Voracious - (Claire Point Vampire 5)

by V. K. Forrest

  “That’s because I’m a likeable guy,” he quipped. “So, what shall we do this afternoon? Make sandcastles? Rent bikes?”

  “We’re not going anywhere with you.” Dallas laughed, swinging their hands. “I’ve got stuff to do at the bar. Brunch is over.”

  “You like to ride bikes, Kenzie? How about ice cream? Nice and smooth and not a lot of chewing involved. Bet you like ice cream. Maybe bikes, then ice cream? Then we can do what needs to be done at the bar, as a team. Or your mother can just kick me out. After ice cream.”

  Kenzie trotted up beside her mother and looked up at her expectantly. Dallas stared at her daughter, obviously pleasantly surprised. “Have you got her under some kind of spell? She wants to ride bikes.” She shook her head. “This is crazy. She never opens up like this.”

  He leaned back so Dallas couldn’t see him and winked at Kenzie. “Guess it’s my charm.”

  Aedan returned to Peigi’s late in the afternoon. When he entered the cottage, he heard the familiar sound of automatic weapon fire. He walked into the den and found it full of teenage vampires. Brian and Katy’s Pete were both sitting on the floor in front of the TV with game controllers in their hands. Victor sat in a recliner, watching with obvious interest. Kaleigh, Katy, and Lia were all on the couch, cell phones in their hands.

  “Get him!” Victor shouted. “Yes!” He pumped his arm.

  Aedan hung in the doorway. Victor seemed to be adjusting pretty well to his rebirth; apparently Brian’s idea of bringing him here had been a good one.

  “ ‘Black Ops’?” Aedan asked, just wanting to make conversation with Victor.

  “No, ‘Modern Warfare 3.’ The newer one.” He watched the TV screen. “Grenade! Grenade! Pete, you gotta throw a grenade in those situations.”

  Aedan eyed the girls on the couch, an eyebrow raised. Lia giggled.

  “You still here?” he asked her.

  “I’m going back tomorrow. But just for exams. Then I can come home to Clare Point for the summer.”

  “Maybe for good,” Katy put in. “If we can find someone here willing to be her guardian until she’s twenty-one, she might be able to stay. She has one more year of high school, and then she could go to community college with me. Hey, you want to be her guardian?” she asked with sudden enthusiasm. “You know, anyone can do it. You just have to ask the General Council.”

  “I hear Mary Hall wouldn’t vote to make him guardian of a puppy,” Kaleigh quipped.

  Aedan ignored the wisewoman. “I would if I could.” He looked to Lia, whose face had brightened, then fallen. “But I’m just on hiatus. I’m scheduled to return to Paris in a few months.”

  “But that stuff’s not written in stone. Fin’s talking about going back on assignment so he doesn’t have to stay on the police force. He could go in your place, and you could take his job,” Katy suggested. “Then Lia could live here with you and Peigi.”

  “I think there are people here more qualified to be a guardian than I am.”

  “He wouldn’t be that much fun, anyway.” Katy looked at Lia. “We’ll find someone, don’t worry.”

  Aware he’d been dismissed, Aedan looked down at Kaleigh, who was speed-texting. “Peigi around?”

  “Kitchen.” Kaleigh looked up from her phone. “You missed taco night.”

  He frowned. “Do you have a home, little girl?”

  Kaleigh grinned. “Yup. Just don’t want to go there. I’m supposed to be cleaning my room. And Peigi’s tacos are way better than my mom’s. She’s probably still in the kitchen. She’s making cookies.”

  “School night,” Aedan warned as he headed for the kitchen. “I want everyone out of here before midnight.”

  “Bring us cookies!” Kaleigh shouted after him.

  He found Peigi in the kitchen, already in her plaid robe and slippers. She was seated at the kitchen table with paperwork spread all over it.

  She looked up when he walked in. “You have a good day?” she asked. “You didn’t say where you were going. I thought you’d be home sooner.”

  The kitchen smelled of fresh chocolate chip cookies. He walked to the stove and slid a warm cookie off a baking sheet. “Just hung out with a friend. Victor looks good. Seems clearheaded. Kind of happy.”

  She looked down at a paper in front of her. “Pretty amazing, isn’t it? Victor falls into line easy as pie, and my Brian has got to be a royal pain in my you-know-what.” She checked something off with a pen. “This morning he asked me if he and Victor could go to Afghanistan. Something about being mercenary soldiers. Is he out of his mind?”

  Aedan laughed and grabbed another cookie. “Hang in there. It’ll get better. You know it will,” he said, heading out of the kitchen. He thought he’d turn in early, surf the Internet for a while, and then go to sleep. “It always does.”

  “I hope you’re right, because the way things are going right now, he’s going to run me into an early grave.” Realizing what she’ d said, she chuckled, looking up. “Of course, that would solve all of our problems, wouldn’t it?”

  Not willing to justify that comment with an answer, Aedan left the kitchen. He ended up watching a movie via the Internet and turned off his light at eleven when he heard the three girls and Pete leaving.

  Aedan’s cell phone rang at 12:35.

  “Yeah?” he said groggily. He hadn’t even checked the caller ID, he’d been in such a deep sleep when the phone rang.

  “It’s Mark,” his cousin said, his tone grim. “I need you at the hospital.” He paused, sounding tired and discouraged. “He struck again, and I’m not sure this one is going to make it.”

  Chapter 9

  “Listen, I can’t get you in right now.” Mark rested his hand on Aedan’s shoulder and steered him away from the emergency room registration desk. The toothpick in his mouth bobbed up and down as he spoke. “They won’t even let me in yet.”

  Thinking of the injured girl behind those doors made Aedan feel small. Helpless. It pissed him off that Jay could make him feel this way. “She’s that bad?”

  They went around the corner so that they were near the doors that remained locked unless the receptionist at the desk, or someone inside, hit the buzzer to open them. Aedan could see the chairs in the waiting area. Some were occupied, but no one seemed to be paying any attention to him or Mark.

  “She’s that bad,” Mark said. “She’s been sedated. No vital organs hit, but she lost an incredible amount of blood. She was just given a transfusion. She’s apparently doing much better, but she’s not out of the woods yet.”

  “Where was she when she was attacked?”

  “First Street. In Rehoboth.”

  “Damn it,” Aedan murmured, hanging his head. He and Dallas and Kenzie had walked down First Street today on their way back to Brew. It had been such a pretty, sunny, warm day. How could something like this happen on such a gorgeous day? He had felt so happy all day. Was this some sort of punishment for his happiness? He looked up at Mark. “You get to speak to her?”

  “I don’t think she’ll be able to talk for a while. Her mouth is . . . pretty damaged.” The police detective was quiet for a moment, both of them lost in their thoughts. “I think you need to see her. He got creative with his signature. I think he wanted to be sure you knew he was around.”

  “You think this is about me?” Aedan was stunned by the idea.

  Mark plucked the toothpick from his mouth and tossed it in a nearby waste can. “I think it’s a possibility we have to consider, Aedan. Looks like he’s settled on Rehoboth Beach. Why else would he come here when he could have gone anywhere in the world?” He hesitated, seeming to want to choose his words wisely. “I’m not saying this is your fault, but I think he knew you’d returned home on hiatus. He knew you were here, and for whatever crazy-ass reason, he decided to make this place his hunting ground this time.”

  Aedan still couldn’t get his head wrapped around the idea. “How could he have known I was here?”

  “Who the hell knows?
But I think he’s making it into some kind of sick game.”

  “Because I’ve tracked him down twice and haven’t been able to catch him?” Aedan thought out loud. “Because he wants to taunt me?”

  “I don’t know, Aedan.” Mark clasped Aedan’s shoulder. “Some days I don’t feel like I know anything at all. Can you get in there?” He pointed toward the closed emergency room doors. “Just to have a look at her?”

  Aedan glanced at the waiting room. The receptionist could see the locked doors, but not him. Some people in the waiting room could see him, but, still, no one was paying any attention to the two men near the doors. They were too caught up in their own personal traumas, whatever they were. “Where is she?”

  “Curtain five. On the left. Just past the nurses’ station.”

  “Got it.”

  Mark peeked around the corner at the receptionist. It was the same woman who had been there the night Teesha had been brought in. Tonight she was wearing hot pink scrubs. He turned back to Aedan.

  Aedan was gone. In his place stood a woman somewhere in her early thirties, of average height, average weight, medium brown hair up in a twist with a pen stuck through it. She was wearing pale green scrubs and had a stethoscope around her neck. She would blend in anywhere in the hospital.

  “Damn it, Aedan,” Mark whispered under his breath. He looked away then back at him . . . her, again. “I hate it when you do that without warning me.”

  “Sorry,” Aedan said in a woman’s voice. “Where did he leave his signature?”

  “Left side.” He touched his abdomen.

  Aedan leaned to one side, to see around Mark. “Can you hit the door?” he asked the receptionist in the same female voice.

  The receptionist barely glanced up. She could never have identified the nurse she’d given access to the ER, if later asked. There was a loud buzz, and the automatic doors slowly swung open with a pneumatic hiss. Aedan strolled through them, walking with purpose, pretending he belonged there. Most times that was the trick—just look like you knew what you were doing and no human would question you.

  The doors closed behind Aedan, and he went down the hall. The ER was busy, but not hectic, not like on a Saturday night, or worse, a full moon. The doctors, nurses, and technicians he saw were all actively engaged in caring for patients; no one was standing around shooting the breeze or waiting for coffee. Their movements were orderly and organized. The hall and open area around the nurses’ station was alive with sounds: voices, the beep of monitors, the squeak of new sneakers, the moans of a patient in pain. A doctor and two nurses stood at the nurses’ station, talking quietly as they looked over a chart. An orderly pushed a young man with a bandaged ankle up the hall in a wheelchair toward radiology. To his right, from behind the curtain of one of the examining rooms, Aedan heard an elderly woman gently reassuring someone; her husband, he guessed.

  At exam room five, which was just a cubicle with a privacy curtain, Aedan stopped, checked to see if anyone was watching him, and quickly entered past the half-drawn curtain. He walked directly up to the IV machine on the patient’s left side and rested his hand on it as if making an adjustment. He glanced at the woman lying in the bed. Her entire face was covered with loose pads of damp gauze, many of which were stained with blood. Both eyes were shut, but one was so swollen that he doubted she could have opened it if she tried.

  “Ah, sweetheart,” he murmured. With a sigh, he lifted the sheet. She was wearing a hospital gown, but it was draped over her so that her left side could be covered with saline-saturated gauze and yet the gown would still provide some modesty. He pulled a blue disposable glove from a box on the shelf above her head and snapped it on; he didn’t want to risk compromising the wound in any way. He just needed to see it.

  The wound was raw, but the J was easily visible. It was not, however, the crude initial Jay had left on Madeleine, or the hasty mark made on Teesha. Jay had taken his time with this signature; it was a large cursive J with an embellishment of scrolls around it. Cut with a knife.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Aedan muttered, his hand instinctively going to the crucifix he knew was under his scrub top. He always wore it, no matter whom he morphed into. It helped ground him. Remind him of who and what he was.

  Aedan gently covered the girl, arranging her gown and sheet, and pulled off the glove, dropping it into the nearest trash can on his way out. He strolled directly to the exit doors that led to the ER waiting room and hit the button on the wall that would open them. Mark was seated in one of the chairs on the end, but when the doors opened and Aedan walked through, he popped up, his face anxious.

  “You get a look?” Mark whispered.

  “Let’s walk outside. I could use some air.”

  The police officer and the nurse in green scrubs walked past the reception desk, through the waiting room, and out into the well lit, covered entryway. Aedan moved to a shadowed area near a support pole, looked to be sure no one was watching, and morphed back into his own body. It made it easier for him to think.

  “Jeez, that was awful,” Aedan muttered, running his hand over his face.

  “I hear you, buddy.” Mark pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “Want one?”

  Aedan frowned. “I thought you quit. I thought that was the point of the toothpicks.”

  “I cut down.”

  “You know how bad those things are for you?”

  Mark lit up. “They’re going to kill me?”

  Aedan gave him a wry smile. Vampire humor.

  “Listen, while you were back there,” Mark said, exhaling a cumulus of smoke, “reception told me she’s being transferred to Christiana Hospital. They’re better equipped to handle this kind of trauma. They’re going to send a helicopter.”

  “When?”

  “Next few hours.”

  Aedan gazed into the darkness of the parking lot. “It could be days before you get a chance to interview her.”

  “I know.” Mark inhaled. Exhaled. “So what do you make of it? Jay’s artwork?”

  “I don’t know.” Aedan shook his head. “It reminds me of the tattoos young girls are getting.” He drew his hand down his ribcage. “You’ve probably noticed girls in their bathing suits on the boardwalk. The tattoos are getting bigger. More artistic.”

  “You think it means anything?”

  Aedan grimaced. “To me? No. To him? Maybe. Like you said, he’s a crazy killer. Who knows?”

  Mark fell silent, enjoying the cancer stick that couldn’t kill him. “Hey, I hear Victor was reborn. I couldn’t make it the other night to the cemetery. How’s he doing?”

  “Well, actually. He’s moved in with Peigi and Brian. He’s adjusting better than Brian, although Brian went with me to retrieve Victor’s body and the kid was decent company. He’s just got some things to work through, you know?”

  “We’ve all been there,” Mark agreed. He exhaled and watched the smoke dissipate into the evening air. “So listen, I don’t know when I’ll get to talk to her.” He tilted his head toward the ER. “I’ll let you know when I get the go-ahead.”

  “What’s her name?” Aedan asked, feeling guilty that he hadn’t asked before. It was just that it was so hard after all these years. So many victims. Once he knew their names, they were with him forever. “I didn’t even ask you her name.”

  “Maria Tolliver. She’s twenty-five. We have no idea what she was doing on Rehoboth Avenue. She’s from New Brunswick, New Jersey. Her parents are on their way now. They’ll meet her up at Christiana. How about if we talk in the morning?”

  “You want me to start checking hotels for guys staying alone?”

  “No. Let my guys do it. You’re on the case because you’ll be the one to take care of him when we catch him. High Council approved the kill fifty years ago.” He hesitated. “You want to meet me at the crime scene?”

  “I might,” Aedan agreed, “but you know nothing’s going to be there. Because there never is,” he finished quietly. He walked off into the
dark, thinking of pretty Maria Tolliver, who would probably live but would never be pretty again.

  “No, we’re not going to brunch at Victoria’s.” Dallas snatched two waffles from the toaster and dropped them onto a paper plate. “Waffles, plain, no syrup, no butter, that’s what you ordered.” She pushed the plate in front of Kenzie, seated at the round plastic table bought at a local hardware store.

  It was meant for a porch or patio, but it worked fine in the small apartment kitchen, and it was easy to clean. When they had left Rhode Island, they had left without much of anything, just clothing and a few personal items. No furniture, except for Kenzie’s bed. The apartment was nice, freshly painted, hardwood floors. Dallas just hadn’t had the time to furnish it. There was patio furniture in the living room, too. Purchased the same day, at the same hardware store. Big warehouse clearance.

  Kenzie pushed the waffles with a plastic fork. “I want to go to brunch,” she said in her gravelly voice.

  “It’s Monday.” Dallas poured herself a big mug of coffee from a French press. “Victoria’s doesn’t have their fancy brunch on Mondays. Just Sundays. And if you don’t eat your waffles quickly, you’re going to be munching on them in the car. It’s time for school.”

  Kenzie studied the waffles on the plate stubbornly. “Aedan likes brunch. He likes me.”

  Dallas added a big splash of half-and-half to her coffee. Cream, no sugar. “You’re certainly the Chatty Patty,” she remarked, a bit astonished. Kenzie could go days without speaking to anyone, including her. She rarely initiated conversations. Certainly not conversations like this. Like real conversations between a mother and her ten-year-old daughter. “Aedan does like you.”

  Kenzie put her hands in her lap, losing interest in the toaster waffles. “He wants to kiss you.”

  “Kenzie!” Dallas was surprised to feel her cheeks grow warm. What had gotten into this kid? Dallas was on the one hand delighted, on the other completely perplexed by her daughter’s communicative behavior.