“Then what is that?” Julian asks, stopping me again with a sweep of his arm.
“The house,” I answer, nudging his hand aside. “It’s just the house. I promise. No one is here so get that look off your face.”
“What look?”
“The kind that tells me you’re thinking about playing the hero. There’s no one here but us. Now come on. I’m hungry.” I head for the kitchen and this time Julian doesn’t stop me. He follows me, just a step behind. I guess he’s worried that I’m wrong and something might come out of nowhere and get me. We leave behind the thumps and thuds and walk into the kitchen. I put the food on the counter and start to get plates but I only get a hand on the cabinet when Julian stops me with a touch on my wrist.
“You do know a house isn’t supposed to sound like this, right?”
I look at him. He looks concerned. A step up from pouting for sure. His handsome face is so expressive. There’s a way he looks at me, like he’s looking up at me even though he’s taller than me. I don’t know how he does it but I like it, or at least I normally do when it doesn’t have the tinge of disapproval it has now.
“Yes, except forthis house.My house is different and that’s the way it sounds. It’s always sounded that way. It’s just shifting.”
“That’s a person up there, Maris.”
“Maybe,” I say. It’s the truth. It could be. I don’t know. “Granny said to never go look. To just let it do its thing and the house would settle again and it always has.”
Julian growls. “Let it do its thing? There’s someone living in your house and you-anything could happen to you with someone here.”
I grab the plates and put them down on the counter with more force than I mean to. One of them chips and the piece goes skittering across the counter and onto the floor.
“Anything? Anything did happen to me here and it wasn’t because of some sounds,” I remind him and rip open the drawer to hunt for silverware. “I’m safe. Those sounds won’t hurt me. It’s just the house. There’s no one up there. I should be more afraid of you. You’re dead.” I’m grabbing forks and knives blindly when Julian speaks.
“I’m a vampire, Maris.”
I freeze. The silverware in my hand falls back into the drawer. For a second it’s like I’ve forgotten how my hands work. I have to remind myself to breathe.
“What?”
“A vampire.”
I shake my head and look down at the drawer in front of me. “Vampires aren’t real.”
“They’re plenty real. I’m standing right here and you are my mate.”
I shake my head and hold up a finger. “I’m not your mate and you’re not a vampire. You’re just someone who’s having a psychotic break and I’m having one with you because that’s kind of my thing. I bet everything that happened today is all in my head.” I nod and rub my arms. I’m trying to get the feeling back into my hands but it’s not working. I feel like I’m split into two. Disconnected. My entire body made of phantom limbs that ache and scream at me even though they’re long gone.
“None of this is real,” I tell him and shove myself past him.
“Maris, it’s real.”
“You’re probably a hallucination. I bet I’m locked up in a mental hospital and y-you’re what happens when I mix my pills to cope. You’re not a vampire.” I’m walking blindly, just one foot in front of the other. I don’t know where I’m going. I shouldprobably revisit the running for help thing, but what good would that really do? If I’m right and I’m locked away that’s not going to be any good. And if Julian is telling the truth how can anyone stop a fucking vampire?
It’s only when I’m standing in front of the dining room doors that I realize where I’m going. I hesitate for just a second before I open the doors and step inside. It’s cool and quiet in the dining room. The silence feels thicker here. After Mike wrecked it, I did my best to work with conservationists, interior decorators, historians, anyone that could help me put this room back the way it was. It wasn’t easy, not when everything was an original but I’d managed it.
The money in the trust I had was more than enough to refurbish the dining room. You’d think with the amount of time and money I put into setting it back to rights that I’d be in this room all the time.
You’d be fucking wrong.
After the last decorator had left and the floors had been swept and polished for the tenth time, I’d shut the doors and never set foot in here again. It was around the time that everything had settled with what happened between Mike and me. The trial that never happened was over, I was declared innocent of any wrongdoing and Sheriff Dayton started stalking around town asking me if I was all right and like he was going to deck the next person that looked at me funny.
“We all have a right to the liberty of a safe home. It is within her right to defend her home from an intruder.”
That’s what I heard him saying in The Perky Perch one morning when I was trying to convince myself that I still had a soul. He was right about what he was telling the concerned townsfolk, the people that had watched me grow up, and had in some small way helped raise me were now acting like I was theboogeyman just waiting for nightfall to appear in their bedrooms to drag them to hell.
Sheriff Dayton was right. I did have the right to defend myself and my home but that wasn’t what I did that night. He knew it, they knew it, I knew it.
“This is where it happened,” I tell Julian. I don’t have to look to know he’s listening. Vampire or not, the man is tuned into every little move I make. I walk into the room with a shaky breath and look around. “I used to love this room. I spent every holiday here when I was a kid helping my granny decorate.” I pointed to a seat at the table, the third from the head on the left. “I used to sit there. That’s my seat.”
