Still, the rest of it was for him.
He stood still and did his best not to flinch as she threw her arms around him. “Missed you, babe,” he tried to say, but the words caught, and he stuttered himself into silence.
She had changed. Her gait, her hair, her scent, her posture had all changed. Even her shape had changed, and yet, somehow, she still fit him, matched him, made him feel as though the shattered pieces of his life were coming back together.
After a moment, he felt himself relax. His arm went around her waist; his head found her shoulder. He didn’t even know he was crying until Kim cleared her throat.
“Sorry,” she offered, “but can we go inside? We’re going to have a lot of talking to do, and we probably better get started.”
Mara pulled back, swiping at her eyes with her forearms. “Yeah,” she said. She coughed, cleared her throat, and nodded. “That’s a good idea, yeah. It’s hot as blazes out here.”
She led the way to the door. Lenny hung back in the heat, but Kim nudged him inside, and he passed over the threshold without issue; he realized that she had already secured an implicit invitation for him, in the form of Mara’s agreement.
-Can we go inside?
-Yeah.
He experienced a surge of gratitude for the wizard.
The door clicked behind them, but not before two strange creatures had followed them inside. They were both short, pudgy, with enormous black hair and big brown eyes. The marginally taller of the two wore wire-rimmed glasses and a Power Rangers t-shirt. She frowned at Lenny and dropped her backpack on the floor.
“You better not try to kiss my mom,” she warned him. “Hugging is okay, but she thinks boys are assholes, and that means the place where you poop. So you better not kiss her, or she’ll beat you up.”
The shorter one nodded in agreement and followed the aggressor down the short hallway and out of sight.
Mara’s palm met her forehead with a soft thwack. “Oh, God. I am so sorry.”
Kim giggled until she snorted and choked. Lenny gnawed nervously at his thumbnail.
“Your kids?” he managed.
She bit her lip and nodded. Her neck and ears had gone bright red. “Gemma’s six, and Monica’s five. They’re, well… I don’t often have men in the house. Like that makes it all better.”
“No father?” he asked a split second before his lagging brain identified that as stupid observation to make.
Her expression closed off like a slammed door, and he got the distinct impression that, if he had been anyone else, she would have glared.
“We can get all caught up later,” she said flatly. “Come on.”
She led the way through to a living room that was somewhere between cozy and cramped. Lenny took one end of the familiar green plaid sofa, and Kim sat close beside him. She put a steadying hand on his forearm. Mara took the unfamiliar papasan chair on the other side of the unfamiliar coffee table. She kicked off her sneakers and crisscrossed her legs. After a few moments of silence, she began to thaw. Her shoulders relaxed.
“I can’t believe it’s you,” she said again. “This is just so surreal. How are you even here? They said there was like, a zero-point-something chance…”
Lenny shut his eyes and winced as he bit his thumbnail down to the quick.
“It’s not exactly a normal situation,” Kim supplied. She gave Lenny’s hand a squeeze. “The usual sets of statistics wouldn’t apply.”
Mara’s eyes went wide. “Oh, God. What are we talking about, here? Not… Not human trafficking, or something?”
Lenny felt sick.
Kim made a face. “No. No, there was no money involved. I just… Look, I’m going to be frank, here. I know you’re probably assuming I’m with the police, but I’m not. More like private eye, at least for the past year and a bit. I found Lenny because I was after this guy… turned out to be the guy that took him. This is actually something that it would be good if the police didn’t hear about-”
Mara started to get up. Kim put up a hand.
“-and Lenny thinks you’ll agree once you’ve heard us out. Okay? For an old friend?”
Lenny squeezed his eyes shut tighter and worked miserably at his thumbnail until he tasted blood.
Mara slid back down into the papasan chair. She yanked the band out of her ponytail, shook out her hair, and tied it up again, even tighter than before.
“We’ll start with the bare bones,” Kim said. “Build up from there. You ask questions. We can prove the big stuff, so if something seems insane, just wait.” She turned to Lenny. “You wanna take it from here, honey?”
A deep breath rattled in his throat, like it was the first he had taken in some time. With effort, he opened his eyes.
Mara stared expectantly. He looked away.
“The… The g-g-guy,” he muttered, “who… the g-guy who t-t-took me.” He moved his hand away from his mouth and closed his mangled thumbnail in a tight fist.
“He’s not… nuh-not… He’s…”
The words betrayed him. He tried again, and only a soft clicking sound came out. He pressed his lips together.
“Honey? Do you want me to?”
He didn’t. This should come from him. Something so personal should come from him. He vividly remembered planning for this, selecting each word with agonizing care. He had the words, exactly the right words. They just wouldn’t come out.
He nodded.
Kim leaned forward. “His name is Duran. I don’t know exactly what a ‘standard’ kidnapping looks like, but this wasn’t one. That’s because – being really frank, here – Duran’s a vampire.”
Mara’s eyes narrowed.
Kim ploughed on. “They’re real. I’m working for a bunch of them that are sort of in charge of Texas and wanted this guy out of the way. I’m a wizard.”
Mara’s jaw tightened.
“I’m not sure how it went down, exactly, but it wasn’t good. He was pretty bad, even for a vampire. So, basically, this guy kept Lenny in a basement for ten years. Or, more like a cellar.” She felt Lenny flinch and put her arm around him. “Sorry, honey.”
Mara’s neck stiffened, tendons standing taut.
“So, yeah. Messed with his head a lot. Bled him out completely. What you have to understand is that this guy is a power nut. His goal is typically to destroy people. And he did his best.” She paused, thought a moment, and nodded. “Oh, and Lenny is a vampire, too. Just, y’know, not a psychopathic one.”
Mara sat very, very still and spoke very, very quietly. “Get out,” she whispered. “You just get out.”
Kim and Lenny exchanged a glance.
Mara looked up slowly, brown eyes somehow dead and flashing at the same time. There were dark red spots of fury in the hollows of her cheeks.
“Get out,” she repeated, “before I just shoot you. And no way you are taking him. You just get up, you leave, and I give you sixty seconds before I call the cops. I don’t know what kind of scam you’re running, but that is my best friend, and you picked the wrong goddamn schoolteacher, because I will blow you to hell before I let you use him like this.”
“You don’t want to see any proof?”
“You mean the proof that you’ve undoubtedly been setting up all day while I was at work? What kind of rube do you think I am? Get out.”
Lenny squirmed. “Mara.”
She swung around to face him, not quite able to turn off the glare she had put on for Kim. Lenny flinched.
“Mara, it’s b-been t-t-t-ten years.”
“Yeah. Yeah, it has. Lenny, I am so sorry…”
“You knew me for five b-before that.”
“I came and looked for you, Len. I went to the hotel and asked people, and…”
“I haven’t aged in fifteen years.”
Mara pulled up short. She stood slowly. “You’re not asking me to believe this, Len. You can’t ask me to believe this.”
She kept saying his name, just kept saying his name. Lenny wondered whether it wa
s because it had been so long since she’d had a chance to. Looking back for a moment, he realized that he had been saying hers too, every chance he got.
He stood as well. He held out a hand, and Mara took it. He shook his head and slid his hand out of her grasp. “Mara, no,” he said, “look.”
She watched as he splayed his fingers and tensed his hand, revealing gleaming black claws. Frowning, she reached out to touch one. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m asking you to b-believe it. I’m d-different, but that’s still the same, and I never hurt you b-before, or a st-student, and I still won’t. Wouldn’t. P-probably c-c-c-couldn’t, even if I wanted to. D-don’t need you any less than I d-did then. Please.”
She took his hand and inspected it, no doubt looking for seams. He relaxed, and the claws retreated into blunt fingertips and the ragged ends of chewed nails. He guided her hand to the inside of his wrist, then to the side of his throat. Failing to find a pulse, she inspected his scars instead.
“I remember you being colder. You said it was bad circulation.”
“No circulation. B-been outside. It’s hot outside.”
“No,” she said, but it lacked conviction, and Kim and Lenny had no difficulty in getting her to sit down and listen.
Chapter 13
LENNY OCCASIONALLY MADE an effort to confirm or clarify something, but he let Kim do most of the talking. She was just better at it than he was. The few times he spoke up, he only seemed to make the confusion worse. They talked for over an hour, and in the end, Mara agreed to let Lenny stay – reluctantly.
“If it’s such a non-issue, why didn’t you ever tell me?” she demanded.
“Habit,” he mumbled around the thumbnail between his teeth. “And I was g-going to. I spent the whole t-t-time on the bus planning…”
But there was no way to prove that statement, and Mara did not seem to believe it.
“It was such a nightmare that Monday,” she said with a grimace, talking to a spot somewhere above Lenny’s left ear. She pushed her glasses up onto her forehead and pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. She had not looked Lenny in the eye since Kim had warned her about Sebastian and the ways a vampire could get inside a human head. He had noticed that, and tried to be understanding. Tried. “Linda took my class after lunch so I could go pick you up, and when you didn’t get off the bus… I called the bus line, and then I called the hotel, and then I puked all over Paul, and he had to call the cops because I couldn’t… I couldn’t talk, and they said they couldn’t do anything until it had been at least forty-eight hours…”
And the more Mara talked, the more Lenny realized that there was no chance of him picking up where he had left off. He may or may not have ever been declared dead, Mara told the wall between them, still not looking directly at the man on her couch. It had not taken the police long to discover that all of his documentation was fake, and that his Social Security number had been issued the year Social Security was implemented. She pressed a hand to her stomach when she said it, like she was reliving being punched in the gut. They had tracked him back through enough addresses and enough jobs that the only possibility was a large number of people using the same false identity. Some people at the school had speculated that he had disappeared to escape the law, that the investigation was pointless, and that he was probably living extravagantly somewhere on the funds in an offshore account.
“I said witness protection,” Mara added defensively, but admitted that no one had really listened. The way she moved her gaze from the wall to the floor said that she had not really believed it, herself.
The theories had flourished, and there were too many people in Abilene who still remembered.
“Maybe you could get a job outside of the school system. Somewhere, you know, you can pretend to just kind of accidentally look like Leonard Hugo. Is there anything else you can do?”
But he had no answer. His brain was tumbling through scenarios, too fast and disjointed to be called thought. He stared at her blankly until she conceded that he could be forgiven for recuperating a bit more before trying to return to a normal life.
He cried when Kim left to find herself a motel room for the night. Mara pulled out the sofa bed and supplied it with blankets, and when he had calmed enough to be presentable, she introduced him more formally to her daughters. They both evinced a healthy skepticism, but Mara had introduced him as a friend, which helped.
“You got lost?” the elder one, Gemma, asked.
Lenny nodded.
Gemma scratched at her scalp and left for a moment, returning with a very old and worn stuffed rabbit, its chest embroidered with a letter K in faded red.
“Is this yours?” she asked. “Mom said she got it from her friend who got lost. You can have it back, if you want. I’m not allowed to play with it, anyway.”
He took the toy gingerly, running an expert finger along its weakening seams. “Thank you,” he murmured.
“I kept it in case you came back,” Mara told him. “And when it looked like you weren’t going to, I gave it to Gemma. I knew it was important to you, even if you never told me why.”
“I made it for my wife,” he whispered. There was no longer any point to keeping anything secret.
Over Mara’s shoulder, the memory shimmered in gold and white, triggered by the tiny vibrations in the fabric of the stuffed animal. She smiled sadly and mouthed “Be strong,” before he tore his gaze away. He brought the rabbit up to his face and inhaled. Even after so many years, the wool still carried her scent.
“Her name was Kate.”
Gemma fidgeted. “What happened?”
“She got lost, too,” he answered, after a pause. “A long time before I met your mom.”
Undeterred, Gemma grinned. “Maybe she’ll come back, just like you!”
He smiled back, but entertained no real hope. The scarred corners of his mind, where their psychic bond had been ripped away, were more than enough proof for him. He had felt Kate die. He wondered if those scars might be part of the reason Sebastian had free rein inside his head.
Mara bid him good night and took her children to bed. He lay down and held his rabbit tightly.
And he dreamed that Kate was there with him, that they were trapped together in the cellar, and he had to watch her starve, her mind stripped away, silenced, leaving only a monster behind.
He woke weeping and disoriented, aware of someone nearby but unable to tell whom. Slowly, he remembered where he was, and that the presence in the dark was Mara. His Mara. He was sorry to have woken her, but glad she was there. He wanted to feel her again, to be reminded that she was real.
But Mara turned and tiptoed away, and Lenny cried himself back to sleep in silence.
* * *
KIM TURNED UP shortly before Mara left for work. The two women muttered some awkward pleasantries at one another, Kim smiling a bit too broadly in her attempt to seem open and trustworthy, Mara not quite managing to conceal her frustration and doubt.
Mara piled her children into the car, promising that she would try to be home as early as possible.
Lenny watched from the safety of the doorway as she drove away.
“You okay?” Kim asked, and he nodded. “Not quite what you were expecting?”
He nodded again. “I think a lot has happened to her. T-ten years. I didn’t really think it would b-b-be the same.”
“But you hoped?”
He sighed and locked the door, moving to sit on the edge of the sofa bed. “I don’t think I can stay. I’m glad to see Mara again, but she has her own life. She c-can’t put it on hold to t-take care of me. There’s nothing I can do. I’d just be a b-burden.”
Kim touched his arm. “You haven’t really tried, yet,” she told him. “She said you could stay, so I think you should try. It would be better than being somewhere you don’t know. Listen, I have to go back to Austin to get some stuff done. You try to settle in some, and if you can’t, I’ll come get you. I mean,
if you want to stay with me, you can.”
“I don’t want to be a burden on you, either.”
“Eh.” She dismissed his objection with a flip of her hair. “Tony and Edith are comping me. And you don’t take up much room. And I couldn’t really call myself one of the good guys if I left you to fend for yourself.”
She left her phone number on a sticky note in case he needed her. Then she handed him a small mirrored compact.
“If you open it with the intention of getting in touch with me, it’ll get in touch with me,” she said. “You can get Zeb or Coyote, too. Works pretty much like a phone, but I’m always carrying mine, always.”
The magic in the black plastic tingled against his palm.
She got up to go, but he stopped her. There was one more thing he needed to say, one more thing she needed to know, now that he was holding nothing back, had no secrets left to keep.
“Kim?”
“Yes?”
“You’re…”
“What?”
“You’re the… the first…”
“First what?”
He fidgeted. “I never… I never b-bit anyone before.”
She blinked at him, then laughed. “Seriously? I’m… No, ‘flattered’ definitely isn’t the right word.”
He could tell that, like many other things, that did not mean to her what it meant to him. But he had no words for what it meant to him, could not explain, and had no choice but to let her continue, bemused and uncomprehending.
Kim shook her head and grinned. “Never, huh? Leonard Hugo, you are one weird vampire. And someday, when you’re ready, I want to know absolutely everything about you.”
Paranormal After Dark: 20 Paranormal Tales of Demons, Shifters, Werewolves, Vampires, Fae, Witches, Magics, Ghosts and More Page 403