Dracula: Hearts of Fire (Dracula Heart's) (4 page)

   
Lauren had settled into her apartment in New Yo
rk but she couldn’t get Michael out of her head
, and she had never felt so alone. The days were longer and the nights darker.
The loft was large
with shiny hardwood floors
and her furniture didn’t appear to occupy enoug
h space
,
like miniatures in a dollhouse
, but there was a place in her heart that also felt empty.
Michael’s face occupied most of her free
time.
That she missed him wasn’t a surprise, but the fact that s
he missed him to the extent
she did certainly was.
He had taken her heart without permission,
ingratiated himself into her soul,
absolutely nothing she could do about it.
The damage was accomplished.
Lauren couldn’t punch him for that. She went back to the day that he had hired that guy to throw the note in the bottle from his boat and it lifted her mood.
It made her smile.

  
The
four
rectangular windows were
horizontal to the floor; they were
huge and let in a lot of light.
She had a large black
sectional sofa with chaise,
a black reclining love seat
, and in between a square glass coffee table
with her swords
resting
on top
.
There was a
curio cabinet with photos and knickknacks and Michael
’s
note to her
inside it
still in the
Coke
bottle.
The ceilings were the tal
lest that she had ever seen, but
the whitenes
s of it all was
not to her taste
, it needed a splash of color
.
Some day she would take care of it but not today.
Even her large Florida paintings of palm tree
s
hanging over
the water were dwarfed by the huge wall space.

    Lauren
sat on the sofa, starting to read
a new
Dean Koontz
novel almost a half dozen
times but her mind was distant
and she couldn’t get into it; it was difficult to concentrate on anything.
She
alternately paced and t
hen stared out the window. New York’s pace was definitely hectic
, even
more so than Boston
.
There were a million things to do
and see
but she didn’t want to do
or see
any of them.
The nasty vampires were thicker here; she had killed three of them in less than a week.
One had had a spell on him, made his way surreptitiously behind her and almost took her head.
If it hadn’t been for that 10-year-old girl that scream
ed at her she would probably
be dead.
If she ever discovered who the hell was providing the evil ones with magic she would take their heads as well.

    The pot that was New York was beginning to boil.
People were even more irritated with the stifling heat
, some felt like they were literally melting.
People were losing weight and losing hope, and some moved out of the city even though they didn’t want to move.
Add to that the daily slayings making the mood a mixture of anger and bleakness. A story on the hopelessness of it all had been posted in the New York Times, which made
a lot of
people want to track down the writer and pound t
he snot out of him. The reporter
was given a two week vacation just in case the death threats had some validity.
So many
New Yorkers were at the breaking point these days.

    When Lauren
was bored or bothered she liked to clean, however the place was already shiny clean and she was unable to
find even a single dust bunny.
Painting was too smelly.
Perhaps her mind needed to be vacuumed out but that was one thing that she couldn’t accomplish.
With the seriousness of her job it was
n’t
good to be distracted.
Distracted in battle was a good way to get killed.
She desperately wanted to cut something or someone in two. 
On top of everything else Lauren
was now beginning to suffer from lack of sleep.

  
“I’m so bored
and yet I don’t want to do anything, and here I am talking to myself
!”
Her lonely gray blue eyes
examined the place and thought that
the space was missing something important, and of course s
he knew that what it was wanting
was Michael
.
She
had to snap out of
it soon.
Her Nutrisse blue-black hair was short and sassy.
Lauren
turned away from the windows and sighed.
How she missed those
hazel eyes. He had stalked
her for quite some time before she finally agreed to a single date, but it had turned into much more. Now she longed for him whenever she wasn’t battling evil vampires.
She
was starting to feel like a lovesick teenager and she didn’t like it one bit.
Love could be amazing or devastating
and on occasion it was both on the same day
.

    Lauren stared at the poster of the Supernatural brothers on the wall, and then at the poster of Alexander and his female German shepherd vampire dog Tessy. She stood immobile for quite a while, staring past the dog with her th
oughts returning to Michael. The sheriff
missed him on multiple levels, and she also missed Samantha.
Being a red sheriff it wasn’t easy to make new friends, especially those of the genuine variety.
The excitement of dispatching nasty vampires had lost some
of its satisfaction as well. Lauren
knew that it wasn’t wise to put one’s happiness into the hands of another
, but for the present
it was
easier said than accomplished
.
Michael was back in
Boston and she regretted her decision even before she had arrived in the Big Apple. It was difficult to find someone special, and now
she
felt that she hadn’t fought hard enough for him.
Those mixed feelings had turned into something solid
. Life was tricky like that.

    “Maybe I should dirty the place just so I can clean
it.
Don’t even know why I took the damn day off.”

   
She had tried to call him several times but the phone had been disconnected. Why he didn’t have a cell phone was beyond her
, almost everyone else did
.
Those morons that strolled through the mall with their phones glued to their heads spewing personal info
rmation too loud were both
humorous
and pathetic.
“Oh yeah, I got a lump on my left testicle. I said I got a lump on my left testicle!”

   
Even Samantha back in New York had been unable to contact him.
Michael’s
absence made her days so much longer.
On her next day off she had decided to fly back and see if they couldn’t make it work out, after all Boston wasn’t all that far away. It was the only thing that she now had to look forward to, getting Micha
e
l
into her arms.
All those years of being turned off emotionally now made it difficult to deal with.
If necessary she could bring him back in
a
trunk at least that
thought made her smile
, the first in days.

    Lauren picked up her Samurai swords and
held them touching at ninety degrees with her knees bent; she remained motionless as she went into a meditative state, transfixed like a statue.
She remained in that position for several minutes. Her
level of concentration was at a higher intensity than most could obtain.
The mind was wiped clean of all external distractions.
She imagined several foes that approached.
Awareness
was heightened; all her senses were razor sharp
.
The mind was still as her muscles readied. The sheriff then
went through a series
of
thrusts in a
predetermined
pattern
, her swords cutting noisily through the air with the most impressive leaps.
She parried, blocked and decapitated in a fluid motion as natural to t
he sheriff as water in a brook.

   
Then she
envisioned
multiple attackers
with sw
ords as she went into kill mode; s
lice and dice.
There were two males and a female, all with swords.
Controlled fury combined with experience and style.
  It
was art in motion as she tumbled through the air with her swords jutting out at deadly angles.

    Without
warning
her front door was kicked off its hinges and sent flying across t
he room. This was no dream as her new home had sustained damage. Lauren faced the two intruders and smiled
;
Milton and Clifford blurred into the living room area and were actually transluce
nt. The spell that had allowed
them entry
without permission
wasn’t
exactly working
the way it should have.
That was the thing with spells, a person really had to know what they were doing otherwise the effects could be unhealthy
, even deadly
.
They were
tall
, blonde and ski
nny. Clifford’s hair was touching
his shoulders while
Milton had a brush cut. They were after bragging r
ights for killing a red sheriff, and there was now a prestigious club for biters that had killed sheriffs.