Молли Харпер - Nice Girls Don't Date Dead Men

No, wait, I was going broke. That was new.

My part-time paychecks weren’t enough to fund my “extravagant” lifestyle. Thanks to the wonders of vampirism, I’d been able to cut little extras such as food and medical insurance. But the taxes on River Oaks were coming due soon. The water heater was making weird noises, and there was a suspicious and expensive-looking sag in my roof just over Aunt Jettie’s old room. I had a 200-pound dog to feed and an expensive dental regimen to maintain. And the payment people at Visa were starting to ask questions. The financial juggling was becoming a little more than I could keep up with.

Complicating matters was the delay in my “triumph settlement.” Earlier that year, I’d fought Missy the Evil Realtor to the death after she’d framed me for a series of crimes, all in an effort to obtain River Oaks—or, rather, the property River Oaks stood on. My sprawling old family farm was the keystone plot in a tacky undead condo development she had planned. Frustrated by Aunt Jettie’s refusal to sell, Missy had decided to use the Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead’s laws governing vampire behavior to yank the property out from under me. So I didn’t feel too bad about running her through with one of her own realty signs.

In the vampire world, if you kill another vampire in battle, you get all of his or her stuff.

And since Missy had spent years amassing property and swindling vampires out of their homes, that amounted to quite a bit of stuff. But after months of red tape and delays, I wasn’t holding my breath for the council to fulfill its promise to fork over Missy’s holdings anytime soon. Of course, holding my breath wouldn’t really matter one way or the other, but …

I hadn’t told anyone about my financial woes, not even dearly departed Aunt Jettie. There was nothing I could do. I was stuck. I was too fond of Mr. Wainwright to leave Specialty Books. Even though I was basically an unglorified sales clerk with two advanced degrees, I’d gotten the distinct impression that Mr. Wainwright had come to depend on me. He was doing less and less at the shop, opening later, going to bed earlier in his little apartment over the store, and leaving me to close. I couldn’t abandon him.

If I told my parents I was having money problems, Mama would, well, I don’t think she would insist I move back in with them now. But I’m sure my life, liberty, and pursuit of healthy boundaries would be infringed upon in some way. And while Gabriel had made repeated offers to help me out financially, that just wasn’t relationship baggage I wanted.

Most sire-childe relationships are not as complicated as ours. Gabriel is dark and intense, obsessive to the point of being just this side of creepy. Some guys bring you flowers and candy; others exact biblical revenge by pushing trees on top of the drunk hunter who fatally shot you. I’m more of a crunchy-granola-pacifist vampire, so I found this rather disturbing. OK, it was a tiny bit hot but mostly disturbing.

I knew Gabriel was not evil. For that matter, neither was I. Vampires have the same capacity for good and evil that humans do. To be fair, people can lose some notions of etiquette when they’re no longer answering to the moral constraints of human society … and they thirst for human blood. The bottom line is that if you had evil leanings in life, you’re probably going to embrace them wholeheartedly once you’re undead. If you were a decent person, say a former librarian who loves America and puppies, you’re probably going to be an upstanding, almost vegetarian vampire.

It took Gabriel and me weeks to work through the weird feelings that followed his murdering Bud Mc-Elray. As a human, I’d never been in love. I’d been in deep, abiding like with several of my boyfriends, but I’d never had that feeling, that “Wow, this is a person I could spend the rest of my life with” feeling. And even though Gabriel was one of the few people I could spend the rest of my long, long life with, I couldn’t think of being with him as a permanent situation. He’d saved me. He’d killed for me. But I couldn’t accept that someone like him could be interested in me.

Gabriel was everything I was not. Sophisticated and complicated and able to colorcoordinate a room like you wouldn’t believe. I craved him with a bone-deep lust I’d once reserved exclusively for Godiva truffles. I was fixated, not just in the physical sensethough that was an obvious, and occasionally distracting, bonus—but with what he thought, how he saw the world, how he saw me. It was addictive to see myself reflected in his liquid silver eyes as strong, beautiful, intelligent, interesting, though slightly exasperating. Even when we were together, all I could think about was the next time we could be together.

I needed order. I needed constancy. But being with Gabriel was like standing in the center of a swirling eddy, the dark water surrounding you, dizzying, powerful, and beautiful. But all the while, you can’t help but feel those churning walls closing in, threatening to crash in on you and crush you under their weight.

I couldn’t seem to find my footing in this relationship. It didn’t help that Gabriel kept leaving town on business trips like this current one, the third excursion in as many months.

Now that he wasn’t keeping constant “Keep Jane alive and out of trouble” vigils, Gabriel was spending some time catching up with his various business interests. He was the proprietor of three radio stations in the Southeast, plus a hotel in Atlanta, a seafood restaurant in New Orleans, and a mini-golf course in Biloxi. And those were just the ventures in this country. I know it sounds like Tony Soprano’s investment portfolio, but to be fair, he had more than 100 years to diversify. Older vampires are heavily invested in human real estate, medical research, music, publishing, and media. It’s what has helped maintain our cover for two millennia. It’s not a conspiracy or anything, we’re just trying to keep you people from setting us on fire in our sleep. If we controlled everything, do you really think the Lifetime network would have had a vampire detective show?

So Gabriel floated in and out of my world, letting me think I could handle life without him, only to show up after a few weeks and make me crazy all over again. I was frequently left to wallow and wonder where he was and what he wasn’t telling me. I excelled at wallowing and wondering. If I called, it went to his voice mail. If he called, it was always just before dawn, as I was falling asleep and didn’t have the mental capacity to ask him much. This combined with a painfully active imagination led to scenarios that would have done that Lifetime show very proud.

And, of course, he had to come home from his latest trip on a Tuesday night to find me wearing my “housework” sweats and a dirty bandanna around my head.

“Have we discussed the ‘Call first’ rule?” I asked when I opened the door, suppressing a giddy smile.

Gabriel had been impossibly beautiful even in the harsh neon lights of Shenanigans that first night I met him. And now that I had sharp vampire vision, I could fully appreciate the leonine dreaminess that was my sire. There he stood, wearing his typical Johnny Cash full black, flowing dark locks curling at his collar. His full, soft lips quirked at my rude greeting, and a flicker of warmth reflected back at me in those clear, gray eyes. Despite our general resilience, he looked tired. There was the slightest hint of shadows under his eyes. And even for a vampire, he looked pretty pale.

“Hello, Gabriel, it’s lovely to see you?” he responded in a feminine voice that, frankly, sounded nothing like me. “I missed you terribly. How was Nashville?”