COMES THE DAWN

(part 2, Dreams of Blood and Water)

By DixieHellcat

I woke with a start. My apartment was silent; my bed, so far as I could tell lying facing its edge, was empty. If I’m alone—does that mean I dreamed it all? Last night, yesterday, the weeks before, the time that had irrevocably changed my life—could even the fevered brain of a frustrated novelist have concocted them all in one frantic night?

Did I dream it? Did I dream…him?

I had set out in search of a reporter’s fantasy, the scoop of the decade. What I had found was the love of a lifetime; an angel flung into an earthly hell by an act of unspeakable evil; a man trapped between life and death, who offered up the soul he believed destined for certain and eternal damnation—to protect me. Yesterday had begun with that sacrifice, answered by a deed I could only call a miracle, and ended in this bed with the joyful giving of my body and heart to him in love.

At least that was the way I remembered it. Now, with dawn’s pale preview slipping in through the blinds, I lay still as the dead, afraid to move, terrified of the truth. If I dreamed it…God, how can I get up and go through another day? How can I go to Letitia Heisen’s party tonight, when I remember it happening weeks ago, when I’ll spend all night with my heart breaking, searching for someone who won’t be there, someone I’ll never meet because he doesn’t exist?

“Clay?” I whispered into the stillness.

The mattress creaked and sank behind me. A large hand laid itself on my bare shoulder, and warm breath tickled my ear. “Good mornin’, Sleeping Beauty. You’d better get up, or we’ll miss our plane.”

I rolled onto my back and looked up, at limitless green eyes, strong sharp features untouched by twenty years of existing in the shadows, a beautiful body as naked as mine, and a luminous smile that faltered when my own eyes filled with tears. “Rebecca?” Clay pulled me into his arms. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

I wiped my face, feeling foolish. “I woke up, and I didn’t hear you, or feel you here, and, well, I thought for a minute maybe I dreamed you.”

“Dream? More like a nightmare.” I smacked his bare chest and he yelped and laughed, then sobered. “I know. I…I felt the same way. All of a sudden I was aware, and my mind was racing, going ‘what is this soft thing I’m lying on’ and ‘it’s night, shouldn’t I be up’ and ‘why do I feel like my body’s in constant motion’ and ‘I can’t remember what happened a few minutes ago, what’s wrong with me’. Then I realized—I was sleeping, really sleeping, in a real bed, not lying in a trance on a pile of dirt from North Carolina. I’m breathing, and my heart is beating. It seemed like a dream, but I haven’t had a real dream in so long…” As his sleep had not been the sleep of mortals, neither had his dreams; they had been only endless reruns of his endless tormented existence, not hopes and wishes. “So even if I was dreaming, that could only happen if—“ Clay bit his lip, his eyes huge with wonder. “If I’m human again,” he whispered. “I’m healed. I’m not a vampire anymore.” I squeezed him, and reveled in the warmth of his body that had been so cold to my touch only a day before. “I reached over then and felt you lying beside me, and I just had to get up and pray.” He gestured with his head at the other side of the bed. “I was over there on my knees when you woke up, I guess. I’m sorry. I didn’t think about you looking for me.”

“It’s okay. I’ll be praying some thank-you notes too.” I reached for the clock projector built into the headboard. “It’s still early. We don’t have to get up just yet.”

“Good. I want to watch the sun come up,” he said. I got the environmental control remote off my nightstand and handed him his glasses. A tap of a button raised the blinds. “My house has those. They were already installed when I moved in—eight years ago, in ’17, I think. When existence goes on forever, it’s hard to keep track of days, or years. I never used them though. I couldn’t let in the day, and I didn’t really want to let in the night.”

“We’ll see if they still work. I dreamed about them, in fact. Remember that first night you fed from me, the first time I slept on your bed with you? I dreamed I dragged that waterbed cover outside, and dumped the dirt into flower beds. Then you drove up, all in white—the sun was bright and you almost glowed. We went inside, and every window was open, and the whole house smelled like pot roast cooking. The waterbed in the bedroom was real, and you kissed me and pulled me down on it and we…”

I let the end hang. “Oh, we did?” Clay chuckled wickedly.

“Yeah. I wanted you in the worst way, even then. I fell in love with you so fast—really, I guess it was that night I first got into your house.”

“The night you broke my crock pot? The night you cut yourself and bled and I went fang-happy for a second? I can’t have made a very good first impression.”

“Oh, on the contrary. You controlled that, remember—and you were as horrified by it as any rational human would be by a vampire. Not that I’ve ever been accused of being rational…When I found out what had happened, why you’d vanished for twenty years without a word, I couldn’t help but feel for you. And then, you could’ve hypnotized me, or done worse, to keep your secret, but you didn’t. You just begged me to leave. You were going to run, and it was clear you’d done it before, just as clear as the way you’d wrecked your health drinking only animal blood, as clear as the way you hated what you were. Oh, yeah. You were one beautiful disaster, Clay, and I loved you from that night on. I was afraid to admit it, because I knew if it—we—went on, I’d get old, and you wouldn’t. I figured it’d be easier for you to let go when the time came if I didn’t let you feel I expected anything from you, if I didn’t let you get attached.”

“Too late. I was already attached. You were so feisty and honest. That night, you said you’d talked to Mom, and you chased me down because you couldn’t figure why I let her think I was dead. Then you said ‘now I think I understand’ or something like that, and you took my hand… it’d been so long since a human being touched me, just because they wanted to.” Clay’s voice trembled a little, even though that agonizing loneliness was only a memory now. “I could barely remember how it felt. I mean, Letitia is great—having a world expert on vampires in my corner was a blessing. She helped me get the animal blood, helped me run when I had to, and she was kind, but I don’t know that she ever trusted me really. And Kim—I scared her totally out of the state of California. They were the only ones who knew, so that was it, until you came along; and you acted like you didn’t care what I was!” I didn’t, I wanted to say, but before I could he went on, “Then the night I first fed from you, you sat on the couch with me and you shivered a little. I was sure you were having second thoughts, but you said—and this I can’t forget—‘this is the first time you’ve held me, really, and it feels good’.” His laugh was incredulous. “I almost lost it. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. You knew the creature I was, you knew what I was about to do to you, so how could you say it felt good when I touched you?”

“Because it did!” I laid my fingertips on his lips. “To be honest, I was imagining you touching me in other places. It wasn’t a creature touching me, Clay, it was a man I was falling in love with. It was you.”

He kissed my fingers without speaking, then glanced toward the window at the rapidly brightening eastern sky. “Uh oh, we’re gonna miss it!” We sat up, plumped our pillows and snuggled together as if to watch a show. “Very different from yesterday,” he said.

“Very.” Yesterday his sweet freckled face was ghost-pale, streaked with a vampire’s bloody tears. Yesterday we had sat on a hillside waiting for the sunrise, certain we would never again hold each other in this life, fearful we would be torn apart for eternity. “The best I hoped for, honestly, was that you—you’d be taken quickly, without suffering, and be at peace.”

“Me too.” He clasped me to him, suddenly and fiercely. “Thank you for not leaving me alone out there. I know I told you to go, but I was so scared…I might’ve run if you hadn’t been there. The only thing that kept me there was being more afraid of hurting you than of burning in hell.”

The sun rose and bathed us unafraid in its glory. “I promised you long before I’d stay with you. I don’t know if you still mean to hold me to it—“

“You’ve got a one-track mind, you know it? You talked like this last night.”

“But being seen with an Internet gossip columnist and part-time paranormal researcher can’t be great for your career.”

“What career? I haven’t been in a recording studio since 2005. Twenty years is a long time under any circumstances, but it’s an eternity in the entertainment business.”

“Bull. You’ll be surprised how many fans you still have.”

“The only one I care about right now is the one I’m lookin’ at. I told you last night, Rebecca, I love you, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. If I recall rightly, you said yes then.”

“And I’m saying yes now.”

He smiled that devastating smile, and then sniffed. “What is that smell?” he said with childlike delight. Vampires can only smell blood, and rediscovering scent was one of his new favorite things.

“I set the auto-coffee last night. It’s decaf if you feel brave.” He shook his head, and I touched the edge of his glasses. “I wonder why everything wasn’t healed—your eyesight, your allergies and all.”

Clay shrugged. “Just putting things back the way they were, I suppose. Suits me. I didn’t ask for perfection. Heck, I didn’t ask for anything, except mercy.”

“And you got everything that counted.”

“We got everything,” he corrected me, with a kiss that went to my head like wine. My close-up view of his face as we kissed showed me something else new and delightful.

“Hey, you need a shave.”

“I what?” He felt his cheeks and chin, and burst into laughter. Vampires’ hair doesn’t grow, either. It was such joy to watch his joy, as he reclaimed his humanity bit by bit. He hugged me tight, and when I squeaked at the scrape of his stubble on my shoulder he repeated it just for sweet meanness. “I smell you too,” he murmured, his nose buried in my neck.

“Oops. Rebecca June needs a shower, huh?”

“Not just yet.” Clay’s voice roughened, and when he lifted his head the sparkle in his eyes had kindled into green flame. “You said you imagined me touching you in other places.” I nodded. “Show me.” I opened my mouth. “No.” He took my hand and folded it around his. “Take me there. Show me.” My pulse quickened, and I guided his hand to my breast. Just thinking about this, on that night when I had been so sure I would never experience it, had made my nipples stiffen with eagerness; now they responded even faster to the reality. A crooked grin tugged at his cheek as he touched my skin, and sure enough I shivered as if on cue. “Mm, must be hittin’ the right spot.” When he tickled my hardening points I caught my breath and managed to nod. “Does that feel good?”

“Yes. Oh, yes.” I laced my fingers in his tousled red-gold hair and pulled his mouth to mine.

“You said places, though. I don’t want to leave anything out.” The eyes whose vampire spell had barely fazed me now drew me into their mortal depths, and I went happily. “Show me.” Without a word I led his other hand to my inner thighs. He stroked their smoothness and traced the line of my groin. “So soft…” When his search found my most sensitive and delicate parts, already pulsing with desire, I slid from my seated position to my back. “So warm,” he sighed, still caressing my breast with his other hand. “I didn’t realize how cold I’d become until you touched me. Saturday night when we first made love, I thought I might burn up inside you, but at least I’d die in a moment of love.”

“Don’t talk about that,” I gasped, my body quivering as if his hands were two poles of a battery sending electricity through me. He rolled on top of me, and I ran my palms up his cinnamon-furred chest, and the tips of my nails feather-light down his back. Now he was shivering too. “That’s over. There’s nothing ahead of us now but good, nothing but love.” I kneaded his muscular thighs, then slipped my hand between his legs, finding him as ready for me as I was for him. “Love me, Clay. I begged you Saturday, don’t make me beg again.”

“I won’t, not ever. I was afraid then. I’m not afraid now.”

His simple words, his manhood—in more contexts than one—filled me to overflowing. It amazed me how naturally our bodies joined and moved as one. My every move, whether intended so or not, made him gasp with pleasure. What washed over me was greater than mere physical climax, a happiness that lifted me beyond anything I had ever imagined. “I have never felt so right with a man,” I sighed after lying a while satisfied in his embrace.

“It never occurred to me you could want me.” He still looked amazed. “Isn’t it crazy, that doing something I had always believed was wrong was exactly the right thing? Loving you saved me.”

“Well, with you, I feel as if I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, and I don’t intend for that to change, ever.” I could have lain there all day, but reluctantly I started to move. “I’d better get moving.“

“No,” Clay said suddenly. “Don’t.”

I paused at the sudden tightness in his voice. “Honey, you promised Kim we’d meet her at that restaurant in Nashville at noon. It’s past six now. The plane leaves at eight, and I’ve got to shower and dig out my travel bag, and you’ve gotta go home and shave, my dear, and pack some clean underwear at least. It’s Monday too, so the airport’ll be crowded, and I bet you’re not listed with security so that’ll take a—“

“I know. I know.” The softness in his eyes was gone, replaced by a pinched look of distress. “Remember when I told you about sitting up late with my mom, the night I—left Raleigh?”

It was more than that, the night twenty years ago when he had fled his hometown, when what he had been made, forced on him by his nearest kin, had revealed itself to him in all its horror. I nodded. “You didn’t want to be alone, and you wondered later if you’d sensed something bad was about to happen.”

“Right. Only just now—when you were talking—I’m feeling that again, and I don’t know why, and I don’t want to be alone with it. Please, stay a minute…”

The shiver that swept through his body now had nothing to do with desire. I drew him into my arms. “It’s okay, Clay. You’re safe. Fire does kill vampires, and Vernon Grissom’s been dead for nearly twenty years. He can’t hurt you ever again.” In the time I’d known Clay I had never heard him speak the name of his biological father, the man who had stolen his dreams and his life in one bloody attack. If he feared saying it, I did not. I would give the once undead bastard no power over me. “I understand, though—I’d be more worried if you weren’t anxious about going back, whether you realize it or not.”

He sat up, straightened his glasses and made an effort to calm himself. “I feel like such a wuss.”

“Don’t you dare start that again.” I took his face in my hands to make him look at me. “I only caught a glimpse of what you endured, but it was enough to let me know you are the bravest, strongest man I have ever known, Clay Aiken, and don’t you ever think otherwise. And you will never have to worry about being alone, not as long as I’m living—except if you come into the shower with me we may never get out of this house!”

The sunlit smile reappeared, and he went looking for his clothes while I jumped in the shower. I keep essentials in a duffel for sudden trips—reporters don’t travel as much as we used to, but sometimes there’s no substitute for a face-to-face. I dressed in haste, but with care, for my first meeting with the friend who had helped Clay survive, and the mother he had left to protect her from his curse. I punched up a quick breakfast and we ate in Clay’s car while it drove us to his house. “When we get back I am cooking you a full-blown Irish breakfast every morning till you put on some weight,” I told him.

“Do I look that bad?”

“Please. Even when you were a vampire you could see yourself in the mirror! You don’t look as bad as when we met, but bad enough.” I tried to sound tough, I really did, but I couldn’t help but drink in the sight of him sitting beside me, scruffy, his hair a mess, in the rumpled black silk shirt and jeans he had put on in the wee hours of Sunday morning for what he had fully expected to be his own funeral.

“I hear you,” he said softly, “but your face isn’t in agreement. What are you thinking?”

He’s too darn good. “I’m thinking that even as sickly as you look right now, you’re still gorgeous, and I’m thinking how thankful I am that we were given a chance to be together.”

He pulled me into his arms. “God must want me to do something very serious, or He wouldn’t have sent me you to help me.”

“Like I said last night, there’s a reason behind all this. We’ll find it, or maybe it’ll find us.”

The little bungalow where Clay had hidden, tucked in the hills above LA, looked so different in the sunshine, especially after he pecked at his computer till the windows swung wide. While he showered I grabbed a broom, the same one I had used to clean up that infamous broken crock pot he had used to heat jars of animal blood. I did some late-spring cleaning and enjoyed a running commentary that began almost as soon as he was out of my sight. “This soap smells funky, remind me never to buy it again…Ow! I think I forgot how to shave...Gyah, this shirt’s supposed to be white, not yellow…Oh wow, something ate these pants, ick…Brr, crap, why’s this water so cold?” Before my ears he was changing, from the brooding silent prisoner of the shadows, to the unguarded motormouth I had adored as a preteen fan. I laughed till I nearly cried. Well, I nearly cried too, just for joy, before Clay emerged in a rust T-shirt and faded jeans with a worn backpack tossed over his shoulder, looking like a college kid off to class.

“Oh, great,” I groaned. “The calendar says you’re fifteen years older than me, but I suddenly feel very much like a cradle-robber!” It might or might not matter much to him, but somehow the greatest thing to me about these remarkable past few days was that his healing had been so fair that it simply restarted the clock of his life where it had been smashed to a halt, rather than taking from his body the years he had lost.

He giggled all the way to the front door while I put the broom away. When I returned from the kitchen, he stood with his hand on the doorknob, the irrepressible chatterbox fled. “I’ve never walked out this door in the daylight,” he said, his voice quiet, a little uncertain and a little awed.

I took his free hand in mine. “Then let’s see what’s out there.”

+++

We parked in a lot a mile or so from the airport and hopped a moving sidewalk with the morning commuters. Clay confessed he’d only been on one a few times—they’re mostly in the high-traffic areas he avoided as a vampire—but the riders fascinated him even more. “This is amazing,” he said under his breath. “To be around people again, and not be afraid of them, or afraid of what I might do…” He sighed and turned his gaze skyward briefly in a silent appreciation I fervently seconded.

Between our e-tickets and light packing, we dodged several security points, but eventually had to stop. As I suspected, Clay created a bit of a stir, mostly because no trace of him could be found in any of their databases. He produced a faded North Carolina drivers license, so old the picture showed him before he even auditioned for American Idol, from his wallet. “I keep losing the new one,” he protested to my howls of laughter. While he tried to explain to the baffled security staff that he hadn’t been on a plane, or much of anywhere, for a very long time, a group of women in business dress walked past. One looked up and choked on her bagel, and two others nearly fell over her rolling baggage when they followed her look and stopped dead in their tracks. “Is that—it can’t be—can it—oh my God—“

They swarmed Clay, much to his shock. By the time he had autographed their boarding passes and handed out hugs and pic-phone snapshots, the bewildered security checkers had managed to access enough old data to confirm his identity to their satisfaction. One woman wiped away tears as we parted and headed for our flight. “That was a surprise,” Clay said. “I didn’t expect anyone to recognize me.”

“Get used to it, sweetie,” I snorted. We made our way back to coach. “Sorry about the accommodations, but as you pointed out the night we met, reporters do not make the big bucks.”

“Maybe I can do something about that soon,” he replied mysteriously, and folded himself into the seat. While the plane filled with travelers, he looked around and then closed his eyes.

“Is something wrong?” I asked. “I didn’t think you were afraid of flying.”

“I’m not. I like it. I just keep thinking any minute this is all going to disappear. It feels unreal.”

I leaned in and kissed him, my lips lingering on his warm freckled cheek. “Does that feel unreal?”

Without opening his eyes he smiled. “No, and if you do that again I might embarrass us both.”

“Oops! Can’t have that, now can we?” I tittered and helped him with his seat harness. “Get ready, this won’t be like the takeoffs you remember.” Supersonic flight always feels like being shot out of a cannon to me, and this one was no exception. After Clay’s eyes went back in their sockets, we got some juice and spent the next 89 minutes talking about furnishing the barren bungalow, planning a future that only days ago would have seemed the maddest sort of fancy.

We were totally ignored in the Nashville airport—clearly natives still pride themselves on their blasé reaction to all celebrities. It had been several years since I’d been in the area, but I could still find my way around, and even in a cheap rental car without auto-drive or directionals I got us to Mr. Boo’s Hot Chicken with time to spare before noon. The savory scents of spices and cayenne pepper wafted out the open door of the unpretentious little storefront in an old strip mall just off a main road. We sat in rocking chairs on the sidewalk and rocked in companionable silence. “They didn’t even ask where I’d been,” Clay said after a few minutes.

“I doubt they care. The real fans, the ones who stuck around, probably won’t.” That small marveling smile touched his face again, and then melted into an open-mouthed stare at the parking lot. A small car was parking itself there, and a plump brown woman in a nice suit got out.

Clay came to his feet as she started toward the restaurant. “Kim?” he said, took a step or two, and then broke into a run. I watched, pleased for him, and steeled myself to feel a twinge of jealousy—after all, what might have been between them, had Clay not been torn away from his world? Instead, I found myself puzzled by Kimberley Locke’s less than enthusiastic body language. She halted at his approach, and when he caught her in an exuberant embrace her arms were slow to respond. He escorted her to where I sat, raised his glasses to wipe his eyes and introduced us.

She acknowledged me with a brief nod, her mind on Clay. “My God, you haven’t changed a bit.”

“Neither have you,” he responded gallantly. He took her hands in his, and I swore she almost started. “You look—“

“Older.” She was still very pretty, but her dark ponytail was streaked with gray, and the lines around her eyes spoke of years. “Letitia says she doesn’t understand what happened to you, so maybe you do. How do you just appear one morning cured of—that—and not looking a day older, when an expert has looked in vain for twenty years?”

“Do you want the Reader’s Digest Condensed version, or do you have a week?” I put in, trying to lighten a suddenly awkward air. She gave me a strange look, and we went inside and ordered (Kim advised nothing hotter than medium, and that only to cure sinus problems).

I took my root beer toward a table. “Let’s eat outside,” Kim said abruptly. The sky had been cloudy but was clearing, so we happily trooped out to a table on the sidewalk beyond the rocking chairs. It was a better place for a private conversation anyhow, I agreed.

Clay steered for the brightest spot, a chair in direct sunlight. “Watch it,” I warned. “I don’t want to have to nurse you through sunburn.”

“I wouldn’t complain much,” he returned. “Just having the alternative to get sunburned might be worth it.” I had to smile as he pulled out the chair beside him. When I tried to sit across from him I always ended up right beside him; I needed to be by his heart, somehow, and had quit arguing with myself about it.

Kim set her iced tea aside and folded her hands on the Formica tabletop, scratched but spotless. “All right, let’s hear it.”

With a beatific smile he sucked back half his Sprite. “I met Rebecca at a party at Letitia’s house several weeks ago,” he began.

“A party?” Kim pounced. “Since when did you go to parties? Especially since…”

“If you mean why did I go that night, I don’t know.” Clay grinned, probably thinking about driving a tipsy me home. “But I thank God I did.”

“Amen,” I agreed. “I recognized him, even though he insisted otherwise. So, being a nosy reporter, I started to nose.” Clay tweaked my nose. “Quit distracting me. Anyway, that’s when I called you, Kimberley; you may remember it.” Her nod was curt. I could imagine her fixing one of her law clients with the same steady gaze she now turned on me. “I tracked him down through my contacts, and confronted him expecting some scandal. When I learned the truth, I felt really sorry for him, and I wanted to help.”

“You felt sorry for him, and you wanted to help.” Her measured tone repeating my words would not have been out of place in a hostile cross-examination. “You wanted a story, more likely.”

Ah, so it’s me she suspects! That I could handle. “Sure, at first, but not by that time. He wasn’t in great condition—“ Clay groaned and I elbowed him. “I couldn’t have done anything to hurt him, seeing him like that. I started visiting, hanging around, and eventually I persuaded him to feed from me.” Her face went ashen. “That went fine for weeks, until…”

I paused, unsure how detailed to be, and Clay picked up the thread. “Until last Saturday night, when I lost control. It made me face the truth, that I couldn’t control it. So I did what I should’ve done all along. I found a nice quiet place facing east, and I sat down and prayed, and waited for God to decide what to do with me.” I admired how smoothly he had glossed over the rest: how we had spoken that scary wonderful L word to each other for the first time that night; how I had begged him to make love to me despite his fears of biting me in the heat of passion—which was exactly what had occurred—and set in motion the chain of events that had found us on that hillside. “Rebecca found me a little before dawn, and stayed with me.” The quick cut of his eyes toward me whispered his continuing gratefulness. “So the sun came up, and—nothing happened.”

“Did so!” I sputtered. “How do you miss becoming alive, for pete’s sake?”

“Hey, I was expecting to fry, not start breathing!” he retorted.

“Whatever,” I groaned. “Men. Stuff flies right over their pretty heads.” We could laugh now, over what had been so terrible barely hours before.

Our food arrived in cardboard boats. Clay leaned over his, the chicken red with spice, and inhaled, and I couldn’t tell whether the moisture in his eyes was from the hotness of it or the joy of smelling it. He lowered his head to say grace, and his hands clasped on the table clenched after a moment—prayer was the time the storm of his emotions came closest to breaking. I put my hands over his and squeezed gently, sensing he was thanking God as much for the ability to eat and all that implied to him as for the food itself. Kim watched us with an air of confusion. I reminded myself that if her behavior seemed strange, it was likely because the Clay she had last seen was very different; trying to starve the vampire out after discovering it, he had succeeded only in driving himself mad with blood-hunger, and almost attacked her.

We dug in, but Kim still seemed reserved, and I hoped Clay wasn’t noticing. He felt he had wronged her, and seeing him hurt by her would be unbearable. While we ate, I finished our account by telling Kim about our visit to Letitia on Sunday morning, and that we would soon be back on a plane bound for Raleigh to see Clay’s mother and family. “After I tie myself in a knot in the seat,” he grunted. “I hate flying coach. Which, among other things, is why I need your help, Kim. You’ve been great managing my money and getting me the few things I needed over the years, but now it’s time the trust was terminated.”

“Damn straight,” I snickered. “I can’t keep you up in your accustomed style, Mr. Superstar.”

We both giggled, but Kim looked distressed. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said. “This is all so sudden. I’m concerned about…about your label! Yeah, they could sue you for breach of contract, but if the money’s in the trust they can’t get it. And going to Raleigh right now may not be wise either. I—“

“Hey, Kim!” a voice interrupted. It belonged to a woman with a cheery smile and a bulging shopping bag approaching us.

“Hi, Cindy.” Kim looked even more fidgety.

The bag, I saw when she stopped at the table, was full of old paperbacks. “E-books are fine, but I love the feel of paper and ink,” I said after I introduced myself. “Wish we were here for more than a stopover. I hate the idea of a bookstore nearby that I don’t have time to explore.”

Cindy laughed; then her eyes widened as Clay rose to greet her. “Hi there. So how tired do you get of people telling you you look exactly like Clay Aiken?”

“Not very much, actually,” he replied with that world-flattening smile.

She set her bag down with a thud, and I thought she might follow suit. “You’re shittin’ me,” she gasped and stared at Kim, who looked almost nauseous, then back at him. “Uh oh. Pardon the language. That voice. That face. It is you, isn’t it? Oh my God. I’ve been a fan forever. Where have you been?”

It was the question we had not yet faced, the one I had vainly hoped we might not have to. Clay’s smile faltered. “I, uh…” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, I just haven’t yet figured out how to talk about it.”

Kim’s friend paused, seeming to perceive his discomfort, then grinned. “Hey, it’s none of my business, long as you don’t run out on us again!” She pointed at Clay’s meal with a stern face. “And as long as you sit your skinny butt down and eat!”

That made him laugh, and me relax, as he obeyed. “Why does everybody want to mother me?”

“It has nothing to do with mothering,” Cindy declared, “and everything to do with a long list of highly imaginative activities that would require a whole lotta stamina on your part.”

The look on Clay’s face was priceless. I snickered, and we chatted a moment more. Cindy reached across him to shake my hand and leave—and a trickle of blood ran down her arm and plopped on the table. Instantly he was on his feet again, urging her to sit down and grabbing a wad of spare napkins to press to the blood-soaked bandage in the crook on her elbow. “I gave blood this morning,” she explained. “Maybe carrying that heavy bag made it break loose. When I go back to work I’ll have it checked and rebandaged.”

“Do you have auto-drive?” Clay asked. She shook her head. “You shouldn’t drive. I can—“

“No,” Kim snapped and scrambled to her feet. “I’ll take her.”

“Stop fussing, y’all!” Cindy sputtered. “I’m not exactly sucked dry here!” At her words Kim stopped cold, but Clay didn’t seem to notice the irony of the comment at all. Cindy insisted she could get back to work without help, but Clay carried her bag to her car and I even gave her my cel number if she felt ill on the way. “Not that a trip with you wouldn’t be a pleasure, Mr. Aiken, but I’m fine.”

He actually blushed as she drove away. “I should’ve said Sorry sweetie, he’s taken!” I chuckled.

“I should hire you as my bodyguard,” he muttered, his ears crimson. “These women are crazy. Why else would they act this way over a first class nerd like me?”

“Oh, so I’m crazy too, huh?” I demanded. “Fine. Guilty as charged.” I wrapped my arms around him and looked up into his face. “I am totally crazy about you, Mister Aiken.”

The southern sun set his hair aflame as he squinted down at me against its glare and grinned. Then he lifted his hand, the one that still held the blood-splotched clump of paper napkins. “No fangs.”

“No fangs,” I agreed happily as we found a garbage can.

Clay casually wiped a little leakage off his fingers before he tossed the trash, the same stuff that two days ago would have had him struggling to contain a feeding frenzy. No fangs meant no vampire: no more fighting an implacable foe that had shattered his world, taken his body, left him in fear for his soul, and intended to break his will and spirit. “Let’s get back to that chicken before it spontaneously combusts.”

Kim was still standing by her seat. As we crossed the pavement I almost said is it just me or is she acting really weird? but I held my tongue. Her stare was as intent as if she had never before seen a man and a woman walk laughing toward her with arms around each other. Still, I hoped this encounter was salvageable, until she blurted, “I’ve got to go,” and turned away.

Clay halted, his hand on the back of my chair about to pull it out. “Okay,” he said softly to her retreating back. “I understand. It can’t be easy to forgive what I did to you.” She stopped, but did not turn. “When I called yesterday and you said you didn’t hate me, I guess I overreacted, rushing down here. It was dumb of me to think things could be anything like the way they were.” Regret thickened his voice and crushed my heart. “I’ll, uh, stay in touch—I mean, I’m sure you don’t want to hear from me directly, but I’ll ask Letitia to call you. Maybe you two can work out the trust thing. I never wanted a woman to marry me for my money, but I don’t want her to have to support me either.” His attempt at humor fell flat. Clay bit his lip and stared down at his food. “Um, I hope you don’t mind if we stay and finish our lunch. It really is good, and it’s been so long since I could eat, I’m enjoying it more than I expected.”

A low wail lifted in the still warm air, and rose in intensity. It took a second for me to realize it came from Kimberley. Clay glanced at me, confused and then alarmed, as she bent almost double. “Kim?” he asked. “Are you okay?” He started to go around the table to her, and then stopped. The grimace on his face told how he was torn, between the desire to help and the chilling knowledge that his presence was more hurtful than helpful to her. For a moment he wavered, and then moved; I expected no less. He went up to her, his hands open at his sides but not touching her. “We’ll go, Kim. I’m sorry, I’m so sor—“

With a cry, she turned and grabbed him. “It’s you, Clay—oh God, it’s you—“

“Well, yeah.” He put his arms cautiously around her. “Kim—did you think I wasn’t? Or did you think I was lying to you?”

“I didn’t know what to think!” she sobbed. “On the phone you sounded —the few times we talked before, you hardly spoke, but yesterday you didn’t shut up. You sounded so normal. I was excited, but then I called Letitia and she didn’t know what happened, and I started to worry…it’s cunning, y’know, and deceitful, and if it had finally managed to kill what was left of you, what couldn’t it do? Everybody knows how good you are, it could use that to do such evil. And here you came, looking just like the last time I saw you before it—happened, and wanting your money, and I couldn’t believe…” She buried her face in his chest, and the caution left his stance as he wrapped himself around her and let her weep. I stood quietly where I was; this was their moment. After several minutes, she seemd to regain some control. “I made you come out here, to see if the sun would affect you. When Cindy came up I was terrified, I couldn’t let her be alone with you—and then the blood—I remember, Clay, I remember, you couldn’t stop yourself when you saw blood—“

“Not anymore,” Clay said, his tone gently triumphant.

“I know that—now,” Kim sniffled, “and I’m so ashamed of what I was thinking, and of all the times I should have come to see you—“ She began to cry again. “I knew how alone you were, but I just couldn’t…”

Clay hugged her. “That wasn’t your fault.”

“Well, it sure wasn’t yours!” she said tartly. “It really is you, isn’t it, Clay?”

Her tone as she looked up into his face was less question than affirmation now. “It really is, Kim. Only by the grace of God.”

She almost managed a smile. “It was that easy?”

“That easy.” Clay looked over at me and his grin reappeared. “That easy, and that impossible, without the right motivation to stop running.”

For the first time, Kim’s gaze at me was not wary. She sat down, and I handed her one of the dwindling stack of napkins to dry her eyes. “Why is it they can send people to Mars, and they still can’t make a mascara that won’t run?” I asked.

This time she actually laughed a little. “I need to apologize to you too, Rebecca. I couldn’t figure how you fit in. Were you a prisoner of a—a vampire, or an opportunist ready to spread scandal, somebody who didn’t know or care what Clay had been through?”

“Oh, I know.” I replied. Clay finished what he had started, pulling out my chair and then seating himself. “I know he’s been through hell, and I know he was willing to go to hell, rather than risk harming me.” My throat surprised me by tightening, and Clay surprised me by taking my hands in his. “I should apologize too, Kim—I was all set to go upside your head if you’d said anything to hurt him.”

She looked from me to him, and her smile widened. “Obviously there’s a lot you two haven’t told me.” The wall broken, we did just that while we devoured our lunch, and Kim shared her new life with us too, her deep satisfaction with her law practice, and the handsome psychiatrist she had once cross-examined and was now dating. When nothing was left but chicken bones, she insisted we follow her back to her office, led us proudly past gaping lawyers and clerks, and dug a stack of forms out of her impressive desk. “Here,” she said to Clay, signing them with a flourish and handing them to him. “Sign these and I’ll file them this afternoon. The trust will be dissolved tomorrow, and your money will be yours.”

“But what will I tell them?” Clay frowned. “You talked about the label, and lawsuits.”

“I lied,” Kim admitted. “If you think back, you’ll remember your contract was coming up for renewal when you…Anyway, your sales went through the roof with all the publicity surrounding your disappearance. They would have been crazy to drop you, and they’d be crazy to do anything to you now. If you allude to some medical reason you dropped out of sight, no one can legally ask more; privacy laws will protect you. No, there won’t be any lawsuits. I made that up to keep—it—from your money.”

Clay signed. “There’s no it to be afraid of anymore.”

“Thank God,” Kim sighed and hugged him, and me too this time. “He’s a slob, Rebecca. Believe me, I lived with him. Are you sure you want to marry him?”

“Uh, I haven’t seen him slob much. He doesn’t have enough stuff.” As emotion steadied, I was buffeted by new facts—Clay was once again one of the wealthiest young men in America—and he had said he wanted to marry me. Couples don’t find marriage as essential as in the past, but this was Clay. It hadn’t soaked in before, but I knew him well enough that it should have; when he said he wanted to spend his life with me this was exactly what he meant.

“I hope she wants to marry this slob.” Clay’s tone was hopeful. “Especially since I can buy her a ring now—well, tomorrow. Darn, that means coach to Raleigh, still. I get to fly pretzel again.”

“Afraid so,” I retorted, “unless we kick the arm rest up and you put your feet in my lap.”

“You two are adorable,” Kim burst out. “Call me when you set a wedding date?”

We promised, and left her laughing as if she hadn’t in years. Clay was giddy with relief. Now it was my turn for a brief attack of the nerves, as we boarded a smaller subsonic plane for the short hop from Nashville to Raleigh, but I talked myself out of it by the time we landed. On the phone yesterday Faye Parker had sounded thrilled to meet me, giving me the not altogether deserved credit for the return of her lost son, and hopefully she hadn’t had the same second thoughts about me that Kim had. “I got directions,” I said as we procured another cheap drive-it-yourself rental car, “in case the city’s changed too much. Do you want to drive?”

Clay slid behind the wheel. “Technically I’m breaking the law, since I don’t have a valid license. When auto-drives first came out I got one right away—cops tend to leave them alone, and I couldn’t risk getting pulled over on the rare nights I was out. The night we met, when I lifted your keys and brought your car to your apartment, was the first time I’d actually driven in, gosh, years. I was scared silly.”

He did seem tense, but his driving was fine. We meandered all over the Triangle, with Clay pointing out places important to him and quieting whenever we came upon a spot where one once had been. “This is great,” I said finally after a check of my wrist watch-plant, “but we should probably head for your mom’s house. She’ll be wondering where we are.”

We idled at a stop light, and Clay gazed up at its unblinking eye. “What if she’s mad, Rebecca? What if she wants to know where I’ve been, why I left, and won’t take ‘I can’t explain’ for an answer?”

“Why shouldn’t she take it? It’s true. Clay, if your fans will give you your space, how much more should your family? Wasn’t I right yesterday, when I said all your mom wanted to hear was that you’re alive and you love her?” I put my arm around his tight shoulders and laid my hands over his, clenched on the steering wheel. “She’s waited twenty years, sweetie. Let’s not make her wait any longer.”

He let go of the wheel long enough to take my face in his hands and kiss me. “Thank you, God,” he murmured. “I love this woman so much!” With an unsteady but brave smile he drove on, until we turned into a driveway shaded by big trees. The house we approached sat in tallish grass; the bright paint on the shutters was chipped, and the roof was streaked. It looked as if someone had once worked to make it pleasant, but lately hadn’t put in the effort.

Clay stared out the windshield a moment, then got out and came around to open my door. This tomboy found she liked being treated like a lady! I got out and stretched, and he gasped and was gone, racing across the unkempt lawn toward a silver-haired woman running toward him from the now open front door. They fell into each other’s arms, and I could hear Clay sobbing all the way out at the car. Before I realized I had moved, I had covered half the distance between us, but forced myself to stop. As much as I hated to see him cry, this was another moment that didn’t need my interruption. So I stood rather awkwardly at the edge of the driveway, until Faye Parker lifted her head from her son’s chest and saw me. She looked up at him, wiped his cheek with her hand and said something. With a swipe at his nose he turned toward me, his face eerily as I recalled it from watching American Idol as a kid, the night he fought his way into the finals as the wild card. Then as now, his tears were of joy and relief. At his beckoning little smile I hurried to his side. “Mom, this is Rebecca. Uh, I…”

“I’m happy to finally meet you, Mrs. Parker,” I finished. If he had been about to say what I thought, this might not be the right time for it. How many surprises can one person take in a day?

I put out my hand, but she pulled me into an embrace. “Around here we don’t shake hands with people we owe so much to,” she said. “Or let them call us by our full names either. It’s Faye to you, young lady.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I grinned. Not something you say much in LA, even if you were raised to it as I was. “I should be thanking you too, for raising such a remarkable son.”

Her smile engulfed her face. “I have to admit I was still a little unsure, until I saw him coming toward me. Clayton never was a graceful runner.” Through his tears he laughed, and she hugged him forcefully again. “Darlin’, you are skin and bones!” she exclaimed, her hands on his ribs. “What have you been doin’ to yourself? You look like you haven’t eaten in Lord knows how long.”

She doesn’t know how close she is, I thought. “Well, I haven’t much lately,” Clay confessed, “but I’m doing better, I promise. If you still feel up to a barbecue, I could definitely eat anything you dish up.”

“We’ll see. Come in, you two. Forgive the house, Rebecca—Brett, my youngest, cuts my grass, but I hate to bother him so I try to let it go a while.”

“That’s not right!” Clay said. “I’ll do it tomorrow. Is that okay?” Faye protested, but he wouldn’t hear it. As soon as we stepped inside he was looking around, picking out what was the same and what had changed, and asking questions a mile a minute, about friends and relatives, the town, and his foundation. Laughing, Faye shepherded us both into the kitchen, where she poured lemonade and answered his queries. Clay took a big swallow. “Ooh, that’s good. You must’ve run out of raspberry though, I don’t taste it.”

His mother paused in the act of returning the pitcher to the refrigerator. “Why, yes, you’re right. It’s not in there, is it? I…I…”

She set the pitcher down and started to cry quietly. Clay leaped from his chair. “Mom? Did I say something wrong? Mom?” Faye shook her head, and held onto him and cried as she had not outside. I sat and wondered what she had been about to say. Did she forget a small special ingredient he had loved, and feel appalled at herself; or was the omission deliberate, one more test of his identity? I didn’t know, Faye didn’t say, and Clay clearly didn’t care. He just stood and shifted from foot to foot and spoke softly to her. It reminded me of the night he had told me how he came to be a vampire, how sitting on his sofa he had wept tears of blood, and I had held him and rocked him, trying to comfort his inconsolable grief. I took another sip of the marvelous lemonade and tried to make myself small.

Faye finally steadied herself, and was about to speak when I heard an odd but instantly identifiable sound—the click of claws on linoleum. A small furry form limped into the kitchen. I had never seen her in the flesh, but even after years I knew her from old pictures. “Hello there,” I greeted the little dog.

Clay looked down and gasped again. “Raleigh?”

She had started toward me, the nearest human; but when Clay called her name her ragged ears perked up, and she dragged herself toward him with a feeble yip. He dropped to his knees, one hand over his open mouth. “She’s had every body part replaced that they can replace, but she still doesn’t get up and around much,” Faye said. “She must’ve recognized—“ her voice broke briefly—“Clayton’s voice.”

Raleigh put her front paws on Clay’s leg and struggled to jump into his lap. He scooped her into his arms and hid his face in her graying fur. I rubbed his shaking shoulders. “Clay said you never liked dogs indoors,” I said, puzzled. “That was why he left her with his friend Suzanne.”

Faye’s smile was sad. “I went and got her three weeks after he left. How could I not? She was all I had left of him.” In Clay’s arms Raleigh wriggled and whined and licked his tear-wet face in glee, as though her biological clock too had turned back, restoring her lost puppyhood to her. “The vet wanted to put her to sleep, three or four years ago. It seemed it would’ve been a blessing to the little old thing, but I just couldn’t. As long as she was here, a little of Clayton was still here; and as crazy as I knew it was, I could still hope that one day he might come home…”

She sniffled, and gazed down at the man and the dog on the floor, and I reached up and squeezed her hand. “He’s home, Miss Faye, and he never intends to go away again, I know.” I could not go further; that was Clay’s to tell, when he could, but hope sparked in her eyes, and that was enough for now.

Clay crooned softly to the old terrier. “Hey, baby girl, you still remember me, dontcha?” I scratched her grizzled muzzle, and after a few laborious sniffs at my fingers she decided to lick them too. “I bet you smell me on Rebecca, huh?” he added with a pointed look that made me giggle, and then gulp when I remembered his mother was standing right beside my chair!

Faye did not appear to catch his double entendre, though. She stood and watched in silence a moment. “Clayton,” she said suddenly, “I need to tell you about—the family.”

At the new firmness in her voice Clay looked up. “You said yesterday Jeff and Amy both still live where they did, and Brett came back after he got out of the Marines. I can’t wait to see them all.”

“Yes.” Faye took a breath. “I talked to them yesterday afternoon. Jeff and Amy both wanted me to call the police. They certainly didn’t want me to open the house, or be alone with this person claiming to be my son, but they couldn’t come down till the weekend, so any family get-together will have to wait till then. Brett suspected the man I spoke with on the phone wouldn’t show up at all. He couldn’t come over till he got off work, so he wanted me to put you off till then; but I wouldn’t. I wanted to see you myself, and find out if the way my heart jumped when I heard that voice was telling me the truth.”

Frankly, Clay was more upset at having to wait for his barbecue than at the news that his brothers and sister thought him an imposter. ”I’d be suspicious too, under the circumstances,” he agreed. “I’m glad they were. I’m glad they were taking care of you, and trying to keep somebody from conning you.”

A door slammed at the rear of the house. “Mom?” called a gruff voice. At Faye’s reply footsteps clumped closer, and a man entered the kitchen. He was big, burly and dark, and looked tough and capable—and angry.

Clay’s jaw dropped into an amazed smile. “Brett,” he said. “No more little-brother jokes, huh? Lord, you look just like Dad.” So this was the closest I would get to meeting Ray Parker, who had raised Clay and loved him as his own—far more, considering Clay’s ‘own’ had brought on all this misery.

Brett glared down at him, still sitting on the floor cuddling Raleigh. “Who the hell are you?”

“Wow, the Marines didn’t improve your vocabulary any.” Clay got up, handed me Raleigh and dusted his butt off before he put out his hand. “Considering the situation, a handshake makes more sense than a hug for starters.”

“I’m not shakin’ shit,” the other man snarled. “You didn’t do your homework, pal. My brother Clayton would be walking up to fifty now, so how come you look twenty-something?” Clay shrugged helplessly. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t beat the hell outta you before I call the cops.”

Clay gave him several reasons, none of which I’ll mention here. They were without exception things I had never read or heard in all my research into the life of Clay Aiken, things no one outside his family knew or should know. Suffice it to say that by the time Clay finished, Brett had to concede he was who he said he was. That did not, however, lessen his anger, only changed its focus. “So where the hell have you been all this time?” he demanded. “Mom called me in a panic, I got emergency leave—thank God I wasn’t in Iraq or Afghanistan or some other godforsaken place—there wasn’t much of your stuff gone, but the cops couldn’t find any sign of foul play—nobody knew anything, nobody’d seen anything. Christ, it was like you’d evaporated into the air.” It was an accurate analogy, if unintentionally so, since the ability to do that very thing was one of the vampiric powers Clay was discovering in those dreadful first days after his turning. “Now you pop up looking like you used some of your millions to get the best damn plastic surgery on the planet, and you expect us to welcome you back without a peep. Is that it?”

“No, that’s not it, Brett. I don’t expect anything from any of you, although a welcome would be nice. I can’t…I don’t know yet how to explain what happened to me, without you all thinking I’m totally crazy or totally evil. If you can give me a little time, when I figure it out, you’ll be the first to hear it, I swear.” Clay put his hand out again.

This time Brett slapped it aside. “Brett!” Faye snapped. “There’ll be none of that in my house, especially not between my children, you understand me?”

Clay hadn’t moved, but shock and hurt were written large in the sudden slackness of his face. “Yeah, I understand. You claim him if you want to, Mom.” Brett took a step forward until he was nose to nose with Clay. “You are one arrogant son of a bitch. When you come up with a nice fancy explanation, don’t bother calling. I don’t want to hear it.”

He spun on his heel and stalked out the way he had come. Faye ran after him. I gently put Raleigh down, stood and put my arms around Clay. “It’ll be okay. He’s surprised, of course he is; but he’s your brother. He loves you, and he knows you love him. He’ll get over it.”

“Maybe not,” Clay muttered. “I was afraid of this. I don’t think I can ever explain.”

“Why not?” Faye’s return startled us both. “What is it you can’t tell your own mother, Clayton?” He simply shook his head and clasped me to him. A part of me thought I should move, if I wanted to maintain a fiction that we were only friends; but far more of me wanted, as I had never wanted anything in my life, to protect Clay from a world that could never comprehend or even accept what he had suffered through and survived. Whether it was wise or not, I stood there and held him, and the kitchen was silent for a long few moments. “It doesn’t matter,” she said at last. “I don’t pretend to understand, but I love you, and I trust you, and hopefully one of these days you’ll trust me enough to tell me.”

“It’s not about trust, Mom.” Clay’s voice was rough. “If it were only that, you’d have heard it all by now. It—it was awful, and unbelievable, and I think if I just tried to say it you’d think I was…”

“Crazy or evil,” she finished when he hesitated. “You were so adamant on the phone yesterday, and in the note you left, about… Did Vernon have anything to do with this?”

I had finally stepped aside, but left one hand resting on his back, to remind him I was keeping my promise not to leave him to face hard things alone; and the taut muscles under my palm relaxed a bit. Here at least was a question he could answer with honesty. “Yes.”

“Something happened that day you went to meet him,” she guessed, and Clay nodded. “You were sick from then until you left, I remember—Clayton, what did he do to you—“

“Mom, please, don’t make me talk about it. It’s over, but it hasn’t been very long, and it still scares me to even think much about it...” He choked and sank into a chair.

Faye rushed to hug him. “Don’t you say another word, not until you’re ready to. I won’t push you. And anybody else who does is gonna have me to answer to.” Me too, I added mentally.

“Thank you,” he whispered. “I love you, Mom. I missed you so much.”

“I know, baby, I know,” she said. I swallowed back new tears, and when her eyes met mine I could see she was having the same problem.

After a few more minutes Clay sat up and sighed. “I guess we’d better get going.”

“Excuse me?” Faye challenged. “Go where? To some hotel? Not tonight, or any night soon if I have any say. I moved most of the fan stuff out of your old room, but you’ll still have to climb over a few boxes. I’m afraid I moved part of it into the guest room—Brett’s old room—so you’ll have to climb over boxes too, Rebecca. What you two can do is get out of here and let me cook in peace.” She looked down. “And get this puppy out of my kitchen!” she added, but with a small smile.

We adjourned down the hall to the room that would be mine. When we sat down on the bed Raleigh sprawled across our laps and promptly fell asleep. “If you’d let me tell her about us—“ Clay began.

“She still would’ve felt weird about letting us sleep together under her roof, even engaged.”

“Yeah, but now I’ll feel weird. After being alone for so long I was just getting used to you lying beside me every day.”

“I know. I feel the same, but it won’t be for long.” I kissed him quickly. “I just thought presenting her with a fiancee was more shock than you should hand her in one day.” His mock-scowl said he understood, but didn’t enjoy it. “It really may not be long—she already suspects we’re more than friends.”

“Oh, ya think?” Clay’s sardonic rejoinder was accompanied by another kiss, deeper and lengthier.

“You’re incorrigible,” I giggled, then sobered. “Yeah, and I think she also thinks she knows what happened to you.”

“Huh?”

“You all but gave it to her, Clay. Something you couldn’t find words for. Something awful and unbelievable. Something that would make your family think you were crazy, or evil. Think like a mortal, honey. You are one now, remember. From the questions she was asking, and from her reaction, I think she’s decided Vernon molested you sometime in the past. That day you met, he might’ve threatened to tell, or maybe tried to blackmail you, and you went under to forestall it.”

“But he died just a couple of months later. Why wouldn’t I have come back?”

“Maybe she thinks you had something to do with his death,” I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. The important thing is it gets her off your back and on your side.”

I wasn’t displeased, but Clay shook his head. “It’s a lie. I’ve got to tell her the truth, somehow.”

“Well, I vote we let sleeping dogs lie, for now.” I scratched Raleigh’s belly and she grunted contentedly.

Clay smiled down at her. “She’s the only one who hasn’t judged, or condemned.” He looked around the room. “Her, and the fans. Look at all these boxes!” Dates were written on each one. “2007, 2010, 2019—2024, just last year—why did they still care?”

“You never did get it, did you? Maybe that was part of your appeal. You gave so much to others, and never seemed to understand why they loved you in return.”

He still looked baffled. “I didn’t give that much. All I did was what I wanted to do.”

“And all they do is what they want to do. You’ll see.” Faye called us to supper, and we spent the evening with old photos and clippings and videos...really old ones, the kind that made Clay groan with embarrassment. It didn’t make sleeping alone any easier, but at least I was chuckling as I nodded off.

+++

Clay spent most of Tuesday morning with his mom’s old-fashioned landline phone receiver to his ear, reconnecting with those he had left. Several of his old friends had moved, a couple had died, and a couple more refused his call, unable to believe it was him. Diane Bubel, whose encouragement had sparked Clay to try out for the talent show that had been his stepping stone to stardom, screamed happily and loudly enough to be heard across the kitchen when he phoned. Her son Mike, whom Clay had taught, was living in his own home with two other men with autism. Clay was thrilled, until Diane gently asked him not to call or visit; she was afraid it would only upset and confuse Mike. It did upset Clay, and the upset only intensified when I wangled his old friend and competitor Ruben Studdard’s number through a contact, and his call was again rebuffed. “Whoever answered said he was busy, rehearsing for a show,” Clay said glumly. Ruben had released two more albums after Clay’s disappearance, but both had done only modestly well, and he had finally returned to his hometown of Birmingham to be the local celebrity. “I can’t blame him, or my friends, or anybody else for their reactions. It just makes me feel…unwelcome. Like I’m still up in that house, cut off from the world. Or like I should be.”

I blocked his path as he started out of the room. “Don’t let me hear you talk like that again. If you want to spit on what God did for you—hell, on what I did for you, and Letitia, and even Kim—fine, but don’t do it within earshot of me.”

“I’m not!” Clay was clearly taken aback by my sudden anger. “I swear I’m not. I thought I’d been blessed before, but being given my life back surpasses everything—and having you too, that’s just ridiculous abundance. Adjusting, though—it’s harder than I thought it’d be. Getting through every night for twenty years took all my strength. Thinking beyond it, imagining a time when I might see the sun again, never occurred to me. It’s wonderful, but it’s overwhelming too. So much so fast, and all topsy turvy—I spent half of last night trying to remember how to sleep, and you weren’t there…” He crushed me to him. “Forgive me, Rebecca. I can’t alienate you too. I feel like you’re all I’ve got to hold on to right now.”

“It’d take more than you’re capable of to push me away,” I soothed him. “I told you before, Aiken, you’re stuck with me.”

As he chuckled, my phone beeped. Grumbling, I disentangled myself from his embrace to pull it out of its case and poke it in my ear. “Hey, Rebecca, it’s Kim. Have you been online this morning?”

“Hi, Kim. We were just talking about you.” Clay grinned, as if reminded he had more support than just me. “I’ve just been on briefly. I pulled up some phone numbers, and checked in with my editor at InquiringMinds.com. My Sunday morning scoop on the ‘Clay sighting’ is getting some attention.”

“’Some attention’, my eye.” She rattled off several urls. “What is it his fans call themselves—Clay Nation? Well, there’s an uprising brewing, so prepare him!”

“Is this a good uprising or bad?” I asked warily.

“See for yourself,” she replied, but she was laughing.

Clay looked suspicious as I hung up and reopened my memobook computer lying on the table. “What uprising?”

“Dunno, but let’s find out.” Within a few minutes I had pieced it together. “Okay. One of the women we met at LAX uploaded her pictures to the Web, where heated debate broke out over whether they were real, and whether it was you.” Following a link, I found a photo of us walking through the Nashville airport. “She saw us board, and someone was lying in wait on the other end. So much for the infamous jaded Nashvillian. It looks like they think we’re still there—you mean nobody went so far as to tail us? And they’re in a tizzy trying to figure out who the hell I am or where I fall in the scheme of things, although somebody did match my name on the airline ticket list to my name on the IM.com article.” Clay was silently amazed. “I bet you’ll need a real bodyguard again soon. Did you call Jerome?”

Clay shook his head as Faye walked in and her phone rang almost simultaneously. I handed him my phone, and he spoke the number to it and grabbed a banana. By the time I folded my computer and dropped it in my purse his brief conversation was over; he unwound the phone from behind his ear and handed it back to me. “He doesn’t work for that security agency in Atlanta—he owns it! How cool is that?”

“Can you hold on a minute?” Faye was saying in her sweetest voice. She covered the receiver mouthpiece. “Clayton, this is Trudy from Radio Raleigh.” He frowned. “Oh, WRDC. They’re all up on the satellite now, so they don’t use their old letters much except around here. Anyhow, they heard through the people on the computer that you might be around, and Trudy wondered if I knew where you were and could I ask you if you could come and talk to them on the air.”

“Wow. Maybe we were tailed, Rebecca.” Clay started to reach for the receiver when my phone chirped again. “Uh, Mom, can you ask her if this afternoon is okay?” he said and grabbed for mine. It was Jerome, and from Clay’s end of the conversation his former bodyguard was delighted to hear from him. Jerome’s business kept him from resuming his old duties, but he was all for hopping a flight to Raleigh this afternoon to see Clay. The radio station manager, judging from Faye’s report, was downright ecstatic at the prospect of Clay’s visit. For my part, I was happy to see Clay juggling and scheduling, opening his new life up, acting like—well, like himself again.

After lunch we were ready to leave for the station when Faye met us at the door. “I think I’ll stay here with Raleigh and listen,” she said. “Then I can give you my opinion when you all get home.”

“Oh, thanks, mom. My toughest critic!” Clay laughed.

“Sassy!” she retorted. “You are still sassy, Clayton.”

“Yes, I am, and you still love me, don’t you?”

Obviously it was a game they had played many times, but now it held new meaning. “Yes, I do,” she said, and they hugged each other tightly. “I found something you left here. You said you wanted it, and this felt like a good time.” She took a piece of paper, its edges soft and the writing on it faint with age, from her slacks pocket and unfolded it. Inside was a worn strip of black fabric, with white letters woven in that spelled W.W.J.D. Clay’s joyful reaction clearly didn’t surprise her at all, but my excited hug after she helped him buckle the bracelet around his wrist certainly appeared to! He had always said she could sense his needs, and somehow she had known he needed it right then: a small link to his bright-eyed past, and a reminder of who had given him back his future. I noticed him glance down at it once or twice as we drove to the station, turn his wrist slightly as if growing reaccustomed to its gentle hold, and smile.

Two blocks from the station, we began to pass cars parked along the shoulder of the road. As we started to turn into the back parking lot, we encountered people walking toward the front of the complex where a small crowd was gathering. When Clay slowed to a crawl, I could see many wore T-shirts with his face on them. Signs abounded, many proclaiming the bearer’s home; my hasty count yielded fifteen or twenty southern and eastern states. “Good grief, what is this?” he exclaimed.

“The station’s probably been announcing you were coming. Remember, satellite stations cast around the world, and on a supersonic anyone east of the Mississippi could get here in an hour or less.”

Heads started to turn in our direction as Clay drove around back and parked near a small loading dock. “I wondered why they told us to come in the service entrance,” he said as we mounted several concrete steps to a door. “What are all those people doing here?”

“I’ll check the net while you’re on air,” I chuckled as we entered.

Trudy, the station manager, was a big friendly woman who greeted Clay with a holler. He remembered her as a late-night DJ who had risked her job to play his music. “That was then, this is now,” she grinned. “You must have been under a rock, sugar. That ended when the monopolies, Clear Channel and their bedfellows, got smashed. The lawsuits started before you dropped out of sight, but by 2010 it was nothing but us sat stations and the low-power locals—which meant we all got back to actually playing requests instead of pretending to!” The station hadn’t initiated the gathering of fans, but she viewed it with good humor and no surprise. “Your fans had a lot to do with the shape of radio today, Clay, and we thank them and you for it.” It was a sentiment Trudy reiterated as she personally took over the mike once they were on air. Clay seemed abashed at first, but within minutes he was chattering away.

I found a quiet corner and hit the web, where debate raged on. Some sharp-eyed fans had seized on the clearly visible and clearly naked right wrist in the LAX picture to declare its subject a poorly prepared imposter; the fact that he had left his bracelet behind on his flight into exile had never been made public. Others, noting his young appearance, speculated about clones. Then there were the really weird theories. All dispute had screeched to a halt, though, in late morning when a post appeared that said simply and in all caps, “RADIO RALEIGH REPORTS CLAY IN STUDIO THIS PM—HEAD FOR THE HOLY LAND!” It was the kidding fannish term for the Triangle, and they did, in droves from all indications, converge from all over. Many were hopeful, others enraged, still others unsure; but all were drawn by the same magnet. “Clay’s music got me thru some rough times,” said one poster, ”and he was a goal and an inspiration. Whether this is an appalling untruth, or the miracle we’ve prayed for, I’ve got to see it—him—for myself. Yeah, I’m getting on a plane. Yeah, it’s crazy. But I’ve got to know.”

I closed my memobook and listened to the rest of the interview. I tensed when the inevitable question about Clay’s whereabouts came up, but he handled it beautifully, saying simply that it had been a personal matter involving his health and his family. He added that he didn’t want to disturb others involved, so he couldn’t go into more detail, but he hoped the fans would understand. “I think they will, they’ve always been amazing.” Another predictable question concerned me, and again Clay was splendidly nimble in his reply. He didn’t say what I was to him, but he didn’t say what I wasn’t either. What he did say moved me deeply. “I’m sitting here right now alive because of the good Lord and Rebecca Palmer.”

All told, we were there two hours or more, as the whole station staff came by after the interview to meet Clay. As Trudy finally escorted us out, I wondered how many determined souls had toughed it out to catch a glimpse. My question was answered when we walked out into a scene from an epic film. The crowd had found its way to the service entrance, and was packed in all directions. Signs had multiplied accordingly, and now represented, as I scanned in amazement, virtually the entire continental US, parts of Canada, Cuba, and Mexico, and a couple of Caribbean islands. A gasp rose when the door swung open, but when Clay stepped out onto the loading dock it emerged as a roar that gained in volume with each second, rising and stretching out to embrace him.

He was overwhelmed. I could see it in the way he froze in his tracks. At the base of the steps a group of women, all wearing something purple, broke into song.

“Living without you, living alone, this empty house seemed so cold…”

The people around them took up the song.

“Wanting to hold you, wanting you near, how much I wanted you home…”

For a moment I thought he was going to turn and run.

“And now that you’ve come back, turned night into day, I need you to stay…”

They hit the chorus full tilt, hundred of voices singing the old rock ballad Clay had performed on American Idol, its words so incredibly appropriate.

“So now I come to you with open arms, nothing to hide, believe what I say.

So here I am with open arms, hoping you’ll see what your love means to me, open arms…”

His eyes overflowed with tears. Before Trudy or I could open our mouths he stumbled down the steps, reached out to the women and was instantly caught up in a sea of tears and hugs and cries of joy. I was down the steps in two bounds (very unladylike in a sundress, granted, but so what), but the crowd was amazingly controlled. Fans hugged Clay, then squeezed aside as best they could to give those behind them a chance to touch him. The ones who couldn’t reach him, or already had, hugged each other. Several of the purple gang stood near me. “You’re her, aren’t you?” demanded one. “Rebecca Palmer!”

I wasn’t sure whether to confess—would I face a horde of jealous harpies? “Uh, yes,” I ventured, and found myself in the middle of a wet and happy group hug.

“Thank you!” the women sobbed. “Our friend called from Nashville but we didn’t know what to believe—Thank you!!”

My brief relief was shaken when I saw the multitude had pressed in and swept Clay far out into its midst. He moved without a trace of apparent fear, buoyed no doubt by the emotion of the moment and the freedom to touch and be touched that he had missed so much, but I was suddenly anxious enough for both of us. I yelled his name, which was worse than useless, although he paused and turned his head almost as if he had heard me. Excitement threatened to spiral into hysteria, and just as I started to panic a big figure appeared at the edge of the crowd, pushing through them and toward Clay. When the man reached him they embraced and began to work their way back to us. The newcomer was a handsome black man, dark hair graying, and I could guess his identity without introduction. Jerome looked as if he had never left Clay’s side, as he firmly but politely nudged them through. At the foot of the steps he gathered me up and pushed us both up, as he took up a position at the base.

Trudy was giving orders to several technicians. “You get us a portable out here; you tell Jannette and Bradley in the studio we’re going live as soon as we can get set up.” She scanned the clamoring crowd and grinned at Clay. “These folks want to hear from you, badly, and we can oblige them if you’re up for it.”

She was radiant. Clay, as he took in the view, looked positively distraught, the energy of moments before draining away. “If they knew,” he muttered. “If they knew…”

“Knew what, babe/” Trudy asked.

Blow it off, Clay, I thought.

No such luck. “If they knew where I’d been, why I left, they wouldn’t be here. They wouldn’t be happy to see me. They’d be running.” Oh, damn, I shuddered. Lord protect him from himself.

Trudy laughed. “As a fan, I believe I’m insulted. Do you think that poorly of us? We have a pretty good grasp of who you are, Clay, and personally, I don’t know that there’s anything you would or could do to change the way these people feel about you.”

He wouldn’t let it go. “Even if I told them I was abducted by aliens?”

“We’d have to get that looked at; but no,” she shot back.

“Even if I was sold into slavery?”

“Wait a minute, let me get my gun.”

“Even if I’d been prowling the night as a vampire?” SHIT, SHUT UP!!! I screamed silently.

“Hand me a stake and give me directions to the bastard who did it to you.” Trudy was still grinning. “Joking aside, what don’t you get here, honey? Look what we did to Peta, to Clear Channel, to Conan O’Brien, to American Idol. You never had to lift a finger when they wronged you; we kicked their asses for you. You mobilized us to do a lot for others, but we did all that for you.”

Two engineers returned with the sound rig, and Trudy turned to consult with them. Clay was briefly speechless, but finally said in my ear, “Uh…what happened to Conan?”

“Viewers got him fired several months after you disappeared. Last I heard, he was doing stand-up in the Catskills.”

Jerome was conversing with some people below. “Yo, man,” he called up to Clay, “you might want to talk to these folks.” Tentatively, holding my hand tight, he made his way from the now busy dock down to them.

A woman in a wheelchair smiled up at us. “I have MS. When you last toured I was still walking. In fact I chased your bus for a block after you played in Richmond! I wasn’t sure I’d live long enough to see you again, but I’m thankful I did.”

Clay crouched beside her and hugged her. “Thank you. I’m so sorry...”

“Hush. I’m sure you did what you felt you had to. Knowing you, you couldn’t do any less.” She pointed out her daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter, beaming nearby. “I’ve got four generations here. We all listened to you talk just now, out here on car radios and computers. You say it’s personal, fine. I don’t know and I don’t care to know. We got you back, and that’s all that matters to me.”

A young man with an oddly intent stare edged through the crowd. He stuck out his hand toward Clay, his motion almost robot-like, and reeled off his name, address and date of birth. His manner was instantly odd; but Clay’s stance changed just as quickly, at once more relaxed and focused. “I have autism,” the man said—of course, and Clay, trained in the signs, had recognized it immediately. “My father and my mother thought I would not have a ‘normal’ life, and they would not let me do things. But I was able to go to summer camp in 2008 because of your foundation, and be with other children who did not have autism. Your foundation also trained a Boy Scout leader in my hometown, and so I was able to be a Boy Scout, and learn how to behave toward people. Now, I have a job, I am married, and I have a son. He doesn’t have autism, but he is a Boy Scout too, and I am an assistant troop leader. I am very proud of him.” The man’s smile was quirky but genuine. “I have a life. It is an autistic life, and it is my life. I might not have a life at all if you had not cared about people like me. I want to thank you.”

Clay nodded. “You’re welcome. Do you mind being hugged? I like to hug people.”

“I like hugs too, but I can’t always tell when they are appropriate.”

“Well, this would be an appropriate time,” Clay grinned, while I stood in awe. It was amazing to watch him in action, how he knew exactly what to say to be understood, and how to say it. “Thank you for telling me about yourself. It makes me feel very good to know I did something to help you.”

A truck turned into the parking lot, marked with TV station letters and logos. Clay waved to them, seeming much calmer. “Looks like you helped all these people without knowing it,” I said to him. “Maybe this is that purpose we were looking for.” He nodded slowly, but did not speak.

The TV crew set their RC hover-cam aloft and started filming. The sound rig was set up and ready, and Trudy gestured Clay back up onto the dock. The crowd had started to chant his name, but shushed when she hooked a mike-monitor, the size and form of a cel phone, over her ear and began to speak. “Clay tells me he feels a little unworthy of all this fuss.” The assemblage hollered their disbelief. “I told him we didn’t care if he’d been sleepin’ in a coffin for the past twenty years, just as long as he’s back now!” Her joke was greeted with whoops of laughter. “Heck, I figure if he’d point us the right way and give us time to pull up a few tomato stakes, Clay Nation could even clear up that kind of problem for him!” she added to howls and applause, then turned to Clay.

His hands were unsteady as he fit the monitor into his ear and draped the mike behind it. “I, uh, I have no clue what to say here…I do feel very undeserving of your attention.” Shouts of protest replied. “I’ve been dealing with some things, trying to do it alone, but lately I’ve been reminded that I don’t have to be. I believe with all my heart that God has spared my life for a reason. You’re a part of that, I think, and if you’re willing to accept me, knowing I’m not perfect, knowing I’ve failed, then I’ll keep searching for that reason.” A wall of sound rose in response, solid love and appreciation from every throat. “You all are absolutely amazing!” he cried. “I love you, and I missed you every day!”

“Sing!” people started to call.

“Sing? Uh, okay. Hope I remember the words—“

“Don’t worry, we do!” someone yelled, and everybody including Clay laughed.

“Good. Okay. Help me out then. This song was always for you, anyway.” He began to sing ‘The Way’ a cappella. After one full-throated scream, the parking lot fell silent. I had stayed at the foot of the steps beside Jerome, and as I looked around every eye, many wet with tears, was fixed on the gaunt figure up on the dock. A few people stood with arms folded—the skeptics who still needed to be convinced. Despite Clay’s invitation, no one sang along, at least not aloud, though many lips moved silently. The faces covered a vast age range, from grandparents to kids who hadn’t even been born when Clay’s first recordings set in motion a movement that would change the face of popular music forever. When the last note faded, the air erupted, and a breathless little smile woke on Clay’s lips.

Around me I heard snatches of conversation: noting his glasses, or his bracelet, or how painfully thin he was. “He looks like a junkie,” one woman in purple fretted to her friends. “Or a convict.”

“Can I squelch rumors before they start?” I put in. “No drugs, no jail. You can quote me on both.”

They sighed with relief, as Clay kidded with the crowd. “You all must have been American Idol fans. See if you remember this.” On ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ he got plenty of help, people clapping and singing along. He almost seemed to grow as I watched, the adulation building him up more swiftly and brightly than my blood had rebuilt his vampire health. By the end of the song the smile had claimed his whole face. “Okay, one more, but then I promised my mom I’d come home and cut her grass.

“If one day you discover him broken down, he’s lost everything…”

The fans’ laughter dissolved into a collective gasp, and then voices rose around me.

“No cars, no fancy clothes to make him who he’s not,

The woman at his side is all that he has got…”

Clay came to the edge of his makeshift stage and looked down into my face as he sang. My determined composure slipped away at the incredible love in his eyes. It was plain how true these words were to him; I had for a while been all he had in this world, and from the glow on his face he might feel I still was. The knowledge overwhelmed me the way the adoration of his steadfast fans had him. I started to cry, and felt arms unexpectedly go around me: the women in purple. “Damn, he loves you,” one marveled. “Keep taking care of him for us, okay?”

I nodded. The crowd was in full voice now, not drowning Clay out, but giving this favorite of his songs back to him as their gift.

“Will he be your anchor when the dark unfolds,

Will he always love you the best that he knows,

Will he give his life up to be all he can,

Is that, is that, is that…how you measure a man.”

In one more amazing moment, the crowd parted spontaneously after the last song for us to make our way to our car. Clay hugged Jerome again and all but ordered him to the house for supper, and the big man left with a wide grin. We waved to the multitude of happy weeping faces as we drove away. “You were wonderful,” I said. “You scared me silly a couple of times, but you were wonderful. Especially ‘Measure of a Man’. That was always one of my favorites.”

“I don’t know if I can sing that one much anymore.” His tone was regretful. “It reminds me of everything I haven’t been.”

“Really? How strange. It reminds me of everything you have been.” I did not belabor the point, only left him to think on it while I drove. After a few moments, I glanced over and caught him gazing out the car window with a thoughtful half-smile. The afternoon was sunny and warm, like the one Clay had described from twenty years ago, when he had left his mother’s house for a meeting he had hoped would put long strain to rest: a trip that had ended in an ambush, a trap that held him helpless as his very life was ripped from him. Perhaps this day had redeemed, a little, the memory of that one. “Hey, Lawnmower Man, you got some sunscreen?”

“No,” he admitted guiltily, so we stopped at a convenience store. We were headed for the front with a jumbo bottle in hand to check ourselves out when I spied a familiar sign, its red and green design unchanged for most of a century. I poked Clay and pointed to it. When we got to the car with the bag, he pulled a Krispy Kreme out and stared at it as if contemplating the Holy Grail; he held it and sniffed at it, and finally took a bite. I was all set to be flip and playful and probably beg for a bite, but the undisguised happiness on his face so moved me I just put my arm around his shoulders and sat quietly with him for a while before I started the car. It was as if that simple item of food were an emblem of all he had lost and was working to regain a piece at a time.

“Home at last,” I said as we pulled into Faye’s driveway, and then laughed. “I’m sorry. It just felt so natural to say that. Like when your mom said ‘when you all get home’. I was surprised she included me, but I, well, didn’t have much of a home life as a kid, so that felt really nice, really special.”

“You never have said much about your family.” Clay’s eyes sharpened with understanding, and he folded his sticky fingers around mine. “My mother’s home is my home, or at least I hope it still is; and if you’re going to be my wife, that makes it your home too.”

His gentle logic made me smile with hope, but the donut glaze on my hand made me giggle. “Here you go again, making a mess that needs cleaning up.”

“Oh, my goodness, you’re right.” He grinned, brought my hand to his mouth, and began to lick the sugary icing away. It was a secret joke between us, but my body’s reaction was anything but humorous.

“Clay,” I gasped, “you really are evil, you do know that, right?”

He just chuckled, and refused to relinquish my hand until his tongue had covered every inch of it. Then he paused, as if struck by a thought. “Now that I’ve got a point of comparison—your blood really did taste kind of like this, and we never figured out why. Letitia said once that some vampires like to scare their victims—they said fear made the blood taste stronger—but that couldn’t explain this, could it? Were you that afraid of me?”

“Absolutely not. But maybe other emotions would affect the taste, or the perception of it. I loved you then, and I wanted you.”

“So you tasted sweet to me?” he grinned. “Maybe. I’d much rather eat a donut and kiss you, though.” Both of which he proceeded to do, with obvious pleasure and much vigor, before we slipped into the house. Miss Faye pronounced her approval of Clay’s interview and performance. I checked the net again, to find still photos and video already posted. Even the doubters were convinced this was the real deal: Clay Aiken was back. Speculation ran wild as to the reasons he had vanished, and equally so as to the reasons for his sudden return. I was quietly satisfied to see a large number of fans voicing variations of his famous quote ‘here’s to not caring’. Of theories about the latter, I featured prominently in most, naturally since Clay had said as much. The guesses as to exactly why and how I had coaxed him back into the world, however, were legion and often hilarious. At least no one was taking Trudy’s vampire jokes seriously.

I folded my computer and went to the kitchen in search of more lemonade. Faye sat at the table, looking out the window. Outside, Clay, in baggy shorts and an ancient T-shirt, busily pushed her old-fashioned gas mower around the back yard. Raleigh trotted several steps behind him, then lay down until he next passed her. “I should get one of those new kinds, where you sit on the porch and drive it with a remote,” she said, “but prettying up the house hasn’t been high on my to-do list.” I nodded; sadness moved a lot of things down the priority ranking. It was especially telling, coming from a woman whose career had been spent helping others ‘pretty up’ their homes.

The sunscreen sat on the table. “He did put some of this on, didn’t he?”

“I think so, but he probably needs more—he never listens to me though!”

I marched outside and planted my barefoot self in the path of oncoming traffic, brandishing the bottle. Clay slowed, stopped, shut the mower off and flopped down at the old wooden picnic table nearby with arms outflung. “I didn’t know being hot, sweaty and sore could feel this good,” he exulted. Personally, I didn’t know hot and sweaty could look that good on a man. Auburn ringlets hugged his damp neck, and his wet T-shirt clung enticingly along the lines of his chest.

When I handed him the sunscreen, he squirted a bit on his arms. “Oh, please,” I groaned and took it back. He sat with eyes half-shut and a look of utter bliss while I slathered every inch of his exposed skin, already pink. “I guess you’ll expect me to wait on you like this when we’re married,” I mock-grumbled.

His eyes popped open, and he caught his breath briefly, as if he had just received some priceless gift. “’When we’re married’,” he repeated. “I never dared imagine I’d ever hear that.”

“You’re stuck with me,” I shrugged, and sat and looked at him looking at me, and was profoundly thankful for the twists and turns that had brought us together. “Think I’ll sit out here while you finish up,” I said when he finally got up. “I love to smell fresh-cut grass.”

“Me too. One of the few things I’m not allergic to. You’d better have some of this too, then.” Clay sat back down and spread sunscreen on my arms, then my legs. I found myself sighing almost as deeply as he had; the steady strokes of his strong fingers felt so good. Then he nudged me to turn around where I sat, so he could get my bare shoulders. It placed us in a position like that in which he had fed from me, and while I had given gladly of myself to him then, I was more glad now that he need no longer exist that way. The same thought must have occurred to him, because instead of the cool splat of lotion on my skin I felt the moist heat of his mouth. “Much better than before,” he murmured and pulled me back against him. From my waist his hands slid up my body, until my breasts nestled in the firm gentle cups of his big hands. “This is how you wanted me to touch you then, isn’t it?”

“Yes—but, um…” Desire tingled through me, and if we had been anywhere else on the planet I knew exactly how this would end. “Clay, we’re in your mother’s back yard—she may be looking out the window right now—“

“Fine,” he breathed. “I’m not gonna ravish you in front of my mom, but if she hasn’t figured out yet how much I love you, she’s not as smart as I know she is.”

“Don’t start what you can’t finish, though—unless you expect me to sneak into your room after lights out. I really don’t want to offend her.”

After a little more nuzzling Clay sighed, “You’re right.” He doused my shoulders with sunscreen, stole one more kiss and headed back for the mower. Raleigh curled up at my feet and drowsed, and I enjoyed the balmy breeze while he completed his work. The yard ended at the edge of some woods, and he stopped there as evening started to fall and motioned for me to come. As I joined him, he took my hand and we walked a short distance into the trees. “The day before I had to leave town, when Mom got the cookout together, I ran back here to throw up.” He halted and looked behind—we were just out of sight of the picnic table. “Right about here, in fact.” The light wind creaked through the limbs overhead. “My body was already changing. I couldn’t tolerate food, or light. No amount of sunscreen could have stopped the blisters that broke out on my skin.” Clay turned slowly in place. “It was the last time I saw the sun, until last Sunday morning. All that time, it was as if it had happened yesterday. It felt so immediate, the last day before a night that would never end. But now—it’s funny, it’s like I woke up, and that finally feels distant, like it did happen twenty years ago.”

“Because it did.” I took his hands in mine. “You’re letting it go now, so you can move on. So we can move on.”

“I hope so.” As we kissed, a sudden puff of chill air made us both jump and hold onto each other, and a faint barking reached us. “Raleigh? Where are ya, girl?” We retraced our steps, and saw the old dog at the border of the grass. “C’mon!” Clay called, but she refused to set paw among the trees, and leaped on him with whines and yips when he emerged. “Let’s go on in,” he said with another shiver, and I agreed.

As it turned out I’d been a bit paranoid—Faye hadn’t been watching us at all, or so she said. She’d been busy with another surprise for Clay: she’d found his old contact lens prescription and ordered replacements. “They still sell the kind you used to wear,” she told him, “the kind that last a month, even though they said most people wear them now for a year! I thought you’d want to see how your vision had changed though, so these should do you till you can get to the eye doctor.”

Neither of us mentioned that we suspected his eyesight hadn’t changed any. Clay was delighted, and downright overjoyed when Jerome arrived just in time for supper. He stayed a good while, and after he left I pulled together a report for InquiringMinds on Clay’s first public appearance. It was supposed to be the exclusive Clay had promised me, the night I found him, but he wasn’t much help; every time I thought of something truly scrumptious to say about him he tried to shoot it down. I didn’t care that much. I had the only exclusive I needed or wanted, in those dazzling eyes that followed my every move, in those lips that whispered teasing secrets in the hallway. I got something written anyhow and sent it off, pondering whether it might be the last piece I wrote for the tabloid website. Like Clay, I too had been reminded I didn’t have to exist the way I had. When the late news came on we all watched Clay’s performance at the radio station. Trudy’s vampire wisecracks still gave me a carefully concealed shudder, but it passed and we headed off to bed. I was no happier about having to sleep without Clay’s arms around me, but settled down with hope in my belly as comforting as Faye’s home cooking. With a little prayer of thanks I drifted off—and woke in the darkest hour of night shuddering as if I’d been tossed into the teeth of a storm.

The bedroom was freezing. I tried to reach for another layer of cover and could not move. A half-recollected dream left me grasping for something beyond a rapidly fading image of eyes bleached of their vivid greenness and pinning me beneath a baleful stare. The sheets were wound around me as tightly as a mummy’s swaddle. Though the windows were shut, I swore icy fingers of moving air groped my cheek. Reason fought to win over fright, as I fought free from the twisted ropes of the bedclothes. The chill seemed less by the time I got out of bed, whether because I’d worked up a sweat tossing and turning in forgotten nightmare or from some other cause. The cause didn’t matter—however foolish my fear, I couldn’t stay in that room. I found my old kimono tossed over a box of gifts from fans, wrapped it around me and slipped out.

The house was still, as if slumbering itself. I tried to move with the same quiet, but the door that was my destination opened before I even reached it. Clay stepped into the corridor, barefoot in his T-shirt and boxers. My heart started to pound, and I ran the last few steps into his arms. “You’re shaking!” he whispered and drew me into his room, nudging the door shut behind us with his foot.

I breathed deeply, calmed by his embrace, and feeling really dumb. “I know. Did I make that much noise?” He shook his head. “Then how’d you know I was coming?”

“I don’t know.” His fair face was troubled, and the look of unease only deepened when I got over my embarrassment and described my experience. He scooted a sleepy Raleigh to the foot of his bed and we sat down.

“I promise, I wasn’t ‘sneaking in after lights out’,” I said, “despite the fact that I threatened to. I know I was silly, running down here after a bad dream like a big baby. I just knew I’d feel better if I could be with you for a few minutes.” I moved to stand, but he refused to let me go. “I’ll be fine,” I insisted, though I suspected I might not be. I wondered if anybody would notice if I camped in the car.

Clay inclined his head toward his bed, the covers a tangled mess too, though not as much so as mine. “I couldn’t sleep either. If you hadn’t come, I would have gone to you probably. Please stay.”

Raleigh snorted once in canine annoyance when we slid under the covers and dislodged her, and then resettled herself. The last thing I remembered seeing was Clay’s eyes on me, smoothing my fears away with their gentle inescapable pressure.

+++

The reassuringly old-time sound of a phone ringer woke me Wednesday morning. Alone in Clay’s bed, I gulped, slid to the floor, and looked both ways before scurrying to my room. I felt foolishly guilty, even though we hadn’t done a thing except sleep; I also felt exhausted, as if I had done everything but. The night’s anxiety had drained me more than I thought, I supposed.

By contrast, as I found when I finally dragged myself out, Clay was full of energy. He stood in the kitchen on his mom’s phone again. Faye sat at the table sipping juice and watching him with a pleased smile as she greeted me. “The phone’s been ringin’ off the hook since dawn, just about! I’m going to have to go find that old answering machine, I guess.” After seeing the TV footage yesterday, two of Clay’s old friends who had refused to believe he had returned had called. So had his record label, apparently not as displeased with his reemergence as I had feared, to schedule a meeting next week in New York. So had the county sheriff’s department, asking if he could come sing the national anthem for their annual charity softball game Thursday night. While I listened to him work that out, and watched his face alight with excitement, I dove into bacon and eggs and biscuits as though I were the one who hadn’t eaten in twenty years.

Clay hung up the phone and all but skipped over to the table. I slugged back some coffee and formed a grin, which apparently didn’t make it completely across my face. “Something wrong?” he asked.

“Just didn’t sleep well,” I replied in the same deadpan. Clay touched my cheek with a small frown of concern, then swiped a strip of bacon from my plate and was off again as the phone resumed its activity. As happy as I was to see him this way, worry poked me in the ribs; perhaps I’d been right all along, and there was no space for me in his newly reconstituted superstar world. I tried to shoo the doubts away; they were born of fatigue, I was sure, and nothing more.

Faye was talking about their friends at church, how eager they were to see Clayton, and how she hoped he could go with her to service tonight. I was trying to focus on her when Clay abruptly called, “Hey—somebody turn on the TV, please?”

At the alarm in his voice, I went into the living room and found the switch. The receiver was still set to the station we had watched him on the night before. Now a reporter’s voice rode over images of dour-faced police and EMTs loading a covered gurney into an ambulance. “The young woman’s body was found early this morning on the shoulder of a road on the north side of town.” The picture changed to the face of a thin girl, tears behind her glasses. ‘She walked to my house so she could ride with me to the radio station to see Clay, ‘cause her car was in the shop. She was so excited. We hung around here talkin’ bout him half the night, till after we watched him on the news. I recorded it, an’ promised her I’d burn her a copy. Then she started home…” She sobbed and turned away from the camera.

A large hand on my shoulder moved me aside. Clay stood in the doorway, phone cord stretched to its limit, staring at the screen. “Preliminary autopsy reports were inconclusive as to cause of death, though significant blood loss was noted,” the reporter continued, and suddenly I felt faint. I turned, and Clay’s face was as white as it ever had been when undead. I wrapped my arms around him as he spoke into the phone. “Yeah, I see it…yeah, it sure is awful. Did you all film her yesterday?…Could you send it over?…Thanks. Okay, uh, maybe I can come by around midday tomorrow, although I can’t promise anything right now…I will…Bye now.” He hung up. “The TV station wants me to do an interview tomorrow.” His tone was flat and dazed.

At first I could not speak. Faye had joined us; she was shocked, but it was not the same shock I saw in Clay’s eyes, the same shock he could probably see in mine—from the clues we dared not speak about in front of her. My brain finally unfroze, and I asked, “Do you think anybody at the radio station knew who she was?” While Clay phoned them, I ran for my memobook and downloaded the footage the TV station had sent over. I unfolded my monitor from its usual wallet size to full, so Faye and I could watch the brief snippet of a girl with sweaty hair and a pierced nose, her sharp face softened by a happy glow as she yelled Clay’s name. Clay looked at the screen only once, at that moment, and as if he were looking into the mouth of perdition.

I accessed the local paper, the News and Observer, but their coverage held little additional information. More bad news arrived when Clay got off the phone. “Trudy’s assistant says nobody there knew the woman. Trudy’s out sick. First time in years, the man said. She told him she didn’t know what she might have caught, just that she had a stiff neck, and felt weak and dizzy.”

How he was keeping his composure I had no idea, because I was perilously close to snapping. It had to have been learned from the years of struggling to control his emotions, lest the vampire in him use them against him. I stared at the computer screen, where the early and late editions of the N&O’s front page now sat side by side. I printed both out. The early front bore a spectacular picture of Clay, head tipped back, eyes closed, with a smile bright as sunrise. In the later edition it was gone, replaced by coverage of the inexplicable death of one of his fans. I looked down at them, and up into Clay’s face. His expression was carefully neutral, but his eyes were almost wild, and suddenly I was very, very angry.

“I’d like to go take a look at this,” I said, mostly to Faye. “We get more things like this in LA, sad to say, than you do around here, so even your cops may not be as accustomed to looking at such as scene as I am. If I can spot something that could help, I have to try.” I hurried off to shower and dress, and was sitting on the bed tying my shoes when I felt Clay’s presence, almost as clearly as I had before his healing. He stood in the doorway, dressed in jeans and a long sleeved shirt. “I thought you might want some time to yourself with your mom and Raleigh,” I said as I stood up. “Or is there something you need to do?”

“I need to go with you.” I could think of two dozen reasons just off the top of my head why he shouldn’t, but the grim look in his eyes silenced every one. I kissed him, and even his lips were less responsive, as though his flesh were as numbed by horror as his mind must be.

Shifting into Crusading Reporter mode helped me maintain some semblance of stability as we roved over the Triangle. Clay’s newly restored media contacts got me names and addresses. I paced the area where the body had been found. There was no sign of a struggle, a weapon, or a vehicle, and that lack in itself set off warning buzzers in my head. I talked to the dead woman’s family and friends, while Clay sat in the car hidden behind mirrored shades and an old hat. We hardly spoke a word all morning. To cheer Clay, I located an old burger joint I remembered him wistfully mentioning once; but he only picked at his food and finally threw it away. “I want to see Trudy,” he said.

“So do I,” I replied.

The Radio Raleigh manager answered her door-call in a caftan, and feeling well enough to be appalled that we were seeing her this way. “I’ve never felt so bad,” she said. “Flu, mono, nothing ever nailed me like this. And awful dreams, too, no wonder I was worn out! You know how you dream you can’t move? It was like that, only it seemed to go on forever.”

I listened with an increasing sense of certainty. Clay sat stock still, looking toward Trudy but not exactly at her. Of course, that could have been because he had taken off the sunglasses and not put his glasses on, though they were in his shirt pocket. Not wanting to tire her, we only stayed a few minutes. As we started to leave I hugged her, and then paused. “Hey, Trudy,” I asked casually, cautiously, “when’d you bruise your shoulder?”

Without even looking, or asking what I meant, her hand went to the juncture of her shoulder and neck, exposed now by the loose fit of her garment. “Oh,” she shrugged, “dunno. I noticed it this morning. It’s not too big and it doesn’t hurt. I’m sure I just bumped into a boom at the station or something.”

I was equally sure that if I could get my paws on the autopsy report on the woman found along the road, I would find a small unexplained bruise at the same spot. Trudy hugged Clay at the door; his response was almost perfunctory, and he walked straight to the car like an automaton. As soon as I slammed the car door, I exploded. “Damn, damn, damn!!” I pounded the steering wheel. “This is pissing me off, and the hell of it is, I think it’s meant to. Not me, specifically, but you. Whoever’s doing this, they know you, Clay. They know what was done to you, and they know that somehow you escaped it. They targeted people who mean something to you—friends, fans—and they timed it to wreck your homecoming. Whether they’re threatening you, or just sending a message that vampires are still around here, I don’t know.” Beside me, Clay was a million miles away: silent and impassive, his eyes hidden behind the shades that reflected my own fury back at me. I was furious partly because I felt so irrationally guilty—hadn’t I just been selfishly worrying that normal life might take him from me? I didn’t mean it, I pleaded. I’d let him go in a heartbeat, if it meant his heart would keep beating. Knowing he was happy and safe would be enough. It wouldn’t have to be ‘happy with me’, just happy… For the first time since his healing he was withdrawing from me, back into the shell where he had hidden his anguish. “Vernon could have turned others. Didn’t you tell me he said a woman he picked up in a bar turned him? He could easily have told any of them about you, and maybe now they’re jealous, or just ready for a little game-playing.”

“Nice theory,” Clay said at last, “but there’s another possibility.”

Did he mean other vampires? Or was he in denial that the undead were involved at all? Perhaps, so soon freed from the prison of their existence, he could not even bring himself to think of them, the ones who had rejected him because he rejected their dissolute lifestyle. I couldn’t say I blamed him for recoiling from the thought. “I’m listening,” I said.

He bowed his head and sat for what felt like an eternity. I put my hand over his, and got no answering movement. I wasn’t angry now; I was scared—not of any vampire ever made, but of whatever was going on in Clay’s head. When he finally spoke, it was almost inaudible. “What if Kim was right?”

“About what?”

“She didn’t believe healing a vampire could be that easy. She knew how crafty it was, how it could overpower my will. Maybe the only vampire in Raleigh arrived on a plane on Monday.”

After I picked my jaw up, I replied, “You have said some stupid things, pal, but this one takes the checkered flag. How, pray tell, could you still be a vampire? You’ve been out in the sun for four days, and eating everything in sight—“

“And having a lot of trouble sleeping, and I couldn’t eat at all today. What if it just—changed somehow, if I’m back where I was right after I was turned? I prowled around at night, and I fed, and I couldn’t remember it. I wouldn’t let myself remember. Both those women were near me yesterday. It makes sense the vampire in me would target—“

“No. Hell no.” I jerked his dark glasses off. “Is this why you won’t wear your glasses? You’re looking to see if your vision regenerates again? Not gonna happen. You’re alive, Clay. You’re human, mortal, normal. As normal as a gorgeous geek who claims he’s in love with me could be, anyhow.” The green eyes squinted, straining to focus on me. “If nothing else will convince you, need I remind you you couldn’t have slid out last night, because I was with you?”

“Not all night,” he countered. “Besides, you could’ve been right there, and I could’ve made you forget. I could’ve left and come back, and you’d never know. For that matter—dear Lord, Rebecca, I could’ve fed from you and you’d never know.”

“It didn’t work on me!” I almost yelled. “It never worked on me, remember? You tried to make me forget things, and it never worked. I don’t know that I’m immune to all vampires’ powers of persuasion, but I certainly was to yours!” I had to put this subject to rest before my anger overflowed, so I went for humor instead. “Now, as for your mortal-male powers of persuasion, or rather seduction, I’m anything but immune to those, thankfully.”

Clay didn’t rise to the bait. “You said you dreamed about me, before you woke so scared,” he persisted. “And you were still exhausted this morning.”

“Which considering how little sleep I actually got last night makes perfect sense. If I were God, I think I’d be offended if I gave somebody the kind of gift you’ve been given and they still doubted me.”

My irritation drained away when Clay’s trembling hands clasped mine. “I don’t doubt God, just my understanding. Maybe I wanted to be healed so badly I convinced myself I was. Maybe the vampire is using my wanting against me. I’ve told you all along I don’t feel this is over. You say sometimes you ‘know things’ but I never did. Nothing weird ever happened to me when—when I was human before.” He pressed my fingers to his lips, once, then pulled them away as if frightened he’d reacquire a taste for them. “That scares me too. Why do I feel this foreboding, like I felt the night I was turned? And how did I know you were coming to me last night before you got there?”

He wasn’t arguing to be contrary, I realized; he was truly, deeply afraid the darkness had not let him go. I scooted closer, and stroked his cheek with my free hand. “You shaved this morning, didn’t you? I know you did, but I feel stubble: human hair, no matter what your fears tell you. I’ve done a lot of research on psychic stuff for XtheUnknown.com. Paranormal experiences often open people up to talents they didn’t even know they had. This sense you describe may fade over time, or it may stay, a small good gift that came out of all that pain. Personally, if it tells you when I need you, I’m all for it.” Finally he dared look at me, fear and hope mingled in his beautiful bottomless eyes. “It looks as if that gift, your gift, was right all along about one thing. This isn’t over, unfortunately. There is a vampire here, but it’s not you, Clay. Yeah, I know things occasionally, and I know this with everything in me. It’s not you. Put your glasses on, and let’s go home, and I’ll prove it.”

We arrived to find Faye bustling around the kitchen, scaring up supper before church. Clay looked half sick with fear, but then he lifted his head and put on a smile for his mother, along with a nice shirt and a tie. I begged off, insisting I’d feel like a third wheel, and that Clay should have some space with his friends without me in the way. In reality, I needed the time to implement the plan I had formed while sitting in the car with him. It was going to take some creative hacking to gather the information I’d need to prove Clay’s fears groundless. Still, I felt uneasy as I watched them leave.

In the quiet of the living room I spread out on the sofa and was busily clicking away when a rap on the door stopped me cold. Vampires don’t knock, dummy, I told myself, but peered cautiously around the curtain before I approached the door. Brett pushed past me and inside. “Where’s my mom, and what the hell are you doing answering her door?”

“Your mother and your brother are at church,” I retorted, “which in my humble opinion, which I realize means nothing to you, would do you a world of good too.”

“And why aren’t you there?” he jibed

“I have work to do.” I turned my back on him and returned to my nest. “Work which I hope will benefit everyone around here. If you want to wait for them, you can have a seat and be quiet.”

He did sit silently for a few moments and watch me. “Figured you two would’ve appreciated by now that you’re not welcome an’ moved on.”

“You must not keep up with the news, or you’d have noticed Clay seems to be quite welcome.”

Brett sneered. “Yeah, he always was big on that. Sweet smiles an’ worthy causes. So where the hell was all that charitable impulse when our mother needed—“

I put the computer down and stood up. “I won’t presume to tell you to get out of your mother’s house, because I respect her too much for that. But I will tell you that every time you open your mouth you show your total ignorance.” I stalked across the room till I stood in front of the chair where he sat. “You cannot conceive of what Clay has suffered, or how desperately he wanted to come home, or how terrified he was of what he might bring down on all of you if he tried. You can’t begin to imagine how utterly, completely alone he has been for all these years. You have no clue. None. And you act like you wouldn’t want a clue if it were offered. When it is—and it will be, somehow, if Clay has his way—maybe you’ll feel some remorse for the way you’re treating him. I hope so, for his sake, because if you don’t, it’ll disappoint him more than he’s disappointed now.” Tears ran down my face, but my fists tightened with rage. “Until then, don’t you speak a word in my presence about things you know nothing about. Clay’s been hurt more than any one person should, and as far as it lies in my power, I will not let him be hurt anymore.” Brett opened his mouth. “You don’t believe me? Then try me,” I snarled.

Slowly he stood, his face betraying something beyond the mean-spirited bitterness that was all I had seen from him. For all I knew though, it could have been mere unease as to what this crazy woman might do. “You’re right that I don’t understand what’s going on here,” he said, “but you’re wrong if you think I don’t care.”

He left, and I wiped my face off and got back to work. I had hardly sat down, though, when the door opened again and Faye came in. “Rebecca, was Brett here? I swear I thought we passed him on the road.”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I think he wanted to talk to you. He was going to stay, but we…had words. I wasn’t trying to be rude, but I had to make it clear I wouldn’t listen to him insult Clay when he has no idea what he’s talking about.”

Faye sighed. “I wish it hadn’t come to this…They both get their stubbornness from me, y’know. I hope they can talk, and work things out.” I peered around her in time to see Clay’s bedroom door down the hall closing. “I do want to thank you, dear, for caring so much about Clayton, and trying to protect him.”

I wanted to go see him, but a silly fond smile crept across my face at the mention of his name. “It’s not as if he can’t take care of himself, but, well, I kinda can’t help myself.”

When I shrugged, she smiled too. “It’s hard not to when you love someone,” she agreed.

I don’t know why I was at all surprised. “Don’t blame Clay. It was my idea not to say anything to you. It seemed like one shock at a time was all you should be asked to deal with. I’m sorry we weren’t honest with you.”

“Oh, you were,” she chuckled. “Just not by talkin’. You two are like magnets—whenever you’re in the same space you move towards each other. At church tonight, he was certainly happy to see his friends, and to be in the house of the Lord; but he fidgeted like a little boy sometimes. I think he was wishing you were there.”

I didn’t say he might have been more concerned about being struck by lightning, or some other picturesque display of divine displeasure, but the thought of his anxiety tore at me. “I had some work to do, looking up some things. I think it may help him…get adjusted. I’d better go show him what I found.”

“How did you two meet?” she asked as I got up.

“I, uh…” I shook my head. “I hope I can tell you one day, but it’s all wound up in the rest, and I can’t, not right now.” The disappointment that flickered across her face saddened me. “He told you the truth, Miss Faye. It’s not a matter of trust, or lack of it. It—it’s what you said before. It’s about how you want to protect what you love. The only way Clay could see to do that was to leave.” That made her pause and think. “I know that doesn’t make things any clearer, but please be patient. Getting back into life has been harder for him than he thought. Actually, it has for me too, and I wasn’t even at the middle of it. I still have bad dreams about it.”

“Like last night, when you went to Clayton’s room?”

The question was gentle, and not judgmental. “Did I make that much noise?”

“No, but when you’ve laid in a house so silent for so long, every little sound gets bigger.”

Impulsively I hugged her. “Would it upset you if I stayed with him tonight? For all that I want to protect him, I feel much safer when I’m with him.” She searched my face. “If it makes you feel any better—I mean, we’re not planning on, you know, doing anything—but Clay has asked me to marry him, and I said yes.”

Faye laughed. “Now that doesn’t surprise me. He always said he wouldn’t get married until he found a girl with some spunk. Go on, sweetie. I’m going to wash up and turn in.”

Down the hall, Clay’s door was barely ajar, and I peeked around. Moonlight streamed through the slightly opened bedroom window, and illuminated his broad shoulders where he knelt beside his bed. I slipped in, eased to the floor, and put my arms around him. My thoughts formed no words, but my heart overflowed with love that was its own prayer. “You okay?” I whispered when he raised his head.

He smiled a little, his sweet face as much at peace as I had ever seen it. “I don’t know about okay,” he said, “but I’m definitely better. I needed to go to church. I needed to be reminded.”

“Good.” I squeezed him till he laughed. “I’ve got some things that’ll make you feel even better. Here’s one.” I indicated my computer, and handed it to him. “Let me go jump into my jammies and I’ll be right back to show you.”

“Your jammies? Uh, Rebecca, weren’t you the one who didn’t want—“

“Oh, that’s the other thing,” I grinned on my way out the door. “I have your mom’s permission to stay the night, and I didn’t even have to promise we wouldn’t fool around.” At his look of consternation I giggled, and kept it up all the way to my room. I tossed on my pink silk shorties and dashed back. Raleigh had trotted in and curled up on the little rug by the bed.. I shut the door before I sprawled on the bed, propped myself on one elbow and unfolded the monitor screen. Clay stretched out behind me, peering over my shoulder as I pulled up the results of my research. “There’s a series of deaths, illnesses and assaults, reaching back to 2002 in the Triangle and continuing up to the present, that all bear features of vampire attacks. I suspect a few of the less drastic reports would be the ones you fed from right after your turning, before you were conscious of what you were doing. To rule those out, I need your help.” I displayed a map, and Clay, as best he could recall or guess, culled them out.

His intent concentration calmed me—hopefully this would convince him his healing was true. I felt a surge of relief…but that wasn’t the only surge I felt. I was acutely aware of his body next to mine, and when he reached across me to point to a place on the map his arm brushed along my breast and sent a thrill through me. Down, libido! I ordered, and strove to focus on the task at hand, only to be distracted anew by his hands. I loved to watch them, so strong and expressive as they moved across the screen and the keypad. Finally they stopped. “So,” Clay’s voice came from behind me, “that’s it. If we assume the attacks last night are part of the same pattern—and they sure look like it—then they started before I was ever turned, and continued while I was nowhere near.” His arm went around my waist, and his face pressed against the back of my shoulder. “You’re right. It’s not me. It can’t be me.”

“I hate to say ‘I told you so’, but…” He chuckled, still holding me, breathing slowly as if to savor each lungful. The bedroom was lit only by the soft glow from the monitor. I ran my hand down his arm, and he sighed and rubbed his face against me like a cat. For a moment I thought my body’s mute need might be met—until a sudden chill swept through the room. Raleigh staggered to her paws and started to bark, as loudly as her feeble old lungs would allow. Clay’s body stiffened, and the gentle pressure on my back vanished as he raised his head. “Clay…do you feel something…strange?”

“Yes,” he whispered, and then shushed Raleigh in a louder voice. She backed up against the closed door, whimpered and cowered.

“It’s like last night in my room.” I started to turn over. “What—“

His arm tensed and held me in place. “Don’t move. Don’t acknowledge it,” he breathed, his mouth by my ear. “He’d like to know we know he’s here. He’d like to think we’re afraid of him.”

Clay’s voice was as taut as his body. Now I suspected I knew what I had narrowly escaped last night—what he could somehow sense far more clearly than I—and I was afraid. “You know who it is,” I murmured. “A vampire?”

“Yes.”

No doubt it was one of those who had scorned Clay for his refusal to yield, and who was now more than just curious as to how he had escaped their fate. “Someone who knows what you were.”

“Yes.” Briefly I wondered how it had gotten inside—maybe the old saw about having to be invited was just that. “And now he’ll know what I’m not.”

Abruptly he moved away from me. Not expecting the removal of his body’s support, I lost balance and rolled onto my back. One glimpse of Clay’s face over me, dark with rage, was all I caught before he descended and his mouth captured mine, fierce and demanding. A startled yelp rose in my throat, swallowed by his forceful kiss. He tore away, his hand over his mouth as if horrified by what he had just done. “Rebecca—“ he started. I grabbed the necktie that dangled brushing my chest and pulled him back down to me, giving as good as I got this time when our lips met. Now he’ll know what I’m not... After that first instant of surprise, I understood, and my fury kindled to join his. “Rebecca—“ he gasped when we parted again, “I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have—but he—“

“I know.” The cold hovered near, but I banished it from my awareness. All I saw was this beautiful man who had defied the offspring of the night, even when their doom held him in its pitiless grasp. Now he yearned to hurl his victory in their cruel undead faces, and so did I. “I don’t want to talk about him. I don’t want to talk.” I held his eyes with mine. “Do you love me, Clayton?”

I couldn’t recall ever having called him by his full name before, but it just came out that way. “Yes. Lord, yes.”

“And I love you. So let’s show ‘em what our love is about. If we’ve got an unwelcome voyeur, let’s give the cold SOB something to look at.”

Clay’s eyes glittered like polished jade. His voice dropped to a low sensuous growl meant for my ears alone. “Tell me how much you want me.”

“Touch me and find out. You know where.” I tugged the knot of his tie loose and started unbuttoning his shirt. “I’ve been wanting you for days. It’s crazy, as few times as we’ve made love, I can hardly remember now what it was like not to be with you. No other man seems real to me. Just now, I was lying here trying to think, trying to be serious, and every time you brushed up against me I—“

My discourse ended with a gasp when he cupped my crotch and stroked the aching flesh through the silk of my shorts, already soaked through with my juices. “Tell me how good that feels,” he purred.

I arched against his hand. “Yes—oh—don’t tease me, Clay, I need you inside me—please—“

“Shh.” He kissed me again while his fingertips slid under the silk and made me squirm with excitement. Then his lips found my neck, exactly where he had fed from me; but no sharp fangs pricked my skin now, nor cold flesh longing for my warmth. These lips brought their own heat, and set me on fire. “I promised I wouldn’t make you beg again.” He reached up to remove his glasses.

“Leave them. They’re sexy.”

His mouth returned to my ear. “You don’t have to overdo it,” he muttered.

“Overdo what? Guys in glasses turn me on. When I was a kid watching X Files reruns, Mulder in his glasses turned me on. I was just too young to know I was turned on.” I turned my head just enough for my mouth to find his ear. “Besides, haven’t we established vampires don’t wear glasses?”

Clay’s darkening eyes held no fury now, or fear. He looked down at me the way he had when he sang to me the day before, the way he had when I refused to leave him to face his end alone: with love so powerful it robbed me of breath in a way even my body’s desire for his could not. Suddenly I was no longer afraid. Suddenly it really didn’t matter that a nasty thing lurked within these walls staring at us. If this man loved me this completely, I felt nothing could harm me. Tears of amazed joy burst from my eyes, and he wrapped his arms around me and pressed his body full length to mine. We lay that way for a minute, whispering love to each other, before I wiggled my shorts down and pulled at his pants. “Ohh, you are so ready,” Clay sighed when he slid into my wet welcoming walls.

“Only for you, Clay. Remember? Only for you, forever.” He smiled and held me tight, kissing the tears from my cheeks, then kissing every inch of me he could reach. Our joined pelvises rocked, slowly at first, then harder and faster, as our breathing grew harder and faster. When climax swept over me I clutched him and buried my face in his chest to muffle my cries—the liquified puddle sloshing around in my brain pan did manage to remind me I didn’t want to wake Faye with screams of ecstasy elicited by her son’s sexual prowess. Clay seemed to have retained the same thought, and seconds later he hid his face in my breasts while his body bucked against mine. I could feel his groans right through my sternum.

As we lay spent, I felt a chill that was not physical. “It’s leaving,” I hissed. Clay nodded slightly. As unsettling as the sensation was, I tried to attend to it, and I sensed something else, though I could not have said how. “It’s mad.”

“I know,” Clay said. Despite myself I shuddered, and his embrace tightened. “I’ll find him. I won’t let him hurt you, I promise.”

After a while, we roused enough to shed the remainder of our clothes and slip under the covers. I was warm and sated enough to almost drift off, then stifled a scream when something landed on the bed with a thump and a grunt. Raleigh lay winded at our feet, and stared up at me with what I would have sworn was a look of doggy puzzlement. “Wow, that was some jump for a little old lady,” I praised her, and thought with a touch of sadness of her and Faye growing old together in this silent house, pining for Clay to come home. “Is it okay if I stay here?” She panted, thumped her tail and curled up, foiling Clay’s efforts to shoo her. I laughed at him, then curled up myself in the security of his arms. I needed my rest, because I didn’t intend for him to be the only one hunting the vampire.

+++

Unfortunately for Clay’s vampire-hunting plans, his Thursday was already packed. Besides the midday appearance on TV and the charity softball game at night, he had agreed to several other requests. After breakfast, I walked out with him. “I’m going to look around town and do some more research,” I said simply.

“You’ll need a way to get ‘around town’. I’ve got to take the rental car, and Mom may need hers.” He escorted me around the back of the house to a small garage. Opening the smaller of the two doors, he reached in and pushed a few buttons. The larger door slowly lifted to reveal the most beautiful car I had ever seen, a little vintage convertible. “Mom says it still runs fine. She doesn’t use it for everyday, but she takes it out every now and then.”

I touched the Volvo’s sleek silver skin in amazement. “She doesn’t mind if I use it?”

“She looked at me like I was crazy when I asked. I gave it to her in ’03, but apparently she never considered it hers to begin with. Which was good, actually, because I wanted it back to give it to you.” I gasped in disbelief. “I know it’s old, but you can get modern stuff installed—autodrive and Cartalk and direction finder and all—“

I threw my arms around him. “You don’t have to do this, Clay!”

“I want to. I could get all maudlin and say I want you to have it if something happens to me—“ I made a strangled noise and clung tighter to him. “But I’m not. I believe God healed me for a reason, and after last night I think I know what it is. I spent too long hiding from God, fearing Him, and even yesterday I was doubting Him. I can’t live that way anymore. If this is what I’m called to do I’ll do it, and believe I have a future beyond it.”

“We have a future. You said it yourself, when you said you believed God sent me to help you. A tall order, but I’m up for it.”

“That was before…” He tried to move away, but I would not relent.

“Before what?” I challenged him. “What’s different? What’s changed? Before what?”

“Before I knew he’s still alive!”

Had willful blindness kept me from hearing it the night before, that loaded mixture of dread and hatred in Clay’s voice that could only apply to one person…one vampire. “Oh, God,” I said. “Vernon.”

“Yeah.” He would not look at me. “Now you start to see why I don’t want you mixed up in—“

“I see nothing of the sort,” I cut him off. “I do, however, see why you were so angry last night.”

“I shouldn’t have,” he muttered, eyes cast aside and down as if in shame. “I used you, and all it accomplished was putting you at greater risk.”

“Used me!” I scoffed. “I’ve never been used in my life, and I didn’t start last night. I quite enjoyed pissing him off, rubbing his face in his failure.” I studied Clay’s profile for a few moments, the lush mouth and perfectly sculpted nose and exquisite bone structure, and wondered who could be privy to bringing such beauty into the world and yet hate it enough to kill it—no, worse than kill it. “You’re sure it’s him.”

He nodded, his face still averted. “When he came in last night…it was like the way I knew humans were near, when I was a vampire, and sometimes I knew who. I knew him, as if I heard his voice, or—If I’d walked into his old trailer with my eyes shut, I’d still know where I was, by the smell of stale tobacco and spilled beer and dirty shirts. It was like that.”

“And you didn’t tell me this last night.”

I tried not to sound bitchy or accusing, but Clay’s voice caught a little as though in remorse. “I was so angry. That first moment all I could think was I’ll show you. I’ll show you everything you said to me or thought of me or did to me was wrong. And then—I didn’t know which would scare you worse, knowing or not knowing.”

A fine tremor coursed through him, and he finally looked at me. His clear eyes reflected the welter of emotions in his heart, and pierced me through. “Aaah, I’ll be pissed at you later,” I groaned. “We don’t have time for that foolishness right now. If you know his old haunts I’ll scope them out today. Then I’ll contact my cousin’s ex-wife—she works at the FBI and we stayed tight. They have software they use to map serial killers’ victims and pinpoint where the perp lives. By the time you get home tonight I’ll have a better idea where to start looking.”

Clay shook his head. “I can’t come home tonight, or at all till this is settled. Vampires do have to be invited in, unless a blood relative is in the building. Pardon the pun.”

“Wow.” I exhaled slowly and thought. “I wondered about that. Okay, I’ll get our stuff together and you can pick me up. We’ll find a low-profile motel and work from there.”

:No.” He pressed the car keys into my hand. “Drive the Volvo to LA. The door keys to the bungalow are in a dog biscuit canister on the kitchen counter, so you can lock up and be safe. Wait for me there. The tank’s full—thank heavens not everybody’s gone totally to ethanol. If you leave now you’ll be well over the Smokies and into Tennessee before nightfall. Unless he’s drivin’ around with a trunk full of Carolina dirt or something, he can’t leave the state. I called Kim, and you’re welcome to stay the night with her.”

“Oh, hell no!” I pulled away. “You can call Kim right back and tell her I appreciate what it took for her to offer, but not to make up her spare bed. Don’t try to tell me this isn’t my fight. I love you. That makes it my fight. You trust God to protect you, but not me? I’m sure He’d be flattered to hear that. Come to think of it, I’m flattered too—I swore I wouldn’t leave you alone, but you’re just fine leaving me!”

“Rebecca, that’s not what I meant and you know it!” His voice snapped now, the unsteadiness gone. Clay mad was a lot easier for me to deal with. “I want you to go and—“

I drew breath to fire back, when sudden terror sucked it from me. “I can’t,” I gasped and reached for him. “I can’t. If I get in that car and leave Raleigh, I’ll never see you alive again.” Yes, I know things sometimes, but I had never been so overturned by the knowing, never felt fear grab me like hands about to pick me up and fling me into an abyss. “I know it. I don’t know how, but I do. I’ve needed to be beside you, ever since you were healed. I need to stay beside you now. If we separate, I think something awful is going to happen. You say you wouldn’t have been healed without me, but that means if there’s a purpose to that I’m part of it, and you can’t toss me aside. Don’t, Clay—God, please, don’t—“

“Honey, honey!” Clay held me tightly; clearly he was as caught off guard by my outburst as I was. “I wouldn’t be living without you. I wouldn’t want to live without you. I’d rather be dead. I’d—I’d rather be a vampire again. But I don’t want you in danger.”

“What about you? He’s got no reason to come after me, and at least I may have some resistance to his tricks.” I didn’t have to say the reverse: that Clay had had no immunity at all when he had fallen prey to the vampire’s hypnotic stare. Now that I brought it up, I saw in his face what he had tried to deny even to himself; thinking of his worry for me had kept him from facing his own peril. “I promised you I wouldn’t leave you alone, and I won’t. Let me come to the game with you tonight.”

“He won’t try anything in public.”

“But you have to drive home,” I protested, but the glint in his eyes said he wasn’t backing down. “Okay, then call me the instant you get in the car—at least the old heap does have Cartalk. I’ll stay inside with your mom till you get here to pick me up.” He started to argue. “You come get me, Clayton, or I’ll come looking for you. Your choice.”

“What did I do to deserve you?” he sighed, sounding half exasperated and half grateful.

“Payback for being a sassy kid?” I suggested, and at last he giggled. “We’re gonna be okay, Clay. We are. We’re gonna face this together, and settle it together.”

“And then we’re going on together.” He pushed my hand gently away as I tried to return the car keys. “You can retire that ol’ clunker of yours when we get back to LA. I haven’t been able to buy you a ring yet, so consider this an early wedding present.”

My ‘ring’ and I covered a lot of ground that day. By noon I had concluded that probably no mortal knew the true identity of the body found in the ashes of the ramshackle house trailer that burned outside Raleigh nearly twenty years before. Visits to some roadhouses yielded several old men drinking beer early, who spoke in timid low voices of glimpsing while in their bottles a drinking buddy they knew to be long dead, when they could recall anything at all. Vernon Grissom, minimally talented musician, marginal wage-earner, and failed husband and father, had managed to become successful at one thing—being a vampire.

Actually, I reflected as I returned to the Parker home, up until the past few days he would have believed himself to be a spectacular success in one other area—the destruction of his son’s life. No wonder Clay’s reappearance, in all of his radiance and talent and humanity, had maddened him so that even my dull mortal senses could perceive it. The years Clay had spent in the shadowland of the undead had sharpened his own senses, it seemed: a survival skill we might find to be a great blessing before all was said and done.

Faye was on the phone when I came in. “Oh, here she is, Clayton!” she said and handed the receiver over with a knowing smile, sure she at least had our relationship figured out. “I’ve got a lonely boy here wants to talk to you, Rebecca.”

I hadn’t used a land line phone since I was a kid, and I almost choked myself in the cords before I got the clumsy thing right side up. “How’s your morning been?” I asked.

“As busy as I remember celebrity being. More fans camped at the TV station—I met a lady from South Africa, I remember she flew to St Louis to see me in, gosh, ’03?” After years of getting phone sound straight through my mastoid bone into my inner ear, Clay’s voice from the earpiece sounded strange, tinny and far away. “I talked to Trudy. She’s back at work and feelin’ much better, she says.”

“Good. I just got back. I’m about to email Delores to get that program I told you about, and then I’ll sit down and look at your lovely self on TV. There’s one more quick run I want to make this afternoon, but I’ll be back well before dark.”

“See that you do, and don’t set foot out after. Make sure Raleigh’s been let out too, and keep Mom in. I’ll honk when I get there—I don’t want to risk coming inside even for a minute. If he’s lurking around, watching, he could slip in that quickly. Be on your guard, understand?”

“Yes.” Heavens, he didn’t have to sound so bossy. “I know what game we’re playing.”

“Not the way I do.” How true that was, and it made me feel so stupid and insensitive I could not reply. “I’m sorry,” he said after a long silence. “It just feels like we’re right back where we were. I want to protect you, but it seems like I’m the biggest threat to your safety, to everybody’s safety.”

“Stop that talk, right now.” Faye hovered near, trying not to look concerned. “Or else I’ll send your mama over with the dish detergent to wash your mouth out.”

“She’s nearby.”

“Standing right here and rarin’ to go.” I heard him shift on the seat—he was in the rental car, using its com system. “Take a deep breath and say a prayer, sweetheart. You’ll be just fine.”

Faye smiled and moved away. Hopefully my words had convinced her her son suffered from nothing worse than an attack of nerves. “I’m praying,” Clay replied, “and then some. You’ll see in a few. I’m so ready for this to be over, so we can get on with our lives.”

“I like we,” I said. He chuckled, no doubt remembering he had said the same a few days ago. “Call me later this evening. You remember my cel number, right?”

“Yeah. I love you.”

“I love you too, sweetheart. See ya tonight.”

If he really did have any nerves, they didn’t show on screen; he was as calm and pleasant as if he had never been thrown off the thrill ride of stardom. When the anchorwoman made the by now standard comment about him not looking a day older, however, Faye, relaxing in her chair, retorted, “Yes, he does. Those lines around his eyes weren’t all there before. Why do folks say such stuff? Do they just not pay attention?”

If that were the case, I hadn’t paid attention either. I studied the handsome image on the big TV screen. Clay looked cool and casual in white shirt and khakis, but as I examined his face I saw what she meant. Maybe I could not say from experience that the creases had not been there when he had fled Carolina in terror twenty years ago, but they certainly hadn’t been so pronounced on the night we met, when the smoothness of his features had so struck me. Perhaps it was merely his humanness returning…or perhaps not. If lines could appear in less than a week, maybe his restored life was not as we had thought. What if he began to age too fast, his body racing to catch up with the calendar? Quit looking for things to worry about, I scolded myself and tried to set it aside. What he looked like meant nothing to my heart.

The segment ended with the expected request for a song. Clay obliged, and I understood what he had said earlier on the phone when I heard his choice. “Many things about tomorrow I don’t seem to understand, But I know who holds tomorrow, And I know who holds my hand…”

My last run of the day was to a vacant lot. The city of Raleigh had grown around it, but it lay fallow. A quick search of property records on my memobook showed why. The ground on which Vernon Grissom’s burnt-out trailer had squatted was in municipal holding, put there when the supposedly dead owner’s only heir did not appear to claim it. In other words, the land where Clay’s life had ended was now his.

The lot was thick with weeds but little else. Even the trailer’s foundation could barely be made out. I walked the land over, but found no spot where a vampire might lair unseen. The Feds’ program was our best hope to find him now. You’ve lost, jackass, I thought. Clay survived what you tried to do to him, and now we’re going to put an end to this.

As I got back into the Volvo my computer beeped; Delores was sending the program! It was downloaded before I got halfway to the house, and it took all my self-control not to pull over and start plugging info in. I knew me, though; if I started on it, the next thing I knew night would be closing in, bringing with it beings far more sinister than the one I had found there, and loved back into the light with me. So I held off till I was safely back in Faye’s spare bedroom, where I could lock the door, spread out my printouts and get to work.

In my one break to check the net, I found Clay Nation in a collective uproar over their ‘luscious vanilla milkshake of a man’. MY milkshake, ladies! I snickered and returned to my work, stopping only when the sky outside was purple with dusk. Faye prepared a light supper, and I thanked her and explained I was working on another piece for the online sites. It was only a partial untruth; the next untruth, I thought with sadness as I returned to my room and stealthily began to gather my few personal things, was to convince her nothing was wrong when Clay arrived and didn’t even come in to see her.

My keychain on the bed beeped. I pulled the phone out and answered. “Bad news,” Clay said. “The sheriff’s pulled together some deputies who can play a little music. They want me to stay and do a little set after the game. I’ll be home a lot later than I thought.”

“Damn. Well, call me at this number, so if your mom’s gone to bed it won’t wake her. It may make it easier for us to slip out without a lot of awkward explaining.”

“I know,” he sighed, “but I had to do this to her when I left the first time. She just woke up and I was gone. I hate to do it again.”

“Yeah, but at least this time if you leave her a note you know you’re coming back.” I tried to sound as positive as I could. “Just be careful, angel.”

He laughed. “That’s a word I wouldn’t think would apply to me.”

“Hey, it means messenger of the divine, and if that doesn’t describe your place in my life I can’t imagine what would. You talk about what I brought to your world, how I changed it; but I was drinking and sleeping my way across southern California, and writing trash when I wrote at all. That woman doesn’t exist anymore. I am no longer the person I was the night I met you, Clay Aiken, and it’s all your fault. Thank God.” Now where had that come from? It certainly wasn’t uppermost in my thoughts at that moment, and yet it was the most true thing I had ever said. Only silence answered me. “Uh oh, did I get all intense and scare you off?”

“No. I…didn’t know that. You never said it before.”

“It didn’t seem so important compared to what you were fighting.”

“That’s not true. Nothing is more important to me than you, Rebecca.” He was quiet for a few moments, which gave me leisure to sit down on the bed and enjoy the gentle vibrato of emotion in his voice when he spoke again. “I wish you had said it sooner. I’ve felt for so long like I was taking and taking from you and giving nothing in return. I hated that feeling, and I was scared you felt taken advantage of.”

“And that’s not true either. We settled that already, didn’t we? Everything I gave to you I did just that—except my heart, and I didn’t have much say when you took that.” We laughed together quietly. “I love you so much, Clay. Please promise me you’ll be careful, and not do something brave and stupid.”

“With me, the stupid’s definitely more likely than the brave.”

“Bullshit.”

“Okay, I promise. Has your computer program come up with anything yet?”

“I just got the data input. Now I’ll have the program look for a pattern, something that’ll point us toward where he’s hiding.”

After he hung up I did just that, and was baffled. No pattern at all emerged; the deaths and assaults with vampiric features seemed randomly scattered. I started thinking Grissom had indeed turned others, and wondered if a whole brood of vampires were preying on the Triangle. For a while I played with the data, sorting it by various criteria, and plugged in one more data point—the unknown body in Grissom’s trailer. Whoever they had been, they deserved to be counted among his victims.

No clearer pattern emerged until I started breaking the incidents up by time. As I placed them one by one on the North Carolina map, the program began to blink and whistle, but I could see what was happening as easily with human eyes. The first attacks, from several months before Clay’s turning until a month after the trailer fire, centered on the trailer site itself, naturally enough. The next batch shifted its focal point to an area a mile or so away. I put the program on hold, ran a search and found a bar had occupied that site until seven years ago, when, interestingly, it too had burned to the ground. That was good to know, but where was the leech hiding now?

I continued working, and before long the answer was obvious, and one I had feared to guess. The latest group of vampire attacks, with the sole exception of the last two—the fan’s death and the attack on Trudy—ranged around the North Raleigh neighborhood where I sat. Vernon’s lair was near, very near.

My still moment of realization was broken by the shrill ring of Faye’s phone outside my closed door. I stood and stretched and opened the door, thinking while she was distracted with the caller I’d slip into Clay’s room and collect some of his things. Instead, I heard her say, “Hello? Hello? Oh, well,” and hang up. I went down the hall. “Rebecca, were you expecting a call?”

Well, not on that line. “No, ma’am.” I liked how she spoke to me as if I really were family, and hoped things would work out so that I could be. This occurrence bothered me, though. Crooks have used phones to case a house as long as there’ve been phones, I guess…except this call might not have been to see if someone weren’t home, but if someone were. “I’ll get it if it rings again,” I told Faye, and sure enough, a couple of minutes later it did.

When I answered, I heard nothing at all at first but dead air, not even breathing. After a moment, though, I made out a faint, raspy croak. “Rebecca…”

“Yes? Hello?” I could almost place the voice, but it was so weak.

“Rebecca…” he said again, and my heart almost stopped. Faye was in the living room; I ducked into the kitchen, stretching the phone cord.

“Clay?” I hissed. “Clay, is that you? Where are you? Is something wrong?”

“Cold…so cold…” The plaintive whisper was feeble as if with age. Was accelerated aging only my paranoid fancy, or was it happening? Or…cold…was it something even worse? Had the darkness caught up with my love?

“Clay, where are you?” I pleaded. Without directionals in the rental car, I couldn’t find him myself. My cousin at the Pentagon had long since gone home for the day; I couldn’t beg him to use GPS till morning, and by then it might be far too late. “Tell me and I’ll come get you.”

The response surprised me. “Out…out back…help me…”

The cord wouldn’t stretch far enough for me to see out the kitchen window into the back yard, but that didn’t matter. “Okay. Okay, I’m coming!” I dashed around the corner and dropped the receiver in its cradle. “I need to go out,” I told a startled Faye. “Don’t leave the house, please, not for anything, no matter what you may see or hear outside; not until I come back—or Clay does—okay?” Raleigh huddled whimpering by the door; without waiting for a reply I dodged her and shot outside.

The yard was vacant, and the rental car nowhere to be seen; how could Clay have gotten here? Oh, there’s a way, an fearful inner voice reminded me, the same way he got around for twenty years without needing a car. “God, no,” I whispered to the night. “Please, not that again.” A flicker of motion, pale in the cloudy moonlight, among the trees at the back of the lot snared my eye then vanished. I ran in that direction, but was forced to slow as I entered the wood, ducking branches whipped in my face by a rising wind, and scanning the ground as I went. Clay could have found his way this far and then collapsed, dazed and disoriented by—what? If I found him, would I look into a face aged years in hours, or the pale hopeless face of the undead?

I delved deeper into the trees. Nothing moved except leaves blown around in circles. Ahead I spied a sturdy old tree with low limbs, and accessed my inner tomboy to climb up it a short way. Even from there, as far as I could look no figure in light clothes walked or stumbled or slumped in the dirt. Reason, and unease, began to overtake my panic—Clay didn’t have a cel phone, so he couldn’t have called me from out here; and he had planned to call my number anyway, not his mother’s. I wished now I had brought my phone when I rushed out. After a moment’s thought I decided to get back to the house, call the rental’s Cartalk and try to reach Clay that way. My heart screamed at the idea of leaving him out here somewhere, hurt or scared, but things were getting more suspicious by the minute. I gripped the limb above me, then checked below for clear ground, swung and dropped—and landed in a grasp like steel.

Rubbery arms appeared from nowhere and pinned mine to my sides. A death-cold hand clamped over my mouth and gripped the sides of my face in a painful grasp when I tried to kick and fight back. “I know right where to snap your neck clean in two,” an icy drawl sounded in my ear, “where you’ll not be able to move a muscle, and smother to death, real slow. How’dya like your sweet Clayton to find you like that?” Even through the glare of fear, I recognized my mistake. The voice was harsh from tobacco and whiskey, bad living and who knew what kind of unlife, but it still sounded just enough like Clay’s that over the bad land line I had heard what I had expected and feared hearing, and not the truth.

The hands turned me around and shoved my back up against the tree trunk. I tried to avert my eyes, but he grabbed a handful of my hair and jerked my head up to face him. Vernon Grissom wore a stained T-shirt, once white, and faded dungarees. His eyes were almost colorless, and impossible to escape. He let go of me, and I could not move, though inside I was shaking with fury. Damn him, he even looks like Clay, a little. The vampire’s wan face still had the puffy slack look of the alcoholic, but beneath it, the relation of eyes and mouth and bones remained. He did resemble a Clay gone to seed, and it felt like the worst sort of insult. I focused on my anger, to dampen the terror of realizing he had me.

“You know who I am?” he asked, and numbly I nodded. “Shit, you are a pretty lil’ piece.” He pawed at me a little, and I wondered if, immobilized, I could still throw up. “Way too much woman for that girly boy.” His fangs glinted in the moon’s faint glow when he grinned. “C’mon, an’ lemme show ya what a real man can do.” I felt even sicker. Iron fingers gripped my wrist, their vampiric strength unbreakable; but when my captor turned to lead me away something else broke—the stasis that had held me prisoner. Without his eyes on me I could fight, try to break and run; but I did not. If I played docile, pretended I was still under his spell, he would take me to what I had been seeking—his lair. Maybe I had been dumb enough to run right into his clutches, but besting him on his own turf would be the ultimate way to make up for my stupidity, and the best gift I could possibly give to Clay.

So, I went along, hauled through the wood until we emerged into a weed-infested yard behind a tumbledown little frame house. The back windows were covered and dark, and when he pulled me up the crumbling concrete back steps and inside, the space was utterly black. I gasped when light suddenly blared from a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. “Modern conveniences,” Vernon snorted from beside a wall switch. “Helluva lot better’n sunshine. Get it whenever you want it. Make yourself to home.” His fanged leer was unnerving—did they ever go away? Clay’s had hardly ever been visible, except when provoked—or about to feed…”I did. Old coot that lived here didn’t need it anymore, once I’s through with him. So sit yourself down, we got a while to wait.” He started toward an old land line on a table, then stopped and laughed. “No need to make any more calls,” he said mockingly, and gestured toward an old console TV in the corner. “Been keepin’ up with him. When he gets through bein’ a star, he can find me, if he wants to bad enough.”

The small den in which I stood was comfortably furnished, but showed signs of ill-use. A footstool was broken, a curtain rod half-fallen, and a light fixure lay cracked in a corner. Dark splotches were scattered here and there on the carpet and upholstery. I tried not to think about those. Black trash-bag plastic was duct taped over every window. Obediently I sat down in a worn armchair, and wondered if responding to his words would tip him that I wasn’t totally in his power. “If you’re thinking Clay will find you the way one vampire would find another, you’ve got one hell of a wait ahead of you. He won’t. He can’t. He’s not a vampire anymore.”

“Damn!” he barked out a laugh. “How’d he make you believe that? He’s got a mouth on him, so I figured he’d told you a tale, but I never expected that sappy lil’ choir boy could lie like that.” He walked over and grabbed my hair again, forcing me to meet his grasping eyes. “How’s he walkin’ round in the daylight?”

Despite my perilous situation, it was almost funny to realize he didn’t believe me. “He’s human,” I spat, and felt a chuckle of triumph bubble up inside me.

“You’re fulla shit,” he said, but it was clear he was rattled. His pale gaze bound me. His will searched me like ants crawling through my brain, trying to compel from me a truth he could accept; and searching me, I felt now, to find if I were already a vampire’s thrall—Clay’s.

“I was there, asshole. I saw it happen.”

Angrily he let go of me and flopped into a tattered recliner. A battered, cheap guitar was propped up beside it. “How?” he said. “Tell me how, missy. Tell me about my son the vampire.”

“I don’t know anything about any son of yours,” I snapped before I could rein in my disgust. Uh oh. Had my defiance tipped my hand? He glared, but did nothing more; maybe he was accustomed to a little resistance from his victims. “But I can tell you about Clayton,” I added, and he seemed to take that as obedience to his command.

I did not say a word about Clay’s pain, or his anguished solitude, or his terror of hell. Instead I spoke of his resourcefulness, his courage, and his refusal to yield to the parasite inflicted on him by the creature who sat before me. Every word was calculated to hammer home one point—if Vernon’s wish had been to destroy Clay, he had utterly failed. And the bastard got it, I could tell. Oh, he tried to hold his own. He mocked Clay for not having the nerve to feed on humans, and heaped more scorn on my account of Clay’s rejection of and by the other vampires he had encountered. “Hell, they’re better eatin’ than people! The bitch that bit me, she had all these grand notions of spendin’ eternity together. Guess I shoulda told her I ain’t the settlin’ down kind. After I sucked her dry I left her in my ol’ trailer when I torched it. Fine timin’, to have a body to leave in there. Dunno if she was dead or not, though. Damn women, good for a few things, ‘cept when they start gettin’ ideas.” The thought of bloodsuckers feeding off their own kind was for some reason doubly gruesome. I suppressed shudders and held fast to the memory of the light. Vernon’s derision only increased when I described Clay’s healing. “Oh, hell. Sit down an’ say a prayer? If it was that easy to get out of, we’d all do it.”

“No you wouldn’t.” It was my turn for a little contempt. “That’d involve admitting someone’s more powerful than you. You’re loving your little power trip too much to give it up.”

“Shut your smart mouth, missy,” he snarled. Words froze in my throat as his spell gripped me. “I don’t know what kinda stunt he’s pullin’, but I’ll find out soon enough. Talk about power, who’s got it now, huh, girly?” He rose and stalked toward me, fangs showing. Ohh, God help me, my struggling mind cried, and suddenly the sensation of insects burrowing into my being was overwhelmed by another—the sense of a strong tender caress, and the whiff of a crisp fresh scent. I had never felt it quite this way, but I knew it, as surely as if a familiar beloved hand had taken mine. Clay was nearby.

Vernon knew it too, though certainly not in the same way. “Aha, now who lied?” His distraction freed me from his grasp, but I stayed still, afraid on a whole new plane. Unprepared, Clay had fallen victim once to the vampire’s attack; would knowing what he faced give him any resistance now? If not, my half-immunity might have to get both of us out of here. Don’t let it end this way, I begged silently. You brought him this far, God—whatever happens to me, don’t desert him now. “C’mon in, Junior, door’s open!”

The knob turned, and Clay stepped inside. In the glare of the light bulb, his light-colored clothes, though rumpled, almost glowed white, reminding me of the dream I had had before either of us imagined freedom from his curse was possible. He scanned the shabby room till he spotted me and moved toward me, but Vernon stepped between us. “You’re late getting’ here, boy, ‘bout twenty year late. I waited for you, expectin’ you’d come back when you made out what was goin’ on, but you never did. I could’ve taught you how to make this the great thing it is, if you wasn’t such a pitiful coward. We could’ve had a real father an’ son thing. It can get right lonely—I didn’t make others besides you, didn’t want ‘em stealin’ my food supply. I knew you were alive, and you’d of knowed the same about me if you’d of looked. Your little missy here tells me you got out of it somehow, though, and now I see that’s true. You didn’t want it.” The vampire’s cold drawl dripped with sarcasm. “I give you the finest thing a father could give a son, what every father prob’ly wishes he could give—immortality—an’ you didn’t want it. How ungrateful can a lil’ wimp be? Thought you were too good for it, maybe? Well, it’s still not too late for me to set you straight. Come over here, boy, and let me tell you what I’m gonna do.”

Clay had not moved a muscle while Vernon spoke, his eyes locked with the vampire’s. I was frantic—somehow I had to break his focus, but how without exposing myself? Before I could do anything, Clay did move, but only to stick his hands in his pockets and cock his head. “I don’t think so.” I nearly sobbed in relief, as he took a step forward, and Vernon, startled, fell back. “Your tricks don’t work on me anymore, apparently. One more little gift I found in that black hole you threw me into and left me to rot in. You can lay off the crap about your paternal feelings. I know why you turned me. I haven’t forgotten what you said and did that day. It wasn’t all that different from what you’d said and done to me all my life, really. You wanted revenge, on Mom for getting away from you, and on me for being born to begin with, and then having the gall to grow up and be everything you wanted to be and weren’t. You hated me for that most of all, and you wanted to destroy me, for being my own man.”

Vernon sneered. “Man enough to get a woman, anyhow. Never expected that outta you.” Clay’s eyes flicked to me; I didn’t dare move from the chair, but I flipped a bird at Vernon’s back, to reassure him. He kept an admirable straight face, but his stance relaxed just a hair. That was only half the story though, and I wished I had some way to warn him I was vulnerable under some circumstances. The next instant, a hunting knife appeared in Vernon’s hand and he sprang, not at Clay, but back to grab me. The blade slid along my throat like an undead bug’s leg, and I froze. So did Clay. “Surprised?”

“Not especially.” Clay shook his head. “When I got home and Mom told me what happened—“

“Damn that meddlin’ woman.”

“—I figured you intended to cut a deal,” Clay finished, unruffled. “Fine. I’m here. Let her go.”

“Not that easy, sissy boy. It would’ve been more entertainin’ to run you both, get a lil’ rerun of that show you put on last night; but there’s still fun to be had. She’s stayin’ awhile. Bet she’s a damn tasty mouthful.” Clay’s face twitched, in shock or revulsion or memory. The knife moved from my neck. “Remember this?” Vernon held it up with a sneer. I would’ve bet it was the same one he had used years ago to cut himself and force his blood on Clay, to turn him.

The shock passed. “I remember,” Clay said softly, “and I get it now. You can’t stand it, ‘cause you did your worst to me, and I was delivered from it. You’d love to suck me back in—pardon the pun. Fine. Let her go, and you’ll get your chance. We’ll settle it here and now. But know this: whatever you do, it won’t be the same as before.” He held up his clenched right fist, the shirt sleeve falling back to expose the bracelet around his wrist. “The worst thing you did to me was to frighten me away from this. That’s not gonna happen again. You can try to turn me, and maybe even succeed, but I know better now. I know it won’t last long, whether God chooses to heal me a second time or take me. I’ve been searching for the purpose behind all this. Maybe it was to teach me that. Maybe it’s so I could see the light again, and take it back into the night with me. If God wants to send me back into the darkness I’ll go, and know I’m not alone. Whatever I have to do to protect the people I love I’ll do, because I know nothing can separate me from that love except myself. You sure can’t. You’re not that strong.” Vernon’s fingers tightened around the knife handle, and the hand gripping me shook with anger. “You can hurt me, but you can’t change me. I know who I am, and I know whose I am.” His face was white, but his voice was level, his clear green eyes unflinching. Me, I was flinching, and furious. Thrust Clay back into the vampires’ nightmarish fold? Not while I was breathing. He nodded toward the TV. “You could’ve seen me today, if you were awake.” He sang quietly. “I know who holds tomorrow, and I know who holds my hand…it might not be too late for you either, if you—“

With a gutteral roar, Vernon rushed him, knocked him to the floor and held him there. Clay gasped and struggled, but his mortal body’s strength was no match for the vampire’s. I tensed to jump him—I had even less chance against him except the element of surprise, but he was going to have to kill me before I’d let him hurt Clay. “You holy little idiot,” he growled. “If I can’t make you mind me now, how crazy would I have to be to give you back this kind of power? You don’t deserve it—but at least you’ll make me one more decent meal.” He threw the knife aside, pinned Clay’s throat to the floor with one hand and tore at Clay’s shirt with the other. “Yeah, I’ll be one fat ’n’ happy sucker ‘fore long. Drain you till you quit your infernal fussin’—but not to death, mind you, not yet. Don’t want you missin’ the end of my show—the part where your prissy gal yonder gets the gift you threw back at me.” I slid from the chair to a crouch. The depth of his evil was dizzying, but I had no time for shock. “Oh yeah, now you’re scared. I see it. I smell it. Good enough. Your blood’ll taste better—like strong whiskey. After I get her done an’ turned, I’ll finish you off. Or better yet, you can be her first meal. She’ll be needin’ it. You can go to your precious God, if one exists, knowin’ she’s mine forever.”

Clay let out a choked yell and thrust one shoulder upward. The turn of his body threw his attacker off balance, and Vernon fell off to one side. Coughing, Clay struggled to his knees, and I flew across the room to him and hid my face in his half-open shirt front. “He can’t get me unless I look at him,” I said urgently as we scrambled to our feet, “but he doesn’t know it, he thinks he’s got me—“

The cold voice behind me drew closer. “C’mere, girly, let’s do this right. You listen to me, hear?”

I looked down at the feet that approached, took a quick gauge of time and distance, and lashed out with a back kick. One handy fact I’d learned about vampires is that their parts function pretty much as humans’ do in many ways, which meant a swift kick in the crotch would have a good effect for me, and a fairly bad one on the owner of the crotch. It did, but it only slowed him down long enough for Clay to shove me aside and lunge at him, rage suffusing his face as it had last night. “Get out, Rebecca!!” he yelled while hitting at Vernon with every available body part. Like hell. I was too busy looking for a weapon.

They grappled around the room and hit the recliner, and they and it went over with a thunderous crash. Clay landed flat on his back, his head bouncing off the scarred hardwood; his glasses went flying, and he lay limp. Vernon hunched over him, ripped the shirt away from Clay’s shoulder and bared his fangs with a hiss. “CLAAY!!” I screamed, and the back door burst open.

Brett bowled through the doorway. Vernon looked up and snarled like a beast, fangs halfway to his chin. “What the fuck—“ Brett gasped just before the vampire leaped at him.

I had finally found something I could strike with and was reaching for it when a cry stopped me and everybody else in their tracks. “Vernon??” Faye ran into the room and shoved him as hard as her small frame would allow, a mother’s love blinding her to all peril. He hissed again and tossed her aside, only to be tackled by Brett, as tenacious as a Marine bulldog.

The chaos gave me the precious seconds I needed to grab the guitar from where it had fallen to the floor when the recliner overturned. I thought of my brothers teaching me to hit a baseball, and held the guitar like a bat, taking a firm two-handed grip on the neck just below the headstock. Amid the shouts and growls I crept nearer. Brett connected with a punch that smashed Vernon’s nose, and probably would’ve shoved splinters of bone into a man’s brain with its force—if the man were alive, that is. It rocked the vampire all the same; he backed up a step or two, which gave me just the room I needed to swing. In the corner Clay stirred, and the sight lifted my hopes and steeled my muscles. I stepped into the pitch just the way my brothers had always nagged me to do, and shattered the guitar body to splinters across Vernon’s face.

He howled and flung me across the room as he fell himself. I smacked into a wall and slid down it. What people say about seeing stars is true, by the way. The racket around me melted into a single roar, like a crowd, or the sea. I shook myself and struggled out of the daze. I lifted my head in time to see Clay on his feet again, snatching up the sheared-off guitar neck I had dropped. Vernon lay sprawled on the floor, still snarling. Clay gripped the neck with both hands, dropped to his knees and with a loud grunt plunged the jagged end of the wood into the vampire's chest.

After one gargly groan, the whole room seemed to go very quiet and still. Clay knelt over the staked body as if to offer a last prayer. My head spun, and the scene before me went all red and black like an old-fashioned photographic negative. The next thing I was aware of was Clay gathering me into his arms. "Rebecca-—oh God, please let her be okay—“

“Yeah, I’m good,” I mumbled and pulled myself together, as sight and hearing kicked back in. No heavenly vision could have been more beautiful than the sweaty stubbly face staring with concern down into mine. “Clay, you’re bleeding!” I gulped and touched the edge of his lower lip where a small split oozed red. He licked the spot and made a face at the taste, which in turn made me laugh shakily on all kinds of levels.

Brett held his mother, and both stood over the body on the floor and stared down at it. Clay helped me up and we joined them, to watch in silent amazement as wrinkles and creases spread like a computerized map over Vernon’s features. His hands and arms seemed to wither before our eyes, and he drooled a little bubbly pink sputum. The stake through his heart was stained red from the slow leak around it; blood did not pulse from the still chest. His limbs and head moved slightly, but he appeared only vaguely aware of his surroundings, his eyes half-closed and cloudy. “It doesn’t kill them?” I asked, fascinated by the length of the fangs and the speed with which the other teeth were falling out.

Clay shook his head. “Only fire does that, or sunlight.” He went to the nearest window and ripped down the plastic over it. I reached for the next one and we opened the room together. Beyond the dirty glass the sky was graying. “Brett,” Clay said as we pulled down the last covering, “will you get them home—“

“When hell freezes over,” I cut him off. “And platypuses fly out my butt. Forgive my language, Miss Faye.”

“Quite all right, sweetheart.” She still looked shaken, but her reply was stout. “I am not leavin’ here without you, Clayton.” She sat down in the armchair and folded her arms with the air of a matriarch declaring an end to a debate. Well, she did say her sons got their stubborn streaks from her. Clay sighed, but underneath his feigned exasperation I could sense joy welling up inside him.

“Okay,” he conceded. “I want to take a quick look around, then we need to go. What happens when the sun comes up isn’t going to be, uh…”

“Pleasant,” I offered. His answering look said he remembered when he had said that very thing to me, just before that dawn that had changed everything for us both.

I found his glasses, bent them back into shape as best I could, and we walked through the house. It held little of interest other than floorboards pulled up in a bedroom to expose the dirt beneath, in a space long and wide enough for a body to lie in. In only a few minutes, we regrouped at the back door. Faye walked out without a look back at the skeletal corpse that had once been a man, the guitar stock protruding from its chest. Brett followed her, and I him. Bringing up the rear, Clay paused with his hand on the door frame, turned and said something under his breath. Or perhaps he sang something. I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t ask.

We were halfway across the back yard when the first rays of morning lit the day. From behind us a screech split the air and was cut short in an instant. I jumped, spun and saw the tips of flames leaping behind the bare windows of the old house, as though to greet their kin in the sky. Clay halted briefly, but did not turn, and for once the candid green eyes were unreadable. “Let’s go,” he said, and we did.

We tramped through the woods, through dew-damp grass and underbrush, until we had to stop so Faye could rest. “Not too long, Mom,” Brett fretted as she sat down on a tree stump. “There might be more of those—things around.”

“No, I don’t think so.” I plumped to the ground next to her seat, blissfully not caring that I’d get up with a damp butt. This spot felt wonderful now, the cool early morning mist and the earth under me, at once alive and grounding. “Vernon fed off his own kind, so they wouldn’t be hanging around; and he didn’t make others, so he wouldn’t have competition for food. I don’t think he’d’ve had a reason to lie about something like that.”

Clay flopped down between me and the stump with an ironic little laugh. “Makes sense he wouldn’t have turned anybody else. He reserved that for—special—victims.”

“Very special.” I shuddered at the delayed awareness of how close I had come to being one of his special victims: his vampiric slave, thoroughly dominated, unable to escape his sadistic control even long enough to give myself to the sun and its creator, to flee to the only freedom I could reach and the only chance of reunion with the man I loved…

My vision of cold and dark and horror was broken by the warmth and strength of Clay’s arms around me. “It’s okay, baby. It’s over, for both of us.”

I clung to his torn shirt. “I told you that once,” I murmured, “but I was wrong.”

“You didn’t have any way of knowing better.” His tone was confident. “I do.” I raised my head; his eyes were alight, and I would have sworn the lines on his face that had so worried me were gone. “It’s over.”

I rested my head on his shoulder for a minute, and then began to explain what had happened. “It was dumb of me to fall for it, but I was so afraid he’d gotten you again.”

Clay nodded. “I called a few minutes after you left, I guess. When you didn’t answer I phoned Mom and she said you’d run out. I knew he’d pulled some trick.” He fiddled with his twisted glasses, and finally gave up and took them off. “So I got home as fast as I could, told her to stay put till I got back, and went lookin’.”

“That’s not exactly what you said,” Faye objected. “You said not to go out unless you came back—and then the very last thing you said before you ran off was ‘Mom, don’t forget I love you—“ She swallowed back tears. “It was too much like the other time, and the note you left; when you didn’t come back. Brett pulled into the driveway before you were out of sight. I couldn’t let you go like that. Brett could run fast enough to keep sight of you, but then he had to slow down for me.” She stuck her feet out. “Short and old legs.”

I grinned, and then turned my attention to Clay’s brother. “Whatever you expected out of coming over here tonight, I’d bet with a bookie this wasn’t it.”

Brett’s face was grave. “I thought all day about what you said Wednesday, Rebecca: how you didn’t think I gave a damn why Clayton left, that he had to go and was afraid for us if he came back, and how I’d be sorry if I knew. Well, I got tired of waitin’. I talked to Tara about it, and then I came back to get an answer out of him.”

“You definitely got one,” Clay replied dryly. “Maybe it worked out for the best, ‘cause I hadn’t come close to figuring out how to explain this to you all. Seeing is believing, though. Now I guess you understand why I was—kind of hesitant.”

“Yeah,” Brett echoed. “Seein’s believin’. I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t put it all together till just now, though. It was that one word you said, Rebecca…you thought the bastard had gotten him again.” His gruff voice cracked. “How long, Clayton?”

Clay met his gaze square on. “From the day I went to meet him at his trailer twenty years ago till last Sunday morning.”

Faye covered her mouth with a small cry. Clay described his ordeal simply, not soft-pedaling it but not belaboring it either, and only faltered once. “Leaving was the hardest part. Gettin’ on that plane knowing I’d never see any of you again, ever, even when I—stopped existing, whenever that happened.” I had not noticed until then how he never used the words life or death to describe his state during those years. “And even when that did happen, I was sure I could never be where you would be—where Dad is—“ He bit his lip, and I caught a flash of the forsaken look I had seen the night I burst into his house. By all rights I should have been terrified of what he had been made, but that look had shown me what he truly was. Instead of fear, it had kindled compassion in me, and love, and I held him tight now as he relived that horror for what was hopefully the last time.

Faye wiped her wet cheeks. “You could’ve come home, Clayton,” she whispered. “You didn’t have to be afraid of me.”

“I wasn’t, Mom. As long as I couldn’t control what I was doing I was dangerous. Besides, Raleigh was a pretty small town, still is in a lot of ways really. You know how everybody knows everybody’s business, especially mine. How long could I have hidden here? I told you you’d think I was crazy or evil if I tried to explain, so what would anybody else have thought? I thought it, for heaven’s sake. How could I dump that on you? I wasn’t afraid of you. I was afraid of me.” He drew a shaky breath. “That’s not altogether true. I was afraid of him too. Not that he could do anything more to me, but he could to others, and if he thought that would hurt me he would. Even after he supposedly ‘died’ I was still afraid. Maybe he was right about that, that on some level I knew he was still around. I felt like a coward, but all I could think to do was to warn you, and then get as far away as possible. I just hid, and dealt with it the best I could, and spent the nights trying to remember what home was like.”

She reached down to touch Clay’s face, and he laid his cheek against her palm like a child in need of comfort, the comfort he had yearned for for so long. Then she frowned. “Is something wrong?” I asked.

“No…” Faye’s voice was thoughtful. “When we first talked, Rebecca, I told you I felt certain Clayton was…no longer here, but I never told you why. I didn’t tell anybody. I figured they’d think I was crazy. Now and then, I’d wake up—you know I said how quiet the house has been—but I’d think I heard him call my name. There were nights I’d be out of bed and halfway down the hall before I’d catch myself, I was that sure he was somewhere in that house, sick and cryin’ for me…I never believed in ghosts, but I—I came to think if such did exist, maybe Clayton was haunting me. Maybe he finally had come home, the only way he could.”

Tears spilled from Clay’s wide eyes. He looked up at her, and just nodded. In writing for XtheUnknown, I’d researched many cases of psychic communication. As close as these two were, it didn’t surprise me at all that a mother’s heart might resonate with the echoes of her child’s pain and despair. “That’s about it,” he said simply. “I’d walk through the house in my mind. Anything, to keep from thinking about the hell I was in, or the hell I was bound for, or the way I brought it on myself—“

“Bullshit,” I retorted before anyone else could speak. “And bullshit, as a great writer once said, is always bullshit and will never be mistaken for McDonald’s secret sauce.” Brett’s guffaw surprised me, but not as much as Faye’s laughter. “Uh, sorry again, Miss Faye. I’ll have to really clean my mouth up if I hope to marry your son, won’t I?”

“I imagine that’s up to him.” She smiled down at a snickering Clay. “You listen to that young lady. I believe she knows you better than you know yourself.”

“Probably,” he agreed, “considering she was sent straight from heaven to me.” That was still a pretty weighty attribution, but hey, it could be true. I certainly didn’t wake up one day and decide to go get drunk at a party and fall in love with a vampire! That incandescent smile definitely made me willing to try living up to it, though. As Clay resumed his account, I was surprised again. It wasn’t his immediate loathing of me when he’d identified me as a reporter—he’d made that abundantly clear at the time—but how perilously close he had come to attacking me that night, when he’d driven me home from Letitia’s party. “Just another piece of tabloid trash who probably deserved it,” he admitted, shamefaced. “I did tell you not to tempt me when you started to invite me in, remember.” The admission left me to ponder: had the memory of what he had almost done to me sparked his towering rage when Vernon exposed what he intended to do to me? Whether that were the case or not, the important thing was that Clay’s self-control on that night had ultimately saved us both.

From that point on, I chimed in on the story. When we described Sunday morning and his healing, Faye gasped and then smiled. “There, you see?” she scolded. “The Lord didn’t desert you at all!”

“I know that now,” Clay confessed. “I didn’t say His name for twenty years, I was so scared of attracting His attention. Which was stupid, and I guess a part of me knew it. It’s just hard to be rational, when something you never imagined existed takes your life away from you….but I could kick myself anyhow. I should’ve let it go years ago, and saved myself a lot of grief, and maybe saved a lot of people around here.”

“I can’t say,” I offered, “but maybe this was what needed to happen. Maybe you needed those years to be prepared to do this. It put you in the right place at the right time, with the knowledge and the strength to do what nobody else could have—to stop the real madness, the true evil.” I grinned wickedly at Clay. “And I still think you were waiting for me to catch up to you.”

He laughed, and we finished by telling them about the aftermath, up to this moment. There was silence for a few minutes afterwards, except for the faint call of a siren somewhere in the distance. The last shreds of morning fog burned away as we sat there, and the sun poured down through the tree branches. Clay tipped his head back, his whole being seemingly set aglow by the radiant beams of light. “I just know I’ve never been so happy to be up first thing in the morning,” he said quietly. “Thank you, God, for another sunrise.”

Faye sniffled, and then slapped her hands on her thighs. “I won’t speak for anybody else, but I’m starving! Let’s get on home so I can fix us some breakfast.”

Everyone seemed quite receptive to that idea, including Brett, who had been silent through the entire recitation, listening with an intensity that reminded me a bit of Clay. When we reached the house, he pulled his phone out of his pants pocket and walked into another room. Raleigh lay sleeping inside the back door, and woke when we entered with as clear a display of worry as you could imagine from a dog. Clay picked her up and carried her into the living room to console her. “I’ll help with breakfast,” I told Faye.

“You will not,” she returned. “All you’re going to do, young lady, is get yourself in there and sit down with Clayton. If you must do something, you can help him keep that puppy out of my way. I have phone calls to make too, and a barbecue to get organized!”

“Yes, ma’am.” I tried not to laugh. Okay, I see where Clay gets that bossy streak from too! On the sofa, Clay sat and cuddled his dog. I sat down beside him and he slid an arm around me. “Thanks for sparing me one,” I teased. “An arm, I mean.”

“I think I can manage that. You’ve already got several other body parts of mine.” With his head he gestured toward the end table where his damaged glasses now lay. “Only you said you thought my glasses were sexy, so are you gonna dump me when my contacts get here?”

“Oh, yeah, definitely.” I sat and looked at him, bruised and tired and brave and beautiful. “Damn, I love you.”

“I love you too.” After some reassurance from her daddy, Raleigh felt sure enough to hop stiffly down from Clay’s lap and go in search of some breakfast of her own. The scents of sausage links frying and coffee brewing drifted in, and we sat and held each other in the companionable silence you only get with someone with whom you’ve shared much bad and much good.

Brett clumped into the room, stuffing his old-model handheld cel phone back in his pocket. “I’ll be back in a little while,” he said. “I just called in to work, and then I called Tara and told her to do the same, and to call the school and tell ‘em the girls won’t be there today.” He looked down at his boots for a moment. “I’m going home to pick them up. They need to meet you.”

The joy that burst across Clay’s face was breathtaking. He stood slowly, not taking his eyes from the other man, and cautiously put out his hand. Brett looked at it as if it were an alien. “Screw that,” he growled and threw his arms around Clay. “I love you, big brother,” he mumbled. “I don’t know that you can ever forgive me for bein’ an asshole first class, but I sure do wish you’d try.”

“Oh, knock it off.” Clay’s voice was just as tight with emotion as he returned the hug. “There’s nothing to forgive. You didn’t know, and I didn’t know how to tell you. It’s over. Let it go.” After a few moments, they moved apart, Brett swiping at his eyes. “Now get goin’. I want to see my sister-in-law. And my nieces!” The brothers grinned at each other. “And as long as you’re playing hooky from work, I could use your help later on with something.”

“Anything. What is it?”

Still smiling, Clay glanced over at me. “We need to go shopping for some rings,” he said. “And a waterbed.”

+++

Later that day, the local news showed footage of a neighborhood house that had burned to the ground. An old man lived there, rarely seen by his neighbors for a number of years. An autopsy of the charred remains showed signs of a stabbing, but no clues as to the source could be found. The death was attributed to the mysterious killer who had stalked the Triangle, and ultimately, as weeks passed and no more strange deaths were reported, was considered that killer’s final victim.

The barbecue on Saturday was the most joyous occasion I had ever attended. Clay could not get enough of being surrounded by his family and friends, though he had to step away a time or two before his emotions overwhelmed him. I walked with him in the woods, just holding his hand, until he got himself under control again. His brother Jeff and sister Amy, still hesitant but reassured by Faye and now Brett, arrived early that morning and stayed late into the night. Somewhere around midnight I caught Clay’s eye, and could almost hear what he was thinking; this time he was up late because he wanted to be, not because he was afraid to lie down.

I can’t say his career got back on track, because it was never really off. His label and his management were ecstatic to have him back, and launched a media blitz, with the aid of his brand new personal publicity coordinator…me. He insisted on having several weeks free in the summer, though. We had plans already made for those.

Our wedding was held in Faye’s back yard that had seen so much. When he asked me if it was okay, Clay explained that he never wanted to forget all that had happened there, but that he wanted to put the stamp of the best day of his life over it all. I thought forgetting was seriously doubtful, but I had no complaints. The house became more of a second home to me every day, though I was getting increasingly excited about going back to LA. I looked forward to pitching a lot of my accumulated junk and moving the rest into the bungalow on the hill—after we dumped the dirt out of that old waterbed!

I invited the aunt and uncle who had largely raised me, and Clay and I honeymooned in the Smoky Mountains, at a little guest lodge where they had taken my brothers and me for vacations. We dropped our bags in the cozy room and I ran out to my favorite spot, the covered bridge over the creek out back. “There’s all sorts of neat places across,” I called to Clay, who followed with some trepidation. “A great pancake house, and a cute little winery, and a health food store where they make the greatest sandwiches!”

“That’s nice.” He stopped at the foot of the steps that led up onto the bridge. “I hope I can find another way there,” he added with an anxious look at the crystalline, laughing stream.

I started to argue, or try to cajole; and then I reconsidered. “You know,” I said with my foot on the bottom step, “I always heard vampires can’t cross running water.”

The spark that lit in Clay’s eyes was part amusement and part determination. He took my hand, and we walked across the bridge together.

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~Posted 8.23.2004~

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