Echoes Of The Dead

"She's right," Jessie said. "Robbie, or whatever that thing is, isn’t going to stop until he has Heidi and me."

"We won’t let that happen," Carl said, resting a steady hand on her shoulder.

Francine’s stomach tightened.

Jessie had only been a widow a few months. The last thing her brother needed was to lose his heart to a woman whose husband might not be entirely dead.

Jessie drew a slow breath. "He’s always known what he wanted, and he never stopped until he had it. That used to be one of the things I loved about him. Until it turned into obsession."

She stared down at her hands.

"One day he was Robbie, the man I fell in love with. The next day he was angry. Suspicious. Controlling. Like he was watching me all the time. Like I belonged to him."

"When did it start?" Carl asked gently.

"The day his father died. Robbie was there when it happened." She hesitated. "At first I told myself it was grief or regret. They hadn’t spoken in years."

"Regret?" Carl prompted.

"Robbie tried to fix things. After his mother passed, he reached out again. But his father was cruel and manipulative. Everything Robbie eventually became."

"It must have been terrifying," Francine said softly. "Watching the man you loved turn into someone else."

"Almost as if he did," Sondra murmured.

The room went still.

Francine turned slowly. "You’re thinking possession?"

Sondra did not answer immediately. Her gaze never left Jessie. "It wouldn’t be the first time," she said at last. Then she asked, deliberate and precise, "Was his father involved in the occult?"

Jessie hesitated long enough to be answer enough.

"Yes," she whispered. "Obsessed. Books. Rituals. Symbols carved into things. He talked about vampires constantly. About their blood. About how it could bring someone back from the dead."

Silence pressed in from all sides.

"I thought he was delusional," Jessie continued, her voice tightening. "But after he died, Robbie started repeating the same things."

Her eyes flicked toward Francine and then to Hunter.

A flush crept up her neck.

Hunter held her gaze calmly. "There are more of us than you know," he said. "Though far fewer than there used to be."

Jessie swallowed hard. "Robbie said vampire blood could resurrect the dead. That if you had enough of it."

"That is a lie desperate men tell themselves," Sondra snapped.

Her voice cut clean through the air.

"Death is absolute. Once the heart has stopped and the soul has fled, nothing brings it back. Not spells. Not rituals. Not blood."

Her eyes shifted to Francine.

"A vampire must feed three times. On the third feeding, he shares his blood. But the human must still be alive. Weak. Dying. Suspended between breaths. Like Francine was. But not dead."

The words lingered.

Heavy.

If Robbie had tried to resurrect his father, if he had believed the ritual would work, then whatever was walking around in Robbie’s body now was not his father.

And it might not be Robbie either.