Page 53 of Nash
"She saved me."
"And Arden."
Leo's jaw tightens. "Arden turned me. Frankie took me in. Nobody else knows."
"Turned you into what?"
Leo doesn't answer. His mouth presses into a line.
"Can you explain the rest? Because I still need to know why you look like you haven't seen the sun since the Clinton administration."
Something shifts in his expression. "The second Clinton administration or the first?"
"Does it matter?"
"It does if we're establishing a timeline." He glances at the stairs. "Frankie's going to kill me for real when she finds out you're down here."
"Frankie didn't tell me anything. I broke in."
"That doesn't make it better."
"It makes it more impressive. That padlock took me twenty-two seconds."
I step fully into the room and close the door. The air is cool, cooler than it should be, with a faint smell underneath the mustiness that I can't identify. Something metallic. Something that makes the hair on my arms stand up.
"Are you a vampire?" I ask.
The question exits my mouth before I can stop it. The pale skin. A basement dwelling. That faint metallic smell. The factthat I watched Arden sniff a photograph weeks ago and heard him say old blood, and I've been building a case file about this town that I've been too sane to open until right now.
Leo's expression goes very still. A living person would have laughed.
"Frankie is a witch," I say. "The candles. Sage. The way she touches things and they respond. She's a witch. You're down here because you can't go outside, and you can't go outside because you're a fucking vampire."
"I want to point out that you're handling this extremely calmly."
"I'm not calm. I'm in shock. The calm is a performance. Underneath this, approximately forty percent of my brain is screaming." I pull the wooden chair out and sit because my legs are done. "A witch and a vampire. In a basement. In Willowridge, Mississippi."
"A witch and a vampire isn't the combination I would have picked either." He picks up the sandwich again. Takes a bite. Winces. Presses a fist to his sternum. "I'm UNDEAD and I still get heartburn. How is that fair?"
"You're a vampire with heartburn."
"The ham doesn't help. But the ham is the only thing keeping me civilized, Ruby. The blood situation is... managed. But there's something about processed deli meat that holds the whole operation together." He rubs his chest. "Frankie says the heartburn is psychosomatic. I say the heartburn is the last human thing I have and I'm keeping it."
I laugh. Too loud, bouncing off the brick walls. The absurdity of it cracks something in my chest, and the laugh keeps going until my eyes sting.
"Don't tell Frankie about the extra ham," he says. "She's trying to regulate my diet."
"Frankie is monitoring your deli intake. That's either a nurse or a girlfriend."
Something raw crosses his face. "It's complicated."
"Everything in this town is complicated. I'm starting to think Willowridge runs on complications the way other towns run on tax revenue."
The stairs creak above us. Footsteps descend. The door opens, and Frankie is there. She looks at me. Looks at Leo.
She looks at the picked padlock.
"I heard something two days ago," I say. "I came back to check."
