It was starting to get late but Norah tried really hard to stay focused on the inane game on her phone and not check the clock every minute. She sat in a folding chair at a small card table and munched on peanuts. Shelby was just across the room, chatting and smiling with a bazillion-year-old vampire guy. Truthfully he was just over a thousand years old, but it might as well have been a made up numeral. How does somebody even manage to stay alive for that long, she thought, whether they’re generally indestructible or not? She didn’t care how much blood he’d slurped over that many centuries. Was he bored? Over a thousand years old and you… spend time at a rec hall meetup? You’ve got to be bored.
She tried not to think of him as a walking corpse and just think of him as the guy talking to Shelby. He had the whole tall, Viking-adjacent thing going on, and he seemed pretty engaged in whatever ridiculous story she was telling him, so he couldn’t be that bad. She turned back to her game, and after a few minutes, Shelby wound her way back, the Viking in tow.
She stood up and smiled at them. Vamp guy gave her a polite smile of his own.
“Norah! This is Erik,” Shelby said as the vamp guy—Erik—offered a handshake. Cold hands—very cold. But a warm smile. “Nice to meet you,” Norah said.
“Likewise,” he said with a nod.
“Erik lives downtown. He’s been telling me all about those great shows they put on in the park all summer. And this great new Thai place we have to try.” She turned to Erik. “I’m buying her dinner in exchange for being my wing woman tonight.”
He laughed. “Sounds like a fair deal. I was telling your sister about a new bar that opened up near my apartment, too. I offered to buy her a drink but she said she came in a set tonight,” he said. “Would you both like to join me?”
Shelby looked expectantly at Norah, who was trying not to roll her eyes. “Erik, would you excuse us for just a minute?” Norah said.
She yanked Shelby by the elbow a few feet away and hissed at her in her very best inside voice. “We are not going to a bar with a strange man you just met!”
“Oh come ON.” Now it was Shelby’s turn to roll her eyes. “Don’t be such a prude. You’re just saying that because he’s a vampire. You’ve gone home with randos you met at bars. If he was human you wouldn’t even say a word.”
“That is not true! You’re my baby sister! I’m not just gonna watch you hop in the cab with some dude you met in a basement!”
“Oh my gawd. You sound like mom.”
“Hey, I—”
“Shhh! No. First of all, you’d be hopping in that cab with me, so it’s not like I’m going by myself. Second of all, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m a freakin’ vampire too, now! That’s why we’re here in the first place. And! I’m like probably way stronger than him because I’m newer so even if he did try anything sketchy—which he won’t, hello, he works in finance—I could totally take him. If anything, you need me to protect you now, not the other way around.”
Norah narrowed her eyes, ready to protest, but Shelby pressed on. “If you really don’t want to go, it’s fine. I can go by myself. But I thought it’d be nice to spend time together like this. You’ve been really great and supportive, but I know you think it’s weird. And I know lying to mom and dad’s been hard on you, too. I thought it’d be good if you met some other vamps besides me.”
“I’ve met other vamps!”
“Oh puh-lease. You’ve covered their petitions against the code department [editor’s note: Yes, Norah is a reporter. I started writing this when I worked in a newsroom and it was the only office environment I had any experience with. And at this point I don’t really feel like reworking this whole thing to make Norah work in marketing] and, I don’t know, written about subscription blood banks. I’m talking like, normal vamps. Like me.”
Norah sighed, thinking about her beat—her sad, sad, “hey, all the other reporters are working on real stories, can you cover this?” beat. It was a weird local government mash up of city council meetings, budget hearings and vampire-related infrastructure news. “Fine,” she said. “Erik seems fine. Let’s go.”
She squealed and jumped at her with a half hug. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
“You’re welcome. But if he turns out to be a creep, I’m bailing and dragging you with me.”
“Understood. And by the way…”
“What?”
“Vampire hearing,” she said, throwing a smirk in Erik’s direction. “He totally heard everything you said.”
Norah’s face turned ten shades of red and she gave him a sheepish smile. He shrugged and called over, “No problem. Happens all the time.”