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drunk.”
     
    Sam shook his head in disappointment.   “You don’t feel it huh?”   He glared at Casey now. “Remind me why I turned you again?”
     
    Casey sat down and drank some more wine with one hand and wagged a finger in the air with the other.   “I seems to recall you hooded and gagged, with an angry mob and one pissed off sheriff all looking to put a stake in you.”
     
    Sam smiled and closed his eyes, falling into memory.   “Clay Sollero .   He was a clever bastard. Relentless too.”
     
    “He relented pretty fast with a bullet in his back,” Casey said gruffly.  
     
    Sam nodded and fixed his strange eyes back on the pair of headlights that crept along a far off ridge, before they disappeared over a hill, down into the sleepy town of Lost Valley.  
     
    Casey coughed and offered Sam the bottle, “C’mon ya old croaker, bend an elbow with me,” but Sam declined with the wave of a hand.
     
    “You’re about as fun as a snake bite, you know that,” Casey said.   He got up and threw the empty wine bottle out into the darkness where is smashed down on some rocks bellow.   “I can smell that smoke.   Those fires must be going strong,” he said taking a deep sniff of the air.
     
    “Yeah,” Sam said, but he smelled something else in the air, something ancient and grim.      
     
               
     
               
     
               
     

     

     

     

     

6.
     

     

     
    Twig was not himself.   He was some other person, a much older and angrier man.   He was leading a mob somewhere, torch in hand. Yelling.   He was in a canyon with dark red walls that towered high above him on either side.   In one hand he carried a torch, in the other a heavy pistol.   They were after someone, someone dangerous.   They came to a dead end where the canyon walls were as smooth as ice and no man or beast could escape judgment up its sheer sides.   Twig saw his quarry there, hunched and his pale face aglow in moonlight.   Wounded and hissing at them, his hands like two talons.   Before he could stop them the mob poured foolishly past, a blur of scornful faces, and he shouted for them to stop but it was too late.   The cornered man with the two different eyes grinned like a shark opening its maw.  
     
    When Twig woke up, Zara had her hand on his shoulder and was shaking him.   He looked around bewildered.   He was clutching one of his stakes and gasping for breath.   Zara squeezed his hand and told him he was safe.   It took a moment for Twig to remember where he was.   They were in the truck, at a rest stop outside of Silverthorne.   A light rain was falling and semi trucks were whizzing by back on the highway.  
     
    It was night again, and an overhead streetlight cast a dull orange light down on the truck.   Twig could make out the smooth contours of Zara’s face.   She had become paler since they left Denver, and in a way that Twig couldn’t quite place, more beautiful too.   When she smiled at him now, it had a hint of seduction to it that Twig never noticed before.  
     
    “Bad dream?” Zara asked, touching him lightly on his cheek.
     
    “Yeah,” Twig replied.   He reached under his seat and found a water bottle, uncapped it, and took a long drink.   “I was someone else.   I was chasing someone.”
     
    “Damon?” Zara asked.   Just saying the name sent shivers down her spine.   During the ride to Silverthorne Twig had told her everything about his encounter with Damon: his frightening speed, his power…how he had batted Twig around like a toy.   While listening, Zara remembered how strong Micah had been, how she was only able to defeat him when she let all the primal anger within her boil to the surface.   If Damon or Drake came for her, she might have to summon that inner monster again.   But there was something else too.   When that presence had overtaken her, it had killed a small part of her, and afterwards she had