And my own thoughts churning over and over, one single sentence.
It’s because you have vampire blood, Dante.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Voshki was a whole lot less concerned with Robin’s dramatic re-declaration of war than she was livid about my getting hurt again. I was none too thrilled about it myself. I had managed to call Ellis from my prone position on the ground in Bel Air and she flew (not literally, vampires can’t turn into bats and fly either, that’s just more clever myth making) to collect me. She made me drink a large amount of her blood right there in the car. I had never been so grateful for tinted glass windows. Or vampire blood. Despite Ellis’s blood, however, a visit to the ER was called for since vampire blood can help to knit broken bones faster but it can’t set them properly. That still takes a trained physician.
Whilst I waited in the ER to have my wrist set, Ellis paced and scowled, muttering dark threats against Robin Shepherd and her redheaded cohorts. Eventually I had to insist that she sit the fuck down. Or go away.
“That’s three times now Robin has had ample opportunity to kill me. She hasn’t done it yet, so I don’t think she is going to,” I deduced.
Ellis stared at me. “You don’t actually believe that, do you?”
I sighed. “I don’t know. All I know is that right now I want you to go fetch me some coffee, please? Your aura is making me jittery.”
“My aura?”
“Yes.”
I hadn’t a clue what Ellis’s aura was doing or what it might be capable of doing. I wouldn’t know an aura if it jumped out of the bushes and tried to molest me. I just knew that I needed her to be gone for a few minutes. Her fussing and fretting was getting on my last nerve. Each time a nurse passed bearing a hypodermic needle I contemplated snatching it from her and using it to stake my overprotective vampire girlfriend.
“Coffee. Now. Please, Ellis.”
“Fine.” She started to move away in search of a vending machine and some of the truly horrible coffee only those can produce, but first she sent a parting shot winging at me. “You should know that me and my aura both think you are fucking insane to even imagine Robin Shepherd is done with you yet.”
Sadly, I supposed she could be right.
Voshki reassigned Armin to me on a permanent basis. I argued with her over it, of course. “That’s going to get old in a hurry, having Mr. Sunshine around,” I told her.
“I don’t care,” she told me.
So I was stuck then with the scary, brooding Armin hanging around my home and my office once again. At least he seemed a little lighter in mood thanks to his blossoming romance with Lydia. He was still Armin though.
I hadn’t mentioned Robin’s allegations regarding my having vampire ancestry to anyone but Lydia. She took the news with an equanimity that surprised me, and touched me too.
“So you might have some vampire blood,” she said with a shrug. She poured us both another drink. “Some people have Italian blood. Some have Irish blood. Your blood is just a wee bit more exotic than most.”
Good old Lydia. I swore her to secrecy, meaning she couldn’t even tell Armin. Especially not Armin. His loyalty to Voshki would demand he told her. I needed to keep the vampires out of this particular bit of my business for now. Even if that meant upsetting Ellis if and when she found out that I’d been holding out on her.
“What if the vampires already know?” Lydia asked.
I had thought of that. After all, Robin hadn’t been the only one to tell me that I was a special human. Voshki said it too. I just never had gotten around to asking her about it. Now that Robin had told me why I was special, I didn’t need to ask Voshki. But I did think about the possibility of her having known all along that I had vampire blood. I wondered, too, if Ellis knew? I shrugged in response to Lydia’s question. “I can’t deal with that right now. I need to deal with one revelation at a time.”
I had already decided that if I was going to tackle my mother on the subject of vampires, I needed a wingman, and who better than Lydia? Lydia has always been pretty good at handling my Mom. And Mom likes Lydia. At least she tends to remember who Lydia is without too much prompting, which amounts to liking in my mother’s wacky world.
We made the drive upstate a week after my encounter with Robin in Bel Air. My wrist was still in a cast. The bones would take maybe ten days to knit with the help of Ellis’s blood, but I’d have to wear the cast for a while longer to avoid raising unwelcome questions.
When my father made the decision to remove his pill- and booze-addled wife from the immediate dangers presented by the Hollywood environment, he had no idea that upstate California would become the pot-growing capital of the western hemisphere. My mother has a steady supply coming in. I know Irina, her live-in care worker, tries to stem the flow, but Mom, like most addicts, is wily, and poor old Irina is fighting a losing battle.
The drive was pretty. We stopped along the Pacific Coast Highway for lunch at a little wooden shack of a place where we drank cold milk shakes and ate fresh lobster while we listened to crackly, tinny music played on a radio old enough to have belonged to Marconi himself. If this had been an ordinary road trip, we could have had fun.
“So how’s it going with Armin?” I asked after lunch.
Lydia beamed. “He’s terrific,” she enthused. She waved her cigarette for emphasis, sending little red-glowing coals flying about. Another attraction of the little shack eatery—they had no truck with all that citified nonsense about smoking bans. When Lydia realized this I thought for a moment she might be seriously considering moving upstate. “He treats me like a real lady, you know? And he’s funny, and smart too. I like funny, smart men. And in bed… Whoo! But hell, honey, I don’t need to tell you about that, do I?”
She did not. I grinned. “Have you, uh, tasted his blood yet?” I inquired as delicately as the subject matter permitted.
Lydia shook her head. “We’re taking it slow, but you bet we’ll get around to it. My ex-husband…the vampire accountant? I used to share blood with him and it was scary fucking good at times. Especially if you smoke a little weed beforehand.”
I made a mental note to suggest this to Ellis. I had a feeling though that she might be a tad too straitlaced for any such revelry.
I called ahead to let Irina know we were en route. She promised to make Mom aware of the impending visit, but she could not guarantee sobriety.
“Irina, you’re a saint to work with her, but you’re not a miracle worker,” I sighed.
When we arrived at the cabin, Irina met us at the front door. She looked harried. Her gaze dropped immediately to the cast on my wrist and a frown creased her heavy Slavic features.
“I was mugged,” I explained shortly.
Irina’s eyebrows waggled. “Is dangerous place you live.”
If she only knew. Lydia and I followed Irina inside the neatly appointed cabin. It’s kept that way by Irina. What my mother knows about housekeeping you could print on Martha Stewart’s little fingernail and have room left over for a couple verses of the Bible. “Your mother is in sunroom,” Irina said. “She is water plants. And drunk.”
Of course she was.
“I try with her,” Irina insisted glumly.
I nodded. “I know you do. We all do. And we all appreciate the thankless task you have.”
The sunroom was, well, sunny. Large picture windows overlooked a cerulean blue lake ringed by emerald fir trees. Rattan furniture dotted the room amidst various types of flora, most of it either already dead or circling the drain. My mother pottered unsteadily between these withered specimens, tilting a red plastic watering can in their direction but largely missing the target each time.
“Mom,” I said.
She straightened up from her task and looked around. My stomach knotted when I saw the lack of recognition in her face.
“Mom, it’s me. Dante.”
The bemusement slowly cleared. My mother beamed. “Milton!”
“I’m Dante,”
I told her again. “Milton is my brother.”
She just kept beaming, the action stretching her face to breaking point. Yeah, my mother has been down the plastic surgery road quite a number of times. Her chronological age may be fifty-eight, but her nose is fourteen and her tits are twelve. I cast a quick, help-me-out-here look at Lydia. She sprang into action.
“Hey, Mrs. S,” she greeted my mother enthusiastically as she gently pried the watering can from her hands and guided her into a seat. “You remember me, right? Lydia Diamond. Dante’s friend.”
“Oh yes. Yes, of course I remember you, dear,” my mother beamed. “You’re the one who always drank too much.”
Lydia gave her a brief fish-eye. Then she sat down and allowed me to take the lead. I wished I didn’t have to. My mother was lit like a fucking Christmas tree. I figured just getting straight to the point would be best. That way I had a chance at least of getting out of here before I was overcome with the urge to bash my mother’s head in with the watering can.
“I need you tell me about the Sonnier’s having vampire blood,” I stated.
My mother frowned. “We’ve always been friendly with the bloodsuckers,” she said.
I winced. Both at the non sequitur and the “bloodsuckers” reference. Vampires ever catch anyone calling them “bloodsuckers,” they tend to get very pissy about it.
“Yeah, Mom, I know that. But what about us having some vampire blood in our veins?” I persisted.
“Great great-grandma Alice. She had babies with a vampire man. My Great-great-grandma Alice,” Mom said. I threw a glance at Lydia. The vampire blood was on Mom’s side?
“You sure about that, Mom?” I asked.
She glared at me. “I’m your mother, Milton. Don’t question me.”
Right. I gritted my teeth whilst Lydia leaned forward and gave the scrawny strip of beef-jerky that was my mother’s arm a soothing pat. “Of course you’re sure, hon,” she cooed. “You remember anything else about Alice and her vampire beau?”
Mom did indeed. She couldn’t remember what she’d had for breakfast, or whether she’d even had breakfast in the past twenty fucking years, she couldn’t tell the difference between her own male and female children, but she could remember stories she was told as a girl about a woman who’d been dead for centuries. God bless the human mind.
“Great-great-grandma’s name was Alice Petersen. She married a chap called Bennett. He was from the Midwest…” Mom frowned… “I hate the Midwest.”
So I did have something in common with my mother then. As far as I am concerned, the Midwest is still a fucking dustbowl. There’s nothing there except miles and miles of restlessly fidgeting corn.
Mom gazed fondly at the memories on her own personal movie screen situated somewhere in the middle distance between my left shoulder and the doorway behind me. “Grandma Alice and Grandpa Mike had a brood of kids. She was a very fertile woman. That’s why the vampires chose her.”
I shuddered. Here was yet another of those revelations I could have lived long and happy without ever knowing, but was instead forced to listen to.
“She had four babies with a vampire man,” Mom went on, cheerfully oblivious to my squirming discomfort. Still, this was what I’d come here to find out, wasn’t it? No sense bitching because the details offended my suddenly delicate sensibilities. “One of the babies died as an infant. That happened a lot in those days. Poor postnatal care, you know.”
I knew. I didn’t want a history lesson either. “Get to the point, Mom, I need to be someplace,” I said.
“Don’t be rude, Miriam. I’m telling the story,” Mom scolded.
I looked at Lydia with both eyebrows raised in a question: Who the fuck is Miriam? But she had no more clue than I did. I let my mother go on uninterrupted.
“The other three babies were healthy and they survived right into adulthood. Two boys and a girl. Two of them became vampires, one boy and the girl, and the remaining boy chose to be human. That’s our ancestor. John Bennett, my great-grandfather.”
So there it was. My blood connection to the vampire race. It was an even bigger shock hearing my mother talk about it than it had been hearing it first from Robin. And she spoke of it so casually. I asked my mother if she recalled being told any details about the vampire man with whom Alice had her babies?
She nodded. “We didn’t talk about him so much. Except that he was quite the charmer apparently, and he was a redhead. I don’t like redheads. I prefer blondes.”
Which was weird because my father has jet dark hair. But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about Alice’s vampire beau being a redhead. Did that also mean he’d been a Child of Judas? My mother is a drunk and a drug addict, and hasn’t been reliable for at least twenty-five years, so it was entirely feasible that her memory was playing tricks. She often thought the CIA and the KGB, and probably the DMV too, were all coming down the chimney to get her.
On the other hand, if my ancestor really had been a Child of Judas, it might explain why Robin Shepherd was eager that I should know about my vampire blood. It might also explain why she hadn’t killed me, despite the three opportunities she’d had to do so. We could be related.
That was a singularly, deeply unpleasant notion.
Mom’s eyes were starting to become unfocused. She was already thinking about her next hit or drink, our presence slowly slipping from her consciousness. There would be little more of any import to be gained from her today. Anyway, I wanted to get away from here. It was depressing being around my mother. But first I wanted to know something.
“Mom, who is Miriam?” I asked.
She looked at me, startled apparently. “You know Miriam,” she insisted.
I shook my head.
“She’s Lucien’s wife.”
Well, that didn’t help me. “I don’t know who Lucien is,” I explained, slowly and clearly enough so that even my addled mother could understand.
“Voshki’s father,” she said.
Surprise heaped upon surprise. Mystery followed mystery. I looked to Lydia for assistance, found none there either.
“How do you know Voshki?” I asked.
My mother stared at me without recognition. My heart sank. “Milton, why are you here today? This isn’t your day to visit,” she said.
“See you later, Mom,” I told her as Lydia and I took our leave.
She looked blankly at me. “Sure, Miriam. And would you tell my daughter Milton to come see me sometime, if you run into her?”
Just as we were about to depart Irina, called us back. “There is thing. I forget almost to give you.” She opened up one of the pinewood cabinets hung on the kitchen walls and rummaged around in there. “Ah. Here it is. Woman come here, give to me and say give to you. Day before it is yesterday, she come.”
Irina handed me a pale cream envelope, my name written in a neat, ornate hand on the front. I frowned as I took it and slit the top with a kitchen knife from the sink. I caught Irina’s wince. My housekeeping skills were not much better than my mother’s.
“What woman?” I asked. I already had a nasty feeling, however, that I knew exactly what woman.
“Small woman, and skinny…” Irina held her hand palm at a level just below her own capacious bosom to indicate her visitor’s height… “and had dark hair. The brunette, yes? And green eye. Very green eye. Is she friend of you, Dante?”
Not a friend, no. A distant relation perhaps. But never a friend. Friends I tended not to want to kill with my bare hands.
I extracted the single sheet of notepaper from within the envelope, unfolded it and read with Lydia peering over my shoulder.
Remember, Dante, it read, I know where they ALL are.
I folded the notepaper back in half, stuffed it in the envelope again, and placed both in my jacket pocket. I smiled at Irina. “She’s not really a friend, no. But I doubt very much that she’ll ever come back. If she does, I want you to call me immediately. Or call Voshki Kevorkian.”
&nbs
p; The Russian woman frowned. “I should call vampire for assistance?”
It would have been impossible to employ a live-in care worker for anyone in our family unless that person were aware of the existence of vampires. I nodded to Irina’s inquiry. “If you can’t get hold of me.”
“I need to worry, Dante?” she asked then.
Maybe. I wasn’t sure. I shook my head with more confidence than I felt. “No. You shouldn’t worry. Just take care, Irina. Of yourself and Mom. I’ll try to come by again in a couple weeks.”
As we walked back to the car, Lydia asked me if I was okay with this new information.
“I’m processing it,” I told her with a wan smile.
“Do you still intend to process it all on your own, or are you going to share with the vampires now?” she asked.
“I don’t know what to do,” I confessed. I leaned on the hood of the coupe and frowned toward the distant lake where the blue water sparkled under the bright California sun. For a brief moment I entertained a desire to go down there and take a swim. I find swimming helps me to forget for a little while whatever shit is going on in my life. “I mean, what if Voshki already knew about this too? That my vampire ancestor was a redhead and maybe a Child of Judas? That’s a pretty big fucking thing to keep from someone. And how in hell does my mother know Voshki?”
“That I might be able to help you with,” Lydia sighed. I stopped and glared at her. She held up a conciliatory hand. “Your parents worked for the vampires too, Dante, you know that. I think Voshki may have visited your home once or twice when you were a kid.”
“You only think?” I echoed.
Lydia shrugged. “I really can’t remember. Sorry, Dante. Your mom isn’t the only one that embraced the ’80s excess, you know. As for your ancestor, honey, there must be some way of checking out who this vampire dude was?”
I smiled wryly at her. “You mean like the Vampire Hall of Records? I doubt it. The vampires themselves might be my only chance.”
“How about your father?”
I frowned. Started to shake my head, but Lydia interrupted me. “Why don’t you give it a try with him first? He might surprise you.”
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