Behind the shopping center is the parking lot; and behind the parking lot is the drainage ditch; and behind the drainage ditch, before the back lawns of the housing development, are the woods. The woods are narrow and ugly, their borders uninviting. On one side the random refuse of commerce: the cigarette butts of cashiers on break, empty foil potato chip bags faded to sooty pastels, cardboard boxes rain-soaked to ink-stained pulp. On the other side, the owners of the houses in the development have put up hedgerows, windbreaks, unfriendly spreading things with thorns — the detritus of the shopping center will not invade their quiet civilized yards.

And in between, no more than twenty yards wide at its widest point, are the woods. They run perhaps two miles before ending abruptly at the far end of the elementary-school soccer field, behind the playground.

Emiline walks in the woods and takes inventory. She has: One semester of college now behind her. She has brown hair that goes stringy in good weather and flat in bad weather, and a blue streak she keeps in it that looks nice the first day but fades to dishwater gray almost immediately, even if she bleaches it first. She has purple glasses that her mother says hide her “lovely green eyes” (in fact, plain hazel), and she has contacts but she never wears them because she is nervous about touching her eyes. She has a collection of T-shirts that say things like “I roll twenties” and “You get what everyone gets; you get a lifetime” and “She blinded me with library science.” She has all of her mom’s Anne Rice hardcovers. She has a Celtic cross necklace that her best friend, Marcus, got her when they went to the Renaissance Faire in Tuxedo, New York, on her seventeenth birthday. She has a place she lives, most of the time, that is not this boring suburb she’s returned to for winter break. She is no longer confined in her dull plain shoe box of a hometown; now she has a monkish room in a beautiful stone tower — nothing so drab as the term “dormitory” suggests — where she works daily to transmute into the fascinating soul she wants to be.

She does not have: A boyfriend. A life of adventure and mystery. Sufficiently narrow hips. A car of her own. A dark, perfect, forbidden love.

She is home from her first semester of college, and she has made it three whole days of claustrophobic cohabitation with her parents before fleeing for the quiet of her little strip of forgotten wilderness. The general mood at home is antagonistic, and her parents mostly ignore her in favor of bouts of fighting with each other, interspersed with sulking alone. This is a new and unpleasant development, and Em wonders what has happened to chip away at their marriage in just the four months she’s been gone. She feels strongly motivated to spend as little time at home as possible.

As always, the woods calm her. When she stops walking, and the crunching and cracking of leaves and twigs under her ceases, the trees hum with bewitching silence. It’s evening, not late, but the sun is long gone.

Her destination is a house in the development at the far end of her walk; she is meant to meet up with her friends Marcus and Lilith. She kind of doesn’t want to spend the next month going to her old high-school hangouts with her old high-school friends, but she can’t imagine what else she might do. Tonight they gather at Marcus’s parents’ house — where Marcus, it should be noted, still lives, since he is going to college locally — and try to figure out what they have now with each other.

She kicks at leaves, crunchy with frost. This town is dead, she thinks. It is a terrible place to be from if you are trying to be somebody.

The boy could not possibly have appeared anywhere else in her stupid little town, so he appears at the end of the woods where the soccer field starts and orangeade-colored sodium lights mark the boundaries of school property. She has made this walk hundreds of times and has met another person here perhaps twice before. But from the shadows comes the boy, and when he sees her, though she doesn’t know him, he smiles as though he was expecting her.

He could only appear here because his appearing anywhere else in town would make him ridiculous. He’s dressed in clothes appropriate to a night at the opera, not a weeknight walk past the split-levels in Owl’s Crest North. And he is blue-pale. And also, she sees as she gets closer, he is very pretty. He has what she would now, after this past fall, refer to as a Byronic profile, with a strong brow and a look of great gravity set in the bones of his face.

She tries to imagine him down at the Frosty on Friday night, eating soft-serve in the parking lot. Tries to imagine him at the chain faux Irish pub out on the main drag where the local bank tellers go to drink Irish coffees and beer. It simply doesn’t compute. He is clearly not of this place, so much so that Em’s first thought as she sees him isn’t Who is he? but instead What is he doing here?

He stops before her and cocks his head curiously. He says, “What brings a pretty girl out walking on a night with no moon?”

Not the best line she’s ever heard, but not the worst either. “Emiline,” she says, “and friends.” She sticks her hands in her vest pockets and shifts her weight back and forth to keep herself warm. “Old friends I haven’t seen in a while.” She pushes her glasses up her nose, suddenly self-conscious of her messy ponytail and “Dungeon Masters do it behind a screen” T-shirt.

He grins and she sees that under his soft prettiness is a sharpness. “Well, Emiline, you may call me Ricard. And they are lucky friends who might earn your company for an evening.”

This is all very Gothic and Romantic, but Emiline reminds herself firmly that by any normal measure he sounds like an insane person. She wants to play along, but here in the sodium lights in view of the loading dock of her elementary school, she can’t, she just can’t. “I’m sorry, look, I’m really not in the mood tonight. Normally I’d love to play lord and damsel or whatever, but right now I’m just feeling a lot of ambivalence about seeing these old friends and I’m kind of preoccupied.”

His grin falls, but in its place is not disappointment or annoyance but confusion. “In the mood for what?”

“You know, the”— Em gestures up to take in all of Ricard, his clothes, his face, his hair — “the whole dark prince thing. Yes, you’re the prettiest thing in the suburbs. Congratulations.”

He smiles. “I am pleased that you think me pretty.”

“Well, you’ve worked hard enough at it.”

Now that the romance of the woods is gone, she realizes she knows the type well. Overdressed for everything, affects archaic speech patterns, playing a little live-action role-playing dark fantasy game in his head. She is reminded why she became friends with Marcus and Lilith, two of the few people she knew who liked dark fantasy and nerdy stuff, but didn’t take it way too seriously, or pour their entire personalities into it. She knew boys like Ricard in high school — smug, patrician, and eager for you to understand how they personally are tortured by existence. Cruel parodies of the Romantic.

Ricard cocks his head as though she has said something deeply intriguing. “Does it seem so?” he says. “It’s meant to look natural. Like I woke up like this.”

His look is so sincere that she begins laughing, then claps her hand over her mouth. “Most of us don’t wake up in eyeliner.”

He nods. “I will remember that for next time.” His mouth quirks up in a smirk that Em is irritated to find charming. “Anything else about me you would change?”

Em swears loudly. “Stop being so likable! I’m trying to judge you. I don’t like fake vampires and all that.”

“Well, I am happy to report,” says Ricard, “that I am not one of those.” He starts into the woods, heading into the dark. “I’ll see you again, I think,” he calls back.

Emiline watches him slip into shadows until the sound of his boots on the underbrush fades.

Her friends are in the semifinished basement where Emiline has spent probably whole months of her life in aggregate. Em finds herself smiling when she walks by Blackball, Marcus’s terrible tiny car, whose many flaws he is constantly trying to hide by endless weird customizations. For the holiday season, Marcus has painted an extremely Gothic stylized crow on the hood in glow-in-the-dark paint, because Marcus does not care about the holiday season.

Marcus himself is lazily shooting pool with no real purpose, and Lilith is sitting up on the back of the couch, her feet on the seat. In addition there is Clyde, who Emiline vaguely knew before, and who is apparently now dating Marcus, and who throws the entire balance of the gathering off. Immediately Emiline feels self-conscious and observed — the prodigal returning. Marcus looks up and grins as she comes down the steps. “There she is,” he says. “Come over here and let me beat you at nine-ball.”

“You better play with him,” says Lilith from her perch. “He’s completely insufferable tonight and needs a whuppin’.”

Marcus holds up the back of his hand. “I am the night. Behold my nail polish.” His nails are very purple. “It’s called Aperotos Eros,” he adds.

“Very Latin,” Clyde says.

“Greek,” says Em.

“Swinburne,” one-ups Lilith. “It’s the name of a Swinburne poem. ‘Strong as death, and cruel as the grave.’”

“Which perfectly describes my prowess at the pool table,” says Marcus.

“You are the gothiest pool hustler ever,” says Clyde.

“Throws them off,” Marcus says. “They underestimate a dude in eye shadow.”

Em pretends to carefully select a cue from the wall; she knows this basement well and knows that they are all equally terrible.

They shoot pool and talk. Em tells them some funny stories from college, feels how odd it is that these people who are so important to her know nothing of these other people who are also so important to her. Says “my friend” and a name in an explanatory tone a lot. They laugh. They tell her stories. They all go to the local college together, and they still hang out together, and they want to tell her about their new friends, too. They think she would really like these new friends. It would be great if Em came down to visit for a weekend. Em nods vaguely. Marcus brings down some of his dad’s home brew, and she takes one, though when she last spent time with these friends, she never touched alcohol at all. No one mentions it.

She doesn’t mention Ricard, either.

Em’s next week is full of Christmas and extended family and answering the same questions over and over. This affords her very few opportunities to flee her parents. She walks the dog. A lot. Well more than the dog needs walking.

Which is when she sees Ricard again. This time he is crossing the street at the entrance to Em’s parents’ development, walking with purpose, although this is not a place where anybody walks and there is nowhere nearby for him to plausibly be walking from or to. When the dog sees Ricard, she goes berserk, barking and jumping as though in warning. He looks taken aback but then notices Em, and a smile breaks out on his face that Em finds she is very gratified to see. This winter break could be more interesting than she thought. If the dog would ever shut up and stop killing the mood.

“Sorry about that,” she calls over the barks. “Don’t take it personally — she does it to kids on bikes too. Uh, hello, also. Ricard, right?”

Ricard is trying to smile at her but is eyeing the dog nervously. “And you are Emiline.”

“People just call me Em,” she says. The dog has retreated to sitting and growling quietly. “Emiline is a little long and old-fashioned.”

“I like old-fashioned,” says Ricard. He hesitates. “This is forward of me, but — I should like to see you again. Without the dog perhaps. Dogs are never fond of me.”

“It’s because you’re a vaaaampire,” Em says, wiggling her fingers at him in what she hopes will be taken for playful flirtation.

“I get that all the time,” Ricard says seriously.

“I can’t possibly imagine why,” Em says with a little grin.

She begins going for long walks without the dog.

Em has no way of finding Ricard, but he finds her. Perhaps he lives nearby; perhaps, like her, he enjoys the rough cold quiet of walking the neighborhood streets at night. She knows that, realistically, Ricard must wait for her, must pay attention to when she walks and where she goes. Thinking of this, a sinister frisson slides like a cold finger from her neck to the small of her back, which oddly also excites her.

He falls in step with her and they talk. She tells him about how she fled, how she went away to make a project of herself, to transform herself. He tells her that he hopes to stay here, to settle down. This place appeals to him for all the reasons it’s meant to appeal: safety, convenience, quiet.

“But it’s so antiseptic,” Em complains. They are perched together on the handrail preventing kids from falling into the sad little creek behind the public library. Em has a pile of pebbles in her hand, damp with soil, and is pitching them into the creek, one by one. The chill of the steel handrail slices a line across the backs of her thighs. “It doesn’t seem like your kind of place at all.”

“Nor yours, but here you are,” Ricard points out.

“Accident of birth. I didn’t choose to be here.”

He shrugs. “I have lived all over this country. Right now I live here.” He stops, and when she turns to look at him questioningly, he puts his fingertips to the side of her face; it’s the first time he has touched her. His hand is cold. He stares at her with his dark eyes, his irises nearly black.

When she goes home, and then the next day when she meets Marcus and Clyde and Lilith for what Marcus describes as their “post-ironic” bowling night, she feels the places on her face where his fingers touched her. She wishes that they had left marks, something that would intrigue her friends, let them know she has a secret.

Ricard never asks for any more contact than their fortuitous meetings and walks, but one night he kisses her, not under a streetlight but in the shadows of a baseball field scoreboard. His lips, his tongue, are cold. He gives her a necklace, a teardrop-shaped, faceted garnet on a thick filigree gold chain. It looks very old. When she puts it on, it shines like a fresh wound on her throat. It has a pleasantly real weight to it, unlike any other jewelry she owns. He asks her to wear it when she sees him, instead of the Celtic cross that she usually wears.

“I have found a forbidden love,” Em tells her friends when next she sees them. They are at Lilith’s gigantic house for her parents’ yearly Epiphany party, and Em notes that she is still able to reliably call Lilith “Lillian” in front of her parents. Some things are programmed into her forever, apparently.

“Oh?” says Clyde politely.

“Yes, but it’s a secret,” she says. She has had a couple of glasses of wine and is a little flushed. Her ears are too warm, she thinks.

“Do tell,” says Marcus, coming up behind Clyde. “Someone we know?”

“I don’t know,” Em says. “I don’t think so. He’s older. I never saw him before a couple of weeks ago.” She tells them about Ricard, and then when Lilith — Lillian — comes over to see how they’re doing, she tells again.

Marcus nods with sagacity at the end of the story. “I can already tell you the punch line.”

“This guy is obviously a vampire?” says Em gravely.

“By which you mean a goth kid with too much money,” says Lilith.

“Like Lillian,” agrees Marcus.

“Shut up.”

Marcus puts his hand on Em’s shoulder. “No, but seriously, that guy sounds super-weird. There are super-weird people in this town, you know that.”

“He doesn’t seem weird, really,” she says. “He seems . . . old-fashioned. And so serious that he seems a little silly. But sincere. And that makes up for a lot.”

“So you’re saying that if he was pretending to be a vampire, he’d be a weird creep, but since he’s probably actually a vampire, he’s okay?”

“Well, I might not have put it that way,” Em says defensively.

“I knew it!” Marcus says. “Did you jump through the thornbush today, Em?”

“What?” This from Clyde.

Marcus turns as if just noticing him. “Wow, that last sentence probably sounded completely insane and out of nowhere for you, huh?”

“It did,” confirms Clyde.

“Emiline used to make us jump through a thornbush,” Lilith says drily. “When we were kids.”

Clyde cocks an eyebrow at Em. Show-off, she thinks. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You stand accused, Em,” Marcus says. “Of making your poor friends jump through a thornbush just to play with you.”

“Explain,” says Clyde.

Em sighs. Of course she knows what they’re talking about. “When we used to play in the woods, the ones between my neighborhood and the shopping center, I told Marcus and Lillian — we must have been about nine or ten then — that I was going to play in the Real Forest, and if they wanted to come with me, they had to jump through this big thornbush at the entrance.”

“You were a little tyrant,” says Marcus.

“The Real Forest?” says Clyde politely.

“That’s where the faeries are,” Lilith says.

“Ah. And you guys actually did it? Jumped?”

Marcus looks a little sheepish. “We told her that she had to do it first, and she just took off and did it. Came down covered in nettles, must have hurt like crazy, and this girl stands up smiling. ‘See?’ she said. ‘Are you coming to the Real Forest, or am I going alone?’”

“She was very convincing,” says Lilith.

“I’m ready to go to the Real Forest right now,” Clyde says. He looks at Marcus. “So you jumped?”

Marcus shrugged. “What were we going to do? Not join our friend in the Real Forest? The clearly superior Real Forest? And then once we did it once —”

“— you had to do it every time,” says Em, smiling. “I haven’t made you do that in years.”

“Six years, four months, eleven days,” Marcus says, and Em pulls a face at him.

“Why the hell did you let her boss you around like that?” says Clyde.

“Well,” says Marcus, “it used to drive me crazy, and I’d get mad at Em when I was home and still finding thorns stuck in my socks. But then I would think, ‘What if she were actually right? What if she really did see the magic in the world? There’s no chance, right? But maybe the tiniest, teeniest little chance.’” He shrugs. “That teeny, tiny chance was worth it. Because how stupid would I be if I had a friend who could see faeries, and when she invited me to join her, I blew her off to avoid some thorns?”

Emiline arranges for all of them to meet at the old wooden playground at the elementary school. It’s meant for little kids, but on weekend nights it’s invaded by high-school kids who use its wooden castles and forts and tunnels to play tag and smoke and make out. Emiline feels a wave of nostalgia and then realizes that she last spent time here only five months ago.

Ricard appears from between the trees at the edge of the grass. The playground is six or seven miles from where they usually meet on their walks; she wonders for the first time if he has a car or a bike, and if so, whether he parks it far away so he can make a dramatic entrance on foot. The mystery of it delights her.

Em and her friends are perched atop a picnic table. Tonight, a winter weeknight while kids are still on break from school, they are the only ones there. She introduces everyone around, and then almost immediately an awkward silence descends.

Marcus does his best to break it. “So, do you go to school around here?”

Ricard shakes his head. “I’m done with schooling.”

“So what do you, you know, do?” says Lilith. They are not reacting to Ricard in the way Em would have hoped; they are not caught up in the deep mystery of him, just the shallow mystery of fitting him into the patterns they already know. They seem suspicious and troubled.

Ricard smiles in a way that is probably meant to be reassuring but seems oddly predatory. “I’m still working out what it is that I do.”

“So you just, like, bum around?” Clyde says. With a start, Emiline realizes why her friends are so dubious. They have fit Ricard neatly into a box she had never even considered for him, that of the guy who graduates from high school and then, unable to leave his well-known world, keeps hanging out with high-school kids, taking advantage of how easily a teenager can be impressed by a grown-up, even a marginal grown-up living with his parents, becoming more pathetic with each passing year. Even as Em thinks of Marcus and Lilith as hopelessly stuck in this charmless town, they at least are in college, are taking the expected next life step, and they are looking at Ricard in the same way that, perhaps, Em sometimes looks at them.

“It’s not like that,” Em says. “Ricard is new here; he’s still trying to figure out his life around here. He’s lived all over.”

“Can I ask you a personal question?” Marcus says to Ricard, who nods politely. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but are you a vampire?”

The direct approach is not what Em had expected, but she has to acknowledge it saves a certain amount of otherwise wasted time.

Ricard looks, for the first time in Em’s knowing of him, surprised. And perhaps intrigued. “I am,” he says, very slowly. “I am, in fact.”

This is not the right answer. “Wait,” Em says, trying for a playful tone, “it’s not —”

But Marcus is looking right at Ricard. “Prove it.”

Ricard now looks even more surprised. “You don’t want that.”

Lilith catches Em’s eye. She looks alarmed; Em feels all of the new sophistication she’s tried to show her friends slipping unpleasantly away like a snowball stuffed down the back of her shirt. You’re smarter than this, Em reads on Lilith’s face.

“That’s about what I thought,” says Marcus, smiling. “You know, I’ve met a lot of vampires in this town, and none of them have ever been willing to prove it.”

Ricard shrugs. Then, with an unexpectedly inhuman speed, he bites Clyde in the neck.

The world is abruptly stilled. The wind stops whistling. They are frozen, the five of them, in a strange tableau. Marcus’s smile has dropped, and his eyes have widened; Lilith is gasping, mouth open. Em’s gaze is fixed at the point where Ricard’s mouth meets Clyde’s skin. Ricard’s hand is on Em’s forearm, bracing himself as he bends over; it is very, very cold.

Clyde’s head is thrown back, and in his throat and chest, Em sees his breath rising and falling. She expects fear, hyperventilating, but his breath is sure and slow. He looks surprisingly calm; his only movement is a rapid fluttering under his closed eyelids.

Ricard detaches himself and stands up. Time starts again, and two streams of blood, black in the light, flow unhurriedly from Clyde’s neck, over his collarbone, and under the collar of his sweater. Ricard himself has a dark stain of blood on his lips, which he wipes off with two fingers and, watching Em, puts into his mouth to suck.

She should be horrified. She should at the very least be frightened. But instead her head and her body buzz electrically; she realizes her fists are clenched, though she doesn’t remember clenching them. The blood on Clyde’s neck is real, so much more real than anything else here, as though it has been dripped onto a photograph.

After a moment, Marcus finds his voice. “Why —”

“Will that serve as proof?” Ricard says mildly.

Marcus looks at Clyde. “Are you —”

“I’m fine,” says Clyde, with more clarity than Em would have expected. He looks at Ricard, back to Marcus, touches his neck. “It was fine. It felt good, actually.” He stares at Ricard. “You could have killed me. Could — couldn’t you?”

Ricard has drawn a handkerchief from his pocket and hands it to Clyde. “Anyone could kill you,” he says. “You could be stabbed with a knife or poisoned or drowned. I am not unique in that ability.”

“But —” Marcus begins.

“I could have hurt you,” Ricard continues, “but I did not. I have no wish to hurt you. I wished only to make a point. And my survival is made much easier not hurting anyone. Being a vampire does not mean being a murderer.”

“You didn’t need to do that,” Em says quietly, not looking at him, not looking at anyone.

“But it did serve as proof,” he says. “A swift demonstration seemed best.”

“I’m fine,” Clyde says again. “Really,” he says to Marcus. He looks back at Ricard. “But don’t . . . don’t do that again without warning me, okay?”

Ricard nods.

“Do me next,” says Lilith.

“No,” says Em sharply, to protect Lilith, but also — yes, also out of jealousy. “I think . . . I think we should probably all go. I think we’ll . . . I mean, I’ll call you guys tomorrow and . . .” She trails off. She only wants to get away, to not allow all of these things to collide any further tonight.

Lilith gets it. “Yeah, I think that’s right. Yeah. Come on, guys. Are you coming, Em?”

Em shakes her head. “I need to . . . to figure this out . . .” She cannot yet find words. Her friends look dubious, but they let her stay.

“I thought good vampires only drank blood from animals and stuff,” Marcus says as he turns to go.

“There are no good vampires,” says Ricard.

“So, yes,” he says to Em when her friends are out of sight, “I’m a monster; not a man.”

Em feels her blood buzz beneath her veins. Without a word, she slides up her sleeve and holds her wrist out to him.

He drinks from her, only a little. There is no pain. Each pump of her heart drives cold fire through her entire body. He releases her hand, presses his thumb to the wound, draws her closer, and presses his mouth to her neck like a lover. They are in a strange standing embrace; his body is cold, but at every point where it touches hers, a current flows from that point, to her heart, to her throat.

One hand is on her shoulder. With the other he gently lifts her Celtic cross out from under her shirt by its chain, unclasps it, and closes his fist around it. He releases her, takes a step back, and opens his balled fist to show Em. The cross falls to the ground, and in his palm Em can see its shape duplicated in angry red burns, beginning now to blister.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” she says.

Ricard nods. “Very much so.”

She shakes her head quickly. “I won’t wear it. Anymore.”

“I would like that.”

“I’m sorry about my friends,” she says. “They . . . I don’t know if they can understand.”

“If they are truly your friends, they will come to understand,” Ricard says.

Headlights appear in the distance, cresting the hill. Em takes Ricard’s burned hand in hers — even the burn is still cold — and, wanting to laugh, wanting to cry out, pulls him into the trees.

She doesn’t see her friends and Ricard at the same time after that. It is just too strange. She only has two weeks or so more of break, anyway, and then her parents will drive her back to the mountain village where she reads Chaucer and argues about Plato and looks for faeries under the ferns in the arboretum. She has no idea what she is going to do about Ricard.

In the meantime, their major relationship problem is a lack of privacy. Em can’t imagine bringing Ricard home to her parents — he looks young, but not, she admits to herself, young enough to be dating an eighteen-year-old. Ricard is her escape from the tension of home, and she finds she doesn’t want to make him part of that.

It’s difficult to find time to be truly hidden together from the world. Neither of them has a car they could park in a dark place for an evening. There are a few dingy local parks, but they are well patrolled, often by parents of Emiline’s high-school classmates, suggesting the worst possible discovery scenario. Her parents barely ever go out. And Ricard hasn’t told her where he lives and never invites her there, and she never asks.

Finally she smuggles a sleeping bag and a ground pad out of her parents’ attic and brings it into her woods. No one, as far as she knows, ever goes there but her, especially in this cold. She feels very self-conscious as she walks down the neighborhood streets with a bed roll under her arm, but no one pays the slightest attention, and once she is in her little strip of woods, she is hidden. She can see out, to the warm amber lights of the kitchens and the cold blue lights of flickering televisions, but no one can see in.

Ricard seems amused by the sleeping bag — he feels neither heat nor cold, he says, but he understands her need. “Even though I can be burned by fire,” he says, “I would feel it only as raw pain, without the heat you feel.” Em takes off her shoes and socks and her vest and sweater and, after some hesitation, her jeans, under which she is wearing profoundly unsexy waffle-knit long underwear — but at least it will be a much thinner barrier between them.

They get into the sleeping bag and wrap themselves together. Em’s T-shirt rucks up, and she feels her bare belly pressed against his. Slowly her warmth begins to seep into him, and it is more like she is embracing another regular person.

“You are leaving soon,” he says to her.

This was not what she had in mind when she brought the sleeping bag here. “Yeah,” she says. He doesn’t say anything, so after a moment she says, “Will you come visit?”

“I want you to stay with me,” he says.

“I can’t stay here,” she says. “I can’t live with my parents. I have — you know, I have school and stuff. Look how hard it is just for us to get this much time alone here.”

“What if I made you like me?”

“What?” she says, alarmed. She pulls her face away from his. “Like you? Like . . . a vampire?”

He looks in her eyes, says nothing.

“Can you do that?” she says.

Ricard nods. “You must feed from my blood, while being drained of yours. Then you will die and be reborn as one like me.”

“I have to die?”

“The path from life to undeath leads through death,” Ricard says. “Of this much at least I am sure.”

“And then?” she says.

“And then we leave this place,” Ricard says. “We travel, we seek a place to settle. We make a life together, you and I.” His eyes gleam.

“What about — what about school?” she says. “What about my life?”

“It would be a sacrifice,” he says. “A sacrifice of normalcy in exchange for life, for youth, for blood.”

“We barely know each other,” Em says. But the poetry of it appeals. And “normalcy” is one of the most hateful words she knows. She thinks of herself in four years, done with college, and getting ready to — what? To settle down into some terrible job and worry about her career? To meet someone and move to the suburbs with them and fight and sulk? Put that way, would she even miss what she sacrificed?

“We would have an eternity for that,” he says. He cocks his head at her as if in consideration, in evaluation. “I think that this is a thing that you want, more than you want this ‘college.’” He says “college” as if he’s never spoken the word before. Em feels the rocks and twigs beneath the sleeping pad, feels deeply, purely embodied. It is immediate and real, far more so than her town, which is almost transparent with falseness, but also more so than the books and intellectual searching of her school. For a semester she has been trying to escape from the mundane world by rising above it, becoming wiser, transcending the everyday, but now she considers what Ricard offers: going not up but down, not rising into air but burrowing into earth. She desperately wants to feel Ricard’s slim pale hands move from their chaste place on her shoulder blades. Blood rushes palpably up and down the vessels in her arms and legs, collects in her core. With a single word she can change everything, all at once, no four-year project of painful reconstruction but an instantaneous becoming something new and unnerving and beautiful, like Ricard himself.

So: “Yes,” she says.

“You will be damned,” he says quietly. “But you will never die.”

“We will be damned together,” she says. She frees one hand and uses two fingers to pull the collar of her shirt down on one side, to just barely below the top of her bra. “Drink from me,” she says, and he bends his head and does. The canopy of trees above is black against the purple-blue sky.

“I’m going to become a vampire,” she tells her friends the next time she sees them, back at Marcus’s house. She expects them to protest, to argue. But they take it as a reasonable career plan. They have no context for the life she made this past fall, the friends she has there, what she plans to sacrifice. Becoming a vampire is as feasible a path, and as strange, as what Em has been doing. They seem not so much troubled as disoriented; they are full of questions, only some of which Em has the answer to (Will we ever see you? Sure, all the time, just at night. Will you be immortal, invulnerable? Mostly, but not to fire or sunlight or holy water.) It reminds her disconcertingly of the questions they asked when she told them she was going away for school. (Will we ever see you? Sure, I’ll come visit; you can visit me. Why not just go to school here, where it’s cheaper? Because . . . because.) None of them ask if they can join her. She gets it. She is the one who goes away; they are the ones who stay.

The appointed day arrives. Now that Em is meant to become a vampire too, Ricard has invited her to his home; he gives an address that is surprisingly close by, in Fair Lane Manor, an enormous development of exactly identical postwar bungalows. In fact, she remembers, Clyde himself lives in the neighborhood, albeit three miles away at the other end.

She at once understands why he hadn’t wanted to show her his house — it is so utterly not Ricard. She had envisioned a lair, some hollowed-out cave under a hill or maybe an abandoned rickety house that everyone knew was haunted. She had not envisioned vinyl siding and fiberglass shutters. And then we leave this place, she thinks. Even the vampires’ houses are lame here.

Using the brass knocker on the front door of this particular house design is an act so familiar to her it is unsettling, something she’s done literally thousands of times before in her life. No one answers, and after a moment she tries the door and finds it unlocked. She steps into the foyer, dim in moonlight that streams through sheer curtains, illuminating dust floating and settling on a completely unremarkable room. “Hello?” she calls, and her voice is lost in the wall-to-wall carpeting; not only does she not get an answer — she doesn’t even hear an echo. She begins to look around, and as she does, the house’s relentless unremarkability starts to weigh upon her. It’s impossible to imagine Ricard picking out sensible table linen and dusting crystal goblets in a china cupboard, Em decides, because it is impossible, and now she paces the house with a slightly different eye, running her fingers slightly across the ends of furniture.

The house is opulent in a suburban way, a kind of cheerful beige rococo. Emiline passes through what she labels a “sitting room” and then a “living room”— these names feel right, even though she could not really tell you the exact distinction between the two. In each of these is beautiful furniture, expensive rugs, finery, and as she moves through the house, Em becomes more and more uneasy. Everything is very tasteful and normal, disconcertingly normal, like a hotel lobby or a model home. Has Ricard set this up for her benefit? Could he think this would humanize him in her eyes?

She decides no, probably not; this is likely just the camouflage of his house. This is a safe town, a town where kids trick-or-treat door-to-door or collect for charity or come to tell you about their religion, without much worry. And the view of the house they’d get from Ricard’s door would not cause worry. Strangely, though, to be surrounded by it here is oppressive. There is a feeling of dread in the back of her throat. Ricard must, after all, do his vampire stuff somewhere.

She is wondering if she should be searching for a crawl space or stairs to a basement when she walks into the dining room and finds the women awaiting her.

The dining table is set for thirteen. Its surface shines glossy with moonlight through the windows, and reflected in that surface are the faces of eleven motionless women. They are all dead. Some are long dead.

Em waits for the bottom to drop from her stomach, but it doesn’t; her curiosity needs to be satisfied first. Are these other vampires? Ricard’s family? They vary in age, though none are younger than perhaps eighteen and none are older than perhaps fifty.

Are they always here? Did Ricard put them here? Will they, unbreathing, nevertheless suddenly turn to look at her, fixing her with the empty gazes of their slack eyes?

She clings to confusion to avoid feeling horror. The women are silent and still. They seem to be mostly clothed in formal dresses, some quite old-fashioned. The uneven quality of the light drapes odd shadows across them.

Em is the only one in the room breathing. The only sounds are her feet scuffing the rug, her breath roaring in her ears, the tick of a grandfather clock in the next room, the hum of a furnace or boiler somewhere below.

You’ve never even seen a dead body before, she thinks to herself. Now you’ve seen a dozen. She is acutely aware of the rational part of her brain holding back the part of her brain that is screaming and panicking. With a calmness that she thinks might be actual shock — like the medical condition, not just shock in the sense of surprise — she realizes that the women are bolted in place in the chairs, their shoulders and waists pinioned to the chair back with a few long thin steel rods pierced through their bodies. That is what is keeping them sitting upright.

The necks of some of the women are horrible. She expects neat wounds, delicate fang holes, and a few of the women seem to have these dainty marks, but a number of the others seem to have had their throats torn out. Maybe they struggled.

“Do you want to know their names?” Ricard says from very, very close behind her.

Em gasps and then feels like an idiot for gasping, and then is angry at Ricard for his stupid dramatic entrance, and then is abruptly, coldly aware that Ricard, whatever else may be true of him, undeniably has eleven dead women pinned like butterflies in his dining room. Eleven women almost certainly murdered by him and — even stranger — left here for Emiline to find.

“Why are they here?” she says.

“They’re always here,” he says. Emiline grimaces, and he quickly adds, “Not here in the dining room, of course. They have their places of rest in the basement, in the cold. I have brought them here as witnesses.”

“Of what?” Em is slowly edging her way around the table, putting distance between herself and Ricard. “Are you a serial killer?”

“I’m a vampire,” Ricard says. “These are my failures. The ones I tried to turn, to join me in eternal life, but failed.”

“You mean you killed them. It was an accident, but you killed them. I thought you didn’t kill people. You don’t kill people.”

“They are my great unsolved mystery,” he says. “I keep them cold, below, where rot and contamination can’t find them. Someday I will find what I am doing wrong, and I will bring them back, all of them. Where now I am alone, then we will be a whole colony of vampires.”

The dark romance of Ricard’s vision clashes a bit with the reality of the glowering rictus gazes of the women at the table. Em focuses on their deterioration, the signs of their deaths. Surely they are too far gone to be made into vampires.

But what has happened to the ones who were not failures? The ones who he successfully turned, in the past? All gone away?

She steps involuntarily away from the table and finds the wall. She presses her hands against it behind her, feels its cool solidity as she says, “How many times have you succeeded?”

“That is of no matter,” says Ricard. “What matters is you and your joining with me. I am sure that I will succeed tonight.”

“How many times?” she says, more firmly. She stares at him, and he avoids her eyes.

“It will work with you,” he says. “I am sure of it. I have never been so sure.”

“It’s none,” Em says. “You’ve never succeeded at this, have you?” Anger courses through her. How unexpected. “How hard can it be to turn someone into a vampire?”

Ricard inhales sharply, through his teeth, and as he does he moves fast, not impossibly fast as she’s seen in vampire movies but faster, certainly, than her. He moves with conviction, in deliberate abrupt flashes, like something stalking prey. And he has his cold hand up against her neck, and he has pushed her head into the wall behind her. Her head rings and pain spreads from the spot. She flinches; she can’t help it.

“Do you know what it is like to be alone?” he whispers. His voice is not harsh; he speaks the words as if to a lover. “You are surrounded by family, by friends. Do you want to know”— and his face is so very close to hers — “the great secret of vampires? Do you? The secret is that as far as I know there are no other vampires.

“That is what it means to be alone — truly alone, alone in a way that you cannot imagine.”

He lets her go, walks back to the most cadaverous and sunken of the women. He puts a hand on her shoulder companionably.

“Violet. She was twenty years old, and we were in love. I knew her before. I fed from her, purposefully, with her permission, until she was overcome with blood loss and fell dead. I waited for her to arise. She did not.”

He moves to the next. “Angela, a widow at thirty-six. I was her younger man, even though I was nearly her age in true years lived. In those days I was romantic. We became engaged. On our wedding night, I fed her my own blood, and then I drained her.

“Clara. By then I was a monster. I terrorized her family, killed and ate their servants. I bled her, ritually, in front of her parents, and fed her both my blood and, when she weakened further, her own mother’s blood. She sits still dead before you.

“Laura, the daughter of a wealthy friend. I snuck into her room like a cat and fed her my blood without drinking any of hers myself. Vampire blood turns out, in large-enough quantity, to be fatal to humans.

“Lucy, a lady of low means living alone. I —”

“Stop!” Em yells, and he does.

“Why me?” she says.

“Why anyone?” He shrugs his usual shrug. “You appeal to me, little one. Is it not a great honor to be wanted as my eternal companion?”

“It is, but —” Is it? “Did you have to kill them? Why wouldn’t you try things that didn’t kill them?”

“I did,” Ricard said. “And then I tried things that killed them. Death is part of who I am. I am a thing which is, by all normal measures, dead. So however”— he slams his hand on the table, and Em jumps a little at the loud crack — “one may become a vampire, one will be dead by the time the process is done.

“I cannot turn away from that truth. And if you are to join me, you cannot either.”

His gaze is wide and hungry. Under his eyes, the skin sags slightly; to Em, it appears almost gray. In the dimness he could be a black-and-white photograph.

“So what do you have planned? For me?” she says shakily. She tries, very slowly and casually, to shift herself toward the door.

“We shall mingle our blood together,” he says, producing a knife from somewhere on his person.

“Uh, so like a ‘blood brothers’ kind of thing, or . . .” Em is stalling for time. She shifts her weight to her right foot and shuffles her body a little closer to the door.

“No. Not enough mingling of blood with a wound in the hand or even the wrist; I have tried both of those before. My fangs will not draw enough blood flow for that to work.” Ricard smiles a surprisingly cheerful smile for someone holding a gigantic knife. “I will draw the blood from your heart and then from my own, and allow them to mingle between us.”

“Oh,” she says. She glances around the room, hunting for a weapon, a clear path to a doorway, anything. “So you’re going to stab me in the heart and then stab yourself. Got it. That’s great. So you’re a crazy person. I thought that maybe, just maybe, under the clean surface of the suburbs lived something dark and vicious and romantic, but instead you’re just a serial killer with a vampire thing. I think —” She steps back and her shoulders unexpectedly bump the glass-fronted cabinets of serving ware behind her. They rattle loudly and unpleasantly. Ricard stays where he is, watching. The knife is down at his side; he doesn’t look concerned. “I think that I have thought better of it, Ricard,” she says, “and I think that I don’t want to become a vampire. And I —” She sidesteps, another loud glass rattling — why is she trying not to break anything in Ricard’s house? She is being careful of the possessions of a man who is currently preparing to stab her. “I think, I hate to say it, but I think that . . . I think when I go back to school, this needs to be over.”

“I am not crazy,” says Ricard. He continues not to move, just to track her with his eyes. “I drink blood. I am harmed, wounded by the light of day. You know these things.”

“I know I’ve only seen you at night,” Em says. “I know you drink blood, but again — serial killer! Those guys eat people all the time!”

“I,” says Ricard in what is clearly cold rage, “am a vampire, and I must try, until I succeed, to make another of my kind. I cannot know how. I can only guess and try, guess and try, and kill when I am wrong, and mourn my kill. I have been wrong eleven times. Perhaps I will be right the twelfth. If not, I will try again. I have, it seems, all the time in the world.” He smiles bleakly and raises the knife again.

Three things happen at once.

Em drops to the floor.

Ricard lashes out with the knife.

And a light as bright as the sun pierces her closed eyes with orange-white fire.

Some feeling has overloaded Em’s capacity for thought, which she distantly identified as pain radiating from the knee she has banged hard against the parquet. When, a few seconds later, she opens her eyes, it is bright as day.

Ricard is backed up against the far wall, an arm thrown over his face. Where the light hits him, smoke rises, his skin glows unpleasantly. A terrible smell like burning rubber hangs in the air; several of the women in their chairs have been knocked over and lie staring cockeyed at nothing at all.

The light is coming from a single spot the size of a dinner plate in the doorway. A dark figure steps forward; it is Marcus, holding a huge klieg light at his side like a Gatling gun. He looks grim and waves the light slightly, sending small lines of smoke up and down Ricard.

Em cannot speak. Marcus looks at her with concern. “Are you okay?”

Ricard takes this opportunity to leap for the door and disappears into the back part of the house. Marcus makes to follow him, but he can’t move very fast because of the weight of the light. “So much for the element of surprise,” he says. “Now we have to get out without him running us down and killing us.”

“How — why —” Em shakes her head; it does not clear. She begins to struggle to her feet.

Marcus drops the light, which lands hard on the carpet with a crack that sounds like a floorboard breaking. “We thought we should probably keep an eye on you. Lot of creeps in this town.”

“Since?” she says.

“Pretty much since he bit Clyde. I mean, he is a vampire, Em. Here’s what the folklore says. Vampires: sometimes good. Mostly evil, though. Mostly they are monsters and murderers.”

“Check and check,” Em says wearily.

“So we watched you. Followed Ricard home once, found the house, broke in when he was away.”

Suddenly he staggers and bends forward, a look of surprise and pain on his face. Ricard appears behind him in the doorway. Marcus coughs and winces, but he doesn’t seem to be bleeding, so Em grabs his hand and pulls, and he manages to stagger with her out the other doorway and into the back of the house. Fair Lane Manor house, she reminds herself. I could find my way around blindfolded. She makes for the open back door and leaps down four cement steps to the back patio. Her knee complains sharply, and she hears Marcus wheeze in pain, but they make it into the underbrush beyond the backyard, and though she feels the bright pricks of brambles and thorns pierce her through her clothes, they quickly pull free and slide down a few feet of scree into a dry creek bed. She can hear Ricard’s footfalls, loud against the patio.

“Again with the thorns,” Marcus says, pulling one out of his sleeve.

“Where are we going?” says Em.

“Playground,” Marcus says. “Blackball.”

She orients herself rapidly and takes off. She leaps over huge twisted roots and sharp rocks, stumbles, keeps going. Marcus runs just behind, breathing hard but keeping up.

She can hear Ricard behind them in the creek bed, also running, faster than her. In her mind is the thought of civilization, of human lights and company — but it is late and no one is out on the streets.

The creek bed ends at an overgrown culvert. She scrambles to the top of it and sees they are at a main road. She runs down it, toward the school. When they reach it, she runs down the circular driveway, where the buses stop, and around the side of the building to the parking lot next to the playground. Blackball is there, the only car in the lot, hunkered down with reassuring solidity, its engine running.

Em risks a look back, and there is Ricard, not nearly far enough behind them. They’re out in the open and Ricard is faster and there’s no place to hide — could they even get into the car before he caught them? And what then? He’ll just find them again later. He knows where Em lives, after all, and now he knows the car.

The door on the far side of the car opens and Clyde emerges. He is holding some large metal sculpture, and she has no idea what it is until he steps forward and a twenty-foot jet of flame emerges from one end of it with an enormous roar, catching Ricard in the face.

Em has no time to consider what this means, because at the same time, the other car door opens and Lilith emerges. She yells, “Catch!” and underhands something to her. Em catches it — a can of pepper spray.

Ricard has stopped running and is trying to figure a way to get close to them, but Clyde is doing a remarkably good job of keeping him at a distance with short bursts of flame.

“Just burn him!” she yells in rage, tremendously loud and echoing in the empty lot.

“I can’t!” Clyde calls back. “These things don’t hold a lot of fuel! Don’t know if it’s enough to kill him! And who knows what he can recover from!”

“What the hell are we going to do, then?” she yells back.

Marcus is bent over double, hand braced against the car, still breathing hard. “Trunk,” he says.

Clyde’s caution seems to be unnecessary; Ricard is getting pretty weakened by the constant gouts of fire and has stumbled and is struggling to regain his footing. Em walks over, and with a feeling of great satisfaction, she empties the pepper spray into his face. He falls back to the ground and claws at his eyes.

“Stay there,” she commands. “Plenty more pepper spray. More fire.”

“More theatrical lighting,” Marcus calls.

Lilith emerges from rummaging in Blackball’s trunk, clutching a huge coil of white nylon rope in triumph.

“You brought rope?” Em says.

“We brought all kinds of stuff,” says Lilith. She lifts things out of the trunk to show her. “What do you think? Wooden stake? Garlic rope? Uh . . . repro sword? I think this is supposed to be Durandal.”

Em sprays Ricard again and he writhes; confident he isn’t about to get up soon, she turns to see Lilith heading toward her with the rope. “Hang on, Lil,” she says. “Let me.”

Sunrise is at 7:30.

They’ve decided that’s best — keep Ricard here until sunrise, let things take their natural course. Em sits on the back bumper of the car, watching him. She exhales fog into the cold and watches it instead. She and Lilith have lashed him tightly to one of the lampposts, and as they did so, she had a bizarre nostalgic vision of she and Lil nailing together theatrical flats in the high school’s shop. It’s another odd moment of unexpected congruity: her trust in Lilith’s competence, her ability to communicate and get what Em is saying, doing physical tasks together — these are all still there somewhere in her mind. She has never had quite this feeling about anyone before, the way she feels about Marcus and Lilith and even Clyde — utterly familiar and yet still, despite everything, now also utterly strange.

Clyde and Marcus are sitting on the curb of the parking lot, both with cigarettes in their mouths. She gets up and walks over to them.

“You were quitting,” she says.

“I think I’ve earned this one,” says Marcus.

She looks at Clyde. “You own a flamethrower?”

“Would you believe they’re legal in this state?” Clyde says. “Would you believe there are instructions for building your own that you can just take out of the public library?”

“The answer is yes,” Marcus puts in. “Turns out, yes and yes.”

“Your boyfriend is a pyromaniac survivalist,” she says to him.

Marcus gestures to Ricard, who still smolders as he struggles weakly against his bonds. “You’re one to judge.”

“Emiline,” Ricard calls. His voice is steady despite the way his body shudders with pain. “I loved them. I loved them all. I love you.”

“You don’t,” says Em. “It’s just bait,” she snaps, suddenly furious. “Your love is bait for catching girls, for catching . . . warm bags of blood for you to drink. That’s all it is.”

“I only wanted not to be alone,” he says.

He is probably telling the truth. But it doesn’t matter.

Marcus drops out first, pleading an early day tomorrow and a short walk to his house from here. Clyde rather sweetly and awkwardly takes his leave shortly thereafter.

“You don’t have to stay, Lilith,” Em says. “You must be exhausted. I’ll watch him.”

“I’m staying,” says Lilith. “To the bitter end.”

Ricard is silent, unmoving, though there’s no way he’s even unconscious. He might be trying to endure the pain. Or he might be waiting, recovering his strength.

“It’s sad,” Em says. “We found out that there really was something magic in the world, and then we have to destroy the only known example of it.” Lilith glances at her. “Which we have to do,” she adds firmly. “Killing him will save people’s lives.”

“Ours, for instance,” says Lilith.

“But still, it’s sad. After this, back to real life. Back to no more magic.”

Lilith looks more intently at Em now. “If I left you alone here, you might let him go. You really might.”

“No!” says Em. “Well, maybe. Probably not?”

“Not good enough; I’m staying until the bitter end.”

“But —”

“The bitter end!” Lilith yells, waving her fist into the sky. A few birds take off from the trees.

“You think I’m ridiculous,” Em says. “Don’t you?”

“No,” says Lilith. “We’re friends because you might let him go. I might let him go too. But we both know we can’t.”

Em snorts. “What are you going to do without me when I go back north for spring semester?”

Lilith punches her on the arm. “When I have to watch a vampire get burned alive, I’ll make Marcus come with.”

The first rays of the sun begin to pierce through the trees.