Her parents are dead.
She didn’t run them off. They died. I knew she was alone.
I stop in my tracks but I don’t turn around to look back at her. Instead, I look up at the house in front of me, I scan the windows for a sign of Maris while I speak.
“That wasn’t in the listing description.”
I hear her practically choke on her own spit. “I-I-, well, I mean-”
“If it were a safety concern, I’d hope you would make that known to renters.”
“Well-it’s not that easy.”
“Not that easy or not true?”
“It’s true. She killed that man.”
“You mean the one that broke into her house? That man?” I ask, remembering Maris’ choked sobs in the confessional booth. “That sounds like self-defense to me. I’ll be going now, Mrs. Owens.”
“You don’t understand. You didn’t see what she did to him. How she killed him.”
That’s interesting. Maris said she killed him and that she enjoyed it, but she didn’t tell me how. If the fuck I buried last night is anything to go by I’m going to guess it wasn’t with finesse.
“Have you ever seen someone die?” I ask.
There’s a change in the air when I ask that, the cool fall air turns to ice and it’s me that’s doing it. All vampires come with some magic, the older you are the more you feed, the easier it is to manipulate. While I’m only a couple hundred years old, I’ve fed on enough human blood to be stronger than I should be. Another perk of being a doctor. I’ve been given a fast pass to power and a meal ticket all in one.
I hear Mrs. Owen’s breath. It’s ragged and taking effort, more effort than she’s used to. Good. If I’m lucky, I’ll choke her out without even touching her and she’ll have a heart attack. Nosy fucking bitch.
“Have you?” I prompt and I’m not her friendly renter anymore. My voice is sharp, deeper, something she’d hear whispered to her in a nightmare.
“N-no,” she manages to get the one word out in a shaky whisper.
“I have. Death is hard, Mrs. Owens. It’s not like they show you in the movies. It’s not peaceful, it’s never peaceful. We leave this world the way we entered it. In agony. Every death,” I look back at her to see she’s white-faced and gripping her stupid handbag so tightly that her hands are shaking, “is terrible and violent. That’s what death is no matter what side of it you’re on.”
“But s-she, but she-”
“She survived. She didn’t die.” I look away from her and towards the house again. Maris is there peeking at me from a window on the second floor, I see it when the curtain twitches ever so slightly. What is she doing up there? “You’ll never know what it takes to survive, sometimes that’s more agony than dying and I think she’s paid plenty for it, don’t you? A woman like her all on her own with the entire town against her? How much more can you get out of her before the debit is paid?”
I don’t wait for her answer.
I head off towards Maris’ house, hop the fence and knock on the back door. I’m set on letting Maris come to me after she saw me talking to the old hag that called her a murderer. I only have to wait a minute or two before I see Maris’ shadow in the kitchen doorway. She must have been on her way already before I knocked. I smile at Maris through the glass of the door and hear Mrs. Owens’ car start and pull away while Maris opens the door to me.
“You came back?”
“I did.”
Sixteen
MARIS
Isound like a weirdo freak when I open the door to Julian.You came back?Really? God, what the fuck, Maris. Of all the damn things I could have said when I opened the door, I said that. It isn’t even so much that I said it, it’s that I asked it.
I asked it.
I wince at how pathetic and lonely the question no doubt makes me seem but it’s true. I didn’t expect him to come back, not after I saw Mrs. Bernaden stop him. She calls herself Mrs. Owens, which is just weird. She isn’t even a real Owens, she married into the family and took to calling the real Mrs. Owens her sister. She had a few kids before Mr. Owens kicked the bucket and that kind of sealed the deal, I guess. She swore she was an Owens, so much so that I can’t even remember what her maiden last name is. She’s remarried now to Mr. Bernaden who owns the real estate agency but still claims Mr. Owens’ as her husband.
I didn’t think I’d see her. I never see her anymore, not since she re-married and moved to the south end of town in one of the newer developments. She’s hardly ever around, only coming by when there’s someone renting that she thinks is worth it. Of course she’d mark Julian as someone worth a visit. He's thehandsome new doctor in town and she’s got a desperate aging daughter at home to marry off.
