Chasing Sunrise

Twenty-Two

"Sooo," said Corban, as he turned the car onto the main road, "here's the thing about vampires. There are never very many of them at any one time. Unless there's a major outbreak, I see one pop up maybe once a decade or so."

"But you said there are more of them since people started thinking of them as sexy," I said. The night had that velvety quality to the darkness, broken only by the occasional street light.

"Yeah, but by that I mean I've seen thirty in the last twenty years. Most of the ones I see are babies. Turned within the last few months, like Evan."

"But you only cover the Taos region," I said. "Thirty here sounds like a lot."

He shook his head. "When it comes to vampires, other members of my order call on me to go help out. Because of my age, and because vamps are so deadly and dangerous. I've killed a few hundred so that kind of makes me an expert."

I stared at him. "I thought you were a vampire hunter."

"I am."

"As, like, your main job."

He shook his head. "No, it was just my main reason for dealing with you the way I did. I didn't think my work with humans pertained."

"And so being a good vampire hunter doesn't make you all that high ranking in your organization?"

"I'm not answering that, all right? You already know more than any vampire's ever been told by one of my kind."

That was fair. "Okay," I said. "So how do you kill vampires?"

"I'm not going to tell you all the ways in case you turn. I need some element of surprise."

I nodded. Because calmly accepting a guy telling me he needed to be able to kill me whenever he wanted was now my normal.

"Sunlight works," he said. "Decapitation works. Stabbing the heart can theoretically work too, but it's really hard to do. You ever tried to punch through a human sternum?"

I stared at him. Silence descended, but for the sound of the car engine and the tires rolling on asphalt.

He glanced back at me. "What?"

"What do you think?"

"Well, in biology class or—"

"We don't dissect people in biology."

"All right, all right—"

"And I don't know what kind of dissection you've been doing, but punching through—"

"All right," he cut me off, eyes twinkling. "Fine. Suffice it to say, it's hard to do. Back in the olden days people would chain the vamp down and drive the stake with a sledgehammer. It's not my go-to method. Anyway, this isn't specifically what I wanted to talk to you about." He looked over at me, as if to check that I was listening.

Was this the kind of conversation anyone zoned out from? I met his gaze and he looked at the road again.

"There are a few nests of old vampires," he said. "Actually, these days there's just one."

"Is it in Romania?" I joked.

"No, we cleaned that one out about a century ago. It's the one in New England. There are three old, old vampires that go off-grid for centuries at a time. Really hard to kill because they've learned quite a few tricks in their lifetimes."

"And Darissa is one of them?"

"Bingo."

I stared out at the road slipping past under the beams of the headlights. We'd reached the end of town and were headed out towards the gorge. "There are three?" I asked. "I thought they tended to go in pairs."