Free Bring On the Night by Jeri Smith-Ready

featured long wooden beams amid swirling white plaster. A small fireplace held a virtual fire, safe for vampires.
    To the left, a set of double doors opened into a large bathroom, where I could see a Jacuzzi tub big enough for a baseball team. My skin tingled at the sight.
    On the right lay a king-size four-poster covered in a plush red comforter. Soft light suffused the entire room.
    It was perfect. I couldn’t wait for them to get the hell out.
    “If this is suitable,” Mel said, “we’ll just leave you alone.”
    “We don’t want to keep you up.” I hoped the ceiling was soundproof.
    “You won’t,” Brenda said. “The ceiling is soundproof.”
    With a final good night, Mel and Brenda made themselves scarce.
    I went to the bed and grasped one of the posts. “Very sturdy. I hope you brought the handcuffs.”
    Without responding, Shane pulled his classical guitar from its case, then sat in the corner armchair and began to tune it.
    “This is so cool—a vampire-friendly B and B!” I bopped over and gave him a quick kiss. “Talk about a niche market.”
    “Yeah. Let me focus for a second, okay?”
    I pressed my lips together and piled a small plate with fruit, cheese, and slices of baguette, while behind me Shane tuned and fretted. Finally he took a pair of deep, slow breaths, muttering to himself in words I couldn’t decipher.
    “Come sit down,” he said finally.
    I moved to the brown-silk-upholstered ottoman in front of his chair, pulled it back a few feet to give him room, and sat with my plate upon my knees.
    Fingers poised above the strings, he looked at me for a long moment. “I wrote this for you.”
    My heart halted, then sped up. He’d never written a song for me—never written a song, period. One effect of a vampire’s temporal adhesion was difficulty learning new things, whether it was how to surf the Internet or how to love contemporary music. Shane’s relative youth and his involvement with me helped him overcome the natural vampire stickiness, and while he wasn’t exactly downloading the latest Kings of Leon tracks, he’d at least started playing music from the twenty-first century.
    But concocting something new out of his own head and heart? Vampires didn’t do that. Creation was an act of the living.
    My food forgotten, I watched him play. I never tired of seeing his hands travel over the fretboard and the strings, imagining and remembering how they felt on my skin. He used no pick, only his nails and fingertips, stroking and coaxing beauty into existence.
    When he started to sing, I closed my eyes.
    First he sang of the past—our disastrous first encounterthat almost ended in my death; our hands-off, one-hundred-percent-platonic first real date; and the first night we made love, after another vampire had almost taken my life. How Shane’s own life had changed.
    Then he moved to the present, extolling our mismatched, underground existence and making Dexter the first vampire dog to be immortalized in song. Shane sang of how he tried so hard to be normal.
    The last verse told of the future, of silver hair and sallow skin. Of my deathbed and grave, and how he would be there, at my side. Until the end.
    Tears squeezed out between my lids and rolled in swollen streams down my cheeks. I held back a sniffle, wanting this room to hear no sound but his promise.
    He offered me his life, eternal youth, and timeless strength, wrapped in a love that would transcend the ravages of human fragility and vampire eccentricity.
    We could do this,
he was saying. He had faith in us. I’d never had faith in anything.
    He stroked the last chord and let it echo against the wooden walls. Then he set down the guitar, leaning the headstock against the chair.
    When he finally looked at me, his eyes held no fear.
    “Do you know what comes next, Ciara?”
    I opened my mouth, but could fit no words around my incoherent croak.
    Shane sank to his knees before me, then reached into the pocket of his flannel shirt.