Page 93 of Magic and Muffins

“No. I met Cross when I accidentally woke him up.”

“Woke him up? That sounds interesting. How does one wake a vampire?”

“Well, I wouldn’t recommend falling on him,” I said with a smile.

Craig laughed and leaned forward. “I think not falling on a vampire is good advice. It sounds like there’s a story there. We’d love to hear it.”

I didn’t want to talk about it. Looking back, I could see how ridiculous the experience was. But with what I knew now, I also understood the story needed to be told. At least, parts of it. People needed to know about a real vampire experience.

“I was hiking with my friend, and we accidentally fell into a cave. The fall was traumatic enough. Getting up and seeing what we thought was a corpse was even more terrifying.”

“Describe it to us,” Craig said. “What made you think he was a corpse?”

“He was lying on this stone ledge. It couldn’t have been comfortable.”

I glanced at Cross.

He flashed his sexy smile at me. “It wasn’t. I assure you.”

Holding Cross’ gaze, I tried to remember what he’d looked like.

“He wore old clothes. Really old. And he was covered with dust and cobwebs.”

“Was he sunken and bony?” Craig asked.

Slightly offended by the description, I looked at Craig. “No. Not at all. He looked like he does now. Handsome. A little too perfect. Aloof.”

Cross chuckled next to me.

“Why did you think he was a corpse then?”

“The clothes he wore looked like he’d come over on the Mayflower. The dust. The cobwebs. His absolute stillness…it was like he was perfectly preserved. And he wasn’t moving or breathing that I could tell.”

“And how did you discover he was alive?” Craig asked.

“When I fell into the cave, I cut my cheek. My friend was looking at his clothes, trying to figure out what they were, and I leaned down to check to see if he was breathing because, like I said, he looked like he does now.”

“Not dead,” Craig supplied.

“Exactly. It didn’t make sense. When I checked to see if he was breathing, I accidentally bled on him.”

“Then what happened?”

“My friend realized what he was and what I’d done, and we ran before he woke up.”

Craig shifted his attention to Cross. “Was that all it took? A drop of her blood to wake you?”

“It was.”

“Why were you there?”

“Living as a vampire, seeing the people you care about age and then die…” Cross shook his head, and without thinking, I took his hand to comfort him. He wrapped my hand in both of his like he was capturing it. “Unlike most of my kind, it was an existence I no longer wanted. I left England and my savage brethren behind and came to the Americas, where I found a cave.”

“How does a vampire go into hibernation?”

“We stop feeding. We let the hunger for blood consume us until we can no longer draw a breath.”

“You died?” Craig asked.

---