"Beautiful, isn't it?" Teren asked, as he watched me examining every flawlessly placed stone.
I nodded as I looked over at him. "It's amazing. Your parents' home is pretty...impressive."
He smiled nonchalantly and shrugged. "It's all right."
I laughed as he pulled me through the rest of the living room to the other side of the house. He showed me the mandatory "piano" room and explained that both his mother and grandmother enjoyed playing. He pulled me through a library packed with leather-bound editions of just about every classic novel the world had ever seen. He showed me the main bathroom downstairs; it rivaled the penthouse suite bathroom in any five star hotel in California, and, because I was a curious girl, I couldn't help but wonder if vampires even needed a bathroom?
Next, he showed me the rest of the rooms upstairs, including the oasis his parents called a bedroom. It was about the size of my mother's entire house, and probably included all the same amenities. Everything was cream, gold, burnished reds and oranges. It reminded me of the sunrise painting downstairs. Fresh flowers were in every room and spaced evenly along the hallway, so that the entire upper floor smelled of freesia. There was nothing in this home that wasn't meticulous and magnificent.
At the opposite end of the hallway from our room, Teren stopped in front of a closed, heavy-duty, white door. He softly knocked twice. A soft voice replied with something I couldn't make out through the thick door, and Teren gently opened it.
We walked into a spacious room with thick, beaded curtains covering every window. The air was perfumed, and light vibrated and danced by the dozen or so lit candles. I felt like tiptoeing into the near sanctuary of this quiet place. Teren's grandmother was sitting on a padded, antique rocking chair, knitting at lightning speed. She gently rocked herself as she knitted, and the odd mixture of her slow moving feet with her quicker-than-humanly-possible hands was causing some small part of my brain to melt, I was sure.
"Good morning, children." It was a little disconcerting, to be referred to as a child from someone who looked younger than me, but I ignored it and smiled politely at her.
"Good morning, Gran," Teren said. "I was just showing Emma the house."
Not stopping from her work, her young face beamed at her grandson. "That's good, dear. You could show her the ranch hand's home down the road as well, if you like? No one's staying there right now." She crooked a smile as she raised an eyebrow.
Teren coughed and looked around the room. "Yeah. Maybe we'll do that...later."
She stopped knitting for a moment and motioned to a plush chair beside her. "Have a seat."
Teren grabbed my hand as I was halfway to a seated position, and I straightened. "Maybe another time, Gran. I still have a lot to show Emma." He smiled at her as he started leading me away.
Imogen raised her lips slightly at the corners as she replied, "Yes, I suppose you do. We'll catch up this evening, I'm sure."
I waved goodbye as we exited her room, Teren shutting the heavy door behind him.
Knowing there was only one vampire we hadn't seen this morning, I hesitantly asked him, "So...where's Halina?"
Teren nodded at the floor. "Her rooms are in the basement levels."
"Oh. Will we be going down there?" I hoped my voice didn't betray my reluctance at that prospect. Entering her "lair" wasn't exactly an appealing thought to me.
Teren's expression turned thoughtful. "She tends to sleep through most of the day. Waking her up really isn't...a good idea."
"Oh...okay." I breathed the word in case she could hear it.
He laughed at my attempt to be quiet. "She's asleep right now. She's actually the only vampire who can't hear you. And she's a pretty solid sleeper once she's down, so you don't need to worry about waking her up."
I relaxed. "Oh," I said again, but at normal volume. "So, she's...nocturnal?"
He nodded, his eyes amused. "Yeah...it kind of goes with the whole vampire thing."
I twisted my lips and gave him a meaningful onceover. He laughed, understanding. "I'm mostly human, remember."
My mouth shifted into a wry smile. "Right. I don't know how I keep forgetting that. What about your mom and Imogen?"
Grabbing my hand, he started leading me back down one side of the dual staircase. "They are more human in that respect. They sleep at night and are awake during the day, although sometimes Gran will stay up all night with Great-Gran, and sleep during the day as well."
"Oh."
The thought of a vampire roaming the halls while I obliviously slept didn't sit well with me, but I kept my irrational fear of that from Teren. He would just say that I had nothing to worry about and that his family wouldn't eat me. I had the sudden thought that everyone was going to keep reassuring me that I wouldn't get eaten, right up until the day I did. Hopefully, I would at least get an "oops" or "sorry" before I was completely consumed.
He showed me around the side buildings that housed more guest rooms. I wasn't quite sure what they needed so many rooms for, maybe it just came with the spread, but there were two libraries, three offices, more bathrooms than I could count, a laundry room with the single largest washer and dryer I'd ever seen, an indoor greenhouse that smelled wonderfully of ripening tomatoes and made me damp with sweat before we left the room, a formal dining room that put the area by the kitchen to shame, and an informal lounging area with televisions, board games, a plethora of movies, including a slew of modern and classic vampire movies, which I found pretty amusing. There was even a three-hole putting green, because what self-respecting vampire doesn't like to practice their putt?
Really, all it needed was an indoor bowling alley, and I'd have been convinced that Teren's family was some sort of vampire royalty.
He ended the home tour by leading me to the courtyard out back. It took my breath away. The sun was approaching its zenith and its rays sparkled along the ripples of water in the Olympic-sized swimming pool basking below it. The entire family could swim laps and not bump into each other. A diving board on the far end indicated where the deep end was, and a few feet on the other side of that was the one thing I was actually really looking forward to...a hot tub-what looked like a twenty person hot tub, with jets everywhere and areas that conformed to a lying person's shape, so you could nearly nap in the slightly-below-boiling water.
Flat river rocks formed a patio, stretching from the glass wall of the living room, all the way around the pool and hot tub, to a large area behind that, where covered tables and lounge chairs rested in the sunshine before a barbecue grilling station. That huge grill swept up out of the river rock floor so naturally, that you'd expect to come across its twin while hiking in the Grand Tetons.
We walked across the flat stones while Teren pointed out various aspects of the land that we could see. The summit of Mount Diablo was positioned perfectly in the open area of the courtyard, creating a stunning backdrop for the already stunning view. These vampires sure knew how to pick a place.
On the far side of the patio were granite steps that led to a granite pathway. We followed the pathway to some outbuildings at the base of the hill where the main home sat. I looked back and marveled again at the gleaming red tiles, white stucco, and gray rocked beauty that was the Adams' family home. When we approached the buildings that stored the farm equipment, some motorcycles, four wheelers, and a couple of jeeps with oversized tires, I noticed Jack screwing a cap back on one of the bikes.
He looked up at the crunching sound of our approach. Walking into the sun, he squinted up at us and said, "Hey, Teren, Emma. I was just about to check out the cattle in the east pasture. You guys want to come along?"
Teren looked back at me, and I nodded eagerly. I'd lived in the city my entire life and had never seen a cow up close. Teren smiled and led me to one of the jeeps. His dad hopped on a bike and started it while we slipped into the open-topped vehicle. We started out after Jack, who was zipping along at a pretty decent pace. I supposed that if you live your whole life with someone who could cross a room faster than you could say vampire, you learned to be speedy where you could. We bounced along behind him on faint trails that I could just barely make out in the rolling hillside. Teren had a grin on his face and his blue eyes sparkled in the sunshine. Boys did love their toys.
We approached a long, white fence and slowed to park beside it. I could see a few cow heads poking up out of the amber grass and wondered if Teren could walk in there with them. Spike didn't seem to mind him, but surely a cow would have some innate sense of predacious danger and would run from him. But Teren followed his dad's lead and climbed the fence. He paused at the top and held his hand out to me. I gave him a wry look and scrambled up and over the fence by myself. He laughed once, then stood at the top of the suddenly narrow-looking fence and stepped off, landing the five feet to the ground as effortlessly as one steps off the front porch. Show off.
We walked among the cows. They didn't move much from munching on their meals, and certainly had no fear of Teren, who walked close by a few and even ran a hand along the back of one. I patted the head of another one. She looked up at me with huge, vacant brown eyes and I giggled. I'd never imagined a month ago, when I ran into Teren with my coffee, that the future would have me at a ranch petting cattle...with a vampire.
Jack inspected hooves or mouths or bellies of the beasts as we walked among them. I snuggled up to Teren's side as we strolled through the knee-high grass, watching for any fresh piles beneath us and listening for rattlers (I hate snakes). I looked around the pasture at the various brown and white cows, and then looked over to what I could see of the other pastures. I saw various bulks that must be more bovines, but nothing larger than that. I saw the building that must have been the ranch hand's house that Gran had mentioned, and beside it was an unmistakable building that could only be a massive barn.
"Are the horses in there?" I pointed over to the long building as Teren and I walked along.
Looking back at me, he shook his head. "No. We don't keep horses anymore."
I frowned. "That seems a little odd. Horses and ranches are kind of like peanut butter and jelly...they just go together."
He chuckled and kissed my head. "Are you hungry again?" I pinched his arm and he laughed again. "We had a hard time with them...falling ill, so we stopped bringing them in."
I eyed him suspiciously. "Falling ill?"
He kicked at a rock in the grass as we walked by it. His dad up ahead was busy digging something out of one of the cow's hooves. Teren sighed. "That's what the hired hands believed."
"And the truth would be...?"
He looked over at me. "Well, horses are more naturally spooked by us than the cows, so training them to overcome their fear was really more effort than it was worth, especially since we move faster than them anyway."
I nodded, thinking that was perfectly understandable, but then he continued, "And Great-Gran has a taste for them. We couldn't keep her away from the few we did manage to train. We just couldn't keep any alive for long..."
I stopped walking and stared at him, absorbing that. He stopped walking and shrugged. "After a few of those instances, we switched to bikes for the humans."