Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(75)

So when I had a golden opportunity for launching a big, fat, drama-filled scene, and ended up acting like an actual adult, perhaps you’ll appreciate just how important this was to me. But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

First, let me explain the drama that is my life—and this is just the background, broad strokes, you know, for I am epic, I tell you. I am a Goth, but mainly for the fashion, not the ’tude. I had an emotionally abusive father and a checked-out mom. My little brother turned out to be one step short of either the asylum or federal prison.

Oh, and my boyfriend is a sweet boy, a gifted rock guitarist, and he just happens to have an allergy to sunlight and crave plasma on a regular basis. However, in our hometown of Morganville, this is not really all that unusual, since about a third of the citizens are vamps. Yes, vampires. Really. So you see why my life was generally a nightmare from an early age—the monsters under the bed really existed, and the pressure on all of us growing up was to give in. Be a good Morganville conformist.

Give up our blood for the cause.

Not me. I had a pact with all my other rebel friends. We’d never, ever be part of that scene.

And I mentioned my boyfriend is a vampire, right? Yeah. There’s that.

Given all that, when I say that today was a crisis . . . well. Maybe you get the legendary scale of which I am speaking.

The saga started out a normal day—don’t they all? I mean, surely one morning back there in prehistoric times a dinosaur woke up, yawned, chewed some coffee beans, and thought his day was going to be dead boring, just before a comet slammed into his neighborhood. “Normal day” in my life means that I woke up late, yelled at my housemate Shane to get the hell out of my way as I dashed to the bathroom in my vintage dragon-embroidered silk robe, and spent forty-five minutes doing shampoo, body wash, conditioner, blow-dry, straightening, makeup, clothes, and listening to Shane bang on the door and complain about how he was going to go pee all over my bedroom floor if I insisted on living in the bathroom.

I blew him a mocking black-lipsticked kiss on the way out, checked the time, and winced. I was late for my job at Common Grounds, the best local coffee shop of the two in town. (I also worked at the second best, but on alternate days.) I didn’t mind dragging my ass in late to the University Center java store, but at Common Grounds, the boss was a little more of a leg-breaker—probably because he’d been making people show up on time since before the invention of the pocket watch.

I tried sneaking in the back door of Common Grounds, which seemed to work all right; I ditched my coffin purse in my locker, grabbed my long black apron, and tied it on before I went to grab a clipboard from the back. I took a hasty, not very thorough inventory, and toddled out to the front. . . .

. . . Where my boss, Oliver, fixed me with a long, cold glare that had probably been terrifying underlings for hundreds of years. Oliver = vampire, obviously, although he did a good job of putting on a human smile and seeming like Mr. Nice Hippie Dude when he thought it would get him something. He wasn’t bothering today, because the counter was slammed three deep with people desperate for their morning caff fix, and his other help, what’s-her-name, Jodi-with-an-i, hadn’t shown up yet. I held up my clipboard and put on my best innocent expression. “I was doing inventory,” I said. “We need more lids.”

He growled, and I could hear it even over the hissing brass monster of the espresso machine. “Get on the register,” he snapped, and I could tell he wasn’t buying the inventory excuse for a second. Well, it had been thin at best. I mouthed, Sorry, and hurried over to beam a smile at the next harassed person who wanted to fork over $4.50 for his mochachocalattefrappalicious, or whatever it was he’d ordered. We made things easy by charging one price for each size of drink. Funny how people never seemed to appreciate that time-saver. I worked fast, burning through the backlog of caffiends in record time, then moved to help Oliver build the drinks once the register was idle. He’d stopped growling, and from time to time actually gave me a nod of approval. This was, for Oliver, a little like arranging for a paid vacation and a dozen roses.

We’d gotten the morning rush out of the way, and were settling into the slow midmorning period, when a door in the back of the store opened, and a girl came strolling out. Now, that wasn’t so unusual—that door was the typical vampire entrance, for those who wanted to avoid the not-so-healthful effects of a stroll in the sun. But I’d never seen this particular vamp before. She was . . . interesting. Masses of curly blond hair that had that salon sheen you see in commercials, but which hardly exists in the wild; porcelain-pale skin (without the benefit of the rice powder I was using); big jade green eyes with spots of golden brown. She was wearing an Ed Hardy tee under a black leather jacket, all buckles and zippers. She looked pretty much like any other twentysomething in any town in the U.S., and maybe in a lot of the world. Shorter than most, maybe. She was five feet three, tops, but all kinds of curvy.

I took a cordial dislike to her, on principle, as she meandered her way toward the counter. Oliver, who’d been wiping down the bar, stopped in midmotion to watch her. That seemed to be a male thing, because I noticed pretty much the entire Y-chromosome population, including the table of gay boys, watching her, too. She didn’t seem that sexy to me, at least in an obvious kind of way, and she wasn’t vamping (no pun intended) it up . . . but she got attention, whether she was demanding it or not.