Page 21 of My Blind Date is a Vampire

Vampires! How was that even possible? Maybe someone laced my drink with LSD or something. Sitting up, I looked at my arm for where Cosmo had scratched me, hoping that it was all part of one long nightmare and that I was now fully awake and back in my normal, day-to-day, vampire-less reality. My stomach hollowed out when I saw the bandage wrapped around my arm. A sob caught in my throat as I tore it off and stared blankly at the pink lines running down my arm—somehow, the scratches were already healing. My skin was now unbroken but still bore the marks Cosmo had made, and they still stung when I prodded at them.

My phone rang, startling a scream out of me as the ringtone seemed to echo throughout the house. A gaping chasm opened up where my heart was supposed to be when I saw Landon’s name pop up on the screen and I immediately cut off the call and blocked his number. My call log showed that he’d called almost twenty times since last night and left just as many messages. There were a few calls from the school and Rachel as well.

I cursed when I saw the time. I was beyond late and there was no use showing up halfway through the workday. They would have already called in a sub. Besides, I didn’t think I would be going in anytime soon. This place was dangerous. I needed to get out of here.

When I called the admin secretary to call in sick, she patched me through to Principal Hawthorne. “I heard what happened last night. I can’t even begin to imagine what a shock it was to you, my dear,” she began, sounding sympathetic and understanding but not shocked or outraged or any of the myriad emotions swirling within me. “I’ll give you the rest of the week to wrap your head around this and to get the answers you need, but I expect you back here bright and early next Monday.”

“You knew,” I said breathlessly. “You knew that he was a vampire. And so did Beverly, and Dane… Does Rachel know?” I asked, thinking back to her reaction when she first learned about Landon and me.

Principal Hawthorne sighed but did not answer my questions. “I am not the one you need to be asking. Get the answers and closure you need, Julia, and come back to work,” she ordered, ending the call before I could protest further.

I glared at the dark screen of my phone before switching it off. I didn’t think that I was in any frame of mind to talk to anyone. A sticky note on my nightstand caught my eye. I’ll be waiting when you’re ready to talk —Bev.

Ready to talk, indeed! I thought bitterly, crumpling up the note and tossing it on the floor. She should have told me before setting me up on a date with a literal bloodsucker. Now I understood why West had called him a leech. Was Beverly a vampire too? Landon had said they were as close as family. Was it because they were both immortal, blood-sucking monsters? Exactly how old was he anyway? Had I been dating a contemporary of my grandfather this entire time. Or maybe he was older than that? Was he with me because he desired my blood?

I thought back to the night when he’d nicked my neck and the ravenous expression on his face. Bile burned its way up my throat, and I stumbled my way to the bathroom only to hurl all over the carpet beside my bed when I stood up too quickly.

My body and head both ached fiercely, and exhaustion weighed me down. My heart was bruised, my trust betrayed—again!—and my brain was bursting with so many questions I was scared to get the answers to. Instead of cleaning up the mess I’d made, I slumped back into bed and burrowed underneath my blankets and went back to sleep.

CHAPTER 24

LANDON

“This is a giant mess!” I growled, cradling my hand into my chest and watching the cuts on my knuckles and hand heal over. I was sure there were some glass shards stuck in a few of the cuts. If I were thinking straight, I would have removed them right then instead of letting my wounds heal over them, only to cut myself open later and remove them.

“You will replace that,” Beverly stated, looking unimpressed by my quick burst of anger that had resulted in me punching a hole through her glass coffee table. She snapped her fingers and the mess disappeared. Where she’d sent it off to, I had no idea. She shifted, leaning farther back into her high-backed chair and re-crossed her legs.

“I called you here so that we can work out a way to get your girl back, not to listen to your tales of woe. Looking at you, you’d think the world is coming to an end, but seeing as Julia is alive and breathing, I have no idea what you’re looking so glum about. We knew that she would react more or less like she did once she found out that you require blood for sustenance. But you are mates. You’ll work this out somehow. That is if you actually get off your butt and put in the work to get her back,” Beverly chastised, patting her hair and making sure that the huge rollers she used to curl her colorful strands were still in place.

She’d summoned me to her cottage three days after the debacle that went down at the gallery. After Cosmo had revealed not just to Julia but all the out-of-towners that I was a vampire, we’d all been working overtime to erase their memories. Or rather, Beverly and her coven did. Dane and I were just the hired muscle who rounded all the affected out-of-towners up.

That plus dealing with Cosmo had left me very little time to deal with the Julia situation. No, that was a bald-faced lie. I was dragging my feet because I was scared that she would reject me. Yet what I felt for her grew stronger with each day. I’d felt the nascent bond snap into place between us the night we first made love. It was up to Julia to acknowledge and accept me as her mate, for I had done so the moment I realized that Beverly had been right about her.

“What is there to do? Short of breaking into her house and forcing a confrontation, traumatizing her more than she already is in the process, I have no idea what to do.” I slumped into my seat, feeling helpless and exhausted. I had not fed properly since the night of the fundraiser except for the blood-laced alcohol I kept in my house. One nice thing about living in Mystic Cove was that my…condition was an open secret. The locals know about my kind, the witches, and all the others. We had learned a long time ago to live peacefully alongside humans. In fact, the local vampire population all got their blood supply from the hospital, and there were some humans who craved the bloody kiss of a vampire and volunteered themselves for feedings.

Julia would have been told all about this down the line once the community knew she could be trusted. I was planning on telling her as well. I was going to explain my past and everything she needed to understand in a controlled environment where she felt safe. It was my mistake to wait until I felt like our connection was stronger before telling her.

Beverly rolled her eyes, the corners of her lips turning down as she glared at me. “You youngsters, always so dramatic and defeatist. What do you mean what is there left to do? You know how to romance women, don’t you? You still have your tongue and wits. Talk to her, make her listen and understand who and what you are. Tell her how you feel. Promise her the moon if that’s what it takes.” She huffed, getting up to let her dog out of the house when it started scratching and sniffing at the door.

“You know that I am older than you, right? I am not the youngster here,” I pointed out, my lips twitching in a smile I couldn’t suppress.

“Your grandmother was one of my best friends, so that puts me on the same level as her. That is why you tell everyone that you think of me as your grandmother after all. Although, I don’t know how to feel about being a grandmother while I’m still so young.” She sighed in exasperation, ruffling my hair as she walked past me to take her seat.

I told everyone that she was my grandmother because she was the closest thing to family I had left. My grandmother was a long-lived witch who’d used her power to live long past her prime and had also served as a mentor to a young Beverly way back when. My mother had been a witch as well, but my father had been a normal human. My parents and my wife had all been killed by a vampire—the one who turned me instead of putting me out of my misery. That had been almost one hundred and fifty years ago. I was the only one to survive the ordeal, and for the longest time, I was lost under a cloud of grief and anger driven only by the need to feed and to hunt down the vampires who’d attacked my family.

It was my grandmother who hauled me back to Mystic Cove and taught me to get my bloodlust under control. That control shattered once more when I finally caught onto the trail of the vampires who’d killed my family, and like an idiot, I went after them with no regard for my own life. If it weren’t for Gran coming after me, I would have died at the hands of vampires who had decades, if not centuries, to hone their killer instincts. It was my own stupidity that cost me my grandmother. But then again, she had been just as thirsty for revenge as me, and when she came face to face with the men who killed her daughter, she thought nothing about sacrificing her life to take the vampires out.

It was a twenty-something-year-old Beverly who found me in the house the vampires had been using as their base, half-starved and half-mad. The injuries I’d gotten in the fight were so grievous, I needed copious amounts of blood to completely heal.

“Alright, lad, let’s get to planning. Word on the street is that our sweet Jules went to visit her family, but Catherine is sure she’ll be back in the classroom by Monday morning. You’ll have to either corner her when she gets back on Sunday or after work on Monday and you will make her listen to you. I know you think that it’s the vampire thing that’s got her all twisted up, but I wager there are deeper issues beneath the surface. After what happened with her best friend and fiancé, I think she has a hard time letting people in through the walls she built around her heart. And just when she was starting to let her guard down, she was hit with all of this.” She waved her hand in a vague gesture.

Julia did not talk all that much about her ex, but she’d said enough for me to figure out what had happened between them. If she felt that I’d betrayed her, then I had my work cut out for me. What if I lost her forever? I never thought I’d fall in love again after losing my wife. Even after learning about the concept of fated mates, I’d believed mine died all those years ago. None of the women I’d been with since then had sparked any feelings close to what I felt for my late wife until I met Julia, with her cute freckles and cupid’s bow, kissable lips. Now that I found her, how would I live with myself if she decided that she wanted no part of this? What if she could not be with a freak of nature like me? I drank blood, for Pete’s sake! Human blood!

“What do you suggest I do?” I needed to get her back no matter the cost because I refused to live through eternity with half a soul.

“First, let’s take out those glass shards in your hand and discuss it over a nice stiff drink.” Beverly winked and I followed her into the kitchen where she kept her first aid kit.

CHAPTER 25

---