Author's Note: Thanks for the amazing feedback. I'm not super satisfied with how this chapter ended up, but I'm trying to stick to a schedule or I'll never finish this story.
Part Three
Mick's intrusion into Beth's life didn't go without consequence. Beth spent the next year with her window open. Even as rain tumbled in and the temperatures dropped, she stubbornly unlatched it and let the room chill. Her parents had debated putting a padlock on the window, only the fear of fire had stopped them.
Finally, her mother had come up with an ingenious solution: a cat.
He'd wandered into their garage, through some unknown hidey hole and mewled at the steps. He was clean, not tragically thin like most stray cats and he loved Beth at first sight. She'd named him Bogart, as in Humphrey.
"Bethy, if you want to keep him, the window is going to have to stay shut," her mother secured herself in the doorway of Beth's room. "If it's open, he could jump out and until he knows this is home he'll never come back."
A year of waiting, of watching and knowing that her angel was out there passed through her eyes. Her birthday had come and gone unmarked except for a plain card with hand-drawn cartoon angels bearing a birthday cake and the simple message, "Happy birthday – M"
No more presents to put in her angel box, no visitors in the middle of the night, nothing.
And so Beth moved to the window.
She opened it wide, leaned out and whispered into the night, "I miss you."
Then she closed it. Flipped the latch and turned to her mother.
It was for her own good, Mick repeated to himself. In fact, he was tempted to get it tattooed some place, though he doubted a tattoo would stay on his skin for long. Maybe he should get it tattooed nightly. He needed the reminder that often.
He'd made his grand gesture. He'd let her see him, let himself have a painless moment in the sunlight before the moonlight sucked him back in.
But every day turned to night and Mick was back where he started. Except he was dragging an eight-year-old child down with him.
So he got busy. He took on case after case, he hunted down drug dealers and murderers, adulterers and thieves. He sorted through every life Coraline had ravaged and the ones he himself had ruined.
Every year on the anniversary of the attack, a letter from Beth's mother arrived, gushing over her daughter. The good grades, the stories she'd written, the local theater she'd joined, how much Beth loved horseback riding at her aunt's ranch in Utah, the dances she'd put on in the living room to "Miss Otis Regrets" and all the little things that made her child so special in a mother's eyes. She closed with a simple thank you and, despite Mick's silence, the letters continued to come.
And Mick managed to steal himself against seeing these things with his own eyes. Mostly.
Like the newly turned, he slipped. Driving late into the night, he found his car drifting down roads that headed away from his penthouse, from Josef's buildings and toward that little house with the little treasure. Sometimes he turned the wheel away, sometimes he didn't.
The nights he actually made it to her house, he didn't get out of the car. He simply counted the heartbeats, sifting Beth's from them with a practiced ease. It shocked him when he heard an echo next to her, a strange faint beat that he couldn't identify.
His eyes slipped to ice blue and he felt his fangs push down. He was out of his seat and to window in a flash. It was a shock to find the thing shut and latched. But even Beth's tenacity had its limits.
Mick peered in. There was a huge, furry lump on Beth's chest. Finally it clicked -- a cat. The huge, gray beast slept on her chest during this dark hour of the night, like he was guarding her very breath.
"Hey Bogart," he whispered, catching sight of his tags. "Where's Bacall?"
The tail flickered and the cat stared at him through slits. Back arched, the feline moved from the warm spot on Beth's chest. He tumbled to the floor and jumped to the window frame.
Mick inhaled the new smells in the room. He saw the waves of fur winding through Beth's jean-clad legs, a purr kicking up every time she walked in the door. The cat's pale stomach exposed to her with a pleading mewl. Beth crouching to rub him up and down.
Beth on her back on the floor next to him, caressing the cat in quick strokes, then falling back as he hopped on her chest and began kneading his paws into her, rubbing his face and his scent over her.
Bogart stared at Mick, daring the vampire to come inside. With regret, Mick yielded to the cat and turned away, thankful she had something to keep her comfort through the long nights. Mick brushed a hand against the window pane and returned to this car.
One month later, Mick again heard the frantic voice of Beth's mother. This time over the phone.
"She's gone," the woman nearly shrieked at him. "The damn cat got out and Beth went after him. I woke up and she was gone. There was a note. The police won't do anything for a runaway. I didn't know who else to call. You have to help us."
"How long?"
"I don't know," a pause. "Some time after midnight? We stopped looking for Bogart, her cat, around ten. It was cold and... "
"I'm heading out to look right now," Mick dropped the phone into its cradle with enough force to shatter the plastic.
Mick swigged the pint of blood in his hand, slipped his sunglasses into the pockets of his long-sleeved jacket. He had a few hours until sunrise, but he wasn't coming back until Beth was home again.
Beth's smell, tinged with fur and feline, was all around the house, the yard. Mick found the trail quickly, weaving through neighbors' yard in what Beth must have imagined was the ideal cat path. Slipping between split fence posts, across grass, down a sloping ditch and back to a culvert. A mile and a half from her house.
Mick tumbled down the embankment. There, a plastic flashlight. Broken, but hers. Her little blond head was nowhere to be found, though. He splashed through the knee deep water, feeling for anything below the surface. Nothing.
No scent in the water.
A growl rumbled from his chest. Mick felt his eyes flicker with ice blue fear and anger. He dragged himself out of the ditch, searching for a sign of her. Eyes closed, he blew out the smell of stale water and rancid grass clippings.
Where would she go? Mick tried to clear his mind, think like Beth. On one side was a road, not terribly busy in the early morning hours, but with a couple of cars every few minutes and picking up speed as commuters took to the road.
Past the road, office buildings, stretches of concrete and metal. The other side was an empty lot, patches of grass surrounded by clots of mud, rusted barrels and abandoned equipment.
There – on the wind came the faintest hint of her, a splash of her blood – Mick inhaled deeply.
The lot.
With the perfume of her blood, tinged with fear and desperation and tears, Mick gave up pretense. Fanged and eyes flashing, he surrendered to the predatory instinct to hunt. The vampire knew to look for mud on patches of grass, for the drops of water, the slightest stumble leaving sweat and skin. The vampire knew that sun was coming and Beth was near.
He flew over old steel as the haze of pre-dawn settled over the shadowy scene. The skeletons of aborted buildings were laced with her scent. Past them, feet barely touching the dirt, into a copse of orange trees, a wooded island in the midst of over development. Exactly where Beth would go and where Mick caught her heartbeat.
The crack of a young tree trunk ripped through the morning. There she was, curled into a ball, streams of tears drying clear paths on her dirty cheeks. A gash in her arm, flecked with bits of rusted metal.
The vamp wanted to suckle her arm and gasped in anticipation before Mick thrust the urges aside.
The heavy pressure of impending sun rippled across his skin. He shrugged off his jacket and wrapped it around her, checking for other injuries. A bruise here, a turned ankle.
Mick gathered her exhausted little body into his arms. She just shifted, falling into the bend of his elbow, burrowing against his neck. The wind whipped Beth's hair across his face while he held her steady and dashed through the shadows, back to her house.
At the edge of her yard Mick pulled her close to him. He smoothed her hair back.
"Don't do this again, kid," he told her. "You are not a cat. You do not have nine lives, so don't waste this one."