“Ohhhh, how’s my buddy? How’s my Fitz? Did you miss me?” Cooing like an idiot, I rolled him over and scratched his belly.

Fitz was the apparent result of a one-night stand between a Great Dane and a loofah. His coat was the color of that stuff that grows in your shower. He was so big that his paws rested on my shoulders when he stood on his hind legs. Loose folds of skin hung over his eyes, so he viewed most of the world with his head tipped back. Fitz ’s one claim to distinction is that I named him after Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy from Pride and Prejudice.

I have Jane Austen issues.

“I’m so, so sorry I went away without telling you, but I’ll make it up to you, I promise,” I said, scrubbing behind his ears. His eyes lolled back as he leaned into the scratch, which meant I was forgiven.

It was then that Zeb, my best friend, the fric to my frac, the Shaggy to my Velma, fumbled through his screen door, swaying under the weight of dozens of crucifixes. “Back!” he shouted. “Back!”

Fitz and I both cocked our heads as I marveled at the sheer number of chains around Zeb’s skinny neck. Gold plate, silver, rhinestone, Day-Glo orange plastic. Zeb advanced on me, holding an old rosewood cross his grandma McBride used to keep nailed to her wall. “Back, demon! Out of my sight!”

“Oh, for goodness sake.” I rolled my eyes.

Nonplussed, Zeb shook the cross like a shoddy flashlight and waved it at me again. “The power of Christ compels you!”

“Interesting tactics from the guy who hasn’t set foot in a church in fifteen yea—uggh!”

It was embarrassing to be stabbed, especially when one considered my new catlike reflexes. I can only say that I didn ’t expect it. Zeb passed out when we dissected frogs in junior high. He won one fight in high school, and that was because Steve McGee tripped and fell onto Zeb’s fist. But still, there I was, mocking Zeb’s overaccessorizing one minute, and the next, the orange plastic hilt of his carving knife was protruding from my gut.

“Ow! It has to be wood, you doorknob. And it has to be in the heart!” I yelled.

My experience with stab wounds was limited, but it was certainly different from being shot. This was a cold sensation, the flimsy steel embedded in my flesh like a splinter. The wound itched as I wiggled the blade out of my stomach, back and forth, a loose wound that annoyed more than pained.

I hissed as I pulled it free, glaring at a thunderstruck Zeb. We watched as my skin knit itself back together, the tendrils of muscle and skin tissue reaching out to restore itself. I smacked Zeb’s shoulder.

“Dumbass!” I cried, tossing the knife away.

“I’m—I’m sorry,” he sputtered. The shock of what he’d done had apparently broken the violent vigilante spell. “I just panicked.”

Fitz loped after the knife to retrieve it. Fascinated, we stared as my idiot dog managed to drag the knife back by its plastic handle and drop it at our feet. Zeb grabbed it and rammed it into my thigh.

“Ow!” I yelped, shoving him hard enough for the weight of the crosses to tip him onto his back. “If you stab me one more time, I’m going to kill you. Not funny ha-ha kill you, literally suck the life out of you. And giving me the chair will obviously do the state no good.”

I pulled the knife out again. Zeb sat up enough to watch the wound close again. My jaw dropped. “Zeb Lavelle, are you stabbing me just to watch me heal up?”

He looked defensive. “No!”

“I’m so going to bite you.” I tossed the knife up onto Zeb’s roof and glared at the cross-a-palooza. “Would you take those stupid things off?”

“So, you are afraid of the crosses?” he said, holding a neon orange plastic monstrosity up in a protective gesture.

“No, I’m afraid of people who look like Mr. T.” I shook my head. “Is there a gumball machine in town left intact?”

“Well, I remembered enough of last night to know I might need some insurance, ” he said, taking off the necklaces but keeping the rosewood cross in his lap.

I plopped down next to him, wondering what to say next. Does Hallmark make a “Sorry I tried to drink your blood and touched you in a vaguely inappropriate manner” card? I settled for “How much do you remember?”

“It’s pretty foggy. I remember you having big front teeth and being really strong, me offering to buy you pizza, and then for some reason, me scoring the winning touchdown in a pickup football with the guys, followed by a round of beers at Eddie Mac ’s.

And I’ve never been to Eddie Mac’s.”

“And you don’t have any guys,” I pointed out, glad that Gabriel had managed to wipe the least flattering portions of the evening.

“So, you’re a vampire,” said Zeb, always eager to fill verbal space.

I shrugged. “Yup. Is that going to be a problem for you?”

“I don’t know yet. I don’t know what you’re capable of, which is scary. The whole blood-drinking thing is weird,” he said, giving me his honesty face. I hated that face. It usually meant I was getting bad news or the truth. Sometimes they were one and the same, which sucked.

“I would never hurt you, Zeb. I was just kidding about sucking the life out of you, really,” I said. I didn’t reach out. I couldn’t stand the possibility that he would shy away from me. Instead, I countered with hurtful sarcasm. “Besides, my drinking blood’s not nearly as weird as that time I caught you shaving your legs.”

“I was curious!” he yelled. I burst out laughing. Being Zeb, he made his “I’m not responding in order to spare our friendship”

face, which was more agreeable. He said, “Besides, I did that once. You’re going to be drinking blood for the next thousand years or something. You’ll never die, never eat, never grow old, never have kids.”

“Thanks, I hadn’t thought of that one,” I muttered. Like so many elements of my new nature, the thought of never having children hadn’t occurred to me yet. It was still one of those things far off in Somedayland, after I got married and learned how crock pots worked. Now, children weren’t possible, which was yet another thing my mother could be pissed at me about.

“I was so scared for you, Janie,” he said. “You just disappeared. I thought you were in a car wreck, murdered, or, worse, that you’d finally taken Norman Hughes up on his offer to elope. So you were dead …or married to a guy born without sweat glands. And when I found out that you were dead but you weren’t, well, I didn’t know what to think. I mean, it’s kind of cool. I have a friend who’s got superpowers. But I feel left behind and, well, terrified.”

“It’s still me, just different,” I said lamely.

“How did it happen?” he asked. “Most of the people you read about being turned meet vamps in clubs or over the Internet…Ew, did you…?”

“Yes, I met a vampire on the Internet, went to his evil love den, and let him turn me, because I ’m that brainless,” I huffed, slapping his shoulder. “Look, I don’t want to tell the whole long sordid story, OK? Someday, when I’m very drunk, I’ll tell you.

The bottom line is, I had no choice. It was either vampirism or lying dead in a ditch. Though over the last day or so, I ’ve been wondering whether I should have gone for door number two.”

“Aww, don’t say that,” Zeb said, tentatively wrapping his arm around me. “I’m glad you’re alive. Really, I am. I love you, Jane. Otherwise, I would have sold that ugly mutt to the carnival days ago.”

Fitz growled.

“He’s stupid, not deaf,” I reminded Zeb, who scratched Fitz into a forgiving mood.

“There has to be cool stuff, too,” he said. “From what I remember through the beer and fog, you’re strong. And you heal up pretty quickly. And being newly unemployed, that opens up a lot of new job opportunities for you. Crime fighter. Bulletproof-vest tester. Naomi Campbell’s personal assistant.”

“Funny.” I grimaced. Zeb was looking around, scanning the porch for something. “You want to stab me again, don’t you?”

He didn’t look at all ashamed. “Think of it as testing the limits of your new abilities.”

I groaned. “I’ve created a monster.”

“I don’t think someone who recently crawled from the grave should be throwing around labels like ‘monster,’” he said, making sarcastic little air-quotes fingers.

“It wasn’t a grave.” I sniffed. “It was a comfy four-poster.”

When we were kids, Mama used to ask, “If Zeb wanted to jump off the roof, would you do it, too?” And as it turned out, the answer was yes.

Before you start to judge, I had my reasons, including wanting to keep the one living person who knew about my new after-lifestyle happy. But I also wanted to see what I could do. Despite the assumption that all tall people are great at basketball, volleyball, and other net-related sports, I’ve never been a particularly athletic person. (See previous episode involving me falling facedown in a ditch.) So, testing my newfound ability to leap cow pastures in a single bound was intriguing. But I did feign reluctance right up until the point where I jumped off the second story of my house. Nothing happened. OK, I got a massive headache. But that was it.

The previous generations who had owned River Oaks refused to sell the now unused farmland surrounding the house, so my nearest neighbor was about five miles down the road and not likely to hear suspicious noises. This turned out to be a fortunate decision, as Zeb screamed like a girl when I hit the lawn headfirst.

As pretentious as it is to live in a house with its own name, River Oaks is just an old family home. Two stories, built in the semi-Colonial style out of gray fieldstone. It ’s more of an English country cottage than Tara, though a traditional Southern wraparound porch was added sometime in the early 1900s. There’s a library, a formal dining room, a formal parlor, a living room, a pantry big enough to store winter rations for a family of ten, and a solarium, which is a fancy way of saying sun porch. We do love our porches in the South.