He had been a vampire since 1968. The year he died and woke up to eternity. Music was all he had to connect him to the life he once knew—vinyl records, jazz clubs, the sound of a guitar in the quiet of night. Decades passed, lovers came and went, none staying long enough to warm the cold centuries. That is, until 2018.

She walked into the old record store he ran as a front for his nocturnal life—laughing at the selection, running her claw-like nails across the dusty album covers, humming along to a Fleetwood Mac song. She was human. Curious. And completely unaware that the man behind the counter had lived five of her lifetimes.

He didn’t dare move too fast. She was sunshine and laughter. He was shadow and hunger. So he stayed close but never too close. Let her talk. Let her sing along to Bowie and Nina Simone. Let her fall, slowly, into the idea of him.

But everything unraveled the night she scraped her leg on a broken amplifier, and her blood hit the air like perfume.

He tried to breathe through it. Tried to swallow the beast inside. But his fangs came out—sharp and shining. His nails extended, matching hers now, only his were deadly weapons honed by time. And his eyes… oh, his eyes betrayed everything he’d tried to hide. Not red, not black. But that strange, ancient gold surrounded by endless grey—like the last light of a dying star.

She stared at him, breath held tight in her chest. But instead of screaming, she reached for him. “You’re not like the stories,” she whispered. And for the first time in fifty years, he hoped the ending would be different.