His full lips broke into a smile. “Sorry I intruded on your thoughts. But I gotta admit, I like what I see in there.”
Veronica felt heat rise in her chest, neck and face. Busted. He offered his hand, another trick she wouldn’t fall for.
“I’m Remy and you are?”
Remy. The name sounded too familiar. Veronica recalled the name listed somewhere on the documents she’d stolen from The Brotherhood. His name was just one of the many that stuck out to her but at the moment she couldn’t remember why.
She fixed her thoughts on her napkin, staring at the condensation ring left by the wet glass. Still her mind wouldn’t quiet. What Deamhan type is he? Until she knew which, she couldn’t be sure of his level of threat. She couldn’t get too close.
Despite herself, she stole a quick look in his direction.
He flashed a ready smile.
Teeth aren’t sharp and pointy. He’s not a Ramanga. She stared again at her drink, wiping the droplets of water from the side of her glass.
“Am I scaring you?” Remy’s voice interrupted Veronica’s thoughts. She shook her head and remained silent.
“Do you talk?”
“Not to strangers.” She immediately regretted her gutsy remark, knowing it would intrigue him further.
“Maybe you should.” He traced the rim of the glass with a slender, pale finger. “You’re new here.”
Veronica wanted to check him out but knew she should avoid his eye. She looked over her shoulder and then at the ceiling. She glanced at the sticky floor and studied the woodwork on the bar.
“Nervous?”
He’d read her like an open book. She felt a tiny tingle as he tried again to read her thoughts.
“Your thoughts. They come to me kinda like a movie: sometimes clear, other times fuzzy.” He chuckled. “Right now, they’re crystal. Do you really find the bar’s wood grain that intriguing?”
Veronica couldn’t help but grin.
“Do you smell that?” His voice dropped to a loud whisper. “I smell a vampire.”
Remy’s eyes fixated over Veronica’s shoulder.
The dark woman from the bathroom sashayed over and leaned against the bar on the other side of Veronica.
Veronica hardly recognized her. She now wore the professional attire of a business woman: grayish slacks, a red blouse, and a gray suit jacket. She’d styled her hair into a chic ponytail and glossed her lips in red.
Remy and the woman locked eyes.
Veronica felt a fierce, electrical tension emanating from the two, and glanced back and forth between them. The woman smirked, and Remy smiled nonchalantly.
“She’s mine, Remy,” she said. “He said I can have her.”
Remy revealed his even, pearly teeth, his finger still tracing the rim of the glass. “Already tired of the other one?” he asked.
Unable to stand the crackling air between the two, Veronica slid from the stool.
The woman placed her hands on her hips, blocking Veronica’s escape with her elbow. Remy smiled. “Not every female who strolls into Dark Sepulcher belongs to you, Alexis.”
Veronica made a mental note of the vampire’s name.
“But this little catch is stirring up the attention.” Her lips puckered.
“Oh, that’s it,” Remy said. “You just want to be the first to take her.”
Veronica eased sideways. They were playing a game to see who would be the first to have her. Well, she wasn’t going to be “had” by anyone.
“Please sit.” Remy respectfully motioned to Veronica. “Don’t let Alexis scare you.”
Leaving again entered Veronica’s mind. If I ran, would they stop me? Alexis seemed to be the more violent of the two. Remy appeared relaxed and comfortable in the mini-altercation. Veronica wondered how easy it was for them to sense her discomfort. She decided to leave.
“Excuse me.” Veronica slid past Remy, intending to walk away.
Remy reached out his arm, blocking her path. “But we haven’t talked yet, researcher.” Remy tapped his index finger on the counter.
His comment stopped Veronica in her tracks.
“Researcher?” Alexis visibly cringed at the mention of the word. “Well, then. You can have her.” She snarled her lip in distaste. “I don’t like researchers. Their blood tastes funny.”
A cold chill blew up Veronica’s spine. Try as he might, Veronica couldn’t allow herself to be associated with The Brotherhood. She was not a researcher, her father made sure of that. He kept her away from it, shielding her just enough to tell her what she needed to know. Even if her father wanted her to follow in her mother’s footsteps, Veronica wouldn’t allow herself to be used in the way that her mother was. The bad memories of The Brotherhood were fresh in the execrable minds of the vampires and Deamhan alike. She couldn’t risk allowing Remy to peg her with the title of “researcher”, thus immediately black-listing her in the club—and in the city.
“I’m not a researcher,” she blurted. Not like my father.
“Then who are you?” Remy asked, fixing her with his penetrating stare.
She buried the important pieces from her memory like names, cities, places, and the reason why she came to Dark Sepulcher from her mind.
“What? What is it?” Alexis asked Remy. “What do you see?”
Remy smirked. “Nothing now.”
“That’s why she interests you?” Alexis rolled her eyes. “Because she knows how to hide her thoughts unlike the whores you prefer?”
Remy tilted his head to the side, still studying Veronica.
“That should make you want to kill her even more.” Alexis turned her body toward Veronica, gloating over the fear she saw in her eyes.
“Now, now, Alexis,” Remy said softly, “let’s give Veronica a chance to explain.”
Veronica again felt the tingling sensation. He even knew her name. This time, it hurt.
Remy persisted.
Veronica ran toward the front exit. She plowed through the crowd, knocking past people and Deamhan alike. The sensation continued until she passed the security guards outside. Her heart thumped in her chest, and she drank fresh air in huge gulps.
As she reached the corner and turned in the direction of her apartment, she slowed her pace. When she neared the end of the block, she paused and checked the street behind her.
Sloppy. Mother would never have acted like that.
As she continued her walk home, thoughts about her father’s warning before she left San Diego repeated over and over in her mind. He’d said she wasn’t ready to come back to Minneapolis. Nonsense.
She had to be.
The full moon filled the night sky. Veronica zipped her jacket as the wind picked up. She turned her face to the wind and inhaled, letting the crisp air fill her lungs. Fall was the best time of year in Minnesota. She shoved her hands into her pockets and mounted the steps to home.
CHAPTER TWO
A loud slapping sound woke Veronica, and she jerked upright on the couch, startled. She cocked her head, listening for the arcane sound to repeat itself but nothing came.
Moving her head from side to side, she stretched her neck. A sharp pain in her back reminded her why she should have slept in the bed last night.
The apartment building, Palm Oaks (once a shoe factory that fell victim to a wave of new development) sat facing the bank of the Mississippi River. She’d considered a larger apartment, but the river view kept her there, despite the fact that in only a few days, she felt she’d outgrown the tiny space.
Since childhood, Veronica felt a weird attraction to water. Watching vast amounts of it rush downstream, caught her attention as a child. The Mississippi River was her favorite. She marveled at its course and the history behind it thanks to Mark Twain’s majestic adventures.
She released an audible breath as she turned her head to look out of the window. The leaves on the trees that banked the edge of the river were in the middle of changing colors. Her gaze drifted near the red asphalt bike
path to the old gazebo. Now weather beaten, its white paint cracked and peeled at the edges. Its once-detailed walls were nonexistent, destroyed by the harsh Minnesota weather.
Yep, I’m in a great location.
The apartment building was also located near many of the dance clubs and bars littering downtown Hennepin Avenue. The area seemed perfect for her. At night, the street came alive with tourists and Minneapolis citizens crowding the sidewalks along with young adults who bar-hopped to relieve themselves from the job pressures of corporate America.
Hennepin Avenue ran the length of two miles from east to west, beginning at the bank of the river and ending near the freeway. Its warehouse district rested near the eastern edge, close to Dark Sepulcher. With huge, boarded-up vacant buildings, the district felt desolate and quiet until nightfall; except for the occasional police sirens in the distance. It agitated her that many of the buildings, part of original downtown Minneapolis, were shamefully left to rot in disrepair. Finally, the city decided to renovate half of the buildings, turning them into condominiums and businesses instead of tearing them down.
Veronica stretched her arms overhead, then reached for the remote control on her coffee table and flicked on the TV. In her still-groggy state, she paused on a breaking story about a house fire near the warehouse district. The camera crew panned on the ruins of the destroyed home behind the newscaster. The report showed a crowd gathering across the street from the fire, watching smoke escape into the sky from smoldering pieces of wood and debris.
A newswoman dressed in a bright red shirt with short, carrot-colored hair, spoke into the microphone about the fires. The news surprised Veronica. Before coming to San Diego, she thought she’d researched all there was to know about the state of Minneapolis until her best friend, Sean warned her about the fires. Crime wasn’t high but from the news report, anyone else not knowing about the city would have thought differently. She didn’t know what this had to do with her search, but the news report gave the impression that the fires were frequent and out of control.
The camera panned right to left, filming the other homes on the block. Old Victorian homes with bright green lawns and brick lined porches came into view. Tall red oak gates separated the properties and expensive cars parked on the streets and driveways.
Sean told her that the Deamhan in Minneapolis now violated their Dictum—basic rules laid down by their ancestors centuries ago on how to survive in the human world without risking your privacy. Now the Deamhan of today in Minneapolis released their transgressions on each other. Besides the fires, they killed each other by the hundreds. Veronica knew about these dangers. And Remy and Alexis’ reaction to her last night proved that the creatures remained unstable.
Still, the Deamhan had turned a total one eighty from their Dictum. Some of its rules were simple, yet explicit: maintain secrecy, dispose of human remains, and respect the Ancients, the oldest of the Deamhan. Something caused them to sway from those rules decades ago and Veronica blamed that something on her father and The Brotherhood. Her father declared the city an off-limit zone for all Brotherhood members, right around the time she boarded her flight. It was typical Brotherhood behavior.
Veronica finally pulled herself from the couch. The bright sunlight crept through her window and blinded her. She twisted the window blinds to block the rays and smiled to hear and see the birds chirping outside her window. When she opened the window, the smell of wet leaves and dew entered her nostrils. Below, the sidewalk came alive with cyclists and rollerbladers. The Jubilee Coffee shop across the street spilled its patrons onto the sidewalk. The clear blue sky showed nary a cloud.
“This is the Minnesota I remember,” she said to the robins beneath her window ledge. The Minnesota that surprises me when I least expect it. A beautiful state with breathtaking scenery, lavish forests, and ten thousand lakes.
And Deamhan and vampires.
Little did its residents know what lurked in the city and slithered from the burrows at sunset.
She sat back on the couch, wiping the morning sweat from her forehead. The smells and the scenery made her think of her mother and her childhood. Reliving her childhood without the tragedies became her one thing she wished for in her teenage years. Just the thought of her mother coming back home from her assignments felt like needles puncturing her skin. One Saturday evening, at the age of five, Veronica used bright pink crayons to scribble a Welcome Home sign for her mother while she sat on the dining room floor of her parents’ shabby two bedroom apartment in south Minneapolis. Her father paced back and forth in the living room, puffing on his tobacco pipe.
On her piece of construction paper, below her child-written words which read “Welcome Home,” she’d drawn three stick figures in black of mom and dad with her in the middle. In the foreground she attempted to draw a pyramid. She’d never seen one before but from what her mother told her, it was a huge triangle with four huge and uneven bricks.
The front door creaked open and she had jumped to her feet. With her drawing in hand, she raced to the door and collapsed into her mother’s arms. The smell of wet leaves emitted from her brown wool jacket. She watched her mother reach into her purse and pull out a sandwich bag filled with dirt and small pieces of limestone.
Veronica took the bag and ran back to her safe spot on the dining room floor. The beautiful limestone and rough speckles of sand sparkled. She poured a small amount in the palm of her hand but her excitement was short lived when she heard the deafening sound of her father’s hand hitting her mother’s cheek.
Veronica didn’t remember if her father had really slapped her mother’s face, or if the abundance of the memory caused her to think he had.
She rubbed her eyes with her fists to erase the vision.
On the other hand, she felt thankful that her mother still appeared so lovely and fresh in her dreams and memories. She knew her mother believed in what she was doing, but Veronica had never understood the reason she’d involved herself in The Brotherhood. It wasn’t like her father’s side of the family, who had a history with the organization. Her mother started at the bottom and, over time, she’d moved up in the organization’s status to researcher and she was good at it. The Brotherhood’s historical research department in San Diego often sought her mother’s opinion on the Deamhan. The staff and administration admired and respected her mother at the same level which they feared her father. Veronica remembered being forced to play with the other kids whose parents were also researchers. She was home-schooled and she attended high school as a teen.
Veronica remembered the McKenzie twins, Joseph and James, the nerds of the group. They excelled in academics, but sucked in athletics. Kelli Simpson, a pudgy blonde girl, had a crush on Joseph, but he claimed she had cooties and broke her heart. She loved to drink Kool-Aid and once claimed to a teacher that she was allergic to prune juice. All three of them became researchers and they were moved to the Eastern Division with its headquarters based in New York.
Her thoughts moved to Sean Fechin, her best and only friend in The Brotherhood. He was the only person she could trust. With her own father hardly at home, he became her adopted brother and he stuck his neck out for her. His family also had ties in The Brotherhood, except that his parents both retired early and didn’t force their son to follow in their footsteps. It was Sean who secured the secret documents about the Deamhan for her. He supported her decision to go to Minneapolis.
And then there was Kenneth Dearhorn. Even now, sitting alone in her apartment, Veronica sighed to think of him. Kenneth Dearhorn was smart, athletic and handsome for his age. She could still picture his hazel eyes and smooth skin. He claimed Native American and Irish ancestry. He was also cocky, arrogant, and fickle. Every girl in school had a crush on him—including Veronica. At the time of her mother’s disappearance, his father, Peter, was the President of the Midwest Region with Veronica’s father serving under him. He trained his son rigorously to one day become a researcher and take his father’s place as Preside
nt. Unlike Veronica’s father, Kenneth’s father didn’t shelter him from the Deamhan. Instead, he allowed his son to marinate with them. When Kenneth’s father was killed, Veronica’s father sent Kenneth along with her to San Diego to continue his training. Now he had the job of lead researcher of the Western Division. Soon, he’d be President.
The pressures of representing the Austin family name became a burden to Veronica. Her father expected Veronica to be like Kenneth and to not question but to remain silent, but she proved to be nothing like him. The Brotherhood was engrained in her family genes. Her grandparents and her great grandparents both worked for The Brotherhood. It was her mother who had no family ties in the organization and who also viewed any teachings of The Brotherhood to be propaganda and argued that no child should be exposed to it by force.
Veronica paced the floor. A morning of reminiscing caused her to yearn to hear Sean’s voice. She pulled the cell phone from her coat pocket and dialed his number.
“So now you call,” he answered.
“It’s only been a couple of days, Sean,” she replied.
“Three, to be precise. Besides, you told me as soon as you arrived in Minneapolis you’d call.”
She remembered. Their short conversation about her trip became clear as though it had happened yesterday. “Well, I had to get settled first.” She headed for the kitchen. “I still haven’t unpacked everything yet.”
“What do you have to unpack? It’s not like you’re staying there forever.”
“So now you’re my self-appointed protector.” The noise of rustling papers and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon rebounded from the ear piece. “I thought you didn’t like Pink Floyd?”
“What makes you think that? I’ve always like Floyd.” He grunted. “So, how is it up there?”
“So far, so good”—she opened the door of her fridge to retrieve a carton of orange juice from the top shelf—“I guess.”
“And Dark Sepulcher? Was it like I said it would be?”
Deamhan Page 3
