“And I do not see what you enjoy about it.”

“About what?”

“Coming up with rows of numbers. It’s poor entertainment.”

“No. No, there is an actual . . . No.” I spend the next two hours teaching a vampire slayer who was created to wipe out my bloodline how to correctly fill in a sudoku grid. He’s not at all bad at it, and I hate to acknowledge it.

“So, this is what we do during the day,” he says after a while.

“We?” I frown. “We don’t usually spend our days together.”

He smiles like I didn’t even speak.

“I’m serious. We rarely . . .” I drift off, because he’s taking a strand of my hair between his fingers and rubbing it gently, watching the flow of light orange across his own pale skin. His mouth murmurs a few words in another language—one that I speak, but I pretend not to, because this is not—

It shouldn’t—

What is even—

It’s casual, the way he tucks a lock of hair behind my ear. His touch is at once new and familiar, scorching and gentle. “Strawberry blond,” he says to himself. Then asks me, “We rarely what?”

Vampires don’t blush. We simply don’t have enough blood for it. I thank whoever cursed us for that small grace, glance away, and mumble, “Nothing.”

The rest of the day is . . .

I wish I could say that it’s terrible. That I consider walking into the sun just to escape Lazlo’s suffocating presence. But that’s not the way it goes.

He is surprisingly restful to be around, even when he teases me for holding a spoon like it’s an object of alien provenance, even when I sneak back up from the basement with my dried laundry, and he watches me fold my lingerie with a smile that says: I know who you wear it for.

In the afternoon, he collects all his weapons and begins to clean them.

“Have you—”

“No, I have not remembered,” he says. “But I feel an itch.”

“An itch,” I repeat. But I watch him polish and oil, trying not to jolt at every sound of clanking metal. My understanding is that the Hällsing Guild doesn’t micromanage, and that every slayer is allowed their weapon of choice. Or five. Given that silver, wooden stakes through the heart, or particularly garlicky Olive Garden dishes have no effect on us, and that only the sun can truly kill us, intelligent slayers (to my constant despair, Lazlo is one of them) tend to prioritize tools that will incapacitate us. Steel bolas trip and bind us, while blades can cut off limbs and make it difficult to run away. Since Lazlo has done both things to me, multiple times, I cannot help but startle when he asks, mid-sharpen:

“What do I do, Ethel?”

I blink. Force myself to calm down. “I told you, you—”

“Ethel.” He holds my gaze, still whetting his dagger with expert strokes. “What do I really do?”

I bite my lower lip. I’m going to have to lie to him again. When, exactly, did that begin to feel so abominable? “You’re right. I wasn’t truthful. The reason we know each other is . . .”

He stares, patient.

“You’re a CPA, Lazlo. You do my taxes.”

He sighs. Shakes his head, but his mouth twitches. “I remember why we were in that building now.”

“You do?”

“Hm. To go over your itemized deductions.”

“Precisely.”

He looks at me, amused. I look at him in pretty much the same way. And when I can no longer stand the tension of it, I ask him, “Do you, um, maybe wanna play cards?”

He immediately puts the blade away, like sharing an activity with me is the only thing he has ever desired, and it’s . . .

Nice, kind of. Shared. Pleasant. Not really what I usually do during the day, which is . . . maybe not lonely, but definitely on my own.

This is different. Playing cards with Lazlo. Watching him realize that “Clearly we are both very competitive people.” Laughing.

I can make my own meaning. I can find my own joy. But there is a different kind of happiness in this companionship. A sense of something coming. Like the breeze picking up before a storm.

It’s possible that I am, like the abbess said, just a fanciful, too-distractible girl. But for the first time in nearly one and a half millennia, I forget to keep track of time, and I don’t feel the need to run outside the exact moment the sun has set.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter 9

Lazlo’s response to the hordes of kids wearing costumes, adults sitting on their stoops giving out candy, and jack-o’-lanterns casting rich golden light across the neighborhood is a simple, unfazed, straightforward nod. I’m not sure whether he remembers what Halloween is or just thinks that this is what goes on every night in the West Village, but he’s game, and I cannot help but laugh.

“What sharp teeth you have,” he tells a group of little vampires who hold out their baskets to him. Then he distributes some of the cash I found in the back pocket of his jeans before washing them—all one-hundred-dollar bills.

I mouth Sorry to the children’s baffled mothers and quickly pull Lazlo away.

My people are, unsurprisingly, highly represented in this year’s costuming choices. I glance at Lazlo, wondering if seeing them is jogging his memory, but all he says is, “I’m hungry.” He eats a hot dog. Then a candied apple. Not once does he ask me if I’m hungry, too, or if I want a single bite.

I think he’s done with my bullshit. And I think that he’d rather I stay quiet than lie. So I do. When a pack of sexy Slimers tries to step between us, he grabs my hand to pull me closer, and doesn’t let go, not even when a fortune teller tries to sell us a couple’s reading.

“We’re not a couple,” I explain just as he loftily proclaims, “I am a man, and I make my own fortune.”

The teller’s eyes fall pointedly to where his fingers are closed around mine. “No matter,” she says. “Your fates are already intertwined.”

I scowl and let Lazlo drag me away into the night, watching the crowd as it transitions from adorable children to adults in skimpy costumes drinking questionable alcohol mixes from poorly disguised cups.

“I like it,” he says when we dip into a narrow, semi-deserted alleyway to avoid the throng. “We’ll do this often.”

“Halloween is only once a year,” I say, leaning back against the wall. “By the next, you’ll have remembered enough of who you are to spend it with . . . with whomever it is that you usually do.”

He stares down at me, patiently amused, arms crossed. Steps closer. “Just tell me, Ethel.”

“Tell you . . . ?”

“What we are.”

I straighten a little. “We are people. I thought you knew that.”

“What we are to each other,” he clarifies, a note of Come on, Ethel, don’t be obtuse in his tone that I should take more offense to.

But I am being obtuse. And he is being remarkably forbearing. “Should I redefine work nemeses for you?” I ask archly.

His smile just widens. “I think you’re tired, too.”

“Of what?”

“The lies.”

I look down at my shoes. Back up. “How are you so sure that—”

“I told you, Ethel. I know how I feel about you. And I know how you feel, too.”

“And what would that—”

He bends toward me slowly enough that I could conceivably stop him, but I don’t care to conceive of it—before his lips touch mine, or after.

I’ve kissed and been kissed by many people. None, however, who were, fundamentally, at an atomic level, like me. None whose feel and scent and body I’d learned over centuries, through endless battles and close calls. None who were anything like Lazlo.

That’s the problem, I think. After a while on this earth, one rarely experiences new sensations. But nothing has ever felt as good as Lazlo’s leg slipping between mine and pinning me to the wall. As the warmth of his hands closing around my lower back and my nape to turn me into him. As his tongue sliding against mine with no hesitation.