Blood Ties: A Grace Harper Novel

by J. T. Hardy

  More than anything in the whole world I wished I could call Dad and hear him say he was okay, not to worry, that life was about more than trinkets collected and items possessed. It was about...about...

  He'd never told me what it was about, only what it wasn't.

  We'd spent too much time running and not enough talking. When we did talk, it was about rules and how to spot a tail, and how to walk the fine line between nondescript and noticeable loner.

  And what to do if the Pretty Boys ever found us.

  Libby moved through the emptiness, her shoulders squared, arms locked, turning at the waist as she checked the rooms. Not many of those. Living room, kitchen and dining area, one bedroom in the back, bath on the side. She swept back into the living room like GI Jane. "Clear."

  "That was kind of badass," I said. Easier to focus on her than what the room represented.

  "Please don't ever say that around my brothers."

  "They don't think you're badass?"

  "Oh they know I am, but if you sound the least bit impressed, they'll be all over you."

  I reached over and clicked on the light. The easy chair wasn't just out of place--it had been shoved aside. A tear ripped through the upholstery in the back, and a few coins and a half-melted mint lay scattered on the floor beside it. Even the coffee table was pushed back, with a long scuff across the top, and two gouges. I kneeled by the table and ran a finger along one of the gouges. Red grit stained my fingers. More red pebbles lay tangled in the carpet.

  "Grace." Libby said, her tone wary. She stood in the foyer. "Look at this."

  I returned to the door. A doorknob-sized hole had punctured the wall and snapped the doorstop right off the trim. "It took a lot of force to do that."

  Libby nodded. "Frame's not broken though. He opened the door first."

  In unison, we looked from the doorway to the living room. I didn't know what her GI Jane senses were telling her, but I saw someone knock on the door and Dad answering. Not a Pretty Boy, because he would have spotted one through the peephole, so it had to have been a minion or lackey. Someone who looked innocent and safe. Whoever they were, Dad opened the door, and the Pretty Boy burst in and slammed Dad against the table. Maybe he tried to scramble over the chair and get away. He was too sick to have done that. He could have broken something, or fallen and done real damage.

  My throat tightened. With Pretty Boys in the room, he'd never have made it out.

  Libby put a hand on my arm. "It doesn't mean they--"

  I darted to the closet by the door and yanked it open. The last of my hope faded. "His go-bag is still here." But no body. If they were going to kill him, they'd have done it here and left. There was no reason not to unless... "They took him." Just like they'd tried to take me.

  Why hadn't they killed us?

  I ran through Cavanaugh's list of crossed-off names and obituaries. Dad wasn't on that list. He shouldn't be missing. Cavanaugh's list suggested it had actually been me they were after, though I still had no idea why.

  "All right," Libby began, pulling out her phone. "A deal's a deal. We call the police."

  "Don't."

  "Grace, this is serious now."

  "The cops can't do anything to help us."

  "Of course they can."

  I grabbed her phone. "They can't. You don't know these people--they're not your...typical mobsters. The cops will only make it worse, and they'll get themselves killed."

  She waited, her expression stuck somewhere between pissed off and worried. Then she crossed her arms and pinned me with a military stare. "What aren't you telling me?"

  "Only the crazy crap that might get you killed. Trust me or go home."

  Her eyes narrowed. "Answers. Now. What the hell is really going on?"

  She meant it. She was absolutely prepared to turn and walk right out the door if I didn't level with her. Safer for her, but my stomach churned just thinking about looking for Dad on my own. The Pretty Boys had changed their playbook and I had no idea what threats I might face next, and no idea where to start searching for Dad.

  "I honestly don't know anymore." Not that she'd accept that answer. I could hardly blame her, but it was inconvenient.

  "You told me people wanted to kill you and your father."

  "That's what Dad always said."

  She huffed. "You're saying he lied."

  "I'm saying that's what he told me," I snapped. Unless he'd known all along? "It's not like we had time to ask the thing that murdered my mother why it did it."

  "Your mother was killed?" Libby had the good sense to wince. "I'm sorry. I didn't know. But this is all a little--" she waved a hand about "--hard to take in."

  "I know."

  She hesitated, her head cocked. "Wait, what do you mean by 'The thing'?"

  "Hmmm?"

  "You said 'the thing that murdered my mother.' Not who."

  Think before you speak, girl. "I'm tired is all."

  "Bullshit. Either trust me or I go home."

  "You won't believe me."

  "I might. You don't know how open-minded I am."

  I hesitated. She had gone along with everything so far. Maybe she could buy into the truth. I debated stalling her until we got someplace safer, but if the Pretty Boys were still watching the apartment, I'd be eligible for a milk carton by now.

  "Okay, the truth. But when you think I'm a nut job, remember you asked for this."

  Chapter Seven

  "Do you believe there's evil in the world?" I said, taking a seat on the couch. Libby took the other side.

  She frowned. "Oh, this is not starting out well at all."

  "Answer the question."

  She glared at me, her expression poised to blow me off, but then her eyes darkened and she was suddenly a million miles away. Finally, she nodded. "Yes."

  "So do I, but my definition of that has changed over the years." I paused. This wasn't something you blurted out.

  "When I was five," I began, "my parents and I were driving home from dinner. It was in Pensacola where Dad was working for a group building a new hotel. We were singing. Dumb kid songs that made me laugh.

  "We were the only car on a side road when Mom screamed. Someone was in the middle of the road, and we hit him."

  "You hit someone?"

  "More like we hit something. He barely moved, but our car crumpled and spun out, round and round until it slid over the embankment."

  "That's impossible."

  Until then, I'd thought so, too. "My head was still spinning when he ripped Mom's door off the car and yanked her out." I closed my eyes, the shriek of metal mixing with the screams of my mother echoing in my memory. "Then he bit her in the neck."

  "Grace--"

  I opened my eyes again and held up a hand. "Let me finish. This is hard enough."

  "All right."

  It rolled through my mind for the second time in two days. "Mom fought whatever he was, but he wouldn't let her go. He...licked her blood off her neck. Dad leapt from the car and ran to her, but before he could reach her, the thing roared like it was pissed as hell, and tore out her throat."

  So much blood, dark like shadows running down her chest. It hadn't seemed real. I'd had no words to understand it then.

  Libby gasped and pressed a hand over her mouth.

  "Dad reached Mom in time to catch her body, but he couldn't stop the bleeding." I gripped myself tight with both hands. "He couldn't save her. He tried but it was--" I stopped and sucked in a breath. I'd never told anyone this before. Dad and I had lived it. We'd had no reason to talk through it again.

  I blew out the breath. "That thing walked away from her and came toward me, blood all over his face, and I swear to God he smiled at me and said, 'Maybe you'll be the one.'"

  "You're making this up."

  "I wish I were."

  "How did you survive that?"

  The dusky man with the knife. Although it wasn't real, I smelled his woodfire smoke and spice scent as clearly as I had that night.
"Someone saved us. He was like the other one, but, I don't know, good versus evil. He came out of nowhere and tackled the thing. They fought. There was a flash, then the thing...disintegrated...into glowing chartreuse mist. All that was left was the dusky man who saved us. He told us we were in danger, that we had to run and keep moving or they'd find us."

  "Damn." She pulled her knees up to her chest.

  My own chest burned as if I was still running for my life along a dark road. Dad had gone to the police, but no one had believed his story.

  "Last night, a Pretty Boy attacked me in the parking lot outside Frisco's." I managed to keep my voice calm and steady. "But he didn't kill me. He grabbed me and tried to drag me into an alley. I don't know, maybe he planned to kill me there, but he had no reason to take that extra step. These things are fast--he could have killed me before I'd known he was there. And just like before, a dusky man showed up and saved me. He dropped a knife during the fight, and I grabbed it."

  I paused, my hands shaking. Libby was still as stone, her eyes wide, her arms wrapped around her knees.

  "I stabbed the Pretty Boy who'd attacked me and he exploded into green grit and dust, just like the one on the road that night."

  Libby jerked. "Biting necks, drinking blood, death by dust," she whispered. "That sounds like..."

  I met her frightened gaze. "I know what it sounds like. It looked like it, too."

  Libby unfolded and walked to the kitchen. She grabbed the bottle of bourbon off the counter and fetched two glasses. I said nothing as she poured us both generous shots.

  "Still think helping me is the right call?" I asked.

  "I should have you committed." She gulped her drink. "But...I had a cousin who was a priest. Couple of years ago everyone was over for Thanksgiving, and the nieces were watching TV--some old rerun--and they were going on and on about the sexy vampire with a soul, and how cool it would be to live forever. My cousin lost it and turned off the TV. He yelled at them for ten minutes about romanticizing evil.

  "They blew him off, and even I laughed a little. He was upset about something ridiculous. I asked him, 'Who cares if they watch? It's a show.' He told me, 'If they fantasize about evil, how could they avoid the real thing?'"

  "He said vampires were real?"

  "Not in so many words, but he said he'd seen things that couldn't be explained, and that evil shouldn't be glorified." She swigged the last of her bourbon, then laughed wryly. "Yes, I still think helping you is the right thing to do."

  "Think your cousin would know something about all this?"

  She shook her head. "He died last year. An animal attack while camping."

  I chugged my drink, but the burn didn't chase away my chill. "Are you sure?"

  "Until now I was."

  We sat in silence for a while, letting my story--and the bourbon--sink in. Libby believed me, or at least, enough to give me the benefit of the doubt.

  "Pretty Boys," Libby said softly. "Let's stick to calling them that."

  "Agreed."

  "Why would Pretty Boys kidnap your father?"

  "I have no idea, but according to that guy who came to the hospital, others are also missing. The kidnappings are new--they always killed before. It makes no sense."

  She groaned and rubbed her eyes. "I can't even parse this. It's too much."

  "I know, believe me. I go through it every few years myself, doubt what I saw happened, think I'm losing my mind, the whole works. But it did happen. It's all real."

  "How do we fight...Pretty Boys?"

  "Silver hurts them. That knife killed one."

  She paused. "Have you tried shooting them?"

  "No, but if a car doing forty didn't splatter them, I have my doubts about bullets."

  "Holy water?"

  "Never tried it. We focused on protecting ourselves and running. They're just too strong, and they move too fast. The only way to survive is to run when you get even an inkling that they're nearby." I gave a tight laugh. "Killing one was a fluke, and I don't have that knife anymore. The guy who saved me took it."

  She rubbed her face with both hands and paced the room. "Isn't there someone you can go to? What about a church?"

  "Dad tried that. They told him he was crazy. The second one he went to for help sent social services after me. We barely got out of town in time."

  "So you kept running?"

  I nodded. "We kept running. And lying. And pretending everything was normal in the world when it certainly was not."

  "You have vampires chasing you."

  I nodded again. "I have vampires chasing me."

  She paced some more, then stopped. "Organized vampires."

  "They seem to be, yes."

  "List-carrying, people-abducting, organized vampires."

  I rubbed my eyes. "What's your point?"

  "I have none. I hope saying it out loud helps my brain accept it."

  I almost smiled. Breaking the rules had been a good idea. I couldn't imagine doing this without Libby. Trusting one person wasn't so bad. It felt...good. Safe even.

  "What do we do now?" I asked. It was also nice not to have to think up everything on my own.

  "Improvise, adapt, and overcome." She shrugged. "I'm still working out the details."

  I looked around the room. "This is the crime scene, so I guess we start with a thorough search." The apartment was pretty bare, but we might find something besides rocks and old mints that could give us a lead. Besides, it was a lot safer if we kept our names off the hotel registers for a while.

  "I'll get the door and foyer," Libby said. "You'll know the personal space better than I will."

  "Got it." I checked the couch and chair area again, moving the furniture aside and rooting through the shag carpet. A few more coins, but nothing we hadn't already found. The rip in the chair didn't hide any clues either. No torn off pieces of matchbook covers with a hotel logo, no rare seeds found only in the Vegas Botanical Gardens. "The cops on TV make this look easier."

  "They have forensic consultants."

  We searched in silence for a while.

  "Anything?" I asked.

  "Just dirt. There's no doormat." She paused. "Did he have a doormat? Is it significant that it's missing?"

  "No to both."

  I moved to the closet again and pulled out Dad's go-bag. A glint in the mashed carpet underneath caught my eye, square and shiny.

  I crouched and picked it up. An amethyst as big as my thumbnail sat in the middle of dark wood shaped like a plus sign. Gold wire wrapped the wood and the filigree setting, a little tarnished like the jewelry in the estate sale counters. Grandma jewelry. A pendant?

  Libby came over. "Find something?"

  "Maybe." I showed it to her.

  "Looks like a cross."

  "It's square."

  "Not all crosses are T-shaped. My Great Aunt Rosa wore something like this on a chain thick as my pinky. Used to kiss it and wave it at us when we were acting up. One of my cousins always thought she was cursing us."

  "Dad only curses the old-fashioned way, but it was under his bag." It wouldn't be the first religious trinket of his I'd found. Growing up, our car's glove box had always been stuffed with them. He'd even engraved that bit of scripture on my knuckledusters. We'd never let a Pretty Boy get close enough to test the vampires-and-crosses theory, but he'd kept some around just in case.

  "Is it a clue?" Libby said.

  "No." I tucked it in my pocket anyway. It was still Dad's.

  We combed through the rest of the apartment but found nothing. The other rooms showed no signs of a struggle and hadn't been disturbed.

  "I'll check the hallway," Libby said. "It's a longshot, but there's nothing in here."

  I nodded and set the go-bag down on the coffee table. Although it held lots of useful items, none of them helped me find Dad. The extra cash would be nice if I had to run, but I didn't want to run again. I liked being Grace Harper, and I liked her life. I even enjoyed working with Daisy the Devil Child. All t
hat would vanish once I became Grace Kaufmann.

  The door opened and Libby came back inside, shaking her head. "Nothing weird outside."

  I blew out a breath and dropped onto the couch. "I'm running out of ideas."

  "I think we should call my Uncle Roberto."

  "It's six in the morning on a Sunday."

  "He's been up for an hour already."

  "It's bad enough I dragged you into this, now you want to put your uncle at risk?"

  "We don't have to tell him the specifics. He'll understand need-to-know."

  Sitting around here wasn't getting us anywhere. I was almost desperate enough to use my credit card or do something to draw the Pretty Boys to me just for a lead.

  "Grace, you know sooner or later you're going to have to deal with them." She crossed her arms. "Would you rather face them with serious firepower that gives us a fighting chance or unarmed?"

  That was a no-brainer. "Bring on the big guns. I'm done running."

  The Big Brass Commando Experience was an unapologetically squat, bunker-inspired building off the Vegas strip, not far from a pair of hotels that cost hundreds of millions to build. Camo-colored Jeeps and military vehicles were parked outside next to a lone truck. In a few hours the parking lot would be full, but at 7 a.m., it was just us.

  Libby hesitated by the car. "Silver hurts them, right?" she asked.

  "Hurts who?"

  "The Pretty Boys. In the myths, they can't stand silver."

  "My dusters hurt the one the other night. Why?"

  "Thinking about what to ask Uncle Roberto for." She looked at the gun range again. I'd say she was stalling.

  "Getting cold feet?" I asked.

  "No." But she still didn't move. "Maybe."

  "We can leave if you want."

  She shook her head. "We need supplies. No, I can do this." She took a deep breath and marched up to the door. I followed, less certain about this whole idea.

  Inside, cream cinderblock walls gave off a high-school-hallway vibe, if you ignored the rifles and machine guns hanging on racks behind the counters. Dad had owned a small revolver, and he'd taught me how to shoot, but we never spent much time at a range beyond a monthly skill brush up.