Hot for Slayer

by Ali Hazelwood

Not that I enjoy relentless harassment, but what’s a girl to do when the only constant presence during the last millennium of her life has been a guy who’s contractually mandated to murder her?

A mix of phlegm and blood squirted out of my throat and landed on his button-down, but I didn’t feel bad at all.

Fuck him and his dry-cleaning bill.

“Why do I get the impression that you’re lying to me?” Dammit. “Because you hit your noggin, and your impressions are out of whack?”

“It was one-sided,” he tells me after he’s done chewing. “From you.” “What?” “The dislike.” “I assure you, it was not.” “And I assure you, when I look at you, I feel anything but that.”

Immortality can mean deep thoughts and philosophical pondering and the relentless pursuit of knowledge, sure, but for me it was always the opposite. I found it so easy, falling into the day-to-day. The humdrum. Staring out of the window with an empty mind. A crossword, a walk in the rain, a well-written book. Flowers blooming.

Sometimes I’m lonely. Sometimes I want more—whatever that means. Not everything is ideal. But I’m capable of finding my own meaning.

“I might not remember my name, or anything about who I am. But I could never be near you and not know exactly what you are to me.”

I throw an apple in his direction—which turns out to be a mistake when, in the blink of an eye, Lazlo grabs a knife from the wooden block and uses it to slash the fruit into four pieces. While it’s still in the air. The chunks hit the ground with dull thuds, and we stare at them for a long stretch of silence. Then I clear my throat. “I didn’t know that an apple murdered your family.”

I spend the next two hours teaching a vampire slayer who was created to wipe out my bloodline how to correctly fill in a sudoku grid. He’s not at all bad at it, and I hate to acknowledge it.

“I know your smell. I know your skin. Your hair. It’s all familiar. I have it all memorized. And I dream of you—of this. So many dreams, all so different, we must have done it a million times, in a million different ways. Tell me what you’re hiding from me, let’s get this over with, and then let’s do it a million more times.”

“Some lives run invisibly. Undetected by most. And when a person comes along who sees those lives for what they are, who acknowledges their reality, who reminds people that there is value in different ways of existing . . . A minute of that is worth more than a thousand nights with a lover.

“Aethelthryth, nothing would make me happier than having you with me here, or in any other place that I will call home, for as long as I live. Please, come in.”

“Then why did they let you go?” “They didn’t. When I left, they sent people after me.” 78 “And?” “And I sent them back.” “With a politely worded refusal to rejoin?” “With their heads cut off.”

And looking at you, I couldn’t help but think that the world was better. Because you were in it.”