An Advent Tale II

The woman’s eyes scanned the man in front of her from his head to his toes and he retreated slightly and pulled his thin clothes tighter around himself. “Who are you?” she demanded. He was only slightly taller than herself, and pale and ill dressed both considering the weather and, well, everything else. On top of that he was stiff like a corpse from the cold. A miserable sight.

“I’m… my name is Julian,” he said and threw a longing eye into the warmth of the cottage.

Since he didn’t go on she sighed and let him in. “I’m Melody,” she said. “I have no idea how you got here through the snow, but you better have a good reason for invading our privacy.”

“Our?” he said and looked around. The cottage was hardly something to be proud of, small and scarcely furnished with a few shelves, sofas and tables, nothing on the walls. Any number of people could have lived there, from one to ten.

She didn’t answer that. “I thought you came to meet Ray? He knows a lot of strange people,” she said instead.

“I don’t really know where I am,” Julian said. “I, I don’t know what happened. I’ve been walking through the forest for days. You haven’t seen someone else have you? A woman, blonde, um, short?”

“Nope,” Melody answered.

“Oh,” he said and looked sad.

“Maybe she’s dead,” she said. “If she wasn’t turned, in this cold, she wouldn’t make it.”

What she said seemed to upset him, but he focused on what he didn’t understand rather than what he did. “Turned?”

“Please, I’m not stupid,” Melody said. “You must have fed since you turned or you wouldn’t have made it so far. You’re one of us. The kindred.” When he still looked confused she sighed, walked off to a bookcase and came back with a book, blood red. She held it in front of him and, with a bored sneer, clarified; “A vampire.”