Chapter One
As of about four and a half minutes ago, I officially
quit college. I’ve decided that after attending not one but two separate
colleges during my nine…okay ten years of switching majors and still not
knowing what I want to be when I grow up, that I was never meant to be a
serious intellectual. I was not designed to run a corporate enterprise or wow
the art world with genius sculpture and paintings. I was studying to become a
teacher until I realized I don’t like children. I would have made an excellent
veterinarian, except I’m allergic to cats. Or, more accurately they are
allergic to me. I wanted to be an engineer, but it turns out I’m also allergic
to math, which also eliminated engineering and accounting. I even tried
psychology, caseworker, and business major. So after trying everything that
ever caught my attention, I switched to a technical college, where I discovered
I had no talent for mechanics, carpentry, plumbing, heating, or cooking
anything in an oven. And I literally flunked out as a dental assistant when I
vomited on a patient while I was cleaning his teeth during final exams. So
because of this, or rather despite all of this, I’m going into the family
business.
My decision for this very sudden and life-altering
change might have been prompted by the three-page, single-spaced letter I am
now holding. It’s written in legal speak and since I did a very brief stint in
law – after watching a marathon of Law and Order while recovering from a
vicious and unprompted cat attack – I will summarize; “Your grandmother is
dead, and she’s left you the house and its current occupants.”
This is the letter telling me that my Granny Nan has
passed away. It was unexpected, and I’m not saying unexpected as in she was
always so healthy and she never said she was sick. No, I’m saying unexpected
because she was a vampire. Granny Nan was the
first in our family, full born. She came with all the perks of the undead. She
could turn into a bat and she never aged. She drank the blood of the living,
but she never took more than necessary. She could hypnotize people with a wink
of her long black lashes, and any whispered suggestions she made became the
victim’s lifelong mission to fulfill. She stayed inside on sunny days and
avoided anything resembling a wooden stake. On top of all of this, she was very
fast and very smart and very full of life.
She raised me from six months old, as my mother had met
her untimely demise in an unfortunate car accident involving a truck
transporting picket fence posts. As far as anyone knew in the small town where
I grew up, Granny Nan wasn’t my very young-looking, nearly two hundred year-old
grandmother. She was just my mom.
I’m a second-generation vampire. Vampires aren’t made,
or even bred. As far as we can tell, they just happen once in a while, and the
only way they can have children is if they choose to do so with a human. Long
story short, that makes me a quarter vampire. Meaning I don’t get to live
forever, I can’t turn into any cool animals, and I will never be able to hypnotize
people with a look or a whisper. The only thing I got from that side of the
family is that I have to wear sunscreen year round and I’m mildly anemic. I
don’t drink blood, but I like my steak extra rare. I have a pretty good
metabolism, but unlike Granny Nan I do have to burn a few calories on the
treadmill a few times a week if I want to eat cupcakes.
Having been raised in a retirement home, I am probably
more aware of my own mortality than most. What I learned from my somewhat
different childhood experience was that I didn’t want to die without living a
full and happy life. The only problem was I seemed to be having trouble getting
that life of excitement started. I was so scared to make the wrong move that I
ended up not moving at all. So at twenty-seven – okay twenty-eight, I was now
the newest caretaker of Maple Lane Manor, Home for Retired Supernaturals.
***
I stepped off the little twin engine plane, feeling the
first flutter of nervousness. Though I loved my Granny Nan dearly, I hadn’t
actually been home once since I started my lengthy college experience nearly
ten years ago. Part of the reason I’d chosen to attend school nearly two
thousand miles away was because I was living in the now, not sitting in a
retirement home waiting to die and talking about the good old days. I told
myself the night I left that I would not go to one more funeral. I would not
attend one more wake and I would not read one more obituary. For those of you
who don’t know, these make up some very intoxicating pastimes for the elderly,
and though the current crew of the Manor was pretty healthy, I wasn’t going to
risk sticking around to find out if I was wrong. Up ’til now I believed they’d
had their lives, so it was my turn and, unlike my Granny Nan and a long line of
her predecessors, I wasn’t wasting mine on them. A decade of wasted reality had
altered that perspective and I found out the hard way where my fate truly lay.
I snorted as I grabbed my pink leopard-print suitcase.
It was vintage Louie and a gift from Vie on the night of my high school
graduation. It was the only old thing I owned and I only kept it out of respect
for Vie and her history of traveling around the world with it. Otherwise, old
things had an expiration date just like people, and since I had yet to make my
own history I refused to own anything that the factory had more than one of.
Walter was waiting for me in the house car. The
car was a vintage nineteen twenty-three Mercedes-Benz. It was a very cool car
but not very practical in eastern Massachusetts
during the winter months. Fortunately, tonight was a humid eighty-seven degree
June evening.
I tried not to react to how shockingly old Walter had
grown in the ten years I’d been away. He grumbled something about moving my ass
because The Wheel was about to start. The Wheel – better known to the rest of
the world as Wheel of Fortune – made that small half hour slot a religious
gathering for its residents. I wasn’t sure if it was all the lights and glitter
or if it was Vanna White, an eighth vampire by the way, strutting her stuff and
pressing buttons, but the residents of Maple Lane didn’t miss it. Ever. Events
were scheduled around that sacred half hour, even seeing me off when I’d left
the Manor for the last time ten years ago. I remember walking out the door with
Granny Nan and waving over my shoulder as they all sat hypnotized by the
glowing television screen. Nobody even moved.
“Nice to see you too, Walter,” I said sweetly. Walter’s
appearance might have aged, but his unwavering grumpy scowl was steadfast as
ever.
He grumbled again and peered out at the road through
impressive Coke bottle glasses.
Walter had always been a man of few words, but since I’d
left, even those words had become non-existent. Werewolves are nothing if not a
loyal bunch, and to Walter I’d abandoned them because I didn’t respect or love
them anymore. At least that’s what Granny Nan told me when he refused to talk
to me on the phone.
I would have continued to push for conversation, but I
was too busy gripping the door handle for the duration of the ride. His vision
had been pretty bad ten years ago, and I was pretty sure he was now legally
blind. I would have offered to drive, but that would have entailed him pulling
to the side of the road and I wasn’t sure if I should risk that proximity to
the ditch or the telephone poles.
We screeched to a halt in the Manor’s driveway safe and
sound, if you didn’t count my elevated blood pressure, and Walter got out and
went inside without so much as a hello. With shaky hands I fumbled the door
open and angled out of the low-riding antique automobile. I lugged my bag out
of the tiny backseat and looked up at the not-so-splendid wonder of Maple Lane. I
blinked up several times at the ramshackle mansion and sighed. Even in the
twilight I could see it needed paint and a new roof. The lawn needed serious
help, and the overall appearance of the house was that it looked haunted.
Ironically, the one thing Maple
Lane lacked was a ghost.
The door slammed behind me, and I cringed at the noise.
But everyone was seated in the parlor staring slack-jawed and wide-eyed at the
colorful screen as the ratcheting sound of the sacred wheel was spun. I
couldn’t help but smile at the sight before me. Vie sat in the faded orange,
overstuffed wingback chair she’d dubbed “the throne.” Walter had plunked
himself down in a beat-up brown La-Z-Boy less than four feet from the screen so
he could see, and Willow
and Alex shared the couch. Both had their legs crossed in lotus position.
I waited patiently for a commercial before announcing a
friendly hello to everyone.
Walter ignored me, Willow
nodded, Alex flashed me a peace sign, and Vie sighed and rose to her feet to
give me a welcoming hug. She patted my hair and whispered how sorry she was
that my Nan had passed so unexpectedly.
Willow and Alex scooted to the ends of the couch so I could sit between
them and suddenly I was a little girl again, watching The Wheel with my strange
extended family. I enjoyed those few moments of remembered bliss until Jeopardy
came on and Alexander clicked off the television.
“So are you going to sell this old heap?” Walter snapped
suddenly. This was rude even for Walter.
“Why would I sell this place? It’s our home.”
“Walter!” Vie said sharply.
“We’ve got a right to know what she’s going to do, don’t
we?” Walter countered.
When nobody else spoke and every eye in the house
focused on me expectantly, I cleared my throat. “I love this old house.”
“How do you plan to maintain it?” Walter asked. “Your
grandmother sank most of her savings into your college experience. I
supported her at first, thinking maybe one day you’d wise up and get your head
out of the clouds, but you’ve managed to be the only person on Earth to attend
college for a decade without getting a single degree in anything. How does one
do that, exactly?”
One drops out of classes before completing them, I thought to myself.
“Walter!” Vie hissed again.
“No, woman. She needs to hear the truth of it. If she’s
ever going to grow up she needs to be treated like an adult.”
Vie hissed at him and it sounded like a protective
mother cat standing over her kitten.
The elderly werewolf snarled back at her, but broke into
a cough and wheezed from the effort.
I sighed as I waited patiently for Walter’s temper and
coughing fit to dissipate. “No, he’s right.” I nodded to the group. “I hadn’t
realized that Granny had sacrificed so much for my schooling, but it’s time for
me to grow up.”
“Too little, too late,” Walter barked. “This place is
too far gone for some flighty little girl without a degree – or a job, I might
add – to fix it. You’ll never get this old dump up and running again and the
longer you wait, the lower its market value will go. Time is no longer on your
side, young lady.”
I narrowed my eyes at his challenge. “We’ll see about
that, you old dog,” I said, throwing a little of his venom back at him.
He glared his optically enlarged eyes right back at me.
“You haven’t finished a thing in your life, little girl. I don’t expect the
biggest challenge of it to be the first thing you manage to complete.”
I crossed my arms. “I’ll take your bet.”
There was an audible ugly gasp as everyone in the room
sucked in a breath. My grandmother had very few rules in her house, and “no
betting” was number one on that list. But Granny Nan wasn’t here.
“If I do get this place up and running again, what do I
get in return?” I asked the group.
“How about the satisfaction of knowing you’ve finally
accomplished something?” Walter sneered.
“How about that collection of baseball cards you keep
under your bed?” I countered with a raised eyebrow.
Then I looked at Vie. “And I want Marilyn’s shoes.”
I looked to the wizard next. “Alex…you’ve got to shave
your beard and cut your hair if I do this, and, – ” I turned to Willow, who
reeked of peppermint schnapps, “ – I want you to stop drinking before noon.
How’s that sound?”
“What do we get in return?” Walter argued.
“How about the satisfaction of knowing you have a place
to live and a bed to sleep in at night?” I shot back.
Walter thought on it long and hard. “We need to come up
with a time frame to decide if we’re just fighting a losing battle or if you’re
here for the long haul.”
“A year,” I said.
Walter snorted. “The way the housing market is crashing
I wouldn’t give you a month before you decide it’s too hard and quit.”
“Six months,” Vie interjected. “We have to give her a
fighting chance to actually do something.”
“We’ll vote on it!” Willow announced suddenly in her soft little
voice.
In the end I got six months, but I think it was only
because half of them hoped to be dead and gone by the time my trial period was
up. The deal was I had to improve the house and catch up on the bills.
Oh, and not quit.
Biography
Cree Walker lives in Northern Maine
with her very patient debate partner and their furry love child, mini rat
terrier, Titan. When Cree isn't plugging away at her computer she can most
likely be found at the hospital where she works as an advanced psychiatric
technician for both children and adults.
To date, Cree has four novel length publications with Naughty
Nights Press. Paranormal werewolf romance, Whisper on a Scream, and its sequel,
Urban Fantasy nominated book for 2012, Willing Sacrifice. She also has
paranormal romantic comedy, A Winter's Grave; book one to the Reaper series and
her most recent publication, Maple Lane Manor, Home for Retired Supernaturals.
So far, Maple Lane Manor has been a finalist in the 2013 Up Authors Fiction
Challenge and all have received the coveted 5 star review rating from the
Paranormal Romance Guild.
Buy Links for Maple Lane Manor, Home for Retired Supernaturals
I just finished my ARC copy of “Identity X” and all I can say is, Michelle has done it again. With so much action going on in this story, it’s amazing how she manages to make these characters so real. She seamlessly brings their background history and current situations together so that you feel you know these people intimately. And her world building, done so subtly that you almost feel as if it’s the world we’re living in now, conveys such a sense of underlying menace and hopelessness, that you are transported into that world without even realizing it.
