CJ leaned into the doorway. “See you tomorrow, Winnie.”
“Until tomorrow.”
Mr. Lawrence remained at the door while I descended the steps. I could feel him watching me. Humans often stared at things they didn’t understand.
By the time I reached the driveway, I allowed myself to smile.Older than I looked.If only he knew.
Though I appeared somewhere around twenty-nine by modern standards, I was considerably closer to two hundred.
Par for the course for a vampire.
4
WINNIE
My alarm went off at four-thirty in the morning, and I would have grumbled if I had been sleeping soundly. Most of my truly restful sleep, though, was obtained during daylight hours. Taking on a job simply meant I needed to adjust my sleep schedule. It was a small price to pay for having a reason to get out of bed in the first place.
It was earlier than most employees would start their day, but getting properly prepared for daylight exposure required planning and an amount of sunscreen that would horrify most people, even dermatologists.
I reached blindly across my casket, found the little brass clock, and silenced it before the second chime.
After lifting the lid of the casket, I lay there for a moment, listening to the familiar sounds of the woods outside my cottage. Wind moved through pine branches, and the rainwater from last night’s storm dripped off the porch roof. Next came the grumbling of the old water pipes beneath the floorboards.
Home.
My cottage was nestled deep enough in the mountains that most GPS systems became useless halfway through the drive. Dense woods wrapped around the property on all sides, and the nearest town was nearly forty minutes away down winding roads that tourists always underestimated.
Was commuting inconvenient? Absolutely. But when one had lived through two centuries, plagues, and the invention of low-rise jeans, a forty-minute drive was nothing.
I sat up slowly and pushed my hair back from my face.
The bedroom was softly lit from the electric lanterns I’d mounted along the walls. Most vampires preferred dramatic interiors with chandeliers and everything covered in velvet. That was all too cliché for me. I preferred quilts and all things cozy.
The cottage had once belonged to a widow with six children and questionable taste in wallpaper. I’d purchased it in 1948 under a different name and spent decades turning it into my sanctuary.
The kitchen shelves held jars of dried herbs with handwritten labels, all harvested from my garden that overflowed with chamomile, mint, lavender, thyme, rosemary, and comfrey when the weather allowed it.
Comfort mattered to me, since I had spent enough years alive to understand how little of it truly existed in the world. It was why I kept the fireplace lit most evenings.
I crossed the bedroom and opened the curtains just enough to inspect the sky safely through the tinted glass. It was still dark outside, but I could see from the light of the moon that it would be a gray day.
Excellent.
Cloud cover made life much easier for me. Still, caution remained a necessity.
I moved through my usual routine. Shower. Thick layers of sunscreen applied with rigorous attention to every inch of skin. Long sleeves. Gloves. Stockings. Boots. The black dresses varied slightly depending on mood and weather, though modern humans generally categorized all of them as “gothic” and moved on with their lives.
Today required professionalism.
I selected the wool dress with the high collar and fitted waist, then layered a lighter black coat over top. By the time I finished buttoning everything into place, barely an inch of skin remained exposed.
People found it strange until they learned enough about skin cancer. Then suddenly I was merely eccentric and proactive. They didn’t need to know that my skin would literally smoke and burn if directly exposed to the sunlight for more than a few moments.
I braided my hair halfway back as I moved into the kitchen and started boiling water for tea.
Copper pots hung above the stove beside drying herbs. One entire shelf near the sink overflowed with handwritten recipe journals I’d accumulated over decades.
Cooking soothed me. It always had. There was something deeply comforting about feeding people properly. I loved the sound of soup simmering slowly, and the scent of fresh bread cooling near open windows.
