There were terrors in the world that became easier to manage once given a face and a name. This was not one of them, yet somehow I knew whatever was after me was ancient and patient.
My feet slipped on wet earth as panic climbed higher and higher into my throat. I wanted to scream, but no sound came out. Somewhere in the distance, church bells rang through thick fog while cold air burned the back of my throat.
The cold air elicited a memory. I knew this feeling. I knew it too well. It was the sensation of being hunted.
My heart hammered violently as I forced myself forward through the dark. Branches snagged at my sleeves. Mud splashed my stockings. Somewhere behind me, something dragged slowly across the ground. It knew I couldn’t escape.
“No,” I whispered. “No, no, no…”
I tried to remind my dream-state of the truth. There was nothing left to fear anymore. My sire had been taken care of. The world had changed. The old monsters were gone. I had survived. He couldn’t hurt me anymore. He couldn’t control me anymore. He couldn’t rip me from the people who mattered most to me.
Decades had passed without incident. Then more decades after that. Entire generations born and buried while I remained, unchanging and safe.
Nothing had followed me. Nothing had hunted me. Nothing?—
The sound behind me came closer. A wet, dragging scrape across stone.
My stomach dropped violently. I stumbled into another place entirely. The dream shifted around me without warning, trees melting into tall, dark hallways with wallpaper peeling from damp walls.
A house. No. Not just any house. The Lawrence house. Panic transformed instantly, my entire focus now on the children. The terror inside me changed shape so quickly it hurt.
Then an alarm screamed. A shrill electronic sound ripped violently through the dream and my eyes snapped open into darkness. For a long, disoriented moment, I couldn’t understandwhere I was. Velvet lining. Wood walls. Cramped familiar darkness.
My casket.
The alarm continued blaring. I blinked slowly upward, still trapped halfway between nightmare and waking while my brain struggled painfully toward consciousness.
Something was wrong.
The children.
That thought surfaced first, and everything else followed after.
Children. Alarm. Danger.
I reached clumsily toward the monitor beside me, nearly knocking it out of reach because my hands still weren’t functioning properly. Waking during the day was already unnatural, but adding in the extra layer of such an intense nightmare and waking to a house alarm was almost more than my system could reconcile. My body viciously resisted waking.
Normally, I woke slowly. I stretched. Drank tea sometimes. Read for a while inside the car until the heaviness faded enough for movement to feel natural again. This was like being dragged from the bottom of the ocean too quickly.
The screen on the baby monitor flickered to life in my trembling hands. At first, there was only static. Then, an image came into perfect view. The front foyer camera showed the entrance hall.
And two men inside the house.
Shit. No, no, no.
For a second, my brain simply refused to process what I was seeing.
The front door hung partially open behind them. One man carried a crowbar. The other moved through the foyer, opening drawers and tracking muddy footsteps across the floor. Then one of them looked toward the staircase. Toward the second floor. Toward the children’s rooms. I didn’t even stop to think about sunlight or anything else that might stand in my way.
Something primal tore through me. “No.”
I shoved up immediately, slamming hard into the side of the casket because my limbs still barely obeyed me. My muscles were heavy and numb with forced wakefulness. Every instinct in my body screamed to lie back down. To return to safety and darkness and death-rest.
Instead, I fought the casket lid open with frantic strength.
The dim daylight filtering through the vehicle’s tinted windows stabbed painfully against my eyes. Not enough to burn outright because of the storm clouds gathering overhead, but enough that my skin prickled in warning.
The alarm was still screaming.
