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MERCER

Mercer had not expected to spend the day alone. The scowl his daughter was sending him across the kitchen table, though, told him he had to revise his Saturday plans.

“I thought we were going to do something fun?” he ventured anyway. “Go to the lake? If you’re feeling well enough, I could rent us a canoe.”

With an air fit for a 14th century general instead of a pale, freckle-faced middle schooler shoveling down a bowl of cereal, her dark braids crammed into a beanie, Lydia replied, “I’m busy.”

Mercer had eaten his own breakfast hours ago, but he picked at a few of the cereal’s marshmallows from the center of his palm. “You sleep in until all hours of the morning and then you’re busy?”

She didn’t even look up. “Yup.”

He had a sneaking suspicion that she was mad at him again, and try as he might, he couldn’t figure out why. “Puck, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, Dad.” This time she did glance at him, just long enough for her dark eyes to meet his with a gaze so sharp and deep that Mercer couldn’t help but see her mother in it more and more often. That scared him in ways he wasn’t ready to admit to himself. Lydia snorted. “I just want to hang out with my friends—is that like a crime now or something?”

“Or something,” Mercer grumbled, and maybe he had meant it to be funny, but maybe at the same time he hadn’t, and it came out with a bitter edge he regretted instantly. He was the adult—the only adult Lydia had. He was not supposed to be arguing with his own daughter. Even if she was being an absolute pill for no apparent reason. But he couldn’t help her if she wasn’t willing to talk to him about it. Mercer sighed. “Have fun with your friends, then.”

He shoved the last few marshmallows into his mouth as he stood. They were undesirably sweet suddenly, little memories of days that seemed like a different lifetime. Who had he been when he’d sorted the pink marshmallows out of their cereal with an eight-year-old Lydia because she had learned that the pink food dye was made from bugs? It felt like just heartbeats earlier that he’d tossed similar pieces at her mother as they fed the fussy toddler, calling her The Puck for the first time. He swore a moment before that he’d been on his second date with Leah, where she’d told him she often ate cereal for dinner and they’d left their prestigious restaurant reservations for two bowls on her couch, his head in her lap as she tried to land marshmallows in his mouth.

When had those days slipped so far into the past? It felt as though there was nothing he could have done to stop the progression, and yet he was the one left hurting for it.

He, and his daughter, who’d gone back to ignoring him like it came as easy to her as breathing now.

Mercer threw out one last-ditch life preserver. “I guess I’ll just be paddleboarding by myself, while crying about uneaten movie popcorn. All alone. No one to save me from the Lake Ness Monster.”

He hoped their inside joke would buy him an extra moment of her attention. They’d been out on the lake the first time he’d made it, four—or was it five?—years ago, Lydia bouncing in front of him as he’d paddled their canoe.

“This is a lake, Dad. Lochs are in Scotland and Ireland. They’re Gaelic.” She’d sounded like a general then too, come to think of it.

“Well, then it’s the Lake Ness Monster,” Mercer had replied, “and it’s coming to eat you!”

Lydia didn’t laugh or squeal now, but the way she rolled her eyes seemed a little softer than before. Less irritated, at least. “I thought it was sexist and only ate little girls.”

“I could be a little girl. You don’t know my gender.” Technically, he’d played around enough when Lydia was younger to be fairly certain his gender was a boring match to the one that had been labeled on his birth certificate. But imaginary sexist monsters didn’t have to know that.

“Gross, Dad. You’re a full-grown adult. You’d be a woman ,” she complained, but her lips twitched as she got up and she hit the faucet long enough to drench her bowl, even if she left it in the sink after.

Mercer didn’t have the heart to remind her to stick it in the dishwasher—he still had his late night queso dishes “soaking”, so it would be hypocritical anyway.

He watched as Lydia snatched her med bag off the rack and shoved her feet into her boots without bothering to lace them, but as she reached the door, she glanced back, her lips a little crooked. “Later!”

“Be safe, Puck,” Mercer replied. “Stay out of the forest—and the cemeteries. Call me if you’re tired, or you feel a spell coming, or you just want to rest—anything. I’m always here if you need to be picked up!”

“Yeah, yeah.”

The door didn’t slam, and that felt like a success. Every step she took away from the house still broke Mercer’s heart, the cracks bleeding with an anxiety that had lived there ever since the police officer had knocked on his door that night. He could still hear the crisp, cautious question, Is Leah Bloncourt your wife? The rest of their conversation might not have existed, besides a scattering of words: hospital won’t accept her. Transformation. Unfortunately. I’m sorry.

When Lydia was out of the house, there was still a part of him that panicked at every doorbell and phone call, as though this would be the one where he’d learn he’d lost his little girl irreversibly; that she’d had an accident, her meds had stopped working, someone from Vitalis-Barron’s research department had realized what she was and decided vampires weren’t the only species worth studying. It was an illogical fear. Her meds had been doing a fine job for years and no one would want to study a girl whose nonhuman qualities were constantly trying to kill her. And accidents…

Is Leah Bloncourt your wife?

They’d used up their family’s share of bad karma, hadn’t they?

Besides, Mercer was doing everything he possibly could to prevent anything like what had happened to Leah. He knew all his daughter’s friends and ensured their parents were aware of any emergency procedures; took loops around the neighborhood as a local watch; confirmed that every time she left the house, she took extra meds, water, electrolytes, anything she could possibly need, and never engaged in anything dangerous, never overexerted herself, always had a way to reach him if she needed it. This summer was the first time he feared she wasn’t taking those precautions seriously, though. Maybe he needed a phone tracking app…

No, he didn’t want to be that parent.

But if something happened to her…

Mercer breathed in and out and tried to think of anything but her bloody and gruesome death. Instead, his mind just went right back to Leah. Oh, how things would have been different if she were still here. He wouldn’t have accidentally ended up with a dating app on his phone, that was for sure.

He knew, technically, how it had gotten there—too much gin and not enough club soda—right after finishing the reunion episode of his favorite reality dating show, which, based on how many of the couples had already split up, should really have had the opposite effect on his ideas of kindling a new love life. That was where the gin had come in. Seeing all the smiling faces on the app, though, with more bared skin than he thought he’d ever be comfortable presenting in return, he’d felt the courage of the alcohol slip out of him one left-swipe at a time.

Is this your future spouse ? Each profile seemed to scream at him. He’d almost deleted it then and there.

Mercer leaned against the kitchen counter, fiddling with his phone before giving in and opening the app, like this time would actually grant him the conviction to press uninstall. Instead, it showed him a list of the reasons he’d kept it around: one short stream of messages from the only match in his inbox, completed by an icon of a devilishly grinning twink with sparkling brown eyes, a cascade of dark hair, and lean little fangs.

R. BabyCock

You say you like hiking huh? Well, you’re free to climb me any day of the week ;)

That was the dorkiest message I could have possibly sent, but I have no regrets.

I have one regret actually, because I think I’ve scared you off now. I do hope I didn’t make you too uncomfortable; that was never my intention. I’m just a terrible flirt, who flirts terribly when people are out of his league.

Anyways, I will shut up before this becomes creepy on my end.

(But you can always reply, I’ll still be here.)

It was, in fact, terrible flirtation, and a little bit creepy considering the space of the timestamps meant that this “R” person had come back to add a response every few days, but it was also kind of sweet that it only got dorkier after the pickup line. Mercer would never meet R. BabyCock, and he didn’t have the guts to respond just to tell him so. He also didn’t have the guts to make his profile suddenly vanish.

Why the hell had he let himself sign up for this damn app in the first place?

From the living room, Kat made her adorably melancholic beagle bay at something in the backyard. Dam squirrels were probably trying to get into the birdfeeder again. He’d have to check it later.

Mercer closed the dating app. He didn’t delete it.

Instead he swiped around his phone a bit, checking on his socials—trying not to snoop too hard on Lydia’s in the process, though the fact that she hadn’t removed him as a follower yet felt like a win—and got distracted by an update video from one of the reality stars he’d hated in the last season of the survivalist dating show, Love Cabin, before he finally managed to work his way to his professional email. Mercer had a few new commission requests, which he opened one by one, taking a moment to consider the project’s complexity and his work schedule before accepting the first two and rejecting the third.

In the middle of his draft, a new email came through. The subject alone made his skin prickle. Holy Silver. He deleted it unread and prayed it would end at that. Too many people knew where he lived, and since the news had broken that Vitalis-Barron was—allegedly—employing hunters to bring vampires into their ‘totally legal’ voluntary research studies, somehow a lot more people also knew that Mercer had, years ago, made the holy silver that had wormed its way into those very hunter’s hands.

Well, they could all fuck off.

Mercer’s stomach twisted unhappily and a slight pounding started in the left side of his head. That brought an even unhappier churning to his gut. He breathed through it, scanning his body for signs that this wasn’t the start of a migraine. No, it seemed to be just a normal flare of anxiety. And maybe a headache. His blood sugar was probably fine after the marshmallows, but he hadn’t drunk his second glass of morning water.

Mercer shut off his phone and refilled his cup, downing it twice for good measure.

He had enough stress compounding in his life as it was; he didn’t need added triggers like screen time and dehydration creeping up on him. What he actually needed was a vacation—one of the relaxing kinds where he got to sit in peace for two weeks and do absolutely nothing for the first time since before he could remember—but he’d just spent a year’s worth of vacation savings on a glass-maker’s gloryhole and Lydia’s fall term for the private school where he paid them enough to actually care about accommodating her medication routine and the side effects of fatigue and nausea it produced. The best vacation he was likely to get was a free Saturday to spend with his daughter. Now that Lydia had trashed that plan, Mercer already knew that instead of using the time to relax, he was going to be making up for the migraine that had taken him out of commission for half of Wednesday and most of Thursday.

That was how life worked. Shit happened to the people with the best of intentions, and they had to suffer through it to keep making money until they died. His grouchiness wasn’t entirely fair, he decided—his job was one of the few real joys he found in life, even if it came with a fair amount of toil and didn’t pay him for half of the effort he put in. Though, frankly, that was his own fault for not being willing to cater solely to rich folks.

He filled himself a water bottle the size of his head, topped off Kat’s breakfast, and changed into his work clothes. The t-shirt was no longer the white it had once been, marked by enough color stains and holes to be a tie-dye experiment gone wrong, but his cargo pants were in slightly better condition, and it wasn’t as though anyone but Lydia ever saw him in this outfit. He shoved back his natural curls with one of his dozen colorful bandanas, threw on his boots, and made his way into the backyard.

Kat tumbled out with him, tripping over herself to race through the yard, sniffing a path around Mercer’s barn-sized work shed at the back. The sight of her gleeful bounding never failed to bring Mercer joy. He caught her and gave her back a hardy scratch as she tried to barrel past him again, setting her back down with a chuckle as she waggled and bayed. She went right back to her snuffling.

There was no sign of squirrels, but one brave sparrow still pecked away at the feeder despite the presence of the hound cheerfully circling below. Kat was certainly interested in something , though. Something leading her awfully near the front door of the shed…

Mercer begrudgingly pulled back out his phone, entering the passcode on the shed’s security app and— oh . Well, fuck. According to his phone, the shed traps had been activated. His nerves lit up, his mind turning back to the holy silver email he’d deleted that morning and the dozen others like it that had been arriving for the last month.

“Kat,” he called, then whistled, letting the dog mournfully romp over to him before guiding her back into the house. His heart pounded, but he pulled the largest kitchen knife from its block with steady hands. “Stay here, girl.”

The yard felt strangely quiet without her meager protection, but Mercer held his weapon at the ready as he braced against the shed’s heavy rolling door. If Leah’s traps were still functional, then he was being overly cautious. And he’d never known something of Leah’s to break without warning. Still though…

He eased the door open, stepping into the shed with his knife raised and his senses alight, the thrum in his chest echoing in his ears. As he took in the sight before him, he could feel the beat of it change.

“Oh,” said the vampire hanging from the ceiling. “It’s you.”