The delivery man stopped mid-chew, his mouth full of lo mein. He paused to look the girl up and down, taken aback by her unusual style. It looked too comfortable to be a costume. Some kind of goth, maybe? She looked interesting anyway. Most girls just wore tanktops and crocs.
He briefly considered asking her for coffee, or something, but then realized that it would make him sound like a creep. Even if they weren’t in a rainy alley, he wouldn’t have had the bravado to talk to girls with anything but perfunctory courtesy.
“Um.” He chewed a few more times. “It’s okay? I think.” She looked cold, and he considered giving her a jacket. But again, he was a chump, and thought it would come off as awkward. Once he went home he would spend the entire night regretting how he handled this moment. “Well I hope you find your, um, way. Rain, huh?”
He swallowed his mouthful, neglecting to recall that it had been filled with food that whole time. Chiding himself internally, he tried not to look too closely at the girl’s outfit as she passed him by. At the last second, she asked him one final question.
“Oh, the…!” Was she okay? She looked… shaken. Lost? Who gets lost in Newcastle except tourists? “The police station? Uh… it’s on Clifford Street, just a block that way. We’re on Shields now. Just head down that lane there and to the left.”
This didn’t seem right. Although his heart was racing, mostly because girls never found reason to talk to him, he couldn’t ignore the notion that something was wrong. She was shaking, her smile was trembling. She wanted to get a ride home from cops?
The deliveryman turned to put his food down on the scooter and took a step forward.
“Hey, girl, is everything alright?” He stopped short, not wanting to scare her. “You seem a little… upset, I think? I don’t know. Maybe I could give you a ri—”
He suddenly pitched backwards, choked by the collar of his shirt, and landed flat on his back in the rain. Sasha appeared behind him, almost materializing out of pure shadow. Before the stranger could attempt to get up, Sasha planted one foot on his chest, prompting a strangled cough out of him.
“Alice,” Sasha whispered, his voice almost swallowed by the rain. And yet, it seemed to come from everywhere, even from inside her own mind. “You’re only making this harder on yourself.”
The delivery man groaned and began to grab at Sasha’s foot.
“What…”
Sasha turned his boot.
“Quiet. You’re insignificant.” The vampire’s brown eyes leveled with Alice’s, seeming much darker in the shadowed street. “Unfortunate soul, isn’t he? What should be done with him, Alice?”
