by Atha, DL
“I don’t owe you any explanations. But if it makes you feel better to know, I was asleep. I usually work the night shift so I make it a point to not hear doorbells from pesky people who don’t care about my work schedule.”
“Ms. Creed, you were supposed to be at work at six tonight, but you didn’t show.” He let his words sink in. I couldn’t keep the look of surprise off of my face. In my vampire angst, I’d completely forgotten about work, and it was a big deal. “In the doctor world, that’s called patient abandonment and if anyone wants to push it, you could find yourself in some hot water with the state medical board,” he added.
He’d found an angle and was pushing the point as far as he could take it. “I called the chief of staff of the hospital to find out a little more about you. He was happy to talk about you. Pretty pissed, you not showing up and all. Seems like that sort of behavior just doesn’t fly, and I don’t think he’s going to let it slide so easy once I got finished filling him in on the chain of events out here. You are planning on going back to work, right? Of course, I guess it’s hard to return to a normal work schedule after staking men and burying them and all the weird crap you’ve been up to the last few days. Wandering around in the dark, looking for left‐behind weapons from your latest crime and things like that. But I suggest you be available when I want to talk to you. Understand what I’m saying, Ms. Creed?” he asked as he closed the distance between us.
“That’s Dr. Creed to you, and you better get what I’m saying Detective. You’ve got nothing. Those footprints, if they are mine, don’t prove anything except that I’ve been hiking. You don’t even have the shoes that you think made those prints. And your so‐ called ‘tracking ability’ would never hold up in court. And if anyone believed your ridiculous story, you’d already have a warrant and be searching my place, and that ‘stake’ you’re holding would be in the state crime lab. Not out here in your bat‐ shit crazy hands. But you don’t have a search warrant. Truth is, you wasted your only shot with a warrant on me a couple days back. Now I know you’re a big shot in that one‐horse town, but you can only push old favors so far before the judge starts to worry about his rep. It’s hard to keep risking it on nothing more than crazy theories. Isn’t that right, Detective? But you tried, didn’t you? But you just can’t get crazy separated from your name down at the station, huh?”
His face fell for the second time. So they really are calling him crazy, I thought. I guess I’d found the kryptonite because Superman had lost his composure. I’ll give him credit for regaining it quickly though. He was looking confident again in a matter of seconds.
“And I’ll keep trying, ma’am. It’s just a matter of time, and I’ll have everything I need,” the detective replied as he turned on his heel. He shook his index finger at me as he did so. The movement only fanned the scent of his body towards me more.
Was he a madman? Couldn’t he feel my loss of control heading towards him like a freight train?
“Kill him!” Asa screamed a demon’s cry in my brain. “He is a liability!”
I was losing control. The hallucinations were back, and I could hear Asa’s voice in my ear, and truth be told, he was speaking logic. Like the rare schizophrenic whose pathologic auditory hallucinations actually make sense.
Somehow, Rumsfield remained oblivious. He just kept talking. Like a dog with a worn‐out bone.
It was a few miles to the highway that bisected the forest. He walked away briskly, heading north; I supposed his vehicle was parked somewhere up ahead. He made it a few feet before he stopped in mid‐step, fine hairs beginning to rise up on the back of his neck. His diaphragm drew a breath in a sharp jerk and then slowed down to suck the air in slowly in the reaction of dread, each movement exaggerated by the innate knowledge that the slightest movement could be his final one. It was an age‐old reaction of the prey. To lie still, blend in, bring no attention to oneself.
Finally, the reaction I’d been expecting. My instincts and Asa were begging me to kill him. He was a danger to me. A threat to Ellie. He stood between me and any chance I might have of living a halfway normal life with my daughter.
How simple it would be to end him and his endless questions. How easy he would die. I could bury his body so deep that it would never be found. Maybe I’d be a top suspect, but what did it matter? No one could prove anything. In the end, Rumsfield would be remembered as a good detective, but one who had finally been destroyed by the stress of the job. He’d let a case get to him—a missing person that would never be found.
“Eventually, he will only be your memory because everyone else will have died,” Asa said. “And you will not remember him as any of those things. Only as your first kill. Your first taste of human blood and the first of many. He will remain special in that way alone,” Asa’s voice seemed real now. So embodied and full. I looked to my left and found him standing there. “Kill him,” he urged.
“He’s not real. He’s using your own thoughts against you,” the logical part of my brain tried to reason with the portion that wanted Rumsfield dead. The battle seemed lost, but still I kept fighting. I forced the air out of my lungs and closed my eyes so I couldn’t see the fear-paralyzed form of Rumsfield.
When I opened them again, I was staring directly into Rumsfield’s dilated gaze. I realized then that I’d followed him and jerked him around to face me without me even recognizing that I’d moved.
All seemed lost. My future, my daughter. Everything that I held dear evaporated like a hazy mist in early morning.
Rumsfield staggered backwards, struggling to pull himself from my hands. He was a tall man, towering above me, but now in my grasp, he looked small. I pulled him towards me, the momentum lifting him momentarily off his feet. My fangs cut into my tongue. All was definitely lost. I wouldn’t have given a plug nickel for his life at that minute.
And with some inner strength that I hadn’t recognized in him, he found his voice. “For God’s sake, Annalice.” His voice cracked on my name. Sensing the seriousness of the danger, his training had kicked in. He tried to make some type of connection with me—a human connection.
I’m not exactly sure what saved him. Certainly not my self‐
control or my lack of thirst. Maybe he survived because of expectations that had been pre‐destined by my ancestors for the last two centuries. I’d been raised to be a good girl, a southern female curse that we pass from one generation to the next. We’re brought up to be kind to a fault, helpful to the point of hurting ourselves. Ever apologizing for things that are out of our control, and I was still, at least in part, the woman I’d been raised to be. Or maybe, whether you’re human or not, you don’t become a killer overnight. But I made no mistake in believing that it had anything to do with any shreds of my own humanity. If I had any left, they were only fragments borrowed from my mother and daughter—a leftover code from a bygone era.
Either way, he was likely as surprised as I was when I gave him a shove and shouted, “Leave!” There was a moment’s hesitation before he took a halting step backwards and finally flew away from my hands and into the darkness. I closed my eyes, hoping that the old saying “out of sight, out of mind” held true.
I didn’t watch the detective disappear into the woods. I’d already spun on my heels and streaked away into the protective cover of the forest. Thinking of the event later on that night, I realized that I should have waited for him to make it to his parked car before I sprinted out of sight, but I’d wanted to put as much distance between me and his fear‐tainted, delicious bloodstream as possible. My only salvation was that he’d probably been too frightened to stop and see the inhuman speed at which I had fled.
Moments later, I made it back to the spot where I’d staked Asa, and in the distance, I heard the roar of his patrol car and the bump of his tires on the potholed county road as he drove back towards town. He was out of sight, but he was not out of mind. I could think of nothing but him as I walked back towards my home.
Chapter 6
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It was four a.m. when I stepped out of the shower. Almost forty-eight hours had passed since I had staked Asa. His death was my way of marking time. A sick way but so far, it had made sense. The wall clock’s chimes had reverberated through the house, and I’d listened and cringed when I heard my mom stir a few rooms down. I waited, my breath held, as though I were still human until she rolled over and her breathing had returned to a deeper rhythm.
I’d come to clean up, wash the forest and rain from my skin and change clothes. And as badly as I wanted to stay here, spend the day in my own bed, I knew that could never happen. I couldn’t risk sleeping anywhere Rumsfield could find me, and so, after pulling on a fresh T‐shirt and clean jeans, I soundlessly slipped into Ellie’s room, kissed her forehead and left out the back door.
The yard was heavily dewed, and I regretted that I hadn’t put on my mud boots as I walked in the direction of the pasture. The wet grass seeped water into my shoes, and I clicked my tongue at my stupidity, hoping vampires didn’t get athlete’s foot. I’d be spending my day, asleep, with wet feet.
Two nights previous, when Asa and I had left on our hunting trip and I’d died as a human, we’d crossed through the field behind my house. His smell had hovered on the air as we did so, and I suspected then that his hiding place must have been somewhere in my own pasture. Since I couldn’t sleep in my own house, my plan was to sleep wherever Asa had spent the daylight hours. He’d managed to stay out of humans’ reach during the day for over a century and a half, so I doubted I could do any better.
Still I was dread‐filled at the thought of entering Asa’s hiding spot as I leapt the barbed wire fence that separated the yard from the pasture. My emotions were mixed. He’d been a bastard and a murderer. Regardless, I found myself missing him in some ways over the last night.
Two days ago, I’d craved some human companionship, and now, I craved something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I can’t say I craved a vampire specifically, but I did crave something, someone to talk to maybe or just to tell me how to be. It was like I was going through puberty all over again without the benefit of someone a few years older to tell me what to expect.
I followed Asa’s scent, now mine as well, until I found the strongest point. The scent coincided with a small knoll in the pasture that eventually flattened back out near the fence line. I surveyed the ground but saw nothing I recognized as out of the ordinary. I’d crossed this same spot a thousand times while catching horses or taking a hike with Ellie.
Tonight, the horses had moved to the back of the field, wanting to be as far from me as possible. The cows had taken their lead and were trying to make themselves inconspicuous among the sleek, taller bodies of the horses. The gentle swell of the knoll drifted away towards the edges of the national forest that bordered my property. The rye grass waved gently, the green fluorescing in the moonlight. In the west corner, I could see a piece of fence that needed mending. A tree had fallen six months back and had taken the top strand of wire down. Along the eastern border, pine trees rocked in the breeze.
But nothing stood out or screamed, “This is where the monster slept.’ Still, I could smell Asa. His scent floated on the air, coming and going like he did every night of that last week I’d been human. I whistled through my teeth in frustration as I walked away from the spot and then back towards it when his scent got weaker. Following a spiral, I worked my way out and then back in again. But still nothing. I studied the ground and finally the trees out of sheer desperation.
“Even in death, I make a fool of you,” Asa whispered. His voice sounded so real, and for a slightly too hopeful moment, I looked around for him. Of course, he wasn’t here. I’d killed him, shoved a stake through his heart, and siphoned his blood out so I could live and have a life with my daughter. I’m alive and Asa is dead, I reminded myself. He can’t hurt me now.
I returned to scouting the surroundings and tried to ignore the feeling of unease that had settled into the pit of my stomach. Maybe Asa had just traveled through here many times and that was why I could still smell him. His hiding spot was probably miles from here, and I was wasting my time, I argued with myself.
But I continued to search. What else could I do? My internal clock was raging in the background. I only had about an hour left till dawn, and I needed a place to go. If only I hadn’t made such fun of Rumsfield. I could sleep in my own bed, I thought. But that bridge was a pile of embers. I could see the proverbial smoke from where I was standing.
I was giving up and turning towards the barn to sleep buried in the hay when my eyes caught again on an outcropping of rock that seemed, on my one hundredth glance, too planned. The stones were well hidden in the dead space between two ancient oaks, the branches of which had intertwined in a battle of wills over the years. The tree on the left was winning as the other tree was forced to drop armfuls of bark onto the ground as it lost the struggle. It was in the roots of the left tree that I could just make out a corner edge of an old and decaying structure.
I approached it slowly, pushing past the overgrown bushes that obscured it. The visible edge was about six inches tall and built of rectangular shaped rocks held together by mud. It disappeared into the ground as the knoll lifted higher in elevation. I traced the roofline down with my hands until I could feel the fibers of a door recessed into the hill.
A forgotten root cellar, I realized as I felt the door through the vinery that had grown down across the entryway over the years. I started to rip the years of overgrowth down, my fingers closing around thick grapevine and the sharp thorns of blackberry brambles, when I realized Asa must have left it hidden for a reason—a reason that I now needed as much as he had. Sliding to the side, I let the thorns and branches scratch across my body as I crawled as close to the rock wall as I could. Blood welled up on my arms and face, but I paid the scratches no attention. They healed almost as quickly as they had occurred.
During the two years that Ellie and I had lived here, we’d never found the root cellar, although we’d both spent hours in this field riding horses, looking for arrowheads, and any other activity I could think of to keep us out of the house. Over the last week that Asa had been with me, I’d agonized over where he could be hiding. The answer had been only a few hundred feet away from where I’d waited for him each night.
The wood was soft in my hands as I pushed the door open, but it held together, screeching as it scraped on the earthen floor. The smell of my maker rushed up to meet me in such thickness that my nostrils burned. More thorns tore at me, welling blood up on my skin, but I brushed them away absentmindedly as I crossed the threshold.
The door opened into a small room about ten feet by ten feet. It was old. Older than the house even. By looking at the stone walls held together by hand‐mixed mortar, I would have estimated it to have been built well over a century ago. The rock walls still held back the dirt except in a few places where the stones had been spat out by the occasional groanings of the earth since the cellar had been built. Here the wall bulged forward slightly, a moist and cool reminder that I stood a good eight feet below ground level. As a human, I’d been somewhat claustrophobic, but now, this cellar felt comfortable. Safe. Even Asa’s scent brought me more peace than it should have.
The corners of the room were littered with petrified droppings of the nocturnal animals that had made their dens in here over the years, and cobwebs, thick like curtains, draped the walls. Years of moss, accumulated on the rocks, shone green and moist. A stale odor of the onions and potatoes that the cellar had once housed rose from the floor and laced the air, but I could smell no lingering scent of any humans.
I doubted if any living man or woman had crossed the threshold in several decades, so it was easy to understand why Asa had chosen it. Human eyes would be unlikely to see its ancient outlines deeply embedded into the dirt, and it was even more doubtful that any human who’d known of its presence still lived.
Leaned up in one corner was a rotting corn stalk broom, in anothe
r, a pile of rancid blankets, and in the far back corner stood the swaybacked remnants of an old iron bedframe. Yellowed feathers from the mattress ticking lay trapped in the cobwebs of time. All items from another era, but across one bedpost was slung a modern‐looking leather bag, and although the leather was worn smooth, it stuck out like a sore thumb amongst the other relics.
The bedframe hadn’t been suitable for sleeping in generations, so squatting down on the uneven dirt floor, I ran my hands under the frame, my fingers falling into a packed depression where Asa’s body had lain day after day. To the left of the frame, the dirt had been thrown where he’d dug down deeper into the ground to hide from the coming sun. Like vermin, I thought, and overwhelmed by anger, I tore the packed dirt from the hole. In handfuls, I flung it behind me, spraying the walls and the ceiling as I did everything in my power to rip all traces of him from the ground. Finally, I came to hard‐packed clay and rock which broke even my hard vampire nails. Fingers dripping large drops of blood, I rocked back on my heels crying and beat the ground around me. I could tear the impression of his body from the ground but not from my life.
I cried then, not the light weeping that I’d done when I put Ellie to bed, but deep chest‐racking sobs; my vision going ruddy as I faced the reality of just how close he’d been to me. “I could have killed him,” I said out loud to myself, “if I had …”
I could have finished that thought in so many different ways. If I’d only known. Or if I’d only been brave enough to walk out my door and search. If only I’d realized sooner. If only I’d gotten an apartment in town. There were so many “if onlys,” and I’d missed each one of them.
