“Yes,” his muffled voice came back.
“Okay. Everyone needs to just calm down. Tim, that means you. We just want to talk right?”
“Fine,” I said to Kenny and then turned to John and spoke in his ear as I helped him up. “But you so much as fart and I’m going to drop you like a fuckin’ dog.”
Then he snapped his head back and my gun clattered to the ground. I couldn’t believe I had been so stupid to get that close to him. He got up fast and I reacted and gave him a powerful body shot. I grabbed him and took him down. He seemed to be loaded up with power from the demon. He rolled and twisted out of my arms. He stood up quickly and so did I.
“You’re making a big mistake, John,” I snarled at him. “Getting up was a mistake.”
I hit John with a hard, reverse punch. It was a solid hit. His head snapped back about six inches. Then I sunk a front kick into his abdomen and finished with a left cross. I was still the tough street cop, but I had missed something. Suddenly I felt a flash of intense pain and then darkness.
Chapter 61
2:45 a.m., May 7
Blood is life. It behaves like a living creature. When the circulatory system is breached, the blood vessel contracts in horror, making itself smaller in an attempt to diminish the blood flowing through it and out of the tear. Kenny could feel the gash on his temple. Someone must have surprised him from behind. Most likely John’s wife. His head was throbbing and he couldn’t see a thing. His back hurt and his knees were screaming because they were crammed up in a coat closet.
Kenny began to bang on a heavy wooden door. It wouldn’t budge and it was locked. He seemed to be held in some kind of cramped closet. His knees were throbbing because they were bent, wedged under his body. Slowly, he tried to stand up. Coats and old boxes were stacked around him and he found it very difficult to move.
“Tim!” Kenny yelled in the darkness.
“Tim can’t talk right now.”
John’s maniacal voice came back at him from behind the door and he seemed to have an eerie calm to his tone. Like Jack Nicolson did in The Shining, Kenny thought.
“John!” Kenny screamed out and struck the closet door that locked him in. “You hurt him… and I swear to God…”
“Calm down. Your friend is alive, but he won’t be much longer if you don’t calm down.”
“Alright, John… Listen. Open this door and we can figure this out. Okay?” Kenny said in his most reasonable and charismatic tone.
“Yeah, we’ll have ourselves a little brain storming session. Just before you kill me. Right?”
“John, please,” Kenny said, trying not to sound like he was begging.
“After what you did? You think I’m going to let you out?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“You sent your friend here to kill me!” John yelled. “I heard you two talking. You think I’m evil.”
“No, John,” Kenny said. “Listen to me. My friend and I never would have hurt your family.”
“Oh, only me then, huh? God I miss it so much. How about you? You miss the blood?” John asked through a sneer.
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, come on. I can smell it on you! You’re a blood drinker just like me. Don’t lie to me.”
“Yes. Okay? Yes. But that was before. Now I’m just like you. I’m human.”
“Don’t you see it yet? We’re above humanity. We had something they only dream about. Immortality.”
“John, don’t do this…”
Kenny was picking the lock of the door. At first he worked as quietly as he could, trying not to make it known what he was doing.
“Why did you stop me? He chose me to finish it for him. Inferi chose me to be his final soldier. He chose me to finish it. He said I will rise again, immortal and more powerful than before. My life for his. It’s little to ask. Then I will have immortality.”
“If you want to kill yourself, then do it, but please don’t hurt my friend.”
“No one was making you do this to me! No one was making you kill me!”
John’s voice started to sound panicky, almost shrill.
“Listen to me. You have this dark thing inside you. I know, believe me, I know. But that doesn’t mean you have to fall into it. You don’t have to be a monster.”
“Have you seen me lately? I am a monster,” John told Kenny almost proudly.
“That doesn’t mean it’s what you are. It only matters what you do,” Kenny told him. “It’s your choice, John!”
Kenny heard the slide on Tim’s gun get pulled back and snap into place. Kenny threw his large shoulders into the door several times.
“John, stop!”
Then with the last strike of the door, the frame splintered into fragments and the door blasted open.
“John!” Kenny screamed as he got through the door. Tim was unconscious on the floor and looked almost dead. A puddle of dark blood surrounded his face. John had the barrel of Tim’s weapon on Tim’s head and was a split second away from pulling the trigger when the old house was shocked with deafening shots. With quick squeezes of the trigger, the firing pin launched explosion after explosion of gas and flame from Kenny’s Glock. The first shot took out the lamp and the room was cloaked in black.
Suddenly the house was coming alive with light and fire, with every mighty spray of gunpowder. Round after round was propelled forward in bursts of illumination and massive swirls of devastation. Streams of blood sprayed backward as Tim’s gun clamored to the floor. Suddenly Kenny was inked in black once more.
“Tim, goddamnit, are you okay?”
At first he had no response. But then there was a soft, weak moan.
“Mmm… K… Kennnny.”
He pulled out his cell phone and the room was lit in a soft blue light. Tim was only feet from him. He was lying face down on the floor in large amounts of his own blood mixed with John’s. He didn’t look good. But he looked alive. Kenny ran to him, landing on his knees at his friend’s side.
“Tim, can you hear me?” Kenny gave him a gentle shake.
“No… You just shot up the entire house. I think my ears are fucking bleeding, asshole.”
“Right. Sorry about that.”
“You should have just let me kill him.”
“I know,” Kenny said as he took a seat next to Tim. Police sirens began to come to life somewhere in the distance of the night.
“You did the right thing, you know,” Tim told Kenny. “The guy was a monster. There was no going back… Kenny, I want to tell you I’m sorry. I’ve been kind of hard on you lately.”
“Don’t worry about it, Tim.”
“It’s just… I don’t like what’s happened to us. To our friendship, I mean.”
“Look, Tim, I am sorry. I don’t really know what to say. It’s just that I got really used to being your partner and then you were gone. I guess I kind of blamed you for not fighting the FBI. For leaving.”
“I wish I had never left. Leaving was the worst thing I have ever done. But really, what kind of a cop could I be now after all I’ve seen?” Tim said almost sarcastically.
“A damn good one, that’s what.”
“Anyway, I understand why you didn’t want to kill him, Kenny. It will be okay.”
“It will never be okay. I can’t explain it because this thing, this dream… It’s not in you the way it’s in me. It’s just something I got to deal with,” Kenny said.
“Not alone. Anyway, it’s all over now.”
Chapter 62
11:45 p.m., May 7
Hours later, after a trip to the hospital and giving my statement to several police officers, I was home. I looked out at wind rocking the Japanese maples in my yard and the incomplete wall of short bushes that scarcely kept me hidden from my neighbors. Which I didn’t mind. I didn’t want to face my neighbors after being released from the hospital and seeing Kenny get reamed by the Captain about my involvement. I enjoyed my neighbors’ company and didn’
t want them to get the wrong idea.
My cell phone abruptly rang and I was reluctant to answer it. I knew no good news ever came after the sun had set. And I was exhausted.
“Tim Anderson,” I said holding the thin phone to my ear.
“Tim,” Kenny’s familiar voice came over the line. “It’s me.”
I knew my friend well enough to recognize his tone and braced myself for bad news.
“What’s up?” I said to him.
“Flames reported in Toledo, man. An old hanger at the airport went up. You may have heard about it on the news,” he said. “Spreading fast, seems to be out of control. Do you think it’s our friend?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll meet you in ten minutes.”
Ten minutes later, I was on I-5 on the two and a half hour drive from Seattle to Toledo, Washington. Kenny and I took separate vehicles, since we never knew when something would come up and send one of us racing back home. Not so much these days for me, unless Merric was injured. But Kenny was on thin ice after the heat he took for gunning John down. Thank god he did though. No matter how much of a hard time I gave him afterwards for waiting so long.
However I wasn’t surprised when my cell phone rang as I neared the exit for Toledo.
“Anderson,” I said on the Bluetooth. Kenny’s voice erupted inside my ear and I almost cringed.
“Captain’s freaking for me to get back,” he said. “Wife of that vamp I put down is threatening to file charges for unlawful arrest and use of excessive and deadly force and a bunch of other shit. It’s all over the news. Soon she’ll have lawyers coming out of the woodwork. You can hear it on the radio now.”
“Do you need to head back?”
“No, man, I’m here for you. Let’s finish this thing,” he said with certainty.
When we reached the fire scene at the Toledo Airport, the activity had diminished considerably. Most of the fire trucks had left, and those few firefighters still on the job were exhausted and coiling hoses. Steamy smoke drifted up from the hanger area of the old Junk Row where the demon tree had been. But I couldn’t see any flames, and from within, voices and footsteps sounded as the strong beams of flashlights cut the darkness and were caught in shards of broken glass.
I made my way inside the burnt-out framework of the charred hanger as large drops of cold, dirty water smacked my face and dripped down my neck. I recognized one of the local police voices, but I could not make out what he was saying. He sounded almost muffled, as if he had a hand over his mouth as he talked. Suddenly there was a lot of splashing and commotion.
“Hold on. Tim, hold on,” Kenny commanded me.
“No!!!” someone was screaming. Then there was a loud splash and a surprised outcry. I was halfway inside when I saw one of the officers helping a young woman to her feet. At first I thought it was her. I thought it was Fabiana. But I was wrong. The woman was hysterical and bleeding. My feet sloshed through waterlogged soil as I made my way through.
“Let me through!” I demanded and the woman looked up at me through her tears. The look on her face said she knew me.
“What’s happened here?” I asked the officer closest to me.
“Back off, you have no jurisdiction here.”
“Tell me what happened!”
“We found some remains. Three burn victims. Please, I need you to just…”
“Tim, they have a job to do,” Kenny told me. I pulled away from him as I looked toward the back corner where investigators were talking amongst themselves, sloshing and wading as fingers of light probed.
“Tim, don’t go over there,” Kenny was pleading with me. “Just don’t.”
But I would hear none of it. Because by now I knew I must find out what had happened. I left Kenny for the corner of the hanger, splashing and almost tripping when my boot threatened to come off in the watery mud. I was getting weak in the knees when I suddenly realized that I could feel nothing from Fabiana’s mind. The investigators grew quiet at my approach. At first I didn’t know what I was looking at as I followed the beams of light to something charred by powerful flames. It was mingled with soggy paper and wood that had fallen from the rooftop of the hanger.
Then I saw the shape of a bracelet and its Celtic design and the protruding femur that looked like a thick burned stick. My heart was beating out of my chest as the shape became the burned ruins of a female body attached to a blackened head. No features. Only patches of long black sooty hair.
“Let me see the necklace! I know there was a necklace,” I said, staring wildly at the local police officers. One of them held up a locket shaped like a misshapen Roman coin of Caesar.
“No, no, no, no, no…” I muttered over and over as I knelt in the water and mud. “Please, no… Fabiana.”
I covered my face with my shaking hands. My mind shorted out. My vision failed as I swayed. Then a hand was steadying me. Bile crept up my throat.
“Come on, Tim,” Kenny’s gentle voice said as he lifted me to my feet.
“It can’t be her…” I barely was able to say. “After all she’s been through… she can’t just die in a fire. Oh God, please don’t let it be. Please, please, please…”
I couldn’t seem to keep my balance, and it took two of the locals and Kenny to get me out as I did what I could to gather the fragments that were left of me. I spoke to no one when I was returned to my truck.
Emergency lights flashed in our faces. The night and the people in it seemed disconnected and strange. Kenny drove me away in my truck as the Medical Examiner’s van pulled up. There would be X-rays, dental charts, maybe even DNA tests. Most likely, none of it would help confirm the identification. The process would probably take a while, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. I already knew. Fabiana was dead.
Chapter 63
2:00 a.m., May 8
As best as anyone can reconstruct the events at that time, Fabiana was captured before she could destroy the tree. Or maybe she was lured to the hanger somehow, seduced by demonic forces. Whatever brought her to that hanger, once there, she was never to leave again. We believe she was been chained up at some point, and the continuing search also turned up links of chain—most likely they had been used to restrain her. It seemed to me that, in an attempt to destroy the tree and free herself from her captors, Fabiana incinerated the hanger with her and a few others inside. The point of origin of the fire seemed to be where her body had been found.
Several hours later, Kenny and I arrived back in Seattle. Kenny had left his car behind to drive me home, only telling me not to worry about it, that he could get a squad car to take him back later and get his car. It was the worst car trip I could remember, with me staring blankly out the passenger window of my truck and saying nothing. An oppressive depression in the cold night air. It did not seem true somehow. And whenever truth struck again, it was with the blow of a powerful hammer into my chest. Images of Fabiana were vivid. I did not know if it was grace or a more profound sin that I had not been with her in the end, and it felt as if I was the one that sent her to her death.
In a way, I wasn’t sure I could bear the fresh memories of her in my life. Her breath, the way she felt in my arms. Then I wanted to hold her and kiss her just one last time. My mind tumbled down different hills into dark spaces where thoughts became caught on the realities of dealing with what was left of me now.
“I’m going to stop all this,” I finally told Kenny. “I can’t deal with her loss and find the vampires too. They just win.”
“Bullshit,” Kenny answered. His eyes were on mine as I sat next to him. “That’s just what they want you to do. Quit the fight. Be a human loser. A fuckup.”
“I am a loser and a fuckup.”
“Bull fuckin’ shit you are,” he said with conviction.
“She died because of me, Kenny,” I went on in an emotionally drained monotone.
“They killed her. They killed her because they wanted to and we can sit here and have a pity party or we can go after those f
uckheads.”
But I could not be consoled. Indirectly, I had exposed all of us to them a long time ago and they could come after any one of us, even Merric. And that I could never let happen.
Poor Fabiana. I lost her. I lost the woman that I loved and that was a tragedy I was not prepared to deal with. I knew I could never move on.
Epilogue
Several weeks later
The lights of Seattle cast murky shadows along the horizon, turning it a grayish hue as Tim Anderson sits on a long, soft sofa in an office in the Westlake area of the city. Once again Tim Anderson has spun his tale, this time to a young Dr. Abel Hayes, PhD. Dr. Abel Hayes is a down-to-earth person, and though he may not believe all of what Tim has revealed to him during their time together, he knows it is what Tim believes to be true. That will have to do.
“Your story is one of sadness and an unknown fate. It seems to me, Anderson, that in times such as these, I like to remember the words of the great Roman ruler, Marcus Aurelius. ‘Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.’ You really, truly did love her. Didn’t you?”
Tim doesn’t answer. He just averts his eyes to examine the rain-streaked glass window next to the small wooden table piled high with volumes of textbooks.
“Are you certain that the body was Fabiana’s?”
“Yes, Doctor, I’m afraid so. Bone markers and particulates found in one of the joints prove that the recovered victim was from the ancient Roman Empire. I can’t deny the evidence. It’s her.”
“What will you do now?” Dr. Hayes asks gently.
“Nothing,” he answers.
Tim stops talking for a moment and looks around the small, cramped office. The shades are drawn and Tim would very much like to see some sunlight right now. But there is no sunlight to be seen. It seems as if spring is on some kind of extended strike. There is a cloud of emptiness hovering over Tim right now. The loss of her weighs on him still and will forever, it seems.
“She really did love me, you know…” Tim says with a meager shrug. “I was able to see that for at least a moment.”
The Blood Born Tales (Book 2): Blood Dream Page 29
