Teaser Tuesday from Vampire's Trill Chapter 8

Hi, everyone. Well, it's Teaser Tuesday. Today I'm taking this from Vampire's Trill from chapter 8

When it was over, as I lay there catching my breath and trying to focus my eyes, I heard a man's voice anxiously asking me if I was all right. He was hovering over me, and he sounded scared, half out of his mind.

“Should I call someone? Should I call the paramedics?” he was demanding with panic in his voice and a cell phone in his hand.

Yeah. What happens to me when I go into a full trance is genuinely scary. I didn't blame him for that look on his face.

I shook the cobwebs out of my head — at least partially. “What? No. No, don't call anyone. They don't know how to treat my form of affliction.”

“Jesus,” he said. I was glad to see, however, that he had pulled on some jeans while I had been out of it. Tattooed heavily on the upper body and both arms, I saw some wild-looking scenes on his chest that I didn't want to linger on.

“Are you—”

“I'm alright. I... My face was wet. I wiped it, wondering what it was. I gaped at my hand. Spit? Realizing my hands were uncovered—and at the same time I was still naked—I said, “Where are my clothes?”

“Babe, you came that way,” he said. “Don't you remember? You went into your creature. You came to me. We were together the whole night.”

“What?” I was trying to make sense of it all. Here I was, naked as the day I was born, in a strange man's house with him telling me that we'd spent the night together. Then it came to me: he had been a wolf, and I was — whatever I became. “Oh. Shit.” I'd forgotten because of what had just happened to me. I had been totally out.

We stared at one another for a few heartbeats.

“Do you usually babble like that?” he asked, pointing at me with the cell phone.

“Babble?” I asked.

“Yeah. It was really freaky,” he said. “It was like you had a seizure or something. I didn't know what to do, but I knew that I didn't want you to bump into anything while you were under that spell, whatever you call it.”

“I'm a clairvoyant. Sometimes I black out, sometimes I talk about what I see, and sometimes I speak in tongues.” I knew that when I did that, no one could understand me, except, apparently, vampires. Who knew?

“The blacking out part I can handle, but whatever else you just did was scary.”

“You mean going into a trance and babbling?” I pulled the blanket up as I gathered my legs underneath me and sat up.

“I guess. It was all nonsense,” he said. “I couldn't make heads or tails of it.”

“I really, really need to go home, if that's okay with you,” I said soberly, changing the subject. (I didn't want to be here, and I didn't want to spend one more minute with Hobart than I had to, but I needed clothes.) "Do you have something I can wear?"

“Huh? Oh. Yeah, sure, sure.” He seemed distracted.

I twisted my mouth with his lack of moving. “Is there something wrong?”

He looked up at me then. “No. Just... memories.” I felt his sadness. He seemed so despondent I had to ask.

“What's wrong? What happened?”

Gazing at me, he took a deep breath and let it out on a sigh, his shoulders going limp. “Frank was really bummed by his old lady being killed and all. I thought that he might go off the deep end, but... ”

“Okay, old lady meaning his girlfriend or wife?”

“Yeah, his woman. She was run over by a semi.”

“Run over!” I was shocked.

“She was a wolf at the time. Semi got her, just missed him. He was really depressed afterward. Blamed himself for it. So, him biting you, well, that might be something that maybe Frank did to try and find himself someone else. He marked you for himself. Tonight, if he'd been out there, he would have called to you. And you would have come to him just like you did to me.”

“Okay, I'm sick of you people biting and marking me for future lays or whatever you have in mind.” Holding the blanket around myself, I leapt to my feet, and he jumped up too.

“What are you talking about? I didn't bite you.”

I strode off, but it was hard to storm out of the room naked with only a ratty blanket around myself. I had nowhere to go, so I stood with my back to him, arms crossed around the blanket. “I was bitten when I was ten by a rogue master vampire.”