The Dangers of Dating a Rebound Vampire Read Free

reinforcing the stereotype that computer geeks were poorly socialized kids with weird hair and unfortunate wardrobe choices. Ms. Gibson had looked directly at Jordan when she mentioned reviewing the dress code. But I couldn’t help but feel just a little bit envious of her while I sat there, tugging at my uncomfortable pantsuit.
    Also, I was considering stealing those violet Converse high-tops.
    Marty McCullough was a tall, slender guy with piercing dark eyes and a pale, pleasant face. He wore a plaid work shirt and chinos and seemed just a bit too relaxed around the vampires, as if he thought they were too civilized to hurt him. I hoped he would figure out how wrong he was without my having to use the first-aid kit too many times.
    Aaron Chen slept through the orientation, but no one could tell for the first hour or so, because his outdated and overgrown Justin Bieber haircut covered his eyes. And when Ms. Gibson woke him up, he didn’t even say he was sorry. I think I was looking forward to working with him most of all.
    It was sort of a mixed bag for me when it came to vampires and trust issues. I mean, Ophelia was a four-hundred-plus-year-old vampire who looked like a teenager and schemed like a Bond villain. So I was going to avoid any situation that would lead to sitting in her office near a hidden trapdoor. And sure, I’d been duped and supernaturally hypnotized by a vampire sent by a local supervillain to date me under false pretenses. But thanks to the hypnosis, I’d blanked out most of the unpleasant parts and only remembered dreamy scenes of teen vampire romance.
    It was interesting to me that none of the programmers was older than mid-twenties. The oldest of us, Marty, looked to be about twenty-three or twenty-four. Then again, working at the Council office full-time, we would be exposed to many of the vampire world’s secrets and machinations. We would have access to their leaders. We would figure out how they managed to save enough money to survive for centuries. That was a considerable liability, as far as the vampires were concerned. Maybe responsible adults in their thirties didn’t work for vampires because they were too worried about the families they could leave behind.
    And while there were a few vampires out there who could do the work, the Council didn’t hire them. The rumor was that the Council members didn’t trust their own kind enough to handle the genealogical information. Long-standing feuds between vampires could escalate swiftly if one knew where to find the living great-great-grandchildren of one’s arch­enemy. So the coding was farmed out to us ­nonsuperpowered humans who had been through a rigorous, highly intimidating vetting process. The theory was that properly intimidated humans wouldn’t use their access to secret vampire records to track down (or assist other vampires in tracking down) other humans to hurt them.
    Also, by hiring human undergrads, they could employ us at a far lower pay grade than someone who could claim he had helped Charles Babbage perfect his idea of complex machines completing mathematical functions back in 1812. Two hundred years of work experience was a human resources nightmare.
    When my coworkers and their wardrobes were no longer entertaining, my mind wandered to the mystery vampire I’d “met” over Christmas break. The “met” is in quotation marks because I hadn’t actually introduced myself. Because, well, he hardly stood still long enough for me to see him, much less speak to him. At first, I thought he was a ghost. I’d barely been able to make out his facial features the first few times I saw him. And when Mr. Barely Visible finally became Fully Visible (and ho boy, was the visual nice), he’d surprised the ever-loving hell out of me by swooping in, kissing me like something out of a Nicholas Sparks movie, and then disappearing, literally.
    That was one of the few things