The Single Undead Moms Club (Half Moon Hollow series Book 4) (28 page)

But he retreated on his own, sliding his hand along my arm as he settled back in the seat. “So how’s my favorite vampire accountant?”

“I am doing well,” I said.

“Still have plans for the weekend?”

“Yes,” I told him. My date with Wade was cemented, with babysitters and everything. If nothing else, I really wanted a romantic outing with him that didn’t involve a death barn. “I’m assuming this is an unsanctioned visit?” I asked.

“I left Jane a voice mail,” Finn promised. “Which she will not get, because according to Dick, she doesn’t understand how to use her voice mail.”

I sighed, letting my head drop to his shoulder. “Why do you risk pissing her off just to see me? Why do
I
risk pissing her off just to see you? Is it just that you’re my sire? Is this why I feel drawn to you?”

“No,” he said, stroking his thumb along my cheek. “At first, there is an instinctual bond between the sire and the childe, to help the new vampire trust their mentor enough to get them through the transition. But it fades once the new vampire feels more settled in their new life. Most of the sire’s privileges after that? Rules designed by the Council to keep older vampires in power and younger vampires in line. Look it up in any of the guidebooks.”

“Oh, trust me, I will,” I told him. “Maybe your influence over me got extended because we didn’t get that time together at first? Maybe that explains the warm fuzzy feelings and the dreams.”

“Dreams? There were dreams?” Finn’s smile widened.

“I will never recap them.”

“Mom!” Danny yelled from upstairs. “I can’t find my ninja pajamas!”

At the sound of my son’s voice, I slid out of Finn’s lap. “Well, of course you can’t, they’re ninja pajamas! No one sees ninja pajamas.”

I got silence from upstairs. Finn stared at me.

“I thought it was funny,” I told him before calling to Danny. “I put them in your top drawer.”

“I’m still a little stung by the refusal to recap. I’m really not so bad as all that, am I?”

“Yes!” I exclaimed, laughing. “You are completely untrustworthy. You haven’t told me why you answered my ad. You haven’t even told me why you’ve stuck around and continued to see me, despite Jane threatening you with some very creative retribution.”

“I told you, your ad made you sound like a good person. I wanted to help you.”

I stared at him, silent and stone-faced.

Finn cleared his throat. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

“No.”

He sighed. “OK, cards on the table. I turned you because of your talent.”

“You needed a discreet bookkeeper?”

He chuckled and cupped my cheek in his palm, settling a very serious gaze on my face. “Your vampiric gift.”

“I don’t have a vampiric gift,” I told him. “Jane said it would probably manifest itself within a few months of my changing. But nothing so far, and for some reason, she can’t get a read off me. “

“That’s because you’re a stabilizer.”

“What?”

“When you’re around, you suppress the gifts of the vampires around you. Jane can’t always read your mind. I’d bet she couldn’t read the mind of any human or vampire within twenty yards when you’re around. She’s just so focused on trying to read you that she hasn’t noticed.”

“Well, that’s a crappy power!” I exclaimed, unable to contain the disappointment of being told I was the psychic equivalent of a candle snuffer. “I was hoping for something cool, like telepathy. I would have settled for the squirrel thing!”

“No,” he said, holding my hands between his. “It’s an incredible gift, especially to someone like me.”

“Why?”

“My special ability involves a sort of mental possession. I can travel into other people’s heads, read their thoughts, see what they’ve done, what they plan to do. Occasionally, if the person I’m occupying is highly suggestible, I can move them around, physically, a little bit like a puppet.”

“Have you ever done that to me?” I demanded.

“I try not to invade my hosts’ privacy.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

Still not responding, he said, “My ability has become more unpredictable lately. I’m not sure why. It’s becoming . . . more. The door is swinging both ways. For months, when I’ve gone into other people’s heads, some of them have made their way back into mine. I’m losing consciousness in the middle of conversations while my mind goes on walkabout and I drag people in. I am walking around my apartment during the day, copying the morning routines of my neighbors. The day before I turned you, I woke up in my hallway, inches away from walking into a beam of sunlight.”

“How is that possible?” I asked.

“Our talents change over time. They grow and mutate. Your friend Jane couldn’t read the minds of vampires when she first rose, but now she’s able to read our thoughts easily, unless there’s some complication like your gift. My talent is just changing faster than I can control it.”

“And how does my gift work? How am I helping you?”

“Because you are suppressing my power. You’re stabilizing me.”

“How?”

“Without even trying, which is the best sort of gift,” he said. “Think about it. You’re one of the most stable people I’ve ever met. You’re nurturing and solid. It only makes sense that you would provide an anchor for the people around you.”

“But how did you even know that this would be my completely passive and useless-to-me gift? How did you know to turn me?”

“I was in the Hollow, months ago. You were sitting at a coffee shop at the hospital. I was visiting a human acquaintance who had gotten into a, let’s say,
disagreement
with a business associate.”

“So many of your stories involve violent disagreements.”

He poked my side, continuing as if I hadn’t said anything. “I passed by the coffee shop, and I saw you there. And you looked so very miserable. I don’t think I’d ever seen a human look so hopeless in all my life. I felt something for you. And I hadn’t felt anything for anyone, besides myself, in a long, long time. I couldn’t help but slip into your head, to see what was making you so unhappy.”

“So you
have
been in my head.”

Still no acknowledgment that I’d spoken. “I could sense it, that latent power, bubbling under the surface of your blood, the ability to suppress the abilities of the vampires around you,” he said. “You were my salvation, my solution, and you didn’t even know it. I settled into your memories, learning more about you. I saw you fighting with your husband, just before he died. I saw you sitting in the doctor’s office, receiving news about your test results. I saw your little boy sleeping and your terror at never being able to see him grow up. And before it even fully formed, I could see the birth of the inspiration for your plan to become a vampire. I knew you were going to follow through with it. And if you weren’t careful, you would either find some brutish vampire who would take advantage of you—or, worse, a human who would take advantage of you. So I stayed close to you. I dipped into your mind a few more times and made sure I was the first to answer your ad.”

“So you’ve been in my head
multiple
times?”

“And . . . I may have hired someone to hack the Web site to disable your ad so you wouldn’t get any other answers,” he admitted.

“That is the least disturbing thing you’ve told me so far,” I groused, rubbing my hands over my face. “So you only turned me to save your own ass?”

“It’s not that different from you seeking someone to turn you so you would have more time with your son.”

Damned if he didn’t have a point there. I couldn’t help but feel deceived, though. I’d thought that he’d done something for me for the sake of doing something good, but he’d done it because it benefited him. It felt like that episode in high school when Hal Morrow asked me to Homecoming only to ask me to do his math homework the next day. He’d made me feel special only to yank it out from under me. Finn was an enigma wrapped in a riddle coated in misdirection. He was a burrito of dishonesty.

Wait.

“I
did
have cancer, didn’t I?” I demanded, sliding out of Finn’s lap. “You didn’t find some way to fake my medical test results so you could manipulate me with this insane vampirism idea?”

“No. I’m devious, but I’m not evil.”

“That remains to be seen,” I muttered. “So you’ve been hanging around because being in my presence is sort of like a booster shot for controlling your power?”

“Well, yes, but that’s not why I want to spend time with you!”

“You know, you could have just told me this at the beginning. You could have just said, ‘I need a supernatural supplement from your aura.’ And I wouldn’t have minded. You didn’t have to put on this charming act, the whole ‘seduce the schoolmarm’ thing. You didn’t have to—”

“This isn’t an act!” he swore. “I do want more time with you. I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want you to think that was the only reason I turned you. But I also didn’t want you to hear this from Jane before you heard it from me. Frankly, I’m surprised she hasn’t told you already.”

I stood up, putting space between myself and my sire. For the first time since meeting him, I wanted Finn out of my presence. Stat. I wanted to throw Wade up in his face. I wanted him to know that I didn’t need him in order to feel special. I didn’t need him in order to feel loved or appreciated.

“I need some time to think about this,” I said. “I appreciate your honesty, half-assed and delayed as it may be, but at the same time, I don’t. If you need a booster, I’ll meet you at the bookshop, and you can soak up my rays or whatever for a few minutes.”

“You’re upset.”

“I’m glad you’re picking up on that.”

“I didn’t tell you this to hurt you,” he said, rising. He moved toward me but seemed to think better of it. “I’ll see you soon.”

As Finn disappeared into the woods near my house, I flopped back onto my swing, whacking my head against the backing. Ouch.

I didn’t have the time or the emotional resources for a pity party. I was a grown-ass woman. I was a mother. Mothers didn’t pout. At least, the good ones didn’t.

“I thought you liked Mr. Finn, Mom.” Danny poked his head out around the screen door. He was carrying a freshly popped bag of extra-butter microwave popcorn, his favorite snack since I’d taught him how to use the microwave. It smelled like sour milk and oven cleaner to me, but Danny was chowing down like I would never allow him to have hydrogenated yellow food dye again.

I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, despite the disgusting popcorn smell. This was what I’d dreaded, the idea of men drifting in and out of Danny’s life. Danny deserved stability. “I do like Finn, hon. But sometimes even grown-ups fuss at each other.”

“Does that mean that he’s not going to bring me any more LEGOs?”

“If anything, he might bring you
more
LEGOs.”

“That would be OK,” Danny conceded, climbing up onto the swing and settling against my side. The smell of his snack was making me gag, even if I craned my neck so far away that I felt a vertebra pop. “So Finn’s the guy who made you into a vampire, huh?”

“How do you know that?”

“You used the word ‘sire’ the other day when you were talking about him with Miss Kerrianne,” he said. “I hear Miss Jane say it when she’s talking about Jamie. So he’s like your vampire daddy?”

“I don’t really know how to answer that.”

“It’s weird.”

“Yes, it is,” I admitted. “But no matter who comes into our lives or goes out of our lives, it’s never going to change the way I feel about you. I might make new friends, I might start dating someone, but you will always be first for me, got it?”

“You mean you’re going to start dating Harley’s dad?”

“Wha—how—why do you say that?”

“Because when you look at each other, your eyes get all googly, like Madison’s stupid cartoon kitty-cat folder.”

I snorted. “Sometimes I wish you weren’t so smart.”

“And Madison says that means you like someone as more than a friend,” Danny told me, tilting the popcorn toward me. I shook my head and turned it so the popcorn was facing downwind.

“Is Madison pretty smart about this sort of thing?”

Danny nodded, his face solemn. “She knew that Mr. Brinker and Miss Hershell were going steady before any of the grown-ups figured it out.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter if Mr. Wade and I start dating; it will not affect whether you and Harley can play together. And it won’t affect whether Mr. Wade likes you. You’re a great kid, and everybody loves you.”

“Except for Madison,” he said. “She says boys smell.”

“Except for Madison,” I amended as Danny offered me his popcorn again.

“I can’t eat popcorn anymore, baby. I can’t eat any food.”

“Oh, OK,” he said, with a glimmer of mischief in his eyes as he moved the popcorn closer to my face.

“Are you taunting me with popcorn right now?”

“What does ‘taunt’ mean?”

“Waving the popcorn in front of my face because you know I can’t have it.”

“Then, yes, I am taunting you.”

It’s important to take time for yourself, develop your own interests as hobbies. One day, your child will grow up, and vampires with empty-nest syndrome tend to be destructive.