“Something I said?” Mai sat in the bed alone, in the dark, waiting for an answer that didn’t come. He’d left again. She’d been sure he meant to ravish her when he’d come to stand over her, drink her blood, make her a vampire. He’d stared down at her so long she was convinced he wanted her--then he’d just turned and walked away, completely disinterested. It was embarrassing. Worse, it was frustrating. For the life of her, she could not come up with a good plan to seduce the vampire. If naked and willing didn’t work, what the hell would? Hell, would life as a vampire really be any better? Is it even possible to become a vampire? They were so wrong about so many things. Why would they be right about that? What am I doing here? She already knew the answers to most of that. The truth was Mai had always held life in the highest regard. She had been so afraid of losing it, of dying and leaving nothing at all behind, that she had hardly even begun to live. Psychiatrists couldn’t help her. They told her she suffered from Thanatophobia, that the fear of death she felt was a result of losing her whole family in one fell swoop. There was nothing they could do except give her drugs and the medication was worse in many ways than the fear itself. Sure, after it had finally kicked in she felt like she could do anything at all, but she was also sleeping most of the day, every day. Hell, how is that making anything better? While her friends all sympathized with her, they simply could not understand. The truth was, it all made her feel so alone in the world. Fear held her back, but if she didn’t have to worry about it anymore, if she knew that no matter what happened, she would be all right, that she was not likely to die.... If she knew that life would no longer pass her by while she worked up the guts to live it.... “How do you seduce a vampire?” Her mind felt as though it were full of cotton. It’s the dark. It always makes me sleepy. Of course, it had been night time when they’d taken her. She supposed it was her internal clock telling her it was time to sleep. Yawning, Mai lay back and closed her eyes, allowing her mind to drift. She wondered sleepily what the vampire planned to do with her. He didn’t seem interested in her body, a fact made painfully clear by the reaction he had had when she had tried to seduce him, and he had yet to try to bite her. Why take her, in particular? Hell, why take anyone at all as far as that went? Time seemed to move sluggishly in the dark, but at last Mai fell into a fitful sleep.