by Amy Faye
“He’s not going to believe you,” Sarah says. Her voice is resolute and sure, and I don’t know how she could be, but I feel like she’s very certain.
“Why not?”
“He’s not thinking clearly,” Sarah says. She flexes her fingers on the steering wheel. “When he comes to his senses, he’ll come and find us, and we’ll be waiting for him.”
“What? Waiting for him?”
“I’m going to find whoever really killed them. You want to find out who’s guilty, right?”
“How could we do that, though? The list of suspects… it’s really short. You, me, and him. He’s off the list.”
“Really? That’s the whole list?”
“Who else could it have been?”
“Anyone,” Sarah says. “But you’re right. The list isn’t really that long. After all, could it have been some random stranger? Yeah, of course it could. But it wasn’t. You know that. I know that.”
“And when you look at the likely suspects, then…”
“You’re still discounting several good options.”
“Okay?”
“Are we the only two people in the world who know Ben? Know what he really is?”
I squint out the window for a minute before sitting up. “I don’t understand.”
“No?”
“Spell it out for me. I’m too tired for this.”
“There are three other candidates who were in that car. Three other people who knew that he’d just gotten home with his new, fresh meat. That means more competition. More women who want Ben.”
“But they… they died, didn’t they?”
“You were there. Did they? Or did it seem like they did?”
“Ben would have saved them,” I say, but even as I say the words I realize that I don’t really know that. He might have checked on them. I didn’t see. I didn’t see him check, and I didn’t see him not check. But how certain am I? Is the answer one hundred percent?
“You’d think that,” Sarah said. Her voice was low. “And he would have. At least, he would have tried. But the car was burning, and he’s… well, fire is a peculiar weakness of his. So maybe he was a little quick about checking.”
“So you’re saying…”
“What if there was someone there who had survived? Or what if there were someone involved who died in the crash, by accident? He wasn’t supposed to know that they were coming, after all.”
“That’s awful.”
Sarah’s big lips pursed together, and she said nothing.
“But how do you explain the rest of it?”
“We were followed,” Sarah says. “Simple as that.”
“But Ben said…”
“‘What Ben said.’ It doesn’t matter what he said. You’re new, but eventually… he does things to you. Not just the mind stuff. You were on the bad side of that. But you get… addicted. To the drinking. It feels so…” Sarah shivers.
“So?”
“So I’m saying, you get a sense for where your Master is. It’s not exact. You can’t just point him out on a map. But I can point you in the right direction, and I haven’t been around that long. Some of those women were around for ten, fifteen, twenty years.”
“And?”
“You don’t think that they could follow along a few hours after the fact?”
I shudder. “So?”
“So we do some digging. Who bought plane tickets here from Ibiza? Ibiza to Michigan can’t be a popular trip. There’s probably a pretty short list, don’t you think?”
“I guess,” I said. My body hurt. I wish I could think clearer. I wish I could add something to the conversation.
“So we find out who didn’t eat it in that crash, and we pick them up, and then we can give her to Ben. He’ll be so happy with us.” The last part comes out of her mouth like she doesn’t even realize that she’s saying it. Maybe she really doesn’t.
“Oh.” My head feels so foggy. I want to sleep more. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
“You seem real tired,” Sarah says. “When was the last time you ate?”
“Ate?”
I think back. I don’t actually remember. The last time…
“Three days ago?”
“Fucking…” Sarah takes a deep breath. “And you’ve been losing blood every day or so. You need a hamburger, honey, and you need one fast.”
I lean my head against the window again. I don’t care. “Whatever you want to do.”
“I’m serious. You could be seriously hurting right now for red blood cells. I don’t need to be carrying some anemic girl around with me while I do investigating, alright? I like you. You’re good, you’re pretty, you’re smart. But I need you up and at ‘em.”
“I need to go back to the cabin,” I say. My voice is slurred. “I need to get back to Ben, so he won’t be mad.”
“He’s not going to be mad. Not when we hand him the woman who got his family killed, gift-wrapped and tied up. Okay? He’s going to be as happy as a little clam.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.” Sarah tests her fingers again on the wheel of the car. I don’t know where she got it. “But first, we need to get you something to eat, and we need to do it like. Now.”
“Alright.” I’m tired. I want to sleep. Sarah pinches my arm and it jerks me upright.
“Fucking… that hurt!” It takes every part of me not to slap her right upside her perfect head. She’s driving, though. I remind myself of that two or three times, until I can feel it sticking in my mind.
“Yeah, and it’s going to hurt a lot more when you don’t wake up, alright? So just. Stay awake, okay? Turn on the radio or something.”
I reach down and push the button. The radio system is nice. Fancy and new. Nothing like the one in my car, which hasn’t seen any new technology since 1996. It still has a cassette player, for example.
“What kind of music?”
“Whatever,” Sarah answers. “As long as it’ll keep you awake, sweetheart, listen to harsh noise for all I care.”
I flip through stations until there’s something without any commercials on. It’s an R&B station, which isn’t necessarily my usual gas, but the rhythm seeps into my bones. If anything will keep me awake, then this is going to be it.
I force my back to stay straight, and follow the countryside with my eyes. On the right is just thick trees, with occasional signs offering to sell 20 acres of it, with the number of a real estate agent on it.
On the left is farm country. I know, dimly, that there are farms in Michigan. Farms and ranches and stuff. But I don’t know what they grow there. The only thing I can positively identify are signs that say “firewood $5/bundle” next to tall stacks of wood, covered haphazardly by tarps.
As I start to come awake again properly I can feel my stomach for the first time in what feels like forever. Since before I can remember. And it hurts bad. Sarah is right.
I need food, and I need it like… yesterday.
“I’m hungry.”
“I hope so,” Sarah says. “Because I’m getting you two super-size meals, and I don’t want to hear a single argument.”
“I don’t know if I can eat that much,” I say. My speech is still pretty sharp, at least. In a little while, I’ll have eaten, and maybe I’ll feel better. I will feel better. As long as I keep saying it to myself, eventually, I’m going to believe it.
Then we can start figuring out how we’re going to make Ben a little less angry at us for escaping.
Seventeen
My stomach being full never felt so good as this. I didn’t realize how hungry I was until I started to eat, and suddenly having two meals’ worth of food seemed impossibly genius. I take another bite, and I can barely swallow it before I want to take another.
“You see?” I look up at Sarah, a hamburger stuck halfway in my mouth.
“Wha?” I shouldn’t talk with my mouth full. But I’m not exactly thinking too hard about my manners right now. I’m thinking about how I’d be
en run so ragged by the past seventy hours that I hadn’t even noticed that I hadn’t eaten anything in almost three days.
I’ve been busy before. I’ve been so busy and so consumed with doing something that I forgot about supper. Well, it’s generally only one thing that distracts me like that, and admittedly, I’ve been doing plenty of fucking lately. Three times in a week isn’t a record, but it’s a good week for a single woman. Or a previously-single woman.
I inhale a couple of fries as Sarah taps on her phone. She pushes a button and then sets it down on the table face-down.
“So, what’s our next move?” Sarah looks at me intently like she expects an answer. My next move was to throw myself on the mercy of a crazed vampire. But that wasn’t what she wanted to do, and I understood it even if I wouldn’t have done it myself.
“I don’t know. Keep moving maybe? If you can tell where he is, then what are the odds that he can tell where you are?”
Sarah nodded softly. “It’s a good question. I don’t know. I’ve never been a bloodsucker. I’ve only been bloodsuck-ee, and he’s never mentioned being able to tell where we are. Maybe it’s a one-way thing?”
“Maybe,” I say. I stuff another three fries into my mouth. The salt tastes so good that I have to remind myself that more isn’t always better. “But it’s better to be safe than sorry, right?”
Sarah stiffens. At first I almost think it’s her phone ringing, and I hadn’t noticed. But then she has a very purposeful moment of relaxation.
“You almost done over there?”
“I can eat in the car,” I say. “Now that I’m feeling a little better.”
“Fine. I’ll carry the drinks, but we should go.”
“Is he close?”
“He’s moving, and he’s moving closer to us.”
“So he knows which way we went?”
“Or he guessed right. There’s only two ways on the road. East or west. We went west, but he had a fifty-fifty chance. So maybe we’re alright.”
“But maybe we aren’t.”
“Which means we need to hurry, alright? We’re going to be fine.”
I ate. She drove. We stopped for a few hours in a hotel in Wisconsin, and then I took up driving, and she took up sleeping in the passenger seat. I don’t know how she can tell that he’s coming closer. I feel nothing. I don’t have a sense for where he is. Maybe I could guess; maybe I’d be very good at guessing. But it’s not a physical sensation. It’s not something that I would notice if it suddenly changed.
The radio played softly. The host is talking about sports, about which teams are going to win the big game. I don’t know much about sports, and I don’t care much about them. So sue me. I also don’t want to be fiddling with the radio for the next ten minutes when there’s someone on my tail.
Maybe if Sarah were awake, I’d have had an early warning system. But she isn’t awake. I’m driving, she’s sleeping, and it’s not time for breakfast yet, so that’s the deal. I look over at her. Her chest rises and falls gently with each breath, and I relax a little bit. If there was going to be something horrifically wrong, then I would have noticed. Right?
As my eyes move back to the road, I scan the horizon, and then move over to the mirrors. For four hours, there have been nothing but the occasional oncoming car. Nobody following us. Nobody on our trail.
This time there’s something behind me. Oh, well, I think. It’s nothing. It’s a trap. I look closer. There’s a man behind the wheel. He’s at least medium build, and he’s got a vaguely familiar cast to his features. I gasp and reach across the car, my hand jabbing against whatever it can find without looking. My foot falls harder on the gas pedal.
“Sarah?”
She’s groggy at first. “What’s up?”
“You need to look behind us.”
She straightens in her seat first, stretching. I wish that I felt that rested. So rested I needed a stretch. And now that I’ve broken the dam of my hunger, I can’t help the desire to get something to eat, as soon as possible.
I stow the hunger in my gut and press the gas harder again. Sarah turns in her seat and looks back.
“Fuck.” She drops back into the seat. Her hands clench and unclench. “Fuck!”
I hear something behind us. I look. There’s no one behind us any more. In the distance, a pair of cars have collided. It might be an accident, and then… Pop! Pop!
The sound of gunshots isn’t one I’m familiar with. At least, it wasn’t a week ago. I’ve heard it before, in movies, but they always sound quieter in the movies. We’re almost a quarter-mile away, and I can hear it clear as day. Like the movie’s playing at full volume right in the car with me.
Then the distance widens. Within 10 seconds it’s a half mile, and then 30 more, and it’s a full mile. And then it’s so far in the background that all I can make out is a soft ‘pop’ as if the stereo were picking up interference, or we were playing an old vinyl record. There’s no sign of the accident except a thin chimney of smoke far in the distance. I take a deep breath.
No time for breakfast right now, no matter how bad I want it. Because we need to be gone, and we need to be gone as far as possible.
Eighteen
Sarah relaxes visibly in the passenger seat as we drive on. “Are you alright?”
I look over at her and take a deep breath. “Yeah, I’m fine. Why? Did I look bad?”
“You never look bad, sweetheart,” she says. Her voice is low and sweet. Almost flirtatious. I feel my stomach twist.
“Flattery will get you nowhere.” It’s a lie, and we both know it. “We’ve got to get out of here. We’re not going to be able to stay ahead of him forever.”
“We need to eat, too, though. Don’t forget that.”
“I know. I haven’t forgotten.”
Sarah’s head leans back and she takes a deep breath, and lets it out. I can’t help notice her chest heaving as she does it. Her body always seems to draw my eyes. I hate it and love it all at the same time. My blood pumps in my ears.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I say. My cheeks turn red. “How do you want to do this? He’s going to be on our tail soon. I know it.”
“We can’t be sure. Ben is tough, but he’s not invincible. There are ways to hurt him.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“I’ve had a little longer than you to get acquainted with our master’s… condition.”
“Besides, when did we decide that he’s not following us any more was the goal? I thought we wanted to back to that big old house in Spain.”
“The manor? Sure. We can go back there, eventually. But as for me, I’m taking my time.”
“You sound like you’re not planning on going back to him.”
“I just don’t see the point,” Sarah says, her head leaned against the window. She watches the countryside whip by, the same as I did yesterday. There’s a herd of cattle out to pasture. They look exactly like the image in my head of cattle, white and black spotted and staring at us dully from the side of the road.
I don’t know what to think about that. But I know what it feels like when you’re hungry. I know that we haven’t eaten in twelve hours, and that she’s probably feeling pretty apathetic right now. She’s crashing, and her mood’s crashing with it. Same as I’m about to do if I don’t find something to eat.
“A sign a mile back said we’re not far out of some city. We can stop in and get something to eat from the drive-thru.” I start planning the route in my head. It’ll be on the right, two miles up the road. Three from the sign.
“Sounds great.”
The road eases to the left, around a wide bend to accommodate a tall hill. The curve makes it feel as if the right-side exit comes out of nowhere at all. I turn the wheel smoothly to the right. We’ve got to fuel up and figure out how someone managed to fake their own death. The whole thing feels like it’s an insurmountable task. I’ve never needed to do any detective work before. But I’ll have to figure it
out at some point, or I’ll have to face the consequences for leaving Ben behind.
“What’re you having?”
Sarah shrugs. “Let’s just go sit inside. He’s not following us.”
“What do you mean?”
She pointed at her head. “He’s not moving. Not towards us, anyways.”
“Not at all?”
“I don’t know. Not fast, if he is.”
“But he’s alive still?”
Sarah shrugged again. “Would I know if he weren’t? I don’t know. I think he’s alive. But I’m just guessing.”
“Doesn’t that mean that we should be worried about him?”
“Why?”
“He’d worry about us,” I said softly. “If he thought that one of us were captured.”
“You think, huh?”
“I know it. Not a doubt about it in my mind.”
Sarah bit a mouthful of pancakes off her fork.
“I wish I still had that faith of youth, you know?”
“I don’t really know, no. What do you mean?”
“I mean, things change, you know? When I got started with this, I thought it’d be all glitz and glamour, you know? You get there, there’s so much going on. So many people, and you’re living with them. These women, right? Women I’d kill to get to know. Literally kill someone.”
“So you are…”
“I’m not that stuck on labels,” Sarah says, with a dismissive shrug. “I like attractive people. Women can be attractive.”
I don’t know where to go with the conversation. I can feel parts of myself pulling in both directions, telling me that I need to seriously avoid the topic of her interest in me specifically. And at the same time, another little voice that wants to know for sure, not just guess at whether or not she’s seriously considered anything with me. A third voice that says that I really shouldn’t want to know, because I’m not interested, and I shouldn’t lead her on. And then another voice that asks whether or not I’m really not interested.
“So what’s the next move?”