“I could . . .” I spluttered, glaring at him. “OK, no, there’s actually very little chance of me surviving this scenario on my own. But there’s even less chance of me getting out of here alive if my traveling companion eats me.”
Given the return of that impish gleam in his eye, I really wished I’d phrased that differently.
“Look, you could maybe do it . . . under the right circumstances . . .” he conceded magnanimously.
“Please, pause less,” I snapped at him.
“You’re clearly resourceful when cornered, OK? But it would be stupid to try it alone. You know this. Surely you have some sort of mental statistic about the probability of dying while hiking through the woods unprepared and unaccompanied at night.”
I didn’t have exact figures, but I’d read enough survival guides to know that the probability of surviving “wasn’t good.” And as much as I hated to admit it, he had a point. And he’d said I was resourceful, which was the first time anyone had ever applied that word to me. “Intelligent” or “thorough” or even “fastidious,” sure, but nothing that implied that I was capable outside the research library. It meant a lot, but I wasn’t about to tell him so.
“I give you my solemn promise as a vampire, I will not harm a hair on your head,” he said, in a tone so serious it sounded like a mockery, while holding up his left hand.
“Most people swear oaths with their right hands,” I noted, because I did not, in fact, have a statistic for unprepared solo night-hiking deaths, but I was sure it wasn’t optimistic.
“Sassy. You are sassing me now, aren’t you?” he said, though he did raise his right hand.
“Yes, I am. And I have one condition,” I told him.
He rolled his eyes heavenward and sighed. “What?”
“I do not set one foot into the woods with you until you tell me your name.”
“We’re wasting time! And we’re already in the woods!”
“You got to ‘accidental’ second base with me earlier—we might as well be on a first-name basis. If nothing else, it’s just good manners.”
He waved his pale hands at me, flinging water at my face. “This from the woman who could barely be persuaded to have a polite conversation with me when I was being nothing but charming before takeoff?”
“Are you seriously not going to tell me your name?” I exclaimed.
“Not until you tell me yours.”
“Anna Whitfield.” I slung my hand up to shake his.
He bent over and looked like he was about to kiss my knuckles but instead hauled me to my feet. “Nice to meet you, Anna. My name is Finn Palmeroy.”
My lips twitched. He did not look like a Finn. A Slade or a Clint or some other hyper-romantic soap-opera hero name but not Finn. And it seemed that his vampire sight allowed him to see my smirk, even in the moonlight, because he sounded none too amused when he said, “Girls with a name like an angry librarian should not throw stones.”
“It’s a family name, but fair enough,” I said, barely restraining the urge to make a rude gesture. “Let’s go.”
My ballet flats slipped and slid on my feet while I walked, and I worried about mud sucking them off my feet as the vampire led me into the trees. I shuddered in my sodden clothes. While the air might have been warm, I still felt as if I were getting a full-body hug from a wet sponge. My only comfort was that Finn looked as miserable as I did.
“What about Ernie the pilot?” I asked. “What if we run into him?”
“Trust me, he doesn’t want to run into me,” he growled, and I could tell by the slight slur to his speech that his fangs had descended.
I dropped back to a safe distance. I’d had very little in-person experience with actual vampires. Not that I had anything against them. We just didn’t move in the same circles. I was still in middle school when a recently turned tax consultant named Arnie Frink launched vampires out of the coffin and onto an unsuspecting human public . . . and then humanity had a collective nervous breakdown. Stakes were purchased and used on a grand scale. Curfews were imposed. Halloween was canceled.
It took a few years for human governments and the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead to reach a compromise that both sides could live with. Humans couldn’t seem to accept that the monsters they’d always feared didn’t want to gnaw on their necks at the first opportunity. Vampires were just looking for a chance to live out in the open without worrying about being staked by their paranoid neighbors.
As a reward for not overthrowing humanity just by virtue of superior upper-body strength, the Council was allowed to establish smaller regional offices in each state in every country. Local Council members policed newly turned vampires for irresponsible feeding behavior, settled quarrels, and generally kept the vampire circles respectable.
My life after the Coming Out, well, it didn’t change much. My father the professor was too wrapped up in his work to pay much attention to a total alteration of humanity’s view of the world. Other than the possibility of having live (so to speak) subjects to interview about key events in history, he had no interest. My mother thought dealing with the reality of mythical creatures was “too scary” for me, so she kept me from watching the news, reading magazines, or surfing the Internet for vampire news. And when she found out that my school was holding an “Undead American Awareness Week,” she threatened to homeschool me. As with the sex-ed lessons, I had to excuse myself from the classroom and do independent study in the library while my classmates learned about vampire culture. Because Mother didn’t sign the permission slip, and her signature was difficult to forge.
A few vampires taught at the college I attended, but strict fraternizing guidelines kept students from forming personal attachments to them. As an adult, working in the history department of a small private university in rural Virginia, I had even less contact with the undead. I spent my hours locked away in the special archives, studying books so old they could crumble into dust at a touch. Those vampires who chose to specialize in history tended toward the more theoretical angles of the field. Objects from their period of origin seemed to make them sad.
Seeing Finn bare his fangs and go into full-on raging undead mode on the plane had been a shock I hadn’t quite registered yet. When those fangs came out again now, my hands started to shake, and my legs felt like they would liquefy.
I leaned against an oak tree, the rough bark scratching my waterlogged skin as I struggled to get my breath back. The full impact of what I’d just experienced seemed to land directly on my chest. I focused on breathing in and then out, one breath at a time. I pictured my blood flowing back into my fingertips, my toes, keeping my body warm. It was a technique I’d learned in one of my many, many, many therapy sessions, meditating on keeping my body functioning even while my mind spun into chaos.
I burst out laughing, a hysterical half sob that grated on my own nerves. But I couldn’t seem to stop, Finn took a step back, and I laughed even harder. All thoughts of the first few minutes after the crash being vital to our survival disappeared from my head, and all I could do was cackle.
I laughed until tears rolled down my already wet cheeks. I seemed to be feeling all of the emotions at once—fear, confusion, anger, fear, joy, relief, fear. It was all I could do to stay upright under the weight of all those feelings. Finn took hold of my elbows, trying to support my weight while pulling me away from the tree.
My feet got tangled up with each other, and I flopped face-first into his chest. I stopped laughing immediately. Finn’s arms slipped around my waist to hold me up. My nose seemed to be buried directly between his pecs, which were just as firm and well shaped as I’d suspected them to be on the plane. He smelled like expensive cologne and dryer sheets. How did I end up smelling like lake water and panic sweat, while he smelled like he just rolled out of a fashionable magazine? To my surprise, I didn’t fight his hold. I didn’t freak out over the invasion—nay, shattering—of my personal space. I wanted to stay right there, where I felt
almost safe, with the comforting weight of his arms resting around me. As long as I could suppress the memory of Finn tossing me out of the plane, I could stay there forever.
And because that was one of the strangest thoughts I could remember having in a long time, I started giggling all over again.
“Uh, I don’t know what to do here,” Finn said, patting my head awkwardly. “We’ve only taken a few steps. I thought we had a couple of miles to go before one of us collapsed into hysterics.”
I snorted into his shirt. I had to pull it together. As much as I deserved to wallow in these crash waves of endorphins, giggling like a loon wasn’t going to get me to a warm, safe, dry place.
I pulled away from him, wiping at my damp cheeks.
“OK, doll?” he asked, and I shook my head. I also grimaced at the condescending nickname, but chose the better part of “not pissing off a vampire.”
“Why didn’t you do anything?” I wheezed. “When he was trying to take my bag? When he was jumping out of the plane? Why didn’t you stop him?” He hooked his arm through my elbow and tried to budge me along, but I jerked out of his grasp and leaned harder against the tree, bark be damned.
“I was trying, but it didn’t work. It’s a common problem for me, lately.”
“What does that even mean?” I asked.
“Come on,” he said, ignoring my question. “We have to keep moving. It will help our clothes dry faster.”
“In a place where logic doesn’t live,” I retorted, though I moved my feet all the same.
We walked deeper into the trees, my limbs seeming all the more heavy. Any energy or adrenaline in my system had been used up, and I was running on fumes. The ground was uneven and smelled strongly of old pennies. My feet snagged on roots that rippled up out of the ground. I deliberately ignored the slap of leaves against my shins, sure that I was wading through a sea of poison ivy. We walked for what felt like forever, with the vampire—Finn, his name was Finn—dragging me along half the time, until I could no longer see the glow from the burning plane wreckage.
“Let’s stop,” he said, helping me lower my butt to a felled log. I wondered why, until twinges of soreness rippled up my legs. My heels and the balls of my feet stung with the beginnings of blisters. And despite the fact that I was soaked to the bone, I was so thirsty I could have wept with it. Where was I going to get water? Would the lake have been safe to drink from? Was it a mistake to leave it? Maybe we should have stayed near the wreckage, even if it meant confronting whoever had downed the plane? Finn could fight them off, couldn’t he? I mean, he might need to feed before he did it . . . Wait. I eyed him suspiciously and questioned again whether that was why he was really dragging me along. As a road-trip snack? Was I the human equivalent of Corn Nuts?
I watched as he scrambled up the tree, lithe and graceful as any predator. Well, it seemed he had energy to spare even without turning me into a juice box. He disappeared into the branches above, and I was suddenly sort of jealous. I wanted to be up there with him, moving with so little trouble. I wanted to see the view, to know what it was like to take in the world from such a height. I’d never so much as climbed a rock wall before. I found the number of waivers required by my gym to be off-putting.
“Do you see anything?” I called, and then clamped my lips together. If we were being followed by Ernie or his employers, I probably shouldn’t shout. Or if I did, I should just go ahead and shout, “Here we are!” to save some time. At any rate, Finn didn’t answer.
A panicked thought hit me. What if he was already gone? What if he was swinging through the trees like some sort of vampire Tarzan? What if he’d left me alone in the woods? I had a head full of information but no survival skills.
Once again, I took several slow, deep breaths. I couldn’t respond like this every time Finn got out of my sight, and I couldn’t rely on the lovely white rectangular pills to get me through my anxiety.
A few minutes later, I heard the foliage above rustling, and I sighed in relief.
I grinned widely as Finn dropped to the ground in front of me, then quickly schooled my features into a less awestruck expression.
“What?”
“Nothing, that was just impressive,” I said, shrugging.
He hauled me up to my feet. “Well, I’ve got bad news, and I’ve got worse news.”
“Hit me with the worse news first.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Most people ask for the better news first.”
“I just want to know what I’m dealing with.”
“The worse news is that I don’t see lights anywhere. For miles. No signs of civilization. And I can see pretty damn far.”
I frowned, thinking of an ad I’d seen at the airport, a big, splashy, colorful poster that had taken up a good portion of the wall near the ladies’ room at my gate. Happy families camping near a lake, fishing, kayaking. It had looked so inviting I actually took a brochure, before remembering that I disliked camping, rough living, and the outdoors in general.
“Maybe we’re in the Lakelands Nature Preserve,” I told him. “I saw a bunch of posters and stuff at the airport. It’s the biggest parcel of untouched land in the state. We’re about three hundred miles away from the Hollow, in the middle of what can only be described as ‘lake, undeveloped land, more lake, more undeveloped land, more lake.’ ”
“What about campgrounds? Cabins? Hell, a ranger station?”
“Oh, they have them, ringed all around the outside edge of the woods, because most people are smart enough to stay out of the middle.”
Finn groaned.
“Why don’t you just run ahead?” I asked. “You can run a lot faster than I can, not to mention see in the dark. You could make it to a road or town much easier without me slowing you down. Send help back for me. I’ll stay right here.”
He suddenly looked very uncomfortable and glanced down at my bag. “I don’t want to leave you alone, especially with the pilot still out there, wandering around.”
“You could carry me,” I told him, somewhat insulted by the flicker of doubt that crossed his face.
“Well, that’s the bad news. We’ve walked for much longer than I thought. The sun’s going to come up in about an hour. And I haven’t had any blood in about eight hours. I don’t have the strength to carry you without feeding.”
I shot him a look that I could only describe as “extreme shade.” I wasn’t about to let him feed from me. I didn’t trust him not to take too much. Maybe he could control his thirst, maybe he couldn’t, but I wasn’t about to test the theory. We would just have to find some other way.
“I could keep going, try to find help on my own, while you sleep,” I offered. He smirked at me, as if he didn’t believe I could get five feet on my own. “That facial expression is unnecessary.”
“I’m not doubting that you could find your way out of here by yourself. I doubt that anybody could. You don’t know which way to go. You don’t have any supplies. And you’re dressed for the mall.”
I pursed my lips. I was equal parts relieved that his doubts weren’t rooted in me personally and annoyed that he was right. My shoes were decidedly mall-friendly. I pointed over the horizon. “Well, the plane was headed in that direction. I’m assuming that if we continued that way, eventually, we would run into other people.”
He looked vaguely impressed with my logic and nodded his head. “OK, but you’re dead on your feet, kitten. Fatigue sets in, you start making bad decisions, you could get even more lost, hurt, dehydrated.”
“I could make it,” I insisted, before adding snappishly, “OK, fine, I probably couldn’t. And don’t call me ‘kitten.’ ”
“Let’s just find somewhere to rest for the day. That will be challenge enough, kitten.”
I grimaced at the nickname but reasoned that he was right. I was tired and sore, and my feet felt like they were on fire. There was no way I was going to make it much farther in what was left of the night.
He tried to slip his arm under mi
ne to tug me along, but I shrugged him off. He raised his hands defensively, as if he was so scared of the little human. We staggered on, Finn watching the sky warily, until we found a thicket of pine trees, the branches thick with needles.
Finn started stripping off boughs from the middle of the trunks and stacking them carefully on the lower branches, adding an extra layer of pine needles between him and the sky.
“Really?” I asked, watching him check for thin spots in the coverage.
“You were expecting the Ritz? Trust me, I’ve had to sleep outside a time or two in my years. This works.”
I wondered exactly how many years he was talking about, but I knew that age questions were considered rude in vampire circles.
“I just thought you would know how to find a cave or dig a hole or something.”
“Right, all vampires have a sense for the nearest caves, because we’re all part bat?”
“The sun is coming up. Is this really the time for undead cultural sensitivity training?” I shot back. “Wait, don’t you have some of that mega-SPF 500 sunscreen to protect you in situations like this?”
“Yes,” he said. “All vampires carry it on them for emergencies.”
“Great.”
“It’s in my carry-on. On the plane. Which has crashed.”
“Sonofabitch.” I sighed. “Well, if it makes you feel better, I have an effective, all-natural insect spray, which happens to repel both of the extremely bite-y species of poisonous spiders that live in Kentucky, but it’s in my luggage, too.”
“My being evaporated by the sun is a bit more of an issue than your getting a couple of bug bites, so no, that doesn’t make me feel better. And yes, I can sleep underground, but that wouldn’t provide you much protection, now, would it?”
“How much protection are you going to provide me when you’re technically dead for the day?”
“Enough that you’re sleeping right by my side, kitten.”
“Call me ‘kitten’ one more time, and you’re going to ‘accidentally’ roll over on one of those pointy wooden branches in your sleep.”