The stories varied depending on who you asked and how much they'd had to drink at the time you asked them. The most popular version insisted that the whole thing had been a big scam straight from the get-go. A local real estate developer had sold fifty percent shares of the new strip mall to a dozen different investors and then vanished into the night. A common variation suggested that the mall had been sold as being ten times larger than it had turned out to be. At the whimsical end of the spectrum, there were those who were sure the original builder had gone out to the Burning Man festival and caught religion from the Hare Krishnas and just never came back.

No matter which story you believed, the little mall had never opened for business and the various lawyers had stripped all of the value out of the potential lawsuits years ago. The land and the buildings, getting a little shabby now and located just off the interstate where the exit never did get built, were available for the price of the back taxes and an ecological survey to guarantee that the existing drainage ditch was sufficient to handle the runoff from the parking lot -- which was cracked and stippled with weed forcing their way through the cheap blacktop.

The White Pines Mall consisted of a bank building with a single-lane drive-through teller and a row of five storefronts across the parking lot from the bank. The derelict bank vault made an excellent safe room, and she sealed it shut, relying instead on the ventilation vents to come and go in her mist form at dawn and dusk. Her coffin lay within, in perpetual night, and she added small luxuries such as a guitar and several sculptures she liked to explore by touch.

To distract attention, she turned the rest of the bank building into a coffee shop with a drive-through window for those in a hurry. It didn't make a dime of profit, selling high-end Joe at a dollar a cup and staffed by pretty baristas, but it didn't need to. In two centuries of unnatural life, she had amassed fortunes to spare.

Similarly, the storefronts could run at an appalling loss and she leased the space at very favorable rates to colorful characters with unique ideas about how to run a business: A comic book store that sold and staged role-playing games, an antique documents store, a spice emporium, a musical instrument store, and a seamstress experimenting with her own ideas about haute couture to round out the community. Most of these businesses could not have survived six months in the real world, but she enjoyed their company and the flavor of the customers they attracted. She not only undercharged them in rent, she also took a silent partner interest in their business plans and to their universal thanks, took away the accounting tasks, and kept them well hidden from outside eyes.

As hoped, the exotic nature of the stores encouraged a regular clientele of fringe characters to stop by, many unlikely to be missed. Not that she abused the local population. She could live quite happily for days, even weeks at a time with a nightly sip from the veins of a semi willing servitor. But once every lunar cycle her metabolism required the life's blood and the actual death of a true victim.

These feedings she took outside her new home town, researching a suitable target each month, carefully selecting someone she felt deserved to die: A monster in his own rights (she targeted only men) -- a murderer, a rapist, a child molester. It was horrifying how many there were in any middle-class community, easy to find with simple social media searches. Hundreds of thousands within a day's travel.