by Atha, DL
He’d also had a business card, I remembered suddenly. I’d forgotten about it after I stuffed it down in one of my pockets. “You had a business card with a phone number on it in your bag. Whose was it?” I questioned him. I hadn’t changed clothes since then, and I pulled the card from my back pocket. It was still slightly damp from where I’d swam the river the other day, the ink smudged a tad, but otherwise it was no worse for the wear.
“Who does this number belong to?” I asked again, looking back towards him. But he was gone.
“He isn’t real,” I told myself. Even so, I kind of missed him. Further proof that I was pathetic. I was so lonely that I enjoyed the company of a delusion.
Pointedly, I distracted myself with the card. Who could Asa have possibly known that would have given him their phone number? Some very lucky girl he never hooked up with or some woman who wanted to buy him a drink while he was stalking her? Maybe, but he’d have just thrown those kind of numbers away. He’d kept this number for a reason.
The card was an advertisement for a bar in Denver. The emblem was a large ‘J’ decorated with roses and a cowboy hat hanging off one crook of the J. “Jolene’s,” it read. The phone number was handwritten on the back. I didn’t recognize the area code, so I asked my iPhone to search the web. Thankfully, I’d upgraded my phone recently and the voice commands worked. I sure couldn’t work the screen, which was why the battery hadn’t died, but the battery was about to go. Only a sliver of red remained.
The area code traced back to Maine—Boston to be exact. Asa had never mentioned going there, but he’d had years to travel. Curiosity got the better of me, and I asked Siri to dial the number before I lost my nerve. It was probably very unwise to dig into Asa’s past at all, but I was aching to discover not only why he’d keep this number but keep it so well hidden.
The line rang several times with no answer. It’s four in the morning, I chided myself. It’s a stupid goose chase anyway. Asa never had any need to know anyone. I was just about to hang up when a strong male voice that didn’t sound like it was four in the morning answered on the other end.
I was caught so off‐guard at the sound of the voice that I didn’t speak or even breathe. The man on the other end repeated “Hello,” once and then twice and then went silent. The two of us sat like that for several minutes in a game of quiet tug‐of‐war. I didn’t move at all. You couldn’t have heard the rub of my jeans if you had a stethoscope on my butt.
“Only vampires can hold their breath that long,” the man said, and out of surprise, I sucked my breath in sharply. He laughed lightly and then asked, “Is that you, Asa?”
I jerked the phone away from my ear like it had suddenly caught fire, pulled it halfway back to my ear again, and then laid it gently upside down on the ground, as if that would lessen the effect that I was trying to get rid of him.
I watched it for an hour until I was sure it was dead, expecting whoever I’d called to hit redial. They knew about vampires and they knew about Asa, and I couldn’t shake the bad feeling that had crept into the pit of my belly. I regretted ever making the call.
But the phone remained silent, and long before the sun threatened to crest the mountains to the east, I sprinted back to the cellar, crawled between the blankets lining my sleeping spot, brushed a couple of spiders out of the way, and pulled the bed frame back into place. I was thinking about the voice on the phone when the sunrise claimed my thoughts and put them to rest for the day.
Chapter 13
“You should have taken my offer,” Asa whispered to me. I looked up at him through the coils of the ancient springs that had once been a bed. How was the rusted metal even holding him up? I wondered. It was evening, and the sun was down for the day.
“You’re not real,” I spoke aloud for my own benefit.
The last two nights were perhaps the lowest points of my entire existence. Nothing I’d ever been through in my life could have prepared me for how I felt when I woke the evening after Ellie’s abduction. Not the enormity of surviving medical school to the emotional roller coaster of divorce. Losing my dad had probably been the worst moment of my life until I’d met Asa, and then the almost certainty that I’d lose my life to Asa in exchange for my daughter’s life now seemed pale in comparison to what I was facing.
An eternity of nothing. What does one do with immortality when they have no one to share it with? Losing my mother would be hard. Losing my daughter—insurmountable.
So when I became conscious the evening after the confrontation with Mom, I didn’t bother to get out of my hole. I was still lying in the same pit of depression I’d gone to ground in when the sun oozed back behind the mountains. The sliver of hope was a knife like no other, and I’d cut my heart out with it. There was nothing left.
When the sun rose again the second day post Ellie’s abduction, I didn’t bother to open my eyes. The movement seemed pointless. There was nothing to see. There was no one to see. There was no Ellie to see. I knew I was wallowing, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I ever got up out of this hole again, and I had every intention of lying there and starving myself into a state of paralysis.
My only company was Asa. He’d joined me in the cellar again, or maybe he’d never left. I couldn’t remember, and it didn’t matter whether my eyes were closed or not, I couldn’t escape him. His voice vibrated in my ears, and he laughed at my condition, tormenting me for my attempts to outwit him.
“I promised you a quick death. A dignified demise really, Annalice. You should have accepted my offer.”
“You said that already.” I glared at Asa through the springs of the bed again before I rolled away and dug myself a little farther into the ground. The hole I was laying in was now just a dirty packed‐in pit. I’d clawed through the blankets I’d placed into the hole, and now my clothes were damp with mud and starting to mildew. The smell of the fungus was starting to overwhelm the decades‐old scent of vegetables.
“I cannot see how this path you have chosen is any better than the one I offered you,” Asa said.
Angry, I punched through the springs at his face, but he was faster than me, and he dissolved just in time.
“I didn’t want to die,” I answered. Sometimes when I answered his deranged line of thinking he’d leave me alone for a while.
“What were you expecting to happen, Annalice? Did you honestly expect that you could survive me and simply return to your former life? Surely, somewhere deep within, you understood that fantasy would never happen.”
“Leave me alone.”
“Answer the question and I shall.”
“You’re a damned liar,” I answered back. “You’ll never leave me alone.”
Asa laughed at me, his face leering down at me between the mattress springs. “You are correct. I will never leave you alone. Still, answer the question. What were you expecting to happen?”
“What would it hurt?” I whispered to myself. “I don’t know, Asa. Call me crazy, I guess, because I expected to help my daughter with her homework in the evenings and take her to the movies on the weekends. Normal motherly things. I certainly didn’t expect to be laying in here with you.”
“Foolish girl. It was insanity to lie to yourself that way.” “Why? Because you couldn’t manage it?” I asked.
Asa smiled down at me with his cruel, albeit beautiful face.
“Because you are a vampire. Because you are dead. Because you are not human, no matter how hard you try to convince yourself. Because you drink blood. I could go on with the whys if you need me to.”
“Whatever,” I said. But he was right. The truth burned as deep in me as the hunger that felt like it might eat its way through my ribcage. I was a fool to think I could be any different from him.
Chapter 14
I was attempting to ignore the monologue that Asa kept up in the background by arguing with myself on whether he’d returned from the dead-dead or was my own consciousness reflected back towards me. In my saner moments—I went with
the latter. But here, now, with the deep-seated hunger singeing the lining of my stomach, I was leaning towards the argument that he was dead and well beside me and not dead and dead in the ground. I wasn’t entirely sure I understood my own questions.
From the corner of the cellar, he was calmly talking about how I could put an end to myself, and I was considering the merits of his argument when I heard the rumble of a vehicle in the driveway. In the ground, all such sounds were magnified. The vibratory sense of vampires were as powerful or maybe more so than the hearing. The engine of the motor cut off, and I waved Asa into silence as I listened. For once, he listened and fell quiet. No other sounds reached me for about five minutes, and I was beginning to wonder if I’d imagined it when a door opened, the hinges protesting with a high‐pitched grating.
The human who stepped out of the vehicle milled around in the yard for a few minutes before climbing through the strands of barbed wire guarding the pasture. The faint rip of snagged material could be heard and then more steps as he walked towards me. At least I was fairly certain it was a man. The footsteps were heavy and hard as they approached.
I listened as the human walked the perimeter of the pasture, the footsteps getting weaker the closer he got towards the fence that separated the forest from the pasture and then stronger as he walked back towards the house. He walked in circles and then took off on near diagonals. The footsteps meandered around the barn and then over to where I’d killed the cow. Here they paused for a couple of minutes before turning in the direction of where I was laying in the cellar. If there was a pattern to his walking, I couldn’t discern it.
I wasn’t alarmed that this human would find me, and even when he passed directly over my hiding spot, I didn’t get alarmed. I even smiled a little at the stealth I could hear in the footsteps. I most likely would have laid there and ignored him, I was too deep in my own pity party to be disturbed, if the scent of this man hadn’t floated down to me through the aged vent holes. But one whiff of his blood brought me to my feet, and the second whiff sent me leaping from the hidden doorway onto the ground six feet above.
It wasn’t the smell of blood that brought me out but whose blood it was. I had to hand it to him; he was brave and dedicated. Or stupid and fanatical, depending on how you looked at it. Whichever, here the detective was, in the middle of the night, facing his own fears and knowledge that something wasn’t quite right about me, clearly willing to risk his life for his convictions.
“I think you are overselling him. He is just nosy,” Asa said. He was beside me again. Together, we watched the detective, who was now about thirty feet ahead of us. Deep in his studies, he was walking slowly, his shoulders hunched forward as he used a flashlight to search the ground. He was so intent that he had not, as of yet, noticed my presence behind him. The fact that he hadn’t swung around at the sound of Asa’s voice was further proof Asa was a hallucination after all.
Every few feet, the detective would bend down and pick at something on the ground. A twig, a blade of grass. I took a few steps in his direction, my curiosity burning slightly more than my hunger. He moved on a few feet, his flashlight bobbing brightly on the dark ground as he walked.
“What’s he doing and why is he doing it at night?” I whispered to Asa. My thinking was foggy. I could feel the elusive answers hovering at the edge of my reason.
“This man is foolish. He should have at the very least come during the day,” Asa responded.
“See, I told you he was dedicated. He works 24/7.” The words had only cleared my mouth when I realized the truth. “Or he’s working during the day, and this is his side project. Unsanctioned by the station, of course, so he’s forced to do it on his own time.”
“He is tracking you,” Asa answered.
I looked at Asa for a second, my mouth opening to argue and then realizing that he was right. “Holy crap,” I said. Instantly, I was simmering. Rumsfield was working off the record, which meant he had no business here at all. He was my own personal demon. Tracking me and ruining my life, adding fuel to my mother’s flames. I felt the renewed desire to kill him; the urge slipped on as easily as a winter coat, and Rumsfield felt it immediately. I smiled as he came to a halt, my presence washing over him like a dark cloud across the warm summer sun. Still stooped from his tracking, he lifted up slowly. Did he actually think his quicksand movements would keep me from killing him? “So you stuck around after all?” Rumsfield asked, turning towards me.
Where did he get the strength to face me? Grudgingly, I admired his bravery. Even if it was immensely stupid.
“Detective, what a surprise. What brings you to my neck of the woods? Official police business, I presume?” My voice was warmly sarcastic, and I enjoyed its effect on his expression. He had no right to be here, and he knew that as well as I did. “Maybe I’ll just call down to the station and check on your warrant,” I said, smiling at him again as I pulled my now very dead cellphone from my pocket.
“Don’t bother, Ms. Creed. You know I don’t have a warrant.
But that doesn’t change anything. You’re as guilty as they come. We both know it, and I will prove it.”
“And yet here I am still not in jail. Still not charged. Doesn’t quite make sense, does it?” I asked. I pretended to peck at the screen of my phone, hoping he didn’t realize the screen was dark from that far away.
He whistled between his teeth when I laid the phone to my cheek. “Just… just wait. Okay. Let’s talk about it before you get crazy with that phone.”
So I’d hit the nail on the head. “Fine,” I said, shoving my phone in my pocket. “Sure, let’s talk about it. Why don’t you tell me again what you have exactly and what makes you think that I’m so guilty? Surely killing a cow isn’t illegal?” I asked, spreading my hands out in front of me as I pursed my lips together in a sarcastic look. “And then I’ll try to talk you out of crazy town and back into reality.”
He didn’t answer me, just stood looking at me with his arms crossed tightly across his chest. I continued to berate him. “Ah, come on. You can’t tell anyone down at the station because they’d think you’re nuts, but you can tell me. I already know you’re crazy.” My cold laughter drifted across to him in the dark. “I’m laughing at you, by the way, not with you.”
He shrugged and blew out his breath harshly again while shaking his head. “We’ve already been through this, Dr. Creed.” “Humor me, Detective. Surely you didn’t come all the way out here just to hike around my pasture,” I answered.
Another sigh, one hand tugging its way through his sandy hair. “Fine. What’s it matter? Let me build you a timeline, Annalice. That way you won’t be so surprised when I do arrest you someday. You see, it happened like this. First, your boyfriend killed Ms. McElhaney. I don’t know why, and I think you probably had nothing to do with it. But you knew about it,” he said, pausing here for a moment for emphasis before continuing. “But you didn’t call it in. In fact, you were still screwing around with him after he killed her. Now, that seems weird to me, Annalice. I personally showed you what I thought he did to her, and yet you were having dinner with him a couple of nights later.
“So after some sex and drinks, you two head into the woods. Ransack and rob a campsite and then track a hunter.” Shaking his head, his hands dropped down to rest on his hips as he pinned ice blue eyes on me. “And this is where it gets really strange for me. You guys tracked him. No one else in the department seemed to notice that, by the way. Maybe because they haven’t spent every free minute of their spare time out here in these woods like I have. But I followed footprints from this house,” he jammed his finger towards the ground beneath his feet, “all the way to the crime scene. With no variance and no wrong turns, you both followed him until you trapped him and then killed him. “He tried to get away, but not from you. Your footprints seem to say that you held back, and at some point, you even knelt down. What for? Were you trying to help him or were you freaking out at what you were seeing? Got in a little over
your head maybe? I’m not sure yet. But here’s where it gets even stranger. One set of footprints, yours, leads away to a grave with clothes, an antique wedding ring, and a wooden stake but no body. And your footsteps were heavy, like you were carrying something. Or someone?” He stopped here for emphasis, his eyes pleading with me to fess up. “Any answers for me, Annie?” he questioned.
I stepped closer, needing him to believe me. “You have a stressful job, Mike. I get that. But you’re desperate, and you think you’re on to something here, but you’re not. My boyfriend and I spent most of the day in the woods. We’d been hiking, so of course, we might have left footprints out there, and hiking is not a crime. Besides, the papers said that young man died of some sort of bear attack. There were no signs of foul play. The most you can prove is that we saw the scene of the attack. So let me spell this out for you, Mike. We might have hiked before the event, during the event, or after the event. The worst you could get us for would be not calling the attack in. But you can’t accuse me of murder by bear. Besides, are you that good of a tracker? That you can tell me the exact hour of the day I was there? If you were, I suspect you’d be working for the Discovery Channel.”
He ignored my remarks about his tracking skills completely.
“That doesn’t explain everything, Annalice. What about the one set of footprints leading away and the grave with clothes? Am I to believe there’s nothing to that either?”
“Come on. You cannot actually believe that I went up against my ‘boyfriend’ with that stake that you were so ridiculously parading around the other night. And can you really call that hole where I buried my boyfriend’s clothes a grave? It was empty, Detective, because there was no body.”
It was his turn to laugh at me now. My story was a little ridiculous, but he couldn’t prove it, and I knew it. “It was a really big hole. I could tell that as I dug it back out. And if not a grave, then why did you bury his clothes? And please don’t forget to tell me why you’d punched holes through them. Holes that just happened to match in size and shape of the stake I found on the ground with your fingerprints on it. Please tell me because I just can’t wait to hear this one. It could go down as the best lie I’ve ever heard.” His blue eyes remained cold and hard despite the pleasantly condescending smile he held on his face.
