Ben Wake
This place is perfect. I don’t just mean the town of Stokers Mill, I mean the house I’ve found just outside of it, and its backyard, lightly treed and gently sloping up to a sudden, steep rise in the valley wall. There’s a nice route, hard to detect from even twenty feet away, but crystal clear when your feet are on it, that climbs up the rise to a little shelf that gives a great view over the house and its neighbors.
The house is on the west wall of the valley, where it won’t get direct sunlight until late in the morning. There’s a great bedroom up on the second floor at the back of the house, with just one narrow window. A simple blackout curtain, and I can keep the room as dark as I need even on the brightest of days.
Between this house, and another parcel of land several miles outside of town with a solid old cabin on it, I think I’ve found a place I can settle for a while. I’ve spent a couple months cultivating a couple to play my parents while I hide out as a student in town. Right now, Paul and Carol are at the bank handling all of the paperwork to buy the two properties for me. Cash sale funded by a trust fund I’ve set up through a couple blind transfers of money, and neither their names nor mine end up attached to the transaction at all.
There’s only one thing I have to worry about, and that’s not pressing. Just something for me to make sure I keep in the back of my mind. I shook off the active pursuit by my clan, the Negre of Romania, a little over a year back. But I know that at least two of their hunters live in Colorado and Wyoming. It will take a while before our paths start to intersect and the risk of running into each other becomes measurable and troubling. For now, it’s best for me to not go out looking for them yet. I don’t have myself set up well enough to go out courting problems. They’ll find me soon enough, and the more prepared I am for the inevitable encounter, the more likely I am to be the one that walks away from it.
Downhill from me, someone is running a riding mower through the backyard of the house, around the trees. One little courtesy on the part of the bank before they hand possession of the property over – have a service in to cut the grass and trim the hedges out front. It’s part of the courtesy that is normal out in this area. Yes. This will be a good place to live.
With all of my training and years of practice, it is very easy for me to come down from my overlook and skirt the edge of the yard without anybody noticing me, even in the middle of a bright and sunny day. I get into my car, not parked in the driveway yet, and head into town. Tomorrow, Paul and Carol will take me to the Stokers Mill high school to register me for classes. Today, I want to take another quiet look at it, get a feel for what I’ll be walking into.
I pull into the parking lot about ten minutes before classes let out for the day. The place is eerily quiet on the outside, as all such places are at this time. The school buses are pulled up and waiting, idling softly to keep their heaters running. The cars are the typical mix, a few nice vehicles, a good number of average quality rides, and a bunch of old beaters. I’m pleased to see a small section of motorcycle parking in the lot, empty of course during the snowy part of the year. But it does tell me that enough of the upperclassmen and faculty appreciate the curvy mountain roads to justify giving them their own dedicated part of the lot. My fingers start to subconsciously flex, missing the feel of the hand grips.
While I’m sitting there, mentally replaying one of the roads I just drove down, thinking of how great it would be to take it on two fast wheels, the bell rings. Just a few seconds later, students come flooding out of the building. I see the usual assortment of cliques and clusters form in the stream of bodies. There’s one that especially catches my eye. Two young women, two young men, who meet up at the top of the steps. The leader of the group is one that I’ve had my eye on since one of my first trips through town. She’s clearly smart, that much is visible in her eyes and the way she carries herself. She’s also popular in the good way. It seems like she is friendly with everybody, regardless of which group they belong to. She must be best of friends with the other young woman in the foursome, who is not as pretty and not as popular, but is still attractive and quite personable. The two boys have obviously known her since childhood, and have undeniable crushes on her. The way they watch her every move, and subtly vie against each other for her attention. They don’t ignore the other woman in the group, but she does not command their attention in the same way her companion does.
I cannot blame the two young men. I also find myself immensely attracted to that same young woman. Not just because she appears charming and brilliant, but because there is something very unique about her that pulls at a part deep inside of me. She’s a witch, of no small power or talent, but even that is not it. I’ve known a few witches in my many years, and while they are often more interesting than the average human, there has never been anything about any of them that lights me up the same way this woman does. There is something very unusual about her that I’ve never experienced before, but that compels me to get closer to her, to find out more.
I know there’s a thrope – a lycanthrope, or werewolf – in this town. I’ve been past his house at night. I made it a point to not approach his home too close or encounter him directly yet. Thropes can be pretty hot headed and very territorial, and the Truce that ended the Great War between my kind and theirs seems to barely hold some days. I’m already an outlaw and marked for death by my own clan, the Negre, and because I’ve been a soldier in the clan wars as well as the Great War, most of the other clans have a bounty on me as well. The fact that there is a tenuous peace with the thropes means that for the time being, I have a lot fewer enemies, and I’d like to keep it that way.
As I watch the group of four students, I am pretty sure that one of the two men is the thrope in town. At this distance, and with everybody wearing winter clothes, I can’t see if he’s got the hair, but I know the way a thrope moves. They have a very powerful sense of posture and position. As a vampire, I have supernatural powers that can give me influence over the warm. A thrope can sometimes affect and control a person simply by the way they stand. In my time fighting them, it is one of the things I’d learned to appreciate about them more and more as I’ve studied and observed it.
When students start dispersing to the buses and their cars, I drive off. I am tempted to follow the young woman home, but that strikes me as wrong, invasive. Instead, I head out of town to the other property I should now be the owner of. It’s several acres of steeply sloped and wooded land that I intend to use as a hideout if I ever need to get out of Stokers Mill quickly and lay low. This time of year, the temperature starts to drop rapidly as afternoon fades to evening, and the high valley walls block out the sun. With the return of cold, the snowmelt running across the roads starts to freeze again, and I have to take it slow lest I spin the car out and launch myself down into a valley.
While I’m carefully negotiating a sharp switchback, another car passes me coming up the from below. It just takes a glance at the driver to realize that I had sorely underestimated the likelihood of running into one of the Negre hunters in the area. It’s only because of the angle we approached each other at – my headlights shining into her passenger compartment, that she didn’t catch sight of me. My throat tightens up as I finish the curve and speed up a bit to get as far away from her as quickly as I can, throwing caution to the wind.
Now that she and I have crossed paths once, it is inevitable that we will do it again, and soon.