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“Dick Cheney. I live with Ms. Byrne.”
“That name sounds familiar,” Lane said, scratching it in his little notebook for future reference. “So, let me get this straight. She lives with a vampire, works for a vampire, and spends her free time letting vampires feed from her.”
Sergeant Lane closed his little notebook. “Well, we’ll keep an eye out for her. But we can’t do much until an official missing-person report is filed.”
“I thought I was filing a missing-person report. I know a person who is missing, and I’m reporting it to you,” I said, placing a restraining hand on Dick when he took a menacing step toward the officer.
“Look, she could have run out to the grocery store for all you know. Or gone to a costume party,” Lane said. “It’s Halloween. It’s a busy night for us. We’re not going to be able to do much for you, anyway. Why don’t you wait twenty-four hours and come down to the department to file a report if she doesn’t turn up?”
“But she could be anywhere!” I cried. “Look, my friends and family members have been abducted before, I know the signs when I see them.”
“I’m sure that being associated with you has its problems.” He ignored the enormous amount of stink-eye I was sending his way. “But I can’t do anything about a woman who just decided to flake out of work. Besides, she’s a grown woman; if she wants to take off for a while, she can.”>Mama Ginger flopped onto a couch and petulantly flipped through a year-old copy of Redbook . In the choice between sitting with Jolene’s extended family, most of whom didn’t like me much better than Mama Ginger, or with Mama Ginger herself, I chose to lean against the wall. This proved to be a good call, as I had to launch myself after Mama Ginger from time to time whenever she made a break for the delivery rooms.
I could only fly-tackle a fifty-year-old woman so many times before I started losing my sense of humor, so I was grateful when my sensitive vampire ears picked up the sound of two strong cries down the hall.
15
The element of surprise is vastly overrated in any relationship.
—Love Bites: A Female Vampire’s Guide to Less
Destructive Relationships
J olene had two perfectly healthy babies, in a perfectly normal delivery, in a perfectly normal hospital room.
It was a McClaine family first.
After the inevitable squabble between Mimi and Mama Ginger over who held the babies first (Mama Ginger was lucky she lost the struggle and not, say, a finger) and the pack was allowed to sniff the babies to their hearts’ content, I finally made it back to Jolene’s recovery room. An exhausted, beaming Zeb handed me a squirming pink bundle, and I fell in love. Little Janelyn, my namesake. The daughter I would never have. The baby I could love and spoil and then immediately hand back to her real mother. Now I knew how Aunt Jettie must have felt, to love a child so completely, to want to be a part of her life, even if you weren’t a parent.
When Zeb placed a sleeping baby Joe in my hands, it seemed like an embarrassment of riches.
“They’re beautiful,” I told Jolene, who was fighting hard not to doze off in her hospital bed. Jolene smiled, her contentment so complete that she didn’t have to respond. My eyes pricked with hot, happy tears as Janelyn studied me with her big blue eyes. Her little hand crept out from under the blanket and wrapped around my finger.
“Hello, little baby,” I cooed. “I’m Auntie Jane. When your mama says it’s OK, I’m going to take you guys to the library and museums and movies. I’ll feed you food that’ll make you hyper and nauseous, and then I’ll bring you straight home. I’ll help you hide your first tattoo. We’re going to have a great time.”
“Nice,” Jolene muttered, her mouth quirked into a tired smile. I snickered.
I stroked a finger along the curve of Joe’s downy-soft cheek, and for a moment, I felt a keen sense of loss for not being able to have a baby of my own.
Janelyn, who seemed incredibly strong for a newborn, even in my limited experience with babies, pulled my finger to her mouth. Chomp!
The moment passed.
“Ow!” I exclaimed. I gently pulled the baby’s lip back to find a full set of perfect, tiny white teeth with particularly sharp-looking canines. “What the?”
“It’s a wolf thing,” Zeb said, looking completely unperturbed by his babies’ having more teeth than their paternal grandfather.
Jolene, whose eyes were still closed, raised her hand and waggled her finger at me. “Let that be a lesson on what happens when you plan on interferin’ with responsible parentin’.”
“No biting the namesake, kid,” I told the unrepentant infant. “Especially when the namesake has fangs.”
Jolene yawned. “That just means she’s happy to see you.”
“I hope she’s never happy to see you when you’re nursing,” I muttered. Jolene opened her mouth to protest. “If you launch into some story about the miracle of werewolf nipples, I will leave.”
Jolene rolled her eyes and snuggled into Zeb’s side. He wrapped his arm around her and cleared his throat. “So, we wanted to talk to you about something. We wanted to wait until the babies were here safely, because we didn’t want to jinx ourselves.”
I noted with pride how right it seemed now for Zeb to use the word we when it came to him and Jolene. And now he had two more little people to add to that unit. When he’d first found Jolene, it bothered me. I’d felt left out, abandoned. Zeb and I used to be a we. We were the we. But now, Zeb had the we he was meant to have. And I had my own we with Gabriel. This was the way it was supposed to be; growing, changing, finding your own we.
