Sweet Last Drop

by Melody Johnson

  “This is beautiful,” I commented. “I love how it overlooks the first floor.”

  “What breaking news is occurring in little old Erin that you’d leave the city for us?” She asked, ignoring my compliment.

  I smiled warily. “Breaking news is admittedly the great love of my life, but we’ve had a falling out recently. I needed a vacation, and honestly, the chance to report something real.”

  “Breaking news isn’t ‘real’ news?”

  “It used to be my favorite kind of news. The rush, the immediacy, the race: it’s a sport, and I was my team’s star player.” I sighed. “Or I liked to think so. But since I discovered the truth about Dominic and Bex and, and—” I hedged, hesitating to say it.

  “Vampires,” Ronnie said helpfully, her smile understanding. “Since you found out that you’re a night blood.”

  I nodded. “And since I realized that vampires are the cause of many, if not most, of the violent crimes in the city, I’ve felt disenchanted about my job. Maybe when Dominic gains better control of his coven after the Leveling, I can go back to reporting news like I used to, but until then—” I shrugged. “Here I am.”

  “It’ll never go back to the way it was. Once you find out about them and who you are, everything else in life becomes nothing but background.” Ronnie wrung her hands. “Did Ian invite you to stay with us, or did you need somewhere to stay while on assignment?”

  I leaned against the arm of the nearest couch to alleviate some of the pressure on my hip and crossed my arms. “I could have chosen any county for on-site research on my article, if that’s what you’re implying. I chose Erin because Walker encouraged me to visit.”

  She worried her bottom lip with her teeth, nodding.

  I shook my head. “If you’ve got something to say, you may as well say it. Everything is just background anyway, right?”

  “That’s my point.” Ronnie said. She crossed her arms too, but it seemed to me like she was holding herself together. “You could have chosen any county upstate, but you chose Erin, New York because of Ian. Whether you came here to learn more about being a night blood or to learn more about Ian, I don’t know and it’s really not my business, but I know Ian a little better than you do. Whether he’s invested in you as a night blood or a reporter, or whether he’s actually invested in you, it doesn’t matter compared to his investment in the great love of his life: vampire hunting. He’s got a personal vendetta against Bex and a deep rooted hate for all vampires, and rightfully so, but you will never hold a bigger place in his heart than the one that Bex already carved out.”

  It took me a moment to respond. Of all the things to come out of Ronnie’s mouth, I hadn’t expected a warning against Walker for my sake.

  “I suspected as much,” I said quietly.

  Ronnie frowned. “So you’re not here for Ian?”

  “I didn’t say that. I’m here for multiple reasons. It’s complicated.”

  “Anything involving vampires always is.” Ronnie turned away from the parlor and walked down the hall. “How would you like to meet some of the other night bloods living here?” she asked, her voice forcibly chipper.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Aren’t most people asleep at this hour? It’s past midnight.”

  “Most of us live a nocturnal lifestyle. Who can sleep knowing the vampires are awake and potentially outside your window?”

  “Well then, lead the way.”

  Everyone was friendly and welcoming as we knocked door to door. Walker’s residents greeted me with varying degrees of excitement to have another “night blood sister,” as Theresa gushed. Ronnie introduced Theresa as the first to move into the house after herself. Logan and his sons—Keagan, Douglas, William, and Colin—recently moved into the room across the hall from Theresa and were still unpacking. Ronnie explained that I’d only just discovered my “heritage” three weeks ago. Logan’s youngest, Colin, had promptly commented, “It’s fucked up, right?” only to be smacked lovingly in the head by his barrel-chested father.

  “You’ll have to excuse my son,” Logan said, his eyes rolled heavenward. “Nothing, not even the vampires, could curb that kid’s tongue.”

  Colin stuck the said appendage out at his father, only to be snatched around the neck in a headlock by William—or maybe he’d introduced that son as Douglas—and they both disappeared back into the room. I shook my head at the chaos.

  Theresa, watching from her doorway across the hall, laughed. Despite her youthful appearance, she laughed like a cackling witch.

  “Those boys will be the death of you, Logan!” she shouted between cackles.

  “Care to babysit?”

  Theresa raised her hands in mock surrender, backed into her room, and slammed the door. I could still hear her grating cackles through the wall.

  Logan had black hair and was a mountain of a man, built of pure muscle and spit, but all four of his sons were gangly redheads. I wondered about their mother, presumably the mass contributor to the boys’ genes, but it seemed like everyone in the house had at least one missing loved one and a past filled with blood and sadness. Everyone was here because they’d survived their siblings and spouses. They’d survived their parents.

  Ronnie knocked on the last door on the second floor, but no one answered.

  “Jeremy?” She knocked again. “It’s Ronnie. We have a guest staying with us if you’d like to make her acquaintance.”

  She waited a moment, but her knock was only answered by silence.

  “He’s our newest tenant,” Ronnie whispered to me. “He doesn’t socialize much, but that’s how Keagan was, Logan’s oldest son. Eventually, he came around. Jeremy is about Keagan’s age, maybe a little younger. He’ll come around, too.”

  “I can hear you talking about me,” Jeremy said through the door.

  “If you’d open the door and talk to her yourself, I wouldn’t have to,” Ronnie said.

  Silence.

  Ronnie met my eyes and shrugged. “You’ll have plenty of time to get aquainted. Your guest room is right here, across the hall from Jeremy’s. I know you dropped your luggage off in a rush earlier today, but please, make yourself at home.”

  I smiled. “Thanks, Ronnie. I appreciate that.”

  We turned away to walk back down the hall when I heard the lock unlatch.

  The door opened, and my breath caught.

  Jeremy was my height, made a little shorter as he leaned bare-chested against the doorframe. He crossed his arms and pinned Ronnie and me with a hot stare, daring us to comment on the four rows of stitches across his abdomen. They were tiny, neat stitches, and the cuts looked clean, albeit fresh. From his mop of shaggy brown hair to his ripped skinny jeans, he looked about sixteen with a sixty-pound chip on his shoulder. But who was I to judge? I was thirty with a three-hundred-pound chip on mine; I’d just gained the maturity to hide it better.

  “Jeremy,” Ronnie said, her voice squeaky with false cheer. “Thank you for opening your door.”

  Jeremy raised his eyebrows.

  Ronnie ignored his wound and continued her introductions. “Jeremy McFerson, I’d like you to meet Cassidy DiRocco. Cassidy is a reporter for The Sun Accord in New York City and a good friend of Ian.” She turned to me. “Jeremy just moved in last week.”

  My stomach turned at the sight of Jeremy’s wounds, but I followed Ronnie’s lead and held out my hand.

  He didn’t uncross his arms. “You’re from the city?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What made you leave for this Godforsaken place?”

  I grinned. “A combination of work, Walker’s insistence, and my own curiosity. And for the record, the city’s no better,” I lied. I wiggled my fingers, trying one more time for the handshake. “You can call me DiRocco. Everybody does.”

  Jeremy looked me up and down, his cornflower blue eyes sharp and quick. He nodded to Ronnie. “She didn’t.”

  I met his eyes with my own hard gaze
. He wasn’t the only one in this hallway who could be difficult. “Jeremy McFerson. Any relation to Buck McFerson?”

  He looked away. I could see the muscles of his jaw shift as he clenched his teeth, and I let my hand drop to my side.

  Ronnie whispered, as if Jeremy wasn’t just in front of us and couldn’t hear. “Buck’s his uncle.”

  Ah, I thought. Lydia.

  His head snapped up. “Shut up.”

  She raised one eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

  “My business is none of her business,” Jeremy hissed.

  “I plan to make it my business,” I said. “Those are some pretty deep scratches you’ve got there.”

  Jeremy glared at Ronnie a moment longer before turning his glare on me. “Yeah.”

  “If they’re as new as they look, you should keep gauze over them for a few days.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “I know a lot,” I said calmly. “Like I know that those cuts from their spacing are fingernail scratches.”

  He laughed. “You can’t get cuts like this from fingernails.”

  “No, not from human fingernails.”

  Jeremy stopped laughing and just stared at me.

  “Did you visit your uncle last night?”

  He scoffed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Did you know Lydia Bowser?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I leaned in close. “Did you see her before or after she was torn apart?”

  “I said I don’t want to talk about it!” Jeremy shoved passed me and into the hall. My hip blazed with a sharp, cutting pain and gave out. I ended up on my ass on the floor.

  “Jeremy McFerson!” Ronnie shouted. “When your uncle hears abo—”

  “Shut up!”

  He pounded down the hall and would have continued down the steps except that six feet of broad muscle blocked his way.

  “What the hell is going on up here?” Walker asked, his voice low.

  He looked over Jeremy’s shoulder to me on the floor, and his eyes widened. He shoved Jeremy back against the wall and opened his mouth to blast him, but whatever words had boiled to the surface turned to steam when he caught sight of the stitches across Jeremy’s abdomen.

  “It’s my fault,” I cut in. Ronnie offered me a hand up, but I waved her away, using the wall for support. “I pushed him too far.”

  “What did this?” Walker asked Jeremy.

  “It wasn’t a vampire,” Jeremy said quietly. His surly attitude toward Ronnie and me evaporated in Walker’s presence.

  “Next time he acts up,” I whispered to Ronnie, “maybe you should threaten him with Walker, not his uncle.”

  Ronnie snorted.

  “What was it?” Walker repeated.

  Jeremy shrugged.

  “You’re under my roof, and I’ll be damned if I don’t know what’s going on under it. I can’t ensure our safety, the safety of everyone living here, if I’m blind. Knowing is s—”

  “Knowing is surviving,” he interrupted. “I know.”

  Walker raised his eyebrows.

  Jeremy opened his mouth. He closed it, cleared his throat, and tried to start again, but his face twisted. He flushed a bright red and cleared his throat again, louder than before, and this time, I could hear the wetness in his throat. He was struggling not to cry.

  “How about we move this conversation out of the hall and take a seat in the family room?” Ronnie offered.

  Jeremy nodded, jumping on the opportunity to compose himself.

  I grunted, still trying to leverage off the floor.

  Ronnie gave up on watching me struggle, gripped my arms above the elbows, and yanked me to my feet. She had some muscle hidden somewhere under her skin and bones. The next thing I knew, I was back on my feet, and she was steadying me as I swayed over the gnawing ache of my hip.

  “Thanks,” I said grudgingly.

  “You’re more stubborn than Ian.” Ronnie said, shaking her head. “That’s something I never thought I’d say.”

  Walker glanced between the two of us, his eyes narrowed. I smiled back, acting deliberately obtuse. Walker shook his head and turned around, leading Jeremy by a firm grip on his shoulder to the family room. When I turned to look at Ronnie, I realized that she had been forcing a strained smile at Walker, too.

  * * * *

  “I met Lydia at Gretel’s Tavern last night, like we do every night before dinner.”

  Jeremy, Ronnie, Walker, and I were all seated in the family room. Jeremy and Ronnie took the couch, and Walker and I scooted two of the overstuffed chairs from the other side of the room, so we all faced each other.

  “How long have you been meeting her at Gretel’s?” Walker asked.

  Jeremy wrung his hands. He wouldn’t meet Walker’s gaze as he spoke.

  “Two months. Her dad hates me, always has, but after I was suspended from school for that damn pen, he forbade that we continue dating. We’ve been meeting at Gretel’s ever since.”

  She didn’t have a boyfriend, huh? I thought, looking at Walker.

  My thoughts must have been pretty loud; he frowned at me before responding to Jeremy.

  “What happened this time when you met that was different from the other times?”

  Jeremy shrugged. “Nothing. We made out. Ragged about her old man and Mrs. Secor for clicking that damn pen.”

  “Why is a pen the feature in this story?” I asked.

  Walker sighed. “He brought one of my pens to school.”

  “Ah,” I murmured. The wooden stake that sprang from its tip would certainly be a surprise to an unsuspecting teacher. “Poor Mrs. Secor.”

  “Poor me! I don’t get out of practice until six,” Jeremy snapped, sounding defensive. “It’s dark by then.”

  Walker put up a hand. “I know. No one’s saying that you don’t need a weapon to protect yourself. You just needed to implement a better method of concealing it or find a different weapon. Which we did.”

  Jeremy closed his mouth and stared down at his hands again. He nodded.

  “Which is why you need to tell me what’s going on, so we can figure out the tough stuff together.” Walker said, but he glanced at me when he said the last.

  Jeremy just shook his head, holding his silence.

  I pursed my lips. “Did Lydia get angry when you complained about her father?” I asked.

  Jeremy finally looked up, frowning. “No. She complains about her old man all the time.”

  “But he’s her dad. I bet she didn’t like you ‘ragging’ about him.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Then how was it?”

  “It was like any other night.” Jeremy said, and then his jaw dropped. “You think that I, what happened to Lydia, you think that was my fault?” Jeremy asked, his eyes frantic.

  Walker shook his head. “You tell me what happened, Jeremy.”

  “I don’t know what happened!” Jeremy burst. “One second we were kissing and talking and she was laughing and kissing me back and then—” He ran both hands through his hair to the back of his neck. “—then something crashed into us. The only light behind Gretel’s is what little shines through the bathroom windows, so I couldn’t see shit, but whatever it was, the thing was on top of Lydia. And she—” he took a deep breath, but when he continued, his voice cracked. “—she was screaming. It didn’t hypnotize her like the vampires usually do. It didn’t strike at the neck or her carotid, and it didn’t just suck her blood. It looked like it was actually eating her.”

  Jeremy stopped speaking. He looked away and after a moment, when I thought he would continue, tears spilled down his cheeks. He wiped them away with a jerk of his arm.

  Ronnie squeezed his knee.

  “This is bullshit!” he exploded. “What the fuck was that thing?”

  Walker shook his head. “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

>   “I tried to get it off her,” Jeremy said, still wiping away tears. “But it swiped its hand out, it just fucking backhanded me, and I slammed into a tree. I couldn’t move for a minute, and Lydia, God, she screamed the whole time. It was a while until she finally stopped screaming. And this,” Jeremy looked down at the slashes on his stomach, “this was from its backhand. It wasn’t even attacking me, and its claws nearly spilled my guts.”

  “What did you tell the doctor who stitched you up?” I asked.

  Jeremy narrowed his eyes on me. “What’s it to you?”

  I looked at Walker. “His blood is at that crime scene, and when the labs come back with his blood alongside Lydia’s, her father’s going to demand answers.” I looked back at Jeremy. “What do you think he’ll do when the sheriff tells him that his daughter was with you in the woods that night?”

  Jeremy blanched.

  “What you said at the hospital matters. The police will look into that.”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t go to the hospital.”

  Walker made a scrambled noise in his throat. “You went to Theresa, didn’t you?”

  Jeremy shrugged.

  I pointed my thumb down the hallway. “This Theresa?”

  Ronnie nodded. “She’s a surgeon.”

  “Was. She’s retired.” Walker swiped his hand down his face. “That was a good move, but you should have come to me, too.”

  “I wanted to, but—” Jeremy shook his head.

  Walker pressed forward this time. “But what?”

  Jeremy pounded his fist into his thigh. “Lydia kept screaming! And I just laid there while she screamed and that thing ate her and she died. I just laid there, Walker. Is that what you would have done?”

  Jeremy’s shouts rang through the entire house, making the resulting silence heavy between us.

  “Sometimes,” I whispered, “simply surviving is all you can do.”

  Ronnie nodded.

  “Amen to that,” Walker said, “but now we need to clean up the mess.”

  Jeremy frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “DiRocco’s got a good point,” Walker said, nodding to me. “What the hell are we going to do about your blood at the scene?”