Ewan had been coming in and out of Lunar Cove for the last century, leaving without a word for weeks at a time, only to return on the first day of the school year with a pile of new books and absolutely no explanation. He was used to the town running on a general sense of chaos, used to catching up on the news and quietly filling out his disaster bingo card under the table while he sipped his coffee and pretended to be surprised by the events. Mostly, he was used to getting the hell out of town during the holiday season--any holiday season--because he was simply too old to deal with any of this anymore.

But even he had to admit this one was a real doozy. He stared at the damaged inn and scratched his head. "Hey," he said, stopping the first person to walk past him on the street. "Explain in ten words or less."

Ewan had been alive for so long, he sometimes thought he'd circled back around to being part of the living dead. He was walking on autopilot, barely able to remember what the point of, well, anything was anymore--and the fact that he literally couldn't feel a thing didn't help the spiritual numbness. But the one place he still came alive was the classroom. He might spend half his days with Ben, complaining about the woes of teaching the humanities in a STEM-focused world and fretting gloomily that history forgotten was repeating itself in real time, he really did love his students, and he loved his subject.

Vampire lessons, however, were a bit different than history lessons.

Today's "lesson" was just to beat him at poker. He fanned out his cards to check his hand. "Alright," he said. "Easy. You got this."

Ewan was several beers in when he finally left Bad Moon Brewery. Stumbling into the moonlit streets of Echo Acres, he'd taken only a few small steps before he saw a face that made him believe that maybe he really had found the limit of vampiric alcohol tolerance and was now hallucinating.