The Deadliest Bite

gorgeous and powerful vampire.

It is a world where nothing can be taken for granted: a dog can heal with a lick; spirits bag your groceries; and whatever you do, never—ever—rub the genie’s lamp.

I eyebal ed the freezer, trying to decide what to cook for dinner that night. Such a decision was no mean feat, since a visiting stranger might assume that Martha Stewart not only lived with us but was preparing for the apocalypse. Frozen lasagnas, casseroles, pot pies, and the like fil ed our icebox nearly to the brim. Final y deciding on fish chowder, I took out some haddock and mussels. After a brief, internal struggle, I grabbed some salmon to make extra soup to—you guessed it—freeze.

Yeah, the stockpiling was more than a little OCD, but it made me feel better. It also meant that when I actual y had something to do for the entire evening, I could leave my dad by himself without feeling too guilty about it.

My dad wasn’t an invalid—not exactly. But he had a bad heart and needed help taking care of things, especial y with my mother gone. So I took up the slack, which I was happy to do. It’s not like I had much else on my plate, what with being the vil age pariah and al .

It’s amazing how being a pariah gives you ample amounts of free time.

After putting in the laundry and cleaning the downstairs bathroom, I went upstairs to take a shower. I would have loved to walk around al day with the sea salt on my skin, but not even in Rockabil was Eau de Brine an acceptable perfume. Like many twentysomethings, I’d woken up early that day to go exercise. Unlike most twenty-somethings, however, my morning exercise took the form of an hour or so long swim in the freezing ocean. And in one of America’s deadliest whirlpools. Which is why I am so careful to keep the swimming on the DL. It might be a great cardio workout, but it probably would get me burned at the stake. This is New England, after al .

As I got dressed in my work clothes—khaki chinos and a longsleeved pink polo-style shirt with Read It and Weep embroidered in navy blue over the breast pocket—I heard my father emerge from his bedroom and clomp down the stairs. His job in the morning was to make the coffee, so I took a moment to apply a little mascara, blush, and some lip gloss, before brushing out my damp black hair. I kept it cut in a much longer—and admittedly more unkempt—version of Cleopatra’s style because I liked to hide my dark eyes under my long bangs. Most recently, my nemesis, Stuart Gray, had referred to them as “demon eyes.” They’re not as Marilyn Manson as that, thank you very much, but even I had to admit to difficulty determining where my pupil ended and my iris began.

I went back downstairs to join my dad in the kitchen, and I felt that pang in my heart that I get sometimes when I’m struck by how he’s changed. He’d been a fisherman, but he’d had to retire about ten years ago, on disability, when his heart condition worsened. Once a handsome, confident, and brawny man whose presence fil ed any space he entered, his long il ness and my mother’s disappearance had diminished him in every possible way. He looked so smal and gray in his faded old bathrobe, his hands trembling from the antiarrhythmics he takes for his screwed-up heart, that it took every ounce of self-control I had not to make him sit down and rest. Even if his body didn’t agree, he stil felt himself to be the man he had been, and I knew I already walked a thin line between caring for him and treading on his dignity. So I put on my widest smile and bustled into the kitchen, as if we were a father and daughter in some sitcom set in the 1950s.

“Good morning, Daddy!” I beamed. “Morning, honey. Want some coffee?” He asked me that question every morning, even though the answer had been yes since I was fifteen.

“Sure, thanks. Did you sleep al right?”

“Oh, yes. And you? How was your morning?” My dad never asked me directly about the swimming. It’s a question that lay under the auspices of the “don’t ask, don’t tel ” policy that ruled our household. For example, he didn’t ask me about my swimming, I didn’t ask him about my mother.

He didn’t ask me about Jason, I didn’t ask him about my mother. He didn’t ask me whether or not I was happy in Rockabil , I didn’t ask him about my mother…

“Oh, I slept fine, Dad. Thanks.” Of course I hadn’t, real y, as I only needed about four hours of sleep a night. But that’s another thing we never talked about.

He asked me about my plans for the day, while I made us a breakfast of scrambled eggs on whole wheat toast. I told him that I’d be working til six, then I’d go to the grocery store on the way home. So, as usual for a Monday, I’d take the car to work. We performed pretty much the exact same routine every week, but it was nice of him to act like it was possible I might have new and exciting plans. On Mondays, I didn’t have to worry about him eating lunch, as Trevor McKinley picked him up to go play a few hours of cheeky lunchtime poker with George Varga, Louis Finch, and Joe Covel i. They’re al natives of Rockabil and friends since childhood, except for Joe, who moved here to Maine about twenty years ago to open up our local garage. That’s how things were around Rockabil . For the winter, when the tourists were mostly absent, the town was populated by natives who grew up together and were more intimately acquainted with each other’s dirty laundry than their own hampers. Some people enjoyed that intimacy. But when you were more usual y the object of the whispers than the subject, intimacy had a tendency to feel like persecution.

We ate while we shared our local paper, The Light House News. But because the paper mostly functioned as a vehicle for advertising things to tourists, and the tourists were gone for the season, the pickings were scarce. Yet we went through the motions anyway. For al of our sins, no one could say that the True family wasn’t good at going through the motions. After breakfast, I doled out my father’s copious pil s and set them next to his orange juice. He flashed me his charming smile, which was the only thing left unchanged after the ravages to his health and his heart.

“Thank you, Jane,” he said. And I knew he meant it, despite the fact that I’d set his pil s down next to his orange juice every single morning for the past twelve years.

I gulped down a knot in my throat, since I knew that no smal share of his worry and grief was due to me, and kissed him on the cheek. Then I bustled around clearing away breakfast, and bustled around getting my stuff together, and bustled out the door to get to work. In my experience, bustling is always a great way to keep from crying.

Tracy Gregory, the owner of Read It and Weep, was already hard at work when I walked in the front door. The Gregorys were an old fishing family from Rockabil , and Tracy was their prodigal daughter.

She had left to work in Los Angeles, where she had apparently been a successful movie stylist. I say apparently because she never told us the names of any of the movies she’d worked on. She’d only moved back to Rockabil about five years ago to open Read It and Weep, which was our local bookstore, cafe, and al -around tourist trap. Since tourism replaced fishing as our major industry, Rockabil can just about support an al - year-round enterprise like Read It and Weep. But other things, like the nicer restaurant—rather unfortunately named The Pig Out Bar and Gril —close for the winter.

“Hey, girl,” she said gruffly, as I locked the door behind me. We didn’t open for another half hour.