Page 2 of Road Trip with a Vampire

An awkward quiet settled between us after that. If I were smart, I would thank this stranger for the help and go home. The pinprick tingles in my fingertips were now spreading up through my arms. I couldn’t ignore them for much longer.

But I didn’t want to say good night. Maybe it was just because it had been so long since I’d encountered someone so attractive, but there was something about this man that compelled me.

I wanted to keep him there. Keep him talking.

“So, Peter,” I began. “What do you do when you’re not either helping strangers with their trash or avoiding the sun?”

He slid his hands into his pockets, rocking back on his heels as he considered the question. “You could say I’m engaging in a…How did I hear someone put it the other day?” He pursed his lips, searching for the right words. “A journey of self-discovery.”

He said it like he was speaking an unfamiliar language. I laughed. “Sounds like something a person around here would say.”

“Really?”

“Yes. It could have even been someone who takes classes at my studio.”

“Your studio?”

I jerked my thumb over my shoulder, in the direction of Yoga Magic .

“We hold yoga classes six days a week. Pilates, too, on Tuesdays. All ability levels.” The smile I gave him was one part sales pitch, one part my continued weak attempt at flirting.

“If you’re engaging in a journey of self-discovery , yoga could be just the thing. ”

He frowned. “How so?”

How much truth should I offer this guy? Some partial truths would probably be all right. “I’m not sure where I’d be today without yoga. My students share similar stories with me all the time.”

He considered that. “Do you think someone like me, who, as far as I can recall, has no yoga experience, might benefit?”

“Definitely,” I said. “First class is free if you want to try it.”

“I do appreciate free.” Then he added, so quietly I didn’t know whether I was meant to hear, “Right now I’ll try anything.”

There was pain in his expression, in the way his brows knit together for just a whisper of a moment.

When a car horn blared some distance away, it seemed to bring him back to the present.

He shook his head slightly, as if to shake off an errant thought.

“Thank you for the invitation.” His voice was back to the warm neutrality it had held before. “I’ll think about it.”

“I hope you do,” I said.

Silence again. I needed to get started on my bedtime routine to have any chance of sleeping that night, but Peter was still watching me like I was a puzzle he was determined to solve.

I couldn’t look away.

Would it be a bad idea to ask for his number?

To invite him up to my apartment? Probably.

But it had been ages since my last hookup.

I didn’t do real romantic entanglements with anyone with a normal human lifespan, but perhaps spending one night with this guy was just what I needed to blow off some steam.

I closed my eyes for the span of a handful of heartbeats, gathering the nerve to ask if he’d like to join me upstairs for a cup of coffee.

When I opened them again, he was gone.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

I’d seen this kind of silent speed before. People who could just disappear like that were usually very bad news.

Renault, the dog who lived in the apartment complex next to my studio, started barking. It snapped me out of my irrational wave of paranoia.

I was being ridiculous. There had been some false alarms, particularly recently—but no one from my old life had ever found me here.

There was no reason to think they would now.

My one-bedroom apartment wasn’t much. It was small and mostly furnished with things I’d picked up at Redwoodsville’s sole consignment store over the years.

I loved it, though. It was directly upstairs from the studio, making my commute nonexistent. More than that, though, it was home. Just when I’d given up hope of anyplace feeling like a refuge again, my apartment had slowly become the only space in the world I could truly be myself.

Or at least as much myself as I ever allowed the person I’d become to be.

The stress of the day and the strangeness of my encounter with Peter fell away as soon as I crossed the threshold into my living room.

But that niggling ache deep in my bones, the tingling in my fingertips—they did not.

No, they had been with me when I’d woken up that morning, only growing more insistent as the day had worn on.

Sighing, I tossed my keys onto my rickety old entryway table. Then I stripped, leaving my workout clothes on the floor where they fell. Normally I prided myself on keeping my home neat and tidy. But I was tired and feeling gross from the unseasonable heat.

I’d pick my clothes up later. One perk to living alone? No one was around to see my mess.

My shower’s water pressure was god-tier and much better than you’d expect from the slightly run-down state of the rest of the building. I turned the water up as hot as it would go, then stood beneath the spray for long minutes as I scrubbed my body clean.

I tried focusing on how good it felt, willed my mind to go quiet and empty with the mindfulness skills I’d honed since becoming a yogi.

Sometimes that was enough to do the trick.

But it didn’t work. No matter how many deep breaths I took, no matter how much I tried to focus solely on the pleasurable sensation of hot water sluicing down my back, the physical need to expel some of my power churned through me, impossible to ignore.

After long minutes I dried off, wiping the steam from my bathroom mirror with a corner of my towel. My reflection—or Zelda’s reflection—stared back at me.

Technically speaking, my body and my face were essentially the same as they’d always been.

I still had the same smattering of freckles across the bridge of my nose, that same star-shaped birthmark just beneath my right ear that no amount of concealer—or magic—had ever been able to completely hide.

I’d stopped dyeing my hair garish colors a few years back to let my natural auburn shine through, but my hair itself was still the same wavy texture and thickness it had been in the seventeenth century and every decade since.

Yet despite everything about me that had not changed, the person I used to be would hardly recognize the person staring back at her now.

I kept an old picture of myself on my bedside table to remind me how far I’d come.

But I didn’t need to do a side-by-side comparison between that picture and my image in the mirror to note the differences.

I held myself differently in my new life.

Took up less space somehow, even though my body had not really changed since I’d reached adulthood.

Maybe the peace I’d found since assuming this new, magic-free identity was the reason for it.

There was no more fleeing in the middle of the night because angry villagers with pitchforks had learned who and what I was.

I never woke up in cornfields anymore, unable to clearly remember what had happened the night before because I’d been so intoxicated with magic and gods only knew what else when I’d passed out.

Here, there were no magical practical jokes that went so awry that the guilt would haunt me for years.

Or maybe I simply held myself differently because Northern California weather was just that damn good. I had no way of knowing.

Unfortunately, though, there were also drawbacks to my new lifestyle.

I wrapped my towel around myself and pulled shut the lacy blue curtains covering my bedroom window. If someone was out at this hour, I didn’t want to risk them seeing what I was about to do.

With a flick of my wrist, I conjured a row of six squat candles on the low table beneath my bedroom window.

Another flick, and a flame the size of a match head appeared at my fingertip.

Impressive work to some. To me, though, it was as easy as breathing.

I was an elemental witch who could create thunderstorms on a sunny day and burn down a house with a snap of my fingers.

Magicking up a few candles and then lighting them was such a tiny fraction of what I could do, it defied mathematics.

I touched the tip of my lit finger to the first candle, then moved down the line, lighting each one in turn.

Then I sat on my bed and watched the candles flicker in my darkened bedroom.

I already felt lighter, the ugly static pulsing through my bloodstream mellowing into a quiet, manageable hum.

My hands no longer shook. If I tried to put it into words, I’d compare this feeling to the relief that comes when you finally exhale after holding your breath a few moments too long.

What I hadn’t known ten years ago, when I’d vowed to permanently leave magic and my old life behind, was that my power was too deeply rooted in me to ignore altogether.

Ten years ago, I could go months without tapping into the raw energy that made up who I was.

The length of time I could comfortably abstain had dwindled over the years, though.

Now I couldn’t go more than twenty-four hours without an impossible-to-ignore, intolerably jittery feeling that sometimes bordered on pain setting in.

And if I ignored it too long, sometimes things got destructive.

About six months ago, the buildup inside me had grown too much, and I’d accidentally set a greeting card display on fire, right in the middle of a drugstore.

Fortunately, I’d been able to act quickly, extinguishing the fire and disposing of the ruined cards before the half-asleep cashier had even noticed.

In fairness to me, the cards had been cheesy as hell.

Burning them may have even done the poor cardstock they were printed on a favor.

But it didn’t matter. The whole experience had rattled me so badly I’d vowed to use at least a little of my magic every day so nothing like that would ever happen again.

I wanted nothing to do with my magic anymore. But if doing a simple candle-lighting party trick every night was the compromise I had to make to keep the predictable, easy life I’d built for myself here, so be it.

The person I used to be would have been horrified at everything I’d just done. She’d have called these candles, the yoga, every single detail of my new life, a bunch of cottagecore bullshit.

But I wasn’t speaking with that person anymore.

She’d never once led me in the right direction.