country, even from another century. Its windows were blacked out, and yellow and black tape stretched across the blackened doorway. It looked like it had been destroyed in a fire. A car cruised past and he slunk backwards into the alley, sliding down a wall behind a dumpster and resting on his haunches. Now he’d stopped running he had started shivering. He wrapped his arms around his body and stared at the scars marking his upper chest and arms. Most looked like knife injuries, though there was one that looked like a burn on his right forearm. He had been in fights – that much was obvious – but he couldn’t remember when or how or against whom.
The doctors had checked his fingerprints against some police database but he had never been arrested. And no one had reported him missing. Which was strange, because somewhere in the fogged-up recesses of his brain he could remember someone.
He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, trying to stir up something, anything at all from the muddled images resembling a Dali painting in his head. With the drugs still heavy in his system he was having trouble trying to piece everything together. There was a tall blond guy in his memory. And he was coming at him, attacking him, but a girl with long dark hair and eyes the blue of a summer sky stepped between them. The girl haunted his dreams – with her dark lashes and fierce gaze. He had no idea who she was but he knew he had to find her.
Find her before the monsters did.
He didn’t know what they were but he knew they were bad. Vampires. The doctors had called them that after he described them but he had argued with them. That wasn’t what they were called. They weren’t the black-caped, pale-faced creatures portrayed in films and in books – they were something else entirely. They were something real. As were the things with tails.
The scar on his back – it wasn’t a knife wound as the nurse had guessed. It had been made by a tail. He was sure of it. And the mark on his arm, where the skin was tanned darker, was a burn, though from what he didn’t know. Creatures shifted into animals in his dreams, things flew, hands burnt, voices whispered and none of it, none of it, made sense.
He leant out from behind the dumpster and peered out into the street. There was something about that building. His feet, his instinct, whatever you wanted to call it, had brought him here for a reason. Did he know something about the fire? How many weeks ago had it been? How long ago had he been brought into the hospital?
He slunk back against the wall suddenly, his hearing pricking. He seemed to be able to hear more than other people. He knew the doctors hadn’t meant for him to listen in on their whispered diagnoses in the corridor outside his cell – all the heated debates about upping his doses and scheduling him for shock therapy – but he had. He’d been able to hear the nurses too, chatting at their station at the far end of the corridor, giggling about the good-looking patient with no name and a body to die for, pulling straws to see who got to bed bath him. Fortunately for him it had always been the blonde one with the spectacular chest.
Right now he could hear footsteps heading towards him and all of a sudden his heart was beating strong enough to burst clean through his ribcage. He rested the flat of his hand over it, panicking that maybe it was the result of missing his meds. His palms were sweating too. He wiped them on his scrubs and tried to heave himself upright. The adrenaline rushed through him, making him light-headed and spinning him out when he stood.
Over the street across from him he could make out four shapes. He already knew that they weren’t people. He didn’t know how. He just knew these were the monsters that haunted his dreams.
On automatic, without stopping to think about what he was doing, he stepped out of his hiding place in the alley and into a patch of light cast by a streetlamp.
Four heads flew up, four bloodshot sets of eyes staring right back at him. And then, there – the glint of razor sharp teeth.
Well, what do you know, he thought triumphantly. I was right.