The Vampire Next Door

THE VAMPIRE NEXT DOOR

Written by

Charity Santiago

and

Evan Hale

http://charitysantiago.blogspot.com/

Cover design by

Cover Pub

Copyright © 2013 by Charity Santiago. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author. Please do your part to discourage piracy, and purchase only authorized editions.

PROLOGUE

I’m one of those people who can never figure out exactly the right place to begin a story. If someone asks me, “Where did you get those shoes?” I will
typically respond by rambling about how a few weeks ago, one of my co-workers fell ill, and I was asked to fill in for her. The same day, these gorgeous espadrille wedges caught my eye from a store window while I was walking to Jimmy John’s for lunch, and I bought the shoes on a whim.

By the time I get to the end of my story, you’ll know every minute detail that my crazy mind thinks is relevant, but I probably will not have answered your original question.

I guess you could say I’m easily sidetracked.

You’ll probably understand, then, when I tell you that I’m not quite sure where to begin this story- the story of how I lost a friend, and found myself. It’s the story of how I met the vampire next door, and how my life was irrevocably changed from the moment of that first encounter.

To start, though, I guess I’ll tell you about The Ex.

Her name is Kellie, but I often think of her simply as The Ex, because she was married to my husband, Cole, for three years. They divorced three years before I met Cole, but you wouldn’t know that by talking to Kellie. In her mind, I stole her man, and I should be made to pay for my sins.

Long story short, The Ex hated me even before she was dead.

But at least when she was alive, she wasn‘t homicidal. Annoying, yes. Childish, yes. Heinously bitchy, yes. But not homicidal.

Her entire life’s goal was to make everyone who had ever wronged her utterly miserable, and Cole was one of her primary targets. Since they had two daughters together, there was no way for him to escape her, either, short of abandoning his kids. He tried to do what he could, even taking her to court on a couple of occasions, but nothing ever came of it. Just as long as she kept to the letter of the law, no judge on the planet was going to reprimand her.

All that changed when she became a vampire.

And of course, by then all the judges were dead (good riddance) and society as a whole was pretty much reduced to a whining puddle of
pretty-please-don’t-eat-me
, so the odds of me picking up the phone and saying, “Yeah, operator? I have a psychotic bloodsucker outside my house, threatening to use my entrails as dental floss. Can you send law enforcement, please?” to an actual live person were sort of slim to nil.

I might
possibly
get a dead person on the phone, but then I’d be no better off, really.

In the midst of a real-life apocalypse, the honest-to-goodness end of civilization, I was lucky enough to end up on The Ex‘s hit list. As if my marrying the man who had divorced her hadn’t aggravated her enough, some dumbass had to go and turn her into a vampire, so now she was really pissed off.

The good news?

I’m still alive.

In the not-undead sense, anyway.

Even so, in the eight months since the vampire pandemic started, my everyday existence had changed completely. I spent my days scavenging food and collecting weapons, and at night I locked myself in the basement of my house with my friend and fellow survivor, Eddie.

It seemed like I was always waiting. Waiting for The Ex to finally exact her revenge, or forget about me and move on. Waiting to live, waiting to die…waiting for Cole to return to me.

“You’re not making an effort here,” Eddie said to me now. His usual monotone was laced with irritation. “I feel like I’m doing all the work.”

I was sitting on my back patio, making extra bolts for my crossbow. I eyed the thin, roughly cylindrical stick of wood in my hands, wondering if it was sharp enough to stab Eddie in the foot. Hmm.

“It’s been eight months,” he continued, oblivious to my evil thoughts, “and you’re still sitting here, waiting. What the hell are you waiting for, Kennedy? Cole isn’t coming back.”

I tested the end of the stick with my finger, and frowned. Definitely not sharp enough to break the skin. If I lunged at Eddie now and tried to impale his big toe, the best I could hope for was a really painful splinter.

“I’m not waiting with you anymore,” Eddie announced.

Silence followed his remark.

“You’re leaving me,” I said. No use talking in circles, like he seemed to be doing.

“Leaving would imply that we were together, at some point,” he replied, and the deliberate lilt to his tone clued me in.

Aha. So he was ditching me because of
that.

End of the world, a vampire apocalypse, and he was giving me an ultimatum over sex? I rolled my eyes, but said nothing. There probably wasn’t a woman left on the planet who would put out after months without so much as a can of Nair.

The silence stretched into awkwardness, and finally Eddie cleared his throat. “You’re not going with me?”

Well, duh, I wanted to tell him. Instead I said, “Nope.”

If I’d expected waterworks, I wouldn’t have known Eddie very well. He was a lot like Cole in that way- didn’t cry much, didn’t show a lot of overwrought emotion. It was one of the many things I liked about him. Eddie was a good guy, a guy I could count on to make all the right decisions for me.

I looked up, meeting his sad, hazel eyes. A year ago, the sight of a man dressed in faded fatigues, carrying a dusty backpack over one shoulder and a shotgun over the other, with various sharpened wooden stakes strapped within easy reach, would have struck me as a bit scary.

But not now. The horror of the past eight months had completely obliterated the innocence of the twenty-four years preceding. The world had changed, and I had changed with it.

Eddie nodded once, a short, jerky movement that probably betrayed more emotion than he‘d intended.

“I’ll see you around,” he said.

Don’t go.
It was a silent plea, one that hovered in the air between us. But I’d never found it easy to talk about my feelings with Eddie, and I said nothing now.

“Yeah,” I muttered, and looked away, fiddling with my pitiful pieces of wood as his footsteps crunched down the gravel driveway.

I retrieved my knife from my backpack and set to work creating more bolts, not because I needed them, but because I needed something to do.

As I hacked away chips of wood, I wondered why men were so damn obsessed with sex. Funny. A vampire apocalypse was in full swing, and my showers were generally limited to a quick five minutes to scrub off the worst of the grime. I’d never felt less attractive in my life, but Eddie still wanted to jump my bones, and still had the arrogance to be miffed that I wouldn’t let him.

Yep. Typical man.

Nobody could call me a man-hater, but considering the way my husband and I had parted company, I wasn’t exactly harboring any warm, fuzzy feelings towards the male gender, either. We’d been on the verge of divorce even before vampires took over the world. I had been fed up with his friendships with other women, which he stubbornly denied were in any way inappropriate, and he had been angry at me for having the nerve to hold him to my own standards of fidelity.

It’s such a long and infuriating story as to how we got there, but what it all boiled down to was that we hadn’t said goodbye when he’d taken the kids, my two stepchildren, to Florida to visit family.

It was supposed to be a three-week vacation, their annual summer trip. Eight months later, I was still waiting for them to come back. But I figured their extended absence had something to do with the fact that a long-rumored vampire pandemic jumped across the Mexican border a couple of days after their departure. Suddenly vamps were popping up everywhere.

No one, me especially, believed it was actually happening until it was too late. By then it had spread throughout the country. The spread of the disease had been either a horribly devastating coincidence or a perfectly-executed attack by the vampires, but either way, civilization had fallen more quickly than anyone could have anticipated.

The first day I’d realized that this might be the end, I’d called Cole on his cell phone, but hadn’t been able to get through.

I’d continued calling for days, huddled inside my bedroom, praying for rescue as I clutched my phone like a lifeline.

A week later, my call finally connected. Cole answered on the second ring.

“Kennedy?” He sounded out of breath. “Kennedy, are you okay?”

“Cole, I’m here. I’m at home,” I said, my voice suddenly choked with tears, though I’d been composed only moments earlier.

“I’m coming to get you, baby. Stay put. I’m-” He was cut off by a woman’s scream. It was so loud that I flinched away from my cell phone.

A cold stab of fear shot through my heart. “Cole?” I said into the phone, trying to stay calm.

More screaming. I heard Cole’s sharp intake of breath.

Then the call ended.

I’d called back, over and over again, but there’d been no answer.

That was the last I’d heard from him.

I tried not to think about it too much. He’d said he was coming to get me, and I clung to that hope with a tenacity that was surprising, given the level of strife between us prior to his departure.

Now, mere months after the fact, I was living in a bad post-apocalyptic movie, still waiting. But at least in
The Book of Eli
, Mila Kunis got to wear stylish skinny jeans. Wishful thinking, Hollywood. Most of my clothes had been ruined in the first few months, stained black with vampire blood, and the battered sweats I’d dug up from an abandoned discount store did absolutely nothing for my ass.

I’d fared a lot better in some other departments though, like food and shelter. It had taken an agonizing three months of nightly attempts at vampire-proofing my house, the house I’d shared with Cole and his kids, before I’d met Eddie. By that time, I was a frazzled, sleep-deprived mess, jumping at my own shadow and ready to stab anything that moved.

Eddie had seen my house for the rarity that it was here in southern Arizona- a potential fortress- and he also had the experience to take care of the issues I hadn’t known how to correct. Issues like those damn skylights that I’d loved so much when we’d bought the house, though they now seemed to be the vampire equivalent of a drive-thru window after sunset.

Speaking of…

I looked up at the colorful sky, then glanced at my pocket watch and frowned. Time to bunk in for the night.

Darkness was falling.

As if on cue, I heard a jingling sound, and a medium-sized dog with a short, tan coat trotted through the open gate on the other side of the yard.

“Holloway,” I said, standing up and stretching. “Did you come back to bum another meal off me?”

I closed the gate and padlocked it. Holloway had wandered into my yard a few months ago, but his visits were brief. At first I’d tried to keep him with me, but he was a free spirit. He was also a fence-jumper, and had escaped several times. Finally I’d just given up any hope of tying him down, and now the friendly mutt came and went as he pleased.

He followed me inside now, tail wagging happily as I welcomed him back into my home.