Blood Games

by Lee Killough

  Raven tossed her head. “Yes! I’ll be set for life.”

  “Which’ll be very short,” a voice behind them said, “because I’ll fucking rip your head off!”

  Raven spun...and stared at the speaker...a thin woman with a mane of platinum hair, chain belt around her waist, lace-up bustier, leather miniskirt, and high heels.

  The hooker hissed, “No one trespasses on my territory!”

  Garreth backed away. “We’re just passing through.”

  Raven snickered. “You mean you think you can rough us up?” Remembering tossing Officer Benton across the room?

  Garreth braced to take action if necessary but made no attempt to intervene.

  The hooker’s mouth twisted. “Not rough you up, gump. Kill you...and that’s true death, fangette...forever and ever...no third coming.” Her eyes flared red.

  Raven started. “Hey...you--you’re...like me.”

  The street vampire bared her teeth. “I’m nothing at all like you!” She glanced at Garreth with disgust. “Is this thing your fault?”

  He sighed. “Sorry, yes.”

  Her lip curled. “Shit for brains obviously runs in the family. Well, if you want it, you’d better keep it away from here.” Shoving past them, she stalked away. No question that in Garreth’s place, she would have dropped Raven out that hospital window with a broken neck.

  Raven stared after her, ashen, then tossed her head. “Bitch. You’re just going to let her talk to you that way? Ice would kick her butt!”

  “Not for just name calling, I’m sure. You don’t survive two thousand years without learning to pick your fights. If you want to challenge her for the territory, though, go ahead. Or maybe you’re thinking of finding another block to stake out?”

  Raven’s expression went thoughtful. “Are there others like her along here?”

  Intelligence had finally kicked in. “A few...here and in the Tenderloin and South of Market.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You brought me up here hoping we’d meet one of them, didn’t you?”

  He could see how it looked that way. “No...but I’m not sorry we did. That’s what you’d face living on your own here...and that’s what you’d turn into.”

  She frowned. “Ice likes his blood on the hoof but he’s not like that.”

  “Until now you haven’t been in a position to compete with him.” Saying it brought Garreth another flash of his vision, Raven snarling up at Ice and Ice staring down with murder in his eyes. Was competition causing the confrontation? Not that the reason mattered, as long as it led him to Ice.

  His phone warbled.

  It was the video store owner. “I found that private detective’s card if you’re still interested.”

  Garreth dug in his blazer for his notebook. “I’m still interested.”

  “The name is Walter Daniels of the Bettencourt Detective Agency. They’re in Seattle.”

  Seattle? “What’s his number?” He scribbled as Singer dictated. “Thank you very much, sir. I really appreciate you taking the time to look for the card.” He disconnected and punched in the Seattle number. Somewhat to his surprise, a live voice answered, and offered to switch Garreth to Daniels’ voice mail. He told the voice, “I know it’s late but can you page him for me? This is important. It’s about a man named Cameron Dark he came to San Francisco for three years ago.”

  “I’ll try to reach him. What’s your number?”

  As he disconnected Raven said, “He never found Ice, did he?”

  It was immaterial since that trail was three years old. He was more interested in who hired the detective.

  Heading back to the car, Garreth crossed his fingers. Let the guy call back. Let him call.

  Almost at the foot of Broadway, the phone warbled. On the other end of the phone a baritone voice said, “What’s so important this time of day about a three-year-old case?”

  Garreth introduced himself. “Dark is a suspect in the murder of a police officer.”

  “I’m not surprised. He was a cold, creepy bastard. Only his name’s Blackburn, not Dark...Mitchell Craig Blackburn.”

  Yet another name. Garreth wrote it down. “So you traced him?”

  “Of course. I’m good at my job. I located him in Portland a few months later and dragged his slimy ass back to his family in Seattle. Never turning my back on him, let me tell you.”

  Family? Garreth stared at the phone. While wondering who wanted to find Ice, he never thought of family. The information hit with the jolt of an earthquake, shattering assumptions around him. Ice was human after all? Really the age he seemed?

  “What is it?” Raven demanded. “What’s he saying?”

  Garreth knew the information should relieve him, but somehow it did not. It felt...unreal. What about his visions? The eyes he saw in them. The fangs. What about the menace he felt from the bastard? “May I have the name and number of the person who hired you?”

  “Sure. It was his father, Harrison Blackburn.”

  Feeling numb, Garreth wrote.

  Raven danced in front of him. “What? What? Come on, damn it! Tell me what’s happening.”

  Disconnecting, Garreth shoved both phone and notebook into his pocket. “In the morning we’re going to Seattle.”

  She stared at him. “Seattle? Why?”

  He took a deep breath. “To learn the truth about your two millennium vampire.”

  Chapter Thirty

  “He isn’t Ice! No way!”

  Raven made that declaration how often through last night and their dawn flight north? Far too many times...though he understood her anger and anxiety. For the second time this week she had her sense of reality jerked from under her. Hell, he had, too, after buying into the evidence of Ice as that ancient vampire. Now if only Ice was Blackburn.

  Garreth settled deeper into the limousine’s seat, eyes closed, trying to relax and enjoy the rain, which combined with the limo’s dark windows, made daylight almost bearable. The limo was well worth the expense, he decided...more fun than a cab and certainly easier than fighting daylight in a rental car looking for the address.

  He missed the listless Raven of yesterday’s flight. For the umpteenth time, he told her, “We’ll see if it’s Ice when we talk to Alexandria Blackburn.”

  “Who says she’s Ice’s sister.” She made the statement an accusation of lying.

  “She’s Mitchell Blackburn’s sister. That’s all we know right now.”

  About the Blackbirds themselves he knew a little more after time on the internet. Seattle had a law firm with that name and the online Martindale-Hubble lawyer listings named both Harrison and Alexandria Blackburn as firm members. Everyone in the practice seemed related, from Harlan Littrell (practice suspended while he served on the state supreme court) to Catherine Blackburn nee Littrell, Harlan Blackburn, and five other Littrells and Effinghams.

  “Why is it again we’re talking to her?”

  Garreth did not have the energy to be impatient. “Because according to her father, she’s the family member closest to her brother.”

  Emotionally maybe. Her birth date in the Martindale-Hobble listing made her thirty-seven, fifteen years older than Mitchell.

  What Harrison Blackburn had actually said when Garreth called him last night was: “Don’t bother telling me why you want Mitchell. Short of receiving his head on a platter, I have no interest whatsoever in his whereabouts or activities, and in any case, I haven’t heard from him in nearly three years. My daughter Alexandria may have been in contact. She was always close to him, god knows why. She’s working at home for a few weeks. I’ll tell her you’re coming. In the morning, I presume?”

  What went on in this family, Garreth wondered as he disconnected. All the urbane courtesy in the voice did not hide the icy anger under it. Yet this was the man who hired a detective to find and bring home his son?

  A question Alexandria would hopefully answer.

  The face of the woman on the other side of the fire barrier at the open apar
tment door answered another question immediately. An angle here, a plane there, echoed the man grinning at him through the windshield. Even with her brown hair and brown eyes. Did Raven notice? It appeared so. The girl’s face tightened into a mask.

  “You’re the detective from Kansas?” Braced on crutches, a fuchsia cast encasing her left leg to the hip, Alexandria studied the ID he held up, then eyed Raven from blue hair to black duster and stiletto boots. “And this is...”

  “Tiffany Ballinger,” Garreth said. “She’s met my suspect and is assisting me in establishing whether he’s your brother.”

  She paled, almost to Ice’s color. Still she said, “Please come in. You can lean your umbrellas against the wall there.” Courteous...with fear in her eyes.

  Turning, she crutched ahead of them into book-lined study with a glass wall whose view of the city must be spectacular at night. Now it admitted entirely too much daylight for vampire comfort, even with the rain. Garreth drifted along the bookshelves with his computer case, keeping as far from the windows as possible. Interestingly, the books, all pushed to the back to make room for photographs, small sculptures, and art glass vases at the front of the shelves, seemed mostly fiction. One title raised the hair on his neck. Hotel Transylvania.

  Setting down the computer case, Garreth pulled out the book. The front flap of the dust jacket indicated the story involved a vampire in eighteenth century France. The reign of the Sun King. He pulled out the next book, one of six others on the shelf by the same author. According to this dust jacket, The Palace had the vampire running around fifteenth century Florence with the likes of Botticelli. It echoed what Raven said of Ice’s past.

  Alexandria sat down behind a desk, crutches leaning against the bookshelves behind her, and clasped her hands together on the desk. “What kind of trouble is...your suspect in?” She visibly braced herself. “It must be serious to bring you all the way from Kansas.”

  The next book had the vampire in the Far East with Genghis Khan.

  “I’m afraid it is serious.” Raven had slouched in a wingback chair with its back to the window. Garreth handed her the book. “The suspect killed a police officer.”

  “Oh my god.” The words emerged as less a sentence than the convulsive exhalation of someone socked in the stomach. Garreth thought she had been pale before. Now she went bone white. Her hands tightened convulsively. Her eyes closed. “Oh my god.” Almost whispering.

  Thumbing through the book, Raven was going paler, too. She slapped it shut.

  At the sound Alexandria opened her eyes. “What--” Her voice came out strangled. She licked her lips and tried again. “What makes you suspect Mitch?”

  Movement of Raven’s hand suggested she wanted to throw the book. Instead, after a moment she stood and returned it to the shelf.

  Garreth pulled the police sketch of Ice out of his computer case and laid it on the desk. “This is the man who killed our officer. Subsequently, fingerprints at the scene of an assault our suspect perpetrated in Lincoln, showing tented arches similar to those in the vehicle connected to the death of our officer, were identified as belonging to this man.” Beside the sketch he laid his mug shot of Cameron Dark.

  If Alexandria had any more color to lose, Garreth thought she would have. She sat frozen, staring at the sketch and mug shot.

  From the corner of his eye, he watched Raven staring, too...at the other titles by that author. Slowly, but with increasing agitation, she read the dust jacket of each.

  He said, “We know our suspect and Cameron Dark are the same person. We know your father’s detective found a Cameron Dark in Portland and brought him here. We just need something definitive establishing that Cameron Dark is your brother. Do you have a photograph of Mitch?”

  She pointed wordlessly toward several on one of the bookshelves.

  The moment he picked them up, Garreth knew with grim, smoldering certainty that he stared at Maggie’s killer. The eyes told everything. If Garreth saw nothing else of the face, he would still have recognized Ice. In both photos, one with him in a cap and gown, the other showing him and an older man beside a Formula I race car, Mitchell smiled, but the pale blue eyes did not. They glinted cold and empty, as if the gene that failed to give him color had also left him without some vital spark of humanity. Or, Garreth reflected, thinking of windows to the soul and old souls, Mitchell had lost the lottery the day they drew for souls in Heaven.

  “Who’s this?” Garreth asked, holding out the photo with the race car.

  “Our uncle Sheldon.” Her voice regained a more normal tone. “Outside of court, he’s an amateur race driver.”

  “Did he teach your brother to drive?” He handed the photos on to Raven.

  “To a point.” Alexandria’s voice smoothed to one she probably used in a courtroom, masking whatever emotions lay beneath. Her hands unclasped for a finger to trace the lines on the police sketch. “Then Mitch talked Dad into sending him to a professional driving course. He always had to be the best at whatever he set out to do.”

  After staring hard at the photos, Raven carefully laid them on the desk. “May I go to the car?”

  No need to ask her if she recognized the Mitch, not with her face so tight it looked ready to shatter and her body rigid with the effort of containing her own emotions.

  “In a few minutes.”

  She perched on the edge of the nearest chair and stared down at hands clenched white-knuckled in her lap.

  Garreth felt the knots in himself unclenching, however. So much for Ice’s terrible power and her worship of him.

  Alexandria slid the photos over beside the sketch and mug shot. “It was defense against harassment by the other children. He looked different yes, but they had to respect him. He made himself an honor student, basketball star, president of the chess and fencing clubs.” Her finger kept tracing the drawing. “His senior year he told me he’d made himself the man who could get anything...except test answers--he considered that too much risk to his academic standing--but...candy in grade school and cigarettes and liquor in prep school, yes. Even setting up dates for classmates with girls guaranteed to put out.” She drew a breath. “I should have taught him to make friends. For all the people hanging around him, none were ever friends, I think, just sycophants. He didn’t care, though, as long as they were there.” The brown eyes looked up, wounded, into Garreth’s. “Your dead officer is probably my fault.”

  She had lost him. “Excuse me?”

  “Because I raised him.”

  Definitely lost him. “I don’t understand.”

  She slumped back in her chair. “My mother’s pregnancy with Mitch came as a shock. She thought she’d had her family. She deliberately spent most of law school in maternity clothes having my brother Harlan and me so pregnancy wouldn’t stall her career later.”

  Garreth recalled Judith at Grandma Doyle’s funeral, radiant over her own mid-life surprise. Not Alexandria’s mother’s reaction, it appeared.

  “I thought it was wonderful! I was fifteen and in love with the idea of babies. And he was so adorable, all pastels...that pale skin and hair and pale blue eyes! Like a Lladro figurine. He had a nanny but I snatched him away from her every chance I had so I could play with him. I went to college and law school right here in Seattle so I could come home every night and be near him. I thought of him as my baby.” Tears welled in her eyes. “I don’t know when it went wrong. Maybe when I dressed him up as Dracula for Halloween when he was six. He always wanted to do Dracula after that. He became obsessed with vampires and werewolves. Those are his books you were looking at. I took them to keep Dad from throwing them away.” She stared blindly past Garreth. “Or maybe it was just growing up in our family. We’re lawyers, born and bred to it for generations...all the way from Daniel Emmett Effingham, who founded the firm in the fall of 1889, a few months after the Great Seattle Fire. The only one of us who doesn’t live and breathe law is Shel. Dinner at home is never just a meal. As long as I can remember it’s always b
een a debating society or moot court session. Maybe Mitch grew up thinking that’s what life is, playing power games, getting one up on everyone around you.”

  That sounded like Ice. “How did your father happen to be having a detective hunting him?’

  Alexandria sighed. “The year before Mitch had declared he hated college and wanted to drop out. I think what he hated was being a lowly freshman and a small frog in a large pond. Dad wouldn’t hear of it, of course, so Mitch took off. I got a postcard from him a few months later saying he’d been in LA but left because there were too many freaks. Another pond too big for him, I guess. We should have just let him go his way. Maybe he would have eventually come home on his own. But at the time I was frantic with worry and Dad hates people crossing him, so...the detective.” Her eyes turned haunted. “I wish to god he’d never found Mitch.”

  Cold ran through Garreth. “Why?”

  “Because he’d...changed.”

  The chill deepened. “Changed how?”

  “Dad’s a very intimidating person but...Mitch wasn’t intimidated anymore. He had this... smugness about him, as if he knew something that put him one up on the rest of us for all time. He sat there at dinner that night talking about how he didn’t mind leaving Portland because he’d gotten all he could out of being there, and when Dad asked him what that meant he just smirked and said he’d gained what might be called a new lease on life.”

  Raven lifted her eyes and stared at Alexandria.

  Garreth’s stomach sank. Had Mitch, obsessed with vampires, met one in Portland and managed to be brought across? Was he a vampire after all? “Do you remember if Mitch ate anything at dinner?”

  Alexandria blinked. “What? No, he didn’t. I remember Mother making some remark about it and him answering that none of this was on his new dietary plan.”

  Garreth swore silently.

  “Next morning he’d disappeared again. We haven’t heard from him since.”

  “Nothing?” Garreth frowned.