Chapter Twenty: Vacillations

In the sea of happy faces under the clear blue sky that she'd predicted, the sad face of Ness Masen stuck out. Graduation caps were raining down on her head but she didn't appear to notice. She was staring into the trees that bordered the school field. It must be difficult to be among so many families on today of all days. As her fellow students dispersed to meet up with their own parents, I watched her made her way through the throngs of people and into the waiting arms of Jake Black. She buried her face into his chest and I saw the tell-tale shake of her shoulders that indicated that she was crying. Jake held her tightly, rested his chin on her head and took his turn staring into the trees. I followed his line of sight, but I couldn't see what he was looking at. I guessed he was simply lost in thought. In the crowd I caught sight of Mike with a woman I could only assume was Jessica. She was tiny, but what she lacked in stature was made up for with curly brown hair that dominated her appearance. They were laughing with Principal Greene and suddenly I didn't want to be here anymore. Ness wasn't the only one struggling to be happy on such a beautiful day at this. I maintained a fixed smile as I made my way back through the crowd, into the school building and down the hallway to my room. The walls were bare, all my books and files were stored safely away and everything was straight and neat for September. I picked up my bag and walked out of the school.

Back home I kicked off my shoes and even though it was only four in the afternoon I poured a large glass of ice-cold wine from the bottle in the refrigerator. I drained it and poured more. I knew I'd regret this in the morning, but I had a year's worth of stuff in my head. Some that I wanted to think about and some that I wanted to forget. On the counter, the moonflower nestling in the pink bouquet was a tangible reminder of the endless list of things that hadn't made sense this year. I pulled the barrette out of my hair and let it fall in its usual brown curtain to my shoulders. I hooked the right side behind my ear, took another slug of wine and wondered where the hell I should start with all this.

Endless questions circulated and I struggled to pick just one to think about. Finally, I decided I'd start from the end and work back. If Daniel really was alive why hadn't he gotten in touch? My brain supplied two answers to that one. Firstly, I'd told him to go. I'd told him it was over and he'd gone. If that really was Daniel and not some ghost or other paranormal manifestation, then I'd let the man I loved slip through my fingers. I didn't know where he lived and something was stopping me from picking up the phone and calling him. Secondly, if he didn't answer then he really was dead. But if was alive and he did answer, then that raised more questions, not least how the heck I back-tracked on what I'd said. I could hardly use the excuse that I had no idea what I was saying. I'd repeated it more than once.

Armed with my bottle of wine and a giant bag of pretzels, I nibbled, drank and cogitated my way through the early evening, pausing only to order pizza. I wasn't thinking objectively about him, I was just very sad. What had started as a chance to think honestly had turned into wallowing in wine-fuelled unhappiness. I kept looking at my phone, daring myself to select his name and hit the green button. Why wouldn't I do the simple thing and find out one way or another if he was alive? It was fear. Fear that he wouldn't answer and that he really was dead. As long as I didn't call there was always the hope that he was alive.

My pizza arrived and as I paid for it, a commotion in the street made me glance outside. Ness, Jake, a large group of people, a stack of luggage and an even bigger one of instruments were being loaded into a truck for their flight to Italy. Ness was clearly stressed.

"Stacey, your make-up case is the least of my concerns right now!" She addressed this to an orange-coloured girl who was suffering from an overdose of bronzer. Unlike everyone else, who was casually dressed in jeans and t-shirts, Stacey was in towering white heels and a sun dress. A dress moreover, that left nothing to the imagination when it came to hiding her ample chest. In response to Ness's retort, she gave a shrug of her shoulders and flounced over to Dan; who stood apart from everyone else. Stacey draped herself around him and this seemed to anger Ness even more. Dan was dressed head to toe in black and half his face was obscured by oversize black sunglasses. He was desperately thin and even his skinny jeans hung off him. He'd scraped a graduation by the skin of his teeth and catching him sober was a rarity. Perhaps in dating Stacey he was starting to get over his wife? He didn't look all that happy to be with her.

I recognised most of the other members of the band. There was Ricky Scott and Zak Foster, both of whom had graduated last year. Ricky's girlfriend Chrissy stood by the truck with a baby in her arms. In spite of giving birth last November, Chrissy had been fortunate to have had the support of her parents, and come today's graduation, she was there receiving her diploma with the other members of her class. There was Karl Stevens who'd taken Jess's place in the band when she'd died. From the number of suitcases it seemed everyone was talking a partner and Jake and Ricky were loading the truck. Ness's nerves appeared to be soothed by a young guy I didn't recognise. He gave her a hug and the two exchanged whispered words.

"Good evening." Charlie's voice shocked me. I hadn't seen him standing to my right.

"Everything OK?" I gestured to the truck loading. "Ness seems a little stressed."

He wrinkled his nose. "Yeah, it's not been the greatest of days for her."

"But she graduated second in her class?" That was something to be proud of. She'd ended the year one point behind Pete Degrassi the valedictorian, whose toe-curling speech we'd all had to sit through this afternoon. There was genuine bafflement why Ness hadn't managed to come out on top, seeing as she was far and away Degrassi's academic superior. But no matter how much we added it all up, she came out a point behind.

Charlie shook his head. "She did well, but…"

"She was upset that her parents weren't there to see it."

"Yes, and now Dan's turned up with some girl he chose at random off the band's message-board. They all get to take someone and Dan's chosen an orange Popsicle. Ness feels it's going to be a long week."

"He picked her off the message-board?" I laughed.

"Yeah. It's about the limit of his engagement with life right now." Charlie exhaled. "I wish he'd get some help, but he just wants to wallow in it all. How he managed to graduate is beyond me."

"It's beyond the rest of us. I wasn't expecting him to. He hasn't submitted a coherent piece of work to me since Christmas. Perhaps Stacey will be his turning point and this week he'll realise that he has something to live for?"

"Don't hold your breath. It looks like they're pretty much done. I'd better go see them off."

Charlie walked back over to the group and I retreated inside to eat my pizza, drink some more wine and wallow in my own loss. I identified with Dan Taylor a little too much right now, but with my track record I wouldn't be losing weight through the experience.

I ate and drank until I felt uncomfortable. I switched on the TV and let it play in the background whilst I lay on the sofa in a carbohydrate-induced coma. This was not my finest hour and I thought back to my good intentions last August when my split from Scott had left me clear-headed and decisive about my future. Now I couldn't even settle on a TV channel to watch and flicked between half a dozen before settling on something innocuous.

Whatever my attraction to Daniel was, the experience of being around him had left me with a brain that had gone from analytical to useless. Why wasn't I thinking about things? Why, when presented with something as odd as half a million dollars' worth of jewellery, had I merely stashed it away? Why had I allowed Daniel to dictate things, including the ridiculous charade with Mike, which served no purpose whatsoever and resulted in one very awkward week staying at his parent's home? I didn't even get sex with either of them out of it; which, looking back now was a good thing. It would've made life way more complicated. When we'd shared a bed, Daniel had remained firmly on his half of the mattress, never touching me once; even though I'd left him in no doubt that I wanted more. I'd not ended up with a man-free year, but I'd gotten a sex-free one instead. I snickered to myself. "How pathetic." I said out loud to no one.

And what about the notes? The visits to my apartment? The incident on the stairs? The car accident? My broken kitchen window? My dead cat and the terrifying incident in the forest? Why was I not in Charlie Swan's kitchen right now demanding answers? Why was I not thinking about all this? I'd placed an unconsciously worrying amount of trust in Daniel. For some reason I'd believed him and Charlie Swan too, that this… thing was being dealt with and investigated. Had it been? Or had I been lied to there as well? The only time I had seen a Police Officer other than Chief Swan, had been in connection with the car accident. They'd drawn a blank and Daniel had told me that the incident was connected to the whole thing about him and that the Police wouldn't have found anything anyway. What about the attack on my house when Lyra was killed? Surely the Police would have swarmed all over that? But instead I'd been removed and when it was all cleared up I'd simply been let back into my house by Charlie. Was Charlie Swan privy to more information than he was letting on? I'd trusted him and now I wasn't sure of him at all.

What about Heather's assertion that she felt something was being kept hidden from her? I wasn't the only one who'd picked up that something wasn't adding up when it came to Charlie. I should question him more. Heather wasn't given to over-reactions, if both she and I were suspicious, then that was grounds enough to investigate. I'd make a point of getting to know Charlie Swan and discovering what exactly he knew about Daniel.

Then there was Jake Black. Right now I couldn't do anything about him as he was on his way to Italy. But he'd lied to Mike about what had happened in the forest and I couldn't ignore that. I knew there hadn't been another person with him, so why lie? And what exactly was going on down at the Reservation?

But compared to the minor gripes with Charlie and Jake, Daniel was one big conundrum. Did anything about him make sense? What on earth was he involved with that required the most mind-boggling secrecy? What would require you to remove every piece of information about yourself from the Internet? He'd said something about protecting his daughter. Did he really have a daughter? Could I rely on that? Had he really been married to Helen Mitchell? All that seemed deeply implausible; the CEO and her mercenary tactics just to get pregnant and get rid of her name. If she didn't like her name why not simply change it? You didn't need to get married to do that. Was Daniel just feeding me a line to keep me sympathetic to a cold-blooded killer? I shivered. What he did definitely unsettled me - big time. But even there I'd had a mental bypass. I'd said 'I can deal with that' and taken it on board. I could deal with a killer? Had I lost my morals as well as my mind along the way?

Now, it seemed so ludicrous when I stopped to think about it. He was an assassin who spent his nights, not even days, working on computer systems and who, as a side-line, taught an Astronomy class. Never once in the eight months I'd known him, had my brain lifted out of the marshmallow long enough to say 'Enough!' So if he really was dead then I was rid of a lot of impossible things.

But despite all those impossible things, there were other things that meant that I couldn't cast him away without hurting myself in the process. Was he really a cold-blooded killer if he was just doing his job rather than killing out of hate of a person? If he'd been hired to take someone out, was that any different to someone in the field of battle killing an enemy? You wouldn't describe a soldier as a cold-blooded killer; they were simply doing what they were trained to do. Was Daniel any different? Yes he murdered people, but… There my argument fell down. He took lives and I was struggling with it, regardless of how I was trying to rationalise it. If he really was dead then this was not an issue. But if he was alive, was it a deal-breaker?

Even within himself there was an odd juxtaposition. He was a killer, but he gave off such incredible vulnerability. He'd not been specific but something bad had happened in his past and caused deep emotional damage. I longed to hold him and to spend time with him, but he would never let me. He'd only stayed occasional nights and even then he'd never touched me. Apart from sketchy details about his family – which weren't his real family he told me – and the revelation that he had a daughter, I knew very little about him.

What information I had was totally random, I couldn't see any pattern or form in it. I didn't have anything to grasp hold of to start to put it all together. Especially now, when I'd drunk pretty much a bottle of wine. What was the point anyhow, he was dead. I looked at the bouquet of flowers and shook my head. No. That moonflower right there was evidence that Daniel Mitchell was not dead. Sunday night was evidence that Daniel Mitchell was not dead. He'd grabbed my wrists, I'd smelled his cologne and he'd spoken to me. I didn't want to admit it because it was just too much, too impossible, like everything else about him. But if he wasn't dead, where was he?

I had to call him and establish once and for all if he was alive, I sighed. There was only one glass left in the bottle of wine. I poured it and resolved to call him when I'd finished it. I flicked up the sound on the TV to distract me a little longer from what awkward conversation calling Daniel might result in. It was nine o'clock and the channel was re-running that vampire show that Jess Taylor used to go on about. This would be a distraction whilst I finished my wine.

Well, it was a distraction - until about a third of the way through and then the character of Alric uttered a line while I was reaching for another slice of pizza, that made me roll off the sofa in shock.

"I can't kiss you; if I do then you'll know too much about me." That line! That exact line that Daniel had used in the Newton's guest room as the reason why I couldn't kiss him. What a unique line to use, to be able to know too much about a person by kissing them.

After that I was transfixed and as I watched the rest of the show, a cold feeling spread through me. What I had in my life was not dissimilar to what the character of Christianne had in hers, as she tried to piece together the puzzle of Alric. He would barely touch her and only gave her a brief chaste kiss on the cheek - exactly as Daniel had. Alric never ate. We'd shared a pizza once, but for the life of me I couldn't remember him ever having eaten any, I'd eaten most of it and I think I'd saved the rest for the next day. All he'd ever had were tiny cups of coffee but had I ever seen him drink any of it? I racked my brain. No. But this was all circumstantial. Or was it? There was more: The man in the stairwell that night, the same one who'd been in the forest, had exactly the same colour eyes as Alric did - bright red. OK, so Alric was just a character in a TV show, but there was enduring mythology about vampires. I'd already discovered there were such things as angels; so perhaps it wasn't outside the bounds of possibility that there were vampires. Daniel didn't have red eyes, his apparently were gold; but the man in the stairwell had told me that my friendship with Daniel would result in my death. A vampire would need a victim, but I'd never thought they'd court them first.

My head was swirling, both from the wine and from the random bits of information that were now starting to coalesce. He had gold eyes not red eyes, but gold wasn't a colour you found in other people's eyes. Well, apart from that couple in Seattle and what Heather had said about Edward and Bella. My head joined everything together and came out with 'Daniel is a vampire.' I laughed.

"No." I said quite rationally. "He would've tried to kill me."

'But Alric overcame his lust for Christianne's blood because he loved her,' My head supplied.

"That's a TV show." I asserted out loud. But I was off the sofa and walking – albeit unsteadily - over to the computer.

In the search box I put in vampires. That was a bad move, there were eighty one million returned results. This was as hopeless as trying to find Daniel. I scanned down the sites and hidden away, many pages down, I found a little site that focused on real vampires, not those that you'd find in a movie, a book or a TV show. I clicked on it, started to read and discovered almost instantly that the red eyes were a giveaway. I had met a vampire twice and lived to tell the tale! It said that real vampires would, if they were white-skinned, look very pale, as if they'd never been in the sun and that they'd feel cold and hard to the touch. Daniel was the palest I'd ever seen and when he'd grabbed my wrists he was cold. I couldn't vouch for the hard bit. I read on and discovered that vampires were created from a bite and they had all started life as ordinary people, of varying ages. They were immortal and contrary to popular belief, were able to be out in daylight. But for reasons unknown, they kept out of direct sunlight.

There wasn't a great deal of information but what there was, was presented simply and without hysteria. These people believed that vampires existed and they were out to document what they could. Tucked away at the bottom of one of the pages was a link to a forum. I clicked on it and discovered a small selection of topics. I read a couple of the threads. They were mostly people asking for clarification about what they'd seen, but one thread in particular sent a wave of cold through me. It was a link to a newspaper website and underneath was an explanation from the user, that this article was about her friend's death and that she didn't believe the explanation that the authorities had given. She believed that a vampire had been responsible for the death of her friend. She said she'd documented a vampire's occasional visits to a neighbour, this girl's grandmother. By studying local history and genealogy, she conjectured that this girl's grandmother was a descendant of a girl the vampire once loved. Her friend looked very like the drawing of a girl immortalised in a book of local folk-songs. As I clicked on the news website link, I glanced at the user details on the side. The user was Fi-Saurus and she was located in Cumbria, England. The next second I was face to face with a picture of Jess Taylor. I gasped. This girl was seriously suggesting that Jess had been killed by a vampire? I read the article. It gave all the details that I knew about the fire. The coroner had ruled that there were no suspicious circumstances, but Fi-Saurus didn't believe it.

I went back to the thread and read it again, clicking on Fi-Saurus's information and discovering that she was a frequent contributor to the site and had been there as recently as a few hours ago. I did the calculation: It was ten forty five here, so in England would be six forty five on Saturday morning. I read her replies to other people, they were mature and sensible. She backed up everything with references from where she'd gotten the information. Historical facts, I could deal with historical facts. She must have been one of Jess's friends before she'd moved to Forks, so this wasn't someone drawing random connections, she had known Jess. From what she was implying, Jess may well have been lured to her death, exactly as the mysterious red-eyed man had said would happen to me.

Should I contact this girl? Could she shed any light on the situation I had here? I checked the site again for the answer to a question that had arisen in my mind. If there were red-eyed vampires, could there be gold-eyed vampires - in the way that you got people with different coloured eyes in everyday life? Perhaps they were a different type of vampire; ones who worked differently and only killed people who needed taking out anyway. Perhaps Daniel knew what people's intentions were and could kill them before they did anyone harm? Where did that leave me? Did I need taking out? I'd never considered myself a threat to society. The thing was, that he'd told me all along that he was a killer. Was assassin a more legitimate way of saying vampire? He killed people but yet he'd sat on the floor of my bedroom and told me that he wanted the chance to love me. A vampire wanted to love me? My life had turned into an episode of Vampire Nights. Perhaps I should buy the DVDs…

I decided against contacting Fi-Saurus right now, but bookmarked the page. I'd keep an eye on what got added to the body of information. I shut down the computer and glanced at the clock, it was approaching midnight. I'd done a lot of reading and my head was alive with so many questions. I wandered around the house not able to settle and not able to get my heart rate to drop back down, either. My system was coursing with adrenaline and my head was pulling out everything that had gone on over the last few months. Whatever angle I approached it from my head reached the same conclusion. Contributors on the website had reported extreme evasiveness in those who they suspected were vampires. If Daniel was anything, he was textbook evasive.

I couldn't do more right now and I was too petrified to pick up the phone and call Daniel, I went to bed and tried to settle. Unsurprisingly sleep didn't come and I lay there hour after hour working my head and my heart into an ever bigger knot. As the clock ticked past 3.30am I admitted defeat and got back up. Anxiety was taking hold and I needed some air. It was a stupid thing to do off the back of a bottle of wine and absolutely no sleep, but I had the urge to get down to the beach. Sky and fresh air were what I needed right now, not four walls as I went slowly mad.

I pulled on sweatpants, a t-shirt and threw a hooded top over it. I went out into the dawn and ran straight into Charlie Swan, packing his fishing gear into the trunk of his car.

"You're up early." He said cheerfully. After what my head had been thinking about him last night, I was momentarily too stunned to reply.

"Ah…Yes. First day of vacation, I feel like going to the beach."

"You'll have it all to yourself."

"That's the idea." I smiled. "Get some peace and quiet; be at one with nature and all that stuff."

"Yeah, that's why I get out fishing as often as I can. See you later."

We said goodbye and Charlie pulled away. I waited until he was out of sight. I didn't want to be arrested for drunk driving right outside my own house.

I drove down the street and stopped at the intersection. I waited for the green light and had just started my left turn, when from nowhere a black car crossed my path against the lights. It took me a second to realise what I was seeing. It was a black Jaguar XF, there was a blonde-haired man at the wheel and as it pulled away I recognised the licence plate. It was Daniel!