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Not all relationships between vampires and humans end badly. A very, very small percentage of them end happily.
—Surviving the Undead Breakup: A Human’s Guide to Healing
If I moved even one inch, I was going to be crushed by a stack of werewolf mating guides. It would be a weird and yet entirely appropriate-to-my-lifestyle way for me to die.
Visiting Specialty Books was like living in an episode of Extreme Hoarders: Bibliophiles. My librarian-turned-vampire friend, Jane Jameson, had done her best to organize her boss’s collection of obscure occult books, but the store was still impossible to navigate for anyone who wasn’t Jane or Mr. Wainwright. Unfortunately, Mr. Wainwright died yesterday, so if anything happened to Jane, we’d have to burn the shop down.
I mean, sure, there’d be other repercussions of Jane dying—heartbreak, a lack of smartass literary references, relative calm—but, mostly, burning down the shop would be a pain. And . . . arson. I was too pretty for jail. This was why I never spoke at funerals. Because these were the types of morbid, inappropriate thoughts that filled my head when I was confronted with death.
So there I stood, in the mess of Specialty Books, trying to provide wordless support as Jane sorted copies of The Guide for the Newly Undead, Life on Loch Ness, and Mating Customs and Love Rituals of the Were. She was oddly calm for someone who’d found her boss’s body under an avalanche of hardcovers just a few hours earlier. But it seemed that Mr. Wainwright’s spirit was still hanging around the shop, just in case something interesting happened. And judging by the steady stream of chatter Jane was keeping up, he was in a pretty good mood.
Vampires, ghosts, werewolves. I’m sure it should’ve worried me that I’d accepted the existence of these creatures so easily. I’d become enmeshed in the supernatural world almost immediately after vampires came out to live in the open. I’d made my living as a blood surrogate for years, providing live feedings for vampires who didn’t want bottled blood but couldn’t risk biting a random stranger. The World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead, the governing body for vampires worldwide, had pretty strict rules about that sort of thing. It wasn’t a job that required qualifications beyond good people skills and my exceedingly rare, tasty AB-negative blood.
It was scary at first. Sure, my new customers were referred by trusted clients, but that didn’t guarantee they’d be gentle or kind. I’d had to cut a few weirdos from my roster, but now I had a steady stream of regulars. I’d fallen into this job when my life went pear-shaped after I left college. Not graduated. Left. My family might have cut me from the Christmas card list, but I’d found a supportive community among the vampires. I built a solid base of regulars, and it turned out that a lot of them were moving to Half-Moon Hollow, Kentucky, so I had followed. I still kept a sales position at a local gift shop so I could have contact with living people, but honestly, most of my real friends were undead, and Jane was becoming the closest among them.
Jane Jameson was a relatively new vampire. She was pretty in that quirky, casual way, with slightly mussy brown curls and puckish hazel eyes. A children’s librarian fired from her position at the Half-Moon Hollow Public Library, Jane was a big fan of jeans, cardigans, and T-shirts with book-centric logos. She dressed as if she didn’t give a damn what people thought of her . . . because she honestly didn’t give a damn.
I’d been her first live feeding, something her sire had insisted on. It was awkward and weird, and based on the experience, she’d decided to stick with bottled blood. But since she’d made so few contacts among her new peers, she was open to a friendship with me based on our mutual exasperation with vampire males. Of course, the first night we went out together, she ended up being charged with the murder of another vampire. But she decided to keep hanging out with me anyway and added me to her growing circle of supernatural super-friends.
And now we were cleaning out the shop because Jane organized when she was upset. Besides, it was sort of traumatizing for her to see the books in disarray, reminding her of how she’d found them piled on top of Mr. Wainwright’s body after his heart attack. I sighed, standing and rolling my shoulders against the ache gathering between the blades. It was times like this when having vampire strength wouldn’t have been so bad.
“Hey, Red. As much as I’m sure those books are enjoying you leaning up against them, do you mind getting out of the way so I can move this?”
I turned to find the one drawback to spending time with Jane standing behind me holding several ratty boxes of sword-and-bustier fantasy paperbacks. I still had trouble understanding why Jane was friends with Dick Cheney—the vampire, not the vice president. It wasn’t that I didn’t see his charm. It wasn’t even that Dick wasn’t attractive. He was dangerously so, in that scruffy, roguish way every girl’s mother warns her about before giving her a dime to keep squeezed between her knees.
Dick was tall and well built with shaggy dirty-blond hair and deep-set sea-green eyes. He had dimples that winked from the corners of his mouth when he smirked, which he did almost ninety percent of his waking hours. He walked with the sort of swagger you expected with a Stetson and chaps, though his wardrobe was composed almost entirely of inappropriate T-shirts and ass-hugging jeans. God help me, the jeans.
To complete the “pre–Civil War–born scoundrel” package, Dick made his income in a way that was . . . less than reputable. Like Rhett Butler—if instead of sneaking whiskey and silk across blockades, Rhett had sold counterfeit Uzbekistani-made iPods out of the back of his wagon. Let’s just say Dick would never be invited to join the Half-Moon Hollow Chamber of Commerce.