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.
I really needed some sleep.
“We would like you to be godmother to the twins,” Zeb said. “We’ve thought this over very carefully. And we can’t imagine asking anyone else … so, no pressure.”
“But I’m not all that religious, Zeb. You should probably appoint someone who, you know, hasn’t been tossed out of their church for being an unholy monster, to head the kids’ spiritual development.”
“It’s more of a guardianship thing,” Zeb assured me. “If anything ever happened to me or Jolene, we would want to know that you would be there for the kids. No one would take care of them like you, love them like you would.”
“And you’re the least crazy person available for the job,” the barely conscious Jolene added.
“Well, that’s sort of sad,” I told them.
“We know,” Zeb admitted. “Doesn’t make it untrue.”
I peered down at the sleeping bundles in my arms. The burden of their weight seemed just a little bit heavier. Could I accept this kind of responsibility? Despite working with children for most of my adult life, I’d never really taken care of any. I didn’t have the kind of life that was conducive to child-rearing. I slept all day. There was rarely solid food in my house. There were lots of pointy, breakable objects down at child-eye level. I wanted to travel, to spend time with Gabriel, to run my shop. Was I really willing to turn all of that upside down if something happened to Zeb and Jolene? Could I raise two kids?
Baby Joe wrapped his little fingers around another of mine, mirroring his twin. I stared down at them.
Yes, I could.
I placed the babies on either side of Jolene and threw my arms around Zeb. “I will do everything I can to give the kids the kind of childhood we never had, Zeb,” I promised. “Unconditional love, holidays without drunken nudity, and birthday parties where they don’t end up crying. Of course, we’ll have to go underground to get away from your families. But I’m sure Dick can forge the necessary paperwork.”
Zeb squeezed me back. “You know, when I pictured us having this conversation, I didn’t think nudity and forgery would come into it.”
I sighed heavily. “And you think you know me so well.”
I basked in the new parents’ happy glow for a few more minutes before I excused myself. I wanted to call Gabriel, to ask why he and Dick and Andrea hadn’t made it down to the hospital yet. But when I walked out into the waiting room, Gabriel was waiting for me. I threw myself into his arms, gave him a smacking kiss on the lips. “Hey, I’ve been wondering where you guys were. You finally dragged yourselves down here to see the babies?”
Gabriel’s face was blank, taut. He had that look in his eye, the “I have bad news, and I’m trying to think of a way to break it gently” thing that always sent me into a panic. A nervous bubble of laughter escaped my throat, even as it constricted. “Gabriel, what is it?”
Gabriel swallowed hard, reaching out to take my hand. “It’s Andrea.”
“What do you mean, it’s Andrea? Is she hurt? Did something happen?” I babbled, panic racing through my chest.
My brain reeled through a number of horrible scenarios. Car accident. Robbery at the store. Halloween prank gone awry. The last thing I’d said to her was, “Watch it, or I’ll drop a house on you.” And she’d laughed. Oh, God, what if she was dead and those were my last words to her?
“Dick was at the store with her, and he went to run an errand right before closing. When he came back, Andrea was gone. Her car was missing. But the cash register was full. And Dick could smell …”
By now, tears were streaming down my cheeks. “What? Gabriel, what’s going on?”
“Dick could smell blood, Andrea’s blood.”
I don’t remember much about Gabriel driving us to the shop. The darkened streets of downtown passed by in a blur as my mind raced. Where could Andrea be? I tried to convince myself that it was perfectly reasonable to think that she might have simply hurt herself at the shop, that she’d driven herself to get help. It was so much better than the alternative, that someone had taken Andrea, dragged her, bleeding, out of the shop in her silly pink ballgown. What if it was one of us? I’d been so stupid. I put her right in the line of fire, working in a vampire shop when her rare blood type called out to the undead like a fine, irresistible wine. I wiped at my eyes, knowing it was pointless to try to stop the tears from falling.
“Dick called the police,” Gabriel said, his voice bleak. “He’s waiting at the shop for them.”
I moaned softly, leaning my head against the seat. For Dick to be willing to call the police, the situation had to be desperate.
We would have been better off calling Barney Fife.
Gabriel dropped me off at the shop. He thought his time would be better spent contacting the local Council members and various underworld characters who might have information about Andrea. So far, I had a lot more faith that he might find her than in the combined forces of the Half-Moon Hollow Police Department.
To say that the police were not exactly concerned about finding a woman who worked in an occult shop and lived with her vampire boyfriend would be a grand understatement. Sergeant Russell Lane, whom I’d gone to school with for thirteen years, seemed far more interested in treating us like suspects than in taking down any information about Andrea.
“Didn’t your boss die under strange circumstances here last year?” Sergeant Lane asked, as he scribbled notes in his duty notebook. He looked at Dick and me with a gleam of distrust, even malice, in his eyes.
“I don’t consider a seventy-nine-year-old man having a heart attack while moving heavy boxes to be strange,” I said, struggling to keep calm. I was a giant, exposed, twitching nerve just standing there, waiting for news, trying to keep from flashing my fangs at Lane.
Lane shrugged. “I just think it’s kind of a weird coincidence that your boss dies in the store, and a year later, your employee disappears from the store,” he said, giving me a long, appraising look. “Andrea Byrne was a registered blood surrogate, wasn’t she?”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Dick growled.
“And you would be?” Lane asked.
“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.”