Mellie Rose's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

Mellie drove until the cottage was two ridges behind her and pulled off onto a fire road. She killed the engine and rolled the window down. Her own scent came back at her on the wind, sharp as a signal flare. Every step she had taken from porch to car had laid a fresh line. The hunter would follow it straight to the only person she had visited this week. Raven. She called Avril first. "I need to kill a scent trail," Mellie said. "Mine. Tonight. Before it points at my girlfriend." Avril did not ask why. Avril was her bandmate, the one she called when the answer had to be honest and fast. "Burnt ground kills scent. So does running water. So does another vampire's blood over your tracks." "I'm not near a river." "Then call the pink-haired one." Mellie hung up and called Mia. Mia was the other vampire guitarist in town, the one who traded her tips for a hunter the way strangers trade cigarettes. "He's tracking me toward Raven," Mellie said. A pause. Mia's voice came quieter. "Cross your own trail with a stronger one. Feed. Not a kill. Enough to bleed on the ground where your line bends. His nose will lock onto the fresh blood and follow that instead." "Follow it where." "Anywhere that isn't her door. Lead it into stone. Something old. Something that eats sound." Mellie knew the place. Two towns over, off the highway, a black-stone ruin the locals called the vampire castle. Tourists took photos of its spires in daylight and stayed away after dark. Empty halls. Cold floors. No neighbors to hear a hunter fall down a stairwell. She drove to a truck stop on the way and found a man alone behind the diner, drunk, arguing with no one. She took him by the sleeve, bit the soft place under his jaw, and drank until his knees loosened. She let him sit down against the wall. He would wake with a headache and a story no one believed. She pressed her bleeding wrist to the gravel where her tire tracks turned. Then she drove east, dragging the wet cuff out the window for the first mile. She reached the black castle before three. She walked in through the broken gate, up the main stair, and out a servant's door on the far side. Her blood marked every threshold. The trail ended in a stone room with three exits and a drop to the cellars. She went home the long way, on foot, through a creek bed. At dawn she called Raven from a payphone. "Don't open your door tonight," she said. "For anyone. Not even me." "Where are you?" "Safer than you if you listen." Raven was quiet. Then she said, "Okay." Mellie hung up. The trail pointed east now, into black stone. But Raven was locked in alone, and the hunter had a full night to decide he had been lied to.