She’s My Eternity (The Girl Who Bit Me #2)

Chapter 1

Aster was no economist, but something she probably could have seen coming was that, when you completely wipe out the elite council of vampires that secretly controls the majority of the world’s economy, things can look a little different when you get home the next day.

Especially when that home is New York City, the penthouse of capitalism.

The first clue came when their plane landed in the LaGuardia terminal.

The moment everyone got their cell phone service back, phones started ringing off the wire.

People were crying, screaming, squirming in their seats, bulldozing each other with their suitcases.

Aster didn’t put two and two together until Sylvia pinched her brow and scowled.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she paused. “I think I might have to do something about this.”

Of course, what Aster thought Sylvia meant was that she was going to start eating people in order to get to the front of the plane.

(Sylvia hated waiting in lines.)

But when Sylvia instead just continued watching Finding Nemo on the in-flight entertainment screen until everyone left, Aster got confused. Aster got even more confused when they exited the plane, hailed a cab, and Sylvia called someone on the phone.

“Hey Yasmine,” she sing-songed. “It’s seven AM.

We’ve just landed back home. They’re all dead.

Even Leonard. Wall Street is pissing itself.

The president is probably going to announce a recession next afternoon.

I don’t give a flying shit about any of it, but I figure you and your cheap data plan do.

Fix this mess for me and I’ll owe you one, sweet cheeks.

Anyway, Aster and I bit each other in that gross, marry-me way and now she has a rash on her ass, which I sent you a picture of.

So maybe you can let me know what that is.

Thanks. Going to take our honeymoon now.

Hopefully you won’t mind me stealing your credit card for a few days. Bye!”

All Aster heard was honeymoon.

ABOUT A YEAR AND A HALF LATER

Yasmine Sokolov was going to die alone.

That was, if she ever had the pleasure of dying.

Vampires were immortal by default, but some were more easily done away with than others. Unfortunately, Yasmine was one of the frustratingly resilient ones. Practically unkillable. It was a complete disaster.

So she’d probably be cockroaching her way through time and space until the sun finally exploded.

Someone loudly cleared their throat. Yasmine looked up, her impending doom increasing as she remembered what exactly had made her come to such a conclusion.

Sitting across from her was Man Von Whatshisface. Kidding. She had no idea what his name was. All she remembered from his VampireMatch dating profile was the “Von” part, because there was a small chance it meant he was also as ancient as she was.

It turned out to be a secret, worse, second thing.

The man was twenty-eight years old, five years into being a vampire, and he changed his last name because he thought it sounded more vampire-y.

“As I was saying,” he said. Yasmine stared at the hairy caterpillar above his lip as he spoke. It looked almost alive. Fascinating. “I started as a stock trader right out of uni.”

“Uni?” Her eyes flicked up. “What the hell is uni?”

“University?”

“Ah,” she said, leaning back in her chair and taking a long sip of her coffee. “I think this date is done. That was the sixth time you abbreviated something that didn’t need to be abbreviated. I’m not particularly interested in someone who can’t finish the second half of a word.”

His eyes widened, his cheeks flushed, and he let out a sharp, disapproving laugh. The obvious misery in it was the first thing that gave Yasmine joy all day.

“Jeez,” he said. “You’re a real—”

Yasmine flashed him a great wide smile, and his tongue froze in his mouth. His pupils dilated. The hairs of his mustache stood straight up like he’d been electrocuted.

She perched her chin on her hand, bored, just watching it happen.

The frustrating thing about Yasmine’s power was that she could never see what they saw.

She would have loved to know what this man’s greatest fear was.

He was probably visualizing his Robinhood account getting hacked, or his stocks vesting a year late. Poor thing.

Either way, it ended as it usually did. Man Von Guy screamed at the top of his lungs, ran out of the shop like a headless chicken, and descended into the swell of hot dog carts, Tiktok-streaming street performers, overly vertical tour buses, and knockoff handbag scammers that made up the innards and organs of New York City in late July.

“Wow. Can you teach me how you do that?”

Yasmine nearly came out of her seat. She’d been indulging in too much schadenfreude again: she’d been completely snuck up on.

She turned her head toward the sound of the light, charming voice. Despite her initial shock, that voice was like hearing doves sing compared to the nails-on-a-chalkboard conversation she’d been wrestled into minutes before.

Standing next to her table was a Barbie doll of a woman. Tall, impossibly blonde—in a way that adults should never be, it was unnerving—with her hair slicked back in a messy bun. She was, in a word, manicured.

She was also an employee. The apron she was wearing—much too unfashionable for this woman to be wearing otherwise—told her so.

“You’re new,” Yasmine said, rather stupidly. She had been coming to the Nightingale every day since she relocated to New York City. So every day for about… a year and a half.

“And you’re Yasmine Sokolov.”

Yasmine blinked. She looked down to see if she was wearing a name tag. She was not.

The woman laughed at her. It was, again, a very pleasant sound. Endearing, even. Which was very bad news for Yasmine.

Because if the Nightingale had finally found a way to hire someone with an emotional IQ higher than 3, that meant the insect plague known as tourists would soon arrive at her blissfully dirty doorstep.

She enjoyed this coffee shop for a series of very specific reasons: the staff were rude, the coffees were overpriced, the bathroom sink was always broken, the pipes made a sound every five minutes that sounded like a bomb going off, the kitchen most likely had an unhandled mold problem, and, most of all, because it only entertained a customer every two and a half hours, due to previously mentioned reasons.

Having an attractive and non-offputting member of the staff meant one of those things might change.

Yasmine could not hide her horror. Thankfully, she had the foresight to stop her power from activating as she grimaced.

Even though it would have been a very practical solution to her problem, she didn’t actually like scaring people who didn’t deserve it.

The girl’s smile had dropped slightly. “Did I say something to offend you?”

Yasmine shook her head. “No. It’s fine.” She sighed. “Why are you working here?”

Yasmine thought this was a perfectly respectable question to ask. The girl didn’t seem to agree, because she laughed in her face.

“Is there a problem with me working here?”

She sounded a little offended. Yasmine was offended on her behalf that she thought so little of herself.

“Of course there is. You—no offense, I’m sure there’s more to you than the fact that you’re an adult blonde, but it’s pretty distracting—but you look like an expensive collector’s edition doll.

And your smile muscles still work. This place is a soul-sucking dump.

Could you not get a job somewhere else? Like Starbucks?

Or, if you really hate yourself, the Juice Palace?

” Yasmine said, matter-of-fact, then bit down on her tongue when she realized she’d forgotten to address something. “Wait, how do you know my name?”

The adult blonde stared at her for an agonizingly long moment.

Yasmine wasn’t sure why it was so agonizing.

If she could do one thing in life, it was wait.

She’d once waited for twenty-three days in a solitary confinement cell in the freezing cold of Siberia.

That was what she got for relying on Sylvia to get anything done in a timely fashion.

Anyway, patience was a virtue she possessed in spades. But currently, she felt unnerved. Her knee was bobbing up and down. Maybe it was the bad date. Or the consistently bad coffee.

“Your reputation precedes you,” the woman confessed with a small smile. “There was a note on the wall of the kitchen when I arrived with your coffee order. A double espresso, topped with two tablespoons of hot water. Which is—”

“I refuse to call it an Americano,” Yasmine cut in. “I will not indulge the belief that America invented anything. The country’s barely a toddler.”

“The post-it note mentioned that opinion, too.” The girl snorted. “You’re a lot.”

Yasmine was struck by her honesty. It made her laugh, genuinely laugh; it also made her knee bob a little faster. “Thank you. I am. That’s how I do it, by the way. The driving away men bit. By being a lot. If you really wanted to take notes.”

“Thank you, I’ll remember that,” she said, then tapped her finger—french tip pink nails, so Barbie—to Yasmine’s notebook.

Well, one of her notebooks. There were around fifteen in total stacked on top of each other like Jenga.

Several had coffee stains from their various interactions with the floor.

“You seem to take a lot of notes. Student?”

Yasmine blinked incredulously. “Do I look that young to you?”

“Well, you certainly don’t look old.”

Yasmine would have laughed, but for some reason it stung a bit.

There was a certain loneliness in not looking your age.

No wrinkles to bear all the things you’d endured.

God, I sound like a character from a soap opera.

Being immortal was both incredibly isolating and also totally silly.

Sometimes it hurt to become aware of it, sometimes it didn’t.

“Take whatever age you’re thinking about, then multiply it by a thousand,” she said, holding the woman’s gaze for a moment before turning back to her work.

Her pen had lapsed next to an unsolved equation.

She usually took her dates during her breaks.

Quantum equations had so far been a lot more tantalizing than anyone she’d met.

Instead of disappearing like Yasmine would expect her to, the woman just stood there, put a hand on her hip, and hummed.

“Huh. So that would put you right at the death of Charlemagne.”

Before Yasmine thought about it, she reflexively replied, “Fifteen years after, actually, not that I can remember much—” She froze, realizing the girl was joking.

Of course she was joking. This was a human barista at fucking Nightingale. She looked all of twenty-seven years old. Maybe twenty-eight.

But what the hell? Why had she been so dead on?

Yasmine’s whole body suddenly itched. Itched to leave, to say something. The woman bit down on her lip and looked like she was about to say something when a man in an ashtray of an outfit stepped out from the kitchen.

“Bella!” he said, waving towards them. “Come here! Chad just got a five dollar lottery ticket! He needs you to run to the gas station to redeem it. He says you can buy yourself something nice with a dollar fifty of the winnings, eh? What does that get you these days?”

The woman, this completely baffling woman—Bella?—kept her gaze pinned on Yasmine for a moment longer before she sighed, turned on her heel, and addressed the owner of this fine dining establishment. “Absolutely nothing, Larry. Nothing.”

Before she departed, though, she turned back once more, and gently touched Yasmine on the hand. “It was nice to meet you, Yasmine,” she said. “And I’m eager to hear more about what it was like living in the Holy Roman Empire next time we chat.”

Yasmine did nothing but blink at her. She would have said something, anything, really, but Bella was headed to the bar and Yasmine’s phone was vibrating so loudly it nearly toppled off the table. She caught it at the last second, taking a breath in before she noticed who was lighting up the screen.

Financial Leech: so, how’d the date go? This one a keeper, or did you just do calculus on the side like last time, you complete nerd?

Financial Leech: also, asking for a friend, what the fuck are you supposed to do if your child has started levitating out of their crib at night