Nice Girls Don't Bite Their Neighbors (37 page)

The thing to remember about “stray” vampires is that there is probably a good reason he is friendless, alone, and wounded. Approach with caution.

—The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires

H
ow did an internal debate regarding flavored sexual aids become part of my workday?

I was a good person. I went to church . . . on the “big days.” I was a college graduate. Nice, God-fearing people with bachelor’s degrees in botany should not end up standing in the pharmacy aisle at Walmart debating which variety of flavored lube is best.

“Ugh, forget it, I’m going with Sensual Strawberry.” I sighed, throwing the obscenely pink box into the basket.

Diandra Starr—a poorly-thought-out pole name if I’d ever heard one—had managed to snag to the world’s only codependent vampire. My client Mr. Rychek. When she made her quarterly visits to Half-Moon Hollow, I was turned into some bizarre hybrid of both Cinderella and the Fairy Godmother; waking up at dawn to find voicemails and e-mails detailing the myriad needs that must be attended to
at once
. Mr. Rychek seemed convinced that Diandra would flounce away on her designer platform heels unless her every whim was anticipated and met. No demand for custom-blended bath salts was considered too extravagant. No organic, free-trade
food requirement was too extreme. And the lady liked her sexual aids to taste of summer fruits.

I surveyed the contents of the cart against the list. Iron supplements? Check. Organic almond milk? Check. Flavored lube? Check.

I did not pretend to understand the dynamics of human–vampire relationships.

Shopping in the “special dietary needs” aisle was always an adventure. An unexpected side effect of the Great Coming Out in 1999 was the emergence of all-night industries, special products, and cottage businesses, like mine, that catered to the needs of “Undead Americans.” Companies were tripping over one another to come up with products for a spanking new marketing demographic: synthetic blood, protein additives, dental care accessories, lifelike bronzers. The problem was that those companies still hadn’t figured out packaging for the undead, and tended to jump on bizarre trending bandwagons—the most recent being a brand of plasma concentrate that came pouring out of what looked liked Kewpie dolls. You had to flip back the head to open it.

It’s just as creepy as it sounds, if not more so.

Between that and the sporty, aggressively neon tubes of Razor Wire Floss, the clear bubble-shaped pots of Solar Shield SPF-500 sunblock, and the black Gothic boxes of Forever Smooth moisturizing serum, the vampire aisle was ground zero for visual overstimulation.

I stopped in my tracks, pulling my cart to an abrupt halt in the middle of the pharmacy section as I recalled that Rychek’s girlfriend was a vegan. I started to review the label to determine whether the flavored lube was an animal by-product. But I found that I honestly didn’t care. It was 4:20, which meant I had an hour to drop this stuff by Mr. Rychek’s house, drop the service contracts by a new client’s house in Deer Haven, and then get to Half-Moon Hollow High for the volleyball booster meeting. Such was the exotic
and glamorous life as the Hollow’s only daytime vampire concierge.

My company, Beeline, was part special-event coordinator, part concierge service, part personal organizer. I took care of all the little details vampires didn’t have time for, or just didn’t want to deal with themselves. Though it was appropriate, I tried avoiding the term “daywalker” unless dealing with established clients. It turns out that if you put an ad for a daywalker service in the yellow pages, you get a lot of calls from people who expect you to scoop Fluffy’s sidewalk leavings. And I was allergic to dogs, and their leavings.

On my sprint to the checkout aisle, I cast a longing glance at the candy aisle and its many forbidden, sugary pleasures. With my compulsive sweet tooth, I did not discriminate against chocolate, gummies, taffy, lollipops, or even those weird so-sour-the-citric-acid-burns-off-your-taste-buds torture candies. But between Gigi’s worries about the potential for adult-onset diabetes in our gene pool and my tendency toward what I prefer to call “curviness,” I only broke into the various candy caches I had stashed around the house under great personal stress. Or if it was a weekday.

Placating myself with a piece of fruity sugarless gum, I whizzed through the express lane and loaded Mr. Rychek’s weekend supplies into what my sister, Gigi, in all her seventeen-year-old sarcastic glory, called the Dorkmobile. I agreed that an enormous yellow minivan was not exactly a sexy car. But until she could suggest another way to haul cases of synthetic blood, Gothic-themed wedding cakes, and, once, a pet crate large enough for a Bengal tiger, I’d told Gigi that she had to suck it up and ride shotgun in the Dorkmobile. The next fall, she’d used her earnings from the Half-Moon Hollow Country Club golf course snack bar to buy a secondhand VW bug. Never underestimate a teenager’s work ethic if the end result is averted embarrassment.

I used my security pass to get past the gate into Deer Haven,
a private, secure subdivision inhabited entirely by vampires and their human pets. It was always a little spooky, driving through this perfectly maintained, cookie-cutter ghost-suburb during the day. The streets and driveways were empty. The windows were shuttered tight against the sunlight. Sometimes, I expected tumbleweeds to come bouncing past my car. Then again, I’d never seen the neighborhood awake and hopping after dark. I made it a policy to be well out of my clients’ homes before the sun set. With the exception of the clients whose newly legal weddings I helped plan, I rarely saw any of them face-to-face. I allowed my wedding clients a little more leeway because they were generally too distracted by their own issues to bother nibbling on me. And, still, I only met with them in public places with a lot of witnesses present.

Though it had been nearly ten years since the Great Coming Out and vampire–human relations were vastly improved since the early pitchfork-and-torch days, some vampires were still a bit touchy about humans’ efforts to wipe out their species. They refused to let any human they hadn’t met in person near their home while they were sleeping and vulnerable.

After years of working with them, I had no remaining romantic notions about vampires. They had the same capacity for good and evil that humans do. And despite what most TV evangelists preached, I believed they had souls. The problem was that the cruelest of tendencies can emerge when a person is no longer restricted to the “no biting, no using people as food” rules humans insist upon. If you were a jerk in your original life, you’re probably going to be a bigger undead jerk. If you were a decent person, you’re probably not going to change much beyond your diet and skin-care regimen.

With vampires, you had to be able to operate from a distance, whether that distance was physical or emotional. My business was built on guarded, but optimistic, trust. And a can of vampire pepper spray that I kept in my purse.

I opened the back of my van and hitched the crate of supplies against my hip. I had pretty impressive upper body
strength for a petite gal, but it was at times like these, struggling to schlep the crate up Mr. Rychek’s front walk, that I wondered why I’d never hired an assistant.

Oh right, because I couldn’t afford one yet.

Until my little business, Beeline, started showing a profit margin just above “lemonade stand,” I would have to continue toting my own barge and lifting my own bale. I looked forward to the day that heavy lifting wouldn’t determine my wardrobe or hairstyle. On days like this, I tended toward sensible flats, twin sets, and pencil skirts in dark, smudge-proof colors. I liked to throw in a pretty blouse every once in a while, but it depended on whether I thought I could wash synthetic blood out of it. (No matter how careful you are, sometimes there are mishaps.)

And the hair. It was difficult for human companions, blood-bank staff, and storekeepers to take me seriously when I walked around with a crazy cloud of dark curls framing my head. Having Diana Ross’s ’do didn’t exactly inspire confidence, so I twisted my hair into a thick coil at the nape of my neck. Gigi called it my “sexy librarian” look, having little sympathy for me and my frizz. But since we shared the same unpredictable follicles, I was biding my time until she got her first serious job and realized how difficult it was to be considered a professional when your hair was practically sentient.

I used another keyless entry code to let myself into Mr. Rychek’s tidy little town house. Some American vampires lived in groups of threes and fours in what vampire behaviorists called “nesting,” but most of my clients, like Mr. Rychek, were loners. They had little habits and quirks that would annoy anyone, human or immortal, after a few centuries. So they lived alone and relied on people like me to bring the outside world to them.

I put the almond milk in the fridge and discreetly tucked the other items into a kitchen cabinet. I checked the memo board for further requests and was relieved to find none. I only hoped I could get through Diandra’s visit without being called to find a twenty-four-hour emergency vet service for
her hypoallergenic cat, Ginger. That stupid furball had some sort of weird fascination with prying open remote controls and swallowing the batteries. And somehow, Diandra was always shocked when it happened.

As an afterthought, I moved Mr. Rychek’s remote from the coffee table to the top of the TV.

One more stop. I had just one stop left before I could put in my time at the booster meeting, go home, and bury myself in the romance novel I’d squirreled away inside the dust jacket for
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
. If Gigi saw the bare-chested gladiator on the cover, the mockery would be inventive and, mostly likely, public.

My new client’s house was conveniently located in the newer section of Deer Haven, at the end of a long row of matching beige condos. As usual, I had to count the house numbers three times before I was sure I was at the right door, and I wondered how wrong it would be to bookmark my clients’ doors with big fluorescent yellow bumblebees.

Entering the security code provided on his new-client application, I popped the door open, carrying my usual “Thank you for supporting Beeline” floral arrangement inside. Most vampires enjoyed waking up to fresh flowers. The sight and smell reminded them of their human days, when they could wander around in the daylight unscathed. And they didn’t have to know I’d harvested the artfully arranged roses, irises, and freesia from my own garden. The appearance of an expensive gift was more important than the actual cost of said gift.

Mr. C. Calix certainly hadn’t wasted any money on redecorating, I mused as I walked into the bare beige foyer and set the vase on the generic maple end table. The place was dark, which was to be expected, given the sunproof metal shades clamped over the windows. But there was little furniture in the living room, no dining room table, no art or pictures on the clean taupe walls. The place looked barely lived in, even for a dead guy’s house.

Scraping past a few cardboard packing boxes, I walked into the kitchen, where I’d agreed to leave the contracts. My foot caught on a soft weight on the floor. “Mother of fudge!” I yelped, then fell flat on my face.

Have I mentioned that I haven’t cursed properly in about five years? With an impressionable kid around the house, I’d taken to using the “safe for network TV” version of curse words. Though that impressionable kid was now seventeen, I couldn’t seem to break the habit. Even with my face smashed against cold tile.

“Frak frakity frak,” I moaned, rubbing my bruised mouth as I righted myself from the floor. I ran my tongue over my teeth to make sure I hadn’t broken any of them. Because honestly, I wasn’t sure I could afford dental intervention at this point. My skinned knees—and my pride—stung viciously as I recounted my teeth for good measure.

What had I tripped over? I wondered. I pushed to my feet and stumbled over to the fridge and yanked the door open. The interior light clicked on, illuminating the dead body stretched across the floor.

Shrieking, I scrambled back against the fridge, my dress shoes skittering uselessly against the tile. I couldn’t seem to swallow the lump of panic hardening in my throat, keeping me from drawing a breath.

The corpse was huge, with long, rangy limbs and narrow, highly arched feet. Dark waves of hair sprang over his forehead in an inky profusion. The face would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been covered in dried blood. A straight nose, high cheekbones, full, generous lips that bowed slightly. He had that whole Michelangelo’s
David
thing going. If David had been a creepy religious figurine that wept blood.

A half-empty bottle of Faux Type O lay splattered against the floor, which explained the rusty-looking dried splotches on his face. Had he been drinking it when he . . . passed out?

Vampires didn’t pass out. And most of them could sense when to get somewhere safe well before the sun rose. They
didn’t get caught off guard and collapse wherever they were at dawn. What the hell was going on here?

I eyed my shoulder bag, flung across the room when I’d fallen on my face. Breathing steadily, I resolved that I’d call Ophelia at the local Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead office and leave her a message. She would know what to do. And I could get the hell out of here before the hungry, wounded vampire rose for the night and made me into his breakfast.

I reached over him, aiming my arm away from his mouth. A strong hand clamped around my wrist. I am ashamed to say I screamed like a little girl. I heard the telltale snick of fangs descending and panicked, yanking and struggling against a relentless vise grip. A tug-of-war ensued for control of the arm he was pulling toward his chapped, bloodied lips. He tried to lunge for me, but the effort cost him, and his head thunked back to the floor with a heavy thud.