Page 20 of Road Trip with a Vampire
“I may have acted first, thought things through later,” Reggie admitted.
“Reassuring to know some things never change.”
“I’m sorry.” He sounded like he meant it. “Amelia and I just felt bad for the guy. We can’t take him in right now—”
“You thoughtIcould?”
“—and Peter really wanted to see California,” he continued as if I hadn’t interrupted. “Your letter said you were in California, and it must have been front of mind. The Grizzy I knew would have thought nothing of taking in a stranger with a story as odd as Peter’s. I should have considered that maybe you’d changed since we last spent time together. I’m sorry that I overstepped. Truly.”
I sighed and closed my eyes. I didn’t regret reaching out to him a few months earlier. But…
“I left my old life for a reason,” I said in a much gentler voice. “I don’t hang out with vampires anymore. Not ever.”
“I get that,” Reggie said, conciliatory. “Even if I don’t understand. I should have thought things through.”
“You should have,” I agreed. But Reggie was the kind of person who was hard to stay mad at for long. Unable to keep the teasing from my voice, I added, “I willconsiderforgiving you.”
“Thanks,” he said, laughing. “I’ve missed you, you know.”
“I’ve missed you, too,” I admitted.
There had been a time when Reg and I had been nearly inseparable. Completely platonically, of course. We’d only ever been friends, nothing more than two misfits who’d somehow found our way to each other. Wrecking that kind of bond with sex had never appealed to either of us.
Also, blonds had never done it for me at all.
But platonic love was love, too. Leaving my old life behind without telling my yearslong partner in crime was the only thing I regretted about disappearing without a trace.
“I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye,” I said. It was an apology that was a decade overdue. But once I’d made up my mind to leave, I’d known that if I’d told Reggie, he’d have tried to talk me out of it.
After what had happened, I’d needed it all to end.
For centuries, I had loved partying and getting into trouble with vampires. I’d been adrift, with an apparently limitless lifespan I didn’t know what to do with, and vampires’ wild pyrotechnics had appealed to me.
But althoughIwas immortal, all other good things did eventually come to an end. Maybe anything a person did repeatedlyfor centuries eventually got old. In truth, even before I walked away, I’d started suspecting there was more to living forever than living wild. All that partying had grown tedious, the mingled scents of smoke and regret clinging to me like a second skin every morning after.
Even still, I probably would have stayed along that path if it hadn’t been for the Evanston fire.
It was supposed to have been an easy prank. I was to start up a sudden windstorm to encourage people near the Evanston Recreation Center to hurry inside. Once the building had achieved critical mass, Basil Frent—one of the funniest vampires I’d ever known, though also a huge jackass—would walk into the room looking as much like Timothée Chalamet as we could manage to get a six-foot-seven, broad-shouldered vampire to look. He would shoutTimmy Chalamet is here!, everyone would get a thrill, Basil would have his pick of excitable humans for dinner, and we’d both enjoy a laugh.
Unfortunately, things went wrong from the beginning. There had been only my reckless use of magic to blame.
What Basil and I hadn’t realized when we’d concocted this scheme was that the North Shore Fire Eaters Association was holding its annual convention in the Evanston Rec Center that day. It had taken less than a minute for my conjured windstorm to find their fires, since the front doors to the building had been kept open.
In the end, no one even remembered thatTimmyhad been there.
No one had died that night. But none of the other fires I’d been responsible for over the centuries had rattled me like that one. People caught in the crosshairs of my other fires had largely gotten what had been coming to them. The people at theEvanston Recreation Center who’d been rushed to the hospital that night had been innocent teenage girls, old ladies, and a few very peculiar fire eaters. All they’d been guilty of was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It didn’t matter that no one had died that night. Peoplecouldhave died.
It had been the wake-up call I’d needed.
When you think you’re going to live forever, the boundaries betweenshouldandshould notget dangerously blurred. If I’d suspected this before, I’d known it with a certainty then. A few days after the fire, I’d staged a car crash, then vanished with a pinch of my transporting powder. Weeks later I found myself in Redwoodsville. If magic—and vampires—could lead me to do such awful things, it was time to make a clean break from both.
So that’s exactly what I’d done.
I wasn’t ready to explain this to Reggie just yet. Maybe I would, though, one day soon.
“I’m sorry you left without saying goodbye, too,” Reggie admitted. “Though I have a high enough opinion of myself to assume it had nothing to do with me.”
