Chapter One
“Welcome to Taco Bell. Order when ready.” As I punched in the number of soft and hard tacos the drive-up wanted for their Grande Meal, I cursed every movie that made the life of a vampire look glamorous.
No one told me immortality was going to be like this. I should’ve been given a warning. Someone should’ve pulled me aside and let me know that trying to find a decent job that pays a living wage when you’re forever sixteen is a trip to hell in a brown paper sack filled with hot and mild sauce.
I finished ringing up the total and handed my headset to the night shift manager, Jimmy, so I could take a smoke break. I didn’t even smoke. I just liked taking breaks.
Outside, the last hint of a summer breeze mixed with the crisp air of fall. I flexed my long, pale fingers and tried to appreciate the few minutes I had to myself, but I couldn’t stay calm. My heart beat in skips. Thump, silence, thump. The telltale sign that I needed sustenance.
It had been four days since my last kill, and I wasn’t used to going so long without feeling the flood of warm blood beneath my teeth. The satisfying metallic scent filling my nostrils. My vision blurred, and I clenched my fist. There were only a few hours left in my shift, but if I stayed, I’d end up dining on Jimmy.
Things got complicated the last time I drank one of my coworkers.
I pushed open the metal door we used to haul out trash and went back inside, where I tapped Jimmy on his bony shoulder. “I’m going home. Cramps.”
He wiped his sweaty forehead, tucking a greasy lock of hair back into his hat. “Weren’t you having cramps last week?”
“They come and go.” It had been my birthday, and the idea of spending it with Jimmy on the night shift at Taco Bell depressed me. So instead, I checked out a few books from the library and spent it alone. As a special treat, I fed on a guy who smelled like birthday cake, but I’d been fooled by his vape. He tasted like protein bars. Happy birthday to me.
Once Jimmy gave me permission to leave, with a heavy dose of stink eye, I tossed my hat onto a back counter and scooped my crimped hair into a messy bun. The crimping had been a poorly thought-out but fashionable choice—in 1987. The last time I’d been able to make changes, before I became frozen, both mentally and physically, for all time. Along with my questionable hairstyle, the spot I missed on my knee the last time I shaved would also haunt me for eternity.
The buses stopped running an hour ago, and I had to walk back to my motel after every shift. Most nights, I didn’t mind. My route took me downtown and up the street that catered to the local college scene. The perfect feeding ground. I passed a mix of start-up breweries and clubs, where people spilled onto the sidewalk. A girl who smelled like jasmine and honey bumped into me as she teetered on her ice-pick heels. She turned with a smile frozen on her bright face, the apology already forming on her lips, but she faltered and backed away at the sight of me. I had that effect on the living.
When I reached a darkened alley between a macaron shop and a sushi bar, I sized up the space. The dumpster that catered to the apartment units above the shops would provide good cover. Music poured out of the piano bar across the street, a badly sung rendition of “Sweet Caroline” (bum, bum, bum), and I took a step into the shadows to wait.
A group of college guys walked past, fist-bumping and shoving one another. One stumbled into my alley. The burned-out streetlamp above my head cloaked me in darkness, allowing me to observe my dinner for a moment. He wore a U of M shirt that looked like it had been freshly pressed by his mom that morning, the sleeves just short enough to reveal his generic tribal armband. If I had to guess, I’d say it was baby’s first tattoo.
I took a step forward. A slice of moonlight danced across my pale skin. When he caught sight of me, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He had the air of someone who’d always slept on clean sheets and ate three square meals a day since birth.
“Hey there, girly.” He leaned closer to me. His friends were already half a block down the street and didn’t seem like they’d be coming back for him. “What are you doing out here all by yourself in the dark?”
His lips peeled back in a feral grin, and he had a slight flair to his nostrils. I’d become familiar with his type. Over the years, I acquired a taste for the pampered frat boys, bored with a life of endlessly being told yes. The kind of guys who thought they deserved more than all they’d been given. This one had been drinking; not enough to be drunk, but that’s the excuse he’d want to use the next morning when he looked in the mirror with bloodshot eyes and tried to convince himself he was still a good person.
“You have two seconds to leave,” I said. I always gave them a chance to run.
Elton used to laugh at these games I played with my dinner. He never understood why I bothered to pick and choose. In the early days, preying on the guys who’d corner a young girl in an alley assuaged the guilt of having to be so casual in my kills, but it had become a code I continued to follow. A routine that kept my own humanity within reach. I made a promise to always adhere to the rules I created and stay accountable to the only person I could count on: myself.
College Boy leaned in too close by then. He crowded my space, towering over me, and he knew it. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to be friends. Don’t you want to be my friend?” His breath reeked of cheap beer and, oddly, some kind of ointment. He trailed a finger down my arm and shivered from the cold he found there. Still, he didn’t run.
He really should’ve run.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
I didn’t answer.
“You’re just going to ignore me?” When I still didn’t answer, he pushed me against the cinderblock wall. Rotting garbage spilled out of the dumpster, blocking us from view. He grabbed my face, digging his fingers into my cheeks. “That’s not very friendly. You’re lucky I’m even looking at a girl like you. Did you know you smell like tacos?”
Honestly, I could’ve killed him for that alone. I flashed my fangs, and the first hint of fear crept into his eyes. He tried to run then, but it was too late. With the quick reflexes gifted to the undead, I wrapped my hand around his throat and brought my teeth down on his neck. He didn’t even have time to scream before I crushed his windpipe.
As soon as I felt the sweet whisper of death shudder through him, I pulled back and pressed my lips against his ear. “My name is Holly.”
I wanted my name to be the last thing he’d hear before life left his body. As his heartbeat slowed and stopped, mine returned to a normal thump, thump, thump. He tasted like jelly beans and beef jerky. Not entirely unpleasant on their own, but wholly gross mixed together.
After checking his cargo shorts—finding nothing more than a wallet with a ten-dollar bill, license, debit card, student ID, and a plastic baggie filled with pills—I flung him into the trash and covered him with bags that stunk of old Band-Aids and Hamburger Helper. The ten dollars wouldn’t do much for me. It wouldn’t even cover half a night in my crappy motel room. Nobody carried cash anymore. I missed the ’90s. Everyone carried cash in the ’90s.
Footsteps, two sets, sounded at the entrance of the alley, then stopped short. They smelled like black cherries and clean cotton. Not typical scents of the living. From the harsh rasp of a voice, it sounded like an argument, though I couldn’t make out the words. I wouldn’t need to feed again for a few days, so I pressed my back against the wall, hoping they’d go away. Then I could make a quick exit.
“Holly, you can come out. We know you’re here.”
“You can’t just say it like that. You’re going to scare her.”
Now they had my attention. Their voices weren’t familiar, and as far as I knew, Elton was the only one aware of my presence in this city.
Maybe he’d had a change of heart and sent these two to retrieve me. I could only hope that I’d finally get the opportunity to tell him to go to hell. I was doing fine on my own. Admittedly, not great. But fine. I didn’t need Elton. I’d learned to stop depending on him the moment he stranded me at that Quick Stop in Tulsa.
I stepped out from behind the dumpster. “If Elton sent you—”
“He didn’t.” A girl who looked to be about my age—the age I appeared, anyway, not my actual age—held her palms out as she approached. She was a good six inches shorter than me, with storm-gray eyes and swinging mink-brown hair cut into a bell-like bob that curved along the line of her heart-shaped face and didn’t quite conceal the pimple on her chin. Her fangs glistened in the moonlight.
I gasped and took a step back. “Who are you?”
“We’re like you,” the other girl said. She looked maybe a year older than me, eighteen at most. Her dark hair hung just past her shoulders, styled with finger waves. She had a sharp chin and deep-brown eyes a century older than her physical age suggested. She also had fangs. “I’m Ida Radley. This is Rose Mackay.” She nodded to the petite girl beside her. “We were also made by Elton.”
“That’s not possible.” Elton told me there hadn’t been anyone else. I’d been the first. The only. According to him, we were fated. A once-in-a-lifetime match.
“I assure you, it’s true.” The one introduced as Rose bowed her head.
There had been others? A fresh and sharp pain stabbed me in the chest. He ditched me after more than thirty years together, yet still found ways to make me feel like a fool. “He said he was alone for a hundred years before he met me, he said I’m …” I swallowed the hurt that still lingered, even after everything Elton had done. “I’m the one who made him believe in love.”
Ida snorted. “And you bought that? Did he also tell you that you weren’t like the other girls? I bet you were a sensitive loner who read poetry for fun and snacked on hand-rolled granola.”
“Ida, stop.” Rose smacked her arm before taking my hands. The clean-cotton scent enveloped me, and I was too dumbstruck to do anything other than stare at her. “What Ida is trying to say—though she could stand to be less bitchy about it—is that Elton lied to you. He lied to us, too, and we want to help you.”
I snatched my hands back. “I don’t need anyone’s help. I don’t know you, and you don’t know me. For all I know, he sent you both here.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” A muscle in Ida’s jaw ticked as she turned from me and addressed Rose. “I told you it was too soon. She’s still in love with him.”
“No, I’m not.” I was hurt and angry, feeling endlessly betrayed and a million other emotions, but I wasn’t in love with Elton Irving. Not anymore.
Maybe once upon a time, when I’d been a living girl who believed in soul mates and true love. He made me feel special when I’d only ever been invisible, he told me he’d walked this earth for a hundred years before he found me, and we’d be forever. I knew better now.
“Listen.” Rose put a hand on both of our shoulders. “We need one another.”
Ida stiffened, but she gave a short nod of confirmation.
“We came to you, Holly, because we know how difficult it is to be on your own when you’ll never age past sixteen,” Rose said. “I’m sure you’re surviving, but is that all you want to do with your eternity? Survive?”
“We’ve both been there,” Ida said. “We hated it.”
“What do you want from me?” Nothing came for free in life. Not in death, either. There was always a cost in dealing with vampires. I’d learned that the hard way.
Rose and Ida glanced at each other, and a darkness passed between them. Rose turned back to me. “We can’t discuss it out here in the open. Words carry on the wind. But if you come back to our apartment, I promise we’ll explain what we can.”
An apartment that probably had white walls, a clean bathroom, and chairs that weren’t made out of razor blades. I would’ve given anything to have just a few hours in a place that didn’t make my skin crawl. While I was hesitant to show my hand right away, I really didn’t want to go back to the motel that took my weekly rent in cash with no questions in exchange for me not complaining about the roaches and stained mattresses.
And I was so tired of being alone all the time.
“I guess I could hear you out,” I said.
We rounded the corner of the alley, and just as we stepped back onto the busy sidewalk, I caught sight of someone familiar in the crowd outside the piano bar, her bloodred scarf flapping in the wind. Stacey. I hadn’t seen her in thirty-four years, but I knew the face of my old best friend as well as my own. The fresh blood in my veins rushed, as if the part of me I’d exposed and given up so long ago still remembered, but I blinked and she was gone, leaving me breathless and barely standing as round two of “Sweet Caroline” echoed through the night.
Bum, bum, bum.
Chapter Two
Rose and Ida lived in an apartment above a meat market. Other than the vague scent of raw beef lingering in the walls, it was charming. Nothing like my dark and dusty lair, otherwise known as the Gas-and-Go Economy Lodge. Hand-sewn curtains with a cheery sunflower print covered the windows, which matched the tablecloth of a round dining table that had two wicker chairs. A squishy couch with a light-blue cover, nearly the same shade as my eyes, and a chair in the same fabric sat in the living room.
The apartment had two bedrooms, a small open kitchen, and a bathroom with a claw-foot tub. It was the nicest room I’d stood in since I fed on a traveling insurance salesman in his Marriott suite two months ago. I nearly cried at the sight of clean towels on the linen rack.
“You’re welcome to stay with us for now,” Rose said. “We can go with you to get your things from the motel tomorrow. Once Elton finds out you’re with us, it’ll probably be best if we all stick together, anyway.”
“How do you know where I’m staying?” The amount of information they knew unnerved me. Especially because I’d never seen them before, and if Elton really had made them, they would’ve been somewhere in the various cities where we’d resided. They would’ve had no choice but to be around if they had the same draw to him that I had.
I couldn’t entirely explain it. I hadn’t even discovered it existed until Tulsa. It started a few hours after he drove away, a pounding inside my head, an overwhelming need to follow him, stronger than any hunger I’d faced. It wasn’t love, or missing him, or attached to any emotion I could recognize. It felt like dying all over again, but worse. Permanent.
So I hitchhiked, then fed on the person who picked me up and drove their car until it ran out of gas, and then started the process over again until I crossed the state line into Michigan. Once I made it to Glen River, the city I’d called home while I’d been living, the clawing need subsided. I settled into my new routine of working at Taco Bell, hiding out during the day in my cheap motel room, and barely getting by while I waited for Elton to move on to someplace warmer.
Ida sunk into the couch and clunked her feet onto the coffee table, mud flaking off her heavy boots. “We’ve been following you for a while now.”
“Why?” What could the two of them possibly want from me? “If you’re planning on selling my organs on the dark web, joke is on you. They’ll just grow back.”
“We know.” Ida flashed her fangs. “We’d just keep you on ice and do it again. How else do you think we can afford this nice apartment?”
My muscles tensed, but before I could run for the door, Rose patted my shoulder. “Ida is messing with you. She’s old, and being an asshole is the only thing that brings her joy.”
Ida mimicked shaking a cane at me. “Get off my lawn.”
Annoyed but curious, I slowly lowered myself to the edge of the chair, nearest to the balcony in case I needed to get out of there quickly. I had so many questions, but I didn’t know where to begin. How long ago had they been with Elton? When did they find each other? Why did they want to help me? Rose peeked in her room, then shut the door again and took a seat on the couch and crossed her legs at the ankles. Her 1950s polka-dot dress and proper-lady manners made me feel like I’d just crawled out of the swamp.
“I’d offer you some of the guy I have in my room, but seeing as you just ate, I’m assuming you’re not hungry at the moment,” Rose said.
My jaw dropped. “You bring your kills home?”
So gross. Elton went through a phase about a decade ago where he brought kills home. We nearly split up over it. He kept leaving them in the foyer, like he expected me to clean up after him, and he had the nerve to be pissed when I let the bodies pile up until he took care of them.
“For the record, I think it’s a disgusting habit,” Ida said. “If she forgets to take them out, they start bloating, and then we have a hell of a mess on our hands.”
Rose’s brows pinched together as she frowned at Ida. “One time. That was one time I forgot to take out the body.”
“One time is too many,” Ida muttered.
Rose fixed a polite smile on her face when she turned back to me. “I occasionally enjoy a little snack at three in the morning, and fresh kills are harder to find at that hour.”
“That’s really not a good enough excuse,” I said.
“Thank you.” Ida threw her hands in the air. “Finally, someone else who gets it.”
“Anyway.” Rose’s fixed smile faltered for a moment. “Since Elton never bothered to fill you in on his past, I’m sure you have questions about us. We also have blank spots with you, since Ida and I didn’t meet up until after you’d been turned and moved down to Louisiana.”
“I’d like to hear from you first.” I wouldn’t give them a thing until they explained exactly who they’d been, what it had to do with me, and what this all meant.
Ida and Rose exchanged a look, as if they could communicate that way. Ida nodded, and Rose turned back to me. “I was the second. Elton turned me in 1954. He also fed me that line about how he’d been alone for half a century, and he didn’t believe in love until he met me, and blah, blah, blah. Ida came before you and me, but I didn’t know about her until she found me in New Orleans in 1989.”
I’d also been in New Orleans with Elton at that time. Which confirmed we all had the same clawing need to be near him, binding us for all of eternity. Just when I thought working at Taco Bell was the worst part about immortality …
“Why do we have to follow him everywhere?” I asked.
“We have theories, but we don’t know for sure,” Ida said. “We think it’s because he made us. His blood runs in our veins, so we’re a part of him. Where he goes, we have no choice but to follow.”
“And he follows no one? How is that fair?” I crossed my arms. Elton told me none of this before he turned me, but I’d been so in love, had trusted him so completely, I wasn’t sure; nor did I want to examine if that would’ve made a difference.
“His maker is dead,” Rose said. “He goes where he pleases.”
My breath whooshed out of me. “What?”
“We don’t fully understand how he did it,” Ida said.
As far as I knew, we were nearly impossible to kill since we were already dead. Most of the modern-day myths about vampires were wrong, even if they had the smallest basis in truth. We could go out in sunlight, but since we didn’t require sleep, we were also active at night. I imagined most vampires preferred to stay indoors during the day because of the amount of people around. We didn’t enjoy the company of the living any more than we’d felt the need to strike up a conversation with a cow or chicken before we’d become undead.
Stakes in the heart didn’t kill us; they just hurt like hell for a few hours while we healed. Garlic and crosses didn’t do a thing, but I could see a vampire acting like those things repelled them if they were in the mood to play with their food. We had reflections, and we didn’t require an invitation to enter a home, but we still waited for one because that was the polite thing to do.
When I’d confessed to Elton that I was becoming accustomed to immortality, he went ahead and ruined it by telling me about how we could be starved. It wouldn’t kill us, but we’d go mad with bloodlust, our bones would become brittle, and our skin would shrivel to paper-thin scraps clinging to our aging bodies. Yet we would live in that form until we could feed again. A cruel fate I wouldn’t wish on anyone. ...
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