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And it drove like a dream.
Which was why a vampire like him, who could dematerialize anywhere he wanted, chose to take the long way home sometimes…
As he passed through a part of town congested by newly constructed developments of mid-market apartment buildings, he turned up the volume on the stereo so Supertramp could tell him more about lonely days and lonely nights. He didn’t need the primer. Sure, he had no wife at home, but he did feel like a piece of furniture in his own life: When he was fighting lessers, those pale, soulless killers who hunted vampires, he was as animated as they came; inside of himself, though, he had become an inanimate object. He’d noticed this fossilization about a year ago, and ever since then, he’d been trying to figure out exactly what his problem was. A rereading of his diaries, whereupon he’d probed the fact patterns of his life as if he were a disinterested third party instead of the main character, had yielded nothing of note.
And endless, contemporaneously penned entries detailing the fact that he was rereading his diaries hadn’t gotten him any further.
Then again, maybe it was because he already knew what ailed him and he just didn’t want to look at all that he couldn’t see ever changing.
His cycles of days and nights were always the same: Fighting. Eating. Sleeping. Feeding in a chaste way from a Chosen. Doing it again. And again. And again. As the pinwheel of time continued to spin, and humans went in and out of different fashions, fads, and presidents, he was the trudging same. Not even the noble purpose of his existence—saving the vampire race from the Lessening Society and protecting the King who refused to lead—was enough to relieve the rote detachment that blanked him like anesthesia.
And this was why he not only needed a nice new car, but had to drive the thing.
Running his hand over the top of the steering wheel, he breathed in deep. He didn’t require a vampire nose to appreciate the rich perfume of hand-tooled leather, that delicious new-car smell—
As he rounded a turn in the road, the movement came at him from the left, the streak the kind of thing that his peripheral vision caught and his hair-trigger instincts reacted to without any conscious thought on his part. In quick coordination, he punched the brake pedal and yanked the wheel to the right. The tires did their best to find purchase, squealing in their slow-down efforts, but there was too much mass, too much acceleration. A sickening jolt of impact registered, and then the BMW veered off the four-lane road and jumped the curb.
The tree in his headlights was enormous.
The biggest arboreal anything he had ever seen.
Then again, when you were about to crash your brand-new BMW, that did lend a certain distortion to things—
Boom!
Like a bomb going off, the impact was loud and had shock waves. As his ears rang, he was thrown forward and the steering wheel punched back, defending its territory with the stiff arm of its column. A flop of the head later and he was close as his own nose to the windshield before a boomerang effect snapped him back into his seat.
At which point he smelled gas, heard hissing, and started cursing.
As his eyes focused, he found that the trunk of the maple was just about centered between those two sets of headlights, like the blue-and-white hood ornament was a target. And what do you know, that badge was now halfway up into the engine block.
With a deflation characteristic of people who find themselves in the crosshairs of chaos theory, he opened his door. The damage had not extended back far enough to affect its release, hinges, or panel, and glancing into the interior as he got out, he closed his lids against how pristine everything remained in the cockpit, the dash and seating still so fresh and new. When he was ready, he turned to—
The fact that mid-pivot he caught sight of the unused seat belt seemed like a tap on the shoulder from Fate, a little reminder that this time—this time—he’d gotten away with it, but in the next accident, his head was going right through that safety glass.
Maybe he should buckle up in the future—
Freezing in his tracks, he caught the scent of fresh blood, and as he ripped his head around, he saw the human woman lying in the center of the four-lane street on the yellow line. She was tucked into a ball, crumpled as if by a fist, and he had an instant impression of a blue skirt that was the color of a morning glory, and a white blouse that was untucked. A red sweater was tied around her waist. The shoes were brown with no heels. No stockings.
