Reckless: Shades of a Vampire (17 page)

“
Come home,”
she hums
, “Come home…”

Emma pulls into the church parking lot, and turns the truck lights off. She leaves the engine running. Emma gets out of the truck and scampers to the shed door of the building where the rattlesnakes are kept. The door is latched only with a knob – her father’s design.

“The serpent is too powerful to lock in,” he has said.

Emma lets herself into the shed, finds a string hanging from the ceiling light and pulls it, illuminating the room.

The serpents are sleeping.

Emma takes the black material draped around her neck and ties it into a sack. She opens the lid to the snake box and peers in. The rattlers are curled around one another like kittens on a couch. Emma reaches her right hand in, taking one on top from just behind its head.

She slowly pulls it out.

The snake is limp.

Emma holds its head even with hers, looking into its eyes as its awakened tongue slithers in and out. The snake hangs to her knees, but its rattle is calm. She takes the black bag with her left hand and drops the snake in.

“There,” she says.

Emma reaches back into the box and takes out another, slowly. She opens the bag, and places it in.

“There,” she says.

Emma takes the bag of snakes, pulls the string to turn out the light, shuts the door and gently tosses the bag onto the front seat of the truck. She gets in and starts making her way back on the road on a path toward David’s house. She notices Christmas lights decorating the night outside houses along the way, and softly sings words to her favorite seasonal hymn in the spirit of the Eve.

Emma parks just off the highway at David’s house, turns out the lights and the engine, takes the black bag of snakes, gets out of the truck, softly shuts the door to a half latch, and starts walking toward the security light in the distance that illuminates the frame house where David and his parents are resting.

At the house, Emma circles to the back and tiptoes toward David’s window, the one she left unlatched when she visited the house several weeks before. She hopes David hasn’t latched it back. But since it has been too cold to open the window, reasonably, she figures he has paid the window no attention at all.

Standing before the one she thinks is David’s, Emma puts the black bag holding the snakes on the ground. She pushes the window gently from the bottom by pushing on the glass inward and upward.

It moves an inch, and she feels a warm gush of air seep out from the crack into her face. She can’t see inside the room because of a dangling curtain. But Emma pushes the window up farther, and farther, until it’s up far enough so that she can crawl through.

She picks up the snakes from the ground, and pushes her palms including the one holding the bag into the windowsill. Emma hoists herself up, flings her leg into the sill, and pushes herself up as the cold night gusts under her opened dress.

Emma pushes the windowpane up further, crouches, hoists the bag of snakes and stumbles to the ground inside the house with a big thud followed by a smaller thud when the bag lands on top of her.

BUMP, she lands in the night.

Emma looks up, seeing David in his bed across the room. He rolls over, presumably stirred by the noise. Emma balls up and closes her eyes, covering with the black bag to her side. She stays in the position until she hears David snoring.

Emma walks to the side of David’s bed. She pauses, and looks at him. She smiles.

“Oh, David,” she whispers in her thoughts. “You want the preacher’s daughter, huh. Well tonight, I am yours.”

Emma kneels beside the bed, placing the bag of snakes on the floor. David is on his back, the covers drawn tightly around his face. He is snoring in a steady rhythm. Emma places her hand on his stomach. She waits to see if he wakens.

He doesn’t.

Emma rubs her hand softly, and slowly, up and down his stomach, moving farther in each direction with each pass. David murmurs a pleasant sound amid the snoring.

“Ummm,” he says, smacking his lips.

On a down stroke with her hand, Emma feels a bump. She wraps her hand around it. David gasps between snores.

“Ahh,” he murmurs, exhaling.

Emma squeezes her hand. The bump grows more rigid, and she can feel David’s heart beating in her fingertips. She slips his boner out through the slit in his pajamas so she can get a better grasp. She tucks her hair behind her ears with her left hand, licks her lips, and eases her mouth toward David’s neck. She circles her thumb around the top of the firm shaft she is holding, faster, and faster.

David's cock is firm, and throbbing. She feels some slippery liquid ooze out, and Emma smears it all around. David buckles. She thinks he is about to cum.

“Ahhh,” David says, opening his eyes.

He sees Emma’s face, inches from his.

“Huh!?” he says. "Emma?"

She squeezes her hand, and cocks her head, like a snake about to strike. Emma darts at David’s neck with her lips open wide. She squeezes her hand so tight her fingernails dig in at the moment her incisors pierce the flesh of David’s neck.

STRIKE!

“Ahhhhh,” David shouts, revealing both pleasure and pain as he ejaculates, squirting cum into his pajamas and her hand.

Emma clinches her jaw, setting her teeth firmly into the veins of his neck, and David settles back quietly into the position on his back he was in sleeping. Emma drinks his blood, releasing her hand to rest it on the bedside as she drains his every ounce of life.

Letting go of his neck, she is full but energized by both her nourishment and freedom. She sits briefly on the side of the bed, gathering her composure.

Emma then reaches inside the bag to pull the snakes out, one by one.

“There,” she says, placing each at David’s side in the bed.

Emma hears a noise from the hallway. Perhaps the commotion woke someone up. She listens, hearing footsteps, and a voice.

“David,” his mother says. “David, did you hear something?”

Emma grabs the black bag, leaps toward the window, hoisting herself into the sill and dropping to the ground on the other side.

She sits up, and listens.

A door creeks.

Emma quickly gets on her feet and quietly grabs the bottom of the window, pulling it down as David’s mother enters the room.

“David?” she says. “David? It’s cold in here. What’s going on?”

Emma gets the window down and pulls her fingers away from it, crouching outside the house. Moments later, she’s sure David’s mother has found him.

“Eeeeeeeeeeee,” David’s mother cries out.

Emma clutches the black bag and darts toward the truck. There, she sits in the driver’s seat for a moment watching the house. When she sees lights come on, she has a thought.

“Merry Christmas David,” Emma thinks.

She had a gift for David after all -- a hand job and a bite.

Emma starts the truck and drives away.

She stores the truck back in the bushes down the dirt road on the Denton farm, gets back into her bed, and falls fast asleep, just hours before sunrise is due on Christmas morning.

“Jeremiah,” she hears her mother call. “Get the door.”

Who could be at the house so early Christmas morning? Emma wonders.

She rubs here eyes, and glances at her body spread on top of the covers. She’s still wearing her dress. She looks on the floor and sees the bag she made from the black material. Emma sits up quickly as she hears her father walking to answer the door.

“Just a minute,” her father shouts, when the knocking repeats before he can get there.

Emma folds the black material and puts it in her to dresser drawer, hangs up her jacket and her dress in the closet, pulls on a green night gown that reaches to her ankles from a drawer, and slips into house slippers.

She takes two bobby pins from a small bowl on top of her dresser and pins back her hair behind her ears.

She hears her father open the door and greet the sheriff and deputy.

Emma knows she will be needed, so she heads for the parlor, arriving just as the guests come in.

“Sheriff Smith, Deputy Cagle – Merry Christmas,” her father says.

“Merry Christmas Reverend,” the sheriff says.

“What brings you out so early on this day? I dare say nobody should be working on the day of Christ’s birth unless it is an emergency.”

“That it is, Reverend,” the sheriff says. “That it is. Or trust me, we wouldn’t be here.”

Emma is standing in the parlor doorway as the sheriff and deputy are taking a seat on the couch.

“Emma,” her father says. “I don’t think nightclothes are appropriate dress for a lady when guests are here.”

“I heard a knock,” Emma says. “I wanted to see who it was. Christmas morning and all.”

“Actually, Reverend, this involves her,” the sheriff says. “It’s fine if she wants to change first, but we need to talk with her in the room since we have some difficult news to share.”

“Difficult news?” Emma asks.

“Yes, ma’am. Not exactly a good tidings we bring.”

“I see,” Emma says. “I think it’s important to hear them out father. I can change later.”

Emma takes a seat on a chair across from the sheriff and deputy. She hikes the hem on her gown to just below her knees, revealing the smooth, pale skin of her lower legs to the deputy, who keeps his eyes fixated on her.

“It seems there has been an accident, Reverend,” the sheriff says. “An accident involving your snakes.”

“My snakes?”

“Yes, your snakes. Billy, why don’t you explain. And you might want to brace yourselves, especially you, young lady.”

The deputy pulls out a small notepad from his shirt pocket. He starts reading from notes.

“At approximately 3 a.m. on December 25 the sheriff’s office received a call from a Reverend Samuels, who reported that one hour before, at their house in Henegar, Mrs. Samuels heard a commotion and went to check it out.

“The Reverend said Mrs. Samuels went to the room of David, her son, since the noise seemed to come from there,” the deputy continues. “Apparently it did, since the Reverend reports that Mrs. Samuels turned on the light to find two rattlesnakes were in the bed with David, her son. Seemed found some pleasure from the snakes.”

Emma’s father looks at her. Emma’s mother, standing in the doorway between the parlor and the kitchen, lets out a wail.

“Oh, no,” she cries, covering her mouth.

Emma doesn’t flinch.

"Pleasure?" Emma's father asks.

"You don't want to go there sir," the deputy says. “The Reverend said Mrs. Samuels yelled for her son to get up. But he did not. The Reverend said Mrs. Samuels saw that her son was white as a ghost. No color in his body at all. She could see a mark on his neck.

“The Reverend says Mrs. Samuels got him out of the bed. He went to the bedroom, saw the snakes, got a broom stick, opened the window, dropped them out the window, and then checked on his son.

“The Reverend said his son was dead with a snake bite to the neck.”

“Oh, no,” Emma’s mother cries.

Emma does not flinch.

“The sheriff and his deputy are called by the dispatcher. They meet at the Samuel house at approximately 4 a.m. on Dec. 25. They find that one David Samuels is deceased in his bed with a snake bite to his neck.”

“And that’s why we are here,” the sheriff says, picking up where the deputy left off.

The deputy looks at Emma, who is looking at her father.

“The Reverend is some kind of mad, I must say,” the sheriff says. “Best you stay away from him. He says you put some kind of spell on his boy about those snakes.

“Nothing in our law that says that snake handling you do is illegal but you can see that once again it has become dangerous. I suspect those snakes came from your church, but we need to go and see to make sure.”

“As for you Miss Mays, I’m sorry,” the sheriff says. “I understand you and David had just become engaged. I know news like this can be shocking and I’m sorry to say that your fiancé is dead.”

Emma’s mother cries out again.

“Oh, no, no, no,” she wails, as tears run down her cheeks.

The deputy is watching Emma, who is motionless and speechless and looking not at them but out the window, toward the Denton farm.

“I’m sorry,” the deputy says to her.

“I understand,” she says, changing the cross of her legs during the exchange.

“She’s shocked, you understand,” her father says. “Not exactly what she expected on Christmas morning.”

“No,” the sheriff says. “And we’d like to get on out of your way quick as we can. We just need to get by the church to see if that was your snakes that boy was playing with.”

“You don’t
play
with the snakes, sheriff,” her father says.

“I’m sorry, Reverend, you are right. Nothing playful about it.”

“If David took the serpent in hand and was struck down then it’s the will of God that he is no longer with us, nothing else. His father may not want to accept that, but it’s the truth. If David’s time has come, then maybe he wasn’t right with the Lord.”

“If you say so, Reverend. We just need to see where those snakes came from then be on our way.”

The deputy looks at Emma’s left hand.

“I see you have on the engagement ring,” he says.

“Yes,” Emma says, sliding the engagement ring off her finger. “I got it last night.”

“That’s what his parents said. You got the ring last night.”

“Yes, sir. Last night. David came over, got down on one knee, and said we were getting married.”

“That’s a shame. Probably the only boy you ever dated, huh?” the sheriff says.

“Well …,” Emma says, stammering. “Yes. Well, yes. That’s the only boy I ever dated.”

“So he gave you a ring last night and left? Did he say he might go get some snakes?”