“Come on, shug, we have to get you out there. You’ve got to network!” She wheedled in her syrupy voice.

Considering that my social interactions with other vampires so far had amounted to a beating and a cranial route canal, I did my best to decline politely. “I really appreciate the invitation, but cocktail parties aren’t my thing, Missy. Also, I don’t have a job at the moment, so networking with me would probably be a waste of time.”

“Are you enjoying the gift basket?” Missy asked sweetly.

“Loved it. I’ve been meaning to write a thank you note,” I said, gritting my teeth at the rather obvious social strong-arming tactic. Missy was not so subtly reminding me that she’d done something nice for me, and here I was being rude, when all she was asking me to do was attend a nice party. This was the way Southern women worked—all peaches and cream laced with arsenic.

“Oh, honey, don’t worry about it. I know you haven’t had time,” she said. “The first few weeks are so hectic. Working out your feeding schedule, sleeping arrangements. I’m surprised you’re as together as you are.”

Grr.

“Are you suuuuure you couldn’t make it on Monday?” Missy asked. “It’s just a little party. I just want to see you make some new friends, that’s all.”

“I’ll think about it,” I promised.

“I’ll send you an e-vite. You’ll love it, shug. Byeeee!” She giggled before hanging up.

I looked down at Fitz, who was lying on his back, flipping his ears back and forth over his eyes. Not for the first time, I envied the simplicity of his life. “How exactly did she get my e-mail address?” I asked.

Andrea broke our contact embargo and called. Her council questioning was far friendlier than my own, by the way. Ophelia even paid for Andrea’s pancakes. When someone is a link in your food chain, you tend to be more polite to them. Sensing my boredom and distress, Andrea offered to brave the wrath of the council and bring over some dessert blood and her favorite girlie movie. But I had only sat through The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood once in my prevampire days. I considered it a sort of afterlife resolution never to suffer through that again. We settled for ice cream (for her) and Queen of the Damned (for me).

We’d gotten as far as the concert scene when one of Andrea ’s clients texted her. He’d been attacked by several quarrelsome “business associates” outside a Dairy Queen and needed an emergency transfusion. As she slid into her strappy black sandals and downed some iron supplements, Andrea admitted a stunted social life was an occupational hazard for blood surrogates.

And my excuse was what, exactly?

I made good use of my free time. I made a strong effort to read every page of the Guide for the Newly Undead, twice. I made arrangements with a company that sold and delivered synthetic blood in bulk, so I wouldn’t have to run out to Wal-Mart every week. I experimented with various fake-blood concoctions that would add some variety to my diet. There were a few bright spots, but it was generally a progression of entertaining and spectacular failures. Let ’s just say that tomato juice, Tabasco, and blood should not be mixed. Bleh.

I even looked up meditation exercises to try to find ways to focus my energy and harness my chi and all that stuff. All right, so I probably didn’t take it as seriously as I should have. But I found out I can stand on my head for extended periods of time.

I spent a lot of time with Aunt Jettie or dodging Aunt Jettie. Now that I was aware of her presence, she felt free to move objects at will and follow me anywhere in the house. Undead senses or not, I still got startled when someone suddenly appeared behind me in the shower. We had a long chat about boundaries and the ready availability of exorcism rites on the Internet.

On a more menacing note, it was very subtle, but a few times, I thought I felt someone watching the house. If I stayed still enough, I could sense someone standing at the edge of the woods, and the presence was downright jarring. But by the time I got to the backyard, whoever it was had vanished.

One night, I was reading, and I thought I saw a dark shape move outside my parlor window. I immediately reverted to frightened-single-woman instincts and ran for my phone. I had dialed nine and one when I realized, Hey, I have superpowers, and ran out the back door. The scent was faint, bitter, and somehow vegetable, like bad asparagus. This is going to sound crazy, but it smelled like greed. I filed that away under “Weird New Jane Thoughts” while I searched my garden for the covetous intruder. I followed the scent to the edge of the trees that lined my yard. Whoever was there was long gone. I had to start running faster. This was embarrassing.

I spent the rest of the night on the porch with an antique hunting rifle from Grandpa Early ’s collection, just hoping that whoever it was would show up again. Did I know how to shoot? No, but there was always the chance I could club the intruder with the rifle or maybe throw a bullet at him. Besides, it was much safer than letting Fitz run loose to patrol for trespassers. I couldn’t risk my mysterious visitor hurting him. Also, the last time I did that, I lost Fitz for about two weeks.

Zeb finally came by for a visit while I was installing my spanking-new security lights. He watched in awe as I deftly balanced on one foot on a wobbly ladder, handing me the wrong tools and cracking jokes about the probability of me electrocuting myself again. (His guess: 97 percent. He wanted to leave some room for the possibility of me falling off the ladder while electrocuting myself.) But he was very evasive and made vague excuses for not seeing me over the last few weeks. He didn ’t tell me about the new girl he was dating, and considering how long it had been since Zeb ’s last date, this was worth a mention…or possibly a billboard. I had to extract the information from his brain.

A startling development in my fabulous vampire powers was being able to put together mental pictures while Zeb was talking to me. The signal was patchy at best, like trying to watch scrambled pay-per-view. There was a tingly buzzing right behind my ear, then an image would spring into my mind. Zeb told me he spent Friday night reading the Bible to his grandma. I saw him at an Italian restaurant with an unbelievably pretty girl with sleek auburn hair and almond -shaped green eyes. She was laughing, actually laughing, at what Zeb was saying. And I could detect no drunkenness or mental defect on her part, so I could only assume she knew she was dating him. In my vision, he reached for her hand and knocked over a water glass. Then the picture faded out.

“So.” I sat on top of the ladder, crossed my arms, and gave him a smirk. “How is your grandma?”

“Fine.” Zeb sighed. “Driving my grandpa slowly insane gives her a reason to live. My mom, on the other hand, is focusing on driving me insane…which is not as fun.”

“Still wants to know when we’re getting married, huh?” I asked. Zeb made a miserable face. Ginger Lavelle had never quite shaken those images of Zeb and me playing house when we were little. OK, me forcing Zeb to play house when we were little. She convinced herself long ago that no matter how much we protested or dated other people, we would eventually see things her way and give her the daughter-in-law and grandbabies she’d always wanted.

“Actually, she’s decided she’s mad at you for not following her professional advice.”

“She gave me poufy bangs. I looked like a TV evangelist, ” I cried, hopping down from my perch and giving the newly installed lights a testing flick. Zeb winced at the sudden flood of light.

“Well, since you so coldly and callously tossed her aside as your personal cosmetologist, she has decided that you are not worthy of the Lavelle name, and I should instead marry Hannah Jo Butler. Hannah Jo gladly lets Mama give her perms that make her look like an electrocuted poodle.”

“Well, thank God you have someone to make these decisions for you,” I deadpanned as I sat down on a porch step.

“I begged God for a brother, a sister with a lazy eye, anything to distract her, but no. I had to be the only child to the heat -

seeking missile of motherhood. Hannah Jo keeps showing up at my house with pies, saying my mother sent her over. She’s been at Sunday dinner every weekend for the last two months. Mamaw is making a Christmas stocking with her name on it.”

“What happened to my stocking?” I demanded.

“She ripped your name tag off and is hot-gluing Hannah Jo’s on in its place,” Zeb admitted.

“Well, good luck to the both of you,” I grumbled.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call over the last couple of days. I lost my cell phone.”

I arched an eyebrow. “And you haven’t been able to find your land line, either?”

“Um, nope.” He laughed nervously. “I guess that means it’s time for spring cleaning.”

“It’s September, Zeb.”

Zeb looked down and to the left, a sure sign of lying, and another image came up. Zeb was walking this girl to the door of a neatly kept trailer. He obviously wanted to kiss her and leaned about twenty degrees in but hesitated and pulled back. So, the girl grabbed him and pressed him into a full-on lip-lock.

I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy. I do not have warm, squishy feelings for Zeb. But I am used to being the only woman under fifty in his life. Also, here were two young, vital people, starting what could be a bright future together. They could get married, have children, grow old together. I couldn’t do any of those things. I was wallowing in the depths of self-pity and general melancholy when the picture changed again. In the midst of his (fictitious) description of a Sunday spent hanging out with his parents, I saw Zeb trying to round to second base.

“Ew!” I yelled, vainly attempting to wipe the image through my forehead.

“It’s not that bad,” he insisted. “Better since my dad stopped drinking homemade persimmon wine.”

“No, you big liar, ew to the image of your over-the-sweater action!” I cried. “You were out with a girl this weekend. I saw the whole thing in my head.”

“You read my mind?” he exclaimed. “That’s just…well, it’s extremely cool. But I don’t think I’m comfortable with you knowing what’s going on inside my head.”