Finally, he took on a look of complete hopelessness and held up his hands. “Fine. Since you and the whole bloody world know about me, it was the consumption. I was near dead when one of the physicians attending me did the job. Near enough, anyway, that I made it through the burial convincingly.”

“You were buried alive?” A chill went up my spine.

“Undead, actually.” He took a draw off his sickly sweet smelling cigarette. “A writer never sneers at experience, Miss—”

“Harrison,” I lied quickly. No sense in revealing my real name in front of Grizzly Adams, who never stopped watching us for a moment. “You can call me…Maxine.”

“Maxine?” Byron’s elegant nose wrinkled in distaste. “But as I was saying, after the burial, the physician dug me up and I’ve been here ever since.”

“I have to give you credit.” I leaned back in the seat. “I couldn’t have stood it. Claustrophobic.”

“That’s how it was done in those days. Mozart did it. Hugo did it.”

I sat up straighter. “Mozart and Victor Hugo?”

“In the past, if you truly wanted eternal life, you had to work for it,” he continued as if he hadn’t heard my interruption. “Now a vampire is lucky if he or she even sees the mortician’s slab.”

“Lucky?” I thought of Cyrus cold and dead on the gurney in the E.R. “I would hardly call it lucky.”

“So, since you’re bursting to know about my change, you must be dying to talk about yours. What happened? Dark prince of love sweep you off your feet and then never call?” Byron shook his head and blew a sequence of smoke rings into the air between us. “They always promise eternity, don’t they?”

“I was attacked and turned accidentally. It’s not the most interesting of stories.” I rolled my eyes. “Nothing like Blood Heat.”

“Well, of course not. It if were, you’d be on the bestseller list, not me.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “What are you doing out in the desert, Maxine?”

“What are you doing out in the desert, George?” I put the same sarcastic emphasis on his name as he had on my assumed one.

“I already told you mine.” He looked over his shoulder at his companion. “I’m writing the great American novel.”

“You’re British.” I took another drink of my quickly cooling coffee.

His gaze, suddenly intense, never wavered. “You’re looking for something.”

Prickles ran up the back of my neck. The oddest feeling, that he was telling me something I just wasn’t picking up on, slowly worked into my hypersensitive brain. I wanted to shrug it off as paranoia, but something in his eyes told me there were parts to this encounter I had missed.

I looked at the biker. The parts I was missing were the parts Byron couldn’t tell me.