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Barbara walked over, gun still raised. “Stay where you are.”
The figure slowly turned over, holding his hands up.
Barbara pointed the flashlight at his face.
“I can explain,” Dan Garrett said.
41
The voices followed him. Before, Beau only used to hear them occasionally. Now, they were with him constantly. Whispering in his ear. Even in his sleep. He got up, moved from room to room, but they refused to abate.
“Leave me alone,” he muttered, and they chuckled softly.
“We can’t. We’re part of you, old man.”
He shook his head. “I won’t listen to your devil tongues.”
Beau was not a fanciful man. He believed in right and wrong. Good and evil. But in reality, he had never been a regular churchgoer. He called himself a Christian, but he hadn’t worshipped enough. Since Patricia died, he didn’t regularly say grace, he drank a little too much, he had let his devotion falter.
Truth be told, he wasn’t fond of that new preacher. Something about her. Well, maybe it was just that she was a woman and in Beau’s opinion a woman had no place being a preacher. Maybe he needed to get over that and get back to church. Maybe now was as good a time as any for praying.
He knew he should have mentioned the Doc’s news to Jess. But he didn’t want to worry her. She had enough on her plate with the business and her boy and that useless husband of hers. Perhaps more selfishly, he didn’t want to see the pity in her eyes. The fear. He didn’t want her to look at him the way she had looked at her mother.
He walked downstairs to the kitchen. His throat felt scratchy and dry. Beau turned on the tap and filled a glass with water, gulping it back quickly. Maybe too quickly. He felt it swirl in his stomach and then belched. A little of the water came back up and he spat over the sink, hanging there for a moment. He felt light-headed and dizzy.
“You’re sick, old man—and you’re only going to get sicker as we get stronger.”
“That isn’t going to happen.”
But even as he said it, Beau felt the fear. The fear of becoming like Patricia. His mind slipping through his fingers like sand. The mass taking over.
“Damn you.”
He turned and walked back up to the bedroom. A picture of him and Patricia on their wedding day stood on the table beside the bed. Next to it, a framed photograph of their children. On the chest, an older photograph—his parents and grandparents with Beau and his sister. It was a rare picture of his grandfather. He usually hated being photographed because of his burns.
When Beau was a child, he had been told his grandfather had been badly injured in a fire at the mine. It was only later, when his father’s tongue grew looser as death loomed closer, that he learned the truth.
Beau turned from the photograph and walked to the window. When Patricia was ill, he often used to stand here, the window wide open, freezing wind blasting his face, pretending he couldn’t hear her cries of distress from downstairs.
He wiped condensation off the glass with his sleeve and looked out. His heart stalled. Three figures stood outside. Two men and a younger adolescent boy. They gazed up at him, skin white as the snow, eyes glowing, long animal-skin coats billowing in the wind. Not possible, he thought. Dead. You’re all dead.
“Are we? Maybe we’ve been here all along. Waiting. Only now you can see us as well as hear us.”
Beau ducked back against the wall. His heart pounded and sweat crept from his hairline. Not real. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t. He waited, breathing heavily, trying to calm himself. Then, slowly, he edged forward and peered around the curtains.
A face hovered outside the window. Beau screamed. The man stared in, amber eyes glowing, teeth bared in a smile, one hand pressed against the glass.
“No, no, no.”
Vampyrs couldn’t fly or float. It must be…
“In your mind, a hallucination?”
Beau moaned. Nausea overwhelmed him. He staggered across the hall and made it into the bathroom just in time to spew up a stream of water and bile. He hung over the toilet bowl and retched until his stomach ached.
After a while, he hit the flush and then, on unsteady legs, turned to the sink and splashed his face with water. He looked at himself in the mirror. White hair so thin he could see the pink of his scalp. Loose bags like deflated balloons beneath his eyes. His skin looked clammy and pale. Like he was coming down with something.
“What’s happening to me?” he croaked. “What in hell is happening to me?”
