Page One

Becoming a vampire is simple, especially when you’re not given a choice in the matter. Say you’re on your way home from the pub one evening and you get blindsided by a car taking a corner, smashing right into you, that sort of thing.

You see, Patrick Hartford hadn’t planned on his life to change, hadn’t even kept a space for the possibility, but apparently what plans you’ve made for yourself, and what the Fates decide it is you truly need, can be two wildly differing things.

When he stepped out of the pub a handful of minutes before getting car-slammed into wet asphalt, he did so with a soft sigh of relief. It was nearing eleven o’clock but the bell hadn’t been rung yet and he’d left a rowdy crew behind that was readying itself to order in final drinks.

He’d spent the summer out of Oxford, but now that he was back they’d insisted he join them. Without any real thought he’d complied.

Unsurprisingly to him, the evening quickly turned into a game of them goading him about his non-drinking and asking prickly questions about his summer internship. More than once he’d thought to himself that they weren’t his friends, not even close, and the insight had kept poking him to get up and leave early.

Whenever the compulsion flared in his chest, Sally’s consternation at what she saw as his inability to stand up for himself had come back to him. She had been right in telling him not to go.

It had left him smiling to himself because her voice, softly concerned, had accompanied it. She wanted what was best for him; she was steady like that. Perhaps it was why he could so easily see her as a part of his future.

He wasn’t convinced that it was an aversion for confrontation that had kept him in his seat, though. Not really. It was more an unwillingness to burn bridges. Strategy, one might say.

At least that’s what he’d kept telling himself.

Grin and bear the borderline malicious teasing, the gentle picking apart of his stories of Rome. Be patient with them since, from their point of view, he’d ripped the internship out of the hands of everyone seated at the table.

They didn’t care that he’d managed it by submitting the most compelling architectural design; they only cared that he’d won. Winners were losers unless it was one of them winning, and he wasn’t one of them—their underhanded lack of support kept making that imperviously clear.

And yet there he’d sat, drinking his lemon water and laughing along because one day one of the people around him might have a job to offer, a connection to hand over, a collaboration to pull him into. His father’s advice.

Rome had put certain things in perspective and this evening had sharpened that perspective into something kind of beautiful. Excitement bloomed at the thought of telling Sally about it. He felt she’d be amazed, perhaps even proud, and he realized right then, standing on the pavement with lungfuls of cool evening air in his chest, that he’d really like that.