Author: Molly Harper

He mulled over my diatribe(s) and at long last said, “I know you have questions.”

I smiled, thrilled to be the smug one for a change. “Yes, that’s why I just asked them.”

He made a noise I can only describe as a nasal reminder to watch the snarking. “All right, then, I do not have a job. I live off the profits of various investments I’ve made over the years. I devote my time to my own interests. As a vampire, I’ve made an effort to stay out of the public eye. I’ve taken extensive measures with local officials to make sure traffic and public interest are steered away from my property. But it seems wise for vampires to reconnect now that humans are adjusting to our presence. And there are certain things I miss about human society.”

“Appletinis?”

He scowled, but there was no real heat in it.

“Well, you were at Shenanigans.” I shrugged.

He snickered. “You are not a dull girl.”

“Thank you.”

He was smiling at me, so I thought it would be a good time to ask. “Is your relationship with Andrea part of your ‘reconnection’ with human society?”

“I do not have a relationship with Andrea,” he said. “I met her a little more than a year after she moved to Half-Moon Hollow. I introduced her to some acquaintances of mine. I admire and respect Andrea. She’s a friend. But we agreed that I would no longer feed from her in order to prevent…confusion.”

It was like Melrose Place, with fangs.

“I do occasionally feed from consenting donors,” he said. “I also drink the occasional bottle of artificial or donated blood. I prefer donated blood. And you can get blackout curtains at Bed, Bath and Beyond.”

I could have stopped there, but I was enjoying my power trip.

“Who made you into a vampire?” I asked.

His expression was as bland as bread pudding. “That’s a discussion for another time.”

“How many vampires have you made?”

“Three, including you,” he said.

“What happened to the other two?”

“That’s a discussion for another time.”

I scowled. “Do you practice being enigmatic, or does it come naturally?”

“It comes naturally,” he said. He sprang from his seat, offering his outstretched hand. “Come with me.”

He led me outside onto the porch, where we stood, soaking in the night sounds. He stood behind me, cupping his fingers over my eyes. His lips hovered near my ear. “You are the night.”

“I am the night,” I repeated.

“You are the night.”

I cocked my head, sending him a questioning look. “I am the night?”

“Jane!”

“Why is it that when you say my name, it sounds like a curse word?” I asked, turning toward him.

He sighed and pushed me back to face the yard. “Please stop talking.”

I giggled, bumping the back of my head into his chin. He was doing that hair-smelling thing again, which I didn’t dignify with a response. I turned to face him, finding myself nose-to-nose with my sire. He had that irritated look Mrs. Truman used to get when I passed notes in third-grade math. I giggled again, which was becoming an annoying habit.

“I’m sorry, I have a hard time with this vampire Yoda routine. I don’t sit around listening to one hand clapping for my inner-selfness. I have never read a single Chicken Soup for the Soul book, and, God willing, I’ll never have to. I look at the big picture. If I don’t like it, I change it, or I’m paralyzed by the fear of change, which is more often than not. It’s the one area where I’m sort of complicated.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” he said, turning me back to his darkened yard. “You’re more and more complicated with every word that comes out of your mouth. It’s time to see the picture in small pieces, Jane. Every blade of grass. The croaking of every frog. The scent of honeysuckle. Let each of these elements wash over you until you can see the whole of the landscape before you without opening your eyes. Feel the heartbeat of every animal that skitters across the dirt. Focus on the flow of its blood, the pulse of it through its veins. Don’t settle for the prey that’s closest to you or the easiest to catch, find the right animal. The size and speed you need. Focus every fiber of your considerable musculature on that creature, and throw your body into action.”

I felt this was not the moment to tell Gabriel that was exactly what Yoda would have said (in a slightly less grammatically sound manner), so I focused on the night sounds. It was like a combination of night vision and a thermal camera, all shifting colors and pulsing warmth. I shut out the coldblooded creatures, the frogs and snakes, because my culinary courage does not run that far. I could feel coyotes, and deep in the trees I saw a deer, an eight-pointer. But given my recent steps in his hooves, I wasn’t planning to hunt him anytime soon.

As if he sensed my interest, the buck raised his head and met my gaze. It felt as if I could reach out and stroke his coat. I raised my hand, and the buck started, disappearing with a flash of white tail through the trees.

“All of my life, I’ve wanted to be more interesting than I am, special,” I said, turning to Gabriel and, I’m sure, grinning like an idiot. “And now it seems I’ve got ‘special’ out the ying-yang. I don’t know if I can handle it.”

He made his inscrutable face. “I’ve been a vampire for a long time, and I’ve never heard it described it quite like that.”

“I do have a way with words,” I admitted. “Why did this happen to me? How is this possible? Where do we come from?”

“I would never have thought of you as an existentialist, Jane,” he said.

I arched an eyebrow at him. “No one likes a smart-ass, Gabriel.”

“For your sake, I hope that’s not true,” he said, to which I responded with a smack on the arm. “No one knows where we come from. The ancient Greeks, Middle Eastern cultures, the earliest people of Malaysia, they all wrote of creatures that stole the blood from humans as they slept. The romantic theory seems to be that Lilith, the first wife that God created for Adam, refused to submit to her husband, particularly in their…evening activities. So, as punishment, she was sent away from the garden to live in darkness. She became the first vampire and had her revenge by feeding off Adam’s children and turning his descendants into creatures like her. Vampirism is thought to be her vengeance passed down through the generations.”

“Trivia monologue. You are so the man for me,” I marveled.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing,” I said, smiling insipidly and thanking the perverse vampire gods that his super hearing hadn’t picked that up. “Do you believe that?”

The twist in his lips showed that he might have heard what I said but was choosing to ignore it. “The truth is, there may be no single origin of vampires. The way we change may have evolved, over time, like humans but never with them.”

I crossed my arms. “OK, lightning round. Real or fake: Werewolves?”

“Real.”

“Demons?”

“Very real.”

“Sasquatch?’

“Real, but he’s actually a were-ape.”

I decided to explore that later. “Aliens?”

“I don’t know.”

“Witches?”

“Real.” He shrugged. “Some work real magic, and others are deluded children in black makeup and ill-fitting clothes.”

“Good to know,” I said soberly. “Wait, what about zombies? I couldn’t even get through the preview for Dawn of the Dead without covering my eyes.”

“You don’t want to know.”

I made a small distressed sound. He chuckled, something I noticed was becoming more frequent.

“I know Dracula was a real person, but is he still, you know, around?” I asked.

“No one knows for sure. He’s a bit like our Elvis. Lots of vampires have claimed to see him, but there’s never been documented proof. You ask a lot of questions.”

“I’m a librarian. The learning curve is steep,” I said, ever so sassily jutting my chin forward.

“You’re going to be an interesting person to know, Jane Jameson,” he said, leaning forward and brushing his mouth across mine.

Sparks. Hell, fireworks. The Fourth of July was exploding in my head as he slipped his hands under my jaw and pinned me with his mouth. When he pulled away from me, my hands were wound in his hair, my lips bruised and tingling pleasantly.

“I enjoy your height,” he said, pressing me against the porch railing. With my butt precariously balanced on the rail, I had to wind my feet around his calves to keep from tumbling over. “Back in my day, I never courted an exceptionally tall woman. But it makes for some interesting possibilities.”

“There’s that word again, ‘interesting,’” I said before kissing him again. I tangled my fingers in his pullover. He tasted like the best share of my trick-or-treating candy, the mini Three Musketeers and Almond Joys. And for most of my life, I’d been gnawing on those stupid orange-wrapped peanut taffy things.

I sighed and wrapped my arms around his neck, enjoying the sensation of Gabriel planting a few more soft, nibbling kisses along the edge of my jaw. Feeling bold, I traced the line of his bottom lip with my tongue and bit down on it gently.

He pulled away and grinned down at me. “Very interesting.”

8

Indoctrinated by years of secrecy, many older vampires have histories they may not want to share right away. It’s best to respect their privacy.

—From The Guide for the Newly Undead

I am not the kind of girl who trusts a man to tell her everything she needs to know in his own due time, so I did some research on my sire. You can take the girl out of the library, but you can’t take the neurotic, compulsively curious librarian out of the girl.

Oddly enough, the limited information I could find on Gabriel Nightengale, (yes, that really was his name) started with a passage from my father’s self-published textbook on local history. I’d read that thing at least ten times, and I never paid attention to the well-bred boy born in 1858. Gabriel was around to see the Civil War transform Half-Moon Hollow from a grimy little river outpost to a major point of trade along the Ohio. His family owned a sizable tobacco farm on Silver Ridge Road. The family eventually amassed enough money to build a proper antebellum home they called Fairhaven.

The Nightengales were abolitionists, which I found oddly comforting. Beyond considerable wealth, the Nightengale family was utterly normal until Gabriel disappeared at age twenty one. He was healthy, hale, the pride of his family, and then suddenly he wasn’t. His parents told their neighbors that they had sent Gabriel abroad for a tour of the Continent. The sole reason for Gabriel’s inclusion in Daddy’s book was his rumored mauling at the hands—well, flippers—of a sea lion off the coast of Portugal. That was, and is, an unusual cause of death for rural Kentucky residents.

But it’s amazing what you can find out with the right Web browser. VampireArchive.com turned out to be deliciously gossipy, the Us Weekly of the underworld. According to the archives, Gabriel was a strapping young lad living a privileged, unremarkable life, until he took a strange girl out for a walk after a barn dance. I guess following strange women home is a bit of a habit with him. I couldn’t find any information about Gabriel’s sire, which was surprising, as I’d heard that vampire historians tended to be incredibly detail-oriented. They have this whole thing about preserving the vampire “family tree.”

The unnamed woman who turned him left Gabriel to rise in a cellar about a mile from his farm. Without guidance from his sire, Gabriel returned home after his traumatic first kill and hoped to return to his former life. Considering the times, his family took his being turned well. His brothers tied him to a tree, naked, to wait for sunrise. Gabriel broke free and ran away. When he didn’t descend on them in a fit of bloody vampire vengeance, his parents told everyone he was traveling. A year later, they cooked up the story about the sea lion. Apparently, sea lions were thought to be much more vicious back then. And people believed they lived in Portugal.