Chapter Twenty-three
HE WASN’T CALLING himself Bingley anymore, and she wasn’t calling herself Louisa.
Elizabeth was going by Liz these days and her husband was Tad, and they were staying at a house in the country.
They didn’t own a lot of property these days, and they had sold Pemberley a very, very long time ago.
This house, this country house, it wasn’t theirs.
They were renting it. They had booked it on a website and paid for it with a credit card.
They had cell phones and they used them to keep in touch with other vampire friends.
Bingley was Benedict these days. Louisa was Maisey.
Surprisingly, she had gotten used to shedding names like a snake sheds its skin.
Benedict and Maisey had another vampire with them, a man who was currently called Harrison. He was younger than Liz, maybe by eighty years. The three of them were delighted when popular culture started coming up with words like “polyamorous triad.”
“Oh, look, we’re normal now, there’s a word for us,” Maisey would say, laughing. Had she ever considered turning Mr. Hurst? Liz would never know and she never asked.
Liz let their three guests in. It was afternoon, but the invention of sunblock had proved rather wondrous for vampires.
Liz couldn’t stay out in the sun for hours or anything, but she could put on a high SPF and go out and run errands with a big-brimmed hat and long sleeves.
It felt miraculous, really. Even now, after decades of it, she was astonished at how much she appreciated being able to go out in daylight.
It made travel ever so much easier also.
“This is lovely,” said Maisey, looking around the rented house. “It’s so airy.”
“Yes, lots of windows,” said Liz. “But we’ll be able to see the fireworks through the skylights, I think. In the meantime, there’s a finished basement just down there.”
“I looked at the pictures online,” said Benedict, pulling her into a hug. “Is that where your husband is?”
“Yes, he’s rewatching The Maltese Falcon downstairs,” said Liz. “On the big screen.”
“Oh, truly? Never gets tired of that, does he?” Benedict laughed. “Then again, look at the two of you. I don’t know another vampire couple who’s been exclusive to each other for anywhere near as long as you two.”
Liz shrugged. “We are what we are.”
Her husband was fiercely loyal. He was still as attracted to her today as he had been two hundred years ago, and she found him just as alluring.
She still liked it when she straddled him and bent down to nick at his chin with her sharp teeth.
He still picked her up and held her against the wall and pressed the long, thick length of himself inside her.
She did not entirely understand how it was that other vampires grew bored with each other.
But then, of course, other vampires were not her husband.
She adored him.
They all trooped down the stairs and Tad barely looked up from the television, though he called out his hellos.
They all sat down on the couch, and Tad ignored them, and the others joked about how many times he had watched this movie, and how he was a creature of habit.
Tad put his arm around Liz. “I like what I like.”
“Is there blood?” spoke up Harrison.
“Oh, let me fetch it from the refrigerator,” said Liz.
Modern freezing and refrigeration meant that they were less likely to need to actually feed from humans.
And they took the blood from hospitals and donation sites.
Being a vampire these days was easier and more comfortable than it had ever been.
“No, just checking,” said Harrison. “Because I had to convince Maisey we didn’t need to bring a cooler of our own. I said, ‘They will have blood.’”
Maisey snuggled into Harrison’s shoulder. “You were right, love.”
Benedict surveyed them both with a small smile.
He was actually recently back in this whatever-they-were-calling-it, a triad, after a long solitary spell of maybe sixty years, where he’d been living in a basement apartment in New York City and working at clubs, playing music, his hair chopped short and dyed bright green.
Well, perhaps he’d done that in the 1980s and then not had the presence of mind to change it.
Now, he was back with Maisey and Harrison and he seemed content and happy, but it wasn’t uncommon for vampires to do those sorts of things.
Liz knew Tad had been quite solitary before her, but he never seemed to tire of her, nor she of him.
They had time, she supposed, time and each other.
That night, as she looked up at the fireworks in the sky, through the skylight in her rented house, she contemplated the words her sister had said to her, centuries ago.
She wasn’t alive, she supposed. Life was about growth and change and meeting new challenges. Her existence was often about sameness, stagnation, an endless array of similarity. But the world changed, of course, in ways that delighted and intrigued her.
And anyway, she didn’t think she was missing anything.
Jane had wished to die because everyone she loved was also going to die. When her children sobbed at her deathbed, it was all part of the natural order of things. As their mother, their grandmother, Jane had to leave the world to make room for their growth.
But Liz loved Tad.
So, she wasn’t missing anything at all.
Maybe she was not alive. Maybe she was dead, an animated corpse, a monstrous fiend.
But she would be quite happy to spend her endless death with her husband.
Come what may, they had each other.
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