8The ghost was eating a peanutbutter and jelly sandwich. Watching the chunks of PB&J seperate from the sandwich and get mashed by ghostly teeth was nauseating to say the least.
Jeanne shuddered at the sight.
Her father sat next to the ghost, calmly reading the newspaper.
"Uncle Tom," he said without looking up, "Please chew more quietly. I'm trying to read the obituaries."
The ghost, who had made no noise to begin with, nodded an assent as he resumed eating.
A curse echoed from the kitchen as Jeanne's mother scalded her hand in the oven as she tried futilely to extract the burnt remnants of a pan of cinnamon rolls. Walking into the dining room quickly, she stuck her burnt hand through the abdomen of the ghost, sighing in relief.
"Thanks Tom." The ghost nodded again, not even pausing in his chewing.
Jeanne walked into the room, mumbling a soft greeting to her parents.
She was already tired.
She deftly snatched a clean pan from the drying rack by the sink, slapping a pat of butter on it and waiting for it to sizzle. Glancing at her pouting mother who was watching the process jealously, she smiled.
"Don't worry about it mum," she said in a kind voice, grinning at her sulking mother. "There's lots of things that you can do easily that are very hard for me to do."
Her mother's face brightened visibly at this.
"That's true," she said happily as Jeanne cracked an egg over the sizzling pan and quickly scrambled them. She sat down on the other side of her transparent uncle and gobbled them down swiftly.
As soon as she was finished, she snatched her purse from the rack by the door and, after brushing her white button-down shirt free of crumbs, left for work.
Jeanne walked to her job by herself, ignoring the passing ghosts, petting the occasional weredog, and hiding behind the bushes whenever she saw a vampire.
No one would blame her for that. At least, no one besides those insane Equality is Exemplarity people. Vampires weren't exactly the most friendly of creatures, and wherever they went they seemed to be followed by death. On top of that, very few facts were known about them. And the unknown tended to make Jeanne either really nervous or really irritable. Neither of these made for a good day.
Jeanne liked to try to keep her good mood until at least noon if she could help it. And when she didn't, well, Uncle Tom had nothing on that Ice Queen.
At twenty five years of age, Jeanne Sylvest was proud to be ably to say she was happy with where she was in life.
Sure, she didn't have a boyfriend.
Of course, there was that really dangerous and expensive sounding grinding noise her car had started making.
There was always the fact that her mother might have a terminal illness, but who cared about that, right?
Who was she kidding.
Her life sucked freakin' monkey ass.
Jeanne had graduated ULS at the tender age of twenty-one with high hopes and a master's degree in library science and cultural anthropology. She hadn't wanted to save the world through literacy or anything, but she had definitely wanted to make a difference.
What had actually happened was a different story. Every library she applied to seemed to have no need of a new librarian. There were simply no positions open. Then, after a year of living at her parent's house, Jeanne had an epiphany.
Life just really sucked. There was nothing you could do about it.
So, she tried to put her degrees and her years of work behind her as she embarked into the exciting world of... bartending. In her defense, it was a really nice bar. It catered to mostly supes, but the odd human was welcome as well as long as their wallets were pretty well fattened.
Jeanne arrived at work with not a minute to spare. After she quickly put her apron on over her tailored black pencil skirt, she carefully slicked back her riotous red curls into a bun and adjusted her glasses.
She greeted the waiters and waitresses as they passed her bar, chatting amiably with the customers and filing away the stock market gossip that tended to get dropped after a few glasses. Jeanne was on her way to building a tidy little fortune with the stock information that was dropped by unrealizing patrons. And that tidy little fortune almost covered the expenses from her obsession with romance novels.
The owner came out from his office about halfway through the night. Jeanne's gaze flicked up to try to guage where he was headed. Patrick, the owner, had been looking at her oddly for the last few weeks. Although she hadn't done anything wrong per se, she really hoped he hadn't found out the incident with that over-sloshed werecat. She supposed she had overreacted. All he had done was kiss her. In front of the entire bar. And ripped off two buttons doing it.
Even if Patrick was her best friend, it was possible that he would be angry at her about that. After all, sidhe had more...flexible ideas of sexuality and the appropriateness of public displays than humans. And that had been a very rich werecat.
If he had found out about that time that a werelion had practically jumped her on the way home from work however, then it was probably more of a "sorry, but I was wondering if you'd like his balls on a necklace or bronzed" sort of thing.
Jeanne sighed happily, smiling as she wiped down the bartop. She was so lucky to have this job. Most of the good jobs had been taken by the supes when they had made that united revelation of their existance.
Think about it, who wouldn't want a weredog on security duty at night, or better yet, a vampire? Super strength and night vision, all in one immortal package.
At least until someone shot them, decapitated them, stabbed them with silver, or took away their supply of blood-hookers for a week.
Patrick walked slowly towards the bar, stopping to chat with patrons along the way. Jeanne kept one eye on him as she nodded absently while listening to a drunken female werecat bemoaning her boyfriend's current infidelity.
When Patrick finally arrived at her bar, she greeted him with a smile over the head of the snoring she-cat. She was careful not to show her teeth though. In a room of drunken supes, showing your teeth could have unexpected results.
"What brings you out among the drunken masses boss?"
Patrick sighed, running a hand through his golden hair and drawing the gazes of people all around the room. They practically salivated at the six-foot-tall, blond-haired, bronze-skinned, California-born sidhe.
Jeanne sighed.
"Pat, you're leaking again."
Patrick looked at her silently for a moment, then widened his his eyes as he realized her meaning.
Pursing his lips, he tightened his glamour.
In the old days, sidhe used their pheromones to lure humans to them. Supposedly these pheromones could even be used to kill. Jeanne had always been a little skeptical about that, even before she had met Pat. But since she seemed to be immune to them, she guessed she would never know.
It was almost a shame...
Patrick grimaced slightly at his slipup. "Sorry Jeannie. Thanks for the reminder."
Jeanne shrugged.
"No prob hun."
The two fell into companionable silence as Patrick sipped on the glass of ambrosia Jeanne had readied when she had seen him emerge from his office.
Jeanne had met Patrick at a rare books convention when they had both reached for the same book: a copy of "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkein, signed, first-edition, with dust jacket completely intact. After bickering companionably over who would get the book, Jeanne let Patrick buy it on the condition that he would treat her to dinner; she had blown all of her money on books and couldn't afford either anyway.
After a few glasses of wine, Patrick described himself as "pansexual, from the Seelie Court, and unhealthily addicted to game shows."
After quite a few more glasses of wine, Jeanne described herself as "currently asexual, from southern Louisiana, and unhealthily addicted to romance novels."
When the two got kicked out of the resteraunt for being drunk in public, Patrick took an extremely drunk Jeanne to his apartment, and promptly exiled her to the couch while he took the substantially more comfortable bed.
When she woke up, Jeanne was in a stranger's apartment with someone else's shirt on. After she indulged in a few minutes of freaking out over her short term memory loss, Jeanne recovered enough to go wake up the snoring sidhe in the next room.
When she shook the sleeping Patrick, he wrapped a hand around her waist and tugged her hard enough to send her sprawling into his bed. Annoyed at this high-handed behaviour, and still a little wierded out, Jeanne flicked him in the forehead. Hard.
Patrick yelped and sat up, his eyes blazing as he frowned fiercely at her, obviously expecting something.
When nothing happened, he blinked in a confused manner.
"Who are you and why aren't you jumping my bones?" he asked in a confused voice.
Jeanne blinked.
What?
Upon seeing her confused look, Patrick stared.
"You really don't feel anything?" he asked in amazement.
"Umm, no. Not unless you count being annoyed. And really confused."
And thus a friendship was born.
Patrick leaned back in his chair and sighed.
"Jeanne," he began uncomfortably, "there's something I need to tell you."
Jeanne stiffened. "What happened this time Patrick?" she asked this in a long-suffering tone, hoping to distract him into a tale about his latest scrape- she already knew that a certain vampire's favorite mistress had been seen coming from his apartment last night.
Patrick colored slightly, and avoided her eyes, confirming her suspicions.
"Pat, you know you're a lover not a fighter! Would you please stop seducing other people's mistresses?"
"That's not what I mean," he said, squirming under her gaze.
"I met up with an old friend a few weeks ago, and we got to talking… He mentioned the need for an assistant, and I instantly thought of you. I'm not trying to get rid of ya Jeannie-girl, but-" he paused, looking me in the eye firmly. "I know this isn't what you really want to do. You're not happy here."
It was Jeanne's turn to avoid his eyes.
"That's not true Pat, I just have some things…"
She shifted uncomfortably, looking anywhere but at Patrick.
He sighed softly.
"Well, I kind of also invited him here tonight to meet you. How about you see him for yourself, and decide what you want to do then? At least give him a chance to convince you."
Jeanne jerked her head up at that, and stared at Patrick incredulously.
"You invited him to meet me? Without even asking me first!"
Her voice rose through the statement, and ended in a shriek that had several weredogs wincing.
Patrick was so busy trying to calm her down that he didn't even notice when a tall, dark man entered the bar and immediately stole all of the attention away from him. Usually that would at least have him annoyed.
The tall man strode purposefully through the crowd towards the bar. The crowd seemed to part in front of him as he moved. Jeanne stopped her scowling at Pat to look up and see what had caused the sudden cessation of all of the chatter in the bar.
The man was stunning. His shiny black hair brushed his collar and fell over his forehead, almost covering his icy blue eyes. His suit was very well made, having the quiet ostenticity of the obscenely expensive.
As he arrived at the bar, he sat gracefully on the stool next to Patrick. He easily ignored the stares of all the occupants of the bar, both male and female. Jeanne roused herself from her mental stupor with a shake of her head like a cat's. When she looked at him politely, he raised both eyebrows in a small expression of surprise.
"I'll have a Full Moon, Double-tall."
His voice was warm and rich. Jeanne raised an eyebrow in imitation of him, and nodded. Obviously she was supposed to be impressed by him in some way. Well, anyone who knew her at all knew that that wasn't going to happen. She hated obnoxious, snobby, self-appreciative jerks like this man doubtless was.
Sniffing disdainfully, she turned to make his drink.
Patrick stared at her incredulously at her lack of reaction. Jeanne smiled at her gaping boss as soon as the customer turned away.
This was just the type of man that she liked to stay away from. They were almost always more trouble than they were worth. Best thing to do with this type was to stay far away.
Even if he did look good enough to eat.
Hey guys! Well, this is my first try at fiction on this account! I came up with this story tonight actually. I have a vague idea where I'm going with it though. Nothing definite yet.
Some criticism would be very helpful, so feel free to critique.