Always the Vampire

Always the Vampire by Nancy Haddock



This is for my extended family.

You know who you are,

and I hope you know

how very dear you are to me!





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


First, a belated but sincere shout-out to wonderful author and friend Sandy Blair, who came up with the title for my second book, Last Vampire Standing. Apologies again for the omission last time, Sandy!

Thanks to my critique group and manuscript readers Lynne Smith (Lynn Michaels), Julie Benson, Sherry Winstead, and Thomas “Tommy” Kerper. They make my work better and my life brighter.

Leis Pederson is my editor and a special kind of star in my galaxy, and Roberta Brown is an agent extraordinaire and dear friend. I’m blessed to know and work with them both!

A mega thank-you to all the kind folks who assisted me with research. They include members of the City of St. Augustine government staff, the park rangers of the Castillo de San Marcos, and the officers of the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Department, the St. Augustine Police Department, and the St. Augustine Beach Police Department. Everyone answered my questions with professionalism and humor. Any errors and/or embellishments are mine.

I must include Elizabeth Topp and Nicole Ritsi of the Nisiotes Dance Troupe in my gratitude. In the midst of the annual Greek festival, they took the time to patiently answer my dance questions, and later demonstrated the fire dance. Awesome, ladies!

I deeply appreciate my pals at Starbucks (Store 8484) for the caffeine and caring, and my friends at Barnes & Noble (Store 2796) for helping me ferret out books for fun and research. And to the ladies of Second Read Books, you have my heart for all you do and for all you are.

Never last or least, my abiding gratitude goes to my friends and fans for their encouragement and support. Thank you for sharing your Light!





ONE




Maid of honor.

That phrase may strike stark fear into the hearts of some women, but I’m not one of them.

Okay, that’s partly because I’m a vampire. Not a scary one, mind you, but caterers and florists hop to when I’m around.

Of course, it helps that the bride is my mentor and friend, and is usually cool under fire. As an interior designer and home-restoration specialist, Maggie O’Halloran has calmed dozens of fractious clients, from the picky to the pushy to the outright psycho. With that kind of experience, I can’t see her going bridezilla on me, no matter what the provocation.

Last, I have a secret weapon. I’m locked and loaded with a ginormous binder filled with lists, notes, and phone numbers. Not to mention printouts of every maid of honor scrap of information I could find on the Internet and pages torn from bride magazines.

Yep, I’m Francesca Melisenda Alejandra Marinelli, the Oldest City’s only vampire, now doing my first and likely last tour of duty as a maid of honor. As Maggie’s retired Army dad said, my mission was to make Maggie’s Victorian-themed wedding perfect.

The only element of the wedding weekend that veered from the Victorian theme was the rehearsal dinner. Maggie refused to have one. Instead, she and Neil and those of the bridal party who wanted to join them would attend the first night of the annual Greek festival. Why the one-eighty on the Victorian theme? Because her first date with Neil had been at the festival. She was too sentimental to change her mind; no matter that Neil, her dad, and even I had tried to talk her out of it.

But, hey, I had talked her out of bustles for the bridesmaid dresses, hadn’t I? Winning that skirmish was good enough for me.

With less than three weeks until the wedding day, I collected my trusty maid of honor binder to head out the door for a meeting with Maggie. The dining room in her restored Victorian home served as Wedding Central, and we were sorting yet another pile of invitation RSVPs.

Good thing I was leaving, because the perimeter alarm—the one Sam of Sam’s Security Systems was supposed to be fixing—suddenly blared to life yet again. With my vampire hyper-hearing, the darn thing shrieked in my skull, rattled my teeth, and threatened to deafen me.

A streak of white tore past my feet on a beeline for the laundry room. Snowball—Saber’s cat—taking cover in the dirty-clothes basket.

Me? I tore out the front door, slammed it on the worst of the noise, and tapped a sneakered foot on the cobblestone patio.

“Saber,” I yelled to my ex-slayer sweetheart, who was “supervising” Sam’s fix-it job.

Instead of Saber answering, Neil Benson popped his head around the corner of my carriage-house-cum-cottage.

“What?” Neil bellowed back.

“Turn. That. Volume. Down.”

“Shut. The. Door.”

“It is shut.”

Neil, Maggie’s fiancé and my surfing buddy, trotted past my Polynesian-style bar with its tiki carvings, moved me aside, and eyed my door.

“Hunh. That is loud.”

“You think? Didn’t Saber tell Sam to fix the volume?”