I drove out of town to the east, where most of the resorts and cabins staked their claim along the lake shore. It was a picture perfect day, not a cloud in the sky, and the tourists were out in force. There were many resorts along that road, but the cabin where Belinda had been staying was past all of them, in a more remote location.
I stopped by the resort’s main office, where the proprietor sat in a rocking chair on the porch, sipping his morning coffee. He was an older man, and a long-time resident of Eagle Rock, though I couldn’t recall his name until he introduced himself as Sam.
“As far as I know, Belinda’s still here,” Sam said when I told him what I needed.
“She is?” The news surprised me. Surely, it couldn’t be that easy.
“She was supposed to check out Sunday morning, but she called and said she needed to extend her stay a couple of days.”
“Can you tell me which cabin number?” I asked.
“Number three,” he replied, and then gave me directions.
Cabin #3 lay in the quiet shade of half a dozen large trees. The small, single bedroom structure looked picturesque and still, but then again, so had Belinda’s house, yesterday afternoon. I felt a vague sense of deja vu as I walked up the wooden steps to the small front porch and knocked on the door.
No one answered, but somehow, I wasn’t surprised. Sighing, I decided to take a walk around the building, and then maybe head to the lake to see if Belinda was sunning herself on the shore.
As I rounded the cabin, I was hit by a foul stench that made the hair on my neck and arms prickle. In back, a large cedar deck spanned the length of the structure. It ran straight off the back of the house, leaving a space underneath, blocked off by wooden mesh. Except for one section that looked as if it had been ripped out. Wooden splinters littered the ground nearby.
With a terrible sense of foreboding, I approached the deck, reeling and nearly losing my breakfast as the stench grew stronger. I ducked my head under the deck, blinked a few times to adjust to the darkness, broken only by shafts of light slanting in through breaks in the wood, and spotted something to take my mind off the smell.
A body lay to my right, bent at an odd angle so the feet were behind the back. I couldn’t see much with the poor illumination, and I couldn’t even be sure that the corpse was Belinda’s, but I could see the head was no longer attached to the body. It lay a few feet away, off to my left.
Backing away to escape both the sights and smells, I phoned in yet another murder.
* * *
Half an hour later, the cabin was swarming with deputies. It turned out, the front door to the cabin was unlocked, so Jeff and Ryan went inside to gather evidence. I didn’t see the inside, but I overheard them saying it looked like there had been a lot of blood at one point, because they found traces of it on the sofa and carpet, but someone had done their best to clean it.
The sheriff arrived shortly after everyone else, and I had never seen him looking so grim. Wordlessly, he went around back, and when he returned a few minutes later, he looked even worse.
“Is it Belinda?” I had to ask.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think–I want you to take a look.”
My stomach squirmed at the idea, but when he handed me a flashlight, I gave him a determined nod and headed back to the scene.
With the help of the flashlight, I could make out far more detail than before. The body definitely belonged to a woman. She had been wearing a tank top and shorts that would have left most of her skin exposed, had there not been so many insects crawling over it. As I panned the flashlight over the body, I could see half healed wounds on her wrists, thighs, and shoulders. They might have been bite marks, but it was tough to tell.
There was also a wooden stake protruding from her chest.
Swallowing hard, I panned my flashlight to the left. I saw dead, yellow eyes, like a feline’s, staring at me through wild, platinum blond hair. It was Belinda, all right, except it hadn’t been Belinda at all. She had become a vampire.
I quickly backed away, returning to the front of the cabin. The Sheriff followed.
“Well?” he asked.
I took a moment constructing my answer. It was perfectly obvious that she had been attacked by a vampire, and in fact, had turned into one herself, but I had to decide what I could and could not tell the sheriff. His position in the town gave him more access to truth than the average person, especially since he had a sharp wit and keen attention to detail, but he wasn’t a sorcerer.
“Was it a vampire?” he prompted.
I nodded. By and large, vampires were not considered a secret and in fact, sorcerers had done everything they could to get the information out there. Keeping secrets in the magical world was a power game, and the only ones who gained power by lying about vampires were the monsters themselves. The recent craze of vampire romance had undermined a lot of efforts to get the truth out there, and some suspected the vampires themselves were responsible.
“She must have been attacked recently, judging from the bite marks. She turned. You can tell from the yellow, catlike eyes. They get that way when they hunt; when they’re feeling the bloodlust.”
I trailed off, wrinkling my brow in confusion. It just didn’t make sense. For one thing, Belinda Hewitt was a witch whose mother should have given her the anti-venom potion when she was a small child. She shouldn’t have been susceptible to the venom. She shouldn’t have turned. Of course, it was possible Mrs. Hewitt didn’t know about the potion. Sorcerers rarely shared information with one another, but I had always gotten the impression that the anti-venom potion was something most practitioners knew about.
I turned back to the sheriff, who seemed to be trying hard to keep it together. My heart went out to him. Even though he had been under the influence of a love potion, he believed he loved her, and the hurt he felt now was entirely real.
“I’m so sorry.” The words were as inadequate as they had been when I’d spoken them to Evan the day before, but if there are others, I don’t know them.
“What else can you tell me?” He seemed determined to get down to business, and I decided to let him.
“They said there was blood in the cabin,” I said, thinking aloud. “Probably lots of it, though it had been cleaned. But that doesn’t make any sense, either.”
“Because a vampire would have drunk it all?”
“Yes,” I lied. I couldn’t tell the sheriff about the anti-venom potion, which was the real issue. It was one of those secrets I was expected to keep.
The potion is given to counteract vampire venom, so in the event of an attack, the person will not turn. The venom doesn’t just create new vampires, however; it has three purposes: It creates vampires, acts as a drug to put the victim in thrall, and it coagulates the blood so the victim won’t bleed out. This allows a vampire to feed without necessarily killing.
So I had a contradiction. If Belinda had been attacked in that cabin, the presence of a lot of blood suggested she had been protected from the venom. But she turned, proving she had not been.
“It looks like she’s been dead for a few days,” Sheriff Adams said.
I shook my head. “I doubt it. Sam said she called him two days ago. You can’t always tell with vampires.” Because they reverted to their natural level of decay upon death, meaning, more than likely, that Belinda had been turned several days ago.
I really needed to talk to my cousin, Jason. He was the family expert on all things vampire. He knew things the rest of us didn’t, secrets held by the community of hunters.
“How strong are vampires?” the sheriff asked.
“Very strong, why?”
“Because I’m wondering, if she was so strong, who could have killed her?”
I must have gaped at him. He and I were clearly not operating on the same wavelength, if he was under the impression that whoever had staked Belinda had killed her. Love potion or no love potion, on this point, I had to set him straight.
“The
vampire who turned her, killed her. Whoever staked her, and cut off her head, slayed a monster. It wasn’t Belinda anymore.”
The sheriff didn’t look convinced.
“Belinda might have killed Nancy Hastings,” I said, in an attempt to get through to him.
“Do you know how to kill a vampire?” Sheriff Adams asked.
“I don’t. I may know someone who does, though.”
“He wasn’t around this weekend, was he?” the sheriff asked.
“No.” Apparently, it was a good thing, too, or the sheriff might accuse the wrong man. I definitely needed to get him off the love potion, so he could start thinking clearly.
“Well, find out what you can, but I can’t wait for him. We’ve got a lot of work to do, and I want to find the monster who did this. How do I do that?”
“Well,” I said, “He won’t be out during the daytime.”
Sheriff Adams glanced up at the clear blue sky. “No sunlight, garlic, holy water, crosses?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Bram Stoker pretty much got it right. The one thing you need to keep in mind, though, is that vampires are strong and fast. Unbelievably strong and fast.” I hesitated, unwilling to tell him about the existence of hunters, but not sure how else to keep him from going after the vampire himself.
“What if we found them sleeping in their coffins?” Sheriff Adams asked.
“It takes a lot of strength to drive a piece of wood through a man’s ribcage,” I said. “If you can’t do it, or if you miss the heart, you’ll be dead in half a heartbeat.”
“I just need to know what I have to do to find and kill this thing,” Sheriff Adams said. “There has to be something. If not a wooden stake, then what about a wooden arrow? I’m good with a bow and I hear you’re good too.”
I was better than good. I’d won many competitions over the years, though it had been a few months since I’d practiced. “Even the best archer misses sometimes. And before you can even take that shot, you have to see him before he sees you–a vampire’s eyes work very well in the dark.”
The Sheriff scowled. “I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”
Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of a single thing the sheriff could do without seeing Belinda clearly for who she had been. We needed to know who had stayed with her at that cabin, and who had seen her last. The sheriff wouldn’t want to acknowledge that Belinda might have come to the cabin with another man.
“Just let me talk to my family and get back to you. Meanwhile, get some holy water and crosses, and get inside after dark. A threshold is really your best defense.”
9
BY THE TIME I ESCAPED the new crime scene, it was nearly eleven o’clock. I headed for home, even though doing so would make me late for my usual lunch date, again, because I wanted to ask how to get in touch with Jason and warn my family about the vampire attack.
If we had time, I also wanted to know what Mom had wanted to talk to me about the night before. After a sleepless night, I felt more anxious than ever about the possibilities. All of my reasonable ideas of the night before were gone, replaced with a strange certainty that it had something to do with the new baby.
I wasn’t often home on weekday mornings. With school out and everyone home, all of the kids were busy with magic lessons. Nicolas had graduated from home school magic when he had graduated from high school, but all the rest, from Juliana to Christina, had a curriculum to follow.
When I walked in, Mom was on the floor with Christina, singing her a playful song about ivy to the tune of “Frere Jaques.”
Here’s an ivy, here’s an ivy,
What’s it for? What’s it for?
Healing and protection, strength and binding.
Ivy is strong. And it’s good
I groaned. It had been years since I’d had to listen to that.
“Don’t be such a critic,” Mom said. “It doesn’t have to be poetic, it just has to work.” She called over her shoulder. “Adam.”
He ran in from the next room. “What?”
“What’s ivy for?”
“Healing and protection. Strength and binding,” he intoned.
“There’s a bit more to it than that,” I muttered.
“Well, she’s three.” Mom pulled a stray lock of hair behind her ear, and gathered Christina into her lap.
“Cassie! What are you doing home?” Adam asked, rushing forward to entwine bony limbs around my leg. “Will you play cars with me?”
“No, Adam,” Mom said, “Cassie doesn’t have time right now, and neither do you. You’re supposed to be working on spell detection.”
“I’m done!” Adam announced. “The black and red box were spelled. The orange and purple ones weren’t.”
“Oh.” Mom sounded impressed. “Very good.”
“So can I play with my cars?” Adam smiled at her. “Please?”
Mom glanced at her watch. “Thirty minutes.”
“Yeah!” Adam ran off down the hall.
A few seconds later, Isaac came in, his brows furrowed in concentration, a soccer ball floating a few feet ahead of him. “I think I’m getting it,” he said. The moment he spoke, the soccer ball fell to the floor and bounced across the room. He cursed, and ran after it.
“Language!” Mom called.
Juliana came in next, and gave me a reproachful look. I pretended not to notice. I wondered, briefly, whether she had followed through on her blackmail, but I had bigger problems.
“Listen,” I said, trying to move things along, “I was kind of hoping for a private word with you and Dad.”
Mom nodded. “Juliana, keep an eye on the kids. We’ll be back in a few minutes.”
I followed Mom up the stairs to the library, where Dad and Elena were practicing linking. Two sorcerers can be more powerful than one if they know how to combine their magic, but it was a skill that took years to perfect. It also took a bit more maturity than the typical nine-year-old possessed, but Elena wasn’t like other girls her age.
Dad and Elena sat across from one another, legs crossed, hands resting against one another. Eventually, if they got good enough, they wouldn’t even need to touch.
As soon as we walked in, Dad looked up and broke the connection. “Elena, Mom and I need a few minutes with Cassandra. Will you wait downstairs?”
“Okay.” Elena stood and drifted out of the room, closing the door behind her.
As soon as she had gone, I turned to face Dad, but when I saw his face, my reasons for wanting to see him fled my mind. I had rarely seen Dad looking so angry, and all of that rage was directed at me. His ears were smoking.
“What is going on between you and Evan Blackwood?” Dad asked.
“Huh?” I looked from him to Mom, but her mask had fallen off. She now had the look of a deer caught in headlights.
“Juliana said you were with him last night,” Dad said.
My mouth fell open. Whatever I had expected him to do when Juliana told him what she’d seen, this wasn’t it. Or maybe he was upset because I’d taken the job. I knew he’d be upset about that, but I hadn’t guessed it would send him into a rage.
“What is this about?” I asked, looking between them. “I’ve been friends with Evan for a long time.”
“We thought you had a falling out,” Mom said.
“Not exactly.” Honestly, I didn’t usually talk to them about Evan because of their irrational reactions whenever it came up. “Yesterday, he hired me to help him find out who killed his cousin. I told you I had a job.”
“A job?” Dad said. “Is that what you’re doing for him?”
“Juliana told us what she saw last night,” Mom said.
“I don’t suppose you were half as angry at her for spying on me?” I asked. “You’re being ridiculous. I’m not a little girl anymore, and I’m trying to earn a living. And yes, Evan and I are friends. Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Friends?” Dad asked. “Is that what you’re calling it?”
“What
did Juliana tell you?” From their reactions, I wondered how much truth had been involved.
“Everything,” Dad said, significantly. “She told me he sprayed you with love potion-”
“I dropped it on my foot,” I corrected. “We were in Belinda’s shop. It was swimming in them.”
“Oh please,” Dad said. “Use common sense. You do know what his gift is, don’t you? He could have knocked a bottle off a shelf as easily as breathe, although I suppose with a bit of effort, even Isaac could drop a bottle off a shelf.”
This conversation was going nowhere. I threw my hands in the air and spun on my heels. “I’m out of here. Let me know if you ever return to reality.”
Mom stood by the door, as if guarding it. She didn’t look inclined to let me leave, and in fact, her cheeks had started to grow dangerously red. Remembering her condition, I took a step back and tried to make my voice soothing. It was difficult. I was pretty angry. “Mom, calm down.”
“Cassandra, we need to talk about this. It’s important. There are things you don’t understand.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “I understand it’s none of your business. I’m an adult. It wouldn’t even be your business if we were sleeping together.”
At that moment, my purse burst into flames. I screamed and threw it aside, but it had caught my shirt on fire as well. Instincts took over and I dropped to the floor, rolling to smother the flames.
Dad was there in an instant, suffocating the last of the fire, but the damage was already done.
“Oh, God, Cassandra, I’m so sorry!” Mom was there then, leaning over me with an anxious expression, all signs of anger gone.
I took inventory of the physical damage. It hurt like hell. The entire right side of my body was scorched from my hair to my hips. There were second degree burns on my shoulder, arms, and hand, and first degree burns running down the side of my torso. The remains of my purse lay a couple feet away, a smoldering ruin. I’d need to spend the afternoon replacing the contents. Worse, my hair had been scorched. Without a mirror handy, I had no idea how badly. Mom could probably regrow it, but I wasn’t inclined to ask her for help.
Cassie Scot: ParaNormal Detective Page 7
