Free Dare I? by Kallysten Page A

Compared to that, her salad
did seem a little bland but that didn’t mean anything.
    “You always order a salad,” Jessie pointed
out before Anna could protest that she hadn’t been very hungry. “It
doesn’t matter where we go, that’s what you order. I love you girl,
but you can be really predictable sometimes. You need to learn to
shake things up!”
    “You’re not getting any younger,” Carol
added, and on Anna’s dark look she grinned. “OK, none of us are.
But getting older doesn’t mean we can’t do anything fun anymore or
have to eat like rabbits!”
    Anna let out a quiet snort at that, drawing a
reproving glance from the passing maitre d’. She felt herself
blushing as she dropped her eyes back to her plate and speared a
piece of lettuce with a little too much strength. She winced at the
sound of her fork hitting the porcelain plate.
    “And what is it that you do to have fun, Miss
Soon-To-Be-Happily-Married? Other than deciding twice a week on a
new color for our dresses?”
    Her tone was snippy, and Anna regretted her
words as soon as they passed her lips. Bitterness at soon being the
last of her group of friends not to have a significant other had
surged out of nowhere. She was usually good at hiding how much she
hated being single again, but to be put on a defensive stance had
made that tightly controlled jealousy come to the front. She
glanced up at Carol, ready to apologize, but her friend merely
smiled at her with a slight shake of her head that said more than
words could have. Then her eyes widened and took a devilish glint
as she leaned forward over the table, looking in turns at Anna and
Jessie.
    “You want to know what Johnny and I did last
Friday?” she whispered. “You’ll never guess!”
    Jessie and Anna shared puzzled glances.
    “We went to The Edge!” Carol continued after
merely a second, her excitement piercing through her quiet
words.
    Anna’s eyes widened. There were a few dancing
clubs in the city, but On The Edge was the most famous—or
infamous—of all. Elsewhere, vampires were tolerated as long as they
didn’t show their fangs; at The Edge, though, as the club was
nicknamed, they were openly welcomed by an owner who reportedly
lived with not one but two vampire lovers. Many humans who went
there returned with bite marks on their throats and stories of
intensely erotic if not always sexual encounters. But as much as
Anna looked, she could see no scar on Carol’s neck, and it was hard
to believe that the glowing bride-to-be would have slept with a
vampire.
    “You went to The Edge with Johnny,” Anna
repeated, still incredulous and just a little bit in awe. “Did
you…you know…meet vampires?”
    Carol’s eyes were sparkling. “Of course. The
place is filled with them. They even serve blood at the bar! It was
pretty weird to see. And when we were dancing, we kept trying to
guess who was a vamp and who was human. I danced with one while
Johnny was getting a drink but the vamp left when he came
back.”
    Unable to find anything to say, Anna just
stared at her friend. Like many people, she was caught somewhere
between fascination and fear where vampires were concerned. She had
never been in contact with one, at least not as far as she knew,
but she had heard about them, rumors tangled with facts, gossip
that made them seem murderous monsters and misunderstood creatures
in turn. To know that her friend had been in such close contact to
several of them…
    “See, I went before I started dating Brian,”
Jessie said suddenly, her voice as quiet as Carol’s had been. “So I
could try the full experience.”
    Very conspicuously, she extended her left arm
on the table between Carol and her, palm turned upward. She drew
back the bracelets that always hung loosely at her wrist and
revealed two round scar marks, a shade paler than her skin.
    “You didn’t!” Carol gasped. She sounded as
shocked as Anna felt herself, both at the bite mark and at the fact
that their friend