Maggie was silent and that made Pamela strangely uncomfortable. Normally she cared very little for the chatter of humans, but the carrier's silence filled the car: a reproachful, weighty stillness.

She could stand it no longer.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to ... scare you."
Maggie nodded. "It's okay," she muttered.
"It's just that ... well, I've been with Eric very long..."
"How long?"
"Over a hundred years."
"A hundred years is not very long," she pointed out, a little defiantly. "Not to most vampires."
"Well, it is to me," Pamela insisted.
"Did you ever tell me when exactly you were turned?" she asked, turning slightly towards Pam, a gesture the vampire took as some kind of olive branch. She returned the concession with some personal information she usually didn't share.
"No," Pamela said. She paused. "I don't think I ever did. You had access to the Book of the Undead, so you probably knew without having to ask. Eric turned me in 1905. In San Francisco."
"Uh-huh. So did you celebrate your anniversary in 2005? Your turniversary?"
She was grinning again and Pam felt a little relieved. Before the mess, the incident – she couldn't bring herself to give it a name – she had considered the redhead a friend. A human friend, to be sure, but a friend nonetheless.
"We celebrated it in 2006," she said and she could've bit her tongue when she said it.
"Why?"
Pamela considered lying but she'd given away more than she cared to already.

"Eric turned me in 1905 but I always consider 1906 the year of my birth. My re-birth."
"Why?" Maggie said again.
"I'm really not comfortable talking about it."
"Then why did you mention it?" she said, exasperated. "You can't just leave me hanging. Go on, Pam. Tell me."
Pam glanced in the rear-view mirror and took her foot off the gas, slowing down a little. She would need a little more time to tell this story than the trip back to Shreveport required.

"When Eric turned me, he was working for the King of California. No, not the current one, the one before. Birnbaum was his name. He was a small man, with tiny hands and feet and a pointy little face. He claimed he was two thousand years old at that point, he'd been turned in a village by Lake Galilee. Yes, that Lake Galilee. Do the math and ask the question everyone does."
"Did he ever meet Jesus Christ?" she asked, excitedly.
"He didn't think so. Apparently a lot of wandering preachers and peddlers passed through his little town, there was nothing about that particular Nazarene that sticks out in his memory. Anyway, he spent many years in the Middle East, then he came to the New World and staked a claim on California. And because he knew Godric, he offered Eric a place in his nest."
"Eric lived in a nest? Really? Eric?"
"Oh, please," Pam said, waving a hand. "I know he likes to think he's a lone wolf but for as long as I have known him, Eric has always had a companion or two. He likes company, it gives him something to complain about. Anyway, it was a small nest: Birnbaum – that was his name – Eric, me and the sweetest little thing called Ava."

Pam closed her eyes for a second. Blond like Pamela, Ava was as small and fine-boned as the king, but she was softly-spoken, with the same faint Swedish accent as Eric. She had a heart-shaped face with clear green eyes, and she looked like an exquisite porcelain doll. Pamela fell in love with her on the spot, but Ava only had eyes for the king. She rebuffed Pam's subtle overtures gently and kindly, squeezing her arm and telling her that she perfectly understood how overwhelming one's urges were when one was so young. Rather than be annoyed by the woman who had burst in on their quiet arrangement à trois, she'd been patient, gracious and welcoming – far more so than either of the men. She showed Pam where they could have their clothes made, introduced her to the other vampires in Birnbaum's circle and taught her enough Swedish to understand Eric's commands. She made Pamela repeat impossible tongue twisters, covering her mouth with her hands when Pamela stumbled over "Sju sjösjuka sjömän" and laughing till bloody tears trickled down her face.

"What was the king like?" Maggie asked eagerly, startling Pam back to the dark car.
"Birnbaum was ... kind in his own way, I suppose. He was a bit distant, a bit scholarly. He collected stamps, he liked to repair clockwork, he collected old books. He was fastidious and polite: he always asked after my well-being but didn't seem particularly interested in the answer. Do you know what I mean?"
Maggie nodded her head.
"But Eric liked him," she said. "Or, better said, Eric respected him and God knows, he doesn't respect all that many vampires. So I spent my first six months in that house, only a half-hour from where I'd been turned."
"And then?"
"What do you mean, and then?"
"Where did you go then? Why did you leave? What happened in 1906?"

"I thought you were the history expert," Pamela said drily. "San Francisco, 1906? Ring any bells?"
Maggie shook her head. "Europe in the Dark Ages is more my area of expertise," she said with a smile. "I don't know much about American history."
"Fine. Time for an American history lesson, Ms Kennick. One night in April, Eric and I went to ground under the house as usual, leaving Ava and Birnbaum in the library. He would stay up until the sky started to turn pink because he was old enough to endure it; she would stay up with him because she loved him enough to endure it. Eric had no patience for the bleeds so we always took to ground before the sun came up. I don't know what happened next but it felt like someone picked the coffin up and shook it wildly; I was flung against the sides and lid, I remember waking just as it stopped. I lay in the darkness, bruised and bewildered, and then it started again. And the noise, Maggie: there was a sound like a train rushing through a station, a deafening noise, a roaring - but it was the sound of the house moving and groaning, the sound of the furniture being pounded to kindling or toppling down. Something crashed on my coffin and the lower part of it was crushed."
"What was it?" she asked. "I mean, what caused the destruction?"
Pamela looked over. "An earthquake," she said. Maggie bit her lip. "Go on," Pam said. "Google it, I know you want to."
Maggie whipped out her phone and tapped the screen.
"Oh my," she said. "Holy shit."
Her fingers scrolled down and she held out the phone so Pam could see it.
"No pictures, please," Pam said. "I was actually there, if you recall."

Maggie read silently for a few minutes.
"Were you hurt?" she asked.
"My legs were crushed," she replied simply. "I could feel immediately that the bones had been snapped, like chicken bones. I just lay there in the darkness and I could feel the blood from my eyes running down the side of my face but I couldn't do anything, I couldn't move. The lid of the coffin had been dislodged and through the crack I could see the sky. It was a strange colour and I thought it was the dawn: That's it, I thought, I will meet the True Death before my first year as an immortal is over. And apparently I laughed out loud because that's how Eric found me. He took me into his own coffin and we spent the day there, praying there wouldn't be another earthquake or an aftershock, because that would have killed us for certain."

She remembered him scrabbling to remove debris, pulling the lid of her coffin aside. When he saw his progeny, his bloody face looked almost human in its relief. He seemed to gasp, to exhale, scratching and digging with his hands with renewed fervour.
"We need to go to ground," he said. "We don't have time to find somewhere safe, we have to stay here."
He yanked the lid off, dislodging a pile of stones and dirt that fell on her injured legs. Pamela yelped in pain.
"My legs are broken," she'd said piteously.
"They'll heal," was his curt reply. "We have mere minutes, Pamela. Minutes. Then the sun will come through that hole where the ceiling of the cellar used to be and you and I will fry. Get out of there."
"I can't," she said and wept.
Eric scooped up the dirt covering her legs, then put his large hands under her arms and pulled her out, as gently as he could, laying her down on the ground while he pulled his own coffin out from beneath a fallen door. He lifted the lid, then lay her inside, shoving the open coffin beneath the arch of the doorway that had led to the king's cold room. Looking up, Pamela saw the earthenware jugs that held the king's blood supplies broken on their shelves, the walls stained dark. Eric scrambled in beside her, pulled the lid over both of them, pushing Pam over a little so he could stretch out his legs. She cried out loud when his hand touched her.
"I thought we would feel no pain!" she cried. "We're supposed to live forever!"
"Oh, we feel pain," he said grimly and in the darkness she felt his arm move as his fingers touched his face, his head, looking for injuries. "Your legs will heal, Pamela, but you will have to endure the pain till they do."
"What about the king?" she asked. "What about Ava?"
"We won't know till night falls," he said. "We have to hope that the ground will be still and no well-meaning humans will find us."

She leaned her head on his chest and closed her eyes. She felt her maker go still, leave consciousness. She tried to do the same but it was some time before she could; her face was crusty with dried blood before she could manage to drift into their deep black sleep.

"So you survived?" Maggie asked and checked herself. "Obviously. Duh. What about the king? And Ava?"
"The king was gone, nothing but a bloody mass. You've seen a vampire staked, you can imagine it. Ava said he'd been impaled when the house shifted, his death was instantaneous."
"She survived, then, too?"
Pamela considered the question, then flicked the indicator to turn off to her apartment.
"She was barely alive," she said. "One side of her had lain in the light and she was burned badly, almost beyond recognition: her entire right side and that side of her face."
That beautiful white face was grotesque: the side that had lain in shadow was white, streaked with bloody tears, but the side that had been exposed was charred black, like her body. Ava's fingers – burned, tattered flesh through which Pamela could see the startling white of her bones – stroked Pamela's face and she'd felt the ash they'd left on her skin.

"She'd survived the day because of the smoke – there were fires all over the city, with so much smoke that it blocked out the sun. But there was enough daylight to burn her badly. She'd seen Birnbaum die and by the time Eric found her, she didn't want to heal. So Eric told me to stake her."
Maggie gulped, her face aghast.
"It was my duty," Pamela said stiffly. "She was my friend. She was the first vampire I staked, but the only one I have ever staked for mercy."
There was silence in the car. Pamela pressed a button to lower the window and swiped her key-card at the scanner. The door to the apartment complex's underground car-park rose smoothly and she drove in. She swung neatly into her parking space and turned off the ignition.

"That night we walked away, Eric and I. We literally walked away from that house, walked out of the city with nothing but the clothes on our backs. We passed by mangled bodies with little children crying next to them still in their nightclothes. We picked our way over the debris of buildings that was blocking roads. We skirted raging fires, we crossed deep gashes in the earth that had been bridged by planks or doors from ruined houses. I was hungry, my legs hadn't fully healed and I needed blood but Eric would not let me feed – and God knows we passed enough pitiful, bleeding humans as we walked away. But he said that they had suffered enough without us preying on them like vultures on the dead."
Maggie was looking at her, her blue eyes serious. The neon lights of the car park made her pale skin almost as white as Pamela's own.
"At dawn we went to ground in the cellar of a barn on a farm outside the city and fed from the farmer who found us the following night. We walked till we reached a town called Antioch and from there we organised our journey to the East Coast. We were in New York till Eric left for Germany in the 1930s."

She opened the car door and got out. Maggie followed her, grabbing her bag off the back seat.
"I understand, Pam," she said as she caught up. "I know what he means to you, I really do."
"He's my maker," she said shortly.
"You think he's your saviour," Maggie returned.
Pamela tsk-tsked as she opened the door to the stairwell.
"Honestly, Maggie," she said with a lightness she did not feel. "Don't be so dramatic."