Breathe, Sam. Breathe. Forget them.
Fuck them.
Breathe, Sam.
And with that last thought, I felt a sudden deep calm overcome me. I didn’t have to look up to know the sun had set. My weird, immortal, cursed, supernatural body was hyper-aware of the sun. Attuned to the sun.
I took a deep, full, useless, beautiful breath and felt my lungs expand, and as they expanded, I felt myself expand, too. I felt my energy, strength and vitality noticeably increase.
I went from a shell of a human, to something unstoppable.
Just like that.
I stepped out of the minivan and surveyed the Starbucks where, three weeks earlier, a woman had gone missing.
Chapter Six
Unlike some movie vampires, I could go for a few days without eating.
I abhorred the word feed. Hell, if anything, what I did was closer to drinking. Now, I imagined going an eternity and never really chewing on anything ever again.
It was not my idea of fun, although a brief image of nibbling on Kingsley’s fat lower lip did pop into my mind. And I left it there, in my mind. Where it belonged. Hidden and buried.
No, I had nothing against Kingsley. Not even these days. But our time might have come and gone. He had had every chance to be with me, and, in a moment of weakness, had decided that some young floozy was worth more to him than me.
Yeah, it still rankled, and, yeah, I might never truly forgive him for it, even though he had been set up by Ishmael, my one-time guardian angel. Set up to fail.
Still, I happened to believe that his feelings for me should have been stronger than a few minutes with some stranger. But it hadn’t been, and to this day, we weren’t together because of that.
One strike, I thought, as I stepped into the middle of the mostly empty parking lot, and you’re out.
Of course, Kingsley had been trying to make up for it ever since, even standing by and mostly keeping his mouth shut as I had dated—and perhaps even loved—another man.
Now that I was single again, Kingsley had respectfully kept his distance, but he’d made it known that he was interested in more. A lot more. That he had gone out of his way, twice, to save me, were feathers in his cap.
We’ll see, I thought.
The parking lot was lit with overhanging industrial lamps high up on stanchions, spaced evenly throughout the unusually big lot. Surely, there was more parking here than the Starbucks needed. In fact, I knew this area to be a popular holdover or changeover for people on their way out to, say, Vegas, or down south to San Diego. This was a way station, so to speak, for travelers. Still, why the parking lot was so big was beyond me...until I saw the answer.
And it came in the form of a big, rumbling, diesel smoke-belching recreational vehicle, or RV, pulling into the parking lot from the side road.
As it lumbered toward me, I saw immediately the benefit of the epic space, to accommodate the bigger vacation vehicles, and, undoubtedly, big rigs, too.
Yes, it was a true way station.
The RV parked in due course. A moment later, an elderly couple stepped out, stretched, and headed up to Starbucks. Both smiled and said hello to me. I smiled, too, and turned and watched them go.
That I briefly envisioned pinning them down and feasting, first off the man and then off the woman, should have caused me more alarm than it did.
In fact, the thought seemed perfectly normal.
Uh, oh.
Snap out of it, kiddo, I thought, and heard Kingsley’s voice in my head. Or was it Fang’s? Maybe a blending of the two.
I focused on the task ahead. The task being, of course, to figure out how a grown woman had disappeared off the face of the earth inside of a Starbucks.
Standing in the center of the parking lot, I turned in a small circle as the sky above grew darker. As it grew darker, the tiny filaments of light that only I could see, appeared, slashing and darting and giving depth and structure to the night. A million fireflies. Hell, tens of millions. Billions. All flashing and forming and reforming.