Just One Bite Volume 4 Read online

  I felt helpless and completely out of my league, yet these men obviously believed I was L’Aran’s best chance for survival. It made me realize how little I actually knew about a guy I’d come to think of as my life partner. Hell, aside from a starring role in my fantasies, I had little indication he felt more than a deep kinship.

  Doubts began to weave their stench into my thoughts, and I shook myself. Friend or lover, it didn’t matter. L’Aran needed me, and I was determined to rise to the occasion. If I failed, after all, the distinction was moot.

  What was it he’d said just before the attack? I struggled to recall his words, wishing again I’d paid closer attention to detail. They only think they know everything about me.

  “Tell me all you know about L’Aran’s abilities.”

  They looked at one another, then at me. We do not speak aloud of such things. Even insects have been used for eavesdropping.

  “Oh, please. If the hunters were that powerful, we’d all be toast by now.” I rose and grabbed my waterlogged backpack, intending to set off on my own quest.

  “We believe L’Aran to be more powerful than he’s allowed us to see,” they conceded. And we believe him also more powerful than he knows himself. His blood is like nothing we’ve seen thus far.

  I glared at them. The others aren’t the only ones who experiment, then, are they?

  “We collect information.” The defensiveness was so sour, I could taste as well as smell it. The lie followed. “We do not attempt to manipulate it.”

  I moved toward the door.

  “Your blood is very similar to L’Aran’s.” The words—and their truth—hit me like a blow to the back of the head.

  Before I could stop to think, I turned and hurled my acrid fury at them. They collapsed like rag dolls, unconscious but apparently otherwise unharmed.

  “Well, now,” I grinned in surprise. “Go, me!”

  Blood. They seemed to believe that our abilities originated in the blood. If so, then my blood was my power. As was L’Aran’s. And ours was similar, they’d said. An idea began to form.

  I followed the rutted dirt road from the cabin toward town. I had precious little information, and less time.

  The streets looked foreign, as if I’d been plopped into an alternate reality. Everything and nothing had changed. Paranoia greeted me with every person I passed, and as I neared the cemetery—the only point of reference I had—it intensified.

  I climbed the fence at the back of the property, where the stately stone and wrought iron rising from the pampered shrubbery gave way to waist-high chain link threaded with Virginia creeper. A doe looked up from her grazing, and held my gaze long enough for me to wonder if she was what she seemed before ambling away.

  As I made my way toward my mother’s grave, I fished in my backpack until my hand found what it sought. Looking at the pale yellow moon, large and low on the horizon, I made a short slice across my forearm.

  Blood on death.

  My blood dripped onto the grass and seemed to glow there, viscous and alive. Instantly, I felt the vigilance of the night.

  A group of hunters arrived first, as expected, followed moments later by a cadre of the others. It looked like confrontation between an order of monks and a band of outlaws. Had I not been desperate to free L’Aran, I would’ve been amused by the absurdity of it all.

  He was near. I could smell the maelstrom of his thoughts, outrage and concern and overwhelming love. Love for me!

  I turned toward the hunters and took a step. Behind me, the others closed the distance. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a robed figure bend to collect my blood from the grass. He fell, stricken by an unseen force, just as L’Aran stepped from the midst of the hunters.

  One of them attempted to prevent him from moving toward me. I smelled L’Aran’s lightning blue determination a split second before the hunter, too, fell.

  We ran, then, toward each other. L’Aran, I swear, flew. It seemed his feet barely touched the grass, whereas mine felt like they were made of lead. He looked gallant in the moonlight, eyes blazing and dark hair streaming behind.

  When his hand grasped mine, relief nearly knocked me from my feet. Only the cold hands that fell on my shoulders prevented it. They pulled me away despite my resistance, and I tried in vain to summon whatever force I’d used back at the cabin.

  L’Aran was looking at his hand, at my blood glistening on his skin, and I smelled his spark of intuition. It happened quickly, but I saw it in cinematic slow motion.

  He lifted his hand to his mouth and bit, tearing a chunk of flesh from the base of his thumb. His blood, like mine, glowed with power, and I felt the one holding me tense. The others edged closer on all sides.

  I threw an elbow and heard a grunt. It wasn’t enough to break free, but it did allow me to extend my other arm toward L’Aran. The intensity of our contact—his blood to mine, mingling—lit up the night.

  Blood on love.

  He pulled me, effortlessly, from the others’ grasp and delivered a toe-curling kiss. “Let’s get out of here.”

  We left them there, stunned, glaring at one another, and no doubt plotting their next moves. Their game had changed, and it was our turn to make the rules.

  Night Carnival

  by Kathryn Meyer Griffith

  No one lives forever, and oh, how well I’d learned that sad truth. In the space of a short month I’d lost my husband of fifteen years, Jeffrey, and my eccentric mother, Evelyn. One to a freak car accident and the other to a quick-spreading cancer. They were the only people in the world who’d ever loved me and the only people I’d ever cared about. In my entire strange solitary life. A life I sometimes felt wasn’t even mine.

  Now here I sit in my mother’s empty house, the night before it’s to go on the selling block. Bargain seekers, some old friends of my mother’s, but mostly strangers, have traipsed through it in the last three days scooping up whatever was in it. Some stuff I sold cheaply and some I gave away. I wanted little from my childhood home. Mainly mementos. Letters, various precious books and photos. That’s all. Tomorrow morning I’d drive back to my home hundreds of miles away leaving the selling of the nearly worthless house (it really was in disrepair) to a friendly real estate agent who promised she’d sell the place and get something, at least, for it. Eventually. I hoped she was right. I could use the money. My mother’s medical bills, my own huge remaining mortgage, and the tiny problem of my husband’s nonexistent life insurance policy had disintegrated my financial life. I was flat busted broke.

  Damn, and as of this morning, with a cold-blooded phone call from my heartless boss, I was also jobless. Could things get any worse? I didn’t think so. How in the world had I ended up at thirty-seven husbandless, motherless, jobless and broke? What a pickle.

  I ran my trembling hands through my short hair and dropped my head into my arms. I was so tired. Tired of keeping my head above water. Tired of being lonely. Scared. Worrying constantly over what I’d do next.

  Sitting alone in the echoing house made me restless; so uneasy I could hardly bear it. This house and I had a history and not a good one. Since I’d been a child I’d lie, shivering, in my bed and be terrified of the night’s mysteries. Thinking there were ghosts, zombies and worse things hovering or lurching out there looking to hurt me. I don’t know why, I just did.

  I’d listen to the nocturnal winds outside the walls. Calling me. Usually in the fall when the air was crisp and the leaves of brilliant crimson, gold and orange were drifting to the ground.

  When the yearly carnival came to town and set up in the middle of the forest. I never went. My young self was scared of the woods and the feelings that engulfed me when I even thought of going.

  That was when I was a child. I was a child no longer.

  I slipped into my coat and walked out onto the back porch. Around me the woods, packed with night creatures calling to each other, was filling with an autumn fog. It flowed around like a live thing, swirling and clustering in darker
shadows. The trees were whispering. I could smell rain in the air. I shivered.

  I’d never felt more alone. Out of place. Out of body.

  That’s when I heard the haunting music. Irresistibly beckoning. It mingled with the fog, rose and fell on the night breezes and reminded me of a kind of eerie calliope melody; warped from the cheerful dirges of my childhood memories. It came from the wooded meadow down by the stream about a mile away where the carnivals usually ensconced themselves. But it was awfully late in the season for a carnival.

  I walked through the dark mist and trees drawn forward by the spooky music and as I got closer, the heavenly aromas of cotton candy, funnel cakes and roasted hot dogs. How well I knew the way, though I’d never traveled it before.

  The carnival was there beneath the towering trees, a strange looking collection of people and objects. In a clearing was a huge carousel, slowly going around in circles, and a large worn-looking tent. The sounds of a show in progress were seeping through the wind-tugged canvas.

  The eerie tune was coming from the carousel whose wooden painted horses, on closer inspection, looked more demonic than whimsical. I cautiously strolled past it; tiny lights strung along the outlines of the big top and in the nearby trees illuminating my way, and could have sworn the horses’ eyes followed me and their stirruped mouths grinned fiendishly. Muffled neighs hung on the air behind me. I didn’t dare look back.

  A gauntlet of shabby booths with shadowy people inside hawking either food or games for the unsuspecting rubes lined the midway. It was late in the evening so there weren’t many customers left wandering about, mostly lingerers and teenage boys looking for mischief.

  I passed a fortuneteller’s brightly colored tent. A sign bouncing in the wind on gold chains above the entrance said: DO YOU WANT TO KNOW YOUR FUTURE? Yeah, tell me my future. Will it have less death or more in it than my recent past? Will I ever be happy? Find where I belong? Love again? Will I even care? It made me almost laugh, but my lips refused to move. Perhaps I’d return to have my fortune read later.

  The noises from the big top were winding down, the applause weakly sporadic. Pulling my coat tighter around me, I slipped inside and stood in the gloom taking in the act of the moment, and by the emptiness of the place, the final one of the night.

  I was surprised to see that there were animals in the center ring. Huge lions, tigers and leopards that seemed to float across the sawdust. They growled and pranced about; did amazing tricks, with no human in sight to control them. Strange. But they were magnificent. So clever. The elephants came next. Again, astonishingly intelligent. Enormous and weird. Their outlines seemed to shimmer with a reddish light.

  When the animals exited, a clown and his friends moved around and through the crowd entertaining the remaining meager audience, performing little sleigh-of-hands or magician’s tricks. Very civilized. Even elegant.

  As the carnival’s inhabitants and animals, the clowns were also unusual. The main one was tall and dressed peculiarly in somber clothes of black and red. A long billowing cape with a silken lining the hue of blood. A high hat like eighteenth century gentleman used to wear. From the moment he’d entered the ring he’d turned his gaze on me, locking me in, and I couldn’t look away. It was as if he were speaking only to me.

  I got up and moved to the first row of bleachers, sitting, entranced as he floated before me. His face was ivory paint and his clown persona was one of great sorrow. His lips downturned, tears painted on his cheeks. Piercing ebony eyes glittered in the semi dark, raccoon smudges encircling them. They were the sadness eyes I’d ever seen. They made me want to cry for all the unhappiness in the world, his and mine included.

  His partner clowns were as strikingly macabre as he, dressed in inky clothes with melancholy clown faces, and yet they, everyone, seemed to defer to him.

  I was struck then by how strange it all was. The funeral-like music. The weird carousel horses, the phantom-like animals and the ghoulish clowns. The other acts I’d glimpsed in the murky corners staring at me as if I were the main attraction. The whole carnival. Other than the Ferris wheel and the carousel, I’d seen no other rides outside, no animals in or out of cages. Just the carnies that ran the booths, the performers scurrying around the big top and a small gathering of fair goers. The thick fog had crowded around the tent and it was as if I was in another alien world.

  Lost in thought, fear beginning to creep in around the edges, I looked up and there he was. My dark clown. Because that was what I’d begin to think of him as.

  His black eyes bored into mine and I couldn’t resist him when he reached out his hand to me. A cold hand. He leaned down, his face so near I saw the hunger in his eyes. “I’ve been waiting a very long time for you, Angela. And, at long last, here you are.”

  I was startled. “How do you know my name?”

  “I know everything about you. You’ve always been lonely, have never felt as if you belonged in the world you live in, and more than anything you seek acceptance and…love. I’m the one who called you here.”

  I would have pulled away but he wouldn’t allow me. His hold on me an iron vise. Everyone was watching with voracious eyes yet no one was moving to help me. The calliope music, a new tune, now softer and more insistent, had me enthralled. I couldn’t move and was truly frightened. Every nerve in my body alert to the danger I knew this place and this…man…might represent.

  There was something here I didn’t understand. Something unnatural.

  “Who are you?” I asked softly as he led me from the big top and through the midway. I couldn’t escape. A bug frozen in amber. A sacrifice being led to the slaughter. All the people were gone. The booths abandoned and the lights dimmed. The machines stilled. Pools of blackness had filled in parts of our pathway. I caught a sweet whiff of candy apples as we turned a corner. It made me realize how hungry I was. I hadn’t had supper. Too busy crying.

  I could have sworn, out of the corners of my eyes and slinking just beyond my sight, there were wraithlike luminescent creatures flitting between the shadows beyond the booths and tents. Following us. Watching with unearthly glowing eyes.

  Had to be my imagination.

  We arrived at and entered the fortuneteller’s tent. There was no one there but us. Me and the clown. I sat and watched him sit and wash the makeup from his face. Change his clothes. Black shirt and pants. He wasn’t modest, didn’t turn his back, and I noticed how muscled he was, how pale his skin. A beautiful looking man. Every inch of him.

  Soon he was sitting across a table from me, my hands captured in his.

  “You asked who I am,” he spoke in a deeply hypnotic voice and I felt myself sliding away. “I’m a vampire. An ancient one.”

  I didn’t believe in vampires. Who believed in such craziness? Was this man insane?

  He nodded as if he’d read my thoughts. He smiled and his fangs gleamed white.

  My heart banged against my chest. His hold on my hands tightened.

  “Oh, we exist all right, but we’re not always the evil creatures of legend. As you humans, we can be good or wicked. Killers or saviors. I, and my family, glean our…sustenance,” he smiled then, “from society’s transients, the sickly and murderers; have lived in the carnival a long time and travel the world in disguise. As performers, human and animal. High wire walkers. Illusionists. Clowns. It’s how we live. I tell the audience I’m descended from a long line of clowns – from my great-great-great grandfather on down, but it’s only been me. Always me. The same with the others.” He smiled again and shrugged.

  “I’ve been searching six long centuries.”

  “For what?” I whispered.

  “For you, Angela. My eternal love. The woman I’ve been waiting for my whole long lonely existence. I’ve waited long enough. You’re ready. All obstacles have been removed and it’s time. I claim you now. Finally.”

  “Obstacles?”

  “I had to let you live your human life first. Grow up. Marry. Have children. Before I summoned you.
”

  “I have no children.”

  “I know. Now you have no husband. No parents. No family.”

  I nodded. I almost begged him to let me go but looked into his eyes, eyes as deep as forever, not cruel, but dark and powerful, and I knew who he was. He was the one I was meant to be with. Oh, I’d loved my husband dearly, but through the years I’d always felt something missing. That I wasn’t living my true life. There was something I had to find. Someone. Someday. Somewhere. I just never knew where to look.

  How was I to have known the love of my life was a vampire.

  “I know you don’t want to accept what I am, but in time you will. You’ll accept our world and our life. It can be an exciting wondrous life. There’s so much I can show you. So much you’ll be able to do. Magical things. The life of a vampire is so much more than you could ever imagine.”

  I’m going to die. I’m going to….

  “Don’t be afraid. I’d never hurt you.” He stood up and I had no will but to follow him behind the curtained off section of the tent. Inside it was a different world. A soft bed and furniture, lit candles, and the end of all I’d ever known before as he laid me gently down to the silk pillow and his lips touched mine. I thought they’d be cold, but they weren’t. My clothes melted away and so did his. His arms were strong and his lovemaking surprisingly vital.

  I’d never been loved, adored, possessed as I was by him that night. And I did die…but not in the way I’d feared.

  Outside the wind moaned, covering mine, and the rain danced on the tent’s canvas. The night had absorbed me and I knew I’d never be returning to anyone’s house ever again. Never to the human world again.

  I’d begun my true life.

  The following morning when the mists cleared the carnival was gone. The meadow empty.

  The carnival on the edge of town seemed to appear from nowhere out of the dark fog one misty fall night. The tiny fireflies, blinking on and off, flocked to it.

  The Ferris wheel, adorned in miniature lights that sparkled into the night, went round and round operated by invisible hands, never completely stopping unless it was taking on or letting off riders.