Page 14 of Hot for Slayer
“Oh. Um, I was so hungry, I scarfed down a candy bar at the register,” I recite. It’s the one excuse I could come up with, and he doesn’t buy it, but he accepts my plate when I push it in his direction.
The sweet heat of his blood still churns through my body.
“Why did you become an entomologist?”
Christ.I can’t remember the last time someone asked me this many questions. “It wasn’t really planned.”
“How do you become something without planning to?”
Well, Lazlo, sometimes a gang of bandits decides to rob your nunnery—because why not?—and you see what’s happening to your sisters and decide that you’d rather throw yourself out of the window than allow the raiders to come any closer to you—because why not?—and a vampire passing by spots you in your last moments and decides to suck you dry—because why not?—and then you wake up in the middle of the night, and for some reason, you’re a damn vampire, too.
“It wasn’t my decision,” I tell him instead. It wasn’t my maker’s decision, either. Even vampires are not sure why some people turn and others don’t. There are necessary conditions—the person has to be on the brink of death but strong enough to sustain the transformation and some of the vampire’s blood has to be ingested by them, but it’s not as simple as that. Many tried and failed. Many didn’t mean to welcome new souls into the night, but ... here I am.
“You enjoy it, though.”
I shouldn’t. At least, that’s the stereotype, right? Immortals are supposed to be sullen and full of regrets, always a hairbreadth away from stepping into the sun and get it all over with. Butmal de vivre, meaninglessness, pain and suffering ... They’re not really my thing. I consider myself lucky, because I’m not prone to ennui. It may sound foolish,but I never get bored of watching the trees change, of seeing girls walk around hand in hand while giggling over a text from a crush, of finding a good poem.
Immortalitycanmean deep thoughts and philosophical pondering and the relentless pursuit of knowledge, sure, but for me it was always the opposite. I found it so easy, falling into the day-to-day. The humdrum. Staring out of the window with an empty mind. A crossword, a walk in the rain, a well-written book. Flowers blooming.
Perhaps the abbess was right, and I romanticize insignificant things too much—although, if I recall correctly, the way she put it was more like,Life is not a brightly painted knight’s tale, Sister Aethelthryth. Stop wasting time on fancies and follies, and go scrub the privy, child.Still, I’ve learned to live in the moment, and to be happy, even on my own. I’ve learned to treasure little joys, like making other people’s lives better by lending a hand or a smile, doing small talk, laughing at bad puns.
Sometimes I’m lonely. Sometimes I want more—whatever that means. Not everything is ideal. But I’m capable of finding my own meaning.
“Yes,” I say firmly. “I didn’t choose it, but I enjoy it.”
“I feel the same,” Lazlo says after a pensive beat.
My spine straightens. “Have you remembered something?”
“No. But what you said about becoming something without wanting, and still trying to make the best out of it ... It makes sense. On a visceral level.”
“Oh.”
We finish eating in silence—and bywe, I meanheefficiently shovels food inside his mouth, and I play with the worn edges of the place mat I found in the drawers. Afterward, he stands and heads for the sink to do the disheslike it’s a reflex, a simple courtesy after a meal. I cannot help but wonder who taught him that.
Maybe heismarried. Maybe during the Reign of Terror, while I was milling around the falling guillotines to get a good drink out of people who’d have died anyway (hate wasting food), Lazlo was having a beachside wedding with a colleague. Maybe his partner is currently worried sick about him, tossing and turning in the bed they usually share, because he hasn’t come home and ...
My train of thought stops, and my head explodes into a panic.
“You okay?” he asks, still drying the plates we used as though he heard my entire brain detonate.
“Yeah,” I say. But no, I’m not okay. Because I just remembered something very important.
There are no beds in this apartment.
Chapter 7
Vampires don’t sleep.
It’s part of the whole curse thing—no rest, no quiet, no respite from our evil deeds. We are condemned to an eternity of staring at empty walls and reflecting on what we have done, all in the hope of atoning for our very existence. The possibilities for self-flagellation are endless.
But my white-hot take is that I’ve done nothing wrong, at least not since I began observing a strictly asshole-tarian diet. So I politely excused myself from the pity party and retooled that time for playing sudoku.
While my apartment does have a bedroom—mostly packed with clothes, books, and the equipment I have accumulated over years of taking up, and almost instantly quitting, all kinds of crafts—it doesn’t have abed.
Which, I realize now, is onlyslightlyless suspicious than putting a coffin in my living space.
“You are a horse,” Lazlo says. He surveys the room from behind me, cross-armed.
