Brown Mountain Lights

Vampires, Motel Rooms, and Stupid-Ass Men

IIt had been a really long fucking day.

I worked in the special collections department at Overton University in North Carolina, specializing in Native American occult paraphernalia. Everyone thinks librarians do nothing but answer obscure research questions, check out patrons, and shush people, but working in a library is a lot more complicated than that. New books don't magically appear on the shelves, the catalog doesn't update itself, and grant applications don't write themselves. The entire cataloging system had crashed today, and as the resident IT girl (the only person there under thirty-five), I was the one who had to figure out how to fix it. Once I'd figured out what was wrong – the head librarian had tried to update the system by uninstalling the entire program – and fixed it, I had precisely two hours to do eight hours worth of work. That, of course, meant I'd ended up staying late, so when I left, the sun had gone down.

As I walked to my car, though I shivered in the cool October air, I was paying absolutely no attention to my surroundings; I had this nasty habit of getting lost in thought and going somewhere on muscle memory alone. I jerked back to awareness when I reached my parking spot – and my car wasn't there.

After a brief moment of panic, I remembered that I'd parked farther from the library today, trying to make an effort to not be quite so lazy. Unfortunately, I had managed to park in the darkest corner of the enormous lot, and of course everyone else was gone. Taking a deep breath, I pulled my keys out of my pocket and positioned them between my fingers. While the library was in a decent part of town, there had been reports of animal attacks in the area, and I figured a swipe to the face with four sharp keys would at least make whatever creature it was back off for a few seconds.

I reached my car and let out a huge breath, unlocked the door, and got in. Driving away, I laughed at myself for thinking someone was after me.

I pulled into my driveway, got out of the car, looked up at the dark motion activated light and sighed – I'd been meaning to replace the bulb for weeks, but I only remembered it after sunset, and I wasn't going to try to change a bulb in the pitch-black. I meandered towards the front door, trying to locate my house key. Just as I pulled the key out of the mess my keychain had turned into, something hit me hard from behind, knocking me to the brick walkway. My head connected with the stone and everything went white with pain.

Rough hands turned me over and hard fingers clamped over my mouth, another hand pinning my wrists above my head. The man above me was wild-eyed and disheveled, and – oh God, was that blood on his shirt? I finally regained control of my body and started to squirm and kick, letting out muffled screams against his hand, trying my best to get a knee up between his legs or my teeth into his fingers, but it was like he was made of granite. "Easy, little one. Easy. Calm down. I'm not going to hurt you," the man whispered, and I slowly began to stop struggling, wide eyes staring up into his.

Once I was still he grinned, showing a mouthful of teeth that were definitely not human, and hissed, "I lied."

I tried to scream again, but his teeth were in my neck and it hurt so badly I could barely think. I tried to bring up a hand to pull his hair, slap him, do something, but he just slammed my wrists into the asphalt and bit down harder.

I shut my eyes and tried to pretend this wasn't happening, but I was starting to get woozy and I knew I was losing a lot of blood. I could feel consciousness slipping away when I felt a warm spray on my face and chest and the pressure of his teeth disappeared. I opened my eyes to see a man in a plaid shirt holding a bloody machete but before I could ask him what the hell was going on, I blacked out.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

When I woke up, I was in a motel room – one of the super sketchy, charges-by-the-hour-not-just-the-night type. I was lying on one of two double beds while the guy in the plaid shirt dabbed something on the wounds in my neck. I groaned and started to sit up, but a huge hand landed on my chest and pushed me back down.