Free Infinite Days by Rebecca Maizel

the black jacket. He must have just fed, because his teeth looked whiter than I had seen them in ages.
    I walked languidly around the inner part of the circle of vampires. I held my eyes on Rhode until I reached the ballroom doorway, which now was open and showed the long hallway and the dance of light from the fireplace.
    The woman in the middle of the room kept glancing at the hallway. I felt, as always with my vampire extrasensory perception, what this woman wanted. She wanted to make a run for it.
    “Do you know why you are here?” I asked the woman, speaking to her in Dutch. I circled her very slowly, keeping my hands behind my back.
    She sat on her heels watching me. She shook her head no.
    “Do you know what I am?” I asked.
    Again, she shook her head. “I want to—to leave,” she said, her voice quivering. “My mother and father.”
    I raised my index finger and placed it over my lips. Images from my human life drifted to the front of my mind. My parents’ stone manor. The wet earth. An earring in a palm. I refocused on the servant’s features. Her keen blue eyes, their round shape and short blond eyelashes. I stopped circling and stood above her, looking down.
    “You know,” I said, and smiled. The moment before the vampire will kill, the fangs lower. At first they appear as regular teeth, but when the kill is happening, like an animal, the fangs are bared. And mine lowered; I felt them lower, as though slowly unfolding a blade. I bent over and looked deeply into her eyes. I whispered into her right ear, “You’re going to taste horrible. Look at your disposition.”
    I pulled back and looked into her eyes again. “I wouldn’t dare sully my insides with what you are.” I stood back up. For a moment, relief swept over her face.
    I walked past her, the low heels of my black leather shoes clicking against the wooden floor. The train of my gown swiveled behind me like a snake. I threw one long glance back at Rhode and smiled. It was silent in the ballroom. The musicians had stopped playing. I was midway back down the hallway when I lifted my right hand in the air, bent my wrist down, and snapped my fingers.
    Two hundred vampires descended upon her at once. I smiled all the way back up to my bedroom.

    The library at Wickham was a Gothic masterpiece with panoramic glass windows. I entered through the two double doors, taking in the plush chairs, rows and rows of books, and students investigating the stacks. Decorating the ceiling were three-dimensional, octagonal tiles made out of black wood.
    “Your job, Ms. Beaudonte, is to sit here behind this desk. When people ask you questions, you answer them to the best of your ability. You can always direct them to a librarian if you can’t answer something they want to know.” The librarian, who was leading me on a tour, was a tall woman with a thin nose and eyes shaped like a cat.
    These contemporary humans were so horribly misinformed. I was a former vampire who had been asleep the last hundred years. They expected me to act as a reference guide?
    “You get paid every Friday. I’ll have your semester schedule at the end of your shift at seven p.m. Headmistress Williams also suggested you tutor some of the students in their language skills, as you are so proficient. I’ll make a sign for you to put up on the miscellaneous bulletin board at the Union.”
    Once she walked away, I collapsed into a chair behind the semicircular reference desk. Wickham private school certainly was going to keep me busy. In front of me was a computer, which basically blinded me with its blue light. There were all sorts of contraptions I had never seen before: staplers, ballpoint pens, paper clips, printers, and electrical outlets. Keyboards, virtual desktops, search engines—these were just some of the hundreds of words that I had to learn in order to fit in, and quickly. To assimilate within Wickham or, as Rhode would say, “to become a teenage girl again” would require