“It’s Jennifer.”
“Who’s Jennifer?”
“The heroine.”
Eyes fixed on the snowy scene, I asked, “Heaven, have you ever been to Vermont?”
“Nope. Just Florida.”
I turned up the volume as the perfect couple drank glasses of red wine on a couch that didn’t need a slipcover. I had died at twenty-nine, frozen at the age before you learn proper grown-up things, like how to pick out a bottle of wine and own a white couch.
On the screen, a Christmas tree worthy of Martha Stewart glowed splendidly. The smell of sugar cookies practically wafted through the screen, and the warmth of the fire crackling in the fireplace toasted my emotional core like a marshmallow. Heaven leaned into my arms as the brown-haired man took the heroine’s hand, smiling at her warmly. It was going to be a Christmas engagement, of course.
“Do you want—” Heaven angled her neck toward me again. A little vampire bite would send her worries flying. In her words, they made her feel “high as shit.”
Heaven’s silk bonnet was soft against my cheek. I sank my fangs into her neck. Bagged blood was fine, but this was so much better.
Heaven’s breathing evened, and her blood flowed freely. With each sip I got stronger and surer of myself, as thoughts of Lance and my broken blinds and my stupid couch faded into the background. The heroine on my TV was in a faux-fur-lined jacket and boots I had seen for sale online. She looked cute but I could never pull off that look in LA. Snowflakes landed like kisses on Jessica/Jennifer’s pink cheeks. With a contented expression on his face, the hero took her mittened hand, and they twirled in the soft glow of streetlamps.
Vermont could never work, could it?
My alarm rang, the sound muffled and distant. I groped for the phone on my nightstand, but instead got a handful of couch. I’d fallen asleep watching some rosy-cheeked woman named Jessica or Jennifer get her Christmas miracle.
“Heaven,” I grumbled, “you’re sitting on my phone.”
No response.
Louder, I repeated, “Heaven.”
Still nothing.
According to the microwave clock, my shift had started an hour ago. I was late again. Three hundred years of this shit and an eternity to go.
I sank deeper into the cushions. The programming had shifted to an online-shopping informercial for leather gloves, and my fairy lights were blinking, eerily illuminating my dusty apartment every few seconds. My Impress Lance outfit, which I’d slept in, was now wrinkled in addition to being bloody.
The wrongness of the situation was palpable. I’d watched aDatelineepisode recently in which the main evidence of foul play was a statement from the woman’s son: “She’s never gone to bed without tidying up before.” I hadn’t even made it to the bed last night, and Heaven had slept through the entire day. This wasn’t right.
Not since Sarajevo in 1914 had I felt such a strong sense of doomand foreboding. I could feel a world war blooming in the darkness of my apartment, just as I had when Princip died. Heaven wasn’t heir presumptive to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but still.
“Heaven.” Her name rolled off my tongue too quickly, a welfare check rather than a greeting. When I jostled her, her head lolled to the side, revealing fang marks and two trails of blood running down her shoulder, staining the edge of her Funshine Bear T-shirt rusty red.
Holy shit.
I couldn’t have.
I didn’t.
…did I?
I squeezed my eyes shut as if that would make this all go away, but I couldn’t block out what I’d just seen. Heaven’s strangely still form and the telltale fang marks.
This. Wasn’t. Happening.
No killing. That was my code. I grew up in Transylvania, which was ground zero for vampires. I had the good fortune to become a vampire instead of a vampire’s lunch. But I’d decided right then and there that I didn’t want to be the kind of vampire who would leave someone without a sister, daughter, or mother.
Visions of Alba hit me like a montage from a horror film. Alba shopping in the village, her eyes sparkling with life and mischief, a few errant curls escaping from the braids she had pinned up in a way that she thought was so sophisticated. Alba kneading bread dough while confiding her hopes and dreams. It was always some man, a new one every week. Then me, stupidly telling her every detail about my crush on a vampire, about how I was going to marry Vlad and become Queen of the Undead. At twenty-nine, I should have been smarter. I was practically considered an old lady during that time. I’d been so dumb.
Then the closing image: Alba with blood trailing down her neck while I flung myself on top of her, pleading with members of the parliament to turn her instead.
