Free Nice Girls Don't Bite Their Neighbors by Molly Harper Page A

an entirely different finger, I wouldn’t subject Mama to whispers from the church ladies about how heartless her child was.
    For once in my life, I was going to get through a situation with a little dignity. OK, I probably wasn’t, but I would fake it as if my life depended on it.
    I hung up the phone, and for the first time in my life, human or undead, my first instinct was to pick the receiver right back up and call my sister.
    Weird.
    Gabriel climbed back into bed, burying his face in a pillow. Shell-shocked, I leaned against the headboard. “My grandma died.”
    Gabriel raised his head, his brow crinkled. “But I thought you said meanness was a preservative.”
    “Clearly, I was wrong,” I sighed as he twined his fingers through mine. “I’m OK. Really. I’m a little sad that she died with things so bitter between the two of us, but I’m also smart enough to recognize that was never going to change unless I magically transformed myself into the person she wanted me to be. I didn’t owe her that just because she happened to be related to me. But I do owe it to my mother and my sister to help them through whatever mourning process they’re going to go through.”
    Gabriel put his arm around my shoulder and tucked my head under his chin. “What do you need from me?”
    “I need you to be well rested, so when this all comes crashing down on my head, I have a safety net,” I said, nuzzling his neck.
    “Excellent. I can do that,” he said, closing his eyes and seeming to doze off in a sitting position.
    I listened for sounds of movement in the house but heard nothing. Apparently, the phone didn’t wake Jamie. Carefully unraveling myself from Gabriel’s grasp, I went downstairs and found that my childe had not risen for the evening, which wasn’t surprising. But the trail of empty synthetic blood bottles scattered from the kitchen to the stairs told me that at some point during the day, he’d managed to get out of bed and drink the last of our Faux Type O supply. I never heard of a newborn doing such a thing. I’d practically been comatose during my first few days as a vampire. But I supposed all bets wereoff when you were dealing with any food source and a teenage boy.
    “It would be wrong to kill my childe,” I muttered, sorting through the debris to try to find some semblance of food. I settled on a half-empty bottle of Sangre left over from a party a few weeks before, hidden at the back of the fridge. “It would be wrong to kill my childe.”
    My teen-o-cidal thoughts were interrupted by a knock on my door. I still had the bottle to my lips and was mid-swig when Jenny burst through the door and wailed, “Jane!”
    I nearly choked on the fancy dessert blood, reminding myself once again that giving Jenny a spare key to the house had been a gesture of good faith. Taking it back now would be a leap in the wrong direction. “Jen?”
    I’d never seen my prim, polished sister look so disheveled, and that includes the time we got into a mud-wrestling match at last year’s Chamber of Commerce Fall Festival. Her dark blond hair was scraped up into a limp little ponytail. Her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. And she was wearing a raspberry-colored track suit. I wasn’t even aware that Jenny owned a track suit.
    Jenny sniffled and threw her arms around me. Gabriel came downstairs and saw Jenny sobbing quietly into my neck. He lifted his eyebrows in amazement. I shrugged. When he moved back toward the steps, I mouthed, “Coward!” silently to him.
    “Jenny, calm down,” I said, awkwardly patting her back. “Let me make you some coffee.”
    “OK.” She whimpered soggily as she dropped into oneof the kitchen chairs. “I just couldn’t go by Mama’s house and worry her, so my first thought was that I should go to you.”
    “Really?”
    “I know, I was a little surprised, too,” she admitted as I set up the coffeemaker. “I mean, I know she wasn’t perfect. I know the two of you never really got