Page 1 of My Vampire Plus-One

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SHOULD ANY INFORMATION ABOUT THIS:

CRIMINAL

EVIL VAMPIRE MASTERMIND

TERRIBLE GUY

COME TO LIGHT

PLEASEEMAIL THE COLLECTIVEIMMEDIATELYAT [email protected]

Amelia

My friends and family HADenjoyed teasing me with the adagethe only sure things in life are death and taxesever since I became an accountant.

After hearing it for the hundredth time, though, it stopped being funny. For me—a single, thirty-four-year-old CPA a year away from making partner at a big accounting firm—the onlyrealsure things in life were an intractable caffeine addiction every tax season, and my mostly well-intentioned family giving me grief over my life choices.

Most people didn’t understand that I loved my job. I loved the way the Internal Revenue Code made careful sense, and how it always gave you the right answer as long as you knew what questions to ask. Tax work was complex, but it was also neat, orderly, and consistent in a way the rest of life seldom was.

Most of all, though, I loved that I was good at what I did. It was hard to beat the high that came with knowing that very few people could do my job as well as I could.

But the night my world turned upside down, I was questioning my life choices for the first time in recent memory. It was the middle of tax season, which was always my most brutal time of year, but this year it was worse than usual. Mostly because of one absolute nightmare of a client.

The Wyatt Foundation had the biggest budget of any organization I’d ever worked with. In a show of confidence from Evelyn Anderson, the Butyl & Dowidge partner I reported to most frequently, I was handling this file solo. That was the good news. The bad news was within hours of getting the file it was obvious Wyatt was the least organized client I’d ever had.

The Wyatt Foundation was, to use a word you wouldn’t find anywhere in the Internal Revenue Code, a shitshow. Its board seemed to have no idea how to run a nonprofit, and its chief financial officer seemed incapable of following simple directions. He’d been sending me new documents daily, some of which werefrom years I’d already told him the IRS didn’t care about, and many of which were impossible to reconcile with other statements they’d sent.

I had less than three weeks to wrap everything up and get Wyatt’s filing to the IRS. To say nothing of all my other files that were languishing from inattention.

I was good at working hard. But even though I was an accountant, I was stillhuman. And I was nearing the breaking point.

I missed dancing around my Lakeview apartment to Taylor Swift. I missed spending time with Gracie, my temperamental cat. Above all, I missed my bed. Especially the way I used to spend at least seven hours in it every night.

I’d left my apartment at the crack of dawn that morning so I’d have a chance of getting on top of my other work before Wyatt’s daily missives arrived. I had been focusing for so long on my Excel spreadsheet that when my phone buzzed with a series of texts, I nearly jumped out of my chair.

I fumbled through my briefcase until I found my phone, then reached for my glasses and slid them on. I’d taken them off hours ago; staring at my computer for too long made my vision blur. I needed to visit an optometrist, but that would have to wait until after tax season. Just like all the other forms of self-care I’d been putting off.

I smiled when I saw the texts were from my best friend, Sophie. She’d been dropping by my apartment every night the past two weeks to feed Gracie and take in my mail while I was working inhuman hours.

SOPHIE:Queen Gracie is fed and your mail is in its usual spot on the counter

SOPHIE:Also, Gracie asked me to ask you if you are coming home soon

SOPHIE:In cat language of course

SOPHIE:She’s worried you’re working too hard

I smiled. Sophie was so good to me. I glanced at the time and saw it was already six-thirty.

Shit.

If I didn’t want to be late for my monthly dinner with my family, I needed to leave the office in the next ten minutes. And I was nowhere near finished with what I’d hoped to get done that day.

AMELIA:I’m actually meeting my family for dinner tonight