Tangled Blood Lines

by Deborah Noel

  I was lucky that Declan’s love was strong enough to withstand the pain I caused him and that he was dedicated enough stand beside me and wait out my stupidity.

  Matilda Anne was born when I was 25. You wouldn’t have found prouder, more elated parents.

  I included Declan on everything; even every doctor’s appointment. Simply everything. I begrudged him nothing. It was my choice to move away. He spent some time with us at the new house when Mattie was brought home. He talked to her every day. He visited whenever he wanted. No courts, no fighting, no pawn. I hadn’t wanted to hurt my child by keeping her away from her father. The only stipulation was that he took a different route to the new house and made sure he wasn’t being followed. He and I split up, not he and she.

  But that was water under the bridge.

  Things since our reunion had been picture perfect, minus a few quirks with vampires and werewolves, but who sweats the little stuff?

  We were always happy. Until this moment: The kidnapping and disappearance of our 4 year-old daughter.

  Anger began to build inside of me. And that anger got me thinking.

  And pacing.

  I don’t have enemies. Hell, I barely have friends. I only have one close friend – Declan. I consider the rest as “associates” or social friends. Basically I’m what most call a “loner.” It’s not that I’m anti-social, it’s just I’m uncomfortable being intimate with strangers. It’s about trust. It’s hard from me to trust. Forget that, I just don’t trust. There were some people that I considered “friends” who stabbed me in the back too many times. Sometimes the betrayal was obvious, but those other times – that’s where my skill as a detective blossomed! I scrutinized the details. Man, those betrayals stung. Yeah, that is the reason for my underlying lack of trust in the human race. That’s why I keep my distance. Whatever. I made peace with my inability to trust and my loner status years ago. Honestly, though, I do sometimes envy “girl-time”, but these feelings inevitably pass. Of course, telepathy doesn’t help foster trust.

  Come to think of it, there are several different meanings of telepathic, depending on which dictionary you use. One is “communication between minds by some means other than sensory perception,” usually referred to as mental telepathy. Another says that telepathy is “communication through means other than the senses, as by the exercise of an occult power” (I think the phrase, “by the exercise of an occult power” is way off base here, but hey who am I?) Yet another says telepathy is “knowledge conveyed from one individual to another without means of the five senses; mind reading.” Telepathy as I lived and breathed it every day was my ability to communicate in a non-audible way with my husband, my daughter and my uncle. I can hear their voice in my head and they can hear mine in theirs. I used to be able to do the same with my sisters, mother and grandmother. Gosh, that was eons ago. Declan hated it when I “put up my wall” or “closed the door,” when I blocked him out, when he couldn’t even say anything in my head.

  I don’t see myself as beautiful but rather tolerably cute. I am well aware of my flaws, while still being able to live comfortably in my own skin. I certainly don’t belittle myself about them. Declan completely disagrees whole-heartedly and thinks I have esteem issues, but I consider myself to be realistically honest about how I see myself without being detrimental.

  I have never harmed anyone. I have always been polite, well-mannered and said my “please” and “thank yous.” Why would someone want to hurt me this way? I would have rather had them pull my beating heart from my chest than take my daughter from her family.

  Funny, isn’t it, how one can do a full self-reflection in a time of such chaos?. Chaos. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

  Somehow I remembered Bullet. I needed air to clear my brain, and refocus. I decided to take my dog for a walk. Automatically I stopped to leave Declan a note on the table, which read that I had gone for a walk.

  I headed out the door. I started down the corridor toward the back of the waterfall. Abruptly I stopped and turned 180-degrees. I decided to see what was hidden deeper in the mountain.

  The passage way twisted and turned the deeper I went. Although it was dark, there were small amounts of light jetting out from behind this hidden nook or that opening, which kept the whole place from being pitch black. I could only attribute that to the skylight-type openings throughout the mountainside like we had in our space. It didn’t matter anyway; my swollen eyes had adjusted to the dim light.

  I came up upon one opening that seemed to mirror ours. There was ample light, enough to investigate. It was like ours. In one of the back rooms, I noticed a change in the height of the flooring. I carefully made my way over and found what looked to be a set of stairs going down. I started to descend, but the light vanished quickly and I could no longer see in front of me. I would have to come back to investigate further. I made my way back up the steps and back through to the bigger space, which was like our living room.

  As I stood there deciding what I should do next, the weirdest thing happened to me.

  A movie started playing in my head, with this place as center stage. It was set up like an office. The space I was standing in appeared to be a reception-type area. The rooms to the left that I had just come from were individual offices. I could see people sitting in them having conversations, but the faces were blurred. The stairs leading down below were lit up and usable. Like a ghost I was traveling down to see the space below. It was set up like a laboratory. Off to the right were smaller rooms enclosed by silver bars.

  And then, abruptly, the movie disappeared from my mind. I was startled. I was cold and clammy with sweat soaking my shirt. I almost fell short of breath.

  I immediately headed back down the corridor toward the back of the waterfall. I hadn’t noticed that my pace had quickened until I turned the final corner and ran right into Declan. He wrapped his arms around me to stop me from falling onto my ass.

  With all of my woes and what I just experienced in the forefront of my mind, I simply began spilling my guts to Declan. All of my worries, troubles, fears, doubts, anger and thoughts came rolling off my tongue.

  Trying to keep up with all I was unloading on him, he guided me into our space. He led me to the table and gestured for me to sit, never once interrupting me. He made us a cup of tea and joined me at the table, listening to every word I was spewing. He understood my need for self-reflection, nodding in agreement.

  When I finished telling him about the other space down the corridor, he looked as if a light bulb went off in his head.

  He questioned me, “Is the portion below as you described it to me?”

  “I don’t know. It was too dark for me to get all the way down there.”

  I knew the look on his face.

  “What is it, Declan?”

  He smiled and winked.

  “First things first, the authorities have issued an Amber Alert for Mattie.”

  I felt a twinge.

  “Sam is re-interviewing the teachers who were out at recess and walking door-to-door to the homes adjacent to the school asking questions. Shane is having a hard time with the trackers at Branwen’s flat. He has them in a dark room. They haven’t gone into their day sleep and are refusing to talk. He wants to get them out of Brae’s before nightfall but we had nowhere to keep them – until now. Take me to the place.”

  Declan grabbed a flashlight and followed me down the corridor. Bullet matched our stride.

  Declan turned the flashlight on when we got to the stairs leading down. I counted 13 of them before we got to the bottom. It was much cooler down there. Off to the one side there were a dozen little nooks approximately 6 feet wide by maybe 6 feet deep. They reminded me of individual holding cells at the old police station. Of course, they lacked the bars, but that could be remedied.

  “Exactly,” Declan chimed in my head.

  He grabbed my hand and we began to take the steps two at a time back up.

  When we were back upstairs, he tur
ned to me. “You must have had a premonition about this place. There is much work that needs to be done before nightfall. I do want to hear more details of what you saw this place as later.”

  I agreed.

  We went right past our doorway and out behind the waterfall. Declan grabbed the canoe and we were across the lake in no time. When we got back to the Jeep, Declan was on the phone with Shane. He had already had a conversation with Sam. Everyone was meeting at our house in 20 minutes. I was surprised to learn that it was only just after noon. It had been the longest morning in my life.

  I described in detail what I saw in what Declan called my premonition as we made our way home.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Unbeknownst to me, Sam and Declan had started to accumulate pure silver poles in large quantities that they were going to use to around the house to keep the vampire that scented me away, as legend had it that silver rendered vampires weak. (I didn’t really want to know where they had gotten the poles from.) And though another legend had it that vampires had to be invited into your home to enter, they just weren’t one hundred percent confident that that was the case.

  None of us were sure what was true or not about vampires, so they wanted to be prepared for the worst case scenario. Since the two times that I had encountered a vampire, before today, it had been around dusk, the myth that vampires only came out after dark seemed to be a farce. I had also come to the conclusion, after watching one fight with wolves in my backyard in plain daylight this morning, that vampires don’t show their faces during daytime hours was a false claim.

  Like two army ants, Sam and Declan, decked out in work gloves and street clothes, set their course of readying the holding cells for the vampire trackers that Shane had held up at his girlfriend’s place. They gathered the silver poles and all the tools they would need. They also packed Sam’s pick-up truck with a few desks and a few more chairs.

  Declan handed me a list of things he wanted me to go to Sam’s Club to get and bring out to the Castle. The list included two new laptops and two desktop computers, as well as basic office supplies. For some reason, I mentally added a two-drawer filing cabinet to the end of the list.

  We parted ways.

  It took me about an hour to get everything that was on my list and get over to the Castle. As instructed, I called to Declan through our minds when I arrived.

  The back of Sam’s pick-up was empty.

  Moments later Sam and Declan appeared on the path coming through the woods to where we always parked. They were sweaty and smeared with dirt.

  With each of us carrying some of the supplies, we were able to get all of them to the canoe in one trip. In a few quick strokes, we were across the lake and on our way down the corridor.

  I was shocked at the progress they had made in a short amount of time.

  Three of the cubbies now looked like jail cells. The inside walls were lined with silver bars, and silver bars were made into a door that, when closed, looked just like an authentic jail cell. These were now holding cells for vampires.

  String lights were strung across the ceiling. A generator was humming in the furthest nook with a regular looking door shut across the opening to keep the noise of the generator to a minimum.

  The desk was set up close to the stairs. Two chairs on the opposite side of the desk. It took me a second to realize what looked “off” about the scene. The chairs were made of silver bars. There was a throw pillow from Mattie’s bed as a cushion. I chuckled. I knew instantly what Declan had in mind. He was going to interview the vampires using the chairs of silver to keep them in place. Silver shackles were attached to the bottom of the chairs.

  Behind the desk, Sam or Declan had carved out shelving in the rock wall. Next to the shelves hung a cork board. It stretched from the floor to the ceiling. I don’t know where that had come from. On one of the shelves lay a pile of real silver handcuffs.

  Sam quickly set up the desktop PC, running all the wires across the ceiling with the string lighting back to the generator.

  On the wall that ran parallel with the stairs I noticed an archway. I couldn’t help myself. I went through. The room was colder than the one I just came from, although I hadn’t traveled far. In the walls were two dozen small tunnels maybe eight-foot deep each, stacked on top of each other. The room was not a new find, silver-barred doors hung open next to a dozen of the little tunnels. It reminded me of the iceboxes used in the morgue for corpses. I shivered and left the room.

  Declan was upstairs drilling through the rock floor to access the generator for wires for whatever he had planned for this space.

  “Shane and Branwen are bringing the vampire trackers here. We are going to hold them in the cells downstairs while we question them,” he began to explain to me.

  “What kind of questions are you going to ask?”

  “Depends on how cooperative they are. I want to know everything about their world. Who and why they were sent to track. And whatever other tidbits they are willing to share.”

  “Are you going to torture them?”

  He looked at me. He thought carefully without letting a thought escape to my mind.

  “I don’t know.”

  His cell phone rang. “It’s Shane, they are here.”

  Declan hollered down to Sam and in an instant they were gone.

  In one of the offices, I set up a computer. Having the little wireless modems that plug into the USB ports of the computer, I hopped onto the Internet.

  I googled “vampire facts” and quickly learned that I’d have to sit at a computer for years to go through it all and there’s really no way of knowing who was telling the truth. It was then I determined to get the facts – straight from the vampire’s mouth.

  Declan and Sam walked up to me, each with a body draped over their shoulders, wrapped in a big thick blanket that was duct taped closed (more like a mummy wrapped). I couldn’t help but chuckle. It looked so funny.

  They both stopped for a second, “Please welcome our guests,” Declan said.

  “Welcome to your new accommodations,” I said dryly.

  Brae and Shane followed them in. We all went downstairs. Not that I wanted to make our first guests comfortable, but I couldn’t help myself putting a chair in each cell.

  The bundles were taken into separate cells and the duct tape was removed. The blankets were taken off and left on the floor. The vampires stood exposed wearing ripped clothes (that I assumed happened during the confrontation with Shane) and silver handcuffs and shackles. They greeted us with hisses. The silver-barred doors were closed and locked with silver padlocks.

  The vampires each eyed their new surroundings. They came as close as they could to the barred door and hissed at us all. Sam decided that we should go upstairs and give them time to adjust.

  Upstairs we gathered around a desk in one of the rooms. Shane recanted the encounter with the vampires after he dropped the girls off at school.

  He watched the girls go in the front doors. He walked down the street to his car. He noticed his tires were flat and three men were leaning against his car. One charged him. He fought the first off. The second one started towards him as the first ran off. He tried to watch him to see where he was going, but he took a hard sucker punch to the eye. The third hollered after the first, reminding that their orders were to gather information, no killing was allowed this visit.

  Shane gathered his strength and fought the second tracker. The first came back around and shared his findings with the third. Shane heard Mattie’s name as well as mine and Declan’s. The beating he took from his competitor was brutal. At one point he was knocked to the asphalt and thought quickly to stay there. The beast, thinking Shane was out cold, joined the others discussing their options.

  He overheard them saying street names that were close to our house. He knew that they would be able to find the house with some effort. And because he wasn’t sure if one of them was the one who scented me, Shane knew he had to do something to distract
them.

  He moaned to get their attention.

  The third one commanded the first to search the streets. The second was told to bring Shane to the car. He was put into the back seat.

  The trackers stood against the car, doors opened, waiting for the return of the first. That was when Shane out-smarted the vampires. He had two silver chains that he had bought for himself and for Brae’s arrival. He was able to wrap a chain around each of the vampire’s wrists much like the plastic zip-strips handcuffs that the police use sometimes. He didn’t go into details as to how he accomplished that.

  He called Brae, who brought more silver chains and they were able to get the vamps into Brae’s first floor flat. It was there on the scanner that Shane heard about the missing child at the school.

  Mattie. My heart ached for her.

  It was my turn to tell the tale of the fight I had witnessed between the vampire and the wolves in our back yard.

  My audience was captivated by the story. I conveyed every detail.

  “Sam,” I looked at him and went all business-like on him, “I am convinced that a vampire was responsible for all the murders that I investigated. I’m almost positive it was the same one that committed them all, though he might have had company. I’m going to bet that the vampire responsible was killed in the fire pit at the Chambers/Fitzgerald murder scene, which would explain the end of the rampage. I just haven’t figured out why the vampire chose those victims and who killed the vampire.”

  I could see the wheels churning in Sam’s brain. Pressing his lips together in thought, he nodded in agreement to me, “Makes sense.”