by Sloan Archer
I nodded. “Okay.”
“Both Maxine and I were big fans of the occult, as were our friends. During one of our dinner parties, we thought it would be a hoot to hire a fortuneteller.”
“She was very extravagant,” Maxine said. “She wore the most beautiful scarves you’ve ever seen, Mercy! She even came with tarot cards and a crystal ball.”
Richard seemed annoyed with Maxine’s unneeded addendums. Ignoring his wife, he said, “Francine, of course, being your typical teenager, did not want to hang around with a bunch of fuddy-duddies. She never included herself in our dinner parties, which we allowed because we did not wish to subject our friends to the whims of a juvenile. Francine was rather chatty, and we knew she would monopolize dinner conversations.”
“So, win-win for both of you if she stayed away,” I said, feeling sad for Grams. I would have done just about anything to have five minutes with her at the dinner table, even if it was only to chat about her favorite soap opera or to go over a grocery list. I missed her so much.
Richard said, “On the night in question—the night we had the clairvoyant over to entertain our guests—Francine wandered into the living room. We were having a tarot reading. Though I do believe in a great many things supernatural, I’d dismissed the clairvoyant as a charlatan.”
“I didn’t,” Maxine said. “I knew she was for real.”
“Anyhow,” Richard powered on with a cold look aimed at Maxine, “things changed when the clairvoyant saw Francine.”
“How?” I asked my great-grandfather.
“The clairvoyant had been boisterous prior to the arrival of Francine, cracking off-color jokes to get a rise out of our guests, which they secretly enjoyed, and telling everyone fortunes they’d want to hear: you are greatly loved, your brilliance is celebrated by others . . . That sort of thing.”
“So what changed?” I said.
“When the clairvoyant set her eyes on Francine, it was like she’d been struck by an invisible bolt of lightning. She grew very quiet and serious,” said Maxine.
“She jumped up from the table so quickly that she knocked over a few drinks.” Richard seemed particularly agitated by this fact. Oh, the humiliation of having your preforming monkey spill over the martinis! “She swept her cards up off the table and pocketed them, and then she bolted toward the door.”
“Had Grams said anything to her?” I asked.
“Not a word,” Richard answered.
“I caught up with her before she had a chance to leave,” said Maxine. “I demanded to know why she was behaving so peculiarly. She tried to tell me that she was feeling ill and needed to go home.”
“She was blatantly lying. I told her that I would not pay her until she explained herself,” Richard said. “She then told me that we could keep the money and then ran out.”
I asked, “Why didn’t you stop her?”
“We couldn’t very well hold her prisoner, now could we?” Maxine answered, which I found to be a rather audacious thing to say, considering my current circumstance.
“We tracked the psychic down a few days later and demanded an explanation,” Maxine said. “She took some persuading, but eventually she talked.”
I could only imagine what they did to the poor woman to scare the truth out of her.
“She was reluctant to reveal what she had seen about Francine. It would have made her sound mad, for starters. She was also afraid of inciting our anger,” Richard said. “We promised that we would pay her handsomely and that we would not take our rage out on her, if she talked.”
“What had the psychic seen?” I asked. “In her bolt-of-lightning vision?”
“Many things,” Maxine answered. “She told us that our daughter was with child, which we just could not believe.”
“But she was,” I said. “With my mother.”
“Yes,” Richard confirmed. “And she told us that the fetus was tainted, that the father was supernatural. An abomination of nature.”
I leaned forward. “Supernatural?”
“Yes. Not of mortal origins but not immortal, either,” Richard said. “And Francine would be in danger simply for associating with the father.”
“You mean . . . No . . . Not like a vampire?” I said.
Maxine smiled with coldness. “Yes, like a vampire. A half-breed.”
“But . . . That doesn’t make sense. Vampires are unable to procreate. And what is a half-breed?” I asked. There had to be a mix-up. If my mother’s father was a vampire, then that would mean that I was part vampire, which I plainly wasn’t. I was incapable of turning vampire.
“I didn’t know,” Richard admitted. “Nor did the clairvoyant. She could only tell us that the child was not of this typical world and that our daughter was in danger. She said that Francine would always be in danger as long as the father was in her life.”
Maxine said, “We went home right away to talk to Francine. After much badgering on our part, she admitted that she was pregnant. But she swore that the only thing off about the boy was the he was—” she sniffed haughtily “—from New Jersey.”
I asked, “Did you track him down? The father?”
“No,” Richard answered. “He tracked me down.”
The suspense was killing me. “And?”
“He said that he’d been watching us,” Richard said.
“Who? You and Maxine?”
“Yes,” Richard confirmed. “And my hunting club. He said that he’d been keeping an eye on us, because he knew that we were hunting vampires. Falling in love with Francine was a byproduct of his stalking.”
“So he was a vampire, then? My grandfather?”
“No, he wasn’t. I know this unequivocally, since we met while the sun was out,” Richard told me. “But he was something else. Something . . . supernatural.”
“How could you be sure?” I asked. “Because of what the clairvoyant told you?”
“There was that, and the fact that he’d been following my hunting group for many years.”
I frowned. “I don’t follow. How old was he?”
Richard said, “He couldn’t have been a day older than seventeen, maybe eighteen.”
“Okay. So . . . ?”
“The boy told me this in the year 1970. He said that he’d started following my group a few years after it was established . . .” He paused for dramatic effect. “In 1780.”
“Oh my . . .” There were so many questions I had. “So, okay, he wasn’t a vampire. Then what was he? An alien?” But how could that be? There was absolutely nothing supernatural about me, unless the ability to plow through an entire pint of ice cream in a single sitting counted as an unearthly talent.
Richard smiled blandly. “I don’t believe so, no. I never found out what he was. But I gathered that he was affiliated with the vampires, somehow, because he’d been keeping an eye on our club. He made it clear that he wasn’t an ally.”
“If he wasn’t an ally, why didn’t you just take him out then and there?” I asked. “Sure, Grams would have been upset, but I gather that you were just as equally upset that he’d gotten your teenaged daughter pregnant.” I didn’t say what was really on my mind, which was: And you obviously weren’t too concerned with Grams’s happiness. Or committing crimes. “You could have told your hunting buddies to take care of him.”
Richard shook his head. “There were a couple reasons I kept quiet and didn’t hurt the boy. Both of them had to do with Francine. I know you may find this hard to believe based on the way things turned out, Mercy, but Maxine and I loved our daughter very much.”
Next they were going to throw the old “you always hurt the one you love” adage at me.
“We did,” Maxine concurred, as if sensing my skepticism.
Richard continued, “But some of the men in my hunting club were fanatical in their beliefs—” this coming from him, I thought “—and I feared they might hurt Francine if they knew what sort of child she was carrying.”
I asked, “So, why didn’
t you get rid of the boy?”
Richard sighed. “He assured me that if I hurt him, the fetus inside Francine’s body—and Francine—would suffer. I didn’t care about the mutant fetus—”
“Who was my mother,” I sniped.
“—but I did care about Francine. I don’t mean to imply that the boy was saying that he’d hurt Francine to punish me, should harm befall him. Had he threatened me in such a manner, then, yes, I would have put an end to him. What he had meant was that the connection he had with the fetus extended to Francine,” Richard clarified. “He said that any harm to the fetus would also harm Francine, because she and the baby were connected. Of course, it did cross my mind that he was lying—I was almost certain of it—but I couldn’t prove otherwise. But I refused to gamble with Francine’s life based on a hunch.”
“So you sent her away,” I said.
Richard nodded. “But it was only a last resort. Maxine and I tried desperately to convince Francine to go away until the child was born and then return once she’d given it up for adoption. But she wouldn’t hear of it. She was very stubborn.”
That sounded like Grams, all right.
I asked, “Did Grams know what the father was?”
“No, she didn’t,” Richard answered. “Which is why he and I made a deal. We agreed that we would both have to stay away from Francine in order to keep her safe. I vowed that I would not reveal his identity to the club, ever, as long as he stayed away. Though he had unintentionally gotten Francine pregnant, he was no sap. It had occurred to him, undoubtedly, that I could turn him into my associates after the connection he had to Francine’s body was broken—meaning, after the baby was born.”
“But you didn’t?”
“No, I didn’t,” Richard told me. “After the day we met, the boy vanished like a ghost, though I really didn’t try too hard to look for him. Also, I feared that the club might get wise to Francine’s pregnancy with the tainted child, if they were alerted to the boy’s existence. They might then go after her and the child.”
“What was his name? My grandfather?”
“I have no idea,” Richard said.
“We figured it was safer to remain in the dark,” added Maxine.
“Did he love her?” I asked. “The boy?”
Richard shrugged to show me exactly how irrelevant he thought the boy’s love was. “He said he did. And I suppose, yes, he must have, because it seems he really did stay away from Francine. But I blame everything that’s happened on him.”
“You mean Grams getting pregnant?” I asked.
Richard brought his fist down into his palm. “I mean everything, Mercy! Don’t you see how vampires destroy everything? How different do you think things would have been with Francine if vampires hadn’t intruded in our lives?”
“But you said the boy wasn’t a vamp—”
“Psh,” Richard sputtered. “Close enough.”
I tried to bite my tongue, but I loathed Richard so much that I could hardly see straight. And I was tired and moody—I wanted to go home, damn it. “Did it ever occur to you that your daughter wouldn’t have been in danger at all had it not been for your association with the vampire hunters?” I’d tried to sound neutral but failed. My words might as well have come out of my mouth with teeth and talons.
“And why had I joined forces with the hunters to begin with, hmm?” Richard snarled. “Because one of their vile kind attacked me on the street. It is they who are culpable, Mercy, not I. Oh, the many ways my life has suffered at the hands of vampires!”
You don’t have to shout, you lunatic.
“We kept tabs on Francine,” said Maxine, trying to diffuse the tension in the air. “And your mother. And you. We may have not known where you were and what you were doing all day, every day. But we did know.”
“Why didn’t you make contact?” I asked. “All these years and you never once made contact.” I swept a hand out. “And here you were the whole time, a short drive away from me in Napa.”
“This isn’t our house, dear,” clarified Maxine. “This belongs to a friend of ours.”
“And this is their guest house?” I asked, dubious.
“Something like that,” said Richard.
Right—probably more like their torture chamber for vampire sympathizers.
Maxine said, “But, again, we did not make contact because we were worried about the link you’d have to your grandfather. We did not want to put you in harm’s way.” That was rich, coming from my kidnapper.
What I believed to be closer to the truth was that the demented hunting club would have been pissed if they found out that Richard had been deceiving them for years. If they were as cutthroat as Richard was making them out to be, they’d probably kill him for his disloyalty.
“And you have no idea where my grandfather is?” I asked, wondering why he hadn’t ever looked me up. I was considering looking for him myself, should these lunatics ever let me go. If my grandfather was an enemy of Maxine and Richard, I thought, he couldn’t be a half bad person . . . or vampire . . . or whatever he was. And, naturally, I was curious about my DNA. If I had some kind of mutation, doctors surely would have detected it during a checkup long ago, right? But they hadn’t.
“No idea,” Maxine confirmed.
I asked, “So then why did you suddenly make contact with me, if you were so afraid of putting me in danger? Because you need my blood?”
“Our reunion has not gone as planned,” said Maxine, delivering the understatement of the century. “We were not hoping for it to end like this.”
I snorted, taking in my shed-prison. “Ya think?” And then it occurred to me how much I did not like Maxine’s use of the phrase “end like this.” What did that mean for me, if things were “ending?”
“We have human moles on the inside,” said Richard, ignoring my snide comment. “Most of them work at blood banks, but a few are like you—humans who are simply in the know about vampires. When we discovered that you’d started decoying at Dignitary, we just couldn’t believe it.”
“Then we heard that you’d been involved in the murder of a vampire at Dignitary, so we began to think that you were in support of our cause,” said Maxine.
What, like bigotry through genetics?
“You have to bear in mind, Mercy, that much of the information we received was secondhand—hearsay at best,” said Richard. “Given our opposition to vampires, we’ve had to keep our distance from all things related to them. We weren’t able to hear the full story about your involvement with Dignitary, just bits and pieces. But no matter what we heard, we could never figure out why you were living with a vampire.”
“And then we heard about the serum, which, as you are aware, was delivered to a lot of blood banks,” said Maxine.
“I didn’t know that,” I told them with a shake of the head. “I wasn’t involved in the making of the serum whatsoever. As I already mentioned, I was tricked.”
“Well, we didn’t know that,” said Maxine huffily. “We only knew that you contributed to its making. We assumed that you had gotten involved with Robert because you were acting as a spy, and that you were using him to gather inside information.”
How diabolical did my great-grandparents think I was? “So, if the serum was already being made, which is what you wanted all along, then why did you bother coming to me at all yesterday?” I asked.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? The serum went off the market,” Richard said. “And just when it was finally starting to take off!”
If my great-grandparents thought that I was going to provide information about the discontinuation of the serum—that, for example, its termination was linked to the VGO—then they had another thing coming. I wondered if Richard and Maxine had even heard of the VGO. The VGO had most definitely not heard of them, or else they would have been assassinated years ago.
“So . . . ?” I said.
Maxine smiled. “Now we’d like to introduce the serum to vampires on a grander scale.”
“How do you plan on doing that?” I asked. I once again had a very bad feeling.
“You let us worry about the details, dear,” said Maxine.
If anyone should have been worried, it was I. The chance of them letting me walk out of there was looking slimmer and slimmer. Maxine might have warmed to me over time, but Richard was about as cold as they came. It was clear that he hated vampires, and it was as equally clear that I didn’t—that if I were to hate anyone, it would actually be Richard.
I had to get out of prison. I ventured, “You were gracious enough to make a deal with my grandfather, so maybe you might consider making a deal with me now?”
Richard leaned forward. “What kind of deal?”
“If I gave you my blood willingly,” I said, “would you let me go?”
I felt like a huge traitor, offering up my blood like that, but it was evident that they were going to take it from me regardless. At least if they let me go, I’d be able to alert the VGO about what my great-grandparents were up to. As sweetly as possible, I added, “And of course I won’t tell anyone about what happened. I would never turn my family in. I’m sure we’re only having a misunderstanding, right?”
Richard chuckled and slapped his knee. “Goodness, Mercy, I can see our daughter has had quite an influence on you. You’re just as opportunistic as she was. And you also lie as bad as she did. I’m afraid we have no deal.” Richard reached inside his coat pocket and extracted an empty syringe. “Now, be a good girl and give me your arm.”
I recoiled back against the wall, shrieking. I wasn’t so much afraid of them taking my blood. I was afraid of what they were planning on doing with it.
12
I repositioned my arms so that they were behind my back, blocking Richard from having access to them.
Richard sighed, as if I were disappointing him with a bad report card. “Jason, please come,” he called toward the door.
