Page 9 of Road Trip with a Vampire

“—and Peter really wanted to see California,” he continued as if I hadn’t interrupted.

“Your letter said you were in California, and it must have been front of mind. The Grizzy I knew would have thought nothing of taking in a stranger with a story as odd as Peter’s.

I should have considered that maybe you’d changed since we last spent time together. I’m sorry that I overstepped. Truly.”

I sighed and closed my eyes. I didn’t regret reaching out to him a few months earlier. But…

“I left my old life for a reason,” I said in a much gentler voice. “I don’t hang out with vampires anymore. Not ever.”

“I get that,” Reggie said, conciliatory. “Even if I don’t understand. I should have thought things through.”

“You should have,” I agreed. But Reggie was the kind of person who was hard to stay mad at for long. Unable to keep the teasing from my voice, I added, “I will consider forgiving you.”

“Thanks,” he said, laughing. “I’ve missed you, you know.”

“I’ve missed you, too,” I admitted.

There had been a time when Reg and I had been nearly inseparable. Completely platonically, of course. We’d only ever been friends, nothing more than two misfits who’d somehow found our way to each other. Wrecking that kind of bond with sex had never appealed to either of us.

Also, blonds had never done it for me at all.

But platonic love was love, too. Leaving my old life behind without telling my yearslong partner in crime was the only thing I regretted about disappearing without a trace.

“I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye,” I said. It was an apology that was a decade overdue. But once I’d made up my mind to leave, I’d known that if I’d told Reggie, he’d have tried to talk me out of it.

After what had happened, I’d needed it all to end.

For centuries, I had loved partying and getting into trouble with vampires. I’d been adrift, with an apparently limitless lifespan I didn’t know what to do with, and vampires’ wild pyrotechnics had appealed to me.

But although I was immortal, all other good things did eventually come to an end.

Maybe anything a person did repeatedly for centuries eventually got old.

In truth, even before I walked away, I’d started suspecting there was more to living forever than living wild.

All that partying had grown tedious, the mingled scents of smoke and regret clinging to me like a second skin every morning after.

Even still, I probably would have stayed along that path if it hadn’t been for the Evanston fire.

It was supposed to have been an easy prank.

I was to start up a sudden windstorm to encourage people near the Evanston Recreation Center to hurry inside.

Once the building had achieved critical mass, Basil Frent—one of the funniest vampires I’d ever known, though also a huge jackass—would walk into the room looking as much like Timothée Chalamet as we could manage to get a six-foot-seven, broad-shouldered vampire to look.

He would shout Timmy Chalamet is here! , everyone would get a thrill, Basil would have his pick of excitable humans for dinner, and we’d both enjoy a laugh.

Unfortunately, things went wrong from the beginning. There had been only my reckless use of magic to blame.

What Basil and I hadn’t realized when we’d concocted this scheme was that the North Shore Fire Eaters Association was holding its annual convention in the Evanston Rec Center that day.

It had taken less than a minute for my conjured windstorm to find their fires, since the front doors to the building had been kept open.

In the end, no one even remembered that Timmy had been there.

No one had died that night. But none of the other fires I’d been responsible for over the centuries had rattled me like that one.

People caught in the crosshairs of my other fires had largely gotten what had been coming to them.

The people at the Evanston Recreation Center who’d been rushed to the hospital that night had been innocent teenage girls, old ladies, and a few very peculiar fire eaters.

All they’d been guilty of was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It didn’t matter that no one had died that night. People could have died.

It had been the wake-up call I’d needed.

When you think you’re going to live forever, the boundaries between should and should not get dangerously blurred.

If I’d suspected this before, I’d known it with a certainty then.

A few days after the fire, I’d staged a car crash, then vanished with a pinch of my transporting powder.

Weeks later I found myself in Redwoodsville.

If magic—and vampires—could lead me to do such awful things, it was time to make a clean break from both.

So that’s exactly what I’d done.

I wasn’t ready to explain this to Reggie just yet. Maybe I would, though, one day soon.

“I’m sorry you left without saying goodbye, too,” Reggie admitted. “Though I have a high enough opinion of myself to assume it had nothing to do with me.”

I snorted. “It had nothing to do with you,” I confirmed. “Though I hope your girlfriend does something about your ego.”

“Oh, she does,” Reggie said mock seriously. “It’s her life’s mission to take me down at least one peg every day.” And then in a more serious voice he said, “She’s human, you know. The love of my life.”

As hard as it was for me to imagine my friend seriously dating a human, the joy in his voice was impossible to miss. “I’m really happy for you,” I said, meaning it.

“I’d love for you to meet her.” I could all but hear the grin in his voice.

I hesitated. Could we meaningfully rekindle our old friendship after all this time?

“Anybody important to you is important to me, too,” I said. That part, at least, was true. “And now that the mushy stuff is out of the way, can you please tell me what the hell I’m supposed to do with a six-foot-tall amnesiac vampire?”

He chuckled. “How terrible would it be if I admitted I have no idea?”

“How did I manage to never throttle you in all the years we hung out together?”

“A question for the ages,” he quipped. “Look. Since I put you in this situation, I’ll ask around to see whether there are any vampire communities out your way. Maybe Peter can find some people interested in making friends.”

“Thanks,” I said. “He seemed disappointed when I didn’t welcome him with open arms.”

“Consider it done,” Reggie said. “I don’t know what I’ll find, but I’ll do my best.”

An awkward silence fell between us. What did you say to someone who had once been a close friend after ten years of no communication?

“I…need to run,” Reggie said, the catch in his voice suggesting he felt the awkwardness as well. “But it’s been good catching up. Even if you only called to yell at me.”

“I’ll be sure not to let ten more years go by without calling,” I said.

I could at least promise him that much.