Chapter 2
Five Years Ago
It’s just down this alley,” Olivia said, skipping ahead of Lorenzo on the rain-soaked pavement.
He hurried to keep up with her. Olivia was small but fearless, and she moved quickly despite the fact that the alleyway was dark and foreboding and her night vision, like all humans’, was poor. “This doesn’t seem like a safe area of town,” he pointed out. “You come here often?”
“Yeah,” she said. “They’re my best friends. It’s fine!” She turned and walked backward for a moment just to grin and waggle her eyebrows at him. “What do you think is going to jump out of the shadows and get me, huh? A monster?”
“Of course not,” he said. “Monsters! Hah. Those don’t . . . exist.” At least, they wouldn’t officially exist for a few more years, if the rumors he was hearing were true.
“Uh, yeah,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Anyway, I think it’s kind of cool that they decided to live off campus this year. It’s so, like . . . real. Oh, here it is!”
She stopped at a small bungalow and rang the doorbell, and he stepped up beside her.
She was more than a foot shorter than him, her long black hair glossy in the dim light, and she smelled of the perfume he’d watched her dance through as she was getting ready.
As a human, Olivia was frail in ways she didn’t even understand, but despite that, there was a core of strength in her he found incredibly sexy.
She was confident and effervescent. He envied that.
When she looked up at him, she must have seen the trepidation in his face. She smiled reassuringly, squeezing his shoulders, and said, “Don’t worry! My friends love you.”
It was a common misconception in human stories about vampires that they could always tell when humans were lying.
Often this power was said to be related to vampires’ heightened senses of scent or hearing; they could supposedly hear a racing heartbeat, or smell the scent of guilt.
None of that was true, of course; vampires had no particular advantage over humans when it came to deception.
Olivia, however, was a kind soul who just so happened to be bad at lying in the ordinary way shared by vampires and humans alike. But he didn’t want her to worry, so he just smiled and said, “Okay.”
The party smelled of drugs and cheap cologne, and the music that was playing wasn’t familiar to him, though he tended to be a century or so behind on that sort of thing.
The bungalow had a few rooms, with parquet floors and sparse furniture, all of which looked better in the low lighting.
Lorenzo wished he could have invited Olivia to his place, but their relationship was still in the bloom of newness; he wasn’t ready to tell her the truth about his vampiric nature.
Humans were scattered all around the party, but Olivia bounded straight over to a group standing by a large neon sign that said FERN. “Hey, guys!” she said happily, wrapping her arms around one of them. When she pulled back, Lorenzo saw that it was her friend Charles.
He suppressed a grimace.
Charlie laughed as Olivia hugged him, the neon reflecting off his round cheeks. “Hey, babe,” he said, while the others waved in greeting.
Olivia turned to Lorenzo, offering her purse. “Hold this, will you? I’m gonna get us some drinks.”
She left for the kitchen. Lorenzo smiled and nodded graciously at her friends. “Hello.”
They all offered limp greetings in return, some barely more than grunts. Then their eyes collectively slid away from him, as if he had simply vanished from their line of sight, and resumed their conversation. He felt like a wart on their gathering, something unsightly and best ignored.
He tried not to judge her friends too harshly. Olivia was young, and so were her compatriots. Sometimes they behaved with the thoughtlessness of youth, and that was understandable, if irritating.
Charles was definitely the worst one, though.
He laughed loudly at a joke one of the others made, his obvious enjoyment of the party only underscoring how ill at ease Lorenzo felt by contrast. Charlie never came across as thoughtless or juvenile, like the others; in fact, he was remarkably self-possessed for someone his age.
There was a sharpness to his gaze, a cocky broadness to his smile.
He clearly thought he had the whole world figured out.
When he ignored Lorenzo, it felt deliberate.
Still, he was determined to win Olivia’s friends over—Charles included—so he waited for a pause in their conversation and then jumped in. “Thank you for inviting me into your home,” he said. “It is lovely.”
The humans stared at him, looking taken aback for some reason. “Uh,” one of them said at length. “Thank you?”
“I would love to host a gathering such as this,” Lorenzo said, and then trailed off as he realized what a fool he was being.
He’d wanted to show off, but instead he’d bragged himself into a corner: he couldn’t invite any of these people into his home, even though it was far more spacious and luxurious than this place, which was barely a step up from a dorm room.
He smiled nervously as he tried to think of a way to end his sentence other than but I cannot, because then you might notice that I am a vampire.
As he stalled, Olivia’s friends stared at him blankly. Except for Charlie, who cocked an arrogant eyebrow.
“But . . . my roommates,” Lorenzo finished lamely. “They prefer . . . quiet.”
“Got it,” one of the humans said. An awkward silence fell.
Uncharacteristically, Charlie asked Lorenzo a follow-up question. “I didn’t know you had roommates,” he said.
There was something insulting in his tone, although Lorenzo couldn’t pin down what it was. There was a weight to Charlie’s focus that went beyond his simple good looks and teasing amber eyes—every time Charlie looked at him, he felt pinned in place. “Yes, I do,” he said cautiously.
“Cool,” Charlie said. “Hey, uh, what do you do again?”
“Um,” Lorenzo said. He needed a better answer to this question. “You know . . . this and that. The, uh . . . gig economy.”
The humans blinked at him, and Charlie frowned. One of the others said, “You’re not a student?”
“No,” Lorenzo said, to uncomfortable stares from the group. This was going downhill swifter than he had anticipated.
“You’re older, right?” Charlie pressed.
Lorenzo grasped for an answer. “I . . . well . . . technically, I am twenty-four.”
Charlie’s eyes narrowed. “What does that mean? Like, you’re about to turn twenty-five?”
Lorenzo paused. “Yes.”
The humans stared at him again, and he cursed internally. He was trying to brainstorm the best way to restart the conversation when Charlie leaned casually toward one of the others and muttered, “Oh my god, where is Olivia.”
A human probably wouldn’t have been able to hear him over the music, so Lorenzo kept his smile firmly in place. But he could feel his fangs biting into his lower lip.
Thankfully, Olivia reappeared just then with their drinks. He thanked her when she handed him a beer, and she beamed in response, reaching up on her toes to give him a kiss on the cheek, leaving a smudge of her lip gloss behind. Lorenzo sighed happily, the kiss sending warmth all through him.
He could put up with Olivia’s horrible friends, so long as she was by his side.
Present Day
Lorenzo paced by his front door, wearing a hole in the foyer carpet.
A hundred years ago, he probably would have been waiting here to kill Charlie. That would have been the only reason he’d invite Charles to his home—to eat him in a civilized fashion. But Lorenzo had lost his taste for killing long ago.
And he had no desire to taste Charlie.
Charlie was a jerk. He was catty and cruel, and he’d made Lorenzo feel like an idiot every time they’d crossed paths five years ago. He’d never wasted a chance to make him feel out of place and unworthy of Olivia. And in the end, he had destroyed their relationship by counseling her against him.
At least now Lorenzo would have his revenge.
Yes, he’d told Charlie he would help him out with his thesis, that he would educate him about the world of the supernatural in exchange for Charlie’s help running errands.
But that was all a ruse. In reality, he had decided that he would use the situation to get close to Charlie and figure out how best to wreak havoc on him for poisoning his relationship with Olivia. Charlie would never see it coming.
Currently, Lorenzo also could not see it coming, because he hadn’t yet figured out just how he would take his revenge.
He was confident, however, that he would think of something devious and awful.
Nothing violent, of course; vampires were out in the open now, so killing and nonconsensual biting were sort of faux pas.
No, his plot against Charlie would be more in the vein of psychological vengeance.
Perhaps he would come up with a way to ruin Charlie’s thesis, or his entire degree.
Yes, he would have to think carefully about just what form his vengeance would take; but whatever it was, it would be vicious.
He jumped a little when the doorbell rang. Hesitantly, he cracked open the door, finding Charlie’s earnest, irritating face on the other side.
“Oh,” he said flatly. “Hello.”
“Hi,” Charlie said, with a perky smile that faltered after a moment. “You said to come by at nightfall, and it’s nightfall . . . I think. I wasn’t sure when that was, exactly. But—the sun’s not out, so . . .?”
Lorenzo stifled a sigh and stood aside. “Yes. Come in.”
Charlie crossed the threshold, and Lorenzo shut the door behind him. “So I guess that whole thing about vampires is true, then,” Charlie said. “That they can’t come out during day-light?”
“Have you ever seen a vampire in the daylight?” Lorenzo asked.
“I guess not,” he said with a shrug. “You’re the first vampire I’ve ever met. I think.”
“How fun for me.”