Marty Phillips (Book 2): The Taste of Blood

by Kieran Double

  There was a sheer drop either side of the rough gravel path that led towards the wooden cabin. It was small, maybe three rooms at most. Our lights were dipped, but if there was someone looking out they’d probably see us. A few hundred yards from the cabin, just around the bend, we got out of our cars. The Brasoveanu clan already had the place surrounded.

  So we marched forward, machetes and stakes in hand. My night eyes are better than most – as are all Huntsmen’s. That’s why we went first. Susie was to my right, Tasaria to my left. The others followed my lead. As we drew closer, I realized the cabin was perched on the edge of a precipice.

  Pushed in the door. It gave way without resistance. I had a glimpse of the interior, for maybe, five seconds, then darkness. It felt… as if someone has just thrown liquid night at me. The feeling passed, quickly.

  When I could see again, Tasaria was making towards the door. I pulled her back. “No.”

  The house disappeared. Well, that’s a bit of an overstatement. It tumbled into a gorge and shattered like a pile of matchsticks.

  “How the…?” began Tasaria.

  “Don’t ask. I haven’t a clue.” I answered. Instinct… Picking up my walkie, I told Nicolae, “You and your Dad better come around. Lewis is gone. Probably just a few steps ahead of us. Leave one of your boys with the twins.”

  “Sure thing, Marlowe.”

  “What’s the Super Smeller got for us?”

  “They went out the floor, I think.”

  “Who’s the other one?”

  “Noble scum!” growled Susie, revealing the wolf inside.

  “How do you know that?” said Tasaria.

  “Smells like Trix. Blood-relative. I don’t know how close. Could be distant, could be close, but nobility. I know that.”

  “You can tell that from their smell?” asked Tasaria

  “Yeah. I can smell their blood. Their DNA. Now, come on, we don’t have much time to waste.” Susie led us down from the precipice on all fours. It took everyone longer to get down, and soon we were playing catch-up.

  Wolfvolk were made for this, hunting, and as much as the Nobles changed us in the Dark Ages, they can’t change the fact that we are essentially human. Muller reckons that Versteckvolk have only learned to act like humans. Underneath, they’re a different sort of creature altogether, one that was once merely capable of mimicking human appearance for short times. As this worked as a defensive technique, human form became the default form of the Verstecktvolk.

  We tracked them into the depths of the forest. Vaguely, I was aware we were probably passing into Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park. I’d seen a sign for it a few miles back. Slowly, we came to a river.

  “Fuck” Susie swore loudly. “They went into the river.”

  Thinking quickly, I said “Schlaukopf, how good’s your sense of smell?”

  “Far better than anyone but Susie’s. But not exactly pinpoint, and no DNA, just scent.”

  “Good. Take the left side – if you get anything, call Susie, she’ll take it from there. Susie, take the right side,” I ordered, “Teddy, John, Nicolae, follow Schlaukopf. Ashley, Muller, Tasaria, Alexandru, follow Susie. I’ll go with you. Have your people come forward, Alex.”

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “They won’t be able to see properly…”

  “Not very far, perhaps,” I answered. “But that will make it harder for them. Swarm them. Make sure there’s nowhere to go. A dragnet.”

  We were wandering around in the woods for about five or ten minutes when Schalukopf called. “I’ve got a scent,” came his husky voice from my walkie. “The Noble, I think. More human than a vampire.”

  “Follow him yourself. We’ll stay here.”

  “But you said…”

  “Forget what I said earlier.”

  “Marty!” exclaimed Susie. “I don’t have a scent.”

  “You don’t need a scent,” I argued. “He’s over here somewhere. Find him.”

  “How do you know he’s not with the Noble?”

  “They split up. At the river. It’s perfect. If the Noble’s over there, the other must be over here. One wouldn’t have gone forward, and the other backward, or one forwards and the other sideways. That would make it too easy to trace them. Therefore, they spilled, left and right. Now stop damn arguing for once and do your jobs.”

  “You guessed…”

  “Basically…”

  “Marty! I’m here. Come and get me,” boomed Adam Lewis’ voice, moving around. I guess he was moving super-fast. He was a vampire, after all. “Phillips vs. Lewis in the title bout”

  We waited. We were bait. As with a Wolfmann, a vampire’s ego was the best weapon for whoever was hunting them. All psychopaths are the same in some ways.

  There wasn’t a long waiting time. Alexandru cried out. I was aware of him disappearing from my side. There was the sound of someone getting stabbed, then a crash into the vegetation and the snap of bone.

  Tasaria lashed out. Faster than any human could, she leaped forward and grasped onto Lewis. They grappled for a while, zooming around the forest. There was no dramatic drop, no snap of bone.

  One second, all I knew of the fight was grunts and the scrap of teeth on bone. Then Tasaria was back by my side and Susie was gone, seized her chance. I saw them, halfway up a tree, an eleven-year-old fighting a vampire. Somehow, she got him stuck to a tree, pinned down.

  I tore up the tree, holding onto to anything that I could. The branches were weak, long, flimsy. Fir sap went into my face. By any right, I should have fallen. But I didn’t. Adrenaline fuelled my every move.

  They were halfway up the tree. Susie had literally hugged him to the tree, her claws digging into the tree. I grabbed him, pulled out my machete. I swung. Missed, straight into the tree trunk. I yanked it out of the tree.

  Lewis had moved up the tree, but this time, it was him that was on top. Susie was the one pinned in. She didn’t sound like a child anymore. She sounded like an angry Wolffrau.

  I climbed higher up the tree. Grappling his ankle, I called out to Lewis. I used him to haul myself up the tree. In the process, Lewis loosened his grip on Susie. It freed her up to fight back and gave me time to come alongside them.

  Leaping across, I grabbed Lewis by the shoulder with my left hand, adjusting the axis of my bodyweight. I yelled, “Susie, let go!”

  I just had to hope she had let go. It all passed in a blur. I pulled the machete hard against the front of Lewis’ throat. It didn’t go all the way through.

  We were on the floor, me on top of him. If it had been the other way, I would have been dead. It wasn’t any other way and Lewis was a vampire. I yanked the machete out of his neck, chopping back down again. Then I took the stake from my belt and started stabbing him, crushed his ribcage.

  I turned on my flashlight. It didn’t matter if I was seen anymore. The Noble was basically human, an enhanced Huntsman, or Rotkäppchen. Besides, the others probably had him.

  They didn’t.

  They had him cornered. Somehow, he had managed to get Alexandru. The old man must have wandered on his broken leg. He was a magician. He’d probably half-healed the fracture.

  It didn’t matter now. There was a semi-automatic pointed towards his temple. We all surrounded the two of them, flashlights out.

  “Let him go, and no one gets hurt,” I said loudly.

  “Really, Huntsman? Is that the best you’ve got? And you’re the published author. That is you, Martin, isn’t it?” The voice was posh, refined, learned English. A foreigner. European. Rather fitting for what little of the face we could see. Designer stubble. Sharp cheek-bones. Well-looked after. Grooming would do him no good in a fight.

  “It is, Noble.”

  “You’ve made quite a name for yourself.”

  “I have? Well, in that case, tell me yours.”

  He didn’t. Instead… “Marty Phillips. Born February 27th, 1982. Worked for Seattle Public Schools, as security, from
2000 to 2002. Three years a patrol officer for Seattle PD. Seven as a homicide detective. Early retirement in November 2012, relating to chronic alcoholism and your wife’s rape and murder at the hands of the Wolfmann, Michael Merkel.”

  “Defence mechanism. Level III Neurotic. Intellectualisation, isolation, rationalization. Freud. He one of yours? You Austrian?” I said, quoting some basic psychoanalysis.

  “Might be. Not that it matters to you.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “If I was going to give up that easily, I would have already.” The Noble had a fair point, even I have to admit that.

  “Name. Now. Or I blow your brains in.”

  “What about the Romani? I’ll blow his brains in.”

  “He’s a hostage. You’re a smart man. You know he’s valuable. You won’t kill him unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “Well, I think that my life is absolutely necessary, so we’ve hit a stalemate.”

  “No. Let Alex go, and we’ll let you go free.”

  “Really? How do I know you can trust us?” continued the Noble passionately. “You’re treacherous! It’s in your blood. Rebels. Nothing more.”

  “Name.”

  “You’re a persistent man, Mr. Phillips.”

  “Name.”

  “Prince Frederick Von und Zu Fürstberg. Your new archenemy. I’ll be seeing you around.”

  “Provided you escape this dilemma.”

  “Provided that…”

  “Send Alex over, and you’ll be free to go, Frederick.”

  “How do I know you won’t just shoot me immediately?”

  “We’ll just have to find out, won’t we?”

  Slowly, Alexandru stumbled forward. Prince Frederick stood back, grabbed on to something. A broomstick, must have been, because, suddenly, he was flying away from us. We began to shoot in earnest. It seemed that the bullets just bounced away, deflected.

  Prince Frederick was soon gone. Escaped. We’d cleared up his mess, but the perpetrator was still free. He had slipped out of our grasp, just when we had him.

  Everyone slept in that Christmas day. We were exhausted, a week of late nights weighing us down. Finally, we were free from the burden of the hunt. Adrenaline had kept us going for the duration, but the cold turkey was hard. The rush was over and, even though we wanted more, we all knew it was wrong. Who wants more people getting hurt? The lull in between cases is sometimes unbearable.

  I woke up at a reasonable time that morning. Tasaria wasn’t next to me in the bed. I thought, at first, she must have gone down for breakfast. But she wasn’t the dining room or the huge kitchen. No one seemed to know where she was.

  That wasn’t such a big deal, was it? Bergman Manor was huge. The grounds were huge. She could be anywhere.

  An hour later, though, my hopes were gone. “Marty, I think I’ll be leaving.” Try as I may, I couldn’t find her anywhere. The Romani hadn’t a clue. Neither did any of the Huntsmen, Muller or Susie. “I was just passing through anyway.”

  Tasaria Brasoveanu was running again.

  Frantically, I went out onto the drive. The Gran Torino was there, along with a few pickups and Ashley’s BMW. The Harley-Davidson was gone. Maybe it was in one of the garages around back, near the old stables…

  I ran back inside. “You were…” I slammed the front door behind me loudly. “…the only man I ever seriously thought about…” I leaped up the stairs, three at a time, to the third floor, and my small bedroom in a huge house. “…you know, romantically.”

  It was one place I hadn’t checked. ‘But she was something to me, not everything, but something.’ That wasn’t true now, I realized, opening the door, she was everything.

  She wasn’t there.

  But a note was.

  This was all it read:

  ‘Goodbye Marty, see you some other time.’

  I sat out on our little balcony with Buster next to me. Susie was out with some friends, an Ungefährlich Bärfrau and Schlaukopf’s daughter, Amber. On a good night, and those could be rare in Seattle, I can see most of the city, and Mount Rainier to the south-east. Often, I just sat here and thought. About what, it didn’t really matter.

  It was the eye of the storm. The only place where I could rest.

  So I began typing this beauty out, copying my notes. As it an ex-cop, it hadn’t been hard to adjust to writing everything that I did down on paper. It goes with the territory.

  I’m not sure when it was, or how long I’d been out on the balcony when I heard someone knocking softly on the front door of the apartment. Slowly, methodically, I opened the door. It was Alexandru Brasoveanu.

  “Come in,” I said, leading him out to the balcony.

  There was a small table and three chairs. Alexandru took the one across from me. “You missed the presents, Mr. Phillips. Your present for Susie was good. She liked it. A photo album. You’ve got a lot of pictures for two months together.”

  I shrugged. “It’s the 21st Century, Alex. People like pictures, but presents aren’t much use when the most important one has gone, of its own accord.”

  “And now who’s being unfair?” said Alexandru, smiling ruefully. “I told you this would happen. Tasaria is selfish. It’s in her nature.”

  “I know. You realize, half the reason I miss her so much, is because of what you said. Tasaria’s just scared of connection, of losing me like she did Grigore – and don’t tell me there wasn’t any love in that marriage, because he did what she wanted him to. Treated her differently.”

  “That was my intention. But you’re a Phillips. You never do what you’re supposed to, and yet, you always manage to do the right thing.”

  “Did I? Alex, did I?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  I looked around, then took out my wallet and the fifty dollars Susie had given me – as part of our little bet on whether or not I could get laid by the end of the week. I’d won. “On the upside, I won my bet with Susie.”

  “A bet on what?”

  “Whether or not I could get a woman to sleep with me this week.”

  “You’re one of a kind, Mr. Phillips,” commented Alexandru ruefully. “I hope you know that. One minute, you’re all chivalrous, the next you’re a sleazy dirtbag. Full of contradictions.”

  “The chivalry is why Annie fell in love with me – Tasaria too, probably, though she’d never admit it – but the sleazy dirtbag-ness is why it took them both a while to realize the chivalry in me existed at all.”

  “At least it’s that way, and not the other way round. You know what you are. I have to give you credit for that,” said Alexandru. He smiling, as if he really didn’t care about the traditional ways and, I realized, he was as much a slave to them as his American-born children were.

  We were silent for some time, each immersed in our own worlds, our own thoughts. Then Alexandru said, “How did you find out?”

  “Find out what?”

  “That Tasy is what she is.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Alex.”

  “Don’t play games with me, Martin,” said Alexandru persistently. “I know she’s a vampire. You really thought I wouldn’t notice? The way she fought Lewis…”

  “It hadn’t really thought about that. And maybe it’s better you found out this way…”

  “Maybe. The alternative would have been worse.”

  “I’m sorry” I began helplessly “We should have…”

  “Probably,” said Alexandru. “But weakness of the heart, Marty, that’s not bad, awkward, perhaps, and not the best outcome for everyone involved, but it’s still good. The overpowering strength of the brain, that quenches the heart inside, and is a weakness of itself… now that, I’d be worried about…”

  I didn’t speak. It seemed… right to let Alexandru speak. He had something to say and he would take his own time doing so.

  “Back on the drink, Marty Phillips?”

  “What?” I looked down into my hand. There was a glass of whi
skey in it, and a bottle of Jack Daniels on the coffee table. “Jesus, I hadn’t realized… Christ, that’s weird. I don’t remember getting this out.”

  “That happens a lot?” said Alexandru, smiling dryly.

  “Only with drink.”

  “Only with drink,” repeated Alexandru. “Like Tasaria and the Phillips family.”

  “All of us? That would explain…” I said, it all suddenly dawning on me. It seemed so obvious in that moment. The signs had been everywhere. “…Ashley. She always awkward around Ashley, especially…”

  “Exactly, Marty. Exactly,” said Alexandru, nodding. He helped himself to some whiskey, producing a tin cup from god knows where “It nearly ruined their friendship. Tasaria wanted her so much, but your sister… she so much like you grandfather sometimes, cold where she could be kind, and kind all the time when there is no need.”

  “Love is as cold as it is warm, Alex, and so is blood. Don’t forget that. All families argue, all families have disagreements. But real family – and I don’t mean blood, you and I both know that blood has nothing to with real family – real family comes together when they’re needed, when one of them needs there help. And for all your faults, and those of the traditional society you represent, in that you never seem to have failed.”

  “Sometimes, in the modern world, people become complacent. They forget that no society is perfect, like no family is. But that doesn’t mean it’s all bad. Some societies are generally bad, some societies are generally good. But none are completely one or the other. And you have never forgotten the core of any good society – family, community.”

  I held up my glass to his. “To family, Alexandru. To family.”

  “To family, Marty Phillips.”

  Afterword

  So there we have it. I fell in love for a second time, with a vampire, who’s an alcoholic, has commitment problems, and an on-going feud with her parents over her sexuality. Then… guess what, she disappears. It seems as if lately I can’t get what I want.