Shock gave way to fear, fear to anger, then anger to shame. And when I realized that I was actually tearing up because someone wrote mean things about me on my car, I rolled right back to anger again. This was a nasty girl trick. This was high school stuff. My hands were shaking so badly it took several passes to try to pull my keys from my pocket.

And now I was driving around town in a car declaring that I was a bloodsucking whore. No one would notice that. I slumped low behind the wheel and drove on as many side streets as I could. Fortunately, there were very few people who needed to wash slanderous graffiti off their cars after ten P.M., so I had the Auto Spa all to myself.

As the remnants swirled red around the drain of the car-wash bay, I pondered the list of people who might have victimized Big Bertha. Unless Sandy had some sort of senior-citizen ninja skills, I doubted she’d be able to beat me back to my car, bloody it, and then get out of sight before I got there. Could it have been a friend of Walter’s? A human who guessed my secret and was determined to out me whether I liked it or not?

The more I thought about it, the more pissed off I got. I was a grown woman, a vampire. People weren’t supposed to be able to pull crap like this on me. By the time I turned the newly bathed Bertha onto my driveway, I’d gripped the steering wheel so tightly I’d warped it. Big Bertha now aimed slightly to the right no matter how I steered.

That was kind of an improvement.

I couldn’t burn Walter’s festering grab bag of personal effects. It seemed mean and petty, especially when you considered his fiery end. I decided to give the box to Dick. He was the only person I knew who had some sort of history with Walter and the only person I could think of who could unload so many Knight Rider DVDs.

I made absolutely no effort to look nice. Plain white T-shirt, fat jeans, no makeup. I was planning to go to one of Zeb’s FFOTU meetings afterward, so I wanted to stand out as little as possible, anyway.

I knocked tentatively on the door, half hoping he wouldn’t be home. I wasn’t in the mood for dirty charades. The door swung open, and out stepped a familiar, barely dressed blonde.

“Missy! Wow, you’re mostly naked,” I exclaimed.

“Hi, shug!” she said cheerfully. You’d think that someone with a “public sales persona” like Missy would be embarrassed to be caught in a position like this. But she soldiered through the situation as if she weren’t just wearing an old Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt and a smile.

“Hi. So, I guess the other night on the phone, when you mentioned you knew Dick, you meant that you knew Dick. Wow. Awkward.”

“Jane?” Dick came up behind Missy, barefoot and buttoning ragged Levi’s. He looked mildly embarrassed but not embarrassed enough to go put on a shirt. I just stared, unsure of what to say or where to look.

“Hi,” I said, settling for a long glance at the pull-tab wind chime dangling from Dick’s porch light. I intentionally hoisted a mental brick wall between my brain/ senses and whatever was going on in Dick’s and Missy’s heads. I did not need those visuals haunting me for the rest of my immortal life.

“What brings you over, Jane?” Missy cooed, smooching Dick’s neck. “Do I have competition for my sweet Dickie?”

“No!” I said, too emphatically. Dick was too occupied by Missy’s full-on oral assault to look offended.

I tried to hand the box over, but Missy wound herself around Dick like a strangling vine. A strangling vine with a butt you could bounce a quarter off. “I just wanted to drop this off for you. It’s Walter’s stuff—”

“Oh, honey, I heard about that awful mess,” Missy said, pulling herself away from nipping Dick’s Adam’s apple. “You just let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

Pulling her tongue out of Dick’s ear would have been a nice start.

“Don’t you have a meeting to go to, baby?” he asked, untangling himself.

“Why, yes, the Undead Realtors Association is meeting tonight. I’m the chapter president,” Missy told me. She laughed, tweaking Dick’s nipple. “Wait, are you trying to get rid of me so you can get to your next appointment? You’d better watch yourself, Jane, we may have a little catfight over my Dickie.”

Missy laughed and disappeared into the trailer. Dick caught my apparently horrified expression and said, “She’s just messing with you. We’re not dating or anything. It’s not even what you would call a relationship. We’re just…” He looked away, avoiding eye contact. “You know, sometimes you just need a lukewarm body.”

“And there’s the Dick I know and…barely tolerate,” I said, as Missy opened the door. She was wearing another slick pink dress suit and fluffing her blond curls back into their “Junior League gone slightly slutty” style.

“Well, I’m off, shug,” she said, then leaned in for another tongue bath. She winked at me. “Jane, don’t forget. Monday. Mojitos at my place. You promised you’d try. Y’all be good now.”

Did I use the word “promise”?

“I should be going, too,” I said, as Missy slid into her sporty little car. “I hope you find some use for that stuff.”

He smiled, opening the door to show me his rumpled fold-out couch. “You know, you could stick around—”

“Again, I’m going to have to ask you not to finish that sentence.”

“What’s the matter, Stretch? We could have a lot of fun, you and me.” Dick leaned in far too close and made preliminary moves to kiss me. I leaned out of it until I was bent back at a spine-breaking angle. Spicy man treat though he may be, Dick was not boyfriend material. He was just barely respectable acquaintance material.

“Dick,” I said, “I’m really flattered, but I’m not going to let you use me to piss off Gabriel.”

“But I do want you. I want to hear you whisper, pant, scream my name. I want to know what kind of panties an out-of-work librarian wears,” he said, grinning lazily. “Pissing off Gabriel would be an added side bonus.”

I laughed, hoping it would cover up the involuntary shivers Dick was giving me. I hadn’t lived a sheltered life where attractive men didn’t say that sort of thing to me, but I hadn’t had sex in three years. Do the math. “You two have no idea how alike you are. Dick, I like you. But don’t make me choose between being friends with you and doing whatever the hell I’m doing with Gabriel. My choice wouldn’t make you happy.”

Instead of taking my rejection at face value, Dick smirked. “You like me?”

“You’re mildly amusing and remotely charming, when you’re not giving me the full-on Pat O’Brien routine.” I sighed, rolling my eyes. “Plus, you’re one of the few people who actually tell me what they’re thinking, even when I don’t want to know. I appreciate that.”

“And you want to be friends?” he asked, scratching his head. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been friends with someone with breasts, particularly breasts like yours. Can I still make inappropriate remarks about you and your person?”

Suddenly self-conscious, I crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t think I could stop you if I tried.”

The Friends and Family of the Undead met at the Traveler’s Bowl, a restaurant featuring healthy cuisine. It was known locally as “that place where they sell hippie food.” Zeb said the FFOTU meetings were the only thing keeping the restaurant going, besides the “glass sculptures” they sold at the gift shop. (I hadn’t spent a lot of time in head shops, but I recognized a bong when I saw one.)

I bought a large mineral water and some hummus, even though I wouldn’t be able to eat it. Most chick-pea consumption is based on misplaced politeness. But I wanted to do my part for the proprietors, a nice-looking artsy couple who had sunk their life savings into overestimating Half-Moon Hollow’s palate. It was hard to get local residents to eat anything involving wheatgrass, sprouts, or lentils. If you mashed all those things together into balls and deep-fried them, you might have something going.

The FFOTU, which, given the surroundings, I kept calling TOFU, consisted of twenty or so people of all races, ages, and socioeconomic classes. They were individuals who never would have spoken in “real life” but seemed to share a strong bond within the walls of the Traveler’s Bowl. There was Carol, a cook at the Coffee Spot, whose brother, Junior, had been turned by an angry ex-girlfriend. The family had no idea what had happened until Junior flipped out in the middle of a Sunday dinner and tried to bite their uncle. Daisy’s banker husband turned in the midst of a midlife crisis. Instead of buying a sports car and nailing his receptionist to avoid thinking about death, Daisy’s husband chose to stop the aging the process altogether. Daisy was pretty angry at first, but now she was confused about whether she should let him turn her, too. She felt pressured to make a decision soon, as she aged a little every day, but he was forever forty-seven. George’s daughter was turned on a bad date, and now she refused to speak to anyone in the family. He couldn’t understand why she just cut off contact with them. He and his wife were left mourning someone they still occasionally saw at Wal-Mart.

Each of them hurt. Each of them offered understanding and sympathy to the other members. Each tried to keep a sense of humor. Carol pointed out that had she been thinking clearly, she would have aimed her brother’s fangs at her aunt Cecile, whom no one liked.

Every meeting started with the Pledge, a collection of five truths the group promised to remember:

“I will remember that a newly turned vampire is the same person with new needs.

“I will remember that a loved one’s being turned into a vampire does not reflect on me.

“I will remember to offer my vampire loved ones acceptance and love, while maintaining healthy boundaries.

“I will remember that vampirism is not contagious unless blood is exchanged.

“I will remember that I am not alone.”

Seeing my vampirism from my parents’ or even from Zeb’s perspective was sobering. A loved one had died, but there was no funeral, no chance to grieve, no chance to adjust to their complete change in lifestyle. Plus, there was the embarrassment of telling friends and family that your son/sister/friend had become “infected” with vampirism. And worrying that the new vampire would go all evil and hurt you, as in the case of Carol’s brother. It all convinced me that I was not ready to come out to my parents yet, if for nothing else than to spare them those feelings as long as possible.

Fine, it was a rationalization, but that didn’t make it any less binding.

I didn’t know if anyone in the group could tell I was a vampire. No one asked, which I found refreshing. I was the only one in the room that night, but Zeb said they had a few local vamps who attended off and on. Based on the group’s commitment to confidentiality, he refused to tell me who they were.

After discussing changes in vampire legislation, the members traded stories and tips. For instance, I learned about a company in Colorado that made SPF 500 window tinting for cars, allowing vampires to drive in full sunlight. Carol announced that she’d come up with several recipes to help make vampires feel more welcome at family meals. Even as a vampire, I had to say that Plasma Pop Jell-O Molds sounded gross. Eventually, the group broke up to socialize, which was obviously their favorite part of the meeting.

With Zeb distracted by a funny story from Carol involving her brother, a silver platter, and a confused pawn broker, Zeb’s new girlfriend bounded up to me and almost knocked me flat. Jolene was just as I had pictured her in my visions, gorgeous in an exotic way that added up to strike one against me liking her. A perfectly oval face with high cheekbones and a lush pink mouth that tilted at the corners. Extremely long, even white teeth that glinted in the low light of the restaurant. Wild curls that shifted from auburn to fiery red to strawberry blond depending on how she tilted her magnificent head. Longlidded emerald eyes fringed with sable lashes. There was something not quite right, a fierceness to the features that unsettled as much as it staggered. I imagined that males of any species would be willing to overlook that.