Bride(45)

I frown. “Me?”

“She asked specifically for Miresy.”

“Is she aware that I don’t eat?”

Lowe folds his arms on his chest. “You do, in fact—”

“Shhhh.” I gesture frantically at him to shut his yapping mouth and turn to Mick. “I’m coming. We’re coming. Let’s go!” Lowe’s smirk can only be described as evil.

Ana is delighted to see me. She runs to me, a blur of sparkly pink cotton and unicorn ears, and wraps her little arms around my waist.

“We don’t always have to hug,” I tell her.

She squeezes harder.

I sigh. “Fine. Sure.”

It’s been nearly a week since the full moon, and the cumulative time I’ve spent with my husband since then wouldn’t be enough to bring a kettle to boil. But Juno came to visit one night and brought a deck of cards, and came back two nights later and brought a movie and Gemma and Flor and Arden, and both evenings felt similar: odd, but fun. I’m with Alex all the time, and Cal’s daughter Misha asked to meet me to see “a real-life leech,” and a couple other seconds stopped by because they were in the area, just to introduce themselves, and . . .

It’s unexpected, especially after my rocky start. I should be a pariah, I am one, but I don’t think I fit in this place anymore poorly than I did among the Humans, or the Vampyres. In the past seven days, I’ve had more social interactions than ever before. No: more positive social interactions than ever before. The Weres are being surprisingly amicable, even though they know I’m a Vampyre. And I’m being surprisingly relaxed with them, perhaps because they know I am a Vampyre. It’s a new experience, being treated as what I am.

And now I’m sitting at a table with Lowe, Mick, and Alex, while Sparkles watches us from the windowsill and Ana serves goldfish crackers, heavily implying they are seafood. I hear their heartbeats mix together like an out of tune symphony, and the stray thought hits me that Lowe is my husband, and Ana is my sister-in-law. Technically, I’m having the first family dinner of my life. Like those human sitcoms, the ones with twenty minutes of banter about snap peas that only sounds funny because of the laugh track.

I let out a befuddled snort and everyone turns to me curiously. “Sorry. Carry on, please.”

I’m proud of the way I cut my meatloaf and move the crackers around the plate to mimic a half-eaten meal. But I’m not very good at using cutlery, and the context—a meal, shared—is as foreign to me as crocodile wrestling. Ana, of course, notices.

“Why is she acting like that?” she whispers theatrically from the head of the table, pointing at my ramrod straight spine, the way I lift and lower my fork like an animatronic puppet.

“She’s just not very good at this. Be kind,” Lowe murmurs back from next to me.

Ana nods owl-eyed, and moves the conversation to the important matter of whether she’ll get a new pair of roller skates before her birthday, what color they might be, will they have glitter, and, more important, will Juno take her to the rink to practice. I get to observe Lowe when he’s relaxed. He pretends not to know what roller skates are to irk Ana just a little bit, or that her birthday is coming up to irk her a whole lot. When he’s not leading a pack against a group of violent dissidents, he smiles quite a bit. There is something soothing about his teasing humor and his innate self-confidence.

“When is your birthday?” Ana asks me, after Mick reveals an unexpected expertise in astrology and informs Ana that she’s a Virgo. Alex is an Aquarius—a fact that, like everything else under the sun, violently alarms him.

“I don’t have one,” I tell her, still reeling from the mental image of middle-aged, rugged Mick perching rimmed glasses on his nose and settling in bed with a copy of The Zodiac for Dummies. “My mate used to dabble,” he whispers at me, picking up on my befuddlement.

Peas sputter out of Ana’s mouth. “How can you not have a birthday?”

“I don’t know what day I was born.” I could find out from council records, since it was the day Mother died. I doubt Father would know. “It might have been spring?”

“How do you keep track of your age?” Alex asks.

“I count one up on Vampyre New Year’s Day.”

“And you have a party?”

I shake my head at Ana. “We don’t do parties.”

“No . . . gatherings? Soirees? Board game nights? Communal blood drinking?” Alex is shocked. Maybe relieved. I wonder what stories he was told as a child when he resisted cleaning his bedroom.

“We don’t commune. We don’t meet in large groups, unless it’s to set up war strategies, or business strategies, or other kinds of strategies. Our social life is all strategizing.” For the next Father’s Day, I should get him a mug that says All I care about is machinating and like, three people. Except we don’t celebrate Father’s Day, either. “But if we did have communal blood drinking, we’d feast on promising young computer engineers,” I add, and then smack my lips as though I’m thinking of a scrumptious meal, just to watch Alex pale.

“Regarding blood,” Mick warns while Ana spills several gallons of water on the table under the guise of pouring us “cocktails,” “Misery, the blood bank messaged us that this week’s delivery will be delayed a couple of days.”