Authors: Ginger Voight
Her mind, however, was still in chaos. H
ushed voices only she could hear carried themselves along the wind. A chorus of excited voices whispered all around her, saying something she could not understand. Her pace quickened. Thankfully she wasn’t that far away from her apartment.
As she rounded a block she could distinctly make out one sound louder than the other.
It sounded distinctly like a child crying, which was one sound no decent citizen of her terrorized city could ignore. Adele pulled her jacket closer around her and entered the darkened alley.
There at the far end was a little girl. She sat with her arms around her knees, her straggly hair cascading down her
scruffy knees. She was barefoot and in a slip of a dress. Adele immediately assessed the girl was homeless. She also realized this child was in grave danger. Darlington was no place for an unsupervised child in the dead of night.
Cautiously Adele made her approach.
“Hello? Are you all right?”
A wail rose from the tiny child. She was so pale she was luminous in the low lig
ht. Dirt was caked on her skin and under her long nails.
“
What are you doing here?” asked Adele as she came to kneel right in front of the girl. “You shouldn’t be out here all alone.”
Adele noticed something out of the corner of her eye. Someone was nearb
y, an old man, lying flat on the ground. He appeared to be a vagrant, much like the girl herself. As Adele drew closer, however, she discovered that blood poured from his neck, and a sizable chunk was missing.
Behind her the wail of the child rose louder until Adele realized it
wasn’t a wail at all. It was laughter. The child was laughing.
Adele spun around to see the girl on her feet, her eyes glowing yellow as she stared hungrily at Adele. It was Lily, only her once sweet smile
was distorted by two large, bloody fangs. Adele could almost see the old man's blood filling through Lily’s empty veins, as though her skin was translucent. Each vein throbbed as it pumped dark red fluid to all the dead organs and blue tissue, filling it with life. Stolen life.
Adele stumbled backward as the child advanced. With a screech
she flew straight at Adele with fangs bared. Right as Adele hit the ground and Lily was poised to bite into her neck, the girl was wrenched backward and flung up high against a brick wall, where she landed with a loud, sickening smack and a cry of pain.
Adele watched from the ground as the child hissed angrily and scurried across the face of the building like a spider, disappearing quickly out of sight.
The hushed, disembodied voices grew louder as they swirled around her in the night air. “Natasha,” she could now understand them to say. They repeated it until it grew into a dull roar in her ears.
Adele scrambled to her feet and
the wind died down instantly. The voices grew louder, more distinct. “Natasha.”
She spun around looking in all directions. There was no one there. Hysterical sobs rose in her throat. Maybe it was just another nightmare, she thought to herself frantically. She closed her eyes tight and counted to t
en, willing herself to wake up.
But it was useless. In the darkened alley she remained where voices taunted her from the shadows. It was more than she could stand.
“What do you want from me?” she finally cried.
An evil peal of laughter rose in
to the night. It seemed to come from all around her. She reached deep into her bag to grasp her pepper spray. She had to let her rage take her where her fear couldn’t. “Show your face, you coward!” she demanded, her voice cracking as her teeth chattered.
The laughter stopped. The voices stopped. Her heart stopped.
Out of the shadows came a tall, thin figure, cloaked in black. Her hand shook as she aimed her pepper spray. This did not stop the figure from approaching. It stopped a mere foot in front of her. The smell of decay assaulted her senses.
An overhead light cracked and popped, shining light on the face of the creature before her.
It was a gaunt face, as old as the sun, and eyes that burned as bright.
The visual of an ancient, reanimated corpse rooted her to the spot
. A startled scream escaped her lips as her pepper spray clattered to the ground. The creature reached out a bony hand with long sharp nails. An inhuman hand grasped her own; it felt as stiff as death. The unnaturally smooth fingers made Adele’s skin crawl. As she snatched her hand away one of the nails cut deep into her skin, like a knife piercing her flesh, drawing blood.
With a hellish grin the creature brought his claw to what should have been his lips, where two long fangs protruded. A snake-like tongue slithered along the fingernail and drops of her blood stained his mouth.
Adele wilted to the ground, her whole world faded to blissful black.
CHAPTER TEN
Adele’s hand shook as she lifted the steaming mug of strong coffee to her lips. Her face was as white as a sheet of paper, quite literally as if she’d seen a ghost. She kept telling herself it hadn’t been real, it couldn’t have been real. She looked around her tiny kitchen trying to ground herself in what was solid and true, not what never could have been.
Only the sharp stinging pain in h
er hand as Nicholas doctored would not be denied. Maybe she’d been sleepwalking, she thought, trying to inject a little reason into her overwhelming insanity. Like the forest, when she found Dani.
But
Dani’s injury had been real. And now Adele had physical, tangible proof that what she’d seen had not been another hallucination.
Nicholas tied the handkerchief around her injured hand, holding it in both of his.
“There you go. All better now.”
Her red rim
med eyes met his. How could she be all better? How could anything be all better? She was just lucky that Nicholas happened along when he had. Otherwise… “I guess I should thank your insomnia for saving my hide,” she joked, although her heart was anything but light. “How did you know where to find me, Nicholas?”
“
I didn’t, that was the problem.” he answered softly. “I finally got your messages and I sensed there was a problem. You weren’t answering your cell phone and you weren’t at the office or at your home. I worried that you once again had insisted upon walking in the middle of the night, so I set off to find you. I was a few blocks over when I heard you scream.” She nodded. “By the time I rounded the corner whoever had attacked you had gone, leaving you unconscious and bleeding in the street.”
She
thought about the homeless man… and Lily. “You didn’t’ see anything… anyone else?”
He shook his head. “Just you.”
Her eyes closed as she swallowed hard. Maybe she had been sleepwalking and simply stumbled and cut her hand. Or maybe a couple of creatures of the night had dragged the corpse of a vagrant to their lair to feast. Neither scenario did much to reassure her. “Want to tell me what happened?” he asked.
She hesitated.
Surprisingly she did want to tell him what happened. But she didn’t want him to think she was crazy. She sighed. There was no getting around that now. “I honestly don’t know what happened. I don’t know what I saw. I don’t know anything, Nicholas.” She pulled her hand from his. “You better get while the getting is good. There’s nowhere to go with me but downhill.”
She got up from the chair and started to leave, he was quick on his feet to follow.
“Don’t say that, Adele,” he scolded. “Don’t you know how special you are?”
That was it. That one little bit of kindness that cracked the dam and set everything free.
“Didn’t you hear me?” she screamed. “I don’t know anything!” She spun away from him, unable to look him in the eye. “I used to think I saw the world through truth and fact. Now I don’t even know what’s true anymore. I thought I was so smart,” she said, her voice beginning to break. “I thought that was God's way of making it up to me that I was born…” she trailed off as she tried to articulate what she’d always suspected, but never validated with words uttered out loud. “For being born a mistake.”
Nicholas
was quick upon her and grabbed her shoulders, forcing her to look him in the eye. “You are not a mistake,” he told her, his voice strong… almost angry. “Look at me.”
She shook her head.
“You don’t know me,” she insisted, and refused to look into his face. So he tipped her chin. Tears hovered in those dark brown beautiful eyes.
“
I know everything I need to know,” he stated, “just by looking in your eyes.” He took her injured hand and brought it to rest on his chest. “Tell me you feel it too.”
She could almost feel his heart tapping against her fingers.
Like the red string of fate she felt herself drawn into the miracle of his embrace.
“Feel me, Adele,” he whispered as he wound his fingers in her hair, tipping her face up for a kiss. His body trembled as his mouth engulfed her own, and she truly could feel every emotion flowing through his body. They were feelings she herself had recently felt when Dani had been missing. There was apprehension, then te
rror, then elation. There was that moment when they realized how close they had come to missing every opportunity to act on love before it was too late.
It was insanity. M
ere weeks ago she would have never considered such a thing. But his words were a balm for her wounded soul that had been so lonely for so long. In a way that could never make sense, it was as if she had always been waiting for him, for this exact kiss and for his specific embrace. An undeniable love wrapped itself around her as he enclosed his hard body around her soft curves. And she wanted it more than she had ever wanted anything. She wanted to feel his fingertips along her skin, taste his kiss upon her mouth. Her body ached for him as if it needed him to be completed. Yet it was her soul that yearned for him the most. In his arms she wasn’t odd or strange or queer – she was unique… special… loved.
She
didn’t resist as he lifted her into his arms and carried her to the sofa. He held her until her tears were spent, murmuring words to her in another, unfamiliar language that gave her the comfort she needed.
He carried her to her bed after she fell asleep against his strong shoulder, and left a sweet, tender kiss on her forehead after he tucked her under her covers.
He sat on the edge of the bed, stroking her hair, until she drifted to sleep.
That night she
didn’t dream at all. It was just the respite she needed.
The next day
she took a detour along that same city street, which looked less ominous in the light of day. There was no evidence to suggest a homeless man had been attacked and bled to death on the street. Even the light in the street lamp was intact. She rubbed her throbbing hand as her brow furrowed.
Twenty minutes later,
the same familiar jingle heralded her arrival at the bookstore. Vincent glanced her direction from his position on the ladder where he filed books away. “Finished the books already?” he asked casually, paying no particular attention to her as he finished his duty.
“
Some of them,” she replied, her voice deadened.
He scaled down the ladder landing beside her with a thud. He caught a glance of her hand wrapped in a handkerchief.
“He got to you, didn’t he?”
“
Who’s he?” she demanded.
“
Uh uh. You know our deal. You read the books, then I tell you want you want to know.” He turned and disappeared behind a beaded curtain.
“
How do you know what’s going to happen before it happens?” she yelled from the counter. She waited a long moment before he finally reappeared, carrying a cup of tea that smelled strongly of roses.
“
What makes you think I do?”
“
That’s what my source said. That you tell Denise things almost as though you know they’re going to happen.”
He shrugged.
“Just perceptive, I guess.”
She had enough, enough of the games, enough of the spooky mystical stuff that she
couldn’t explain. Though she had no evidence to support the night before except for a deep cut in her hand, she strongly suspected what she had seen has not been a hallucination. Otherwise the demon she was fighting lived solely within her own head. “I want to know how to fight this,” she exclaimed, banging her fist on the counter, drops of blood oozing from her handkerchief.
“
Read the books,” he told her again, unmoved by her show of emotion.
“
He attacked my daughter,” Adele finally confessed, figuring there was no need to quibble over semantics when Dani was her daughter in heart if not by blood. And details seemed to be trifles only as Vincent didn’t look surprised by the news. “I need to know if he will be back. I need to know,” she gulped, unable to believe she was about to say, “I need to know if she’s going to turn into one of them.” She caught his gaze. She knew how crazy she sounded but at that moment she felt she was in the company of someone who not only would understand, but be able to help. “The other little girl did. She killed a homeless man last night. She nearly came after me. Is my little girl infected now? How does this work?”