Page 48 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

Oh, come on, I try to think. But I have to admit, his words do send a trickle of ice through me. I think of the devil dog, I think of the time I almost got buried alive, I think of my own foggy memories of all the times I died in past lives. I have to really work to shake it off. “I think I’ll survive someone trapping me in my library.”

“You say that as if you had ventured here under ordinary circumstances.”

“Even in weird ones, it’s perfectly safe. It’s just books.”

“And what if it isn’t?”

I laugh then. “So, like, an evil creature gets me.”

“Yes, I suppose you could put it that way.”

“Well, I only have to evade them for a few hours. Dawn will be here really soon, and when it comes so will the morning crowd. The goblins that like reading to their kids. The talking goat who tries to sneak in and eat all the paper.”

“I fear they will be too late, my sorceress,” he says.

And this time the my is so obvious I can’t escape it.

But it’s not what I’m thinking about now.

I’m thinking about how mournful he sounds.

How he won’t look at me. “I don’t see why,” I say.

Then he turns, and I do. His mouth is full of teeth.

His eyes are as pale as a winter moon.

“Because I am hungry now,” he purrs, low and deadly. “Oh, I am starved.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The first thing I think to do is call Greg, the local minotaur. I mean, I think he has some idea that I might be a witch, after I made an appearance at Cassie’s party—so none of this is going to be a shock. And as he runs a popular real estate agency under the guise of being a completely ordinary human, I have his number.

He would probably come down here if I asked him.

I could even tell him that it was actually me who helped him get out of that labyrinth someone set up in the House That Isn’t Here—a magical mansion where supernatural beings often gather—last year. I’m sure that would get me on his good side. And I’m certain he could open the door if he can get into an invisible building that is able to suddenly grow a dancing David Bowie.

But then Phone suddenly pipes up from inside my jacket pocket. Half muffled in a way that Halsten won’t be able to hear—considering he’s currently trying to attack the nonexistent door with a table—but clear enough to me. “If you’re thinking of getting out of the mess that I absolutely told you to stay out of by calling someone, just know that my signal strength is currently showing up as three scary symbols and an emoji of an eyeball,” she says.

And I can’t even be mad at her for that scolding in the middle, either.

She was absolutely correct. I should have been more cautious, I should have been smarter—at the very least I should have understood that I was probably misjudging when he last had something to eat—and now I’m stuck in a book-filled tomb with a hungry vampire.

Or in other words: my worst nightmare.

Seriously, I’ve woken up in cold sweats over this very idea. I have this recurring dream where I’m in that pit from Blade and there’s just me and a shambling, ravenous Halsten down there. Or that sunlight trap in Interview with the Vampire, except without the sunlight and also somehow I’m chained to him.

Yeah, there’s a reason I stopped watching horror movies.

That’s just my life. Those are things that could actually happen to me. They have actually happened to me—I mean, it was a Blockbuster and not a comic book store, and I didn’t have Corey Haim for a little brother. But other than that, my life in the eighties was basically The Lost Boys.

And now here we go with whatever movie this is.

“I think it’s going to be like in 28 Weeks Later when they’re trapped in that room with a slobbering, zombified Robert Carlyle,” Phone chimes in, once she hears me muttering to myself about movies. And then I seriously consider stabbing her with whatever first comes to hand.

“You really want to be skewered by a book,” I tell her. “Because that is not going to be a fast and pleasant process.”

But she doesn’t pipe down. Now she wants to talk about the fact that I called him Sten, like he’s my best friend, and about how I almost smooched him, which I swear I did not. “You’re sweet on him, you sicko,” she hisses at me, loud enough that I look up at Halsten, struck through with fear that he might have heard.