The Sun Also Bites: Penelope Covens Mystery Book 1
A Vampire heading to the American Southwest, what could go wrong
I folded the last blouse and placed it in the suitcase. Ivory linen, French seams, purchased in 1981 from a shop on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré that no longer exists. One of the few things I kept from that decade.
Outside, the rain had been falling for three days. Gray, persistent, mid-Atlantic weather that doesn’t end. It becomes the air you breathe. It had settled over the city and would stay until spring. I wouldn’t be here then.
The apartment was beginning to look like nobody lived in it. That was the trick of places like this. Furnished rentals in a quiet corner of the city. Nothing in it was mine. The couch, the dishes, the smell of the previous tenant’s cooking embedded in the curtains. All I’d added in three years was a reading lamp and a scarf draped over a chair, and both of those were packed up now.
I checked the bathroom. Empty. The kitchen. Two clean glasses on the counter that weren’t mine. I left them where they were. I was leaving the same way I’d arrived—with nothing in the room that would remember me.
Three years in this apartment. Before that, four years in Portland. A bookshop run by a woman who never once recommended the wrong novel. A neighbor who waved from her garden every morning and grew tomatoes I could smell from my kitchen window. Before that, five years in Montreal, which was longer than I should have stayed but the bakery made a pain au chocolat that was almost as good as one I’d had in Lyon in 1941, and I’d let myself settle into a routine that almost passed for a life. Before that, a string of cities blending into one another. Three or four years, long enough to learn the streets, the shops, the sound each roof made in the rain. Never long enough for anyone to say you haven’t changed at all. Each one left with the same suitcase, the same careful removal of every trace, the same walk to the car in the gray morning light with nothing behind me that mattered and nothing ahead that was different.
I had lived in Lyon once, before and after everything changed. I don’t go back. Not because it’s dangerous—time has made it safe—but because the streets remember what happened there better than I’d like, and I have never trusted myself to walk the Rue Mercière without looking for someone who told me not to look for him.
I’d learned to read people in a bar in Lyon in 1943, pouring wine for men in uniforms who talked too freely to the girl behind the counter. They never suspected the girl. They never do.
Eighty years of the same.
The car was parked in the building’s underground garage. A ten-year-old Volvo, dark blue, clean, unremarkable. Nothing anyone would remember five minutes after seeing it. The plates were current. The registration matched the name on the lease, which matched the name on my driver’s license, which matched nothing at all that was true about me.
I carried the suitcase to the door and set it down. Took one last look at the apartment. Rain streaked the windows, and the light coming through was the color of old pewter. I would not miss it.
My phone rang.
I’d already turned off the utilities. Notified the landlord. Mapped a route south. The phone was supposed to ring zero more times from this number. This identity was ending.
The number on the screen was a 760 area code. Palm Springs.
I knew before I answered.
“Penny. Aunt Penny, thank God. I’ve been calling for an hour.”
He had not been calling for an hour. He had called once, ten seconds ago. Frankie Marchetti had never experienced an emotion at its actual size. Everything was amplified. Everything was theater. He got it from his mother, who once described a parking ticket as “the worst thing that has happened to this family since we left Calabria,” and from forty years acting on stage, which had taught him that if a moment didn’t land in the back row, it didn’t land at all.
“Frankie.” I sat on the arm of the couch.
“I have been blacklisted.”
He was pacing. His mother had been a pacer. Angela Marchetti could cover the length of her kitchen in four strides, the phone cord wrapped around her wrist like a tourniquet, talking with her free hand as if the person on the other end could see her. His breathing changed direction every few seconds. Living room to kitchen. Kitchen to living room.
“Blacklisted from what?”
“From everything. Card night. The potluck rotation. Sal Russo told me Barbara is doing a formal review through the HOA. A formal review, of me. I have lived in this community for six years. I have contributed. I organized the holiday party in 2021, and everyone said it was the best one they’d ever had. Old Hollywood theme. I did the whole clubhouse. Gold tablecloths, white orchids, a projector running clips from Sunset Boulevard on the back wall. I had Sal in a tuxedo. Sal. In a tuxedo. Even Barbara said it was lovely, and Barbara has never said anything was the best anything in her natural life.”
I closed my eyes. I had forgotten what it was like to listen to Frankie at full velocity. It was like standing in a warm wind.
“Frankie.”
“They think I killed someone.”
The rain hit a gust and spattered hard against the glass, ran down in streaks.
“Tell me.”
Richard Ashworth. Seventy-four. Retired entertainment lawyer. Found dead in his kitchen three weeks ago. Cardiac arrest. Frankie delivered it fast and loud, well-rehearsed. Case closed before it opened because Richard was seventy-four and that was evidently sufficient explanation for the coroner in Palm Springs.
“And Aunt Penny, I had words with him. Three weeks before. At the pool bar. In front of everyone. Half the community was sitting right there.”
“What kind of words?”
“I told him that if he didn’t stop, I would make sure he regretted it.” The pacing stopped. When Frankie spoke again, his voice was quieter, which in Frankie’s range meant he’d dropped from a shout to a normal speaking volume. “It was about Martin. Richard had something on Martin. I don’t know what. Martin won’t tell me. But Richard was using it, and Martin was getting smaller every week, and I just…I lost it. I told him off. Right there. At the bar. At full volume.”
“In front of witnesses.”
“In front of the afternoon pool crowd. Which at Crimson Canyon is essentially the Supreme Court of public opinion.” The pacing resumed. “And now Richard is dead, and I’m the man who threatened him before he died, and the whispers, Penny. The whispers are the worst part. Nobody says it to my face. They just stop sitting near me. They stop calling. I’m a leper.”
I listened to him breathe. Rapid. Agitated. Underneath all the theater, frightened.
“Martin is baking at two in the morning,” he added, quieter still. “He bakes when he’s stressed. We’ve been through a bag of flour since Tuesday.”
The line was quiet. Just his breathing and the rain on my windows.
“Aunt Penny. Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“I need you.” The performance fell away completely. “The way Mom needed you. In seventy-six. I don’t need a lawyer. I need you.”
The suitcase was packed. The car was in the garage. I’d been ready to leave and hadn’t once asked myself where I was going. Frankie was asking me to help him.
“I’ll come.”
“Tonight?”
“I’ll leave tonight. I’ll drive through. I’ll be there tomorrow evening.”
“Aunt Penny, I could kiss you.” “Save it for Martin. I’ll settle for coffee when I get there.”
“Martin doesn’t know I’m calling you. He doesn’t know about any of this. I just told him old family friend, very discreet. He’s going to take one look at you and…” He caught himself. “You still look the same?”
“Frankie.”
“Right. Stupid question. Of course you do. You’ve always…right. Okay. I’ll make up the guest room. What do you like to eat? Never mind. I’ll figure it out. I’ll make something. I’ll make everything.”
“Just make the bed, Frankie. I don’t need everything.”
“You’re getting everything. You’re getting the Egyptian cotton sheets. You’re getting Martin’s banana bread. You’re getting the full Crimson Canyon Estates welcome experience.”
“Frankie.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I hung up. Sat in the quiet.
The rain had softened. The apartment was dark except for the light leaking in from the hallway through the gap under the door. Every apartment I’d ever left had looked like this at the end.
I picked up the suitcase and carried it to the car.
The route south was dark and wet for the first six hours. The mountains were invisible, a heavier darkness on either side of the road. I drove with the window cracked, the car was a sealed box and I could smell every molecule of its history—the former owner’s cologne, a dog that had ridden in the back seat, coffee spilled in the cup holder, cleaned but not erased. Other people’s lives, layered into the upholstery. I was used to inheriting traces of strangers.
I thought about Angela.
Angela Marchetti collected people. When she decided you belonged to her, that was that. No negotiation. No exit clause. I met her in San Francisco in 1955. She was nineteen, newly married, homesick for a neighborhood in Brooklyn, and absolutely certain that the quiet young woman in the apartment next door needed feeding. She was not wrong. I needed feeding in ways she couldn’t have imagined. The feeding she provided was aggressive, Italian, and came with opinions about my weight.
I stayed in San Francisco for five years because of Angela. Too long. She never asked why I didn’t age. Never asked about the deliveries that arrived in plain packaging once a month. She decided I was family, and the details were not her concern.
When I left, she pressed a photograph into my hand. Her and me on the fire escape. It was in the locked case in the trunk, along with everything else I couldn’t leave behind.
Frankie had been born in 1968. Angela’s miracle baby, she called him. Thirteen years of waiting, and by the end, she’d stopped expecting him. I met him when he was three on one of the visits back. Angela called every few months, long rambling conversations about the neighborhood and her husband’s snoring and what she’d planted in the window box, and mentioned that I hadn’t been out in years and that was unacceptable and I should come for dinner on Sunday. I drove up from wherever I was living then. The boy was in the kitchen in overalls, standing on a chair to reach the counter, helping Angela roll meatballs with hands the size of walnuts. He looked up at me with enormous brown eyes and said, seriously, “You’re pretty.”
Angela said, “Frankie, this is your Aunt Penny. She’s family.”
“Penelope.”
He called me Aunt Penny for the next fifty-five years.
I came back every year or two after that. Sometimes for a weekend, sometimes for a week. Frankie grew up with me as a fact of his life—the family friend who appeared at the door, who brought him books from different cities, who sat at the kitchen table and listened to him like he was the most interesting person in the room. When he was eight, he performed the Cowardly Lion’s speech from The Wizard of Oz for me, standing on a kitchen chair. I applauded, and he bowed so deep he nearly fell off. When he was fourteen, he told me he was gay while we were sitting on the fire escape. Before he’d told Angela. Before he’d told anyone. He told me because I was the one person in his life who never changed. Not just my face. My attention. Every time I came back, I picked up exactly where we’d left off, and he never had to explain himself to me.
Angela and I never named what I was. She watched me not age through her thirties, her forties, her fifties, her sixties. She handled it by making sure I was fed and refusing to discuss the menu. The deliveries that arrived in plain packaging once a month went into the back of her refrigerator without comment. When she needed help in 1976—something serious, something I dealt with quietly and never spoke about again—she called me the way you call a sister.
When Frankie was sixteen, he found a package in the back of the refrigerator and opened it. Angela sat him down at the kitchen table and told him three things: his Aunt Penny was a vampire. She had been a vampire since before he was born. And he was old enough now to know the truth. Frankie had two questions. The first was, “Does garlic actually work?” The second was, “Should I hide the holy water?” Angela told him not to be ridiculous. She hid it anyway, just in case. It wouldn’t have done anything. I never told her that.
When Angela died in 1998, Frankie called me. I drove through the night. I sat in the back of the church, and he found me afterward and held on to me and said nothing. He was thirty. I was still twenty-six. He’d known what I was for half his life, and he’d never once treated it as anything other than one more thing his family took care of.
After that, the visits slowed. He had Martin. I had the road. We went on like that for years.
Now he was fifty-eight and frightened, and I was driving through the rain to help him.
Tennessee by dawn. I pulled off at a rest stop and sat in the car while the sky lightened from black to charcoal to the flat gray of an overcast morning. I put on sunglasses before the sun was technically visible. Habit. The cloud cover was thick enough that I could have walked barefoot through a parking lot and felt nothing worse than mild discomfort, but I’d stopped trusting overcast skies when a break in the clouds in Edinburgh cost me a week of recovery in a dark hotel room. I’d been careless.
I ate nothing. Drank nothing. Stretched my legs in the shadow between two semis and watched a woman in a pickup truck argue with a toddler about a juice box. The toddler was winning. The woman was exhausted. The toddler was magnificent.
I got back in the car and kept driving.
By afternoon I’d crossed into Arkansas and the rain was behind me. The sky opened in stages—gray thinning to white thinning to a blue that was almost aggressive after three days of mid-Atlantic murk. I could feel the sun gaining strength through the windshield. Not dangerous yet. Just present. A reminder.
I stopped for gas in Oklahoma. Paid cash. A man at the next pump glanced at me twice. I gave him nothing back. I’d been beautiful all my life. Before the war, my face was just my face. During the war, it was an asset. I was a young woman who looked like she didn’t understand German. Who looked like she’d forget everything by morning.
After the war, it was a mask I couldn’t remove, frozen in place the night a man I’d pulled from a burning building on the Rue Mercière returned the favor in a way I hadn’t asked for and have never forgiven him for. He had told me I was brave. He had told me I was dying. He had told me he could stop it. He hadn’t told me what it would cost, and by the time I understood the price, it was too late.
I would look twenty-six when everyone I loved was dust.
The word for what I am has too many syllables and too much Bram Stoker. I don’t sleep in coffins. I don’t turn into a bat. I don’t sparkle. I do avoid the sun, which in the American Southwest is a full-time logistical nightmare.
I’ve been discovered seven times in eighty years. A lover in Buenos Aires who found the medical cooler. A friend in Montreal who started asking research questions. A landlord in Seattle who called the police. Nobody tried to hurt me. The danger was never violence. The danger was the look—the moment when the person across from you stops seeing you and starts seeing what you are. You become a thing they can’t stop thinking about, and the relationship is over. Permanently.
You can’t un-find that out, so you leave, start again, and add another city to the list of places where you used to be someone.
In 1955, if someone found out, they told their priest, or they told nobody. Now they’d tell the internet.
I drove into the sunset. New Mexico. The desert opened up around me like a fist unclenching—a hundred miles in every direction, the sky the color of blood and copper, the mountains on the horizon purple against it. I hadn’t seen a horizon this wide since I’d left the West. I’d missed it more than I’d let myself know.
The hat was on the passenger seat. Cream, wide-brimmed, purchased from a milliner in London in 1974 who told me it would last a lifetime. She had no idea how right she was. I’d had it resoled once and reshaped twice, and it was still the best hat I’d ever owned.
I picked it up and set it on my head.
California by morning.
After a full life of running, Penelope is walking right into the sun to help an old friend. Find out what happens next on May 22nd, when The Sun Also Bites: Penelope Covens Mystery Book 1 is released. Head over to Amazon and pre-order it today.
