The windows had been locked, but not boarded up, and even though Danny might have ordinarily appreciated the small glimpse outside, the world had conspired to drag down his disposition. Rain beat against the reinforced glass, and even though he had been given the run of the place, security systems kept him from leaving. His internal gauge told him that Liam occupied a condo somewhere in Manayunk, and even though people came and went outside, the likelihood of anyone looking up and seeing him was minimal.

Instead, he had been left to watch humanity carry on without him.

“What’s going to happen to me?” he had asked Liam when they had exited the elevator and walked toward the front door. Heedless of whoever heard them, he added, “Are you killing me quickly or slowly?” which led Liam to shoot him another exasperated, angry look.

“If I intended to kill you quickly,” he said through clenched teeth, “you would be lying in a ditch right now, am I clear?” The two hadn’t exchanged another word for the rest of the night, and though Mari had made the attempt to offer an olive branch, Danny had answered by asking where he could sleep. A spare bedroom became his new domicile. Mari retired with Liam, and Danny sat up in his room, watching the sun come up before finally lying down to rest. He hadn’t eaten yet, upon waking. He’d smoked his last cigarette hours ago and while he knew the sun would be setting shortly, it only made him more nauseated.

Danny hadn’t bothered to ask what a slow death involved. He simply knew it had something to do with the empty looks he’d seen in the eyes of the other humans.

Liam was the first to emerge from the bedroom, showered and dressed, and after offering him a quick glance, Danny pretended to ignore him. Instead, he leaned against the glass of the living room window, where he’d been perched since waking up, and counted the cars which sped past them on the street below.

“I’m leaving for the night,” Liam said. “Do you want anything?”

“A pack of cigarettes,” Danny said. ‘Maybe a whole fucking carton,’ he added in his head, but speaking more than a few words to Liam made him even sicker to his stomach. Liam, mercifully, didn’t answer. In the distance, Danny heard Liam press the buttons to temporarily deactivate the alarm system and, once the door clicked shut again, the alarm beeped, indicating it had been reactivated. Danny sighed. Within minutes, another car drove down the street, and this time, Danny recognized it as belonging to Liam.

“Looks like it’s just you and me for the rest of the night,” Mari said, suddenly appearing beside him.

Danny jumped, shifting to look at her as she shot a quick glance down at him. Frowning, he made idle note of the light, silk robe she wore, her hair still disheveled from rest. ‘Do vampires even toss and turn?’ he thought, directing his focus outside again.

“Did he leave you to start doing me in, whatever that means?” Danny asked.

Mari snorted. “No, he left to avoid that for the moment. He’s not the kind to leave other people to clean up his messes. Would you like coffee?”

“I guess. Do vampires drink coffee?”

“No. But you’re not the first human I’ve had up here, and I haven’t forgotten how to be a good host.”

He breathed a sardonic laugh. “Playing host to your dinners. That’s cute.”

“Chiquito, I don’t care how much you judge my life. Just know that all you’re doing is showing me how scared you are. We’d work better together if you were honest about it.”

Her accusation only deepened his frown. Turning away from the window, he remained seated on the bench he’d been occupying and watched Mari gently glide from the living room to the kitchen, once again noting the lack of formal dining room. Still, a kitchen counter with bar stools had been set up, presumably for entertaining, and despite his desire to remain an unapologetic recluse, Danny stood and padded toward the counter. “What do you mean by work better together?” he asked.

Mari shrugged, her back already to him, hands working on pulling down a coffee mug from the cabinet. “I mean figure out what can be done about this, if anything. Unless you like the idea of figuring out that whole slow death thing firsthand, in which case, I’ll miss you when your mind begins to slip.”

She shot a deliberate look at him across her shoulder, then continued to prepare the coffeemaker. Danny watched her for a few moments, chewing on the confirmation she offered. “Those people in the house…”

“Yes, they were dying slowly. It happens when a vampire feeds on you too many times. You form an attachment to your vampire. The attachment turns into complete dependency and from there, it’s a descent into being a vegetable.” She scooped coffee into a filter with some emotive gusto. “I don’t like it. I’ve never liked it, but Liam’s older than me and stuck in his ways.”

“He does that to people?”

Mari sighed. “Not since I’ve been with him. But I know he’s done it in the past.” After filling the carafe with water, she transferred the water into the machine and flipped the on switch. Turning to face him, she nodded in the direction of the bedroom. “Help me pick out what I’m going to wear. Maybe we can make a case for you being my maid.” Ending the statement with a conspiratorial wink, she flitted toward the bedroom, her light steps bouncing in a way that appeared to be deliberate. Whatever the cause, Danny felt a laugh nearly bubble to the surface, the moment of levity bordering on relief. As such, he acquiesced toward following her.

She shrugged off the gown, unapologetic about the action, leaving her bare-chested and with only a pair of matching silk sleep pants covering her bottom half. Tossing the garment onto the bed, she opened the door to a walk-in closet and left the implication for Danny to follow her inside. “Now, I don’t think we’ll be leaving the house tonight,” she said. “So maybe something more casual?”

“Do you have a sweatsuit or something like that?” Danny asked.

Mari scoffed. “Please, God, no. I’d rather shove myself into another goddamned business suit than to do that.” As she left the cryptic comment hanging, she rushed over to a set of hangers containing a blue shirt and matching skirt. “What do you think about this?” she asked, pulling the hangers from the rack and turning to hold both pieces of clothing up against her chest.

Something about her enthusiasm felt infectious, as little as Danny wanted to admit it. “It looks fantastic,” he said, grateful, in a corner of his mind, for the distraction. After slipping out of her pajama pants, she shimmied the skirt over her hips and pulled the shirt over her head. Her hair still mussed, she ran her fingers through it to smooth it back and spun around.

“Zipper me up?” she asked, waggling her shoulders as if that had the power to entice Danny.

Danny smiled and walked up behind her, pulling her zipper up and smoothing out the fabric across her back. She turned, presenting him with a grateful smirk and though he saw sin in her eyes, he nearly breathed a sigh of relief when she spirited past him. “I need to teach you how to braid hair,” she said, walking back into the bedroom and turning off the light to the closet. “I’d teach you makeup, too, but I’ve seen what you do with eyeliner and I’m not sure I want you doing that to me.”

“You don’t like how I do my makeup?” Danny asked, walking with her.

“No offense, but I didn’t like my makeup that heavy even when I went to the kinds of clubs you go to.”

Mari pulled out a chair in front of a makeup table and handed a brush to Danny. He dutifully ran the bristles through her hair, soothed when she seemed to relax and focusing less on the dismal future and more on the present. “Why do you want to help me?” he asked, taking a barrette Mari handed to him and using it to affix her hair in the same side-part it had been in when they first met.

“Because you’re a beautiful spirit. Liam thinks it’s superstition, but I can see into people. Into their souls,” Mari said. She took the hairbrush once handed to her and turned on the lights in her mirror, admiring her reflection as she did. “I saw his soul when we first met.”

“And you thought he was a good man?”

“Liam is a man who never had the chance to be good. He makes up for it in other ways, though.”

Danny nodded, walking over to their bed and perching at the edge of it. Mari arranged her makeup on the table and brushed foundation onto her cheeks and forehead. The whole act became hypnotizing to watch. “I must have liked him to let him dance with me,” Danny said. He frowned. “If that’s what we did. I don’t know. I had a dream about us, but I can’t be sure whether it was a memory or not.”

“You went looking for him because of a dream?”

“Yeah.” Danny made eye contact with Mari’s reflection. “To be honest, I wanted to know why I’d forgotten a whole night with somebody. And at a point, the chase became more important than reconsidering what I might be doing.”

Mari hummed, silent as she finished with her foundation and moved onto her blush. “My madre would have said that you were chasing destiny.”

“Isn’t destiny usually good?”

“Nope.” She popped her lips while pronouncing the word. “Destiny is destiny, good or bad. Mine just turned out to be good.”

“What happened to you?”

“I met Liam out on the town. He was looking for a meal, and I was a caterpillar looking for a cocoon.” Mari extended her arms. Making fluttering motions with them, she shut her eyes and smiled. “I used to dress up and go to the bar to let the true me out. No corporate meetings. No ties or pretending. That was when I was first Mari. He saw me one night and rescued me.”

Slowly, Mari lowered her arms again. As she opened her eyes, she looked lost in reverie, once again serving to lighten Danny’s mood. “That was ten years ago, when I was reborn,” she said. “My only regret is that he didn’t warn me we get stuck like this for an eternity. I would have grown out my hair better first.”

She winked before she resumed doing her makeup. Silence fell between them, but turned comfortable, surprising Danny at how natural it became. Danny gravitated toward her warm, welcoming demeanor and poured himself a cup of coffee as she made him dinner and engaged him in conversation. When Danny settled on the couch, she curled up next to him, and even though he entertained the brief thought that he’d allowed himself to get cozy with his captor, it felt better than the alternative. Mari turned on an old, black-and-white movie, and halfway through it, Danny fell asleep.

It took several hours before he woke again, though it wasn’t the sun rising that roused him. A door slammed, startling his eyes opened, and when two voices began to argue in one of the bedrooms, he strained to listen. One belonged to Liam – it didn’t take long for him to recognize it – but when the other bore a deeper pitch, it took a moment for him to realize it belonged to Mari. Her confidence wavered, voice strained with emotion, and when she spoke Danny’s name, he sat upright on the couch.

“Stop calling him by his name,” Liam snapped back at Mari. “We can’t keep him, so it’s not good to get attached to him.”

“You were able to keep me,” Mari said back. “Why not him?”

“Mi amor, you know exactly why we can’t keep him.” A tense silence followed. When Liam spoke again, he lowered his voice, making his words barely distinguishable to Danny. “Should I do it quickly? Would that make everything better?”

“No.” The strain lingered with Mari, but she had lowered her volume as well. Her higher-pitched, more feminine diction returned, though Danny heard the weight of tears in it. “There has to be a way.”

“I have you. There isn’t a way.”

“Then let me keep him.”

“You’re too young.”

“Hijo de puta. I wish you’d have done a better job enthralling him.”

When neither of them spoke, Danny curled beneath the blanket over him, gathering his knees close to his chest. That aching feeling returned, and as tears welled in his eyes, he thought of his sister again, trying to comfort himself with the thought of seeing Kim. Somehow, this only left him feeling like he’d failed her; that in trying to live life on his own terms, he’d ensured his death and he knew that was the last thing that Kim would’ve wanted.

A tear trickled down his cheek, dropping on the couch pillow beneath his cheek. As more followed, he bit his lip and clenched his eyes shut, trying desperately to stop either vampire from hearing him cry. His mind spun with the temptation to try to break down the reinforced glass; to either jump to a swifter death or to race out the front door, heedless of how quickly either would catch him. The thought of stakes and daring escapes danced through his mind, but instead of doing anything else, he continued to cry, until he fell asleep again. A dreamless sleep awaited him, and countless hours of daylight greeted him on the other side, with what he would face the next night uncertain.

Danny smoked his cigarettes, grateful that Liam had bought him the carton he’d been afraid to request.

“To a slow death,” he said, admiring the end of one.

Morbidly, he wondered when he would stop giving a shit.