Page 37 of Road Trip with a Vampire

Eighteen

Five weeks earlier

Out of pure boredom and frustration, Peter went online and researched the person whose safe he’d spent the better part of two weeks trying unsuccessfully to crack.

He rarely researched his marks if he wasn’t being paid for a hit job. But this was an unusual situation. The internet frequently baffled him, but it was unparalleled when it came to providing leads.

After only thirty minutes of online sleuthing Peter had learned two critical things. First, the safe’s owner went by a different name than what Peter’s employers had given him. Second, she hadn’t lived in Chicago in a decade.

He’d suspected his employers were incompetent, but this was next level.

Peter didn’t know why a woman who ran a yoga studio in Northern California would have a safe in Chicago. He stopped caring, though, after he saw her picture on the studio’s website.

She was an exceptionally striking woman, with thick, curly hair that fell to just below her shoulders and the sort of knowing hazel eyes that could see straight through you. In a different lifetime, he might have gone to great lengths to get the attention of a woman like this.

Under different circumstances, she might have been exactly his type.

Now, though…

Now he was only researching both her given name and her pseudonym, as well as the town where she lived, in case it yielded clues.

It had nothing whatsoever to do with how soft this woman’s hair looked or how beautifully kissable her lips were.

When he was on a job, Peter was above such things.

And should his employers ever find his search history, that was the story he’d be sticking to.

The house we pulled up to was a well-maintained mid-century one-story home, with neatly trimmed hedges in front and planter boxes beneath all the windows.

Nothing grew in them—but then, it was autumn in Michigan, one of the coldest places in the country.

Despite it still being several weeks before winter officially began, the temperature was well below freezing.

It was easy enough to imagine this yard and those planter boxes the way they likely looked in the summertime. They’d be filled with bright multicolored annuals striving for the sun. I’d grown flowers like those once. But that had been many years and several human lifetimes ago.

As I pondered the house’s neat, freshly painted black shutters, Peter made his way from the car to where I stood, about ten feet away from the front door. His hands were stuffed deep in the pockets of his coat, his face giving away none of what he was thinking.

We’d driven well into the night to get to South Harbor. I’d proposed stopping along the way, but Peter had been far too excited to finally see something he remembered to take a real break. He’d insisted he could drive if I needed rest, and he’d made good on that.

As glad as I was to accommodate him, I needed to conduct another magical experiment soon.

Driving through the night without stopping for longer than it took to refuel the car meant my blood was roiling in my veins and my hands were beginning to shake for reasons that had nothing to do with the below-freezing temperatures.

After we saw this house, I’d need to find a way to do a spell or risk more significant discomfort.

“What do you remember?” I asked Peter, threading my arm through his. It was past two in the morning, so I kept my voice low. There were two cars parked in the driveway; the last thing we wanted was to wake whoever now lived here and alert them to our lurking presence.

Peter closed his eyes and breathed deeply, as though by gathering the essence of this place into his lungs, he might regain something vital he had lost.

“My name,” he said. He indicated the mailbox at the end of the driveway. “ Peter Elliott was written on that mailbox in white stenciled letters.”

He slowly approached the house, tucking me closer to his side as he walked.

Grizelda Watson, protective talisman , I thought.

That was a new one for me. A kitschy Welcome mat depicting autumn vegetables lay on the ground in front of the door.

Though I suspected Peter and I would be anything but welcome here.

“I built this,” Peter said, voice reverent.

He ran a hand along the house’s limestone base the way one might caress something precious and long thought lost. “Or rather, I designed it. I can remember the plans for this house spread out over a large wooden table. I remember working on them every night.”

As he said the words, I could almost picture it.

Peter, dressed in clothes from the era in which this house was built, poring over designs with the same fastidiousness he brought to everything he did.

His large hand clasped around a pencil, drawing neat, careful lines on the page.

He wouldn’t tolerate any mistakes, would not be satisfied until everything was drawn exactly as he wanted it to be.

The mailbox in his memory bore no one else’s name besides his own. No Elliott Family . He must have lived here alone. How a man like this could have made it into his mid-thirties without a partner was beyond me.

Not that I wanted to imagine him living here with anyone else.

Peter looked at me then, eyes very bright. “I think I must have been an architect or an engineer. I don’t remember who used my designs to build this home, but whoever did it was important to me.”

“Someone from your family, maybe?” I asked.

Peter’s brow furrowed as he tried to remember. “I don’t recall.” His frustration was impossible to miss.

“That probably doesn’t have anything to do with the amnesia,” I said.

At the look of consternation on his face, I placed my hand on his arm and gave what I hoped was a reassuring squeeze.

“Very few vampires remember their human lives with clarity.” The vampire transformation process was a uniformly traumatic experience, involving the death of what made the person human plus the loss of a truly disturbing amount of blood.

Like with most traumatic experiences, the brain did everything it could to cabin it off and tuck it away.

Clear human memories were usually an unavoidable casualty of the experience.

“Is that so?” Peter asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “The fact that you can remember as much as you do of your human life is amazing.”

He considered that. “Huh. Well, I don’t know how I went from designing houses to being someone who inspires fear in restaurant and bowling alley employees. I’m glad that at one point in my existence, at least, I did honest work.”

All at once, the excitement Peter had felt when we’d found this house leached out of him. His shoulders slumped forward, and his brow furrowed at the reminder that he still didn’t know who he was or what he’d done.

I had to do something to bring his smile back.

Thinking quickly, I placed a hand on the house’s limestone base. “You know,” I began, “none of the houses in this neighborhood look more than sixty, seventy years old.”

Peter turned to face me. “True.” He still looked troubled, though, which meant he didn’t see where I was going with this.

“That means ,” I said, drawing out the word, “if you built it while still human, I am much older than you.” I let my smile grow into one of pure mischief. “I’m officially a cradle-robber.”

Maybe he knew I was just trying to distract him. Either way, it worked. His surprised laughter was so loud it might have woken the people who lived here.

We didn’t stick around long enough to find out.

We drove around South Harbor’s small downtown for hours. There were no other cars on the roads, but Peter slowed at every intersection anyway, looking in both directions in case something else jogged his memories.

Other than his old house, though, nothing seemed familiar to him.

We reached a secluded beach at the edge of town shortly before dawn. When we got there, Peter stopped the car for the first time in hours.

“It’s beautiful,” I breathed. It was. We were perched at an elevation several feet above the beach, giving us a beautiful vantage point from which to look out on the vast expanse of lake and sky.

It was a cold, cloudless night, dawn still far enough away that the only real light came from the moon and stars above us, as well as a lighthouse beacon winking at us from many miles away.

“Huh,” Peter said, frowning.

“What is it?”

He didn’t answer me. Wordlessly, he unbuckled his seatbelt and left the car. Concerned now, I followed him down a sandy path connecting the parking lot to the lakeshore.

We stopped when we were just a few feet from the water, the waves of the massive lake lapping at our shoes.

It had been many years since I’d visited any of the Great Lakes.

Lake Michigan didn’t get the fanfare that California’s coast did, or even the Atlantic seashore.

But for my money, the west coast of Michigan was one of the most slept-on stretches of coastline in the world.

In the summer this beach would be packed with tourists who agreed with me, mostly from nearby Chicago and other parts of Michigan, seeking a beautiful place away from home where they could escape the sweltering Midwestern humidity.

Now, though, it was just Peter, me, and the endless water.

“I used to like coming here,” he said, solemn as a prayer.

“I remembered that the minute we got here.” He took off the light jacket he wore and spread it out on the sand.

I was about to protest and tell him it was way too cold outside to go without a jacket.

Then I remembered that as long as we weren’t out here for too long, he’d be fine.

He sat on his makeshift beach blanket, then gestured for me to join him.

I pulled my own puffer jacket tighter around myself. He might do okay in this kind of weather, but despite my quasi-immortality I was still made of flesh and blood.