Peace, Blood, and Understanding Page 18

  “I’m not wasting time. I have all the time in the world,” I tossed back.

  There was that greedy sheen in my mom’s eyes again. “Haven’t you missed us at all?”

  “To be honest, I rarely think about you. I don’t appreciate you sending a private investigator to come looking for me, especially when he practically stalks me around town. In twenty years, I haven’t called, I haven’t written. I don’t think about you unless you send me those birthday cards—which I throw right in the trash unopened. I sent the first few back to you, return to sender. Wasn’t all of that enough of a hint that I want nothing to do with you?”

  “What are you talking about?” Mama said, blinking with so much difficulty I feared for her eyelids. “Honey, we only wanted what was best for you. And that meant trusting you to the Council’s care. We never meant for it to be a permanent separation. We miss you, and we want to be a family again.”

  “That is not at all the way I remember it, and I think my memory is a little more reliable than yours,” I shot back. “I seem to recall you said that I’d ‘brought this on myself’ and you couldn’t have ‘someone like me’ around the house. You said you’d be ruined if anybody knew, which is kind of hilarious, since it was your fault I was bitten in the first place. And, by the way, I have it on good authority that you’re still doing the things that got me turned. I have less than zero interest in having anything to do with you. You clearly haven’t changed at all.”

  “I don’t see why you’re still so upset about it,” my father muttered. “You’re clearly doing just fine.”

  I threw up my arms. “You know, it’s funny how being murdered really puts a negative spin on a memory.”

  “Now, look.” My father slammed his hand down on the desk, which was always the sign that the argument was over and he was about to tell me, This is how it’s going to be.

  “Your mother and I are getting on in years. I’m having some hip problems, and I ache everywhere. There are only so many procedures your mother can have before she doesn’t look natural. And we think it’s time that stopped.”

  My mouth dropped open in a stupid expression that I could see clearly in the little rectangle in the corner of the screen. “I don’t know what you mean by that.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” My mother sighed. “We want you to turn us. We don’t want to get any older. We don’t want to die.”

  For a second, I thought the speakers had failed, because all I could hear was static. The same people who had swept my home out from under me like I was nothing, the people who had acted like I was something to be ashamed of, were now asking me to remake them in that shameful image? Because I owed it to them?

  “You said I was a monster,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.

  “Well, that was then. It’s much more acceptable now,” my mother said, waving my hurt away with a wiggle of her fingers.

  “We’re your parents,” my father said sternly. “You should do what we tell you. Who are you to question us?”

  I stared at the computer, that same stupid expression occupying the corner of the screen.

  “Answer your father!” my mother exclaimed.

  “This is so hypocritical, my brain is having trouble processing it,” I shot back, my voice finally rising above that cold veneer and sounding like a person—a very angry person.

  “Why are you even calling me about this?” I demanded. “We don’t speak for years, and suddenly you want me to turn you? What about your vampire ‘business contacts’? Surely one of them would turn you for a quick buck.”

  “Don’t be vulgar, Elizabeth Jane!” my father barked.

  Mama lifted a hand, spotted with age—she’d always told me that you could see a woman’s age in her hands first—and touched my father’s shoulder. He flopped back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, the thing is, we can’t trust those people not to just tear our throats out. We need someone we know won’t hurt us. After everything we’ve done for you, we think that’s the least you could do for us.”

  I shook my head. “No, the least I could do is to tell you to grow up and grow old gracefully, which I’m saying to you now. Mom, Dad, grow up and grow old gracefully.”

  “You owe us this, young lady!” my father yelled.

  “You’ll find that I don’t.”

  “At least consider it,” my mother wheedled. “Just think about it for a while, honey. Think about how it could bring us back together as a family.”

  I opened my mouth to say no one more time, but my mother interrupted me. “Don’t say another word. Just think on it. We’ll be in touch.”

  Her hand moved toward the screen and must have clicked end, because my side went black. I dropped my head down on the table, and then again, much harder. And then did that a few more times.

  My parents were crazy. And not in the usual, garden-variety dysfunctional way. They were certifiably insane to expect this of me. And they seemed to think I was the one who was wrong to want to say no. I was going to do something, something final, so they couldn’t pretend that I didn’t understand their intensions or vice versa.

  Jane opened the door to the conference room and peeked through. She winced when she saw my head dropped against the table. “That bad, huh?”

  “My parents are learning-proof. Nothing gets through,” I said.

  “I would say, ‘Oh, it can’t be that bad,’ however, the self-help books say that’s invalidating and wrong. But… it can’t be worse than the meth thing, right?”

  “They want me to turn them into vampires.”

  “Oh… wow. Nothing does get through.” Jane sank down into the chair across the table.

  “I’m not crazy for wanting to say no, am I? I mean, my automatic reaction is to have nothing to do with them. But it’s not wrong to just let time and nature take their course, right? People age and get sick and die. I know most people would want to prevent that for their parents, but… I just don’t feel that.”

  “Meadow, let me tell you what I’ve learned in my long life.”

  “We’re pretty much the same age, Jane.”

  “Potayto, potahto,” she said, waving me off. “In my long life of collecting wisdom, I’ve learned that family is what you make it. My grandmother was an evil harridan who literally haunted me. My mother and I have an almost-healthy relationship but that’s because there is an extensive list of subjects we’ve agreed we just don’t discuss. We signed it and had it notarized with my sister as a witness and everything. But my undead family? They are the people I chose. The people I want to spend my time with, to give my support to and go to when I need support.”

  “Except for Ophelia.”

  “Yeah, there’s always that one anomaly.” She sighed. “My point is that your family shouldn’t be a source of pain. And if your parents are as bad as I think they are—given the way Dick is pacing out here and muttering to himself—it’s perfectly OK to stay away from them. You’ve done that just fine for years. The fact that they’ve suddenly changed their minds because they have a use for you? Doesn’t change anything.”

  “Thanks, Jane.”

  “Anytime,” she said. “Do you need the room for a minute?”

  I nodded. Jane reached across the table and patted my hand. She walked out, and I took a long deep breath I didn’t need. My options tumbled around in my head. And a lot of them involved moving, changing my name again, and staying far from where Mr. Bollinger could find me. Something was bothering me about the call, beyond my parents’ lack of morals or anything resembling human emotion.

  My mother had seemed completely shocked by my mentioning the birthday cards. Not just in an “oh, your father didn’t know about that” sort of way, but in that she was not aware that I had a birthday, much less received cards for it. Now that I thought about it, my mother never sent birthday cards, not even to her friends. Our housekeeper, Anna, was responsible for keeping a careful calendar of the birthdays and anniversaries of Mama’s frien
ds. She chose the cards and signed them with a scribble that sort of resembled Mama’s signature, and then mailed them off. By the time I was fourteen, my name was added to the calendar. Mama was terrible with dates, and she kept forgetting. I usually bought my own birthday presents with their credit card.

  Apparently, it had been Anna who was sending me birthday cards all of those years. Literally the only time my parents had reached out to me was when they’d decided they didn’t want hip problems or wrinkles anymore.

  Well, hell, now I sort of felt bad. Anna was a nice lady.

  12

  Sometimes life throws some unpleasant surprises at you. Sometimes those surprises end up splashed on your shoes.

  —Peace, Blood, and Understanding: A Living Guide for Vampires Embracing Pacifism

  Only the best conference room would do to receive the national Council muckety-mucks. Far from the usual utilitarian gray conference rooms of the common people, I was laying out my tea tools on a proper walnut cart with a full silver service. This meeting room, which was in a wing of the administrative building I hadn’t even known existed—the entrance was hidden behind a panel in Jane’s office—looked like a church by comparison.

  There were stained glass windows on each end of the room, for heaven’s sake. The windows didn’t even open to the outside. They were only there for appearances. The walls were beveled walnut paneling—the real stuff, not the awful laminate used in dens across America. The table was made of that same polished wood, carved with some sort of crest involving a crescent moon and what looked like a curving fang and a sword… that looked like it was dripping blood. Maybe the Council had an insignia, once upon a time? The members had certainly picked up on enough public relations know-how not to use a scary-looking symbol on its brochures. The chairs arranged around the long, rectangular yacht of a table looked like something out of a Titian painting.

  “Are you sure you want us serving coffee and tea and… blood in here?” I asked Jane, eyeing the chair cushions covered in purple velvet.

  “Yeah, these people are… well, let’s just say they’re used to the best, and we have them staying at a two-star hotel at Land Between the Lakes. We can at least use the nice conference room.”

  While all of the programming team, including Gigi and Ben, were fairly relaxed, Jane’s tense facial muscles were making me nervous. I knew this meeting was important. I knew that with all the recent problems we’d had, we couldn’t afford for anything else to go wrong. But surely we could get through a simple informational session without some international vampire incident.

  Dick walked in with three vampire strangers, wearing long sleeves and a smart blue-and-red-striped tie.

  Dick was wearing a tie.

  This was bad. This was very bad. This was a huge mistake, and we should all just go home.

  The trio of elder vampires appeared to be in their early thirties and forties. They were all wearing very prominent VIP name badges. Katarina Delgado was wearing a sharply tailored black linen jumpsuit, and while I usually hated jumpsuits, based on an unfortunate phase my mother put me through in middle school, she looked amazing. Therese Zimmerman appeared to be stuck somewhere in 1994 in her heavily shoulder-padded, double-breasted coral suit jacket, with a gauzy floral print skirt peeking out beneath it. Blond and angular, she looked like an extra from the Beverly Hills scenes in Pretty Woman.

  The third, Gunter Roscbach, refused to speak. He refused to shake hands. I was unsure whether he was a Council rep or the ladies’ bodyguard.

  “Gunter!” Weston exclaimed, only for the man to reach out and shake his hand heartily and speak to him in rapid-fire German.

  I hoped that this didn’t spell some sort of previous bias Weston had given Gunter against Dick and Jane, but I also realized I couldn’t do much about that. I focused on blending requested drinks while Jane and Dick made the introductions to these vampires, who spoke with lyrical accents and condescending tones. They weren’t pleased to be here, even I could tell that, but they needed the talent within these walls, so they had to be polite.

  “And what are you making, my dear?” Katarina purred as she approached my tea cart.

  “I have a selection of tea blends specifically designed for vampires. If you’d like one, I’ll blend it with your favorite blood type for you to enjoy.”

  “What a novel concept!” she cried, smiling at me with genuine delight. “I do miss a good cup of Saint John’s wort tea.”

  “Yeah, it turns out that Saint John’s wort is basically vampire cocaine.”

  “Really?!” Katarina exclaimed, giving a low, tinkling laugh. Jane’s head whipped toward us and she gave me a relieved smile. And a double thumbs-up.

  “But if you want something soothing, I can recommend a few blends,” I told her.

  “I trust your judgment, darling. Ms. Jameson-Nightengale speaks very highly of you.”

  “Thank you!” I gave her my best customer service smile while blending her a cup of Soul Center. She sniffed it as I handed her the china cup.

  “Smells divine,” she said, swishing back to her seat in her fabulous jumpsuit.

  Sammy, who was working the coffee cart beside me, gave me a wink as he served Ben a bloodychino. Maybe we could get through this meeting unscathed, I thought. Just maybe.

  The session started innocuously enough, lots of information sharing and PowerPoints about efficiency of program language. As passionate as Gigi and Ben were about the project, well, it was ass-numbingly boring. There was a lot of discussion about coding and routing and other verbs that I didn’t quite understand. Weston sat in the back of the room with his friend Gunter, taking notes.

  I just kept my head down and poured the drinks, mulling over the response I’d received from the Martin archivist, Rosemary. She’d happily provided me the copies of Jonas’s investigation notes. But she couldn’t give me a list of personnel from 1978.

  Sorry, Meadow, but that’s considered protected information. Beyond your clearance and mine. Any chance you could find it on your own? —Rosemary

  Why wouldn’t they want to tell me who worked at the office during that time? That seemed like such a random thing to get all secretive about. Was it to protect those people from consequences of what they did for the Council? Or reprisals from people like Weston, who wanted revenge for what had happened to their loved ones during that time?

  Still, I had Jonas’s records, and that was something. I would go over them as soon as I had a chance and try to find some piece of information that could prove to Weston that Dick had nothing to do with Jonas’s murder.

  I’d almost zoned out of the meeting entirely when it happened. Just as Gigi and Ben were opening a slide on simplifying operating systems, a wave of nausea hit me so powerfully I had to prop myself against the coffee counter to stay upright. But it wasn’t my own stomach that was tumbling. The need to vomit was so strong it was overwhelming. I needed to get out of this room. I needed to get to the hallway before I threw up in front of all of these vampires and disrupted the meeting in the most disgusting way possible. This was a nightmare, a literal nightmare I’d had in high school.

  Focus, Meadow. Focus on something else, I told myself. You’ll get through this. Just think of how humiliating it would be to lose digestive control in front of Weston.

  Through the panic, I realized I was feeling it through that the hazy filter of separation I felt when the pain belonged to someone else. I didn’t feel sick. Other people in the room did. I looked up just in time to see Gunter bend at the waist and toss up his bloodychino on the table. Several vampires lurched to their feet and stumbled toward the wastebasket. The piteous sound of vomiting filled the room, and I suddenly regretted my superior sense of smell.

  We were definitely going to need a large cleaning crew for the church room.

  I looked up at Weston. Did he do this? I felt guilty for even thinking it, but his dislike for Dick seemed to be growing worse every day. He looked just as horrified as I was. Fighting the over
whelming nausea, I managed to process that no one was dying, just ill. Was the blood tainted? The tea? No, it couldn’t be the tea. The guest vampires I’d served were just fine.

  I pulled out my phone and called Chloe’s number. She picked up on the second ring, and I barked, “Chloe, we’re going to need some trash cans and cleaning supplies in the meeting room. STAT. And some air freshener.”

  I hung up and tried to escort those who weren’t sick out of the room into Jane’s office. Along with Dick and Jane, we performed a sort of triage to find who was the sickest (Gunter) and who was only mildly ill. The VIPs were escorted to a special lounge where they could freshen up. A veritable army of cleaners, medical personnel, and other staff swarmed the room to sort through the chaos, and within thirty minutes, we had the rather stinky room to ourselves, with Weston and Sammy. We were examining the tea and coffee carts to try to figure out what had gone wrong.

  “This is a disaster.” Jane sighed.

  “Is the blood out of date?” Dick asked. “Tainted? We’ve had that problem before.”

  “You’ve served high-ranking Council officials tainted blood before?” Weston asked. I shook my head at him, but he didn’t seem to get the “please don’t make this worse” message I was trying to send.

  “No… just Gigi. But it was more of a personnel issue… involving a stalker she didn’t know she had. And then that time with Cal, but that turned out to be the greedy machination of an amoral Council representative, so not really related to the office… You know what? Never mind. I’m not helping myself.”

  “I can’t help but notice that several of the affected vampires were drinking your teas,” Weston noted.

  “Really?” I said, turning on him. “You think I would do that? Actually, no, they weren’t. They were drinking the coffees. No offense meant, Sammy.”

  “None taken.” Sammy shrugged.

  “No, Meadow would never do that,” Jane shot back. “She believes in healing people, not making them sick. Making people sick would be against her moral code. Also, you seem to forget I can read her thoughts because she still hasn’t learned to keep up a mental shield when I’m around.”