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  I made all the appropriate noises. I told him a Volvo like Mom used to have would be nice, and watched him flinch. I ate as much as I could, and when he was finished I fled upstairs, turned up the music in my room, and threw up everything in a curdled rush as the sun slid toward the horizon and the wind rasped, moaned, and whistled.

  When it was done I rested my feverish forehead against the cool porcelain of the toilet. It felt good. I cleaned myself up and felt a little better now that I didn't have the food weighing me down, and it was getting to be dusk. So I brushed my teeth, gagging at the mint in the toothpaste, and put on a pair of jeans and a cami, and went out in the backyard. Consuela was washing dishes and my dad was in his home office on the phone.

  Nobody saw me leave.

  * * * *

  The gardening shed was full of cobwebs, the smell of oil and grass clippings, and weird shadows. The riding mower hunched under a tarp, for those times when Dad got a bug up his ass about the lawn. I sat on an old concrete bench that had been hauled in here probably before I was born, and waited.

  Night filled the one little window. It was hot and the wind moaned, flinging dust everywhere. My hair filled with electricity, but the waves were springy. Go figure, the day I feel like shit warmed over is the day I have good hair.

  I waited, chewing on my fingernail. The scab on my left palm throbbed, and the two little puncture scabs on my throat sent a zing through me every time I moved.

  The door quivered. I swallowed hard and sat up straight. Lift your chin, sweetheart, it takes years off.

  Goddamn.

  "And what are you doing in here?" The red dots were back in his eyes. He shut the door casually. "You've said your good-byes, I guess. Right?"

  He sounded so sure. I curled my left hand around the wood. "Yeah."

  "You certainly don't disappoint. Are you thirsty, darling? Say yes."

  Just say yes. Sourness filled my mouth. "Yes."

  "Well, come on. There's a whole world out there." His eyes glittered and his teeth gleamed. The fangs all but glowed.

  I held up my right hand and smiled. It felt like wood on my frozen face. "Okay."

  He stepped closer. His fingers closed around mine. "You know, as a rendezvous, this isn't—"

  I jerked at him hard with my right hand, brought the stake up in my left. It was braced against the wall, a long round piece of wood left over from the bonsai experiments that had been here when we moved in. It had taken a little bit of hacking with a rusted machete before the end was sharpened enough. It went in with a meaty sound that would have made me throw up again if I wasn't already so sick.

  Jack's face went slack. The red lights in his eyes dimmed, but his teeth champed together twice. His head dropped like he'd just fallen asleep, and he almost fell on me. The end of the long-ass stake skritched against the wall of the shed, and I landed on my knees. He folded to the side, landed slumped against the bulk of the riding mower, and a long rattling hiss like an angry snake filled the shed, overpowering the sound of the wind.

  I let out a coughing sob. Stumbled for the door. The stake whapped against things as his body convulsed. I don't know what I was expecting. I thought maybe he'd turn to dust, or explode, or something. But he just kept making that hissing sound, and the end of the stake kept hitting things. It seemed to last forever before he fell down between the riding mower and the shed wall, the stake pointing up before cocking over to the side. His legs made one final little dancing movement and then were still.

  Deathly still.

  It was like a nightmare where you can't run fast enough. My dumb fingers closed around the doorknob. I ran, the door slamming shut behind me, lungs bursting and heart pounding, and made it into the house. I shut the pool door, locked it, and stepped quick and soft up the stairs until I reached my room.

  As a plan, it kind of sucked. But it was all I had. And here in the house the lights were bright and they were all on. I slumped against my bedroom door, hyperventilating. My throat throbbed. When I put my hand up to touch the little puncture wounds, my fingers came away wet and red. I sucked on them while I stumbled to the bathroom. I had to pee like damn.

  "Tragic," I whispered around my fingers, and giggled. "I'm so tragic."

  It took a long time before I could stop crying. The divots in my neck stopped bleeding after a little bit, re-scabbed, and I stood in the shower for a long time, shaking and shuddering.

  I tossed the mashed-together chunks of soap in the garbage. Faint bubbles on its wet surface gleamed before they popped.

  Then I went to bed and I dreamed of Chel. Only she was on the riding mower, and she was cutting down banks of bubbles and leaving a river of blood behind her. And when I woke up the next morning, I was still thirsty.

  * * * *

  Consuela flipped the television on. "You eat," she told me, sternly, her eyebrows coming together. "Don't starve yourself, mija."

  I eyed the eggs and potatoes, the bacon, the toast. My stomach turned into a knot and the news came on. I picked up the glass of orange juice. Dad was already at work.

  "—the so-called Schoolgirl Murders," the television said.

  Consuela reached for the knob.

  "Don't!" The orange juice slid from my hand. The glass didn't break, but half of it slopped into my plate and she gave me a reproachful look. "Sorry. I'm sorry."

  She whisked the plate away and the television kept yapping.

  "Again, the chief of police has just issued a statement. Theodore Michael Briggs, a twenty-four-year old handyman in the Valley, has just been charged with the Schoolgirl Murders." The screen filled with a mug shot of a dark-haired man with a narrow face. He didn't look anything like Jack, really, but his hair was dark and curly and he was skinny.

  Consuela started mopping up the orange juice. I stared at the television screen.

  "The murders have held the entire city in a grip of fear," the blonde anchorwoman intoned as the picture shrank and retreated to the upper right-hand corner of the screen. "Police arrested Briggs in the company of a young girl from St. Mary's Academy, where two of the victims attended school. The girl's parents are calling it a narrow escape—"

  "Mija?" Consuela said softly.

  "A source close to the investigation says Briggs was found with several items belonging to the victims, including four cell phones—"

  "Holy fuck," I whispered, and slid off my stool. Consuela called my name, sharply, but I was already at the back door and running for the shed.

  When I got there the door was open, and there was a dark stain on the cement floor. But no stake.

  And no body. The shed was hot, airless—and empty.

  * * * *

  The wind is up. It mouths at the edges of the house and the air-conditioning is working overtime. It's a fall heat wave, ninety degrees in the shade and no hope of a break for a while. And with the wind, well, everyone's crazy. The news was full of rapes, fires, other stuff.

  "At least they caught that bastard," Dad said before he kissed my cheek and went out for another partner dinner. Consuela fussed at me. I tried eating, ran upstairs and threw it all up afterward. I didn't even fucking care.

  I'm sitting on my bed, staring at the window. Sunlight is draining out of the sky. The wind moans, and moans. The two little wounds on my throat are pulsing-hot. The inside of my throat is on fire, and part of why I ran upstairs after dinner is because I could hear Consuela's heart working, each chamber throbbing open and clapping shut.

  I could smell the blood in her veins.

  It smells good. Even now, upstairs, with my door closed and the lights on, it smells so good.

  It's almost night. They expect the Santa Anas to blow themselves out soon. I have my hands knotted together into fists. I'm waiting. My entire body aches.

  I should have said no. Jesus Christ, I should have said no.

  I'm thirsty.

  And I'm waiting. God only knows what he'll do when he comes back.

  But the thing that really scares me?


  Is the idea that he might not.

  Letters to Romeo

  Nancy Holder

  In fair Verona, where we lay our scene:

  Romeo attacked the old man in the foyer of the villa's home movie theater while busy servants decorated the room with festoons of orange-tree flowers, dried pomegranates, and silver leaves. He bent the drugged-out, half-dead bag of bones backward beneath the hanging pots of deadly nightshade and sunk in his fangs. Immediately he spit out the blood. It was contaminated with tetrodox— rank, disgusting. It rendered its victims paralytic. Sometimes it stopped hearts. It was a chemical sister of the poison Friar Lawrence had given to Juliet, to fake her own death.

  "Who did this?" Romeo shouted. "Who dared?"

  The servants kept to the shadows, rats fearing the king of the beasts—Romeo Montague, seven hundred years a nobleman of Verona, seven centuries the lover of Juliet Capulet, and a vampire.

  The stone coat of arms of the House of Montague, which had adorned his family's crypt until the nineteenth century, hung over his head like a crown. Fashionable apartments now stood where the palazzo had sprawled lavishly down the hillside. In fact, that was where he had found the old man, swaying in a doorway, drunk, starving, and crying for his cat—which, it turned out, had died five years before.

  Romeo had invited the miserable old man home to have dinner, and he had fed him well, too—better than he himself had eaten, when he had still eaten, though he was the only son of a noble family and therefore accustomed to the best. Romeo wasn't being kind; he did it to fatten up the old man's blood, so to speak, so that his own blood when he shared it would be full and rich. He wanted his love to have the best—or at the least, the best that he could give her under the circumstances.

  The old man would be Romeo's antipasto; it was Romeo's intention that a slew of better dishes—healthier veins— would follow. Until Juliet was changed, he had to lay low. It was difficult to hunt in these days of cell phones, Google Earth, and security surveillance cameras—especially since he didn't show up on any of them—and Romeo had been very distracted of late. Distracted meant careless, and vampires could not afford to be careless.

  But he wasn't so much careless as lovesick. The people of the 1300s had believed that love at first sight was a kind of lunacy, and Romeo now believed that they had been entirely correct. His love for Juliet Capulet had driven him mad. Imagine loving, wanting, for seven hundred years. Living the life of a fiend to pursue the sweetest of angels. Believing in God and in magic and then in nothing and then believing again, and then losing faith in everything. The unrelenting loneliness. How did one still hope, after the first century, the second?

  That was the nature of love. Utter madness.

  Romeo wore a black silk shirt, black jeans, and black boots. His black hair was cut close to his head, and his cheeks were scruffy with five-o'clock shadow. He had dark eyebrows, dark eyes, and darker lashes. Women swooned over him. But he didn't take advantage—didn't kiss them, didn't kill them. He was married.

  He was married!

  Juliet. Her name was the answer to centuries of prayer, and bargaining. During bad times—wars, famines, and the continued, utter absence of any sign of her—Romeo assumed that if there was a God, He despised him. Why else deny him his wife, when he had suffered so much for love of her?

  But he was alone no longer. Claire Johnson, the reincarnation of Juliet, had been living in his house for six months, and tomorrow night, she would be fifteen years old. Back in the day, Lord Capulet had betrothed her to Count Paris, insisting that he wait until she turned fifteen to marry her. So this time, he would wait for the magic number, fifteen, in hopes that things would fare better.

  Drumming his fingers on the table while the old man devoured a steak and a plate of pasta, Romeo had asked him questions. His staff bustled everywhere, putting up canopies of white silk and lilies, dusting, sweeping. Polishing the silverware and the crystal. Preparing a sumptuous feast for her last meal as a human.

  When he was certain that no one would miss the toothless old signor, he had attacked.

  And now this . . . outrage.

  "Who poisoned his blood?" he thundered.

  Snarling, he let the body fall to the floor. Night's candles had all burned out; the oldster's face was as gray and pale as a dead rat, and his bones cracked as he hit the hard marble.

  Tomorrow night, he thought, staring at the drugged man's blank eyes, she'll feed for the first time. And I was about to suck down poison. If from my unholy blood, she takes offense . . .

  He rammed his fist into the wall as his fangs retracted. He was hungry and angry; was he, the lord of this place, to be denied a simple meal?

  "Romeo," Lucenzo said, bowing low as he approached. He was Romeo's lieutenant, and he had hopes of becoming a vampire himself. "What's the matter?"

  "Someone gave this man tetrodox," Romeo said.

  Lucenzo's dark Italian eyes widened. "Surely not," he countered. "Who would dare to do such a thing in your house?"

  "Who, indeed? Someone who has more will to be kind than to live?"

  "He must have had it before he came here."

  "Impossible. Where would he have gotten it?" He glared at Lucenzo. "Find out. And when you do, bring him, or her, to me."

  Lucenzo grimaced. "Romeo, it's one night before the Signora's birthday. She's not used to . . . there's so much she's had to adjust to. A death like that would shock her."

  "She knows what I am. What I do. What I'm like."

  But did she? He had explained. He had even fed in front of her. But he had softened all of it—using Lucenzo as a willing donor, whom he left very much alive. Swearing a silent vow that, with her at his side, he would return to the gentle hunt he had employed when he'd first been turned. Once more, he would become the soft youth he had been before her death—and not the angry, tormented—

  —Monster—

  "I won't kill whoever did it," he informed Lucenzo. "But there will be consequences."

  "Si," Lucenzo said.

  "And clean it up." Romeo gestured to the old man. "He's still alive. Take him back to his doorway. He'll think it was all a dream, with all that tetrodox in his bloodstream."

  "Of course," Lucenzo said.

  Romeo turned his back on the mess and slammed down the hall. Livid, he pulled out his cell phone. And there he saw his wallpaper picture of Claire, grinning at him between glasses of Chianti. Her hair was wound into two little topknots, and she was wearing the Italian Twilight T-shirt she had bought as a joke.

  His anger softened. In the past, he had used a poison very like tetrodox to paralyze his victims and numb them from pain. Friar Lawrence had taught him to distill it. But it had been a pain to make. He'd had to buy hundreds of gallons of the puffer fish derivative and store it in his crypt. And it fouled the blood and made him sick. Sometimes he hallucinated. So ultimately he had banned it, although he hadn't disposed of it. What if someone beyond the world of his villa discovered it, and traced it back to him?

  When he'd awakened that evening, he'd impulsively carried one gallon of the stuff from the crypt up to the kitchen. He'd thought to show it to Claire, as she seemed quite intrigued by the idea that seven hundred years ago, "she" had drunk poison to feign her own death. There were servants everywhere, preparing for Juliet's big night, and he had discussed using a sedative and painkillers for her transformation with Lucenzo. They'd chatted about the tetrodox in the kitchen within earshot of the cook and a dozen other of Romeo's staff. Maybe someone had gotten confused and thought he meant to use it on the old man. Still, one did not make such assumptions in the home of a vampire.

  He looked down at Claire's picture again. Was she counting down the hours, the way he was? Seven hundred years of waiting. Seven hundred.

  ILY. R, he texted. He smirked. Look at the son of the House of Montague, texting. He wasn't big on it. There was no grace in it.

  The era Romeo and Juliet had been born in had been violent, yes, yet graceful
in its way. Duty and honor were as real as love at first sight. The twenty-first century was more complicated, with murky rules, coarse language, and coarser behavior. There was sex everywhere. If their story had begun now, instead of back then, they would never have had to kill themselves for the sake of their innocent passion. Very few people these days believed in the kind of love they had—a love that conquered the grave.

  He waited. She didn't text back.

  J? he added, with a flash of irritation. Or was it fear?

  There's nothing to fear, he reminded himself. She is Juliet. My search is over. But the fear wouldn't go away. It washed over him like the horror of finding himself buried in unhallowed ground, behind the sanctuary of his family's vault. He was a suicide, after all, destined for hell, and a suicide did not deserve to lie with the faithful sons and daughters of the church.