I coughed deliberately to hide my answer. “Yes.”

He shook his head. “Rule number one, don’t go public.”

“Rule number what? What are you talking about?”

As if he had all the time in the world to explain himself, he turned away. He stepped behind the counter and pressed a button on the CD player, cutting off the annoyingly soothing New Age droning.

“What are you talking about?” I demanded, tagging after him as he walked through the shop and snuffed the candles. “Would you stop and talk to me?”

He sighed and dropped his head, bracing his arms on a table that looked far too dainty to support his weight.

“The rules you have to follow. The rules every vampire has to follow.”

My hand was on the door before I realized I’d intended to run.

“Wait!” he called after me. He caught my arm and gently turned me around to face him just as my hand found the lock. “If you run out of here, this will only end badly.”

His grip on the sleeve of my coat unnerved me, as did the tension in his voice. My words sounded thick and strange as I spoke. “Is that a threat?”

“Listen,” he began, some of the urgency of his tone gone now. “I know you have some questions. Otherwise you wouldn’t have run into Ziggy.”

“Yeah, I have questions.” I spat the words in my anger. “Who the hell are you? Why did I get attacked when I walked through that door? And what the hell makes you think I’m a vampire?”

I yanked open the shop door and stepped into the pitiless cold, fishing in my pocket for my half-empty pack of cigarettes.

He followed me to the threshold and let me get halfway up the steps before he spoke again. I was struggling with my lighter when he called after me.

“What makes you think you’re a vampire? That’s why you were trolling the vampire message boards, right? That’s where Ziggy found you. It’s his M.O.” He moved up the stairs with a grace I’d thought reserved for animals and put his hand over mine. His skin was ice cold. “No matter how many you smoke, you’ll never feel satisfied. The food you eat no longer fills you up, and you can’t understand why.”

The cigarette suddenly looked ridiculous where it rested between my fingers. I trembled, and not entirely due to the cold.

Nathan spoke again, but he sounded disconnected and far away.

“Come upstairs,” he said. “I’ll try to explain.”

I took a few more steps and tried to convince myself to keep walking, to get in my car and never come back, to avoid this side of town altogether. If I never saw this place again, I could pretend none of this had ever happened. There was always the hope that I’d never actually woken from surgery, and that I lingered in a coma in the ICU. As much as I wanted that to be true, I knew it wasn’t. I dropped the cigarette and watched it roll to the next step. “No chance I’m dreaming here, huh?”