Dracula: Hearts of Fire (Dracula Heart's) (21 page)

    At four minutes she was able to move all her toes but of course it did her absolutely no good. By the time she could move her legs and fre
e herself
she’d
have been bones for hours.
Hope was an invaluable thing, without it all was lost. With it possibilities for the future were endless. Lauren now had no hope.

   
Outside the white Arabian ran with the tire and tossed it. The tire bounced and rolled down the incline and he chased it, moving further and further away from the ranch house.
The animal was like a child with a toy.
He caught up to the tire and tried to bite it but missed.
The horse then stopped and listened. He could hear Lauren calling him in his mind but he didn’t know her and refused to g
o. The tire fell on its side, grabbing his attention and
again the horse took after it.

   
With about
three minutes
of sand remaining
Lauren wanted to stop staring at
the grains of sand counting down the seconds of her life
but she couldn’t. It was like looki
ng at an approaching train heading straight for a car stuck on the tracks
.
It was impossible to look away.
Grain after gain continued to fall and it was maddening
.
She thought that if she had any magic in her that she could perhaps reverse the flow of the sand by simply willing it. She concentrated on
its reversal, visualized it
, commanded it but nothing happ
ened. There was no stopping the
sand from flowing.

   
Lauren was
waiting for the guillotine to fall.

    When there was approximately two minutes of sand remaining she started to recall different moments in her life. How she had been involved with drugs and how she had gotten herself out of it. She remembered how she had always been for the underdog even in grade school. She remembered her two past loves before Michael, and how they had both cheated on her, one had been a vampire. She closed her eyes and remembered the
best
times of her life.
The situation was surreal and unforgiving.

    “Oh Michael.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Under the summer sun

Beneath
a
puffy white cloud

Stood the cabin by the lake

The sound of silence extremely loud

Inside its wooden walls

On an expensive
Persian
rug

Her nak
ed body lay in a pool of
blood

beneath its hardwood floors

an ant carried his piece of cake

happily enjoying the summer day by the lake

    T
HE RED SHERIFF FINISHED READING
the poem, slowly shaking
his head. Vincent could
smell the blood from within, but
detecting no heartbeat he
guessed someone was dead.
Vampires had a subtle but distinctive smell
to other vampires
and there was something on the air but it
was
faint,
seemed that whoever did the deed had left the area
.
He had received the call from an adventurer wit
h a satellite phone
.
The fellow
had gone into the cabin
looking for a drink
, discovering the body
and believing
he
could also be in danger
fled the scene.

   
Vincent’s
rugged good looks were slightly diminished by the pain on his face
. He wore a classic trench coat with a black Stetson hat. In his sheath a Katana sword, in his holster an 1878 Colt revolver. He had killed seventeen vampires with that gun over the years; he sometimes had the ability to know
where
they would be when the bullet arrived
, a distinct advantage
.
However it only worked less than half the time and
he
had no idea why that was. It was said that all vampires had at least a little magic in them, but he
had no idea if that was factual.
Perhaps his magic ebbed and flowed. Dracula had told him that the magic within certain vampires was much more effecti
ve with a new moon
.

   
“Chica dee dee dee dee dee!”

    He had dusted the note for prints but found none. The note was written on typewriter paper in red ink. Vincent listened intently to the sounds of the forest. Chickadees were ne
arby, a rabbit, some
mice
and several other animals
but that was it.
It was a bit of a strange spot to have a cabin
out in the middle of nowhere, but he supposed that was the point.
The perpetrator had fled the area leaving
behind a little of his scent but
that body odor would be ingrained. If he ever came across him again he would recognise his smell.
That scent somehow
seemed a little familiar.

    Vincent went up the steps and entered the cabin and there she was, blond and beautiful only hours earlier, now
lying
in her own blood.
Her throat had been torn out. The
ID in her
purse showed that she was Mary Mai Brown from Connecticut, a lawyer of means but her luck had run out. Interestingly enough, only a small amount of blood
appeared to have been taken
. Sometimes that was a sign of a vampire serial killer, even when they were full they continued to hunger for the kill. Being alone by the lake must have been an opportunity too good to pass up.
She had managed to get her gun out and got off a single shot, but it
had been a futile attempt
. Vincent could see where the bullet went into the wall.
He dug it out and put it into a small plastic bag; there was no smell of blood on it and so she had missed him.

    After the sheriff completed his investigation on the inside, he sat on the steps outside and listened
once again to the sounds of the forest
. Sometimes killers liked to watch from a distance as their gruesome scenes were being discovered, but the only things that he could hear were the sounds of nature.
Those
sounds would have been enjoyable had it not been for the crime scene.
A cracked branch had him going for his gun but he saw the deer that had broken the old branch.

    As Vincent
sat and waited for the authorities to retrieve the body, he was wondering how much longer he could continue to deal with such acts of cruelty.
He had gotten used to the carnage long ago but lately, for some reason, all the killings had commenced to bother him once again. All those wasted lives were starting to pile up and poke at his soul.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

    J
ENNY WAS TRAPPED
inside Jeptha’s m
ind and she was frightened
.
Being so inexperienced at being a wizard wasn’t good at al
l. She thought about Dracula,
that he had probably already been
in that freaking cottage.
Being trapped in another’s mind wasn’t something she would have thought possible.
Such a thing had never occurred before and she had no experience on how to extricate herself from the situation. He
r
body was now prone o
n the forest floor
. The old man stood near her with his arms crossed and a big nasty smile. One wizard had taken advantag
e of the other and it was always
satisfying
getting the
upper hand
on one’
s own kind
, even though she was a child
.
He reached down and poked her
as if to say
TAKE THAT
. One wizard was never allowed to touch another for fear of magic trickery,
so the fact that he was able to touch
her made his day.

    Jenny found herself inside the wizard’s mind at the point where her white portal should have been, but there was nothing there. Without that door to escape, she was stuck in there, perhaps forever.
How had it worked? Had her soul been imprisoned in there? 
She could hear Jeptha
laughing and it sounded hollow, the m
ocking made her angry and more determined
. If her white way out wasn’t here, then she knew it had to be somewhere in his mind. Was it now
disguised as another
door? Jenny
ran down one of the black corridors and her foot falls sounded like they were in an empty gym, with reverberations off the walls. She entered the first door on the left only to find
another fire
pit;
stopping there she
stared at it. After a bit she realized that the flames had a hypnotic effect, it was trying to keep her in that one location. She put h
er hands in the flames not thinking
that it would really burn her but it did. He
r
body on
the ground
jerked from the fire, and the burn on her finger healed instantly.