He was coming. He was just out of my sight, just beyond the curve of the hill.
He was death.
"Don't get upset," Barbara said. "You are in no personal danger. Just describe what you're seeing calmly, and in detail."
"I don't know about you, but I consider a decapitation and barbecue as some sort of personal danger."
"Barbecue?" Patsy asked. "Someone's roasting a pig or something?"
"No. The ox lady waved her hands around, and all of a sudden this silver light was there, all over my body, singeing it around the edges. Oh, great. Here comes someone." No! my mind screamed. Not again! Please god, not again! "Hey, you, mister, would you stop the lady from doing the light thing? She's burnt off half of my hair."
"This is the most bizarre thing I've ever heard," Terri told Patsy. "You have the best parties!
"It's all in the planning," Patsy said, prodding my knee again. "What's going on now, Cora?"
"The guy just saw me. He did a little stagger to the side. I think it's because the lady tried to hide my head behind her, and my ear flew off and landed at his feet. Now he's picking it up. He's yelling at her. She's pointing to the oxen in the field, but he looks really pissed. Yeah, you tell her, mister. She has no right driving if she can't handle her cows."
My heart wept at what was coming.
"This would make a great film," Patsy said thoughtfully. "I wonder if we could write a screenplay. We could make millions."
"Well, now the guy has my head, and he's shaking it at the lady, still yelling at her. Whoops. Chunk of hair came loose. My head is bouncing down the hill. Guy and lady are chasing it. Hee hee hee. OK, that's really funny in a horrible sort of way. Ah. Good for you, sir. He caught me again, and now he's taking me back to my body, hauling the ox lady with him. Whoa! Whoa, whoa, whoa!"
I struggled to get out of the dream, just as I struggled every time. It never did any good. The scene was determined to play out as it first had.
"Did he drop your head again? " Terri asked, her eyes wide.
Panic flooded me. "No, he just . . . holy shit! I want out of here! Take me out of this dream or whatever it is! Wake me up!"
"Remain calm," Barbara said in a soothing voice. "The images you see are in the past, and cannot harm you now."
"What's going on? What did the guy do? " Terri asked.
"I want to wake up! Right now!" I said, clawing the couch to sit up.
"Very well. I'm going to count backwards to one, and when I reach that number, you will awaken feeling refreshed and quite serene. Five, four, three, two, one. Welcome back, Corazon."
"You OK? " Patsy asked as I sat up, gasping, my blood all but curdling at the memory of what I'd witnessed.
"Yeah. I think so."
"What happened at the end? " Terri asked. "You looked scared to death."
"You'd be scared, too, if you saw a vampire kill someone!"
I sat up in bed, torn from the dream at last, gasping and blinking as the dream memory faded and I realized I was safe, in my own little apartment, alone, without the green-eyed, dark-haired monster who had killed a woman before my eyes.
I slumped back against the pillow, wondering why I kept dreaming about Patsy's party and experiencing the awful past-life scene again and again. Why were the dreams increasing in frequency? Why was I doomed to relive the experience over and over again, the sense of dread and horror so great I could taste it on my tongue?
Sleep, I knew from sad experience, would be useless. I got to my feet, headed for the bathroom. I'd brush my teeth to get rid of the taste of my own fear, and go sit with a book until I was too numb with exhaustion to stay awake any longer.
And I'd pray that the green-eyed vampire stayed out of my dreams.
"And then Dee said, 'Darlin', if you're going to rise to the top, you have to work for it. That goes for sex as well as anything else.' Well, you know how he is, Cora - he's such a joker, and of course, I was on top at that moment, but I'm sure you don't want to hear about that."
"Why on earth would you think I didn't want to hear about you and my ex-husband having sex?" I gritted my teeth at both the conversation and the ruts that riddled the long dirt drive up to the Astley house.
The car bounced on a particularly bad one, causing me to cling to the dashboard, as Diamond, with one hand waving airily, didn't seem to notice the appalling state of the drive. "It's not like it's something you haven't done before, unless Dee never asked you to play Cowgirl and the One-legged Itinerant Rodeo Clown, and given how much he loves that, I'm positive he did. But that's neither here nor there, really, is it?"