Calling her job stressful proves an understatement when the truth comes out…
Personal assistant to a high-powered executive, Franchesca Miller thrives on stress and anxiety. Builds her life around work. Stomachs all that anxiety like chocolate. But this new situation might be one step too far. One stressor that breaks her. One realization that upends everything.
Or she might just be hallucinating.
Tough call.
Either way, she finds refuge in the cozy café attached to a bookstore. Tries to sooth the panic building in her gut with a warm mug of chamomile tea. Tries to pretend she never witnessed what she thought she witnessed in her boss’s office.
Because vampires can’t exist.
FRANCHESCA MILLER AT THE CAFE is available to read for free until the 1st of November, when another story will be posted. For readers who would prefer to read on a device of preference, or who would like their own personal eBook of this story, you can find it here.
***
Franchesca Miller at the Café
A Café Story
Franchesca Miller was having a heart attack. Or a panic attack. Either way, she was feeling a wash of dread, rapid heart rate, tight chest, difficulty breathing, nausea. Given the situation, it was probably a panic attack. But one couldn’t be too careful.
Because coffee would absolutely help but she knew she’d be better off with tea, she went into the nearest coffee shop she could find, hoping they had tea. Coffee would probably just rev her more. She needed to calm the fuck down. Something soothing. Like chamomile.
The coffee shop she found turned out to be this very cute little café attached to a bookstore through a giant opening in one wall. The space was warm and scattered with couches and comfy chairs and wooden tables. Along the wall opposite the bookstore, a long counter topped with three of four plates of delicious looking pastries under clear cake toppers, with one of those giant espresso machines behind the counter and the humming barista who looked like she had not a care in the world.
Maybe Franchesca could do that, be a barista in a coffee shop. Probably a lot less cause for panic attacks in that kind of job. Or heart attack. Or whatever this was.
When she stepped up to the register, she noticed an empty stool by the cash register, though almost as soon as she noticed it, a huge pale gray cat jumped up onto it, circled and settled into a precarious looking position, then closed its pale blue eyes. The cat was about two times too big for the stool, yet looked content and comfortable.
She could do that too. Just be a cat at a café. That definitely seemed like a low stress job that didn’t initiate heart or panic or any other kind of attacks. Probably didn’t even have to worry about money since that was some poor human’s job to take care of. She imagined the entire job of a café cat was probably keep away vermin and look adorable napping on a stool, and she could get behind that process.
Only hitch was her not being a cat, of course.
A tiny inconvenience. But one that might affect her ability to apply for the job of “Cat at a café.”
The woman behind the counter stepped up to the register and smiled at Franchesca. “Can I get you something?”
“If you have tea, I should drink tea. Coffee might be bad right now. But if you have coffee, I would take that too.” She was absolutely certain she sounded like a lunatic but wasn’t sure how to sound normal just then. See panic/heart attack. She was leaning more toward panic attack, though. Because she was absolutely panicking.
“How about some chamomile?” the woman asked, giving her a gentle, and slightly worried, smile.
“Just thinking chamomile would be good. Yes, that please.”
“You need anything else? A pastry? And emotional support cat?” She gestured to the giant gray cat somehow balanced on the too small stool. “Boo would be happy to lay in your lap and purr. That can be very regulating.”
Actually, that sounded delightful. But she was afraid if she did that, she’d relax too much. She needed to calm down. She needed to not give herself a heart attack and/or a panic attack. Or at least mitigate the one she was currently having. But she was afraid to stop worrying. Afraid to let the anxiety go.
What would she be if she let it all go?
Probably more of a mess than she was now. So she said, “Thanks. I’m fine, really. But if I need an emotional support cat, I’ll know where to go.”
“Any time,” the woman said. “Boo will be happy to help.”
Boo stretched his front legs out and gave a big, teeth-revealing yawn. Then pulled his legs back into the fluffy ball of his body and closed his eyes again. Franchesca envied the ease with which Boo navigated his space.
“My name’s Nina, by the way,” Nina said. “In case you need a more human variety of help.”
Franchesca nodded and took the warm ceramic mug with the bag of tea dropped into the hot water that Nina slid to her, then found a table near the back of the café. If she stared out the window, that would only make things worse.
Her leg bounced under the table and she put a hand on her knee to stop the leg movement before she knocked over the table and her mug of steeping tea. The smell was soothing, that wash of floral warmth helped her breathe. In and out. In and out.
Maybe she hadn’t really seen what she’d seen. Maybe she’d imagined it. It was broad daylight. In her boss’s unlocked office of all places. If what she’d seen had been real and not her imagination, then her boss would have at the very least locked the door. Right? Obviously what she thought she saw couldn’t have been real.
There was no such thing as supernatural monsters, right?
Especially not blood sucking monsters that looked suspiciously like vampires. But it was daylight. And vampires weren’t real. And her boss had called her back into the office the minute she squealed and slammed the door shut again. And there hadn’t been anyone else in the office when she went back in. So there obviously hadn’t been a vampire. She was hallucinating. Had to be.
The fact that she was hallucinating was the cause for her panic/heart attack. Hallucinating about monsters no less! What was wrong with her? Was this a sign of a mental breakdown? Had she been working too hard? Probably. Her boss was the CEO of a massive finance and investment company. She was the second assistant, second only to his personal assistant, and that meant she was under a lot of pressure. Not just from the CEO but from his personal assistant who managed to think she was Franchesca’s boss even though Franchesca answered to the CEO, not his first assistant.
It was complicated, political, stressful, and she’d been thinking for months she was going to start having panic attacks if she didn’t learn how to minimize the stress. She had no life outside work. There was no time for a life. She was on call twenty-four-seven, and even the occasional chance she got to fly out to visit her family in Oregon weren’t really holidays. She had to keep her cellphone and work computer with her at all times. And the calls and meetings and work continued, even when she was away.
She hadn’t gone looking for a new job yet mostly because she liked the salary and benefits. But after today, maybe all that wasn’t worth her mental sanity.
Franchesca sipped her tea, now fully steeped and warm and soothing. She took a deep breath as the heat sank into her chest, loosening some of the tightness there, settling the nausea that had gripped her gut.
She started to question what had happened. Obviously a hallucination, because vampires didn’t exist. But what did that mean? Why was she imagining a monster sucking on her boss’s neck in the middle of the day, out of nowhere? Did it mean she was losing her mind? Or was she just overworked and stressed? Her best friend Anna, who she rarely saw and only had a chance to speak to on the phone about once a month, thought she was working too much and had let this man consume most of her life.
Maybe he was the vampire, so to speak, sucking all the life out of her. Maybe that’s why she’d had that particular hallucination? She wasn’t a reader of vampire fiction in general—she preferred a good contemporary romance when she had time to relax and read; which was never these days—and she didn’t generally watch vampire movies or TV. But there had been a vampire show on TV a few days ago. She’d had in running in the background while she frantically tried to solve an issue with an upcoming investors meeting. So maybe that was where her subconscious picked up the imagery.
And ran with it because she was feeling sucked dry by her job.
Maybe. But then why imagine her boss being fed on instead of her boss being the one feeding? Did hallucinations even have to make sense, though? Wasn’t that the point. They didn’t make sense.
She sipped her tea, her brain working hard to reassert a layer of logic on the world, and scanned the other people in the coffee shop. Realizing as she did there were some interesting characters here, too.
That woman with the excellent manicure and the hunting magazine near the entrance to the bookstore, flipping through the magazine and ignoring everyone in her magnificence. The older lady sitting in the middle of the café, sipping her drink and reading a book of…erotic short stories? Huh. But it was a Best Of collection, so sure. Why not? There was a man hunched over a lap top not far from her, but he was so preoccupied with whatever he was doing, his fingers moving rapidly over the keyboard, that he didn’t even look up. Hadn’t noticed her when she’d sat down near him.
There were half a dozen people coming in and leaving. Some from the bookstore. One or two through the front door. A young man came in carrying a guitar and settled in a comfortably cushioned chair between the main counter and the front windows of the café. Boo immediately jumped off his stool and went to sit on the armrest next to the young man, and they appeared to have a very one-sided conversation for a moment before Nina brought the young man a drink.
That was cute.
A couple of teenagers came in from the bookstore, talking loudly and animatedly about something to do with…Kpop, Franchesca thought. But she was so far behind on pop culture she might be wrong. They got iced coffees and sat in chairs by the windows at the front of the café, making heart eyes at the young man strumming his guitar.
The place had a very relaxed vibe. Between that and the tea, Franchesca was definitely calming down and seeing the earlier incident in a whole new light. Not an actual vampire. Just a metaphor for her job sucking the life out of her. No need for a panic attack. Or a heart attack.
She just needed to find another job.
Her shoulders dropped as what felt like a huge weight lifted from her. Year-end bonuses be damned, she needed a new job.
Her cellphone rang, vibrating against her hip where she’d hurriedly stuffed it into her pants pocket. She’d left her suit’s jacket at the office, but had grabbed her purse and phone automatically on the way out. Force of habit to have her work cell close to hand at all times. When she pulled it out, she saw her boss’s office number across the screen and for the first time in the five years she’d worked for him, she considered letting the call go to voicemail. She could say she was in the bathroom. Normally, she’d still take the call—and just pretend not to be in the bathroom—but really, she did need more boundaries before she found a new job.
Old habits were hard to break though, as they say, and she flicked the screen to answer the call. “Andrew,” she said, trying to sound normal and not like she’d just gone through a panic attack and existential crisis, “what can I do for you?”
“Where are you, Ms. Miller?”
“At a…” Just say it, Franchesca! You’re allowed to take breaks. “A coffee shop. I needed a tea. Would you like me to bring you back anything?” Normally, if she’d been leaving the office for a coffee—which she didn’t have to do because there was a very fancy machine in the office and a coffee kiosk on the ground floor of the building—she’d have asked if he wanted anything before leaving.
“No. I need you back here. There’s a problem with the investors document. It has to be fixed ASAP.”
“Sure.” She hid her sigh, but the internal version was heavy and tinged with anxiety. “Just around the corner. Be back in a snap.”
“Also…”
She waited, but his hesitance made her stomach tight. She’d rather not get fired before she had a chance to quit. That looked bad on a resume. Especially for a personal assistant.
She swore she heard someone speaking in the background, but it was a muffled sound and could have been anyone. The voice made her heartrate shoot up again, though. And the anxiety and panic that had followed her to the café ratcheted up. She wasn’t even sure why. The sound of a voice other than her boss’s shouldn’t be cause for panicking.
“Just get back immediately,” her boss said after that long pause. After the voice in the background said whatever they’d said. “We have a lot of work to get done today. This wasn’t the day to go out for a coffee.”
“Yes, sir.” She winced at the rebuke, but also something was bothering her. On a cellular level. Some instinct rebelled at going back to the office. At being anywhere near the person she’d swear she’d heard in the background. “Be right there.”
She started to slide her phone into her pocket when she saw a series of texts she’d somehow managed to miss from Sara, Andrew’s main personal assistant.
Where are you?
Get back here!
He’s upset. What happened?
Franchesca? Are you okay?
Something’s weird here.
Don’t come back. Something is very wrong.
Franchesca stay away!
The panic that had been clawing at Franchesca’s chest intensified and all the work she’d put into calming her pulse and settling her system went out the window. Her chest felt tight again, and the nausea rolled through her.
She sent a text back to Sara as she scooped up her purse. Sara, you OK? What’s happening? Just got a call from Andrew. He didn’t explain.
She hurried to the counter to hand Nina her mug. “Thank you. The chamomile was lovely.”
Nina frowned, glanced at Boo who was still sitting next to the young guitar player. Boo hopped down from his position on the chair’s armrest and came back to the stool, jumping up easily.
“I’m not trying to be nosey,” Nina said, to which Boo made a chuffing noise that sounded suspiciously like a laugh.
Franchesca frowned at the cat, but then looked back at Nina. “I’m sorry, I don’t have time to talk. There’s a crisis at work.” She half-laughed, trying to hide her worry. “Always something, right?”
“It’s just…” Nina said, stopping her before she could hurry away, “it’s just…” She scowled and glanced at Boo. Then said, “I get the feeling you might want to, maybe, stay here and have another tea. Just, a feeling. You know. Barista’s intuition.” She tried a chuckle and a smile, but both looked really forced.
“I appreciate your concern,” Franchesca said to the sweet woman. “But I can’t. I have to go.”
Nina reached across the counter and stopped Franchesca with a light touch on her arm. She pulled her hand back immediately, but not before Franchesca felt a little stinging spark, like she’d been hit with static electricity.
“I really think you should stay,” Nina said. And now there was something different about her voice. A little deeper maybe? A little more…power in it.
Franchesca frowned. But she didn’t immediately leave. Between her boss’s call, that weird voice in the background, and the increasingly frantic texts from Sara, she was pretty freaked out. Now Nina? This day was just so weird. Maybe she’d already had a heart attack, was laying on the floor at the office while medics tried to revive her as she hallucinated some really weird shit.
“I…” Franchesca started to repeat that she had to go, but the intensity in Nina’s gaze stopped her. “What are you trying not to tell me?”
Nina sighed. “I have a friend coming. He can help. It’s very important that you wait for him or the crisis at work will turn into something unexpectedly bad.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about or how you know anything about my office, but my co-worker seems to be in trouble and it’s my job to handle trouble.”
“Yes.” Nina nodded rapidly. “Yes. That’s it exactly. You will need to handle the trouble. But you’re new. Brand new. Never faced this type of…trouble before. You’re going to need someone who has.”
The little bell over the door opened and a tall, rather handsome man in a nicely cut business suit walked in. If Franchesca was any judge, the suit was less expensive than anything her boss would wear, but it was tailored well to the man and so didn’t look cheap or off-rack. The man himself was attractive, probably somewhere in his late thirties, early-forties. Dark hair neatly trimmed. Intense brown eyes.
If she had to guess, she’d say lawyer of some kind. Probably worked more pro bono than jobs for wealthy clients. Might also be an accountant, but she was placing bets on lawyer. He also looked faintly familiar, but she couldn’t place where she might have seen him before. Obviously the office—they dealt with a lot of lawyers—but she could remember the specific meeting, situation, or time period when she might have crossed paths with the man.
He scanned the café, then looked to the counter and flashed Nina a smile, and the impact was impressive. Good smile. Very nice smile.
When he looked at Franchesca, though, the smile took on a different edge, a sort of wary intensity that made Franchesca frown.
“This is the friend I told you about,” Nina said. “Rhys Witherby. He’s very knowledgeable about…what you face at work.”
“I don’t need a lawyer,” Franchesca said, to both the man and Nina.
“No,” the man agreed, without missing a beat, confirming Franchesca’s guess. “No, you don’t need a lawyer. You need a vampire hunter.”
***
They took over the table in the window when the teenagers left, which struck Franchesca as very good timing. Nina handed Franchesca another cup of chamomile tea, but Franchesca wasn’t in the mood for more tea, even if she did need the soothing scent. She held the warm mug in her cold hands and tried to return some rational logic to her world. A world that felt like it had just turned upside down.
Because there was no such thing as vampires. Yet she’d thought she’d seen one in her boss’s office. And then, out of the blue, a “vampire hunter” who looks like a lawyer shows up to help?
She probably really was lying on the lobby floor in her office building, dying of the heart attack she’d had, experiencing this…delusion as her last moments before her oxygen starved brain finally gave up the ghost.
A much more logical explanation than the one being put to her. And somehow less terrifying. Okay. She was dying. That sucked. But at least that would mean there weren’t real vampires in the world. Nor lawyers who hunted them in their spare time. Did lawyers even have spare time? That seemed like an oxymoron. Made believing this was all a delusion, a hallucination, seem infinitely more likely.
Except that a part of her believed Rhys Witherby was exactly what he said he was—a lawyer and a vampire hunter. And that he knew what he was talking about.
“I don’t believe in vampires,” she said weakly, her hands tightening on the tea mug.
“Most people don’t and it’s better that way,” Nina said gently.
They were sitting in a triangle, with Franchesca across a low table from Rhys and Nina. The arrangement meant Franchesca didn’t feel hemmed in or ganged up on. So, smart positioning on their part. Part of her job had been to arrange the seating for important meetings and there was an art to it, depending on what sort of outcome one wanted. This positioning felt purposeful, but not like they knew what they were doing. More that they were the sort of people who didn’t want to gang up on a hardworking woman having a mental breakdown.
Or a heart attack. She still hadn’t ruled out the dying-from-heart-failure possibility.
“But the fact that you saw one when you weren’t meant to means something,” Rhys said quietly, leaning forward to rest his forearms on his knees. It made him a little shorter, so he didn’t feel like he was imposing. And it softened the overall feel of the conversation. Again, clever or accident, they were both very good at this.
“That I’ve had a mental break and am currently curled up in a corner somewhere having a hallucination?”
Rhys’s quick smile looked involuntary and was nicer for it. “I realize this is all very difficult to believe.”
“You think?”
“The thing is,” Nina said, “with vampires… They’re very good at not being seen when they don’t want to be. By humans,” she amended.
Which made Franchesca wonder what Nina thought she was if not a human. And Rhys for that matter.
“Some better than others,” Rhys said. “Hiding in daylight is more difficult, though.”
“Vampires don’t turn to ash in daylight?” That was disappointing. If this wasn’t a hallucination, she’d planned to move to a desert and live in the sun. She could wear sunscreen. There was no screen against vampires. At least, she didn’t think there was.
“’Fraid not,” Rhys said with another of those small smiles. “They just don’t have all the powers that make them vampires in daylight.”
“Huh?”
“They’re weaker,” Nina said gently, “more human-like. But still dangerous.”
“And some of them are less affected by daylight than others,” Rhys added.
“That’s very disappointing,” Franchesca said aloud.
“It really is, isn’t it?” Nina said, sounding very encouraging but also sincere.
“The good news,” Rhys said, “is that the really old and very powerful vampires just don’t come out during the day because they don’t like feeling weak. Makes them vulnerable to their enemies.” He winced and said, “Most of the old ones don’t come out during the day. There are, as with everything, a few exceptions.”
Franchesca got the feeling that was his lawyer half talking, covering the bases, making sure he was giving her accurate information. Part of her appreciated that. Part of her wished he’d stopped with “vampires are real.” And just left it at that.
“Anyway,” Nina said, as if she sensed they were losing Franchesca and she was about to run away screaming—which was not off the table. “All this is to say that the vampire you encountered earlier is not one of the super old powerful ones. That’s good news.”
“Sure.” Franchesca shrugged.
“The more complicated news,” Rhys said—and Franchesca appreciated that he was creative and didn’t say “bad news” because she knew with absolute certainty what was coming next was bad news—“The complicated news is that if you return to your office unprepared, the vampire will kill you.”
“Kinda thinking I died in the building lobby of a heart attack already,” she murmured.
“You’re still alive,” Nina reassured. Then winced. “If that’s reassuring to you?”
“Not really.”
“You’re not dead,” Rhys said. Then sighed. “You’re just a vampire hunter.”
***
Franchesca Miller was a lot of things. Workaholic. Cooking show addict when she had time for watching TV—which was never because of above workaholic impulses. She was an excellent assistant. She was an apartment owner. She was a classic rock lover. She was a sister. And a niece. A daughter. An aspiring pet owner.
She was not, however, as far as she could make out, not now nor ever, a vampire hunter.
The idea was ludicrous and if she hadn’t been so wobbly, she would have just stood up and left. She did set her tea mug down, carefully because of her shaking hands and the rush of adrenaline coursing through her limbs. She’d had a vague hope that all the nonsense vampire talk was just a metaphor. That Nina and Rhys were actually sane humans and they were trying to ease her into reality from some sort of psychotic break.
She’d hoped in vain.
“I need to get back to the office,” she said, carefully, slowly. “My colleague is in trouble. Thank you for the mythology lesson.” Were vampires mythology? She wasn’t sure. Maybe that was reserved for things like Greek gods. “I have to go.”
Nina and Rhys exchanged a look. Neither raised a hand to stop her. But Rhys stood and said, “Tell you what. I’ll walk you back. I have some business in your building later today anyway. I’ll just see if my client can push up the meeting a few hours.”
She was absolutely certain he was lying. And also, under normal circumstances, would have absolutely said no to this because she didn’t know Rhys Witherby and he’d spent their entire acquaintance talking about vampires as if they were real.
But instincts kicked in, panic rushed adrenaline through her system, and she said, “Thank you, that would be nice,” instead of refusing like she’d planned. The minute she knew he’d be there too, that he’d also see the thing in her boss’s office, a huge relief flooded her system. Which was surprising for a lot of reasons, but mostly because she couldn’t explain the relief.
She checked her phone again. No new texts from Sara. Nothing from Andrew. The ominous last text from Sara seemed to be larger on her phone than it should be.
Franchesca stay away!
She stuffed her phone back into her purse and stood. A little wobbly but she was able to stand at least. Out of habit, even though she was still certain this wasn’t reality, she said, “Thank you for the tea.”
Nina nodded, her smile careful as she glanced again at Rhys. He gave her a little nod, then motioned Franchesca out of the café.
Having him at her side on the walk back to the office was surprisingly reassuring. It shouldn’t have been, but it was.
As they stepped into the lobby, she half-expected to see a clump of medical people gathered around her collapsed form, trying to revive her as she slipped away. But she didn’t. The lobby was as it always was. Lots of black marble and gray carpet and double high ceilings, a bank of elevators at the back and a security desk to the right. To the left, a little cut in the wall led into a sundries store that also served coffee, but it smelled significantly more burnt than Nina’s coffee had.
Franchesca waved to the security guard on duty—Hamish—and walked to the elevator on the right side of the bank, which was an express up to the offices of Adler Cohen Investments. Andrew had been the CEO of the company since both James Adler and Richard Cohen retired five years ago. Franchesca had started working for Andrew a month after the dual retirements.
The elevator whisked them up to the twentieth floor in silence. Franchesca didn’t question Rhys going with her all the way to her office. She tapped her foot against the elevator’s shiny black floor and fidgeted with her purse strap and tried not think too much.
The doors dinged open directly onto the lobby of Adler Cohen. The normal receptionist, Tannor, wasn’t at his desk, though. Which was unusual. The lobby was very empty. She knew Andrew had a meeting with some potential investors, big-wigs worth lots of money, in a half hour. That meant the place should be bustling getting ready for the meeting. That no one was here and the offices felt silent as ghost towns was ominous. She was even more glad her instincts had agreed to having Rhys here. She was afraid she’d have run away again if he wasn’t at her back.
“Which way to your boss’s office?” Rhys asked, his voice quiet and hushed in the near silent lobby. Still it seemed to echo loudly.
She nodded to the right and started toward the hallway behind the reception desk. But Rhys stopped her.
“So, I know you don’t believe me,” he whispered. “But carry this just to make us both feel better.”
She turned back to see him offering her a stake. A foot long length of solid wood, pointed at one end and thick enough to look scary. If she weren’t so terrified—especially by the implications of the stake—she’d have laughed at the potential double entendre thinking about the length of “wood” she was being offered. But she didn’t have it in her to even think dirty jokes at the moment.
Because Rhys was offering her a stake to kill a vampire.
And despite the fact that she assumed she’d wave him off, outright refuse, keep going without the ridiculous hunk of pointy wood, she wordlessly took the stake from him and hefted it in her hands and realized that it felt a little too comfortable. Such a weird realization she almost dropped the thing.
Okay, definitely still leaning toward all this being a near death hallucination because she’d never held a vampire-killing stake in her life so it shouldn’t have fit her hand perfectly and felt so very natural.
Rhys watched her carefully, nodding when she looked up with wide eyes. “Yeah. Sorry. You are definitely a vampire hunter.”
Refusing to believe such a think was even possible, she turned back toward the interior offices. There had to be a reason for the silence that was perfectly normal. Big, all-hands meeting in the conference room because of some crisis or other probably. That would explain why Sara wanted her back so desperately. In fact, that last text from Sara probably had said Get your ass back her! And Franchesca had just read it wrong.
So which is it, Franchesca? You’re hallucinating before you die, or everything is fine and this is normal and not freaky even a little bit?
She wanted to roll her eyes at herself. But she was carrying a vampire-killing stake. Irony was dead. Was there irony involved in any of this? She’d have to look the word up. She could never remember.
Thinking nonsense and berating herself for her own idiocy got her all the way to her boss’s office. But it did not hide the fact that there didn’t seem to be anyone around. That the conference room doors were wide open and there was no one inside. There were no people at the various desks. Office doors were open and rooms empty. The only closed door was the door to Andrew’s big corner office with all the windows.
The twin desks outside the office were both empty. Hers looked as she’d left it, with a pile of paperwork on top she had to deal with and some sticky notes with “important reminders” scattered around. She’d intended on straightening all that up before the big meeting. She never left her desk messy when they had clients or potential clients coming in.
Sara’s desk was immaculate, as always, but the chair was pushed backward and knocked off its rolling wheels, half leaning against the wall of Andrew’s office. The computer was turned at an odd angle too, facing the hallway more than where Sara would have needed it to actually do work on it.
Franchesca didn’t say anything aloud, but a slight movement from Rhys at her back let her know he was as aware of the strangeness as she was. Almost to herself, she murmured, “Where is everyone?”
When she glanced at Rhys, he looked grim. But he didn’t comment.
Franchesca’s hand shook as she reached for Andrew’s office door. Double doors, with simple round doorknobs because Andrew went in for minimalist décor and the entire office, with its dark woods and pale carpets, reflected that. She froze with her hand on one of the knobs, her other clutching the stake. If she pushed open this door and Andrew was just sitting behind his desk working, she was going to get fired.
She pushed open the door. The room was dark, the shades inside the floor to ceiling window panes lowered fully so that the office was as dim as it could get during the day time. Some light leaked through the shades, but not much. It was so dark it took a moment for her eyes to adjust so she could actually see.
Andrew was not sitting behind his desk working.
But since he was sitting behind his desk dead, she was probably still going to have to find another job.
***
Franchesca wasn’t one to panic under normal circumstances. Her job was too intense, stressful, and full of last-minute crises. Something was always going wrong and had to be fixed in the eleventh hour and that was one of the things she was really good at and why she had kept this job for so long, despite Sara not thinking she was good enough.
So Franchesca’s first instinct upon seeing her boss behind his desk, in his expensive leather swivel chair, with his neck at an impossible angle, blood splashed across the side of his throat, and muted dead eyes, was to rush forward and check to make sure he was dead before figuring out how to solve the problem.
She couldn’t solve this problem. The smell of death and blood in the room nearly choked her. Even in the near darkness inside the office there was no mistaking the man in that chair was absolutely dead and had been for some time, though she couldn’t have said exactly how long. There was no point in checking his pulse—which would have gotten blood on her and her fingerprints on the victim.
Now, if this was a normal situation, she would have hurried outside to ring emergency services and then run away to wait for them downstairs. That last wasn’t great instinct, leaving a crime scene unattended, but also, she was a normal woman and this was disgusting and terrifying and what if the killer was still here.
The “what if the killer was still here” instinct to run away was a good one, though.
Because the killer was still here.
The monster she’d seen bent over Andrew, mouth to her boss’s neck, stepped out of the shadows.
She hadn’t imagined it. She hadn’t been hallucinating. She wasn’t dying in the lobby downstairs.
And didn’t that just suck.
Her fawn instincts kicked in and she froze. Couldn’t run. Forgot she had a weapon in her hand. Just froze in place, staring at the monster. It was tall. Maybe eight foot tall. And thin. Dressed in a worn black turtleneck sweater and black pants. The face above the black clothing was a colorless white so pale the skin looked translucent. The monster was bald, too. No hair anywhere she could see. Its skull was shaped funny, long and pointed at the top. And its eyes, sunken in the misshapen skull, glowed a strange, sickly yellow.
Huh. She would have thought vampire would have red eyes.
Long fingers were tipped in sharp claw-like nails. Its limbs were out of proportion to its body, longer, the joints seeming to fall in the wrong places. And as she watched, its jaw elongated, further distorting its skull, until its mouth stretched in a hideous rictus of pointed-teeth displaying horror.
She wondered if that expression was supposed to be a smile.
The thing issued an almost constant stream of sound like a hiss. And moved both fast and weirdly, like it was in a stop-motion movie. A jerky change, and then it was closer to the desk. Another jerky movement, and then it was behind her dead boss.
“I see it brings a weapon this time,” the monster hissed.
Franchesca didn’t have enough spit in her mouth to wet her throat to get any words out so she just continued to fawn in place like an idiot, waiting to die. If the stake in her hand was supposed to be a weapon against something like that, she wondered why Rhys had bothered handing it to her. It hung in her numb fingers at her side, useless.
The monster’s glowing eyes moved from her to Rhys behind her. “And it brings more for me to eat. Baby hunter and the wizard’s brother. Such tasty morsels. I have fed well today. I shall consume more.”
Wizard’s brother? For some reason that question was top of her mind in that instant even though there were more important questions that needed answers.
But the monster’s moment of looking away from her left her blinking and her head cleared, just a little. A vague memory from books and movies rose. Not supposed to look a vampire in the eyes, right? And she had been. Those yellow orbs were impossible to ignore. But she felt a little more like herself when she wasn’t staring into its eyes. Her hand felt a little less numb on the stake.
In fact, her skin was tingling now and there was adrenaline in her system, and she shifted to her toes, prepared to… What, she wasn’t sure. To move. But not to run away.
She was sort of waiting for Rhys to counter the monster’s comments with witty banter because that’s what fiction had taught her happened in these circumstances. But he remained quiet. She was tempted to look back and make sure he hadn’t been mesmerized by the vampire, but was afraid if she looked away from the vampire it would attack.
A good instinct, because it did another of those jerky motions and suddenly it was standing only three feet away. So close the stench of blood and death and decay that seeped from it made her want to choke. So close, she could now see there was some pink color in its cheeks—she refused to think about how that color had gotten there. So close, she could almost feel its cold touch on her throat.
“You saw me,” the monster hissed, its head swaying from side to side like a snake. Its yellow eyes glowing in the dim office. She tried to avoid looking directly at his eyes, but the glow was impossible to miss. “I was not expecting that. He did not warn me that he employed someone like you.”
“Probably didn’t know,” she murmured. Because she hadn’t known. She still wasn’t sure what “someone like you” meant. But if Rhys was right, it meant her life was now upside down.
She sort of missed the “dying on the lobby floor from a heart attack and this was a hallucination” idea, though.
“We had a very fine arrangement,” the monster said, its voice a sibilant and hypnotic lure in the deathly quiet office. “I ensure he grows rich. He feeds me and occasionally passes on someone I need not worry about draining. A very fine arrangement indeed.” The creature sighed. “All at an end now. Shame. But I will have one more morsel before I find my next minion.” Its gaze flicked to the man still standing at Franchesca’s back—and wasn’t that amazing! She would definitely have run by now if she could—and its strangely stretched mouth widened grotesquely into another grin. “Two morsels. Wizard blood is so very tasty. I look forward to draining you.”
Franchesca swallowed hard, a gesture that brought the vampire’s attention back to her. It made a sound like a hum. The sound pierced her ears, vibrating like pain across her eardrums and making her knees wobble. She nearly dropped the stake. Almost feel to the ground.
Another jerky movement from the vampire was her only warning.
She blinked and it was standing right in front of her, its putrid breath washing across her cheeks. Its jaw extended long, sharp canines on full display, so long they looked prehistoric. Needle sharp, thin and gleaming. Its glowing yellow eyes wide and focused on her face.
Its mouth worked as blood rolled out past its white lips, spreading over its chin, dripping down its front. Its eyes were comically wide now. And it glanced down to the space between them.
Franchesca followed its gaze. To see the stake solidly piercing its heart. Her hand still wrapped around the weapon where it wasn’t embedded in the monster’s chest. She blinked. Looked up as the monster gnashed its teeth together and tried to pull away from her.
It raised its hands and Franchesca thought, I should move. And then a sharp point slid out of the monster’s throat.
Franchesca took at least two seconds to realize the sharp point was the end of a knife. A big knife. And that it had not only pierced the vampire’s throat, it was still moving.
Another few seconds, and the vampire’s head dropped to one side, barely connected to its neck. A flick of the knife and the remaining connections were severed and the head dropped to the ground with a sickening thud.
Franchesca had just enough time to see Rhys’s face beyond the neck stump before her vision went black. And she finally, blissfully passed out.
***
Franchesca Miller came to sitting on one of the couches in the café, sleeping on an armrest, her head pillowed on one arm. There was a cooling mug of tea on the table in front of her. The rest of the café bustled around her. A few more people coming in and out of the bookstore now. Some of the people that had been there earlier now gone, like the young man playing the guitar and the woman who’d sat near the bookstore reading a hunting magazine. Others were still there—the woman reading erotic short stories, the man working diligently at his laptop.
The smell of coffee and pastries filled her nose and made the faint memory of something worse, something horrible that followed her into wakefulness fade. Boo sat on his too-small stool near the register. Nina was working to help a customer with a to-go order. It was bright and sunny outside.
She must have…fallen asleep? That didn’t seem right. She hadn’t been sleepy when she came into the café earlier.
Why had she come into the café earlier? Why wasn’t she at work?
She blinked hard a few times. Then sat straight up, letting out a panicked gasp.
“It’s okay,” a deep voice beside her. “Take a few breaths. You’re okay. Deep breaths.”
Without questioning the calming voice, she did as instructed and took a number of deep breaths, filling her senses with oxygen and coffee-scented air. She blinked hard at the sun outside. At the comforting daylight. Then faced the person on the couch next to her.
“You’re Rhys Witherby.” The man Nina had introduced her to. Franchesca’s gaze flicked to Nina. Then back to Rhys. “Did I… Tell me that was just a nightmare and I passed out here and that’s why I was asleep. I had a panic attack, didn’t I? That’s why I initially came in. Because I was panicking about…something, and I wanted to calm down.”
The something crept forward in her brain, the memories slithering around the edges of her awareness where she was trying not to notice them.
“Not so much a panic attack as shock,” Rhys said. He looked to the counter and caught Nina’s gaze. She gave a small nod, finished with the customer at the counter, then came around to join them. She brought a fresh mug of what turned out to be chamomile tea with her.
After Nina placed the warm mug in Franchesca’s hands and the soothing scent had time to form a little cloud of calm around Franchesca’s head, Nina sat in a cushioned chair across from her and said, “How are you doing? Feeling any better?”
“Not even a little bit,” Franchesca said with a small, tight smile. She lifted her mug in a solute and took a sip. The warmth and floral flavor seeped into her, relaxing muscles she hadn’t known were stiff. Like magic. She was going to have to pick up some more of this tea. “Was it real or was I having a delusion?”
Nina and Rhys exchanged a look.
“What do you remember?” Rhys asked.
“I’m trying not to,” Franchesca admitted. “My brain is flinching away from what…happened.”
“That’s fair enough. We won’t push those memories just yet. It was real. But it’s being cleaned up. You’ll…have to find a new job.”
“Couldn’t walk into that building again if you paid me a billion dollars.” She sipped more tea and let the calm seep into her bones. “Are the police going to come calling?” Though she was trying to ignore the memories, the disturbing pictures in her mind, she remembered blood. Lots of blood. The kind of blood that meant investigations. “Am I about to be accused of murder?”
“No.” Rhys’s eyes narrowed, but he said, “I wiped our presence from the cameras, the memory of the security guard. He saw you leave the first time, and your boss came down to the security desk after that to check if you’d left the building. There’s a record of you being gone when…it happened.”
“What will the police find when they get to the office?” She hadn’t asked about her colleagues yet. About Sara. About Tannor. About the others that worked in the office. She was afraid to ask. Afraid to know what was there in her memories.
“So, the good news, is that the other people in the office were all okay. Unconscious and locked in one of the bathrooms. The…” He flicked a look at Nina. “The vampire was saving them for later. So they survived.”
Franchesca set her mug down quickly, her hands shaking so hard she nearly spilled hot tea on her lap. “They’re alive?”
“And confused. And with the police now. But they’ll be fine. Thanks to what you did.”
“What you did, really,” she murmured, wondering if she was going to throw up now. The combination of relief and disgust churned in her gut. He’d said the word. And now all the images came roaring back.
The stake. The sight of her boss. All the blood. The monster. Its teeth. Its sneer and voice. The glow of yellow eyes. The feel of the stake in her hand as she impaled the monster. Watching the vampire’s head fall off after Rhys cut through its neck with a knife.
Yeah, she was going to pass out again. She put her head between her knees and breathed in and out very slowly, her eyes closed, concentrating on her breaths. A gentle hand rubbed her spine. Another held her hair back from her face.
When she was sure she wouldn’t, in fact, pass out and/or throw up, she lifted her head. Nina was on one side of her now, holding her hair. Rhys’s hand lifted away from her spine.
“Vampires,” Franchesca murmured. “How do I live in a world with vampires?”
“Well,” Rhys said, “it’ll take time. And some training.”
“Training? Training for what?”
Rhys exchanged another look with Nina over her head. Franchesca sat up so she could look at them both.
“You remember me telling you that you’re a vampire hunter, right?”
Actually, that was a memory she’d still been suppressing apparently because she had forgotten until he mentioned it.
He seemed to see the memory click into place and nodded faintly. “Yeah. That. You’ll need to train. This first time was…not bad. You encountered it during the day and that helped. Night is worse. They’re at their full power then. But you were born for this, so you’ll be fine.”
“Born for it? No. I wasn’t born for this. I refuse.”
“You can. But it won’t help. The vampires will come looking for you now. You’ve killed one. It puts you on their radar. The good news, again, is that you’ll have time before they figure out who you are. Plenty of time. And honestly, around it, you can have a pretty ordinary life. They start hiding from you…most of them anyway, once you’re trained and have killed a few. Gets easier then.”
“How do you know this?” Franchesca asked.
“As I said, I’m not just a lawyer. It’s what I do too.” He hesitated, as if there was more, but Franchesca couldn’t really take any more.
“So you’re saying I either accept this executive assistant during the day, vampire hunter at night lifestyle, or I’ll get killed? Is that it.”
He didn’t even wince when he nodded.
“Who trains me?”
“I can,” Rhys said. “If you trust me too. Otherwise, we can find a safe teacher you can trust to work with.” Something flickered in his eyes when he said, “I have a…brother who I work with but you are not to train with him. He’s…complicated.”
Franchesca was fine with that. She’d had more than enough complicated for one day. “And if I try to ignore it all…”
“Eventually it’ll find you again. Even if they don’t go looking for you, they’ll end up in your life. You’ll encounter them wherever you go. And if you don’t learn how to deal with them with more than instinct, they will eventually kill you.”
Franchesca had to appreciate the bluntness. At least he wasn’t dancing around the reality. “What will my colleagues have seen? Do they…know it was a vampire?”
“Their memories will fill in holes with a human killer. Most humans do the work of turning scary supernatural situations into more ‘logical’ explanations all by themselves. Which is convenient.”
“How are you doing?” Nina asked, gently. “Would you like some more tea?”
Franchesca nodded and took the mug when Nina passed it to her. It was still surprisingly warm. And each sip soothed her nervous system. Settling something inside her chest. None of this should make sense and she should definitely reject all this information out of hand.
Except.
Except a deep instinct was whispering. Whispering that this was the thing that had been missing. The thing she hadn’t even realized was missing as she worked her ass off at her job. The knowledge she’d been suppressing and ignoring for a very long time. She was not happy about this knowledge, this instinct. But she was surprisingly…okay with it.
“I’ll be destroying monsters?” she asked, sipping the tea again as she looked at Nina and then Rhys.
Rhys nodded. “Destroying monsters. That’s our calling.”
She was going to need a less demanding job. She sipped her drink. Something she could work the hunting around. That didn’t sound so bad. She’d been intending on getting a less stressful job anyway.
More tea. The idea settled. So did her churning gut and fear and anxiety. Allowing for some clear thinking. And the realization that somewhere deep inside, not only did she know this was all true. That this was her destiny. That there was no going back now. Somewhere deep inside, she was…
Good with this.
She drank the rest of her tea, gently set the mug down, and faced Rhys. “Okay. When do we get started?”
***
Thanks for reading FRANCHESCA MILLER AT THE CAFE. I hope you enjoyed it. If you’d like your own personal eBook copy of this story, you can find it for sale here. You can also peruse the previous Café stories that are individually available for sale here.
And since it's spooky season and this story fits right on into the whole spooky season vibe, but you'd like more spooky season reading, don't miss...well a lot of my books! LOL. They're here at the Spooky Season List.
And if you're keen on vampire fiction, might I recommend ANGER MANAGEMENT with one of my very favorite angry heroines.
Thanks again for reading! Don’t forget to check back on November 1st for the next Free story from The Café!
FRANCHESCA MILLER AT THE CAFE Copyright © 2025 Kat Simons
All Rights Reserved. No part of this story may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This story is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.