Page 80 of My Vampire Plus-One

I ignored his obvious attempt at distracting me. “If you have the same…vampire ancestors, or whatever, does that mean you’re related?”

“Depends who you ask,” he said, all traces of humor gone again. “I don’t personally think I owe the monsters who took everything from me and made me what I am today anything at all. My…siblingsdisagree.” He said the word with barely concealed disdain. “Central to their weird vigilante cult thing is reverence for a group called The Founding Eight. Our sires’ sires’ sires, basically.”

“Okay. So…what did you do to make them want to…tovigilanteyou, or whatever?”

His face shuttered. He looked away from me, at the half circle of snowmen surrounding our little lean-to.

“Like I said earlier, there was a party,” he said, very quietly. “A hundred and fifty years ago, give or take a decade.”

I nearly choked on my tongue. “You’re…” I tried to gather my scattered wits. “You’re one hundred and fifty years old?”

“No.”

“But you just said—”

“I said this party happened one hundred and fifty years ago.” He gave me a sad, sardonic smile. “I was already more than a hundred years old at the time.”

In a rush, I realized that all I really knew about vampires had been the handful of things Reggie had told me and little details I’d gleaned over the years via pop culture. I supposed on some level, I already knew that vampires were immortal. I’d just never had occasion to dwell on it.

Until now.

“Oh,” I said weakly.

“Anyway,” he continued, as if I weren’t having paradigm-shifting realizations on the bench beside him, “there was a fire. Some people died. Other people think I was responsible for it. The Collective definitely does.” He sighed and stared down at his hands. “The Collective never much liked the cut of my jib, so to speak. Ever since their—our—sires died, The Collective has felt like they have a serious stake to grind with me.”

I hesitated before asking my next question. “Reggie—wereyou responsible for the fire?”

He shook his head. “No. At least, not in the way they think.”

He stood up abruptly, as though he wanted to pace as he spoke. But then he seemed to think better of it when he realized that pacing would entail tromping through feet of snow. He sat down beside me again, looking a bit sheepish.

“There isn’t a lot that can kill a vampire,” he continued. “While most of us are nocturnal, the wholeburning up in sunlightthing is a myth. Driving a wooden stake through our hearts would do the job, but that would kill anybody.” He gave me a wry smile. “The only things that will reliably end a vampire’s life are entering somebody’s home without express permission—we explode like a bomb has gone off inside us, very gross—and fire. Let’s just say the night I got on The Collective’s bad side I was figuratively and literally playing with fire.”

The wind chose that moment to pick up dramatically, rattling our shed. The gaps in the old wooden walls let in a rush of frigid air. I shivered, leaning closer to Reggie reflexively.

Slowly—as though he wanted to give me the opportunity to move away from him if his touch was unwelcome—he wrapped an arm around me, pulling me close. I let him do it without allowing myself to think about what it meant. I felt the cold bite ofthe wind against the cheek that wasn’t pressed against his shoulder but was almost too distracted by the unexpected warmth of his body to notice.

Once we were settled again, he continued his story. “I was not a particularly nice person in the late nineteenth century,” he mused. “I stopped far short of mass murder, of course,” he added hastily, shooting me a sideways glance. “But at the time of the fire, I had a well-deserved reputation as a prankster and an ass. I can understand why some people at that party thought I’d set the place on fire.”

“And why was that?”

His arm tightened around me a little. He looked away. “I can’t say for certain, but it’s probably the signed note I left by the torches out front that saidI hate you all and am going to burn this place to the ground.”

“Are youkiddingme?” He didn’t answer. He wouldn’t meet my gaze. “Reggie, that wasseriouslystupid.”

“I am aware.” He started cracking the knuckles of his free hand against his knee. A nervous tic. “But when I wrote that note, I was just being an asshole. I never had any intention of doing anything other than piss people off. How was I supposed to know someone else at the party was going to see that note, take inspiration from it, and think to themselvesyes, burning this place down sounds like a spiffing idea?”

He sounded despondent. If I were a more tactful person, I probably would have been sensitive to that and not asked my next question. But I had to know. “Why exactlydidyou write that note, Reggie?”

Another sharp gust of wind rattled the shed. “This was over a century before therapy became in vogue, mind you. But I’m pretty sure that if I had been seeing a therapist back then, theywould’ve told me I was lashing out because immortality, and everything I lost to become immortal, was more than I could handle.”

My heart clenched. I hadn’t thought about what it must be like to live forever. But now that Iwasthinking about it, I thought I understood what he meant. Being frozen in time at age thirty-five had some obvious advantages, but how would it feel still being thirty-five, while friends and family continued to age and eventually died?

“Everybody dies in the end,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. His voice was barely above a whisper. “Everybody who isn’t a vampire…they die. Even vampires start to go a bit strange after five hundred years or so.” He looked at the ground. “I’ve done some things I’m not proud of—played a lot of practical jokes, and worse—because…” He trailed off, and glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “Probably because I was afraid to get too close to anybody. Because getting close to people only leads to eventual pain.”

His words from earlier in the day came rushing back to me.To be perfectly honest, kissing you was probably a mistake on my end, too.

Was this what he’d meant by that?

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