Her Dear & Loving Husband

by Meredith Allard

  “‘I haven’t lost you. You’re here.’

  “‘Am I? Sometimes I’m not even certain. Sometimes I think I’m dreaming in my death’s imagination of a demon life I recall from a nightmare. ‘Tis all just a nightmare, is it not? An unending nightmare? Tell me ‘tis all a nightmare that shall end and then I can sleep peacefully at last knowing I have died human.’

  “My father couldn’t speak, and I couldn’t stand to see him so miserable. I looked out the window and saw the light of the new day peeking through the low-sitting clouds.

  “‘I must be on my leave,’ I said again. ‘‘Tis nearly daylight.’

  “‘Don’t mind the daylight,’ my father said. ‘No one shall come round this day. You’re safe here.’

  “‘I cannot be in the sunlight,’ I said. ‘It pains me.’

  “My father looked at the sun breaking through to day. He grabbed some quilts and used them to block the light coming in through the window. ‘Do you stay indoors while the sun is high?’ he asked.

  “‘I sleep,’ I said. ‘While the sun is high I sleep like the dead, and when the sky is dark I am awakened with life again.’

  “He gathered more quilts and bundled them on the floor along the wall farthest from the window. It was an amazing act of love, this devoted man making a special bed away from the sunlight, his only wish to keep his demon boy safe from harm. He didn’t seem at all afraid that this bloodsucker he let into his home would attack him and drain him dry. He gestured toward the makeshift bed. ‘Sleep, James,’ he said. ‘Sleep now and we’ll talk more this night. Just know that I shall do all I can for you. All shall be well.’

  “‘Nothing shall ever be well again,’ I said. ‘I miss my Lizzie.’

  “‘I know, Son. I know.’

  “I was weary, it was my time to rest, so I did as my father said and I lay on the quilts and fell asleep.”

  James stopped when he heard Sarah sobbing. He pressed her head to his chest and stroked her hair. He kissed her tears away.

  “Poor John,” she said. “How he must have suffered seeing you so changed. He always had such a loving heart.”

  “My father was the epitome of unconditional love, and there was a lesson for me that night that was a long time coming. Even after that time with my father I was still intent on acknowledging only what was wrong with all humans, not what was good about some.” He kissed the top of Sarah’s head and pulled her closer. “I don’t think I fully grasped the magnitude of that lesson until I met you.”

  “What lesson?”

  “There are good things, sweet things, beautiful things in the world if you open yourself enough to see them. Even I, turned as I am, can see them.”

  “Yes,” Sarah said, “I can see them too.”

  He kissed her lips, softly at first, then passionately. She slid her arms around his neck, tousled his hair with her fingers, pushed her lips into his. He couldn’t get enough of her warm softness. Her body temperature was soothing to him, such a contrast to his cold-blooded skin. In his entire life, all the many years of it, he had never held another woman in his arms. No one else would do. Now just being near Sarah made all that lonely time worthwhile. Basking in the scent of strawberries and cream, feeling her responsive heat, made him feel alive. As they sat there intertwined he realized that it might be one of their last nights together, one of the last times he could touch her, but he pressed that thought away.

  Sarah pulled away first. “Tell me more,” she said.

  James had to shake the memories back into place. He was too distracted by her lips.

  “After I left my father’s house I lived alone in isolated rural areas where I could hide easily and hunt unnoticed. After a time I realized I could no longer live like the mindless hunter I had become, driven only by instinct and not by reason.”

  “How did you decide which people to hunt?”

  “I hunted people who were alone.”

  “Oh.”

  “I haven’t hunted for a very long time.” He looked at Sarah and wondered how much she really wanted to know. But Sarah, like his father, was the epitome of unconditional love, so he didn’t edit his words. He didn’t worry about saying too much. He knew she loved him, all of him, the good and the bad of him, and he decided to tell her things he had never told anyone. The honesty was thrilling to him.

  “There were years when I spent my nights as the quintessential hunter, jumping out from the shadows. I would find my prey, stalk them soundlessly, effortlessly, better than any predatory animal in the wild. I had to feed myself. Besides, I thought, all humans were weak, selfish, and willing to sacrifice innocent others for their own personal gain. Then I realized I was no better than the people I despised for so long. I felt the painful pangs of human emotions again, and I realized, with a long-lost shudder, that I felt ashamed. I knew you wouldn’t be proud of what I had become. That was the revival of my humanity.”

  “So you stopped hunting?”

  “I remember the night like it was yesterday. I saw a young family, a father, mother, and child. They were mountain people living in a lonely log cabin beneath the deep green foliage in the Great Smoky Mountains. The Smokies are one of the oldest mountain ranges on earth, more than a million years old, and I felt better about myself among the ancient stones and time-telling trees. There were times when I felt like the oldest being on earth, and in the mountains I was surrounded by things even older than me. They’re called the Smokies because even at night you can see the gray-blue fog settle like an ethereal veil over the mountains.”

  “It sounds beautiful,” Sarah said.

  “The mountains are a great cathedral of hardwood trees like sugar maples and shrubs like hydrangeas, wildflowers, and too many species of birds and wild animals to count. I liked it there because I could get lost in the maze of the forest, think my thoughts, and wonder at what I had become.

  “That night I was hungry, I hadn’t fed in some time, and I saw the family. My instincts began singing attack songs between my ears—there is your next meal, they sang. Though the family was together, I was so hungry I didn’t care. The mother was stirring a pot over the fire burning in a pit outside the log cabin, and she had a smiling baby on her hip. The father was dragging in wood he chopped. Suddenly I heard the wife’s laughter at something her baby did and the memories flooded back, like tidal waves crashing into my skull, knocking me back into consciousness after staying numb so long. I saw you standing before me as you used to, and I remembered how happy we were before the madness overwhelmed us. I realized how that family was just like us, how we could have been if our child was born and we were allowed to remain happy. Whether I took all of them or just one or two of them, I would be stealing their happiness the way our happiness had been stolen.”

  “I don’t think I could do that,” Sarah said. Her voice was serious, as if she had spent some time considering it. “Hunting.”

  “You don’t need to be anything other than what you are, Sarah. I wish I could be the one to change. I wish I could be human again.”

  “But…”

  He pressed his finger to her lips. “We have time to worry about such things.”

  “James…”

  “Hush.” He kissed her lips to stop her from saying any more. “Another time.”

  He didn’t want her to spend that night worrying about what he knew they would have to come to terms with one day. He had learned over time that it didn’t pay to waste today away consumed by tomorrow’s problems. Tomorrow would come soon enough.

  He hugged her closer as he continued. “After I saw that mountain family I knew I couldn’t do to them what had been done to us. I left at such a rapid speed I was miles away by morning, and I had to find a place to hide until night. That’s when I challenged myself to be more human than some humans. There have been times when humans were better predators than any lion in the wild or any vampire on the prowl. Like the way Kenneth Hempel is hunting me right now.”

  “I still don’t want you
to go out in the sun.”

  “I know, honey, but I have to. It’s the only way.”

  He kissed her again, lost once more in her warm softness. He could lose himself in her lips forever. For a moment he forgot how much time had passed. He was transported to the days before the Salem Witch Trials, a time when there were no problems in the world when they were connected that way. He carried her to bed, but when he looked at her face he saw her closed eyes so he covered her with the blanket. He would let her sleep that night. They would have other nights to enjoy connecting again. When he stood up to leave, Sarah grabbed his arm and wouldn’t let him go.

  “Stay with me,” she said.

  “I’m not going anywhere, Sarah.” He put his arms around her and held her until she fell asleep again.

  CHAPTER 22

  The hunt. The hunter. The hunted.

  Hunting is an innate state for animals in the wild, for vampires, even for humans. The first tribes of human civilization were hunter-gatherers where men hunted wild game and women gathered edible fruits and berries. To aid their hunting skills, hu-mans invented arrowheads to bring the animals down. Vampires are closer to wild animals in their hunting skills, to lions in the jungle for example, than to humans who need weapons, strategy, and skill to conquer their game. We do not need arrows, traps, or guns, James thought. We need only our predatory instincts and natural abilities. To human eyes a vampire hunt might seem gorier than a lion attacking an antelope because vampires hunt humans, but most vampires are only looking to feed like the lion. Lions in the wild are not sadistic. They are feeding to survive. Yet vampires are different from the hunting animals, too, because while they are driven by the same primal instinct to lunge at their prey, feed, and satiate themselves, they were human once, and the human emotions were still there, even if they were so long forgotten they were nearly undetectable in some.

  Some humans hunt for reasons other than survival, though, and sometimes the human hunt is more subtle. The Salem Witch Trials are also called the witch hunts. They were seeking and searching for anyone guilty of witchcraft. This wasn’t a blatant hunt where the hunters brandished their bows and arrows. In-stead, the witch hunters brandished their accusations and condemnations. Instead of hunting for sustenance so they could live another day, they were hunting to inflate their egos and wield power over those weaker than themselves. Hunting is always about overpowering someone weaker than you, James thought. When you are the weaker one then you are the hunted. It is a law of nature. Humans, like vampires, are guilty of giving into their baser instincts, survival of the fittest, there isn’t room for all of us, better me than you. Everyone wants to be at the top of the food chain, the hunter instead of the hunted. Everyone, humans, animals, and vampires alike, are entrenched in this endless cycle. James knew only the strong would survive.

  As James thought about Kenneth Hempel and the reporter’s own hunting games, he wondered who would prove to be the stronger of the two. Who would be the hunter and who would be the hunted? Who would walk away standing, the victor in this battle of wills? Hempel had flushed James, his prey, out of hiding in the dark night into the sunlight. To counterattack, James had to lunge at him, unafraid, and bare his fangs, figuratively speaking, and show that he wouldn’t surrender. He wouldn’t be the prey. He would be the final link at the top of this chain. His only solace was knowing that this miserable hunt would soon be over and he could go back to his new life with the woman he loved.

  The night before he went to meet Hempel he watched Sarah as she slept. Everything he ever loved, then and now, was sleeping there. Those last few nights he spent his late night hours with his arms around her, watching her sleep, watching her breathe, her chest rising and falling to the rhythm of her heartbeat. As much as he didn’t know what would happen when he stepped into the sunlight, he was prepared to endure what-ever pain he must, that and tenfold more, to be back safe in their home Friday night. He would not say good-bye again. Not now. Not after everything that had to happen in exactly the right way at exactly the right time for them to be reunited. He had endured one long endless night waiting to see her again. And suddenly there she was, Sarah, sweet Sarah, beautiful Sarah, and he was determined to remain there for her. To know that she loved him, even as he was, to know that she still smiled whenever she saw him, that sweet, beautiful smile, those were the images he would see in his mind when the glare of the sun made him blind. He would do what he needed to do.

  That night he wrote a note for her:

  Sarah,

  I could write for days and never get to the depth of how I have become a better man since that night you first stood in front of this house, wanting to know it better because it looked familiar to you. It should have looked familiar to you because it is your home. You have made me happy again.

  I will come back to you on Friday. It is more than a coincidence or an accident that we found each other again. It is fate. It has to be. It is our destiny to be together. Just know that I love you and I will be with you forever.

  Forever.

  James

  CHAPTER 23

  Sarah had a plan. It was a good plan, deceptively simple, so sim-ple Kenneth Hempel wouldn’t notice or even suspect it. Sarah, Jennifer, and Olivia were going to help James make it into the library while exposing him to as little sun as possible. The sun couldn’t be completely avoided, it was James in the light Hempel wanted to see, but they could keep him out of it as long as possible. Jennifer offered to cast a spell so the heat wouldn’t hurt him, but James said no, he would do this on his own. He could stand a lot, he reminded them. But they were still determined to see him through his mission.

  Olivia suggested using the keys to let him inside the library before dawn. “We can hide him in his office until Hempel arrives,” she said.

  “No,” said Sarah. “Hempel will be looking for any tricks James might try to play.”

  With the exception of this one, she hoped.

  The next morning, the day James would go outside in the sunlight for the first time in three hundred and nineteen years, Sarah drove his black Explorer to the library and parked it in its usual spot in the faculty lot. It was early when she arrived, not yet eight a.m., and she sighed with relief when she scanned the campus and saw only a few scattered students and some birds perched in the trees. She expected to see Kenneth Hempel jump out from behind the bushes lining the parking lot and yell, “A trick! I knew that man wasn’t human!”

  The library wouldn’t open for another hour, so Sarah let her-self in. Dim and silent inside when closed, it felt strange to be alone when the place usually whispered sound and movement. She checked behind the librarians’s desk, around the computer terminals, besides the stacks, still looking for the reporter. She glanced at the camera perched on the ceiling and imagined Hempel sitting at the security desk, his feet up, his hands behind his head, watching the monitors, seeing her every move. She thought she heard footsteps overhead and stopped. When she listened again and heard nothing, she brushed off the terrible chill, tasting the paranoia like sour grapes in her mouth, waxy and bitter. She had to stop worrying about how this day would play out and stay focused. For James.

  She let herself into the closet where the maintenance work-ers left their supplies. She grabbed the long metal bar with the hand-like claw and closed the blinds on all the windows. When she turned the lights on, it wasn’t obvious that the blinds were closed since enough fluorescence glowed to illuminate the room.

  She took the elevator up to the third floor and closed the blinds closest to James’s office. Standing alone in the hallway she paused, certain she heard movement near the storage room, though she dismissed it as her paranoia rising to the surface again. She used James’s key to let herself into his office and she closed the blinds in there. She thought about covering his window with black paper, but she was sure Hempel would look for tricks like that. The blinds were tattered, old, the ends sticking out in different directions, and streams of sunlight played patterns l
ike checkerboards on the wall. She tried to bend the ends back into place, but they were stubborn. She put her hand on the first checkerboard and nodded when she didn’t feel any heat. That was good, she thought. For some reason she thought the heat of the sun was worse for James than the light.

  As she turned to leave she noticed the brown paneled icebox sitting under his desk. She had seen James place the red-filled medical bags in there. She opened the icebox, removed the two bags, and brought them to the refrigerator in the third floor fac-ulty lounge. She hoped no one looked in there since she wasn’t sure how to explain the donated blood in the vegetable drawer. It could be for the science department, she thought, for a biology lab or a pre-med class. But there was yogurt on the shelf that had expired over two months before, so she wasn’t too concerned that anyone would look that closely. Besides, no one had seen her put the bags in there, so as long as no one checked the security cameras no one should question her. Later, before the library opened, she filled James’s icebox with cans of diet soda and candy bars from the vending machines. Just in case.

  It was morning but it was dark inside Jennifer’s house. The blinds were closed, the curtains drawn, and over that were four layers of black velvet pinned with thumbtacks. No sunlight was getting through that day. James had been there since four a.m. so he would be inside before sunrise, and soon after he arrived he fell asleep on the sofa. Jennifer and her mother stayed away, letting him rest, whispering to each other when they needed to speak, getting Jennifer’s car in the garage ready for the three-mile drive to the library with their light-sensitive cargo. The windows of Jen-nifer’s white Toyota were tinted, but she was afraid they were not dark enough and she tacked some black velvet around all four sides of the backseat.

  Jennifer let James sleep until a little after eleven a.m. He was disoriented when he woke up, but he would be strong that day. He shook away his lethargy and stood up, wandering to the win-dow. Daylight peeked into the living room where the velvet cur-tains had come unhooked. He stared at the splash on the wall, more sun than he had seen in over three hundred years. As he stood there he realized the few beaming streams weren’t hurting his eyes at all. It wasn’t anything like the flash of agony he re-membered from 1692. In fact, he felt comforted by the radiating warmth. Jennifer jumped between him and the light, pinning the corner closed.