Page 27 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

“I wish you’d stop calling your battery compartment that.”

“Well, if you would only mold me a plasticine bottom like I asked.”

“But I did and you weren’t happy with it,” I protest, impatient now. There are more important things to be focusing on—like the fact that I can’t seem to get her ass back on. She hurls herself about so frequently that the tiny screws that hold her body together are kind of loose now.

But she doesn’t care.

“Because you made the bum crack enormous.”

“The crack was a normal size, I just don’t think you really like the idea of having one. You want a sort of bulge on your back, quite obviously. Which is fine, but don’t shout at me when I give you that.”

“I wasn’t shouting, I was—”

She stops dead in the middle of her sentence, and I know exactly what has happened when she does. Her screen is facing the window while I fiddle with her backside, and so of course she sees what happens out there before I do. “He’s awake, isn’t he,” I whisper without looking. I don’t know why I bother with either of those moves, however, because her nightmare collage face is on the screen.

And she’s made it horrified.

Now I have no choice but to show I know he’s awake, too. No chance of a surprise attack or a sudden attempt at fleeing. “Thanks a lot, Phone,” I hiss at her as I turn my head toward him. Expression set to stern and annoyed, one fist raised and already glowing.

But then we lock gazes, him and me, and somehow it doesn’t go the way I expect. His eyes are much less narrowed than I was imagining. In fact, they’re wide, in a way I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. And they get wider when he sees me see him. They’re really quite big when he’s not scowling and squinting.

And did I know that they were that color?

It’s this deep, strange blue, like a hole in the middle of the ocean.

But before I can really process that, he makes a sound. An exclamation, muffled by the glass between us but made clear by the round O of his mouth. Then he abruptly drops, in a way I don’t think was entirely intentional. It’s too fast, and too flail-y, and I definitely hear a crash from down below.

“Oh, I do hope he’s dead,” Phone says.

Even though she has to know that’s not possible. It’s only two stories, and down below is just tarmac and trashcans and a scrubby strip of grass that runs into a mess of trees that I call my garden. I mean, he could have technically gotten beheaded by one of the fences that separates my area from the area owned by the hat shop and the area owned by the laundromat.

But it seems unlikely.

And sure enough, when I peer through the glass I can see him.

He’s sprawled on the grass, not even dazed enough to stay there, baking in the sun. As I watch he scrabbles back toward the building, and even manages to stand up and put his back against the wall. Like a criminal hiding from the law—if the law were a lot yellower and hotter and somehow in the sky.

Not to mention likely to melt him into goo.

“He’s not. He’s alive. And we both know what that means.”

“If you go down there and get yourself killed I will kill you.”

“So in other words you’re going to angrily bounce on my corpse until your butt falls off,” I say, much to her disgruntlement. And she’s even more disgruntled when I shove her in my pocket and head to the door. Mainly because she hates being in my pocket, but mostly it’s the threat-to-my-life thing.

Though naturally I take precautions. I wrap a silver chain around one fist, and carry a burning ball in the other. And I don’t close the fire doors behind me once I’m out behind the building. I leave them standing open so I can dart back in through the now silver-rubbed doorframes at a moment’s notice.

Try following me through them, I think at him, once we’re face-to-face.

Or rather, my face is up where it’s supposed to be. And his is suddenly down there, again. He kneels and bows his head the moment he sees me. As if that’s just a thing he does now, instead of something he should never be doing under any circumstances. Honestly it makes me jerk back and fumble around for words. Then when they finally come, they’re not good ones.

“Okay, you stop that right now. No more of this tomfoolery. Get up,” I hiss, then I get way too close and gesture wildly at him to do it. Like he’s my friend who’s just embarrassing me or something. Instead of someone who would usually make a building fall on my head for such impertinence.

“What are you doing,” Phone spits, under her non-breath.

She sounds frightened. Panicked.

And I get it. He could just grab me now.