Twentieth.
This new revelation meant that there must be another vampire around the area, or at least there was one a few years back. Maybe I could find them and get answers to all of the questions that swirled around in my head. All I knew of vampires were folklore and legend, stories that I thought my father had made up to discourage me from disobeying him and going outside of the house after dusk. There had to be more that I didn't know.
I spent half of my nights searching for the elusive night walker and the other half watching Maddie as she slept. As time went by she grew and became more beautiful with each passing day. One night when I got to her window and looked in I was shocked, for there in the bed where my sweet little baby had once laid was a young woman. She looked only a few years my junior. How had this happened? Full years had slipped away from me and my little girl was no longer little.
I noticed a bouquet of flowers on her bedside table but they were not the wild flowers that grew around the home, these looked expertly arranged and tied with a pink ribbon. Then it hit me, Maddie was being courted! She was sixteen years old by now and had found herself a young man. I wanted so badly to talk to her about him, what did he look like, where was he from, what were his intentions, and how was she feeling about all of this? But I knew that I could not. Maddie had not seen me since she was four years old. Her father told her that I had taken ill and died. They even had a funeral with an empty wooden box buried where my body should have been.
I gazed in at her, trying to work this all out in my mind. My child was grown-up and on the cusp of a new life. I lost track of time while I sat there and soon the first light of dawn started to peek out from behind the hills, but still I sat, in a trance, staring at my girl, until the crowing of a rooster snapped me out of it. I realized in horror that the sun was just about to rise. I ran as fast as I could to get back to the old tree but I knew I wasn't going to make it in time. I ran harder, pushing my out of shape body to its limit. I could see the tree in front of me, but it was already surrounded by a ring of light. I thought that if I could jump in quickly, maybe I wouldn't burn. I had no other choice. The sun was quickly creeping across the forest floor, so I made a run for it.
I tensed up and closed my eyes at the last moment, miscalculating the distance and landing hard on the ground, gashing my forearm on a fallen branch and landing right in the center of the sunlight. I rolled into a fetal position and started screaming, expecting pain to envelope my body, but after a few moments I realized nothing was happening. Cautiously I opened my eyes and unfolded my body, sat up and gazed around me. Sunlight flooded the forest and blanketed my skin in warmth. He was wrong, my father had been wrong about vampires. We could in fact walk in the sunlight. This was going to open up a whole new world to me.
I looked at my right forearm at the gash, bleeding onto the leaves. It hurt, but not as much as it should have, the branch had cut deep. I walked farther into the woods to a small creek to clean it off. I was able to stop the bleeding but it still looked pretty gruesome. As I tried to figure out what I could use to wrap it I thought to myself how nice it would be if it just healed itself, quickly, leaving no mark, for there would no doubt be a nasty scar left behind. I looked back down at my arm and gasped. As I watched the skin began to close over the wound and pain subsided. In less than a minute it was gone without any evidence that it had been there except for the blood on my torn sleeve.
It made no sense, how did that happen. I picked up a stone and make a small nick in the back of my right hand. I watched it bleed and clot just as my arm had. I stared and stared waiting for it to heal, but it didn't. I sat down and tried to think about that I had done that made this any different from the gash on my arm. Cradling my wounded hand in my lap I looked towards the sky and closed my eyes, willing the pain away and the cut to heal. I opened my eyes in time to see the last of the redness dissipate and any trace of the cut disappear. So I wouldn't burn in the sun, and I couldn't really be hurt. I was starting to think that this life might not be so bad…