Page 1 of My Blind Date is a Vampire

CHAPTER 1

Why did I torture myself? What purpose did scrolling through all the wedding pictures posted online serve except to drive me deeper into depression and serve up a side of righteous indignation? What I was doing was the equivalent of picking at a scab and watching the wound bleed all over again when it was supposed to be healing. I was latching onto my feelings of hurt and betrayal when I was supposed to be moving on.

And yet, I couldn’t look away from my phone. I couldn’t log off Facebook ot Instagram. That’s how pathetic I was being right now, but how could I not be? How could I let go of all the feelings I’d been working to move past when the two people who’d hurt me more than I ever thought possible were smiling back at me from the screen, their smiles stretched from ear to ear and stars practically dancing in their eyes.

Yesterday evening, my former best friend Jessica married my ex-fiancé, Toby Wilson. I suppose I should have been thankful they waited a whole year to drive the knife hilt all the way into my back while also letting everyone forget their love was born of betrayal and callousness.

My breath shuddered in my chest, my vision blurring as I saw the names of all the people who posted pictures from the wedding reception with captions of felicitations and blessings for the newlyweds.

“Some friends!” I scoffed, ignoring the steady tears flowing down my cheeks and the salty tang as they pooled in the crease between my lips. Jess hadn’t just stolen the man I loved—or thought I was in love with. Most of the friends we shared chose sides immediately following the outcome of her treachery and cut ties with me with no compunction whatsoever. “They are in love,” they tried to reason. “Why stand in the way of that? You can just find someone else!”

I kept scrolling through my timeline, hating how beautiful Jess looked; she was every bit the golden girl everyone pretended she was, from her impeccable blonde locks twisted into an elegant chignon to the Vera Wang dress—whose design, might I add, looked suspiciously like the wedding dress I’d been salivating over back when she and I were planning my wedding to the jerk she now clung too.

“Et tu, Brute?” I murmured in a teary voice, reading over the lengthy post Mrs. Wilson wrote welcoming Jess into her family. My former future mother-in-law raved about how perfectly matched Jess and her obnoxious son were for each other—not that she was wrong about that—and what a wonderful addition Jess was to the family.

“Where was she when you needed someone to look after you after your herniated disk surgery, you old bat? Matter of fact, where was your selfish jerk of a son?” I growled at my phone before tossing it aside. My heart skipped a beat when it bounced off the mattress and landed with a thud on the floor.

For some reason, that set me off and a sob finally broke past my throat. Four years! Four whole years I’d wasted on Tobias freakin’ Wilson just for him to throw me out with last night’s trash and the only explanation I got was that he wasn’t the same man anymore.

“The heart wants what it wants, Julia. I didn’t mean to fall for Jessica, but it just happened and there’s nothing I can do about that.” He had the audacity to say that to me standing in the middle of our bedroom while Jess cowered behind him in our bed, covering her naked self with the sheets that I had bought.

Toby didn’t waste time packing his stuff up, leaving that same night. At least both of them had the decency to look shame-faced when they left. But what rankled more than catching my fiancé cheating on me with my best friend since middle school was that I never got an explanation from Jess, or even an apology. She’d returned none of my calls or messages and refused to meet and before I knew it, all my friends were making up excuses to not hang out with me.

In hindsight, I should have known something was up when Toby started comparing me to Jess, wanting me to lose weight so that I would drop down to the lithe runway model figure that Jess had always flaunted instead of appreciating my hourglass curves. He’d even started nitpicking little things, like how my laugh sounded and my choice of a career. Jess was quickly making her way up the ranks of the corporate world as a lawyer while I’d chosen a “menial job like teaching.”

A sharp pain lanced through my heart as I remembered how I used to bend over backward to try and please that guy, how I’d let him steamroll right over me whenever we had to make decisions together. I relented when he said he wanted us to rent a luxury apartment smack dab in the middle of the city when I wanted to live in a nice and quiet suburban neighborhood. And then he got up and left me in that stuck-up place to pay the ridiculously expensive rent on my substitute-teacher salary. Full-time teaching jobs were hard to come by in the city. Not that I stayed there for long; our landlord had kicked me out the moment he learned that Toby and I were over. He was the one with the money in our relationship after all, so it was his name on the lease. I’d already been planning to move out, though. I was still looking around for an affordable place to live when I was evicted and had to move back in with my parents and deal with everyone’s well-meaning advice that only made me feel even more miserable.

I knew they were trying to comfort me, but it felt more like they were kicking the dog while it was down. Like they were saying “I told you so” instead of “I’m sorry your heart was broken.” No one in my family liked Toby, not my parents, not my three older brothers and their significant others. Even my twin nephews tended to close up the few times Toby actually showed up beside me to a Bryant family gathering. They only tolerated the man because I was so smitten with him. That’ll teach me to ignore my family’s intuition, I thought bitterly.

I must have dozed off because when I woke my bedroom was bathed in darkness with only my laptop providing a soft light. I shut the computer down, scowling at the photo of the couple looking back at me and mocking me with their happy ever after. “May you never know the pleasure of an orgasm in your marriage bed,” I pseudo-cursed the couple.

My stomach growled, the rumble sounding too loud in the silence of the night, so I slipped my feet into my bunny slippers and picked up my phone, sighing in relief that the screen hadn’t cracked, and quietly made my way to the kitchen downstairs. I wondered why no one had woken me up for dinner or why Mom didn’t drag me out of my pity party like she usually did and demand that I help her plan her big birthday bash. She was hitting the big six-oh in less than three weeks and was determined to make an event of it.

There was a sticky note on the fridge, letting me know that my dinner was in the microwave. “Calm your butt, I get it!” I murmured to my stomach when it growled again. I could actually feel my intestines trying to digest themselves and was feeling a little light-headed. The last thing I ate was a bagel for breakfast. I heated up the pot roast in the microwave, my mouth watering when the scent filled the empty kitchen.

Dinner was a lonesome affair with just me at the table, scrolling through job listings for a teaching position. I didn’t think I’d find something—I’d been checking the boards daily for months—but this time, I struck gold five minutes in.

History teacher wanted. Mystic Cove High School.

“Could it be that the fates are starting to work in my favor on the worst day of my life?” I asked out loud to the ceiling in case there was a higher power listening. I skimmed over the job posting and saved the link so that I could apply for the position when I got back up to my room. Next, I looked up Mystic Cove; it was a town about an hour away from the city, a hot tourist spot in winter and summer. A little valley town nestled between a mountain range and the ocean, I found myself charmed by the pictures I saw and could easily see myself living there. One link in particular caught my eye. It was titled simply, “The Witches of Mystic Cove—A History of Mystic Cove.”

As a history nerd, I couldn’t help but be intrigued. The article detailed everything. Many of the old families were rumored to be witches and warlocks who’d fled religious persecution in the Old World. I found myself immersed in the stories of how the witches of Mystic Cove evaded the brutality of the witch trials back in the 1600s and I somehow fell into a rabbit hole when I saw another article on Mystic Cove, this one written by someone who claimed that there were shapeshifting beasts living in the forests surrounding the town and man-eating ghouls in the cemeteries. The witch article I could believe, but shapeshifters not so much. It seemed to be a hotspot for paranormal activity—if you believed in that kind of stuff. As a historian, I found folklore fascinating, but I couldn’t really say I believed in the paranormal.

Maybe if I got the job, I could conduct a research study of my own, like trying to trace descendants of the founding families and find out if there was any truth to the witch angle. Maybe there was a Wiccan community I could interview. I could even ask to join them just so that I could learn how to hex people. Naturally, my first target would be Toby. I’d hex him so that Jess would make him so miserable that they would divorce in a year.

“Now that would be something.” I smiled, my mood brightened by the thought. I went back upstairs and sent in my application for the job, praying that I’d get it.

CHAPTER 2

Mom’s party was in full swing outside while I hid from everyone in my closet. The walls and windows vibrated from the pounding bass of the music blaring from the DJ sound system Bas had rented for the very occasion.

I’d shown my face in front of the guests for an entire hour, maybe two, before I decided that I needed some time away from everyone for a little while if I was going to spend the entire day without going psycho on anyone. Mom had invited what felt like the entire Coleman family—her side of the family—the majority of the Bryants—Dad’s side—and the entire neighborhood.

There wasn’t a single room downstairs that was empty, the guests spilling out into the backyard, front yard, and down the street where a line of cars was parked on either side. I wasn’t ordinarily antisocial during family functions. Right about now, I should have been catching up with my cousins or playing with my nephews or helping Mom out in the kitchen—lord knows she could use all the help she could get with all the platters of food her guests brought despite this party having been catered—but the Bryants and Colemans were nothing if not generous when it came to food.

Word of my broken engagement had spread like wildfire among the family when it happened, and with Toby and Jess’s wedding having happened almost a fortnight ago and the happy couple posting their honeymoon adventures all over the internet, it was all everyone wanted to talk about when they saw me. I hated the looks of pity and sympathy. Not to mention the veiled insults from some people insinuating that the breakup might have been my fault. As if that wasn’t enough, Mom had made sure to invite all the single men within a block radius and was not-so-subtly trying to set me up with all of them.

Worst of all, though, was the fact that Bas had proposed to his girlfriend a few days ago, but it was like he and the rest of the family did not want to celebrate the news openly while I was there, as if I was too fragile and depressed to be happy for them. I was beyond happy. I was ecstatic that Bas had finally found someone to put up with him.

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