Modern Day

Nikki Flynn tightened her ponytail, making sure her thick curls were securely held off her face, and glanced over at Jason Grant, who was checking the laces on his running shoes.

"You ready?" he asked.

"Oh yeah." Nikki jogged on the spot, getting into the spirit. "Don't hold back on me, though."

Jason grinned. "I won't."

"Kick his ass, Nikki," Renie called from where she stood a couple of feet away.

Edmond, Ludovic, Gideon, and Roux stood with her, their faces ethereally pale under the moonlight.

Nikki usually did her daily workout during the day, but Renie and Roux still couldn't be couldn't be outside when the sun was up, so hanging out with them away from Belle Morte had to be done at night. Nikki was okay with that. At sixteen, she was too young to work security at a vampire house, but that was still her dream, which meant there was a good chance that she'd work a lot of night shifts.

She checked her watch once more. She still had an hour and a half before she had to catch a train home, so Jason had driven them out to Oram's Arbour, a small park not far from the station, where Nikki could test her fitness against his. Most kids she went to school with weren't as dedicated to working out as she was, and she couldn't afford a gym membership, so a good way to track her progress was to compete against someone she knew was better than her.

"You ready?" Roux said.

Nikki and Jason both nodded.

"Go," Roux said.

Nikki ran. She knew that she couldn't outrun Jason – he was bigger, stronger, faster, and he had several years' experience on her, and the last time they'd run together, Jason had left her in the dust. What she wanted was to see how much she could keep up with him, to see how many circuits of the park she could see, to really push herself. That was why she'd warned him not to hold back. She'd never get a realistic idea of what she could do if she was running against someone who was holding back on her.

Her feet pounded on the ground, and a fierce grin spread across her face. She loved this. She loved the way her blood pumped and her muscles worked and her breath rushed in her lungs. She loved the burn in her legs, the way she could push past the moment when they started to hurt, and find a second wind. She loved the feeling of being active.

She kept her eyes on Jason's blond head as he bobbed ahead of her. He ran to keep in shape, not to test the limits of what his body could do, and Nikki was absolutely sure that there was less distance between them than there had been last time.

Fresh determination spurred her. Even if she couldn't catch him, she wanted to maintain this momentum.

They lapped the park again and again and again, until Nikki had lost track of time, and her legs felt like heavy weights, and her breathing had become a painful rasp, and then she finally slowed and came to a stop near her friends.

Jason, breathing heavily, his T-shirt dark with sweat, jogged back over to her.

"You're definitely faster than last time," he said.

Nikki nodded, waiting for her racing heart to slow before she spoke.

Her gaze moved past Jason, to the kids' playground behind the watching vampires, tucked behind a black iron fence.

"You want to keep going?" she challenged.

Jason's eyebrows shot up. "Running? Not really."

"I had something else in mind."

Wiping sweat from her forehead, Nikki walked over to the park and climbed over the low fence. During the day, this place was probably rife with kids, but at night, the swings hung silent and still, and the slide gleamed under the light of the moon.

Nikki approached one of the wooden climbing frames, and looked up at the monkey bars.

"Oh, bring it on," Jason said, catching on.

He joined her at the frame. He was tall enough that he didn't need to jump to reach the bars – another advantage that he had over Nikki, who had accepted that her respectable five foot five was probably as tall as she was going to get. But, as with the running, she knew that she couldn't match Jason for strength. She just wanted to pit herself against him to see how far she'd come and how much further she could go.

Jason flexed his fingers. "Let's do this."

Nikki jumped and grabbed the bars. The metal was cool beneath her fingers, and her muscles let out a groan of protest. Apparently they'd thought that they were done for the night.

Her arms shook slightly as she pulled herself up until her chin was level with the bar, then lowered herself back down, then pulled herself back up. Jason was already on his fourth pullup.

Nikki managed two more, and then dropped to the ground, gasping.

Jason did a few more, before letting go of the bars. "Please tell me we're done for the night," he said.

Nikki nodded. Much as she loved to push herself beyond her limits, she had to recognise when her body had had enough, and that time was now.

Jason pulled her to her feet. Her arms felt shaky, and her muscles would be sore in the morning, but she regretted nothing.

Renie eyed the climbing frame. "I don't think I could even do one pull-up."

"You're a vampire. You can do pull-ups for hours," Jason said.

"When I was human, I mean," Renie said.

As the only human in the group, Jason was the only one that Nikki could test herself against, but for the first time, she wondered what it would have been like to compete against the others when they were human.

"Who's the strongest vampire here?" she asked, though she suspected she already knew.

"Me," Edmond said, and Ludovic nodded in agreement. "But not by much," Edmond added. "There are only a few decades between Ludovic and me."

Whereas, Nikki knew, Gideon was roughly two hundred years younger than the two French vampires.

"Who would have been strongest when you were human?" she asked.

"Gideon," said Edmond and Ludovic in unison.

"That's my man," Jason said, beaming.

Gideon smiled a little.

That wasn't really a surprise, Nikki thought. Gideon was no taller than the others, but his shoulders and chest were broader.

Jason took Gideon's wrist and lifted his hand into the air. "Champion bareknuckle boxer," he proclaimed.

"That didn't happen until I was a vampire, so it wasn't exactly a fair fight," Gideon pointed out.

"You'd still have won if you'd been human," Jason insisted, looking at his husband with complete adoration.

"Perhaps, but it would have been a lot harder," Gideon said.

"And you might not have stayed as pretty as you are," said Jason thoughtfully.

"That too," Gideon agreed.

Jason leaned in and kissed him. "I'd still have fallen in love with you."

"You guys are so sweet you're giving me diabetes," Nikki grumbled.

She climbed back over the iron fence, out of the playground and into the park, and lay in the damp grass for a moment, staring up at the star-scattered sky.

"Are you okay?" Renie asked, sitting beside her.

"Yeah. I just hate going home." The older that Nikki got, the less control her aunt had over her, but that hadn't actually made things better. By the time Nikki was old enough to move out, she imagined that she and Diane would be little more strangers occupying the same house.

Once that hadn't bothered her.

Now she felt a small sting of regret.

She and Diane would never have got on – they were too different – but she was the only blood relative that Nikki had left in the world. Three years had passed since her dad had died inside Belle Morte, and his loss was still a raw wound, albeit one that Nikki had learned to live with. Maybe bonding with his sister would have helped ease that pain. If she hadn't been a raging bitch, that was.

"Even if you can't visit, we're always a phone call away," Renie reminded her.

Nikki leaned against Renie's shoulder. In a little less than two years, she'd be the age Renie had been when she died and became a vampire. In three years, she'd be older than Renie had been, and that seemed unspeakably strange to her.

Jason would one day become a vampire and live forever with Gideon, but that wasn't the future that waited for Nikki. She wanted to work with vampires, but she didn't want to be one. That meant that, one day, she would grow to be an old woman while the people she loved most in the world would look as young and beautiful as they did now.

Nikki swallowed a sudden lump in her throat. It wasn't always easy being friends with vampires.

But, as she looked at them, Renie sitting beside her and Edmond watching his fiancée from the other side of the gate, Ludovic murmuring something to Roux that made her smile, Jason begging Gideon to feel his bicep, Nikki knew that she wouldn't change a thing.

These people were vampires, and their lives would always be different to hers, but they were her family, and she loved them fiercely. No matter how old and grey she grew, they would always be part of her life.

Nikki climbed to her feet and dusted bits of grass off her leggings. "It's probably about time for me to get back to the station," she said.

Renie smiled sadly at her. She would go back to Belle Morte with the others, to the beautiful mansion that had become their home, while Nikki faced a solitary train ride back to a house that she'd never wanted to live in, with a woman who didn't particularly like her. Nikki often felt at her loneliest after she'd seen her friends.

But it wouldn't last forever – she had to keep reminding herself of that. In less than two years she'd be eighteen, a legal adult. That had seemed like forever away when Diane first took custody of her, back when she was thirteen, and now it was close enough to taste.

Maybe nothing would change when she turned eighteen.

Maybe she'd petition Ysanne to let her live at Belle Morte until she could support herself.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

No matter what, the possibility of a brighter future didn't seem so far away now, and that was enough to lift Nikki's spirits and keep her going until the next time she saw the people she loved.