Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Vampire (Possessive Small Town Alpha Kings #85)

1. Posy

— ? —

Posy

The Honda dies with a wheeze the second I pull up to Thornwick Manor, which feels appropriate given the circumstances.

I sit in the driver’s seat, engine ticking as it cools, and stare at what my grandmother apparently thought was an acceptable thing to leave me in her will. Crumbling stone, and rows of windows that watch me with the judgment I usually only get from my mother.

“Gran,” I mutter to no one, “what the actual hell.”

My phone buzzes against my thigh. I fish it out, see the name on the screen, and briefly consider driving my dented Honda directly into the ornamental fountain, which at this point is more moss than marble.

I answer anyway. “Hi, Derek.”

“Posy! Great news.” Derek Huntsman of Huntsman Realty has a voice that makes you want to check your wallet. “I’ve been running comps in the area, and I think I’ve got a solid number for you on the Thornwick property.”

A crow lands on one of the manor’s gargoyles. The gargoyle looks about as thrilled as I feel. “That was fast. You haven’t even seen the inside yet.”

“Well, that’s the thing.” Derek clears his throat the way he does before saying what I won’t like. “Properties in this condition, in this market, we’re looking at a very niche buyer pool. I’m thinking we list it low. Embarrassingly low. See what bites.”

“Embarrassingly low.” I repeat it flatly, because surely I misheard. “The property has acreage, Derek. The manor has more bedrooms than a hotel.”

“Bedrooms that all need complete renovation. Foundation issues, roof damage, possible asbestos. We’d be lucky to clear the embarrassing number after inspections. I’m doing you a favor even taking this listing.”

The crow turns its head and looks directly at me. I swear it’s judging my life choices.

“I’ll call you back, Derek.”

“Posy, wait.”

I hang up. It’s rude, but Derek’s been lowballing me since the moment he found out I inherited this place, and I’m too tired to perform gratitude for scraps. I drove all day on gas station coffee. Now I have to walk into a dead woman’s house and figure out what parts of her life are worth keeping.

Get in. Get gone.

That’s the plan. That’s been the plan since the lawyer called and informed me that Eleanora Thornwick, grandmother, stranger, apparent owner of a gothic mansion I never knew existed, had left everything to me instead of my mother, her actual daughter, who stopped speaking to her decades ago. Me, the granddaughter she barely met.

I grab my bag and step out into air that smells of rain and old roses, with an under-layer of turned earth and iron that doesn’t belong in a garden.

The hedges have swollen past their borders, the flower beds are rioting, and the stone path to the front entrance is cracked and heaved by roots nobody’s trimmed back in years.

My grandmother died alone in this place.

That’s what the lawyer said, very delicately, when I asked.

The only reason anyone found her at all was a grocery delivery nobody answered the door for.

I didn’t know her, and I keep thinking about it anyway, this enormous house going quiet around her while nobody noticed.

“Okay.” I hoist my bag higher on my shoulder and start up the path. “Okay, okay, okay.”

The front steps groan under my weight, which is not ominous at all.

The door is massive, dark wood with iron hardware gone green with age, and the key the lawyer sent is a full skeleton key, straight out of a horror movie.

The lock turns with a clunk I feel in my chest, and the door swings inward on hinges that desperately need oil.

The smell hits me first. Dust and old lavender, dried and faded but still clinging to the air. I step inside and my footsteps echo off dark hardwood that was probably beautiful once, before years of neglect dulled it down.

“Hello?” I call out, then immediately feel stupid. Who am I expecting to answer? The ghost of my grandmother? A helpful butler who’s been waiting patiently for the new owner?

The foyer stretches up two stories, a grand staircase curving toward the upper floors, and everywhere I look there are white sheets draped over furniture.

An entire room of shrouded shapes, standing very still.

A chandelier hangs overhead, crystals clouded and webbed, and I make a mental note not to stand directly underneath it.

I pull out my phone and take a few pictures for documentation purposes. Also because my best friend Riley made me promise to send proof of life, and in this house that might become literal.

Posy: I’m inside. It’s very Miss Havisham chic.

Riley: PICS OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN

Riley: Also are you okay?? You’ve been weird since the lawyer called

Posy: I’m fine. Just tired. Will call later.

I pocket the phone before she can respond with more concern I don’t have the energy to address. Riley means well, but she doesn’t understand why I came here in person instead of letting Derek handle the sale remotely.

I don’t entirely understand it either, if I’m honest.

But when the lawyer mentioned the manor, a memory surfaced. My grandmother’s voice, from one of the only visits I ever got.

“This house keeps secrets, little one,” she’d told me, her hand cool and papery in mine as we walked through a garden that smelled of roses and rain. “Someday, when you’re ready, it will share them with you.”

I was six. I thought she meant a treasure hunt, or a hidden room full of toys. My mother pulled me away before I could ask, and we left the next morning. I never came back.

Now here I am. Ready or not.

“Okay, Gran.” I set my bag down on a sheet-covered chair and put my hands on my hips. “Show me your secrets.”

The house, predictably, does not respond.

I spend the next hour wandering a museum nobody curated.

A parlor full of furniture that probably cost more than my car.

A dining room with a table long enough to seat a wedding party.

A kitchen updated at some point in the last century, with an icebox in the corner that I’m pretty sure is decorative, and off it a short hallway that dead-ends at a heavy iron-bolted door no key on the realtor’s ring will open.

The cold coming off the wood doesn’t match the season.

Cellar, probably. I make a note to call a locksmith, and I back away from it faster than a cellar strictly requires.

Everywhere I look there’s more of a dead woman’s life that I’m supposed to sort and box up, and the weight of it settles on my shoulders until I want to sit on the dusty floor and scream into my hands.

Get in. Get gone.

I keep repeating it, but the house keeps stretching around me, revealing new hallways and doors that lead to more doors. It’s actively resisting my attempts to reduce it to a checklist.

I find a library on the second floor that makes me stop in the doorway and stare.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves, stuffed so full that volumes are stacked horizontally on top of the vertical ones.

A fireplace big enough to stand in. Leather armchairs positioned near windows that look out over the wild gardens below.

It smells of old paper and wood polish, and underneath that, faintly, of incense.

“Holy shit, Gran.”

I run my fingers along the spines as I walk deeper in.

Most of the titles are in English, but a whole shelf near the fireplace is in scripts I don’t recognize, letters that curl and twist until my eyes want to slide away.

I pull one out at random. The pages are handwritten and completely unreadable.

I put it back and wipe my palm on my jeans without deciding to.

The portraits are what get me, though. The upstairs hallway is wall-to-wall ancestors, stern faces with my cheekbones and my dark eyes. I pause in front of a woman who could almost be my reflection if I’d been born in the 1800s and had access to significantly better posture.

“Hi, great-great-whatever grandma.” I give her a little wave. “Sorry about the whole selling-your-house thing. Nothing personal.”

She stares back with an expression that says she finds me deeply disappointing. Fair enough. I find me deeply disappointing most days too.

I keep walking, trailing my fingers along the wallpaper, faded silk printed with roses and thorns in a pattern that repeats endlessly, and that’s when I notice the door.

It’s smaller than the others, tucked into an alcove at the end of the hallway as if it hoped nobody would look. The wood is darker and older, and there’s no doorknob. Just a flat iron plate where a knob should be, etched with symbols that match nothing else in the house.

“Huh.”

I press my palm against the plate. Nothing happens.

I push harder. Still nothing.

“Come on.” I brace my shoulder against the wood and shove with my full body weight, which admittedly isn’t much, but I’m also stubborn to a degree my mother calls pathological. “Open, you stupid…”

It gives all at once, no splintering, no resistance at the end, less like a door forced and more like a door deciding, as if it checked something about my shoulder and approved.

I tumble through, catching myself on my hands and knees on a floor cold enough to shock the breath out of me. Stone. Smooth, gray, ancient-feeling stone that drinks the warmth right out of my palms.

“Ow. Okay. Ow.”

I push myself up, look around, and the complaint dies in my throat.

The room is wrong. The rest of the manor is neglected, sure, dusty and forgotten, but it makes sense.

Old house, old furniture, old everything.

This room doesn’t make sense. It’s circular, which shouldn’t be possible given the hallway I just came from.

Glass jars line the shelves, filled with liquids in colors I’ve only seen in nail polish and nightmares.

Dried herbs hang in bundles tied with black thread, and a cluster of crystals throws the dim light back in fractured rainbows.

And the books stacked on the desk against the curved wall are bound in materials I decide, very firmly, not to examine.