Summoning Sebastian Read Free

—Jacqueline Blachek, University of Chicago
    Mysister Gwen and I have never gotten along all that well. She has a glamorous-ish job working as a flight attendant on private flights, usually jetting off to exotic locales with exotic people. I hang around Lower-Lower Downtown Denver and work for vampires. I can’t say that our parents really favored her, but I’d always felt like I was lurking in her shadow to some extent.
    She and I had shared a house in the Capitol Hill neighborhood until recently, when I’d moved in with Colin. Gwen and I actually seemed to be getting along better now that we weren’t living together. Which was strange to me, because even when we’d shared the house, we hadn’t seen much of each other. Maybe I just liked not having to navigate through all her hair products in my bathroom.
    She was waiting for me at Night Owls, a restaurant on Sixteenth Street near my workplace. It catered to people who held strange hours, and so served all varieties of foods at all times of day. If you worked for any of the vampire-owned establishments in downtown Denver, it was a hot spot.
    Gwen looked stressed. She barely spoke to me as the waiter took us to a table near a darkening window, and I noticed her hand was clutching her purse strap in a grip that looked almost painful. As usual, though, her hair was perfect.
    When the waiter had taken our drink order and departed to fetch it, I said, “What’s up? You seem a little high-strung. Well, more than usual, I mean.”
    She really must have been tense, because she didn’t even offer me a bitch face for that comment. “Have you been on your super-secret vampire boards lately?”
    â€œNot since yesterday.” Gwen seemed overly serious—not a demeanor I was used to from her. “Why? What’s going on?”
    She leaned closer over the table, lowering her voice. The addition of drama relieved me—overreaction was par for the course for Gwen. Maybe I should have given her the benefit of the doubt in this case. “There’ve been some vampire murders. Weird ones. They can’t figure out who’s doing it or why.”
    Well, she had something to say that I needed to know about, after all. “How long has this been going on?”
    â€œAbout two weeks. There’ve been several deaths.”
    I leaned back, mulling. I check the vampire boards on a regular basis to keep up with the news and various items relevant to my job. How had I missed this? It was natural for the vamps to keep serious news under wraps, not wanting the human news outlets to run with stories they knew nothing about, but usually I saw even the ones they were holding on the back burner.
    â€œWhere did you hear this?”
    She was quiet a moment, staring at her silverware. Finally she picked up a fork and set it back down a bit closer to the spoon. “I have some new clients. I’ve been flying with them on the regular. Nighttime flights to the Caribbean, short jumps for business meetings. That kind of thing.”
    â€œVampires?” This revelation surprised me. Gwen wasn’t nuts about vampires, though I’d managed to convince her to take Colin, Sebastian and me to Illinois during our recent shenanigans. Maybe she’d had a change of heart regarding the bloodsucking race. Or maybe she just liked their money.
    â€œDon’t be all judgy,” she said, following the train of my thoughts. “It’s steady work, and they pay really well.”
    â€œDo they bite?” I had to ask, if for no other reason than to see the look of horror on my sister’s face.
    â€œNo. They do not.” Her hand moved to her neck in what looked like an unconscious gesture, and I felt guilty for making the joke. She’d actually been bitten once, so it was mean of me to poke fun. Not that that consideration was likely to stop me in the future. “They’re high-class—pretty well-known