Read A Vampire's Christmas Carol for Free Online Page B

might well kill her. Stay and he
might kill her. Which was more likely? Probably freezing to death.
She took her coat off. Only as she did that did she realize she
still held the wood stake he’d given her. She shifted it to her
other hand long enough to get her arms out of the sleeves, then she
returned to the chair in the living room.
    Michael still stood at the fireplace,
prodding the blaze with the poker. After a moment, he straightened
and turned. “Thank you for staying.” His face looked even more
drawn than earlier and she suspected he was still in some pain.
    “I debated which looked more immediately
fatal, you or the weather. The weather won.”
    He tried for a grin and almost made it.
    Carol tried to stifle a yawn and failed
completely.
    “You’re tired. You want to take a nap? There
are several rooms made up upstairs. Let me show you.”
    “Under the circumstances, I doubt I’d sleep a
wink. But it might be a good idea to show me where that room with
the sturdy lock is, in case I need it.”
    He nodded and led the way out to the hall and
up the stairs.
    “You seem to be pretty comfortable with
modern stuff,” she said as they climbed to the second floor. “I
noticed the TV and DVD. You have a dish too?”
    Michael shrugged. “The satellite receiver?
Yes. I have a lot of time on my hands. It lets me keep up with
what’s going on in the world.”
    “I know this is probably a rude question,
but… Where do you get the money?”
    He turned to her and smiled. “It is a sort of
rude question. And a perfectly normal one. I’d be curious too. It’s
a bit complicated, of course, since legally I’m dead. But there are
ways. When I first returned here, it wasn’t hard at all since
everything was done in cash and you didn’t have all the paperwork
you do now. I managed to set up a bank account. I did odd jobs for
people that could be done at night. I began doing research on a
freelance basis and actually made quite a lot of money at that. I
also started investing in the stock market in the teens and put a
lot more in right after the depression. I saw lots of things
happening then. I had one big lucky break. I invested heavily in
Coca-Cola stock back in the late teens. That alone has made me
pretty well off today. But the research was pretty lucrative back
in the days before the Internet made information so widely and
easily available. I could travel very fast and communicate things
to others much more rapidly than they could get them by any other
means in those days. Now, there’s not much demand for it, but I can
live on what I’ve earned and invested.”
    “What do you do when you have to file
paperwork and someone wants your birth date?”
    He led her to an attractive room off the main
hall on the front side of the house. “This is the nice guest
bedroom and it has a good lock on the door. Deadbolt. But don’t
depend on that if you have to retreat here. Keep the stake handy
too. Vampires can be strong. Strong enough to knock down doors if
we get really desperate.” He stared hard at her, the blue of his
eyes shadowed and dark. “I may well get that desperate. Okay?”
    “Okay.”
    “Stay here now, or come back downstairs?”
    “Back downstairs,” she said. “For now.”
    He nodded and led the way again. “The
documentation thing has been tricky,” he admitted. “Until the whole
immigration hubbub started, though, it wasn’t hard. I’ve had to die
and be reborn a couple of times, passing my estate on to my ‘heir’.
Fortunately I won’t have to worry about doing it again, since it
would be much harder now.”
    As they got to the bottom of the stairs, he
asked, “Refill on the coffee?”
    She considered the rest of the night—or more
accurately, early morning—that loomed ahead. “Yes, please.”
    Again it struck her as funny that a vampire
who threatened her life should be so oddly polite at the same
time.
    He went back to the kitchen and returned a
few minutes later with a pot of