With a twinkle in his eye and a cookie in his belly, he gathered up his velvet sack and disappeared up the chimney. But before he left, he pointed at me and said, “Ho-ho-ho, and a very merry Christmas to you, Mallory.”
I woke up drenched in sweat. That couldn’t be right. I was a vampire, and vampires didn’t sweat.
Granted, I wasn’t like most vampires. Blood made my stomach turn, my fangs were embarrassingly small and probably incapable of penetrating flesh—not that I’d know—and I might have some suspiciously non-vampire-like powers. Maybe witchy. Maybe wizardy. Hard to say at this point. Point being, I wasn’t your garden-variety sociopathic vampire.
One bonus to being turned was that I’d lost all—most? of my, at-that-point-undiagnosed, anxiety disorders. Most vamps lost their humanity—hence the sociopath title—but not all did. And some even made their way back to being empathetic, though still bloodsucking, beings. My roommate fell into one of those two camps. Jefferson Wembley was a good guy.
But as atypical a vamp as I was, in one regard I was quite typical: I didn’t sweat.
And that was about when I felt the hot, heavy breath of a beastly creature on my cheek. I cracked an eye.
“Boone.”
My bloodhound grinned at me with his tongue lolling out to the side.
“Really funny. Freak out the sleeping vampire. Ha-ha.” I wiped bloodhound drool from my cheek and arm onto my nightgown, except that had slobber on it, too. “Ew. How long have you been standing here, drooling on me?”
Unlike most dogs, my hound both understood me and could formulate replies. A djinn search-dog handler, who I’d never met but had been well-liked, died suddenly and tragically, leaving behind Boone, a dog who’d been altered by the magical connection she’d forged between them. He could understand human speech—at least, my human speech. He could even comprehend other people—if I happened to be around.
Why me? And how had the ability survived his djinn partner’s death? No one knew, but I’d gotten a monster-sized, red hound, roommate out of it. Fine by me, because when he wasn’t drooling, he was excellent company. Oh, and he had a great bad-guy-sniffing talents.
Boone yawned, stretched, and then sauntered away. A few minutes later, I heard the thud of him jumping up and settling onto the guest bedroom bed. Who was I kidding? His bed.
“Fine, don’t answer. That’s nifty. Just wake me up with your funky slime and your bad breath.” I glanced at the clock: three minutes past midnight. I groaned and pulled my pillow over my face.
No, I was not a nocturnal vampire. I slept at night. I was sure there were some night owls out there, but it was by choice. We didn’t go up in flames when the sun touched our skin. How would vampires have survived this long if that were true, and where did people get that stuff?
I groaned again. As a day-dwelling and day-errand-running vampire, I had Christmas procrastination shopping to do in the morning. There were only five more days until Christmas. I lifted the pillow up. “Five days till Christmas, Boone. Five. No Christmas doggie bones for you if I don’t get to the store.” At this rate, I wasn’t making it out of bed in time for morning shopping.
A one-hundred-pound-bloodhound-generated snore was my only response.