The Vampire Next Door (9 page)

“Nice,” I said.

I decided to let him stay outside for a while. Even if Holloway hadn’t been a master at fence-jumping, I wouldn’t have worried about the possibility of vampires lurking in my backyard. Although The Ex had climbed the backyard fence a couple times in the first few months, she’d given that up pretty quickly. The backside of my house was even more formidably secured than the front- and I’m pretty sure she’d given herself some splinters when she’d hauled herself over the cedar fence, anyway.

I went straight to Pearl’s bedroom and started looking through her closet. My mind wandered as I searched for the crutches.

There had been nothing wrong with Pearl. She was a perfectly healthy kid, but if you looked at her history of doctor visits, you’d never know it. Kellie had developed a habit of taking Pearl to the emergency room for just about everything, from a scraped knee on the playground to sore fingers after getting her hand slammed in the car door. I’d blown my top at Cole when I found out that Pearl had gone to the ER for her alleged ankle pain. After hundreds of dollars’ worth of x-rays that were not covered by our lousy insurance policy, the doctors found nothing wrong with the kid.

Surprise, surprise.

Of course Kellie had provided the hospital with Cole’s name and social security number, so although the bills for the x-rays went to her house, she ignored them completely, and the delinquent payment impacted Cole’s credit rating. We only found out about the incident after Cole pulled his credit report and saw an outstanding account for a doctor we’d never even heard of.

I stopped, mid-rummage, and took a deep breath.

I was bitter, and I knew it. My fury was eating away at my insides, looking for a way out, and sometimes I felt like I was going to explode from holding everything in all the time. I wanted to forgive and forget- I truly did. For some reason, though, whenever my thoughts turned back to Kellie and her behavior over the years, I got angry all over again. Her nightly taunts from outside my house made the situation even more infuriating. And truthfully, though Eddie had been a great friend to me, I’d never been able to talk to him about my feelings. It had been the same with Cole. He hadn’t wanted to hear my frustrations over his ex-wife. He preferred to pretend like those frustrations didn’t exist.

I remembered telling him, “I can’t just let these things go. I need to talk about them. It’s not normal to sweep your feelings under the rug and ignore them.”

“It’s normal for me,” he’d said, in his usual flippant manner.

In that regard, I was no worse off than I’d been when Cole was here, before the pandemic. I’d been irritated then because I’d had no one to talk to, and Kellie was driving me crazy. I was irritated now because I had no one to talk to, and Kellie was still driving me crazy.

So many things had changed, but there were a few that had stayed the same, though perhaps on a larger scale than previously. For example, Kellie might have
wanted
to kill me before, but now she was actively
trying
to kill me. Big difference.

I closed Pearl’s closet door and slumped against it, feeling defeated. That was when I caught a glimpse of the crutches, peeking out from beneath Pearl’s bed. They were almost completely hidden by one corner of her purple comforter.

The only change I’d made to the girls’ rooms in their absence had been to board up the windows. That was a second line of defense against vampires, and not a necessary one. Our house had been built in 1967, and the wrought iron bars that covered all the windows lacked the safety releases that were common on newer houses. The bars were a fire hazard, but they were also the perfect defense against hungry vampires.

I sat down and leaned over to pull the crutches out from beneath the bed. Perfect. These would be my new best friends for the next week or so. I took a moment to adjust them to my height, feeling immensely relieved.

As I paused to look around Pearl’s room, my heart gave a little twist inside me. I didn’t come into the kids’ bedrooms very often anymore. Losing Cole had been bad enough, but not knowing what had happened to the girls…that was a tough pill to swallow. My only consolation was that, in spite of all his shortcomings, Cole loved his daughters more than anything in the world. He would do everything in his power to protect them.

The love of a stepmother is a strange and confusing thing. I’m not sure if it’s like this for all stepmothers, but I never quite felt like I had the right to develop an attachment to the girls. That didn’t stop me from adoring them, of course. I just didn’t want to overstep my boundaries, and I didn’t want to give the impression that I felt I had any rights to them. That was probably because Kellie was so eager to pounce on any perceived threat to her status as Mother of the Year. I went out of my way not to give her ammunition. But despite all that, I loved the girls, fiercely and unconditionally. I didn’t have any children of my own, but I couldn’t imagine loving another child more than I loved Pearl and Priscilla.

Maybe that was why I had stayed with Cole. Not because I cared about him- although I did- and not because I was desperate to avoid becoming a divorcee- although I was- but because I was so head over heels for his children that I couldn’t imagine life without them.

Except that I was living without them now.

With the crutches aiding my mobility, I went to the back door and was surprised to see Holloway waiting for me. He hadn’t run off this time. I let him inside, then collected clean clothes and ran a bath for myself in the master bathroom’s claw-foot tub. I hadn’t taken a bath in the last eight months, settling instead for quick, efficient showers, but today I hoped that the hot water might soothe my knee. Besides, I’d just survived two nights with a vampire. I figured I deserved this much.

I sank down to my chin in the steaming water, and sighed as the heat began to erase all the aches and pains of the last forty-eight hours. Reeve’s couch hadn’t been uncomfortable, but the position I’d been forced to assume, flat on my back with pillows piled up under my knee, wasn’t exactly conducive to restful slumber.

I scrubbed my face with soap, and started laughing as my fingers came away gritty. Apparently my quick rinse yesterday hadn’t been enough to remove the layer of grime engrained in my skin from my little tumble across the dollar store parking lot. No wonder Reeve had barely laid a hand on me. He’d probably been appalled at my total lack of hygiene.

I scrubbed my face a second time to make sure I’d gotten all the dirt off.

As I washed my hair, my thoughts drifted to Reeve’s aftershave. The scent had been unexpected, and incredibly sexy. Although I wasn’t necessarily looking to impress anyone, there was something appealing about smelling good. I resolved to try to find some body spray or perfume on my next excursion. Not like anyone in the stores would miss it. For that matter, I should probably start paying attention to my shampoo and soap. I’d been utilizing a 2-in-1 shampoo/conditioner mix for ease of use, but it hadn’t done any favors for my hair, which was a little dry and frizzy.

It occurred to me that this sudden interest in my appearance was highly suspicious, to say the least, after meeting Reeve only the day before. But I had no plans of seeing him again, so I ignored the thought. He’d made me feel attractive again, in just two nights, after all of Eddie’s attention over the last few months hadn’t flattered me one bit.

Whether he’d intended to or not, Reeve had made me feel rejuvenated, like I still had something to live for. I’d gotten so caught up in the monotony of life, the day-in, day-out boredom of survival, that I’d forgotten how to stop and enjoy myself. I’d forgotten the thrill of emotions, of allowing yourself to feel something. In my case, that something was a rush of pure excitement.

Vampire or not, I wasn’t completely averse to admitting that I had the tiniest crush on Reeve. That in itself was something of a miracle, since I’d assumed that Cole had crushed the capacity for those feelings within me long ago.

I took my time in the bathtub, even shaving my legs after I’d finished washing up. My lack of flexibility was less troublesome than I’d anticipated. This week might not be so bad after all- especially now that I’d found the crutches.

After I was safely settled back in the basement, I settled down with a can of beef stew and season two of
Doctor Who
on Priscilla’s portable DVD player
.

Holloway curled up on the floor beside the couch. When I was done with my beef stew, I reached over to scratch my dog behind his ears. I wasn’t quite sure of Holloway’s breed. He was definitely a mix of some sort. He was a medium-sized dog, and his head was vaguely square, like a pitbull or a boxer, but his slightly-too-long body hinted that there might be basset hound somewhere in his family tree.

There was a photo of Pearl and Priscilla on the coffee table in front of the couch, and I reached down to pick it up. Sometimes I took it with me when I went out. I felt like it was a good, solid reminder of why I was fighting so hard to stay alive.

Before the pandemic, I’d worked as a financial advisor for an Arizona-based credit union. When the economy turned to crap and my company started downsizing, the territory I’d had to cover had grown, and I’d found myself spending only about two weeks of every month at home, with the rest of my time split between Tucson and Phoenix. I’d been lucky to be able to coordinate my schedule around the visits with the kids, so that I was always in town while they were staying with us, but the extreme commuting wasn’t much fun.

I sometimes felt like my work schedule had prevented me from having a life of my own. I’d wanted a dog, but I didn’t want to rely on Cole to take care of my pet while I was out of town. Holloway had wandered into my front yard just a few months ago, and I’d promptly claimed the old mutt. Like I’ve said before, a vampire apocalypse is a great time to reevaluate your priorities, and having a dog of my own was pretty high on my list.

“What were you doing before the world went to hell, buddy?” I asked Holloway now.

He rolled onto his back, begging for a tummy rub.

“Were you a family dog?” I asked, scratching his belly. “Where is your family now?”

Where is your family now?
I repeated to myself silently, feeling a little of my customary glumness creep back in.

Suddenly it felt very silly to be sitting here, wondering. Sure, Cole and the girls might still be in Florida, but the rest of my family was in Phoenix- less than two hundred and fifty miles from where I was. That distance was totally doable. Maybe not with my scooter, but with a car, I could make it easily on one tank of gas.

Why was I waiting around?

CHAPTER 7

The thought of actually leaving my house, my town, and everything that had become so familiar to me over the last eight months was quite daunting. I only pondered it for a few moments before deciding not to make any serious plans until after my knee was healed.

By the time
the sun had set that evening, I’d finished season two of my show and resumed working on my dog-eared book of crossword puzzles.

Watching all the movies and TV shows over the years, I’d come to expect a certain level of excitement from the apocalypse. The events at the dollar store yesterday and in Reeve’s backyard had been the exception.

There is a reason why the film version of
World War Z
skipped over Brad Pitt’s flights to Korea and Israel, and instead focused on the pulse-pounding parts of his adventure. The reality is that ninety-five percent of surviving an apocalypse is a lot of sitting around, doing nothing except hiding out. My current injury had very little to do with my confinement- most of my time over the last eight months had been spent inside my house, flipping through bad romance novels, poring over crossword puzzles, or watching movies.

At night, I preferred to stick to activities that were quiet. I didn’t want to attract any attention from outside- well, any more than I already had, with a psychotic ex-wife wailing at the top of her lungs on my doorstep.

She was in rare form tonight, telling me all about her various sexual encounters with Cole. The first time she’d pulled the sex card, I’d been disgusted, but not necessarily appalled or surprised. I wasn’t stupid. I knew she and Cole had been married for three years before he left, and since she’d popped out two kids over those three years- odds were that they’d had sex at least twice.

I also knew that Cole never took her on an overseas trip, or even back east to meet his family, so her story about screwing him on his mother’s living room floor was an outright lie. Kellie was only trying to get a rise out of me, and was embellishing her stories accordingly.

This wasn’t anything new, coming from her. During the first few months after a judge had ordered that Cole could see the girls regularly, The Ex had always shown up to interfere. On the days that Cole picked the girls up from school, Kellie showed up and grabbed the girls, insisting on walking them to Cole’s car herself. She wouldn’t let the girls take their backpacks with them, and after she’d buckled them into their seatbelts, she always told them, “I know you don’t want to go, but be strong. It’ll just be for a few hours.” When summer rolled around, The Ex paid a friend of hers to watch the girls, and the friend promptly banned Cole from setting foot on her property. It was a horrible predicament, since Kellie had sole legal custody and Cole wasn’t allowed to move the kids to another daycare. The Ex’s manipulation meant that she had to be there not just to sign the girls into daycare, but also to sign them out while Cole stood on the sidewalk, waiting.

Kellie had done everything she could to make it difficult for him to see the girls, short of outright denying Cole his court-ordered visitation. But for all her efforts, Cole and I were determined not to let her separate him from the girls again. As time went on and Cole didn’t back down, Kellie grew even more desperate, and resorted to verbally threatening him. On one such occasion, Cole had discreetly dialed my number using his cell phone, so that I could hear what Kellie was saying to him.

That had been a real turning point for me. Before that, I hadn’t realized the lengths Kellie was willing to go to in order to completely eliminate Cole from having any kind of relationship with his daughters. Her words had chilled me to the bone.

“You had better be prepared to keep going back to court until Priscilla is eighteen, because I won’t stop until you are gone from our lives! You hear me? Gone! I will take everything from you! How is your bitch girlfriend going to react when I tell her you cheated on her with me, huh? I doubt she’ll stick around and keep paying your bills!”

Cole had immediately denied any affair, and I believed him without question. I still believed him, even now. Although I didn’t agree with his attempts to downplay his emotional affairs, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind as to his physical fidelity. He agreed with me that sex was cheating, and cheating was wrong- we just saw things differently when it came to emotional attachments.

The Ex’s behavior during the custody conflicts had given me insight into her actions now. Back then, she had been willing to say anything in an attempt to get what she wanted- and even as a vampire, she was using the same methods. She wanted me to come out of my house, and she’d say whatever it took to goad me into it.

Though her voice was muffled, I could still hear her words clearly.

“Didn’t you know? He came to me when you weren’t enough for him,” she yelled, changing tactics, and I rolled my eyes. Same old story.

“You know it’s true, don’t you, you dumb bitch?” she went on. “You wanted to steal my life! My husband, my kids. You wanted to be me! But you couldn’t make him happy like I did!”

“That’s why he left your sorry ass,” I retorted, turning my attention back to my crossword puzzle. “Because you made him happy. Right.” The hint read
light brown,
and I wrote the letters T-A-N.

“You’re a homewrecker! A whore!”

A poet famous for his divine comedy,
the hint read.

Carefully I spelled out D-A-N-T-E.

Even overlooking the fact that Cole had divorced Kellie more than three years before I’d met him, The Ex was way off with her assumptions about my appeal to the opposite sex. As much as I would have liked to brag about my superior hotness, it just wasn’t true. I could count the total number of boyfriends I’d had on three fingers, and now that the apocalypse was in full swing, I didn’t estimate that number was going to change anytime soon.

Famous sunken ship.
This particular answer had to include the T-A-N I’d filled in earlier. I started writing.

T-I-T-A-

“You couldn’t have children of your own, so you tried to steal mine!”

My pencil paused, mid-word. That was a pretty low blow. To the best of my knowledge, I was perfectly capable of getting pregnant and having kids. I just hadn’t wanted any while World War Kellie was still raging.

“It’s called birth control,” I said out loud. “Not everyone wants to pop out two kids in three years.”

Holloway’s ears perked up at the sound of my voice, and he rolled over on the floor beside the couch, stretching before drifting back off to sleep.

I finished the word on my puzzle. T-I-T-A-N-I-C.

“How does it feel to know they’ll never call you Mom?” Kellie taunted me.

The girls had asked to call me Mom. Twice. Both times, I’d said no. It didn’t feel right. I wasn’t there to replace Kellie, and at the time I’d still harbored some hope that The Ex would come around, realize that we didn’t have to be enemies, and accept me as just one more person to adore her kids.

Wishful thinking, I know.

“Come out and face me, you coward!” she screamed, and I heard the wrought iron bars rattle as she shook them fiercely. “You’ve always been afraid of me!”

At that, my fists clenched, and my pencil snapped in half. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to storm outside and put a stake through The Ex’s heart. I wanted her to see the rage in my eyes as she lay dying. I wanted to tell her exactly what I’d thought of her all these years. I wanted to scream all the complaints I’d never been able to voice, all the names I was never able to call her but had so desperately wanted to.

It took every ounce of my self-control to stay where I was. I took a deep breath, then another, inhaling through my nose and exhaling through my mouth. “Five-letter slur for a woman who can’t let shit go,” I muttered as I threw my book down, wishing I could say it to her face. “May alternately be used as a term for a female dog.”

“Bitch!” Kellie shrieked, rattling the bars even harder.

I smiled humorlessly, rubbing my temples. “Got it in one.”

Usually I didn’t let her taunting bother me, but tonight she was really getting under my skin. Maybe it was because I was already grouchy. My knee was still aching, despite the three ibuprofen pills I’d popped about an hour ago. A sore knee did not make for a cheerful Kennedy.

This had been going on for so long, but when Eddie had been here, tolerating Kellie had been easier. Now that I was on my own, I wasn’t so sure I could keep my temper under control.

What would happen if I left?
I wondered. Phoenix wasn’t that far away. If I made the trek to Maricopa County to look for my dad, would Kellie follow?

Probably not. In fact, if I left during daylight hours, she might not even realize I was gone. But if she did get in, she would inevitably trash the house. My throat tightened. The thought of her going through my room…Cole’s closet…the girls’ rooms…was not pleasant.

“It’s just stuff,” I told myself. All the stuff in the world couldn’t replace my dad.

Could I do it, though? Pick up and leave everything behind? I’d have to find a working car with a full tank of gasoline, and of course there was the possibility that my dad wouldn’t even be in Phoenix once I got there.

But I had a dozen cousins who had also been in the area, and my grandma, too. Somebody was bound to have stuck it out like I had. And besides, anything was better than staying here alone, with The Ex howling outside my house every night like a rabid coyote.

I was trying hard not to get my hopes up, but it was impossible not to imagine what it would be like to find my dad, alive and well, maybe holed up in his house like I was.

Maybe lonely…like I was.

I fell asleep like that, sprawled on the couch with the broken pencil from my crossword puzzles still clutched in my fist.

The next morning, Holloway woke me up by licking my feet, and I tried to pull away from his wet tongue, forgetting momentarily about my injured knee. A stab of pain ran up my leg, and I winced.

“Not the way I wanted to wake up, Holloway,” I muttered, rubbing a hand across my eyes.

I was happily surprised to see, however, that my knee looked significantly less swollen this morning. Other than the bruising, it could have passed for almost normal. I tried to straighten it, and was pleased to see I could do so, even though it still felt sore and stiff.

I grabbed the crossbow and, feeling a little reckless, put on flip flops instead of my boots. There was a half bath in the basement, but I really wanted to take a shower this morning. Sitting around in my sweats all day made me feel dirtier than if I’d been out in town, foraging for food. Go figure.

Balancing awkwardly on my crutches, I went through my usual routine, turning on the UV lights, checking all the rooms, and finally making my way to the front door. I really just wanted to check and make sure that The Ex hadn’t left another body outside, and I was relieved to see that my driveway was free of dead guys today. Not that I could have done anything about it anyway- I was in no shape to do anything physical.

I locked up the front and went to the back door to let Holloway out. When I unlocked the wrought iron gate and pushed it back, I was surprised to see my scooter sitting on the concrete patio, propped up by its kickstand. There was a white piece of paper secured under the kickstand.

I hobbled outside and tried to lean down to pick up the paper. I had to put a hand on the scooter to steady myself, and then I had to prop my leg out in front of me, since I couldn’t put any significant weight on my knee. I yanked the paper free and straightened up, breathing hard like I’d just run a marathon.

Thought you might want to move this back inside. I’ll get you some gas soon- couldn’t find any premium tonight.

Let me know if there’s anything else you need while you’re laid up.

Reeve

My jaw dropped. He’d brought my scooter back? And he was going to look for some gasoline for me?