TL;DR So I Became A Vampire, Book 1, Sample, Chapter 1

Book 1

Chapter One: The Proposal Among Books

Evelyn Winters liked to shelve her feelings in Dewey Decimal. Love, 152.41 (Complications). Career aspirations, 331.702 (Unrealistic Ambitions, See Also: Adjunct Purgatory). Existential dread, 128 (Dust). It was tidy in her head that way. Besides, the Special Collections room already held enough chaos—vellum pages that crackled like old leaves, ink that had outlived its authors, and a hundred “Do Not Touch Without Gloves” signs that attracted human fingers like moths to flame.

She was on the graveyard shift, which was both the official schedule and a lifestyle choice. Midnight hummed softly against the stained-glass windows, the long reading tables shone with pools of lamplight, and somewhere far away a janitor sang off-key like a benevolent ghost.

Evelyn leaned over a French journal dated 1793. The ink looked fresh enough to smudge; the handwriting sloped with arrogant precision; the paper smelled faintly of iron and rain. She scribbled a note in her catalog log: possible forgery OR immortal author, will revisit after tea.

She reached for her mug. A sticky note clung to the ceramic: STOP SMELLING THE BOOKS – Management. She sniffed the book again on principle.

“You turn another page like that and we’ll both cry,” said a voice behind her.

Evelyn did not jump. She had been conditioned by undergraduates who materialized from thin air to ask, “Do you have any books?”

“We have several,” she said, and turned.

The man standing in the doorway looked like a portrait that had wandered out of its gilt frame to complain about modern manners. Dark coat, dark hair, face carved in patient marble. No ID lanyard. No sign-in slip. The air around him held that stillness of old houses and closed chapels.

“We’re closed,” she said. “Except to staff. Which is me. And also my mug.”

He stepped into the light, and the candle-soft gleam hardened along his cheekbones. “I am staff,” he said mildly, “of a certain kind.”

“Do you also think you’re Napoleon,” Evelyn asked, “or just the vampire part?”

Something passed over his face, like the barest smile sketched and then erased. He moved closer. He should have had a reflection in the glass case. The glass case chose to be diplomatic.

“I wrote that journal,” he said, nodding toward the 1793 volume.

“Wonderful,” she said. “You owe about two centuries in late fees.”

He looked delighted. “You approve of punctuality?”

“I approve of reality,” she said. “Proof?”

He laid two fingertips on the open page. The ink blushed darker, as though welcoming him home. He traced the flourish of a signature: Jacques. No surname, as if time were on a first-name basis with him.

“Jacques,” she repeated. “How minimalist.”

“Unnecessary accessories weigh down a life,” he said, with the weary authority of a man who had once owned an alarming number of waistcoats.

He spoke in a flat American cadence, like someone who’d spent a hundred years ordering diner coffee. But when he smiled—when he wanted to—an accent curled into the corners like smoke.

“Vampire,” she said, to get it over with.

“Yes,” he said.

She waited for dread. Fear. Blood-scented doom. Instead, her brain scrolled a to-do list: lock the north door; reorder lint-free gloves; convince circulation to stop shelving Petrarch under “Pet Care.”

“You’re not going to sparkle, are you?” she asked.

His mouth twitched. “Only with rage.”

“Good,” she said. “I’m a classics girl. Nosferatu, Dracula, proper crypts. Respectfully, sparkles are for craft projects.”

“I will keep that in mind,” he said dryly. “Evelyn Winters.”

She did not ask how he knew her name. 

The staff directory was online. Also, dramatic strangers calling her by name was a perk of working nights.

“What do you want, Jacques?”

He held her gaze the way portraits hold rooms. “A conversation.”

“I prefer books,” she said.

“Then we will be brief,” he said, and the accent deepened, a velvet ribbon. “I am old. Older than the flaking edges of the pamphlets in your locked cases. I offer a choice that will not come twice. Immortality. Beauty unfading. Power. Knowledge measured in centuries. The night as your ally. Senses sharpened to silver. The—”

“Yes,” she said.

Jacques blinked.

“To which,” he said carefully, “part?”

“Immortality,” she said, and then—because accuracy mattered—“specifically, time to read.”

He watched her the way an astronomer watches a star unexpectedly moving sideways.

“You would accept eternal night,” he said, “for books.”

“One lifetime isn’t enough,” she said simply. “I make lists, and the lists have children, and their children have grandchildren who go to college and start families while I am still finishing page six. Do you know how many translations of The Tale of Genji exist? I need all of them. Preferably in the original too.”

He made a small, incredulous sound, like a chandelier reconsidering its life choices. “You do not ask for youth? For riches? For—”

“Do I still get library access?” she asked. “If I’m technically dead?”

Jacques shut his eyes briefly, perhaps to bargain with a higher power (librarians). “Cards can be arranged.”

“Do I keep my job?”

“Night shifts,” he said. “You already prefer them.”

“I loathe networking,” she said. “And sunlight.”

Somewhere outside, the janitor’s song died away. A moth wrote frantic cursive against the window. Evelyn felt that particular clear coldness of the hour when most things are asleep and the rest are secrets.

“You should warn me,” she said dutifully, “about the curse, the blood, and so forth.”

“It will hurt,” he said, honest as a ledger. “You will be hungry in a way that burns. You will watch the world shed and grow skins it names for centuries. You will make a sacrament of shadow and a currency of silence. People you love will wither like paper left in the rain. And you will never again yawn at noon.”

She considered. “Can I read in every language?”

“You may learn them,” he said. “Faster than most. Memory improves. The mind—sharpens.”

She pictured Old Norse cracking open like a walnut. Sanskrit unfolding. The dead and the living speaking through pages and over her shoulder. Terrifying. Exhilarating.

“Yes,” she said again.

He looked as if he had expected pleading, bargaining, a romantic soliloquy delivered to moonlight. Instead he had been handed a bibliography.

“Very well,” he said softly. “Evelyn Winters, née Bibliophile.”

He stepped closer. The room seemed to tilt its ear. He did not grab her. He simply stood within the bell jar of her lamplight, and old air moved through the books like a sigh.

“This is the part,” Evelyn said, “where you say something seductive and your accent becomes illegal.”

He considered her, then allowed himself the luxury. “Ne bouge pas,” he murmured, and the French rippled like silk. “Do not move.”

“See?” she whispered to the journal. “Illegal.”

His mouth was cool against her throat, and the bite was two needles threading red. The library went quiet in the way snowfall is quiet. A tremor traveled through her bones like a bell being struck. Her heart railed against its own cage, then faltered, then roared again.

The world slows, her mind narrated, as my mortal heart tolls its final note.

The lamplight elongated, candle-gold. Rose petals, inexplicably, began to fall in her imagination. Violins tuned themselves. Shadows braided her into the velvet of forever.

My soul peels away like the last page of a beloved book, she thought grandly, and the night cradles me, soft as—

“HHRRGMMFF,” she said into her scarf.

The needle of reality scraped across the record.

She was not reclining on a marble plinth like a tragic statue. She was on her living room carpet because Jacques had courteously carried her there. (There had been a polite “After you,” at the stairwell, to which she had replied “mmmgh.”) She was wrapped in a discount throw blanket that read READERS DO IT IN THE STACKS in peeling letters. The carpet pressed patterns into her cheek. Someone had placed a mixing bowl next to her for reasons her dignity refused to process.

Her head throbbed. Her skin flamed, then shivered. Her throat felt like the Sahara had taken up pottery. She sneezed, and something in her sinuses wrote a sonnet about despair.

Jacques stood nearby, holding a stainless-steel thermos and looking the way airline attendants look during turbulence: calm, resigned, faintly amused.

“You are transforming,” he said.

“Is—” she croaked, “is the darkness cradling me?”

“That is the fever,” he said.

“Ah.”

The next three nights passed like an educational film about consequences. She dozed, seethed, and performed minor melodramas under her blanket, composing far better deaths in her head than the one her body was busy having. In her imagination, she drifted between silk curtains and ancestral portraits while whispering, The night claims me—. In reality, she whispered, “Do we have more tissues?” and waved a limp hand at the box.

She shook so hard once that the thermos rattled on the coffee table. Jacques caught it with ancient reflexes, the way an immortal catches a toddler’s falling sippy cup without thinking about the centuries between.

He offered the straw. “Drink.”

“Is this artisanal?” she asked weakly.

“Hospital,” he said. “B-positive.”

She sipped. The rational part of her stepped outside and retched in metaphor. The rest of her—new, raw, ravenous—sighed. Warmth pooled in her, as though some backroom furnace had finally been fed. Relief rolled through her muscles, heavy as sleep.

“Worth it,” she whispered to no one, to the ceiling, to the universe which, to its credit, allowed very few things to be both tragic and ridiculous at once.

The fever broke like the weather. Silence folded over the room, full and soft. She lay still and felt—everything. The lamplight grew halos. The hum of the refrigerator combed itself into notes she could count. Outside, a moth breathed against the window. She could hear it. She could hear her building settling, hear an argument three floors down about leftovers, hear—inside herself—nothing. The human heartbeat had closed its book.

Evelyn sat up slowly. The blanket fell from her shoulders like a theatrical curtain. If anyone had been there to film it, the shot would have been excellent. She poised a hand in front of her face, turned it, admired the new pallor with the sort of embarrassed vanity usually reserved for haircuts. Two teeth grazed her lip. There they were. Sensible fangs.

She drew breath out of habit and let it go, empty as laughter. “This is but the first page of my immortal story—” she began, and then ruined her own moment. “Do you think the library will still let me check out books if I don’t technically breathe?”

Jacques looked at her like a man accepting that the Titanic would indeed be sunk by a dessert cart.

“You died, Evelyn,” he said.

“Yes.” She swung her legs off the couch. The floorboards were cold and felt like a fact. “And now I have time. All the time. Help me make a list.”

“A list,” he repeated.

“Priority languages,” she said briskly. “Latin to re-warm the muscles. Old Norse because it’s funny. Classical Arabic because my edition of Al-Mutanabbī is a crime. Sanskrit for the joy of being humbled. Old Church Slavonic for that one psalter no one deciphers correctly. And—oh—Egyptian scripts, hieratic and demotic. We’ll save Coptic for dessert.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose in a universally human gesture and then remembered he was a vampire and therefore above it. “You will need… employment,” he said. “Night work.”

“I already catalog rare books,” she said, fishing in her tote for a pen and triumphantly producing six. “Now I’ll do it better. Fluent. Faster. With less coffee and more… thermos.”

“I can arrange a position,” he said slowly, as if speaking carefully to a runaway carriage. “A private archive. After hours. They will appreciate discretion.”

“I appreciate locked stacks,” she said. “And climate control.”

He studied her, and there was something like fondness under the bewilderment, the way a person might feel about a rainstorm that had chosen to water their petunias and also rearrange the porch.

“You are unlike anyone I have ever turned,” he said finally.

“Good,” she said. “I would hate to be a cliché. Do you have a cape?”

He stared.

She sighed. “Fine. I’ll knit you one.”

He made a noise that translated, roughly, to mon dieu.

She pushed up from the couch, testing her balance. The room sharpened around her like a book coming into focus at the correct distance. The hunger was there—quiet for now, a cat settling—but the other feeling was larger and brighter and embarrassing.

Hope.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go back.”

“To the library,” Jacques said, because of course.

“To the books,” she corrected, because obviously.

He offered his arm. She took it, not because she needed help, but because it felt delightfully Victorian. They stepped into the hallway, where the lightbulbs hummed like polite bees. The stairwell breathed cool air. The city outside stretched itself awake under a sky the color of ink drying.

“Evelyn,” Jacques said, pausing at the door. His voice went gentle, and the old French lilt came back like memory. “There are other vampires. They will not understand you.”

“They don’t have to,” she said cheerfully. “I’m a librarian.”

She pushed into the night as if it were a room full of unread books.

Behind them, the note on her mug fluttered to the floor.

STOP SMELLING THE BOOKS – Management

Evelyn would frame it. And then, of course, she would smell the books.