Sunsets & Other Dangerous Things

Chapter 1

1

Ashley

A shley was on the cusp of getting everything she ever wanted. This year was about getting her life back for the first time…well, for the first time since she died.

She turned to the vanity she’d rescued during post-graduation moveout season nine years ago and pointed at a five-by-seven of her senior portrait taped to the center of the mirror. One from the series in her cheer uniform.

“You are a twenty-year-old girl—I mean, woman.” Crap, she’d forgotten she’d changed that part of her mantra. She shook out her hands, bouncing back and forth on the balls of her feet, her socks sinking into the white faux-fur rug, and then returned her attention to the mirror. “You are a twenty-year-old woman. Always have been. Always will be.” She struck a superhero pose, channeling confidence from her core to the soles of her feet. “You’ve got this.”

The photo was two years younger than she was meant to be and taken in a cornfield just outside her hometown but worked better than a mirror reflecting an empty room back at her. The point was no one would know her age if she…well, acted her age, and she’d gotten pretty good at acting twenty over the past decade. It helped that, aside from one big, vampire-shaped difference, not much had changed. She was still going to school, didn’t own any property, had no real career aspects, lived in a home full of roommates, and was rich in student loans.

And being late for class again was not going to help.

Ashley peered through her curtain’s sliver-sized opening.

Another beautiful, sunny day in upstate New York shone back at her—she was definitely going to be late for class. She tucked the blackout curtain into place with a sigh. She would do unspeakable things for a cloudy day. Well, nothing too awful. But she would do several softly whispered things if the sun would hide for the next ten minutes.

But being late might mean she got to sit next to a certain unspeakable someone. Ashley’s mind wandered to crimson lips and slender fingers caressing her throat before waking from the daydream.

These were not safe thoughts to have before class.

A knock at her door pulled her focus.

“Shouldn’t you be in class already?” Cynthia—her mentor, not babysitter—leaned against the doorjamb, impressively pulling off a denim jumper with flared pants in the twenty-first century.

Crap . How long had she been daydreaming? Maybe she should have offered just one unspeakable thing to the universe.

“Right. Of course. I was just heading out.” Ashley pulled out her sunny day gear—gloves, Ray-Ban category 4 high altitude sunglasses, lightweight shawl, and a wide-brimmed fedora.

Cynthia didn’t look impressed by her hustle. “I mean, it’s not my business, but maybe try taking your future seriously.”

Ashley nodded as she pulled on her gloves, keeping her protective smile in place and ignoring the tightness in her chest whenever she was reminded how important this year was. She’d heard the speech a million times, and it never got easier.

“This isn’t one of your sappy movies,” Cynthia said. “The Family isn’t known for giving second chances, let alone third.”

“I know.” Her words came out tighter than she intended as she slipped her arms into her J. Crew trench coat, cinched it, and eased past Cynthia and downstairs, desperate to escape the foreboding message hidden in her mentor’s nagging.

Cynthia stuck to the shadows as Ashley slipped on her boots and opened the front door. “Maybe this year, try not obsessing over a pretty face.”

Her cackle followed Ashley out the door.

The last rays of daylight coasted the treetops as Ashley stepped out on the creaking porch, breathing deeply and feeling her shoulders relax. Her smile weighed heavier every day as the only people who knew the real her saw her as a burden at best and a liability at worst.

Twelve years of this crap. She was the last twenty-year-old millennial in existence and trying to finish this same school year over and over again without incident was growing old. But if all went as planned, this was her last year. This was her last chance to join the Family and gain the sense of security she’d hunted for the past decade. She just needed to keep her head down and finish one school year without letting her impulsive tendencies grab the wheel and careen off the road to happiness.

She needed this year to be perfect.

Ashley pulled up her collar and slunk into the shadows along the hedge. This year, she’d be a normal college student in a normal college town where the only supernatural characters were actors on TV. She just had to play a twenty-year-old. Not the impulsive romantic she had actually been at twenty. She followed streets canopied in old oaks and crept along the southern edge of the library until sprinting the final stretch across the quad.

At her lecture hall, she slid into the first available seat while her professor’s back was turned, dropping her Platt U tote by her feet and ignoring any feelings she might have about the chair’s proximity to a certain classmate. She dug in her bag, fishing for a gel pen. She removed the sparkly pen’s cap and set to work coloring in the bubbled title of her list.

Ashley’s Rules for Succeeding in Undergrad

Rule 1: Do NOT discuss your roommates

Rule 2: Do NOT do weird stuff where others can see you

Rule 3: Do NOT make friends or obsess over you-know-who

Cynthia’s warning floated back to her. But if she were obsessing, she would write about it in a notebook. And see? She’d crossed it out, and therefore, she was not obsessing.

“Would anyone care to summarize the reading from last week?” Professor Jenkins stalked the small lecture hall of Anthropology 101, hunting for prey. The wooden floors creaked beneath her kitten heels, growing louder as she approached Ashley’s desk.

Ashley kept her gaze firmly on her list, avoiding eye contact. Maybe she could disguise the crossed-out bit with flowers like she never wrote it. She uncapped another pen.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t done the reading. She’d glanced at it—something to do with cultural relativism? But there was this party with Cynthia last night, and Ashley had lost track of time.

The floor in front of Ashley creaked, followed by a long-suffering sigh from Professor Jenkins. Ashley tensed, letting her curtain of blond hair shield her while she curated a list of buzzwords from the two pages she did read.

“Esther,” called Professor Jenkins. An endorphin rush like nailing a perfect back handspring shot down Ashley’s spine. “I know this isn’t your job, but would you share your thoughts on today’s reading? Just to get us started.”

Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look . Ashley’s betraying eyes tracked to the seat at the opposite corner. The seat where Professor Jenkins’s hot graduate assistant always sat. Not that Ashley kept track of where Esther Green sat. That was something someone obsessive would write about in a notebook somewhere, and Ashley wrote nothing of the sort.

She couldn’t see Esther from this angle, another pitfall of the front row. Not that Ashley knew which seat had the best view of Esther—two seats back and three over.

“I guess a part that stood out to me was the discussion on cannibalistic practices and the different approaches to it.” Something about Esther’s matter-of-fact tone had Ashley envisioning Esther behind a library desk pressing spectacles up her nose while giving Ashley a stern look, maybe biting the end of a pen. “You have the spiritual with Christian communion in holy human sacrifice versus the militaristic eat-your-enemies-and-reduce-them-to-waste approach. But I liked the description of cannibalism as a communal funerary practice. I suppose this is a bit of a personal take and probably borders on moral relativism, but the idea of your ashes being put in a stew and consumed by your closest friends and family so you are literally carried with them, even in death, sounds… poetically beautiful.”

A shiver ran down Ashley’s spine. If Esther was into being eaten, Ashley wouldn’t push her out of bed. Hypothetically of course. She’d never spoken to Esther. Never so much as made eye contact with her from Ashley’s usual place in the back of the class.

Ashley leaned forward. However, with Fadl reclining and Taylor leaning over their notes, her view was blocked.

Forming friendships was off-limits, but Ashley took pride in her ability to remember names. Plattsburgh was a small enough college town that she’d run into at least half the class on weekends.

“Thank you, Esther. And that segues into our discussion on what Franz Boas meant when he used the term cultural relativism and how it differs from moral relativism . Would anyone else care to give us a quick definition?”

When Fadl leaned over his notes, Ashley performed a backward-stretch-and-lean to catch a sight of the woman on the other side of the room. The woman she was absolutely not obsessing over. Esther’s face was blocked as she twirled a lazy finger around a lock of brown hair that had escaped from her messy bun—the motion mesmerizing in its slow and steady rhythm.

“Ashley.”

Ashley dropped her arms and whipped her head back to where Professor Jenkins waited. What was the question again? “Cultural relativism…is culture…relative to…other cultures?”

“Their own culture. Relative to their own culture, Ashley.” Professor Jenkins continued up the center aisle. “Would anyone else like to continue the definition?”

Ashley snatched up her pencil to pantomime taking notes. Despite her better judgment, she glanced to the far side of the room. If she slouched back just right… Esther’s slender fingers returned to her notes, revealing a touch of pale, sharp cheekbones and blood red lips. If this were a romance, Esther and Ashley would be enemies. She pictured Esther in a forest green tunic and impractically tight leather leggings, holding a knife to Ashley’s throat. Ashley sighed dreamily.

And then something happened that never happened two rows back and three seats over—Esther and her deep-set eyes glanced back at Ashley.

She had the aura of Winona Ryder from the early nineties.

Ashley shifted in her chair, unable to blink. Jesus, I’m in trouble.

Fadl chose that moment to lean back again, blocking her view. The snap of Ashley’s pencil splintering in her fist startled her back to reality. Someone in the back of the class eloquently discussed Franz Boas’s work in the growing field of anthropology, how racist views of the time shaped and emphasized the novelty of his research on Inuit culture. Ashley took this monologue in like the cold shower she needed.

She most definitely did not need distractions like pools of deep, brown eyes and talk of the romantic elements of cannibalism calling her long history of falling too fast and too hard. Ashley’s crushes led to obsession, which led to oversharing, which led to discovery, failure, banishment, and starting over again in a room full of her previous classmates who had magically forgotten her name.

“Thank you, Charlotte. That was quite thorough.” Professor Jenkins’s smile looked genuine for the first time. She returned to the SMART board, clicking to the next slide. “Now, your assignment for next week. We’re doing ethnographies focusing on everyday rituals. Preparing dinner, putting on makeup, making the bed. Big or small, as long as you can fit it within the?—”

The high-pitched scatting of “The HampsterDance Song” filled the classroom, echoing off the ancient wooden floors and matching wood-paneled walls, traveling up the vaulted ceiling and sharply contrasting with the neo-Gothic look of Plattsburgh University. The floor groaned as desks shifted to face the corner of the room, where the sound emanated from the tote by Ashley’s desk. Ashley couldn’t recall ever wishing to be smitten from the earth more.

“Ashley, could you please silence your phone?”

She dove for her bag as her phone encouraged everyone to stomp their feet and clap their hands. Everything inside fell to the floor—loose gel pens, her favorite Lisa Frank notepad, a flyer for a party this weekend. Finally, she grasped the hard rectangle and flipped it to silent. She flopped into her seat and dropped her phone onto her desk, mortified. What were the chances Esther heard that?

“As I was saying,” Professor Jenkins continued, “the assignment will be?—”

Ashley’s desk vibrated under her fingers, her phone dancing across the surface as if to mock any hope of ever having a positive standing in this class.

“Ashley,” Professor Jenkins hissed. “Please take that outside.”

Ashley grabbed her phone and scampered from the classroom, leaving a whispered “sorry” as she passed her professor.

She followed the corridor to the common area where the last dregs of daylight lit the stained glass and coated the room in a deep orange. Less than shocked to see her mother in the missed calls, Ashley took a calming breath and sat on a hard, wooden pew to return the call.

“Hi, Mom. Did you need something?” She glanced at the wall clock, doing quick mental math. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“Hey, sweetie. It’s Mom.”

Ashley held the phone away from her face so it wouldn’t pick up her sigh.

“Sorry to wake you. I won’t keep you. I just wanted to know your Christmas plans.” Her mom said this like it was a quick check-in and not the start of a multi-day negotiation process. And the thing about her mom was, despite treating her like a child, she knew Ashley’s real age. Her mom continued to fill the silence while Ashley grasped for something to say. “It’s just we haven’t seen you in so long.” Pans clanged and Schatzi yipped in the background. “Your father and I talked about it and decided to buy your plane ticket home from Romania. Think of it as an early Christmas present.”

Ashley felt a stomach cramp and the start of a headache. They must have saved for months to afford this, and Ashley wasn’t even in Romania. A few years ago, she’d spent exactly three seconds looking at a map while her mom asked when she was coming home for Christmas. So, Ashley did the logical thing and picked a random country as far from Iowa as she dared, declaring she was transferring there for her bachelors. And then a couple years for her masters. And now a lengthy Ph.D. She cringed, realizing the excuse may be running thin, but limited funds as a student made her story about being unable to return each holiday nearly plausible—and put off having to tell them she was never coming back.

“It’s not that I don’t want to come home for Christmas.” Ashley’s class ticked by. She should get back to hear about the next assignment.

“Ashybear, it’s been years. I won’t take no for an answer.”

But she needed her mom to take no for an answer. Just a little longer before she had to say goodbye for good. A classmate came down the hall, followed by a second. Her professor was going to be pissed.

“I’ll see what I can do. Gotta go. Love you, bye.” Ashley hung up before her mom could respond.

She wove through the exiting tide of students. The room was empty save for one person crouched by Ashley’s desk, gathering gel pens off the floor. Her stomach clenched.

Esther.

Ashley squashed her excitement as soon as she recognized it.

“Oh my god, you don’t have to do that.” The creaky floor drowned out her words as she scurried to help Esther. “Thanks for watching my stuff though.”

“Sure, I guess.” Esther snatched the last rogue pen from under the desk just as Ashley reached for it. A faint perfume lingered behind the motion. The earthy vanilla of old books. This was officially the closest she had ever been to Esther. She should write this down somewhere.

Every day, Esther left another tempting crumb, be it a casual comment on cannibalism or the way she smiled like it was a secret. The way she wore these tiny rings but never on her ring fingers or her daily insistence on sporting the loudest black boots, even back when the nights were still hot before the leaf tips colored and a cool breeze stirred over Lake Champlain.

Ashley stood, dusting off her skinny jeans, reeling her libido in, and offering Esther a hand. In that small contact, she registered her Midwest manners betraying her in the worst way.

Everything changed to slow motion.

Esther’s gaze flicked up, sparkling in the overhead lights. Her hand slid into Ashley’s, smooth as silk. Music from the movie Troy played in Ashley’s head as Esther rose. The one with a single woman singing mournful vowels accompanied by a booming and unsteady drum, emphasizing the tragic yet epic significance of this moment.

Esther, for her part, seemed not to notice the life-changing contact, her boots stomping as she adjusted her stance and freed her hand from Ashley’s.

“I was waiting for you, actually,” Esther said.

Ashley bit her lip to keep from groaning aloud. There was some dialogue she’d rewind later. She was her own worst enemy. Maybe they weren’t enemies to lovers at all. They could be long-lost childhood friends.

“You don’t happen to be from Iowa, do you?” Be cool, Ashley. She planted her hip on a nearby desk.

Esther blinked at her. “Florida.”

“Oh.” Well, there went that option.

“Anyway.” There—a slight tug at the corner of Esther’s mouth as she turned her face away, her secret smile. “Professor Jenkins paired up the class to do the ethnographies while you were gone. We’re uneven, so I offered to work with the odd student.” She shrugged before shoving a fistful of pens at Ashley. “Hey, odd student, I guess you’re stuck with me.”

Sweet baby Jesus, Ashley didn’t know whether to thank her mom or curse her for putting her in the path of this marvelous temptation. Her fingers brushed Esther’s as she fumbled with the pens. She wanted to live in this awkward moment with Esther for a century at least. This was definitely a bad idea.

The back of her throat tingled, and she coughed it away. “Cool.”

“Right.” Esther nodded, as though that settled things. “We should exchange numbers to plan when to meet.”

When to meet. As in, with another student, outside of class, on purpose. Did this break rule three? It was for class after all. Sure, she’d failed her list twice already, but she’d grown. She was totally in control and ready for a one-on-one with a person she was not obsessing over.

The tingling in her throat increased, and she coughed again, trying to clear out the agitation. “Cool.”

She would need a better vocabulary the next time they met.

Again, Esther shoved something into Ashley’s unprepared hands. Her phone this time.

“Just put it in, and I’ll text you so you have my number.” Esther shifted her weight to one side, tapping the toe of her loud boot in a hurried beat while Ashley weighed the pros and cons.

There was a light knock on the door.

“Hey, Esther.” A bushy-browed, long-haired behemoth filled the doorway. “I was hoping to catch you. Oh. Still busy?” He spotted Ashley and stilled, blocking the exit.

Ashley’s throat now tingled like she’d swallowed an entire bag of Pop Rocks.

That’s when she remembered what that tingling meant.

Ashley plugged in her number and returned the phone without considering any further Family-related complications. But she kept focus on the man in the doorway. He’d just made her life exponentially more difficult.

Esther fumbled the phone Ashley shoved at her. “I’m just wrapping up with class stuff. What did you need?”

“Just checking if you’re coming over tomorrow.” His eyes continued to flick back to Ashley. “There’s something I wanted to talk about.”

“Of course.” Esther waved away his concern, rings flashing in the overhead light, and adjusted the strap of her cross bag. “I’ll see you then, August.”

Ashley’s shoulders stiffened. The name was ringing some sort of bell but that didn’t matter right now because Esther knew him. And not in a casual “hi, fellow classmate” way but an “of course I’ll be at the place where you live and we regularly meet” way. Just another reason Ashley should be avoiding Esther. Maybe they were destined to be enemies to lovers after all.

“Ashley,” Esther said.

Ashley pasted on her everything-is-fine smile before tearing her eyes away from the man and turning to Esther.

“I’ll text you,” Esther said, “and we can coordinate a time to meet up. Maybe this weekend?”

“Sure. Sounds great.” Please leave . She didn’t need the stranger in the doorway saying anything suspicious in front of Esther.

Esther nodded and strolled to the door. “You leaving too, August?”

“I just have to check a thing.” He threw a thumb over his shoulder indicating farther into the building before giving Ashley another side-eye. “You go on ahead.”

Esther shrugged and clomped down the corridor, disappearing from view.

Ashley returned her full attention to the man dripping with the tingling spark of magic before dropping her fangs. “What are you doing here, witch?”