by Winter Reid
“Can you, uh, put this away?” I asked.
“Oh it bothers you?”
“Of course it bothers me.” My voice broke when I said it. I took a deep breath and another drink. “Doesn’t it bother you?”
“You bet,” he said. He took the phone, slipping it into his pocket. “Do you know why I called you down here tonight?”
I shook my head. “Search me.”
“I might,” he laughed. “I might.”
“I’m not hiding anything.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Nadine, what were you doing in the park at that hour? Funny, I feel like I’ve asked you that before.”
“Sneaking in a night run. It was childish. I’m sorry.”
“Who was the man?”
“Just some guy who’d twisted his ankle.”
“Some guy?”
“Yup.”
“Whom you didn’t know.”
“That’s right.”
He leaned in again, folding his hands in front of him on the table. “What the hell is going on here?”
“Dinner? I’m not sure.”
“Do you know when that picture was taken?”
I shook my head.
“Three days after the surveillance cameras we installed after your last escape caught you and an unidentified male trespassing, yet again, on government property in the middle of the night.”
“That’s an unfortunate coincidence but it’s just a coincidence. I really have no idea what’s happen—”
“I don’t believe you,” he cut me off. He leaned in closer, his face angry, all the good cop wearing off. “I don’t know if this is some kind of pathetic alligator Fight Club for bored sorority sisters or some kind of initiation or what. I don’t know but I’ll find out.”
I watched him. He flushed, hot pink rising on the skin around his collar. Something was rising in me as well.
“Good luck with that,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow and rubbed his mouth with his knuckles.
The waiter brought the etouffee and Bell looked at his watch.
“You don’t have time to eat that,” he said.
“That’s okay. I’m not hungry.” I drained my second glass of Syrah.
“Take it home. You need it.”
I nodded.
He waved the waiter over and asked him to wrap up my food. I asked for another glass of wine.
“Don’t get shit-faced, Levitt,” Bell cautioned. “I don’t have time to take you home.”
“I think I’ll be okay,” I said and took a full glass back from the waiter. It was a new one, and I marked it with my lip gloss when I drank.
Bell relaxed back in his chair, watching. Again. “So you like it?” he asked.
“Like what?”
“You like it?” He gestured around us to the restaurant. “The food is good? The wine is okay?”
“Um, yeah,” I said, nodding. “It was okay.”
“And if a guy brought you here? You’d be impressed?”
I blinked. “Ah, I guess so. Uh-huh.”
“Good.” He looked at his watch again. “Well, Nadine, it’s been interesting.”
“It has been that.”
“I wouldn’t go anywhere if I were you,” he said. “Stay close to home for a few days. I may call you again.”
“I’ve got no plans.”
We looked at each other for a minute.
“Go on. Get out of here,” he said.
“O-kay,” I answered, kicking back the rest of my drink before I stood up and immediately sat back down. I tried again, hanging onto the wall for balance. The room spun, just a tad. The waiter was at my side, pressing a brown paper bag into my hand. He started clearing and resetting my place at the table. I looked over my shoulder at Bell. He looked me up and down once before he spoke.
“Stay out of trouble, Nadine.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“What do you think?” I asked.
Meidias squatted on the edge of the path, rubbing mud between his fingers. Yellow police tape stretched between the trees, sagging in the center like Christmas garland, the free ends dancing slightly in the breeze. He was looking out at the spot where they’d found her, the woman on Bell’s phone.
“There have been a lot of men here,” he said.
“That’s because someone found a dead girl.”
“What did you say she looked like?”
“Blonde. Pretty.”
“No. The damage to her body.”
“I only looked for a minute.”
He made a tsking sound and rose, wiping his hand on his jeans. “Close your eyes,” he said.
“I don’t want to.”
He kissed my forehead. “Do you want to know what happened?”
I nodded.
“Close your eyes.”
I did.
“Breathe.”
I did.
“Start with something easy. What was she wearing?”
I shook my head. “Just… a pair of red shorts and a light blue shirt.”
“Look for wounds. What do you see?”
“Most of her leg is missing and there’s a wound on her neck like—”
“Like yours.”
I opened my eyes and he was looking at me. He put his palm against my cheek.
“Yes, like mine,” I said. “But it goes all the way around her neck and down a bit. It was deeper. Savage. It wasn’t you, was it?”
“No. You were my last human.”
“But it was one of you?”
“One of us, yes.”
“I don’t understand why.”
“It was a woman,” he said matter-of-factly.
“I know she was a woman. I saw the picture.”
He shook his head. “The vampire. The vampire was a woman.”
I blinked. “How can you tell?”
“I can smell her,” he said. “She came back here recently.”
“Maybe because of the body?”
“We don’t eat carrion.”
“How do you know the vampire that killed her was the same vampire that came back?”
“Because the girl didn’t die here.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“Because she died in the water.” He took my hand and started walking back toward the park perimeter.
“In the water?”
“Whoever drank from her didn’t finish. She would have been alive and thrashing in the water, which is why the alligator took her to the bottom and rolled her. That’s when her leg came off.”
I broke away from him, retching off the side of the trail. When I was finished, he wiped my mouth with his t-shirt.
“Did you eat anything?” he asked.
I shook my head. “So, what? The alligator got tired of her and left her there in the trees?”
“No, the vampire did. She probably killed the animal and took the girl. She left her there on purpose.”
“Why?”
“To send a message. To tell us that she’s coming.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Leaving Dream
It’s night again and it feels like I’ve been sleeping for days. More than days. Years. And now I’m awake, but not just awake. Super awake. I can see everything, even in the darkness: the bits of bark stuck to his face and beard, a roly poly stuck in the clay behind him. My body should work, as hyperactive as my mind suddenly seems to be. He’s watching me try to move my arm. It doesn’t work.
“Please help me,” I whisper.
He puts his fingers on my mouth and I start crying again. He pulls away from me, hauling his body up and out of the hole, and the emptiness he leaves behind is worse than anything he’s done to me so far.
“I’m dying,” I say to the blackness because there’s suddenly no one else to tell.
Minutes pass and I feel his hands reaching down for me from above. I can see him when I look up, a dark shadow against the darker forest. He grab
s me by the armpits, his fingers digging in so hard it hurts, and yanks me up, dragging me back to the path he snatched me from. Sticks and stones scratch at my legs, my back. He hauls me up over his shoulder and I’m looking down at his back as he walks, my hair swinging back and forth.
Eventually he slides me down and drops me, the back of my head smacking the pebble-covered pavement. I cry out and he covers my mouth with his hand. I can smell the old oak leaves that crackle beneath me, feel the small acorns that jab into my skin with pointy ends and tops. A breeze lifts the hair off my cheeks and sends more leaves skittering across the path, edges curled in on themselves like a dead spider’s legs. I’m cold. So much colder than I was in the hole. I look up at the monster. He’s there, but featureless.
“Please,” I whisper, unsure of what I’m begging for.
He leans over me and I offer him my neck because at this point I want this to be over so much more than I want to survive it. And because if I’m going to die, I don’t want it to be alone. He owes me that at least.
But he doesn’t drink from me and he doesn’t kill me. Instead he leans down and kisses me and it’s the first time he’s put his mouth on me without hurting me, but it hurts most of all.
He kisses me.
Then he leaves.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I couldn’t get the woman out of my head. It was my story, just with a different ending. And if that wasn’t bad enough, there was the dream.
I kicked my bathroom trashcan and leaned in closer to the mirror, glopping another layer of black mascara on my eyelashes—not brown-black. Not soft black. Just black. Onyx black. Black as Meidias’s goddamn soul. I kicked the trash again, knocking it over.
Black liner, black lashes, black shoes—my black come fuck me shoes to be precise. Four-inch heels were generally not a good idea for me, but given the moment I’d relived in my sleep, I figured I could at least use them to stab my lover through his cruel, thoughtless heart. They’d cost me two hundred bucks five years earlier; a fortune at a time in my life when two hundred dollars was a semester of eating, but they were strappy and sinful and they hurt like dry sex.
I’d shimmied into the dress I’d worn during my brief stint as a car model. It was silver and slinky, designed to match the classic Jag I’d spent an afternoon lounging on. Silver, slinky, and short. Lordy, lordy was it short, the top tight and asymmetrical, strapless on one side. I glossed up my lips, grabbed a clutch, and made my way to the street.
There was still a hint of sunlight, the last gasp of warm orange glow at the end of the day. It hurt my eyes so I pulled my fake Gucci sunglasses out of my purse and slid them over my nose. I wasn’t far from St. Catherine but I hailed a cab anyway, wanting to be well out of sniffing range before Meidias got to my apartment.
“Got a party?” my cabbie asked. He was young for a driver, with cute dark curls that probably stuck out farther than his mother liked. There was a Phish sticker on the dashboard.
“Got any ideas?” I asked him.
He turned to look at me and his gaze got stuck at my thighs.
I whistled to bring him around.
“I got a few,” he said.
We ended up in a combo club on the west end doing shots of sake and eating sashimi, which went and stayed down surprisingly well. The restaurant was upstairs with a dance floor on the ground level. I slipped away at eleven when my cabbie went outside to take a call from his irate boss. It was a bitch move to sneak off, but he was sweet, funny, and a genuinely good person. Basically, nothing I wanted to deal with.
I wanted to be with someone anonymous, someone I wouldn’t care about hurting. I wanted to be a siren, a fucking black widow. I wanted to be free.
There were a fair number of bodies on the dance floor even though it was early, and I felt the house music vibrate through my body—the bass in my feet, in my thighs and hips. I danced deeper into the crowd, closing my eyes and letting my hands trail along the bodies of other dancers. Silk, cotton, polyester, sweat, and denim. I carved out a little square for myself and started to move.
It didn’t take long.
Someone put his hands on my waist, sliding them over my back and arms. I didn’t care who it was behind me; it didn’t matter. I turned around and flattened my hands against his chest, rubbing my hips against his, against this stranger whose face I didn’t want to see. I tried to lose myself in him, in us and the rhythm of our dancing, but he didn’t feel right, and he didn’t smell right. And it made me angry when I closed my eyes and couldn’t see anything but Meidias, leaning over to kiss me goodbye.
The man wrapped my arm around his neck, pulling me closer and running his hands down to my hem, grinding up against me with more purpose. I could feel his erection, low against my belly, felt his hands sliding up under my skirt. In the same second I realized that I really didn’t want him to touch me there. I looked over his shoulder and saw Jackson standing just a few feet away from us, staring at me like he had never known me at all. Which was funny because I wasn’t so sure I knew myself either at that point.
Jackson took a couple steps toward us but I wasn’t watching him anymore. Instead, I watched Meidias coming in across the bar. I felt him just before I saw him, a tingle of awareness at the base of my spine. We locked gazes as he pushed through the crowd, stealing all the air from the room. I dropped my arm to my side, struggling to just remember how to breathe.
“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded, yanking me away from my partner. He was hornet mad, the drive to do violence barely contained. My partner must have felt it too because he vanished back into the crowd. Meidias tugged me past Jackson, still looking as shocked as he had when he first saw me, and we were out the door and down the alley before I had time to realize where we were going.
Meidias shoved me up against the wall and took a few steps back. He didn’t speak but shook his head, pacing back and forth in front of me. Good God, he was beautiful. Strong and fierce and mine. The music still sang in my blood.
“Why?” he ground out at last.
The reason was still there. That he had left me a broken, dying little puddle of flesh and confusion, but watching him move, watching him stalk me—it was so much easier to hate him when he wasn’t there. In that moment I only wanted him to touch me. To set my skin on fire. I shook my head.
“I don’t know,” I lied.
He growled and came at me, not stopping until our foreheads touched. “That’s not good enough,” he barked.
I could feel his breath, hot on my mouth, and I groaned, shifting so I could kiss him.
He pulled away, his face fractured with pain.
“I can’t deny you anything,” he whispered.
I kissed him again. He bit my bottom lip and I almost passed out. I tried to wrap my arms around him.
“No!” he said, determined to deny me something. He spun me around to face the wall.
I reached behind me for his hands.
“I said no!” he snarled, grabbing my wrists, pressing my palms against the bricks. He caught my waist, yanking my hips back until I bent over. I stumbled on my heels and leaned into the wall to brace myself. The smell of sun-warmed clay was in my nose and I could hear his breath catching in a torrent of lust and anger. He pushed my dress up over my hips, jerked my panties aside, and ran the pads of his fingers through the whole length of my wetness before he pressed them inside me. I thought I might die on the spot. It was too much and not enough.
“Please,” I whispered, wriggling. He took his fingers away and slapped my ass, hard enough that my eyes welled up and every cell in my body jumped to attention. I whimpered and he squeezed my hip, stilling me.
Then I heard his zipper.
He was in me before I could register another thought, hard and deep and rough, his rhythm off and uneven. Branding me. Touching me everywhere. Marking my skin with his fingers. Pinching my nipples and rubbing circles around my clit with his thumb. He spoke to me in dark whispers. In words that were angry, hurt
, and dirty. Had I not been on my way to the hands down best orgasm of my life, I would have done a happy dance.
And that was when it hit me—there in that dank, dark alley with the smell of Chinese takeout all around me and a dumpster shielding us from public view. With stray cats watching when he put his hand over my mouth to stop me from screaming my ecstasy and lost himself, collapsing against me, wrapping his arms around my middle and squeezing like he’d never let go—that’s when I realized that this was exactly what I wanted.
More than revenge.
More than normalcy.
More than my prior life.
This was it. Our perfect fit. Not just the sex, but Meidias. This strange, beautiful, and terrible creature who had hurt me so badly but knew me better than any other living thing on earth. He was my one and only, and the only one and only I’d ever have. So I’d take as much of him as I could in the time I had left, and I’d be damned if he’d ever be able to kiss me and walk away again.
He sat cross-legged on the asphalt, his spine straight against the brick wall like some kind of otherworldly Buddha—all post-coital peace and contentment. I sat on his lap, pressing my nose into the curve of his neck. His smell was perfect.
“I hate small cities,” I whispered. “They’re full of ghosts.”
He pushed a couple of curls off my shoulder and ran his hand down my arm.
“I thought I might kill you both,” he said. “Or fuck you until you couldn’t walk anymore.”
I snorted. “I vote for fucking.”
Meidias didn’t laugh.
“Why are we here, love?” he asked.
“I just wanted to remember what normal felt like,” I lied, ignoring the way my chest tightened at his endearment.
He looped his finger under the strap of my dress. “And this? The woman I saw in there? Is this your normal?”
“Things have changed in the last hundred years, buddy. Walk into any bar right now and you’ll see a hundred other women doing the same thing.”