I tried to reply. The only word I could get out was “But…” I didn’t really know what you put after that. But I still needed my community service hours? But I just watched you kill a man? But I really liked it here? But you seemed like such a nice guy? But you were a VAMPIRE?
Wash pointed again. “Go.”
I got to my feet. Wash moved to the doorway behind me and opened the bookshelf door, which slid away easily at his touch. We stepped into the laundry room and he pulled the vampire hunting kit out of my backpack.
We walked out to the lobby together where a woman somewhere in her thirties, no coat, shivering from the cold, sat on the desk. I looked outside where I saw a cold, misty rain. It wasn’t snow yet but we were no more than a few weeks away from flakes.
Wash turned to address the woman. “Sorry it took us so long. There was a spill that needed to be dealt with. You have to be careful about chemicals, you know?” Wash then turned to me, handed me my backpack, and said, “Goodnight, Lucy.”
I took the backpack from him. “Goodnight.”
I was on the sidewalk, with the door closing behind me, when I heard Wash again. “Lucy.”
I turned to face Wash again, and saw him framed in the doorway, an echo of the first time I’d met him. His skin seemed even darker now, turning him into a silhouette in the backlit doorway.
“I’ll let the judge know that you finished your hours,” he said softly. I realized that he was trying to prevent the person behind him from hearing what he was saying. He was, in fact, trying to be the same gentleman I thought he was before I knew he sucked the blood out of people. “The bus will be here any minute,” he said. “Stay safe.”
He stepped back, the door closed, and I heard him apologize to the woman again as I walked the short distance to the bus stop. Minutes later, I was headed home, with an empty backpack and a buzzing brain. I was sure of only one thing. I was never going back there.
Which, in hindsight, was stupid of me.
CHAPTER 16
The next few weeks passed. Quickly? Slowly? I can’t remember now.
I got up. I went to my work program. I went to school. I came home. I studied. My mom didn’t ask what had happened to my community service since she wasn’t really paying attention to me. She was still in the throes of infatuation, and within a week I had gotten a copy of a letter stating I had completed my community service hours.
A second one came a few weeks later, from the city, instead of from Wash’s computer.
School continued to improve, at least on a social level. With days off, and the first flakes of snow, and the upcoming holidays, people stopped thinking about the party that ended badly and started thinking about the new, exciting, upcoming parties where they could get wasted all over again and not have to worry about me being there and being a buzzkill.
I had been so busy for so long I had almost stopped missing Becca, and to some extent, stopped missing my dad and mom as well. I worried about whether I was normal for most of a day, and then I remembered I was eighteen. A lot of people my age were already off at college, leading new lives and breaking away from their pasts. I was doing the same thing. I was just doing it in the house I grew up in.
Thanksgiving week came, and after some of the world’s most awkward conversations, I figured out where I was going, and when, and with whom.
My mom, Chuck, and I all went to Thanksgiving lunch at a local family eatery, and I realized that was part of my mom breaking away, too. Her dad was dead, and she was, in a way, reborn. Me leaving for college would turn her from a young mother with a daughter to a businesswoman with a young piece of meat on her arm.
I didn’t like it, necessarily, but I had a certain peace with it. In a few months, I’d be gone most of the time, and all those things would matter to me less than they did at the moment.
It was the same with my dad. He knew I’d gone and had bland Thanksgiving food, so he took me to a local Chinese place we used to go to all the time as a family. In some ways it was perfect. I hadn’t had their pepper shrimp in months, and it was much better than the world’s most uninteresting turkey I’d eaten a few hours before. My dad and I really talked for the first time in a while, and I told him about school and sending out my last few college applications, and about how things seemed to be getting better for me socially. How even Becca no longer went out of her way to give me the evil eye in the hallway.
Dad told me that he’d finally found a job, though it wasn’t ideal. He was working security at a local business, third shift, 11:00 PM to 8:00 AM. No one was there, and nothing ever happened, so he’d gone to the library and started checking out books at a rapid-fire pace. He was reading all the stuff he’d never had time to get to when he was a stay-at-home dad and had even written a few short stories on his day off. He was thinking about going back to college, maybe getting a degree in English or writing.
Most of all, he was excited to be doing something, even if it was working a sucky job and talking about a novel he might never write. And he predicted Becca and I would be seized by the Christmas spirit and forgive each other, start the New Year best friends again.
As I went to bed that night, I even sort of believed him. I realized high school, and the people in it, weren’t forever. Whatever my problems were, whatever it was I was dealing with, or had dealt with, or had done, was all going to be wiped away in a few months by a new school, new friends, and a series of new adventures. Maybe my eighteenth year started rocky but it would end with a bunch of people who hated me in September telling me they’d miss me in May.
And then it would be over and things would be some semblance of okay.
That’s what I went to sleep thinking. When I woke up, I realized some problems can’t be healed by time. They have to be dealt with head-on.
CHAPTER 17
The beautiful thing about the day after Thanksgiving is there aren’t any real obligations. If you have money, you can save a bunch of it by heading out to over-packed stores and shopping until you drop. My mother did so, as she had heard about a deal on laptops and already informed me she was getting me one for college while they were cheap.
I slept in.
By the time I woke up, it was noon, and I held a small pity-party for myself over the fact that there were no Thanksgiving leftovers to consume. With a sigh, I assembled a sandwich, ate it, flipped through the TV channels, considered doing homework, and then turned on the computer.
Our Internet homepage had always been the local newspaper, due to my mom’s interest in local politics. Generally I clicked away from it immediately, and would have done it then, except for the headline: “Homeless Deaths on the Rise.”
I closed my eyes, attempting to squeeze a thought out of my brain. I opened them, and the headline still said the same thing.
I clicked to the story and from there, clicked through another two variations on the same theme. An unusual number of homeless men and women had been found dead recently, despite the lack of dramatic changes in the weather. I kept hunting for statements like, “drained of blood,” or “unusual neck markings,” and found none. Though I figured it was just one of those cover-up things.
I closed my eyes again and saw the note my Grandpa D had left me: “THEY’RE REAL. FIGHT THEM.”
In the movie version of my life, I was sure that was where the montage would have gone. I’d do a bunch of pull-ups and sit-ups, and sharpen a half-dozen stakes. Maybe put on a long coat to hide them. Then I’d hop in an awesome car and drive off to do battle with evil.
In reality, I realized there wasn’t much that I could do. Even if I was buff already, if I took a bus to Sundown Shelter, loaded up with stakes and crosses, it wouldn’t open until after dark, which was when Wash would be at his least vulnerable.
I could have called the cops but what would I have told them? A vampire was killing homeless dudes? And I doubted I could just leave some kind of anonymous tip. I could have said Wash molested me but unless I was willing to testify against him, t
o present myself as a victim, what could I really have done? Say I saw him kill a homeless man several weeks earlier, and was only now coming forward? Now that I’d seen it was, like, a pattern?
Which was when something else hit me. I didn’t know a thing about vampires. The only vampire book I’d read recently was a trashy love story that Wash, an actual vampire, said didn’t reflect reality.
Then again, would he tell me if it did? Maybe being a vampire was just about true love. Like Cupid, only with fangs. And more screaming.
Or a different kind of screaming, anyway.
I did pick up the phone a few times, trying to come up with some sort of explanation that would force the cops to run into Sundown Shelter, guns and possibly holy water at the ready.
I gave up. I put together a makeshift vampire hunting kit.
I took a bottle of holy water off the shelf. Becca sent it to me from Italy—water blessed by the actual Pope, no less. I found a couple of silver (plated?) crosses amongst my mom’s jewelry and put them around my neck. I went out and grabbed the old wooden stakes from my dad’s tent, the one he used back when he was a Boy Scout.
And I took a couple of silver butter knives from my mom’s collection. They had belonged to her mother. As I put them into my backpack, I idly recalled a few pieces of Grandma’s good silver vanished over the years and I wondered if Grandpa D’s silver bullets had been created from lost antique silver.
I put the bag in my room, sat down, and realized I didn’t have a game plan.
I read stories about vampires over the years, and saw a handful of movies, and there was one thing they all agreed on. They agreed on almost nothing.
I flipped around on the Internet for a while, and things got even worse. Depending on who was telling the stories, vampires couldn’t cross running water. Or maybe they could. They didn’t like garlic. Or maybe it didn’t affect them. Crosses hurt them because they were evil. Or maybe crosses didn’t hurt them at all. Silver, in its purest form, could hurt them. Or maybe that was werewolves.
Almost everyone said that a stake through the heart would kill a vampire. Except, sometimes, it had to be a particular kind of wood. Like ash.
Which kind of made me wish I had my old leaf collection from the fifth grade because I wasn’t even sure if there were any ash trees near my house. Or in town. Or in the state.
Other things I didn’t have: A team of people to back me up. A witty best friend to banter with. Anyone I thought I could tell what was going on and have them trust me.
I mean, my mom was the daughter of a man who called himself a vampire hunter, and I was pretty sure if I showed her Grandpa D’s vampire kit, she would have thought her dad had lost it a lot earlier in life.
Oddly, Chuck, with his general physique, probably would have made a pretty good killer of dudes with pointy teeth. But I definitely wasn’t going to ask him to tag along.
In the end, I determined I was going to have to follow the lead of my grandfather. I knew what his weapons were. Kind of. I had no idea if his stakes were made of ash or not. I had to assume he’d used them to bring down bloodsuckers.
Night fell. My mom returned, loaded up with packages for family, friends, and co-workers, and toting a takeout dinner. I ate, and then informed my mother I was headed to Sundown to serve a post-Thanksgiving dinner.
My mom looked at me. “I kind of thought you were done with that place. You haven’t been there in a while. Since when do homeless shelters serve a post-Thanksgiving meal?”
I hadn’t been prepared for the question but it didn’t stop the smooth lie that came out. “Well, Wash likes to collect all the extras people have and use them to serve the needy. So he puts out a call for unused boxes of stuffing, and cranberry sauce, and whatever else, and hands it out the day after Thanksgiving.”
It was a bizarre lie but I could tell my mom was happy to have the house to just her and Chuck. She was so pleased about it, in fact, that she gave me a box of stuffing to take with me.
It was a strange bus ride. No plan. A bunch of old tent stakes, a random vial of holy water, a few silver butter knives, and a box of uncooked stuffing. I was just glad I didn’t have to get on a plane.
CHAPTER 18
By the time I got to Sundown, I had something that resembled a plan.
As I walked to the front door, I slid a couple of stakes into the pocket of my coat. I had six but decided I’d rather have one in each pocket instead of fumbling around and getting a splinter when I really needed a sharp piece of wood.
I took out the bottle of holy water and twisted the top off, slipping the cap into my breast pocket. I planned to throw it on Wash, then stake him while he burned with the agony of the pure water rolling across his flesh.
That was the plan.
Here’s what happened.
I walked to the front door and realized that in the scope of my plan, it worked because he opened the door just as I walked up to it. It was the only way to be certain I had any kind of surprise on my side.
So I stood outside the front door for five minutes, hoping he’d hear me with his super-powered ears and throw open the door.
That didn’t happen.
I didn’t want to go in. Everything I ever learned from scary movies told me it was a terrible idea. If I walked in the door, Wash could approach me from any one of three sides, and with his superior speed, I knew I’d only have a one-in-three chance of dousing him with holy water before he’d grab me and gulp down my, no doubt, delicious A positive.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and prepared to kick the door open, leap in, and sweep my holy-water-filled hand in an arc. Perhaps I’d hit him just enough to hurt him, I thought..
That was when I heard Wash’s voice behind me.
“I thought I asked you not to come back here.”
CHAPTER 19
You always hear the story about the dude who lifts the car off the little kid. His adrenaline surges, he Hulks out, and the next thing you know, some toddler is free and clear.
I kind of did that.
Well, really what I did was more of a cartoon character type thing rather than a superhero type thing. I made a squeaking noise, jumped in the air, and spun around. I did manage to move my hand in a kind of arc, coating Wash with drops of holy water across his body and face.
Then I dropped the bottle of holy water, which smashed on the sidewalk. That freed my hands, and I grabbed for my stakes. I fumbled one, which clunked to the ground. The other I pulled out with no trouble.
I stabbed at Wash as hard as I could, which I have to admit wasn’t all that hard.
Wash barely moved. His hand came up and he caught my wrist. He didn’t even push or squeeze. He held the stake about eighteen inches away from his heart while I hyperventilated.
“Let’s go inside. I need to get a broom and clean up this glass before someone gets hurt,” he said.
He let go of my wrist and my arm kind of flopped to my side. Wash bent down, picked up my other stake, and handed it to me. I stood there for a moment, unsure of what to do.
Finally, Wash said, “You can go, if you want to. My offer from the other day still stands.”
I looked at my makeshift weapons, then back at Wash. “I have questions,” I said.
“I’m sure you do.”
“Those homeless people. Did you kill them?”
Wash shook his head. “No.”
I remembered his previous word choices and rephrased the question. “Did you help them die?”
Wash shook his head again. “Is that all you wanted to know?”
A thought flickered in my brainpan. “There’s a lot that I don’t know, isn’t there? A lot.”
Wash nodded. “There is.”
I turned around and walked in the door, slipping my stakes into my pockets as I went.
CHAPTER 20
Wash took his time cleaning up the glass, going over and over and over the sidewalk with a broom and dustpan while I sat at the desk in the lobby and felt the in
side of my skull itching with questions. I couldn’t tell if he was organizing his thoughts, or if his super sight just made him really, really anal about how clean the sidewalk needed to be.
Finally, he came back in and put the broom and dustpan away, then he walked over to the desk and looked at me.
“So,” he said, “where do you want to go and talk?”
“Does it matter?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “I imagine that it matters to you. We can do this here, where you can escape more easily, if that sort of thing appeals to you.”
A sharp, un-amused giggle popped out of me. “Not that it matters. If you wanted me dead, I’d be dead. Am I right?”
“You are correct.”
I chose the laundry room, which had two chairs. It seemed the most comfortable for everyone involved.
We sat and stared at each other. After a moment, I realized I had no idea where to start. My grandfather? Smitty? Vampires in general? Wash in particular? If he hadn’t killed all those homeless people, who had?
I came up with this: “Washington Lincoln isn’t your real name, is it?”
Wash grinned. It was that smile that had made me trust him when I met him, and I could feel it happening again. I shoved the emotion back in the direction it came from.
“No,” said Wash.
“What’s your real name?”
Wash’s grin shrank a tiny bit. “I don’t know.”
“Did you change your name because you became a vampire?”
“No.”
I felt a twist of exasperation. “This talking thing isn’t going to work very well if you don’t give me details when I ask questions.”
“You’re asking why I changed my name?”
“Yeah.”
“Because I was a runaway who didn’t want to get caught.”
My eyes traced over his features. If he ran away as a kid, he was on the streets long before he became a vampire. “You look like you’re somewhere in your early twenties,” I said. “What were you running away from?”
Blood Calling (The Blood Calling Series, Book 1) Page 5
