Kazimir (Kozlov Family Vampires #1)

Chapter 1

Devon

Margie’s Diner had a hum to it—literal and metaphorical.

The ceiling fluorescents sang their electric dirge, a constant in my ears just above the din of battered plates and the braying from the open kitchen.

Bacon grease baked into the linoleum and the blue vinyl booths had so many cigarette burns I’d stopped counting after the first week.

In my time here (if you could call six months a tenure), I’d memorized the menu, the regulars, and every godforsaken stain that refused to yield to bleach.

Closing shift was its own world: the airless hours between the end of the second dinner rush and the strange time when people with nowhere to be came out to linger over watery coffee.

I preferred those hours, even if they skewed toward the weird and the drunk.

I could let my mind drift. I could work.

I refilled their coffee, keeping a careful eye on the table’s edge. The taller one with the pale eyebrows watched me the way a butcher watches a side of beef.

He smiled. “Are you on the menu, too?”

My lips wanted to flatten into a grim line, but instead I gave him the house-special smile I practiced in the mirror. “That’s only on Tuesdays. Comes with a side of disappointment.”

His friend yapped a laugh and dropped two quarters on the table—tip or tribute, it was hard to say. They weren’t regulars. Regulars had the decency to objectify you without making it sound like you’d have to make an appointment.

I left them with their refills and bussed a pair of plates from the next booth, letting the greasy ceramic clatter on my forearms and hands.

I hated using the plastic trays; they always felt like a challenge, daring me to drop them.

My arms and hands had never failed me. It was my brain that liked to trip me up sometimes.

The men talked in low voices, but not low enough. “She’s got a smart mouth,” the friend whispered. “I bet I could fill it up for her.”

“I bet we could both take a run at that,” said the first, a smirk curling his lip.

I’d spent these last months trying to figure out why stuff like that still phased me. Some days, the comments washed off. Some days they clung. Today was clingy. I found myself rubbing at a spot between my collarbones as I walked back to the dish pit.

Polk, Margie’s cook, stood by the grill with his arms folded over a belly that could have shielded a small child from a hurricane. He wore a graphic t-shirt: faded black, with the words MEAT IS MURDER (Tasty, Tasty Murder) peeling on the front.

“You want me to spit in their pies?” he asked, voice all gravel and kindness.

“Just make sure the forks are clean,” I said. “They look like the litigious type.”

He grunted and slid 2 slices of apple pie under the heat lamp, his movements exact but so slow you’d think he had all the time in the world.

He had a soft spot for the dishes and a weird sense of justice—he kept a private tally of “dicks” and “decent folks” that he updated nightly.

If I hadn’t been able to clean the joint out with both eyes shut, he might’ve hated me for being a girl.

But he didn’t. He watched out for me in his own way.

“Those two bothering you?” he asked, glancing at the men through the pass.

“Not more than usual,” I lied.

He set the pies on the window ledge and tapped the bell once, hard enough that the men in the corner booth looked up. “Let me know if you need a walkout,” he said.

I gave him a thumbs-up and served the pies.

The suits left a $2 tip on a $13 bill. I guess the quarters from earlier were meant to be a joke. It wasn’t funny if so. But the tip was technically generous for this zip code.

The guys finished their pies and said something, probably sexist, as they exited.

I was relieved to see them go, and was already into my closing routine.

Sugar caddies first. I emptied the used packets, refilled them, and rotated the salt-and-pepper so the labels lined up.

Next: ketchup bottles. I hated the sticky dried crust that looked like blood at the mouths, so I wiped each one with a rag damp with bleach water, then set them in a perfect row on the prep counter to air-dry.

I wiped every tabletop—two passes, crosswise, with a new rag for each quadrant of the room.

Then I swept, because the only thing worse than sticky was gritty, and my raggedy tennis shoes attracted every loose crumb like they were magnetic.

My body moved with the speed and precision of a person who had been doing this forever, even though “forever” in this life was 180 days give or take.

It was easy to lose yourself in repetition.

Most nights, I didn’t even notice my feet aching until the final mopping.

Tonight, I lingered. I wanted it perfect. There was a satisfaction in seeing my own reflection in the wiped-down counter, warped by the surface but still recognizable.

By 11:25, the kitchen was already dark except for the glow of Polk’s cigarette at the back door.

He waited for me every night, ostensibly to smoke, but really to check that I made it out okay.

He didn’t have any siblings, but if he did, I imagined he’d be exactly the sort of uncle you could call if you ever needed to bury a body or learn to drive a stick.

I clocked out with a pencil, scrawling DEVON WADE in the ledger as if it meant something. As if the name belonged to someone with a past, a history. I’d picked it for the way it sounded, sharp and a little dangerous.

Our dishwasher, a little old man named Walter, had already clocked out for the night, and Polk met me by the door, arms folded. He smelled like onions and old coffee, but also like safety. “You walkin’ home again?”

“Nah, I’m gonna to try levitating this time,” I deadpanned. “Think the air is less polluted above six feet.”

He made a show of pretending to laugh, then dug in his pocket and handed me a tube of pepper spray. “Just in case. Last month, a girl got mugged two blocks over. You ever use one of these?”

“I watched a video,” I said. It was true, and I’d practiced in the alley behind the diner, obliterating a soda can with a single angry burst.

“Keep it ready,” he said. “You’re not a big target, but you got that look about you.”

“What look?” I asked, bristling a little.

He shrugged. “Like you got somewhere to be, but you ain’t ever been there before.”

The way he said it made me think of the scars on my back, the ones I never let anyone see, not that I had anyone. I rolled the pepper spray between my palms, thumb resting on the trigger. “Thanks, Polk.”

He unlocked the door and opened it for me, holding it until I stepped through.

The street outside was blue-black and mostly empty.

In this part of Kensington, the traffic went dead around midnight, and the silence was broken only by the distant rattle of the El and the hum of neon from the bodega across the way.

Polk watched me go, arms crossed in the window until I turned the corner. For a second, I wondered if this was what family felt like—awkward and a little suffocating, but comforting in the way a heavy blanket could be comforting, even if it made it hard to breathe. I didn’t have a word for it.

I started walking. The air was thick, damp enough to taste. My sneakers squeaked with each step. I didn’t look back.

The night air hit different once you got past the perimeter of the diner’s fake security.

It was denser, more elemental—carrying with it the scent of hot asphalt and ancient trash.

My route home was a ten-minute walk, but I could do it in seven if I skipped every other block and cut through the lot behind the used tire place.

I didn’t, though. Not after the story Polk told about the girl last month.

I always walked in the open, even if it made me a target. It was better to see what was coming.

A block down, the windows of the corner bodega glared in the dark, all garish yellow and red neon, the kind of place that never bothered with security even after two robberies last year.

I went in because I always did, not because I was hungry, but to fill a void.

If you stopped moving, you started to think, and if you started to think, you realized what you can’t remember.

Inside, the overhead buzz was replaced with a radio set to a station with someone ranting about politics, which was the same as any other night.

The aisles were a jumble of instant noodles, off-brand chips, and battery packs.

I went straight for the heated glass case by the register to grab food that I hoped was cooked in compliance with the city health code.

“Hey, baby,” said the cashier, a guy with a raggedy beard wearing a mesh hat and sporting a bandage on his thumb. He’d seen me every night for two weeks and still looked at me like I was a puzzle with a missing piece. “Burrito’s fresh. Got ‘em in fifteen minutes ago.”

I gave him a small nod and paid with a wrinkled five from my tips and a stack of loose change. He always looked at me like he were surprised I chose to purchase a Dr. Pepper. Then he’d watch me open it like I hadn’t paid for it or something.

On my way out, I heard him mutter something in Spanish. I only caught one word, but it was enough. Angelita. He didn’t say it like a compliment. More like a warning.

The outside air was about the same as inside the bodega—warm and humid. The burrito steamed in my hand, and I cradled the can of soda against my chest. I took one step toward my building, then froze.

The world spun for a second. My vision smeared around the edges, and I squeezed my eyes shut, fighting the urge to gag.

A memory flashed—except it wasn’t a memory, not in the way normal people had them.

It was a splinter, a fragment. Light, so much light it ate up everything else, and a sound like singing and static all at once.

There was something I was supposed to do, but the thought disintegrated as soon as I tried to grab it.