Vampires 101 (Twilight Hunters Book 1) A Vampire Romance (4 page)

Within that misty twilight that inhabits the realm between consciousness and sleep, I could feel him - I could feel the fire in his touch as he brushed my lips with a feather light kiss. I sensed the primal hunger that burned inside him and his need to touch me - possess me, but most of all, to protect me.

Our souls were communicating those feelings and needs that could never truly be a part of our reality. Though only half awake, I could not stop my body from trembling when he softly pressed his lips against my ear and whispered, “You’re never alone Princess.”

The truth finally drilled itself through my skull and right into my brain.
I wasn’t dreaming!

My eyes flew open, even before the thought had fully formed in my head. My bedroom was empty, but there was the lingering scent of something I could only compare to sandalwood and musk.

Did vampires wear cologne?

Rolling over in my lumpy queen bed, I glanced at the glowing red numbers on my digital clock. It was 3:00 AM. Hadn’t I heard somewhere that most paranormal activity took place between the hours of 12:00 AM and 3:00 AM?

Oh well. It couldn’t get much worse than coming home to find a vampire in your living room. At least I hoped not anyway. I really didn’t mind his nocturnal visits; I would just prefer to be awake for them.

Pulling my Teddy Bear quilt up over my shoulders, I let myself drift back to sleep. Though I craved blissful nothingness, his seductive black eyes haunted my dreams - allowing me no rest at all.

* * *

I slid into the driver’s seat of my sky blue Chevy Impala, and with a mournful sigh, rested my forehead against the steering wheel. How dare Jake make me the target of his restructuring fiasco?

Wait a minute! There had to be some kind of silver lining hidden within all these murky clouds. There had to be.

If Granny Chadwick had taught me nothing else, she did teach me about clouds and silver linings. Grams could find the good in anything and anyone, no matter how dour the situation looked.

The silver lining in this situation must be that I was lucky enough to get my car out of the shop before Jake hit me with my layoff notice. Of course, there was always unemployment insurance. I’d have that coming in for at least a few months.

I could almost hear Grams telling me what a nice little vacation I’d ended up with. A body needs a little time off every now and again.

Inevitably thinking of Grandma Chadwick, brought to mind my mother. The reason I’d spent so much time with Grams was because with Dad being a cop, he tended to work long hours. Mom wasn’t there, and she hadn’t been since I was three years old.

Though I had no real memory of my mother, that didn’t lesson the pain of growing up without her.

As I got older, no one talked about Mom, and if I asked, the subject was quickly sidetracked. That didn’t keep me from noticing the hushed whispers among friends and family. Most believed Mom had grown tired of my father being married to his job, and had run off with another man, but Grams never bought into that theory. Truthfully, I don’t think Dad did either.

Though Grams never talked about it until I was much older, when she did, I finally began to get a picture of what happened. Grandma Chadwick was certain some misfortune had befallen her daughter, and there wasn’t anyone or anything that was going to convince her otherwise. She couldn’t and wouldn’t believe her Tina would run off and leave her only child.

Dad was another story. He never talked about what happened to my mother. It was a touchy subject with him, and one you didn’t really want to bring up unless you were in the mood to get your head snapped off. I didn’t think it was so much that he believed she’d run off with another man, but that he was still grieving the loss of his wife.

The last thing I had in mind for my future was becoming a cop. The job description of long hours and getting shot at by the bad guy, just didn’t sit well with me. But I did have every intention of solving a few mysteries, namely my mother’s disappearance.

No one just vanishes from the face of the earth without leaving behind a single clue. I agreed with Grams. Something happened to her, and one day I intended to find out what. Once I was old enough, the story I was told was that Dad woke one morning to find Mom’s side of the bed empty. She hadn’t taken anything with her - not her car, driver’s license, or even her wallet - not even a change of clothes. Tina Chadwick Jordan was just gone without a trace, - never to be seen or heard from again.

There was evidence that she’d slept in the bed, but sometime during the night she’d gotten up, and that’s when she went missing. All the doors and windows were locked, and without any signs of an intruder, the police had no choice but to simply treat it as a missing person’s case. Though technically the case was still open, the unofficial conclusion was that she’d left of her own free will.

That didn’t even come close to my theory. My belief was that she heard something outside in the middle of the night and went out to investigate. It was then that she was taken. It didn’t exactly explain why the doors were still locked, but it made about as much sense as anyone else’s theory.

I was startled out of my thoughts by the too cheerful sound of Jingle Bells coming from my cell phone.

That’s it! I really had to find time to change that song. Not only was it so cheerful that it grated my nerves, but for heaven’s sake it was July.

“Hello,” I answered.

“You sound like you’ve just come from your own funeral,” Dad commented. “Still not feeling well?”

I wasn’t about to tell him I’d just lost my job, not yet anyway. “I’m ok. Just a little tired.”

“We have an ID on our guy. Turns out his name is Stuart Butler and he works as a foreman for a major contractor. Another little tidbit is that he traveled a lot for his job.”

Stuart Butler my ass
!

I could maybe believe Norman Bates, as in Psycho. That name fit Killer Tom so much better. But I couldn’t tell Dad any of this. I suspected his blood pressure was already giving him trouble.

“Is that all?” I asked.

“No. We can’t be sure until we run his DNA, but we think he could be responsible for the death of that woman we found a couple of weeks ago. Maybe even a few others that disappeared in areas where he was working.”

As usual, my Dad hadn’t confided in me about the other case, but I’d seen it on the news. The cause of death had never been released, only that foul play was suspected.

“Well maybe we got a bad guy off the streets.” I tried to inject some optimism into my voice.

“Yeah, well that doesn’t change the fact that there’s still a pretty vicious son of a bitch traipsing around that cemetery at night,” he grumbled.

He was talking about my savior. Whoever he was, he’d saved my life, but every cop in town seemed determined to bring him in for killing a killer. What a strange world we lived in.

I was in no mood to argue the merits of someone that had taken a serial killer off the streets, so I changed the subject. “Dad, do you think you can check the missing person database for someone by the name of Shadow. That’s probably a nickname. She’s in her late teens - early twenties, blond hair and brown eyes.”

“Why? What’s going on?” he asked.

“It’s just personal curiosity. I met a homeless girl, and was kind of wondering if she was a runaway.”

That seemed to satisfy him. He promised to look into it and hung up. I hadn’t seen or heard from Shadow for three days, not since the night of the incident in the cemetery. The fact that she seemed to have disappeared went a long way in helping out the idea that the whole thing had been a nightmare.

So now what?

After starting my car, I backed out of the cramped parking lot of Jake’s Diner, and drove in the general direction of home. Since I would probably spend the rest of the day sulking, home was as good a place as any. Maybe I would take a nap, and then think up ways to get even with Jake. Like, I would totally never eat at his restaurant again. That would teach him.

Ok Cassie get a grip!

It’s not really Jake’s fault. The old guy was just trying to stay afloat like everyone else, and he couldn’t play favorites. Seniority was everything, and that was something I had little of at Jake’s Diner. It was time to put that chapter of my life behind me.

Suddenly I felt so drowsy that the street in front of me blurred. There was an annoying voice whispering in my head, telling me that if I didn’t pull over, I would end up killing someone.

That was the last thing I remembered until I woke up hours later.

I was parked on the side of the road, but it was now dark, and it looked like I was miles away from town. My head was still so full of fog, that at first I wasn’t sure where I was. I recognized the road I was on, but my head was still spinning, so I couldn’t quite place it. The one thing that jumped out at me right away was the absence of pain. The pain in my arm and leg was completely gone.

I’m a bit slow, so it took a few minutes for me to realize that I was on the old highway headed out of town. For some odd reason, I was parked next to some farmer’s field. Instead of wondering how I got there, my first thought was that there might be scarecrows in the field. I hated scarecrows. Those things were just so creepy.

So now the problem of trying to figure out how I’d managed to drive so far, and then park next to the field, given that I didn’t remember an iota of any of it. It was always possible I had a brain injury that the doctors hadn’t detected, especially considering the damn bells ringing in my ears.

But then again, maybe not.

The bells were actually Jingle Bells coming from my phone. Damn! I really needed to change my ring tone. I answered without bothering to look at the caller ID.

“Hello,” I croaked into the mouthpiece.

“Where the hell are you?” My dad asked in a not so soft voice. “I’ve been calling all night.”

“Sorry, I must have fallen asleep.” It wasn’t really a lie.

All he said was “Hmm.” That always meant that Dad didn’t believe a word of what I was saying, which was so not fair when I was telling the truth. Technically anyway.

“Well I have some info on what you were asking about earlier,” he told me, apparently deciding against another interrogation.

“Ok, give it to me.” I was anxious to put a stake through Shadows vampire story, and then totally put it out of my mind.

“The only person I could find in the missing person database was a one, Tess Ramose … AKA Shadow. She fits the description you gave me, but according to the police report, she disappeared twelve years ago while attending a Rave. She was twenty years old at the time, so that puts a hole in your theory about this homeless girl. Tess Ramose would be over thirty by now.”

Well so much for discrediting her vampire story. If anything, it made it stronger. “Great Dad. Thanks. I’ll call you tomorrow,” I promised before ending the call.

Taking a deep breath, I began to seriously entertain the notion that the crazy neon girl just might be telling the truth.

The one thing I did know for sure was that something was happening to me, and Shadow might be the only one that could help me figure it out. Of course, that was only if it wasn’t a brain injury, which was also a real possibility.

Problem was, my one and only connection to the world of things that go bump in the night, happened to be missing in action. So where would a vampire hang out, other than the local blood bank? Shadow didn’t strike me as the blood bank type.

Well she did say that she’d been following me. Maybe she followed me today … maybe she could even tell me how I managed to drive fifteen miles out of town without any conscious memory of doing it?

With only a half full moon in the sky, it was pretty dark. Being a Sunday night, there were few cars on the road. Most people tended to avoid the old highway in favor of the freeway, so it wasn’t exactly a well-traveled road, even during the day.

Turning the key in the ignition, I started the car and pulled it further off the road, inching closer to the cornfield. I wasn’t a big fan of cornfields. The stalks were so high that anyone could be sneaking around in there, just waiting to take your head of with a machete, or some other lethal weapon.

The darkness was eerily unsettling. For some reason I couldn’t get over the feeling that I was preparing to play the starring role in some slasher movie, like maybe Rampage of the Scarecrow, or some other equally silly but deadly B movie.

Steeling myself against my totally unreasonable fear of the corn, I opened the car door and got out.

Taking a deep breath, I tried to calm my nerves. “Shadow … are you out there!” I yelled into the darkness.

At first I heard nothing but the irritating buzz of blood sucking insects, namely mosquitoes. While I swatted at the little biting bugs, I figured that if I spent too much time out here, I wouldn’t have to worry about vampires. I wouldn’t have any blood left.

That’s when I heard it - the sound of someone walking through the maze of corn. I went into instant freeze mode.

What were the chances that there really was a crazed killer scarecrow coming out of the corn?

While part of my brain scoffed at such a ridiculous notion, my childhood fears were worming their way through any logical thoughts I still possessed. When Shadow finally stepped out of the corn, I had to fight the urge to run over and give her a hug. I was just so glad it was a vampire and not a scarecrow.