Page 105 of Road Trip with a Vampire
A powerful wave of something like déjà vu washed over him.Her name rang in his head, as familiar as a sunrise, though he could not have said why.
Before leaving her again under cover of darkness, Peter found himself agreeing to think about taking one of her yoga classes. Of all the ludicrous things. But then, he suspected he would have agreed to anything this remarkable woman—Zelda—had asked of him.
Peter sat forward in thehotel room’s lone chair, elbows resting on his knees and hands clasped in front of him.
“I don’t know where to start,” he admitted. “I rehearsed a whole speech on the drive over, but now that I’m here, none of it seems adequate.”
I took a sip of the herbal tea I’d just made for myself, focusing on the pleasant warmth of the mug in my hands to keep from losing my shit. “I’d say start at the beginning, but you only have twenty minutes.”
He swallowed. “Right.” His eyes drifted to the floor, and I could all but see the wheels in his mind spinning as he thought through what to say. “I guess I’ll start with…I haven’t always worked for people like The Collective. I certainly didn’t while Iwas human, and even after I became a vampire, I did…other things for a while.”
I snorted. This part, I could guess. “At first, you just ran around killing and fucking indiscriminately. Right?”
His eyes snapped to mine. “You say that like it’s not a big deal.”
“You’re not the first vampire I’ve known,” I explained. “I know it’s a crazy-wild rush. Your first taste of blood, your first kills, blah, blah, blah.” I shrugged. “All vampires go through it.”
His eyes drifted away again, clearly embarrassed. “Right,” he said very slowly.
“And after your newborn bloodlust calmed down, you had the existential crisis over immortality that most decent vampires eventually have, and you needed to figure out what the hell you were going to do for the rest of eternity.” I took another sip of my tea. “How am I doing so far?”
“You’re reading me like a book.” A corner of his mouth lifted into a sad half smile. “It all felt very dire at the time. But now that I’m talking to you, I suppose it was all rather cliché.”
“Maybe,” I acknowledged. “But clichés are cliché for a reason. Immortality’s a lot to grapple with.” I would know. “Especially if it wasn’t something you expected to happen to you. I don’t judge you for any of that.”
He nodded, eyes full of an emotion I couldn’t name. “Well, as you just said, I didn’t know what to do with the rest of my existence. But I didn’t think I could go back to doing what I’d done before I turned.”
Despite everything, the wistfulness in his voice tugged on something inside me. “And what was that?”
Another sad half smile. “My human life is mostly just images and feelings, nothing concrete, even now that I have most of mymemories back. But I believe I was an engineer with an interest in both machinery and architecture.”
“Really? You’re notbuiltlike an engineer,” I said before I realized how that must have sounded.
He blinked at me. “Oh? And…and howamI built?” His voice was a mix of curiosity and playfulness.
“You know how you’re built,” I muttered.
“The other night you said my body looked like it had been sculpted by the gods,” he murmured. “Do you still think so?”
It felt like I was blushing from the roots of my hair down to my toes. I’d told him that right after he’d given me the first of several mind-blowing orgasms. It had been true then and was still true now. But we werenotdoing this after everything that had happened.
“I’m not dignifying that with a response,” I said. “All I meant was that when I imagine an engineer, they aren’t usually built like…like…”
“Like their bodies have been sculpted by the gods?” he supplied, his smile growing, all traces of his maudlin mood gone.
“Shut up,” I muttered. But I was fighting a losing battle against a smile, too.
Fortunately, Peter dropped it. His mood sobered again. “To answer the question you haven’t asked, my few clear human memories include me spending my spare time doing heavy physical labor with my father on his farm.” He looked away. “Hay threshing does wonders for the upper body.”
That would explain his frankly bonkers physique. But I had too many other questions to allow myself to get sidetracked like this.
“How did you go from being a farmer-boy engineer to working for people like The Collective?” My question had the intendedeffect. He sobered further, shifting in his seat, all playful innuendo forgotten. “It’s quite a change.”
“In some ways, yes,” he admitted. “In other ways, no. Most of what I get paid to do uses the skills I honed as a human engineer. It’s just, now that I’m immortal, I can take on jobs that are more dangerous than anything I could have done as a human. Becoming a vampire seems to have sharpened my abilities. Made them stronger.” He paused, his eyes inscrutable. “I am seldom paid tokillanyone.”
I had to swallow around the lump in my throat. “But not never,” I said.
A long pause. “But not never,” he agreed very quietly.
