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  “So no preliminary report or dispersal of opinion,” Jane muttered, sitting back on her stool with her arms crossed over her chest. “Just one paper that determines the future of my district.”

  “Oh, I get the feeling I will have plenty of time to form an opinion,” Weston said, slinging his bag over his shoulder. “Now, if you could please direct me to the nearest car rental agency, I would appreciate it. You’re the one place on Earth that doesn’t rent cars online.”

  “Oh, well, we have Rent-A-Wreck, over on Strode Lane, but they’re not open this late on a Tuesday,” Andrea said, her tone helpful even if her expression was more than a little smug.

  “You don’t have Enterprise or CarAccess or anything like that?”

  “Oh, sure we have CarAccess… at the airport,” I said.

  “You couldn’t have mentioned that while we were at the airport yesterday?” he asked, his teeth clenched together.

  “Well, it was no use. The office is only open on Fridays.”

  “Oh, unless Roy has to coach his daughter’s soccer team,” Jane said, smirking. “Such a devoted daddy, that man.”

  Andrea cooed, “Aw, yes, he even wears a little pink rhinestone whistle that Sadie got him for Father’s Day. It’s adorable.”

  “Mmm, so important for girls to have strong, involved father figures these days,” I said, my lips twitching as Weston’s face made all sorts of funny shapes.

  Weston spluttered, “Wha— How— Why are they only open on Fridays?”

  I shrugged. “That’s when most people rent cars. Unless Roy has to coach his daughter’s soccer team. And then they wait until Saturday.”

  He stared at me as if I were personally responsible for this erratic scheduling policy. He opened his mouth as if he was going to list the many ways he blamed me for the downward spiral of his trip. But before he could completely lose his composure, he turned on his heel, marching toward the front door. He called over his shoulder, “Tomorrow night, Ms. Jameson-Nightengale! Work space!”

  As selfish as it was, I was a little disappointed to miss out on a full-on yuppie tantrum. That would have been funny as hell. The door bell quivered after him with an irritated jangle. Jane sagged against the bar. “Do we have any booze?”

  Gabriel shook his head as he drained the last of his tea from his mug. “No, you banned it from the shop after the Christmas-party incident.”

  Jane nodded. “Oh, yeah, that was the right call.”

  “It was one time,” Dick muttered.

  “You stood on the coffee bar and sang the ‘Dick in a Box’ song, and changed the words to make it dirtier.”

  Dick shrugged. “I regret nothing.”

  “Don’t panic, Jane. The worst the Council can do is fire you,” Andrea said. “It’s not like you don’t have other options, professionally.”

  “Well…” Dick said, shaking his head. “They can do worse. That one guy from Denver got the Trial for stealing ink cartridges.”

  “Well, he had that coming,” Jane said. “I don’t think they’d give me the Trial because I’m too nice to the interns.”

  “Eh,” Dick said, waggling his hand back and forth.

  “You are the worst pep talker in the world,” Jane told him. “Look, I realize I wasn’t exactly excited about being appointed to this office. I’m pretty sure it was some sort of elaborate revenge prank arranged by Ophelia. But I believe in the work we’re doing here. I believe we’re making Half-Moon Hollow a better, safer place for the living and the undead. And it scares me to think of who the Council might appoint after me to ‘correct’ what they think I did wrong. If I screw this up, it could really mess up the quality of life for people here, and the people here just happen to include all of my loved ones.”

  “It’s going to be OK,” I told her.

  “Yeah, Jane,” Gabriel mumbled, leaning against the counter. He propped his chin up on his palm, squishing his cheek to the point where one of his eyes was closed. His face was starting to look a little bit like abused Silly Putty. “It’ll be fine.”

  Jane turned to me. “Did you give him the horse tranquilizers?”

  “No, it’s just the Calm Your Ass Down Blend,” I scoffed. “Spiny blood balm, apple blossom, elderflower—completely harmless… Though he did have two cups… Oh, shoot. That’s a lot of spiny blood balm.”

  “ ’M fine,” Gabriel insisted, his eyes more than a little glazed over. “Could use a nap, though.”

  “Let’s ask him a lot of highly detailed questions,” Dick said, grinning broadly. “About his feelings.”

  “I think we’re just going to close the shop early,” Jane said. “I apparently have a very long night ahead of me tomorrow at the office.”

  Gabriel attempted to sit on one of the bar stools and slid right off, onto the floor.

  Jane crouched down to heave him up. “And at home tonight.”

  * * *

  After helping Jane load Gabriel into their car, I drove the short distance across town to my apartment on Millard Street. I made myself a cup of half-strength Calm Your Ass Down and settled onto one of my outdoor chairs to watch over the empty street. I was in the mood for a good long mull.

  I was, of course, worried about Dick and Jane, in the larger sense. What was going to happen to them if they failed Weston’s audit? Even if they managed to escape some bizarre, violent Council punishment, they could be removed from office. I doubted very much that Weston was going to be fair and impartial. The Council was rarely fair. The upper-level representatives had their agendas, and they followed them, no matter what it cost vampire citizens. That was part of what made living in Dick and Jane’s district so pleasant. They treated us like people, not walking opportunities. Half-Moon Hollow was better off with them in charge. Erik’s reports hadn’t exaggerated the good Jane was managing through Council programs usually used to funnel money and blood into undead pockets.

  To put a more selfish point on it, what would happen to the vampires who lived in Half-Moon Hollow if Dick and Jane were replaced? If Jane was no longer head of the Council, she wouldn’t be supervising my case. Once she’d realized that I was a mostly stable person, she’d been relatively hands-off with me, trusting me to run my own life as I saw fit and only come to her when I had problems or questions. I could end up with some vampire hard-ass who would insist on being more “hands-on.”

  That might have sounded like a minor threat, but for the Council, “hands-on” could mean being forced to live with my handler. It could mean being subject to a list of arbitrary rules my handler could change at any time. I’d heard horror stories about probationary vampires whose handlers took over all aspects of their lives. My business could be closed and all associated funds and stock turned over to my new “supervisor.” I would have nothing of my own. No accounts, no car, no home—because, unlike Jane, this new handler could decide that I couldn’t be trusted with it. If I really ticked my supervisor off, I could end up confined to a facility for problem vampires.

  I stopped what I was doing and pulled a polished amethyst worry stone from my pocket. Though it was supposed to ward off negative energy, I prized it for its rich purple highlights and smooth surface. I rubbed my thumb over the curves of the stone and tried to clear my mind of my selfish anxiety. Worrying wouldn’t do any good. Worrying wouldn’t help Jane and Dick. All I could do was continue my work and hope for the best.

  I jumped slightly as the sliding door to the unit next door opened. So much for my vampire senses.

  I put on my best smile to greet my new neighbor. I would put the disastrous meeting with Erik Weston behind me by making a warm, approachable first impression on this newcomer.

  Unfortunately, the newcomer stepped out onto the balcony, his blandly pleasant expression melting into stunned indignation. And then my mouth started watering at what was becoming a too-familiar scent.

  Oh, no.

  And in that moment, I realized my new neighbor was Erik Weston.

  He looked no happier to see
me than I was to see him.

  We both said curse words. I’ll just leave it at that. I was not proud of myself.

  “This is unacceptable,” he whispered, then suddenly shouted, “Unacceptable! I refuse to live next door to a crazy person!”

  “Oh, yes, clearly I am the problem, when I was here first and I’m not the one shouting like a lunatic,” I shot back. “How are you my neighbor? Isn’t it a conflict of interest to rent an apartment from the person whose work you’re reviewing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dick Cheney owns this apartment building.”

  “No, that’s not right,” he insisted. “My assistant made a rental contract with a firm called Mind Your Beeswax, Inc., for a short-term lease. It was the only furnished, not completely unlivable apartment in Half-Moon Hollow.”

  I snickered, because of course that’s what Dick Cheney would call his company, and of course Weston had an assistant.

  “Mind Your Beeswax, Inc.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “That’s Cheney’s company, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “Augh! Does anything work right in this armpit of a town!” he yelled into the street.

  I did the only thing I could think of when faced with further degradation of my karma. I walked back inside before Weston could say anything else and shut the door very firmly.

  I pressed my hand against my forehead and giggled. I liked Dick very much, but we needed to have a serious conversation about his vetting process for tenants. How in the hell was I supposed to go home every night knowing that jerk was on the other side of my kitchen wall being all jerky with his jerkish ways?

  Self-centered despair limited my vocabulary.

  3

  Sometimes, when there is a person standing in the pathway to nonviolence, the best thing to do is to change your route. Running them down is not a peaceful resolution.

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

  I found filing in the Council archive to be a meditative exercise. Every night I was presented with a messy stack of receipts, forms, and reports, and I found places for them in my many filing cabinets. I knew that if someone ever asked for them and I ever needed to pull them out again, they would be exactly where I’d left them. It was a simple thing and I only worked a few hours a night, but I liked bringing order to the chaos.

  Long before the Council established office space in an abandoned Kinko’s, they had used the underground caverns that plagued a good portion of western Kentucky to create an enormous storage space filled with floor-to-ceiling filing drawers. It looked like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark but with better labeling.

  I didn’t have an office so much as a big old-fashioned desk on a Persian carpet in the middle of the cavern, surrounded by raw stone, drawers, and darkness. And I loved it. The underground space was quiet and cool and gave me uninterrupted time alone with my thoughts. I’d been hired on as a sort of substitute for the usual archivist, a crabby six-hundred-year-old Dutch woman named Lotte. She’d met an equally ancient vampire from Norway on some vampire mate-matching website. Lotte had used all of her banked vacation time to take an extended honeymoon on a cruise line dedicated to undead travel packages. And since Lotte hadn’t taken a vacation day in the four hundred years she’d worked for the Council… my position was pretty secure. She’d sent me a few postcards from her trip so far as she hopped from ship to ship, exploring the least sunny places on the planet. I was happy for her, even if her husband kind of looked like a character from an F. W. Murnau movie.

  But the situation was going to get untenable in a few months, because my teas were starting to sell well enough, between online sales and Jane’s events, that I would be able to make Everlasting Health my full-time job.

  It was a shame, really, because I did my best thinking in the archive. It was so quiet and calm there, free of distractions and the intrusive energy of other people. I didn’t suppose Jane would let me come back to just sit and think after I quit.

  I attacked that evening’s stack of chaos with gusto, considering a problem with one of my suppliers for rose hips. According to a journal article I’d read, the vitamin-C-packed super-fruit was supposedly able to help vampires rebuild skin after sun exposure. Of course, the article also promised that rose hips could protect vampires by building a resistance to sun damage, but I didn’t want to market a “sunproofing” tea. That seemed like an irresponsible promise to make to one’s customers. But I figured it certainly couldn’t hurt vampires to have extra protection as a side effect of mixing the rose hips into teas as long as they didn’t interact badly with other ingredients. They would add a certain piquant tartness that would pair nicely with some of the more mellow blends, not to mention my recently acquired Jewels of Opar.

  My problem was that my rose hip supplier always seemed to delay my shipments from his farm in North Carolina. And he regularly delivered about two-thirds of what I ordered. The shipment was always discounted, of course, with excuses about small-batch harvesting and the difficulties of one-man operations. And there were the occasional remarks about how my customers didn’t really need the rose hips because they were vampires, and vampires didn’t really need to be healed since we couldn’t get sick.

  I was probably going to have to fire my rose hip guy. (Could I sound any more hipster?) I could tolerate the late, underweight deliveries, because that sort of thing happened sometimes when you were dealing with plants, but the implication that my business was less important than others and my customers less deserving? Nope.

  And that brought me back to the problem of rose hips, and where I was going to get a steady, appropriately weighted supply. I would have loved to grow my own, but unfortunately there wasn’t room for a rose garden in my adorable little apartment. And there was no community garden program in Half-Moon Hollow. And sneaking into other people’s gardens to prune their roses was illegal. Helpful, but illegal.

  “These are the problems of the small business owner,” I murmured to myself. “Be grateful for the challenge of doing what you love. Resist temptation that could result in you being charged with breaking and gardening.”

  * * *

  Several hours into my shift, I came back from the “someone died and we had to settle” court document section to find Jane standing next to the card catalogue with her head leaned against the top of it, in an awkward sort of file hug. The light from my green banker’s lamp reflected dully against her chestnut hair.

  “Surely this constitutes some sort of security breach,” I said, slipping into my leather chair.

  “Not when I’m in charge of this whole complex,” Jane insisted.

  “Jane, we’ve talked about this. You can’t take your breaks in here.”

  “But it’s so much like a library.” Jane sighed, running her hands over the top of the card catalogue. “I love it here.”

  “I love it here, too, but I have actual work to do. And that will be prevented by you hugging my card catalogue. Because I have to access said catalogue to file new entries.”

  “Just a few more minutes,” she said, tilting her head against the cool wooden surface.

  An apprehensive energy rippled along my nerves, like a snapped guitar string. I shuddered, letting it echo and fade away while the fresh vinegar scent of Jane’s worry overwhelmed my nose.

  “You’re anxious,” I said, hitting the button on the electric kettle I kept on a little cart near my desk. I pulled out a donor pint of A negative, my tea kit, and my travel tea ball. “I have just the thing for that.”

  “You know it’s super weird that you have a mobile tea kit, right?”

  “I’ve seen your Jane Austen collection at your house,” I told her. “I’m not taking any crap off of you.”

  “A lot of people like Jane Austen,” she scoffed.

  “Dick told me about the unicorn room, Jane.”

  She grimaced. “Fair enough. But I don’t want that Calm Your Ass Down Blend. Whe
n I left the house, Gabriel still hadn’t woken up.”

  “But this isn’t Calm Your Ass Down. This is Find Your Bliss. It interacts with the parts of your brain that produce anxiety hormones, settles your nervous system without knocking you out. You’ll just feel really mellow. It’s basically legal vampire weed.”

  “Yeah, I’ll try it,” she said, making grabby hands at my “In real life, I’m a mermaid” mug.

  She took a long draft of the sage-infused, faintly citrusy brew. “That’s nice.”

  I started filling out the catalogue card for the paperwork I’d just filed. “So, long night?”

  “I think his secret vampire skill is speed-reading,” she muttered into the mug. “Because he has read every piece of paper in my office. Twice.”

  “Is he allowed to read all of the papers in your office?”

  “I had a conference call with my superiors right before he showed up tonight. I am to give him full cooperation,” she said. “He has signed so many NDAs, he has full access to everything. He has a higher security clearance than Ophelia.”

  I shuddered. Ophelia Lambert was a four-hundred-year-old forever-teenager who had ruled our district with the ruthless efficiency of the Spanish Inquisition until she’d been removed from office. She’d been trying to hire a witch to curse a vampire into killing Gigi Scanlon, a human Council employee who was working on the genealogical search engine project. Ophelia felt that Gigi was just a little too friendly with Ophelia’s boyfriend, Jamie, and considered this a reasonable response. Sadly, it was not this murderous plot that got Ophelia fired but the fact that Ophelia had filed fraudulent receipts to be reimbursed for the payments to the witch.