“I believe in them,” he finally said, setting down his glass and pressing his fingertips together. “You stay in this game long enough, and you see things,” he added.
Inga swallowed. The detective’s words had made her hair stand on end. “But, I mean, you’re talking about people who think they’re vampires, right?” she asked, almost hopefully.
“No,” the detective replied, reaching into his coat and pulling out a thick envelope. He laid in on the table for a moment, before opening it and pulling out a few bundles of paper—copies of old newspaper articles and original clippings by the looks of it. On the surface of the table he carefully laid out five obituaries. “Do you recognize any of these women?”
Inga bent forward and inspected the images. She understood now, this was a line up and she was meant to finger the perpetrator. She pointed at one. “This looks just like the Jane Doe from the morgue.”
Detective Turan nodded and sat back in his chair, looking discretely thoughtful. “You see, this isn’t the first time I’ve dealt with this particular Jane Doe.” As if in response to the questioning gaze that Inga now fixed on him, he elaborated, “If you notice, the death date on the one you pointed out was 1938.”
“1938, but how is that…But it’s obviously her, or…?” Inga was startled. She hadn’t expected this at all, particularly from someone as seemingly grounded as her mentor detective.
“Exactly,” said the detective. “It’s her, or a relative that looks almost exactly like her, correct?”
Inga nodded numbly, lost for words as she looked from the table to the detective. She took a gulp of scotch in an attempt to lull her pounding heart into a relative calm. Strangely, this new and horrible information didn’t deter her interest. She found the concept of a supernatural being almost more enticing somehow, and yet…how could it be?
“So you mean that you think that our Jane Doe is killing people?”
Detective Turan nodded. “It’s not beyond the realm of possibility.”
“But no one’s seen her—I mean there’s nothing on the cameras?” she reasoned, wondering if she sounded a little too desperate to disprove his theory.
“Well if you go by traditional lore, she wouldn’t show up on cameras—mirrors and all that. As for the rest…Rumor has it seduction and vampirism go hand and hand. It would surprise me if someone had seen her, and just…conveniently omitted the information.”
Inga felt a chill run down her spine, and a cold sweat came over her. Was he calling her out? Did he someone know what she had done? Panic swelled inside of her chest for an instant, and then subsided with another sip of scotch. “It’s possible, I guess?” she ventured, savoring the warmth of the drink. “It just seems so…”
“…far-fetched. Yes, I’m aware,” Detective Turan responded, sounding someone impatient now. He had finished his drink. “Well anyway, I’m sorry to have dragged you out for all this…I just thought, as Professor Janson’s star pupil and all, you might be interested in the stranger side of the law.” He chuckled, a rough laugh that sounded more like a growl.
“No, no, I should be thanking you,” Inga replied, forcing a tone of gratitude into her voice so that she would not betray the fact that her legs were shaking.
“I’ll walk you home,” the detective replied. He rose to his feet and led the way from the bar. Inga scrambled to follow him, pulling on her coat as they stepped out into the night air. The fog had thickened with the deepening of night. It was colder now.
They walked quickly and silently together through the winding streets to the door of Inga’s apartment. She paused for a moment facing the door, fumbling for her key before turning to say ‘goodnight’ to the detective. Without warning, he pushed her hard against the door, bruising her shoulders as he leant forward and kissed her forcefully on the mouth. One hand held her wrists, and another gripped her hip impossibly tightly. She felt fear wash over her. Shock rendered her completely frozen—she couldn’t struggle. She wasn’t attracted to the detective. She didn’t want him—he was old enough to be her father, and smelt of smoke and booze. And yet, as he kissed her, bit her lip, tore off her scarf and ravaged her neck, she felt her body respond. For the second time in her life, fear, pain, and pleasure crashed together and created a feeling of frenzied ecstasy within her. He forced her around, gripping her hair, pushing his hips against her ass, making sure she could feel how hard he was as he deftly undid the buttons of her jeans and slipped a cold hand inside. Inga let out a moan in spite of herself as the sensation sent her senses buzzing. And then as soon as he had started, he stopped.
“I suspected that you might be this kind of girl,” he murmured in her ear as he withdrew. She turned, looking at him with a strange combination of lust and disgust. “You’re one in a million,” he said, watching her attempts at regaining her composure with mild amusement. “A lot of people get off on pain. But fear…” he trailed off, smiling a wicked smile, “You’ll want to watch out for yourself…From what I hear, that’s just the kind of mate a vampire likes to make.” And he was gone, walking up the street, his gruff laughter echoing in the silence that remained.
Inga struggled through her apartment door and bolted upstairs to her bed, where she collapsed in the dark, her heart pounding and her body hot with an intoxicating mixture of desire and fear. She could barely believe what had happened. The detective, who seemed to be in complete control, had lost it, or so it seemed. As Inga lay in the dark staring at the ceiling, her body cooled, and she reflected that though the passion of the moment had made her wanting, it was nothing compared to the effect that the mystery woman, or…vampire had had on her. And as she thought, another idea came to mind. What if Detective Turan had been testing her? Seeing if she was the kind of woman who might fall prey to the ministrations of a vicious killer? It was possible. It seemed as though he already knew so much. And yet even as she contemplated the possibilities, Inga simply couldn’t imagine herself coming clean to the detective. Even though he seemed to believe in the fantastical as much as she did now, there was a small feeling in the core of Inga’s chest that made her want to protect the mystery woman. Protect the mystery woman and sacrifice her career. It was crazy.
Without knowing why, Inga rose from her bed and walked to the window. She parted the curtains and looked down to the street. The fog had grown impossibly thick now. The street lights diffused through the thick air, filling her vision with a mysterious golden haze. Inga squinted, and she knew in that moment that she wasn’t alone.
A soft whisper caressed her ear and she started. ‘Inga…’ breathed the voice. There was no one beside her, but she could see now, emerging out of the fog, the figure of the woman for whom she had ached for weeks. ‘Come outside, darling…’ the whisper breathed again.
Inga obeyed, walking as if in a trance, leaving the doors to her apartment open. When she reached the street, the woman was no longer there. A strange sense of loss seized her as she looked around.
‘Here…’ came the voice again. And Inga saw her, standing at the end of the street, her figure blurred by the nighttime mist. ‘Follow me…’
Inga did as she was told, following the shadowy form of her obsession from a distance, barely conscious of where they were going. They walked for about 20 minutes, climbing a small hill and then she stopped. They were on cemetery hill. The city lights below glinted through the mist that enshrouded them. It was colder now. Inga felt the soft touch of the first snow on her cheek.
“What do you want from me?” she called out to the woman.
‘I want you to join me,’ she replied, suddenly very close to Inga. She was smiling a cold, fanged smile, her black eyes unmoving as they held Inga’s gaze. Inga shivered, feeling crimson creep into her cheeks as she looked back into those dark eyes. They were like bottomless pools, perfectly still but for the elegant slither of a snake across the surface. ‘I can show you wonderful things, Inga…’
“But I don’t even know your name,” she managed, her heart pounding i
n her throat.
‘Helena.’
Inga swallowed. She wanted to resist, but it was if she were in the grip of some kind of insanity. She craved this woman, this creature. She wanted to follow her to the ends of the earth. When Helena reached out a hand and caressed her cheek, she leaned into it, savoring the coolness of her palm. “Helena...” she whispered, “I want to come with you, but how…?” How could she leave behind the dream that she had pursued for so long in favor of this wild unknown?
‘It’s easy,’ the woman replied, stroking her cheek gently, and leaning forward to kiss her neck tenderly.
Inga let out a small moan and gripped Helena’s upper arm. Her mind wanted to resume her normal life as a student and a forensics expert to be, but her body and soul craved something more.
“LET HER GO.” A rough voice rang loudly across the cemetery. Helena loosened her embrace, a satisfied smirk on her lips as she turned.
‘Why Detective Turan, what a pleasure it is,” she cooed, letting out a cold laugh.
Inga turned to look at the detective, still clinging to Helena’s arm. So it had been a trap after all.
‘I always knew you were a voyeur.’
“No, stop! Let her go!” the detective shouted again.
Helena ignored him, pulling Inga close, pushing back her hair and sinking her fangs into the other woman’s sweet neck. She drank deeply, her eyes fixed on the man who stood watching, helpless. Inga moaned and writhed, blind with pleasure and pain. She could feel her life force being pulled away as she slumped against Helena, submitting completely to her thirst.
When Inga awoke, she was lying in the cemetery. Snow was falling all around her, blanketing the ground. She scanned the landscape, adjusting to consciousness. The detective was gone. An incredible sensation flowed through her—an intense sense of power and boundless possibilities. She noticed that she didn’t feel cold anymore. She felt a wonderful warmth. As she awoke to the present, she found Helena lying next to her, looking over her with watchful eyes.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she smiled, and slipped her hand into Inga’s hand, squeezing it as she arose, pulling the other woman behind her. She wrapped her close in her pale arms. “All this…” she gestured to the landscape, now perfect white and sparkling quietly, “This whole world is ours.”
Inga, overwhelmed with excitement, stood on her toes and pressed her lips to Helena’s. They kissed passionately for all the world to see on cemetery hill, as the snow fell all around them.
THE END
Bonus Story 23 of 50
Her. Pregnant
“You are a complete asshole!”
Thyssen Skalas didn’t flinch as the woman hurled his wad of money back at him and slammed the thin wood planked door. He deserved that and hell of a lot worse. He couldn’t even remember her name, let alone where he picked her up from, a bar maybe, some honky tonk? He remembered sharing a bottle of Jack with her, and a few hot kisses at the bar that led to this room and hours of animalistic sex, until his booze-induced bubble burst when he called her, her.
He didn’t even realize he’d done it until the woman who just stormed out—Angie? Was her name Angie or Kim—had been on her knees beneath him, taking it hard and fast, turned and slapped him in the face. One minute he was pounding away into sweet Angie-or-Kim, forgetting all the shit that led him here, and for a few short moments not thinking about her as he shot another load into the last of his sterling condoms; the next his face was stinging and he was looking into a pair of the most pissed off set of enraged eyes that were definitely not hers.
Kim/Angie, whatever the hell her name was, wasn’t the first to say it, nor would she be the last at the rate he was going at. He was always a total asshole whenever he wasn’t with her. She had tamed him. She was what he wanted, and the only thing he needed. She had thrown him out on his ass, and for the past month he’d fucked his way across the country like a rutting animal, trying to forget. Every day, and every night he had a different woman in his bed, sometimes two, once another man. Nothing worked. Nothing ever fucking worked. She owned his ass.
Her.
Just her.
Only her.
Always fucking her.
Thyssen lay back on the bed, naked in the sheets, and stared at the dirty ceiling. He had to get out of this one horse shithole town and back to his SEAL team. He’d punished enough women around here for not being her.
***
Charlotte Jones pulled her heavy mane of dark red hair into a knot and inhaled the witching hour morning air from her Juliette balcony. Her fingers shook when she rested them on the wooden rail that overlooked the front of the inn, the place she’d grown up. She looked toward the quiet Maine forest that lined the property before spreading out to the bay.
The dark sky was full of ancient stars; bright beacons that pulled her upward from the place of dormant sadness within in her that tonight would not let her sleep. She hadn’t thought about him in months, so why tonight? She inhaled the salt water sea spray the came from the back of the inn where the waves broke against the rocks. Something was coming. She could feel it. And whatever it was it wouldn’t let her sleep.
She had checked her sleeping toddler, Ian, earlier, and then checked him again before coming out here. She wondered if he was coming down with something, another childhood illness creeping up on what most people considered a blissful life. A single mother from old money, running a quiet bed and breakfast and seaside inn, tempering her high strung guests, and raising her toddler along the way. A more or less normal life, until you added in that she also dealt with the Greek mob.
Charlotte sighed.
A faint stench of cigarette smoke lifted toward her. Seriously?
She wrinkled her nose. She didn’t have to look down to the porch below to know it was Iannis, her father-in-law – was he even her father-in-law? – puffing on one of those disgusting things. His son was Ian’s father. Even though Thyssen questioned the paternity, Iannis never did, but that didn’t make him her father-in-law. Not officially. “Those things are going to kill you, you know?” She delivered her timeless warning again.
“Haven’t so far,” he grunted.
She rolled her eyes. “Ian doesn’t need to be inhaling that shit.”
“He’s sleeping.”
“He still breathes in his sleep.”
“Room’s on the other side of this shack.”
Shack. She rolled her eyes again. Her inn was over ten thousand square feet on the Westhaven coast, the most expensive borough on seaside Maine. It was not a shack. Of course, Iannis had been calling it his fishing shack since she was a little girl and her mother ran this place. He and his buddies had first come down here from Canada during the hunting season. Now that he’d made it his permanent home in his ripe old age of sixty something, she shouldn’t be surprised at his consistent referral of shack.
She sighed as more smoked drifted up to her.
“What are you doin’ up, lighthouse?”
She shook her head. He’d also been calling her a lighthouse since his first season here. He said there wasn’t much to her. Plain. Simple. Functional. But when the time came, and she lit up with something to say or do, people stopped and took notice. Otherwise, she stayed quiet in the background just doing what needed to be done. Just like a lighthouse.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, looking into the calm peace of the forest. You?”
“I’m old. I don’t sleep no more.”
“Same.” She lifted the side of her mouth in a wry smile.
He chuckled. “Waitin’ for that boy to come home—lightin’ up his way?”
She gritted her teeth at the reference to Thyssen. Once he’d been her Greek god, now he was nothing but a God-damned Greek. “Definitely not. Just woke up and can’t get back to sleep. That’s all.”
“Uh huh.” Fresh smoke drifted upwards.
She leaned over the balcony. “Stop it. You’re incorrigible you know?”
“Incorrig
a-what? Let me get my dictionary. Told you not to use those ninety nine cent words with me.”
She stared down at his lined and sea weathered olive skin. Darkened from a lifetime on the Aegean Sea, lined from years of calculation during his time within his country’s organized crime, and creased from constantly frowning at people, and maybe the occasional smile. He was a quintessential Greek man. Proud. A fisherman. A businessman. A stoic tribute to the meaning of family. Thyssen hadn’t been there for Ian’s birth, but Iannis had been. He’d been the first to hold him, his only grandson, and had actually smiled for hours on that day.
“Incorrigible is worth at least a buck,” she informed him.
“He’s comin’, lighthouse.” She watched him toss his cigarette over the balcony onto the slabs of rock that surrounded the house. “Been feeling it for days.”
She inhaled, and looked up and out into the dark forest of trees again. Those old trees had been here since the dawn of man, tall, sheltering and beautiful. They endured.
She’d never admit to knowing something was coming. Thyssen? Maybe. But he’d been gone three years, ever since the day she told him she was pregnant and the first words out of his mouth were—
“Is it mine?”
She could still remember the stone of shock that dropped into her stomach at his words. After she’d managed to breathe past the waves of pain she just whispered for him to get out. Get out and not come back. And he hadn’t. Almost exactly three years to this day.
Was he coming back?
Charlotte stared at the tree tops then down into the forest floor. The grasses and brushes naturally tangled and spread out to create a haven for the nighttime critters.
Pregnant to an Alien King Box Set Page 99
