And even more alarming: the young man had somehow recognized me. He had called me by a name I hadn’t used in hundreds of years.
I’d followed him to his residence and hidden in the branches of the big tree in his backyard, watching as he smoked a cigaretteon his back porch. Remaining perfectly cloaked in darkness, clad in black, and aided by the dim backyard lighting—I should have been invisible in the shadows. But he had seen me. I had… frightened him. His reaction suggested he wasn’t some sort of warlock or hunter.
And now here I was, fleeing his presence for the second time.
I supposed I was stalking him now. That, admittedly, happened quite often. Except whenever I stalked someone, the reason was always the same: it was part of the hunt. The very best part. Maybe even better than the kill.
But the young man from the club wasn’t a killer. Was he?
Of course, it could be hard to tell sometimes. He looked relatively young, perhaps late twenties or early thirties, dressed like any of the other men at the club—cream-colored chinos, a black shirt, and loafers. He looked harmless, but was he? After all, I was unliving proof that looks could be deceiving.
There was little doubt in my mind that he was the reason I had been drawn to that club tonight. Perhaps that wordless thing in my chest that dragged me there had sensed a darkness in him so vast it called me across town to stand face-to-face with him?
I strongly doubted it.
For starters, my instincts didn’t work like that. Certainly, some witches were capable of sensing dangerous individuals from great distances. Rare humans—psychics—could too. But if I were suddenly capable of perceiving killers from miles away through some mysterious inner knowing, then I wouldn’t need even the barest scrap of evidence, would I? I could be happily fed and sated at all times. I would never need to allow myself to grow hungry or restless. An enticing thought. But sadly, life never seemed that easy. Not even for me.
The thought I kept returning to was that young man’s face almost looked recognizable, even though I was certain I had never seen him before. Maddening. But his eyes—twin poolsof warm darkness, threatening to swallow me completely—had been known to me, even if I couldn’t explain why. Yet the memory of a vampire is just as eternal as the rest of me. I would have remembered him.
But he knew me. That alone made him a dangerous variable. I had to understand precisely who he was. Because no one—not even Harris—knew me by the nameNicolas.
Which begged the question: who was he? And what, precisely, was I going to do about him?
Should I end him? Was he going to be one more drained body at my feet?
Clearly, I needed to know for certain if he was a killer. My gut told me he wasn’t, but I couldn’t be sure. If hypnotizing the truth from him wouldn’t work, I needed to get to know him another way.
Which meant breaking into his home.
More difficult with the presence of the young woman he had half carried out of the club earlier. She had gotten sick on the street in a quiet, practiced way, even though she was so intoxicated she could hardly stand. That told me she was used to the ill effects of her overindulgence.
Who was she? A roommate? A girlfriend?
That thought caused a flash of irrational—well, not jealousy, of course—but perhapspossessivenessto flicker through me. I didn’t like the idea of the young man belonging to anyone else.
How very odd.
But no, they hadn’t seemed familiar with each other’s bodies the way lovers were. There was often an unconscious physical intimacy between couples that these two simply hadn’t possessed. Which probably meant she was either his friend or a relative. Perhaps his sister. Given their similarity in coloring, the latter seemed most likely.
Whoever she was, she likely wouldn’t appreciate me poking around their personal effects. Normally I would have just hypnotized her into helping me, then forgetting about it. However, if they were related, I couldn’t be certain my powers would work on her. They hadn’t worked on the young man, after all. It was foolish to take chances with so many unknowns. I hadn’t avoided detection for eight centuries by taking stupid risks.
But would my efforts culminate in the young man’s death?
The thought of holding his broken body in my arms—his eyes blank and sightless—didn’t give me the usual thrill of expectation. Instead, it made my stomach lurch.
* * *
The next two days passed in a blur. I watched the young man from across the street. There was a four-story apartment building with a vacant unit on the second floor. The view faced directly toward his front lawn.
So far, I hadn’t discovered much. He lived in a modest single-story home in Sherman Oaks, a twenty-minute drive from my own in West Hollywood. Though the nearest intersection was reasonably busy, the street he lived on seemed oddly quiet for Los Angeles. This was explained by the fact that it was mostly populated by elderly couples who’d likely purchased their property decades ago. The house next door to his had a For Sale sign in the yard. They were about to make a small fortune once they found a buyer.
The neighbors all seemed to know the young man. On the rare occasions he left home, they smiled and waved at him. He smiled and waved back. He even stopped to chat now and then. It was difficult to tell from my vantage point, but it seemed possible he knew them all by name.
How nauseatingly idyllic.
I did catch one useful tidbit: one of his elderly neighbors, a petite woman with fire-engine-red hair, wearing a matching jacket and sunglasses, was walking her tiny, poorly tempered Pomeranian on the second afternoon of my surveillance—at the same time the young man prepared his car. She paused in his driveway and gave him a wave, and he greeted her by name—Cheryl. After that, they chatted for a few minutes.
And that was when I learned the young man’s name: Eli.
