“What did you do?” he asked.
“First, I felt like I spent the day running around the island, just looking for anyone familiar. Then I went to Doc’s. I found him in the basement, in the cooler where we keep the bodies. He’d found Mary. She was dead.”
Again, the room was silent except for the crackling fire. Emma turned in his arms and rested on her back, looking up at him. James kept his hand across her flat belly. He could almost feel the softness of her skin beneath her sweater. And he loved the softness of her, but he had to work to ignore the warm closeness of her breasts that rose and fell with each breath.
“Do you know I never went back to the apartment I shared with Marcy?”
“You didn’t?” James replied, knowing full well she’d never gone back.
“Doc must have brought me my clothes and pictures and things. I never thought about it until just now. I heard they finally tore the building down a few years ago.”
“They did,” he confirmed.
She paused and met his gaze. “Why is it so easy to talk to you?”
“Perhaps you’re just ready to talk,” he said, having no answer he thought her ready to hear. “Tell me about Doc.”
“He was in shock from Mary’s death. He kept shaking her and begging for her to wake up. It was horrible,” she said softly.
James didn’t want to push her as he allowed her memories to touch her.
“How did she die?” he had to ask, even though he already knew. He had to know what Emma thought. He also wanted to keep her talking. He’d hoped to merely get past her fear of the dark. He had no idea that after opening that door, she would reveal so much to him.
“I really don’t know. I kept asking Doc what happened to her, and he wouldn’t give me a straight answer. I know she’d not been feeling well for a few days before she died. She mentioned that when I came for my interview. The only thing I really noticed was a mark—a bite—on her neck.”
“A bite?”
“Yes. I know how that sounds. A bite on the neck.” She looked up and met his gaze. “I know you’ll think I’m crazy to even insinuate it, but the first thing I thought of was a . . .”
Emma felt like she’d suddenly choked on the word, and she couldn’t say it.
James finished for her. “A vampire?”
Emma chuckled bitterly. “It sounds funny, doesn’t it, since it’s really rather impossible.”
“You tell me,” he put in seriously. He wanted to touch her skin. It would be so easy to simply slide his hand up under her shirt, to feel the softness of her flesh. And it would be so real, no longer just his dream.
“I don’t know if I can. It wasn’t like the movies. The mark on her neck wasn’t two tiny holes and all her blood drained. I tried to convince myself it was from an animal, a small dog or cat. But it didn’t look like that, either. The mark was from several teeth, sharp enough to make little razor cuts in a kind of circle, the skin red and inflamed. I might not even have noticed it if Doc hadn’t pointed it out to me. It was so awful. Doc was beside himself, crying and calling her name over and over, shouting that maybe there was a rabid animal on the island. She was pasty and colorless and cold. It was like a nightmare, and I couldn’t wake up. First Marcy gone, then Mary. I kept thinking that there was some sort of an animal, but I was a medical assistant. I knew there had been no sign of rabies, and I hadn’t noticed this bite before then, either. Besides, it simply didn’t look infected like the bite of rabid animal would. It looked precise. I somehow knew that whatever had bitten her meant to bite her in that exact spot.”
James pushed up, resting his head in his hand, his elbow on the floor as he looked down at her. With his free hand, he caressed her cheek with the back of his fingers.
“I can’t tell you the rest,” Emma said thoughtfully. “You won’t believe it.”
“Try me,” he said, looking deeply into her eyes. The fire reflected in the green of their depths. He thought he could get lost in there and burn up.
“She woke up,” Emma said simply. “She suddenly woke up and sat up. Her teeth were like what I think must have left the bite on her neck, tiny and sharp, every one of them coming to a point. She smiled this hideous smile and said, ‘Blood. I need blood. I’m so thirsty.’ Just like that. She came at me with a look that told me she really wanted to eat me alive. Or at least drink my blood. And her eyes,” Emma said, her words seeming to fade away.
“What about her eyes?”
“They were strange—dark but glowing. It was hard for me to look away from them,” she explained as the memory touched her.
James understood her words. Mary would have been a new vampire, with the ability to hypnotize, but not really knowing how to use that ability to her advantage yet. “What did you do?” he asked, wishing he didn’t have to hear the rest, wishing he didn’t have to make her tell the rest.
“I just reacted. I grabbed the first thing I could reach. It turned out to be a pair of large, curved surgical scissors, and as she rushed at me, I held them out. She ran into them and they stuck right into her chest. She stayed there long enough to scream this horrible, piercing scream before she turned into this gray, dusty-looking ash stuff and scattered all over the place.”
James closed his eyes for a brief moment, still wanting to kick himself for not coming sooner, for not being here to help Emma. He couldn’t imagine the fear, the terror, or the shock she must have felt. And he was thankful that Mary had been a new vampire with no strength since she’d not yet tasted blood. She hadn’t had the ability to live past the scissors in her chest or the knowledge to know that she could pull them from her chest within a few seconds and live.
When James looked down at Emma, he saw her eyes were closed. The fire cracked and popped. He wanted to forget the rest of the story. He wanted to merely lean down and touch his lips to hers and forget about the rest of the world. With his kiss, he thought he could create a safe place for the two of them.
But he knew that safe place could never last. Sooner or later, probably sooner, their kiss would end and reality would barge in.
“You don’t have to tell me any more,” he said. The last thing he needed was for all this to backfire. What if forcing her, or even merely allowing her, to remember all this caused her to regress to again having nightmares every night? What if it caused her to fall back into shock where she refused to speak? Truth be told, she’d just talked longer to him in the last few hours than she probably had to anyone in the last two years.
“Yes, I do,” she replied thoughtfully. She looked up at him. “I don’t know why, but I think you’re right. Now feels like the right time to talk about this. It feels wonderful to finally let it all out. Until now, I couldn’t seem to form the words.”
“All right,” he reluctantly agreed. “But you don’t have to, if you change your mind.”
“You probably think I’m crazy,” she whispered.
He looked right into her eyes. “No, I don’t think you’re crazy.”
She stared up at him as realization sank in. “You’ve seen one, too, haven’t you, one of those things with pointed teeth?” she asked, so softly he barely heard her. She spoke as if she didn’t think it could be possible. Perhaps all this time, she really did think she’d lost her mind, and now she was discovering that everything she’d experienced might be real.
“Let’s finish your story, then perhaps I’ll share mine,” was all he could think to reply. He knew she wasn’t ready to hear any of his experiences.
She licked her lips. “I remember thinking Doc was going to kill me after all that dusty stuff settled. He went berserk, shoving me to the floor. He kept screaming that I’d killed her. I was screaming that she was already dead. I’d checked her out myself, listening with my stethoscope, checking for pulses. There was no doubt in my mind that she was already dead. But he was out of control. He slapped my face—hard.” She paused to chuckle. “I remember thinking, ‘I guess this really is real and not a nightmare because his sla
p should have woke me up.’”
“What happened then?”
“I don’t really remember how I got away from Doc. I just remember I ran from him, up the stairs and out the automatic door. Then—” She stopped and stared at the fire.
“Then?”
James looked down at her. She didn’t look at him, but stared into the flames, and suddenly there were tears on her cheeks, sliding, falling, one after another. James stared at them for a long moment, and each one tore at his heart.
“Emma?” Hell, what had he done? He’d forced too much on her for one night.
“He—he,” she tried. Her words were suddenly breathy and forced. “He was waiting outside,” she said. “He grabbed me.”
“Who was he, Emma?”
She shifted her gaze to him. Her eyes were tear-filled, like an ocean of emeralds. She blinked and more tears silently slid down her cheeks. “His name was Martin Miller. I had seen him at the beach. Marcy had known him. He was big and strong, one of the lifeguards, and I couldn’t fight him. I couldn’t get away.”
“Was he a vampire?”
She shook her head. “His teeth were normal even though his eyes were strange and dead looking—not dark like Mary’s had been, but flat and lifeless, dull, as if he was in a trance or something. He was even slow in his movements and his speaking. What do you suppose happened to him?” she asked.
“He’s dead,” James replied, feeling no remorse considering what Emma had experienced because of him.
She accepted his answer with a deep breath. “He said his master was looking for me and would enjoy me. I didn’t even know where he took me. It was just a room, so dark and cold even though it was summer.” The tears continued as her emotions grew.
James saw a mixture of anger and terror and loathing.
“I was,” she said, her words trembling, “so scared. I was sweating and shivering at the same time. I was never so scared.” She was almost sobbing.
She trembled, her entire body quivering now with the memory. James wrapped his arm around her.
“That’s enough.” he said. “Don’t think about it anymore.”
When she spoke again, her words still trembled and were uneven, filled with terror that refused to release her. “No, you have to hear it all. You have to understand.”
“Understand what?”
“When I was there in that dark room, I had never been so scared in my life. I prayed for death so that the fear would end. I kept thinking I would die right in the middle of a scream. That’s what I thought when I saw Jilly McComb. When I looked at Jilly, I thought if I had really died screaming, that was how I would have looked.”
* * * *
Later, James lay before the fire holding Emma close, pondering over the question of why he didn’t feel Jillian McComb’s fear before it killed her. Emma slept in his arms. She had finally given into the exhaustion that overwhelmed her after being struck by the tornado of emotions from her story.
The phone rang, sounding loud in the quiet of the house. It almost startled him, but he wasn’t prone to surprise. He peeled himself away from Emma without waking her, and moving quicker than any normal human, answered it before it could ring a second time. The fire still burned in the fireplace, and because he didn’t need sleep, he had merely watched it, thinking about Emma’s story and enjoying the feel of her tucked against him.
His caller ID told him Deke was on the other end, so he answered with his usual, “Yeah, Deke? What have you got?” He watched Emma sleeping across the room, reluctant to take his gaze off her.
“Victim number two, if I had to guess.”
James didn’t beat around the bush asking questions, and Deke didn’t beat around the bush with unnecessary information. He simply gave James Glenda Farmington’s address, and James said he’d be there as soon as he could. If James had to analyze his relationship with Deke, he’d say that the reason they worked so well together was the fact that neither of them ever wasted time.
With the screen of the fireplace safely closed, and Emma covered on the floor, James wrote her a quick note with his cell phone number on it. Then he left, knowing she was safe as long as she was within the walls of his house, and considering her fear of the dark, she wouldn’t go anywhere tonight.
He headed for the duplex where Glenda Farmington lived at a speed that would have made most humans shriek in terror. His quick reflexes and enhanced sense of sight enabled him to maneuver about the island’s twisting roads with greater expertise than a NASCAR champion. But despite his speed, James still felt he couldn’t reach the duplex fast enough. Just as he knew no matter how long this took, he would feel he couldn’t back to Emma fast enough. She might be safe within his house, but would she be afraid if she woke to find herself alone? And what if she had a nightmare while he was gone?
One of the island’s two ambulances, two patrol cars, Deke’s Jeep and two cars James didn’t recognize were parked outside the address Deke had relayed to him. Deke leaned against his Jeep, his arms crossed over his chest as he waited for James.
James got out of his car and looked around the neighborhood, noticing neighbors lingering on porches and in driveways, wearing various degrees of leisure clothes from jeans to sweatpants, robes and sweaters. With his excellent night vision, he saw everything, even Deke’s grim expression. The night felt even cooler than when he and Emma had stood out on his deck. The neighborhood was quiet. A dog barked in the distance.
“Deke.”
“James.”
It was their usual greeting. “What’s going on?” James asked.
“We’ve got another female, age twenty, dead,” Deke said quietly.
“How?”
This time Deke didn’t shrug; he merely pursed his lips for a moment before saying, “No apparent cause that I can see.”
That bothered James more than he let on. Deke saw much more than any human could. “So why are you out here in the cold wind?” James was wearing a heavier jacket than Deke, and he fought the urge to shiver, even though the cold generally didn’t bother him.
Deke appeared calm, didn’t seem to need to shiver.
“The victim’s mother’s in there. She refuses to leave. It seems the victim called her just before her death, said some things that didn’t make any sense. The mother drove right over here and found her dead in the middle of the room. I doubt there was ever much of a crime scene, if there was any crime at all. If there was, Ms. Farmington—and don’t you forget it’s Ms. not Mrs. Farmington—” he quoted, “messed it up by touching the victim, as well as touching the furniture. One of the neighbors heard her screaming and came over to investigate, actually took the phone out of the victim’s hand to use it to call nine-one-one.”
Deke let out a frustrated sigh, despite his relaxed stance as he leaned against the car, his ankles crossed.
“So no apparent cause of death?”
“There’s no blood, no holes, no wounds, no visible bruises.”
“Any bite marks?” James had to ask
“No,” Deke replied without hesitation. “None that I can see, anyway.”
“Do you feel any vampires?” James asked.
“No,” Deke said again.
“What do you feel?”
“I don’t know,” Deke let out. “Something in the wind, like an itch I can’t reach, but nothing like the usual sensation that’s there when evil is lurking in the dark.”
James noted the frustration in his voice. “I felt the same thing.”
“Hell,” Deke went on, “I’ve seen everything from sexual predators to bloodthirsty animals in my two hundred years, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”
James looked around again, noting every face who watched them. They were all neighbors, nearly all people he recognized. “But you do think there’s more to this than natural causes?”
Deke chuckled bitterly. “There is nothing natural about this at all. So yes, I think there’s more going on. But I don’t have any idea what it is
.”
“Did Ms. Farmington say what her daughter said on the phone that made no sense?” James leaned against the Jeep, too, almost in the same pose as Deke.
“Something about snakes biting her, then she demanded the place be thoroughly inspected by an exterminator, which she demanded we get immediately from the mainland. She went on to mention something about suing the landlord for negligence and unlawful death,” Deke replied, looking at the duplex, not at James. “It’s rather hard to get any type of a clear picture between the mother’s sobs and her demands. It was easier for me to step out here for a bit.”
“Snakes?” James repeated, bypassing the part about suing the landlord. “Did she look like she’d suffered a snake bite?” Could it really be something so common happening here? Hell, no. The evil he felt flutter in the breeze left him cold.
“Not that I could see with my quick visual examination before Ms. Farmington screamed at me not to touch her daughter. Do I need to mention that in all my years on this island, I’ve never seen one snake?”
“No. I’ve never seen one, either. What’s happening in there now?” James wanted to know.
“That little dweeb, Ghetts, is trying to talk Ms. Farmington into letting the paramedics give her something to calm her down so they can get her away from the body and we can do our work. She’s a pretty adamant woman.”
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