All the Days of My Death
an excerpt

“Careful, Bree. You’re showing a little fang.”
Bree glanced in my direction and adjusted the magnitude of her smile. My cousin, Benny, sitting on my other side, leaned forward, probably hoping for a glance of the offending canine. Even after six months of hanging with the vamps, he was still fascinated by the occasional glimpse of one of those points.
Bree reined in her smile to just the right shape to hide the aberration in her dental apparatus. She found my hand with hers and gave it a little squeeze. I interlaced my fingers with hers and she sighed as she turned away from me to watch the action.
“When does Eddie Joe race?” she asked as she watched the cars speed by in front of her.
“His class is up next,” I replied once the din of the pack of stock cars had subsided a little. Her hands were warm. I was torn between the sensation of her skin against mine and the knowledge that this much warmth in her extremities meant that she had fed recently, probably late last night. It couldn’t have been tonight. I was there when she woke up, just after sunset and she hadn’t left my sight so far this evening.
Of course, she might have had a snack hidden in her fridge, either collected from one of her regular donors or purloined out of the medical blood supply somehow. She almost never took blood from strangers. She also flatly refused to take mine. Which was understandable, being as I was to be her husband in five days. But it still bothered me now and then. She said it would be too confusing to think of one’s significant other as a food source. I said I thought I could handle it. She said she knew she couldn’t.
Anyway, I was pretty sure she had not grabbed a snack, either warm or cold, since she came out of her shut down state this evening, so I was pretty sure she must have fed late last night, while we’d been apart. I kept to her schedule as much as possible, but there were times when I just had to sleep during somewhat regular hours. On these rare occasions, Bree would often be warm and rosy the next time I saw her. I knew she did this to protect me from the reality of what she was and what she needed to do to survive, but I struggled with it all the same. It just seemed to me that if I couldn’t handle a little blood, a little vampire reality, I probably had no business marrying her.
The pack of cars came rushing by on their final lap. These were the outlaw cars. Bree had wrinkled her nose when they started up their alcohol burning engines in the pits behind the grandstand. Even my sinuses were burning from the smell of it. I figured it probably was much worse to her heightened senses.
Other than that obvious discomfort, Bree seemed to really enjoy the atmosphere of dirt track racing. A lot of women would have been put off by the dust and the noise. Not my Bree. She was grinning from the moment those unmuffled V-8’s began starting up in the pit area. When the cars in the first heat took the green flag and opened up their throttles, she had to cover her mouth to hide her grin. She gasped out loud as the cars slid into the first turn, kicking their tails out and drifting side by side around the corners at the bare limit of control before lining up and gunning down the backstretch.
Something about the reckless daring of the drivers, the noise, the speed, even the booming voice of the track announcer on the PA system, seemed to reach out to her on a visceral level. Sitting there, holding her hand, I could feel the energy thrumming through her. As the cars finished their heat, Bree jumped to her feet, cheering as the checkered flag came out.
On the other side of me, Benny, by contrast, could not seem to keep his attention on the track. Any time I glanced over at him, I would usually catch him watching Bree. I couldn’t blame him. In her waist length black leather jacket, with her form fitting jeans and black cowgirl boots, and her long blonde hair flying free in the wind, she was well worth staring at. She was always stunning, at least to me. But tonight she seemed to have a wild and dangerous energy about her.
For Benny, I knew that anything involving the vamps was fascinating to him. Since that night about six months ago when he had first found out about them, even though he hung out with Bree and me on a regular basis and counted several vampires among his friends, he still approached anything involving them with the wonder of a small child. David and Christian, Benny’s closest vampire buddies besides Bree, were getting impatient with him to get over the whole thing. David pointed out that it was hard to be friends with someone who saw you as a piece of performance art.
The other thing Benny seemed fascinated by was beautiful women. Through his association with McCreed, head of the Vampire Fellowship and owner of a number of strip clubs, Benny had managed to date a whole string of strippers. But even this familiarity with so many heavenly creatures had not seemed to take the edge off his obsession with them.
Bree’s being both these things, a vampire and a beautiful woman, seemed to make her irresistible to him. I caught him looking at her several times after we found our seats in the wooden bleachers. I didn’t really mind, though. After all, he had saved her life.