One
Maron
“It’s broccoli, not Hitler,” I said as my best friend stared at my plate like the broccoli had suddenly gotten up and done the rumba across the vinaigrette. She tended to do this every time we went to lunch together. I would normally think it was weird, but she had a good point.
I was a vampire.
I was also a vegan. For the most part. I was finding cheese a very difficult friend to break up with.
I know.
Ridiculous, right?
There’s a lot of vamp lore rolling around out there, but one thing most people didn’t know was that vampires didn’t drink blood until they turned thirteen. Before that our appetites were human. We ate the same things, craved the same things, and never turned down sweets. But when we hit that magical age, our bodies changed. And not in the let’s talk about babies kind of way, more of a hunger sort of way.
Except… it missed me. Somehow, someway, I’d escaped the whole changing bodies talk. I never began to crave blood. I never lost my mind when a human got too close.
For me, this was a relief.
For my parents? An absolute embarrassment.
A lot of parents had stories of chasing their kids down in a shopping center when they’d gone after a human who smelled too good not to bite. My parents had none of those stories. And when I turned fifteen, I started watching way too many documentaries about the world’s food supply and decided then and there… I would never eat meat again. Even if I could.
My mom had fainted dead out to the floor. My father stared at me with the most hurt and disappointed expression I’d ever seen. When the smelling salts were brought out for Mom, her first words when she woke up were, “We shall never speak of this again.”
I stopped eating at their house when I was a teenager because the only thing they served was meat, bloody rare of course, and goblets of O+ from my family’s personal cellars in Italy, shipped over in temperature controlled coolers on a ship with the world’s most elite bodyguards.
My family took blood seriously.
I didn’t take blood at all.
A sneer of disgust flickered over my friend’s pretty face, but I was used to it by now. She was a vampire, after all, and even though she loved me, even she couldn’t understand my aversion to blood.
She kept asking me if I was human. No. I was not. Though looking at me and knowing my aversion to the red stuff, you might think so. However, I had super speed, super strength, super hearing... all the super things other vampires had, I just didn’t have to drink blood to keep or maintain them.
If you thought about it, it was kind of cool. Blood was kinda hard to get out of clothing, and now I never had to worry about stray dribbles of O+ messing up my dress clothes.
Once I shoved a massive bit of lettuce and carrot in my mouth, my friend stopped staring at me. Cassidy shook her head, shoved her fork into a piece of meat so rare it was a wonder it didn’t moo, and speared me with a glance.
“So…” she began slyly.
I sighed because I knew where she was about to go, and it was a black hole I tried never to enter.
“No,” I said, more sharply than I intended to.
A flicker of hurt flashed over her face, but she soldiered on determinedly. “I know you don’t want to talk about it, but this town is due for some babies. What’s the hold-up?”
I rolled my eyes. “You haven’t been paying attention. Lots of new couples have gotten together lately, and at least one of them is knocked up.”
The Deadication Dating Agency had installed a running, digital announcement board above their headquarters a few weeks ago. It listed the matches they’d made over the last six months so all I read every time I passed by it was, “CONGRATULATIONS HELEN AND HANK!! CONGRATULATIONS KATIE AND MARTIN!! CONGRATULATIONS GRACE AND LUCAS ON UPCOMING NEW BABY!!”
I had no idea who any of those people were, though I had heard of the necromancer and the jinn. They were pretty powerful paranormals in this town, but they seemed to keep to themselves. Fine by me. I was the same way myself. Not that I’d had a lot of time to make friends. I was relatively new to Midnight Cove. My parents thought it best we left the spotlight of our old hometown after my failure to fully morph into a bloodthirsty creature of the night. Really what it was was that my parents were too embarrassed to be around their old friends once it became apparent I wasn’t quite like all the other kids.
I was amused by the fact that we made fun of humans for being overprotective helicopter parents, but when confronted by something as embarrassing as my failure to manifest into a proper vampire, they did the exact same thing. Even though they would burst into ash if they knew I was comparing them to humans, I couldn’t help it. At the heart of things, parenting was the same, no matter what species you were.
I guess I needed to clarify, though. When I said I was relatively new, I’d actually been here for over ten years. This is still considered “new” to the non-humans. We were immortal. Time ran differently for us than it did for others. So I wasn’t quite as familiar with the dating agency in this town as others were. What I did know about it could fill a thimble. The owner, Portia, was reclusive yet also super nosy, depending on who you asked. At any time she could show up and start shoving potential matches in your face whether you wanted her to or not. Her word was supposedly law, though I had heard rumors she’d had some pushback with a few of her most recent clients. Also, her track record was impeccable.
Not that anyone would be interested in me. Plus, I didn’t want word of my “affliction” getting around town. It was the last thing my parents needed. We’d finally come to some sort of shaky peace about it. The peace was kind of like a rickety bridge missing a whole lot of steps and with frayed rope holding it all together. But it was there, and as long as I didn’t bring it up, they didn’t bring it up. And we could go on pretending everything was fine.
