Undeath: The Fragile Shadows Series (A Paranormal Vampire Romance)

by Lily Levi

The heat of the June sun glimmered up from the broken blacktop. A lone mosquito buzzed next to her ear.

  Was she doing it?

  She lowered her head and threaded between the empty cars. She was doing it. She was actually doing it. Panic rose up into her throat and she swallowed it back down. Where was she even going to go?

  She threw a last glance back at Benny’s Cadillac. What stuff she had was still in the trunk. There were her clothes, some old makeup, and a ratted collection of Stephen King novels that she’d taken from her mom’s house all those years ago.

  “Jolene!”

  Somewhere, a door slammed shut. The parking lot glowed with the heat and she stopped.

  “Hey, Jolene!”

  The seconds turned in on themselves. It felt as though she stood there between the empty cars long enough for Benny to reach her, but he was only still moving out from beneath the motel’s low awning.

  She had two choices and neither of them were good. Why had she thought he’d stay in the room long enough for her to get away? It wasn’t a movie and if he caught her, she wouldn’t be around to watch the credits roll.

  There was no time left.

  She ran.

  She was doing it.

  The colored sides of cars passed against her peripheral vision.

  She slammed her elbow into a side view mirror.

  There was no time.

  She hurdled over the wooden fence that separated the lot from the road, the sloping hills, and the rising pines beyond.

  She didn’t look back.

  She wouldn’t look back.

  Yes, she was actually doing it.

  “Jolene!” he hollered. “Let’s fuckin’ talk!”

  Half a decade with Benny had twisted her into a sad creature of habit. She knew that about herself and she hated it; hated herself for it.

  Despite the hot adrenaline screaming at her to keep running, she paused in the gravel-filled ditch on the side of the road.

  Chapter Three

  Her mind raced to find an excuse for what it looked like she was doing. No, what she was doing.

  Benny stomped his way across his parking lot. His wet hair glinted against the high sun.

  She scanned the front of the motel. The office door was no longer propped open and she could just make out the paper clock that hung against the glass.

  Sorry we missed you! Be back soon!

  There was no one to stop him from coming straight towards her, and no one to stop him from doing whatever it was he wanted to do with her.

  “So,” he said, drawing closer. “Where are you going with my shit?”

  She clutched the duffel bag’s coarse handle in her sweaty palm. She struggled to find an answer to the question, but the words refused to rise over the thundering of blood in her ears.

  Benny passed behind the trunk of a faded yellow Honda Civic. “Where are you going, huh?”

  She grit her teeth. Even if it was a mistake, there was no going back.

  “I’m going away,” she said, loud enough to travel the distance between them. She worked her jaw against the wonderful, dreadful words. “It’s over and it’s been over for a long time.” She twisted her foot into the gravel and prepared to run. She never should’ve stopped.

  “You don’t tell me when it’s over,” he laughed, stalking closer.

  “It’s over!” she cried. The words flew out of her and the weight of so many years was carried up with them. Unwilling to wait for whatever biting response he had for her, she stumbled forward into the open road.

  He shouted something, but she couldn’t make out the words.

  Her shoes pounded against the road. The double yellow lines came and went beneath her.

  She jumped over the ditch on the other side of the tarmac and slipped against the sunburnt needles covering the ground.

  “Jolene!”

  She scrambled up the steep angle of the hill on the other side of the low ditch, grasping at tree trunks to help herself forward. Without needing to look, she knew that he was following her. Of course he was following her. He wouldn’t quit, either. Benny wasn’t a quitter.

  The ground slipped beneath her and she fell to her knees.

  She looked back over her shoulder.

  If Benny struggled up the incline any more than she did, he wasn’t any slower.

  A fresh burst of adrenaline wound beneath her skin and she fought her way up the steepening hill. She could see how the bushes and trees leveled out not far above where she already was. If she could reach the plateau before him, she could outrun him, and maybe – maybe – she could find a place to hide.

  But it was already too late.

  “Oh,” he huffed loudly behind her, clambering up the steep hill. “You little bitch.” His sweating hand closed around her ankle.

  She cried out and with a strength she didn’t know she possessed, she ripped her leg out away from him and sent him stumbling backwards, cursing.

  Frantic, she hoisted herself up a small cropping of rocks and climbed to flatter ground.

  She ran. Bits of long grass ticked against her bare legs.

  The bag hit against her thigh as she lunged between the trees.

  “Stop!” he screamed out after her.

  He was faster than she’d let herself believe. Suddenly, the juvenile fantasy of escaping him that she’d allowed herself to have all but escaped her instead. She hadn’t thought things through. She’d done what she always did.

  “You’re pissing me off,” he breathed, lumbering behind her. He was too close.

  She zigzagged between the rocks and trees, in a wild bid to outmaneuver him. She jumped over the dips in the ground and clambered up the short inclines, but she couldn’t shake him. If she ran for five or for fifteen minutes, there was no way to tell.

  Twigs snapped. His boots thundered after her, hard rubber on leaves.

  She pushed herself faster, rounded a high boulder, and forced a U-turn back around to the other side. Thinking or not thinking, it didn’t matter. She unshouldered the orange bag and tossed it into a heavy growth of yellow star nettles, like a terrible yellow meadow that stretched out to the edge of yet another steep hill.

  She’d come back for it. He couldn’t have what he couldn’t find.

  She ran back the same way she’d come. Her side ached and her chest heaved on its own with the harsh effort of breathing. Running into to forest had been a mistake. She would find her way back to the motel and if no one was there, she’d scream bloody murder all the way back to the little town. It hadn’t been far.

  “Jolene!”

  “No!” she screamed back at him.

  She passed through the charcoal of an old forest fire and lost her footing against the ashen ground. She wrapped her arm around a scratched trunk to help stop her fall.

  “Benny.” She held her hand out to him to keep him from barreling over her. “Benny,” she coughed, trying to find her breath. “Stop, please stop.”

  But Benny wouldn’t stop. He ripped her away from the tree and slammed her into the hard bed of pine needles and ruptured dirt, forcing the wind from her lungs.

  He held her down by the neck. With both knees on either side of her hips, he punched down into her stomach.

  A red kind of darkness blurred her vision. The branches flayed out above them. They expanded with the pain like long fingers, pushing out from one another. The sun pierced between them.

  Jolene coughed and struggled beneath him. “Please,” she wheezed, unsure if the words even came out of her mouth.

  “I don’t need to tell you what happens when you piss me off,” he grunted. “And you pissed me off. You did it this time, didn’t you?”

  “Benny,” she breathed. “Sorry, I’m sorry.”

  “Where were you gonna go, huh?” He flashed his flat teeth at her and tightened his grip around her throat. “Where were you gonna go? There’s nowhere to go. Nobody wants you. I don’t even want you.”

  “Benny,” she choked. She scratched
at his hand, but he only dug his fingers deeper into the sides of her neck.

  “No one fucks with me,” he said. “No one. Not you, especially not you.” His eyes grew large and a thick vein pulsed through the middle of his glistening forehead. “I should’ve done this a long time ago.” He laughed, but it was a hollow laugh full of self-pity. “You’re a waste of fuckin’ space, piece of shit.”

  Jolene, unable to breathe, saw with a sudden clarity in his reddened eyes that he was enjoying himself. The tighter he squeezed, the more she saw that this was exactly what he’d been wanting to do – for how long?

  She stopped fighting him.

  Maybe he was tired of her. Maybe he was just as dangerous as he’d always wanted her to believe. Maybe killing that woman had stirred something darker inside of him than she imagined.

  She tried to blink his face away.

  Above them, the sky was so cloudless and so blue, that it was almost black. She thought, faintly, that she could see the dim outline of throbbing stars between the crosshatched branches.

  She wondered, as best as she could wonder, if this was what the freckled woman in the Willapa Bay office supply store had seen.

  Jean. Poor Jean.

  But of course she hadn’t seen anything like it. Jean hadn’t had the sun and the stars to look up to. She hadn’t had the sky, streaked with blue in shades that Jolene couldn’t remember ever existing. No, lying on the dirty laminate floor of the Willapa Bay supply store, Jean had had the single twitching of a fluorescent double light bulb. She’d had the crushed Starbuck’s cup next to her head. The coffee had swirled into her blood.

  Jolene blinked back tears for herself and for the Willapa Bay woman – for Jean – and there was no difference in what she saw.

  Chapter Four

  Laurie pulled the Duesenberg into the slated wooden carport and sat quietly beneath the filtered June sunlight. Despite living so close to the shore, the summer would be hot, as all Neverpine summers were.

  Rays of warm light filtered through the overgrown ivy that wound loosely around the beams overhead. The filtered light turned his skin a tired green. Everything was tired.

  He turned off the ignition and sat for a long while in the open-topped Duesenberg. He listened to the slight creaks of the wooden beams and to the chirping birds like feathered diamonds.

  A warm breeze rustled through the ivy.

  He scanned the spaces between the papery green spades, searching for the place where she slept and maybe where she’d always sleep. Finding the corner of her darkened window, he looked away.

  An entirely expected disappointment blossomed in the cavity of his chest.

  The curtains hung just as they had when he’d left. He’d shut them himself. If he left again at that moment and never returned, they would never be opened again.

  And why should they? There would be no one to open them. She could do nothing but lay in that dark bed, unaware of the world and time. Everything was nothing to her. She wasn’t alive and hadn’t been alive for a very long time.

  He stepped out from the car. Another day would pass and then another would pass after that one had gone. Nothing would change until he changed it, but the consequences were still unknown.

  He shut the car door and then opened it again, pretending in some lonely way that he might drive away forever. He would say goodbye to the things he couldn’t know. Of course, it was only a sad fantasy. If he could say goodbye to this, he could say goodbye to everything else and there would be nothing left to live for.

  He straightened his gray jacket, stifling in the heat. He shut the car door a second time and moved out from beneath the green shade of the carport with the sealed can of pig’s blood in the crook of his arm.

  The house was not immaculate. This was his thought every time he walked the path, littered with pine needles and sunbaked pine cones. The salt air off the bay had done its work ages ago, stripping the soft blue paint away from the manor’s façade and leaving pockmarks in the stone. Even so, three hundred years might have at least tried to be more kind to the family home.

  He wondered if she would remember the way summer smelled; he wondered if she would remember the garden maze she’d loved to lose herself in; the kitchen where she had stood with the servants in the baking heat; the ballroom where she’d taught him to dance; the dock where his father had taught them both to fish. He wondered if she would remember herself as his mother or, having forgot, if she would be someone else entirely.

  Riley, the sweet bloodhound of whom he would never tire, met him happily on the porch and he bent to scratch her head. Together, they stepped inside.

  The entryway was dark and cool. No matter how warm the summer, the hallways remained perpetually haunted by the winter before.

  He stood there in his calfskin shoes, sinking into the thick carpet, listening for the familiar sounds – the hard click of the mahogany clock in the empty parlor; the creaking, expanding of wood and of banisters and beams in the ceilings; the tapping of thin branches against the kitchen’s trellised windows; and his own, light breathing below the heavy drapings of a past that he could never quite shake.

  He set the can of pig’s blood down and removed his coat. He hung it with care in the open closet near the double door. There had been a time when on any given night, the cavernous closet had hosted a myriad of gentlemen’s jackets and the beautiful fabric of opaque shawls and overcoats. Even from the entryway, the bustling of laughter mixed with excited voices and elegant music would have been heard emanating from the ballroom.

  But that was all gone now and had been gone for a very long time. He couldn’t remember when he’d stopped taking visitors; when he’d withdrawn from the world. It had been a slow happening and there was no month or year that he could point to and find its beginning.

  Only Darla was left to him now, but their bond was not as strong as it had been. She’d stepped back from him in some wordless way after her son’s death and he hadn’t pressed her. They were still close in their way, but grief had made her tired.

  Riley shook the summer from her coat and followed him into the large, shadowed foyer. The air was remarkably cool and they stood for a long time there. There was no hurry. There never was, not anymore.

  The silver chandelier hung motionless from the ceiling and would someday be indistinguishable from the cobwebs that covered it. Someday, it would fall and shatter into a million silver pieces on the marble floor. He didn’t want to be there when it did, and yet how could he doubt it? He would always be there.

  He climbed the flumed stairs with an ease he did not feel, first one flight and then the next.

  He might climb forever, if time was kind, but time was nothing of the sort.

  If time was soft and warm, he might never stand outside of the dark oak door on the fourth floor as he did now; might never touch the delicate engravings on the bronze knob, cold against his fingertips.

  The door, now more familiar than any other door, submitted to him without a sound.

  The room was still warm from its morning dalliance with the new summer sun. The old furniture sat so heavy with dust that every piece of wood and fabric possessed a kind of solemn grayness.

  Maman – if that’s who she still was – stared blankly up at the ceiling.

  He wondered if the dead could see and what she thought of the room she’d spent so many long nights of her own life in, only to find herself there again in death.

  He sat beside the bed and placed the can of pig’s blood at his feet. He bent over and pried off the lid.

  The hot, salty smell of blood joined the stuffy heat of the room. Riley whined beside his leg.

  “It’s not for you,” he said. He dipped the tip of his pinky finger into the blood and brought it up to his lips.

  It was fresh enough that it would keep awhile longer. Darla only gave him the blood that she drained from the last pigs of the morning. He thought she must know what he was, but she didn’t seem to mind. Darla had never seemed to
mind much of anything at all and he would miss her when she was gone.

  A single lethargic fly buzzed near his cheek.

  He replaced the lid over the blood.

  Maman would be hungry when she returned. If she returned, he corrected himself.

  He sat back. If it was possible to bring her back after so long, there would be consequences, he was sure of it. The only question left was what those consequences would be.

  What are you afraid of?

  He reached out to touch her coarse, gray hair. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, but there was no way to know if she’d heard him. Her eyes and her face, they were always the same; sunken and dry, the husk of what had once been his mother’s face, who had once kissed him goodnight and wished him well in the morning.

  Now, that same face could only stare up at him from the satin pillowcase.

  The small mechanical turn-engine was nearly ready. It sat waiting next to her bedside. He’d built it to course the pig’s blood through the passageways that had once hosted her veins, but perhaps today was not the day to use it.

  There would be other days.

  There would always be other days.

  He stood from the side of the bed with a quiet relief that he hid, even from himself.

  He would bring her back another day, if he could bring her back at all. Either way, the mysteries would never change and the answers would remain the same.

  He stepped away from the bed.

  Riley followed him from Maman’s room and down the long hall. They descended back down through the lower floors of the manor. His boots clicked against the dusty marble tiles and her paws followed closely behind him.

  Outside, the heat baked down on them and the bay sat dark and dismal beneath the afternoon sun.

  Unbuttoning the top of his linen shirt, he took the path down from the front of the house towards the dock at the edge of the water.

  The sun glittered against the lapping waves, but somehow the water would be just as cold as it had been in the dead of November.

  He bypassed the foot of the dock and kneeled on the rocky beach. He cupped his hands into the water and brought it up to his face and ran it through his hair.