Page 12 of Road Trip with a Vampire
Peter swallowed, then squared his shoulders as if preparing himself for an unpleasant task. “Go on.”
“How do you know Reginald?” The last time I’d seen him was at a party we both should have been smarter than to attend. I had vague memories of Reggie ending the night with a lampshade on his head and his teeth deep in the neck of one of the humangroupies who, for inexplicable reasons, had hung around us back then.
I couldn’t reconcile the memories I had of my wild, reckless friend with the person who apparently took on charity cases like this guy.
“I wouldn’t say Iknowhim,” Peter said. “It’s more like…” He trailed off, trying to find the right words. “Reginald and his human girlfriend found me at a scrapbooking convention in Chicago.”
My eyebrows shot up my forehead. At no point in that sentence could I have possibly predicted the next word.
“A scrapbooking convention?” How on earth was Reggie now attending scrapbooking conventions—withorwithout a human girlfriend? Then again, one of the things I’d always liked about him was how just when you thought you had him all figured out, he went and did something unexpected.
“A scrapbooking convention,” Peter confirmed.
Huh. Well, people changed. Maybe domesticity and crafts made Reggie happy these days. Just like pretending to be mortal and running a yoga studio made me happy.
“Are you, like…into scrapbooking or something?” I couldn’t help but ask.
He considered that. “I don’t think I have any specific feelings about scrapbooking. I ended up there because I got lost. Because of my…” He trailed off, then tapped a finger to his temple.
Right. That.
“What exactlydoyou remember?” I asked as gently as I could. “Sorry if that’s too personal. I’ve never met an actual amnesiac before.”
“Almost nothing,” he said. The frustration in his voice was impossible to miss. “I only know my name because it was on theID I found in my wallet.” He paused. “I did remember my, uh…unusual dietright away, but that was more a biological urge than a memory.”
Of course. “Right.”
“Reginald told me you would know whatunusual dietmeant.”
“I do.” And then, because I was curious: “What did he tell you about me, besides my being a witch?”
“That you’re immortal,” he said. “Like me.”
I hesitated, not sure how to reply to that. I didn’t age at the same rate other people did. In fact, I seemed to have stopped aging altogether around my thirty-second birthday. But was Iimmortal? The way Peter and other vampires were?
I didn’t know.
“Not quite like you,” I said, offering him as much of the truth as I had.
“But not quite like everyone else, either.” It wasn’t a question.
I shook my head. “No.”
I didn’t know why I was over four hundred years old yet looked like I was in my early thirties. I didn’t know if there were others who lived as I had. My earliest memories were just images and feelings, though I was fairly sure that I’d been raised by people like me. Fiery and passionate, full of life and a raw kinetic power that could not be contained.
I sometimes wondered what had ultimately become of the people who’d raised me. Were they out there somewhere, as long-lived as me? Or had they died centuries ago? The sense memories I had of people who had loved and cared for me when I was small were too visceral to be false—but their names and faces had long since been lost to me. Trying to recall them was like trying to see through a thick layer of mud.
I’d stopped trying a long time ago.
I left my chair and walked into the kitchen to signal that this line of questioning was over.
“I’m sorry,” Peter said, picking up on my discomfort. “I didn’t mean to overstep.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
“As for what I remember,” he said, returning to my earlier question, “I remember nothing about my life before waking up, alone and with an excruciating headache, sprawled on the floor of an empty bank.”
That was odd. “Why were you sprawled on the floor of a bank?”
