Page 1 of Road Trip with a Vampire
One
Updated Excerpt fromThe Annals of Vampyric Lore, Seventeenth Edition, pages 1123–24
Watson, Grizelda (b. ~1625, approximate; England): Little is known about Grizelda Watson’s earliest life. She first rose to prominence in the late eighteenth century due to her then-unrivaled flair for the dramatic and her penchant for outlandish practical jokes. Her infamy grew exponentially in the last quarter of the nineteenth century when she adopted the nickname Grizelda the Terrible. She allegedly committed a series of crimes involving arson in what is now the American Pacific Northwest and in Chicago during the early twentieth century. “I like to watch things burn,” she once told a confidant.
Ms.Watson made few public appearances in the earliest part of the twenty-first century. Unsubstantiated rumors suggest that Ms.Watson now goes by the name Zelda Turret and runs a popular yoga studio in Northern California.
Before her disappearance, Ms.Watson was famously quoted as saying she “laughs hard, lives hard, and plays hard.”She briefly had groupies in the final decades of the twentieth century, shortly before her disappearance, many of whom adopted this quote as their mantra. T-shirts with this saying can still be found on Etsy.
Once upon a time, Iwas a bad bitch. Or more accurately, a bad witch.
People used to cower when they heard my name. Vampires especially. Sure, my reputation for sowing chaos had been only partly earned from things I actuallydid, but that had never bothered me. It was almost funny, what people thought and what they’d believe based on nothing but rumor and hearsay. One of my favorite things to do in the bad old days had been to start rumors about myself just to see how far they’d fly. I’d even made a sport of it.
Until one day, it wasn’t fun anymore, and I walked away from all of it.
Anyway, all that had been a decade and a lifetime ago.
Now, in my very different new life—dressed in my workout gear in the alley behind my yoga studio, my hair pulled back into a messy ponytail—all I had to do was to pick up a large cardboard box of trash and chuck it into the dumpster in front of me.
Without magic.
How quickly my life had changed.
I reminded myself I could do this. If I could set fire to half of Europe with nothing but the wind at my back—or so the legends about me used to go—surely I could dothis.
I took a deep breath and bent at the knees as I slid my hands beneath the bottom of the box. It wasn’t heavy, but it was large and unwieldy, nearly coming up to my waist. I was as small as Ihad once been fearsome, barely five foot two and with short arms to match. Using magic to dispose of this trash would have been much easier, but that was out of the question.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t done my nightly ritual before coming outside. A stupid oversight. So on top of my body being about twenty-five percent too small to adequately handle this job, now my hands were shaking. No sooner had I lifted the box a few inches off the ground than it slipped from my arms. Much of its contents—mostly yoga mats and leotards that had been ruined when our roof had leaked during a freak rainstorm last week—spilled out onto the pavement.
Fuck.
It had taken me forever to lug that thing out here. Now I’d have to spend another ten minutes picking everything up and starting all over again.
I was just about to get to it when I straightened and saw something that pushed all thoughts of ruined leotards and overlarge boxes out of my head.
Or rather—someone.
It was past ten, and the only light to see by came from the moon, partially obscured by clouds. But even if I didn’t have such preternaturally good night vision that I could spot a falcon a hundred yards away in the middle of a dark forest, it still would have been impossible to miss the giant man who stepped into the alley and directly into my line of sight.
This man was—no exaggeration—the most gorgeous hunk of handsome I’d seen since moving to my new community. He had the kind of broad-shouldered build I’d only seen a handful of times outside romance novels and wore a snug-fitting black T-shirt that did himallkinds of favors. When he crossed his armsacross his chest, it pulled the sleeves of his shirt taut, showing off well-defined biceps that suggested he spent more time in a gym than anyone really ought to.
His wavy dark brown hair looked purposely unkempt and curled up just enough at the nape to suggest it had been a while since his last haircut. I bet it would be soft as hell were someone to reach up and give his locks a tug.
Not that I was imagining doing exactly that as I stared at him.
He cleared his throat. It broke the spell. Too late, I realized we were all alone in a dark alley and he had at least a foot on me. Back in the day, if this man had wanted to hurt me, it would have taken less than a thimbleful of my power to send him running. But things were different now.
In my new life, I used as little magic as I could get away with. To someone in the mood for violence, I looked like an easy target.
“Hi,” he said. He didn’t come any closer. A point in thehe probably isn’t here to hurt mecolumn. Past experience had shown me that people aiming to maim and kill rarely kept their distance.
Whatdidhe want, though? He was just standing there, staring at me. It was getting awkward.
“Can I, uh…help you with something?” I asked.
He nodded at the box on the ground. Its spilled contents. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”
His voice was deep and rich, with the barest hint of a Midwestern accent that shouldn’t have made him sound even sexier but somehow did. I bet his voice would sound like sin no matter what he was saying. Whether he was offering to help with your trash or telling you he planned to dismember you slowly, piece by piece, there was something about a voice like his that made me want to do bad things.
