"I'll be right here," she reassured me as she sat at the table again. "Do you want me to be quiet or to speak my thoughts out loud?"
"Out loud please," I mumbled. I knew her voice would keep me here in this room. My mind wanted to dwell on the unimaginable horrors it had been conjuring up for the past few hours, and I was reluctant to go there. It was bad enough not knowing what was happening thousands of miles away. Brooding over a selection of worst-possible-scenarios was about a million times worse.
Julia's voice droned on as I allowed my thoughts to wander to Angus, and those few glorious hours we had shared before Mark had been abducted. I smiled as I remembered the way his muscles had moved under the glistening skin of his chest, and how it felt beneath my fingers, and how it tasted.
Eventually the memories morphed into dreams as I drifted off.
Angus
I smelled the vampire just as we were packing the few dishes away after lunch. Fergus had used his temporary amputation to weasel out of doing anything remotely domestic, so he was back in the dining room, checking over equipment. Oliver had helped for the first few seconds, but then he'd become distracted by the collection of hunting knives my disorganised father had stored side by side with ladles and bread knives in one of the capacious drawers that were dotted around the kitchen. When the vampire scent drifted within range Oliver actually had four knives balanced on their tips along his forearm, and was grinning at me in triumph. A second later those knives were back in the drawer. Some of them anyway.
"I can sense him too," Oliver spoke in a low voice. "He's a couple of hundred metres away now, and he's wondering how to approach this place without getting killed. Obviously not an idiot, then. He must know what's waiting for him."
"I think he does," I said softly. "He's cautious, but I don't sense any hostility towards us. Something is worrying him, though."
"Yeah, I get that too," said Oliver, frowning. "I think he wants our help."
"We should talk to him. Only thing is, he's carrying a couple of shotguns, so we don't want to startle him. Getting shot is not high on my list of things to do. Again."
"You're preaching to the converted, my friend. Maybe we should go out with our hands in the air just to show we're not armed."
"Then you should probably try to hide those two a bit better," I suggested wryly, indicating the knives he'd jammed into a couple of loops that decorated the leather belt around his waist.