My Neighbor Might be a Vampire

I had exactly two rules for a good night out with Dani and Ed: never let the wine list win, and never let Ed talk me into splitting dessert when he clearly meant to eat all of it himself. Tonight I'd broken both, and the tiramisu had been worth every bite. I hummed to myself as I climbed the porch steps of the old mansion on Main Street, my silver bangles chiming against each other like tiny wind chimes celebrating my arrival home.

The house always looked its best at night, all gables and gingerbread trim silvered by the moon, like something out of a story that hadn't decided yet if it wanted to be romantic or haunted. I loved it either way. I'd loved it from the moment I saw the wraparound porch five years ago.

What I did not expect was seeing a moving truck.

It sat there under the streetlamp, engine ticking as it cooled, its ramp lowered like a tongue into the dark. I stopped walking. I tilted my head. Nobody moved into a place at eleven o'clock at night. Nobody sane, anyway.

Then he stepped out of the shadows behind the truck, and every rational thought in my head packed its bags and left.

He was tall, the kind of tall that made me very aware of my own five-foot-four self, with dark hair that fell over his forehead in a way that looked both careless and completely intentional. He carried a mahogany desk against his chest like it weighed nothing, forearms flexing under rolled black sleeves, and when he looked up and caught me staring, his eyes were the green of bottle glass held up to a candle.

"Evening," he said. His voice was low, unhurried, the kind of voice that made a single word sound like it had been considered from several angles before he let it out. "You must be a neighbor. I hope the truck isn't blocking anything important."

"Only my ability to form sentences," I said, and then immediately regretted every word of it, because that was exactly the kind of thing that made men take a step back and reach for their car keys.

He didn't step back. He almost smiled. "I'll take that as a compliment to my truck."

"Lilly Palmer," I said, recovering, sticking out a hand that jangled with three separate bracelets. "Apartment two-B."

"Darius Adams," he said, shifting the desk to one arm with unsettling ease so he could shake my hand. His palm was cool, his grip firm. "Two-A, I believe. Looks like we'll be sharing a wall."

"And a hallway," I said, "which, fair warning, has terrible acoustics and an even worse gossip pipeline."

"Duly noted." He set the desk down just inside the foyer door with a care that made me let out a small gasp. Everything about him was dressed in black, and not one hair was out of place despite what had clearly been hours of lifting.

"Moving in kind of late, huh?" I said, aiming for casual and landing somewhere closer to a detective on her first stakeout.

"My schedule's a little unconventional," Darius said, which was, I noted with the thrill of a woman collecting clues, not actually an answer.

Behind him, two men in gray coveralls carried in a sleek black crate stamped with a crest I didn't recognize, gold letters looping into some kind of foreign script; there was nothing that told me where it had come from or what on earth was inside it. It looked less like furniture and more like something a museum would lock behind glass and a velvet rope.

"That's a very mysterious box for a Tuesday," I said, pointing.

"Servers," Darius said smoothly. "I work in tech. Very boring, very heavy, very much not worth a story."

"Everything's a story if you tell it right," I said, and I meant it, though the way his mouth twitched told me he wasn't sure whether to be charmed or concerned.

"I'll keep that in mind," he said. "For now, I should get the rest of this inside before sunrise steals my momentum."

My ears all but perked. "Before sunrise?"

"Figure of speech," Darius said, already turning back toward the truck, the porch light catching the pale plane of his cheek in a way that made him look carved from marble. "Good night, Lilly Palmer."

"Good night, Darius Adams," I said, and watched him go, because a woman had to gather all the evidence she could.

Upstairs, a door cracked open exactly two inches, just enough for Alice Strickland's silver head and sharp spectacles to appear, a notepad already balanced against her cardigan. She said nothing, only watched, her pen scratching away at something I was fairly certain involved the words unusual and after hours.

I floated up to my own apartment in a daze, dropped my purse on the counter, and dialed Dani before I'd even kicked off my sandals.

"It's midnight," Dani said by way of greeting. "This better be good."

"Dani. Dani, listen to me. There is a man. A gorgeous man. Moving in next door. At midnight."

"Okay, and?"

"He's pale as moonlight, Dani. He carries furniture like it's made of feathers, he has a crate with some kind of crest on it, no return address, nothing, and he made a joke about sunrise stealing his momentum."

There was a pause, and then Dani's laugh crackled through the phone, bright and unbothered. "Honey, that sounds like a hot IT guy with a bad back and worse hours, not Dracula's understudy."

"You didn't see his eyes," I said. "They were green like a forest that eats people."

"Forests don't eat people, Lilly."

"This one might."

"Go to bed," Dani said, still laughing. "Dream about him being normal for once."

I hung up, walked to my window, and peeked through the curtain at the truck still idling below. I was almost certain, ninety percent certain, that the ordinary explanation was the correct one.

But that other ten percent was going to keep me very, very busy.