Page 2

Right Now.

Welcome home, Syrsee.

I ’m hungry and the cravings have started again. But I just fed two hours ago and even though I know it’s getting worse—it’s all getting worse—giving in to the craving right now just feels like acceptance. Which is the best way forward for me. Acceptance. Because there’s no way out of this. There’s no way back.

“Wow.” Syrsee blows out a breath, making a little mist of steam in the cab of the truck. She’s smiling. “They’re nice people.”

I’m smiling too. On the outside, at least. “Yeah.” I put the truck in gear and we move forward up my driveway, leaving the little welcoming committee—my neighbors who live along this holler with me—behind us in the rear view. “They are nice. I mean, they weren’t always like this. When I first showed up here, they didn’t like me at all. It was as if they knew there was something wrong with me.”

“They didn’t act that way today.” Syrsee is leaning forward as we go up my hill, anxious to see what’s at the top. Which is my house and my land. Our new home, I guess.

For now, at least.

“No. This generation is pretty cool about the whole thing. I don’t even think they’re afraid of me anymore.”

Syrsee chuckles. “Should they be?”

Maybe not before—I’ve never had any urges to hurt humans. It’s been a long time since I’ve taken any notice of humans—but I’m definitely not the same guy anymore. “No. Of course not.” I say this with a confidence I don’t actually feel. But it must come off genuine enough because Syrsee is barely paying attention to my answer. She’s too busy looking around. “It’s not much”—I mean the house, which has just come into view—“but I built it myself.”

Syrsee leans back in her seat as I park the truck in the gravel driveway in front of the cabin, still looking around. “Seriously?”

“Yep.” I turn the engine off, but neither of us makes to get out. “About… fifty years ago, I guess. Cut down all the trees myself and everything. There were a few teenagers around back then who weren’t afraid of me. They helped.”

“Are they still alive?” She’s looking at me now.

“Yeah. Billy Mark and Robby Corten.” I smile, thinking about them. “They were eighteen or nineteen. Something like that. Which was old enough to drink at the time, so they would bring me beer. Try to get me drunk so I would talk. It didn’t really work, but they hung around and helped out, so I painted them a little picture about the devil I worked for.”

“You told them about Paul?”

“I didn’t tell them his name. I just tried to explain that monsters weren’t what they thought.”

I’m looking at her when these words come out of my mouth. Her green eyes are flashing. Bright and curious. She was so mad at me back in the desert when she threw that fit on the side of the road. She was tired, and confused, and scared, too.

After I took over and started handling things, she changed. Her stress level dropped, she took a nap, and she was relieved, I think, that she didn’t have to make all the decisions anymore. Then she stopped being afraid of me.

It’s probably the wrong move for her. I mean, I don’t want to hurt her. I have no plans or desires to hurt her. But I didn’t have any plans or desires to be turned into a vampire, either.

Yet here we are.

Syrsee is still looking at me. Reading my mind, I guess. “I’m not afraid of you.”

“Don’t you think you should be?”

She lifts one shoulder up in a shrug. “We’ll see.” Then she opens her door and gets out of the truck.

I stay where I am. Allowing myself another moment to shake off the feeling that my future, which is tied to her future, will be a disaster.

It doesn’t have to be that way, Ryet. You don’t have to turn into a cliché.

No. That’s true, I guess. I don’t. But I haven’t been in control of anything in a very long time. I’m fairly certain that whatever is coming has nothing to do with my wants or choices.

I take a deep breath, let it out, then get out of the truck and try to see my ninety-three-acre West Virginia hilltop through Syrsee’s eyes.

It’s a lot of forest. Really thick with trees. But there are dozens of trails going through it, so it’s good for hiking, which is good for thinking. And I kinda need that right now.

The drive was nice, but most of the time over the past few days my situation didn’t really feel real. Now, though, the wings are starting to itch. I can feel them pushing up against the skin of my back. Stretching it. And one day, probably one day very soon, they’re gonna break through the skin and just the thought of that is enough to make my heart race.

Syrsee is standing on the stone pavers that lead up to a nice-size front porch, but she’s turning in a circle, trying to get a three-hundred-and-sixty view to start things off.

I shake off the sense of foreboding, then walk up to her, place a hand on her hip, and point a finger in the direction she’s facing. “There’s a trail through there that leads to a lake.” We turn a little to the right as I continue to point. “That clearing keeps going over that drop, and into the valley below.” We turn again. “There’s an old cabin that way. I lived there while I was building this place.” And our final turn brings us face to face with the house. “Two bedrooms, two baths. Nothing fancy, but every bit of wood that you’ll see—inside and out—was cut from the trees in these forests.”

She turns a little so she can see my face. “You’re very handy, Ryet.”

“Well, I started out as a mechanic and when you have sixty-five years of youth, that’s a lot of opportunity to learn things.”

“Hmm. Probably right. But I doubt Paul spent his youth learning how to build cabins and remodel bathrooms.”

“No.” Then I laugh. “I can’t even picture that.” This is when I realize we haven’t talked about Paul yet. She hasn’t said anything about what happened up in the tower room of Paul’s compound. I don’t remember much about that night, and most of what I do remember was just Syrsee yelling at me to hold myself up and walk as we made our way through the house to Paul’s bedroom so we could escape through his secret tunnel to the garage. I don’t know what happened in that tower. Obviously, we—Paul and I both—were drinking her. We were drinking each other too.

Blood. That’s really all I remember. There was a lot of blood.

But this is not the time to talk about Paul. She must feel it too because when I take her hand and start leading her up the stone pavers as an excuse to change the subject, she doesn’t protest.

The porch is very nice. I like porches, so whenever I’m building a place I always put one on. But everything about this cabin is nice, actually. I spent about five years building it. Five years, near the beginning of my second life, where I mostly lived like a normal man. I took my time—no reason not to—and lived in the small cabin in the woods.

Syrsee and I walk up the porch stairs and then I realize I don’t have my keys. We didn’t take my truck, just some random truck from the Montana compound’s underground garage. I put up a finger. “Hold on. I need to break in.”

Syrsee chuckles. “Need any help?”

“Nah. There’s a root cellar over there.” I point to the right side of the house. “It’s got a back entrance.”

“Well, that’s not creepy.”

“I’ll be right back.” I hop over the porch railing and go around to the back of the house and down a little embankment. At the bottom I find a stacked-stone wall built into the side of the hill. There is a heavy wooden door leading to the space inside.

The root cellar is not locked and when I enter the first thing I notice is how well I can see in the dark. The second thing is that I can smell everything . The earth, water from a recent rain, half a dozen small animals with completely different scent profiles, dried leaves, sticks, the wood I used to build the shelves and even the nails holding the shelves together.

I squint into the darkness, fascinated by my new vision skills. Not like it’s daylight. Not like it’s moonlight, either. Something else. There’s a bit of color. Silver. No. Lavender .

And there’s something in there, because the mist is moving and undulating.

“Paul?” I peer into the shadows. “Is that you?” Which is kind of a dumb thing to assume, but I associate him with the ground. The dirt. Him and Josep, both. I haven’t read a lot of vampire lore so I’m not sure how common this urge to bury one’s self in the ground is, but Josep lives underground full time and Paul stays buried for extended periods as well.

Of course, there is no Paul in here. And a moment later, there is no mist, either. My ability to see in the dark fades and even the scents that were just a moment ago so clear and distinct are gone. All I smell now are mice. And you don’t need any kind of supernatural powers to smell mice.

“Well.” I sigh. “Was that a tease or a threat?” Hard to tell, but it doesn’t matter. Because there’s no one here to answer back.

It’s just me. Alone in the dark under the earth.

When I open the front door for Syrsee I find her sitting on the porch in an old rocking chair. She gets to her feet quickly, like I scared her, then lets out a breath, confirming it to be true.

I raise an eyebrow at her. “You OK?”

“Sure. Yeah. Why?”

“You look… spooked.”

She swallows, shaking her head at the same time. “No. I mean, it was a little quiet. And you were gone longer than I thought you would be. Was there a problem with the root cellar?”

“No.” I shrug. “I mean, the tunnel was a little muddy.” I point to my boots, which have evidence of this. “But it’s still a good root cellar. It’s holding up.”

Syrsee leans to the side a little, trying to see past me. “Tunnel? Where does it come in? To the house, I mean.”

“Oh. The basement.” I wave a hand at the door. “Come on. Come inside.”

“That’s double creepy, Ryet.”

“Unsurprisingly, it was Paul’s idea. I just… put it in. But it does come in handy.”

Syrsee is about to step past me and enter the cabin, but then she pauses, looking at me. “Have these people around here ever met Paul?”

I think back for a moment. Trying to remember a time when Paul might’ve been here when the humans were hanging about. “Yeah, they have. The boys who helped me, at least. But they didn’t realize what he was.”

“I don’t understand.” Syrsee makes a face. “They would not be able to tell that he’s evil? They wouldn’t feel it, Ryet? Because even if I was blind, I would be able to feel his wrongness in a crowded room.”

“Well, you’re a Black witch, Syrsee. You can probably do a lot of things regular humans have no clue about. They couldn’t really see him.”

“Was he a ghost or something? An apparition? Only half there?”

“No. He wasn’t a ghost. Mirage is maybe a better word. They could see him, but they didn’t pay any attention to him. I think he was going through something—a phase, or some kind of vampire maturation point, maybe. Because he would spend years at a time in the earth back then.”

Syrsee and I both look at the side of the house that leads to the root cellar and come to the same conclusion in pretty much the same instant. She’s the one who says it out loud. “That’s why he needed the root cellar?”

“Maybe. Anyway.” I let out a breath, wanting to change the subject. I’m hungry. I don’t care about Paul and his mysteries. I just want to feed . I invite her in with a wave of my hand. “Welcome home, Syrsee.”

She hesitates for a moment, perhaps wondering if a vampire inviting you into his home might come with conditions. Kind of like that myth humans have been perpetuating for the last hundred years about inviting a vampire into a human home.

But if these conditions do exist, I’m not aware of them. And she, being a Black witch—albeit a baby one—can probably feel my honesty the same way she can feel Paul’s evil. So she steps past me and goes inside. I follow and close the door behind us.