Page 15 of Vampires Don't Give Hickeys
“Lovely...night...”
The words pounded against my ears even though he hadn’t moved his mouth to speak them.
His presence crushed the air from my lungs until they held nothing but panic. Plenty enough to consume me.
“Lovely night...for a stroll...isn’t it?”
My body had seized up, as if locked in whatever weird spell he’d put me under. I couldn’t move, couldn’t blink. Paul’s face swam behind a haze of tears, automatically triggered by my horror and my inability to close my eyes against it. His whole face warped into some kind of nightmare blob, his image fritzing from six feet away to within inches of my nose and back again. What the hell was happening?
“Lovely night for a stroll, isn’t it?”
A gasp rang in my ears, loud and sharp, followed closely by an awful pain in my chest.
“Lovely night...”
“Ms. Harrison?” a voice asked, male, familiar.
“...for a stroll, isn’t it?” I whispered. Those words had come out of me, but...
Paul was gone. The static noise gone.
I blinked down at the pain, sudden and bright and excruciating. Icy dread tumbled down into my gut for a crash-landing. My stake punctured Papa Smurf on my T-shirt through his eye, and his head and most of his body had bloomed purple with the spread of blood.Myblood. I’d stabbed myself with my own stake. Not through my heart, but much too close for comfort. I swallowed hard at the sight, disbelief making a strangled sound at the back of my throat.
“Ms. Harrison, you all right?”
With my mouth pushed tight against a scream, I yanked out the stake. Blood rushed from the wound in dizzying waves, so I held one hand to it to staunch the flow and used the other to cover everything with my leather jacket. Taking a steadying breath, I glanced as nonchalantly as I could over my shoulder.
Tim, the cemetery groundskeeper, stood behind me, a deep crease between his salt-and-pepper eyebrows.
“Fine,” I lied without turning around. “How are you?”
“I forgot my thermos.” He pointed in the direction of his work shed near the back of the cemetery. “Was just on my way to get it. Without my coffee in the morning, I’m a real bear, even to dead folks.”
“You and me both,” I said, but I could hardly hear myself over the pain, over my mind whirring, over my erratic pulse. “If you want to lock up behind you, feel free. I think I’ll go now.”
Before I bled to death. Would I even make it to the vamps’ place? I was starting to feel all swimmy and disconnected from reality because I didn’t typically go around stabbing myself. I had stakedmyself. Panic rose up within me and threatened to swallow me whole.
“You sure you all right?”
I nodded and swallowed again, my mouth tasting like copper. “Did you see anyone else when you got here?”
He grunted. “Just you, talking to yourself.”
Not all that surprising since humans forgot about vampires as soon as they looked away from them. It had to be the same for...Paul, even though he definitely wasn’t a vampire.
I turned to leave, holding my jacket closed over the hole in my chest. “Well, have a lovely night.”
The static noise blared loud enough to shiver my brain and make my eyes wobble. I stumbled off toward the gate, my head hammering. The world began to sag at the edges the closer I drew to the gate, tunneling my vision through black voids on either side. The wing of an angel statue caught me as I tripped, and when I blinked upward, her stone face was melting. The statue’s eyes stared as they dripped down her cheeks. Fangs stretched between her drooping lips, and somehow the statue reminded me of Paul. Like an angel of death sent to take me out before my twenty-first—before mytwentieth—birthday.
“Lovely night...”
No. Stop. Why were those words coming out of my mouth?
Terror chased up my back, threatening to consume me if unconsciousness didn’t. I didn’t know what Paul was smoking, but it most definitely was the opposite of a lovely fucking night.
I hauled myself forward and through the gate, clinging to the cold iron bars toward the only place that had felt like home in a long time, a pinpoint in the growing night. The distance stretched farther as if taunting me. I didn’t know if I could make it. A cry for help tipped my tongue, something I never did, never asked for, but I had no doubt that it would come.
“Help me,” I whispered.
