Chapter 2
“Huh. You really weren’t kidding.”
“Did you think I was lying to you?” Sylvia scoffed. “Why would I ever do that?”
Yasmine rolled her eyes. If there was one certainty in her life, it was that she could rely on Sylvia Maroven for nothing, least of all the truth.
But as she hung up her rain jacket and strolled into the Maroven/Castelmar residence, a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper East Side, where the rent was controlled, of course, by Yasmine, there really was a levitating baby.
On the contrary, after the marriage bite, any two vampires who stayed in close proximity long enough would end up with a baby.
It was how the species kept its long, dreadful lineage going.
But she could understand why Sylvia hadn’t asked her. Yasmine’s parents had not been vampires, and Yasmine had her son, Wallace, with a human man.
Unlike Sylvia and Aster’s child, though, Wallace was only half-accidental.
It was Christmastime up in Albany when the whole ordeal began.
She was off from university for the holidays, which was a long-awaited blessing for most professors, but to Yasmine, it was equivalent to mental waterboarding.
When left without a problem to solve, her subconscious mind was like the Terrace of Sloth from Dante’s Inferno: a chaotic hell-plane full of screaming, running little creatures, each of them scared to death of being smited for lazing around.
Which is why on that particular evening she had just finished baking five rounds of sourdough, decorating her entire villa with decorations that no one but herself would see, and drinking herself into a stupor in front of a Golden Girls marathon.
She found herself inexplicably crying during an ad-break, and suddenly she was on a sperm donation website.
She received the e-mail days later that she’d been approved, and things had continued from there. It was a spur of the moment decision. One that gave her the greatest joy of her life, her Wallace, but also the greatest regret in her life:
Her Wallace.
Because the thing with the human children of vampires is—they can’t be turned. And the thing with humans is—they die.
No matter how much you love them.
Stop it. She sighed. He’s alive. He just texted you from Taco Bell.
She ground her teeth together and shook off the thought.
It was not difficult to do, as the present moment was an incredibly good distraction.
Sylvia had climbed onto the sofa and was now stretching both arms up towards the ceiling, miserably failing at capturing the giggling child that was crawling across the white plaster. Yasmine couldn’t help but snort.
“This is really not a laughing matter,” Sylvia snapped at Yasmine.
Then her voice lowered to something pleading and almost maternal as she beckoned the infant to come off the ceiling.
“Rafael. Please. Your mother has not had her coffee yet today and she’s trying to break a generational cycle of hating one’s child. ”
Yasmine was about to ask where Aster had gone when the woman of the hour materialized from the bathroom, wearing nothing but a Metallica t-shirt and black underwear, a toothbrush hanging out of her mouth.
And even though Yasmine had been visiting them for over a year now, it still startled her to see the Murder Princess herself reduced to an outfit from Uniqlo. Their whole domestic bliss thing was just… strange.
Not that it was exactly domestic. Or bliss.
The apartment was a complete mess. Sylvia’s DVD collection had been moved into the living room to make space for Rafa’s future bedroom.
The collection of discs was so large that they were having to repurpose some of them as footstools and side tables.
Currently, Yasmine was sitting in an armchair with her feet propped up on a collector’s edition Jaws Blu-ray.
“Oh hey there, Dracula, you’re early," Aster said, smirking as she stepped over season one of Friends and season two of The Wire to make her way to the couch. “Sylvia, let me.”
Aster leaned over toward the kitchen table and grabbed an overturned milk bottle. The tiny plastic thing was full of a red sloshing liquid.
“Absolutely not. You already fed him this morning and last night. I’m not letting you become the favorite parent this early in the game.”
Aster laughed, smiling affectionately at her girlfriend. “You say that like it’s some kind of inevitability.”
Sylvia scoffed. “Um, because it is? Lest you forget, I’m so emotionally abrasive that I put you in a partial memory coma for six hundred years. Also, I’m a Maroven. I’ll inevitably push him too hard to be good at something and you’ll be like aw Rafa, it’s fine, you just be whoever you are.”
“Come on. I’m sure we’ll find ways to even things out. You can be the parent that goes to all of his parent-teacher conferences, and I’ll make sure to reek of weed when I pick him up from school late. Automatic win for you.”
Sylvia made an unenthused noise. “You and your solutions. Give me that.”
Aster handed over the bottle with a laugh, and Sylvia managed to wrangle the crocodile of an infant back into her arms. Once he was no longer defying gravity, she handed him over to Aster, and said, “Alright. Now you can be the good mom and go change him.”
Aster sniffed the baby and grimaced. “I’d rather be the bad mother.”
“Sorry. Too bad. That slot’s already taken. Get on with it so I can find out if Yasmine met the love of her life yesterday. I’m dying with anticipation.”
Yasmine rolled her eyes. “The sarcasm is not lost on me.”
“That’s a first,” Sylvia said with a snicker.
Aster swatted her girlfriend on the shoulder, muttered, “Be nice, she pays our rent,” and then made her way to Rafa’s room, nearly tripping over the vacuum cleaner that had been left splayed on the floor since the last time Yasmine visited, which was four days ago.
“So?” Sylvia made an expectant gesture with her hands. “Tell me everything.”
Yasmine sighed. For some strange reason, she felt uncomfortable discussing it. She’d found it easy to go on and on about how terrible her previous twenty dates had gone, but this one had left a boulder in her stomach. It was weird.
“Nothing to tell,” she said. “Total dud.”
“Aw, really?” Sylvia fake-pouted, batting her eyelashes. “And who could have told you that? Someone really wise, probably.”
This woman. “Yes, the one who accidentally got herself a vampire baby because she didn’t consult me first is the wise one in this equation.”
“I didn’t realize you were a vampire sex expert,” Sylvia groaned. “You had a kid with a human! Anyone can have a kid with a human.”
“The identity of my child’s father has no bearing on my wisdom.”
Sylvia shook her head, groaning again, and Yasmine found herself smiling. She couldn’t stand Sylvia most of the time—she was chronically late, rude, and of course a chronic expense column in Yasmine’s bank accounts—but about twenty percent of the time she made her feel just… good. At ease.
Most of it, she chalked up to time. They’d endured all the same plagues and empires and revolutions and witch hunts. It was hard to find another person with that much shared history. It was kind of like having a sibling.
“So that’s it? Nothing more to tell?” Sylvia said. “God, you’re boring. Come on, give me some kind of fun detail. Did he try to get you to join his multi-level marketing scheme? Did he have a tattoo of some other girl’s name on the back of his neck?”
“No, and no. He was just a man,” Yasmine said, blowing a crimson strand of hair out of her eyes. “The barista was much more interesting, honestly.”
Immediately, the predator’s instincts kicked in. Sylvia’s eyes flashed with that wolfish curiosity and Yasmine completely regretted her choice of words.
“Not like that. She’s a human.”
“She!” Sylvia clapped her hands. “At least we’re getting somewhere.”
Yasmine rolled her eyes. “You know I date both.”
“Wow, this is going faster than I could have dreamed. You already admitted you want to date her!” Sylvia giggled. The woman actually giggled. Then she shouted loudly, so Aster could hear, “Yasmine’s dating a human woman!”
Aster’s head immediately materialized by the doorframe. There were bags under her eyes that weren’t there five minutes ago. Apparently, changing the diaper of a baby who can levitate presents its own challenges. “You’re dating a human?”
“A woman human,” Sylvia reiterated.
“I’m not dating her! Or anyone!” Yasmine covered her face in humiliation.
“And honestly I think I’m going to stop trying with the whole VampireMatch thing.
” Sylvia opened her mouth, and Yasmine cut her off.
“I know you think it’s good for me, but I moved here for my work.
For my research. For my new position at Columbia. Everything else is just a distraction.”
“Finding love is a distraction from… doing math?” Aster asked, rocking the now sleeping Rafael back and forth in her arms as she rejoined Sylvia on the couch.
“Well, yes,” she muttered. “When that math has the potential to be revolutionary in the field of health and disease science, then absolutely.”
“Okay, fair, but consider this,” Sylvia said, waving her hands around like a magician revealing a trick. “You can afford to take six months off.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Of course you can. Aster and I often take six decades off, and it’s no problem.”
“Off from what?” Yasmine hissed. “You two don’t work, Sylvia.”
Of course, this was bait, as proved by the winning smile on Sylvia’s face. But Yasmine fell for it every time.
“What do you mean? Aster is a freelance kubernetes engineer.”
Yasmine took a measured breath in to avoid Nightmaring her.
“I know this is hard for your brain to understand,” she said, pressing her hands together.
“But I am the premier biophysicist in the country. If I don’t spend my time on these theories, then who will?
Human lifetimes are short. If I can make them even a little bit longer, then I need to do that now, not later. ”
Yasmine’s fingers curled into fists, her chest trembling. Embarrassing. You’re embarrassing yourself. Yasmine knew they were only teasing her, but it was very easy for her to get worked up about the subject.
“I know,” Sylvia said softly. The unspoken drifted between them. Wallace. If she could make Wallace’s life a little bit longer, that would mean everything.
Silence enveloped the room. The wind whisked loudly against the windows.
“Well,” Yasmine cleared her throat and anxiously clapped her hands against her pants. “This was fun. As always. But I think I’ll be going now.”
“Yasmine, wait—”
Yasmine turned on her heel, stepped over a skyscraper of Gilmore Girls DVDs, and let the door to the apartment fall flat behind her.
She knew Sylvia thought her research was a dead end. It had been for years, but that didn’t mean Yasmine was going to give up on it and devote her time to something as useless and fleeting as a romance.
If she was the only vampire on Earth who was going to give a damn about the future of humanity, then she’d be alone in that. And that was fine. Not all paths were walked with other people. Some were walked—
Yasmine froze. She had been halfway home, lost in thought, when she realized she wasn’t near her apartment at all.
Her stupid betraying feet had taken her to the Nightingale.
Never mind the fact that it was nine PM. and the coffee shop closed four hours ago. Completely unhelpful. She couldn’t even get herself a coffee. Well, she could always break in, but… she wasn’t Sylvia.
That was practically her life’s mantra at this point.
As she collected herself, she found herself staring into the windows of the shop, expecting to see nothing inside except the grim, molding interior.
But something caught her eye. If she was a human, she wouldn’t have noticed it.
But vampire eyes are excellent for seeing in the dark.
And through those exceptional pupils of hers, Yasmine saw a woman lying on the floor.
A blonde woman. Tucked into the fetal position, sleeping. Sleeping on the floor of the Nightingale. She would have assumed she was dead, but she could faintly hear her pulse through the shop’s paper-thin walls. She was snoring slightly, her nose scrunching.
That was Bella, wasn’t it? The new barista?
What the hell?
Yasmine bit down on her lip. Walk away. Mind your business. Walk away. Mind your business.
Fuck. No, she needed to know.