advanced economics, the sciences, literature. But Georgie kept eating the tutors, which explained the anemic areas of our instruction. After fifty years or so, it was easier just to hand her a stack of books and hope for the best. And now I could see that once again, I’d let my sister down.
“I’m sorry, Georgie,” I said quietly and sincerely.
“Oh, come on, it’s not as bad as all that,” Georgie told me. “We’re both getting polished up, right? Jane says that if I keep reading at the rate I’m going, she’ll let me enroll in some online college classes. And then we can compete to see who can get the most credits next semester.”
I laughed. “Have I ever mentioned that your competitive spirit is more like demonic possession?”
“I object to that!”
“The last time I beat you at Scrabble, you set fire to the board and buried the ashes in the backyard.”
“It was a faulty board.” Georgie sniffed. “No one should win with a word like ‘cookery.’ ”
“ ‘Cookery’ is a word!”
“For stuffy British people,” Georgie countered. “You should have told me we were playing the stuffy British version of the game. There were several unnecessary uses of the letter ‘u’ that could have served as an advantage to me.”
“So what is Jane doing for you, other than forcing you to read?” I asked.
“Oh, she took me to the fair the other night,” Georgie said. “Well, she and Gabriel and Dick and Andrea and Iris and Cal took me to the fair. I was very well supervised. At all times. From all angles. But I got to ride the Tilt-A-Whirl, and Cal won me a stuffed panda at the ring-toss game, so I suppose the evening wasn’t entirely wasted.” The pleased light in her eyes was not dimmed by her indifferent sniff. “It’s silly, really, that they treat me like a little girl.”
I tamped down a smile. I hated to admit it, but even before my sister had been removed to Jane’s home, I’d known my nemesis would take good care of her. For all of Jamie’s whining, Jane had done a commendable job of fostering him in his first years as a vampire. She was much more permissive than I would have been with a newborn, but Jamie was basically a Labradoodle with fangs. He didn’t need a firm hand. He needed a mother’s touch.
For so long, Georgie had been the only person who truly loved me, and vice versa. She had been shut off from the outside world for most of her vampire years. I’d kept her a secret in my home, both because of tensions I’d created with the Council by creating a vampire childe and because of the general uneasiness people felt around a tiny predator. We’d become too accustomed to the isolation, created what was probably an unhealthy dynamic in which we encouraged each other’s less altruistic tendencies, and believed it right and normal.
Even as humans, we hadn’t had much in the way of loving role models. Our parents hadn’t been what you’d call affectionate. They were so busy desperately trying to not die of something as simple as an infected hangnail that they didn’t have time for long heart-to-heart chats or fun family outings. And Georgie had never really had what would be considered a childhood, according to what I’d seen on TV and in movies. She’d never camped out in the living room in a tent made of blankets. She’d never gone to the movies and eaten so much popcorn that she threw up. She’d never had a single tea party for her dolls.
Of course, if someone suggested that she host that sort of tea party now, she’d probably remove their pancreas through their ear canal, but then again, she was with Jane, someone who might be able to get her to engage in those sorts of activities. Georgie always seemed too eager to impress me with her “maturity” to try.
Jane was doing exactly what Georgie needed. She was treating Georgie with respect but still giving her the experiences she’d never had as a child or even as a chronological adult. And she was giving her the moral education I’d neglected over the years, because, frankly, I’d lost sight of so many of those little etiquette rules like “Draining your neighbors makes a bad impression” and “Just because your victim has something shiny, that doesn’t make it yours.” Maybe by the time I was finished with my degree, Georgie would be properly socialized to