“Right. Have fun, I guess,” Dax says as Gray ushers me away.
On the way to my car, I can’t help feeling like I’ve done something wrong. It wasn’t bad enough that he saw everything,but heard the whole exchange before he ever reached us. My car is a short walk from the back exit, but it feels like miles. I carry my humiliation like five bags full of bricks. Either of us could say something to diffuse the awkwardness, but we don’t. Instead, we walk solemnly to my car, which I find easily enough. Most, if not all, of the cars from tonight’s crowd are gone. A few do always linger for the responsible lot that call for a ride if they’ve had one too many shots.
“I’ll drive,” Gray says suddenly.
“You’ll what?” I gawp. From his other hand, the one not around my shoulder, he produces my keys. How the hell did he get those? I pat my pockets and he chuckles. The only thing I find in either of them is cash and my phone.
With a little jangle, he grins. “I said I’ll drive.”
“I didn’t know you could… drive.” My eyes follow him to the passenger side door. When he opens it, my mind reels a little. He’s serious. “I mean, can you? How?”
“Like I said, you learn a thing or two over time. Bartending, driving a car…” He shrugs as I hesitantly climb in. “And when you’ve lived as long as I have, there are endless opportunities to learn.”
“How old are you exactly?”
“Seven-hundred and fifty years old,” he says right before shutting my door.
The way my jaw hits the floor is indescribable. I’m shocked. Completely speechless right until he’s settled in the driver’s seat, at which point I unload every single question flooding through my mind.
“How the hell are you that old? You’re joking, right?”
Gray fixes the mirrors with a patient hand. “No joke. I amthatold, in fact.”
The car starts, and I hurry to put my seatbelt on. “How is that even possible?”
“Vampires have been around for as long as anyone else. Is it really that impossible to believe that I’ve been living for several centuries?” The car revs to life, and with an unexpectedly heavy lead foot, Gray peels out of the parking lot like he’s some kind of street car racer. I fall back against my seat and grip the belt across my chest until my knuckles are white.
“A little,” I manage to squeak out when he slows after turning on the main road.
“You just don’t look seven-hundred,” I add.
He laughs at that. “Immortality might have something to do with it.”
“I only meant that you don’t strike me as a person… er, a vampire… that really comes across as seven-hundred. You don’t have that world-weary air about you.” I’m not sure he gets it, but I don’t know how else to explain it.
It’s like the millennial anomaly. No one born during the 90s looks or acts like they’re pushing mid-thirty to forty. In Gray’s case, he was born in the 12th century, and he definitely doesn’t act like it.
“I was still relatively young when I was turned,” he says, then adds, “It was my 27th year.”
“What was it like being alive then?”
“What? The 12th century?” He ponders this for a brief moment. “I don’t remember much. In fact, the benefit of being so old is that most of my memories from the first three to four-hundred years of my immortal life aren’t…memorable.”
“Why?”
He taps the steering wheel, his expression thoughtful. “Seven-hundred years is a lot of life to remember.”
There’s a weight to his answer that feels a lot like grief.
“So when did you meet Dante?” I ask, throttled by the insta-guilt that follows.
Gray tenses. “Do you really want to talk about Dante?”
“Kind of?” I look out the window and frown. “I don’t know.”
The streetlights blur by, one after another. Fleeting little bulbs of light against a dark sky. We’re not in the city anymore, in fact, we’re far from it. We’re on some back road I don’t recognize. I’m starting to wonder if he knows where he’s going.
“16th century. I remember because I was in Italy at the time, and it was nearing the Renaissance,” Gray says a little too tightly. “Dante came from a greedy, power-hungry family, but when we met, he wasn’t like that. He was an artist.”
