Singled Out (7 page)

‘’Cept mine,’ slurred Jason, who had been sitting sleepily staring down into his glass looking deceptively cuddly, though actually those sudden bursts of bad temper were probably what had finally driven Tanya away. Who wants to live with a volcano?

‘Jason looks like Alice’s dormouse,’ Orla observed critically.

‘More like a Wookie.’

‘Are you getting married, Jason?’ she asked.

‘When Cass says the word.’

‘The word is
no,
’ I said automatically. ‘And not only are you not divorced, Jason, you know you don’t really want to marry me.’

‘Come on, Cass!’ he said, smiling at me. ‘Marry me, live with me – whatever you want!’

He really is rather attractive in a large, loose-limbed, craggy way.

‘Why waste any more of your life waiting for an old man, when you could be sharing it with me?’

‘He’s not an old man,’ I objected automatically, though Max is certainly no spring chicken. He’s a whole decade older than Jason and me, and
our
dewy bloom of youth has long since evaporated.

Somehow this didn’t seem the right moment to tell them that my lover was Suddenly Single but hadn’t bothered to inform me of the fact, though it might have explained just why I found it balm to my wounded feelings to have Jason looking at me tonight as though I was everything he’d ever wanted for Christmas.

Perhaps I might even have given him just a bit of encouragement … unconsciously, of course, for my feelings for him are really more of the sisterly variety.

And after a couple of drinks I certainly began to wonder just why I was being faithful to someone who was, as Orla often pointed out, unfaithful. Who had made promises he hadn’t kept, and hidden me in a sort of limbo for half my life (and just about
all
my reproductive life.)

Can there be that many eggs left in the basket at forty-four and counting? How many of the little lions have climbed off and ambled away, yawning? For we are born with all the eggs we’ll ever have, and no one’s ever gone to work on my Year of the Lion cache. I’ll be even older by the time Max comes back and we get married –
if
he comes back and we
do
finally get married – and it might be too late even now.

Too late.

Also to be taken into the reckoning is Max’s performance in bed, which has declined over the last few years to the disheartening point where I think the sight of his golf clubs excites him more than I do. This is not likely to help.

I was starting to feel really dismal, not to mention a teeny touch of the bitter and twisted. I may even have been muttering under my breath like a malevolent hag. It was the perfect mood for my graveyard shift, though, so wrapping warmly in my purple velvet cloak I set off.

Tonight, for some reason, Orla and Jason were both twitchy about letting me go off on my own, even though I do this sort of thing all the time and am not at all afraid. I had to be quite firm about needing to be alone.

After all, nothing
living
would harm me in Westery, and the dead can’t.

*   *   *

I left the Batmobile outside my cottage in Graveyard Lane, resisting the urge to go in and check for phone messages, which isn’t really a
huge
temptation when you live in the central one in a row of three, like the filling in a dubious sandwich.

On one side of me Mrs Bridges has her TV switched on full-volume between the hours of 7am and midnight, sending me subliminal messages through the party wall that I don’t want to hear: and on the other side, of course, live the Fowkes with their possessed baby, Birdsong.

They call her Birdie, which might be all right for a tiny tot, but could be a bit sick-making when she’s adult, I fear.

Shots from number one and squalling from number three slowly faded behind me as I strode down the lane, warmly wrapped against the chilly breeze in my cape with its quilted mauve satin lining.

I was not at all nervous of the living, for the road to the graveyard is a dead-end and so not much frequented at night, and since Westery is a very small place, what youths there are prefer the dubious nightspots of the nearest large town. I’ve always felt perfectly safe walking the lanes in the middle of the night, waiting for the chill awareness of the undead to strike, as it always does.

Orla thinks I’m going to fall prey to some mad rapist cruising the lanes looking for a victim, but I don’t think they cruise the lanes looking for extremely pissed-off vampires.

Down the high-hedged lane the small and isolated graveyard sits in its very own Foggy Hollow, giving it on the right night that classically spooky effect. But unfortunately tonight was clear and crisp and even, and I didn’t even need my little torch once I was out of the lane because the moon was Werewolf full. The metal gate groaned under my hand, and the gravestones all cast dark, hunched shadows.

I paced about the gravelled paths for a while …
the gravel beneath her feet grated like broken teeth
 … under the inscrutable gaze of angels, and accompanied by the sobbing, guilty shade of Keturah, distraught at having failed her lover, Sylvanus.

She hadn’t truly believed black magic could bring him back, nor deep down had she wanted it to, for she’d been mortally afraid of what form her dead lover would take. No wonder, then, that she cast herself on to the freshly dug earth of his grave in a frenzy of guilt and remorse!

And her lover, Sylvanus? How would he be feeling? (Apart from dead.)

If he did manage to come back in some form without her help, wouldn’t he be seriously cheesed-off with Keturah for failing him? Especially, perhaps, if he had been called back by another, whose yearning for him was greater than hers?

Come to that, he’d probably be feeling pretty much as I do about Max just now.

Finding I was starting to emphasise with Sylvanus more than Keturah, which wouldn’t do in the least at this point, I plunged suddenly off the path and cast myself full-length over the newly sodded grave of Isaiah Kettlewell.

How surprised (but not displeased) he would have been had he been able to appreciate it, the old rogue!

Turf had been jigsawed back over the mound so I couldn’t dig my fingers into the soil like Keturah, but actually the image of those other fingers coming up between the sods to close on her as she lay there was much, much better …

Then something cold squirmed under
my
cheek and dragging fingers closed on my shoulder.

‘Eeee-yaargh!’ I screeched, wrenching free with one mighty bound and leaping away in an acrobatic manner I hadn’t realised was in me, except in my nightmares.

As I was about to hurdle the nearest gravestone a familiar voice stopped me in my tracks: ‘It’s only me, Cass,’ Jason said apologetically.

He uncurled his long body from a graveside crouch. ‘I followed you to make sure you were all right, but I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

‘Frighten me? I nearly died when you touched me, you imbecile! My heart stopped beating. Three million brain cells ceased to exist. The shock could have—’

I stopped, illumination suddenly dawning. ‘Of course! That’s what would have happened!’

‘What would have?’ said Jason, puzzled. ‘When?’

‘Keturah would probably have passed out from the shock, if not died of fear on the spot. She’s such a weak-spined creature.’

‘Look, Cass, just who is this Keturah?’ demanded Jason. ‘And why were you lying on Isaiah’s grave? I hadn’t realised you were so fond of the old villain!’

‘Keturah is the
living
main character of my new novel,
Lover, Come Back To Me.
’

‘Appropriate title, with Max going off like that, isn’t it?’ he quipped unfeelingly, and I glowered at him.

‘No, it isn’t. And although I quite liked Isaiah, I was just using his grave to get the feel of what it would be like to—’

I didn’t finish the sentence, since Jason was looking at me with puzzled affection, like a large, friendly, but not terribly bright dog.

I gave him a pat. ‘Never mind, Jason. I think I’ve got what I needed, and certainly more than I intended, and I’m going home.’

‘Can I come?’ he asked pathetically.

‘No. It’s too late, I have a tattered reputation to uphold, and if you were cherishing any hopes, forget them, because I don’t intend being unfaithful to Max.’

Not yet, anyway.

‘But
I
wouldn’t take you for granted like he does, and anyway, why stay faithful to a married man when you could play the field a bit with an unmarried one – sort of? Besides,’ he added, ‘Tom’s home for the weekend and I don’t want to go back. Strange music will blast the air until three in the morning, and the lounge will be littered with bodies.’

‘I think that sounds pretty much like the next chapter of my book,’ I mused, seeing my way forward at last. ‘A sort of
Wreck of the Hesperus
effect.’

Their naked bodies slithered and writhed together like snakes in a pit?
No, perhaps that’s a cliché.

Jason was still thinking along different lines … or maybe not. ‘You could come back to my place and distract me,’ he suggested.

‘No thanks,’ I said shortly, brushing grass and earth off my cloak and not feeling even remotely tempted. Tom makes rather gross sexual suggestions to me whenever Jason is out of the room, and he’s not only young enough to be my son, but has spots the size of puffball mushrooms.

‘Well, I’d rather come back with you,’ he conceded, removing a worm from my hood and tossing it aside. Then he swept me into a warm embrace which, since I was still wrapped in the cloak, was rather unpleasantly strait-jacketing. ‘Cassy, you know I’m mad about you. If Max hadn’t taken you away from me when we were students—’

‘Jason, Max didn’t take me away from you, you were going out with Tanya by the time he came on the scene. And you know we’d already agreed to be just friends.’

‘Well, that was then, and this is now. Couldn’t you just think seriously about me?’

‘I have – I do,’ I said truthfully. ‘And you know I’m very fond of you, Jason, but that isn’t enough, is it?’

‘I don’t know. Couldn’t you try it and see?’ he suggested, and kissed me.

‘Not until I find out where Tanya’s got to,’ I thought, but relaxed into the kiss anyway, and very pleasant it was, too, once he’d negotiated his way around the vampire teeth.

But it wasn’t
more
than just pleasant, and since Jason was starting to get a bit carried away I wrenched my head back and tried to free myself, before things really got out of hand.

‘Jason, stop,’ I said. ‘No, Jason! I’m sorry, but this just isn’t right, and—’

‘You don’t mean it,’ he said thickly, trying to kiss me again. ‘Forget Max.’

I was starting to get a bit cross, for although I didn’t really think Jason was dangerous (down, Shep!), he was big, focused and had drunk enough to make him stubbornly single-minded. As his mouth closed on mine with passionate determination, I was forced to employ the fangs for the second time that night.

I’d be a full-time vampire before I knew it at this rate.

Jason yelled and let me go so suddenly I staggered back, observing with some interest the way the dark blood welled from his lower lip, and the sudden expression of fury turning his craggy face into a gargoyle’s mask.

Scrub what I said about him not being dangerous. Knowing his rages of old I realised it was quite time I removed myself, and so took to my heels through the graveyard and out through the gates into the lane, with Jason in hot pursuit.

Perhaps it was because I was too busy looking over my shoulder to see how close he was, that I wasn’t aware of the dark sports car hurtling round the bend until it screeched to a halt bare inches from me, warmly quivering.

The driver, a large, dark and unequivocally masculine shape, was making movements as if to get out and probably yell at me, if not worse, though it certainly wasn’t my fault he’d taken a wrong turn down a dead end.

… the vampire cruised the dark lanes seeking his next victim, the sleek, fast car making him feel even more powerful than before …

Vampires in cars? I hadn’t considered the possibilities motor transport would open up to the Undead before …

But the driver of
this
one opened his door, and feeling that I was about to turn into whatever the female equivalent of a misogynist is (and contrary to male belief it isn’t necessarily a feminist) I bared my fangs in a snarl that he could take either as a propitiating smile or a threat, and began to sidle round the further side of the car towards home.

Do you know, I’d quite forgotten I still had the ghastly greenish complexion and dark crimson lipstick on until the door slammed shut again, the central locking went down with a loud ‘clunk!’, and the car shot backwards, executed a rapid three-point turn, and roared away.

I took it as a compliment, and it’s not the first time this sort of thing has happened either. I am quite tall, dark-haired, and naturally pallid of complexion, with deep-set eyes and a rather lugubrious cast of countenance, and in full escapee-from-the-crypt make-up and dress in a darkened room have been known to scare more nervous telegram recipients into a dead faint.

How people do love to be petrified, don’t they? Or maybe they think I’m going to do an Ozzy Osbourne with the Bat? (Ex-bat. Alas, poor Clive! I knew him well …)

Once the car had gone, I became aware of blasphemous sounds from the graveyard indicative of Jason’s having measured his length over a gravestone, so seizing the opportunity I quickly made myself scarce.

*   *   *

Back home it was midnight at the oasis. Mrs Bridges had gone to bed, and even Birdie was silent in her little nest.

The message light lured me to the phone, but it was just Jane with Max’s number. Nothing from Max personally, then or later, though Jason rang the doorbell repeatedly while I wrote through the witching hours with a red-hot pen.

Chapter 5: Mistress Of All She Surveys

‘Another chilling little potboiler from mistress of the macabre Cass Leigh,
Nocturnally Yours
will delight only her fans.