Alma Vampires

Providence Estate, New York

New Year's Eve

The tires of the limo crunch over the ice-coated pavement and I think of how death spares some more than others.

Why is that?

Are certain people born with the necessary luck to avoid it for decades? To never have to live through grief, or to lose someone and with them, a small piece of yourself you're never getting back. To be the ones that leave, rather than the ones left behind.

Or is death an oftentimes random by-product of our circumstances? Worst place at the worst time, but taken to an extreme. A wheel of fate you can only watch spin and spin until it comes to a stop on you. Or those near you.

Some days I wish I had the answer-even an inkling would surely feel more reassuring than the unknown. And other days, I'm resigned to accept I'm not lucky enough to be spared the pain and there's no point in wondering why.

Tonight is one of the latter days. How could it not be, when I'm sitting in my dead mother's limousine, with my dead mother's driver at the wheel, and headed to my dead mother's house for a party all my dead mother's acquaintances are going to attend?

Not that I find the timing insensitive, considering it's New Year's Eve-and not even death can stop the old year from bleeding into the new-but it is a little odd to be sitting in this borrowed vehicle under these circumstances. It's odd to be in borrowed clothes I couldn't have afforded two weeks ago. And it's odd to be grieving that woman as though she were ever mine at all.

Until two weeks ago, I didn't even know she existed beyond any abstract concept one might have of a mother who gives you away before you even form any memories. I never knew how it felt to call her Mom, or be cradled by her. I didn't know her name, or whether she was even alive. I sure as hell didn't know she sat at the top of an empire whose worth has so many zeros you'd lose count if you tried to recite them. And I could have never imagined that she'd arrange for any of that to be mine after her death.

Mine.

She left me everything.

Apparently.

That's what the lawyer that showed up at my dorm door in Icarus on the last day before winter break said after I asked him, Ane Aguirre? I don't know who that is.

Your mother, he said. Apparently.

My first impulse was to tell him he must have been mistaken. He had the wrong girl and the wrong door. Icarus is an Ivy League university, and the campus dorms are brimming with students who could wake up one day and find themselves in the situation I apparently was in. Wealthy dead relative and consequent large inheritance.

Certainly not me. The only family I've ever known was my foster parents, Manni and Linda Cepeda, a working-class elderly couple who took me in at the age of twelve. By the time I was eighteen and going off to college, a heart attack had already taken Manni. And by the end of freshman year, Linda's frail health had taken a turn and she left us too. Left me.

So clearly, the lawyer with the crisp hair and crisper suit couldn't be searching for me. I'd already lost the closest thing to a mother I'd ever known. I'd arranged her funeral and sat on that church pew with my chest filled with a heaviness that made it hard to breathe. But then the lawyer pulled a black-and-white picture out of the binder he'd been holding, showed it to me with an impatient sigh, and said, Do you want the money or not?

It was my picture.

And I don't remember asking him how he came into possession of it, or answering yes or no to his question. But the next thing I knew he was sitting down on one of the two chairs in my dorm, opening the binder again, and extracting the large stack of documents that brought me here, to the plush and shiny leather seat I keep shifting in.

So yup. Apparently, I know my biological mother's name now.

It's one attached to a public name, brand, and fortune. And it overall proves the point I was trying to make.

Even in luck, death refuses to spare those around me.

My thumb swipes one last time across the screen of my phone, reaching the bottom of the umpteenth article I've read about Ane Aguirre. It's filled with empty recycled words that don't say anything new, but they're all I have, so I continue to pore over them like they hide a key for something.

Eccentric and Reclusive Fashion Tycoon Dies in Boating Accident After Financial Scandal Is Tied to Her Name.

CEO and Founder of ALMA Killed in Boat Mishap, the Luxury Brand Faces Rocky Era Under Unknown Heir.

The Solitary Life of Ane Aguirre Culminates in Fatal Boat Incident, Surprise Successor Named.

Or a personal favorite, The Recluse, the Scandal, and the Secret Daughter Who Inherited the Poisoned Luxury House.