by Winter Reid
I used the distraction to lure him away, taking off back the way I’d come. The vampire followed close behind with my vampire on his heels. I glanced back and saw him bend to pick something dark off the ground. I knew what it was so I stopped, letting the other vampire roll into me. Letting him take me to the ground. He didn’t see my vampire coming up beside us, too intent on eating me to see the gun he held. I put my hands on the vampire’s neck, pushing his head up away from me. Saliva dripped from his mouth, landing on my face and neck. There was a click and a bang and his eyes changed, disconnecting a moment before blood, bone, and brains sprayed out from the side of his head.
My vampire grabbed him by the shoulders, hauling him off me. He used the butt of the gun to knock out the dead man’s fangs and then lifted him up, swinging him into the pond with a roar. The body bobbed in the water, leaking blood and gore.
A dark shape took up the invitation, gliding through the darkness, leaving soft ripples in its wake. It disappeared and the body moved, bobbing in the water. Once, twice, and then it was gone.
My vampire bent down, picking up the gun he’d dropped in the grass, and turned around, his gaze too sharp and fierce. I took a step back, stumbling. My nose had mostly stopped bleeding, but there was blood all over my mouth and chin. I wiped it off on my shirt, shaking my head at him, unsure of what I meant by the gesture—I’m okay? Don’t come any closer? Are you hungry?
With his breath still rough and rapid, he looked at my face and then out at the swamp. If he had the power to resurrect and slaughter again, he would have done it. I wanted to soothe him, to tell him I was okay, but he rushed at me before I could get the words out, and suddenly my view changed.
I landed on my back, his body heavy on top of me. Grass tickled the undersides of my knees, the stars winking at me over his shoulder. Tugging impatiently at my jacket, he pulled it up and over my head, hands shaking as he yanked at my bra. I pulled him down to kiss me. He let go of some of his weight, using his hands to snarl my hair instead of brace himself. My tummy was warm. At first I thought it was just us, the combination of our heat and lust. Then the warmth trickled down my side. I broke the kiss and he looked at me.
“I’m wet,” I said.
He pulled back a little. The blood looked black in the darkness, spread over my stomach like paint. Too much paint.
“Are you bleeding somewhere?” he asked.
“No,” I answered. “Are you?”
He sat back on his knees and I followed, pulling his shirt up at the hem.
My heart stuttered and then raced like the devil. “Oh my God.”
“I didn’t even feel it.”
My hands trembled and I yanked his jacket off his arms, pulling his shirt all the way off. Gut in knots, I fought hysteria, pushing him down on his back. I used my teeth to tear his shirt into strips. What the fuck did I know about first aid? I’d never been a Girl Scout.
Putting my hands on his stomach, I bent down to look closer. The wound was long, stretching from one hip almost to the other. And it was deep. Dear Lord was it deep. I wasn’t sure but I thought I could see down to the muscles in his abdomen. And the blood… he bled buckets. I cried in earnest, wiping my nose on my sleeve as I tied strips of cotton together. Stopping the blood seemed like the most important thing to do but my fingers wouldn’t cooperate and I had to stop for a minute, resting my forehead on his chest.
“Baby,” I said, the word an apology, ragged and scared. This was my fault, my bizarre vendetta.
“It’s alright.” He patted my head, his voice quiet and unfocused.
I wrapped him as tight as I could, unsure if that was the right thing to do or if I was hurting him more by cinching him. I hadn’t seen anything in the wound that looked like internal organs, nothing soft or slick. The other vampire must have tagged him when they’d first collided, that headbutt to the stomach. I bent over my vampire and kissed him, his forehead, cheeks, and chin.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He shook his head but didn’t clarify. I checked the dressing beneath my hand. The bleeding had slowed, soaking slowly through the makeshift bandage instead of gushing. I wiped sweat off my face with my arm. A mourning dove sang above us; there wasn’t much time left to the night.
“We have to move,” I said.
He nodded.
“I don’t know where to take you.”
He took his time answering, gathering his words slowly. “The caves aren’t far.”
Liar. They were at least a mile and we wouldn’t be running. I wondered why he didn’t think I’d know that. I put my jacket on, draping his over his shoulders. He groaned when I helped him to his feet, keeping much of his weight on my shoulder. Six months earlier I couldn’t have hefted it.
We stumbled back toward the trail, stopping from time to time so he could catch his breath. He kept his back curved, his hand over the wound, rubbing my arm like a talisman with his free hand as we walked, leaving the marsh and turning left. We started through the pine forest, the ground thick with needles, soft orange in the day and colorless by night. Trees towered around us, stretching so high that their lowest branches began well over our heads, pine bark like thick, brown scales on their trunks. An egret stood at the water’s edge, all gangly legs and blue feathers that almost glowed in the darkness.
“Are you sure you can keep going?” I asked when he stopped for the second time in as many minutes.
He nodded again.
I pressed my hand against his chest, feeling for his heartbeat. I knew a fork in the path was coming—a hard right that would take us to our tree. Our hole. We’d still have a bit of a hike to it but it was closer than the caves, and I didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to keep going. I ran my hand down to his stomach, touching it lightly. Trying not to act like I was checking for new blood.
Our turn came up suddenly and I aimed for it. He was too distracted to notice where we were going at first. That didn’t last long.
Stopping, he frowned. “What are we doing here?”
“It’s closer—”
“No.”
“Please—”
“No.”
I slipped around to the front of him. “We don’t have time to go anywhere else. This is it.”
He didn’t look happy but he didn’t say anything else against it.
I almost missed the hole. It was covered in kudzu, as were the tree and root ball, and much of the surrounding forest. It had happened so fast, just over the last six months. I left my vampire leaning against a standing tree and cleared away some of the vines, its leaves thick and green from all the rain we’d had. I used a stick to poke around inside our hole, unsure whether a snakebite could hurt either of us permanently but unwilling to test it.
I helped my vampire slide down into the darkness and slipped in after him. It was a tighter fit than I remembered—closer, like the walls had grown in some. I opened my jacket and snuggled up to him, using it to cover us both.
He was quiet and I wondered how much of that had to do with where we were. I pressed my hand to his forehead. Cool skin, colder than I’d ever felt him. He looked like the undead more now than in the entire time I’d known him.
Of course, not dead was how I wanted him, and I hadn’t realized just how badly I wanted him until that moment. Until I shifted so I laid half on top of him and pressed my wrist against his mouth.
“Take it,” I said.
He shook his head.
“I want you to. Take it.” I pressed harder.
“No.”
“Please,” I said, and my voice broke.
“I don’t need it.” It was an obvious lie but he didn’t give me time to argue, wrapping his arm around my neck and pulling me down until my head rested on his chest. I could hear his heart again, chugging slow.
“Just let me hold you,” he said.
So I did.
Chapter Twenty-Two
My vampire hunched over a little as he walked. His color had gotten now
here. I leaned against a tree, watching him navigate the barbwire fence, listening to his unsteady breathing.
“Are you sure about this?” I winced when he caught his bare back on one of the metal tines.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t want me to come with you?”
“Stay here.”
“My blood tastes better,” I said, meaning to make him laugh. Instead he turned around and glared at me. “Kidding.” I held up my palms.
He walked on into the pasture, toward the sleeping cows scattered through it like blonde boulders. I couldn’t hear him anymore, not his feet in the grass, not his breath. I got a little panicky about that as attuned to him as I’d become over the last thirty-six hours.
He’d fallen asleep quickly in the hole and stayed that way until the sun went down. I hadn’t been as lucky so I’d had plenty of time to think. I’d used it, thinking to excess about the depth of my reaction to his wounding. How much it hurt to see it. Because for all he was my evil vampire, he was my superman, too. It would be stupid not to acknowledge that. I had come to count on his strength, to see him as an invincible force of nature. The true shock was not that he was a mortal immortal but how much I was fully prepared to give to keep him that way. To keep him alive, I would have bled myself dry. Worse, I would have bled a stranger, and that thought shook me to my bones.
Too sick to be graceful, he knelt down beside the first cow he came to, shielding much of the action from my view with his back. I watched him stretch one arm out, holding her still. He buried his head in the side of her neck and her body jerked. Tensing his arm, he pressed her head down into the grass. His physical strength was something I didn’t consider that often but I thought about it then; the power he must have engaged to keep an adult cow from flailing while he drank from her.
She groaned that low, throaty noise that cattle make. I didn’t want to watch but I couldn’t stop all the same. Her eyes rolled back, searching the woods and stars in that endless, confused way that helps nothing. I remembered him at my neck, so much rougher than he was being with her. I remembered the way I had looked at the moon and felt a twinge of the same self-loathing I always did when I thought about how I had given myself to someone who had done that to me. When I acknowledged that I wanted to again.
After a while, he pulled away from her, stroking her head, talking to her softly. Then he sat back on his heels. I watched him look up at the sky, raising his hands to it, palms up. When he was finished, he came back to me, smiling with a joyousness I hadn’t expected.
“Vampire drive-thru?” I smiled back, handing him a scrap of my ruined shirt. “You didn’t kill her.”
He wiped his mouth on it. “Of course not. I could never drink all of her and I wouldn’t waste it.”
“Won’t the farmer wonder what happened?”
“They’ll think it was a near miss with a dog or coyote.”
“What now?” I asked.
He didn’t answer but put his hand on the back of my head and kissed me. Her taste lingered in his mouth and it didn’t make me sick the way it should have. I kissed him back, harder, using my tongue to catch the flavors—his and hers. I put my arms around his neck, using my new strength to hold him tighter. These were bad signs—that I liked what I’d seen, that I liked the blood—but I didn’t think about that; only his mouth and breath and hands. Nothing but him until he pulled away.
“Not here,” he said and looked back at her, a pale mound in the grass.
“How do we get home?” I asked.
He took his jacket out of my hands and looked down at me. I was filthy and bloody, but I could have just taken a hard fall. He put on his jacket to cover his makeshift bandaging.
“We run.”
I was a little surprised my keys stayed in my pocket through all the activity but grateful just the same. My vampire stayed close behind me as I opened the door, his breath on my shoulder. No one had stopped us, unlikely as folks are to look at runners in the night, especially half naked ones.
I led him to the bathroom and took a clean towel out of the little closet. It was pink, but I didn’t think he’d mind.
“So this is the bathroom,” I said, laying the terrycloth on the closed toilet lid.
Standing by the tub, he held my bath puff, squishing it in his hand like he was trying to figure it out. “I’ve used one before.”
“The shower’s a little tricky.”
“Shower?”
Okay, maybe he hadn’t had a complete bathroom experience.
I leaned over beside him and started the water, getting it wicked hot. Steam rolled out from behind the curtain. I flipped the slidey thing at the base of the handle and water shot out of the massaging (don’t judge) nozzle head, raining down against the inside of the tub. He watched, wide-eyed.
“Wonderful,” he said.
“Right,” I answered, eyeing his dirty jacket. “Listen, you think you got it from here?”
I was suddenly nervous. I wasn’t ready to see him naked. Again. Somehow it seemed there was a world of difference between losing control in the grass and fucking my vampire on the bathroom floor. As if it wouldn’t have counted as much if we were outdoors.
He looked at me and nodded.
I breathed out.
“‘Kay, I’m gonna go…” Stick my head in the freezer. Masturbate in my bedroom. Eat a vast quantity of chocolate ice cream and vomit. “I’m gonna go find you something to wear. Take as long as you need.” I backed toward the door. “There’s soap and shampoo in there.”
He stopped watching me like he’d eat me—nicely—and looked confused instead.
“For your hair,” I clarified and rushed out, closing the door hard behind me.
I went to my bedroom and found the box I’d packed for Jackson. It was depressingly small. Ten years and all I’d needed to extract him from my life was an egg crate. I picked through it, and it hurt a little to touch. It had been so long since the night at the restaurant and I hadn’t heard from him at all. Total radio silence. From my perspective, given my bleak future, the distance he kept between us was a good thing. But did it make me feel sad and insignificant? Oh hell yes.
My hands landed on a set of gray sweats. There were holes here and there in the pants and shirt where the fabric had worn through. Jackson rarely threw things away once he’d broken them in.
I cracked the door to the bathroom, laying the sweats on the floor just inside, and listened to my messages before heading into the kitchen.
Olive rushed in after me, content to leave her hiding place once my vampire was occupied. It wasn’t that she was afraid of him, but that she was shy of strangers in general. Getting a visit from Olive meant you’d undergone careful, long-term study and had been deemed worthy. She was put out by my absence, but she wasn’t hungry, thanks to the gravity feeder I’d gotten her after the dream. I picked her up and snuggled her until she batted my face, asking to be let down.
My loaf of bread was a little green around the edges so I opened the freezer, pulling out a pint of old ice cream and scraping ice crystals off the top and into the sink with a spoon. It wasn’t chocolate, but moose tracks, which was just as good if not better. I grabbed the cordless phone, dialing without looking, and leaned against the wall, watching the bathroom door.
“Hello?” A soft, feminine voice answered on the other end.
“Hi, Momma,” I said.
“Hi, baby!” Her footsteps echoed on the hall floor as she left the den, my father’s TV programs growing faint behind her.
Dad retired from the local power authority two years before and liked to bead in his free time. ‘Bead’ as in he made bracelets and necklaces. He also had a shed behind our vacation house in Maine where they’d moved after his retirement. The shed, or ‘shop’ as he liked to call it, was where he stored all the junk he scavenged from the dump and other people’s yard sales.
At first Mom fought his dumpster diving. For a while there I thought they might separate, but then
one night she got mad enough to sleep at the Super 8. Dad snuck over and stayed with her. It became part of their routine and they started going at least once a month.
With the exception of their epic sex life, Dad was a consummate retiree and remote hog. Mom didn’t care. She’d just sit beside him in her matching recliner and read, magically tuning out whatever sports event or home improvement show he happened to be watching.
“Golf?” I asked.
She laughed and I loved the sound.
“Bass fishing,” she answered. “Are you coming home soon?”
It was her standard question and I expected it every time we spoke.
“I can’t right now, Momma. Work is too crazy. Maybe next summer.” I don’t know why I lied to her.
“Oh? That’s a good idea, sweetie. The heat down there isn’t good for your skin.”
“I know, Mom.”
“The other day Sophie Peters showed me a picture of her daughter. You know how Julie moved to Florida for that Triple-A player? Well that fell apart, poor sweetie, but let me tell you the sun has done a number on her face.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t the meth, Mom?”
Everyone I’d kept in touch with from the old neighborhood couldn’t wait to tell me what happened to Julie Peters. Buncha gossiping bitches. The good news was that Jules was in recovery.
“Nadine! Don’t even joke about that! I’m telling you, the sun will turn you into a raisin if you’re not careful.”
“I use sunscreen every day.”
“Good girl. How’s Jackson?”
I took a bite of ice cream. “We broke up.”
“Oh thank God.”
“Don’t start, Momma.”