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But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I could hardly breathe.
I was too stunned to do anything but gape at him, horrified.
I wasn’t used to being wrong about much.
But oh, god—I’d had itallwrong about him.
The dark secret he’d been harboring wasn’t that he was between jobs, or was unemployed.
It was that he was a vampire.
During that middle of the night phone call, when I’d laughingly asked if he were some sort of murderer, thief, or a vampire, and he answered that yes, he was a vampire…
I’d only been kidding, of course. Buthehadn’t been.
How was this possible?
I had to squeeze my eyes shut tight to fight off the waves of terror and revulsion running through me.
“You’re…you’re a vampire,” I finally managed. “Like, an actualvampire.”
He looked at me blankly. Which was fair. He’d probably—reasonably!—assumed we’d already covered this. “I mean…yes?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just…” I shook my head. I had to get out of there. I was breathing too fast, like I couldn’t take in enough air.Why couldn’t I get my body to move?
Reggie stared at me wide-eyed, scrutinizing my face. Whatever he saw there must have answered whatever questions he had, because his expression changed into something akin to horror. “You didn’t believe me when I told you. You thought I was joking.” He jumped away from me, as though terrified his touch would scald me. “Oh,Hades, Amelia—”
His sudden movement was all I needed for my muscles to finally unlock. I hopped off the table and sprinted to my bedroom, heart thundering in my chest.
I threw the door closed behind me and locked it, hoping that door locks worked on vampires.
•••••••
After a few moments ofpacing my bedroom in a panic, my wits returned enough for me to start thinking things through.
Okay, yes. I was snowed in at my family’s Wisconsin cabin with a vampire. Andyes, a few minutes ago he’d wanted to drink my blood as part of some kinky sex thing. But when I was finally able to quiet the shrieking sound in my head enough to string two coherent thoughts together, I realized that if Reggie wanted to kill or otherwise hurt me, he likely would have done it already.
I went to my door and double-checked the lock to make sure it was still in place. Regardless of how much danger I was actually in, a locked bedroom door seemed smart.
And, hell. I barely knew him. Maybe he was just waiting for the right opportunity to suck me dry.
In the meantime, I needed to research vampires and find out everything I could. I pulled my phone from the front pocket of my jeans and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the Wi-Fi was working. When a big storm hit up there, it sometimes went out for days.
I didn’t know where to start, so I typedVAMPIRE CHARACTERISTICSinto the browser search bar and hoped for the best.
Alotof links popped up. There were tons of Reddit posts by people claiming to have had sex with a vampire, but I ignored those. That wasn’t the sort of information I was looking for—Iwouldn’t be having sex with a vampire—and I suspected they made those stories up for clicks, anyway. It wasn’t until I got to the second page of results that I found something potentially useful: a website for an organization called The Upper-Midwestern Amateur Vampire Hunter Association.
How can you tell if the STRANGE person you just met isn’t just STRANGE but is also actually a VAMPIRE trying to blend into human society? A HANDY CHECKLIST:
Do they wear anachronistic or otherwise bizarre clothing?
Do they seem impervious to cold?
