He made his inscrutable face. “I’ve been a vampire for a long time, and I’ve never heard it described it quite like that.”

“I do have a way with words,” I admitted. “Why did this happen to me? How is this possible? Where do we come from?”

“I would never have thought of you as an existentialist, Jane,” he said.

I arched an eyebrow at him. “No one likes a smart-ass, Gabriel.”

“For your sake, I hope that’s not true,” he said, to which I responded with a smack on the arm. “No one knows where we come from. The ancient Greeks, Middle Eastern cultures, the earliest people of Malaysia, they all wrote of creatures that stole the blood from humans as they slept. The romantic theory seems to be that Lilith, the first wife that God created for Adam, refused to submit to her husband, particularly in their…evening activities. So, as punishment, she was sent away from the garden to live in darkness. She became the first vampire and had her revenge by feeding off Adam ’s children and turning his descendants into creatures like her. Vampirism is thought to be her vengeance passed down through the generations.”

“Trivia monologue. You are so the man for me,” I marveled.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing,” I said, smiling insipidly and thanking the perverse vampire gods that his super hearing hadn’t picked that up. “Do you believe that?”

The twist in his lips showed that he might have heard what I said but was choosing to ignore it. “The truth is, there may be no single origin of vampires. The way we change may have evolved, over time, like humans but never with them.”

I crossed my arms. “OK, lightning round. Real or fake: Werewolves?”

“Real.”

“Demons?”

“Very real.”

“Sasquatch?’

“Real, but he’s actually a were-ape.”

I decided to explore that later. “Aliens?”

“I don’t know.”

“Witches?”

“Real.” He shrugged. “Some work real magic, and others are deluded children in black makeup and ill-fitting clothes.”

“Good to know,” I said soberly. “Wait, what about zombies? I couldn’t even get through the preview for Dawn of the Dead without covering my eyes.”

“You don’t want to know.”

I made a small distressed sound. He chuckled, something I noticed was becoming more frequent.

“I know Dracula was a real person, but is he still, you know, around?” I asked.

“No one knows for sure. He’s a bit like our Elvis. Lots of vampires have claimed to see him, but there ’s never been documented proof. You ask a lot of questions.”

“I’m a librarian. The learning curve is steep,” I said, ever so sassily jutting my chin forward.

“You’re going to be an interesting person to know, Jane Jameson,” he said, leaning forward and brushing his mouth across mine.

Sparks. Hell, fireworks. The Fourth of July was exploding in my head as he slipped his hands under my jaw and pinned me with his mouth. When he pulled away from me, my hands were wound in his hair, my lips bruised and tingling pleasantly.

“I enjoy your height,” he said, pressing me against the porch railing. With my butt precariously balanced on the rail, I had to wind my feet around his calves to keep from tumbling over. “Back in my day, I never courted an exceptionally tall woman. But it makes for some interesting possibilities.”

“There’s that word again, ‘interesting,’” I said before kissing him again. I tangled my fingers in his pullover. He tasted like the best share of my trick-or-treating candy, the mini Three Musketeers and Almond Joys. And for most of my life, I’d been gnawing on those stupid orange-wrapped peanut taffy things.

I sighed and wrapped my arms around his neck, enjoying the sensation of Gabriel planting a few more soft, nibbling kisses along the edge of my jaw. Feeling bold, I traced the line of his bottom lip with my tongue and bit down on it gently.

He pulled away and grinned down at me. “Very interesting.”

8

Indoctrinated by years of secrecy, many older vampires have histories they may not want to share right away. It’s best to respect their privacy.

—From The Guide for the Newly Undead

I am not the kind of girl who trusts a man to tell her everything she needs to know in his own due time, so I did some research on my sire. You can take the girl out of the library, but you can’t take the neurotic, compulsively curious librarian out of the girl.

Oddly enough, the limited information I could find on Gabriel Nightengale, (yes, that really was his name) started with a passage from my father’s self-published textbook on local history. I’d read that thing at least ten times, and I never paid attention to the well-bred boy born in 1858. Gabriel was around to see the Civil War transform Half -Moon Hollow from a grimy little river outpost to a major point of trade along the Ohio. His family owned a sizable tobacco farm on Silver Ridge Road. The family eventually amassed enough money to build a proper antebellum home they called Fairhaven.

The Nightengales were abolitionists, which I found oddly comforting. Beyond considerable wealth, the Nightengale family was utterly normal until Gabriel disappeared at age twenty one. He was healthy, hale, the pride of his family, and then suddenly he wasn’t. His parents told their neighbors that they had sent Gabriel abroad for a tour of the Continent. The sole reason for Gabriel’s inclusion in Daddy’s book was his rumored mauling at the hands—well, flippers—of a sea lion off the coast of Portugal. That was, and is, an unusual cause of death for rural Kentucky residents.

But it’s amazing what you can find out with the right Web browser. VampireArchive.com turned out to be deliciously gossipy, the Us Weekly of the underworld. According to the archives, Gabriel was a strapping young lad living a privileged, unremarkable life, until he took a strange girl out for a walk after a barn dance. I guess following strange women home is a bit of a habit with him. I couldn’t find any information about Gabriel’s sire, which was surprising, as I’d heard that vampire historians tended to be incredibly detail-oriented. They have this whole thing about preserving the vampire “family tree.”

The unnamed woman who turned him left Gabriel to rise in a cellar about a mile from his farm. Without guidance from his sire, Gabriel returned home after his traumatic first kill and hoped to return to his former life. Considering the times, his family took his being turned well. His brothers tied him to a tree, naked, to wait for sunrise. Gabriel broke free and ran away. When he didn ’t descend on them in a fit of bloody vampire vengeance, his parents told everyone he was traveling. A year later, they cooked up the story about the sea lion. Apparently, sea lions were thought to be much more vicious back then. And people believed they lived in Portugal.

But Gabriel was traveling, seeking out European vampires to learn how to control his hunger and use his powers. His studies continued until his brothers died in a duel (with each other) a few years later. Having never fully recovered from Gabriel ’s turning and her husband’s ensuing heart attack, his mother, Margaret, died of what my father called “shock and heartache.” According to the vampire archives, the undigested Gabriel returned to the Hollow with little fanfare, showing up at his family attorney ’s office in the dead of night to claim his birthright: the house, the land, and the income. As soon as the papers were signed and sealed, he dropped off the radar again and faded from local memory.

For more than a century, Gabriel bounced between various vampire hot spots and the Hollow. He lived under an assumed name, pretended to die periodically, and then willed the house to himself under the name of a recently deceased young man. I would accuse him of stealing the trick from the Highlander movie, but he didn’t seem to take my pop-culture references very well.

And he did predate the Highlander movie by about a hundred years.

Maintaining his faux inheritance technique, he rented his land to sharecroppers and developed a hand at real estate. As more local people began giving up their farms, he bought them. Before he knew it, Gabriel owned a good portion of what used to be the township. He sold it at an obscenely high profit during the Hollow’s strip-mall boom and now lived like a sort of vampire gentleman of leisure, without the smoking jacket.

Gabriel returned to the Hollow in late 1999, though it’s unclear whether it was because of the Coming Out or that he just missed his ancestral homeland—his strange, somewhat backward ancestral homeland—where he eventually vamped out yours truly. I’m sure there was more stuff in the middle there, but Gabriel was good at hiding it, which was just driving me nuts.

Aunt Jettie, who practiced moving dining-room chairs while I was elbow-deep in cyberspace, informed me that for as long as anyone in the Hollow could remember, the only people allowed on Nightengale property were the tenant farmers. And even they never met their landlord, who was reported to travel frequently. Less and less was said about the Nightengales and their farm over the years, until no one could remember ever actually meeting a member of the family or seeing the house. It was as if a significant historical property had just faded out of the local consciousness, a difficult feat in a town full of rabid Civil War buffs.

While I was in research mode, I looked up the companion Web site for the Guide for the Newly Undead. The features were impressive, with links for buying artificial blood online, a virtual global map to help track the sun at all times, and a handy translator to help newbies understand the Language of the Dead. It ’s a language beyond the realm of human comprehension. It predates living speech, even humanity. It was whispered in the darkness before God said, “Let there be light,” and one of the few true ties between vampires and demons. And sadly, it sounds a good deal like Pig Latin.

For instance, Ihbiensay thethsay carthax vortho inxnay tuathua means “I believe I left my rapid infuser at the last pot luck.” I’m still learning. Vampires use the language to communicate under the human radar …and to say rude things about living people without their realizing it. There are some things that you just don’t outgrow, no matter how evolved you are as a life form.