Well, perhaps next time.
I swing around the corner, narrowly avoiding a horse, a fairy, and a cart of cabbages.
My publisher will be as disappointed in my sales as I am, but now I can go home and try to forget today’s multiple embarrassments. I open the front door of my new friends’ house.
“I’m back. Anyone here?” I call out to Rychell and her orc mate, Halvard.
There’s no answer. I fall into a chair by the hearth. The single log still glows, but it gives off little heat. It’s rather chilly in here, but the cold doesn’t bother me. One of the few benefits of being a vampire.
I doze until someone comes in, the light behind them so bright that I can’t tell who it is.
“Hello?” I stand and blink.
It’s Colette. Herbraid is a river of gold, a dimple shows as she smiles, and the curve of her waist seems to cup the sunlight behind her. Heat gathers in me, and a wave of longing sweeps through my body.
A slamming sound makes me jump.
I open my eyes to realize that was only a dream. Colette isn’t here. I must have fallen asleep. The slamming sound was the door actually opening. It’s Rychell and her young son, Nate, carrying loosely woven satchels filled with bread and wrapped packages. She’s human and her son is a pixie.
Rychell frowns as she sets her things on the table by the door to the kitchen. “Oh no, did we disturb a well-deserved nap, Archer?”
I straighten in the chair and give both of them a smile. They’re good folks, true in word and deed. “No, it’s your home. I’m fine.”
“We bought you a steak!” Nate waves a bundle wrapped in parchment.
My heart lifts at how considerate this family has been to me during this visit. “Thank you very much.”
“Ma told me you eat meat rare.” The lad’s eyes are wide as saucers.
I chuckle. “Aye.”
“But you don’t drink blood? I thought vampires always drank blood,” Nate says.
Few know about us vampires. Honestly, most of what I learned was from my mother’s dusty books. They were all I had of my vampire mother after she left. All I had to figure out who I was, since my father is a goblin and my siblings took after him in full.
I swallow a bitter taste on the back of my tongue, recalling the last time I saw my mother.
“I can’t stay here with him,” she said of my father. “I don’t know what I was thinking. That it would get better?” She scoffed and muttered something I can’t hear over the noise of my goblin brothers scuffling in the kitchen. Mother lifted my chin so I would look into her cold, red eyes. “I wish I could take you, but you’re not full-blooded and they will eat you alive. I will, however, send your betrothed to visit once you are of age. She is older than you, but not by much. Do as she says. She is full-blooded and outranks you in every way. Try to live up to her standards.”
Each word she spoke to me that day burned into my mind like a brand, the meaning was seared into my very soul. Not only was I misunderstood by my father and brothers, but I was lesser to my own mother. And thatwas the first time I heard the wordbetrothed. I looked it up right after my mother left, reading her books about our kind through the tears that blurred my vision.
I shake my head to clear it and am about to answer Nate’s question, but Rychell is mouthingI’m sorryfor the questions and ushering the young pixie male into the kitchen.
Getting up, I trail them toward the back of the house.
“Nate, put the meat in the cooling box and clean your hands,” Rychell says as she washes her hands at the pump sink.
I dig into the largest of the market baskets and begin sorting the fresh items and dry goods.
“Thanks for your patience with him,” Rychell whispers while Nate is across the kitchen, kneeling at the cooling box.
“It’s no problem at all.”
I liked Rychell immediately because of the way she treats her adopted son. I wish my mother had been like her. She glances at me with a load of curiosity in her eyes. I wonder if she heard about this morning’s event. Thankfully, she doesn’t bring it up.
We load everythinginto place, finishing up as Halvard, her orc mate, comes in through the back door.
“Good afternoon, my love,” Halvard says to Rychell before turning toward me. “Hello, Archer.”
