Page 53 of Bride

And now I’m sitting at a table with Lowe, Mick, and Alex, while Sparkles watches us from the windowsill and Ana serves goldfish crackers, heavily implying they are seafood. I hear their heartbeats mix together like an out of tune symphony, and the stray thought hits me that Lowe is my husband, and Ana is my sister-in-law. Technically, I’m having the first family dinner of my life. Like those human sitcoms, the ones with twenty minutes of banter about snap peas that only sounds funny because of the laugh track.

I let out a befuddled snort and everyone turns to me curiously. “Sorry. Carry on, please.”

I’m proud of the way I cut my meatloaf and move the crackers around the plate to mimic a half-eaten meal. But I’m not very good at using cutlery, and the context—a meal,shared—is as foreign to me as crocodile wrestling. Ana, of course, notices.

“Why is she acting like that?” she whispers theatrically from the head of the table, pointing at my ramrod straight spine, the way I lift and lower my fork like an animatronic puppet.

“She’s just not very good at this. Be kind,” Lowe murmurs back from next to me.

Ana nods owl-eyed, and moves the conversation to the important matter of whether she’ll get a new pair of roller skates before her birthday, what color they might be, will they have glitter, and, more important, will Juno take her to the rink to practice. I get to observe Lowe when he’s relaxed. He pretends not to know what roller skates are to irk Ana just a little bit, or that her birthday is coming up to irk her a whole lot. When he’s not leading a pack against a group of violent dissidents, he smiles quite a bit. There is something soothing about his teasing humor and his innate self-confidence.

“When isyourbirthday?” Ana asks me, after Mick reveals an unexpected expertise in astrology and informs Ana that she’s a Virgo. Alex is an Aquarius—a fact that, like everything else under the sun, violently alarms him.

“I don’t have one,” I tell her, still reeling from the mental image of middle-aged, rugged Mick perching rimmed glasses on his nose and settling in bed with a copy ofThe Zodiac for Dummies. “My mate used to dabble,” he whispers at me, picking up on my befuddlement.

Peas sputter out of Ana’s mouth. “How can younot have a birthday?”

“I don’t know what day I was born.” I could find out from council records, since it was the day Mother died. I doubt Father would know. “It might have been spring?”

“How do you keep track of your age?” Alex asks.

“I count one up on Vampyre New Year’s Day.”

“And you have a party?”

I shake my head at Ana. “We don’t do parties.”

“No... gatherings? Soirees? Board game nights? Communal blood drinking?” Alex is shocked. Maybe relieved. I wonder what stories he was told as a child when he resisted cleaning his bedroom.

“We don’t commune. We don’t meet in large groups, unless it’s to set up war strategies, or business strategies, or other kinds of strategies. Our social life is all strategizing.” For the next Father’s Day, I should get him a mug that saysAll I care about is machinating and like, three people. Except we don’t celebrate Father’s Day, either. “But if wedidhave communal blood drinking, we’d feast on promising young computer engineers,” I add, and then smack my lips as though I’m thinking of a scrumptious meal, just to watch Alex pale.

“Regarding blood,” Mick warns while Ana spills several gallonsof water on the table under the guise of pouring us “cocktails,” “Misery, the blood bank messaged us that this week’s delivery will be delayed a couple of days.”

“D-delayed?” Alex chokes out.

Mick’s eyebrow lifts. “You seem very invested, Alex. I didn’t know you’ve been partaking.”

“No, but... what will she eat?”

“I guess I’ll have to find another source of blood. Hmm, who could it be? Let’s see...” I drum my fingers against the edge of the table to create suspense. It sure works on Ana, who’s looking at me gape-mouthed. “Who smells good around—”

Lowe’s hand closes around mine. Our wedding bands clink together as he lifts it from the table and sets it in my lap, his grip lingering for a second.

I feel hot.

I shiver.

Lowe clicks his tongue. “Stop playing with your food,wife,” he murmurs, and it feels almost intimate, smiling at him and catching the amused gleam in his eyes while Alex crumples into himself. “She has several bags left,” he informs Alex, who’s trying to camouflage with the wallpaper.

“Let’s make up a birthday for you,” Ana proposes, bright-eyed. “And have a biiiig party.”

“Yikes.” I scrunch my nose. “Let’s not.”

“Let’s yes! Your birthday is this weekend, and you’re going to have a bouncy castle!”

“I’m not a very bouncy person.”

“And this weekend your brother will be gone, Ana,” Mick says. Alex’s fork clicks against his plate. Something shifts, and the silence in the room is suddenly tense as Lowe chews his meatloaf.

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