Page 1 of Midlife Vampire Unexpected

Chapter 1

There was something about the name Xavier Santiago that stuck in my head. It was a vague memory floating around but I needed to know why it was there.

Xavier Santiago.

I couldn’t remember things from the last few days but I could remember that name. It made me question everything I found out about him. His records were crazy. He didn’t show up anywhere except in one old social security account that deemed him as dead. He was a ghost in the machine and yet I was going to find him. There was something stuck in my mind that he was doing something I needed to know about. He was doing something wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it kept me awake at night. It had brought me here to this cabin in the woods by Big Bend river. I had taken a week off of working at Cougar Creek to come and find him.

There was something about him when he came to Cougar Creek that made me suspicious of him. I’d seen him at the cemetery. I vaguely remembered I had seen some bodily injury happen to him. I couldn’t remember it outside of my dreams. but still, my dreams had brought me here to the strange cabin in the woods. It was as if I was being called here.

The brown leaves of the trees crunched under my feet as I stepped up to the edge of the porch. In two creaky steps I was at the front door. I knocked on it resoundingly.

“This is the sheriff’s office,” I said. “We’re just doing a routine check,”

Silence greeted me. I saw that the front door was slightly ajar.

“I’m going to come in,” I said quite loudly, catching my reflection in the door. I had put my uniform on that morning. I was trying to make today as routine as possible. I’d even taken a police car. If this man gave me trouble, I was going to make sure he knew who he was dealing with. My shoulder length sandy brown hair was pulled back in a functional ponytail which was my standard style. In my reflection, my pale gray eyes blazed with a fierce determination to get to the bottom of this.

It was the same determination that had gotten me in trouble back in Indianapolis. I’d stuck to a case long after I was told not to, but here I didn’t think Sheriff Ted was going to care very much if I crossed the line and looked in another county. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me.

I hoped.

I couldn’t afford to move homes again. At forty-four, I was ready to retire. I couldn’t afford it, but mentally and emotionally I was done being a cop. The only thing I still wanted was to catch the bad guy. I just didn’t want to do it with a bureaucracy that was required of me by all the regulations. I’d never been that person, even though I had tried to fit in for twenty years of my life.

I pushed the door open and stepped into the dimly lit cabin. It smelled of must and dust and something else. Decay, the sweet smell of decay, whether it was the wood or fabric or somebody’s body. I walked into the living space and as I slowly scanned the area, I realized what was calling to me was not in this room. It was through the wooden door and in the back hallway.

My gun was in the air, ready to take aim on anyone that made the wrong move towards me. The smell of decay was getting stronger as I walked into the back room.

There was somebody in the bed. A lump of non-moving blankets. But I knew it was Xavier. Deformed and decaying, lying there. I stared down. It was like I was looking at the corpse of an old, wrinkled man.

But he moved slightly. I gasped and stepped back, taken by surprise.

I looked again. Clearly this creature was of no danger to me. I got closer, leaning over. I put my hands against his neck. He was missing an arm.

This was him.

This was Xavier.

Then I felt it, barely even a movement, but it was there. There was no pulse, but his arm twitched. It caught me off guard and as he swung up with his one free arm. He grabbed me by the neck then pulled me down, and clamped his teeth against it. I screamed as his teeth pierced my skin. I struggled against him as I felt him begin to…Drink. My. Blood.

What the actual fuck?

I thrashed against his grip, unable to break free.

I could feel myself getting weak as my blood was being drained out of me. He was going to take every last bit of blood and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stop that from happening.

His greedy hungry lips sucked at my neck with a disgusting slurping sound.

A vampire. It couldn’t be the case. This was just some creepy old guy with an injury doing some damage on my throat.

I whacked him upside the head, breaking his teeth loose from my neck.

“Let me go, you fucker,” I said. “Creepy motherfucker.”

I’d come across a lot of creeps in my days as a police officer, but this one was something else. His eyes rolled in all sorts of crazy, with red blood smear across his lips. He licked them. Blood was pouring out of my neck and I saw the excitement that was building in his face

“Not today,” I said, swinging around and knocking his mouth with a fierce elbow, which actually cracked both of his canine teeth.

“You can’t beat me,” he said.

---