“Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought you guys couldn’t eat human food.”

“We don’t. But Andrea and I have been experimenting for years with all those fancy coffees that folks can’t seem to live without, trying to find ways to make them more palatable for vampires.”

“Interesting!” I exclaimed. “Would you mind if I asked you about your techniques?”

“Tess is a chef,” Jolene said proudly. “In one of those big-city restaurants where the paparazzi lie in wait for celebrities.”

“Jolene made friends with a chef, color me shocked,” Andrea said, smirking and shaking her head.

Again with the cracks about Jolene’s eating? Had Jolene recently lost a bunch of weight? She’d eaten a pretty hefty lunch at the Three Little Pigs, so she wasn’t dieting. Either way, it was sort of shitty for her friend to poke fun at her.

I was about to jump to her defense when Jane piped up in a desperate tone, “So, Tess, I’m always interested in how people ended up in their professions. Why did you start cooking?”

“I’m good at it,” I said, shrugging.

Jane didn’t seem satisfied with this and leaned a bit closer, staring into my eyes as if there were secret messages written on my corneas. “But you didn’t know that until you started. And that’s what I was asking, how did you start cooking?”

A bit rattled by Jane’s gaze and feeling very much like a lobster over a pot of boiling water, I blurted out, “Cooking made sense, even when I was a kid. You put eggs, milk, and cinnamon on bread, you got French toast. As long as I followed the rules, I knew what the outcome would be. It was one of the few areas of my life that was predictable. And most of the time, if my parents were eating something I made, their mouths were too full to bicker. It was quite the incentive.”

My mouth snapped shut like a steel trap. I stirred my cappuccino, shocked that I’d said so much. I rarely talked about my parents, even with Chef. Hell, in those two sessions of therapy I’d attended, I hadn’t said more than, “My parents were well-intentioned but selfish people who would probably be making each other—and me by extension—miserable today if they hadn’t died.”

“Do you mind if I ask why you’re so curious about vampires?” Jane asked, sensing somehow that I needed a change in topics. “Jolene said you would probably have some questions for us.”

I cleared my throat, commanding my brain to produce more polite conversation. “Oh, I live with one. Not quite voluntarily.”

“Anyone we know?” Andrea asked.

“Sam Clemson,” I said.

Andrea and Jane both tilted their heads and gave me the “aw” face. “Poor Sam.” Jane sighed.

“Why ‘poor Sam’?” I asked. “I mean, other than he’s married to a ring-tailed bitch.”

Silence. My comment was met with complete, stone-faced silence. I bit my lip, afraid that I’d offended my new acquaintances. But then Jane burst out laughing and exclaimed, “Thank you!” while Andrea rolled her eyes.

Andrea said, “Lindy’s not that bad.”

“She tricked Tess into renting her house without telling her Sam was sleeping in the basement,” Jolene informed her.

“Oh, then she’s an evil she-beast,” Andrea conceded. I chuckled, and she shrugged. “My opinions are very adaptable. They have to be when you’re married to a vampire named Dick Cheney.”

Jane’s T-shirt made much more sense now.

“I actually meant ‘poor Sam,’ as in he was one of the vampires we were talking about, the ones who don’t get a choice about whether they were turned or not,” Jane said. “You know Sam was a contractor, right?”

I shook my head. “Actually, I don’t know anything beyond Sam’s the cranky guy who lives in my basement.”

“Sam was pretty well known around here for being a trustworthy guy,” Jolene said. “He did quality work at a fair price, and you didn’t have to worry about him raiding your jewelry box while you were out. We hired him to finish up our house after some, uh, other companies failed to do the work they’d been paid for.”

Jane smirked but didn’t elaborate. “Sam and Lindy moved here about six months before Sam took a job for an old-school vampire who’d just moved into the area. The vampire—his name was Hans something—asked for a light-proof sleeping compartment to be added to his bedroom closet. When Sam finished it, the vampire decided he didn’t want a human knowing where his evil lair was and drained him.”

“I thought it was illegal to forcibly turn a human.”

“Technically, he didn’t turn him. Hans just drained him until it would be impossible for Sam to survive and dumped him in the woods behind his house to let nature take its course. Fortunately, Hans was already under surveillance for some suspicious feeding activity over in Murphy. When the head of the local Council, Ophelia, saw him tossing Sam’s body, she stepped in and had one of her Council goons turn him. Ophelia would do just about anything to avoid scandal for the vampire community. Draining innocent human temp workers would qualify as a PR disaster.”

“Of course, Lindy pitched a fit, told everybody in town that Sam had gone off the deep end, had an early midlife crisis, fooled around with some vamp-tramp, and got himself ‘infected,’” Jolene said. “Oh, and because of the physical trauma he’d been through, it took Sam nearly five days to transform into a vampire, which is practically unheard of. The Council admitted that it was possible that Sam might not make it through the transformation to vampire, and Lindy managed to get some judge to declare him too dead and/or incompetent to handle his own affairs, which was a legal first. There was no will, and Lindy got everything. She controls every bit of their money until the divorce goes through. Sam gets an allowance for his blood and utilities.”

I mulled that over for a moment. Part of me felt sort of bad for him, in love with a woman who couldn’t see him as the same person she’d married, just because his diet and waking hours had changed. And then I remembered the previous Tuesday, when he’d hidden every product I had that contained caffeine—after keeping me up until 3:00 A.M. with the melodious screams of a jigsaw. My sympathy was short-lived.

“Honestly, I think he just hasn’t adjusted to unlife yet,” she said. “Sam seems like a do-it-yourself kind of guy. And those first few months as a vampire, all you need is help. You feel like you’re losing your connection to the human world and your place in it. You need someone to help you figure out your new schedule, how to feed without hurting your human donor, to vampire-proof your house. Sam went through all that alone.”

A strange, hot sensation twisted in my belly. What if Sam felt like that? What if he was lost and alone? Here I was making life that much more difficult for him, taking away from what little time he had left in his own home. I felt something shift inside me, a little spark of empathy I’d been missing for a while.

I jumped to my feet, nearly knocking over the little café table and our coffees. “I’ve got to go.”

“What? Why?” Jolene’s surprised expression morphed into wary resignation. “What did you do?”

I cringed, thinking of the various traps I’d left around the house for Sam. Suddenly, Jane burst out laughing and clapped her hand over her mouth.

My own jaw dropped. Could Jane read my mind?

Jane winked at me and nodded.

I would worry about that later.

I dug my keys out of my bag. “Someone may have sprayed down the basement steps with high-viscosity cooking spray, making them superslick.”

Jolene sighed as Jane struggled to cover her snickers with her hand. “Tess.”

I held my hands, defenseless. “No, I said someone.”

“Don’t you think you’ve taken this prank thang a little too far?” she asked. “I mean, some of these tricks are sort of stupid and juvenile, not to mention sort of mean.”

I dashed toward the door. “This was really the least stupid or juvenile idea I had. You should have seen what I had planned with a can of Sterno and a jar of pineapple jelly.”

Jolene slapped her palm over her face as I opened the door. Over the tinkle of the little cowbell above the door frame, I heard Jane say, “I really like her.”

—

After driving across town in record time, I dashed into the house just as Sam opened the microwave. The house was still standing, which was a good sign. Sam was in the kitchen, apparently uninjured, also a good sign. What was not good was that he was making his dinner, tossing a warmed bag back and forth between his hands to settle the red cells.

“Look, I’ve had a bad night at work, and I really don’t want to deal with you right now.” He sighed, his shoulders sagging underneath his faded John Deere T-shirt.

Stalled midwarning, I raised an eyebrow. Work? Since when did Sam work? And where? Was that where he was all those nights when the construction noises didn’t start until the wee hours? I thought he was slow-playing me, depriving me of sleep with the anticipation of torture. Had he been out on a job? This new perspective changed the way I’d looked at a lot of the stunts I’d chalked up to Sam’s mean temper. Maybe he was leaving the chores around the house half-finished because he didn’t have the time he needed, not because he wanted to the leave the house unlivable. Then again, that didn’t explain the Saran Wrap. Or the stove.

“Sam, you really don’t want to do that,” I cautioned as he reached toward the cabinet where we kept the coffee mugs. In my haste, I bumped into a saucepan I’d set on the stove. The handle came away in my hands, and the metal bowl clattered to the floor. I gasped in horror as the pieces of my dismantled darling came clattering to a standstill. I shot him a murderous look. He smirked at me, his dark eyes twinkling. I jerked open the drawer where I kept my pots and pans. Everything I touched came apart in my hands. Somehow Sam had managed to remove the rivets from my pans.