Vacation with a Vampire & Other Immortals by Maureen Child, MAGGIE SHAYNE Page B

They won’t even speak to me anymore.”
    “And how long did all of this happen before you were handed your…prognosis?” He’d been about to say “death sentence,” then decided it was too harsh.
    “A few months.”
    He nodded slowly.
    “So, anyway, that’s where I was in my life that night, as I sat on the pier by the lighthouse, staring out at the ocean and crying and wishing someone would step in and tell me what to do. And that’s when I…had this…encounter.”
    He lifted his brows but didn’t meet her eyes. “Encounter?”
    “Vision, maybe? Maybe it all happened inside my head. But it was very clear, very vivid. Like it was real. I met…this man. The same man I’d been dreaming about all my life. He came to me, and he held me, and he told me it would be a sin not to live what was left of my life to the fullest, doing what I had always wanted to do most. He said that was our whole reason for being here in the first place.”
    “Sounds like a very wise man.”
    “It was you, Diego,” she said softly. She stopped walking, staring up at him. Forcing him to meet her steady, probing gaze. “I swear, it was you. How is that possible?”
    He had to hold her eyes, but it was very difficult for him to lie to her when she was looking at him so intently. In fact, he didn’t think he could. But for the life of him, he couldn’t sense deception in her just now. He didn’t think she knew what he was, not in that moment.
    “Is it possible,” he asked, “that you were feeling so low that the man you believe you met that night seemed to…to save you? And that since I also saved you, though in a different way, your subconscious mind has created a connection that wasn’t there before?”
    She blinked, and a tiny crease appeared right above the bridge of her nose. He had to restrain himself from bending to kiss it away. “I…hadn’t thought of it that way.”
    “It’s just a notion,” he said. Then he paused, as a tawny-colored bat flew from a nearby palm, swooping and diving right over her head. She caught her breath, ducking at first, from sheer instinct, but then straightening and watching with awe.
    “I’ve never seen a bat that color before.”
    “That’s Buffy.”
    She grinned so wide he almost laughed. “After the vampire slayer?” she asked.
    He was stunned by those words and stared at her, his eyes no doubt wide with horror. “Vampire… slayer? ”
    “The television show. It was…well, obviously you’ve never seen it.”
    He sighed, relief flooding him. “No. No television reception out here. Nor would I want there to be.”
    She nodded. “So then why name the bat ‘Buffy’?”
    “It’s her name. She’s a buffy flower bat. They supposedly only live in the Bahamas, but she’s living proof otherwise.”
    She smiled, then lifted her eyes and her hand, wiggling her fingers. “Hey, Buffy.” She kept watching the bat’s antics. “She looks so carefree. Not a worry in the world.”
    “What is there to worry about, after all?” he asked.
    She tilted her head sideways, looking at him curiously. “Dying?”
    “Humans are born dying,” he told her. “It’s as natural as the sun setting at night. Part of the cycle. It’s all fine. Everything’s fine.” He watched her taking that in, and then, when she seemed to have absorbed it, he went on. “What did you do, after that night when the…the vision told you it was all right to live as you wanted to?”
    She met his eyes. “I did what I wanted to.” And then she smiled. “I put my house on the market, quit my job, wrote my will, planned my funeral—all the next day. And then I started looking for a sailboat. And you know, it was as if the day I learned I was dying, I finally started living.”
    “And you’ve been at sea ever since?” he asked.
    “Until that storm, yes. I was hoping my boat would outlive me, but, um, it didn’t work out that way. And now I’m not sure what I’m going to do. When I leave here, I