Eternal: More Love Stories With Bite by Anthology

thirsty.

    And I'm waiting. God only knows what he'll do when he comes back.

    But the thing that really scares me?

    Is the idea that he might not.

    Letters to Romeo
    Nancy Holder

    In fair Verona, where we lay our scene:

    Romeo attacked the old man in the foyer of the villa's home movie theater while busy servants decorated the room with festoons of orange-tree flowers, dried pomegranates, and silver leaves. He bent the drugged-out, half-dead bag of bones backward beneath the hanging pots of deadly nightshade and sunk in his fangs. Immediately he spit out the blood. It was contaminated with tetrodox— rank, disgusting. It rendered its victims paralytic. Sometimes it stopped hearts. It was a chemical sister of the poison Friar Lawrence had given to Juliet, to fake her own death.

    "Who did this?" Romeo shouted. "Who dared?"

    The servants kept to the shadows, rats fearing the king of the beasts—Romeo Montague, seven hundred years a nobleman of Verona, seven centuries the lover of Juliet Capulet, and a vampire.

    The stone coat of arms of the House of Montague, which had adorned his family's crypt until the nineteenth century, hung over his head like a crown. Fashionable apartments now stood where the palazzo had sprawled lavishly down the hillside. In fact, that was where he had found the old man, swaying in a doorway, drunk, starving, and crying for his cat— which, it turned out, had died five years before.

    Romeo had invited the miserable old man home to have dinner, and he had fed him well, too—better than he himself had eaten, when he had still eaten, though he was the only son of a noble family and therefore accustomed to the best. Romeo wasn't being kind; he did it to fatten up the old man's blood, so to speak, so that his own blood when he shared it would be full and rich. He wanted his love to have the best— or at the least, the best that he could give her under the circumstances.

    The old man would be Romeo's antipasto; it was Romeo's intention that a slew of better dishes — healthier veins — would follow. Until Juliet was changed, he had to lay low. It was difficult to hunt in these days of cell phones, Google Earth, and security surveillance cameras—especially since he didn't show up on any of them—and Romeo had been very distracted of late. Distracted meant careless, and vampires could not afford to be careless.

    But he wasn't so much careless as lovesick. The people of the 1300s had believed that love at first sight was a kind of lunacy, and Romeo now believed that they had been entirely correct. His love for Juliet Capulet had driven him mad. Imagine loving, wanting, for seven hundred years. Living the life of a fiend to pursue the sweetest of angels. Believing in God and in magic and then in nothing and then believing again, and then losing faith in everything. The unrelenting loneliness. How did one still hope, after the first century, the second?

    That was the nature of love. Utter madness.

    Romeo wore a black silk shirt, black jeans, and black boots. His black hair was cut close to his head, and his cheeks were scruffy with five-o'clock shadow. He had dark eyebrows, dark eyes, and darker lashes. Women swooned over him. But he didn't take advantage—didn't kiss them, didn't kill them. He was married.

    He was married!

    Juliet. Her name was the answer to centuries of prayer, and bargaining. During bad times—wars, famines, and the continued, utter absence of any sign of her—Romeo assumed that if there was a God, He despised him. Why else deny him his wife, when he had suffered so much for love of her?

    But he was alone no longer. Claire Johnson, the reincarnation of Juliet, had been living in his house for six months, and tomorrow night, she would be fifteen years old. Back in the day, Lord Capulet had betrothed her to Count Paris, insisting that he wait until she turned fifteen to marry her. So this time, he would wait for the magic number, fifteen, in hopes that things would