Unappreciated Gifts
At three in the afternoon on the first day of December, the werewolf sometimes known as the Moor, feared for centuries by his own kind, opened his email to find this:
Dear Asil:We have become worried about you. A werewolf alone is a sad thing, especially at Christmastime. So we have a challenge for you. Five dates in three weeks. We have taken the work out of it and connected you with five people (from online dating sites) who should make the excursions from your lonely existence worthwhile. Or amusing, if only to us. The dates, except for meals, which we thought should be up to you and your partner for the experience, are planned and paid for (when necessary). Tickets for your first event should arrive in today's mail-all you have to do is write an email and arrange a meeting time and place.You should know that all of these people think they have been talking to you and are looking for you to bring a little romance into their lives. We have carefully chosen people we think would be very hurt to find out they were unwitting participants in a game. Some of us believe that you would not hurt a stranger just to avoid a little discomfort. Others think that knowing that we have informed the whole pack (via email) and instigated a betting pool will be better incentive. Especially since no one, so far, has bet on your attending more than one date.Below you can see the profile, photos, and email exchanges between your first date and . . . well, I guess you know it's not really you. Charles, computer guru that he is, did help with sending email that looks like it's coming from you and intercepting the return emails. He was unwilling until we enlisted his mate. Lest you get excited, Anna is not one of us. And though she does know who we are, she has sworn not to tell.Should you succeed in all five dates (success defined below), we shall confess, turn over any and all audio/video footage, and submit ourselves to your reckoning.Sincerely,Your Concerned Friends*A successful date is one in which (a) neither party runs screaming into the night, (b) there are no dead bodies at the end of it, and (c) lasts longer than two hours-at least an hour and a half of which is spent with your date-which is an hour and fifty minutes longer than we expect any date of yours to last.Asil read the email three times, followed the link to his profile on BiteMe.com, a dating site for . . . humans pretending to be vampires. He adjusted to that idea for a heartbeat before considering the information his Concerned Friends had assembled about him.
The photo they'd used was a close-up, though he didn't remember any such photos being taken of him. To get a close-up from far enough away that he hadn't noticed would take a very expensive camera. He put that observation aside as a possible hint to the identity of his benefactors.
The photo showed him with his shirt off, looking slightly to the left of the camera with a Black Baccara rose held between two fingers at hip level. His face was mostly hidden in the shadows.
It had clearly been taken during the summer, but not, he thought, last summer. He'd moved that rosebush indoors because, even though it was supposed to be hardy, Aspen Creek, Montana, required a sturdier hardy than his Black Baccara could manage.
He looked beautiful and dangerous.
He approved. If one had to have a photo posted on a website called BiteMe.com, it was good to have one that represented him properly.
He spent significantly less time examining his date's profile because it was not interesting. The photo was a black-and-white blurry image of someone in a (presumably) black cape. It was possible to discern that the person had two eyes and a mouth, but everything else was lost in shadows. The profile was brief and generic. Given the dearth of biographical data, he could only assume she had been chosen because she lived in Missoula, a smallish university town about four hours away by car. Missoula was quite possibly the closest location they could find for a person using the dating app. Aspen Creek was very, very far away from civilization.
There were not, to his knowledge, real vampires in Missoula. Vampires were, generally speaking, city creatures. Missoula was still too small to provide adequate hunting grounds. The occasional missing person would be noticed.
Vampires, unlike werewolves, could not reveal themselves to the human population and expect to coexist peacefully. Being thought of as food was not something people tended to get used to.
Vampires could and did exist as lone hunters, but four hours by car was still too close to the Marrok's territory for a single vampire to feel safe.
Actual vampires, that was. Apparently, there were enough humans pretending to be vampires that they held a yearly winter dance, which Asil and-he checked the name-Kelly were scheduled to attend. Sometimes Asil thought that he'd been a werewolf too long to understand humans at all.
More interesting than his date's bio were the somewhat breathless emails exchanged between his date-to-be and the people who pretended to be him, if only because he could examine them for more clues about the identity of the people to whom he owed this charming . . . gift.
In the end, he concluded that whoever was writing emails as him knew him rather well. These were letters he might have sent himself-excepting only that he would never have written to anyone who signed up on a website for fools who pretended to be vampires.
He hadn't been able to discover much about the person he was supposed to take on his date from the emails-they seemed very impersonal for someone looking for love on the Internet. But people no longer expressed themselves as well as they used to in writing; he blamed it on the move from pen and ink to keyboard.
Asil leaned back in his chair, staring at his computer screen without actually looking at it.
He considered what he should do.
Probably he could figure out who'd sent the email to him-he already had some strong suspicions. He could, without a doubt, extract himself from the situations in which his unknown opponents . . . benefactors . . . had embroiled him.
But he had been invited to a game. An adventure. Adventures were often uncomfortable but never boring.
He composed an email to the woman he was going to take to a vampire ball, Kelly No-Last-Name, whose email was-Asil sighed-FangsForTheMemories@umontana.edu. He suggested they meet at his favorite Thai restaurant in Missoula sufficiently early so that they could retire and assemble their costumes after they ate. Vampires apparently preferred to dance in costume-it was a masquerade ball. Asil's benefactors had assured Kelly that Asil had suitable clothing-which was a costume that humans would think a vampire might wear to such a thing. And indeed, he did own several that would work.
After he sent the email to Kelly, he wrote back to the people who had begun this adventure for him.
Dearest Children,Challenge accepted.AsilPostscript-You do know I am Muslim, yes? I do not care about Christmas, except that the music which the season subjects me to is mostly bad.
Copyright © 2025 by Patricia Briggs. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
