Page 29 of Road Trip with a Vampire

Less than half an hour had passed since our kiss. But the tension lingering between us when he’d left had evaporated. From the terrified look on his face, you’d never have guessed anything had happened between us at all.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, alarmed.

His eyes snapped to mine. “I had a note waiting at the front desk.” He extended his right hand out to me, in which was clutched a single folded sheet of white paper.

With shaking hands, I took it from him and began to read.

Mr.Elliott,

We found you! So glad to see you took our note to heart and are on your way to Blossomtown!

And your choice of travel companions? As the kids would say: “CHEF’S KISS!!!” You haven’t lost your touch. Staying in this hotel, your old stomping grounds? Brilliant.

That said: enough is enough. We do not appreciate you “going off the grid,” so to speak, for so long. Please see that it never happens again.

And do let us know (via the usual channels) if there’s anything we can do to facilitate your arrival.

See you at the B’town warehouse,

—JR

I read the note several times before handing it back to Peter. Its brevity, tone, and lack of a full signature all suggested it had been sent by the same person who’d sent the notes in California.

But who was JR? And how did they know Peter and I were here?

“Did you tell anyone we were at this hotel?” I asked.

“No.” Peter’s eyes were too wide in his pale face, making him look both forlorn and frightened. “Who would I have told?”

I bit my lip. “You never got in touch with the people who sent you the notes back in California?”

“I couldn’t have even if I’d wanted to,” he said. “I don’t know who they are or how to reach them.” He shuddered, then buried his face in his hands. “Whoever they are, though, they’re clearly spying on me. On us .”

When he pulled his hands away from his face, the pain in his expression tugged at my heart. After only a moment’s indecision, I crossed the room and sat beside him on the couch.

“The note confirms you’ve stayed here before,” I said as gently as I could. “So you are getting some of your memories back. That’s something.” And it made sense, if he’d visited the bowling alley before, that he would have stayed here. It was the only decent hotel for miles.

“I don’t know which is more upsetting,” he said, not acknowledging the silver lining I’d offered him.

“That we’re being followed by the people who insist I find them in Indiana, or that I don’t know who they are or what they want from me.

” He continued to study the note until, at length, something akin to recognition flared in his eyes.

“It’s obvious that I was supposed to do something for this JR .

Perhaps I used to work for them.” He set the note down on the couch between us.

“From the way they’re acting, I suspect I still do. ”

I moved closer to him without thinking about it, his anxiety its own gravitational pull. “In what way, do you think?”

He scrubbed a hand over his face. “The reaction from that guy at the chicken restaurant, the spying, the cryptic and vaguely threatening notes this person is sending me…I don’t know. All of it suggests that my work may have been…shady.” He swallowed. “Or worse.”

I wanted to disagree but couldn’t. Everything about this screamed bad news. “Remembering something from your past is still a good thing,” I pointed out. “If it turns out you were a jackass before you lost all your memories, and you don’t want to be one anymore, you can change.”

Peter smiled sadly. “That’s easy for you to say. You’re so afraid of doing wrong you won’t even tell anyone you can do magic.” He shook his head. “I don’t know if a person as good as you could understand.”

And there it was. My opportunity to tell Peter the whole truth about myself handed to me on a silver platter.

Would I take it, though? Everything between us would change. I liked that he thought I was good. No one ever had before. It would all end once he knew what I used to be.

As scary as that thought was…perhaps I’d spent too long hiding from everyone.

Maybe it was time to let someone in.

I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders. “I understand more than you think.”

Peter’s forehead creased. “Oh?”

Gods. Where did I even begin? “Is there anything alcoholic in that minibar?” I asked, walking over to it. “I’ll tell you everything, but I might need a drink to get through it.”

“Get me a Diet Coke while you’re at it?” Peter asked. A sad smile still played at the corners of his lips. “It’s been a hell of a night.”

Fortunately, we were both in luck. I tossed Peter one of the three sodas I found in the fridge as I unscrewed the cap of a miniature vodka bottle. Then I sat beside him on the couch again, downed the bottle in one swallow, and began.

“Most vampires like to think they’re the oldest person in the room,” I said.

“They’re usually right. Unless I’m there.

” I checked for Peter’s reaction. When all I saw was patient acceptance, I continued.

“I can’t remember my exact birthday or even its year.

My earliest clear memory was of people in my village talking about the Mayflower landing having happened in the recent past.” I paused. “I was a teenager.”

That got a reaction. “You’re…wait.” He blinked rapidly as he did the mental math. “You’re hundreds of years old?”

I winced. “Is that a deal breaker?” I had no idea how old Peter was, but odds were good that if we hooked up, I’d be robbing the proverbial cradle.

“No,” he said very quickly. “It’s just…” He trailed off. Considered his next words carefully. “Unexpected.”

“I get that a lot,” I said honestly. “I’m over four hundred years old, and no one can believe I’m older than thirty-two. Is it that hard to imagine someone who looks like me being older than dirt?”

He looked down at his hands. “Something like that.”

I didn’t want to analyze what he meant by that . If I did, I’d never get the rest of this out.

“Anyway, immortality is kind of a mind fuck,” I continued.

Most vampires, being immortal themselves, already knew that.

But since Peter’s memory was limited, I wanted to fill him in.

It was an important detail that added context to my story.

“It’s worse when everyone around you has normal human lifespans.

I don’t remember what happened to my family or to any of the other people in the community where I grew up, but I do remember looking up one day and realizing everyone I had ever loved was gone.

” I looked at the now-empty vodka bottle in my hands, wishing I had another.

“There aren’t words for that kind of pain. ”

Peter’s eyes were full of sympathy. “I can only imagine.”

I didn’t tell him this, but if Peter had his memories, he would be able to do a lot more than imagine what it was like. He’d been human once. Even if he were centuries younger than me, the people he’d known and loved from his human life were almost certainly gone.

I gave a one-shouldered shrug—realizing after the fact that it was a near-perfect imitation of the gesture Peter always made when he didn’t know what to say.

“When immortality you never asked for has you outliving all the people you ever cared about, a destructive sort of nihilism often sets in,” I continued.

“In hindsight, my falling in with vampires was likely inevitable. They were immortal, too, without ever having asked to be. They were the only people who could understand.”

I got up and began pacing. The next part of the story was where I told Peter the worst parts of who I had been. Peter simply sat on the couch, eyes on me as he waited for me to continue.

“We—I—had a marvelous time for centuries, playing practical jokes and causing all sorts of mayhem,” I said. “Have you heard of the Thames Games? Or the Parisian fire of 1823?”

Peter shook his head, looking mildly pained. “I don’t remember if I have.”

Shit . “Right. Sorry,” I said, wincing. “Anyway, they were notorious events in the vampiric community. We had a lot of wild adventures together, me and my friends. Created legends about ourselves that were totally made-up. For a long time, people referred to me as Grizelda the Terrible, of all the ridiculous things . I never knew why, but that was half the fun. When everything else about our endless existences felt pointless, so did societal conventions and inhibitions.”

Peter’s mouth quirked into a wry grin. “That all sounds like a lot of fun.”

I swallowed around the dry lump in my throat.

“It was,” I admitted, my voice gone suddenly hoarse.

“For ages, I had the best time.” I stopped pacing and knelt by the minibar again.

Grabbed another tiny bottle of vodka and downed it, willing the burn to give me the strength I needed to get through the rest of my story.

“Occasionally, though, people got hurt. Sometimes badly.”

When I stood up again, I chanced a glance at Peter’s face. At the expectant look I saw there I knew there was no turning back.

“One of my favorite things to do back then was to start fires,” I admitted for the first time in over a decade.

“I’m an elemental witch, and a damn good one.

All I have to do to make fire is snap my fingers.

” To demonstrate, I did exactly that. Obligingly, a small flame the size of a match head appeared at my fingertip.

Peter opened his mouth in surprise, or possibly to ask me a question, but I snuffed out the flame again with another snap before he could get out the words.

“That’s…” Peter eventually said. He blew out a breath. “Impressive.”