Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(11)

“You are not nothing. You are not a fool.” Lady Grey’s hand moved from his forehead to touch his chin, and turn his face toward her. She looked fierce now, more queen than girl. Less kind but even more lovely. “And what’s broken can be mended stronger than ever.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Oh, I’m sure.” She gave him a secret, slow smile. “I’ve seen it. You may call it a vision, if you’d like. But I promise you, your future is worth the struggle. You must reach for it, Myrnin.”

“I’m . . . so tired.” Tired enough to weep with it. He felt raw and new and fragile.

“Then rest,” she said. “And tomorrow, you will begin again.”

“You won’t . . . leave me?”

“Not until you’re ready.”

He choked on the tears, then managed to say, “You . . . you have become my saving angel, you know.”

“Oh, dear Myrnin,” Lady Grey said, and put her hand on his cheek. “I am nothing like an angel. And someday . . . someday, I hope that you’ll know that very well.”

She pressed her lips to his, a soft whisper of sweetness, and then she sank down next to him, and put his head in her lap, and hummed him into a deep, deep sleep.

And he wasn’t afraid.





SAM’S STORY


I know what you’re thinking. I KNOW! Why? Why did I do . . . Okay, I’ll avoid spoilers, but I hear the question a lot. Well, this story doesn’t answer that, unfortunately, but it does show a little bit of Sam’s history and character. I do plan to write, in detail, a story of Sam and Amelie, and how their romance came to be . . . but I’m not quite ready yet. This is a little piece of character study that I did to help understand Sam in my mind—who he was, what he felt, how he related to the other characters around him.

And if you’re asking WHYYYYY . . . I can only say that Sam told me it was the right thing to do. Would I do it again? Probably not, because at the time, I didn’t know that we’d continue Morganville for so many more books, and reach so many more readers. But choices get made, and there’s no going back. I think Sam would say that, too.





I don’t know where to start, but I guess I’ll start at the beginning, as boring as it is.

My name is Sam Glass—Samuel Abelard Glass, to my mother when she was annoyed.

I was born in 1932, a Depression-era child who grew up to be a World War II teen and a postwar adult. I turned eighteen in 1950, which in Morganville meant that I had to choose to either align myself with a vampire Protector, as my parents had before me, or strike out on my own without any kind of guarantees.

I’d like to say I was brave enough to do that. I wasn’t. I signed the contract, got the bracelet, and life went on as normal, at least in terms of this town, where vampires are a fact and living with them is a challenge everybody faces.

I started at the local college, Texas Prairie University, and when I was nineteen, I met Melinda Barnes, and I fell in love. She was a lovely girl, bright as a star, and things went fast. Too fast, maybe. At twenty, I found myself with a wife, and a baby on the way. My parents had passed on, so I had inherited the family home, one of the big Founder Houses in town. Melinda was dreaming of a houseful of kids, and as she got bigger every month with the child we’d made, I thought about it, too. I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do, having kids in Morganville, but I’d made the choice, and Melinda was so happy. . . .

And then something went wrong, badly wrong, while I was in the waiting room at Morganville General Hospital’s maternity wing. In those days, fathers were expected to sit and wait, or pace and wait, or worry and wait. I paced, wondering how many hours I had left to go, wondering whether those shrieks I could hear from beyond the doors belonged to Melinda. Feeling guilty and anxious and scared.

When the doctor came out, he came slowly, and the look on his face told me all I really needed to know.

Melinda had died in childbirth. They’d managed to save my son, though that had been close, too.

Married at twenty, a widower with a baby at twenty-one. We got by, me and Steven. I’d been terrified of having a baby to tend, but he won me over right away, the first look I had at his big china-blue eyes. So beautiful. I’d never understood what it felt like to really belong so completely to someone else, but little Steven became my world.

I wasn’t all on my own, of course—in the 1950s, nobody trusted a young man to properly raise a child on his own. I had plenty of help from the local busybodies—and some of it was welcome, I admit.

One day, I had a visit from the Founder.

I had never met Amelie, but I expected someone old, dry, chilly. Instead, she was beautiful, and quiet, and when she smiled, the world lit around me. It was a courtesy visit, a condolence call to acknowledge my loss and meet the newest member of the Glass family. She didn’t mean it to be anything more. Neither did I.

Instead, we became friends. Tentative friends, well aware of the huge gulf between us, but I sensed how lonely she was, and she could see the same thing in me. I was alone in the world, with Steven depending on me, and I suppose I was overwhelmed, too. Her kindness—and it was kindness, as strange as that might sound, considering who she was—seemed like water in the desert to me.

She began to drop by more often, helping with Steven, leaving her bodyguards at the door or dispensing with them altogether. With me, Amelie could shed the thousands of years and remember what it was like to be human. To simply . . . be.