Catching Echoes (Reconstructionist 1)

by Meghan Ciana Doidge

  We wandered through a section of shops, passing the open seating area of a restaurant, then a bookstore.

  “So …” Jasmine said. “You aren’t going to go for it?”

  I sighed dramatically. “No.”

  “Good.”

  “The boy in Seattle played online with Colby and Dennis?” I asked, getting us back on neutral ground. Jasmine and I never agreed about relationships, sexual or otherwise. My cousin was steadfast and openhearted, maintaining relationships with people who’d done us both great harm and had barely apologized for it. She also liked to flirt and fall in love, with Adepts and nonmagicals alike.

  I didn’t.

  Though I was grateful for Jasmine’s tenacity when it came to familial relationships. Otherwise, she would have never forced herself back into my life, and I’d have been all alone in the world.

  “Gavin Lowell,” Jasmine said. “Yes. I found his obituary.”

  “Suicide?”

  “Yes.

  “Did he … slaughter anyone?”

  “They cremated him.” Jasmine smiled sadly. “So if he was going to rise, I guess he didn’t get the chance.”

  A lot of families were losing sons. I was hoping we could track down the rogue vampire quickly.

  “Could be a complete coincidence, of course.”

  “Could be.”

  “I’m still digging through the message boards. Some are more difficult to crack than others. Gavin didn’t bother with clever user names, so he was easy to identify. But there has to be something else that links the teens, besides all of them playing the same online game.”

  “I guess it depends on who they were playing with.”

  “You think a vamp would pose as a teenager to ensnare victims online?”

  “I don’t know. As far as I’m aware, vampires aren’t so generous with gifting eternal life. They have rules about turning Adepts, don’t they?”

  “We hope,” Jasmine said quietly. “But the boys were human.”

  We approached an escalator, pausing to grapple with Jasmine’s overly large bag.

  “How long did you think you were coming for?” I groused.

  “Hey! I was in San Francisco. I did some shopping.”

  I laughed. And for one blissful moment, I wasn’t worried about the mounting body count among teenagers or about the vampire hunting them.

  Then Kett appeared beside us, relieving Jasmine of her bag as if it weighed nothing — which, for him, was probably the case.

  “This way,” he said coolly, slipping off in the opposite direction from where he’d originally gone.

  I gazed after him for a moment, then spoke to Jasmine. “Text an update to Pearl?”

  “You think someone should know we’re flying to Seattle with the executioner of the Conclave?” Jasmine asked teasingly.

  I looked over at her. “Yes. Someone powerful definitely needs to know where we are at all times now.”

  Her smile faded. Nodding, she pulled out her phone, texting as we followed the vampire through the crowd of unsuspecting humans.

  ❒ ❒ ❒

  The vampire’s jet was a sleek, customized, six-seat Learjet 70, replete with white leather seats and all the latest technology. Though Jasmine had teased Kett about his access to something as pretentious as a jet, the Fairchild coven owned an older-but-similar model. Or they had twelve years ago. It seemed likely that they would have upgraded by now. Neither Jasmine nor I availed ourselves of the plane, though. Too many strings.

  I took a seat in the middle of the jet, trying to stay equally far away from the engines at the back and the controls in the cockpit, out of force of habit. Though it seemed doubtful that my magic could have any effect on something as large and powerful as a jet engine. Jasmine sat across the aisle from me, immediately pulling out her table and setting up every electronic device she carried with her, plus Dennis’s laptop, which had been waiting for us on the jet. I wasn’t sure where the box of cupcakes had gotten to, but hoped the steward brought them around later for a snack. Otherwise, Jasmine might riot.

  Kett didn’t reappear until after we’d taxied down the long runway, then had taken off into the cloudy evening. Perhaps he liked to sit with the pilot. Perhaps he had phone calls to make. Even the executioner of the Conclave had to check in with someone, didn’t he? He sat in the seat in front of Jasmine, but didn’t bother to swivel his chair around to face us.

  “There’s cola all over the keyboard,” Jasmine said, grumbling cheerfully as she double-checked every file and program, just in case she’d missed anything in her remote pass.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Just be happy it isn’t another fluid. It was owned by a teenaged boy.”

  “Eww, Wisteria!”

  “Do you have Gavin Lowell’s address?” Kett asked, almost absentmindedly. I wouldn’t have thought that tone possible for him.

  “His parents’ address, yeah. Some suburb of Seattle.” Jasmine’s fingers flew across the keyboard of the laptop. Thankfully, despite her earlier comments, vampires didn’t seem quite as intriguing to my cousin as technology was. “North, I think. I don’t know Seattle well.”

  “Or compass directions,” I added jokingly. Then when Kett actually glanced my way, I immediately wished I hadn’t been so informal around him. “Are we just going to show up at the house to ask Gavin’s parents about their dead son?”

  “You reconstruct,” Kett said. “I’ll investigate.”

  “What else would she do?” Jasmine said. “Gargle peanut butter?”

  Kett partially swiveled his seat, so that his long legs were in the aisle. “I’ve heard that expression before. I don’t understand its proper usage.”

  Jasmine laughed, but the vampire wasn’t joking. Well, I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not.

  “If they cremated the boy,” I said, ignoring the weird moment, “and if no other incidents took place like with Dennis and Colby, there probably won’t be anything to reconstruct. So all we’d be doing is harassing the parents with questions they either can’t answer or that will be painful for them.”

  “Is this what you mean?” Kett asked, placing his phone down beside Jasmine’s right wrist.

  With her attention still glued to the laptop, she glanced at the phone, then flinched. “Oh, God. No. That’s not … no. Where did you find that definition?”

  Kett raised one eyebrow. “I used Google. Then consulted the first entry. The urban dictionary. It seemed appropriate.”

  “No,” Jasmine repeated, looking aghast. “That’s not what it means. Is it?” She double-tapped Kett’s phone screen, closing the web browser, then passed it back to him. “That’s not it.” Then she looked at me, grimacing. “Never look that up.”

  “Who is Chuck Norris?” Kett asked. His attention was on his phone again.

  Jasmine shook her head, returning her attention to her laptop and not bothering to answer him.

  “What about a note?” I asked, trying to get us back on topic. “Don’t people who commit suicide leave notes? If Gavin actually committed suicide, maybe he left a Facebook post or said something to a friend. If he did, then we don’t need to harass the parents. Can you look for that?”

  “Um, sure.” Jasmine’s tone was remote, as if she was just responding because I’d paused, not because I’d asked a specific question. “Here. I have something better than a note. Or worse, maybe, depending on your perspective.”

  “Show me,” Kett said.

  Jasmine swiveled the laptop so the vampire could see her screen. He scanned it, not even bothering to lean forward. I was pretty much the same distance away from Jasmine, or maybe even slightly closer, and I could barely make out that there were words on the screen.

  “What?” I asked.

  “A conversation between the boys,” Jasmine said. “They formed a pact.”

  “A suicide pact?”

  “An immortality pact.” Kett sounded as detached as usual as he said it, but the idea of a group of teens seeking immortality seeme
d like the sort of thing that should have bothered him.

  “So one member of the group is actually a vampire?” I asked. “Strong enough to turn the others? Does it work that way? Would they have just needed to ingest or … transfuse the blood? And at what volume? How many pints could the vampire give at one time? And he’s all over the place, crossing international borders now.”

  Kett looked out the window at the dark clouds below us, not answering a single one of my questions.

  “How many boys?” I asked Jasmine. “Do you even know they’re all boys?”

  “No,” Jasmine said. “And five as far as I can tell.”

  “Five. Jesus.”

  “ ‘Sent the blood’,” Kett murmured. “The human girl said.”

  “Luci,” I said, clarifying for Jasmine.

  My cousin nodded, then started typing on her own laptop, which she had opened up on the shelf beside her.

  “Sent,” I said, following up on Kett’s statement. “Implying the vampire mailed the blood? That’s impossible. Customs —”

  “Courier,” Jasmine said, interrupting. “Whether north from Canada or south from the States, it might get through more easily by courier.”

  “Might? What vampire operates under the ‘might’ category?”

  “A young one,” Kett said. “Perhaps without a master. Alone. And unaware of our laws.”

  “A fledgling that strong?” I wasn’t certain how vampires were ‘made,’ but I was fairly certain it would take a powerful vampire to do so.

  Kett eyed me. Adepts didn’t like discussing their magic, but he was the one who’d requested my help, so it was within the parameters of my job to ask.

  “It’s not impossible,” he said.

  “Okay,” Jasmine said. “We have five participants in this convo. We know ElfLord69 is Dennis, because we’re logged in as him.” Jasmine pointed to the mostly black screen she had open on Dennis’s laptop. The conversation she was referring to was a scroll of white that I couldn’t read from where I was sitting.

  “And Colby and Gavin?” I asked.

  “Not sure yet. The user names are different on this site.”

  “Are you saying that one of those five is a vampire?”

  “Not any of the three we’ve already identified,” Kett said mockingly.

  I wanted to snap back about being a reconstructionist, not an investigator, and that I hadn’t trained as Jasmine had, but I stifled the impulse. It would only come off as whining.

  “It could have been Gavin,” I said. “He was cremated.”

  “A vampire would never use the name Gavin,” Kett said.

  Jasmine snorted, then giggled.

  Again, I wasn’t certain if he was joking or not, so I simply barreled ahead. “You just said he was a fledgling.”

  “I said it was possible, but he is certainly not newborn. A newborn would be incapable of … communicating using a messaging board.”

  “His magic would prevent him?”

  “No. His bloodlust would be uncontrollable. He’d be incapable of focusing on even the simplest of tasks. For the first half century, at least.”

  Jasmine’s fingers faltered on the keyboard, then slowly resumed typing.

  My mind stuttered over the information Kett had just blithely revealed. The idea that it took fifty years to gain some sort of control made me wonder again about how old Kett actually was, sitting on a jet with two potential meals within easy reach. His distant demeanor suddenly made complete sense.

  “So when you said young, you meant young for a vampire,” I said.

  Kett didn’t answer.

  And it dawned on me that whenever he didn’t answer, it was either because he didn’t have anything to contribute to the discussion, or because he considered the question irrelevant or obvious.

  “Figure out the user names and find the vampire. Got it,” Jasmine said with false cheerfulness. “I’m pretty sure that 18Tennyson92 is Colby. That’s pretty obvious. The boy never posted a meme or quote that wasn’t from some sort of death-obsessed poet. In fact, are you sure he wasn’t the ringleader? He’s got vampire written all over his Facebook wall.”

  “Quite sure,” Kett said.

  “Who started the conversation?” I asked. “Who brought the subject up?”

  “Dennis,” Jasmine said. “But like it was picking up a previous conversation, not as if he was floating the idea for the first time.”

  “So are we bothering Gavin’s parents or not?” I asked.

  “If the witch finds us an undead gamer, then no,” Kett said. “If not, then yes. We will proceed when we land.”

  “I am a tech wizard,” Jasmine said, “but I’m fairly certain that even I can’t ascertain someone’s undead status from just a user name.”

  “He meant not recently in the morgue or declared dead,” I murmured to my best friend.

  “Ah.” She glanced over at Kett, then gave me a classic ‘oh, whoops’ look.

  I shrugged, fairly certain that it was impossible for anyone to ruffle Kett, undead jokes or not. Except for Jade. Jade got underneath the vampire’s invulnerable skin. But that was because he let her.

  A reserved or even offish employer was fine by me. My friends were few and far between, and I had no need to add a vampire to that short list.

  I snuggled deeper into my plush seat and closed my eyes. Though Vancouver to Seattle was a short flight, a quick nap would be a good idea. It seemed unlikely that Kett was going to snack on either Jasmine or me while he needed us to track down his rogue vampire. After that, though, all bets were probably off.

  I fingered my white-picket-fence bracelet. Kett wouldn’t cross Jade though.

  “Tell me about this game,” Kett said.

  Oh, God, no. I could practically see Jasmine’s face light up through my eyelids.

  “Unseen Arcana? It completely rocks,” she said gushingly. “I’m a werewolf, a hundred points away from enforcer class.”

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  “It’s a relatively new RPG, a role playing game, with an offline component, but mostly played online. Wisteria snapped a picture of the player cards Dennis collected. Here.”

  I peeked through my eyelashes. Jasmine was holding her phone out for Kett.

  “Looks like he was playing a sorcerer, level twenty. That’s good. I’ve never met a sorcerer that powerful myself in real life.” She laughed at her own joke.

  “Are you saying that nonmagical people are playing a game that directly mirrors or incorporates the magic of the Adept?” Kett’s tone was deceptively silky.

  Jasmine’s laughter died. She didn’t answer.

  “Jasmine Fairchild? Has an Adept created this game and marketed it to humans?”

  Now there was a potentially deadly question. An execution-worthy offense. And not just by the vampires. Witches, sorcerers, shapeshifters — any type of magic user or governing body — would maintain the secrecy of the Adept by any means necessary.

  “Of course not,” Jasmine finally said. “There are literally thousands of RPGs. This one just happens to be currently popular, and actually well plotted.”

  “How directly does it parallel the Adept world?”

  Jasmine scoffed. “Barely. I mean, there’s no mention of dowsers or alchemists or dragons at all. And we all know those exist, right?”

  “Yes,” Kett said coolly. “We all know. But we three have reason to know.” His gaze flicked to me with a hint of disapproval, as if I should have kept my mouth shut about dragons existing or the things I’d helped Jade with in London, then Seattle.

  “I’d like to see you try to keep something from Jasmine,” I said snottily. “Plus, dragons and guardians aren’t exactly a secret. Just rare.”

  “After we find the vampire we are hunting, we will look into this further.” Kett addressed Jasmine as if I hadn’t spoken. “I suggest you report it to Pearl Godfrey as well.”

  Then the vampire turned his gaze out the window again.

 
Jasmine swallowed, then looked over at me with an exaggerated grimace.

  Well, that was another can of worms waiting to explode. And I seriously hoped it was just a coincidence. Because Adept or not, I wouldn’t want to be hunted down by Kettil for designing an RPG.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Benjamin Vern,” Jasmine said.

  “What?” I murmured, hoping I was asleep.

  “Benjamin Vern. Lives in Seattle as well.” Jasmine turned her laptop so I could see a picture she’d pulled up on her screen of a brown-haired teenager with deeply set, darkly hollowed eyes. “He’s the fourth player in the immortality pact, and our next stop. I just traced him through the message boards.”

  “He’s not dead?” I straightened in my seat and smoothed my hair.

  “No recent hospital records or police reports that I’ve found yet.”

  “But is Ben a vampire name?” I asked jokingly.

  “Kett thought it might be an assumed identity. For an unregistered fledgling trying to pass as human.”

  I peered around, then up and down the aisle. All the other seats were empty. Kett had apparently vanished. “How do you wander off in a jet?”

  Jasmine shrugged. “He’s not in the bathroom. Actually, I’m not sure how long he’s been gone. He muttered something about being hungry and having his pilot’s license —”

  “What?” I cried, struggling out of my seat belt and bolting to my feet.

  Jasmine dissolved into a fit of giggles.

  “I’m here, witch,” a cool voice said from the front galley. “I was making a phone call.”

  Jasmine stifled her laughter.

  “Very professional,” I muttered, sitting back down.

  “It’s fun working with you again.” My best friend was completely unabashed about making me believe that Kett had gone to snack on the pilot.

  “It is,” I said with a smile. I couldn’t begrudge her the joke. Having Jasmine around was a balm, even when I didn’t know I’d been hurting.

  ❒ ❒ ❒

  Benjamin Vern lived in a small brown bungalow with an equally small fenced front and back yard, just off the I-90 Express and twenty minutes south of downtown, in a small suburb of Seattle that I hadn’t even known existed. Though there was a great coffee roaster, QED, just a few blocks away.