Promise Me

by Tara Fox Hall

When I rejoined him a few minutes later and saw what he’d done with the giant spiders and a pose able Halloween King, I gave him precise directions on what exactly to put where. We finished at a quarter to seven.

  Theo put on his jacket. “Aran and I are heading out now. We won’t be back tonight, but two others will be here by seven.”

  “Will they be watching from outside, or—”

  “No one will come in,” he said quickly.

  “Thanks for your help today. And please call me Sar.”

  “You’re welcome, Sar. Have a good night.” He shot me another grin as he left.

  I had maybe ten minutes to change clothes and apply makeup. I decided on jeans and a sweatshirt, at least until I found out if I could convince Danial to go for a moonlit walk. After I’d dressed, I fluffed my hair and put on my usual makeup: lip-gloss.

  I heard Danial enter the room just as I was smoothing it on my lips. A moment later, he put his arms around me. I relaxed back into him, and we studied our reflections.

  “Why do they say no one can see a vampire in the mirror?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve never understood it. There was something about us being allergic to silver, but I think they got vampires confused with werewolves. And even that’s not true.”

  “Do you know any werewolves?” I asked lightly. If one legend was true, were others?

  “No,” he said solemnly, his eyes sad.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “There used to be a lot of werewolves in America, back when there were wolves here. There are some hiding around the large tracks of privately owned land, but that’s it. The large packs were exterminated when the wolves were wiped out. Any who could leave did, but getting around back then wasn’t like it is now, and most of them couldn’t get away except for walking.” He paused. “It was a slaughter. Most of the survivors never came back. Werewolves live predominantly in Canada, Alaska, and Russia now, where they’re safe.” He grew even more somber. “They’re shot sometimes on sight from planes even in the wilderness. A good friend of mine was killed that way years ago.”

  There was an awkward silence.

  “I’m sorry.” I put my hands on his, still around me, and squeezed lightly. I remembered Theo’s message about the relief security showing up at seven and told him.

  “Want to join the dogs and me for a walk when your people get here?” I asked.

  “Let’s go now. I want you all to myself later.” He trailed a few kisses over my neck as he held my gaze in the mirror. “I admit, I spent a good portion of the past hour thinking of you. Was Theo a help? I heard you two moving around.”

  “Yes, he was. Thank you for that.”

  Any lingering doubts about the night faded away. I was happy being with Danial. After everything I’d been through, I deserved to be happy.

  “Won’t they worry if we aren’t here when they get here?” I asked.

  “Their job is to watch the house. If there’s a lapse between when we leave and when they get here, they’ll check the house from top to bottom before taking up their positions.”

  I called the dogs, locked the door, and joined Danial outside. The night was cool with a light wind. I wanted there to be romantic moonlight, but it was obscured by clouds. A few crickets sang happily in the dark beyond the barn lights. We walked into the field, through the woods, and out to a clearing, with the dogs staying close by. Both of us were waiting for the other to start talking first. I outlasted him.

  “It’s a beautiful night,” he said, his voice drifting on the light wind, caressing me.

  “It is,” I said nervously.

  “Why don’t you tell me how you came to be here,” he prompted.

  I brushed the hair from my face and took a deep breath. “I grew up in the city. My dad died when I was less than a year old, and my mom and I were left to ourselves. She did the best she could, but we were poor. I didn’t care because I was happy. My grandparents lavished me with attention. I have a lot of great memories of my grandmother’s garden and fishing. By the time I was ten, we were able to buy a house, and we lived there for seven years. By the time I graduated from high school, my Mom had met the man who would be my stepfather. His name is Chris. They dated for several years, and eventually married. I went to a community college and graduated with a degree in chemistry. That’s where I met my best friend, Katrina. I worked as a manager at my first job, overseeing a chemical sampling center.” I took a deep breath. “And then I met the man who would become my husband.”

  I had dreaded this part the most. We walked in silence for a while.

  “I’m not sure what to say,” I finally said. “The condensed version is that I had the great fortune to marry a wonderful man I loved very much, and he died when he wasn’t supposed to.” I’d spoken slowly but the words came faster, just pouring out of me. “The life insurance and my part-time job are enough to keep me financially set, at least for now, while I’m young enough and strong enough to do most of the work without having to pay someone to help me. I try not to think about the future too much because I don’t trust long-term plans anymore. We had a lot of plans for life, Brennan and I, and they never came true.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He died on the Infinite Spur of Mt. Foraker; retreat is difficult to impossible after about a day. There’s nowhere to go but up. You have to leave some of your gear on the mountain for every hundred and fifty feet you descend. That’s the maximum length of the rope used. You can only carry so much gear when you ascend, and that gear is used over and over. By the second day of the descent, after about fifty rappel’s, you don’t have much equipment left, so you run out, and then you find yourself on the side of the mountain, unable to descend any farther. The climb has only been done less than five times.” I sounded like I was babbling, but I couldn’t stop; I had to get it all out. “If it sounds like I’ve studied it, I have. I wanted to believe it wasn’t an accident. But his harness snapped when it should have held.” I could feel tears in my eyes, and I wiped them away. “This is more than my home; it was our home. I’ve been here ever since. I didn’t want to move back to the city, even though living in the country alone is hard. So I stayed.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Danial said, taking my hand. “It hurts to lose someone you love.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve been in your shoes.”

  “Tell me,” I said, and I felt his hand tighten on mine.

  “I had a wife once,” he said. “Before I was turned. We had a child, a son. His name was David, after my father. It was a simple life by most standards: getting enough to eat, keeping warm, and having a place to sleep. No one worried about retirement and redecorating the house, or vacationing abroad.” He paused. I squeezed his hand to reassure him.

  “I worked as a laborer most of my life, and the work was hard. When I was twenty-seven, I became a guard at the local prison. I got the job through an influential friend, and I was grateful. It was dangerous work, but it paid better than farming, and I wanted a good life for my family. When I’d been on the job a little more than three years, I was told I’d have to accompany a prisoner who was being transferred to another city for the death penalty. My wife didn’t want me to go, but I told her the bonus for doing this would make it possible for David to go to a real school when he grew up. He could be more than a guard’s son who’d be lucky to someday be a guard himself. If I refused, I’d probably have been fired” He paused again.

  “Was this here, in America?”

  “No,” he replied. “In a rural section of Spain. But that’s not important.”

  “Please go on.”

  “A hundred miles into our journey, we were attacked. I wasn’t a fighter then, and I had little skill with weapons. The attacker killed all but me and one other, another guard. Both of us were wounded but we were able to get away. We had no horses, no supplies, and only the knives we’d been able to escape with. We didn’t know what would happen to us when we returned and the magistrate learned th
at we’d lost our prisoner. We argued over what to do. I said I had to go back to my family, I couldn’t run. He wanted us to disappear and take our chances elsewhere.” He smiled wryly. “We didn’t know that was our last night as human.”

  “We woke up as vampires. The one who’d attacked us had been a vampire, though we didn’t know. If we hadn’t taken shelter in a cave we’d both have been dead when dawn came. As it was, I was partly exposed, and when the sunlight hit my skin, I screamed. I got out of the light, and the pain lessened. My companion reached into the sunlight and the same thing happened to him. He had fangs and I felt my own when I cut my tongue trying to speak. We’d changed but we didn’t know what we were or why the sun made our skin smoke, or why we suddenly had fangs. Neither of us had much education. We were both scared and just wanted to go home more than anything.

  “We headed back the way we’d come. We had to travel by night, and it took a long time. A third of the way, we crossed paths with a traveling merchant. He didn’t recognize us and mentioned our names in passing as gossip. The massacre of our party had been discovered, and it was believed that we’d done it. The law was looking to take us in dead or alive.”

  Danial took a deep breath. “My companion killed him as soon as he slept. I watched him drink his blood. When he offered me some, I drank the rest.” He hesitated. “We parted company after that. He went north and I went back to my wife and son. I thought they loved me enough to accept me and I could find a way to deal with what I’d become.” He was quiet for a time. “It went badly.”

  “What happened?”

  “The moment she saw I had fangs, she recoiled. She was deeply religious and thought God had cursed me. She held a cross up to me as if I was a demon from Hell sent to steal her soul. She notified the priest, but I evaded him. I left to go south, and then west, trying to find out what had happened to me, if there was a cure. I encountered another vampire and learned how to survive. After a year with him, I went back to convince my wife to join me. Humans and vampires could sometimes have relationships if they were both willing to compromise. Disease had beaten me to them by three months. They were both dead.”

  I embraced him. We stood that way for a few minutes, giving each other comfort. Then, we drew back from one another.

  “Neither one of us is unscarred,” I said. “Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the past, and I feel as if I’m drowning in grief and misery. You sound like you’ve had more than your fair share. Together we can work through some of it. Once we have, maybe we can build something of our own.”

  “It’s a deal,” he said, touching my cheek.

  We were almost to the welcoming light of the barn. I smiled, thinking to myself that I’d developed a fondness for ten thousand watts when I’d started living in a place where there were no streetlights.

  As we rounded the corner to head into the light, Danial stopped suddenly.

  “What is it?”

  “Too many heartbeats...Down!”

  He shoved me beneath him, and I heard the whine of bullets overhead. I saw a figure peek out near the woodshed and then a muzzle flash from the darkness to our left. A bullet thwacked the ground a few feet in front of me.

  Chapter Seven

  “Sar, get to the house. I’m going to be hit. When you hear it, keep going.”

  Danial kissed me quickly, and then hauled me to my feet, shielding me with his body as we ran away from the light, towards the tall grass of the corral. He was hit at least twice before we made it to cover, the bullets making him jerk as they impacted.

  “Go!” he hissed painfully, giving me a push toward the house.

  I didn’t say a word. I just grabbed both dogs’ collars and got moving. The dogs, well trained as they were, came with me without barking. Luckily, we were in weeds over waist high. They hid us from view and extended almost all the way to the house, and we were able to make it to the edge of the woodpile without incident.

  I crouched there in the long grass with a hand on each of them, wondering what to do. Dare I cross the deck? The light would reveal us, and I’d have to stop to open the door. I’d be hit for sure, or they would. I needed another plan.

  I heard more shots behind me and hoped Danial was killing some of them. Forget shoot to wound; they’d ambushed us. Those bullets hadn’t been meant for him alone; they’d tried to hit me. Where in the hell was our security?

  I decided to circle around the house and go through the basement door. There were no lights on now back there. The keypad would be able to open the overhead garage door faster than a key, and we could get in as soon as the door rose partway. The bad part was the noise; anyone nearby would hear it going up. But it was our best option.

  We worked our way to the edge of the house, and then made a dash for the garage. As soon as the dogs and I were in, I shut the door. It had only opened a third of the way. Had anyone heard?

  No one was in the cellar, neither the garage or the finished section, or so the dogs told me. I left them down in the basement, knowing the stairs were too steep for them to climb without help and a lot of cajoling. I wanted to hide down there with them, but who knew how many attackers there were? Danial’s men had either still not arrived or been taken out. With there only being him and me, we needed to fight. I crept upstairs, kicking myself for not having my gun with me. And me being a card-carrying member of the NRA.

  I eased up from the cellar stairs to the main floor. The lights were on, but none of the cats were around the cozy woodstove. Someone was in the house. Was it Danial’s people, or the enemy?

  I panicked and dashed for my bedroom door, shutting it behind me. In there, I grabbed my gun, giving thanks that I kept it loaded. I grabbed two speed loaders, too, thinking I might need them before this was over.

  Thinking of how best to help Danial, I headed for the side door of the house, the one closest to the garage. The back fence would give me cover to reach the garage, and my SUV. I might be able to make it to the barn and Danial in that.

  Before I got five steps, someone grabbed me from behind.

  The attacker tried to pin my arms behind my back, but I was a lot stronger than he’d counted on. He wrestled with me, and I pitched to the side, throwing us to the floor. He got to his feet in one fluid motion, drawing a long knife. His eyes fixed me where I lay on my side, zeroing in on the dangling fox head. I bit into my lip to stop the shaking threatening to loosen the grip on my gun.

  “Your lover’s bound to break cover when you start screaming. But if he doesn’t, it’s okay, cause that means he’s already dead. Just like you’re going to be.” He advanced, whistling some somber tune, the blade gleaming. “Let’s get started.”

  Do it, Sar, just do it. Fucking shoot him or he’s going to kill you! He’s almost to you! I raised the gun in both hands.

  “No,” I said weakly, and fired, blowing a spray of blood out of his back after the hollow point punched out his left shoulder blade. He didn’t make a sound, just gave me a shocked look as he went to his knees. He looked at the hole in his shirt, then crumpled, his knife clattering to the linoleum.

  I thought about shooting him again. But he wasn’t getting up again, not with that mess of meat the bullet had made of his back. I'd killed a man in my house. It was all I could do not to cry. I held the gun with both hands, the acrid smell of burnt gunpowder making my eyes water.

  My ears were ringing, yet I heard another shot faintly from outside, then another. It brought me back to the present with a jolt. I had to get up and help Danial. He was still fighting, so some of the enemy must be alive yet.

  I didn’t move. I was afraid to go back out there. I wanted to stay here, where it was safe. For all my posturing, I’d never shot at anyone, much less killed them. And no one had ever shot at me before.

  My conscience would have none of my cowardice. It told me to get the hell up and help Danial. Except I’d charged into this room, and that hadn’t worked out so well. What if I went out the front door and got shot? Danial had told me to
get to the house. I’d trust him, stay here, and wait for him.

  I stayed there for I don’t know how long. In retrospect, it was probably only a few minutes, but it felt like hours. The corpse didn’t move, and from where I sat, a half-open eye glazed over. I smelled both blood and urine, and bit my lip to take my mind off my nausea. I didn’t want to throw up. But I could cry, and I did, bawling at the unfairness of the world. It seemed like fate couldn’t wait for me to hope again before it smashed that hope to pieces. I knew Danial would bring trouble, but why tonight? Couldn’t I catch a break?

  I heard voices, but they weren’t any I recognized. I stayed quiet. Then I heard Danial calling me.

  “I’m here,” I whispered. I took a deep breath, got to my feet, and went to the door’s window to look.

  There was a veritable army walking toward the house. Danial was there, surrounded by at least ten people carrying weapons, mostly men. Behind them, animal shapes darted in the distant light of the barn, then disappeared into the dark. What had those shapes been? Some other kind of guardians?

  “Sar!” Danial called. “Yell if you can hear me! It’s safe to come out!”

  I let out a gasp of relief, unlocked the door, and stepped out. Everyone, Danial included, immediately dropped and took aim.

  “It’s me!” I screamed. “Don’t shoot!”

  Danial raced toward me, vaulted the stairs, and hugged me. I sagged against him. “You’re not hurt?”

  “No.”

  He turned to his people. “Get inside and check the house.”

  “My dogs are in the basement. Don’t hurt them,” I stammered. “And I have three cats—”

  An Asian woman with uneven black hair nodded to me. “I’ll see to it,” she said, her words clipped.

  Danial held me as she and the group went inside. He murmured softly to me that I was safe. For a while, I didn’t think about anything but being protected and that it was over. By the time his people assembled on the deck a few minutes later, I was able to deal with the world again.