Finally satisfied, I slipped outside toward the hearse parked discreetly beneath the trees.
The rear compartment looked nothing like death from the inside. There were soft blankets, battery-powered lanterns, a hidden refrigeration compartment, tiny velvet curtains, and even emergency blood storage.
I didn’t require blood nearly as often as popular culture suggested. Humans seemed attached to the idea that vampires spent every evening dramatically lunging at necks in ballrooms. In reality, I typically fed every week and a half, sometimes longer if I was careful. Fresh human blood remained the strongest, unfortunately, but I had not fed directly from a person in decades. It was too intimate, too personal. Too easy to become careless once affection entered the equation.
Instead, I purchased from a dealer named Emil who operated out of the basement beneath a legitimate funeral home a few towns over. Officially, he specialized in mortuary cosmetics and grief services. Unofficially, he maintained a discreet network involving hospital workers, magical practitioners, one terrifying hospice administrator, and a werewolf phlebotomist named Denise who threatened customers with parking violations if they overstayed pickup appointments. Emil packaged everything meticulously in temperature-controlled medical coolers with handwritten labels and little gold stickers denoting quality.
Vampires either adapted or perished, and I preferred adapting.
After carefully removing my hat, I settled into the casket with a long, soft exhale. It had started raining, and the drops pelted the roof of the hearse, lulling me to sleep.
Waking before sunset never became pleasant.
Manageable, yes. Necessary, certainly. But pleasant? Absolutely fucking not.
My alarm dragged me upward through heavy sleep with all the grace of an exorcism. I slapped blindly at the brass clock inside the casket until the ringing stopped, then lay there, miserably staring at the quilted interior lid above me.
After nearly two centuries, I had learned how to function against instinct. Humans did it constantly, especially parents. Exhaustion rarely cared whether one possessed a pulse.
Rain still tapped softly against the roof of the hearse as I pushed open the lid with a groan and sat up slowly.
It was still daylight outside. Survivable daylight, thanks to the stormy weather and enough sunscreen to preserve a corpse indefinitely, but my body was deeply offended by the concept regardless.
My boots waited near the lantern shelf beside a stack of books. I checked the hidden clock mounted beside the interior wall. Three thirty-eight. The children would arrive at four.
Resigned, I reapplied my layers of SPF100, adjusted my hair, straightened my coat, and slipped back into the house through the side entrance just as the first school carpool vehicle rolled down the drive.
Perfect timing.
The front door burst open four minutes later.
“I saw a goose fight another goose!” Billie said, barreling into the house with the speed of artillery fire.
Behind her, Bianca removed her coat carefully and sighed. “It was not a fight. It was territorial posturing.”
“There was biting,” Billie insisted.
CJ stepped inside, his tie loose around his neck. “I respected the geese for handling conflict directly.”
“I think one of them died,” Billie announced.
“It absolutely did not,” Bianca said.
“Then why was it lying down?”
“It was sitting, Billie.”
I took their backpacks before any of them could abandon them in the foyer. “How was school?”
Three entirely different reactions. CJ launched into an elaborate retelling involving cafeteria corruption and a charismatic substitute teacher. Bianca gave concise factual summaries with visible impatience for narrative embellishment. Billie mumbled that she had accidentally licked glue again.
What an interesting little ecosystem.
Once their coats and shoes had been dealt with, and I’d persuaded Billie not to bring “sad” sidewalk worms inside, I gathered them into the kitchen.
“Right,” I said. “You all have thirty minutes to decompress after school.”
They regarded me with tremendous suspicion.
