Chapter 1
I am a vampire.
It's not all it's cracked up to be.
In fact, and you probably saw this pun coming a mile off:
It usually kind of sucks.
Emma sat staring at the computer screen until her eyes crossed, she leaned back in her chair with an aggravated noise, and deleted the text, only to find nothing more scintillating to take its place. Then she was left performing the frustrated writer's gaze upon the abyss of blank-white doom, which was even worse, so she typed it back in again, tried to think of synonyms with more syllables, made a louder noise of aggravation, and deleted them for the second time. This was pointless anyway. Nobody was going to read this blog even if she started it, those that did weren't liable to be happy with her for it, and she had not a single scrap of penetrating or original insight to help anyone who might find themselves thrust unpleasantly into this new situation, which was the reason she'd had this whole godforsaken idea in the first place. They didn't exactly hand out "So Now You're a Vampire, How To Not Fuck Up Your Afterlife" how-to guides, and considering the hash she'd made of her previous one, she was probably the least qualified individual to think about offering advice on this one. Still, though. She'd had a moment of believing she could be useful; they came along every so often, long after the last one had died of loneliness. That she could try to build a support group for people who did what sensible people did in this day and age, when their entire life turned upside down and they had no idea how to deal with it: Google that shit and complain about their problems online, just like everyone else. Connect over similar interests. If in this case it happened to be the fact that you were now an immortal blood-drinking unholy creature of night and terror instead of some ordinary hobby like TV shows or collector cars or pictures of cats doing dumb things, not that different. But she'd just been deluding herself. As usual.
After a moment, Emma closed out of the browser window, then clicked her dash through a perfunctory refresh. Figuring out what to name a social media site for supernaturals had taken, possibly fittingly, a truly legendary effort. At first it had just been Fangbook, until the werewolves objected that this was discriminatory, and attempted to start Furbook in revenge, which had not worked out for them; it was remembered as the MySpace of the equation, and besides, it sounded like the home of disturbing niche porn. Fangstagram was, for obvious reasons, out, as vampires and cameras generally rendered each other obsolete, and a Twitter full of actual wolves might be even worse than the regular one. Their manifold networking difficulties had finally arrived at a compromise in the form of their current vehicle: Fangd. To avoid a second go-round of the nomenclatorial dilemma, it had been pointed out that both vampires and werewolves had fangs, and besides, it sounded cool. Currently, it was mostly used for chat posts, arranging feeds, perusing heavily filtered photos of buff shirtless werewolves, and the inevitable casual hookups section, as well as worthless shit to buy (all products promising to increase a vampire's tolerance to sunlight were to be filed in the same category as penis-enhancement-pill spam emails).
As far as Emma had found, admittance to the supernatural set seemed to function along the same rules as your first day at high school: asking for help marked you out as the newbie, and in this case, the cool kids snacking on you might not be at all a figure of speech. So everyone, even if they didn't, acted like they knew exactly what they were doing. And the high school comparison could be depressingly apt, considering that all-powerful immortals with hundreds of years of age and experience at their disposal could still hold the pettiest of ridiculous grudges. The "blood feud" and "perpetual enemies" things were way overblown, but stuff did happen. Another reason Emma had wanted to start the blog. Immortal did not by any stretch of the imagination mean indestructible, and plenty of clueless newcomers got caught in the crossfire of the power struggles between the older ones. Then there were the simply stupid ones. You couldn't be killed by the same things as before, no, but you could still Darwin Award yourself out of the running.
Emma pushed the computer chair back and stood, yawning and shuffling off to the kitchen. It was near sunrise; she would have been able to tell even without the clock. That bit about frying in the dawn's first light was yet another myth; even Emma, a baby as vampires went (she had been turned in 1993 at the age of twenty-eight, thus ensuring that in a race of beings who had witnessed the greatest events of history with their own eyes, she would preside over the era of Justin Bieber, selfies, and Netflix) could have endured a few minutes outside. Probably not at high noon, and she wouldn't feel great if she did, but it was still possible, and sometimes she liked to stay up to see the sunrise, to try to remember in the barest bit what it had felt like, living. The oldest and strongest ones could supposedly manage an entire day, but Emma had never met anyone that strong. Probably for the best. They tended to be the type who left those body trails.
Emma opened the fridge and rummaged through the shelves. Like any single person, she had old pizza boxes and cartons of Chinese takeout and other such things; she could chew them for the taste all she wanted, she just couldn't actually eat it. The older a vampire got, the less they craved human food, but sometimes after a shit day, a big old-fashioned bar of chocolate was the only ticket, even if she had to spit it into the trash (a horrible and sacrilegious waste, especially if she'd splurged on the pricey stuff). As far as actual nutrition, vampires had evolved just as many fad diets as their mortal counterparts, and you could buy all the gluten-free, lactose-free, vegetarian, ethically sourced blood replacements you wanted, most of which tasted exactly how you would expect gluten-free, lactose-free, vegetarian, ethically sourced blood replacements to taste. Emma usually had to buy a raw steak to make sure she didn't die of iron deficiency, but while she could get along for weeks or even months in this fashion, eventually she, like the rest of her kind, would have to feed on living human blood. And that deserved its own help guide, Jesus Christ. You were an alpha predator, you were possessed of cold, unnatural beauty and crackling sexual magnetism (no sparkles though, thank God) and helpless humans were drawn into your thrall. . . which was a really big pain in the ass if you were an unsociable introvert who just wanted them to fuck off and leave you alone. Finding a willing partner was never the problem; it was getting to the "so, can I bite your neck and drain your life force?" bit without them thinking you were anything more than particularly kinky or really bad with foreplay. But you had to. There had been a big awareness drive among vampires as to the importance of consent; they stressed that feeding was just like sex, since in many cases it often was, and even if you were desperate, you couldn't just chomp down on Bob from accounting without making sure he was all right with it. (A surprising number of vampires worked in accounting. Emma thought it explained a lot). Only the really worst took it the last, unforgivable step further: turning someone into a vampire without their say-so. Something which she did know a thing or two about.
Emma's mouth tightened as she thumbed open the carton and poured half a glass of ONeg; this stuff was somewhat more palatable than the other brands. If she needed an actual feed, she had given up on trying to arrange it herself, since it always ended up looking like a dinner date (which it was, when your date was dinner). She would just swing by Regina's and borrow one of her drones. The vampire queen of Boston was not a woman to be approached lightly, but after they had gotten off to a very rocky start, and several memorable fights, they had finally grudgingly settled down to an entente cordiale, and Emma knew that if she was ever in a serious jam, she could count on Regina, more or less, to have her back. For obvious reasons, however, she had not run this blog idea past her. She had a feeling Regina wouldn't be a fan.
The light outside was getting greyer, although that could have been just the January gloom. New Year's resolutions weren't really meaningful to immortals, but Emma had still thought it was a good time to try this one. Maybe she'd sleep on it, give it time. She'd probably have a job anyway. The upside of her transformation was that it barely required any adjustment to her work schedule, since bail bondspeople billed most of their hours by night, and also ensured that in just over seven years of working for her current employer, she had a 99.9% success rate in catching the fleeing perp and kicking the shit out of him. (The 0.1% had definitely been another immortal, most likely werewolf, and it hadn't been pretty.) She probably had another five or so years there before her lack of aging and other such supernatural symptoms would get too hard to explain, and she'd have to move on. But Emma didn't want to leave Boston. She had her reasons. She'd have to, though. Eventually.
She finished the ONeg, tossed the glass in the sink, and headed to her bedroom. Undressed in the dimness, hearing the start of morning traffic outside, people on their way to office jobs, ordinary lives. Pulled the blackout curtains shut, crawled under the duvet, and closed her eyes. Vampires didn't dream, which was both a blessing and a curse. Nothing but darkness.
Emma slept all day and awoke with her alarm beeping 7pm, which she reached out with a groan to muffle. But when she grabbed her phone, there was a message on it, and she squinted, frowned, then mumbled a curse and sat up, running her hands through her tangled hair. She stumbled out of bed and into the shower, dressed and did her makeup, then trotted out into the night. It was cold, damp, slushy and miserable, headlights backed up and horns sounding irritably on the freeway, and it was faster to get where she was going on foot, anyway. As long as she stayed to the shadows, nobody would notice her moving at vampire speed.
Ten minutes later, Emma was standing on the welcome mat of a small bungalow in Cambridge, rapping on the door. It took a moment, but then she sensed footsteps, and it opened. "Mom? Shit, right, I forgot. You get here fast."
"Yeah." Emma blew out a breath. Technically she didn't need to, but it was habit. "It's me. What's up?"
Henry held the door open, remembered he had to invite her, and said, "Come in." Once she stepped over the lintel and into his front hall, the scent of something divine cooking on the stove almost made her knees buckle, and he gave her a guilty look. "I'm sorry. Let me go get that."
"No, it's fine." Emma made her way into the warm, wood-beamed kitchen, trying to carve out a place to sit at the kitchen table piled with papers. Henry was an associate professor of English at Harvard, was revising his new book for publication on a tight deadline, and was still grading final exams from the fall semester, so he wasn't likely to have invited her over just for a pleasant chat. That wasn't their thing, anyway. They had become a lot closer once Henry grew up and learned the truth, but the wounds remained. He'd been only ten when she was turned, and since it quickly proved impossible for a newly made vampire to raise a mortal child or be there for him in any meaningful way, Henry had been placed into the system and, thankfully, quickly adopted by his foster parents, David and Mary Margaret Nolan. He had taken their name, they were the ones to see him receive his Ph.D from Columbia and treat him to dinner to celebrate, and they were the family he spent the holidays with, the human world he had a home and future with. Emma struggled not to resent it, to realize that this was the best for him, but it was still hard.
Henry turned down whatever was bubbling on the stove, seemed to be about to offer her tea out of habit, poured a cup for himself, then sat down across from her. It gave Emma a start to see the first few shoots of grey in his beard. It was no big deal, he was only thirty-two, some people had a touch of dignified silver ever since they were twenty, but it was another reminder that he was now older than her physically, and the gap would only continue to widen. He'd already had to start introducing her to people as his sister; pretty soon he would have to introduce her as his daughter. Then his granddaughter, and. . .
She shook her head. At least she knew that the one thing all parents feared, not being there for their children, would not apply to her. She could be quite sure that she'd be there for him, for everything. Including whatever he was on about now. "So," she said. "You said it's important. What's up?"
Henry pushed up his horn-rimmed glasses, searched through his papers, then pulled out a file. "I'm worried about one of my students. Lily Page. I'm pretty sure she's fallen in with. . . well, with someone who runs in your circles, and not someone who plays by your usual rules. I think she may have also invited this. . . individual into Harvard, and while it's usually a matter of entrance on a building basis, whoever this is seems able to move around campus at will. We've had at least four women from different dormitories report symptoms consistent with feeding, and none of them seemed to know what it was, either. Which if I had to guess, means whoever was snacking on them wasn't bothering to fill them in on it or ask their permission, and probably then bamboozled them into forgetting about it. So. You can probably see why I'm concerned."
Emma looked sharply at her son, as Henry had just casually displayed considerable knowledge of vampire politics and powers – far more than she herself had ever told him, and which made her wonder just how much research he had been doing. If it was true what he was hinting at, however – that a clearly powerful and ruthless rogue had been set loose on the university by this Lily Page, whether knowingly or unknowingly – this would be only the tip of the iceberg. Criminals and murders and general lawbreakers were regarded as dimly in supernatural society as they were in the regular world; this was the modern twenty-first century for Pete's sake, not some remote mountain fortress in medieval Wallachia with Vlad Dracula gleefully staking up hapless peasants. You couldn't just jaunt into an Ivy League and start munching on co-eds. And while Emma was aware that the whole vampire thing was extremely popular with this demographic, Henry had said they didn't seem to know what had happened to them. See, shit like this was why they needed the blog. They needed to educate people so they didn't think they'd just gotten some weird STD or whatever else they'd conclude, never finding out until they had already leapt from the frying pan and into the fire and were in it deep. Though if she posted it on Fangd, it would only be read by other immortals, and if she posted it on any mortal social media network, it would land them in a world of hot water, none of which would end pleasantly for her. Still, though. This was serious.
"All right," Emma said, seeing Henry waiting for her answer. "I'll dig into this, see what I can turn up. In the meantime, salt, silver, holy water – all of those are effective at keeping a vampire out. Though I'm not sure I need to tell you that."
"Covered." Henry held up a silver crucifix on a chain, a small glass vial of salt swinging alongside. Emma felt a faint, reflexive swoop of revulsion and nausea, as if he'd just waved a chemical weapon in her face, and he quickly stuffed it away again. "I hang that over my door whenever I'm in my office, and it seems to work. I haven't been lunch yet."
"Good. Though unless this is a really old one, they will have to do most of their hunting at night, when the faculty has gone home and the students are easy pickings. Is there any way you can, I don't know, get a few extra and sneak them in without Residence Services finding out?"
"I suppose I could try." Henry shrugged. "But how old would a vampire need to be, exactly, to be able to move around by day?"
"I don't know. Probably at least three hundred. And if there was one of those in town, I'm pretty sure Regina would have given me the heads up – or at least raring at the bit to fight them herself. I'll run this by her, see if she's heard anything. I'll let you know."
"Great." Henry drained the last of his tea and stood up. "Well, I've got a ton of work to do, and I'm sure you do too. Good night, Mom – though I guess this is good morning for you, huh?"
"Yeah. Good night, Henry." Emma pecked him quickly on the cheek, grabbed her coat, and stepped out into the deepening chill. The worst of the evening rush hour had passed, though the sleet was still coming down, and she took slightly longer about heading back into town, then toward an elegant nineteenth-century brownstone rowhouse, set on a cobbled, gaslamp-lined lane in Beacon Hill. The average property value here was of the sort that you could only accumulate with a seven-figure annual salary or several lifetimes of carefully planned saving, investing, and spending, building a diversified portfolio and shrewdly exploiting tax loopholes. Queen Regina Mills was of the latter variety, though Emma dimly recalled that she had been born into privilege in the first place. It tended to work that way among vampires, for whatever reason. They ran to the educated, upper class, and wealthy, while werewolves trended rough-and-tumble, blue-collar working poor. Economic disparity usually formed the basis of their grudges these days, rather than any ancient immortal rivalry. Whenever a neighborhood gentrified, the vampires were neck and neck with the hipsters in snapping up newly desirable properties. It was debatable which ones were more annoying neighbors. Hipsters dined on arugula instead of your blood, but at least the vampires didn't go in for retro music nights and farmer's markets.
Emma headed up the front steps, rapped the knocker, and waited. It wasn't usually protocol to call on the queen without first letting her know you were coming by, as unexpected visitors tended to make powerful persons of all stripes feel threatened, but this was urgent enough that she figured Regina would just have to make an exception. Though that didn't stop the butler from looking profoundly aggrieved and put-upon when he opened the door. "Miss Swan, what on earth? You did not notify me that we were supposed to expect a visit from – "
"Stuff it, Sidney. This is important. Is she here or not?"
Sidney looked at her primly, as if to remind her that he could still decline to invite her in and thus presumably teach her a Very Serious Lesson about calling etiquette, but after a moment he sighed and made an only slightly sarcastic gesture. "Do come in then, Miss Swan. Stop the presses news, surely?"
Emma ignored him, pausing to knock the mud off her boots – potential rogue or not, she would be the one to get killed if she fouled up Regina's pristine carpet. Then, footwear sanctity more or less assured, she strode down the hall. She wasn't sure when exactly Regina had been turned, but from her manner and general décor and the occasional oblique reference to her pre-immortal life, it could be estimated as the second half of the 1800s, maybe a decade or so after the Civil War. The queen had been based in New England for most of that time, apparently finessing the problem of not aging by rarely appearing in public and delegating most of the grunt work to her various minions, who could always be counted on to pop up out of the blue just when you thought you'd gotten away with something. But she had considerable power, connections, and bite (in more ways than one) and it was her job to deal with any miscreants running around the Quad, so here Emma was.
She rapped on the French doors of the study, then opened them and stepped in. Regina was eyeing her coolly, stirring something in her porcelain teacup that splashed red; the vampire queen of Boston was not a woman for blood replacements. That had beyond doubt come fresh from the source, whichever of the human drones kept around for Regina's feeding purposes and that of the local vampire population, provided they were in her good graces. Piss her off, and you could be desperately posting your very own Craigslist personals ad for an open-minded partner into some light biting before you knew it. Though she had a healthy respect for Regina's danger on her own, and other good reasons to stay close, Emma had to admit that it was sometimes this circumstance alone which kept her toeing the line. The idea of doing that or braving the hookups section on Fangd every time she needed true sustenance was enough to make her quail.
"Miss Swan." Regina laid the silver spoon on a napkin, which soaked up a fat scarlet stain. "This is a surprise. And you know how I feel about surprises."
"Yeah, yeah." Emma sat on the ottoman across from her. "I promise I'm not here for the company either. But we may have a serious problem."
With that, she laid out what she'd heard from Henry, while making it sound as if it was just something he had mentioned in passing and which she had put the pieces together as possibly being a rogue; she doubted Regina would think too warmly of a human, even one with a vampire mother he knew about and accepted, having all this detailed knowledge of their customs. By the way the faintest of lines etched itself between Regina's exquisitely tweezed black brows, Emma could tell that she had been right not to underestimate the worrying nature of this development. When she finished, however, the queen said, "So is this something you've personally observed, or just lurid campus gossip?"
"Henry seemed pretty concerned. So I don't think it's just a random urban legend, no."
"Be that as it may," Regina said crisply, "I would know if there was a newcomer in town. I don't expect you to be familiar with the protocol, but whenever a vampire moves territory, they have to address themselves to the local queen, rather like an ambassador presenting their credentials. The only ones I've accepted into Boston recently aren't nearly powerful enough to even think of trying something like this."
"Well," Emma said. "I may not be a court-admissible expert on vampire law, but I also think if you were coming here with the specific intent of not following it, that kind of seems like a step you'd skip."
Regina glared at her. "Even so, I would have heard something. I have eyes and ears across the city, someone would report it if there was a loner hunting around Harvard. Do they like the taste of stressed-out teenage trust fund overachievers? Unless it isn't a vampire at all, but someone trying to frame us. This would be a convenient way to scaremonger anti-fang sentiment."
"Look, I don't think so." Emma had forgotten how relentlessly paranoid Regina could be. "Henry said – "
"Yes, your human son, who is probably hopped up on Red Bull and gas station coffee trying to finish his book, noticed that a few college kids had odd injuries they couldn't explain. That's not exactly damning evidence." Regina sipped from the teacup and smiled, her own quite pointed canines catching the light. "It's more likely to be a game of beer pong gone wrong than an Old One. The vampires keep tabs on those, and all of them are, to the best of my knowledge, fully accounted for. Besides, the older a vampire gets, the harder it becomes for them to change territory. They become more anchored, more sedentary, just like human senior citizens. The oldest one I've ever met was almost eight hundred, and he never went out of the house. So even if they did have the power to do something like this, it's far from their instinct to carry it out."
"To the best of your knowledge, they're all accounted for?" Emma said. "How about you check?"
Seeing Regina open her mouth in umbrage, she went on, "Fine, maybe I'm pulling this out of my ass and there's absolutely nothing wrong. Five minutes of research can clear that up and Harvard can start looking for a run-of-the-mill pervert instead of a supernatural one. That's not too much to ask, so how about we start by eliminating the obvious steps first? Trust me. I know how perps think."
"Yes, I suppose you do," Regina said, sounding far from universally approving. "What with that hideous night job of yours. You're wasting yourself hunting down common human criminals, you know. It's like running errands in a Ferrari. But as long as you can promise me that this isn't going to end up as some kind of scandal for us, and more specifically me, I'll send for a status report on the Old Ones and let you know. Now go."
Objective achieved, Emma took her dismissal as graciously as possible and exited. It was getting late enough that the supernaturals' usual haunts would be livening up, but she had another house call to make before she could kick back and relax. This time it was to a weathered clapboard second-story apartment in Dorchester, where her friend Ruby Lucas lived with her girlfriend Mulan. Ruby was a werewolf, true, but she was also the first person who had welcomed Emma into the immortal world and tried to make the terrible transition easier, someone who had cared and tried to help without any kind of agenda or expectation of reward, and those people were so rare in Emma's life that she and Ruby had, improbably, remained fairly close. She waited tables at an all-night diner frequented by the local packs, and as such, had her ear to the ground when it came to any rumblings of trouble among the other half of Boston's supernatural residents. If this rogue was flouting vampire rules about not feeding on unwilling innocents, it was a good bet they were stepping on the wolves' paws as well, or planning to. And while Teeth and Tails lived together more or less in truce these days, it remained a situation fairly comparable to Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. There were places of the one where the other just didn't go, the boundaries were instinctively and sharply known, and it wouldn't take much to stoke the embers. If that happened, the fur was definitely flying, and that never went well. Ever.
After Emma had interrupted Mulan (who was some scary degree of black belt in kung fu) from pummeling a punching bag long enough to ascertain that Ruby was in fact at work tonight, she grimaced and decided to take her chances. Seeing as the diner clientele was predominantly werewolf, they could of course sense what she was, and on her last visit there, some drunk beta had made an impertinent comment – what he said exactly, in fact, was "Nice tits, bloodsucker!" – and no matter the ever-present danger of starting a turf war, Emma had vaulted three booths in the blink of an eye to tie his balls in a bowtie around his throat, or at least make an admirable effort before Granny, the diner owner, also a wolf and a formidable old boot with a very low nonsense tolerance, emphatically put an end to it. She hoped Granny had forgotten about that, although it wasn't likely. Werewolves weren't completely immortal; they did age and eventually die, albeit much slower than humans, and thus the idea of carrying a grudge to the grave was not merely figurative where they were concerned. In fact, forgiveness wasn't anyone's strong suit.
Emma girded herself, reminded herself to be on her best manners, and bounded across the parking lot, pushing the door open. She didn't need to receive explicit permission, as she had been invited in here before, and that was usually sufficient to do the trick with public buildings; it was only private residences where you had to be asked in every time. She briefly wondered if that was sufficient to explain the activities of the Harvard Ripper, if they were perhaps a disaffected alumni turned vampire who had decided to return and wreak vengeance upon the halls of their alma mater, some kind of Revenge of the Nerds-style payback on the Mean Girls. But anyone old enough to do this wouldn't have been at school in the twenty-first century or even the twentieth, so that was likely out.
She braced herself as a wave of bad eighties rock hit her broadside; seeing as werewolves possessed the same hyper-attuned hearing as vampires, she still didn't understand why they had to play their music at top volume. There were a few unfriendly looks from the muscled biker types at the bar, but thankfully Ruby spotted her from across the way, and came zipping up before anyone could start round two. "Emma! What are you doing here?"
"Yeah, I wasn't expecting to be back before next century either." Emma smiled wryly, before launching into her second explanation for the evening as to what Henry had told her. "So," she finished. "You haven't seen or heard anything out of the ordinary, have you?"
"No. Not that I can think of." Ruby frowned, screwing up her face in concentration. "Wait, there was one lady the other night who was a little strange – she wasn't a wolf, I couldn't sense exactly what she was. Human, I think, but not quite."
"Yes?" Emma prompted. "Did she say anything? Do anything?"
"No, she was perfectly civilized. She only drank water, I don't think she ordered any food. I only caught her name in passing – I can't remember what. It was something pretty, a little unusual. Nina? No, that wasn't it. I'm sorry, do you think it was important?"
"Probably not." After all, totally ordinary people could and did stumble into here every day, just wanting to chow down a burger and a shake and completely unaware that they were surrounded by alpha predators in human form. Not that they were ever in any danger; no matter your breed, eating your customers was bad for business, and the werewolves had their own codes of conduct the way the vampires did, although whether the two laws should be joined and modified to create one Immortal Protocol was a question disagreed on annually. "I guess just let me know if you see her again, all right? Thanks, Ruby. Sorry to bother you at work."
Ruby cheerily assured her that it wasn't a problem, and Emma let herself out, trying not to look too closely at the platters of glistening, oven-hot food racing by; while werewolves also preferred their steaks very rare, they could eat all the regular human stuff, as well as go out by day, and sometimes she wondered if she would have been happier if she'd been made a wolf instead. Sure, there was the itsy-bitsy caveat of a painful transformation every full moon, a struggle to control your new monstrous nature so you didn't race out and bloodily devour all the buskers and panhandlers in Boston Common, and the possibility of getting fleas and licking your hindquarters in public, but it felt closer to the human world from Emma's lonely perch. She supposed there was some neat irony in the fact that she had ended up as a vampire, as she did after all prey on others to make her living in more ways than one, and it wasn't like her life was a whirl of sociality beforehand, but still. Considering the circumstances of her transformation, it would even have made more sense if she did, but then, where had it ever gotten her to expect the world to make sense? She'd lived this way (if living it could be called) long enough to know how it worked, to adjust, to get a fairly good idea of how the next few centuries were going to go. Assuming World War III and the nuclear holocaust didn't break out or anything. Living in a world like this, it was hard to imagine much of a future for anyone sometimes.
Emma put her head down against the drizzle and started to walk. Work hadn't called yet, so she supposed she could assume that nobody had jumped bail tonight. A très chic new blood bar had opened down by the waterfront, with mood lighting and white-aproned sommeliers who recommended special vintages that came in bottles and could easily be mistaken for red wine; in fact, Emma wondered if they had ever gotten mixed up with some horrified local restaurant who thought a poltergeist had cursed their cabernet sauvignon. There was, of course, a trick to blending in with the local human restaurants and making sure any unwary souls didn't wander in, as it was harder to disguise a vampire bar to your average layman than it was a werewolf diner. But it seemed like the kind of place you took a date – a date who also drank blood or was on an extremely restricted diet, obviously – and Emma didn't do those. Not anymore. Not when, along with numerous other excellent reasons, they were the reason she had ended up like this.
Nobody ever talked about being widowed in your twenties. It just wasn't a concept that occurred to anyone, or made any sense. Widows were older, grey-haired, had been married for thirty years with four kids, were rendered that way by cancer or heart attack or stroke or Bob just keeling over on the treadmill one day, leaving behind a respected business and a personal reputation as a pillar of the community, got his obituary printed in the local paper and a sedate service at a funeral home, flowers on the grave on Christmas and birthdays. That was just the mental image that seemed to go with it. If young widowhood was mentioned at all, it was usually in the context of success stories; two people who had both lost spouses at an early age connecting and finding a second chance with each other, united by shared grief. Other than that, it made people uncomfortable. You were supposed to be getting married at this age, not burying the groom (or the bride). It just went against the proper order of things.
Sometimes Emma wondered if she counted as a full-fledged, card-carrying Widow, given the fact that she and Neal had been in the middle of a contentious and damaging divorce when he died. She had met him when she was sixteen and he quite a bit older, and she'd known he wasn't much good even then, but for a scarred, clingy ex-foster kid escaping one bad situation after another, he was more than good enough. They bounced around while Neal failed to hold down one menial job after another, eventually resorting to stealing to make ends meet. Henry came along when Emma was seventeen and Neal was serving yet another misdemeanor sentence in the county lockup, and when he got out and discovered that he had a kid, Emma was able to successfully leverage that fact to convince him to stay together. They had a civil ceremony at the courthouse the day after her eighteenth birthday, one of the multiple occasions on which Neal swore he'd clean up his act and they would have a real future together, and eventually ended up in Boston mostly by dint of the fact that if they kept heading east they would have driven into the Atlantic Ocean. Neal said he had family in the area, though if that was true Emma never found out. His rap sheet had grown lengthy enough by this point that even his usual jobs were getting leery of employing him, which meant Emma became the main breadwinner for the family while he drank six-packs of Sam Adams and expertly managed the Red Sox from the couch. Whenever they fought, as they did increasingly often, he would hangdog it and give her puppy eyes and swear that this time, this time, he'd really change. He just needed one more chance.
It was a mark of how terrified she was to be left on her own again that she kept giving it to him. They both had some half-baked idea that no matter how dysfunctional they were together, it would be worse for Henry if they split up, and their son's welfare was something – sometimes the only thing – they could both agree on. Even if it meant he'd get home from school and know they'd been fighting again, the broken dishes not quite swept up. Henry had never called the police on them, but the neighbors had, and Emma had been told more than once that the staying together for the kid stuff was bullshit and she should cut her losses and go. But she, beholden to the belief that this was all she deserved and she would never find anyone else to put up with her anyway, stayed. If this was a test of stubbornness, and of fear, she'd pass with flying colors.
Until finally, the last fight. After she had at last been unable to excuse him letting her down yet again, and filed the papers for a legal separation, retained a divorce lawyer whose 800 number she had read off a billboard near Fenway Park. Neal storming out of the house, and not coming back, and not coming back, and not coming back. Until, angry as she was at him, she started to be afraid, and then she'd heard sirens, and finally at three AM a uniformed police sergeant knocked on the door and asked if she was Emma Cassidy, wife of the deceased. Car accident. DOA. It had probably been quick, if that was any comfort. The driver of the other car had been injured, but was expected to pull through. He was very sorry, ma'am. Anything he could do, she only had to ask.
Emma used the meager life insurance money to pay off their debts and try to save for Henry's college fund. She had taken back her maiden name, Swan, which had felt like coming home after years wandering in the desert, but she was terrified that she had grievously erred in divorcing Neal even if he hadn't died, and was sure Henry needed a responsible father figure to insulate him from whatever mistakes she had made and would continue to make as a mother. That was probably why she agreed to go out with Patrick Walsh, an affable everyman who had just moved to Boston to open a new branch of his successful Manhattan furniture store, in the first place. He was nice, reasonably cute, and sane – and demonstrably capable of holding an adult job and functioning like a real human, not an overgrown manchild who ran away from responsibility and needed to be coddled at every turn. She'd get it right this time. Learn from her mistakes.
Nobody had ever said that irony wasn't a complete and utter bitch.
They'd had something decent going for eight months. Good, even. Then he proposed marriage, she got cold feet, and despite Henry's encouragements, something just hadn't felt quite right. Then on the night he came over to talk about it, he had, of all the ways to destroy a romance in five minutes, turned into a large, evil monkey and tried to kill her.
Emma still didn't know exactly what had happened. As far as she had been able to reconstruct later, Walsh had been working for Zelena, the so-called "Wicked Witch of the West" – a beautiful, ruthless, and completely amoral vampire who had arrived from the boondocks, Wyoming or someplace, with the aim of dethroning Regina as queen not just of Boston, but the entire Eastern Seaboard. It was rumored that they were half-sisters. Whatever the truth, Zelena had set her sights on Emma as a desirable member of her new coven, and sent Walsh to wine and dine and beguile her, get her into a position where she would be left vulnerable and open to attack, where Zelena could swoop in and turn her into a vampire in the name of saving her life. Why Walsh had become a were-monkey instead of a wolf had never been entirely explained, but it was a hallmark of the fact that Zelena, batshit crazy though she was, was a foe underestimated or ignored at one's clear and present peril.
She had expected Emma to love her, for making her into an immortal huntress, queen of the night. Had clearly also staged it so that Emma would justifiably distrust the werewolves, that she would think Zelena was her savior and she owed everything to her, and hence would join her with no questions asked. It hadn't quite worked out that way. That was another extremely good reason for Emma placing herself under Regina's protection, and making sure she never got too far on the queen's bad side, as Regina had defeated her insane half-sister on numerous occasions and made sure she stayed well away from Boston, though God knew where else Zelena had already terrorized. Zelena had tried to claim Emma as her daughter under the old principle of blood right, as vampires were expected to owe loyalty to the sire or dam who had made them and consider that individual their new parent, but Emma had successfully fought back. It was why she was so sensitive to the idea of someone being fed on, much less turned, against their will. Yet it was also why, as much as she was completely capable of carrying out something like this, Zelena made an unlikely suspect for the Harvard Ripper. Regina would know if she so much as sneezed fifty miles from here, much less tried to make a return.
Hence it was also why Emma had ended up completely alone. When her experience of human men was Neal's drinking and lying and deadweight and disappointment, and her experience of supernatural men was Walsh's deceit and betrayal and attempted murder in a relationship that had never been real in the first place, it rather decisively ruled out dabbling in either dating pool. She couldn't see herself dating someone mortal, someone she'd have to lose in a butterfly's wingbeat of a lifetime, couldn't stand to do that once, let again over and over. Supernaturals still didn't seem like her kind, and she couldn't imagine she'd ever find anyone she'd want to spend literally forever with, let alone who would feel the same for her. Even marriage vows came with an escape hatch: "till death do us part." When death wouldn't necessarily do so, the entire face of relationships had to be reconsidered.
So, then. It was a good thing this was in no way a distraction on her current project. Find the Harvard Ripper, put them out of business, and get on with things. It might be a challenge, but it was nothing she, Regina, and the rest of the Boston vampires couldn't handle. Then if the word got around that they weren't an easy target, any other rogues and loners would think twice about trying any similar stunts. There'd be peace. There'd be quiet.
Life would go on. It always did. It always would.
If that wasn't something that always seemed terribly desirable – well then.
She'd just have to deal with it.