Nell was excited, She’s never been to university before. She missed that part of her teenage to adult part of life, She had gone straight from school, to college to work, academic she wasn’t.

She had always been told that work and money was better than an academic education, I mean unless you want to teach or go on to higher and better things, what was the point of knowing the difference between a colon and a semi-colon in the real world.

Now she was proud to be a mature student and was looking forward to her creative writing course, making new friends, and learn how to actually do it properly, she had been writing for years, not much of it had been very good, she hadn’t even once won a competition or had anything published, if only, she thought.

The streets were dark. The wind was picking up, and it could have been warmer for February, then you would be walking somewhere exposed and then she wished she’d remembered her thermals and her woolly hat. She was walking between some tall town houses on her way to the main road and she heard a guttural low moan from the darkness, a bit like a washing machine finishing off its cycle. It was loud and felt close by, Nell took a deep breath and ran as fast as she could to the main road, she narrowly missed a cyclist with a broken light, he flashed an angry face in her direction and kept going.

Nell relaxed a little, bloody cyclists she thought. It was bad enough he was on the pavement, but he wasn’t even wearing anything bright or have use of a ringing thing called a bell.

She kept walking, she could no longer hear any weird noises from behind her, putting her headphones in her ears she had noticed they had gone numb with the pain of the biting cold wind.

She picked up the pace just so she could get there sooner and start warming up. Her eyes and nose were streaming in the cold wind and she only had old tissues in her pocket, they would have to do. Just as the dulcet tone of Emelie Sande were fading away she was minutes away from a warm and dry rec room.

She changed the pace of the music as she sat down, scissor sisters blasted through her ear phones as she was trying to stay awake by drinking coke and doing her desired reading. Her course was fun and informative, she could hear the wind howling through the trees outside between concentrating on character development and short story writing.

In the blackness outside she was waiting, she wasn’t bad or a murderer, just hungry, hungry for warm flesh and the taste of fresh hot blood. She would have to get some soon or she would perish, just like her family had, and she still had that detective looking for her, she was running out of options.