Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(12)

By the time my boy turned three, I was in love with her. Not the kind of flash-point love I’d felt with Melinda; that had burned fast, and faded. This was different, longer, richer. I knew it was stupid, impractical, impossible, but I could see, in unguarded moments, that she felt the same.

It might never have been anything more than a phantom, a dream that neither of us could acknowledge, except that Edgar Bryan went insane.

Old Edgar had never been one of the town’s saner residents; he’d been bounced in and out of mental treatments for years, and most knew to avoid him when he was “in a mood.” I don’t know how it happened, exactly, but I earned a reputation as a reasonable man, someone who could help calm down a bad situation; I’d dealt with more bar fights than I could remember, and even a few political arguments between humans and vampires.

When Edgar went around the bend, the first person they called was me. In fact, I got to the Barfly Tavern before the police, although I could hear the sirens wailing across town. Edgar had barricaded himself in a back room, along with six hostages, after he’d gone crazy and accused half the town of being out to get him.

It was already a killing matter by the time I got there. One of those he took hostage was a vampire—a young one, not nearly as capable of protecting herself as most of the others. And I knew her. Her name was Marion—she was so quiet and shy she barely registered as a vampire at all.

When Edgar started waving his Buck knife around at one of the bartenders, Marion stood up and stepped in between them. She had to, by Morganville’s rules—she owed the girl Protection. I wasn’t there, but I heard she was brave. She trusted that being a vampire was enough to protect her, because nobody could be that crazy.

Only Edgar was, and he killed her.

In Morganville, that meant that Edgar’s time was up; he was going to die for that, most likely in a medieval, horrible way. There was nothing I could do for the dead vampire, but I could try to get the other five people out without losing more of them to Edgar’s ravings.

It took all night, but I convinced Edgar to let the rest of them go—and it was a good thing I did. Amelie showed up before dawn, with her entourage, just as I took the last of them out to safety, while Edgar agreed to lay down his knife for good.

He snapped completely at the sight of her—maybe knowing that his life was over anyway. He went straight for her, screaming. If I’d been thinking at all, I’d have known that he couldn’t hurt her; she had guards, and she was far stronger and faster than he was.

But I wasn’t thinking. All I could see was Amelie, and the knife, and that horrible sight of poor Marion in the back room with her head lying two feet from her bloodless body.

So I played the hero. You can guess how that ended—with Edgar’s Buck knife buried so deep in my guts that the tip sliced through my spinal cord. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that I’d stopped him before he got to Amelie.

I didn’t see what happened to Edgar, which I suspect was a blessing. I closed my eyes for a while, and when I opened them again, my head was lying in Amelie’s lap, and she was staring down at me with an expression of completely unguarded grief on her face.

There were tears in her eyes. Tears. That meant something, something so huge I couldn’t even put a name to it.

Before I could, I went away again.

The next time I came back, I was . . . different. It felt quiet inside, so very quiet, and yet I could hear everything, feel everything so intensely. Amelie’s cool fingers against my face, like silk and marble.

I tasted salt on my lips. Salt and copper.

Blood.

Amelie hadn’t made a human into a vampire in a hundred years in Morganville. But she’d done it to me. She’d done it to save me, for my son’s sake—or so she told me. But she knew, and I knew, that it was something else.

I blamed her at first. It was hard to understand the life—if you can call it life—that vampires lead, the cravings, the impulse to violence and cruelty. I’d never been a cruel man. It sickened me to find that in myself, and I fought hard to beat it down. Stay the kind of person I’d been in life. Be a peacemaker.

I tried to stay away from Amelie. Being around her awakened all kinds of emotions in me—and the stronger the feelings, the harder it was to control my worst impulses. Amelie kept me at arm’s length, rightly afraid that she and I would make each other too open, too vulnerable, and after what seemed like an eternity, I spent whole days at a time without feeling out of control and desperate.

But I missed her. I missed her all the time.

I was a terrible father in those years, but Steven turned out better than I deserved. He grew up strong and wild, and not a bit afraid of me, even when the black moods came over me. I suppose his love helped keep me the person I wanted to be, in the end.

At eighteen, Steven refused to sign a contract, and more than once, I was forced to come to his rescue when he got on the wrong side of one vampire faction or another. A few years later, he fell wildly in love with a girl from out of town, Rose, and within a year after that, they were expecting a child. I’d been a father, a widower, a dead man, a vampire. . . . Being a grandfather seemed too much, suddenly.

But just like when I’d held Steven in my arms for the first time, holding my grandson, Michael, on the day of his birth seemed to fill that empty space inside. Love hadn’t changed for me. I still loved my family. I still wanted desperately to protect that small, beautiful life.