won his lawsuit and got a respectable financial settlement, evening hours, and his fifteen minutes in the media spotlight. And an entire planet full of people flipped the hell out. Humans burned, staked, and dragged vampires out into the sun without giving the undead any chance to defend themselves or prove that they weren’t murderous monsters. And if the deaths could reasonably be explained away as accidents, the authorities took on a stubborn “see no evil, hear no evil, believe total bullshit” policy.
The World Council, an elected group of ancient vampires, realized the stubbornness trend wasn’t going away and came forward, asking the world’s governments to recognize them as nonmythical beings who should not be set on fire simply for existing.
After the United Nations officially condemned vampire hate crimes, the international vampire community eventually agreed that it was more convenient to live out in the open anyway. Bottled blood might have been less exciting, but it eliminated the need to dispose of bodies and explain away heavy-duty foil over their windows.
And in exchange for providing census information and agreements not to launch supernatural war against humanity, the Council was allowed to establish smaller regional offices in each state in every country. Selected local Council members were charged with supervising newer vampires to make sure they didn’t attract negative attention from the human community, presiding over squabbles within vampire circles, and investigating “accidents” that befell their constituents.
Unlike my classmates, whose mothers rushed to shut off the news when they felt the Coming Out reports got too scary, I was unsupervised and therefore glued to my TV screen. And honestly, as scary and sensationalist as some of those reports were, I didn’t have a problem with vampires. In my teen years, I followed the government-imposed curfews but only because I didn’t particularly want to be arrested. As an adult, after the curfews had been abolished, I didn’t let a potential encounter with the undead affect my schedule. I figured that if a vampire was going to make a snack of me, he or she would have done it already. I doubted they would have waited until they were living out in the open to chow down on my neck. So I didn’t let it bother me. I was a woman. I was already hyperalert while walking around in dark environments.
And really, I hadn’t run into that many vampires over the course of my lifetime. They didn’t frequent trailer parks or PTA meetings. Sure, I’d visited Specialty Books on a few occasions (because it was the only store in the Hollow that carried my favorite urban fantasy novels), but I’d only dealt with Jane’s manager, Andrea. It took me three visits before I realized that she wasn’t just a super-pale, incredibly attractive human woman. So really, I didn’t have moral quandaries about changing my life status.
But now it felt like I was having a small panic attack every few minutes. My fangs kept dropping at inopportune moments. I misjudged my strength and reduced a coffee mug to porcelain rubble when I tried to pick it up, and I was sure I would crush Danny’s skull just as easily if I hugged him.
What was I going to do when he was older? How strange and sad was it going to be when we were the same age? Or, worse yet, when he was physically older than me? I was going to outlive him, unless he decided he wanted to be turned. Oh, no, what would I do if Danny wanted to become a vampire?
I would ground him. Forever.
My future seemed more uncertain now than when I’d been diagnosed. And one evening, I had a particularly exhausting night, overslept, and didn’t wake up until ten P.M. , which, if Danny had been home, would have been well after his bedtime. This sparked a whole existential “What good am I?” shame spiral that made Dick none too subtly skulk out of the house to safer, less weepy pastures.
“What if I can’t do this?” I
Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child