Page 9 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

And now he’s fucked even those tentative steps forward for me.

“Scared of them, are you,” I sneer. Quietly, so Phone can’t hear me.

But he hears me just fine, of course. He answers while still flicking through my fucking property. “No, I’m just allergic. They get near me, I break out in hives. It’s the reason I’ve killed twelve of them since I arrived in this twee town, and I intend to kill a great deal more. So, you know. You can retire from devil-dog murdering, if you like.”

“Your voice is so flat I genuinely cannot tell if this is all sarcasm or not.”

“Then let me say it with some jaunty enthusiasm. When devil dogs dance close to my delicate skin, I delight in turning them into monstrous sock puppets,” he says. Then just for good measure he adds, complete with the appropriate gesture: “Jazz hands.”

“You know, I don’t remember you being so ridiculous.”

“What can I say, I got bored waiting for you over the last forty years and developed a personality. Or maybe my existing personality grew back, I don’t know. Either way, I’m funny now.”

God, the way he says that last part.

It’s so dry and somehow silly at the same time—I don’t even know how to describe it. All I know is it comes very, very close to making me laugh. Too close, in my opinion. I have to smother it behind my hand and focus on the more important parts of what he said. The parts I’ve always wondered about.

“So that’s what you do, is it? You just wait for me to be reborn, and then hunt me down? Seems to have taken you a long time. Skills getting rusty, huh. Sense of smell starting to wither. Eyesight not what it was. You know, there’s a spectacle shop at the bottom of Main Street,” I say, and I can see it gets him a little bit.

He bristles. Almost looks up at me. Stops turning the pages of my journal.

And he can’t seem to resist correcting me a little.

“I don’t need spectacles. I just wait until … until you grow up.”

“Because even you can’t bring yourself to eat a toddler.”

“No, because it’s creepy lurking around someone I have only ever known as an adult. I don’t want to see you in pigtails and braces, sitting on your school steps sucking a lollipop, completely oblivious to our entire two hundred years of history, gross,” he says, so suddenly steely about it I have to imagine he means it.

He even glares at me as he speaks.

Like: How dare you imagine anything else?

It’s kind of unsettling in a way I can’t place—until it hits me.

“You make your interest in me sound sexual,” I say, and of course I’m laughing as I do it. I’m trying to torment him to some extent. But holy shit, his eyes widen. They actually widen in a way I didn’t even think he was capable of. And his voice, when it emerges, is not normal.

“What? No. No, I meant—” he starts to say.

Only he doesn’t say it. He stutters. He can’t seem to get the rest out.

I get to swoop in and further rattle his rafters.

“Oh my god, you’re hesitating. You’re having trouble denying it.”

“I am not, shut up.”

“Are you flustered?”

“Of course not. Stop saying ridiculous things. I merely meant when I meet my opponent on the battlefield I like us to be on even footing. It’s poor sportsmanship to attack someone so unarmed, so unprepared. As soon as your witchy soul fully awakens it calls to me, and I am come.”

My brain repeats that last word before I can stop it.

Intended in an old-timey way, I know. But it doesn’t feel that way.

“That sounds even more about sex than the other thing.”

“Well, it wasn’t. You know how I meant it. Stop being absurd.”