Jane Bites Back

“Hello, handsome,” said Lucy. Jasper licked her nose. “I think I’m in love,” Lucy said to Jane.

“It’s your fault he’s here,” Jane replied. “If you hadn’t insisted I go back for him—”

“If you hadn’t—you know—then you wouldn’t have had to go look for him,” Lucy interrupted.

Jane ignored her. “I wonder where my bags are,” she said, scanning the conveyor belt filled with arriving luggage.

“I already got them,” said Lucy. “See?” She pointed to two bags that had Jane’s name tags tied to the handles. “I noticed them in the unclaimed luggage area, and assumed they’d come on an earlier flight.”

Jane growled. “Those are the original bags I checked in on my way to Chicago,” she said angrily. “They must never have put them on the plane in the first place.”

Lucy laughed. “Well, now you have more clothes,” she said.

Jane left Lucy with the two bags and went in search of her other ones. She felt a sense of déjà vu as she watched the belt circling and all of the other bags were picked up. Once again she heard the grinding of gears as the belt stopped.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said to Lucy. “What did I do to anger the luggage gods?”

“Vampire slayer,” Lucy whispered.

“Stop that!” Jane insisted.

“Sorry,” said Lucy. “Let’s go get in line.”

Jane shook her head. “I’m calling it a wash,” she said, taking her two original bags in hand. “Besides, there was nothing in there I want.”

As they headed toward the exit, Lucy walking Jasper and rolling his kennel behind her, Lucy said thoughtfully, “Just think. Some baggage handler could be fingering Jane Austen’s panties right about now.”

“Keep it up,” Jane said, “and I will bite you.”

They made their way to the parking garage, where they loaded everything into Lucy’s car. Jasper, sitting in the back, whined until Lucy rolled down the window for him. He immediately stuck his head out.

“I wonder what it was like being Charlotte Brontë’s dog,” Lucy said as she pulled out.

“Can we not mention that name again?” Jane asked.

“You’re in a foul temper,” said Lucy. “What happened at that conference, anyway? Besides setting Char —”

“Byron is what happened,” Jane told her.

“Byron?”

“It’s a long story,” said Jane. “Suffice it to say we made up.”

Lucy looked at her, eyes wide. “You didn’t sleep with him?” she said.

“No!” Jane said. “We just had dinner. Then he walked me home. I hate to admit it, but he was a perfect gentleman. It makes me think he’s up to something.”

“But why was he there at all?” Lucy asked.

Jane told her the whole story.

“Penelope Wentz?” Lucy said when Jane was finished. “Her books are awful.”

Hearing it gave Jane some satisfaction, for which she immediately felt guilty. “She’s apparently very popular,” she said by way of apology to Byron.

“Sure she is,” Lucy said. “We sell a ton of her books. His books,” she corrected. “Haven’t you noticed?”

“I confess I don’t always pay attention to what people are buying,” said Jane. “And since you’ve been doing most of the ordering for the past year or so, I’m not entirely up on what people are reading. Frankly, I’m a little tired of the whole thing.”

“I never get tired of books,” Lucy said as they exited the airport and drove onto the Thruway. “Anyway, tell me more about Byron.”

“I feel sorry for him,” said Jane. “I know how that sounds, but you should have seen his face when he talked about his friend.”

“His friend?” said Lucy. “You sound like my mother when she talks about my brother’s boyfriend.”

“All right, his lover,” Jane said. “In my day we didn’t talk about it at all.”

“You also rode around in dogcarts,” Lucy reminded her. “But go on.”

“He was really in love with Ambrose,” said Jane. “To be honest, I never thought he was capable of it.”

“Sounds like Ambrose’s death killed something in him,” Lucy remarked.

“I think you’re right,” Jane agreed. She fell into silence, watching the dreary landscape of upstate New York pass by.

“It made you think about you and Walter, didn’t it?” Lucy said after a few minutes.

“Yes,” Jane admitted. “I wonder if I haven’t been foolish in that regard.”

“Maybe it’s time to take a chance,” said Lucy.

Jane sighed. She had been thinking the same thing. But still part of her was terribly afraid. After all, her change of heart didn’t change any of the realities of the situation. She was still a vampire, and Walter was still human. He was still going to age and die. While she could die at some point, she wouldn’t age, at least not in the same way. It was a situation destined to make one or both of them miserable.

“You know, my father died when he was thirty-two,” Lucy said.

Jane turned to her. “But I’ve met him,” she said. “When they visited last year.”

“Jim is my stepfather,” Lucy said. “I call him Dad, but he isn’t, at least not biologically. He and my mother have been married since I was eleven. My father died from brain cancer. It was horrible, especially for my mother.”

“I can’t even imagine,” Jane said.

“She loved him more than anything in the world,” Lucy continued. “When he died, she could have just fallen apart. But she didn’t. She held on to all of the good memories and threw the rest away.”

Jane understood what Lucy was getting at. Life never offered any guarantees. Anything could happen at any time, and people could be taken from one another without warning. She thought of Walter and Evelyn. But look what that did to him, she reminded herself. He can barely speak about her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.”

“Suit yourself,” said Lucy. “Spend the next thousand years being lonely.”

“You’re really an impudent young lady, do you know that?” Jane said.

“I’ll tell you another story,” said Lucy, ignoring the reprimand. “When I was on the road with the band, one night in Milwaukee I came out after a gig and saw this dog scrounging through the trash outside the club we were playing at. The bouncer was kicking him to get him to go away. He ran down an alley, and I followed him. He hid under our van and wouldn’t come out. He was terrified. So I got a hamburger from the club and sat there for two hours, coaxing him out. I guess his hunger won out over his fear, because eventually he crawled out and ate.”

“This is a horrible story,” Jane told her.

“It gets worse,” said Lucy. “Well, sort of. The short version is that I talked the other girls into letting him stay. He was an ugly little guy, a mutt. He limped, and his fur was all patchy. I named him Spike. Anyway, when we got to Des Moines I took him to the vet to make sure he was okay. And he wasn’t. It turned out he had a bad heart. The vet said he’d likely been starved as a pup and treated badly. His leg had been broken, which is why he limped.”

Jane glanced back at Jasper, who was still looking out the window, his ears flapping in the breeze. “I don’t think I want to hear the rest of this story,” Jane told Lucy.

“Well, you’re going to,” Lucy said. “Because there’s a point to it. After what happened with my dad, I didn’t think I could handle watching someone I loved die. The other girls wanted me to have Spike put down, or at least leave him at a shelter. And I almost did. But then I looked at his funny little face, and I knew I couldn’t do it. He’d come into my life for a reason. So I kept him.”

She got quiet, and Jane thought perhaps she’d come to the end of the story. That wasn’t so bad after all, she thought, relieved.

“He died three months later,” Lucy said suddenly. There was a hitch in her voice. “We were in Albuquerque. He hadn’t been right for a couple of days, panting a lot, and he didn’t want to eat. I knew something was wrong, so