Page 2 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

Tutting over my wine-colored stockings and my too-blunt bangs.

Hideous, I heard him say, last time I stopped by the store. And now I can actually reply one day, and maybe talk to them about witchy things, and then explain to them all about my vampire stalker and how to avoid him, and it’ll be okay. This time it will be okay. They will be safe in a way no one else could ever be.

They might even be able to help me do something about him.

But the problem is, I have to get out of this predicament first.

And things are not looking good on that front.

I can hear him pacing down below. The heavy thud of his no-doubt-enormous boots. Something rustles, and he curses, and I know he’s up to no good. He’s probably creating some kind of death trap. Or working out a way to saw down this tree—most likely by chomping through it with his enormous fangs.

And there’s not a thing I can do about it.

I couldn’t even manage to save the slice of cake Cassie had given me for my supper. That hint of pink I can see through the leaves is almost certainly the remains of it, smashed all over the dirt path. In fact, I know it is, because I hear his dry-as-a-desert-bone voice singsong up at me a moment later. “Oh, what a shame—strawberry flavor, your favorite,” he says, like the absolute motherfucker he is. Throws me up a tree, rips my best leather jacket, smashes my slab cake supper, and then mocks me over it?

“I’m shocked you even know what strawberry smells like, after a thousand years of a diet of blood. Oh, what on earth should I have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner today, red slop or red slop or red slop? That’s you, all the time.”

“Yes, I managed to fathom the joke, such as it was.”

“I’m gonna make you fathom my foot in your ass the second I get down.”

I hear him sigh. If all the leaves weren’t in the way I’m sure I would see him rolling his eyes. Although with him it’s not really much of an eye roll. He’s been alive so long all his expressions are faint, haunted versions of what they should be. A flicker of one lid, the barest hint of a look upward. “Haven’t we already done feet in butts, Mathilde? It feels a little passé, I have to say,” he says.

And now I’m spitting words at him through gritted teeth.

“I told you the last time you tried to kill me not to call me that.”

“Well, forgive me, after four goes at trying to do this it tends to get muddled.”

God, I think. Has it really been only four? It feels to me like ten thousand. Like we’ve been doing this since the dawn of time. He even says it like it’s secretly more, and I just don’t know it. “You’re not muddled. You know every one of the names I have had. And you know this one, too. You always know, you goddamn stalker,” I say as I do my best to shift position. I can see the curve of one of his enormous shoulders. A hint of that dirty-blond hair; the tip of one big boot. But I need more. I need some flesh, something soft and as close to vulnerable as he ever gets.

And if I can just reach this lower branch with one sneakered toe, if I can just slide around like this, on my stomach, nice and silently so he doesn’t clock what I’m doing, I might be able to get to it.

Especially now that he’s close to monologuing.

“It’s hardly stalking to notice the name Marley Maples under a picture of a person who is clearly you, in the window of this twee town’s bizarre newspaper,” he says, voice just a little less flat, a little less bored, now that he’s getting into the swing of things. “Though I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that it is bizarre, considering who’s writing every headline. My strange little witch, still always ready to say and do the most ridiculous things.”

“Gee, I wonder how I got this way. Couldn’t possibly be all the strangling.”

“How dare you. I have never stooped to anything as common and human as strangulation. In fact, if I recall, you were the stooper. You were the dirty strangler. You even said, as you committed this act of embarrassing mundanity, Oh, I love doing great big stranglings of you, Halsten.”

He puts on a high, breathy voice for that last part, startling enough that I almost overlook the problem with everything he just said. Because yeah, sure, I did once try to choke him out. Foolishly, considering he doesn’t actually breathe.

But the rest of it is a complete fabrication.

I would genuinely rather die than call him by his given name.

“Okay, first of all, in none of my lives have I ever called you Halsten.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to end that serious accusation on what you actually refer to me as. You massive butthole just doesn’t have the gravitas. And nor does … what was the other one you used to call me? Face … fucker? Fucking face? Maybe it was some combination of the two … fuckbutt. Holeface. Holebuttfacefuck,” he says, and I would be madder about it, I really would, if it weren’t giving me the chance to lean just a little to the right, and mime drawing back a bow with my hands.

Though of course I pretend I’m concentrating on the conversation.

“Oh my god,” I say. “Oh my god, where is a filing cabinet when you need it.”

And he sighs, in reply. “I told you, that was an accident.”

“And I told you, you never met a lie you didn’t fall hopelessly in love with.”