Lifting his head, he caught the scent of prey on the evening breeze. With a thought, he vanished from her sight.
Shannah blinked and blinked again. Where had he gone? One minute he had been a few yards ahead of her and the next he was gone as if he had never been there at all.
Pausing, she rubbed her eyes. Had she started to imagine things? Maybe it was just one more symptom of her illness, like the fever that burned through her. Or maybe he really was a vampire. She giggled. Or the Invisible Man.
Feeling suddenly light-headed, she reached out, bracing one hand against the wall of a tall brick building. Her time was running out. She felt it in the deepest part of her being, knew it was only a matter of weeks, perhaps days, before she lapsed into a coma, never to awake again. And then what? The endless nothingness that she feared, or the heavenly paradise that her grandmother had promised awaited all those who believed?
Shannah took a deep breath. Before she left this world, she had to know if the man she had been following was truly a vampire.
On legs that wobbled with every step, she walked to the woods across from his house and settled down in her usual place to keep watch. It was quite cozy, all things considered. She had a couple of warm quilts, a small pillow, an ice chest filled with water and soft drinks, another chest filled with potato chips and her favorite candy bars. Not exactly a healthy diet, but what difference did it make now? It was only a matter of time as to which ran out first, the money her grandfather had left her, or her life. She giggled as she reached for a soda. At least she didn’t have to worry about high cholesterol or getting fat. Or catching some horrible fatal disease, she thought with morbid amusement, since she already had one.
Tonight, she didn’t have to wait long for the stranger to appear. He emerged out of the darkness a short time later and entered his house. The lights came on. Plumes of blue-gray smoke drifted from the chimney to be blown away by an itinerant breeze.
She had promised herself that she would approach him tonight but her courage suddenly deserted her. She would keep watch here again tonight, she decided, and knock on his door tomorrow afternoon. If he answered, she would know he wasn’t a vampire. If he didn’t…somehow she would have to work up the nerve to approach him after the sun went down.
But for now…her eyelids fluttered down. For now she needed sleep.
She woke late in the afternoon with the sun in her face and the usual cramping in her stomach.
Sitting up, she folded her arms around her middle and rocked back and forth. When the worst of the pain was over, she drank some water, then splashed some on her face. Though she wasn’t really hungry, she knew she needed to eat to keep her strength up and she forced herself to eat one of the bran muffins she had bought the day before, and to drink some orange juice.
Finally, with one hand propped against a tree, she gained her feet, her gaze moving to the house across the way. It looked like the kind of house you saw in movies, the kind inhabited by witches or haunted by unfriendly ghosts.
She had planned to approach the mysterious stranger that afternoon but now that the time had come, she found her courage failing her once more. Even though she was convinced he was the only answer to her problem, she wasn’t sure she was ready to meet a vampire face to face.
“Oh, for goodness sakes, stop being such a coward,” she muttered. “What have you got to lose?
A few days at most.”
Still, she wanted those days. In the last few months, she had learned that each new day, each hour of life, was a precious gift from God, a gift that was meant to be savored and cherished.
She only wished she had realized that sooner.
She dusted off her jeans, straightened her T-shirt, ran her hands through the tangles in her hair.
Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was a little after five. Too early for a vampire to be up and about. So, if he answered the door, that would prove he wasn’t a vampire. And if he didn’t answer, well if he didn’t, it could mean one of two things. Either he had left the house while she slept, proving that he was just a man, or he was stretched out in his coffin somewhere, sleeping the sleep of the Undead.
Taking a deep breath, she squared her shoulders and marched resolutely across the grassy field and the road beyond. She pushed on the heavy gate, blew out a sigh of exasperation when it didn’t open. She should have known that it would be locked.
Well, she wasn’t going to let a little thing like a locked gate deter her now that she had finally found the courage to approach him. Turning to the left, she followed the block wall along the property line and there, at the back of the house, she found a tree with branches that extended over the wall.
Taking another deep breath, she reached for the lowest branch. It had been years since she had climbed a tree and now she knew why. She hadn’t worried about falling and breaking a leg, or, worse, her neck, when she’d been a little girl, but the possibility of either or both occurred to her now. And then she shrugged. A broken neck would be a quick, reasonably painless way to go.
Shaking the thought from her mind, she gained the top of the wall, swung her legs over the other side, and dropped to the ground in the backyard.
The house looked as forbidding from the back as it did from the front. The grounds were in dire need of attention. The lawn hadn’t been mowed in weeks, perhaps months. There were weeds that needed pulling, trees that hadn’t been pruned in a long time, a wrought-iron bench in need of paint. It was a big yard, one that could have been beautiful. It seemed a shame to let it get so overgrown. If she lived here, she would plant flowers along the walkway and rose bushes in the weed-infested gardens. She’d put a covered swing in the corner, maybe a gazebo near the gardens.
But it wasn’t her house. With a shake of her head, she walked around to the front porch. Her palms were damp, her mouth as dry as the Sahara in mid-summer when she finally summoned the courage to knock on the door.
Minutes passed.
She knocked again, harder. And then once more.
So, was he sleeping in his coffin, or just not at home?
She was about to turn away when the door opened and she found herself staring up into the face of the man she had been following. She had never been close enough to see the color of his eyes. Now she saw that they were black.As black as death . The words whispered through the corridors of her mind even as she felt the warmth of the late afternoon sun on her back.
Danger emanated from him like heat rising from summer-hot pavement.
He couldn’t be a vampire.
He couldn’t help her.
She was going to die.