Just so you know, the little heart was Melissa’s idea, not mine.

Poor old vamp. He’s trying real hard to play for time here, but mortals are so impatient.

By the way, a reader asked recently why Melissa didn’t just stake the guy. It’s actually going to be a little while before the comic itself will be explaining what stakes do and don’t do, but for the curious, I’ll leave Melissa’s answer to the question here:

“Because I needed him coherent. Vampires are annoying little shits that way — you can shoot them multiple times, even in the head, and they’ll be fine in like minutes. Even shots to the head! Unless you get them in one of just a few very hard-to-hit places, they’ll bounce right back from it. But stakes are weird. First of all, occasionally they actually stay dead after you stake them, even if you take the stake back out. And when they do come back it’s on their own schedule, it might be minutes, it might be months, and for quite a while not a damn thing that comes out of their mouths will make sense. Fr. Castellanos speculated that the stake sends their souls wandering off to Purgatory, or to the outskirts of Hell or something. I dunno. All I know is you can’t stake a vamp and expect to get anything reliable out of them for a long-ass time afterward.”

::”The More You Know” starbursts across the night sky::