The walls were painted a cheerful midnight blue with a sprinkle of twinkling silver stars—Andrea’s suggestion, to keep the place from being “too serious.” I could have gone with the stereotypical blood-red walls and black-lacquered surfaces, but I didn’t think that would be very restful for the customers. If not for the blood warmer next to the espresso machine and the chalkboard advertising a “Half-Caf Fat-Free Type A Mocha Latte” (Dick’s attempt at bonding with our yuppier customers), the store would look like any intentionally whimsical small-town bookstore. It was remarkable progress, considering that the first time I’d come into the store, I narrowly missed having a shelf collapse on top of me.
Despite my wandering into the shop one night and rearranging stacks without permission, the former owner, Mr. Wainwright, had hired me on the spot for my organizational skills and rabid love of books. He became a surrogate grandparent, a mentor, and a close friend. Even though he’d died the previous year, he was the happiest he’d ever been, quite content to haunt the Hollow and pursue a logic-boggling relationship with my aunt Jettie. When he left me the shop in his will, I’d considered closing it. But, aside from the library, Specialty Books was the only place where I’d felt at home. I loved the smell of the books, the odd and nonsensical variety of titles. I loved the memories I had of Mr. Wainwright, his quirks, his stories of a lifetime searching the globe for paranormal creatures. I could just imagine him, standing at the end of the counter, giving me that fond, slightly befuddled smile.
It was at that moment that I realized I was not imagining Mr. Wainwright. He was standing at the end of the counter, giving me that fond, slightly befuddled smile.
“Mr. Wainwright.” I sighed at the apparition and, forgetting that he was noncorporeal, tried to throw my arms around him. I ended up falling through him, a clammy got-in-the-shower-too-early sensation that set even my teeth on edge.
“Where have you been?” I asked. “I haven’t seen you since I got back. I’ve missed you.”
“To be honest, I’ve been rather ashamed to face you,” he said, twisting his hands. “I spent less and less time at the shop while you were gone. I have been ever since …”
“You started enjoying my great-aunt’s company.”
“Yes, thank you.” He cleared his throat. “And as it turned out, the shop being in such upheaval, well, it upset me more than I anticipated, and I haven’t wanted to spend as much time here.”
“Oh, no.” I was stricken. When Mr. Wainwright had given me his blessing to burn the shop for insurance money if necessary, I charged ahead with the renovations, thinking that if he was onboard for arson for hire, surely a little remodeling wouldn’t bother him. I was an ass. A complete and utter ass.
“I just didn’t realize how much change you would deem necessary. I don’t take it as a personal insult, dear. I didn’t expect so much to happen so fast.”
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Wainwright—”
He waved away my apologies. “The point is that I told you I’d keep an eye on the shop while you were gone, and it was my fault that someone broke in. I wasn’t here.”
“Hey, do not play the self-blame game with the world champion, OK? It’s not as if they did a lot of damage, Mr. Wainwright. It’s not a big deal. Besides, you’re not tethered to the place. You’re allowed to have a life … or not, as the case may.” I cringed. It took Mr. Wainwright a beat to grasp the insensitivity of what I had just said, but then he hooted. I laughed, and then it turned into an all-out ghostly giggle fest, which was a fabulous emotional icebreaker.
I wiped at my eyes, trying to compose myself. “Any idea who might have broken into the shop? Have there been suspicious characters hanging around? More suspicious than the characters we normally get?”
“No. If there had been, I would have given them what your aunt Jettie calls the usual.”
Cold chills, goose bumps, a vague feeling of unease as if they’ve left the iron on?” I asked. Mr. Wainwright nodded. “Why don’t you go visit Aunt Jettie?” I suggested. “I’ll be here for a while.”
“Well, we did get rather used to having the house to ourselves while you were gone—”
“No details, please,” I said, holding my hands up. “Just go and enjoy yourselves, in a way that I never have to think about.”
“Thank you,” he said, fading slightly. “And Jane?” I looked up, and he smiled at me. “I missed you, too, dear.”
Mr. Wainwright winked at me and dissolved into thin air.
Outside the shop, I heard the motor of Dick’s El Camino roaring to a stop. I laughed and ran to the door. Richard Cheney, who, for reasons I didn’t understand, insists on being called Dick, had enjoyed annoying the hell out of Gabriel since they were children in the pre-Civil War Hollow. In their last human years, Dick had developed a bit of a gambling problem and lost his family plantation house to Gabriel in a card game. Gabriel’s guilt over winning against an incredibly drunk Dick and Dick’s pride-fueled refusal to take the house back led to a rift that lasted long after they were both turned into vampires. Immortality had just given Dick a lot more time to think up insulting nicknames and juvenile practical jokes.
A mystifying mix of fierce loyalty and moral flexibility, Dick was the local go-to guy for under-the-table commerce. And he had fallen hard for Andrea, the first woman to turn him down in about a century. Andrea didn’t put up with much in the way of bullshit from Dick, which, apparently, was what he was looking for all along. She was the only woman he was willing (intentionally) to make a fool of himself over.
They were now shacking up in a big way. He slowly but surely had moved his vaguely obscene T-shirts and Dukes of Hazzard memorabilia into her swanky condo. Before she realized it, they were cohabitating. It’s by far the sneakiest thing I’ve ever seen him do, and that’s saying something.
For her part, Andrea didn’t seem to mind. They didn’t seem to have the adjustment problems that Gabriel and I had. Neither of them had really changed. Andrea was still the same classy, ethereally beautiful redhead with the elegant wardrobe. Dick was still the same guy you wouldn’t want to take home to Mom. But he spent a lot more time at the shop and way less time in back alleys negotiating for counterfeit concert tickets. That’s progress, right?
To be fair, Andrea had more experience that I did at dating the undead. When she was in college, her rare blood type caught the attention of a vampire professor, who convinced her to drop out, move in with him, and be his personal human wine cellar. A few years later, Andrea was unceremoniously booted by her fickle vampire lover, leaving her with no education, no job, and a family that refused to speak to her. She’d moved to the Hollow, where she worked part-time as a blood surrogate and, now, full-time as an employee of Specialty Books and a part-time dog-sitter.
In addition to her clerk duties, Dick and Andrea kept Fitz for me while I was out of town. As much as Jolene and Fitz loved to play, it can be confusing for weres to spend a lot of time with dogs. There are food-competition issues.
Fitz bounded into the store and nearly knocked me down with the weight of his hello kisses. Fitz is a pound find, the apparent result of a night of reckless passion between Scooby-Doo and a bean-bag chair. The only thing remotely dignified about him is that I named him after Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy from Pride and Prejudice.
Despite being the size of a small tank, Fitz wasn’t much of a daytime guard. Now that I’d had one of those “shock collar” invisible fences installed around the property to keep Fitz from bothering Jolene and Zeb, he mostly just enjoyed loping around the acreage, protecting the perimeter from roving bands of squirrels.
“Hello!” I squealed, scratching behind Fitz’s ears. “Oh, who’s a good boy? Did you miss me?”
Andrea and Dick stepped through the front door. A huge smile stretched across Andrea’s face. Dick usually greeted me with a wildly inappropriate single entendre, but today he had an agenda. “That dog,” he informed me as Fitz licked my neck, “is a menace.”
“Oh, he wasn’t a bother, were you?” Andrea cooed as Fitz rolled over for a belly rub. “Were you, buddy? No.”
“Are you wearing a golf shirt?” I asked, fingering the light blue material of Dick’s collared attire.
Dick seethed a moment before slapping my hand away. “He ate my favorite T-shirt!” He kissed Andrea’s temple and stalked off. “I’m going to go steal something.”
“Sorry,” I called after Dick, who continued to sulk as he went about gathering boxes for the trash. “The shirt will probably pass in a few days.” I turned to Andrea, who threw her arms around my neck. “He seems really pissed. When he said he was going to steal something, did he mean from me?”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Dick loves Fitz. He would ignore Fitz and scold him for getting up on the couch, but the minute I left the room, Dick was scratching his ears and baby-talking to him worse than I do.”
“Dick was using baby talk?” I said, limping as I rounded the counter. “You’ve neutered him. What’s next? Sweater vests?”
“So, what are you doing back?” she asked, squeezing me tight. “I told Zeb not to call you. The break-in wasn’t that bad.”
“Yes, I’m very glad to be back, and I missed you, too,” I responded in a flat voice, avoiding the question. “Keep this barrage of homecoming welcome going, and I won’t give you your presents.”
“Presents!” Andrea cried, clapping and hopping up and down.
“From the snottiest personal parfumerie in France.” I paused to hand her a little lavender gift bag. “I have to tell you that the chemist was slightly unnerved that I was able to describe your natural scent in so much detail, but it was important to get the blend that would complement you.”
“ I’m a little unnerved that you could describe my natural scent in such detail,” she admitted. “Did you get Dick what he asked for?”
“Yes, I got him shot glasses from every country we visited. And in every gift shop I entered, I was glared at and called a ‘horrible American,’” I said, rolling my eyes as I handed her the tinkling box of extremely embarrassing trinkets. “And I got him this!”
She squinted to read the wrinkled red T-shirt I was holding up. “It’s in Italian.”
“It says, ‘My friend went to Italy, and all I got was this stupid T-shirt,’” I said. “I thought I’d add some class to Dick’s T-shirt collection.”
“I just got rid of most of the tackier ones.” Andrea groaned.
“So … you framed my dog for T-shirt theft, huh?” I narrowed my eyes at her.
“If you were laundering a “Federal Bikini Inspector” T-shirt what would you do?”
“I would not use an innocent dog to mask my attempts at giving my boyfriend a makeover,” I told her.
“I’m not trying to change all of him,” she whispered, eyeing the back of the shop, where Dick was working. “Just the tackier T-shirts. And the ones with crusty armpits.”
Andrea eyed my hesitant gait as I rounded the counter. “Did you get a rash while you were traveling?”
“Mom, jeans, starch. I don’t want to talk about it.” I shuddered as I climbed onto one of the high, cushioned bar stools I’d ordered in a deep eggplant. “How do you guys do it? You make it look so easy. You’ve only been dating for a little while, and your personalities are so different. Frankly, your googly-eyed happiness is starting to piss me off.”
“Well, to be honest, we had a little outside help,” she said, her tone a bit sheepish. She disappeared to the self-help section, then came back with a large pink book with pouty fang-puckered lips from the cover.