This vision of perfection strode toward me.
"You're not afraid of me?" he asked.
"Should I be?"
He looked around the meadow.
"Yes," he said, as he tilted up my chin up so I was looking into his eyes.
I looked around, seeing the picnickers, lying twisted and still, some drained of their blood, some lying in pools of it. My father's red hair more orange than the blood that was seeping into the ground around his fat form. I'd always hated that man.
"I'm not." I stared back at him, straight into those bright red eyes, as unafraid as I'd been every time that drunk of a husband of mine had come home, alcohol making him certain that I was to blame for all his problems. His corpse was behind me. One way or another, he was never going to hit me again.
The man in front of me laughed.
"If you were going to kill me, you would have already."
"I like playing with my food, and these others were just too quick."
He was right. If a prolonged struggle, hours of terror was what he wanted, he hadn't gotten it from my family's little reunion. He'd killed my husband first, and my brother in law. I guess he preferred the terror of the women to the anger that the men would have had, however brief it would have been. My father was next, and my mother. He paused to drain my mother. I sat and watched as he sucked every drop of blood he could out of her. It couldn't have taken more than a minute.
My sister had taken her daughter then, using our mother as a distraction. She'd run along the path, trying to get back to the road that we'd taken to get here, carrying a screaming toddler. I bit into my apple, hearing a crisp crunch as this sparkling stranger had just disappeared, and then my sister screaming for her child. I heard his laughter, the most beautiful, musical thing I had ever heard, as my sister must have tried to fight him, trying desperately to save her child. Then the noise had cut off.
I hated all of them.
An intoxicating scent had wafted to my nostrils as I reached calmly for a cracker.
"Do you have many games like this?"
"As many as I want."
I could feel his breath on my neck. He had moved behind me. I shivered, the first sign that I might not have been as calm as I was acting.
"Could I play too?"
"Maybe you can." He sounded thoughtful.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"What's yours?" I shot back, starting to turn towards him, but he was suddenly already in front of me.
"I'm James," he said as he offered me a hand to help me up.
James. A fitting name. Kings had that sort of name, and by his appearance and bearing, he really couldn't be anything else.
"Victoria," I said as he tugged me to my feet. He smiled.
"Like the queen," he said as if he thought it a wonderful joke.
Yes. Exactly like the queen.
