Madeleine loved the feel of her sheets beneath her naked body, how they cooled her as she slid beneath the quilt. When she had first been turned, she’d pretended that she was still human, that her quiet moment in this bed was waking, not one step away from slumber. But the sun outside the double thickness of her blackout curtains, made the thought of waking slip away to sleeping.

Two weeks since the bonfire, she could still smell ash on her skin. His voice had faded to a dull whisper, a buzzing white noise, no longer the steady stream of screams that had haunted her dreams. Good riddance.

She turned on her side and poked at the keys on her laptop. Over the years, she’d found technology intriguing and more than a little useful. It kept her connected to the world and gave access to an assortment of services that once had required minions and Renfields. Now her basic necessities could be delivered to the doorstep of this humble abode, and she could talk to humans without wondering if her fangs were showing or eyes gone black. Or if she should eat them.

Ah, the internet! Saving one human at a time.

She had been more than a little surprised how easily she had managed to adapt to the new tech—Internet for Vampire Dummies, anyone?—as 330 years was a long time to get into the groove of things. But perhaps that was part of the issue. 330 years was also a long time to get terribly bored of the status quo and stereotypical permanence of her condition. It gave her impetus to get out there, so to speak, and get her hands dirty in something other than blood and fear.

Madeleine yawned. She was just stalling against the need to rest now, as most of her ‘friends’ were just waking, getting ready for their normal, mundane day. There would be coffee and fattening fast food breakfasts to be had, children to be kissed and sent on their way, and lovers to bid adieu as they left for work. No time for a sleepy vampire.

That left her with the latest in a long line of online obsessions, answering more of the gazillion personality questions on a dating website. The idea was the more questions you answered, the more you rated in importance, the better your matches. Not that she was looking for anyone in more than a friends-only capacity, but it always amused her the kinds of people who were deemed her match by a giant server system in a building somewhere in California.

A pop-up blinked in the lower right corner of her little screen. New email. Hm. She scrolled to the top of the screen to the site’s internal mailbox system and clicked on the little blinking envelope icon.

The topmost email was from a member named Wasted Wraith, the subject line a simple “Hello”. She maneuvered her mini mouse over the word and clicked again.

I'm new to town and you seem interesting. We should talk.

WW

She smirked. He got brownie points for ‘interesting’ and ‘talk’ versus the normal ‘you are hot’ and ‘hook up’ that she had received from so many of the apparently sexually deprived human males roaming through cyberspace. And they wondered why they couldn't plug and play…The number of brownie points he got on this first impression grew a tad more once she clicked on his profile and saw that he was smart, tall, bald and handsome. The goatee did not hurt either.

Then she scrolled through his stats and saw his age.

Granted, being a vampire pretty much meant any living human was technically too young for her, but she had decided that if she was going to play one online, she needed a way to recalculate her age. So she had taken the easy way out and simply divided her actual age by ten. She could pass as 33 easily, but that still begged the question of how young was too young for her online friends?

Five years of tinkering, she’d realized that the best formula was four years younger or seven years older than her pretend age. Kept the adults who were not quite mature enough and those old enough to collapse beneath her out of the net. She smiled, half-embarassed at the thought that she was already considering this human as a bedmate.

She shook her head. He was 24, entirely too young to be involved with her. Despite the fact that—her eyes skimmed through his interests—he liked the same authors, movies and had a fascination with vampires. She shook her head again. Too young, too easy, too, well, corruptible.

She made her way back to the email screen and typed out her reply:

Thank you, but you are simply too young for me. Welcome to Sierra Vista, though.

She hit ‘send’, closed the laptop and rolled over. She attempted to blink the image of this young stranger out of her head, but his blue eyes followed her into the depths of sleep and her dreams.

*****

Her face felt warm, and she pulled the sheet up higher to block the sun. Her eyes fluttered open. She scrambled backward against her headboard in a panic. It wouldn't do to burst into flames in her own house, after all. Not again. The heat remained, bright and yellow against the paleness of her skin, but she did not burn. Not even wisps of smoke rose from her pedicured toes. And her headboard, well…she looked up and gasped at the twinkling leaves above her.

She was outside.

But not a light.

What the hell?

“Take my hand if you want to live,” a rich baritone said from behind the tree at her back.

Madeleine crooked an eyebrow, her frantic fear giving way to mild amusement. She pushed against the trunk and stood up. “Classic movie lines?”

Wasted Wraith peeked around the broad tree and smiled. “Would you prefer ‘I think you are hot, want to show me your tits’?”

She shook her head. “No, but you are just a figment of my imagination, so really, those words would never leave your lips.”

He shrugged. “Perhaps. But I think you’ll find that I’m something more.”

The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. “An enemy?”

He shook his head. “No, not an enemy. An ally, maybe. Though I think I would prefer an alternate option.” He held a hand out to her, but she hesitated.

“How do I know you’re not like the rest?”

“You don’t. I guess you’ll have to decide whether or not you want to find out.”

She stepped closer and slid her hand into the great expanse of his, the coolness of her meeting the heat of him, the human heat of blood pulsing beneath his skin and the tingle of…what the hell is that?