“That’s a whole new story,” he said, peering out the window, “which I’m afraid will have to be my last. I would stay with you all morning if I could, but the evil sun would not allow it.”
I shuddered at the idea of the beautiful vampire bursting into flames. “Is sunlight the only thing that can kill you?”
“Vampires can also be killed if we are staked through the heart; the movies got that one right. Decapitation will do it, too. Why it is this way, I have absolutely no idea.”
“So, sunlight, staking, and decapitation. Is that all?”
“Why, are you looking to kill some vamps?” he asked, and I rolled my eyes. “The caveat is that vampirescanbe killed by something other than staking or decapitation; for example, if I was drawn and quartered and then left to bleed out. However, I could survive if I drank blood straightaway, though it isn’t a guarantee.”
“So, Leopold probably would have died in the factory had he not drained the thief of blood?”
“Correct. But the sun, staking, and decapitation will always kill us. No exceptions there.”
“So, you’re not so tough after all,” I kidded. “Okay, tell me how you became Robert Bramson.”
“This piece of personal history dates to around 1895 and involves a run-in I had with a mortal Irish writer named Abraham. Abraham, like Leopold, was a distinguished member of London’s high society. I never grew to know him very well, though this was not because he was human. It was because the man terrified me.”
“Unnerved by a mere mortal?” I teased.
Robert smiled. “One evening during a social function, Abraham and I got to chatting about the novel he was writing. It was about a supernatural nobleman from Transylvania who stole blood from human victims. To create this monster—and those were his words,monster—he’d researched Eastern European folklore. The evil deeds he portrayed this creature carrying out were identical to what Leopold and I did on a nightly basis, though Abraham claimed he’d been greatly inspired by a brutal Romanian ruler known by many as Vlad the Impaler.
“I became horrified as I listened to Abraham outline his so-called fictional tale, and I pondered luring him away to drain him. However, he fascinated me, this human who’d come so close to exposing my secret. I asked Leopold to use his mindreading to verify that the author had discovered vampires solely in his imagination. Amazingly, he had. I decided to wait on silencing him, figuring that I always had the option of killing the man in the future, if need be,” Robert said pragmatically, like he was talking about refinancing his home if he ever became dissatisfied with his current mortgage plan.
“I departed Abraham’s company shortly thereafter and avoided him for the rest of his tenure in London. Still, his story unsettled me to such an extent that I never forgot him. When I moved to America, I decided to create a moniker based on my brief acquaintanceship with the author as an indirect way of paying homage to his sinister mind. On the ship to Long Island, I came up with the name Bramson,as inson of Bram.I felt it was only fair, since poor Abraham never had the pleasure of knowing precisely how close he’d been to anactualvampire.”
“Wait a minute . . . Bram as in Abraham? You aren’t talking abouttheBram Sto—”
“The one and only.”
21
Ihad the following two days off, so I decided to tackle my long-neglected bills. The task wasn’t as stressful as it used to be, now that I had a little money. Funny how that worked.
Everything was going smoothly—I’d made payments on two credit cards so far—until I tried to complete an online payment for my student loan. For some reason, my account page had been frozen so that it would not process a payment no matter what I tried. I’d never had such a difficult time giving money to a business in my entire life, almost as if they didn’t want it.
Worried that the bank had finally made good on their threats to turn me over to collections, I located their number on the website and gave them a call. With an exasperated sigh, I sat through about five minutes of a robotic voice telling me to press this and that number until I was finally able to speak with a real, live human. Once the customer service representative picked up, I explained my situation as succinctly as possible.
Still, she had questions. “I’m not understanding what it is you’re trying to do,” she said a little too tersely for my liking.
“Like I said, I’m trying to make a payment, but the website—”
“I heard you the first time. What I’m asking iswhyyou’re making a payment?”
Is she an idiot or what? I thought. “Because I’d like to pay down the balance,” I said slowly. Why else?
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. There is no balance.”
I shook my head, though she obviously couldn’t see me. “As much as I wish that were true, that’s not right. It should be showing that I owe—”
“You’re not understanding me,” she cut in. “Your balance was paid in full yesterday. You can’t make a payment because there’s nothing left to pay. We’re processing your account closure now. It should take about seventy-two hours, and then we’ll send a letter showing—”
“That can’t be!” I said, frustrated and confused. “Who paid it off, then? It wasn’t me; I can tell you that.”
I could hear her fingers tapping a keyboard on her end. “Says here that someone named Robert Bramson called in and made the payment around noon yesterday.”
My mouth dropped open. How . . . why . . . I couldn’t keep my thoughts straight. Over a hundred grand of debt wiped out with a single phone call from a vampire.
I ended the call and sat in my room staring at the wall, uneasy. I didn’t know how I felt about what Robert had done. A huge weight had been taken off my shoulders, that was undeniable, but did that make me smarmy for letting a man take care ofmydebt simply because he had an interest in me? And he must have had an interest, right, to do something so grandiose—unless it was his way of offering charity? Perhaps I’d gone on a little too long about my impoverished childhood, and now he found me pitiful.
