They stood shoulder to shoulder, their hands resting inside their jeans’ pockets, each of them assuming a bully’s stance.
Phaedra’s face pinched with distress.
I had to rescue her but I couldn’t afford to tangle with high schoolers. It would cause too much trouble with the authorities. If anything happened, I better handle this sitation quickly and smoothly. I removed my contacts and put my sunglasses back on.
Phaedra glanced from boy to boy. Her right eyelid fluttered in a nervous spasm.
The boys laughed. The shortest of the bunch got close to Phaedra and stretched one leg behind hers. Another boy tipped his hat and moved forward.
Phaedra stepped back and tripped on the leg. She stumbled and dropped the paper bag. Something inside broke and liquid spilled over the asphalt.
My anger turned blade sharp. I got out of the Toyota and pushed between two of the boys, my vampire strength easily brushing them aside.
Phaedra wouldn’t look at me. I reached for her hand and pulled her up. Her face was red with shame. Her right eye was closed tight and the eyelashes trembled.
“This guy your new boyfriend, Blinky?” the shortest of the bullies asked. His jacket had a chenille M decorated with football-shaped medallions.
Blinky? Kids were cruel.
Phaedra kept her head down and wiped tears.
I put my arm around her and we walked toward my Toyota.
Short guy gave me the once-over. “Where’d you find this dinosaur, Blinky?”
He says Blinky one more time and I’ll use his tongue to wipe my dipstick. I was a couple of inches taller than him but he outweighed me by forty pounds, easily. Made no difference.
His friends tugged at his arm. “Come on, Jason. Let it go.”
Jason gave an arrogant grin, convinced there was little I could to do to him, a minor.
“Who the hell are you, old man? Her Prince Charming? Why bother? She’s no princess.” He waved a finger to his pals. “She’s the school blow-job bitch. Gives good ones too as long as you don’t make eye contact with her. You know.” Jason blinked his right eye. “Freaks you out. Isn’t that right, Blinky?”
At the moment I wanted to use Jason’s head as a soccer ball. I let go of Phaedra and pulled my wallet out. I said to Jason. “I’ll bet a twenty that in less than a minute, I’ll have you singing like a little girl.”
Jason chuckled. “A twenty, huh?”
He walked beside me. I turned and put my back to his friends. I lowered my sunglasses.
His eyes came to mine. His irises popped to the size of marbles. His red aura bloomed crimson red and his smirk sagged into a big wide O.
I whispered into his ear. “You know ‘I’m a Little Teapot’?”
“I…think…so.”
“Good. On three, start singing. Loud. Add the dancing part.”
“O…kay.”
I put my sunglasses back on and counted.
He set his hands on his hips and bounced on his knees as he sang loud, exactly as I’d told him. His buddies stared. The other students pointed and laughed.
The hypnosis would last about a minute. When it wore off, Jason would have no idea what happened, though his throat would be sore from singing so loud.
I led Phaedra to the Toyota. She watched Jason and barely smiled. I got a sense that she didn’t draw much satisfaction from his humiliation.
I did.
Phaedra climbed into the 4Runner like she wanted to leave.
I got in. “I have some questions for you.”
She kept her face down and ignored the commotion of everyone else laughing at Jason. She said, “I don’t want to talk here.”
“Understandable.” I started the engine.” Where to?”
Phaedra cinched her safety belt. “The place I go when I want to be alone.” She pointed west. “It’s my secret place. My hideout.”
CHAPTER 32
Phaedra looked strained and shrunken as if she were caught in a giant fist of anxiety and unhappiness. I couldn’t pry a word out of her.
She pulled a water bottle from her backpack and sipped. For the next half mile her silence dragged across my mood like an anchor.
I slowed for the county road along Pinos Creek, the way to Gino’s. Phaedra motioned to keep going.
She fished a paper napkin from her jacket. She swiped her eyes and her nose. “Do you understand now?”
I wanted to ask, about what? But that would sound like I wasn’t paying attention. I kept quiet and waited for her to elaborate.
“Do you see what my life is like?”
“It can be hard.”
“This is just one day. They’re not going to get any better.”
“Sure they will. Soon you’ll be out of high school.”
And then? I shut up. I could see where Phaedra was going with this. After graduation the worst symptoms of the Huntington’s would begin.
Phaedra looked out the side window.
“That was you last night?”
She cocked her head toward me.
“The mind signals,” I said.
“Who else could it have been?”
“Just making sure. The world of the supernatural still surprises me.”
“What’s your point?” she asked.
“Thanks. You saved me last night.”
She shrugged. You’re welcome.
I asked, “How did you know Cleto and the others were coming after me?”
“I overheard my uncle give them orders.”
“What orders?”
“You want his exact words?”
“If you remember.”
“They were, kill Gomez. Exact enough?”
“Why didn’t you call? I don’t like you using the mind power on me.”
“I couldn’t,” Phaedra snapped. “It was late and I’d left my phone in the kitchen. I couldn’t fetch it. My uncle was up all night and he would’ve seen me.” Her cheeks flushed with anger. “You know what?”
I made eye contact.
She moved to punch my arm. I caught her fist.
She squirmed to pull her hand free. “You don’t trust me.”
I let go of her hand. “I want to trust you.”
“Then start.” She rubbed her knuckles. “You can be such a jerk.”
Jerk? I’d expected insensitive asshole. Jerk had such an adolescent accuracy that the comment stung.
“Being a jerk comes from being careful.”
“Do you trust me or not?” she asked.
Times like now, Phaedra tormented me like an itch I couldn’t reach. “Yes, I trust you.”
“Was that hard?” She turned in her seat away from me and mumbled, “I thought vampires were cool.”
That itch was acting up.
When we passed a gravel road going north, she said, “That’s where I live with my uncle.”
I slowed for a look. Oaks and lindens created a tunnel over the road, which ran straight to a one-story house with a chain-link fence. “Want to stop?”
“No, keep going.”
After another mile she told me to turn south. We took a narrow paved road that curved up an incline into the pine trees. The asphalt ended at a steel gate along a barbed wire fence. A sign on the gate read: NO ACCESS. RIO GRANDE NATIONAL FOREST.
I halted. Phaedra hopped out in an animated rush. She lifted the chain looped over a post at one end of the gate and waved me through. I drove onto a dirt road. She secured the chain behind us and got back in.
Her expression transformed, like she’d changed masks, from sad to happy.
The road turned into a trail that became a wide spot between the trees. We got as far as we could without plowing into the brush.
We both got out. Phaedra slung her backpack over her shoulders. The trees filtered warmth from the sunlight and I felt the chill against my face. Dense mats of pine needles and patches of dry grass spread across the rocky ground.
Phaedra hiked beside me. We started at a brisk pace but she tired and
slowed.
She motioned that she wanted to rest and sat against a large boulder mottled with lichen. She guzzled from her water bottle. Up here, the air remained cool enough for the vapor in her breath to show.
“Where’s your hideout?” I asked.
She pointed to the trees behind her.
I saw nothing but forest.
Her eyes made a look-again expression.
This time I saw a horizontal line among the Ponderosa pines. It was the roof of an earth-colored shack that blended into the surroundings.
I followed Phaedra toward the shack. As we got closer I could see that the shack was made of adobe daubed with mud. The vigas and rough lumber holding up the roof had bleached to the same soft gray as the dead wood around us.
“Kind of hard to get to,” I said.
“It’s a hideout. That’s the point.” Phaedra removed brush that had rolled against the shack and helped camouflage it. The eaves of the pitched roof came to my chest.
I asked, only half joking, “Who made this? Midgets?”
“Penitentes.” She went to the south side of the shack.
“Penitentes?” I repeated, analyzing the word as I translated it. “Those who seek penance?”
“They were a lay order of the Franciscans.” Phaedra led me to a short door. “They migrated to the San Luis Valley from Santa Fe almost two hundred years ago.”
The door was the same bleached color as the rest of the wood. The planks were uneven and held in place with rusted square-faced nails. She swiveled a board on the door and stuck her hand through the gap. After fumbling with a lever arrangement, she pushed the door open. “This is called a morada. Means dwelling but it’s more like a little chapel. There used to be dozens all up and down these parts. It’s what the town was named after.”
“So why did they build this place up here?” I asked.
“To hide their secret rituals. Rites of self-flagellation. They used cactus and whips made from yucca.” Phaedra said this with an enthusiastic lilt like she would’ve enjoyed watching.
“What a fun bunch,” I said. “I would’ve come here for drinks and to play cards.”
We ducked through the low doorway and stepped down to a dirt floor. Inside, the ceiling was tall enough for me to stand upright. Wire hooks dangled from the joists. Smudges on the wood marked where people had once hung lanterns.
Low benches ran along the eastern and western walls. The benches were constructed in the same manner as the walls, adobe and mud plaster. More of the rough-hewn planks lay on top of the benches.
Phaedra bent over the bench on the western wall. She removed adobe bricks along the edge of the bench. She wedged her fingers under the planks, shifted them back and forth, and worked the planks loose. She lifted the planks and propped them against the wall.
The open bench looked like an adobe sarcophagus. An army duffel bag rested inside.
“What’s in the bag?” I asked.
“My camping stuff.”
“You sleep up here?”
She nodded. “Told you it was my hideout.”
“What are you hiding from?”
“The future me.”
The grimness of the comment skewered me. Phaedra meant a future wasting away and dying of Huntington’s. If I turned her into a vampire, I’d spare her that hideous fate. But that was the fate God had given her. If I made Phaedra into a vampire, then I’d hold myself responsible for her new destiny as an undead bloodsucker.
Phaedra lifted the duffel bag and dumped out most of the contents: a rolled sleeping bag, granola and candy bars, packets of beef jerky, and a hurricane lamp. She opened the lamp, exposing a candle that she lit with a butane lighter.
The lamp’s dim yellow light made our shadows flicker on the walls. She brought the lamp close to one of the bench planks.
“Look.” Phaedra turned the board over to reveal an etching of a Star of David and a menorah scorched into the wood. “This is a hiding place within a hiding place. There were Jews among the Penitentes and they snuck here in further secrecy to celebrate their traditions. Did you know many Conquistadors were Jews fleeing the Inquisition?”
I did know. My own past came back to me. Coyote, an ancient vampire I’d met when on assignment in Los Angeles, was a child of the Spanish conquest of America. Half Aztec and half Spanish Jew, perhaps the first true Mexican, Coyote still carried the shameful burden as a survivor of the Inquisition.
“How’d you discover this place?”
“I was hiking by myself about four years ago and found it.” Phaedra sat cross-legged on the floor and rested the lamp in front of her. She closed her eyes. “You feel it? There’s an energy here. It’s a holy place. Aren’t you afraid?”
“Unless I’m tied to the floor and somebody’s about to stake me, why should I be afraid?”
“What about things like holy water? Crucifixes?”
“That’s movie stuff. I could brush my teeth with holy water. You want to hurt me with a crucifix? Pawn it and buy a gun.”
“Then what’s true and what’s not about you? As a vampire, I mean.”
I didn’t want to explain anything. The more Phaedra pried about vampires, the worse I felt about neglecting my duty to the Araneum.
Guilt put its heavy hands on my shoulders. I had no choice but to kill Phaedra, convert her into a chalice, or turn her into one of us. But I wouldn’t do any of them.
“You look tired,” she said. “Aren’t you immortal?”
“The trick to staying immortal is that you’ve got to pace yourself.”
She asked, “What about the zombies? What do you know about them?”
“Not much.”
“Where do they come from?”
“Depends. Several things can cause zombies. A virus. A mutation. In this case, there’s a reanimator. He’s killing people and using them for parts to make zombies.”
“How do you know that?”
“Other vampires told me.”
“How do you pass information? You guys have a newsletter? A website? Blog?”
“Yes. Yes. And yes.”
“Will you show me?”
“No.”
Phaedra played with the lamp and tried not to appear miffed. “Did a reanimator get ahold of Gino?”
“Most likely. It’s what happened to Barrett.”
Phaedra blinked. I could tell she was trying to take in the reality of everything that I’d said.
She picked at the laces of her boots. “Who is this reanimator?”
“That’s what I have to find out.”
“He’s the one you have to stop? By stop, I mean kill.”
“Yes. I have to kill this reanimator and destroy his zombies.”
“Do zombies die of disease?”
“Technically, they’re already dead. Make that undead. I’m pretty sure they’re immune to colds and pneumonia.”
“What about Huntington’s?”
“I guess they’d be immune to that, too. In what I’ve read about zombies, they’re not much of a drain on health care.”
“Are they immortal?”
“Considering they’re undead, I’d say yes. Why the questions?”
“I’ve spent most of my life thinking about my death.” Phaedra twisted a lock of hair from her bangs, the gesture idle, her face blank as if meditating.
She turned to the bench. “I have something else to show you.”
She reached into the bench and folded aside a tarp covered with dirt. Whisking away the dust, she lifted an artist’s black portfolio from under the tarp. She unzipped the portfolio and opened it to reveal a large drawing tablet.
Phaedra laid the portfolio where the light from the lamp was best. The tablet was full of drawings that had been torn loose and slipped back under the cardboard cover.
“When I looked into the void and found you”-Phaedra showed me the first drawing-“this is what I saw.”
It was a charcoal sketch of the little Iraqi girl.
CHAPTER 3
3
The sketch Phaedra held was a caricature, but the rendering captured mood in a way a camera never could. A round innocent face that had no business being close to war: hair drawn as wild zigzags that got lost in the confused crosshatched texture of the night sky; eyebrows arched in permanent horror; tiny lips twisted in sorrow.
Every scratchy mark directed me to her eyes.
Dark eyes. Frightened eyes. Accusing eyes.
Her eyes were smudges of charcoal, but they projected light from deep within the paper.
I wanted to slap the portfolio closed and push it away. But I was transfixed, both fascinated and frightened that the blackest of my memories was exposed.
Phaedra pulled out another sketch.
Soldiers huddled around the little girl where she lay dying on a poncho. Shadows radiated like spokes from each soldier as if the girl was a hub of blazing light. One soldier knelt by her side and leaned close with a bayonet.
Me. That soldier was me.
I had unsheathed the bayonet to cut away her blood-soaked dress.
Phaedra sorted through the sketches.
A pair of man’s hands.
Covered in blood.
My hands.
The emotions burst out of me.
Fear.
Terror.
Despair.
Phaedra held up the drawings like they were exhibits at a trial.
My kundalini noir shrank into a tiny ball.
Now I understood. Phaedra had crossed the astral plane to dig into my psyche. She’d uncovered my nightmares and endless shame. Phaedra’s psyche had woven into mine and that’s why I’d seen her face merge with the Iraqi girl’s.
My mind replayed the events of my vampiric life from the death of the Iraqi girl until now. My turning. My service as a vampire enforcer. The loss of Carmen to alien gangsters. The psychic attacks. Phaedra’s wish to cheat death.
Were these events randomly strung together or were they a path leading me to this moment?
And this decision?
Turn Phaedra.
I wouldn’t do it, but to refuse was to let Phaedra die.
I withdrew from the world, falling, rolling, tumbling-delirious in a miserable confusion.
A mental image of the little Iraqi girl came into focus.
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