A Ghost of a Chance (2 page)

He found her name on her driver’s license in her purse. He’d picked up the purse, the size of a saddlebag, and rooted through it until he found the little beige wallet, stuffed to capacity.

She had some credit cards, the license, more crumpled receipts than he cared to count, and what he surmised from the resemblance was a picture of her family – two parents and one sister. The sister, he observed, looked like his unobservant housemate but had eyes that were, frankly, harder. Sizing people up was a component of Jack’s success and to him Hallie Barkly exuded a sensitive, sort of vulnerable quality.

Of course rather quickly he concluded that it was probably best that they hadn’t met back in New York, because on the whole, Jack hadn’t been too nice to women. And, quite honestly most of the women he’d known hadn’t been too nice. He swam with sharks. In his old circle, Hallie would have been like a guppy in a tank filled with predators. But he thought these things without certainty or much conviction.

Outside of the superficial changes that he’d undergone in this new realm, like the being invisible part, it was becoming clear that he was subtly and overtly linked to this woman. This became painfully obvious when he tried to leave the house on his own. It was a no go. The front door was like a brick wall. The farthest he could get was a screen porch on the side of the house.

It became all to clear to him that he couldn’t go anywhere unless she left too. Luckily he’d been able to tag along when she went out to the grocery, and having raging cabin fever, he’d considered even that a treat.

So ultimately instead of letting himself descend into panic, Jack decided to bide his time and collect information until he could act. Perhaps patience was a lesson that he would be learning here, if indeed this strange episode had any purpose at all. But without having any real reason to think so, he felt that somehow in an obscure way Hallie Barkly was his responsibility.

What exactly that meant he didn’t have a clue. Only that he was stuck in this old country house with her for some definitive reason that he needed to unravel in order to get unstuck or until someone came along to get him out.

It was in an attempt to distract himself from all these disturbing thoughts that he’d first discovered Sebastian Winters.

His eyes were black, not the color of ebony or obsidian but the absence of color – the void. To look into them was essentially to surrender one’s soul, one’s very essence to the will of another – and alas to be oh so grateful to do so.

He glanced across the room at Hallie intensely typing on her computer keyboard. He had settled in a gold, velvet, wing backed chair that she had positioned in the corner of the room. She’d converted this spare bedroom into an office of sorts. In his hands, he held a paperback, one of the first Sebastian Winters novellas published by
Dark Reflection Intrigue Books
. According to the back cover it had been number fifteen in their summer releases entitled
The Vampire’s Grip
. He was scanning through the paperback aware that somehow he could do this without Hallie’s knowledge. The two of them existed often in the same space, but somehow, he suspected, not in the same flow of time. It was an awareness that had come to him, almost as though he was slowly being fed pieces of information about this new existence of his.

He continued,

Jasmine, the young, blonde, cleaning woman, felt a presence within the building, although that in itself was not unusual. It was an office complex usually well populated by young yuppie executives but it was rather late, well after hours.

It wasn’t impossible that someone was working late. Even as she reassured herself, she trembled with an apprehension flowing forth from an unknown source. She forced herself to continue to empty the waste paper baskets, ignoring the sensation as well as the unduly rapid beating of her heart that she could feel pounding loudly in her chest

Even the pulsing blood in her protrusive jugular vein seemed to swish to a new, unfamiliar rhythm.

He looked again at the intense, meek figure positioned at the monitor and grimaced. “Lovely” he murmured:

And then, as though through no will of her own her eyes were dragged up to focus on the long corridor ahead of her.

There he stood where there was no one moments earlier
–
a man with Latin-like features, undeniably attractive, and yet with an unusually pale complexion.

He was dressed in a well tailored, designer suit, but that in itself wasn’t surprising, Jasmine knew that the building held an eclectic, international mix of executives.

As startling as was his sudden appearance, he was now holding out his hand toward her, beckoning and speaking her name in deliciously broken English, “Jasmine.”

The very sound of her name on his lips seemed to reverberate everywhere around her. “Uh,” she stammered out with difficulty, “do you need your trash cans emptied?”

He spoke again, in his deep rich foreign accent, “Jasmine, come to me.”

She felt herself pulled toward him, compelled, magnetized, as though nothing on earth could prevent her going to him.

“
Yes, yes we get the idea.” The intense melodrama felt acutely uncomfortable to his pragmatic mind.

And she did.

And the page ended. It was the end of a chapter. He looked up confused. What strange drivel? He flipped to the beginning of the next chapter and glanced down the first page.

Whoah, it was jolting, disturbing, even for him. Apparently quite a blood bath ensues after the mysterious stranger takes a chunk out of Jasmine’s protruding jugular. He laughed to himself to dispel a little of the shock. How very odd for such pent up intensity to be locked in that nearly fragile, gentile creature across the room.

She stopped typing at the computer and slumped with a deep sigh over onto the desk. The sudden movement had surprised him. Drawn by curiosity, he put
The Vampire’s Grip
aside and went to her.

He looked down at the back of her head resting on the desk. She did have pretty hair. It was a light brown— thick and wavy, generously highlighted with streaks of golden blonde. He’d known women who had their hair colored this way in a beauty salon, but somehow he felt that with Hallie it was just natural. Their shared occupancy had taught him that she didn’t seem to worry about externals a lot.

He reached out his hand to softly touch her hair, but she didn’t move. She didn’t know he was there. And he still didn’t know why he was.

Jack didn’t trust Monica Quimby. She was a tall, slender, brown-eyed blonde whose features were too sharply defined by dieting, hard living, and probably working out quite often. But it was the sternness and determination set in her face that he didn’t like. He’d seen it often enough. In fact, he’d dated it often enough.

“
I don’t know, Hallie. This place just seems kind of isolated. Aren’t you worried about someone breaking in?”

Hallie smiled indulgently and sipped her cup of ridiculously hot peppermint tea.

“
This isn’t the big city you know. Not much happens out here, except hunting. I do hear gunshots outside sometimes.”

“
Oh well, that’s comforting.” Monica sat on the beige overstuffed sofa that Hallie had brought from her apartment in Richmond and crossed her exceptionally long, shapely legs. She was dressed in one of her more tightly fitted business suits with a slit in the skirt long enough to facilitate movement and tantalize at the same time.

There was a time when Hallie had envied her old college roommate, her looks, and her confidence. But a dose of life and experience had let her glean that Monica was a terribly restless and unhappy person. She was aggressive in going after what she wanted, but once she got it was never satisfied very long.

“
Honestly Hal, moving all your stuff here for just the summer.”

“
Probably more like six months.”

“
Now it’s six months. Are you ever coming back to the real world?”

“
This feels pretty real to me.” Jack moved to sit in a large wooden rocking chair that was beside the light blue lazy boy that Hallie was in. Her taste certainly was a mishmash of styles. But that didn’t bother him much, she got what she liked. To him it showed a sort of independence. She certainly did seem very calm and serene in dealing with the blonde piranha. What strange contrasts she seemed to be composed of.

Monica sighed in dramatic exasperation. “You know what I mean. When was the last time you had a date?”

“
Umm, let’s see. Probably when Edward asked me to marry him.”

Her small green eyes got a little bigger. “Are you serious? It’s been four years since your divorce. You’re a successful author. You’re a great catch.”

“
Oh good, let me get a man for those reasons. No thank you, I don’t need another fouled up relationship.”

“
Come on Hallie. A bad relationship is better than none at all.”

She frowned, rubbing her forehead casually. It was the odd sensation again, a pressure just above her eyes that she felt from time to time in the house. “Do you have any idea how truly screwed up that sounds?”

“
Yes I do, but I don’t want you to be alone.”

“
I’m not. I have Sebastian Winters with me.”

“
Do you have any idea how screwed up that sounds?”

She sighed with a touch of exaggeration. “Yes, strangely enough I do. Finish your tea then we can go take a drive in the mountains.”

Monica grimaced, looking dissatisfied with the fact that her point was lost on her friend. “As long as you don’t drive off a mountain.”

“
You are cranky. Are you having your period?”

Jack rolled his eyes. This is stuff he really needed to hear.

“
I don’t believe you’re a lost soul Samory.”

“
Gabriella, you should leave now. You don’t know how many I have killed over the course of my centuries of life. Your innocence cannot save me.”

“
No, that’s not true. Love can change anyone.”

Jack looked quizzically at the woman typing intently on the keyboard beside him. The large brown eyes were glazed. She seemed very tired. Of course fatigue didn’t seem to bother him anymore. The round nautical-looking clock that she’d hung on the wall read two ‘o’clock. Time had ceased to be very significant for him, but Hallie should be asleep.

Then again, he had gathered that she was a bit nocturnal by nature. These late hours did seem to be a very productive time for her.

“
I do love you Samory. Our lives can begin now.”

“
How naive you seem Gabriella,” Jack murmured under his breath. And then in the next moment Hallie had typed:

“
How naive you seem Gabriella.”

“
Why do you say hurtful things to me Samory?”

He smiled, intrigued by the phenomena. Now what campy thing would a woman want to hear? Jack whispered deliberately to her, “Because it is the truth. You cannot know what a horror my existence is. I am death, living death.” And in the next moment to his delight, it was typed on the screen.

“
But you can change.”

Jack continued with mounting interest, “You ask me to change my essence Gabriella. That is not possible,” he paused. “I wish I had known you in my other life. Then it wouldn’t have been too late for you to breathe your innocence into my jaded existence.”

“
What do you mean Samory by jaded? It couldn’t have always been that way.”

Jack frowned, now what would the vampire say? “If it wasn’t, it was too long ago for me to remember.”

Hallie stared at the screen looking a little confused.
“But Samory what about the time before, before you were changed?”

Jack let out a deep sigh, “Well, perhaps when I was younger. Maybe there would have been a chance for me to live differently then, to stop and see the beauty in life instead of just the toil.” Oddly he was thinking about his old law firm. “The endless toil at the office,” he murmured. Oops, he stopped, noticing his slip, but she’d typed it.

She paused, rereading what she’d written, and spoke out loud. “The toil at the office?”