Under a Crescent Moon

It was a bad dream. Bad dream. It wasn’t real.

But the images came back each time she closed her eyes. Images of children being attacked so viciously their necks snapped like match-sticks, of women protesting, faces bloodied as their bodies were violated in disgusting and terrible ways, of men putting up futile defenses, their guns barely slowing the gray-tinged monsters who came for their families.

“What the hell’s wrong with me?” Azaleigh whispered to herself, still facing the wall. Gradually, she turned around. It had grown dark, but not dark enough she could see nothing. It was probably after seven, with the sun setting to the west behind the tall, leafy trees of the woods.

On shaky feet, she made her way to the bathroom just off the side of the sitting room, to wash her face. Azaleigh didn’t recognize the woman who stared back at her from the etched Venetian mirror. Gone were her rosy cheeks and relaxed face. She was blanched to a sickly tinge under the usually healthy glow of her toffee colored skin.

Instead of washing her face, she jumped into the shower. The spray of the lukewarm water and steam did much to relax her, and when she emerged, she was looking more her usual self, minus the haunting in her eyes.

It would probably be a good thing to sell the house because she’d only been having strange dreams here. At her small apartment, she slept dream-free. Running a hand through wet hair that curled to just between her shoulder blades, Azaleigh winced as something snagged it. With the mirror as her guide, she slowly removed caught strands of hair from Antoinette’s ring before peering closely at the ruby-topped golden heirloom.

Maybe Antoinette had been a witch—a real one—and the house was haunted. That would explain the dreams. Maybe the ring was haunted, too? She was moving to pull it from her finger when a loud thud, sounding much like the slap of a door against a wall, reached her ears. The basement was right below this bathroom. Heart thundering once more, Azaleigh quickly slipped into the clothes she’d discarded, going commando. This wasn’t Scary Movie or any other B-rated horror flick, and she wasn’t about to be the stupid girl who died first.

If the freaking house was haunted, Azaleigh wasn’t staying around to find out.

Her hands were on the brass doorknob pulling the front door open. She could see the front yard. Freedom, in the form of the street that would lead her to neighbors, families settling in for their after-dinner television, was in her sights.

The door suddenly slammed shut.

Shit.

She grabbed the knob and turned hard, but the door refused to budge. Her hands felt raw from strain. It was as if she’d locked it. Worse, like she’d sealed it shut.

“Shit!” she hissed, taking a step back, and another. Her back hit the wall, and she blinked. What happened next was the scene from one of those very same B-rated movies. A bulb went off in her mind. The wall wasn’t that close to the door. In fact, the house opened into the living room, which meant she should have toppled over a couch or two by now rather than hit the wall. Slowly, she looked up, already knowing what was there yet needing the confirmation to get her reflexes to kick in. Fight or flight.

A massive hand was pressed flat against the door, thick fingers splayed.

Someone was in her house. Worse, someone was in her house, at her back.

Before she could think, Azaleigh elbowed him in the solar plexus, a shriek escaping her lips when he grunted. She spun away, sprinting for the back door. The rush of blood in her ears did little to prevent her from hearing his heavy boots thundering on the bare, wooden floor after her. What she wouldn’t give for her canister of Mace. Still, she was fast. She jogged, she sprinted.

She was promptly caught about the middle and lifted off her feet.

“HELPPPPPPPPPP!”

All else had failed, and although the house was located in an isolated position, closer to the woods and further from the neighbors than any other, Azaleigh prayed she was loud enough. Her scream died abruptly when he tossed her over his hard shoulder, knocking the breath from her lungs as surely as if he’d hauled back and punched her.

He kept walking, surely, calmly, and once she’d caught her breath, Azaleigh realized they were outside. She inhaled to scream once more and was promptly bounced on his shoulder. Another lost breath.

They said three was a charm, and Azaleigh was a fighter. She drew in the third breath, and was promptly deposited on her feet. Her confusion resulted in a low sound, a grunt that quickly faded. Looking up, because even at her height of five feet eight inches she had to strain her neck, Azaleigh’s breath caught. It was him! Her dream guy. In the flesh. Or was she still dreaming?

The analytical part of her brain made her pinch herself before reacting. When the pain came, Azaleigh let the scream building inside her rip. The night wasn’t quiet, but it drowned everything else out. Even the crickets seemed to give precedent to her scream, letting it flow over their harmony and become part of the night.

“Azaleigh...”

She stopped abruptly, hearing the familiar, low and raspy voice, the one she’d heard in Aunt Toni’s basement, and now matching it to an equally familiar face.

“I won’t hurt you, Azaleigh. I’d give my life for yours.”

The giant fell to one knee, and for the first time, Azaleigh noticed his hair. Midnight-black, like his eyes.

She began to shake. What began as small shivers soon turned to uncontrollable tremors. The last she remembered, those eyes had been green. Now they were black with no whites, pitless voids of empty. The man—thing—before her was not human. It wasn’t possible. Demons, or whatever the hell he was, weren’t real, but somehow, he was there, on his knees...

He lifted her hand to his firm lips, and kissed the blood-red ruby, which now seemed to glow. “I am your Protector, Azaleigh Montclaire. Summon me and I shall come. Need me, and I will be there. My purpose is to protect you from all who would cause you harm. My breath for yours. My blood for yours. My life is yours.”

Azaleigh had been called many things in her twenty-five year existence. Smart. Sophisticated. Pretty. Eloquent.

But at the moment, only three words registered in her mind, three words pierced through the fog into which she’d descended, and she managed to mutter them before the world went black.

“What. The. Fuck?”

***

She came awake in her bed, groaning as her leg and back muscles protested fiercely. Azaleigh felt as if she’d run miles over hilly terrain. When had she dragged herself to sleep and—

Her body went rigid. Where was the non-human psychopath swearing to give his life for hers?

As she popped up, eyes darting around the moonlight-and-shadows room, she relaxed. It was another dream. Christ! She was getting the hell out of this place. She’d never had nightmares before coming here, and now all of a sudden, she was having one a night.

Her body still shaking from fear, Azaleigh slipped from under the thin covers and made her way to the bathroom. As she relieved herself, she got a good look at her clothes. Faded gray jeans and a soiled T-shirt. Hadn’t she showered? Yes, she remembered that. And then had come the loud thud from the basement, and she’d been chased. But that had all been a dream. Maybe she’d dragged herself upstairs and fallen asleep before the shower.

Strange, she thought, her brow creasing on a frown.

Flicking on the bedroom light, she stripped out of the clothes, shocked to find she wore no undies, like the dream. She quickly slipped into a pair of Hanes cottons, navy-colored pajama bottoms and a v-necked tee.

Where was her brush? Her other suitcase was across the room, by the rocking chair with the knitted quilt—

“Oh my God! You’re real!” Her back pressed to the wall as she stared at the man who was everywhere. “I can’t believe this.” If this was another dream, that was it. When she woke up, Azaleigh was out. Out of Hollows Brook, out of this house… out.

“I’m sorry you’re finding out this way, but time is against you.” The thing did not move from its relaxed position in the rocking chair.

“Time? Who the hell—? What the hell are you?”

“I will respond to whatever name you give me.” A black brow lifted and he seemed to be waiting.

“Huh?”

“My name. That which you call, and I answer.”

“I know what you said, damn it! What do you mean? You don’t have a name?”

He cocked his head to the side, like a patient dog analyzing its master. “Antoinette called me Victor.”

“Aunt Toni?” Maybe Antoinette’s eccentricities went further than she realized.

“Yes, I was her Protector first. She created me.”

“Created you?” Her eyes felt close to falling from her head, as she struggled to keep her breathing even. Things were getting stranger by the second, and her lungs protested fiercely. At any moment, if she wasn’t careful, she was going to hit the floor.

He nodded. “To protect her from the Night Walkers.”

“Night Walkers?”

“Vicious, blood-drinking murderers who prey on humans.” His lips curled in distaste.

Vampires. Just freakin’ great. Azaleigh had read enough Anne Rice and watched a decent amount of True Blood to know what these supposed Night Walkers were. Did she believe him? Considering he was real, she was leaning to it.

“You’re a Night Walker?”

Victor looked offended now, his brows lowering as his mouth cinched, and he shook his head. “I’m a Protector.”

Azaleigh swallowed. “I don’t know what that means.”

He shifted, a mere ripple of his obscenely large body that had Azaleigh trying to fuse into the wall. With a shrug, the creature spoke again. “Some call us zombies.”

She blinked. Blinked again.

“You—you’re a zombie?”

Because if he was, Azaleigh had never imagined a zombie who looked like Victor. No, this man looked very much alive, with skin that was lightly tanned, definitely no sickly hue, eyes that burned bright in his head, and was beautifully formed, all hard planes and bulging muscles. His face, while harsh, was...easy to look at, to put it mildly.

He had thick brows that slashed over intense green eyes—or sometimes black void—a long, straight nose that sat well in his square face, and thin lips so sensual they seemed full. Her zombie had a body like Chris Hemsworth, a face to put Hugh Jackman’s to shame, and a sensuality neither had managed to convey on the big screen. As the thought entered her mind, the feminine part of her acknowledged how long it had been since she’d had anything more than a casual, Starbucks-line flirtation with the opposite sex, much less actual intimate relations. Law school hadn’t left time for them, and it was more rational to use her toys than have a one-night stand. Plus, the concept of the latter had never sat well with her. One night of mediocre pleasure, a lifetime of herpes or HIV. She didn’t think so.

“The Night Walkers coined the term because we blindly follow those in our care. Somehow, humans made it something hideous to be feared.”

She nodded. Obviously Michael Jackson, Bram Stroker, and the rest had gotten it wrong. This man was no skeletal creature who smelled of decay and not once had he demanded her brain. That last part might have been laughable if this wasn’t so serious.

“So, you’re a vampire-fighting zombie?”

His lips thinned, as if mildly irritated with her line of questioning. “I’m your Protector. No Night Walker will touch you as long as I am here.”

“Right.” Azaleigh nodded as if this was all normal. There was no problem at all. Vampire and zombie existence was the usual order of the world. “So I’m technically your boss?”

“Yes.”

“And you have to do what I say?”

Victor’s face lost all expression, but he dipped his head.

“What happens if you don’t?”

He hesitated a fraction of a second before he acquiesced. “A Protector who doesn’t follow his Guardian will feel constricting pain until he does.”

“Uh huh.” Azaleigh looked to the door, swiping nervously at her lips and calculating the time it would take her to reach it. Running? Five seconds.

“Azaleigh...” Victor began, his voice low in warning.

“Don’t move,” she ordered, taking a step in the direction of the bedroom door to test his words.

“Azaleigh, don’t. We’re running out of time. The Night Walkers know Antoinette is dead. They’re already on their way here. They’ll massacre everyone, just like they attempted thirty-nine years ago.”

She continued on, eyeing him and seeing the strain on his face. Victor hadn’t moved, though. Not so much as a finger. Maybe he really was a zombie.

“The children will die first.”

The words stopped her cold, and she turned to him.

“That’s how they are. They’ll murder the babies first, in front of the parents just to watch the horror in their eyes, then they take the women, raping youngest to the oldest, and finally, after the men have died twice over in horror, they kill them all. It’s their way.”

Azaleigh remembered her dream, the blood-curdling screams, the stench of decay and coppery blood. Was that what she’d dreamt? Of Night Walkers?

“You’ve dreamt it?”

Her attention veered back to the seated Victor, and she nodded once.

“We’re almost out of time, then. Release me from the command, Azaleigh. You’ve much to learn and little time.”