The Vampire Won't Bite Without My Yes, and I Keep Giving It novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Blade
Vinnie stops her plow six feet from a starving vampire sitting in the road, who will not drink her blood until she says yes aloud. She does, and he tells her it is one of only three bites the law allows between them.
At ten past three in the morning, it was fourteen below on Lakeshore Drive.
A man was sitting in the middle of my lane.
I was in Truck 14, a city plow with a twelve-foot blade and a heater that only worked on the passenger side.
I saw him in my headlights at the last second, a dark coat on a white road.
I stood on the brake with both feet.
The blade stopped six feet from his face.
He didn't flinch.
He just sat there in the snow with his knees up and his glasses frosted over.
He looked at the grille like it was a bus he'd been waiting for.
My radio crackled.
"Fourteen, you stalled?" Dewey said. He's been my foreman for five winters and he talks like every word costs a dollar.
"There's a man in the road."
"Drunk?"
"I don't know yet."
"Don't get out."
I got out.
My mother raised me not to leave a man lying in the road.
She'd have hit me with a spoon for even thinking about it.
The wind took my breath and froze it in my nose.
I walked around the blade with my flashlight, and he put one hand up, palm out, before I was ten feet away.
"Please stay there," he said.
He had an English voice, a soft one from the far end of the country, the kind that rounds off its corners.
"Sir, it's fourteen below."
"I know. I picked this road because nobody lives on it."
"That's not a reason to sit on it."
"It is, actually."
He tried to smile and it didn't take.
"I haven't fed in seventeen days. The blood bank's truck is snowed in at Cloquet."
"And I gave my last bags to a boy who needed them more."
I put the flashlight on his face.
He looked about thirty-four, with sandy hair gone stiff with frost.
Freckles stood out on skin as white as the snow.
His eyes were grey and a little too bright.
Under his coat, his shoulders were shaking, and not from the cold.
"You're a vampire," I said.
"Yes."
"You're sitting in the road because you're hungry."
"I'm sitting in the road so I can't hurt anyone," he said.
"If I stood, I would walk toward the nearest house. I'd like very much not to do that."
I looked down the long white road toward the lake.
Nobody for two miles.
Just the plow, the dark, and a man who'd chosen to freeze rather than knock on a stranger's door.
"How long were you going to sit here?"
"Until the sun came up, I think." He said it as if he were describing his plans for the weekend.
"That's a stupid plan."
"It was the best one I had."
I took off my right glove.
"Don't," he said quickly. "Please. I mean it."
"I won't take it from you unless you ask me to. Those are the only terms I have."
He sounded like a man reciting the one thing he still owned.
I knelt in the snow in front of him, and my knees went numb at once.
"Ask you to what?" I said.
His eyes dropped to my bare wrist.
He swallowed, and I watched his mouth change.
His top teeth slid down, two long, clean points, and he closed his lips over them in shame.
"To bite you," he said. "You'd have to say it aloud. Every part of it."
My heart was going hard.
I had been tired for three years, the kind of tired where nobody asks what you want because you always have it handled.
Now a starving stranger was kneeling in the snow, begging me to tell him what I wanted.
I held my wrist out.
"Bite me," I said.
"Again, please."
"Bite my wrist. I want you to."
"Say yes."
"Yes."
His hand closed around mine, and it was cold as a pipe.
"What's your name?" he asked, very softly.
"Vinnie."
"Vinnie." He said it like a small prayer. "Thank you."
He bent his head and put his mouth to the inside of my wrist, where the pulse jumped.
I felt the points press, and a sharp, bright pinch.
Then the heat came.
It started at the wound and ran up my arm.
It spread into my chest and down my belly and settled between my legs.
I made a sound I'd never made in front of anyone.
"Oh," I said. "Oh, God."
He drank in slow, careful pulls, and every pull went through me.
His other hand slid up my forearm and held on, shaking.
My eyes closed and my head went back, and the wind and the cold stopped mattering.
I could feel my pulse in my clit.
"Keep going," I said. I didn't recognize my voice. "Don't stop."
He made a low, wrecked noise against my skin.
His grip tightened, and his tongue pressed once over the wound, and I came.
It hit me kneeling in the road, with my hand in a stranger's mouth and the plow lights on us both.
I shook so hard that he had to hold me up.
He lifted his head when it was over.
His eyes were clear now, a warm grey, and there was color in his face.
He ran his tongue over the wound, once, and it closed to a pink mark.
"I'm sorry," he said hoarsely. "I'm so sorry. You didn't need to see that."
"I'm not sorry."
I was still kneeling there with my legs shaking, and I realized I was smiling.
He laughed, a small cracked sound.
"I'm Emlyn Trask," he said. "You've saved my life, Vinnie, and I have no way to repay it."
"Get in the truck. The heater works on your side."
He stood, and he was shorter than I'd thought, and slighter, in a camel coat that wasn't made for the lake.
He took off his glasses and wiped them on his sleeve with a hand that was already warm.
"Before you decide anything else," he said, "there's something you ought to know."
"Is it about the bite?"
"It's about the bite."
He put his glasses back on and looked at me.
"Under the Compact's law, a human may be bitten three times in her life. By anyone."
"Three."
"You've given me one."
I stared at him.
"After the third," he said, "the vampire releases the human in front of the Chair."
"They never see each other again. That's the law."
"I've kept it for a hundred and seventy-six years."
The wind howled over the blade.
"So I've got two left to give you," I said slowly.
"You have two left to give anyone."
"And then I never see you."
"Yes."
He looked at me and didn't look away.
"I'd like very much to see you again," he said. "But I wanted you to know the price before you said yes to anything else."
I looked past him, down the hill toward the harbor.
At the bottom, where Lakeshore Drive bent toward the water, a black car sat with its engine running and its lights off.
It had been parked there since before I stopped.
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