Page 4 of Be Still My Unbeating Heart

“Was it a vampire?” he asked, pushing a hand through his hair, which suddenly felt hot against his skin. He knocked his Wayfarers to the ground and fumbled to pick them back up. “Do you think a vampire killed her?”

Whitby padded closer to the body, sniffing the air around it. “I don’t smell saliva.”

Bastian didn’t either, but that could be because the scent ofother thingswas so strong.

“How long do you think she’s been dead?” Whitby asked.

“An hour,” he said, tucking the Wayfarers into his shirt pocket and trying to steady his hands. “Ninety minutes, tops. The bloodaround the wound is already coagulating. Plus, the body’s almost cold.”

He didn’t need to touch the girl to know that. He could sense the lack of body heat—a freezer chill that crept toward him across the sand.

Whitby looked at him from the other side of the corpse.

“You went out an hour ago,” she said.

“I went to buy cat litter before the shop closed.”

“You were gone a while.”

“The shop owner was chatty, and I needed to practice my Italian.”

“You didn’t eat your dinner when you got back.”

“I ate on the road, remember?”

He had finished a full serving of pig’s blood, which he’d brought along in his favorite Bonnie Tyler flask, an original from the eighties that he had found in a charity shop. The refrigerator in the apartment held twenty more pouches of blood, which was more than enough to see them through the next couple of weeks. They had brought them from London in a chill box to guarantee maximum freshness.

He still felt full, and for a second he wondered if that was because he had dined on the girl and buried the memory, but no, he would remember killing again. He wouldfeelit, the human blood rushing through his system, as invigorating as jet fuel and nothing like the minimal satisfaction of animal blood.

There was no way he killed this girl.

“Look,” he said, “let’s not start finger-pointing. You just said you couldn’t detect any saliva.”

Whitby’s tail flicked the sand. “Just seems sort of a coincidence that we’ve been in Vernazza less than a couple of hours and already there’s somebody with their neck—”

She broke off suddenly to dig her mouth into her shoulder, then licked the spot vigorously. An itch…or a flea. Despite himself, Bastian’s mouth twitched with amusement. That would be just perfect. A dead body on the beachandWhitby had fleas.

The gravity of the situation descended on him once more, and he cast around them to make sure nobody else was there. So far, the coast was clear.

“We have to get out of here,” he said.

“Yes.” Whitby trotted back to the path. “We’ll go to the apartment and pack and catch the first train out of town—”

Bastian scoffed. “We’re not going back to London. We only just got here!”

Her eyes narrowed at him. “There’s no way we can stay. As soon as word gets out that a woman is dead with her throat torn out, they’ll be at our door with pitchforks and flaming torches.”

“I forgot we live in the eighteenth century.”

“They won’t care if you did it or not, Bastian; they’ll only care about what you are. You’re good at hiding it, but they’ll figure it out sooner or later.”

Bastian’s jaw pulled tight with frustration that threatened to bloom into anger—the kind of anger that had so often escalated beyond his control in the past. But that was before. Now he was calm.

Calm, calm, calm, like a cucumber in an ice-clinking seltzer.

He turned his gaze away from Whitby. You could never out-stare a cat. He looked at the sea, which glittered and winked under the moon.

Whitby’s worries weren’t unfounded. Prejudice against vampires remained rife. For centuries, they had lived solely in storybooks and fairy tales. Few humans knew that vampires really did exist. Then, ten years ago, a popular social media influencer namedSabrina X “came out of the coffin” as a creature of the night, and vampires went mainstream.