I smile at the genuine excitement in her voice, despite the fact that she must be in pain. It’s so unfair that she hasn’t been able to come this weekend. Whitby is her favourite place at the best of times– she grew up here, after all– but I’ve lost count of the number of times she’s waxed lyrical to me about the Goth Weekend. I’ll get this job done, but I know she would have enjoyed every moment of it.
I must sigh then, because I hear Mina make her ‘come on, old girl’ noise over the phone.
‘Whatever you’re thinking,’ she says, ‘you need to stop. You’re going to have a brilliant weekend.’
I laugh a little. ‘I was just thinking that you’d have done a much better job on this feature than me.’
She snorts in disagreement. ‘You can do this. You’re a great reporter.’
Actually, I’m a pretty average reporter, but I’m grateful for Mina trying to make me feel better. She always does. She’s like a tiny sunbeam in black lipstick and leather.
I swap my phone to the other ear and readjust my bag on my shoulder to grab the banister. The stone steps look slippery, and I’d really prefer not to fall down them before I even settle in.
At the top of the staircase, there’s a tiny landing, maybe a metre square. There’s a door to the left with a little ceramic bath hanging on a nail and an open door to the right. The lights are low in the bedroom, but I can just about see the outline of a small cross on the wallpaper, a whisper of darkness against the faded lines of the paper which surrounds it. The crucifix itself is missing, and for some reason that makes another wave of panic bite at my throat.
‘You’ve gone quiet again,’ Mina says gently, like she thinks she might scare me if she speaks any louder. ‘Did you find the?—’
But my brain never gets the chance to process whatever she says after that. Because that’s the precise moment the bathroom door suddenly swings open, the cloud of steam that billows out just dense enough to blur the lines of the shadowy figure which emerges. There’s the rumble of a low growl, a flash of light glinting off fangs, and green eyes that narrow as they meet mine. It feels like the point in a dream where you start to realise that it’s actually a nightmare.
I try to scream, but the sound sticks in my throat, my heart racing so fast that I genuinely fear it might burst clean out of my chest.
And then everything goes black.
Chapter Two
BRAM
Idon’t know which one of us that awful scream came from.
Ok, that’s a lie. I know exactly who it was, and it’s a secret that I will carry into eternity. My reputation is in tatters anyway, and it won’t do me any favours if people know that I, Liam Bramwell, supposed local hard man and literal vampire, screamed like a toddler at the sudden appearance of a random girl outside my bathroom door.
Girl or woman, I’m not entirely sure which. If I had known which, that might have affected my decision to grab her as she dropped, before she fell head first down the stairs. Actually, that’s a lie too. I would have grabbed her either way. I’m not about to let anyone fall to their death. I’m actually surprisingly anti-death considering… well… the whole undead thing.
It will affect how I get out of this situation, though. I’m pretty sure my towel untucked itself as I grabbed her, and there’s a good chance the only reason it’s still around me at all is because of the weight of her body on mine.
Oh yeah, did I mention that I was still holding her? Not in a creepy way, it’s just that she’s still coming round, and Iwould really prefer she didn’t fall down and die. That’d be a real buzzkill.
Anyway, none of that is the point. Who the hell is she, and why the hell is she here?
It sounds kind of arrogant to assume she’s here for me, but people have attempted it before. But weirdly, it’s usually the bartender thing, rather than the vampire thing, that draws them in. See, I own one of the most well-known vampire-themed bars in Yorkshire, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I do, on occasion, flirt with my customers to get them to spend more money on drinks.
Ok, I’m a little ashamed, but I’ve got to keep the lights on somehow, and it’s a surprisingly effective method of turning a first-timer into a repeat customer.
So they occasionally get a little obsessed with me. They’re only human. Do any of them believe for a moment that I’m an actual vampire? I suspect not, and that’s exactly the way I like it. I can count on my fingers the number of people I trust with that information. You can’t be too careful in this day and age. Especially with the ever-present threat of vampire hunters.
It’s never actually happened to me, but I’ve heard enough tales of the vampire hunters from Elias to see me through the next few centuries. Elias is… well, he’s my mentor, of sorts. It’s complicated. He’s the one who turned me, but he’s also my oldest and best friend. And when I say oldest friend, I mean that literally. The dude predates flushing toilets.
Though, when he spoke about the hunters, I always imagined them to be imposing warriors or middle-aged geeks, not young, beautiful women like the one I just caught.
Anyway, whatever she’s here for, it’s the first time anyone’s managed to get close to me unnoticed, and it’s throwing me off my game. That said, I’m usually at my own cottage on the other side of the harbour, and my security is a hell of a lot tighter thanWladek’s. I mean, the yearDraculacame out, for God’s sake. In our circles, that’s like having ‘password’ as your password.
What I don’t get is how she’d have known I’d be here. Up until a few hours ago,Ididn’t even know I’d be here. I mean, renting out my own place for the Goth Weekend is a no-brainer. I’ve been doing it for years. I usually stay with Quinn in the flat attached to the bar. He’s our head bartender and terminally late, so it made sense to rent the flat to him. It meant he had at least a chance of getting to work on time. It’s not the biggest space in the world, but there are blackout blinds on the windows and an oversized sofa in the living room that usually has my name on it.
But I got there this evening, and the bastard shooed me away. Turns out his new girlfriend showed up to surprise him, and he’s planning to spend the weekend ‘boning her on every last surface of the flat’.
His words, not mine.
It seems having your undead mate knocking around while you’re trying to get your groove on is not exactly conducive to romance, so that’s how I ended up here, back at good old Harker Cottage. With an intruder, apparently. An intruder who finally appears to be waking up.