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“Pardon?”
“Nothing,” I said, smiling insipidly and thanking the perverse vampire gods that his super hearing hadn’t picked that up. “Do you believe that?”
The twist in his lips showed that he might have heard what I said but was choosing to ignore it. “The truth is, there may be no single origin of vampires. The way we change may have evolved, over time, like humans but never with them.”
I crossed my arms. “OK, lightning round. Real or fake: Werewolves?”
“Real.”
“Demons?”
“Very real.”
“Sasquatch?’
“Real, but he’s actually a were-ape.”
I decided to explore that later. “Aliens?”
“I don’t know.”
“Witches?”
“Real.” He shrugged. “Some work real magic, and others are deluded children in black makeup and ill-fitting clothes.”
“Good to know,” I said soberly. “Wait, what about zombies? I couldn’t even get through the preview for Dawn of the Dead without covering my eyes.”
“You don’t want to know.”
I made a small distressed sound. He chuckled, something I noticed was becoming more frequent.
“I know Dracula was a real person, but is he still, you know, around?” I asked.
“No one knows for sure. He’s a bit like our Elvis. Lots of vampires have claimed to see him, but there ’s never been documented proof. You ask a lot of questions.”
“I’m a librarian. The learning curve is steep,” I said, ever so sassily jutting my chin forward.
“You’re going to be an interesting person to know, Jane Jameson,” he said, leaning forward and brushing his mouth across mine.
Sparks. Hell, fireworks. The Fourth of July was exploding in my head as he slipped his hands under my jaw and pinned me with his mouth. When he pulled away from me, my hands were wound in his hair, my lips bruised and tingling pleasantly.
“I enjoy your height,” he said, pressing me against the porch railing. With my butt precariously balanced on the rail, I had to wind my feet around his calves to keep from tumbling over. “Back in my day, I never courted an exceptionally tall woman. But it makes for some interesting possibilities.”
“There’s that word again, ‘interesting,’” I said before kissing him again. I tangled my fingers in his pullover. He tasted like the best share of my trick-or-treating candy, the mini Three Musketeers and Almond Joys. And for most of my life, I’d been gnawing on those stupid orange-wrapped peanut taffy things.
I sighed and wrapped my arms around his neck, enjoying the sensation of Gabriel planting a few more soft, nibbling kisses along the edge of my jaw. Feeling bold, I traced the line of his bottom lip with my tongue and bit down on it gently.
He pulled away and grinned down at me. “Very interesting.”
8
Indoctrinated by years of secrecy, many older vampires have histories they may not want to share right away. It’s best to respect their privacy.
—From The Guide for the Newly Undead
I am not the kind of girl who trusts a man to tell her everything she needs to know in his own due time, so I did some research on my sire. You can take the girl out of the library, but you can’t take the neurotic, compulsively curious librarian out of the girl.
Oddly enough, the limited information I could find on Gabriel Nightengale, (yes, that really was his name) started with a passage from my father’s self-published textbook on local history. I’d read that thing at least ten times, and I never paid attention to the well-bred boy born in 1858. Gabriel was around to see the Civil War transform Half -Moon Hollow from a grimy little river outpost to a major point of trade along the Ohio. His family owned a sizable tobacco farm on Silver Ridge Road. The family eventually amassed enough money to build a proper antebellum home they called Fairhaven.
