Dracula: Hearts of Fire (Dracula Heart's) (5 page)

    Lauren kicked Clifford with such fury that she drove him back out the door. Milton managed to deflect a single blow before she decapitated
him
as she was in no mood to play
. Because of the spell he didn’t immediately turn to dust
, sparkles of lights danced through his headless torso
.
Clifford rushed in screaming like an insane samurai warrior; she knocked the sword out of his hand and as he rushed to retrieve it she also took his head.  Lauren let hersel
f fall onto the sofa and stared
for almost five minutes
at
the corpses that hadn’t yet turned to dust. Milton
’s was the first to pop and turn to dust
,
then
several seconds later
the same thing happened to Clifford. It was time to get the vacuum cleaner.
She had some cleaning to do after all.

CHAPTER THREE

    I
T WAS
A LITTLE AFTER
TEN O’CLOCK
in the evening when Jerome exited the forest and made his
way to the Mill Road in Moncton; he was comfortable dragging his victims into the
nearby
woods and feasting on them in there, surrounded
by
the
trees and animals that concealed themselves in
the night.
The waxing crescent moon peeked through an opening in the clouds and crickets chirped to give the night ambience.
A few cars went by but not many. He knew there weren’t many sheriffs in Moncton, if any.

     Jerome
was a bearded fellow that
had watche
d for
the last
two nights the three
women that resided in the century old white house
with the peeling paint
.
He had set his attention on them like a trucker on a stake and he wasn’t about to let go.
Jerome blurred across the road, then
paced at the back of the house and
became excited every time one of them passed by the windows, lit up by the
interior glow against the
darkness
outside
.
He was motivated
by the night’s hug and by its freshness. The women
were all in their sixties, shared the cost of living which made life easier for all of them.
They had
become good friends and were like family.
When one was sick they all felt ill.

   “
You are b
ags of blood with legs. That’s exactly what you are ladies.”
He looked like a mountain man that had just come out of the mountains and into civilization, with wild and crazy looking eyes.
The more days that went by the hungrier
Jerome had been
getting for their blood, but he liked to be patient.
He took pride in the fact that he was so patient. Now he was just hungry enough to eat their faces off and drink their blood. They would taste as good as a cold draft from a large mug. They wou
ld be such a thirst-quencher. Jerome
considered that his hunger just might be making him a little emotional. Instead of low blood sugar, did he have low blood blood? That thought made him smile.
It was satisfying when he cracked himself up.

    Mary-Lynn Baker was at the kitchen table reading the Times and Transcript newspaper as Betty-Ann Cormier and Margery Tailor were at the sink doing the supper dishes.
Margery always hummed when she did the dishes, and she was so good at it that the other two appreciated it.
Her humming
could raise anyone’s mood as she had a talent for it.
All three were unattached and had little family, although Margery did have two sisters in Abbotsford, British Col
umbia, and a brother in Detroi
t
she hadn’t heard from them in years.
They were
all
well-off and she wasn’t.
She had been ostracized without a single word
, pu
shed out of the family loop
.

    “That poor President Obama,” said Mary-Lynn. “Every time he tries to
do something they stop
him from doing it.
They say it a terrible idea when it’s a great idea.
A president should have more power than that, don’t you think?
Otherwise, what’s the point of being pres
id
ent?
I mean if they fight you on every little thing.
Of course having too much power could be dangerous.
”

   
Betty-Anne was busy scrubbing spaghetti sauce off a white plate
that had been left to set for too long
.
“It’s all about getting
re-elected
. They really don’t care if the coun
try goes right down the toilet
. They have lots of money
and to them that’s all that matters
, but boy do they like to
pretend.
They get in their limousines and go home to
their mansions after telling poor folks to tighten their
belts. I’d like to tighten a belt around their necks.
”

   “I think we watch too much CNN.” Mary-Lynn considered how they almost never watched the Canadian news, because it hit too close
to home
.
They were all CNN junkies.

  
The plate dropped and smashed on the floor, sending white pieces flying everywhere as
Betty
-Anne scre
amed the most horrible scream.
Jerome was staring into the window over
the kitchen sink with wild eyes; he liked to play with his food.
They would have jumped out of their skin
if they could have managed it.
The vampire
maneuvered himself so that he was upside
down, appearing
to be
some sort of crazed maniac
, but of course they knew he was a vampire.
The biter repeatedly showed them his fangs and then retracted them.
He made his way around the window twice
as if defying gravity
, peering in at them from different angles in order to terrorize.
The sound of him doing so was awful.
If anyone showed up to challenge him
he would run off and return again tomorrow night.

  
Margery ran and grabbed
the phone off the wall but the line was cut
. She grabbed her cell phone out of her purse but unfortunately discovered that the battery was dead.
She felt like she was going to vomit.
“My cell phone is dead! What in God’s name are we going to do?”

     Mary-Lynn closed the curtains and tried to remain calm
but her shaking hands told a different story
.
She tried to take a deep breath to calm herself but it wasn’t working.
“He can’t get in if we don’t invite him in
. He’s trying t
o make us run for help. Nobody
can outrun a blood sucking vampire.
” She screamed toward the window. “
Get out of here you bloodsucker!
”

    Jerome went up the side of
the house and onto the roof;
it was the most horrible sound that they had ever heard.
Thump, thump, thump, scrape clunk.
What was he up to?
They knew he
couldn’t come in so what the hell was he up to?
Once on the roof the thumps got louder bu
t he was careful not to cause the roof
to cave in as he had not been invited inside
.
The vampire paced back and
forth up there considering
his options. Tomorrow night they could
possibly
have a red sheriff waiting for him. What to do?
He walked from one end of the roof to the other, then transformed into a bat and flew into the living room window where they had congregated
.
There he stuck to the window and flapped his bat wings to further terrorise them.
It was a peculiar thing
seeing the bat laugh.

   
He
turned back into his regular form
and pressed his face hard against t
he glass.
If Jerome could frighten
them
enough he thought that it was likely that their instincts would take over and they would make a run for it
, or at least one of them would
.
His tongue started to lick the window as Margery screamed
; his smile was disturbing and large
.
She thought he looked like a sick clown.
When he pulled down his pants and stuck his hairy ass against
the window they all ran back into the kitchen
.

    “I can come in if I want to!” It was a lie but it certainly did frighten them.

    “I’m gonna run for help. If I scream loud enough someone will come.”
Panic had pushed away common sense;
crying
she desperately wanted to run but they wouldn’t let her out of
the house
.

    Moon Diamond
the lilac point Siamese
was on the sofa pawing at the remote to turn on Dracula’s large flat screen television. Zacharia
’s
soul was trapped inside the Siamese cat and
he
was looking to watch the news
. After several attempts he managed to find the station but soon became uninterested in all the political talk. He stretched long and hard, then threw himself down
on
the floor and flicked his tail back and forth. The cat
inside his head
showed Zacharia images
of mice that
he wanted to pursue and eat,
the vampire told the cat to discontinue its
pestering, but being a cat it was of course fixated on rodents, birds and balls of string for all he knew.
Things that were important to the cat were not important to him.
It was like living with a polar bear and trying to get along; they were simply too different to mesh.
It was best that he didn’t think about being trapped forever inside the cat but that was just about impossible.