I’d brought my laptop and, as soon as we were seated, set to work catching up on my business e-mail. Cassandra stayed quiet until the plane lifted off.
“I hear from Kenneth that you’re trying to start a new Coven,” she began.
“Not really,” I mumbled, and typed faster.
“Well, that’s good.”
I stopped, fingers poised above the keyboard. Then, with great effort, I forced them back to the keys and resumed typing. Do not rise to the bait. Do not rise—
“I told him I couldn’t imagine you’d do anything so foolish.”
Type faster. Harder. Do not stop.
“I can understand why you’d want to. It must be very hard on your ego. Getting kicked out of your Coven. And as Leader, no less.”
I willed my fingers back to the keyboard, but they ignored my brain’s command, and kept clenching into fists instead.
“I suppose it was very satisfying for you, those few months as Coven Leader. You’d obviously want to recapture that sense of importance.”
“It was never about being important. I just wanted to—”
I stopped and resumed typing.
“You just wanted to do what, Paige?”
The flight attendant stopped by. I ordered a coffee. Cassandra took wine.
“You wanted to do what, Paige?” Cassandra repeated when the server was gone.
I turned to look at her. “Don’t needle me. You always do this. You’re like one of those sitcom mothers-in-law, poking and prodding, feigning interest, but only looking for a soft spot, someplace to sneak in an insinuation, an insult.”
“Isn’t it possible that I’m not feigning interest? That I really do want to know more about you?”
“You’ve never been interested in me before.”
“You’ve never been interesting before. But you’re finally growing up, and I don’t just mean getting older. In the last year or so, you’ve matured into an intriguing individual. Not necessarily someone I’d choose to be stranded on a desert island with, but conflict of opinion can make for more interesting relationships than common interests. If I challenge your opinions, it’s because I’m curious to hear how you defend them.”
“I don’t want to defend them,” I said. “Not now. Your questions feel like insults, Cassandra, and I don’t want to deal with them.”
To my surprise, she didn’t say another word. Just sipped her wine, reclined her seat, and rested for the remainder of the flight.
Disconnected
VAMPIRES ARE A RACE OF CITY DWELLERS. THAT MAY SEEM obvious, since it’s far easier to kill undetected in a city with hundreds of annual unsolved murders, rather than in a small town that might see a single homicide a year. In truth, though, that’s not a major factor in their choice.
Real vampires aren’t the marauding bloodsuckers you see on late-night TV, racking up a dozen victims every night. A real vampire only needs to kill once a year, though they must feed more often than that. Feeding is easy enough—if you ever pass out in a bar and wake up the next morning with a hangover that seems worse than normal, I’d suggest you check your neck. You may not find the marks, though. Unless you know what you’re looking for, vampire bites are nearly impossible to see, and the aftereffects are no more debilitating than donating blood on an empty stomach.
Since a vampire bite is rarely fatal, it would be easy enough for vamps to live outside the city and commute for their annual kill. It might even be safer. The problem is that pesky semi-immortality. When you don’t age, people notice. It may take a while, but they eventually start to ask what brand of moisturizer you’re using. The smaller the town, the more people pay attention, and the more they talk. In a big city, a vampire could stay in one spot for fifteen to twenty years, and never hear more than a few snide Botox comments. Plus, there’s the whole boredom issue. Small towns are great for raising a family, but if you’re single and childless, Saturday nights on the front porch swing get a little dull after the first hundred years.
So, vampires like the city life. In North America, they also prefer the sunshine belt, with over half of the continent’s vampires living below the Mason-Dixon line. Northern winters probably lose their appeal pretty quickly when you realize you could lie on the beach all day and never risk so much as a sunburn. And it’s much easier to bite someone in a tank top than to gnaw through a parka.
Cassandra had arranged to meet Aaron in a bar on the south side of Atlanta. I’d