Café Sangue is a place. A place so unlike others it can barely be held down by adjectives to describe it—it just is. For starters, a quick Google search will tell you that Sangue is Italian for blood, which is an odd name for a place selling food and drinks. The owner claims it’s a funny little nod towards their other unorthodox trait: they are only open from dusk to dawn. Café Sangue is for the local vampires and night-crawlers (“insomniacs and night-shift workers”) who need a bit of a pick-me-up when no other comfortable place is open. A one-of-a-kind kind of place, that so happens to make some damn fine merchandise.

  Though not a vampire, Faiza is a bit of a regular. Once, the staff got concerned about her sleep schedule when she showed up so frequently, but she promised them that she had things under control, and it wasn’t their doing. On the contrary, Faiza had spent most of her adult life drifting about in her home with nothing to do while the world slept. She’d always been a night-owl, preferring the quiet of the moon to go about her business. Maybe it was the writer in her that preferred the pseudo-isolation of midnight to paint pictures of people and places far beyond reality. Or maybe her circadian rhythm was just fucked from the start. But when Café Sangue opened its doors, she finally had a place to go, to talk to people, and to get writing done beyond the walls of her too-familiar home. And to get some crumpets.

  She’s there every night, like clockwork. She knows all the staff, all the regulars, all the semi-regulars; she knows the menu by heart and the staff know her cravings by the look on her face; she has her space, a corner seat tucked just out of sight of the entrance but right where she can watch people come and go, with shelves of books both written by her and recommended by her. Café Sangue is known for a lot of things, and one of them is Faiza.

  So, when a new face walks into the doors after a glance at the welcome sign, Faiza is there to witness and observe.

  The bells emit their soft chime as a door opens, and both Faiza and one of the baristas are already looking over to see who it is. It’s a stranger, a woman with an imposing figure cut beneath the fancy red-soled stilettos and the maroon pantsuit, her shoulders broadened by the black coat lazing over them. Her hair is tied up into a knot, but Faiza can see the unruly curls spilling out in a way that only adds an air of casual elegance, like she had meant to make it look that way. Perhaps she did. Her bronze skin glows under the soft light of the café’s lamps and fairy lights.

  Saffron greets her with a smile as he takes up post beside the register. “Hello, welcome to Café Sangue.”

  The woman peruses the menu posted behind him. The chalkboard is covered in all sorts of colors and handwriting, but the owner only allows those who have legible writing to contribute. Faiza has had the pleasure of adding to the milkshake menu, and her work still proudly displays all the offered flavors in neon pink. Though it’s technically a café, Sangue has a working restaurant-grade kitchen in the back along with a bakery and creamery for the sweets, each staffed with amazing chefs. Faiza isn’t sure how they can afford all that, but they haven’t gone under yet, so she won’t complain and will keep giving them her money.

  Faiza jolts out of her thoughts at the sound of a silky-smooth voice. “Sangue is an interesting name for a place like this.”

  He’s heard this a thousand times already, mainly because of Faiza, so Saffron only smiles and shrugs. “Boss thinks he’s funny, and it’s good for business. Makes people talk.”

  “That it does.” Eventually, the woman makes her order and Saffron gets to work. Faiza watches as the woman moves to the side to wait for her order, straining to see if she can get a glimpse of her name from the cup that Saffron is steadily filling with coffee. Alas, from this distance, she can’t get a good look and gives up when the coffee and bag of sweets are handed over. She goes back to her laptop and wiggles her fingers over the keys, willing them to work with her on this latest chapter. No luck.

  “It’s Estela.” Faiza startles and looks up to see the woman looming over her, a knowing smile pulling at her lips. “You were trying to see my name.”

  Fuck. “No, I—” Faiza sighs and flicks her fingers. “Fine, yes. I was curious.” Nothing more, nothing less. It’s natural for people to be curious about intruders in their usual haunts.

  She thinks that’s the end of it, but the woman apparently takes that as in invite to sit down across from Faiza, and her eyes—a rich mahogany brown framed with sharp winged liner—scan the empty cup sitting off to the side. “Fay-za, then?”

  “Fai-za,” she corrects, more than a bit irritated. She normally says it before people can read and mispronounce it, but the woman—Estela—has her rattled for reasons beyond comprehension. “Like eye.”

  Estela hums and drops her chin onto laced fingers. Her full attention is on Faiza, and it’s unsettling. “A beautiful name, but I quite like Fae for you.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t.” Faiza attempts to block her out with her laptop screen, but her sly eyes peek just over it and continue to stare. “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed or not, but I’m human.” It’s a stupid and absurd comment, but Faiza can only think of the supernatural counterpart of the nickname, and how it feels like that’s what Estela is meaning.

  And, as expected, those eyes squint with humor. “Oh, I’ve noticed. You blush too much to truly be fae. It’s cute.”

  Faiza decidedly does not flush red and resolutely keeps her stare on the blinking cursor. It mocks her with the last words being, blushes and moans. “If you don’t mind, I have work to do, and your food will get cold if you keep talking to me.”

  “Of course.” Estela rises, taking her coffee and bag of sweets with her. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Fae.”

  It’s a miracle that Faiza doesn’t throw a fork at her retreating back.

  **

  “Hello, Fae.”

  “Fuck off, Estela.”

  The woman does not, in fact, fuck off and instead takes a seat across from Faiza again. This time she has a flask that she takes a sip out of, but no scent of alcohol leaves her lips as she sighs. Another fancy outfit, another perfectly imperfect updo. “What are you writing?” she asks, as if Faiza hadn’t said anything at all. And, damn it all, it’s the perfect question because she can’t resist gushing about her stories and the fictional characters in them.

  “My latest book,” Faiza says, lowering the screen so that she can face Estela without cowering behind the shield. It’s a little daunting, with how intense Estela’s attention is, but she works through it by thinking of her work. Gesturing to the shelf closest to them, she continues, “I’m an author, mainly an author of fiction, and I’ve been working on a series of standalone but interconnected books that all center around supernatural romances. This one is the second in that series, and it’s centered around vampires. The first was werewolves, and not the cliché type, I promise.”

  Estela gives her that gentle but amused uptilt of her lips, the most of a smile that she seems to ever give but works anyway. “I wasn’t worried. So, vampires? What made you choose them as your next adventure into the supernatural?”

  Oh, she just unlocked a rant. Faiza fully closes her laptop and her hands start flying along with her words. “They’re the romanticization of danger, right? Death, undeath, whatever, but they’re dangerous. Seductive. They literally feast on blood and stories have been told for ages that they kill their prey. But people still want to fuck them, still want to believe that they can be the sole provider of sustenance to these predators, to have their full attention on just them and be worshiped by something otherworldly. It’s, like, dancing with the devil almost. People by nature want to tangle with a bit of danger even if it means the end.”

  She pauses to take a breath, and Estela takes that opening to smoothly cut in, “I thought they were the personification of endless greed and hunger.”

  “They are,” Faiza allows, “but in a lot of modern interpretations, they can go one way or another. Either you have the big bad vampires that want to kill everything, or you have the vampires that just want to survive. And people love both of those ideas, so I wanted to play with that. Present a character that is, objectively, a monstrous being but has a hidden depth, and neither conquers the human nor gets conquered. They just exist as a vampire and happen to have a human partner in the end. An anti-hero, I guess.”

  Estela hums and picks up her flask, swirling it around as she considers Faiza’s rant. After she takes a quick sip of it, she wipes her lips clean and says, “I’d read it. And, if I may be so bold, it almost sounds like something you would like to play around with.” Though it’s exactly what Faiza had said before, the emphasis and the added hooded look twists it into something much more personal, and her heart kicks up a beat against her will. Estela’s gaze flicks to the side for just a moment, quick enough that Faiza is sure she imagined it landing on her neck, before it continues to stare down her soul.

  “I—I just said that,” she stutters. If she’s blushing, she refuses to admit it. “Plot-wise, it’s an interesting trope to mess with, and I’m excited to see how it unfolds.”

  “You’re the author,” Estela points out, then takes another sip, “Surely you know how it ends.”

  No, no she doesn’t. The thing with being a writer is that characters take their own paths, and even intended endings feel much different on the page than they do in floating thoughts and intentions, especially when Faiza has no experience to draw from. Obviously, she’s never been in love with a vampire before, so she has no idea the logistics of a relationship like that. Most of her past girlfriends hadn’t been so keen on her either, so the idea of total devotion is foreign. But, the art of writing is the art of bullshitting, and she’s gotten werewolves published, so she has hope for this next one.

  Faiza shakes her head and opens her laptop again. “I can’t be sure until I get there. No experience, either, so not like I can predict how things will end up or how they’ll go.”

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Mm.” Something in the tone of Estela’s hum makes Faiza glance up again at her, and those mahogany eyes are surveying her. “Would you like experience?”

  Idiot. Dunce. Moron. Absolutely fucked in the head. All those words accurately describe Faiza when she stupidly blurts out, “Are you a vampire?”

  But Estela only gives her close-lipped smile and raises her flask in salute before standing. “See you tomorrow, Fae, and good luck on the writing.”

  **

  Now that the idea is in her head, Faiza can’t get rid of it. Estela is ethereal, elegance incarnated with every step she takes and every blink of an eye. She comes by Café Sangue every night, almost exactly once the sun is fully set and not a moment before. Every day, she sits with Faiza and incites a conversation that always leaves Faiza rattled and off-balance before slipping away into the night. Looking her up proves no results, not even a stray obituary on a poorly made sham site. She is a beautiful midnight ghost, one that drifts in and out of Faiza’s life just enough to leave her wobbling.

  Her book, consequently, suffers. Focusing on that has become second to pinning down Estela’s nature. Saffron and the other workers humor her pestering questions, but even they have unhelpful and dodgy answers. If the supernatural is real—something Faiza never had a doubt about—then there is a good likelihood that Café Sangue is a beacon of community for them. It literally says so in the name.

  Estela is also useless, of course. Faiza starts ordering garlicy foods to see if the woman avoids her table, but all she does is smile that stupid smile and politely refuse any offerings to share with the excuse of not liking the taste of garlic. Testing the invitation theory is a bit difficult, but she has noticed that Estela always glances at the welcome sign before coming in, so either it’s a force of habit or the roundabout way of getting permission to enter the café.

  It's infuriating—the unknowing. Faiza likes knowing, likes being the one to hold all the information. Maybe it’s a curse of authorship. She’s always the god of her puppets, orchestrating a rich performance of strings and scripts and props so often that she forgets that normal people are not the omniscient of their world. Faiza also holds the theory that Estela knows this fact about her and is using it against her by being deliberately obtuse and vague. Her secret is not a secret to hold beyond the grave, but just one to hold above Faiza’s head out of sadistic glee.

  She doesn’t remember ever agreeing to this game, but then again, she had been the one to initiate it in the first place. It makes the not-knowing even worse. What kind of game master doesn’t know everything about their own pawns?

  Her face twisting up in annoyance, Faiza rather angrily sips at her coffee and stares out the café window. Twilight is upon them, painting the world and just-opening café in an overlay mirage of pinks and purples and a soft flush of marigold. In the serene silence of opening hour, Faiza’s braided curls clack against one another from the wooden beads interspersed through the thick braids, each one painted by her own shaky hand, though the tightly wound knot she had made with the top of her hair stays as immobile as she wants it to—unlike Estela’s effortlessly perfect messy bun always hanging on the threat of coming undone. One point to Faiza. She refuses to think about the full imaginary scoreboard. Especially when she spots the tall figure of Estela.

  The woman stops to chat with Saffron, and two other people walk in behind her, their nerves palpable as they find a place to sit. Faiza gives up the illusion of productivity and closes her already asleep laptop, splitting her attention between the newcomers and the infuriating anomaly of a possible vampire. The former are slightly more entertaining in that they’re unfamiliar and obviously already having a moment, while the latter accepts a small stash of goods and makes her way to her usual seat.

  Her head is cocked and her eyes are on the newcomers when Estela slides into the seat across from her. They sit in extended silence for a moment, with Estela shuffling things about as she waits for Faiza to make a cutting greeting like usual. For once, she’s the one to break routine.

  “I think they’re on a date.”

  Estela glances over, black-lined eyes studying the duo with a mix of intrigue and possibly boredom. Seems her amusement strictly comes from annoying the shit out of Faiza. Vampire of irritation, Faiza thinks, drinks up anger and upset instead of blood.

  “I think you might be right. Eat.”

  Faiza curls her nose at the demand and opens her mouth to air out her displeasure, but the words die on her tongue when she catches sight of what Estela had been doing. Crumpets—Faiza’s favorite—sit in a neat pile in front of her, while a small assortment of other sweets and baked goods are arranged between them in a sort of shared spread. The only item directly in front of Estela is the donut in her manicured hands, too pretty for the glazed topping that cracks beneath her grip. Unfortunately bought by crumpets of all things, Faiza takes one and eats it. But she doesn’t quite give up on her people watching, either.

  She hears Estela’s noise of discontent when she looks back over at the couple, but she doesn’t exactly find it in herself to care. The couple, barely a few minutes into the date, already seem to be at odds with one another. She flashes a grin at Estela and says, “Five bucks says it’ll flop and end in one of them screaming at the other.”

  Another noise, though Estela seems to reluctantly humor Faiza’s attention of the day that doesn’t involve her. “Give it time. Not all first dates that end poorly turn into a failed relationship.”

  Faiza rolls her eyes and unashamedly watches the woman cover up a look of horror at whatever the man is saying. Oh, this is too good. “Please, you can’t possibly believe that first impressions aren’t important. You fuck up at the beginning, then you’re going to fuck up every other point, so why bother?”

  Estela falls silent at that, and Faiza thinks she’s won. It should feel good—and triumph does glitter in her chest—but there’s a heavy weight pulling her down that she can’t quite place. Even still, she happily digs into her gifted crumpets and watches the disaster unfold second by second. The man makes an expansive gesture, then a rather condescending one towards the woman, and there’s a flicker of distaste in even Estela’s rather stoic expression. Faiza takes a moment to wonder if Estela has vampiric hearing and can understand what’s going on in a way that she can’t.

  “You didn’t like me.” The words startle and confuse her enough to draw her attention away from the couple. Estela sends a significant look Faiza’s way, and there’s a ghost of a smile on her lips, and it’s a bit like disappointment and challenge all in one. “Initial dislike doesn’t always equate eternal dislike. Merely a clash of… strong personalities. Sometimes.” Her eyes dart back to the couple as their voices raise a fraction, but she doesn’t continue.

  Faiza crosses her arms and levels a disbelieving look on the woman. “I still don’t like you,” she challenges back. It feels oddly like a lie and a truth mixed into one complicated bag.

  There’s silence between them that sits heavier than the muted triumph did. Estela doesn’t respond, only nods over to the couple. Faiza tears her gaze away from the woman to see that the duo have indeed gotten louder, but the woman is—smiling? The man is gesturing wildly again, but there’s a spark of genuine joy in the woman’s gaze, and the man also seems to be smiling as he speaks. Faiza’s mouth imitates that of a fish as she searches for words. Hardly any time had passed, what changed?

  Estela nudges the crumpets closer to Faiza when she continues to fail to come up with a rebuttal. “Sometimes it takes a little bit of understanding. He’s passionate, and it spooked her at first. Just give things a moment before passing judgement, hm?”

  Faiza glowers down at the offering and considers snubbing it out of spite. It feels awfully like personal advice, and she’d rather not think about that. They aren’t friends, they aren’t on a date, they aren’t anything—just an author and a potentially vampiric headache. Still, watching the couple isn’t nearly as fun with Estela injecting herself underneath Faiza’s attention. “You can hear them?”

  Estela shrugs, but finally smiles down at Faiza. “Yes. Add that to your mental notebook.”

  Oh, she absolutely will.

  **

  “Are you religious?” Estela asks one day as she sits in her usual seat. Faiza plays with the cross around her neck and makes some sort of noncommittal response. “Never thought you the sort. You remind me more of a believer in everything, and thus a believer in nothing.”

  That’s not where Faiza thought today’s conversation would go. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  It’s coffee this time, and cookies that get wordlessly split between the two of them. Estela considers the steaming cup in her hand. The bronze coloring makes it hard to parse out if she’s deprived of sun or not. “I mean that, your faith in anything being possible makes it utterly impossible to stick to one specific human faith. I’ve looked into a few of your books, and you dabble in quite a few beliefs without much favoring. You believing in just one God is… odd, to say the least. Out of character, if you will.” Estela’s smile is dashing and lopsided, her one tell that she’s making a joke and making sure it lands. Faiza likes it far too much.

  “Ha ha,” she says, instead of voicing the warm butterflies in her stomach at being so weirdly known. Lying feels like an affront to whatever hangs between them, though, so she admits, “I got it from a friend, don’t know if I like it or not as an accessory. Was just trying it out.”

  Another scrutinizing stare, and after so many Faiza has started to become—not immune, per se, but used to it. It’s less unsettling and more of a warmth in her chest at being seen. “Well, I think it doesn’t suit you. It’s a falsehood, and you’re no good at those, just—”

  Faiza rolls her eyes and interrupts, “Just like the fae, I know. This nickname of yours is kinda infuriating, just so you know. It’s not even how you say my full name.”

  Estela lifts a shoulder and picks up a cookie to hand it over in a silent offering, one that Faiza can’t resist. “It suits you better than a cross chained around your throat does. Besides, you like it. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t answer to it.”

  Another eye roll to distract from the heat flaming over her face. “Whatever. So, you really aren’t bothered by the cross at all? Personally, not just how it fits me or whatever?” Estela has a gift for dancing around truths and taking advantage of wording, and Faiza is determined to get to the bottom of her private investigation.

  In answer, Estela reaches out and touches the cross. The backs of her fingers ghost over Faiza’s skin, and they’re cold, but not unbearably so. A bit of body heat or a warm coffee would warm them in no time. Faiza’s breath shallows as Estela studies the cross, then gently yanks. The thin chain breaks, but Faiza doesn’t care. She’s never worn it before and never will again.

  “Faith is tricky,” Estela says, setting the cross down onto the table with an elegant gentleness that is just so perfectly her. “Everyone has their own thoughts. But no, I’m not bothered by it.”

  That had been her last resort, but Faiza is resilient, and maybe even a bit of a masochist. When Estela starts to move like she’s about to leave, Faiza reaches out and grabs her wrist to stop her. The woman glances up at that, no hint of being displeased by the delay. “Would you… You always leave so early,” Faiza says. An author, but can’t find the words to ask a pretty woman to stay and hang out with her.

  Estela, though, always knows what lies beyond Faiza’s spoken words. She settles back down and leans across the table. “What would you have me do?”

  Stay with me. Keep knowing me. But she can’t say any of that, so Faiza frantically searches for some kind of thing to say. Her eyes catch the gleaming moon, a softer and gentler counterpart to the hidden star in the sky, and she gets an idea. Estela, with her equally as soft and subtle smile, waits with unwavering patience. Faiza meets her stare and says, “Grin at the sun.”

  She means later, means to make the woman stay with her until sunrise on that excuse and flimsy grasp at proving herself right. But Estela is never a predictable creature, even with her drink orders, and Faiza should’ve known better than to expect the supposedly only answer to her demand.

  Across from her, Faiza sits stock-still with delight and that otherworldly chill of trepidation as she watches Estela sit back and grin at her—with fangs gleaming in the moonlight.