“Stop it, Hans! Leave me alone!”
“Oh, please.” He laughed. “I’ve been leaving you alone for eighteen long years. It’s high time we became properly acquainted.”
“It was you, wasn’t it?” I squeaked at him. “You were the one at Garway!”
He had his hands clasped behind his back so naturally, circling me with footsteps, his bright green eyes fixed on mine as I turned around to keep him in view.
His voice was so low and powerful.
“Strange, don’t you think? How you didn’t remember those encounters at Garway until a short while ago. Recollections can come back in a flash. Just like that!” He clicked his fingers.
I was playing around the gravestones, ran straight into a man’s legs, fell back with a yelp. His smile. His slender fingers reaching to help me up.
Be more careful amongst the dead, Katherine. Those were his words. Then he’d vanished.
I’d forgotten all about…
“What the hell is going on?” I asked him. “Really, Hans. What’s going on?!”
I was terrified, and my heart was thumping so hard I could feel it in my ribs, my legs shaking harder than ever, but underneath all of that there was something different. A recognition, as though I’d known this man my whole life.
“You know what’s going on,” Hans said. “Trust your instincts and not your brain, like you should have done since the day you were born.”
Rational Katherine was losing all hold of me, but I still felt like a fantasist fool when I spoke the words out loud.
“You really are a vampire, aren’t you?”
He smiled his perfect smile.
“Indeed, I am.”
“And last night… that wasn’t just a nightmare, was it? That was real?”
“Ouch. I see you’re using the termnightmarenow. It was adreamearlier, if I recall?”
“A dream, then. It wasn’t a dream at all, was it? It was real.”
He tipped his head, as though he was curious, still circling me. “Call it a trial run.”
I backed up against a door, ignoring my discarded phone and keys. I wasn’t surprised to find it was the same large wooden door I’d backed into in my dream.
“A trial run for what?”
His hand between my legs.
He moved a step closer, his eyes so fierce yet so beautiful.
“You have a choice to make, Katherine.”
“What kind of choice?”
Fingers sliding over my nipple.
“A simple one, really. Tell me you want me to leave you alone and I’ll walk away. You’ll have no memory of this, just as you’ve had no memory of our encounters before. All of it will be forgotten, and you’ll be free to continue your new life in the city, trying to run away from the shadows of the past.”
“And if I don’t?”
“You’re asking me questions you already know the answers to, you just don’t have enough faith in yourself to accept them.” He paused. “I blame your mother and grandmother for that. They’ve been feeding your self-doubt since you were old enough to start believing in fairytales.”