Page 16 of After Darkness Falls

"Charming."

Chloe grimaced. Then she took a sip of the heavenly concoction and found that she didn't mind hearing about dismemberment and blood after all.

"Well, she wasn't."

"She?" Chloe repeated.

Blair rolled her eyes. "No interruptions. Questions after, if you please."

Her voice had changed, adopting a layer of authority. Chloe remembered that Blair wanted to be a teacher. It might actually suit her.

"Sorry." She pinched her fingers together and moved them in front of her mouth in a shushing motion. "Not a word."

"Why thank you. Anyway, as regulars do, they sent a bunch of soldiers, knights, and heroes to take her out. Which was super stupid, because the bitch was badass. But something happened the day they cornered her. One of the soldiers bit her hard enough to draw blood."

Chloe was dying to fill the dramatic pause with a thousand questions, but she prevented herself.

"The soldier was seriously wounded and should have died."

"But he didn't."

"He did, for a time," Blair corrected. "The next night, he rose again as something different. Now, there are a lot of theories as to what vampires actually are, but we do know they were made by this immortal creature, Ariadne. Legend says she was Dionysus's wife, and it's hard to say where mythology ends and history starts in paranormal studies. What we do know is that she calmed down after making the first vampire. No more massacres are attributed to her. She realized she was capable of creating companions for herself, and she did so, exactly seven times. Drakes, Helsings, Beauforts, De Villiers, Rosedeans, and Stormhales. Those are the families who own the houses on the hill—the heirs of the first vampires, made by a goddess. They're paranormal royalty. Literally. The Drakes are kings of the American vampires. The Beauforts and De Villiers rule most of Europe…"

"Wait," Chloe interrupted her, going back on her word. "You said Ariadne made seven families. That's six names."

Blair's furtive glance went to the open door behind them. The common room was oddly silent.

"Yeah…I don't like to talk about the seventh here. It gives me nightmares."

A flash of annoyance needled Chloe. She felt like she was missing something big—something sheshouldknow.

That said, Blair had been nothing but charming to her, and the subject obviously made her uncomfortable. She wasn't going to push the boundaries of her first acquaintance in a new place just because curiosity was her fatal flaw.

"Right. So, where's my room?"

8

Perspective

Whatever she imagined college dorm rooms to be, this wasn't it. The small, second-floor room at the end of the right wing was charming and comfortable but stripped of bedding and decoration. The bare walls were painted purple and had wooden beams, and a four-poster single bed in the corner matched the furnishings.

"That's amazing. Everyone has a room like that?"

"Not quite. Undergrads have to share rooms on the first floor, and we PhD folks have bigger quarters upstairs. Still, the master’s students have it good. You have an en-suite," she said, pointing to a door tucked on the opposite side of the bed, "and a small fridge, but if you want to cook something, that's downstairs. We try to avoid setting the place on fire more than a couple of times per year.”

Somehow, Chloe doubted Blair was joking.

“The walls can be painted, and you're free to hang whatever you want. There's a service room on the first floor with a bunch of stuff you might need—carpets, lights, that kind of stuff. You should have bedding in the wardrobe."

Chloe looked around. Her place in NOLA had been slightly more spacious, but definitely not nicer.

"That's amazing, thank you."

Blair grinned. "You want amazing? Watch this."

She sat down on the floor in the middle of the room, hands on her lap, eyes closed, and seemed to concentrate. Her pale skin emitted a warm glow. Chloe gasped as her hair moved with a wind she couldn't feel.

"Well? What do you think?"

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