Paranormal Bromance (Kitty Norville 12.50)

“For a gaming thing? I Googled you, by the way. Impressive.”

I blushed. I shouldn’t have been able to blush, I was a vampire and I didn’t have the blood to spare. All I did was write about games, and she was impressed? My heart didn’t beat but I was somehow sure I could feel it.

“Thanks. But no, actually. She said she’s doing some kind of article on vampires. Like, normal vampires, not the fancy powerful vampires. It was kind of weird, actually.”

“Normal vampires? Not two words I ever thought to hear together.”

“Come on, you met me. And Jack for that matter.”

“I don’t think Jack is normal.”

She had a point. I chuckled.

“But you said it was weird?”

“Yeah. Like, asking questions she already knew the answers to. Not asking much about us, but wanting to know stuff about the Family, other high-powered vampires in Denver. You know?”

“Like she was spying?”

“Exactly.”

It was probably nothing. She probably didn’t have any crazy ulterior motive. Maybe Jack was right, I’d been living in a basement for too long and needed to get out more.

I said, “You know, forget it. No more talking, let’s kill some zombies.”

“Roger that,” she replied.

And we did. For four hours. It was a blast.

While playing we had, like, actual conversations. It felt great. It felt human. I found out she was a paralegal who’d gone to CU Boulder and lived in Westminster but wanted to move closer to downtown because that was where she worked, and she had two sisters and a cat named George and she also liked to ski, and helpfully tried to think of ways to make a night skiing trip worthwhile, like sharing a condo and buying blackout curtains for the windows so no one would accidentally let in any sunlight. She made it all sound like a thing I could actually do. With her.

Finally, at something like two in the morning, she signed off because she had to work. I understood. So did I, but it was hard getting past the happy glow.

Aaron came out of his room after a stretch of quiet. “Who were you talking to?”

“Ginny,” I said, completely una

ble to keep the dreaminess out of my voice. “Her name is Ginny.”

“A girl?”

“Yes, a girl.”

“You can’t meet a girl. You can’t like a girl.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re a vampire.”

“Jack does it all the time.”

“I don’t think what he does is exactly meeting girls.”

True enough. “I like her. We get along. She’s higher level than me on World of Warcraft.”

“But you’re a vampire.”

I knew what he was really saying, that I couldn’t exactly take her out on a real date, like out to dinner or something, and I couldn’t really meet her parents, and we couldn’t talk about getting married and the kids and the future because, basically, compared to me, she didn’t have one.