For Love of a Vampire

Chapter 7

Having been a sufferer of acute claustrophobia for as long as I can remember, I find the black of night frighteningly confining. Since there were no night lights to ease my discomfort and it was far too dangerous -not to mention wasteful- to keep a candle going while sleeping, I had to force myself to acclimate to the darkness. I managed, but I certainly couldn't claim to be comfortable in it. That was when I missed Duncan the most. He always made me feel so safe.

The following morning didn't bring me much comfort, other than the light of day.

Duncan. My heart sank at the thought of him. I needed to know how he truly felt about me, but how? He was in the twenty-first century going through his day without any inkling that I'd ignored his wishes and traveled back in time.

To the wrong time!

Worst yet, I'd done it without the aid of Isabelle. Now that I'd learned more about the fine Lady Margaret-Jane Chapman, I didn't know whether I should be angry or hurt. What I did know was that I felt very foolish and taken in.

I moved to the miniature portrait of her on the far wall of the room and looked at her closely. My heart felt like it was made of inflexible lead as it struggled to function. Margaret and I could have been twins. Could this be the reason Duncan was with me? Since he'd neglected to share the fact that I could be his one-time fiancé's doppelganger with me, I had no choice than to think it true. If he couldn't have his precious Lady Margaret, then he'd have the next best thing. Me. I wanted to wring his deceitful neck at the thought of it.

The urge to throw something was too great to ignore. I looked around the sparsely furnished room and soon thought better of it. If I'd learned nothing at all during my time here, I'd learned that material goods didn't come as easily to people in the eighteenth century as they did in the twenty-first. Even the poorest of poor of the future lived better than most in the past. There was no Macy's or Target to shop for clothing and home staples. Every item of clothing was painfully made by the hand of some half-starved worker and every piece of furniture or decoration the same. Even if the embroidery was done by a noble woman, it took months -not hours- to create. The room may have been sparsely furnished in accordance to my standards, but what was in it was of fine quality and made with the utmost care. There was nothing in this room that I had the heart to destroy. I wouldn't have been able to live with myself from the guilt of it.

I decided to take a walk instead.

The sensation of walking the garden was an eerie sort of comfortable. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew where I was going, yet I'd never been there before. It was an unexplainable "odd" that I vowed I'd focus on at another time. Right then, I needed all my attention placed on the situation at hand. I'd been duped by a spoiled aristocratic vampire and may have foolishly sealed my fate if I didn't keep my head on my shoulders and find my way back to the portal that would return me to the twenty-first century on time.

First things first, I calculated how much time I had left. This wasn't as easy as I would have thought since I owned no watch or calendar. I'd hidden my belongings in a cave when I arrived. They included a battery operated watch. I'd made note of the position of the sun when I arrived in the event my watch stopped working or was discovered and taken. Once I determined the day that I needed to return to my point of entry, I figured the worst case scenario would be that I would have to get there early and wait until the sun was once again in that same position.

My mind was so preoccupied with making my plans to return home that I didn't notice the disagreeable Lady Lilith until I'd practically stumbled into her.

If I had any doubt about how she felt about me -or should I say Lady Margaret- the look of pure hatred on her face made it painfully clear.

"Why do you hate me so?" I blurted out without even so much as a greeting.