AUTHOR'S NOTE: Obviously picking up where the other left off. Thanks again for reading, thanks again for taking the time out of your life to allow me to share something I enjoy with you. As always, please read, please enjoy, please review, and please feel free to fav/follow. Also, if you're NOT enjoying what I'm writing, don't hesitate to message me and tell me what you'd like to see instead. I do enjoy writing, and so if you have a request, I can always try to get you a little side story in just for you.

CLAIRE

Claire had stopped trying to determine what time it was. She knew she had slept at some point, she knew she was hungry - really hungry - and she knew she was thirsty. Her throat felt like she had swallowed sand. For the hundredth time, she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, only to find it still lifeless. She knew it was stupid to even begin to think that it would magically charge itself while it rested in her pocket - but hey. This was Morganville. The bizarre occurred daily.

As she lay in the darkness, Claire spent most of her waking time trying to figure out a way out of her prison. So far, she had nothing. Obviously, she was coming up blank - there was nothing down here that could be used to do anything at all - there was no way she was going to be able to jump high enough to reach the ceiling. All she could hope for was that she would have the ability to slip past whoever was keeping her prisoner when they came to check on her. If they came to check on her.

As the hours ticked slowly by, Claire began to feel less and less certain that she had gotten her message out, though she knew it was crazy to even begin to think that someone would just be able to find her when she wasn't able to give them any sort of information about where she could possibly be held. While the Claire she had been before Morganville would have curled up into a ball and wept in fear, Claire wasn't that person anymore. She had escaped from worse situations than this. Granted, she usually had her friends with her, or at least out looking for her, but - no. To continue down that path lead to defeat.

Claire knew better than that. She was strong enough to help herself. And if, like she thought, Shane could be out there in danger, she needed to get out of here not just for her own life, but for Shane's as well. He had suffered enough. He had spent far too much of his life feeling helpless and hopeless. Claire knew that she was what gave him hope - she gave him the strength to face down things that should have torn him apart. She was what made him the man he was today. And while Claire wished that it wasn't the case, while she wished he could look in the mirror and see what she saw in him, she had to be pragmatic. She had to survive because that was the only way that Shane would survive.

And so she lay in wait, listening to the darkness for any hints that someone was around. Eventually, she drifted off to sleep once more.

Claire dreamed. This wasn't unusual for Claire, and in the time since she'd arrived in Morganville, nightmares had become a common occurrence. Not a nightly thing - she usually had fairly positive dreams, all things considered - but she'd had enough now that they didn't frighten her as much as they had when she was younger. But, as her dream started, she was fairly certain it would be a doozy.

She was sitting on a tree stump in a small clearing in the middle of a forest. All things considered, she was somewhere beautiful - the trees were tall and full of foliage, the sunlight was warm as it shined down on her face. Somewhere in the distance, however, she heard the call of a creature - an inhuman, if not necessarily scary call. It sounded as if it were searching for something, and probably not for a friend to sit down and chat with. The call went on and on, undulating in the crisp clean air.

Claire felt the hair on the back of her neck prick, and goosebumps rolled their way up her body. She didn't know for sure, but she had an idea that she didn't want whatever it was making that sound to find her. She stood, poised to run, when suddenly a strong, cold wind blew through the forest, starting in the north and flowing past her to the south. Towards the thing calling in the woods. The trees rattled and shook as if shivering from the burst of cold air, and Claire froze in her tracks.

The wind wasn't natural. There was no way that a wind that strong could just come from nowhere and stop that suddenly. As the creature called out again, closer than before, Claire realized that the wind had been caused by the creature itself. I had called up the wind so that it would carry her scent to it. So that it could smell where she was. If that was the case, there would be no running. There would be no hiding. There would only be fighting.

Claire dashed into the treeline looking for anything that could possibly help her, shivering as another wind flowed through the trees. The creature was triangulating her position. It was determining exactly where she was, so that it could cut a straight line through the woods to get to her. Claire thought of the Big Bad Wolf she had once seen in a school play of Little Red Riding Hood. The better to see you with, my dear... The better to hear you with, my dear...

"My," she whispered softly. "Grandmother, what big teeth you have."

She looked up to the sun, shining uncaring in a beautiful, cloudless blue sky. She wished and prayed and hoped that she would just wake up. She would rather have been back in that dark, empty basement than here, in the woods, chased by a monster she had no defense against. A gust of wind blasted her again, and she gritted her teeth, squinting her watering eyes against the frigid air. She wouldn't give up. She couldn't. And even though she knew that it was all a dream, that the creature behind her couldn't actually hurt her, her body responded with a fear she hadn't felt since she had stood over her lifeless body.

This was death, dream or not. Claire's body remembered death. It remembered pain, and fear, that feeling of helplessness and hopelessness and, above all else, it remembered the shock of the whole thing. Claire's body refused to allow her to react rationally. Her muscles screamed in pain from straining to run - to just run and hide and hope that the creature would somehow pass her by. Her nerves sent electrical shocks through her body, urging her to just go, go go. Her heart was pounding from the adrenaline coursing through her veins. Her eyes felt swollen, her ears felt like satellite dishes, bulging as she became hyperalert to everything around her. She tensed against her body's responses, forcing herself to think clearly. If this was a dream, it was telling her something.

She looked again up at the sun, which was slowly but certainly getting brighter and brighter the longer she looked at it. And in that moment between sleeping and waking, she realized what the dream was telling her - monster or not, someone was searching for her.

When she awoke, the basement was blindingly bright. The trap door at the ceiling was open. She gasped and tried to stand, to run, to hide - but her body was stiff and cold from the basement's floor, and the best she could do was sort of shuffle off to the side. Claire was thankful nothing was in the basement except her - the light had affected her eyes terribly, what with having gone who knew how long without light. She gasped, crawling on her hands and knees, trying to figure out what exactly was happening, but knowing that she needed to try her best to hide.

The light pouring from above was eclipsed as someone dropped to the floor. Claire mentally cursed. The person wasn't using a ladder, which meant one of two things - either they were also a prisoner, or they weren't human. Either way, she wasn't in the position she had hoped for. The individual stood up and glanced around the room, facing Claire instantly. And as her eyes finally began to adjust to the light (which wasn't, she realized now, even that terribly bright - a 60 watt bulb at most) she was able to make out the person in front of her. Her bladder threatened to release itself as Claire stood face to face with her captor.

"Jason," she whispered.

The young, sick, twisted, perverted vampire smiled in response.