Page 1 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

CHAPTER ONE

I always know when he turns up to try to kill me, again.

And I’d like to say this is because my witchy vampire-sensing powers tingle, or that I have developed some sort of cool bloodsucker-tracking spell, or even that my crack journalistic skills always unearth his every whereabout. But truthfully—he just has this certain scent. This wintry, oddly outdated scent, like something someone’s dad might have worn around 1987.

Probably because he could have been just that.

He was certainly six feet five and completely alive back then.

Hell, he was alive centuries before that. I once asked him how old he was and he said, After the first five hundred years you sort of lose track. And then I think he tried to crush me to death with a filing cabinet, so I didn’t really get the chance to go for some follow-up questions.

I never do, really.

Or if I ever have I don’t recall that part.

And I doubt I’ll get to ask any here, either, because that icy, sort of spiced scent hits me like a slap on the way home from my semi-friend Cassie’s New Year party, and next thing I know I’m halfway up the nearest tree. There are leaves in my mouth and branches practically up my butt, and I’m pretty sure I’m upside down.

All the blood is rushing to my head.

I swear his throwing arm is unhinged.

He could lob a truck across a goddamn football pitch.

It’s just a real pity that he has no penchant for playing sports with large vehicles. Instead, he has one for finding me in every life I mysteriously get reincarnated back into—even though most witches don’t—and turning it all to shit. In nineteenth-century England it was crashing big ships into Whitby, and then stalking me across cliff tops and almost eating my friends. In the 1920s, I was a silent movie star—I have old posters of a woman who looks like me but not like me—and he bought the studio I was contracted to, and cast himself in the role of someone I was supposed to kiss.

Of course I recoiled.

Making me recoil was the whole point.

I still remember his laughing eyes when I couldn’t do it—though, to be fair, his eyes always laugh when he fucks everything up for me. His favorite thing is trapping me into hideous positions that I can’t explain to anyone, and then meeting my tormented gaze to communicate his deep amusement over my predicament.

Like in the eighties, on the boardwalk, with the funfair behind us.

Me in my video store uniform, him in leather on a motorbike, with his little vampire gang. My best friend at the time wanting to go have such fun with all of them, me unable to explain why that was a super bad idea. Because that’s the thing, you see, about being a witch. About being any sort of supernatural being.

You can’t really tell any human what is going on.

You try to explain to them that a vampire is about to peel their scalp back like a shell from a boiled egg, and somehow the words just don’t come out right. Everything you’re saying gets bleeped out, like you’re in some kind of constant magical game show.

She thought I was talking about candy floss.

I can’t even remember if she got eaten or not.

I don’t remember everything from my other lives. Just snatches, impressions, moments where he made everything awful. Some sense of my own murder, most likely at his hands. I think it’s at his hands. It always feels like it’s at his hands, and really, who else’s hands would it be? One supernatural being who likes to throw you up trees is bizarre enough. A second gunman getting me from the grassy knoll just seems excessive.

It’s him.

It’s always him.

And now he’s come to my sweet home in Hollow Brook, where I finally managed to grow up so normal that I fell in love with the place, and my family, and my job, before I even started to get the memories and all my witchy powers. My youth was spent daydreaming of being a journalist, biking through piles of leaves to report on a pumpkin shortage for a school newspaper that didn’t exist until I made it so. My teenage years involved a lot of acting like I was some horror version of Nancy Drew, doing all the crime solving and investigating every instance of paranormal activity that I was just starting to sense.

And even better: this time, in this life, I’ve actually found friends.

Real friends, who can see all the supernatural things, too.

Cassie is such a massive witch she’s created a whole sanctuary for weird creatures. Her boyfriend is a werewolf. Her microwave talks to her, and her familiar is a raccoon called Pod. And Nancy, although newer to the supernatural business, is already dating a demon and doling out magical books from her bookstore, Better Off Read. And I know that donut-faced dog of hers can talk.

It thinks I can’t hear it. I’ve heard it, all right.