Gabriel repeated.
I tried to close the door, but he stuck his foot in the jamb—most likely to get a better look at my ten-inch ceramic unicorn lamp with the revolving-color, fiber-optic tail. “Fine, fine. You know my secret. I have a unicorn collection.”
“That’s a very sad secret,” he said as he allowed me to shove his foot from the door.
“Strong words coming from someone who was ‘devoured’ by a sea lion.” I snatched the box out of his hands and tossed it into the laundry/utility room. Then I locked both doors with a decisive snick.
“I like your father,” Gabriel said. “I actually enjoyed speaking to him, very much. In my courting days, meeting a woman ’s father could be an unpleasant experience. There was male posturing, vague threats to my manhood. Sometimes a shotgun would be cleaned in front of me.”
“You didn’t by chance meet these girls’ fathers in a hayloft while wearing no pants, did you?” I asked.
