7. Maisie

Chapter seven

Maisie

Barnaby’s mood shifts like the wind, which somehow makes him all the more fascinating. I want to know what’s going on inside his head that makes him so capricious, angry one moment and then thoughtful and introspective the next.

I have an idea of how long he’s been alive, given the letter. If I’m right about his age, he was probably born around the turn of the nineteenth century. After starting his “second life,” he lived through world wars, massive global shifts in power, and who knows what else. I’m infinitely curious what it was like.

The invention of the phone. Radio. Television. Internet. It’s all happened in his lifetime.

And of course, there’s the part I’m less willing to acknowledge, that he is a fine specimen of a man. Even when Barnaby scowls, there’s a rigid set to his strong jaw and a tension in his broad, sharp shoulders that appeals to me. Strength is coiled up in there along with mystery, and I want to unravel it. I want to soothe those shoulders, to dig into the layers of him and find out what he’s hiding underneath it all.

The next day, I’m bouncing on my toes, excited for this new turn my forced vacation has taken. I’ve been reading to keep myself occupied in the meantime, and today I’m going on another long hike despite the ache in my calves. I need a better pair of boots, so the first thing I do is head to the outdoor store down the block.

The shoes cost a pretty penny, but it’s worth it when I get up the mountain and have no new blisters on my feet. Again, I sit on a big rock overlooking town, pull out my book, and read until my limbs are stiff and I need to head back down.

I return to the bookstore in the late afternoon, just as the sun is beating us with its warmest rays. It’s a Sunday, and the town is quiet. There are no customers in the bookstore when I arrive, so hopefully that means Barnaby will have plenty of time for me.

Why do I want his undivided attention so much?

He’s intriguing to me, that’s all. Besides, I have nothing else to do here in Hallow’s Cove besides hike, read, and work on my project at night while I should be sleeping.

The bells jingle overhead as I enter the shop. Barnaby isn’t behind the counter, but he soon appears behind a rack of books. I’m surprised when my stomach does a flip.

“Hi,” I call out nervously, waving a hand.

He sets down a stack of books he was restocking and approaches me, and I realize then that he’s usually sitting down, so I wasn’t aware of just how tall he is. I have to tilt my head back to look into his face. It’s set in a stern expression, as usual, and this time, his nose is crinkled up.

Do I smell bad? I suppose I didn’t shower after hiking, though I think my deodorant is still working.

“We’ll sit out here,” Barnaby says. “In case... customers come in.” He stalks to his reading room in the back and soon emerges with another stool, which he plops down on the other side of the counter, then gestures for me to use it. Happily I sit down.

“I always thought vampires had to hide in the daytime,” I say, gesturing out the window at the bright summer day. “It doesn’t bother you?”

Barnaby gives me a blank look. “Where did you hear that?” He laughs outright. “Humans will spread the strangest rumors. I don’t particularly enjoy direct sun—it makes me tired and irritable—so I tend to stay inside in the summer. Perhaps that’s where such a silly myth started. I’m not the only vampire who finds it exhausting.”

I wonder how many other false things I’ve learned about his kind. Is everything I thought I knew just a stupid rumor?

“How did you turn?” I ask. The letter had mentioned a woman taking Barnaby away at a party, and a twinge of jealousy tickled at the back of my neck when I read it.

Did that woman bite him? How long did he stay with her ?

With a deep sigh, Barnaby turns his dark gaze on me. “Are you sure that’s a story you want to hear? It is a dark one.”

“Yes, of course!” I want to know everything. “If it’s not too painful for you.”

Barnaby sighs. “It was a long time ago. It is less painful and more cumbersome .”

I glance up at the clock. “Well, I stay up late, so I have all the time in the world if you do.”

“All right. I must confess that I don’t have anywhere else to be.” He turns away again. “It began when I went to a gathering with friends of ours—mine and Beatrice’s. We were living in Vienna at the time, and there had been rumors of people disappearing off the streets.” He shakes his head and sighs. “I wish I had listened. I wish I had been more cautious after the fourth newspaper article about someone going missing in the middle of the night.”

“A vampire?”

He shoots me a look that clearly says, don’t interrupt me, so I snap my jaw closed. I know I’m lucky that he’s agreed to do this, and I shouldn’t push it.

“Not just one. An entire coven had taken up residence in the city, I would later learn. It was the leader of that coven, Eleanor, who found me at the party that night.”

Barnaby’s eyes wander away from me to focus on some point on the wall, and I don’t think he’s looking at it so much as remembering something that happened long ago. His brows crease as he digs up ancient memories.

I don’t interrupt this time, and eventually he speaks again .

“It was a rainy night, so everyone was drinking something warm. A lovely woman arrived at the party late, and though I asked around about her, no one knew who she was. But she had a confident air about her, a sort of dark humor, and it drew me to her right away.”

Another unexpected tingle of jealousy. I try to tamp it down as I listen to his story.

“We talked for ages that night, into the late hours. She had lived a marvelous life, though she looked barely out of her twenties. She’d traveled all over and had many stories to share. I was entranced. Enthralled.”

I grit my teeth, knowing what’s coming.

“I was so monumentally foolish not to see the signs,” he says, shaking his head in disappointment. “There was no way she had done and seen so much in her short life, but I accepted it all anyway. I didn’t question her too-long teeth. When she invited me to leave the gathering with her... I agreed.”

His eyes close and he pauses for a time, as if dredging up this point in the story hurts him. I wonder if I’ve made a mistake by asking for this. I didn’t want to inflict pain.

“I’d had so much to drink, I didn’t even notice when she led me deeper into the city, toward the district known for being... what is the word now?” He puzzles over it for a moment. “Sketchy?”

I have to laugh. “Yes, that’s the one.”

“It was not safe, but I wasn’t paying attention, too excited at the idea of what Eleanor had in store for me. I had not engaged in, er, relations in a few years, and so I was eager.”

My jealousy grows bigger and toothier, imagining Barnaby having relations with this woman. Still, I ask in a breathless voice, “What happened next?”

He gets that faraway look in his dark eyes again. “She took me inside an old abandoned building, and I figured that she had an apartment upstairs. I was so trusting. Once inside, I was immediately surrounded, and the ritual began.”

“The ritual?” I echo, sounding kind of like an idiot even to my own ears.

Barnaby just nods, lost as he is in his memories.

“She had chosen me. Eleanor was the leader of a coven, and they were trying to grow. Every member selected their own victim—and I was hers. I would be her apprentice, she told me. That’s probably the last thing I remember before she attacked.”

I’m starting to regret asking him for his story when it’s clear by the curl of his lean body and the strained look on his face that this was a terrible moment.

“She almost completely drained me,” he says, his voice quieter now. “Left just enough blood in my veins to keep me alive. Then she began to feed me her blood. By then, I was so desperate to live that I accepted it. I gladly put my mouth to her wrist and—”

A choking sound cuts him off. I thought this man didn’t have these kinds of emotions, but clearly, I’d been wrong. I’m tempted to hop over this countertop and put an arm around him, though I don’t think he’d welcome that.

“That was it,” he says suddenly, sitting upright. His eyes are darker than before, and now, a pair of very sharp, very white canines have protruded from his mouth. Something about the intensity of that memory must have triggered him. “From then on, I was like her. A vampire. A creature. Her servant .”

I can’t mistake the venom in his voice. I wonder what happened to Eleanor. Did he kill her to get away?

“But you’re free of her now?” I ask, hopeful that he’ll tell me the next part of the story.

Barnaby gives a sharp nod, his eyes focused intently on mine. “She is a memory, like all the other memories. One worth forgetting.” He pauses, swallows harshly, and then continues. “I came here not long after, intent on getting as far away from people as possible. I was... a danger back then.”

I don’t miss how he glosses over his time with Eleanor, how he doesn’t tell me the way he left her.

“And then, somehow, all of this happened.” He gestures around us. “One day I had a plot of land in the middle of nowhere, and the next day, other monsters began arriving who had heard of me, wanting a place they could rest and recover, and, sometimes, hide. We didn’t allow humans here back then—but times always change.”

So that’s how Hallow’s Cove came to be. It’s a refuge for the inhuman, for those who needed safety. I feel like an intruder here when this history is much deeper than I could have imagined.

“Where’d you get the name?” I finally ask, trying to bring the mood back up after his painful confession. “Hallow’s Cove?”

Barnaby squints at me like I have two heads .

“Well, it’s my name. Barnaby Hallow.”

I feel like the biggest dumbass that ever dumbassed. I glance down at the counter, where a clearly-visible plaque reads “Barnaby Hallow.”

“Maybe if I’d used my eyes,” I joke, picking it up. “Sorry. Just not very observant.”

He quirks a brow. “But you found this, didn’t you?” he says, holding up the letter that he’s hidden under the old-fashioned cash register.

I shrug. “Sometimes I get lucky.”

The double entendre seems to occur to both of us at the same time, and I snort while Barnaby looks away, his cheeks darkening.

“Can’t be that lucky if you ended up here on vacation for an entire month,” Barnaby says with a scathing chuckle. “There isn’t a month’s worth of things to do here for a human.”

“If I do get lucky, I’ll go home sooner.”

He cocks his head. “Oh? How?”

“If the investigation concludes that I’m not at fault for what happened.” I’m admitting that I’m responsible for a huge fuckup and not even really on vacation , after all. But after what Barnaby just told me, I think it’s all right to give him the truth. Maybe then he’ll come to trust me, and let me in on the rest of his story.

His eyes widen. “Investigation?”

I take a deep breath, and then dive into my tale. When I finish explaining how Wade demanded that I go on paid leave, Barnaby is unabashedly staring at me.

“You had to be forced to take a vacation? ”

I shrug. “I love my job. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. It’s my whole life.” I didn’t realize how much it hurt to be accused of making such a disastrous mistake, but it aches to think I’ve failed at the one thing that gives me joy.

“So that is why you’re always up at night,” he says, tapping his chin.

I nod. “I’ve always been a night owl. That’s why this job is so important to me—I love the work, and the hours are the only reason I’m still sane.”

He offers the slightest smile, and it’s the first one I’ve ever seen. “A fellow denizen of the darkness,” Barnaby says with a snicker. “You would make a good vampire.”

I’m surprised by the tingle I feel all over at this compliment. I don’t think he doles them out often.

The bell jingles as the door to the shop opens, and a big family walks in, introducing a wild explosion of sound to the otherwise silent bookstore. Barnaby cringes. I step away from the counter as he rises to his feet and asks them, “How can I help you?”

I take this as my cue to leave, as much as I would enjoy sitting and talking even more. He has a business to run, after all.

But as I head for the door, I hear Barnaby call, “Maisie!” I turn around, and he abandons his salesman role to come over to me. “I would... like to hear more about your work. Perhaps late some evening, when we are both more in our natural habitats.”

My heart takes off into a thundering roar. “I would love that.”

He offers me another one of those tiny smiles, then returns with a roll of his eyes to helping the family choose new picture books for their children.

When I’m back in my apartment, I spend the rest of the evening trying to read, but I end up thinking only about Barnaby’s story. There’s much he left out, that was clear. What did he do after he was turned? What became of Eleanor?

I wonder what it would take to learn everything.