Chapter 20 The Toxic Ex-Boyfriend Trope
When I walked through the front door of the inn, it appeared transformed.
The place was cozy instead of cluttered.
Blankets had been draped over the worn fabric of chairs, rugs had been artfully arranged to cover gaps in the wood flooring, and the air smelled of essential oils instead of acrid smoke.
Heaven was reclining on a chair beneath the chandelier that she must have restrung with crystals.
I’d only been gone one evening and she’d done an almost concerning amount of work.
“Did you do this by yourself?” I asked. “Because whoa.”
She waved to me and turned her attention back to her phone.
“So my decorating tip for the day is to arrange your furniture so as not to impede the flow of cosmic energy.” She stood and panned her camera across the room.
“Mmm. Did you feel that? Because I did.” She twirled in the mosaic of light cast by the chandelier.
“Before I sign off, one more thing.” She squared her shoulders and looked into the phone like she was about to drop some truth. Her eyes were peeled open too wide and her energy nearly radioactive. “This is the only financial lesson you will ever need. Money is attracted to me.”
When I snorted, she gave me a dirty look and said, “Repeat after me, people: MONEY IS ATTRACTED TO ME!”
I wish.
“Don’t waste energy chasing money,” she said in the booming tones of a preacher. Her voice filled the entryway, too loud in our empty house. “If chasing money worked, everyone would be rich. Instead, let it chase you.”
Maybe Heaven had channeled her bloodlust into decorating and TikToks.
We’d been living exclusively off coconut water since Halloween. It was almost satisfying, but it wasn’t blood. I’d ordered a few more cases because we’d burned through the original Costco pallets. At this pace, we needed an entire coconut farm to support us, maybe two.
With her livestream over, I handed a box to Heaven in hopes it would help her settle down. She was glowing. “Did you steal my good lotion?” I joked.
She sat down on the stairs and absent-mindedly opened the coconut water. “I watched the sunset tonight. I’ve never had so much energy or felt so alive.”
“You seem a little hype. Is that norm—” I trailed off because she was too focused on her phone, not listening.
“Hallelujah, praise the lord!” Heaven barely flinched at the smiting. Her eyes wide, clutching the crystal around her neck, she whispered, “It worked.”
Oh, no. “What worked?”
“Money is attracted to me,” she said.
“What? Did we win the lottery?”
After an emotional pause she said, “My followers started a GoFundMe. They’re paying for us to fix up Radiance.”
“Radiance?”
She said, “Yeah,” like it was obvious. “That’s what I’ve been calling the inn.”
“Heaven, I’m glad you’re excited, but we’re vampires,” I said, stating the obvious. Sometimes hearing it out loud helps. “We can’t run a bed-and-breakfast. Although Radiance Bed-and-Breakfast sounds kind of good.”
“No. Bed-and-breakfast isn’t us.”
At least she knew that much. “Radiance Hotel?”
“Just Radiance.” Her voice had a strong note of duh to it.
“How’s anyone going to know what it is?”
“They just will.”
“How much are your followers sending?”
“Twenty thousand. Well, at least, that’s what the fundraising goal is. They’re already at three.”
“Dollars?”
“Three thousand.”
I started choking on my coconut water. If they were going to pay for the inn, we could figure it out. Maybe a familiar could make breakfast? “Radiance it is. Order a sign.”
Twenty minutes later, I was sweeping up around the hearth like I used to when I was a young girl, except I was playing “Listen to Your Heart” at top volume.
My heart wanted a Christmas tree farmer.
I used the broom as a mic and belted out the chorus.
Just as the song ended, I heard Heaven’s voice carrying from the foyer.
“Come on in,” she said, in the same casual tone that she’d use when she asked me to feed her parakeet back in LA.
“Nooooooooo!” I dropped the broom and turned to the front door.
“Don’t invite anyone in, Heaven!” I called, although it was already too late.
I’d heard the invitation pass her lips myself.
If it had been the middle of the day, fine, but it was four in the morning.
Who dropped by at four in the morning? The list was short: emergency services (we hadn’t called), serial killers (NBD), another vampire (bad news).
In my haste to get settled in town, I hadn’t talked to Heaven about any of the vampire rules. Not one.
My skin prickled with fear. This was a vampire. I knew it in my three-hundred-year-old bones.
Vampires can’t enter private spaces without being invited in, which is one of the only defenses available to a weak vamp like me.
I couldn’t turn into a bat, or glamour, or even pay my credit card off.
I was at the mercy of whoever this was. You shouldn’t invite a vampire in unless you know they aren’t an asshole—or from Parliament.
Uninviting them is a pain in the ass. Once they’re in, they’re in.
Heaven shouted, “Tiff, someone’s here for you!”
“It’s Vlad,” a voice I would recognize anywhere said.
“Vlad’s here!” she called, as if she had just ordered a pizza.
How? I hadn’t told him my address. Everything was vague. I had intentionally kept every mention of Vermont from him. All he should have known was that we were in the northern hemisphere.
“Tiffenie.” My name rolled off his tongue like it was meant to be said, temporarily stopping my panic.
“What are you doing here?” I took in his physical form.
It had been twenty-five years since I’d last seen him.
Physically, he was broad shouldered and virile, the kind of guy humans often assumed played football.
It wasn’t football Vlad had played but war.
No matter how many meditation apps he tried, he still carried a lifetime of danger and violence within him.
My skin prickled with awareness at his presence.
Vlad was the kind of man who drowned out everyone else.
Just being in a room together, others faded into the background, leaving just him, with his Hollywood looks and charisma.
In the movies, sometimes they blur out all the other actors to focus on the two lovers, usually at a pivotal romantic moment.
That’s how I felt whenever I was with Vlad—everyone else faded away.
At the drugstore shopping for Q-tips, at the bowling alley, at the movie theater—it didn’t matter where we were.
He was a sun that never dimmed, his light too bright for others to shine around him.
And it wasn’t cool. When I was young and impressionable, I was bowled over by his charisma.
Now I knew it was not to be trusted. That kind of charisma left a woman powerless.
Do you want to fight the Ottoman Empire?
Sure. Do you want to watch another action movie even though we haven’t seen a rom-com in a year?
Anything you say, Vlad. Would you be my vampire bride? Of course.
I had been so young, so na?ve. We had been walking through the forest in spring.
The world was lush with new growth. He and I had been meeting every night I could sneak away for what was probably only a month.
He was my refuge from the chaos of my family: my parents, my sisters, my babies, my grief after losing a husband and child, my hopelessness that anything would ever change.
Even as a grown woman, there was no space for me to have ideas that weren’t about what was for dinner and how I would serve God.
Vlad didn’t have me at hello—shout-out to Jerry Maguire—he had me at Have you read Voltaire? I hadn’t, but the fact that he looked at me and thought I might have read anything, in particular a scandalous book that questioned the accepted order of things…that was the world I wanted to live in.
When he asked me to marry him, I knew I had found my happily ever after, no matter that it involved approval from the parliament and candlelit rituals I didn’t understand at the time. That added to the excitement.
Here I was, three centuries later, still trying to find my way after agreeing to that one. What a stupid girl I’d been.
“I don’t understand. How did you find us?” I smoothed my hair and straightened my clothes, which were a mess from a night of mostly emotional labor.
His eyes followed my desperate attempt to look less like a hot mess, and a flicker of amusement crossed his expression. “I missed you,” he said.
“What, Parliament isn’t keeping you busy enough?” I said, putting a wall of sarcasm between us before I invited him into more than the house.
“Yes and no. I’ve made a couple of changes I think you’ll like.” He squared his shoulders and said, “I’ve started a podcast.”
Heaven laughed. “Really? You and Prince Harry, huh?”
Vlad gave her a secret smile. “It’s not not that.” Turning to me, he said, “I’ve enjoyed watching your videos.”
My what? Oh. Heaven’s TikToks.
“I gave all your video recordings a thumbs-up. Didn’t you notice?”
“Since when do you use social media?” I demanded. “I thought you said it was a ‘blight upon humanity’. Is that how you found me?”
“Yes. Did you know your address is on Google Maps?”
I turned to Heaven. “Did you do that?”
She nodded. “Radiance needs to be findable.”
Damn, she worked fast.
“Tiffenie, a vampire is not supposed to share anything with mortals. The dark and mysterious image is by design! And here you are on TikTok changing cat litter and talking about whatever pops into your head.”
I shrugged, but I knew he was right.
“You’re aware that it’s against the rules to give a mortal your location?” he said. “How many followers do you have, Heaven?”
She clapped back with “Didn’t you say you started a podcast?”
“That’s different. TikTok isn’t even secure enough for mortals. Half of these apps are run by people with fascist inclinations who will steal your identity.”
Now that was funny.