Chapter 1 — Rain, Grease, and Ghosts

Rain has a way of making the world honest. It strips paint, reveals rust, and makes neon look like it's bleeding. It also makes people hurry, which is useful if you like to go unnoticed. I did my best to be a nobody.

My boots sloshed through puddles as if they had opinions about my life choices. The town I passed through smelled like wet tar and a kind of tiredness that settled into the bones of buildings. Streetlights smeared halos over the sidewalks, and the drizzle stitched the world together with a million tiny needles. I pulled my jacket tighter—not because I was cold, but because fabric is the polite thing you keep between yourself and everyone who feels entitled to touch you.

Somewhere along the line I learned that stories make people soft. Tell them a sad backstory and they soften toward you. Tell them nothing and they sharpen into curiosity that can be just as dangerous. I’ve toyed with both tactics. Tonight I was sticking with nothing. Silence was warmer than conversation.

I’m not big on anniversaries, holidays, or the kind of milestones that come wrapped in polite expectations, but I mark things in other ways: the number of towns I’ve slept through, the number of broken promises I’ve been given, the number of times a hunter thought they had me pegged and discovered they were only holding a postcard. There’s an ugly pride in surviving one more sunset.

Once, a long time ago—maybe before names mattered—I had a bed that didn’t belong to me and a door that I could leave unlocked without tallying the cost. I try not to picture it. Memory is a cloak you can wrap around your wrists until you can’t move your hands. Easier to keep them open and ready.

The diner’s neon buzzed like a motel confession. Its windows steamed from the inside, painting smudged silhouettes of the patrons as if the world inside preferred to be half-remembered. I pushed through the door and immediately regretted choosing a booth by the window. Regret is an adaptable feeling; it gets used for many things. Still—free coffee, a safe-ish corner, and the acoustics for eavesdropping. Practical and selfish. The only two qualities I value.

Inside smelled like burnt coffee and lemon cleaner. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead like an old insect. A jukebox mumbled something hungry and cheap. A man at the counter tapped his spoon against the cup in sync with the beat of a slow heartbreak song. The waitress—an exhausted saint named Marge who had seen more things than her nametag suggested—moved with the resigned grace of someone who understood the economy of kindness.

I slid into vinyl that squeaked in judgement. Water pooled on the table and I wiped it with the hand that didn’t mind getting dirty. I watched puddles congeal and chased my reflection in the glass. My face looked like a map of bad decisions with eyeliner highways running through it. I liked it that way.

People in diners tell you everything if you let them. They tell you who they are, what they fear, the little betrayals they consider poetic. I listened because hearing people talk is a useful way to learn patterns. Humans are predictable. Vampires—if you are lucky enough to meet real ones—are not. We’re messy, fragile things pretending to be indestructible, and we make mistakes that echo.

“Need a refill?” Marge asked, setting down a mug with the care of someone who knew what the world could do to fragile objects.

“Black,” I said. One word. Crisp. Sufficient.

She studied me—most people do—even if they do it politely behind questions they don't ask. Her eyes slid over my wet hair, my jacket, the faint dark smear on my sleeve. “You look like you’ve been wrestlin’ storms.”

“Storms and hunters,” I said. I lied by omission. I’ve gotten good at folding truth until it fits the fabric of the moment.

Marge nodded like she’d accepted that as a coherent life summary and retreated to the pots. This place was a small ecosystem; people took their cues and lived by them.

I had my elbows on the table and my chin on my hands, the human pose of someone not planning a violent thing, when someone slid into the opposite side of the booth like they owned the vinyl. The booth dipped. The smell of something woody and warm drifted over—cedar? guitar oil?—and for a second my muscles froze because my body recognizes predators in many languages.

He was all wrong for the scene in the best possible way: blonde hair that looked like the kind of sunlight you only see in photographs, cheekbones a skeptical sculptor might approve of, and eyes so pale that I thought they might be cast from glass. He wore a jacket that had clearly seen better days and boots that had a polite scuffing. He carried a guitar case with the casualness of someone who’d been doing the same thing for a long time and had stories folded into the canvas.

“Cold night to be out,” he said. His voice had edges softened by a humor that felt like a hand on the small of your back. “You look like you could use a tune.”

In any other life I might have scoffed at the metaphor. In mine I was more curious than I pretended. Curiosity keeps you alive in small ways. It also makes you dangerous in others.

I didn’t look up at first. That’s how you measure someone—by how long until they notice you’re testing them. People who are comfortable often take their time. Predators make themselves known quickly.

“So you play?” I asked without meaning to. Conversation always finds a way to slip through the cracks.

He grinned, the kind that suggested trouble and marshmallows at the same time. “Sort of. I’m more of an enthusiastic amateur with a flair for eardrum betrayal.”

I snorted. Laughter is a muscle I exercise sparingly, but his joke hit right. It wasn’t a good joke. It was human, which is a start.

“Name’s Travis,” he offered, the etiquette of introductions like a practiced riff.

I tilted my head. “Silver,” I said. The name tasted like iron and the echo of streetlamps.

“Nice to meet you, Silver,” he said, like he was agreeing to a bargain he hadn’t read the terms of. “You’ve been all over tonight. Saw you on the highway. Thought you looked…interesting.”

There it was—his watchful comment. Not the kind that makes you want to bolt, but the kind that makes you check for hidden teeth. I do not like being an exhibit. I like being the curator.

“I was just passing through,” I said. Which is accurate and a lie in the same breath.

He nodded, like he trusted the half-truth. “It’s not safe out there. Not if you’re alone.”

I let the statement sit. Nearly everyone says variations of that to me. They say it like they're handing out weather advice. They don’t know what being unsafe is when it has been a kind of companionship for you.

He tapped the guitar case. “I sleep badly,” he said suddenly. “So I wander. Heard a few things. Figured I’d check if the rumors were true.”

“You make it sound like you’re a traveling bard checking other people’s myths,” I said.

He laughed, and it was quick and honest and surprisingly tender. “Maybe. Or maybe I just don’t like boring nights.”

“Which is a crime in some places,” I muttered, and then, because the world requires balance, I added, “You’re funny.”

He tilted his head, eyes narrowing in mock offense. “That’s a dangerous compliment, coming from someone who looks like they could start a riot with their eyeliner.”

There was a warmth in the corner of my chest that felt like contraband. Humor is dangerous because it makes you like people. Liking is a slippery slope in my profession.

“You been following me?” I asked, eventually. Direct questions cut through the fog.

He shrugged like it wasn’t a confession. “Maybe. Maybe I was following the music. Maybe I was following the idiot who thought a diner was an acceptable place to sit in a storm and not get chatted up by strangers.”

“You were following me,” I said.

“Fine. I was watching,” he admitted with mock solemnity. “But not the bad kind of watching. The kind where you go, ‘Hmm, there’s something interesting here.’ The non-creepy variant.”

His pale eyes were steady, like a lighthouse that knows how to be useful. There was a softness to them that didn’t pretend at mercy. It was...familiar in a way I didn’t want to admit.

“You're one of us,” I said before I could stop myself.

His grin shifted, like someone fitting into an unexpected jacket. “Yeah,” he said simply. “Figured you’d notice eventually.”

I wanted to be startled. I wanted to be outraged. Instead, the rain outside drummed on the roof and a man in a far booth finished his slice of pie like the world was an ordinary thing. In the booth across from me, the stranger—Travis—strummed an absent chord on his knee and watched me like a man watching a story he’d been told to cherish.

There was danger in him, like heat beneath ice. There was also a disarming honesty that made me want to test the edges. Dangerous, mock-heroic, and annoyingly human. Perfect company, really.

Somewhere at the edge of hearing, a car alarm whimpered and then stopped. The rain did its best to wash things clean. Outside, the night moved on in long, patient sweeps. Inside, the diner hummed its small life.

I sipped coffee, watched the steam make ghosts, and felt a decision like a small stone settle at the bottom of my stomach. No more running, I thought again—this time not as a promise I whispered in mud, but as a choice I’d put on the table like a coin. I didn't know yet what it bought me. I only knew that Travis—blonde, dangerous, ridiculous—had just sat across from it and decided to stay.

That felt like either the beginning of a terrible plan or the plot twist I didn’t know I’d been waiting for. Either way, I was ready to see how it played out.