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—Mating Rituals and Love Customs of the Were
After talking a half-dozen very angry werewolf males out of hunting down my best friend like a rabid raccoon, I drove to the Lavelles’ house and sat out in the driveway. I had to talk to Mama Ginger. Emboldened by her meddling success, she would be impossible to deal with. I would be lucky if I didn’t end up shot with a tranquilizer dart and carted off to a Vegas wedding chapel.
I found her sitting on her sun porch, on an old musty couch, chewing her nails. Mama Ginger never chewed her nails. She said the hands were the front window of a girl’s “shop,” and you couldn’t attract a man with a messy front window. “Mama Ginger?”
She turned, and I saw actual tear tracks on her cheek. She seemed so small and deflated, with her clean, bare face and her hair tucked into a ponytail. “Oh, Janie, are you here to see Zeb?”
“No, actually, Mama Ginger, I’m here to see you.”
“Well, whatever for? Honey, my boy already said everything he needed to say.” She sniffed and gave me a weary smile. “You two need to talk all this over, get your heads together. We have a wedding to plan.”
“No, Mama Ginger, we need to talk about why Zeb said those things in the first place. Things that sounded an awful lot like the things you’ve been saying. I don’t know what you did to Zeb to make him do that, but you need to tell me. Because whatever you did ruined Zeb’s and Jolene’s lives.”
“That’s not true!” Mama Ginger cried, her voice cracking. I grabbed her chin and forced her to meet my gaze. I didn’t want to have to use the persuasion voice on her, but I would. Finally, tears welled at the corners of her eyes, and she whispered, “Zeb’s curled up in bed, practically in a damn coma. He refuses to say a word.”
“His brain’s probably gone into shock, Mama Ginger. You can’t mess around with someone’s subconscious, make them do something that is fundamentally opposed to their heart’s desire, and not expect there to be side effects.”
She wailed, “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He wasn’t supposed to be so—a mother knows when her child is hurting, Jane. And he’s just so miserable. And I did that.”
In the years I’d known her, Mama Ginger had never expressed remorse. A change in heart this dramatic must have been killing her. I found small comfort in that.
“I never meant any harm,” she whimpered. “I was just trying to make sure Zeb was happy.”
“But he was happy, with Jolene. She made him very happy. And you can fix this. You just have to tell me what you did to make Zeb say all those things.”
“But he wants you, Jane. You heard him. He wants to be with you.”
“No, he doesn’t. I know that you want him to want me. We both know what he really wants.”
“But I’ve spent so much time—”
“You’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying to fulfill the vision you had of our future. But the future you want, marriage and babies, it’s not possible. I can’t have babies, Mama Ginger. I’m a vampire.”
Blanching a lovely shade of ecru, Mama Ginger gasped and clapped a hand over her throat. “But you’re so, so—”
“Normal? Yes, but I’m also a bloodsucking creature of the night.”
“I can’t believe this. You’re just saying this to keep me from wanting you to marry Zeb!” she cried, stumbling back and tripping over a lawn chair.
“Well, you’re not wrong, but it’s still true.” I reached for her hand to help her up. “I’m a vampire. I have been for almost a year now. And you didn’t notice, because you tend not to pay attention when people evolve or change. Zeb and I are no longer the six-year-olds who played house. I’m not dangerous. Not to Zeb and not to you. But the bright side is that while I can never, ever bear you grandchildren, Jolene can have all the kids she and Zeb want. In fact, there’s every chance that they’re going to have a huge family.”
“Grandbabies?” She sighed.
“Yeah, grandbabies—beautiful, strong, most likely very athletic grandbabies. But first we have to fix Zeb so he can apologize to Jolene, profusely, and they can get married.”
Mama Ginger sighed, twisting a Kleenex into complex tornado shapes. “I took Zeb to Madame Zelda and told him it was for his headaches. It was stress relief, I told him. Madame Zelda could use hypnosis and suggestive imagery to put him in a better state of mind. Every time he told Jolene he was coming over here to do chores, I was taking him to Zelda. She’s spent weeks planting thoughts in his head. Bad stuff about Jolene. Good stuff about you. I made her tell him that you were the only girl he could possibly marry, that you were the only one who could make him happy. That he should be more aggressive with you and let you know how he feels. Zelda fixed it so every time Zeb heard you say the word ‘wedding,’ he would do something to hurt Jolene’s feelings or make a pass at you. And he wouldn’t remember doing it later.”
In my head, I ran over the conversations that had preceded Zeb’s bizarre behavior. In all of them, we’d been talking about the wedding in some capacity. Considering that we’d been planning Zeb’s wedding, that was natural, inevitable. Mama Ginger had set out a minefield for us. “What makes you think you have the right to do this stuff, Mama Ginger? Do you have any idea how crazy this is?”
“I just wanted everyone to be happy!” she yelled. “We weren’t even sure it was working because Zeb was being so resistant. But he kept coming back. Zelda fixed it so he wouldn’t remember anything except the thoughts she put in the back of his brain. We just couldn’t get him to dump her.”
“Because in his heart and his head, he loves Jolene,” I told her. “He was rude to her a few times, said some really hurtful things. He slapped me on the butt in front of my vampire boyfriend, which put him in serious peril—oh, yeah, Gabriel and Dick are vampires, too. But Jolene loves him so much, she forgave him for all of that. So you had to do something bigger.”
Mama Ginger blushed and wiped the mascara streaks from her cheeks. “Zelda fixed it so as soon he heard someone say ‘peas in a pod,’ he would tell Jolene he didn’t want to marry her. He’d repeat all the things that we’d been planting in his head.”
“Well, if there’s a trigger keyword, there has to be a release keyword, right? What is it?”
Mama Ginger flushed. “She didn’t tell me. I only paid half up front. She wouldn’t give me the release word until I paid the rest.” I stared at her. She shrugged. “I wanted to make sure it worked.”
