Sunrise at Sunset (34 page)

He glanced at her with a speculative expression, hoping she wouldn’t notice. Much to his chagrin, she did.

“Come on, just a brief evening walk?” he pleaded hopefully. “I’ll only walk to the end of the driveway and back. That’s all. You can go along with me for protection, if you like.”

She smiled. “Well, sure. I can do that.”

He gave her his best appreciative-looking smile.

“But it’s going to be awful hard for you to take that walk with two broken legs,” she amended with narrowed eyes and flat voice.

His eyes widened momentarily with surprise, and his smile disappeared entirely.

She shrugged. “I have my orders, and they don’t include either of us leaving the house.”

He folded his arms across his chest and sighed derisively.

“For any reason,” she said forcefully with a raised eyebrow. “Remember, nobody’s supposed to know I’m even here.”

“Paige, please,” he pleaded in an urgent voice. “I’m going stir-crazy in here.”

“I sympathize with you Caleb. I really do,” she said. “But it’s for your own safety, after all.”

“Listen, I’ve never felt so bored and useless in my life,” he complained.

She regarded him coolly before smiling back at him. “Well, we better find something for us to do then.”

That caught him off-guard. “Like what?” he asked carefully.

She grinned menacingly. “You could show me some of those handy vampire combat moves that you said you learned from Katrina!”

He gave her a dirty look as she walked past him with a smirk over to the nearby sitting area to turn on the wall-mounted television. “You’re just plain sarcastic. You know that, don’t you?” he called after her irritably.
She seems to enjoy toying with me
, he noted irritably.

Paige forced a laugh. “Be nice. Don’t make me stand you in the corner.”

He hurried to the couch and found her already lounging on the cushions methodically surfing through cable channels. She didn’t even glance up as he glared at her over the back cushion.

“Oh, really? Stand me in the corner?” he pressed with a hint of incredulity.

“Well, despite my appearance, I’m a lot older than you,” she ventured. “And you’re only in your mid-twenties as a human, so I guess that makes you the spoiled youngster here.”

He folded his arms before him and asked, “That so? Well, just how old are you then?”

“My vampire life?” she asked. “Oh, I’m around the century mark now.”

He hadn’t expected her to be quite that old. Her youthful appearance and manner led him to believe she might have only been a vampire for a short time. “A century?”

To him, she seemed like a peer, someone he could have known through college. She had a very modern attitude for someone from her time period if she were truly a century old. “I’m finding that hard to believe,” he muttered while taking a seat in an open spot at the end of the couch near her pale feet.

Paige ignored him and continued to channel surf.

“You’re so...modern,” he added, grasping for the right word.

She glanced at him curiously, considering him at length. “Really,” she replied thoughtfully. “Well, you apparently don’t know much about the early 1900s then. It was a wild time, not much different from today really, other than the technology.”

He felt the history teacher persona rising in him to take over. “My specialty is really more the pre-twentieth century, but my impression is everyone was much more conservative in the early 1900s compared to today,” he ventured.

A smirk formed on her face and she corrected him, “Ah, that may have been true in some of the small towns or as reflected in public photographs, but I can tell you that people in the cities threw some really good parties behind closed doors in those days.” Her eyes grew distant, as if she were seeing another time. “Oh yeah, some really wild parties behind closed doors, especially in the 1920s. We did things that would put even cable TV shows to shame. You see, people aren’t all that different, really, just the facades of what they want to show outwardly.”

“Well, but there was barely women’s suffrage,” he countered.

“Women’s suffrage,” she scoffed. “I’m talking about the essence of what makes men and women tick inside, Caleb. The emotions, the passions, the sex!”

He blushed slightly, which she regarded with a grin.

“Oh yeah, that’s right,” she teased. “You’re the history professor. Well, take it from me, professor, it’s one thing to read about it and another thing to live it.”

Her statement struck him like a cold splash of water to his face
. It was a pretty good response
, he admitted and noticed how very different Paige seemed from Katrina.

She observed his expression out of the corner of her eye while changing the channel to a romantic comedy. “So, spill,” she insisted simply.

Spill?
He shook his head at her strange term and offered, “You’re just so different from Katrina, that’s all. You’re a lot less serious, for example.”

She paused while staring at the television, as though not fully focused on the movie before her. She cast him a sober expression. “Katrina’s serious for a reason. I’m pretty young as a member of my kind. You don’t survive as long as Katrina or Alton without time and events taking some toll on you, I think. So, I may not be like I am now when I’m their age,” she explained. “That is, if I make it to their age.”

“What do you mean by that?” he asked.

She considered her words carefully as he patiently waited.

“Before Katrina left, she warned me,” Paige said while staring into Caleb’s eyes. “She told me not to leave the house if at all possible. She said that Chimalma is very old and powerful for a vampire because of how long she’s been honing her skills. And if Chimalma manages to elude Alton and Katrina somehow…well, we don’t want to confront her out in the open.”

“But you’re a vampire too,” he countered.

“I’m a teenager among my kind,” she explained in a quiet voice. “Chimalma, Katrina, and Alton, they’re serious adults, the veterans.”

He frowned at her ominous tone and everything implied in her explanation.

She noticed his reaction and offered a hopeful smile. “But hey, I’m a tough teenager,” she reassured him. “I’ve never lost any kids on my watch.”

Caleb rolled his eyes with a smirk, and she giggled at his reaction.

“So, I wonder know how old Katrina is in vampire years?” he asked nonchalantly.

She gave him a wary sidelong glance and retorted, “Oh no, you don’t. You’re not getting that out of me if Katrina hasn’t told you. You take that up with her. Though more than likely, she’ll tell you when she’s ready.”

He sighed with resignation.

“So, what do you say? How about a horror film?” she prodded playfully. “There’s a good vampire movie on the Chiller Channel.”

Katrina and Alton took a small charter flight from Atlanta to Bradford, Pennsylvania, to the east of Warren where they last placed Chimalma. Despite the waning hours of night, they were able to take possession of a Jeep Cherokee they had arranged from Atlanta.

On their way to Warren, they stopped at an all-night discount store to stock up on the various supplies that they needed for the cabin. They also acquired an adequate supply of both regular and dry ice for their blood supply. Upon arriving at the campgrounds, they managed to wake the manager, who was staying onsite in a cabin next door to the main office. After hasty, sincere apologies to the semi-retired fellow and a large sum of money to help assuage his irritation, Katrina and Alton arrived at the small, non-descript log cabin.

Even at night, when darkness softened the edges of everything, the cabin was both modest and antiquated. The interior was fairly small, consisting of one main central room with a small stone fireplace, a small kitchen-dining area with a wooden table and four plain wooden chairs, two small bedrooms with wooden framed double beds, and one central bathroom. Katrina noted a small closet next to the front door, which brought to mind her quip to Alton back at the hotel regarding hiding from sunshine in a closet. The few windows in the cabin were thankfully small, and they came well-prepared to cover them for the coming daylight.

As they hauled their supplies into the cabin, Katrina smirked.

“What’s so amusing?” Alton asked while carrying an armful of baggage.

“I was just thinking about Caleb and how he complained so much about being locked indoors,” she recalled. “I should’ve brought him to a cabin like this for one day, and he’d be on his knees begging me to return to the estate.”
He raised an amused eyebrow and teased, “Tsk, tsk, Katrina. You’d actually torture poor Caleb like that? Such vengeful thoughts towards your mate.”

An idea settled into her mind as she considered the matter further. “Actually, it’s kind of quaint. Being sequestered in a cabin with Caleb for a weekend might actually be romantic. We could spend our days inside and walk through the moonlight appreciating the outdoors from a completely different perspective from what he’s used to,” she ventured thoughtfully. “He might enjoy that.”

Alton raised a curious eyebrow in response and offered with a mock-mortified expression, “Okay, now you’re scaring me. Since when did you become such a hopeless romantic?”

She frowned and stuck her tongue out at him, but he merely grinned and chuckled.

He pulled out his notebook computer and established satellite communications for Internet access. He received an email from a clandestine contact regarding some specialized equipment and explosives they needed for the battle with Chimalma.

Katrina watched him for a moment and glanced at her watch. It was nearly dawn.

“I’m going to unpack some things and call Paige to check up on everything back home,” she stated while carrying her luggage into one of the bedrooms. “They should be up and around before long.”

Caleb woke not long after seven o’clock, unable to sleep beyond that. He had trouble falling asleep the night before, though thankfully had no further nightmares. Standing before the bathroom sink wearing a pair of men’s pajama pants and gazing into the mirror, he scraped the blade of his straight razor against his face to attack some remaining stubble. His thoughts were distracted by ruminations on how Katrina was doing. On his last pass with the razor, he abruptly cut his chin.

“Damn!” he cursed as he rinsed the blade in the sink.

A few droplets of blood fell onto the front of his bare right shoulder. He cursed again when he realized how deep the cut went. He toweled the remaining shaving cream from his face and noticed Paige standing next to him, still dressed in some comfy-looking dark blue cotton pajamas. She seemed to appear out of nowhere.

“Are you okay?” she queried. “I thought I heard you curse.”

“Sure, I’m fine,” he replied. “Cut myself shaving, that’s all,”

She moved her body closer to Caleb’s and looked up at his chin. She licked her finger to moisten it and pressed it against his skin. He remembered how a vampire’s saliva helped close wounds and felt a momentary numbing sensation. After a minute or so, she withdrew her finger to inspect his chin. Paige licked her finger absently as if sampling the flavor and took a deep breath of the air between them. Her blue eyes glowed as she focused on the small droplets of blood on his shoulder.

Caleb’s eyes widened as her body lurched closer to his bare chest. The muscles in his body immediately tensed, and his heartbeat began to increase slightly.

“Mmmm,” she murmured from deep in her throat as her nose touched his right shoulder, and he felt the side of her soft face against his skin.

Placing both of his hands carefully and respectfully on her slim waist, he tried to push her away, but immediately froze when one of her razor sharp fangs touched the bare skin of his shoulder. He held his breath and remained statue-still.

Paige parted her lips slightly and her tongue flicked out to lick the drops of blood from his skin. Her fang suddenly retracted, and she pulled away from him with a start. “I’m so sorry,” she apologized in a rough voice while stepping back from him a few feet.

Her eyes still held a deep blue glow as he gazed into them. “Are you okay?” he asked tentatively.

“That was close,” she offered shakily. “Katrina would tear me to shreds. You’re forbidden fruit, my friend.”

He stared at her uncertainly.

“But sweet fruit,” she added with a smirk in a whisper almost too soft for him to hear.

His eyes widened at her comment.

“Sorry. Control is still hard at my age when I haven’t fed and fresh blood is present,” she explained with a nervous chuckle.

Before he could say anything further, she darted from the room in a blur. He released the breath that he didn’t realize he was holding.
That was close
, he silently agreed to her earlier comment.

Upon hearing a phone ring downstairs, he raced from the room and down the stairs.

Katrina glanced around the dimly lit cabin with a grim expression and momentarily worried as she counted to the fourth ring while calling the estate from her cell phone. Alton scrutinized the front window in the main room, making sure no sunlight would break through the combined drapes layered with dark sheets they had put up.