Page 28 of Vampires Don't Give Hickeys
On the count of three, I touched my fingertips to the heavy door and pulled. Nothing happened. Pulled again and still nothing.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I muttered. What was it with me and doors all of a sudden?
I fumbled at my back pockets for my phone only to discover it was gone. Sealed up tight inside a mausoleum without a phone and no grounds keeper to come the next morning to let me out.
“Eddie? Jacek? I need help,” I whispered and squeezed my eyes shut.
I hated to do that. To ask them for help with Paul roaming out there and the terror he’d already wrought. But I didn’t have a choice.
The tree branches tapped out an uneven rhythm around the pounding rain on the roof. Lightning flashed through the stained glass window behind me.
Several minutes passed, and I had to wonder if they could even hear me. They’d be here in the next heartbeat if they could, so maybe whatever was blocking Paul and his static noise out was also blocking me in.
Well, this was one way to get rid of me. I turned and eyed the stained glass window. But it wasn’t agoodway to get rid of me.
Seizing my will to live inside my clenched fists, I let it burn through me, filling every cell, fueling the next several steps I needed to take to get out of this graveyard.
I leaped onto the broken coffin, scrambled into a run on the sides of it, and hurled myself at the stained glass window. The hard pane smashed against my hip first, my head second, and then it burst. Glass rained down, cutting at my arms, slicing at my face. Adrenaline whisked the pain away. I dropped to the ground in a crouch, then ran harder than I had in my entire life for the gate.
But first, Tim. I needed to make sure there was nothing I could do for him before I left him here.
I couldn’t hear much over my stuffed ears—both a blessing and a curse—but I felt the static noise scratching up through the soles of my boots and biting into my nerves. Angel statues and cherubs melted into my path, their fanged mouths stretching wide. Gravestones folded over at the last second to trip me up. I dodged them all, somehow keeping my footing in the slanting rain.
Tim was still there, slumped to the ground now beside the bench, staring up at the pouring rain with empty eyes. Gone.
Tears burned down my cheeks. There was nothing I could do for him.
As soon as I reached the gate, I threw it closed, leaving it unlocked, then rubbed the sleeve of my coat over it to smudge my fingerprints. Because even though my stake and maybe even my phone were still inside, I had to call the police first thing in the morning. They needed to find Tim’s body.
More tears brimmed, and I immediately turned to the house next door, magnetized by the comfort it offered when I was so desperate for some. But I couldn’t go there. Jacek had students. They probably wouldn’t react well to my dropping in.
No, this was on me. Tonight was all on me. Even Tim’s death.EspeciallyTim’s death. I should have offered to take his thermos to him when he forgot it.
I started home, drenched to the bone and freezing, with a worried knot tangled in my gut and the feeling of eyes drilling into the back of my head. One glance back and the cemetery looked as it should, with the statues and gravestones in normal positions. The static had stopped stabbing up through the ground. But Paul was still out there somewhere, watching, planning tomorrow night’s games, and the next night and the next night until he wore me thin enough to end me.
The devil’s marriage proposal was starting to sound better and better.
I frowned and shook my head, speeding my pace toward home and the last twenty-three hours of being nineteen years old.
