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Walking down the porch, she stared out to the lake. There was a moon just cresting over the mountains to the east, and its illumination drew a line on the water, the stripe flickering on top of the waves.
John Matthew had left first, because she had insisted he go out into the field. What else was he going to do? Sit and stare at her?
She wasn’t dying.
Besides, where she was going… she wanted to be alone.
Stepping off the porch, she walked across the lawn. The grass was nothing like the lush, chemically enhanced carpets down in the Caldwell suburbs. Up here, the blades were thin as needles, and just as fun to sit on. The lack of rain, but mostly theregular frosts that had started up in late October, had pulled the green out of everything, so all you had was a pale five o’clock shadow on the hard clay ground.
She paused at the head of one of the stone walkways that wound down to the water. The house had been set up on a cliff, because back when it had been built, prospective homeowners had had the pick of the lots—and man, had they called this site. The view was a dramatic, perfectly centered framing of the mountains that dropped down to the basin of clear water, like an artist had carved the landscape just so Hudson River School painters could have both realism and symmetry.
The vista really should have calmed her.
She needed a number of deep breaths and shoulder rolls before she could dematerialize, and as her molecules scattered, she had a vague worry that there would be no reunion of her components. Then again, even if she was fully corporeal, she wasn’t all together, was she.
When she re-formed, she was at the base of Deer Mountain, on the main trail. The fact that she didn’t bother to hide herself behind a big tree, but instead popped out of thin air right in front of anybody who’d been around? Not good. And as she got to hiking, she told herself the protocol slipup had been intentional because the temperature was north of a meat locker, and who the hell would be out here?But that was bullshit. She hadn’t even thought about some human who might be hardcore-ing for their wilderness YouTube channel seeing herpoof!into existence—and recording the damn thing.
It was the one rule that the vampire species and the Lessening Society agreed on.
No human involvement, unless it couldn’t be avoided. And then if it couldn’t be avoided, you needed to clean that crap up.
Xhex glanced around.
Then again, considering everything else she was fucking up lately, this was a minor infraction. Besides, no one was actually out here.
Nobody human, that was.
As a shiver went through her, she crossed her arms over her chest, her leather jacket creaking from the cold. Without her usual holsters on, there was too much room inside her coat, the sartorial equivalent of clipping your nails, she supposed.
“I’ve got a journey, huh,” she muttered as she scanned the trees that crowded up to the cleared trail. “So here I am. I’m starting. I’m walking.”
With visions of Dustin Hoffman in a white suit pounding on a taxicab hood, she trudged onward, ascending at first gradually and then with greater angle. She remembered the first time she had done this—and John Matthew had been forced to reveal himself.
There was no one with her tonight.
And unfortunately that continued to prove true. No matter how far she went, or how intently she searched the pines, the old woman with the strange aura failed to show up.
It seemed ironic that she was trying to seek out that which she had totally denied back in the spring. Then again, life had a sick sense of humor, and people who were at rock bottom didn’t have the luxury of getting fussy with their opinion of reality.
You have a disease of the soul. If you do not cure it now, it will destroy you.
Between one blink and the next, she saw eyes staring up out of a bandana, eyes that she had taken without any conscious knowledge of having done so. Then she pictured that body on the slab at the morgue.
The energy is trapped just beneath your flesh. Unless it is released, once and for all, you will never be at peace.
“But how?” she said to the pine trees. “How do I release it? Ah, come on… throw me a fucking bone.”
You must, child. Or you will die by inches… and take all you love down with you. To stay where you are is a death sentence.
“What am I doing? Please… tell me.”
There was no reply, and goddamn but shewished she hadn’t wasted her time arguing with the entity. Instead of getting answers, she’d only wanted to fight with everything she hadn’t wanted to accept.
Now, when she needed guidance most, all she had were her own useless thoughts, scrambled and tormented.
And her own useless company.
Or so it appeared.
