Big Vamp on Campus - Molly Harper Page 0,23
awareness of the maneuverings of my fellow Council members or the ability to monitor Georgie’s behavior for violent anomalies—was slowly loosening. I almost missed it. After all, that constant vigilance had kept me alive for centuries. Letting go of it seemed disloyal. But with Georgie in good hands and my time on the Council over, I hardly needed to spend my days in a state of paranoia.
As the weight faded, I slept easier. Blood tasted better. I even found charm in Tina’s frizzy brown hair and hand-knitted poncho when she taught the undead orientation. The woman honestly wore a poncho in a professional environment. Clearly, she saw me as some sort of mellowed vampire kitten.
One night, I was leaving my room to check on my laundry and see if the girls had midnight-snack plans when my cell phone chimed, heralding the arrival of an e-mail to my campus address. I pulled it from my pocket, propping my laundry basket on my hip as I waited for the elevator to arrive.
Jane had responded to my none-too-enthusiastic response about her requested contacts. I frowned as her message scrolled across my screen. Ophelia, I really have no idea what you’re talking about, but if you have some question about how I’m managing your case, you’re welcome to call me. —Jane.
Shoving the phone into my back pocket, I stepped into the waiting elevator and rolled my eyes. Was Jane playing some sort of mind game with me, pretending that she hadn’t contacted Tina to request those names? Mind games weren’t really Jane’s style. She was annoyingly up front about her actions and their intended consequences.
Then again, Jane was the one who had made me sign an agreement to live as a “real student,” including using the communal laundry facilities as part of my “character development.” Maybe she was better at manipulation than I gave her credit for.
The elevator dinged, and I stepped out into the lowest level of the building, which contained the laundry, the long-term blood storage, and the storm shelter. Somehow, despite the newness of the building, the lighting and relative quiet of the hallway made the space unnerving, even to someone whose threshold for such things was pretty high. The only noise I could make out, besides the tumbling of the dryers, was the low hiss of the refrigeration system that kept the blood stores cool. I wasn’t necessarily uneasy. I mean, I’d spent a week wandering around Whitechapel in hopes of running into Jack the Ripper. (I had been single for a while.)
Anyway, even I was a little uneasy as I toted my empty basket toward the low electrical hum. This floor, so far underground, so far from the happy noises of my schoolmates, felt far too confining—like the smaller holding cells of the interrogation level at the Council office, and staying in one of those rooms once drove a vampire to impale himself on a chair leg.
The laundry room, I supposed, was tolerable, once you overlooked the synthetic chemical smell of fabric softener. I dropped my basket onto an empty folding table across from the dryers and followed the row until I found dryer number six. I opened the door, stopping the cycle, but instead of the warm, fluffy towels I expected, my hands swam through a steamy mess of jeans.
“What the hell?” I muttered. These were not my jeans. Where were my towels? I looked across to the folding tables and caught sight of my familiar blue-and-white-striped towels, tossed in a damp jumble. Someone had taken my towels out of the dryer and replaced them with their jeans, drying them on my dime.
OK, I’d done some messed-up stuff in my long, long life, but this was evil.
“Right,” I grumbled. I flung the half-dried jeans across the room and carefully placed my towels back in the dryer. After putting some time on the cycle, I sat on the folding table, picked up a pair of jeans, and began to methodically pick the stitches out of the crotch with my fingernails.
As I worked over the jeans, all of the machines except dryer number six sputtered to a halt. By the time I had finished the second pair, I heard the elevator bell ding down the hall. I listened, still stitch-picking, for footsteps or some indication of where the elevator passenger might be headed, just in case I needed to finish the jeans in double-time. But no footsteps came, and that was . . . odd.
Sure, kids liked to push unnecessary