The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires Read Online Free PDF Page A

phylum, but I chose not to. This was one area where my botany professors and I didn’t agree. I didn’t like calling plants by their Latin names. Yes, it was more appropriate in an academic setting, but it was so impersonal. Plants had personalities. Referring to happy, open sunflowers as “helianthus” was like calling them by the ugly middle names they only listed on their tax forms. If plants paid taxes, that is.
    Despite the use of a wide-brimmed straw hat, my skin was brown and slightly freckled from the hours I spent weeding, watering, and warding off pests. My hands were callused, and my nails were nonexistent. Some days, all I wanted to do was collapse on the couch after work rather than break out the aphid spray, but I could no more neglect my plants than I could leave Gigi “Appliance Killer” Scanlon to cook for herself. Like Gigi, they’d been left to me, and I took care of them.
    I caught Mr. Calix looking at the house over my shoulder as I helped him out of the van. The expression on his handsome face screamed “not impressed.” He cleared his throat and managed, “It’s …”
    I gave him an arch look. “Yes?”
    “Quaint. Very homey.”
    “Because it is a home, my family’s home,” I reminded him. “Which I am bringing you into.”
    “I understand,” he said, gritting his teeth a bit as wenegotiated the front steps. I wasn’t sure why he seemed so pained. I was pretty sure that I was bearing more of his weight than he was. And negotiating a locked front door while attempting to prop up a slumping vampire is quite the feat of concentration.
    Contrary to those talented storytellers’ theories, vampires can, in fact, enter your home without an invitation. In general, they don’t, because they consider it rude. There were a lot of little myths that the humans had to let go of once vampires came out of the coffin—crosses, holy water, guys with cute English accents who wandered around in long black coats being all adorably evil.
    Sigh . Oh, Spike.
    Believe it or not, this whole public vampirism thing was started by an out-of-control undead accountant. In 1999, a newly turned Milwaukee tax consultant named Arnie Frink requested evening hours so he could continue his job at the firm of Jacobi, Meyers, and Leptz. But the human-resources rep, as ignorant as the rest of the world about the existence of the undead at the time, insisted that Arnie keep banker’s hours because of security concerns. Because God forbid anyone should be able to use unsupervised night hours to make unlimited copies.
    Arnie countered with a diagnosis of porphyria, a painful allergy to sunlight, but the evil HR rep could not be moved. So Arnie responded just like any typical wronged American.
    He sued the absolute hell out of them.
    When the allergy-discrimination argument failed to impress a judge, a sunblock-slathered Arnie lost hiscomposure in court and declared that he was a vampire, with a medical condition that rendered him unable to work during the day, thereby making him subject to the Americans with Disabilities Act.
    After several lengthy appeals, Arnie won his lawsuit and got a settlement, evening hours, and an interview with Barbara Walters. While initially furious that some schmuck accountant from Milwaukee had destroyed millenniums’ worth of undead mystique, the international vampire community eventually agreed that it was more convenient to live out in the open, anyway. Blood was easier to get when you could just ask someone for it.
    An elected contingent of ancient vampires officially notified the United Nations of their presence and asked the world’s governments to recognize them as legitimate beings. They also asked for special leniency in certain medical, legal, and tax issues that were sure to come up. Apparently, organized financial records are beneath vampires’ notice.
    The first year or so was a pretty dark chapter in human history. When the media did anniversary reports on the Great Coming