The top of my spine buzzed. I pressed one hand across the back of my neck to dampen the sensation. The vibration continued down my psychic column and my spine shook.
Panic and fear gouged me to the bone. I stumbled into the restaurant and collapsed on the wooden bench in the foyer.
The shriek halted like someone had turned off a spigot of noise. My head held the fading echo. As my helplessness and panic subsided, my strength returned-and my anger.
Psychic energy attacks. Zombies. Gino’s mysterious cousin. The loose ends in this mystery tangled around me.
A woman appeared in the doorway to the dining room. She wore an apron and had a pen stuck in her mop of henna-colored hair. Her eyes and forehead crinkled in worry. “I saw you keel over like you had a seizure or something. You okay?”
“Yeah.” On the outside. Inside I was a mess.
“You waiting for somebody?”
Gino, but it wasn’t her business. “Sorta.”
“Sorta yes or sorta no?” Her tone went from concern to a hard scold. “Either get in or get out. No loitering.”
Feisty shrew needed a kick in the butt to learn about customer service. I followed her inside to see if Gino was here.
A pair of elderly couples sat at a square table in the middle of the room. The old women unsnapped clear plastic bonnets they had cinched over their blue hair. The four geezers complained that they couldn’t remember when it had been this cold and rainy. Try last year.
Two beefy guys wearing down vests over camouflage hoodies-hunters, I was sure-occupied a booth at the far corner.
No Gino.
The waitress fanned a laminated menu toward the empty booths along the wall. “Your pick.”
I took a seat facing the front window and ordered coffee. I sneaked the bag of type O-negative from my coat and squirted the remaining blood into my cup. I stashed the empty bag back into my pocket. I sipped the warm brew and it comforted me like a hug from a chubby hooker.
What now? Where was Gino? Where were the zombies?
My ears tingled, then my fingertips.
Danger.
I set the cup down.
My kundalini noir coiled, like a viper ready to strike. I curled my fingers to hide my extending talons.
The hairs on the nape of my neck stood up. A shadow glided across the fogged restaurant window. My fangs pushed down from my gums and threatened to poke out from under my lip.
The front door opened. A figure entered the foyer and stood behind the window separating the foyer from the dining room.
The figure wore a blue hooded slicker. The feminine outline suggested a woman.
It was her.
I could feel it.
The girl in the psychic attacks.
How was this possible?
A prickly sensation trickled from my head to my fingertips and toes.
Her rain-shellacked slicker glistened in the fluorescent light from the foyer ceiling. The brim of the slicker’s hood cast a shadow across her forehead to the middle of her face, masking her eyes. Moist strands of brunette hair curled from under the hood.
She clasped the hood in both hands and pushed it up and back as if lifting the visor of a helmet. As she did this, the anticipation turned my stomach into mush.
Her face was on the mature side of adolescence, a woman yet still retaining the soft lines of a girl’s features. The elegant sweep of her nose matched the trace of an elongated face and a delicate chin. Her nose and cheeks were rosy from the outside chill.
This was her.
The girl.
The adolescent girl from my hallucinations. That phoenix who had risen from the ghost of the little Iraqi girl.
The prickly sensation became centipedes digging at my skin. I’m an undead bloodsucker; this creeped-out feeling was not supposed to happen to me.
Her right eye twitched. She rubbed the heel of her hand against the eye. When she brought her hand down, the right eye remained open and still.
Her two dark eyes rested on me, as if I was the only object in the world. The gleam in those eyes bore deep-probing, knowing, menacing.
My kundalini noir twisted like it wanted to find a hole and hide.
For a moment, all I could see were her eyes.
The eyes that had haunted me across the oceans and years since I first saw them in Iraq. Deep as wells, dark as the night I’d last seen them.
My fear became cold, heavy, and paralyzing, like I’d been trapped under a giant block of ice.
Her right eye twitched again.
I am vampire-a seasoned warrior, a supernatural killer-and this woman, this ingenue, this girl with a nervous facial tic, made me shrink in terror.
My body screamed: Danger, get away. This…girl…woman…whatever…was poison. My legs tensed to catapult me through the roof.
I forced myself to stay put. Since when did I run away?
Relax. Look tough but nonchalant.
Who the hell was she? Why was she here?
She had been only the stuff of hallucinations, but now she was standing in the doorway.
The girl walked through the foyer into the dining room and stopped by the counter. Water dripped from the hem of her slicker and soaked her green sweatpants.
Everyone else in the restaurant seemed to have vanished and it was only her and me.
My hands trembled.
Control yourself, Felix. Don’t let her see you panic.
She had no weapon that I could see. In any other circumstance, a quick bite to her tender neck was the most I’d need to keep her in place. If that didn’t work, I’d use the.45. The advantage was mine.
Her right eye twitched again. She blotted her eye. When she lowered her hand, those eyes were no longer threatening but uncertain and vulnerable.
Her spell on me dissolved, slowly.
I looped a hand around my coffee cup to feel the warmth. The others in the restaurant came back into focus: the two hunters at a booth, the four geriatrics at their table, the bitchy waitress marching by with a carafe.
The girl took a halting step. She looked afraid.
Good. She needed to be afraid of me.
Keep looking tough.
I had to see what this woman was. Human? Supernatural? If so, what kind? What did she want? My hands flinched upward to remove my contacts but I hesitated. Too many witnesses.
The girl leaned from one foot to the other as if debating whether to leave or to approach me.
She crossed the floor. Her gaze became fragile. A wrong move on my part and she’d be out the door.
I didn’t dare so much as blink.
She stopped beside my booth. Her eyes were a rich honey brown and shiny with fear. This close, I could see fresh pimples on her chin and in the crease along her left nostril.
A teenager. I’d been terrorized by a teenage girl with bad skin.
She reached for the top of her slicker. Was she going for a weapon?
I crossed my arms and set my elbows on the table. I curled my hands and readied my talons.
Without a word, she unzipped her slicker and took a seat on the opposite side of my booth. Her green sweat top said Morada Panthers in yellow script. Water seeped from the folds of her jacket and puddled around her elbows. Her fingers were red and her knuckles white from the outside cold.
She acted scared of me, yet she had come this close.
What did she want?
She took a deep breath and clenched her fists as if steeling herself for a dangerous jump. Her right eyelid blinked repeatedly, semaphoring her anxiety. She put her hand on her upper cheek to keep the eye still.
I smiled to try and put her at ease. After all, I wasn’t exactly bad company. At least not in public.
The girl said, “Felix Gomez.”
It was the voice that echoed through my hallucinations. It was like a spike had been hammered into my head.