Nice Girls Don't Bite Their Neighbors Read Online Free PDF Page A

that we should wait for the Council. We sent Andrea away just after we carried Jamie inside the store. We asked her to drive the delivery truck back to the dairy, then run home. It wasn’t that we were worried about Andrea’s control. After being a blood surrogate for years, live feeding—particularly on mortally injured minors—didn’t hold much attraction for her. But seeing Jamie go through the process brought up bad memories for Andrea, whose turning by Dick’s psychotic descendant had been nonconsensual and painful. She wouldn’t talk about it. She was so happy to wake up alive with Dick that she didn’t make much of it when she was first turned. But privately, Dick told me that she had nightmares about Emery turning her. She dreamed of pain and blood and dark shadows crushing the breath from her. And I wanted to dig up Emery’s ashes so I could kill his creepy, milquetoast ass all over again.
    Jamie’s face was peaceful in death. He looked so young, untroubled. But when he woke, his life would be unrecognizable. He would be angry, confused. I wasn’t stupid enough to think that this was my fault. I hadn’t made that driver careen down an alleyway and smash into Jamie. And he’d asked me to turn him. But I’d hit a sort of stalemate in life when I’d been turned. I’d been an unmarried, unattached, unsatisfied (recently fired) workaholic.
    Jamie still had potential. His was a life that was worth living. He could have grown up, gone to school, gotten a normal job, made some sweet local girl ridiculously happy when he proposed. He could have had babies and gotten into drunken brawls with the other church-league softball players on Sundays. And now he would be frozen forever at seventeen. He would be carded for the rest of his unnaturally long life.
    I thought of Jamie’s parents, at home, completely unaware that their son’s existence had been permanently altered. My parents had celebrated New Year’s Eve with the Laniers as long as I could remember. They played cards and ate Chex Mix to the point of garlic overdose while the dads drank toddies that were way too strong. I was usually watching Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve in the den with Jamie and his sister.
    They were all going to hate me when they found out what I’d done.
    I heard the cowbell tinkle over the front door. Ophelia Lambert, the scary forever-adolescent head of the local panel for the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead, swept into the shop, followed by her panel of ancient flunkies. Ophelia, who had a penchant for themed outfits bordering on jailbait gear, was wearing a lavender poodle skirt with a matching cardigan tied primly around her shoulders.
    Ophelia had overseen my prosecution for several random killings and fires the first year I was turned, and she scared the hell out of me—despite the fact that she had found me innocent and chosen not to put meto death. But Ophelia seemed to find my wacky antics entertaining and took a particular interest anytime I ran afoul of the Council’s policies.
    I managed to focus long enough to register the rest of the panel lining up in an intimidating semicircle around me. There was cool blond Sophie, whose unlined, luminescent face was as unsettling as it was beautiful; the improbably named Waco Marchand, whom one might recognize from the Confederate memorial statue in downtown Half-Moon Hollow; and finally, gaunt and grumpy Peter Crown, who had never liked me . . . or anyone, as far as I could tell.
    I stayed quiet, with my hands in my lap. Dick had taken his place at my right, his hand on my shoulder.
    “No protests of innocence?” Ophelia asked, frowning at the battered, bloodied teen in my lap. I shook my head. “Very well. Explain yourself.”
    I sniffed. “This is Jamie Lanier. He’s a local kid. He was doing his dairy deliveries, and . . . he came around the truck, and he didn’t see—The car didn’t even slow down . . .”
    Seeing that I wasn’t