“I know,” he scoffed. “Shakespeare was not twelve different people.”
“Shakespeare was a woman,” I said. “Most successful pen name in history.”
“I met him. If he was a woman, he had me fooled.”
“You idiot. That was just some guy she convinced to stand in for her. He grandstanded his way into history, the undeserving bastard.”
“That’s absurd. How many women even knew how to read and write in those days?”
I walked away to avoid strangling him. When I heard footsteps behind me, I turned on him and said, “Stop following me!”
“You asked for my help!”
I laughed. “Is this a new argument at least?”
“I don’t think so. Pretty sure we’ve gone at it over Shakespeare before.”
“But not while decorating a Christmas tree,” I pointed out. “That’s new.”
Downstairs, it was a basement-by-spiders situation, a place where people kept pictures and trinkets, where memories went to die. I pushed the cobwebs away from my face and scanned the area. It didn’t take me long to find an entire corner devoted to Christmas. Old boxes that looked like they’d been holding ornaments since the 1970s. One box, undoubtedly the manger scene, was hot to the touch. I might not be able to feel a rush jumping out of a plane, but celebrating a religious holiday…This was skydiving for vampires.
“Take these upstairs,” I told Vlad.
Back in the living room, I shut off the TV and put on Christmas music. If we were going to do this, we were going to do this right.
“Tiffenie, that music hurts.”
“Just the religious ones,” I said. Mariah was all cool.
He shook his head but sat down to help.
The Christmas boxes were mostly a bust, plastic trays filled with colorful glass balls, many of them broken or missing their wire hangers. One tiny frame held a blurry picture of a toddler labeledTiffany1998. No one would realize it wasn’t me. I spotted a few ornaments obviously made by a child: stacked Styrofoam balls with googly eyes, a pine cone with antlers made of pipe cleaners. Memories of someone else’s childhood.
A feeling of melancholy washed over me. For all the time I’d been on earth, I didn’t have a collection of memories in a basement.
“Do you wish you had a box of childhood ornaments?” I asked Vlad as I walked into the living room with the box of ornaments in tow.
He gave me a funny look. “Tiffenie, do you not remember what I told you about my so-called childhood in the Middle Ages? I’ll take someone else’s box of trinkets from 1995 any day.”
I laughed at the truth of the statement and carefully hung Tiffany’sornaments. I’d also purchased some clearance ornaments at Tyrone’s farm and began to rummage through them to find anything that might reflect me. I found a moose with one antler, a scuffed Santa, and an emptyChristmas2024! frame. I added them to the tree.
It wasn’t a Christmas tree so much as a tree of two broken Tiffanys.
“So ugly it’s cute,” Vlad announced. “Like a pug.”
Sitting in front of a tree in a room lit by Christmas lights, going through a memory box—it was downright cozy. Vlad’s hair was bronze in the firelight and called out to me to run my hands through it. I resisted.
“I think Vermont is what I’ve always needed: the clean air, the wholesomeness, the small-town charm.”
Vlad shook his head. “I still don’t think Valentine is a good idea. In small towns you get to know people. What happens when they realize what you are?”
I turned Tiffany Amanda Blair’s toddler photo frame over in my hand.
“You can’t be vulnerable around people.” With an intense look, he said, “I will not let anyone hurt you. You bear my mark.”
My hand brushed the mark on my neck that Vlad had left so many years ago. Did it make me his? Did I want that?
“I’m a vampire,” I pointed out. “I can take care of myself.”
