Page 66 of Eternal Devotion

16

Ensley

Mordecai wasn’t human.

This wasn’t news. I’d figured it out days ago.

Before our confrontation outside of the mansion, I’d been unable to properly label him. Ghost never fit. People saw him. Interacted with him. He took up physical space and wore a corporeal form. Ghosts, if one believed in them, didn’t do that. Although the word vampire had tickled my mind a dozen or more times over the past few weeks, it seemed equally unreal. Unfathomable. Impossible. I had refused to accept it, despite the stacking clues.

His elongated eyeteeth, bared in threat, along with all I’d seen during my clandestine investigations seemed to confirm that these creatures that I’d once believed fantastical did indeed exist, and not solely in the pages of fiction or in the coding of a game.

The front door crashed against the wall and rebounded as Mordecai fled. He did not take a minute to close or lock it and raced away like a wounded creature in the presence of a dominant predator.

Me? He feared me? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

The earsplitting scream echoed through the trees and silenced the nightlife. It raised the hair on my nape and chilled my blood, but it was noise, nothing more.

Mordecai hadn’t launched an attack, despite baring his teeth and warning me to stay back. He’d run.

My heart jackrabbited as I debated what to do. Peppered in sweat, I didn’t feel the October cold.

Over the past week, I’d watched Mordecai come and go. He left every evening after sundown and didn’t return until the blush of dawn colored the sky. He was early tonight. I hoped there might be time to get inside before he returned. I wanted to hide and learn where he went during the day. See what he did. I had suspicions, but I needed confirmation.

The first time I caught him leaving shocked me. It was three days after I woke with a cloudy brain, unable to remember anything clearly. Three days after I coaxed memories to the surface and pieced together part of the puzzle.

Those memories returned brighter than ever. Determined to confront Mordecai and get answers, I had driven to his house to discover he wasn’t at home. Deciding to wait, sitting in the Jeep with the engine off, conserving gas and freezing my nads, Mordecai had appeared.

Not from down the driveway in a taxi, but from within the house.

The house I was certain had been empty.

Startled, I’d tumbled from the Jeep to challenge him when he vanished into a sudden mist. Poof. Gone. Stunned and confused, I’d spent an hour pinching myself and circling the area where he disappeared, unable to accept or believe my eyes.

Two weeks had passed, and I’d returned several times.

After witnessing his initial transformation, I exercised caution and no longer drove to the mansion, hiring a taxi instead. I had no idea how he missed the Jeep that first night.

Each time I returned, I remained out of sight and observed his comings and goings, gathering information and growing the balls to face him.

A vampire. Was it possible? How could it be? How did these creatures exist outside literature?

I stared at the gaping maw of darkness beyond the open front door, listening for Mordecai. After the resounding shriek subsided and the stir of nightlife returned, I tucked my fear away, bolstered myself, and went inside.

I’d been through the mansion enough times that I no longer needed a flashlight to get around, but I used one anyway, for sanity. I didn’t venture into the parlor. I didn’t climb the rickety stairs to the second floor. I went directly to the kitchen and the locked door to the basement, subconsciously knowing it was where he went during the daylight hours. The cellar. If the lore I’d read was even half true, the location made eerie sense.

It was also the only place in the house I couldn’t access. After searching from top to bottom for days and not finding him, despite knowing he was home, it remained the only plausible hiding spot. I no longer pondered how he accessed the subterranean level. A door was no barrier to his kind.

Could I have broken the lock and descended to the lower level? Yes, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what I suspected might be below.

Instead, I wrenched the drapes open to let in the dawning day, sat on a stool at the worktop table, and waited.

For hours.

Shortly after three, hungry and stiff from sitting too long, my curiosity got the better of me. My mind whipped and buzzed and painted all sorts of wild imaginings of what mysteries lay in the basement.

I paced, stopped at the locked door more than a dozen times, and wiggled the knob in vain. Frustrated and impatient, I yanked open kitchen drawers one after another, seeking a tool of some kind that I might use to break through the obstruction.

Nothing.