“I missed you,” she tells me. She and I met only recently, but we got close very quickly. Koen wouldn’t allow me to move into the cabin without periodic supervision and tasked her with coming to check on me once a week or so. I don’t really consider myself in the market for new friendships, not at this stage of my . . . life, let’s call it, but there are only so many games of I Spy one can play (seventeen, to be precise) before starting to miss meaningful conversation. By the second visit, we were dumping on each other like coal trimmers on the Titanic. Pretty cathartic— if mostly abridged and highly redacted on my part. “You don’t look too well.”
I smile. “Yeah. So I hear.”
“Sorry some asshole Vampyre interfered with your search for, uh, inner peace.”
I am profoundly embarrassed that m
