The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires (8 page)

“Money,” Cal muttered, sipping his blood. “I’m always surprised by what people will do for money.”

Gigi’s oceanic eyes widened in alarm. She whirled on me. “I thought you said we were doing OK!”

I shot a significant look at Cal, who was oblivious to the distress he’d just caused my anxiety-prone sister. “We are doing OK,” I insisted. “This will just help us build a little cushion between OK and good.”

Cal snorted, taking another drink. “It should be a bit more than a little cushion. I’m sure it will let your sister take care of all the little things she’s been neglecting around the house.” At my indignant gasp, he added, “It’s nothing to take personally. Most start-up businesses don’t show a profit before—”

“Gigi, would you mind going upstairs while I discuss a few things with our guest?”

My thin, forced smile made Gigi flinch. She turned to Cal. “You’re in for it now. The last time she smiled like that, she told off Mary Anne Gilchrist’s mom for piercing my ears without permission. I don’t know what she said, but Mrs. Gilchrist turned white as a—”

“Gigi!”

She huffed and rolled her eyes. “You know I’m going to listen at the door, right?”

“Go upstairs and pack a bag.”

Gigi sighed and stomped up the steps to make a point. The point being that she was a big, adolescent pain in my butt.

“Do me a favor,” I said, rounding on Cal. “Keep your opinions about my house and my financial status to yourself. Gigi worries.”

My icy tone made Cal’s brows arch. I could see the protest forming on his lips, but instead of objecting, he said, “Excuse me. I wasn’t thinking.”

I nodded curtly. “How are you this afternoon?”

He sat heavily on a bar stool near the counter and leaned close to the giggling-caterpillar cookie jar. It struck me as a little funny, this big, manly vampire all docile and grumpy in our admittedly feminine kitchen. “Weak. Nauseated. Like I could fall back into my daytime sleep at any moment. I only came up to get more blood. The trip up the basement steps took an alarming amount of effort and concentration.”

“I could put a cooler in your tent, if you’d like. It would save you some trouble. But are you sure it’s a good idea
to drink more blood if you’re sick to your stomach?” His brow crinkled. Clearly, he didn’t understand my question. I’m guessing it had been a while since he’d had a tummy ache. “When humans are nauseated, they usually avoid eating so they don’t throw up.”

“Yes, but I’m not human,” he responded snidely, as if the implication was insulting.

I ignored the haughty tone. “Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, considering the surroundings.”

I chose to ignore that, too.

“What is this?” Cal inquired, looking up at the hanks of herbs hanging from the ceiling to dry.

“Cuttings, from my garden. Lavender, chamomile, mint. I like making my own herbal teas, sachets, potpourri, that sort of thing. And Gigi gets heat rash sometimes. Lavender baths help.”

His eyes narrowed at me. “You seem to know an awful lot about plants.”

I scoffed. “Yeah, that’s right,
I
poisoned you. I’m part of a mass antivampire conspiracy. And then, after I tampered with your blood, I snuck back to the scene of the crime, stumbled over your unconscious body, and took you back to my house, all so I could become your domestic servant. I am obviously the greatest criminal mastermind since Ponzi.”

He snorted but didn’t say anything further. I let the kitchen steep in silence for a few beats. Cal didn’t seem to be doing much better than the day before. His hands shook slightly as they gripped the donor blood.
His shoulders were slack, as if he had trouble lifting the weight of his head.

“Do you feel strong enough to take a shower?” I asked. “There are still some, uh, red spots on your face. And your back. Plus, you kind of have a bedraggled-zombie thing going.”

Cal frowned, surveying his wrinkled clothes and rubbing a hand over his equally furrowed face.

“If you think you’ll have trouble standing that long, we could get you one of those shower chairs,” I offered.

“You mean the kind that senior citizens fall off of, never to get back up?”

“Um, yes.”

“I’m willing to risk standing,” he said blandly.

We had a full bath on the ground floor, which was good, because despite the bottled blood, Cal seemed too pale and shaky to take another flight of stairs. After covering the windows with foil, I made sure he had fresh towels and waited outside the bathroom door while the water warmed up. I heard the shower curtain sling across the rod.

A few moments passed, and I heard him call, “I don’t suppose you have soap that doesn’t smell like fruit or flowers or some combination thereof?”

“Sorry, this is a girlie household. You’re lucky there’s not a Disney princess on the label,” I said, glad that there was a door between us to keep him from seeing my snickering. There was a faint grumbling noise while the shower started up.

Gigi appeared at the end of the hall, her team bag slung over her shoulder. She was chewing her lip, eyeing the bathroom door like there was an army of evil winged monkeys ready to burst through it.

Gigi had
Wizard of Oz
issues.

“All packed?” I asked.

“Yeah. Sammi Jo said I could stay at her place for a few days. But I’m not sure about this, Iris. I mean, as cute as he is—in a haggard
Lord of the Rings
sort of way—you barely know this guy.”

“Do you mean Gollum or Éomer?” I asked. “Because that’s a pretty wide spectrum of haggard.”

“Don’t try to distract me,” she accused, pointing her finger at me. “And he defies all hot Tolkien stereotypes. He’s all rough-hewn intensity with a pretty mouth—”

“You came up with that description awfully quick,” I noted. “And what sort of teenager says ‘rough-hewn’?”

“You shouldn’t leave those romance novels lying around,” she shot back. “I’m a teenage girl. We mentally tag and categorize attractive male specimens within ten seconds of eye contact. And stop with the distractions. I mean, he’s a
vampire
. You’ve always told me to be super-cautious around them, and now you’ve invited one to stay? I don’t know if it’s a great idea to leave you alone with him.”

“So you would rather stay, just in case, so he can kill us both?”

She glared at me. “Iris! I’m serious!”

“So am I!” I exclaimed. “Look, I’m sure I’ll be fine. But I think it would be a good idea for you to be elsewhere
for a while, just until I have some idea how this is going to pan out.”

“All right, but I want you to write down this guy’s information and e-mail it to me, so I can offer the police some explanation for why my sister needs to be put on a milk carton.”

“Nice,” I muttered, smacking her arm.

“Child abuse!” she cried. Suddenly, she frowned and turned on me. “Is this all a very convincing act put on to get me out of the house so you can spend the weekend humping like deranged howler monkeys?”

My jaw dropped. “No!”

“Well, it would be clever of you.”

“I’m not quite that devious,” I said dryly.

She kissed my cheek. “I’m going. I’ll call you when I get to Sammi Jo’s.”

“Hey, Geeg?” I called as she moved away. She turned. “Why would the howler monkeys have to be deranged?”

She grinned. “If you have to ask …”

“Get out!” I huffed.

“Call me every day,” she said as she opened the front door. “So I know you’re alive. Love you!”

“Love you, too!” I called. The door closed, and I sighed, leaning my head back against the wall.

“We should never have taught her how to talk,” I mused. “I could have picked up sign language pretty easily …”

I closed my eyes and thought of the Twix bars I had stashed behind the encyclopedias upstairs. It was better than thinking about the fact that Cal was naked on the other side of the door. Cal happened to have a very nice
body … and it had been about three months since Napoleon had “invaded.”

A thud from inside the bathroom wrenched me out of my historically inappropriate musings.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Are you OK in there?”

There was no answer.

I jiggled the doorknob. It was unlocked, but I wasn’t eager to open it unless I had to. “Cal!” No answer. I sighed. “I really don’t want to do this.”

After a few more beats of silence, I called, “If you don’t answer, I’m coming in. Try to cover up!” I muttered, “Think of the money. Think of the money. Think of the money.”

I slowly opened the door, billows of steam rolling toward me as I stepped through. Cal was sprawled on the floor, half in and half out of the shower stall. Suds laced over his dark hair like little tufts of icing. His eyes were closed, long lashes resting on his cheeks. With his lower half undressed, I could see everything I’d missed in his kitchen. Long legs. Flat stomach. Trail of dark hair that extended all the way to his perfectly proportionate—

“Oh, my gosh!” I cried, putting my hand over my eyes. “I’m sorry!”

But he was unconscious again and didn’t seem to care that I was ogling him.

Despite his griping about girlie soaps, the steam and the heat seemed to intensify his natural woodsy scent, diffusing it throughout the room. I felt it seeping into my skin, marking me, as I knelt over him.

“Cal?” I murmured, shaking his shoulders gently.
“Wake up, Cal. I’m not sure what to do for an unconscious vampire.”

As my fingertips grazed his cheek, his eyes snapped open. He popped up into a crouch, or at least, he tried to, but his limbs were too weak to let him maintain the position. He stumbled, falling against me, knocking me to the floor. His lips drew back over his fangs as a rumbling growl echoed through his chest. The vibrations spread from his sternum to mine, sending a strange electric shiver zipping over my skin. I might have leaned closer, if not for the whole “bared razor-sharp fangs” thing. He closed the distance for me, brushing the tip of his nose down my neck to my collarbone, purring in anticipation.

Shrinking back, I realized that until this moment, I’d been dealing with the civilized version of Cal. This was Cal stripped of all those pesky human trappings. This is how our kitchen encounter might have ended, with him poised above me, ready to strike, to drain the life out of me. Or throw up on me … which he did … twice.

I screamed, not in fear but in disgust, as Cal tossed up two bottles’ worth of blood down the front of my shirt. He moaned piteously and collapsed on top of me, pinning me to the floor and squishing the breath from my lungs.

“Crushed by nauseated vampire” was going to be such an embarrassing cause of death.

I grunted, sliding my hands under his shoulders and thrusting my arms up with all my strength. I barely budged him, and when my arms gave out, he slumped
down over my chest, making it even more difficult to breathe. And I’d just sent the one other person with the key to the house away for several days. I would die on my bathroom floor, covered in vampire vomit, crushed by a dead guy who didn’t like me very much.

“I’ve got to find a new job,” I grumbled.

Vampires are notoriously difficult to move once they are at rest for the day. So do not try to move them. Not even a little bit.

—
The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires

I
t took me an hour, a slightly sprained shoulder, and the defiance of several laws of physics, but I finally unwedged myself from under my undead guest.

I stumbled to my feet, sprawling across the floor as the blood flowed back into my tingling arms and legs. During my time on the floor, I learned a few things about Cal. One, he was as heavy as a sack of wet concrete. Two, even when he was all disheveled, he still smelled pretty good. Third, his hands had a bad habit of resting on the nearest breast, even when he was unconscious.

Dead or undead, men were all pretty much the same.

Finally free of my undead burden, I took greedy, gulping breaths. A dull ache in my side had me wincing with every movement. I wondered if he’d given my ribs compression fractures. I slowly sat up, propping myself by the sink so I could get a much-needed drink of water. I wiped the sweat from my face with a wet washcloth and
carefully removed the fouled, sticky-stiff T-shirt. Fortunately, it was Gigi’s T-shirt, a rather obnoxious “Coed Naked Volleyball” specimen that had nearly gotten Gigi suspended from school. Straight into the trash it went.

After calling Gigi’s cell phone to make sure she got to Sammi Jo’s house safely, I got a fresh shirt from the laundry room.

On my way back to my unconscious client, I passed my parents’ ground-floor master bedroom. When we’d moved into the house, neither one of us could bear to open the door and face the room where my parents had slept. We couldn’t face Mom’s slouchy weekend gardening clothes or Dad’s perennial bottle of Aqua Velva.

But a few months before, I’d managed to channel some “Paul trauma” energy into some postmidnight-insomnia cleaning. I’d tossed everything except photos and jewelry into boxes and sent them to the basement or to Goodwill. The room stood empty, except for the stripped bed and a nightstand. I stepped inside, blinking against the dust motes swirling on the currents of sunshine. The air was a bit stale and musty, but it would do until I could get Cal downstairs safely. I foiled the windows and made up the bed with fresh sheets. I somehow managed to get Cal rolled onto an old twin sheet from my childhood, and I dragged him down the hallway.