Page 7 of Only Fangs

“You’re a fucking prick, Matt. You know that?” But there’s a softness in my tone. Because yes, I got fired. And yes, it’s going to be a pain in my ass to find a new job. But oh my god, the look on Danely’s face as he stood in the middle of the office.

Matt nods solemnly, but there’s a twitch at the corner of his mouth. I know he’s desperate to ask for all the details. And I can do one better.

I slide my phone across the breakfast bar, face up, the video ready for him to play. One of the girls in the office was in the middle of recording some TikTok update and managed to capture the whole thing.

We watch in silence and then Matt catches my eye. My defences crumble and I can’t hold the laughter in any longer.

“Was it epic?” Matt asks.

“It was. It really was.”

“I’m sorry you got fired.”

“Are you?”

Matt shrugs. “You’re too good for that place, you know. You could do anything. Do something you really love.”

An hour later, Matt knocks on the door to my bedroom. “Come in,” I call out, putting down the book I was reading as he walks in holding his iPad in front of him like it’s some kind of precious offering.

“I want you to look at this,” he says and hands it over.

“A job advert?” I squint at it.

“For your dream job.” He grins. “A start up app and you’re more than qualified.”

“But it’s a vampire job.”

“There’s no such thing as a ‘vampire job’.” He does the air quotes. “Some human places won’t hire vampires, or not yet anyway, but it doesn’t work like that the other way round. Besides, a job is a job and you’ve always said you’d love to work for a start up.”

“But…”

“No buts. I already sent an email to ask for more information.” His grin stretches further, reaching almost gurning levels.

Chapter 5

Ari

Ilet myself into Clara’s place at 8 p.m. sharp and she rushes to greet me, waving a bottle of a truly decadent red in my face

“I cannot believe you’re actually going through with this,” she all but screams in my face, lips drawn back into something she thinks of as a smile. Other people normally recoil in horror at this particular expression, but when you’ve been friends for well over a hundred years you start to cut each other a bit of slack.

I follow her into the kitchen and grab us a couple of glasses for the wine. OK, it isn’t wine. And the glasses are more what you’d describe at goblets. But that whole gothic, blood drinking aesthetic sounds kind of creepy when you say it out loud.

“Any applicants?” Clara asks, twisting her body so she’s leaning against the breakfast bar, glass poised just in front of her lips.

I grimace. I uploaded the ad for an app developer to Reddit a week ago and I’ve still not had any interest. Well, except for the person who messaged to ask if I was that Ari Haywood in which case they wouldn’t dream of trusting me to pay them, which I thought was a little unfair and so I immediately deleted it without bothering to reply. “I think the pool of qualified vampires is pretty small,” I tell Clara. “I mean, I guess it’s not a skillset most of us have mastered.”

“You’ll have to find a newbie for sure,” she says.

“Actually, I think I might need to take on a normie.”

Clara’s eyes sparkle. “Yes! Do it. Daddy would go insane!”

Clara’s father is one of the wealthiest men in the country and the self-styled keeper of vampiric purity. Basically, think of Jacob Rees Mogg and make him an actual vampire. Yep. Poor Clara. But she does take every possible opportunity to upset him. He’s going to love the idea of the app but he would lose his shit if he knew a normie wrote the code.

Is it fate? Or just pure coincidence as that’s the exact moment my phone pings with a notification. I have a message waiting for me on Reddit. “Oh my god,” I whisper as I read it, scanning forward to see if I’m reading this correctly. “I have an applicant! An actually qualified one.”

“Vamp?”