December Lights

It’s hard to tell the vampires from the students in East Lansing.

Let’s face it: in a university town, at least 80% of the people on the street look young and beautiful. In a northern town gripped by seven months of winter, the only people who aren’t inhumanly pale have spent way too much money in tanning salons. The ones still wearing fashions from twenty years ago are probably math majors; and in the grayest of short winter days, when darkness is only ever replaced by a bleak cloud cover, vampires can safely walk the streets both day and night.

And in every department on campus there are the PhD students who have always been there, their dissertations never quite completed, teaching a section here, a section there, but never, ever leaving. No one in their departments can even remember when they arrived and started their degrees--but with 20,000 whispering, flirting, beer-swilling, belching undergraduates to teach, the professors are only too happy to have reliable teaching assistants on hand who already have the syllabi memorized. It isn’t in their interest to ask too many questions...and anyway, everyone knows that grad students keep strange hours.

So I knew exactly where to go when I couldn’t ignore the vampires anymore.

At nine o’clock p.m. on a Wednesday in December, even the street lamps were covered by falling snow, and Espresso Royale was a beacon of light and warmth in the pitch-black night. I stomped ice off the soles of my take-no-crap boots as I passed the fake fire blazing outside. All the tables inside were taken, leaving five or six stragglers shivering at the outer tables...but they were all bundled in puffy coats, their gloved hands wrapped around their coffee mugs for warmth. I wasn’t here for any of them.

No, my target was seated safely inside, thin blonde ponytail tied behind his head and ragged little goatee stained from his double espresso as he typed on his laptop, apparently shielded from all the noise and conversations around him by the earbuds of his iPod.

Ed Staggs was in deep cover, but I knew him for what he was.

He’d been my teacher for the last two months.

I didn’t bother to order a drink. Instead, I slid into the chair across from him and waited until he noticed me. It didn’t take long--and I’d have bet my first semester’s student loan that it happened well before he took the trouble to look up and widen his eyes in surprise.

“Do I know you?”

“Fourth from the back, far-left row, every Thursday at nine-fifteen.” I rattled off the stats. “You said my last essay on Plato’s Republic was insightful.”

“Umm....”

“And you said I should really work on my handwriting.”

“Got it! Amanda, right?” He snorted out a laugh and leaned forward to share the joke. “My housemate thought, when you wrote--”

I narrowed my eyes and cut him off. “I need your help.”

“Ah. Yeah, right.” He settled back, sighing. “Office hours are on Monday only, two to five. You can sign up on my door.”

“I can’t wait that long,” I said.

“Trust me, you can.” He was already looking back at his computer screen, clicking on a link. “I’ve been teaching this class a long time, and I can tell you--”

“I know,” I said, and something in my voice must have alerted him, because he looked up with sudden wariness as I finished: “You’ve been teaching it for forty years.”

#

Ed Staggs’s eyes did not turn red. His canines didn’t flash; his face remained unchanged.

He said, “Wow. A freshman who actually knows how to use the library. Amazing.”

“It wasn’t that hard,” I said. “You didn’t even bother to change your name.”

“Why should I?” He shrugged, still bonelessly relaxed in his chair. The chatter around us was unchanged, no one listening to our conversation as he said, “I like to keep things simple.”

“Right,” I said. “Simple. I know what you are.”

His pale green eyes narrowed. “And?”

“My roommate’s been bitten by a vampire,” I said. “I need you to help me find out which one.”

Ed Staggs blinked twice. Then he laughed. “Amanda,” he said. “Amanda, Amanda, Amanda.” He pushed aside his laptop and leaned forward across the table. “If you actually know what I am--”

“I do.”

“--then why, exactly, do you think I’d help you track down another of my own kind?”

“Because you’re different,” I said. I ticked the points off on my fingers. “Stupid goatee. Bad hair. Sloppy clothes. Sitting in Espresso Royale instead of one of the bars...” His eyes narrowed. Before he could argue, I finished, “...and pretending to listen to an iPod instead of picking up undergrads.”

He glared at me. “I seem to have picked one up without trying.” Then he looked pointedly from my hair to my motorcycle jacket. “And speaking of bad clothes...?”

I ignored him. “You’re not like the others.”

“So, what? You think I’m a vegetarian hippie vampire? Stuck in the 60’s forever?” He snorted.

I didn’t look away. “No,” I said. “But I think you have a different agenda than the others do.”

He sat back, watching me. The earpods of his iPod still dangled from his ears. He should have looked harmless.

He didn’t.

“Tell me about your roommate,” he said. “Do I know her?”

“I doubt it.” It was my turn to snort. “Aimee’s fantasy is to be a model someday, if she’s really, really lucky. She isn’t the type to take philosophy classes.”

He raised wispy eyebrows at me. “You’re rooming with a wannabe model?”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re still offended about the bad clothes comment?”

“I’m just surprised,” he said.

“Don’t be.” I set my teeth together with a click. “Aimee and I aren’t friends.”

“Then why are you worried about her?”

“She’s been bitten by a vampire,” I said, “and she’s not dead. As far as I know, it’s only been once, but it might have been twice. And--”

“Aha,” he said. “Third time’s the charm.”

“Right,” I said. “I know how to use the library, remember? I looked it up.”

“Smart girl.” Ed Staggs picked up his espresso mug and turned it slowly in his hands, still watching me. “So, if you’re not friends, and you don’t want to find yourself rooming with a vampire’s servant, then why are you going to all this trouble for her? Why don’t you just change rooms?”

“I tried. Housing said there weren’t any openings this late in the semester.”

“Got it,” he said. He watched me for another minute, unblinking. Then he nodded infinitesimally. “So. Where’s Aimee now?”

“It’s a Wednesday night in East Lansing, and she’s a freshman who wants to be a model. Where do you think she is?”

For the first time, he looked startled. “A bar? But if she’s already been bitten once--”

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s where he--whoever he is--picked her up the first time, last weekend.”

“Why’d you let her go back?”

I looked at him with contempt. “Let her? The only way I could have stopped her was by tying her up. And somehow, I didn’t think getting myself arrested was going to help keep her from being bitten a third time.”

“So you decided to go straight to the source.” Ed Staggs smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant smile, but I didn’t have time to worry about it. He stood up, pulling out the earbuds. “Okay. Let’s go.”

“You’re agreeing to help me?” I blinked. I hadn’t even had the chance to make my offer yet--or my blackmail threat, if the offer hadn’t worked. “What’s the deal?”

“Oh, we’ll figure the deal out later.” He leaned down to turn off his computer, so that all I could see of him was his limp, greasy blonde hair. His voice was abstracted as he pressed buttons. “I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

#

Snow was falling through the night air in a soft, steady stream as we left the café, but some things are the same in every season: the line waiting outside the Blue Dragon stretched nearly a block down Grand River Avenue, and every single one of the waiting women was wearing a tank top or little babydoll T-shirt, without a winter coat or scarf in sight. As I looked at them--especially the ones who weren’t even bothering to put on a show of cold as snow fell onto their bare arms--I shook my head in disgust.

How was it possible for anyone not to notice all the vampires in this town? And how had they become the ones in charge of fashion?

I headed for the back of the line, but Staggs set off in a different direction.

“What? You have a VIP pass?” I said.

He walked straight past the open door of the bar and into the alleyway just past it. “Not exactly.”

I hesitated at the mouth of the alley. Stupid to think of it as an alley, really--it was only a short, covered passageway leading out to an open parking lot. But it was dark inside the passageway, and the line of waiting bar-bunnies outside were making way too much noise of their own to hear if anything happened...

The vampire laughed at me from the darkness. “What, you’ve thought better of your big plan already?”

I set my jaw hard and strode into the alley to join him. “My parents would kill me for this,” I muttered.

“For which bit?” I couldn’t see Staggs’s face clearly in the darkness, but I could hear him smirk. “Going to a bar underage? Or doing it with an”--he dropped his voice suggestively--“older man?”

“I don’t think you actually count as an older man,” I said.

There was a moment of nonplussed silence.

“You’re the one who looked me up. Forty years of teaching, remember?”

“Yeah, but you’ve been dead for all of them.”

He made an irritated noise in the back of his throat. “Undead, actually.”

“Whatever. That’s forty years of living like a student,” I said. “Sharing a house with a bunch of other guys? Wearing a stupid little goatee and jeans with holes in them and”--I thought back to how I’d found him in the café--“probably watching porn and getting into lots of internet flamewars? Personally, I don’t think those forty years added a whole lot of maturity.”

He didn’t answer. But the air positively rippled with his irritation as he stalked out the other end of the alley in front of me.

There was a door in the wall just to the left of the alley, looking out onto the parking lot. The only sign on it said, “No Entrance”, but Staggs knocked anyway, and we only waited half a minute in the snow before it opened.

“Huh,” said the man who’d opened it. “You.” He was wearing a cook’s apron, but his hair was lank, his fingernails looked dark with grime even in the faint light of the lamps over the parking lot, and I made a mental note not to eat anything while we were here.

He looked at me. “And...?”

“A friend,” Staggs said. His lips twisted into a smile. “For tonight.”

“Got it.” The man stepped back to let us pass.

“You made it sound like I’m on tonight’s menu,” I muttered as I followed Staggs down a long, unlit flight of stairs.

The roof above the stairs was low and sloping, with weird symbols carved into the wood. Tight walls closed me in on either side. The cook shut the door above us with a click, and the last light disappeared.

“You’re the one who asked for my help,” Staggs said.

I scowled and concentrated on not tripping in the dark.

At least I knew the man behind me wasn’t a vampire. Even in the dim light of the streetlamps, I’d seen the mark of old bites on his unwashed neck. Maybe if I showed Aimee the evidence of what another vampire’s servant ended up looking like, it would frighten her into seeing sense.

On the other hand, this was the same woman who thought Britney Spears’ latest comeback TV special was the most Deep and Meaningful thing she’d ever seen. So maybe common sense and Aimee just didn’t exist in the same universe.

Staggs opened the door at the bottom of the stairs, and light burst through. We pushed our way through a crowded kitchen, full of workers and noise, where no one looked twice at us. In fact, at least a few of the workers were intentionally not looking at us. I glanced sideways at them, but they were bent over ovens and sinks, and I couldn’t see their necks. The cook who’d let us in dropped away to go back to work, and Staggs cut straight across to the big swinging doors at the other end of the room. I followed after, just in time to keep them from slamming shut in my face.

Music blared straight into my ears from the speakers in the wall on either side of the doors and drowned out my groan of horror. Saccharine voices married a thumping beat, somewhere halfway between wannabe techno and bubblegum pop.

“Aimee is so not worth this,” I muttered.

Staggs turned back, grinning. Vampire hearing really was excellent, unfortunately. “What, you don’t like the beat?”

I stared at him. “You do?”

“Hell, no,” he said. “I like the alternative scene.” His gaze added the word: Obviously. “But this is what brings them all in, so...”

“...So this is what you guys play.” I shook my head. “Is every bar in East Lansing owned by vampires?”

He shrugged. “You’re the one who did all the research. You tell me.” His gaze went out across the sea of heads before us, bodies jumbled up into too-close proximity all throughout the big, open room. “So, where’s your roomie?”

“No one says ‘roomie’ anymore,” I said, but it was an empty jibe. I was searching, too. “She could be anywhere. How do these people breathe?”

“They’re having fun,” Staggs said. “C’mon. Don’t they have any fun back where you come from?”

I gritted my teeth. “I come from Northern Michigan, not the end of the universe.”

“Close enough.” Staggs shook his head, looking more insufferably pleased than ever. “Lot of weirdos living up there in the wilds. Are your parents the hippie-dippie types, rednecks, apocalyptic end-of-the-world wackos, Michigan Militia nutjobs, or wannabe artists?”

I couldn’t punch him if I wanted his help. So I just said as evenly as I could, “There’s a lot of room for different belief systems up North.”

“I bet.” He looked smug. “End-of-the-world wackos, right? Holing up with shotguns and ammo and a thousand cans of food for when the UN finally invades...how did they let you come all the way down here for college?”

“My parents and I want different things,” I said tightly. “Now, can we go look for Aimee, please? Because if she gets bitten again while we’re hanging around here--”

“Cool down, Amanda. We’ll find her.” Staggs reached out and snagged the back of a passing waiter’s shirt. “Hey, John. We’re looking for a girl named Aimee. She’s--” He looked at me questioningly.

I sighed. Incredibly, I knew her stats. “Five-foot-eleven, two-foot-long blonde hair, size 4, 38D bust.” I knew it all, because she’d made a point of telling me, the first day we moved into our room. It had been a defining moment in our roommate relationship. “She’s wearing a very small pink tank top and tight blue jeans tonight.”

“I’ll bet she is,” Staggs said. “Wow.” He caught my glare and turned back to the waiter, lowering his voice. “She’s been bitten at least once already.”

The waiter’s eyes widened. His hands were full with the two trays he was carrying, but he jerked his chin at the far end of the room. “She was over there fifteen minutes ago. I think Jeremy was on his way over to her.”

“Jeremy?” I said.

But Staggs was already setting off across the crowded floor. I gritted my teeth and followed after, pushing my way through the press of arms and legs by brute force. The music pounding through the air shifted to a new, even more intrusive beat, topped by a panting female voice mimicking cries of ecstasy, and I thought that if I saw Aimee’s vampire right now, I wouldn’t even need a stake or holy water. I could take him out with my bare hands for putting me through this.

Throttling wasn’t an option, though, because Aimee was gone by the time we reached the other side of the room. Ten minutes later, even I had to admit it: we weren’t going to find her.

Damn it, damn it, damn it.

I wheeled on Staggs, balling my hands into fists. “Tell me who Jeremy is.”

He shrugged, his glare still fixed on the crowd around us. “Who do you think?”

“Who do I think?” My voice started to spiral dangerously out of control. “I think he’s a goddamn vampire! I think he’s about to turn my roommate into his servant, if he hasn’t done it already, and all because I didn’t--”

I snapped my jaw shut, digging my fingernails into the palms of my hands. Breathe, Amanda.

I couldn’t believe I was too late. And all because I’d wanted to prove a stupid, childish point to my parents, of all people, who weren’t even here to see me...

“Look,” Staggs said. He turned back to me, his lean shoulders stiffening with sudden resolution. “I know where we can go, if you really want to get your roommate back.” He paused, cocking his head. “I know you don’t think highly of her, but...”

“No,” I said. Aimee might be the Queen of Vapid, but I was the idiot who’d thought I could bury my head in my books and pretend the vampires in East Lansing had nothing to do with me. I was in no position to throw stones...and even if I had been, I wasn’t going to go back to bed in our room tonight and just wait for a strange vampire’s servant to walk in on me. “Trust me. I want to get her back.”

“Fine. In that case, come with me.” He struck out toward the front exit, and, still cursing myself, I followed.

As soon as we reached the sidewalk outside, though, with cold snow whipping through the night air, my head started to clear. I followed Staggs across Grand River to the edge of the university campus, but then I stopped and planted myself still, arms crossed. We were out of hearing of the bar bunnies across the street, and the walkway to the Union building was quiet and empty underneath the street lamp.

“Before we go any further, I want to know why you’re helping me.”

“Do you really think there’s time for that?” He turned back to face me, hands loosely wrapped around the belt loops on his jeans. Ragged holes showed dark along the legs, letting in the snow, but for all that he reacted, it could have been a sunny July day on the beach. “Jeremy’s got your roommate, and if you knew Jeremy like I do--”

“Exactly,” I said. “You know Jeremy. You don’t know me. So why are you helping me against him?”

He shrugged. “Because I liked your paper on Plato?”

I looked hard at him. “The fact that I’m an English major does not make me naïve or unworldly.”

“Um...”

I ignored the look he was giving me. “You are not doing this as a favor to me. You don’t even know what I was going to offer you in exchange.”

He propped his shoulders against the lamppost, settling in. “Fine. We can stand here all night debating this if you want, while Jeremy bites Aimee a third time and takes on a new servant...or you can accept that I’m happy to score a point against the others--you’re the one who said I was different from them--and we can go after your roommate. Which would you honestly prefer? Because, y’know, I’m a philosophy grad student, I live for debates like this.” He snickered. “At least I used to. Now I un-die for them.”

“Gahh.” I closed my eyes on his smug expression. “I really hate this.”

“You were the one who came after me, Amanda. I was just sitting minding my own business in my favorite café, bothering nobody, just--”

“Fine!” I said. “Fine. But I don’t trust you.”

“You’re the one who did the research,” he said, and straightened away from the lamppost with a jaunty hop. “I wouldn’t trust me, either. This way.” He headed off, into the university campus.

There was a deep blanket of snow covering the field across from the Union building. We trudged through it without speaking. It was only when Staggs pushed open the door of the tall building on the other side of the field, letting out a deafening blur of sound, that I wrested my gritted teeth apart to speak again.

“Jeremy takes his dates to the music practice building to make out?”

Staggs snorted. “Good one, Amanda. No, our Jer’s a bit too smooth for that.” The door swung shut behind us, and he leapt straight down the first six steps of the staircase leading to the basement, where the sounds of a hundred competing musical instruments were coming from. I waited at the top of the stairs, wincing at the cacophony.

“Then what are we doing here?”

Staggs paused on the next landing down. “This is how we get to the council.”

I stared at him. “The vampire council?!”

Three girls pushed past me, holding flute cases. They didn’t say anything, but their faces were pink from the effort of holding back their reaction. As soon as they turned out of sight on the stairs, their giggles burst out, floating through the air back to me. They probably thought I was insane.

Staggs just gave me a thumbs-up sign. “Got it,” he said. “They’re the only ones who can stop Jeremy. So come on!”

This was a really, really bad idea.

The door at the bottom of the stairs led us into a maze of white corridors lined with tiny, windowed practice rooms like cells in a beehive. Every room we passed had a piano in it, and every room had a person in it, too, looking either intent or purely miserable as they played one of a variety of instruments with total dedication, despite the fact that it was ten o’clock on the most popular bar-hopping night of the week. Obviously, the music professors had all of their students enslaved as surely as any of the vampires’ servants.

I didn’t have much time to think about it, though, because at the end of the second corridor, Staggs pulled out a key and unlocked the first door I’d seen that didn’t have a window in it. This door was wooden and solid, without so much as a sign on it, and it swung open to reveal a new corridor--not white this time, but lined with a darker wood and carved with the same weird symbols I’d seen in the staircase leading down to the vampire’s bar. It was, of course, completely unlit.

Great. The door closed behind us, shutting out the bright white light of the practice building. I said,

“And how exactly am I supposed to get through here?”

Staggs snickered. He was closer to me than I’d realized, his cold breath brushing against my cheek. “You can hold my hand, if you want.”

“No, thank you.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out my bulky key ring. It only took a few fumbles before I managed to press the button on the mini-flashlight that hung off it. A thin beam of light pierced the darkness ahead.

Staggs stepped away from me. “Quite the girl scout. Or is it only the boy scouts who are supposed to be prepared?”

“It’s a good key ring,” I said. “My parents gave it to me when I left home. It’s even got a Swiss Army knife on it.”

“Everything you could ever need, then.” He stuck his hands in his jeans pockets and stalked forward. “I wouldn’t count on a Swiss army knife stopping our Jeremy, though.”

“Good to know,” I said, and rolled my eyes as I followed him down the dark corridor.

We walked the next few minutes in silence, as the corridor wove around various turns. I was trying to track where we were--maybe somewhere underneath the university library?--when the corridor finally ended in a big, black door. Completely black: it was made of what looked like pure onyx, shiny even in the pale glow of the flashlight. Vampires can be so dramatic. I wished my heart weren’t speeding up in reaction. My breath shortened in my chest.

Staggs lifted his hand to knock.

I couldn’t do it.

“Wait!” I put one hand on his thin arm to stop him. “Look...” I hated how breathy my voice sounded, like some horror movie heroine. He obviously liked it, though; his lips curved in a smile as he turned back to me. “Is there any other way to get to Jeremy? Because seriously, it would be a much better idea for everybody if--”

The door swung open.

“Did someone say my name?” said the vampire on the other side of it.

Highlighted by the mellow glow of a dozen fat candles inside the room, his hair was a thick, soft blonde, the kind I immediately wanted to run my hands through; his über-preppy sweater and jeans came straight out of a J. Crew catalogue, the kind Aimee always sighed over; and even as I thought that, I spotted my roommate just past him, tied up and gagged against the pitch-black wall, her big, blue eyes filled with terror.

Hell. I really couldn’t turn back after all.

Resigned, I pushed past Jeremy, who fell back, looking surprised. “Um...” he began, and then looked past me at Staggs. His voice sharpened. “Hey. What do you think you’re doing here?”

I was already scoping out the diamond-shaped room and the six vampires spread out around it in various poses of coolness, disdain, and perfect style, like a collection of New York models caught in mid-photo shoot. But I heard Staggs answer,

“I’ve brought you guys a gift.”

Aha. And there was his motivation, finally figured out.

I turned, feeling all six gazes focus on me as the vampires around me straightened into predatory interest. My eyes met Staggs’s. “So much for helping me because you liked my paper, huh?”

He shrugged. “I did like your paper. That’s why I thought it wouldn’t hurt to have you around here for another forty years or so. I don’t get to talk to that many smart people, especially in this community.”

I heard a hiss behind me; next to Staggs, Jeremy’s perfect features tightened in irritation.

“Ah,” I said. “And that charming attitude of yours would be why the other vampires haven’t been hanging out with you lately? Is that why you need to bribe them with a gift?”

The female vampire behind me laughed, a tinkling sound that grated against every single nerve ending in my body. I had to tighten my spine to keep from turning around as I felt her edge closer.

Jeremy said, “So, you’ve noticed what a little pain he is, too?” He started toward me, his brown eyes warming. My legs wanted to go rubbery in reaction. I wouldn’t let them. “You obviously have good taste,” he said, “whoever you are...”

“Amanda,” Staggs said to Jeremy. “Her name is Amanda. She’s from the middle of Nowhere, Northern Michigan. Her parents are wackos who won’t be able to talk anyone into making a fuss...and she came to me tonight, because she’d figured out what was happening with her roommate over there.” Staggs jerked his head at Aimee, who was crying silently against the wall. “Amanda already knew all about us. She’s smart, and she knows how to do her research. I know you didn’t think much of the last few I brought you--”

“The last thing we needed in our group were more geeks like you,” Jeremy said, and his chiseled lips lifted in a frat-boy sneer. “They were barely worth using as servants.”

Staggs scowled. “Well, believe me, this one’s worth it.”

“You know, I think you might actually be right this time.” Jeremy walked a slow circle around me. His voice melted into my senses like chocolate. “She’d need a few tips on her dress sense, of course--”

“Obviously,” Staggs said.

I stared at his ripped jeans. “I beg your pardon?”

Jeremy laughed. “Yeah, she’s cute.” He leaned in to sniff my neck, and I closed my eyes against the cloud of pure pheromones. “I vote yes.” He stepped back, looking at the others. “Well?”

“Why not?” said the woman behind me. “But I want to be the one to change her.”

“I don’t think so,” said Jeremy. He put one hand on my shoulder, lightly possessive.

Staggs said, “Hey, I’m the one who brought her in! Shouldn’t I get to--?”

“Staggs!” I said sharply. “You don’t want to do this.”

“Yes, I do,” he said.

“No, you don’t.” I reached inside my leather jacket, sliding my fingers toward the inner pocket. “Just help me get out, and I’ll--”

They were all laughing now.

“Sweetheart,” Jeremy purred, and stroked my cheek. “There is no way out.”

“Oh, is she going to try to fight us off now?” the woman behind me said. “This should be fun. Staggs did say she had done her research...”

“Funny thing about that, Amanda,” Staggs said. He was grinning so hard, his little goatee actually quivered with his amusement. “All those stories about stakes and garlic and holy water? Total crap, all of them. Garlic might have worked to hold off English vampires, I guess, just because they didn’t like the taste...”

“My favorite flavor,” the vampiress behind me murmured, stepping closer.

“Holy water only works on vampires with a serious case of Catholic guilt...”

“Not a problem for me,” Jeremy said, and smiled into my eyes.

“And stakes?” Staggs shrugged. “Trust me, that’s not something you even want to try. It would just be embarrassing. Think about it. You might have read up on Dracula or watched some Buffy as research, but do you really think you could try shoving some crazy, heavy wooden stake all the way through a pair of ribs and manage to aim it directly into a human heart on the first go?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“You’re right,” I said, and I looked him straight in the eye. “The only way it could ever work was if a person had spent her entire life being trained to do it perfectly. Which would be crazy, right? I mean, her parents would have to be complete wackos, wouldn’t they?”

He blinked. “Well...”

“I told you there’s a lot of room for different belief systems up North,” I said.

And I pulled out my stake from my pocket.

#

I really, really hated doing exactly what my parents had wanted when they sent me down to East Lansing for college. I’d been so determined to ignore the vampires and just be a normal student.

If the vampires had ignored me back, it might have worked.

I wiped off the stake before I untied the ropes and gags that bound Aimee. There was a fresh, second bite on her neck, but not a third. They must have been saving that for the end of the evening’s entertainment.

She was shaking so hard, I had to hold her up. We moved across the room at turtle speed. She let out a girly little scream when her high-heeled boots brushed against the cloud of dust that used to be Jeremy.

“Next time,” I said, “please try to pick out a guy who at least has a heartbeat, okay?”

She glared at me, her lips trembling. “You are such a freak, Amanda.”

So. At least our roommate relationship hadn’t changed.

Hey, if I was really lucky, maybe she would be the one Housing assigned away to another room, whenever a vacancy finally opened up. I really wouldn’t mind having a single for a while.

I paused before I closed the door on the diamond-shaped room that had once held the vampire council of East Lansing. The last pile of dust had a single blond speck in the middle--a fleck of hair from Staggs’ goatee.

Thank goodness for small mercies, my grandma always said, after she’d retired from her own hunting days.

Tomorrow was a Thursday, but for once I would be able to sleep in.

My philosophy class was definitely canceled.

-End-

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