“Are you drunk?” God, her parents were so embarrassing. How much longer until she left for college? A year had never felt so long. Why did they want to talk about the vampires? “Honey.” Her father spoke through gritted teeth. “How much do you really know about the vampires who live here?” Like every person in her town, she’d known about the vampires her whole life. Vampires were not the stuff of legend. Others might believe them fabricated stories meant to scare children or warn young virgins to not stray out at night, but she and the residents of Vereen, Massachusetts had always known better. Vampires lived among them. The town itself, population 14,704, had been half vampire since the 1970s. Before then, perhaps only one-third of the residents were undead. A flood in Michigan, which had taken out an entire town’s worth of homes, had brought more of the vampires in and the rest had been history. Perhaps the humans should have left at that point, but the symbiotic relationship between the vampires and the humans in Vereen had existed since the Revolutionary War.
