“I figured…”, he started, before taking a deep breath and sitting on the bed closest to the door.  He ran his fingers through his hair nervously and shook his head.  He figured Sam wouldn’t stay away for long, which could pose its own issues, “I figured you wouldn’t show, considering how fast you bolted, and how…limited that conversation was on the phone.  Sorry about my dad.”

He thought about how to approach his next words as he stared down at his hands.  He stood, as nervously as he had sat and pulled the note that was left at the previous hotel, “I called you here, because my dad isn’t planning to go out until after midnight.  I can’t sleep, now that we are here…and…well it’s just vampires.  We either die, or they do.  There’s really no in between or guess work.”

He stepped over to her, and held the note up in front of her face, “…and I wanted to talk about this in person, so there’s no lies.  No secrets.  I can read your face, and you can tell me everything you know.  Either I am being haunted, which poses a whole new kind of hunt, or you’re an escape artist, and she…is still alive.”

His eyes were tearing up as he spoke to her, his lip trembling slightly.  A small obsessive glimmer shown behind the green irises as they pleaded with her own.

-------

Anna stepped out of her room at the hotel, groaning at the idea of living off vending machine food for another week.  Her mother moved around from hotel to hotel, combing from town to town to figure out what had happened to her father.  She was too young to even remember him, but wore his dog tags around her neck.  He was a good man, an honorable man.  The house fire was pegged as a freak accident, one that she and her mother barely survived when she was only six months old.

But her mom had never let it go.  She had these mysterious people that she spoke to every now and again, moving from town to town in search of...something.  Sometimes she came back after a day or so, and they would move to another town.  Other times, she would be gone for a few weeks, always coming back seeming older, slightly more scarred than before.

Snapping herself out of her thoughts, she thumbed a few quarters into the snack machine.