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Part 1

She had been having the dreams for about two days. By the second day, they were no longer confined to her sleeping hours. She found herself “winking out,” as she called it, even when standing at the stove stirring canned soup, or doing dishes at the small sink. Always the same vision. Always a man, dressed in black clothing, face pale as if nearly drowned or nearly frozen, always the same message: help me.

When she could stand it no longer, having winked out this time sitting on the couch trying to read a murder mystery, she put the book down on the coffee table, laced up her running shoes, and went out the door, flinging on her hooded sweatshirt as she exited.

The boat shed was where she headed. She didn’t know why, or how she knew that, she just knew that was where she had to be and she didn’t question it. She had stopped questioning both her visions and her instincts when she was a child. The sand this far from shore was hard with the arrival of autumn and packed tight. There was a cold wind blowing in from the water that whipped her hair around her face and stung her cheeks. She wondered if it would snow before Halloween.

The boat shed had been unused for years. Even when the whole family had come up for vacations they had not bothered with the old wooden shack. It stood a few hundred feet back from the shore, far enough not to be flooded unless there was a good run of storms and it had been a long time since that had happened. The walls leaned crazily as the foundation had shifted or rotted beneath it. It was no longer the gray-blue it had been when she was a child.

She stopped outside the door, catching her breath in the shadow cast by the small building. If she had thought about it logically, she would have said she was crazy. But logic never had anything to do with either her visions or her feelings, and taking one more deep breath, she had turned the knob and pushed the door open.

It was dark inside, musty and smelling of old wood and dampness. The floor of it was nothing but sand—if there were planks beneath it, one would have to dig to find them. When her eyes grew used to the gloom she looked around warily. There were stacks of rotting tarps in one corner, and a lifebuoy that had seen better days perhaps early in the last century. The shelves that remained intact were surprisingly empty. A coil of rotting rope hung from a hook. And there, in the far left corner...

She had been expecting this but it was still a shock to see him lying there. He was nearly supine, his head and shoulders still leaning up against the back wall, and his eyes were closed. He was as pale as she had seen and the black clothing, a suit, she guessed, was in tatters. She reached him in three steps and felt for a pulse in his neck.

He stirred then, grabbing her wrist with surprising speed and strength. His mouth worked, but no sound came forth.

“Shhhh.” She tilted her head to make contact with his barely open eyes. “We need to get you out of here.”

He closed his eyes completely with a sigh and she took that as compliance.

“We’ll go slowly, all right? Can you get into a sitting position?”

He tried, struggling against gravity and his own weakness, and she caught him by the arm, lean but hard as cord wood, and helped him straighten up. Just the effort of that seemed to deplete him.

“Rest a minute,” she said. “And then we’ll get you to your feet.”

He nodded nearly imperceptibly.

In a few moments, she felt him gathering himself for the effort and she braced one foot against the corner of the wall and the floor to stabilize both of them. Working together, and she was surprised at how much easier it was than she had anticipated, they got him to his feet, one of which was bare, the other in a torn black sock.

“It’s not far,” she encouraged him and again was aware of a small nod of acknowledgement.

It was the work of nearly half an hour to get him from the shed to her cabin. He needed to rest frequently and managed to communicate, by pushing against her when she would stop, that he needed to rest in as concealed a place as possible. Thus, when she tried to pause just a few feet from the door, he pushed at her and she realized he wanted to stop against the side of the shed, screened on one side by the wall itself, and hidden in the shadow it cast. Yet another time, he stumbled onwards stubbornly, nearly pitching both of them forward, to pause for a moment behind a cluster of bushes that grew wild and untamed where the sand merged into the sparse grass of the woods. But at last they gained the cabin.

“I’m going to park you right here,” she said, removing his arm from around her shoulders and bracing him against the wall just within the doorway. It felt warm and sheltering to be out of the lake wind. “If you sit down anywhere, we’ll never get you back up and I want to put you in the warmest spot in the house. Okay?”

His eyes were closed with weariness, and there were black circles that were shocking against the paleness of his skin, but he nodded once more. He was starting to shiver.

Hurriedly, she shoved the coffee table to one side and spread her thickest blankets directly before the fireplace. She grabbed a pillow from the guest bed, nicked a few more blankets on the way out, and then returned to where she had left him.

He was beginning to sag in spite of the effort she could see he was making to stay upright, and she caught him up again, and helped him across the room.

“Just here,” she said, easing him down. She was relieved. For someone who appeared so thin he was actually quite heavy.

He collapsed more than anything onto the blankets and she had a chance to do a cursory examination of him as he did so. There was no blood visible on him anywhere or any obvious wounds to his head or his neck. His shirt, untucked, had fallen open starting at the bottom and she caught a glimpse of hard muscle over bone and very flat abs. His pant legs were in shreds in various places and he had moved stiffly, but not as if in pain. The bones of his legs appeared straight. She removed the remnants of the sad black sock and cast it aside. His feet were torn as were his hands, but no more than she would have expected from someone who had made what was obviously a very rough journey. She eased his head onto the pillow, then mounded more blankets over him.

“Try to stay with me,” she said. “I need to get something warm into you, okay? I’ve got some soup I can heat up.”

He didn’t even nod this time, just squeezed his eyes more tightly shut for a fraction of a second.

She grabbed the last of her canned chicken soup and rice, stored handily in a microwaveable bowl in the refrigerator, and slipped it into the microwave. While it was heating, she lit the kindling and paper neatly laid in the fireplace, glad that she had known to set it up in advance. Just another one of those urges. When the flames finally caught, she placed two large chunks of wood on it to keep it going, then went back to the soup.

When she returned to him, he had managed to free one arm from the blanket and had extended his hand as far as he could toward the heat. He looked as if he were recharging himself.

“Here.” She sat down cross-legged beside him and began to spoon-feed him. After several mouthfuls he shook his head.

“One more,” she said sternly. “I know hypothermia when I see it. One more. And then I call a doctor.”

His reaction was nearly violent. “No,” he managed. “No doctor. You cannot...” His voice broke as he struggled to get out from under the blankets.

“Okay!” She pushed him back down and covered him again. “Okay. No doctors.”

He acquiesced then and looked straight at her for the first time with eyes that glittered strangely. Perhaps it was the firelight. “How...?” he managed to croak out, but as suddenly as his eyes had jabbed hers with that strange mixture of light and energy, they began to lose their focus, closing in spite of his apparent attempts to keep them open.

“Go to sleep,” she said softly.

His exhaled deeply, a soft rushing sound against the crackling in the fireplace, and the arm that had been straining once more to reach the fire relaxed suddenly. She tucked the blankets in around his narrow form and sat back, soup bowl still in hand, just looking at him. Who are you? she thought, and wondered if she had opened her door to an escaped convict. His face, relaxed, was thin but not unpleasantly so. His skin was very pale and his features finely shaped. He looked like artwork. Even his fair, arched eyebrows looked sculpted. She touched the pale hair for a moment, and was not surprised at the softness of it.



He woke again at night, close to eight.

She had drawn the blinds against the dark, but had put on very few lights. There was something pulling at her, tugging, and she wondered what she would see the next time she winked out. What more could there be for her to see? She had already found the pale man in black.

The fire still roared and she had brought in enough wood to last until the morning. She sat at her place on the couch with just the lamp on the end table for light, reading her book, but even without looking up she knew the instant his eyes opened. “Let me get you more soup.” She put the book aside and rose.

“The soup,” he said quietly, and his voice was low and musical with just the right amount of drawl in it for her to hear the Deep South, “is abysmal.”

She burst out laughing. “It’s canned,” she said. “But it works.”

He managed to groan and sigh at the same time in reply.

“Can you handle solid food?” she asked.

“I had better,” was the somewhat rueful answer.

They agreed on an egg, scrambled, and a cup of tea, ginger peach, not green, much to his chagrin. But he finished the egg and drained the tea and was improved, albeit still quite weak.

“I cannot thank you for this adequately,” he said at last, his voice slightly hoarse.

“You don’t have to.” She looked at him. “But I need to know something. I guess you’re in trouble. A lot of trouble. I haven’t called the police, and you did manage to keep me from getting a doctor. Are you on the run from the law? Are you an escapee of some kind? I deserve to know that much, especially if I’m just going to get a bullet in my brain for all my efforts.”

He looked at her keenly. “You are a strange one,” he said. “No one usually comes right out and states that sort of thing.”

“Life is too short for niceties sometimes,” she said. She returned his gaze levelly, searching for an answer in the pale eyes. His expression was completely blank and told her nothing. “So what are you doing here?”

He looked away from her, into the fire. “I am an escapee, you are correct in that. But not from the law. In point of fact, I’m an FBI agent. You can believe me or not, as you choose. What I run from...” He was silent for a long time and so still that something stayed her from prompting him. “I am afraid I may have put you in very grave danger, here,” he said at last, his voice low and perhaps sad. “If I had not been so weak, I would not have allowed this. But clearly I needed help.”

“Clearly,” she said. She looked at him, curious. “I checked you over while you were asleep,” she said without embarrassment. “You have no wounds that I can see. Hypothermia is certainly possible up here at this time of year. But there is something else, isn’t there?”

He inclined his head, as if trying to think how best to answer the question. The fire glinted in his pale hair, cast shadows across his face. “Exsanguination,” he stated at last. “Bloodletting.”

“I understand the word,” she said. “But what do you mean?”

“The man holding me has a...fascination with blood. He has been draining mine.”

Her breath caught but the horror she felt was not reflected in his closed expression. “Draining yours? For what?”

“I might have said for experimentation. But as it is my blood, I doubt very much that he is doing anything other than collecting it in mason jars.”

“A madman,” she said at last. “You were the prisoner of a madman?”

He didn’t answer.

“But how did he take you? How did he keep you there?”

“How he took me...” He didn’t finish the sentence. “How he kept me, well, you can see my present state. He drugged me initially, then began taking my blood. He only gave me water intermittently, and not very much. Once or twice he gave me some rice. All he had to do was take my blood at regular intervals. Not all at once. He does not wish to kill me that way. But enough to weaken me. It is, you realize, more effective than chains or locks, to be held prisoner by one’s own weakness. After a point, he did not need the drugs or any kind of restraints any longer.”

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