Always the Vampire

“I heard on the national news,” he continued, “that you’d been unearthed, but I couldn’t get away from California for a while.”


“I’d been out of the box for seven months before I saw you at the beach,” I said carefully.

“I left my dolphin charm so you’d know I planned to see you again.”

“And then you disappeared for another five months.”

“I was a little tied up moving my business and dodging the big bad Void.”

“Too busy to call?”

He braked at the Dondanville stoplight and turned to hold my gaze.

“Would a call have made a difference?”

Would it?

I’d once dreamed of waking to those twinkling brown eyes each morning. I’d dreamed of the twinkle turning to passion. I’d dreamed of a life of joy with my best friend.

The spring before I turned sixteen, Triton told me flat out that we’d never be a couple and shattered my dreams. I’d accepted his reasons, mainly that I was sister to him, not a lover. But years later, when I’d been trapped in that coffin, I’d hoped that Triton would be the one to find and release me. That just maybe, after decades apart, he’d see me differently.

Now?

A horn blared behind us, and Triton hit the gas.

I hit a reality check. So, okay, if Triton had come back sooner, come back anytime before I met Saber, maybe it would have made a difference. Triton was my first love, and seeing him stirred memories. But nostalgia faded. My feelings for Triton might be pond deep, but what I felt for Saber was ocean vast.

“Never mind, Cesca. I can see you’re in love. Besides,” he added, throwing me a grin that seemed only a little forced, “I’m still looking for a female I can shift with.”

I made my tone as light as his. “Is that why you came back? You never found that special woman in California?”

“Or anywhere else. The kahuna woman in Hawaii told me I needed to return to the ocean of my birth to find my fin mate.”

“Cosmil confirmed you were born in the Atlantic?”

“More or less.”

“Huh. If you’re the son of a mermaid and a dolphin, why do you have a human form?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t ask. I figured it was a side effect of his goofed spell and left it at that.”

“Probably a good plan.”

We rode in quiet until he took the right turn on the 206 bridge.

“By the way, that display in my store? It looks like the captain’s quarters on your dad’s best ship because I designed it that way. Your father was a good man. Good to me, too.”

“I know he was.”

My father had thought so well of Triton that he’d left him with a responsibility most men would’ve turned down flat. Unbeknownst to me, Papa had bought one hundred acres on Anastasia Island in 1798, when I was eighteen. Maybe he meant to give it to me when I married or reached my majority, but even after I’d been Turned, my father kept the land. Then, before he and the family left St. Augustine, he put it in a trust and named Triton as trustee. I guess he hoped I’d break free of the vampires and would have a safe place away from town to settle. He couldn’t have known Triton would have such a long life span. Heck, I’d never considered that Triton would be nigh on immortal, and I don’t think he had, either.

I’d learned about the land and Triton’s part in the trust by accident when I helped Saber house hunt. The real estate agent had shown us a beach house on the last three lots left in trust and let the secret out.

“About the land, Cesca,” Triton said. “I didn’t mean for you to get ambushed with that tidbit.”

“Tidbit? Those are oceanfront lots worth a small fortune.”

“Yeah, well, with hurricanes and all, oceanfront property wasn’t worth much until the last four or five decades. And before you ask, no, you don’t owe me for taxes. That’s why I sold off parcels.”

“All right, then thank you for taking care of my father’s legacy.”

“You’re welcome.”

“And Triton?”

“What?”

“As long as I can speak my mind, don’t be reading it.”

He flashed a grin. “Make that a ditto, and we have a deal.”

He offered his hand to shake on it, and his palm warmed mine for a long moment before I let go.

“Deal,” I said.

Only then did I realize I hadn’t read his thoughts at all. Not a single one.





We caught up to Saber, idling on the side of the road at 206 and the far side of Interstate 95. He waved for Triton to take the lead, with a shouted, “Hurry.”

Tense minutes later, Triton slowed, turned on the left turn blinker, and steered onto a barely there dirt track carved between pines and scrub oaks and vines. The trail twisted first this direction, then that one, and the truck rocked from side to side as we crept along the rutted ground like a sloop tossed in high seas. I held tight to the grab bar and fretted about how the jostling would affect Cosmil’s injuries.

“Cos hides this entrance completely when he wants to. The times he’s been expecting me out here, he’s smoothed the road and took out most of the turns. Magically, of course.”