3. Precautions

She got up at her customary five in the morning to work out. Mormor would be up at six, and she had to make her breakfast. Except... she wouldn't.

But Alexis got up and exercised anyway. She would make her own breakfast and go to work. She saw the door to the artifact room standing open still and sighed. Was the vampire raised in a barn?

She went down and started to close it, then noticed that he had left a couple of cases open, too. Walking inside, she carefully closed the first one, shutting her eyes against the loss. These artifacts were part of her family's history, and Mormor had thrown them away.

"Leave them-"

She jumped and her heart raced. He was still there. No wonder the door stood open still.

"I will close in a bit before I go find a dark room to rest in," he finished after giving her a second or two to recover from her startle.

"What are you still doing here?" she asked, trying not to be snide.

"Reliving the past," he answered. She saw him leaning casually back in a chair.

"I see that you found two of the pieces. There's another. I'll show you."

"Why?" he was so close when he said it that she felt the breeze of his arrival and then of his speech.

"I just thought you might like to see it." She shivered at his proximity.

"Then by all means, show me everything."

She walked over to open the curtains around the ancient chair. "We keep it in the darkness to slow the decay," she told him. "Please close it back up when you're finished..." Then she remembered that it was his now. "If you wish," she added.

He wasn't looking at the chair, though.

"Why are you dressed like that?"

She straightened. "I was exercising, if you really must know."

"With your hair in a bun?"

"Yes."

"Do you sleep with your hair in a bun?"

She scowled. "None of your business!"

"You need to lighten up. And get your hair done. I think Pam would faint if she saw that mess. Not a highlight in sight." His finger under her chin tilted her head up. "Never any makeup?"

She pulled away from him. "I am not a dress up doll for your girlfriend. Please take your things and leave."

"It's half my house."

She took a deep breath to ease the pain those words brought. "Very well. I will leave. Within the week."

"Prickly, Alexis. Very prickly."

He turned and looked at the chair finally. To her surprise, he lifted the heavy, thick glass box off of it as easily as if it were a tiny little bauble. "That is my father's chair. It would have been mine if..."

He knelt in front of it, running his hands across the ornate wood working on it. "How did your Mormor come to have it in her possession?" he asked.

"It's been in our family for generations. The clan it once belonged to was a friend to our family's clan. They took in the remainder of their people and sheltered them. These were to be kept for the lost prince—you, I guess—but he never returned. They just kept keeping them."

His head drooped against the chair. "Leave me," he commanded her.

She left, closing the door quietly behind her.

She went to work and picked up a newspaper on her way home. Though she knew she had to quit thinking of it as 'home' at all. When she got there, she made herself some dinner and sat down at the table to eat. She opened the classifieds and started looking for apartments.

"What are you doing?"

She had heard him this time, so his voice was not as unexpected. "I'm finding an apartment."

"Why?"

Without looking up, she said, "Why do you think? Even if you're not going to be here, which apparently you are, there's still the fact that this is no longer my home and never will be again."

"You are determined to believe the worst of me, aren't you?"

"Can you tell me that there are good reasons for me to trust vampires?" she asked, still not looking up, though not quite seeing what she was supposedly reading, either. "If it were any other vampire, would you encourage trust?"

His silence was answer enough. He stood beside her and pointed at the newspaper. "You should try this one."

"That's a man looking for a roommate," she said, irritated.

"You should jump on it, it may be your only chance to ever live with a man."

"Wow, you're a real charmer," she told him. "Did you go to school to learn how to be such a complete dick, or is it inborn?"

"All part of my vampire charm," he answered. "There will be men here tomorrow to install a new security system. As paranoid as you are, I'm surprised you have nothing at all."

"I have a gun," she told him.

"Can you use it?" he asked.

She knew her silence was answer enough, and after a moment, he scoffed. "Guns are no use to those who can't fire them."

He grabbed one of her rolls and began tossing it back and forth from hand to hand. "So why do you work out? Are you harboring fantasies of snaring the postman?"

"Postman? Who calls them 'postmen' anymore? And no, not harboring anything. I like to be healthy. Please don't play with my food." She wondered again if he was raised in a barn. Then realized that he was probably raised in the next best thing—an ancient longhouse.

He dropped the bun back into the pile and she sighed.

"Are you a germophobe? Do you expect to catch vampirism from my buns?" he asked her.

She tried not to quirk a grin at that. "I'm a neat person, Mr. Northman. I like things tidy and organized. That generally includes cleanliness."

She put the paper down. "There is an alarm, by the way. It's in my room. It tells me when any door or window on the premises opens. I made Mormor put it in when she insisted on moving the artifacts here."

Picking up the buns, she started cleaning up the table.

"I'm impressed. I didn't give you enough credit," he told her.

She shrugged. "I do care about those artifacts, and I cared about Mormor. I wanted to protect both. Anyone who would break in to steal them would no doubt harm her, too."

"And you," he said.

She chuckled. "You said it yourself. Not even living men want anything to do with me."

"It doesn't bother you? Don't you ever think about going on a date or having sex?"

"No. I had Mormor for conversation and sex is over-rated."

"How would you know?" he asked with a cheeky grin.

"I was young and stupid once. I'm not a thirty year old virgin, vampire."

"So you don't trust vampires and you don't trust men. Is there anyone you do trust?"

She sighed and her heart constricted. "Not anymore. And in the end, even she tossed me out a second story window to the vampires."

"Is it as bad as all that?" he asked.

"I'm going to bed," she told him. "Good night."

"Alexis." When she stopped, turning her head slightly to listen, he went on, "I have a name, you know."

"Yes, Mr. Northman, I know. I read the will."

"Call me 'Eric'," he told her.

"No," she said, leaving him sitting in the dining room.

She cried that night, hurt that Mormor had left her to the mercies of a stranger. But worst of all, she missed her too much to dredge up the anger that she felt the deed deserved.

The next morning when she returned from jogging, the house was abuzz with activity. She stared in consternation at the men swarming the walls with ladders and the workman at the door who was clearly replacing the locks.

"What is all this?"

"Beefing up the security system, ma'am. You're going to need keys," he told her. He dug around in his pocket and handed her two sets of keys. "The man sure wants to protect something in here."

She crossed her arms. Clearly, he meant it couldn't possibly be her. "Yes. He should have dolled me up a bit first, because now the thieves are going to wonder what the real treasure is."

"Sorry, ma'am, I meant no offense. It's just that he's spending a pretty penny to finish up the alarm system install."

"Whatever," Alexis said, skirting past him and into the house.

She went to work that day angry and sad. She'd meant what she said. Now thieves would have reason to wonder what was in her house. The alarm system she'd had was adequate and had just appeared to be a simple self-protection measure for a little old lady and a hermit woman.

The vampire had just put a huge target on her grandmother's house.

That night, she called the cell number he had left her in a note on the table. When he answered, she shivered. His voice was different when he wasn't with it. He sounded so warm and human.

"You have shown the thieves that there's something in this house worth breaking in for by putting in such a huge security system," she accused him. "Those artifacts have been in this house for eighty-five years without such measures because no one thought there was something valuable here to break in for!"

"Those items belonged to my father. I will ensure that they are well protected, and I do not need your permission to do so," he said, the cold vampire back in full force, even over the phone.

"You are wasting my grandmother's money to put in security measures that would never have been necessary if you hadn't put such a huge advertisement on the house-"

"I did not spend any of your precious money," he cut her off. "Those are my things, and I am using my own money to care for them."

"Mormor would not have wanted-"

"I do not believe that you knew your Mormor very well. She was a truly stora fru," he said, meaning 'great lady', "while you are a termagant."

She held the phone away from her face, staring at it. Nobody said 'termagant' outside of literature.

"That's not true," she said. "I'm not violent-"

"I'm sure you'd happily kill me if you could get away with it," he told her.

"I don't kill people!" she objected.

"Of course you don't. But then, you don't think I'm a person, so that certainly wouldn't stop you." The phone beeped with a lost call signal and she laid it down into her lap, closing it quietly.

Her Mormor's words echoed in her head. "I am disappointed in you, Alexis."

"They killed Haley, Mormor," she whispered. "I know they did. I know I can't prove it, but I know they did it."

She got up and went to bed. When she woke in the morning and worked out in the weights room, she realized that Mormor was gone and she had promised herself that after Mormor was gone she would find proof that the vampires had killed Haley. But she had no idea how to go about it.

Finally, she decided that she had to go to that vampire bar that Haley used to go to all the time over in Louisiana. It was an hour drive, but it was the closest vampire bar in the area, and Haley had gone there frequently.

Trembling, she walked into Haley's room. She began to go through her clothes to find something that wasn't all the way over the line into slutty, but that didn't have the same conservative, brown-and-gray look that Alexis generally kept to for herself. Mormor had never let her put Haley's things away, stating that she would be back someday. Alexis was glad now that she hadn't pushed the issue.

She sat down at her sister's vanity and used her makeup. Then she went back to her own room and took out the contacts that she never wore because after a while they'd hurt her eyes.

She got in the car and turned on the Garmin, punching in the address to her very first vampire bar, her stomach tied in brutal knots of fear. She looked at her Mormor's well-lit house and hoped it would be undisturbed when she returned.

A little over an hour later, she pulled the pins out of her hair and brushed it out in the car. Then, taking a deep breath, she stepped out of the car, balancing on the stiletto heels with only sheer effort. She stepped to the door and the man there said, "ID please."

She bristled slightly. "I'm thirty years old," she scowled at him.

"You look about twelve," he replied. "Show me some ID or leave."

She got her ID out. He looked at it dubiously, then at her. Finally, he handed it to her. "You're making a mistake. You don't belong here."

She straightened up. "Humans are not allowed?"

His eyes raked her form. "Humans are allowed, but you look like dinner. And you smell like terror, which makes you that much sweeter."

"I have business inside," she told him, standing up to all five feet four inches [16.45 m] of her very not intimidating height.

He shook his head and opened the door. She walked inside. She'd only rarely ever even been in bars, and this one was little different from the few she'd been in. Except that multiple eyes turned to her as soon as she stepped in the door.

And to her shock, her eyes met familiar ones across the room. It was Eric, sitting in a chair on the stage.