Page 19 of The Good Vampire’s Guide to Blood & Boyfriends

“You noticed the new stop sign?” Travis asked like a kid at show-and-tell, gesturing behind him to a large road sign that still had dirt clinging to the bottom of the post.

“Really brightens up the place,” Dom said.

“I thought so, too,” Travis said, oblivious to Dom’s sarcasm. He waved for them to follow and turned around.

The house was impressive, in the horrifying way a hoarder’s home would be.

Every surface was covered with stuff. Magazines.

Books. CDs, tapes, notebooks, newspapers, boxes full of papers and envelopes.

A tremendous amount of weed. Gallon-sized ziplock bags of it, and containers full of rolled joints, and grinders and all the associated gadgets, left around each corner of the shed-sized home.

There was a small kitchenette to one side, with a mini fridge, stove, and microwave.

How the hell did this place get electricity? The whole building had to be a fire hazard. Brennan wasn’t a neat freak by any means, but this left him itching to grab a couple of garbage bags. How could so much stuff exist in such a small space?

Travis pushed a pile of books onto the floor, off a couch that had likely seen better days judging by the stains, burns, and rips across the fabric.

It creaked dangerously and leaned a few degrees to the right.

Travis gestured in invitation at Brennan and Dom.

Dom took a seat easily while Brennan hovered near the door and decided he’d be better off not touching anything.

The dog, Rosie, followed them inside, squeezing through the narrow space to sit directly on Brennan’s foot. Brennan patted her head. She looked up at him with adoring eyes. Brennan’s heart melted.

Travis reached to grab a pill bottle and shook out a joint, looking at Brennan with his ever-present grin.

“Talk about fun surprises. I never get visitors, but I always love meeting new turns. What brings you here?” He raised his pointer finger to the edge of the joint and it lit with a spark and a flare.

Brennan tried not to look too impressed as Travis offered Dom the joint and she took it.

Travis elbowed her good-naturedly. “Besides the free weed, hah!”

Brennan awkwardly leaned against the mini fridge, the only surface he was confident wouldn’t collapse. He focused his attention on the dog in front of him instead of the two vampires, threading his fingers through the fur on her neck.

“I wanted answers,” Brennan said. But he had about a thousand more questions than when he’d set out for the forest.

“Ooh, fun, fun, ” Travis said. “Can’t guarantee I have ’em but I can sure try!”

Brennan wasn’t sure where to start. Dom offered him the joint and he shook his head. He wanted to keep his head clear. She shrugged and passed it back to Travis.

“How old are you?” he blurted.

“Oh,” Travis said. He feigned checking his watch, emphasizing his bare wrist. “Well, today’s Saturday, so… Um, I don’t know, a bajillion?”

Brennan tried to school away his disappointment but he was sure it was visible. What was the point of him coming if Travis wasn’t going to tell him anything valuable?

“I’m somewhere in the mid–six thousands,” Travis answered. “I lost track in the eighties.”

“Which eighties?” Brennan tried to imagine Travis in the 1980s, the 1880s, the 1780s. He was going to give himself a headache.

“Precisely.” Travis pointed at Brennan. “Good questions. Keep ’em coming, you’ve gotta be curious. If you work real hard, someday you can have all this.”

Travis gave a grand gesture around the shack and Brennan was honest-to-god unsure whether it was sarcastic or not. He hoped with sudden ferocity that he would never live to be six thousand and anything. The thought was unsettling, so he cut to the chase:

“How did I turn?” Brennan asked. “What happened that night?”

Travis took a long hit and exhaled the smoke back toward Brennan. Brennan fought the urge to sneeze.

“Well,” Travis said, “our girl Dom here hit you with her car, swerved into a tree, and stumbled out of the wreck looking for help. Luckily, I smelled the stench of a bloodbath from a mile away and found you guys.”

The word “bloodbath” sent a chill through Brennan, because it was hard to imagine being the center of a bloodbath, bleeding out on the ground, dying.

“You were in pretty rough shape, so it was either let you die or turn you, so I made an executive decision.”

Brennan took a deep breath to calm himself and asked, voice carefully level, “And Dom?”

“I was hurt, but not as bad as you,” Dom said. “Then I thought I killed you, so I was kind of a mess.”

“I couldn’t stand seeing the lil lady sad, so I offered her the chance at a new life, too.”

“Didn’t exactly read me the fine print though, did you, asshole?” Dom said, elbowing Travis and accepting the offered joint. She was smiling, though, something Brennan wasn’t used to seeing on her.

“Please, you love it,” Travis said.

“I do.”

“Why us, though?” Brennan interrupted the vampire pride parade he couldn’t relate to. “People die every day.”

“You were in my domain,” Travis said, like it was simple.

“Your… domain,” Brennan repeated.

“All the woods north of Sturbridge.”

“And you guys,” Brennan continued, “are… friends?”

“Yeah!” Travis said, giving one lazy jazz hand as if to say, Ta-da!

“It’s nice to have a mentor who’s a bit more low-key,” Dom added. “Nellie is a bit… enthusiastic.”

“Plus, Nellie’s way hardcore into the urban schtick,” Travis said, nose wrinkling at the sentiment. “I never got the whole pretending-to-be-human thing. No point in pretending to be something you’re not.”

Dom was nodding along, eyes bright for the first time since Brennan had met her. Annoyance flickered through Brennan. He wasn’t pretending anything. He was trying to keep vampirism from ruining his life.

“Hey, does she still have all those pamphlets?” Travis laughed. “You know, back in the old days vampires used to be fearsome. Now people think we’re lame. Or, worse, sexy. The sparkly vampire thing is the worst thing that’s happened since Vlad slaughtered the whole eastern castle colony.”

Every word out of Travis’s mouth left Brennan with a thousand more questions. Castle colonies? Vlad? Old days of vampires?

“I know the beginning of all this is pretty crazy,” Travis said, which was as unhelpful as it was uninformative. “But you’ll figure out in your own time what being a vampire means.”

When neither Dom nor Brennan seemed satisfied, he took a long pull from his joint.

“Don’t overthink it,” he said. “Trust yourself. Trust your handy new vampy instincts. Do what feels right, and you won’t do anything you shouldn’t. Well, I mean, I don’t know your life.”

“That’s your advice?” Brennan said. “Follow your instincts and hope you don’t accidentally murder anyone?”

Travis grinned and leaned forward conspiratorially. It came across as condescending, like he was taunting kids with candy. But Dom leaned in for the secret and Brennan couldn’t help the curiosity that kept him from running away from all the madness.

“Here’s something Camp Director Nellie won’t talk to ya about,” Travis said, stubbing out the roach of the joint in a mug that acted as an ashtray. “Have you drank from a human?”

Brennan’s stomach dropped and he studied his hands where they were folded in his lap, avoiding Dom’s gaze, his kind-of friend who had still, possibly, killed a guy, and Travis, his possibly deranged vampire-creator.

But Dom didn’t answer. Travis continued, “You can drink from someone without turning them. And without killing them. And that shit”—he gave a little chef’s kiss to dirty, calloused fingers—“is better than any drug I’ve ever had.”

Rosie moved from her perch on Brennan’s foot and ran to Travis, whining. Brennan couldn’t have said it better himself, thanks, Rosie!

“Is it dinnertime already, Little Rosebud?” Travis asked, and hopped to his feet, leaving Brennan still reeling from the information. He went to the mini fridge and Brennan sidestepped to get out of his way, while Rosie followed Travis with an excited wiggle.

Travis produced a bag of blood from the fridge, ripped open a corner with his teeth, and poured it into a bowl. Then he put the bowl on the floor and Rosie began licking it.

“No way,” Brennan said. “The dog is…?”

Travis brushed his hands on his overalls and patted Rosie’s haunch while she eagerly drank blood from her bowl.

“She’s been my loyal companion for something like a century now,” Travis said. “Ever since Sunny and Nellie took over leading the clan. I retired to my domain in the woods, just me, Rosie, and enough weed and blood to go around. Can’t complain.”

Brennan swallowed around his dry throat, and the walls of the small shack somehow seemed closer than they’d been a minute ago. Now that he listened closer, the dog didn’t have a heartbeat. She was eerily silent.

Brennan wondered why an immortal being would choose to be alone, save for a vampire dog, in a shack in the middle of nowhere.

But it occurred to him that maybe Travis hadn’t chosen this.

That maybe everyone he’d ever loved had died and now Travis was the only one left to share war stories with new vampires and waste away.

While Brennan was pondering mortality, Travis had started answering one of Dom’s questions, and by the time Brennan tuned back into the conversation he seemed to be on a rant about the glory days of vampirism.

“—and Nellie probably talked smack and made nomads sound like a bunch of assholes,” Travis was saying, “but let me tell you, traveling the world with Sunny and Shea was the best century of my life.”

He paused, a faraway look in his eyes at the memory.

Travis had said not to overthink things, but that wasn’t something Brennan was capable of.

He thought too much about everything. It was, according to his therapist, probably why he was depressed.

In that moment, in that gross house that stank of weed and mold and god knew what else, Brennan felt disgusted with it all.

Travis felt like a stark reminder that he wasn’t human. None of them were, or would be again.

The part of his brain that sounded like his therapist was already troubleshooting, suggesting ways to cope as the familiar wave of panic and self-hate rose in his stomach.

Acknowledge the intrusive thought, then dismiss it. Except, that didn’t make his lack of humanity any less real. It wasn’t an intrusive thought if it was objectively true.

Focus on your breathing and surroundings. Any of that would remind him of the people around him, the stench, the dog without a heartbeat, the sound of Travis’s voice around words he couldn’t focus on.

Brennan’s eyes snapped open as his swirling thoughts settled on the question he’d been afraid to ask all evening: What about Evelyn?

“—some war with the Germans, I don’t know, I was on a bender for most of the 1900s after ’28—”

Now that the thought was on his mind, he couldn’t bite it back.

“There’s a girl at my school who went missing the day we turned,” Brennan interrupted. “Evelyn VanMeter.”

Dom went still and stony. Travis looked at Brennan with amusement.

“Uh-oh,” Travis said, delighted, “he’s smarter than he looks.”

“What do you know?” Brennan pressed.

For a long moment, Brennan wasn’t sure whether anyone was going to answer, Travis smoking and grinning, Dom staring at her black-polished nails in her lap like they held the answers. “Evelyn was my sister,” Dom finally said. “She was in the wreck with me.”

Brennan’s blood turned to ice. If Travis couldn’t save her, then she must have died in the wreck. Unless—

The memory of Dom crying at brunch, the same round face and dark hair on Evelyn’s missing-person flyer, struck like a lightning bolt.

He remembered the pink scrunchie on the ground, yards away from where the car had actually struck, now shoved in a drawer in his room.

Dom’s sister—Evelyn—had died, and two new vampires emerged.

Brennan felt like a balloon was about to burst in his stomach, like he couldn’t breathe, or was breathing too much.

“Tell me she died in the wreck,” Brennan said.

“She was in the wreck with me—”

“And that’s how she died, right?” Brennan pushed, pleaded.

“My leg was broken and you were knocked out and bleeding so much. She went looking for help. She found Travis. He turned you to save your life.”

“And you, because you asked him to.”

His disgust at Dom’s choice must have been obvious, because Travis jumped in.

“Please, you think you were better off as a human?” Travis said. “Give it a few centuries, you’ll be thanking me.”

Brennan could barely comprehend the idea of existing in a few centuries, let alone being happy about it.

“Who killed Evelyn?” he demanded.

Dom studied Brennan, eyes darting across his face, silent.

“Oh, cute. You think it might have been you,” Travis said, stroking the fuzz on his chin. “Don’t worry, kid, you’re still a vampire-virgin, unless you’re biting a crush we don’t know about.”

“How. Did. Evelyn. Die.”

“Travis turned us. It’s, like, a whole ritual. After, he brought you to his place until he could get someone to bring you to campus. He doesn’t leave the woods. And then it was just me and Evelyn.”

“And you killed her.”

Dom’s expression was pained. “I went into frenzy. I was a new turn, and there was still so much blood.”

Blood from him. From where she hit him with her car and cursed him with this fucking existence and then killed her sister.

“I… I need to go,” Brennan said, standing up too fast.

Travis said, “Aw, come on, vampling, we can all get along—”

“You think I don’t feel bad?” Dom stood to match him, nostrils flaring, eyes fiery. “You think living with that is easy?”

Brennan ignored her, heading to the tarp door only a pace away, mind a perfect storm.

“But you,” Dom spat, “acting like you’re so much better, like you’ve never made a mistake or like—like you don’t drink blood like the rest of us! Pretending you’re so perfect. I think that’s pathetic.”

Brennan paused in front of the doorway, back to Dom and Travis.

“Hey now, Dominique, let’s try to be—” Travis started.

“You know, you’re right,” Dom said. “You should go.”

As the tarp flapped closed behind him, Travis called out, “Come back and visit anytime!”