Page 12 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

And of course there’s the fact that I’m nearly naked.

I can almost hear her mind cracking over that one. Did rage make you rip right out of your clothes? her face seems to say. So I try to take a breath. I force my fists to uncurl—no easy feat, considering they’ve welded themselves shut. Then I straighten slowly, almost sort of casually.

Or as casually as I can manage, anyway, while still terrified that Halsten is lurking somewhere. Maybe he’s under the floorboards, my terrified brain suggests, and hoo boy, does that make my voice come out crooked. “Oh hey, Nance,” I say, like someone who just got caught doing something completely ridiculous. Blowing an octopus, I think, and cringe.

But god bless Nancy, she takes it in her stride.

“You really are like us, aren’t you,” she says softly. Then she seems to consider, and sort of laughs and blushes. “Well, I mean, like me, if I was some sort of witch superhero expert who can probably melt metal with her eyeballs.”

“The eyes started glowing, too, then, huh.”

“Oh yeah. They were amazing. You are amazing. Goodness, that ceiling thing, the magic, the superhero stance, the spectacular body—oh gosh, you could be on a billboard advertising just boobs,” she says, before realizing what exactly she has said. After which her blush deepens. “Sorry, I probably should be focusing a lot more on whatever terrible danger you’re in.”

It’s not me I’m worried about, I think about saying.

But as it’s clear Halsten isn’t here, and won’t be until the sun goes down, it feels like I have enough time to approach this a little less ominously. I climb down off the desk before I answer. Try to dust myself off a bit, and grab a mostly dry pride flag off the wall I keep up there to give old man Hannigan a heart attack.

It wraps nicely around my shoulders, and covers everything I need it to.

Probably would take the chill off, too, if I weren’t standing in an inch of indoor rain water. Nancy watches it splash around my stockinged feet, utterly perplexed. And she looks even more so when I try to sit down on my desk chair and it squelches. I feel cold water squish right between my butt cheeks, and wince.

Then wonder how on earth I’m going to explain all of this.

Usually, you see, I don’t have to. Even if most humans could see all of this, which is not guaranteed, they tend to automatically believe even the silliest of excuses. So silly excuses are kind of all I have. I have no idea at all how to keep my secret from another supernatural being, now that another supernatural being has unearthed evidence of it. The closest I can ever remember being to revealing my secret is that time a fairy wanted to know why my house was missing a front wall.

But the fairy wasn’t my friend.

And Nancy is close to being that.

She sits down opposite me and puts her little hand on my knee.

Like that’s going to work, I try to scoff internally. Even if I wanted to say, even if I was willing to risk her knowing, it would take weeks and weeks to go over it all. Diagrams. PowerPoint presentations. It’s impossible.

“I have a vampire mortal enemy who’s stalked me across centuries,” I say.

She shrugs. “Yeah. That’s about what I figured.”

CHAPTER FIVE

It takes about half an hour to clean up the office. Usually it would take me less, given that I can animate furniture and cleaning fluids and feather dusters with a flick of my hands. But Nancy wants to pitch in, and that means giving her a few helpful hints and beginner tips. None of which should take that long, because she’s already pretty knowledgeable and a quick learner. But it does, because I’m absolutely awful at teaching anything. Every word of advice comes out all rusty. Like I’ve been left too long in a leaky garage, and now there’s no easy way to get me going.

She just has to endure me fumbling out my thoughts in a way I can only hope makes sense to someone I’m supposed to think of as a friend. Kind tone for buddies, I remind myself. But then I find myself wondering if my kind tone comes across as condescending. If it sounds sarcastic—I mean, I am known for being pretty sharp and smartassy. Maybe she thinks I’m secretly rolling my eyes.

I just can’t tell.

Which is embarrassing enough on its own.

All these centuries in my head, and this is the sum total of my relating-to-people knowledge. It’s pathetic. She looks baffled. I don’t know how to fix it. “You’re doing a great job of drying the floor with magical evaporation,” I bellow, and then for some inexplicable reason give her a thumbs-up.

God, things are so much easier when you can just put on a sassy reporter persona. Nobody ever has to know, then, that on top of being me, Marley, I also occasionally have the memories of about four other people in my head. Some of them really strong. Some of them weak and vague. Sometimes it’s almost like hearing their voices from far away. But one thing is for certain: all these other versions of me suck even harder than I do at making friends. Mathilde was so introverted she regularly made wallflowers look like Vegas showgirls. Maisy couldn’t handle a conversation that lasted more than a minute. And Madison?

She preferred the company of movies to anyone she might make friends with.

Her closest buddy hated her so much she left her in an abandoned lighthouse with a gang of vampire bikers. And true, she didn’t know they were vampires. But she did know they were bikers. Massive, hairy bikers who wore leather vests with nothing on underneath, and were regular suspects in the many murders the town was infamous for. And now, I think, all these hundreds of years of loneliness and incompetent attempts at being a person are definitely starting to show.

It’s the reason she’s nervously peering at me through her cute owl-like glasses right now. Obviously I shut off while all that rattled through my stuffed-to-the-brim brain, and now she’s concerned. “Are you okay, Marley?” she even asks after a second, and now I have to think of an excuse for my weirdness.

“Fine. Normal. Just trying to come up with a plan of action.”