Cry Wolf (42 page)
‘It’s that outlaw’, the townsfolk would say, ‘the one that’s been killing these last six weeks’. They’d put deputies out to patrol the streets, but deputies and sheriffs couldn’t be everywhere at once, and many deputies got distracted near Ruby Rue’s.
Behind the clouds, Ivory sensed the impending dawn. She ran to her open window before flying up and closing the shutters tightly until no light could make it through. Then she pulled the pine box from under her bed, shucked out of her dress again, and crawled in, shutting it closed over her. Her door was locked three times, and all the girls knew not to disturb her during the day. Ivory had lived in this dusty little town for ten whole years, ascribing her agelessness to flattering lamplight, makeup and staying out of the sun. Because of her unchanging delicate features, the girls figured she was doing something right, just something they weren’t willing to do themselves, especially considering everything they already had to do.
Ivory didn’t blame them. She wouldn’t have chosen this life either.
Ivory was no killer. She was just lonely.
Maybe this one would take.
* * * *
At the end of sunset, Ivory awoke, opened her coffin and stepped out, her face flushed with last night’s feed and its renewing effects. When she opened her window, not caring that she was naked, she breathed in the crisp, cold air. A thin layer of snow covered the rooftops undisturbed, but the street below was a mix of snow, dirt, horse manure and human urine. Down the street was a single dark bloodstain where lawmen would have retrieved Wynn in the morning, frozen solid and bled to death, his throat slashed like all the others.
Ivory clothed herself in her street dress—still rich and showing her fallen station, but not quite as bright red, a humble maroon instead—and a brown cloak, then exited Ruby Rue’s through the front door. She used pure snow from the railings to clean off the dirt on her exposed skin from her coffin bed and headed to the cemetery.
She didn’t like the cemetery. Her fiancé had buried her under a stone cross, and that had kept her under for almost three days before she’d risked its burn just to quench her thirst. Many vampires made homes of their burial sites, but Ivory preferred sleeping aboveground.
Trailing the low iron fence like a mourner, she searched for new earth and found Wynn’s makeshift marker at the head of a mound of tilled dirt. The gravestone would have been commissioned upon his death, but it would take a few days to complete the stone etching.
There was no sign of anything that would deter a vampire from arising his first night, but there was also no sign that anyone had climbed out of the coffin.
She waited for approximately thirty minutes in the cold and dark, neither of which bothered her. Instead, it was the refusal of the last of her long line of chosen mates to rise that upset her. Blood slid from her eyes, the closest to tears she could get, and painful.
She didn’t know what she was doing wrong—she remembered the process of her own turning quite well, although she hadn’t known what it was at the time. The vampire who had turned her had drunk from her, and when she’d been about to die, he’d given her his blood. Then she’d risen the next night.
But that vampire had died in a shootout with a silver bullet in his heart, and Ivory had had to go on alone. She was tired of being alone. She had company every night, but she could never get too close, lest they see her strangeness too well in the light. She wanted more than company—she wanted a companion. And something wasn’t working.
With a strangled growl, Ivory leapt over the fence and ran to Wynn’s grave to dig him out herself.
She cried out as her hands burned, hissing steam into the cold air. She held her hands up to inspect the blistering. Then she looked down at the grave. Without another sound, she flew to the grave of her previous choice, Red Lanyard, and passed her hand through the snow to the earth beneath. The soil burned her skin once more.
She went from potential mate to potential mate, eight men in all. All of them had been buried in consecrated ground. None of the other new graves had been sprinkled with holy water.
Peering around the cemetery, her gaze paused on the church next to the graveyard.
It wasn’t something
she’d
done wrong. Someone else was interfering and kept her vampires from rising. Her men were probably nothing but dust and bone in their coffins by now.
“Well, shit,” Ivory said.
About the Author
Aurelia T. Evans is an erotic writer with a fondness for horror and the supernatural. In addition to writing, Aurelia enjoys baking, taking late night walks, and listening to almost every genre of music.
Email:
[email protected]
Aurelia loves to hear from readers. You can find her contact information, website and author biography at
http://www.totallybound.com
.
Also by Aurelia T. Evans
Totally Bound Publishing
