Carole Douglas - Vampire Sunrise

My head was beginning to hurt from calculating all the possibilities.

For sure Haskell would have known where to find the security camera and obscure it while he murdered the groupie. He’d never expect Snow to steal the damning tape of me/Lilith confronting the woman for his own reasons.

I had to recalculate the timeline, and find out where Haskell was when the groupie was killed. His arresting me as the killer certainly confirmed Lilith’s story that he’d been around the murder scene that night.

Something came speeding down the service road, something behind Lilith. A four-footed shadow like Quicksilver’s bounced off the Dumpster side. The metal banged, a huge, hollow drum.

My heart echoed it as I leaped back from the passing stray animal, hitting hard against the steel door that wouldn’t let me retreat. The impact triggered a security alarm with a shrill, banshee scream, not unlike my nerves.

My shadowy double was blending into the darker part of the night.

“Lilith! Wait! I need more info. If you know who really killed the woman behind the Inferno, I need-”

“Sorry, Delilah, I don’t stick around for line-ups.”

The shadow was already melting into the crux at the eternal juncture of dark ground, walls, night, desert, vision, despair.

“Lilith! You need to be cleared as much as I do-”

“If anyone besides you believed in me, that is,” the raw voice mocked from the dark. “Anyone official. Sure you’re not hallucinating, Delilah? You hear voices, don’t you? Why can’t you see visions? They’ll burn you at the stake yet. But not me. Not me.”

The last word came whispered from above, below, nearby, at a deep, dark distance.

So close. Lilith cutting though the night and my doubt like a razor caressing a throat in a cul-de-sac. Not a mirror image. Real. Raw. Unfathomable.

I was surprised that I was shaking all over, from my key ring to the silver familiar on my wrist jingling away like Santa’s sleigh bells.

Lilith was real. Light-shy as a vampire. Taunting. Bitchy.

But she was real and she’d been willing to meet me one-on-one-on-two. I lunged away from the steel door I’d jolted that was still unleashing a siren of sound.

Screaming Hell! While I was standing there, stunned stupid about facing my CSI double, a live (or at least un-dead) Lilith, who must have already known for sure I existed, had wisely bolted.

I should too. Talk about dropping the existential ball when it was almost in your hands and tucked under your arm.

I took off running, bouncing off the Dumpster side like the running dog, angling away from the slice of parking lot light, skidding on things I didn’t like to think about.

There was one more thing I hated thinking about even more.

Snow at the front door, Lilith at the back.

Were they working together, against me?

THE SOUND OF pounding footsteps.

An echo of mine? Or Lilith’s? I couldn’t picture Snow running to save my soul, or his own.

I raced along a dimly lit row of waste cans behind the closed storefronts. Once I rounded the row’s end, I’d have to run even farther in the opposite direction to get back to Dolly. Then I’d need to drive away before the distant police car sirens arrived, forcing me to explain my presence.

The good part was I could honestly play the innocent klutz who’d triggered the alarm, so I was mostly still steaming about Lilith’s vanishing on me. At least in Dolly I could cover more ground than she could on foot.

The parking lot lamp at the row’s end was growing larger, like the light at the end of a tunnel. A black silhouette inside it was getting larger too.

The image of lurking darkness inside the light was classic suspense movie stuff. I wanted to believe Lilith had had a change of heart and decided to face me.

As a burst of high, mocking laughter echoed off the concrete blocks I ran faster. I didn’t expect a sentimental encounter. By now I wasn’t looking for Lilith to be a soul sister. Maybe an alibi would do.

After all, she’d known Snow before I had, had even joined the Snow groupies’ online community. She had somehow “stolen” my clothing of the moment to play on the physical fact of our identical appearances. Worst of all, she’d been taped knocking out a Snow groupie outside the Inferno in my exact likeness. Accident or plot?

So I wasn’t running toward her with open arms, but with my key ring bristling through all my right-hand knuckles. The silver familiar sent chills up my torso and limbs, poised to become the weapon I needed on a millisecond’s notice.

Then I realized why my metal familiar was hesitating about choosing a shape. The image ahead of me shrank as I came closer but the laughter reverberated, seeming to isolate my name in a sound studio… De-lie-lahahahahahaha. Dee-lie-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

The thrown-back head, bulking shoulders and thin-legged shadow before me focused into a grinning hellhound hyena from the Karnak Hotel.

And the echoes of its cackling behind me repeated like a tape loop suddenly sporting eight tracks.

I glanced back to see a pack of the terrifying creatures bunched behind me, coming up fast.

I veered left, away from the lights and the parking lot and my faithful ride and the police cars and the street and the passing vehicles.

My left hand clasped a cold smooth metal handle. When I lifted my arm a streak of neon-pink light rippled over an undulating silver snake. The whip’s snap was metal-sharp. A hiss of electric lightning sizzled into the warm evening air.

Good choice. I paused to lash my arm across the oncoming pack. Their unnerving laughter turned to screams of rage as the silver trail slashed through their ranks. For an instant they faded, then those ungainly, misshapen bodies took bristle-furred shape again.

I turned to run, the silver whip coiling around my waist to keep me from entangling with it.

Amazing how flat-out flight can get your body zigzagging around anything in your way. I seemed to almost walk over fallen trash cans along the shops’ back walls, kicking them behind me into my pursuers like cylindrical bowling balls. The backbeat scratch of long, lethal hyena claws on concrete was a rhythmic counter to the guttural arias of inhuman laughter overtaking me.

My lungs were burning to the point of bursting and my sides felt like some magician had skewered me with a dozen very real sword blades.

For an instant I saw myself reflected in a glass door to interior darkness. The glass glowed softly green from a night-light inside. I glimpsed posters of castles and pyramids beyond the reflection of my form outrunning the night. Close enough to a mirror? Lilith again?

I’d more happily risk plunging through this quasi-mirror as an escape if I wasn’t chasing some taunting, unreal image of Lilith… I felt the encompassing comfort of the familiar melting as I hurled my body full-speed at the solid glass.

The suspended moment when my feet left the asphalt made me almost temporarily blind, when the sirens and the laughter abruptly ended, when I couldn’t feel the familiar at all…

Or anything.

Then I saw that my reflection or the image of Lilith had shifted. It was webbed with glittering patterns, the face distorted in a demonic scream. My last conscious sight was the bereaved ghost of Loretta Cicereau. She was as mad as hell and not going to take it, or me, anymore.

Wrong mooove, Irma wailed before she went silent too.

I AWOKE ALONE.

Terrifyingly alone.

I searched first for Irma’s voice, the last warning I’d heard.

She was gone.

Not silent.

Gone.

You know how some memory, some person, is a part of you even when you’re not thinking? Something your mind can always conjure? Maybe it smells like the morning coffee you had first thing at work every morning, or it’s a vivid taste like the cinnamon gum you chewed only when you were a kid, or a scent and sensation like a Teddy bear’s faux fur you buried your face into at a toy store once, all those traces of memory that go back as far as you can remember.