I check my phone. Nothing from Artemis. Maybe I got the cemetery wrong, or Artemis is in a different section. But if I go look, I’m leaving a vampire behind. And if I fight her, I might have to range through the cemetery and miss Artemis that way. Ugh.
“Hey,” I ask, remembering the conference and my thoughts about my responsibility to kill any vampire I’m aware of. “Do you know a vampire named Harmony? She has a reality show?”
Jane hisses. “That idiot child. There’s a reason we live in the night, in the dark. The more people know about us, the more likely they are to kill us. Anonymity is a vampire’s best friend. How many famous vampires can you name?”
“A lot, actually. The Master, Kakistos, Angelus, Dracula, but that one’s obvious, William the Bloody, Drusilla, and are we counting cults, because if we are—”
She rolls her eyes. “Right, I forgot about your line of work. But for most people, up until now, it was Dracula.”
“And Edward.”
“Personally, I prefer Lestat.” She laughs, the sound low and throaty. “But that bastard Dracula, telling his story for fame. And now Harmony. She has no idea what the weight of centuries is. No concept of eternity. Give her a few decades and she’ll come to know and accept the absolute burden and boredom of immortality. We survive not so that we can bask in adulation and glory. We survive and feed and hide so that we can survive and feed and hide. There is no thriving for vampires. Especially now that we are denied even the power of siring new vampires.”
“Oh, right, the whole zompire thing.” With magic dead, new vampires don’t have the connection to the ancient demon that infected the very first vampire. They turn into mindless hivelike zombie vamps. I check the time. Artemis is definitely late.
“That is a disgusting term, and I refuse to use it.” Her nose wrinkles in distaste. “Abominations, all of them.”
I sigh, putting my phone away. “So you sire so you aren’t alone?”
“We are always alone.” She folds her arms, looking out into the darkness. “Friendship requires love, and love requires a soul. We sire so for a few moments we can pretend we have power over life and death. So for a few moments we can savor that moment between dead and undead and remember our own change. And because it’s funny.” Her lips twist in amusement. “Cemeteries used to be so amusing. I’d wait after a burial to see the new vampire emerge, covered in dirt and baffled. Like a baby deer learning to walk.”
“Baby deer don’t kill people.”
She shrugs. “Well. It is a pleasure I no longer have and never will again. It’s all hollow anyway. The only person I should have sired, the only one I would have liked to spend an eternity with, is beyond my reach and forever will be.” She puts her hand over Sarah’s name again.
And, weirdly, I get it. I get her. Because if I thought I had a way to bind the people I love to me, to keep them forever, safe and mine? I think I would. I know it’s wrong. Is it wrong, though? It would be if I were making them vampires. But that impulse—to change someone so they can’t be hurt, so they can’t grow old or grow away from you, or die, or seem to be dead but really be hiding because they’re absolute idiots—that, I understand.
“Who’s in the car?” she asks, nodding toward my car. “You keep looking in that direction.”
“Old friend. Sort of.” Where the hells is Artemis?
“Sort of?”
“We were kind of a thing? Or going to be a thing. I’m not really sure. And now it’s all messed up and complicated and he’s sick and I don’t know how to fix it.”
“Oh, I used to love couples like you. The sick lover! Modern medicine is a plague. Back in the day, I had but to wander through a park a few evenings before I’d find some lad doting on his ailing sweetheart, or some sweet pretty lass placing a blanket on the lap of her wasting beau. I’d offer to save them. The hope and desperation in their eyes! My own Faustian play, over and over, knowing as soon as I turned the dying lover, they’d kill the human one! Such sweet tragedy.”
“Are all vampires this chatty?”
She purses her red lips. “You try living in the shadows of the night for decades; tell me how you entertain yourself then. Besides which, Artemis isn’t here yet. What else do you have to do?”
I half nod in agreement, then I freeze. “I never said her name.”
She freezes, a half smile on her lips. “Didn’t you?” Then she lunges.
22
I TWIST, USING JANE’S OWN momentum to throw her against the side of the mausoleum. Her head cracks against her dead friend’s name. “What did you do to my sister?” I scream. If she took Artemis—if she hurt her—
“Oh, you sweet thing.” She stands.
“Did you hurt her?” Artemis can’t be dead. She can’t be. “Where is she?”
Jane leans in close, licking her lips. “The devastation is going to taste so sweet on you.” I grab her and throw her against the mausoleum again. She laughs. “Don’t you want to know the truth? Don’t you want to know why I’m here? Why you’re here? And why Artemis isn’t?”
I pause, and she uses that moment to slam her fist into my stomach. I stumble backward.
“We have our orders. No killing the Slayer,” a male voice in the darkness calls out.