A Taste Of A Vampire

After a while, she reached into her bag and pulled out the slender gift that Granger had given to her. She pulled the paper off it and her throat tightened as tears filled her eyes when she saw what it was.

He had given her a photograph of all the staff standing together in front of the manor. It was a lovely picture, and it made her heart ache all the more for seeing it. On the back, there was a note signed by all of them: “With love, and best wishes to you”

She gazed at it a while, remembering the home and each one of her staff members, and then she slid it carefully back into her bag. Not long after that the train pulled into London, and she switched trains to go to Heathrow airport.

It seemed surreal to her to be in such a busy place, humming with activity and noise after so long a visit in the quiet and serene country. It surprised her, because she assumed that she’d have been used to the noise and commotion.

A couple of hours later, she was sitting at her gate, waiting to board the airplane, and not long after that, the plane lifted off of the ground, and the green hills of England faded away from the airplane, and then slowly disappeared behind puffy white clouds.

***

It was surreal to her, being back in Manhattan. From the moment she stepped off the plane and walked through the airport, everything around her felt disjointed somehow. It felt as if she didn’t quite fit into the world of New York any longer. She wondered at first, as she took a cab to her apartment on 5^th Avenue, if it was just weariness from the trip, if it was because she had been in the English countryside for so much longer than she meant to be there.

She told herself that that was exactly what it was, but in the back of her head, and in the core of her heart, she didn’t really believe it. He was always there. Always at the edge of her thoughts. Always in the center of her heart. He was in her every dream, sleeping and waking.

She stood in line for coffee at the coffee shop around the corner from her apartment, and the grumpy old man behind her coughed and then asked her if she was going to step forward and order her drink in the current century. She had been lost in memory, hearing that faraway deep voice of his, seeing his eyes in her mind, feeling her body warm at the thought of his touch. At the old man’s sarcasm, she’d snapped out of her reverie and walked to the counter to get her coffee, her cheeks pink and her breath short.

That kind of thing happened to her all over Manhattan, as each day passed, one by one. At the salon when she went in to to have her hair and nails done. At the crosswalk when she should have crossed on a green light, rather than a red one. In line at the grocery store. Standing in an elevator as the silver box reached the floor she needed and her co-workers elbowed her to get off where she should be.

She got lost in conversations with people. Smells, words, and sounds triggered her memory, and in an instant, she would find herself back in England at the manor, talking to the staff, walking through the halls, sleeping in her bed, wandering the garden. Making love with him. She would push all of it out of her mind as much as she could, telling herself that she was back in the real world and she had to stay there.

It wasn’t all wistful memories. There were nights when she finally fell asleep after tossing and turning for hours, only to find herself in dark nightmares. Nightmares where she saw him as he truly was: a vampire with razor sharp teeth and deadly force. She was never afraid of him in those nightmares, but she was afraid for him; afraid that someone might find out who and what he was and destroy him. She was afraid that he might destroy others. It was those night terrors that made her cry out and wake up in a cold sweat, shivering and clutching her pillows tight.

Day by day she tried to assimilate herself back into her old life, but it seemed as if the more she tried to do it, the more she discovered that she didn’t fit into it any longer.

She was sitting at her desk one morning, staring at her computer monitor, her mind back in the gardens of the manor, and the memory of him talking to her there. The door of her office opened, and the woman who walked through it stopped short and looked at her, and then cleared her throat.

Claire turned and blinked at her. “Oh! Jenna, sorry. What is it?” she asked, trying to bring her mind and focus back to the present and feeling as if part of her was being pulled back away from where she was in her thoughts.

Her secretary walked over to her desk and handed an envelope to her. “This just arrived for you from England,” she said with a polite smile. She gave Claire a nod, and then turned and left, closing the office door behind her.

Claire stared at the airmail envelope that Jenna had put into her hands. It was from London. She felt a heavy knot in her stomach, and she turned the package over slowly and tugged at the release tab on the back of it, pulling it open.

Slipping her fingers inside, she pulled out a big envelope with a smaller envelope attached to it. She opened the small envelope and found a letter addressed to her from Colin Dent. He wrote that he hoped that she was faring well in Manhattan, and that he was sending the legal documents to her for her to sign Grayson Manor and all the inheritance over to the distant relation he had found. He instructed her to sign the documents and then mail them back to him in the return envelope that he had provided.