4. Winnie
WINNIE
My alarm went off at four-thirty in the morning, and I would have grumbled if I had been sleeping soundly.
Most of my truly restful sleep, though, was obtained during daylight hours.
Taking on a job simply meant I needed to adjust my sleep schedule.
It was a small price to pay for having a reason to get out of bed in the first place.
It was earlier than most employees would start their day, but getting properly prepared for daylight exposure required planning and an amount of sunscreen that would horrify most people, even dermatologists.
I reached blindly across my casket, found the little brass clock, and silenced it before the second chime.
After lifting the lid of the casket, I lay there for a moment, listening to the familiar sounds of the woods outside my cottage.
Wind moved through pine branches, and the rainwater from last night’s storm dripped off the porch roof.
Next came the grumbling of the old water pipes beneath the floorboards.
Home.
My cottage was nestled deep enough in the mountains that most GPS systems became useless halfway through the drive. Dense woods wrapped around the property on all sides, and the nearest town was nearly forty minutes away down winding roads that tourists always underestimated.
Was commuting inconvenient? Absolutely. But when one had lived through two centuries, plagues, and the invention of low-rise jeans, a forty-minute drive was nothing.
I sat up slowly and pushed my hair back from my face.
The bedroom was softly lit from the electric lanterns I’d mounted along the walls. Most vampires preferred dramatic interiors with chandeliers and everything covered in velvet. That was all too cliché for me. I preferred quilts and all things cozy.
The cottage had once belonged to a widow with six children and questionable taste in wallpaper. I’d purchased it in 1948 under a different name and spent decades turning it into my sanctuary.
The kitchen shelves held jars of dried herbs with handwritten labels, all harvested from my garden that overflowed with chamomile, mint, lavender, thyme, rosemary, and comfrey when the weather allowed it.
Comfort mattered to me, since I had spent enough years alive to understand how little of it truly existed in the world. It was why I kept the fireplace lit most evenings.
I crossed the bedroom and opened the curtains just enough to inspect the sky safely through the tinted glass. It was still dark outside, but I could see from the light of the moon that it would be a gray day.
Excellent.
Cloud cover made life much easier for me. Still, caution remained a necessity.
I moved through my usual routine. Shower.
Thick layers of sunscreen applied with rigorous attention to every inch of skin.
Long sleeves. Gloves. Stockings. Boots. The black dresses varied slightly depending on mood and weather, though modern humans generally categorized all of them as “gothic” and moved on with their lives.
Today required professionalism.
I selected the wool dress with the high collar and fitted waist, then layered a lighter black coat over top. By the time I finished buttoning everything into place, barely an inch of skin remained exposed.
People found it strange until they learned enough about skin cancer. Then suddenly I was merely eccentric and proactive. They didn’t need to know that my skin would literally smoke and burn if directly exposed to the sunlight for more than a few moments.
I braided my hair halfway back as I moved into the kitchen and started boiling water for tea.
Copper pots hung above the stove beside drying herbs. One entire shelf near the sink overflowed with handwritten recipe journals I’d accumulated over decades.
Cooking soothed me. It always had. There was something deeply comforting about feeding people properly. I loved the sound of soup simmering slowly, and the scent of fresh bread cooling near open windows.
I used a lot of my herbs for teas that could help with headaches, sleeplessness, upset stomachs, and several other ailments.
My old-school remedies rarely involved magic, just patience and accumulated knowledge.
Humans had become strangely dismissive of older remedies in modern years, which I found unfortunate.
It wasn’t that contemporary medicine lacked value—quite the opposite.
Antibiotics alone deserved poetry written in their honor.
But there was room for both in the world.
If a child developed an infection, I intended to march them directly to a doctor and demand appropriate medication. If they struggled to sleep after nightmares, however, warm chamomile tea with a touch of valerian root before bed might help more gently than pharmaceuticals.
If they scraped a knee, comfrey salve beneath the bandage would ease healing.
The kettle whistled softly while I tied my boots.
Framed photographs hung on the far kitchen wall. They weren’t family, exactly, but three generations of children I’d nannied for.
The Blackwoods in 1912. All lace collars and solemn expressions except for little Henry Blackwood, who had hidden a frog in his pocket moments before the photograph was taken.
Lady Ferdinand’s family in 1978. Four children grinning wildly around a backyard birthday cake while their exhausted mother laughed somewhere beyond the frame.
The Chen sisters in 1997, arms wrapped around me after high school graduation, despite my protests that I did not belong in the picture.
I loved children. Well, not universally. Some were deeply unpleasant. Little shits, even. But most children were softer than the world allowed adults to become. And grief complicated childhood in uniquely painful ways.
The Lawrence family was not the first grieving home I had entered. But Mr. Lawrence was the first single father to employ me.
That altered the rhythm considerably.
Fathers grieved differently in domestic spaces.
Often more functionally. Especially men who were convinced they needed to remain useful at all costs.
Conrad Lawrence perpetually looked moments away from apologizing for existing while simultaneously working himself to the bone so his children could live luxurious lives.
He was an interesting man with disarmingly kind eyes. He also had very broad shoulders, which was irrelevant and yet also not.
Annoying.
I poured tea into my favorite mug while mentally reviewing the morning ahead. School preparation. Breakfast logistics. Boundary assessment. Behavior observation. Testing whether Billie would attempt to scale furniture unsupervised.
The answer to that was almost certainly yes.
My gaze drifted toward the front window where the hearse was parked beneath the trees.
Technically, it was not a hearse anymore.
The exterior had been modified decades ago, though the elongated shape still remained noticeable to anyone with functioning eyesight and enough confidence to ask questions.
Inside, my traveling casket rested.
Many magical beings maintained similar arrangements while traveling.
Witches rented storage units. Werewolves purchased heavily reinforced campers.
An ancient selkie I knew lived almost exclusively on houseboats because she claimed owning land felt too restrictive.
And I had sunscreen and a casket in a hearse.
We all adapted.
Personally, my greatest bureaucratic challenge remained identification documents. Being two centuries old made for a complicated time at the DMV. Fortunately, magical communities had solutions for these things.
Specifically: a guy.
There was always a guy.
Mine was named Leonard. He lived in New Jersey with six cats and several illegal computers.
Every few decades, he adjusted records appropriately so I could continue existing on paper as a perfectly ordinary woman with a perfectly ordinary birth year instead of an immortal creature old enough to remember when dentistry involved whiskey and a prayer.
Modern civilization functioned almost entirely through paperwork.
Which, frankly, was terrifying.
I finished my tea, washed the mug, and gathered the rest of my things by the front door.
Parasol? Check.
Gloves? Check.
Sunglasses? Check.
Keys? Check.
Before leaving, I took a moment to just stand there. The rooms around me were safe and comfortable, much like the life I’d slowly stitched together over decades.
It wasn’t that I was lonely, exactly. Though perhaps I felt something adjacent to loneliness.
Sighing, I locked the cottage behind me and walked to the hearse as the sun started to rise in the distance, spreading warm light across the sky.
Today, I would begin untangling the strange, grief-filled little ecosystem inside that enormous house.
And possibly confiscate several spiders.
By the time I reached the Lawrence estate, it was officially dawn.
Every lower window in the house was lit while the upper floor remained mostly dark. Humans fascinated me in their insistence on waking before the sun, despite being so poorly designed for it.
I parked and checked the sky automatically before stepping out. Still cloudy. Excellent.
The front door opened before I reached it.
Mr. Lawrence stood there with a travel mug in one hand and fatigue already settled into the lines around his mouth. His hair was damp, and he looked like he was trying to assemble himself into something resembling professionalism before he was even fully conscious.
It had been many years since I was near a freshly bathed, non-dead man. I’d forgotten how attractive they could be.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning.”
Scents assaulted me as soon as I stepped inside. Coffee. Toast. Peanut butter. Burnt sugar.
CJ sat at the kitchen island, only partially dressed in his school uniform. His curls were slightly flattened from sleep, and he held a mug in both hands with the solemn dignity of a tiny accountant.
He brightened instantly when he saw me. “Winnie.”
“Good morning, CJ.”
He lifted the mug proudly. “Dad lets me have coffee.”