At the kitchen table, Sal looked up from the coffee mug he was rolling between his hands and took a deliberately slow sip, his eyes on me the whole time. It did not occur to me until much later to wonder why he was up so late, drinking coffee alone in the kitchen, to puzzle over the strange combination of worry and anger on his face. In the moment, I was too focused on another mystery.

I dropped into a chair across from Sal. “Well? What is she?”

The answer was already there, churning in my gut, but it couldn’t be true. I had never met one, in more than a century, and I just stumbled across one here? I needed Sal to confirm that what seems like an impossibility was the only possibility.

Sal set his cup down and folded his hands. “It’s difficult to tell you what she is when I don’t know who she is. So, who might we be talking about?”

“Don’t play dumb, old man. Who else could I have been with this late at night?”

Sal’s face clouded over. “Been asking myself that for the past two hours.”

“I was at All Hours,” I said. “With Lina.”

Sal took another sip of his coffee.

“I think you might know her,” I pressed. “Blond hair, little off her nut, likes to travel?”

“I’m familiar,” he said.

“Very familiar, according to the pictures on her walls.”

He looked up sharply and growled, “She has pictures of me on her walls? The walls of that shop?”

I shrank a little. “Well, just one picture. One wall.”

“Hmph.”

“You’ve really never been there? It’s the only coffee shop in town.”

“I have all the coffee I need right here, thanks.” Sal lifted his mug as evidence but set it down again when he saw the dissatisfaction on my face. “I don’t go there. She doesn’t come here. And we try not to meet anywhere in the middle.”

“So, you are in some kind of tiff with the village vampire. Why?”

“She told you she’s vampire?”

“She didn’t have to. And I’m asking the questions.”

He raised his mug to take another sip, and it was all I could do not to climb across the kitchen table and smack it out of his hand.

“She’s more than just a vampire, isn’t she?” I pressed. “She’s . . . she’s . . .”

I closed my eyes and saw the coffee shop photos, dozens of them, spanning decades but featuring the same ageless woman, basking in the sunlight. The sunlight!

“She’s an Ancient.” I said it with a quiet reverence.