Page 28 of My Vampire Plus-One

I scrolled through the list of results as I sipped my drink, frowning.

None of them fit the man I’d just had coffee with.

Agent ArchibaldCleaveshosts a going away party for Tom Cruise at his North Hollywood home onReginaldWay—

In this video,Reginald, with the assistance of UC Berkeley’s electron microscope,cleavesthe atom into two disparate halves—

The vampire fugitive R.C.has been wanted for the murder of dozens of innocent partygoers for the better part of two centuries—

That last link made me do a double take.

Vampire fugitive?

The better part oftwo centuries?

I clicked on it, more out of morbid curiosity than anything else.

It brought me to an ancient GeoCities website that looked like it had been created twenty-five years ago and not updated since. The page was filled with enormous Comic Sans text that was so bright red it was nearly impossible to read. I skimmed, snorting when I got to a set of instructions halfway down the page:

The vampire fugitive R.C. has been wanted for the murder of dozens of innocent vampire partygoers forthe better part of two centuries!!!! We, The Collective, remain the only vampiric organization dedicated to bringing him to justice at any cost.

SHOULD ANY INFORMATION ABOUT THIS:

CRIMINAL

EVIL VAMPIRE MASTERMINDL

TERRIBLE GUY

COME TO LIGHT

PLEASEEMAIL THE COLLECTIVEIMMEDIATELYAT

[email protected]

I rolled my eyes and closed out of the site.

Some people really had too much free time on their hands. I wasn’t one of them, and I wasn’t in the mood to fall down a rabbit hole of Internet absurdity this late at night.

Maybe I’d spelled Reginald’s last name wrong. He never did spell it for me. I typed in a few different versions of it to see if that got better results.

Reginald Cleves.

Reginald Cleeves.

Reginald Cleives.

Still nothing that was on point.

A total lack of an Internet presence had to be some sort of red flag, right? Maybe he’d given me a fake name after all.

I yawned and rubbed at my eyes. It was late, and I wasexhausted. My alarm was set for six the next morning, and if I wanted to be able to function I needed to get to bed.

Figuring out the deal with Reggie could wait until morning.

•••••••

I woke up to myphone buzzing loudly on my nightstand. I normally silenced it before bed. But after getting home later than usual, and then spending the better part of two hours trying fruitlessly to find some sign of Reggie on the Internet, I’d skipped about half of my regular nightly rituals.