Page 101 of The Good Vampire's Guide to Blood & Boyfriends
The newcomer spoke in a rough accented voice that Brennan recognized immediately. He resisted the urge to whip his head toward thespeaker but instead slid down in his seat and prayed into his coffee that Travis wouldn’t notice him.
He didn’t know why it never occurred to him that he could see Travis around campus—his forest domain was undefined to Brennan, and the Waffle Den was at the far edge of campus near the hiking path that led to Travis’s clearing. But seeing an all-powerful vampire ordering an inhuman amount of takeout at the Waffle Den was not something Brennan had expected, and he didn’t have the energy to deal with Travis’s endless stories and holier-than-thou attitude. Not when he was going to have to deal with the same from his mom for the next two weeks. Couldn’t he have one quiet night on campus without the friendly reminder that vampirism was ruining his life?
“Vampling!” Travis exclaimed, popping into Brennan’s view with a wide-eyed grin. Brennan winced at the term and glanced at the waitress and cook, who didn’t bat an eye. He reluctantly straightened from where he’d been willing himself into invisibility in his seat.
“Travis,” Brennan greeted him. He didn’t bother to hide his lack of enthusiasm.
“Fancy seeing you here,” Travis said, like there was a joke hidden in his words that Brennan couldn’t detect. “I haven’t gotten takeout in a good few decades, thought I’d spoil myself a bit. How are you holding up?”
Travis crossed over and made to sling himself into Brennan’s booth.
“You still need to pay, sir,” the waitress said at the register, the tone of hersirimplying she wanted to call him anything but.
Travis shot Brennan a wink then turned back to the register.
“No worries, right?” Travis said, and despite his casual tone, the words came out slow and deliberate. “Let’s call it even, yeah?”
A chill came over Brennan like a wave, and he saw the moment it hit the woman, too—she stiffened, spine straightening, eyes glazing over where she had been glaring, and all at once she softened and warmed, smiling and ripping the paper off her notepad.
“Of course. We’ll have that right out to you.”
“Oh, and!” Travis perked up. “My friend’s coffee is on me, too.”
“Sounds good,” the woman said.
Travis whirled around and dropped into the seat across from Brennan, who only realized he was sitting slack-jawed when he closed his mouth with a click. He looked between Travis and the waitress, who turned to talk to the cook, who in turn started cracking eggs.
Brennan leaned across the table and hissed, “What was that?”
“Cool, right?” Travis said. “A little persuasion action. Who could resist a face like this?” He grinned cheekily and held up his palms in a facsimile of jazz hands.
“That’s—”Illegal. A frivolous waste of power. Kind of cool.The thought of it made anxiety rise in his stomach but he pushed it down.
He ended up saying, “This is a locally owned business, not, like, a chain, so I do not approve.”
Travis barked out a laugh. “No offense, kid, but the day I start looking foryourapproval is the day I die.”
Brennan pinched the bridge of his nose and put his book down in defeat, face down and splayed open so the table would hold his place amongst the pages. “I don’t think there’s a way to take that non-offensively.”
Travis kept right on, unbothered. “So how are things? Still in a tizzy about Dom?”
His eyes scanned the wall above Brennan’s head and Brennan twisted to see what he was seeing. The walls were covered in framed photos and newspaper clippings in an elaborate, Tetris-ing collage of rectangles. An article about the Waffle Den opening in Sturbridge. Old-school, black-and-white photos of when the diner was new and sleek instead of rusted and grease-stained. Newspaper clippings from events around Boston.
It took him a minute to realize what Travis was looking for, and Brennan did a double take himself when he saw it—a newspaper headline about a rally against book censorship in Boston, a crowd photo, and behind the main subject of the photo was a little group of four, huddled together laughing.
He barely recognized Travis with his hair cut short, but Sunny and Nellie both looked exactly the same, outside of outfit changes. Then there was a light-haired woman with a hand on Travis’s arm as she laughed. Brennan knew she had to be Shea.
“Back when Sunny and Nellie were still fun, of course,” Travis narrated. However snide, his voice had a softness to it that gave Brennan pause.
They had been Travis’s friends once, Brennan realized. Up until they had killed Shea and banished him to the woods. Now Travis was left alone, only remembering his friends when he dared to scour the walls of a greasy diner.
Again, Brennan was reminded why exactly Travis made him so uncomfortable. Sure, he had weird perspectives on vampirism, and he used his powers in ways Brennan didn’t agree with, and until the last few decades, he had killed people mercilessly.
That all scared Brennan, but none of it so much as this: that Travis, ancient and powerful, was utterly alone. That this was all Brennan had to look forward to in an infinite life.
The waitress arrived at their table, refilling Brennan’s coffee and sliding a bagged stack of to-go boxes to Travis in one smooth motion.
“You’re all set, hon,” she said, then slipped away to sit behind the counter.
