Rue was able to agree with that wholeheartedly.

“Hard to understand why the vampires do this,” she said.

“They gotta live, too. I mean, most of them, they want a nice place to live, clean clothes and so on.”

“I guess I always thought all vampires were rich.”

“Not to hear them tell it. Besides, Thompson’s only been a vamp for twenty years.”

“Wow,” Rue said. She had no idea what difference that would make, but Julie clearly thought she was revealing a significant fact.

“He’s pretty low down on the totem pole,” Julie explained. “What’s unusual is finding a vamp as old as Sean performing. Most of the vamps that old think it’s beneath their dignity to work for a human.” She looked a wee bit contemptuous of Sean.

Rue said, “You all have a good practice, Julie. I’ll see you soon.”

“Sure,” Julie said. “Have a good week.”

Rue hadn’t meant to be abrupt. But she had some sympathy for Sean. Just like her, he was making a living doing what he did best, and he didn’t have false pride about it. She could draw a lesson from that herself.

That sympathy vanished the next night, when Rue discovered that Sean was following her home. After getting off the bus, she caught the barest glimpse of him as she walked the last block to her apartment. She ran up the steps as quickly as she could, and tried to act normally as she unlocked the common door and climbed up to her tiny apartment. Slamming the door behind her, her heart hammering, she wondered what she’d let herself in for. With the greatest caution, she left the lights off and crept over to the window. She would see him outside, looking up. She knew it. She knew all about it.

He wasn’t there. She fed her cat in the dark, able to see the cans and the dish by the light of the city coming in the windows. She looked again.

Sean wasn’t there.

Rue sat down in the one chair she had, to think that over. Her heart quit hammering; her breathing slowed down. Could she have been mistaken? If she’d been a less-experienced woman she might have persuaded herself that was the case, but Rue had long since made up her mind not to second-guess her instincts. She’d seen Sean. Maybe he wanted to know more about his partner. But he hadn’t watched her once she was inside.

Maybe he’d followed her to make sure she was safe, not to spy on her.

It was hard for Rue to pay attention in her History of the British Isles class the next morning. She was still fretting. Should she confront him? Should she stay silent? She’d let her hair go all straggly for class, as she usually did, and she tucked it behind her ear while she bent over her notebook. She was so jangled by her indecision that she let her mind ramble. Her professor caught her by surprise when he asked her what she thought of the policy of the British during the Irish potato famine, and she had a hard time gathering up an answer to give him. To make the day even more unpleasant, while Rue was working on a term paper in the college library, she realized that the brunette across the table was staring at her. Rue recognized that look.

“You’re that girl, aren’t you?” the girl whispered, after gathering her nerve together.

“What girl?” Rue asked, with a stony face.

“The girl who was a beauty queen? The one who—”

“Do I look like a beauty queen?” Rue asked, her voice sharp and cutting. “Do I look like any kind of queen?”

“Ah, sorry,” stammered the girl, her round face flushing red with embarrassment.

“Then shut up,” Rue snarled. Rudeness was the most effective defense, she’d found. She’d had to force herself, at first, but as time went on, rudeness had become all too easy. She outstayed the flustered student, too; the girl gathered up her books and pencils and fled the library. Rue had discovered that if she herself left first, it constituted an admission.

After dark, Rue set out to dance rehearsal with anger riding her shoulders.

She debated all the way to Blue Moon. Should she confront her new partner? She needed the job so badly; she liked dancing so much. And though it embarrassed her to admit it to herself, it was a real treat to sometimes look as good as she could, instead of obscuring herself.

Rue reached an internal compromise. If Sean behaved himself during this practice as well as he had during the first, if he didn’t start asking personal questions, she would let it go. She could dance this Friday and make some money, if she could just get through the week.

She couldn’t prevent the anger rolling around her like a cloud when he came in, but he greeted her quite calmly, and she crammed her rage down to a bearable level.

The dancing went even better that night. She was on edge, and somehow that sharpened her performance. Sean corrected a couple of arm positions, and she carefully complied with his suggestions. She made a few of her own.

If he followed her home, she didn’t catch a glimpse of him. She began to relax about the situation.

The next night, he bit her.

“You don’t want the first time to be in front of a crowd,” he said. “You might scream. You might faint.” He seemed quite matter-of-fact about it. “Let’s do that thing we were working on, that duet to ‘Bolero.’”

“Which is maybe the most hackneyed ‘sexy dance’ music in the world,” she said, willing to pick a fight to cover her anxiety.

“But for a reason,” Sean insisted. “Reason” came out “rayson.” His Irish accent became more pronounced when he was upset, and Rue enjoyed hearing it. Maybe she would irritate him more often.

The duet they’d been working on was definitely a modern ballet. They started out with Sean approaching Rue, gradually winning her, their hands and the alignment of their bodies showing how much they longed to touch. Finally they entwined in a wonderful complicated meshing of arms and legs, and then Sean lowered her to finish up in the position they’d practiced the night before, leaning Rue back over his arm.

“We’ll go very low this time,” he said. “My right knee will touch the ground, and your legs should be extended parallel to my left leg. Put your left arm around my neck. Extend your right.”

“Can you sustain that? I don’t want to end up in a heap on the floor.”

“If I brace my right hand on the floor, I can hold us both up.” He sounded completely confident.

“You’re the vampire,” she said, shrugging.

“What’s my offense?” He sounded stung.

“I didn’t realize you were going to be the boss of us,” she said, pleased to have jolted him out of his calm remove. “Aristocrat,” Sylvia had called him. Rue knew all about people who thought their money provided them with immunity. She also knew she wasn’t being reasonable, but she just couldn’t seem to stop being angry.

“You’d like to be the one in charge?” he asked coldly.

“No,” she said hastily. “It’s just that I—”

“Then what?”

“Nothing! Nothing! Let’s do the damn finale!” Every nerve in her body twanged with anxiety.

She got into position with a precision that almost snapped. Her right leg extended slightly in front of her, touching his left leg, which he swept slightly behind him. He took both her hands and clasped them to his chest. His eyes burned into hers. For the first time, his face showed something besides indifference.

It wasn’t smart of me to have a fight with him right before he bites me, Rue told herself. But the music began. With a feeling of inevitability, Rue moved through the dance with the vampire. Once she moved too far to the right, and once she lost track of her place in the routine, but she recovered quickly both times. And then she was leaning back gracefully, her left arm around Sean’s neck, her right arm reaching back, back, her hand in an appealing line. Sean was leaning over her, and she saw his fangs, and she jumped. She couldn’t help it.

Then he bit her.

All her problems were over, her every muscle relaxed, and she was whole again. Her body was smooth and even, and everything inside her was perfect and intact.

The next thing Rue knew, she was weeping, sitting on the floor with her legs crossed. Sean was sitting by her side, leaning over with his arm around her shoulders.

“It won’t be like this again,” he said quietly, when he was sure she would understand him.

“Why did that happen? Is it that way for everyone?” She rubbed her face with the handkerchief Sean had handed her. Where he’d kept it, she couldn’t imagine.

“No. The first time, you can see what makes you happiest.”

Can, she noted. She was sure it could also hurt like hell. Sean had been generous.

“It will feel pleasant next time,” Sean said. He didn’t add, “As long as I want it to,” but she could read between the lines. “But it won’t be so overwhelming.”

She was glad he’d had enough kindness to introduce her to this in private. Of course, she told herself, he hadn’t wanted her to collapse on the dance floor, either. She would look stupid then, and so would he. “Can you tell what I’m feeling?” she asked, and she deliberately turned to look him in the eyes.

He met her dark eyes squarely. “Yes, in a muffled way,” he said. “I can tell if you are happy, if you are sad—when I bite.”

He didn’t tell her that now he would always be able to tell how she felt. He didn’t tell her that she had tasted sweeter than his memory of honey, sweeter than any human he’d ever bitten.

Chapter 3

They danced together for two months before Sean discovered something else about Rue. He wanted to call her “Layla,” her real name, but she told him he would forget and call her that in front of someone who...and then she’d shut down her train of thought and asked him to call her Rue like everyone else.

He followed her home every night. Sean wasn’t sure if she’d seen him that second night, but he made sure she never saw him again. He was careful. His intention, he told himself, was simply to make sure she arrived at her apartment safely, but he inevitably analyzed what he saw and drew conclusions.

In all those nights, Sean saw her speak to someone only once. Late one Wednesday night, a young man was sitting on the steps of her building. Sean could tell when Rue spotted him. She slowed down perceptibly. By then Sean had bitten her five times, and he could read her so closely that he registered a tiny flinch that would have gone unnoticed by anyone else.

Sean slid through the shadows silently. He maneuvered close enough to be able to help Rue if she needed it.

“Hello, Brandon.” Rue didn’t sound pleased.

“Hey, Rue. I just thought I might...if you weren’t busy... Would you like to go out for a cup of coffee?” He stood up, and now the streetlight showed Sean that the young man was a little older than the common run of students, maybe in his late twenties. He was very thin, but attractive in a solemn way.

Rue stood for a second, her head bowed, as if she were thinking what to do next. The parts of her that Sean had begun to know were brittle and fragile, forged by fear. But now he felt her kindness. She didn’t want to hurt this man. But she didn’t want to be in his company, either, and Sean was dismayed by how happy this made him.

“Brandon, you’re so nice to think of taking me out for coffee,” she said gently. “But I thought I made myself real clear last week. I’m not dating right now. I’m just not in that mode.”

“A cup of coffee isn’t a date.”

Her back straightened. Sean considered stepping out of the shadows to stand by her side.

“Brandon, I’m not interested in spending time with you.” Her voice was clear and merciless.

The man stared at her in shock. “That’s so harsh,” he said. He sounded as though he was on the verge of crying. Sean’s lip curled.

“I’ve turned down your invitations three times, Brandon. I’ve run out of courtesy.”

The man pushed past her and walked down the street in such a hurry that he almost knocked over a trash can. Rue swung around to watch him go, her stance belligerent. She might look ruthless to the human eye, but Sean could tell she was full of shame at being so stern with a man as guileless as a persistent puppy. When she went up the steps, Sean drifted down the street, wondering all the while about a beautiful woman who didn’t date, a woman who camouflaged what she was under layers of unattractive clothing, a woman who was deliberately rude when her first inclination was to be kind.

Rue May—Layla LaRue LeMay—was hiding. But from what? Or who? He’d been dancing with her for two months now, and he didn’t know anything about her.

* * *

“We got a call from Connie Jaslow,” Sylvia said two weeks later. “She wants to hire three couples to dance at a party she’s putting on. Since it’s warm, she’s determined to have a tropical theme.”