[8] Encounters with a Vampire
The Bloodletting
Chapter Seven < : > Chapter Nine
Table of Contents : Start Here
Listen and read: Breathe, 8obes
“Seeing your face/ Down memory lane/ I follow.”
Previously: Brent takes Catherine to his grave in Pensacola, Florida, and invites her to his beachside bungalow, where she admits her past.
The next night Brent and I drove to what I assumed would be another graveyard. Instead, we took the highway to downtown Pensacola.
He parallel parked the clunky Ford on a crowded avenue and stared at the pink neon flashing of ‘The Badlands’ across the street, his eyes darkened like overcast on distant violent waves. Two bouncers managed the growing line outside, checking ID’s, and letting small groups pass at a time.
I hadn’t taken him for the type who was interested in clubbing on a week day.
“Wait here.” He tossed the keys onto the bench between us, rounded the truck, and bypassed the line.
I watched the flickering lights of the repeated opening and closing club door for a while. The street lights half a block away turned from red to yellow to green about twenty times, I even learned the rotation. On the twentieth red, I grabbed the keys and hopped out of the car for some air and lounged on a bench outside a tattoo shop.
Ink stained blood trickled through the open shop door as the pungent pollen of decaying lilies, and I lingered, sniffing the air like a masochist, until the clenching of my jaw caused my fang to cut the inside of my lip. After that, I plucked a cigarette from the interior pocket of my jacket.
That was a lie. It was Brent’s jacket, a tan leather one with green corduroy trim embroidered with the Grateful Dead patches that he picked up from traveling with the band, or so he said. He could have just as easily plucked it off a victims body.
I took a drag and followed the dissipating smoke to the flickering stars, billion mile distant suns in their own right. I missed the sun, the great life giver on this planet. The closest thing to its comforting heat was the output of electric signs, and for that I was thankful of being turned in the modern age.
I fumbled for the phone in my pocket. If I turned it on, the start up screen would blind me, ping my signal, and beam my digital location like a spotlight. I studied my reflection in the black mirror; the cold, glass screen a reminder that my old life was just a back lit dial away.
According to some obscure occult article I read while researching old graves, witches used black mirrors to communicate with spirits, your own or otherwise. That was the purpose of the cellphone, long distance connection.
I could call my mother. I could do it now, sat alone outside the tattoo shop—Brent wouldn’t he around to stop me. But I didn’t want to hear her voice. That would make breathing harder, it would tug at my shoulders as anchoring harbor weights. I could text her, tell her I love her and that I’d be gone for a while and that I’m sorry.
I stomped the cigarette beneath my shoe, thumb hovering above the power button, when I smelled rain and earth across the street.
Brent walked out of the club, trailed by a woman with jet black hair and eye makeup so dark it was visible across the road, dressed in fishnets and a revealing black and white striped bikini. She smelled like sweat and blood that wasn’t hers.
I knew that look on her face, distant and withdrawn, as a broken link that was impossible to mend. I had made that same face in the mirror after I realized Jason had blocked me after he left.
Between the passing traffic and blending of lyrical trance beats of the numerous bars, I couldn’t catch any of their increasingly heated conversation. The woman spit and tossed him something that caught a glint of golden light. She spun on her heel, told something to the bouncers, and returned inside.
Brent stared at whatever was thrown at him for a while. One and three quarter light rotations. It didn’t take much loitering for the bouncers to shoo him off. He walked back to the truck without looking before crossing the street, and I hopped back into the passengers side, returning the keys to the space between us.
He held a golden locket.
“Is that the amulet?” I asked.
Brent stuffed the gold into his jacket, turned the key, and drove on.
Some graves weren’t meant to be dug up.
Did you know?
Scrying mirrors are a divination technique that utilize a black mirror in which the practitioner is to ask a question with a clear mind. The answer presents itself in the practitioner’s mind or in the mirror itself. Scrying mirrors should be used with caution.
More information on scrying techniques can be found here:
About scrying; Scrying process
Thank you for reading! Next week’s chapter installment will be the last of this novelette, thank you for tuning in :) If you enjoyed this story and want to read more like it, let me know in the comments.
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