“I hope you weren’t worried about me,” I say.
“I was mildly worried about you. Then you left me on read and I becameveryworried about you.”
I slip my Pandora’s apron over my head and get to work cleaning the espresso machine. “Yeah, sorry about that. Things took a weird turn last night.”
She quirks a faint brow, leaning her hip against the coffee bar. “Care to elaborate?”
“You won’t believe me if I tell you.”
“Oh, comeoooooon, Di. Try me.”
Where do I even start? With my mom telling me I need to move to Echidna? Do I tell her about Hades House, meetingOrfeo, or almost dying when I tried to decouple? With a sigh, I start with, “You know how I told you my mom was kind of…odd?”
“Paranoid, delusional narcissistwas actually the phrase you used.”
I snort. “Man, I’m a bitch.”
She smiles, taking a quick toke of her vape. “Just because Cosmic Candee was psychic doesn’t mean she was perfect.”Cosmic Candee.How the hell had she remembered that? I shake my head at the invocation of my mother’s most cursed psychic-medium/tarot card–reader persona.
“For the record, my mom’s legal name was Theresina.” I laugh, tossing aside my rag and leaning back against the counter. “Okay, you know how she had all those ideas about being a powerful witch? And that I was”—I cringe, visibly, as I force out the second half of this sentence—“also a powerful witch? Part of that wholethingwas she thought we were being hunted by demons. That’s why we moved so much when I was kid. And when we weren’t running from demons, we were warding off spirits and fairies and vampires…”
She blinks. “So, she wasn’t a narcissist?”
“Evie.” I half laugh, half whine. “I know it all sounds insane—I also thought she was insane! But last night, I…met a vampire.”
For once, the woman is stunned silent. It’s nice, actually. I let her gape at me, slack-jawed, while I finish my cappuccino, rinse the mug, and eat half a blueberry muffin.
Finally, she resurfaces, shaking her head and pinching her brow. “Are you serious?”
Neutrality in the face of chaos is my superpower. Always has been. There are so many things I want to tell Evie about the Italian vampire I met last night. That he’s handsome, sure, but also that he looked at me with eyes so bright and soft that they reminded me of melted caramel. I want to tell her that he savedmy life, brought me home, made me a meal, and stayed until the color came back into my cheeks. And he knew things about me, saw me with a clarity I’d never experienced before.
It’s too much at once. So, I wipe some crumbs from my chin and say, “Uh-huh. Vampire. With fangs.”
Then, she loses it. She laughs for so long and so loudly that I see a murder of crows abandon the tree outside the front of the coffee shop. She leans on a chair, doubles over, even rolls on the ground. Finally, Evie looks up at me from where she’s lying face down in the middle of the old wooden floors. Thank god she mopped. “Is he…impossibly fast?”
“Hmmm.” I roll my eyes, trying to remember. “Kinda? I guess?”
Evie grins, running her tongue over her bottom lip. Her tongue ring catches the overhead light, winking at me. “Is he hot?”
How do I tell her he’sactually fucking gorgeous?
Our shift passes in a blur of strawberry matchas and cold brews with two pumps of this and that. Whenever we have a moment to catch our breath, Evie corners me by the industrial bagel toaster and asks, over and over: “Really? No, like,seriously?”
“Look,” I finally say back, clutching a jalapeño cheddar bagel with cream cheese so tightly the filling oozes out onto its napkin. “I’m not saying I get it or I even, like,believeit. I don’t even know how everything works. I’m just saying…that’s what he told me, and I think I believe him.”
At twelve-thirty, I hug Evie goodbye, promise to text her, and hustle off toward campus for my five-hour shift at the library. Main Street is mostly dead at this hour, especially with the skythreatening snow, any potential sunlight completely obscured by heavy clouds. The barren trees and dirty snowbanks make Echidna look even more forsaken and haunted than usual.
Thankfully, Pandora’s is a block closer to campus than Hades House, though I can’t quite stop myself from stealing a glance in its direction. Dead. The gas lamps are out, the windows completely dark.
Obviously.I roll my eyes at myself. Vampires, demons.They go “bump in the night,” not “bump in the middle of a Tuesday in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.”
I follow the stone path that winds through campus, passing from the shadow of one Gothic revival building to the next with no reprieve from the howling, glacial winds that whip around me. The library’s cathedral windows glow like a lighthouse beckoning maddened sailors to shore. Just when I feel like I might actually die of frostbite, I slip through the heavy double doors.
Inside, silence and warmth envelop me. Overhead, the atrium’s stained-glass, domed ceiling lets in a beam of soft winter light, making the entire space feel holy. Spiral staircases lead from one floor to another, each mezzanine outfitted with desks, tables, and seating areas. The stacks line the curved walls and form corridors on each floor, containing an unknowable number of volumes. And then, beneath the marble floor at my feet, are the archives.
I make my way behind the shoe-horn desk in the center of the atrium, the one I’m already supposed to be manning. Not that anyone ever notices when the front desk person is missing or late. Much like being a barista, I’m invisible here. If someone notices me, it means I fucked up.
I sink into my chair and pull my lunch from my purse—a caprese sandwich Evie toasted and wrapped in wax paper for me—while I log into the desktop computer and slip in my earbuds.
