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“What are you doing, kid?” she asked gruffly.
I glanced at her throat, noticing what shouldn’t have been there—what I hadn’t noticed before. I looked her in the eye. “Can we talk?” I asked, running a hand through my hair.
Diana glanced back into the bar and nodded to someone before shutting the door, drowning out the jukebox.
We walked across the pavement in silence, the late fall wind stinging.
When we made it to her place, she opened the door. It hadn’t been locked.
I walked into her living room, the familiar smell of tea and weed hitting me. It smelled comforting.
Diana walked into her kitchen and put the kettle on.
“No tea for me,” I said, staring at her.
She laughed. “So, for what do I owe the honor of this daytime visit, Hemming?” she asked, grabbing a porcelain mug from the cabinet.
I walked into the kitchen. “I’d like to have a no-bullshit conversation about that night.”
The most honest conversation I’d had was with the paper in my pocket. Only there could I admit what I believed in. I told myself when we left, I wouldn’t believe in anything anymore. Not God. Not angels. Not the Devil. I could feel them all around me now. And not in a good way.
“Okay,” Diana said, crossing her heart. She smiled after that, and it was the look of someone with a secret they promised never to reveal. The face of someone about to reveal that secret.
Diana offered me water, and I filled it myself from the tap, unsure if I could trust her.
We walked into the living room and sat on the couch.
After taking a sip of my water, I jumped in.
“Sorina’s a vampire?” I said, not sure if it was a question or not.
Diana took it as one.
“She wouldn’t call herself that.”
“What would she call herself?” I asked, annoyed at the toying already.
But when Diana spoke again, she gave me what I wanted. Finally. “There are many names for it, and where one is born, where they live and mingle with humans, they often adopt that term. Sorina is a living thing. Her heart beats, she cries, she eats, sleeps, breathes. She would call herself a Moroi. As her people did before she knew what she was.”
“Before she was turned?” My mind flipped through stories, through lore, searching for anything that felt real.
“No onemadeher. She was born that way. No one bit her.” She laughed.
“So …”
“I know you have a mess of facts from movies and comics and TV shows going on in there,” she said, calling me out. “She can’t turn into a bat, and she won’t turn to ash in the sun. But she won’t be watching it rise with you.”
I stopped her. “I’m just trying to figure out if any of this shit Markus said on the ranch was real.” I never believed him, but as a kid, I found some of his stories fascinating. He called it the gospel, and I listened like someone was telling me a fairytale. I studied his scripture and turned it into the stories I fed to the fire.
Diana scoffed. “His head was full of scrambled eggs, and we both know that.”
“Yeah,” I spat. “He was a rapist and a murderer. A monster. And he’s dead now, but he believed in that sort of thing. Maybe that’s why he’s dead. And now I’m on the same fucking track.”
“That’s not why he’s dead. Believing in us doesn’t make you stupid.”
“In us?” I asked, my stomach dropping.
Diana smiled, and I noted her teeth. They looked ordinary. “Oh, I’m no … vampire … as you say. I’m something else. Something you’ll understand one day.”
