Chapter One #2
In the corner, my violin case leans against the wall. Black, scuffed at the edges from years of use. I haven't opened it in months. Can't remember exactly when I stopped playing and that bothers me more than the silence.
I pull on a T-shirt and sweatpants and get into bed. The sheets are cold. Outside my window, the wind pushes against the glass, low and steady. From down the hall, the faint scratch of Lisa's pen.
For a moment, I think about the person I walked into in the parking lot. How still they were. How cold.
The thought is gone before it fully forms. I close my eyes.
* * *
Farkas
The man steps outside to smoke and I take him before the lighter reaches his cigarette.
My hand closes over his throat and pulls him into the shadow beside the dumpster.
He chokes against my palm, fingers scrabbling at my wrist. I hold him as you'd hold a rabbit.
Firmly. Without thought. His heartbeat hammers against my fingers.
Sweat and tobacco and the sharp flood of adrenaline souring his blood.
My jaw opens. His eyes go wide and white in the dark. My teeth find the artery.
The blood fills my mouth and I swallow. He bucks against me once, twice, and goes limp.
His memories open. A flood of images and voices and faces that aren't mine.
Fluorescent lights. A mop handle. A woman's laughter somewhere out of sight.
The little details of a day already fading from my mind as I swallow them.
I take what I need, then stop, and set him against the wall beside the dumpster. His head lolls to the side. The unlit cigarette lies on the concrete beside his open hand. He'll wake in an hour with a gap in his memory and a wound on his neck he won't be able to explain.
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and straighten.
The blood is already cooling on my tongue.
The December air moves through the service area behind the mall, carrying the smell of old grease from the dumpsters and exhaust from the road beyond the lot.
I've been hunting back here for several weeks.
Poorly lit. Infrequently patrolled. The employees who use the back exits after closing are distracted and easy to separate from the herd.
The feeding is done. I should go.
I move along the wall toward the edge of the building. The night is sharp with cold that moves through me without catching, present but belonging to a world I'm no longer part of. I keep to the deeper shadow out of habit. Millennia of habit.
The metal door opens.
A woman walks out into the cold. She flinches, her shoulders pulling in, her chin tucking toward her chest. She digs in her bag with her head down.
The wind catches her hair and pushes it across her face and she doesn't bother to fix it.
She walks with the heavy steps of someone at the end of a long day, her body aimed at the car under the light without any awareness of what lies between her and it.
I don't step aside. She'll pass me and never know I was here, the way they always do. They move through their bright lives and I exist in the spaces between, unseen and unfelt.
She walks into my chest.
Her shoulder presses against me and I feel the warmth of it spread through the point of contact like a crack through ice.
She stumbles sideways, her keys slipping in her grip with a bright jangle before she catches them.
She straightens. "Sorry," she mutters. She doesn't look up.
Doesn't slow down. She's already past me.
I don't move.
The warmth is still there. Pressed into my chest where her shoulder touched me.
Beneath the grease and cheap shampoo there's something else on her.
Warm skin. Clean blood. Something deeper I have no name for, something that hooks behind my ribs and pulls at a place that's been silent for so long I forgot it existed.
She gets in the car. The engine catches and the headlights sweep across the lot and the light doesn't touch me. She pulls out and the taillights shrink down the access road until they're gone.
The maintenance worker groans beside the dumpster. The wind carries ice across the empty lot. I stay where she left me, the shape of her shoulder still pressed into my chest.
I follow her, but not close, keeping to the side roads and moving faster than her car on the main road.
When she pulls into an apartment complex, I'm already across the street in the shadow of a bare elm.
The branches rattle in the wind above me.
The building is two stories of brown brick, ordinary in every way.
She goes inside. A light comes on in a second-floor window. Through the thin curtain, her shadow moves across the room. She's there for a long time. The shadow passes back and forth, pauses near the corner of the room, and finally settles on the bed.
The light goes out.
I watch the dark window. Down the block, a dog barks twice and stops. A car passes on the next street over, its headlights sweeping across a row of houses before disappearing. The neighborhood settles into the heavy quiet that comes only in the deepest hours of winter nights.
I stay until the sky begins to lighten in the east. The cold deepens just before dawn, the air going brittle and still. I leave.
The farmhouse sits on a county road three miles outside of town. No traffic after dark. The windows are covered with heavy black fabric nailed over the frames. Inside, the kitchen has a table, a chair, and a telephone. The rest of the house is empty.
I stop at the table. The phone sits there, its cord curled against the wood. I haven't used it in months.
I go to the interior room, the one with no windows, and sit on the floor with my back against the wall and go still. Behind my closed eyes, there's the warmth of her shoulder against my chest. It's the only warm thing in the house. The only warm thing I've felt in longer than I can remember.
I stay with it until the sun passes overhead and sinks, and then I rise and go back out into the dark.