Dracula: Hearts of Fire (Dracula Heart's) (20 page)

    “I do not know how to get in there.” He coughed and coughed and coughed.

    “Are you going to live?”

    “Not forever. Mind me if you like and you’ll see that I’m telling the truth.
Just give me a second to prepare. Okay now
you can mind me
.
I’ll give you a fe
w seconds in there
.
”

    Jenny went back into his strange mind and found nothing but black corridors wit
h fire burning in the distance, and several red doors.
What the hell was going on in there?
But each door that she opened triggered a spell and showed other corridors with numberless doors.
As she got closer
she saw that
the doors weren’t real.
Each room that she
did manage to enter
had a fire pit that burned with another door opposite it. The atmosphere was becoming smoky and unpleasant, and when she tried to escape his mind she discovered that she couldn’t leave.
She commenced to cough from the acrid smoke.
It burned her throat.
Jenny had made
her way back to
where
the exit
should have been
but her
luminescent door had disappeared.
She looked around and realized that she was at the proper location.

    Jenny was frightened.

    The old man started to laugh.

    The girl was trapped.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

    S
EVERAL HOURS LATER KEITH
mad
e
his way back to
the edge of the forest where he could observe
the
postmodern colonial house
, but this time he was a lot less confident
.
He was nervous as if he expected something untoward to happen. Deep in his bones he was unsettled and wary.
The Cadillac Sport wagon remained in the driveway.  It appeared to be cl
ear sailing for the vampire,
no black cats in sight.
He hesitated in thinking that the
cat’s black spell
might be still on him. If it was
his luck would surely turn and he supposed that someone would
do
him in
. He imagined his bones in a pile
.

    “Do I dare risk it?” Keith whispered to himself.
“How long does it take for bad luck to wear off?”

    A black bird landed into the tree beside him, and it didn’t go without being noticed; if a black cat crossing one’s path was indeed bad luck then why not a black bird? What
if there were a
myriad of things that his father had failed to warn him about? The bird jumped from branch to branch and kept his eye on Keith. Was it his imagination or was that damn bird acting strange? Why was it concerned with his presence?
Maybe it had a nest nearby?

    “Get out of here
,” Keith said to the bird.

    But with that the bird landed
on his right
shoulder and Keith’s small beady brown eyes appeared to get a lot bigger.
The vampire was frozen with fear even though it was only a damn bird.
Was the bird warning him? Telling him to run away? Wild birds were supposed to be frightened of people; those were the rules of nature. Why wasn’t that
damn bird following the rules? The Eurasian Blackbird chirped twice angering
Keith. He decided then and there to kill
the damn thing
and forget it. He grabbed the
black
bird and stared at it, but as much as he wanted to crush the life out of it he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
After all that act in itself could be bad luck. He permitted the bird to fly away but it didn’t, it simply flew up into the tree and looked down at him.

    “What is this world coming to when birds won’
t act like birds?
”

    Keith saw movement past the curtains in the house and then caught a whiff of the blood pumping through their veins, l
ike a hungry dog smelling a juicy piece of meat
. His mouth started to water as the bird chirped and again took his attention. He shook his head only to see the black cat exiting the forest with a rat this time, it got away from the cat and ran for its life but the cat was too fast and killed it.
T
he
black cat lock
ed eyes with Keith once again, and the vampire was forced to blur off into the forest.

    Keith wondered if the cat and th
e bird were sharing a high five; he also wondered if he’d ever get to eat that family.

CHAPTER TWENTY

    L
AUREN HEARD SOMEONE OUTSIDE
on the steps and strained her neck to see who was approaching
; s
he desperately hoped it was
someone was coming to her rescue.
The sheriff
wondered if hearing Michael’s voice
had been genuine or some sort of
hallucination
.
Whatever was out there sounded too heavy to be human.
Then she saw it. It was a white Ar
abian horse on the
porch
. It seemed to be eating something out there, but she was limited in seeing through the crack in the curtains.
The animal had the potential to be her rescuer
, unlikely but least the possibilit
y existed; if she could only mind
the horse to smash through the window and
knock her out of that coffin.

    “Turn this way.” She called to the horse but it was too late
, jumping off the steps i
t trotted
by and then
was out of sight taking care of its own business. Her potential hero had turned out to be an indifferent horse.

     Lauren didn’t know for sure how long she had been trapped in the coffin; she thought that it had only been a couple of hours but wasn’t sure. If her situation wasn’t bad enough now she had
a headache. She
turned her head and looked
a
t the hourglass as
it continued to flow
.
The wizard that had kidnapped her had started it but for what purpose?
At the rate it was flowing it was indeed measuring an hour of time. It seemed likely that
nothing good
was going to happen when the sand empti
ed
. It was then
that she recalled the story
she had hea
r
d long ago, how a wizard would use some sort of magical sand. Once the sand ran out it would extract all the
properties of a vampire, then
would be contained in the
hourglass to
be used to enhance a wizard’s ability.
She also remembered
that it was a sneaky way to do it, because the wizard wouldn’t return for days, lessening his chance of being caught or identified for that matter.
By the look of it she had maybe twenty minutes remaining.

    “If only I could move!”

    It appeared that her chances of escape were miniscule at best. Time and luck were both against her. The end was near at the hands of some coward that didn’t even have the guts to face her. She would go to bones without even having the opportunity to defend herself.
Lauren would never know who did her in, unless she could come back as a ghost and kick his ass.

    Grains of sand continued to fall, with a
slight
mist commencing to form inside the hourglass.

    Again she concentrated with all that she had in her to move her right leg so that she could kick her way out of that contraption. She thought that she felt her right toe move. Perhaps the binding spe
ll was wearing off but was scared
that it wouldn’t be in time to save her. It appeared that there was maybe ten minutes of time remaining. Once her essence was sucked out
she would turn to bones within min
utes. She wondered if the end would be painful.
A clunk at the bottom of the window took her attention. The ho
rse was again outside
. It was playing with a small tire, tossing it around. It picked up the tire and tossed it and again it was gone. Because of the crack in the
curtains was small, it was almost impossible to make contact with the horse. She was unable to get into its mind.

    Time was flowing way too fast, literally.  The hourglass now had less than five minutes remaining
. A degree of panic had set in and beads of sweat ran down her face
making her
itchy, and of course she couldn’t scratch it.
In a panic a
n attempt was made to bang her
head
and break the coffin
open
but it didn’t work
, all she accomplished by the act was to worsen her headache
.
The mist was now drawing towards her, preparing the commencement of its evil incantation.