Siren Song (Hypernaturals 2)

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Solstice

I am cooking Tamales for my crew.

Lori says I only cook them when I am feeling guilty about something, and at the moment, I have nothing to feel bad about at all. Tamales are a holiday tradition for my family and I want to extend it to my new clan.

I am between major Vampire crises. No cops have beaten me to a pulp recently. All of my current coding projects are up-to-date. An entire month has passed since I jumped out of an airplane, both with and without a parachute. I have not told very many major new lies to my human friends to hide the truth about Vampires. Best of all, our house looks like the holiday store exploded inside of it. I had no idea my love and century-plus aged Vampire, Jessica, would have so much fun decorating the house for the holiday.

It is fun and warm and homey. All in all, it seemed a good time to prove Lori wrong about why and when I made Tamales.

I heard the car pull up and Vampire hearing told me who is getting ready to come into the house. Helen 'Thornewall', Small, blonde, Vampire, housemate and Jessica's best friend and lover came in with two large suitcases. They looked light until I heard them whump on the floor by the couch. Five hundred plus-year-old girl Vampires make everything look light.

Helen's birth name isn't Thornewall, but I never asked her what it might have been. Sore subject: I think she is a Tudor.

It does not matter anyway: Vampires tend to use first names only most of the time. Even those change sometimes.

Jessica, for example, was born Maria Guadalupe Rios, but is Jessica Diaz now, here in Austin anyway. That is the name she was using when I met her, and no matter what she changed it to as time goes by and geographies change, I am pretty sure she'll always be Jessica to me. Pretty sure because who knows what happens when you live to be several thousand years old. I only have twenty-nine years on the planet and less than six months as a Vampire. Lots of living yet to do.

"Hello, Adrian." Helen said tiredly as she went back to close the front door.

"Hey, Helen. You look beat. Trip OK?" I asked. Helen hates flying but fears the bigger planes less than the small ones. Vampires are hard to kill, but plane crashes are one pretty sure way to do it.

Helen crossed to the counter that divides the kitchen from the front room, and stopped there, looking at the cooking. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Shook her head.

"You really need to work on getting more control of those pheromones."

"This morning, with no one here, I didn't see the need. It was just Jessica and I. Speaking of our lady love, she'll be back soon. She is off decorating the boat. Even the 'Nightwing' is getting the holiday treatment."

Helen is bitching about scents my body released this morning. My Vampire pheromone 'problem' is that, being in a relationship with a woman who rocks my world every time I look at her, smell her or hear her voice, my control around her is, to say the least, difficult. I manage it when Helen is here, out of courtesy. She wasn't here!

Helen took a deep breath again, filling her lungs. I realized I smell like Jessica too: Her scents clung to me, a happy reminder of the morning. Jessica is not only interested in morning loving, but she is also the one starting things fairly often. Part of this boxing my teeth for lack of pheromonal control is the fact that Helen would prefer it if she were the one wearing Eau de Jessica.

Helen has a special hard-ass and sarcastic way about her that is interesting and irritating. A natural air of superiority that came from being old, a female Vampire, and a member of the Vampire Council. I'm young, and worse, a male. Helen likes men OK, but she loves Jessica. In the Vampire world, being male is rare and about like being something the dog threw up on the front rug.