Free Under My Skin by Judith Graves Page B

one hand shading his eyes from the dim glow of the Tiffany lamp. He staggered about the room as if blind, his feet scuffing in the dust. He sniffed the air, then almost fell over when he zeroed in on the witch.
    His lips pulled back in a snarl.
    A groan of agony ripped through him. His jaw unhinged like a snake’s, opening wide. From his gaping mouth the smell of death filled the air, rancid. His incisors extended into fangs.
    A vampire.
    My pulse raced. I dove between him and the witch, holding my hands out to block his approach. He walked through me. Through my very being. I gagged as darkness permeated my flesh and drifted out my back. I didn’t exist. Not in this time, not here and now. The witch was right. I could do nothing.
    “Feed, boy.” The man leaned his shoulder against the doorframe and crossed his legs at the ankle, nonchalant and at ease. His fedora slanted above his harsh, but deadly attractive, face. Under his long overcoat a silver sheriff’s badge glinted on his lapel.
    He took a long drag from a smoking cigar. Then he grinned, fangs exposed.
    Another vamp. The boy’s sire, eager to watch his fledgling’s first kill.
    I spun. Screamed a warning. I bolted, grabbing at the boy’s arm, but my fingers slipped through air. I clawed at his back, my hands sinking through his cool flesh. I toppled forward, bursting through mother and child as if I’d tried to lean on a wall of fog.
    I backed away, my body shaking.
    The boy dragged the witch into his embrace.
    “My son,” she said. “If you need, then I will provide.”
    “Noo…” I screamed again, my throat burning with the force of it. Sand settled on my tongue.
    With a guttural moan the boy sank his fangs into his mother’s neck. He fed, a sickening slurping, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he gulped and gasped. The witch weakened. The two collapsed in a tangle of limbs.
    I clapped my hands over my ears, trying to muffle the slurps and sighs of his hunger, her death.
    The witch’s eyes fluttered open, met and held mine, while her son drained the blood from her body. “You see how he cursed my boy? Do you see?”
    I forced myself past the disgust, the fear—to a place of calm. I had to for the witch’s sake.
    I crept closer. His muscular shoulders, lean hips, shaggy brown hair were all familiar. I reared back. Bile rose in my throat. No. It couldn’t be…
    The young vampire ripped his fangs from his mother’s ravaged neck.
    Wade stared beyond me to face the sheriff, guilt marred his too-perfect face. Blood dripped down his chin. His mother, dead at his feet.
    *****
    Piercing barks rang in my ears. I woke, struggling for breath and coughing up red dust. It spattered my daisy print pillowcase like blood.
    Gasping, I swiped a hand across my mouth. I reached for the lamp on my bedside table and flicked it on. A shape, like a band of smoke and blacker than the shadows in the corner of my bedroom, slipped out the inch-wide gap under my window.
    Heart pounding, I surged from clinging sheets and slammed the window down in its frame, turned the rusted lock home, and muffled the barking of the Lab next door.
    Vampire mist. I’d only experienced it once before, while on a hunt with my father’s crew, but you remembered things like a strange smoke that moved with a mind of its own.
    Panic clawed at me. I struggled for breath, trying to shake off the dream—the vision of Wade at his mother’s throat. I swallowed hard and backed away from the window. Shivering, I wrapped my arms around myself, clutching at the sides of my tank top, my nails digging into my waist.
    Earlier, when I’d come upstairs…that window had been shut.
    *****
    “Wade Gervais is a vampire,” I announced as I balanced my backpack on a stack of book bags draped over an empty cafeteria chair. Alec, Brit, and Matt looked up from their Taco Tuesday specials, all wearing the same dumbfounded expression. “And I’m thinking his father, the chief of police, is really his