Bride (Ali Hazelwood) by Ali Hazelwood

            I whistle. “Big hands.” My eyes flick to Lowe’s.

            “It’s fine. I’ll figure this coding thing out when I’m there. I can improvise.” He stands, and Alex and I exchange an incredulous look, the words digital illiterate floating in the air between us in Papyrus. Lowe’s incompetence might be healing the rift between us.

            “I’ll call you. You’ll guide me on the phone,” he tells Alex, this time with more gravity.

            “I’m concerned for your safety. There could be traps.”

            “I’ll deal with them.” Lowe puts his hand on Alex’s shoulder, reassuring. I’m about to break my none-of-my-business rule and ask what this is about when Mick appears.

            “Dinner is ready. Ana . . . cooked.” He says the last word with a small wince. “And requested everyone’s presence.” He looks at me. “Yours included.”

            I frown. “Me?”

            “She asked specifically for Miresy.”

            “Is she aware that I don’t eat?”

            Lowe folds his arms on his chest. “You do, in fact—”

            “Shhhh.” I gesture frantically at him to shut his yapping mouth and turn to Mick. “I’m coming. We’re coming. Let’s go!” Lowe’s smirk can only be described as evil.

            Ana is delighted to see me. She runs to me, a blur of sparkly pink cotton and unicorn ears, and wraps her little arms around my waist.

            “We don’t always have to hug,” I tell her.

            She squeezes harder.

            I sigh. “Fine. Sure.”

            It’s been nearly a week since the full moon, and the cumulative time I’ve spent with my husband since then wouldn’t be enough to bring a kettle to boil. But Juno came to visit one night and brought a deck of cards, and came back two nights later and brought a movie and Gemma and Flor and Arden, and both evenings felt similar: odd, but fun. I’m with Alex all the time, and Cal’s daughter Misha asked to meet me to see “a real-life leech,” and a couple other seconds stopped by because they were in the area, just to introduce themselves, and . . .

            It’s unexpected, especially after my rocky start. I should be a pariah, I am one, but I don’t think I fit in this place anymore poorly than I did among the Humans, or the Vampyres. In the past seven days, I’ve had more social interactions than ever before. No: more positive social interactions than ever before. The Weres are being surprisingly amicable, even though they know I’m a Vampyre. And I’m being surprisingly relaxed with them, perhaps because they know I am a Vampyre. It’s a new experience, being treated as what I am.

            And now I’m sitting at a table with Lowe, Mick, and Alex, while Sparkles watches us from the windowsill and Ana serves goldfish crackers, heavily implying they are seafood. I hear their heartbeats mix together like an out of tune symphony, and the stray thought hits me that Lowe is my husband, and Ana is my sister-in-law. Technically, I’m having the first family dinner of my life. Like those human sitcoms, the ones with twenty minutes of banter about snap peas that only sounds funny because of the laugh track.

            I let out a befuddled snort and everyone turns to me curiously. “Sorry. Carry on, please.”

            I’m proud of the way I cut my meatloaf and move the crackers around the plate to mimic a half-eaten meal. But I’m not very good at using cutlery, and the context—a meal, shared—is as foreign to me as crocodile wrestling. Ana, of course, notices.

            “Why is she acting like that?” she whispers theatrically from the head of the table, pointing at my ramrod straight spine, the way I lift and lower my fork like an animatronic puppet.

            “She’s just not very good at this. Be kind,” Lowe murmurs back from next to me.

            Ana nods owl-eyed, and moves the conversation to the important matter of whether she’ll get a new pair of roller skates before her birthday, what color they might be, will they have glitter, and, more important, will Juno take her to the rink to practice. I get to observe Lowe when he’s relaxed. He pretends not to know what roller skates are to irk Ana just a little bit, or that her birthday is coming up to irk her a whole lot. When he’s not leading a pack against a group of violent dissidents, he smiles quite a bit. There is something soothing about his teasing humor and his innate self-confidence.