She read the first page, or the part of the first page she could see. It was…awful! Some kind of strange story about a freaky woman who was traveling the globe with the sole purpose of having sex with anything she could—male, female…and not always human. Could a woman really do that with a donkey? She shuddered. Granted, Sophie could accept the fact that she was a little uptight about sex. Unlike Lilly, the character in Dao’s book, she took the wheres, whos, and whats of sex seriously, hence the lengthy dry spell. But she couldn’t imagine this creepy story selling anywhere, at least not outside of a porn shop.
She glanced at Dao. This had to be a joke, some kind of trick to get her over there, since she hadn’t visited her best pal in several weeks.
The thing was, she couldn’t find a hint of amusement on his face. Lots of hope, a little nervousness even, but not a bit of laughter. She glanced deeper into his eyes.
Oh boy, he was serious.
“I…wow. I don’t know what to say. It’s very…um, different. Why the change in, er, genres? I mean, you’ve done very well with your mysteries. I love your mysteries. They’re so gritty and real.”
“I felt it was time for a change.”
“And what a change it is,” Sophie said, making every effort to keep her reaction tamed down for the sake of her friend’s feelings. She knew Dao had a very delicate ego, at least when it came to his work.
“So, what do you think?” he asked as he scanned the page with his cute little brown eyes. “I’m on fire for this one. Can’t stop thinking about it, even when I’m sleeping.”
It’s garbage, if you want to know the truth. “On fire? Really?” Yes, burning it sounds like a good plan. Sophie sighed. “Well, who am I to say what’ll sell and what won’t?” Not the least bit interested in reading any more, she leaned back in her chair. “I’m just a lowly secretary, not an editor. Have you shown this to your agent yet?”
“No, not yet. I’m waiting. Want to get it perfect first. It’s almost there.”
“Yeah? Almost perfect, eh?” Better do another read through.
Dao leaned forward, obviously becoming engrossed in whatever he was reading. He clicked the mouse, pecked at the keyboard, then scrolled down some more and repeated the process. “I can’t stop tweaking it here and there…I…oh…” his words trailed off as he started typing furiously. His face twisted into a tight expression of intense effort, like one you might see on someone hanging by their fingertips from a thousand-foot cliff. “This is wonderful! Utterly amazing.” His keyboard went clackety-clack as he continued typing. Sweat beaded on his forehead.
Taking that as her cue to leave, Sophie gave his shoulder a pat. “I’ll come back in a few days and see how that story is coming.”
“Ummm.” Dao answered, not missing a beat as he continued typing.
Sophie closed his office door behind her after she tiptoed out of the room. Confused—no, more like freaked out!—by her friend’s bizarre behavior and frightening appearance, she flopped back against the closed door to catch her breath.
Dao had gone from a fun-living, social guy with a sparkling smile and fairly sturdy physique to an obsessed, frail, sickly man in what? A couple of months? A few late nights couldn’t have done that to him.
Something was wrong. Very wrong. And as his friend, she owed it to him to find out what. She’d never let another person she loved down again, never ignore the signs that something was wrong and assume everything would work itself out.
Making that mistake once was more than enough for a lifetime.
And this was Dao, the person who’d practically carried her through the grief of that first loss.
As she straightened up, she caught a dull thump coming from the bedroom he shared with Lisse. She tensed. Nothing like catching a new bride by surprise.
“Dao, honey. Where’d you go?” Lisse crooned from the other side of the closed door.
Not wanting to get in the way of her newly wedded friend’s love life, Sophie hurried down the corridor toward the living room. Before she reached the hallway’s end, she heard the telltale squeak of a door’s hinges, then a female’s surprised gasp. She stopped walking, figuring the sight of a woman running down one’s hallway would be far more suspicious than the sight of one’s husband’s best friend standing all casual-like in the hallway. Still, she couldn’t quite convince herself to turn around and give Lisse the reassuring smile she probably needed.
The door slammed shut behind Sophie’s rigid back before she hazarded a glance over her shoulder. Figuring it was safe to look now, she turned around and said, “Sorry, Lisse. Dao called me over to check out his latest story. I’m headed out now.”
“It’s okay,” Lisse’s muffled voice came through the door. “I didn’t know you were here. I’m…not dressed yet. I hope you don’t mind showing yourself out.”
“Nope, not at all. I was just heading home as we speak,” she said as she hurried toward the door.
“Okay. Goodbye, Sophie. I’m sorry I can’t be more social. You must think I’m very rude but my robe is down in the laundry.”
“Don’t worry about it. Next time I’ll make sure Dao tells you before he invites me over at five A.M. on a Saturday morning.” One hand on the doorknob, Sophie stooped over to slip on her clogs. As she kicked at her overturned left shoe, something opalescent and sparkly clung to the top of it. Curious, she plucked up the roundish shiny object, very thin and delicate, about the size of a quarter, and slipped it in her jacket pocket. On went the shoes and out she went, into the cool, damp early summer morning.
What a way to start the weekend, with a real-life—correction—life-or-death mystery! Regardless of her friend’s insistence to the contrary, she had more than a sneaking suspicion that his health was in serious jeopardy. But how would she get him—a man who’d insisted on weathering pneumonia without seeing a doctor—to go in for a checkup?
Sophie studied the strange shimmery round thing she’d picked up at Dao’s house Saturday as she set the phone back on the cradle. She wasn’t sure if she’d just gotten the brush-off from Lisse or if she was just imagining things. Oftentimes, it was hard for her to distinguish reality from her fairly active imagination.
Looking for an ally in her quest to get Dao to the doctor, she’d called the one person she figured could actually convince him to go—his wife, naturally. Lisse seemed to be on her side as they discussed concerns about Dao’s health, but when it came time to ask her to call and make an appointment for him, she grew very quiet. Granted, she didn’t say she wouldn’t, but for some reason…
Why wouldn’t his wife, the woman who loved him, want him to go to the doctor?
The phone rang, and still lost in her thoughts, Sophie swept it up, tucking it between her chin and shoulder as she answered, “Tri County Paranormal Research Associates. How may I help you?”
Like most folks who called her work, the woman on the other end sounded breathless and panic-stricken as she detailed the nature of her problem. Sophie took down the woman’s information, then put the call through to her boss, Tim, who happened to be in the office today. Most of the time he was out playing ghost buster with a truckload of electronic gizmos that as far as Sophie could tell did nothing but blink and make ugly noises.
Tim was extremely intelligent, like a card-carrying member of MENSA smart. And because she believed genius and insanity were like kissing cousins—too close for most people’s comfort—she attributed his obsession with paranormal gobbledygook to this relationship. At least his stories were amusing, and the interest from his trust fund would keep her paychecks coming for a long time.
After she passed on the call, she set the shiny thing aside, figuring she’d ask Tim what he thought of it later. It had no markings like a coin, and it had a slightly irregular shape. On closer examination, it reminded her of two things—either a dime that had been flattened on a train track or a piece of fish skin or scale. Knowing Dao’s propensity to eat fish, she suspected the latter.
Still,
it was an odd thing. Semitranslucent, the color changed, depending on the light it was examined under. In natural light, it was mostly white and blue, but in artificial light it glowed in a wide range of colors from soft pink to deep midnight, depending on the angle she held it. Even more curious, every now and then it seemed to emit a small electrical charge. A little zap that made her fingers tingle.
Unable to resist the urge, she plucked it up one last time and ran her fingertip over the surface. The colors shimmered as she stroked it. The effect was almost mesmerizing. She stared at it a moment until Tim’s voice broke the spell.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I was hoping you might have an idea. You know a little about everything. What do you think? Is it a fish scale?” She set it in her palm and lifted her flattened hand so he could get a better look.
His eyebrows shot to the top of his forehead as he picked it up and examined it. “Wow, this is amazing. Truly amazing. Where’d you get it?”
“A friend’s house. It was on the floor.”
“Does your friend have a pet snake?” he asked as he flipped it over to look at the other side.
“Pet snake? Heck no! He hates snakes. Why?”
“Looks like a piece of shed snake skin to me. I’d have to get a look at it under the microscope to be sure. Be right back.” He walked back to his office-slash-lab, where he kept all his electronic gadgets and gizmos, and disappeared behind the closed door.
Sophie stayed put, despite her growing curiosity about the strange scale—skin—whatever, and tried to imagine how a piece of snake skin would end up on Dao’s floor. She came up with absolutely nothing. That was, indeed, a mystery all in itself.
Tim returned several minutes later with the most bizarre look on his face. It was something between awe and terror. “I need to meet her. I must meet her—”
“Meet whom? Slow down, would you? What would a snake scale—”
“Skin. Definitely shed skin.”
“Fine. Snake skin. What would a snake skin have to do with…her? It’s a female snake? How can you tell? Did you get a little piece of nipple there? And how does one ‘meet’ a snake? Do you need a formal introduction?”
Tim rolled his eyes and looked at Sophie as if she were an absolute twit—which she was not, thank you very much.
“Don’t look at me that way,” she said. “I wasn’t privy to whatever you saw under the microscope. I’m not a moron. Fill me in.”
“Is your friend a male?” Tim asked as he continued to study the skin.
“Yes. A male human, that is. Just to clarify.”
“Yes. Of course he’s a human. Is this friend of yours dating someone…or married?”
“Yes. He’s married but not to a snake.”
Tim shook his head. “Poor guy,” he murmured.
“What poor guy?” Sophie yanked on Tim’s sleeve. “Poor guy because he isn’t married to a snake?”
“No, poor guy because he’s married to her already.”
“What’s Dao’s marital status have to do with anything? Besides, what’s wrong with marriage? I never imagined you to be one of those ‘marriage sucks’ kind of guys.”
“I’m not, unless the wife happens to be a lamia.”
“What the heck is a lamia?”
“A muse. A female vampire. Is your friend by any chance a writer?”
“Yes, but what’s—”
“And since he’s been married has he been more obsessed with his writing? Has he become ill yet?”
“Yes, on the writing. And yet?”
Tim looked into her eyes and again shook his head. “Poor guy. He’s doomed.”
“Doomed? Why?”
“She’s destroying him.”
“Who? Lisse? She’s a quiet little thing. Maybe a tad demanding in bed from what I surmise, but hardly the kind one would expect to be a vampire. She doesn’t even have a widow’s peak. Don’t real vampires have widow’s peaks? And her teeth all look normal.” Despite all the things Tim seemed to know about Dao, for which there was no reasonable explanation—he couldn’t have been listening in to her conversation with Lisse—she wasn’t buying the whole lamia thing. There was no such thing as vampires. Or ghosts. Or monsters. Nuh-uh.
Tim’s work as a paranormal researcher was a joke. She’d seen nothing to convince her of the existence of anything paranormal. His so-called proof consisted of hazy photographs and less than credible eyewitnesses.
“Yes. She’s a lamia. Half woman, half snake.”
“I’ve seen her. She’s no snake. In fact, she’s very beautiful. And she definitely has two legs. Couldn’t speak for her tongue, though. Could be forked. I’m not about to go ask her to open wide and say ‘ahhhh.’”
“She wouldn’t show her true self to anyone but her lover.”
“If there’s one thing I can be certain of it’s that Dao wouldn’t find a woman covered in scales sexy, even if the scales were rather pretty.”
“He would if he was under her spell. The lamiae are extremely powerful vampires. They find their mates and slowly, over many weeks, seduce them until they are completely under their spell. Once a man marries a lamia, he’s doomed to die a swift, miserable death. He’ll grow weaker and weaker, his life drained from him by his wife.”
“Swift? How swift?”
Tim shrugged. “I’m not sure of the time line. A couple of months, maybe.”
“A couple? Like two? Because he’s been married that long already.” She fought the urge to panic. This was a bunch of baloney. There was no such thing as a lamia. And Dao wasn’t about to die. Dao couldn’t die. He just couldn’t.
Unfortunately, Tim didn’t seem to know that. “Sounds like he’s near the end. Sorry.”
She didn’t like what she was hearing. Not one bit. Which was why she preferred to look for another reason for Dao’s illness. And his strange behavior. And the snake skin in his living room. Okay, there were a number of coincidences here. “There must be another explanation. That skin is from a…a python or something. Who knows, maybe he went to a zoo—”
“It’s not the skin of most common varieties of snakes. I snapped a quick photograph and e-mailed it to my buddy who works in the zoo’s reptile house. He’s assured me it’s not from any snake they have there. That rules out several varieties of pythons and boa constrictors. Just to make sure, he’s forwarding the image to a friend of his who identifies shed snake skins for a living.”
“Ick. There are people who do that for a living?”
“Sure. Out west especially. Think about it. If you found a shed skin under your porch, wouldn’t you want to know if you had a venomous snake living under your house?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
Tim set the piece of skin on the desk and stared into Sophie’s eyes. “Look, when I hired you, I told you I didn’t require you to actually believe in what I study here. So I accept that you’re doubtful. But this is your friend, and if you truly care about him, I suggest you reconsider your position on a few things. Vampires do exist. And they do kill.”
A lump the size of Tim’s SUV formed in Sophie’s throat as she let his words pass through the baloney filter in her brain and really sink in. Even if she still didn’t believe in vampires, didn’t she owe it to Dao to check out all the possibilities? “So, what’s the next step? Do you need to go scan Lisse with one of your gadgets? Shoot her with an ionizing ray? How do I know she’s in fact one of those lamia things and if she is, how do I get her to leave my friend alone?” Oh God. I know this is going to kill Dao. He adores Lisse. But if what Tim says is true, he’s dying already.
“Nothing I have is going to help you.” He patted her shoulder and nodded. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“Why are you saying that like he’s already dead? What’ya mean you’re sorry for my loss?”
“I’m saying that because I can’t help you. There’s virtually no way to one hundred percent identify your friend’s wife as a lamia or to make her leave him.”<
br />
“Virtually no way? What about Buffy? Where’s a vampire slayer when you need one? Or maybe an old-fashioned stake through the heart would do the trick—on second thought, scratch that. I don’t have the stomach to give someone a paper cut let alone shove a wooden stake through their breastbone. Just imagine all the blood. Have I told you that blood gives me the willies—”
“There’s only one way to both identify a lamia and destroy her,” he interjected, cutting off her mindless rant about television characters and paper cuts. “But each step requires the possession of an extremely rare relic, which I’m not sure even exists. They’re the…Shoot, I can’t remember the names. They’re Hebrew. Never been good with Hebrew. Let me go back and get my book.” He took a single step away, then glanced over his shoulder at the piece of snake skin still sitting on Sophie’s desk. “I don’t suppose you’d let me keep that? For research purposes, of course.”
She picked it up and handed it to him. “Sure. If you’ll help me. I think I’m in trouble over my non-vampire-believing head.”
His eyes sparkled as he glanced down at the skin. “Like I said, I can’t help you much. But I’ll do what I can. Come on.” He led her back to his office. “Let’s hope, for your friend’s sake, the book I’ve read on the subject is right and the relics you need haven’t been destroyed eons ago.”
Chapter 2
“Excuse me,” Sophie asked the librarian a couple of hours later. She glanced down at the piece of paper she’d ripped from Tim’s notebook, then continued, “You got rid of the good-old card catalogue and I’ll admit I’m far behind the common kindergartner when it comes to computers—a real crime considering what I do for a living, but that’s beside the point. Where might I find a book on rare biblical relics?”
The middle-aged woman, slim and scholarly looking with her brown hair pulled into a neat bun at the base of her skull, gave Sophie a pleasant, if not a little condescending, smile. “Let me see what I can find.” She tapped a few keys, moved the mouse around a bit, then looked up. “I’m sorry. I’m not finding anything under ‘biblical relics.’ However, you may find what you need under religious relics. Those are in the two-thirties. The nonfiction shelves are in this direction and they are numbered. In particular, this book Religious Relics, Icons, Visions and Cures by James Murrow may be of some help. The call number is two-thirty-one point seven M.”
A Vampire Bundle Page 64
