by A. P. Wayne
Thirty-three
Jordan pulled up in front of Walker’s half-expecting to see Melanie’s car already there. She still didn’t know exactly how to feel if that happened. She knew how she would react. Probably with blind rage. Her reaction to a lot of things lately. But, as quick to anger as she sometimes was, she still considered herself to be a mostly rational person. Sometimes it just took her a bit of time and distance to figure things out.
It didn’t look like Melanie was there. She got out of the car and walked toward the front door. She figured Walker would be there. If her supposition was correct and he and Melanie were together yesterday, it would have to have been while she was at work. Probably right before she got off if Walker still hadn’t made it home by the time she got there. That would have given him plenty of time to get back. Even if he and Melanie hadn’t been together and he’d just gone off somewhere to sulk, then he would definitely be there.
She knocked and went into the house. Called for him. Still nothing.
Wandering around the house, Jordan didn’t see any signs of him being there at all. The book he’d been reading still rested open, pages down on the coffee table. The air felt stale. Like he hadn’t been there to take a shower or open the door to come and go or anything.
If he was still avoiding her, she thought it had to be more out of guilt than anger.
Of course, she thought, no one but her knew the things she thought she knew. As for Walker and Melanie, it was entirely possible that both of them thought she was completely ignorant about everything.
She pulled out her phone to call Melanie. She still wasn’t sure if she should ask her anything about Walker so she figured she would just try and rope Melanie into doing something to make sure she and Walker were not somewhere together.
“Hello?” It was a man’s voice and for a heart stopping moment Jordan thought it was Walker. She couldn’t force any words out.
“Hello? Speak.”
Speak? She almost laughed for thinking it could be Walker. He was way too polite to talk like that on the phone.
“Um, hi, I might have the wrong number.”
“Who is this?”
“Jordan.”
“Hi, Jordan, this is Hunter. Were you trying to reach ...?”
“Melanie.”
“Hm.”
An awkward amount of time passed. She heard him say, “Melanie?” like he was terminally confused, before she heard Melanie’s voice.
“Jordan?”
“Yeah. Who was that?”
“Hunter.”
“Hunter?”
“Yep.”
“Who’s Hunter?”
“Some guy I’m giving a ride.”
“You picked up a hitchhiker?”
“Well, I thought he looked familiar, like one of my dad’s friends and by the time I stopped and realized I didn’t know him I was afraid I’d gotten his hopes up and didn’t want to just leave him stranded.”
“Okay. Hey, did you want to do something today?”
“Sure. Like what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe help me look for Walker.”
“I thought you were about done with that guy.”
“He’s still not home. I’m kind of worried. Help me look for him and, when he turns up, I promise I’ll talk to him. Okay?”
“Okay. I’ll be there in about a half an hour. Did you wanna talk to Hunter again?”
“What? No!”
Melanie laughed and hung up.
Jordan lay down on the couch and wished she had something to drink.
Thirty-four
Ilya knew the man sitting next to her had already forgotten her name. At first, she was slightly offended by this, but when he’d decided to take it upon himself to answer the phone when Jordan called, she was glad. Sometimes, especially if the host person was remarkably similar to whom Ilya had originally been, it was difficult to remember that, to everyone else, she was that person. Not Ilya.
This was her second encounter with Hunter Jenkins. Both of them were something like planned accidents. She had a way of influencing things but she couldn’t directly make anyone do anything unless it was through brute force. She didn’t know about Hunter. She knew he’d written a book called Vampires Drink Blood about a town called Lawrence that was remarkably similar to this Lawrence. It was a work of fiction and not many people had read it. But it had the potential to be really dangerous. As many of her kind were spread across the globe, there were even more people who would like to see her kind destroyed. Many of them used to operate through churches but most churches were beginning to see any study of the occult—even if the overall outcome was intended to be “good”—as evil. So most of the people who would like to see the Fangs pushed back into their own world or destroyed altogether operated on their own or in very small societies. Those were the people she was afraid of seeing the book. They knew what to look out for. They had destroyed many of her kind, a lot of them more powerful than she was. All they would have to do is some minor research into this Jenkins guy’s background, find out where he had come from, study some history, and the somewhat blatant patterns spelled out there, and they would be here.
Luckily, Jenkins was lazy and wasn’t easily researchable. The biography in the back of the book was mostly a lie and his publisher seemed to be mostly unresponsive to contact.
She couldn’t figure out if Jenkins had intended to write such an exposé or if he was some kind of idiot savant. He seemed to be guided only by rage and his dick. Even now he sat in the passenger seat staring at her crotch and rubbing his thighs. Surely he didn’t think she couldn’t see him.
So she was torn. She didn’t want to let him live, but if he mysteriously disappeared, that might stimulate more questions about him. Okay, maybe not more questions, since there hadn’t really been any inquiries that she knew.
Her immediate plan was to keep him close. He seemed kind of cowardly so she thought his only weapon was probably a pen and paper.
Not that it would matter in a couple of days anyway.
Her only human obstacles were Walker and Jordan. Particularly, it seemed, Walker and Jordan together. Walker was one of them. He’d been born to be one of them. Unfortunately, that made him essential to bringing Neverly to Lawrence. Once that happened, they could begin building their society of Fangs and spreading out quicker than they ever had. However, as long as Jordan was alive, that wasn’t going to happen. It didn’t even matter that they were no longer in love like they had been the first time. It was now almost a more dangerous kind of love. Jordan was Walker’s protector. Whether she wanted to be or not, she wouldn’t let anything happen to Walker if she could help it. Luckily for Ilya, Jordan lived in the world where there was a whole array of things to distract her from what was, perhaps, her supreme purpose in life.
Now Ilya was meeting Jordan later. That gave her a small amount of time to think about what she could do to her.
Jenkins was another matter altogether. She’d tried to pull some of this information—about how much he actually knew about doing what he was doing—but he seemed mostly incoherent. If he truly didn’t know that his job was to document the happenings in Lawrence, that made him an almost bigger threat. Basically, she needed to keep him from being in the right places at the right times. Already, just since he’d returned, he’d witnessed Walker’s first transformation since his initiate period, as well as Walker turning who he thought was Melanie, and Ilya fully turning Walker into a very powerful Fang. God only knew what else he’d seen.
She pulled up his driveway and stopped in front of his house.
He looked dazed or maybe just stupid. He started to get out and she grabbed his hand, pulled him close to her, and kissed him deeply.
“I’d like to see you tonight,” she said.
“Uh, okay.”
“Meet me in front of Nilbog’s again?”
“Um ... I have to walk?”
“Would you rather I pick you up here?”
“Sure. I’d really like to take a shower.”
She paused and looked inward. Accessed the rough road map of Melanie that was left. Saturday. Sunday. Summer. A cabin on a lake in Tennessee. Of course, her parents were there. Had probably left sometime yesterday afternoon.
She smiled. “I can take you back to my place and you can grab a shower.”
“Wouldn’t your parents mind?”
“They’re out of town. But I’ve got some things I need to do so I might have to leave you there alone. Is that okay?”
“That’s fine. Can I run in here and grab some freshish clothes?”
“Sure. Actually, you can do some wash at my place too. Just don’t leave anything behind.”
“Thanks.” Jenkins got out of the car and headed toward the blackened shell of his house.
Poor sap. Ilya knew the best way to keep a man out of trouble was to give him a list of chores and the prospect of sex.
Thirty-five
Walker came to even more confused than he had been when he’d gone out. Melanie’s face hovering over him made it that much more confusing.
“Melanie?” His mouth felt really dry, coated in something gross. While he didn’t eat people food, he did drink water and, very occasionally, wine. Those were the only things he could keep down.
“We need to get you out of here.”
“Where is here? And why are you here?”
“It’s terrible, Walker. I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry for what? I’m the one who bit you. Maybe even used you. I’m the one who should be sorry.”
“No. I’ll explain later. Can you stand up?”
Walker stood up slowly, fearing the worst. He still felt bad but nothing like he’d felt before. This felt manageable. And now, with some vague promise of answers, he felt the need to get up. Melanie grabbed his hand and started pulling him in the direction she had been going. That was assuming she was the figure he’d been following. He didn’t really see any alternative.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“We need to find a way to get you back to Lawrence. You don’t want to be here after dark.”
“Where are we?”
“Neverly.”
“How ...?”
“I think I know.”
He was hoping she would tell him but she didn’t say anything. Maybe she wanted to get wherever it was she was going before she told him anything.
“Where are you taking me?”
“My house. Or a version of it, anyway.”
“I’m kind of freaked out.”
“Shh ... You’re going to want to save your energy.”
They continued through the woods and, gradually, Walker noticed other shapes in the distance. City shapes. Or small town shapes, anyway. It looked a lot like Lawrence but it could have been any other small town in America. Of course, from this distance, it seemed more ... slouching. He noticed other things, too. How Melanie’s hand felt cold against his. How, while he had broken a sweat in the heat of the day, she didn’t have a droplet of moisture anywhere on her. And how, while his breathing was deep and nearly ragged, he couldn’t hear anything coming from her.
Melanie was dead. She hadn’t even become a Fang. She was a victim. Trapped here. He wondered if it was his fault. He never would have bitten her if he thought that would happen.
They exited the woods and entered the cemetery. The tombstones leaned every which way, many of them cracked and broken. Piles of earth were in front of many of the stores, as though the corpses had either clawed their way out or been harvested by someone on the surface. The bad feeling Walker had had since the first time he’d come to was intensified. He felt it pressing on his chest. Melanie led him through the cemetery with her cold hand. He thought she lived close to Jordan, which meant they were relatively close to her house if this was a kind of mirror of Lawrence.
So far it seemed like it was but everything was either more intensified or more decimated.
The row houses at his end of the town were crumbling. All the windows had been shattered. It looked like some of them had been burned. The sidewalks were mostly nonexistent. The roads were broken and potholed, grass and shrubbery growing up between the asphalt.
Yet, despite the appearance of this other town, it was quiet and, if it hadn’t been for that feeling of dread deep in his viscera, Walker would have found it somewhat peaceful. No cars. No people. No planes. It reminded him of a documentary he’d seen that showed what would happen when the human race was wiped off the face of the earth and nature was able to run rampant.
He stopped. He felt the urge to take it all in.
“It’s kind of ... pretty,” he said.
Melanie tugged on him. “There’s no time.”
They veered out of town and onto a tree-lined suburban street. The trees looked blighted. Branches hung from them, too low to the ground. Massive cocoons possibly housing some kind of worm or parasite enshrouded much of them. Walker had never seen anything like it.
Then Melanie was leading him up a smashed driveway. The front yard featured a massive hole. Hanging from the front door was a dried out corpse, adorned in shredded and mildewed outdated clothing. Melanie pulled the door open and they went into the stinking house. Walker couldn’t specifically identify the stink. It was sort of like every bad smell in the world had convened to form some stench that was nearly palpable. If he hadn’t been living off blood for the past year, he might have gagged.
“And we’re ... safe here?”
“Safer,” Melanie said. “We’re not safe anywhere here. You might not be safe anywhere.”
Walker knew what this meant. He nearly predicted what she said before she actually said it.
“She’s come back.”
The terrible feeling Walker had had was nothing compared to this moment. He closed his eyes and lowered his head.
“And?” he said.
“You’re part of her now. She owns you.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure of the specifics. I ... there are some things I need to tell you. I can make it quick.”
Walker felt like he wanted to sit down but he didn’t want to sit anywhere here.
“I was the one leaving offerings for you but maybe you already knew that. I’m not sure why you were at the house but that was where we did most of the sacrifices—”
“We?”
“I had some help but that’s nothing to worry about. They were mostly sheep.”
“So was it human blood?”
She lowered her head, looked ashamed. “Every time except for the first time.”
“Jesus, Melanie.”
“Not so important now. The last thing I remember was going to that house because I had a feeling I’d forgotten to do something.”
“Do something?”
“Yeah, like clean-up or whatever, even though I’ve never worried about that before. And then I remember getting there and seeing you and then things started to get cloudy.”
“How so?”
“Because she had moved into me.”
“Moved into you?”
“Don’t act so surprised. You know what they’re capable of. So there’s a period where I remember some things but I had to fight for control of what I was saying and had absolutely no control over what I was doing.”
“So you don’t remember ...”
“No. That’s why I’m able to tell you this. I remember fucking. That person who took over my body made me do that even though she hated every second of it. I wanted you to turn me, but I didn’t want that. What I said about me and Jordan was true. We’ve been together for a while. I love ... loved her a lot. And that person who was inside me wanted you to bite her so you could drink her blood.”
“Thus completing the process.”
“I’m afraid she’s going to hurt Jordan, Walker.”
“Why would she want to do that?”
“Because you and Jordan are meant to be together. Maybe not necessarily as a couple bu
t definitely as a team. Jordan’s told me about your history. You’ve defeated this bitch before and you were together.”
Walker didn’t know what to say. He closed his eyes and put his hands over his face. He felt trapped. Hopeless. Now he would have to rally everything he had and go after the Fangs again. Only he felt like it was pointless. They already thought they’d killed her once before and now she was back. She’d already tricked him and now it sounded like she was going to go after Jordan. If Melanie loved Jordan and Jordan felt the same way about her, then Ilya had found the perfect Trojan horse. And he had to figure out a way to get out of Neverly.
Suddenly Melanie looked around the room, her eyes wide, and said, “She knows I’m here.”
“What? What does that mean?”
But even as he said that Melanie began ... breaking up in front of him. Separating into tendrils of blue mist and then gone. In her place was something that looked like a bag of meat on the floor. Or maybe it was a skinned, legless dog. It twitched and made a strange keening noise. Walker rushed to the front door and outside.
It was dark.
Thirty-six
While lying on the couch waiting for Melanie and thinking about things, Jordan had let her righteous anger build. She liked Melanie a lot. She’d decided to confront her first thing. If they had any hope of making this last, they had to be honest with each other. Jordan felt like she had been nothing but honest with Melanie and, if Melanie had been doing what Jordan thought she had been doing, then that meant she had been lied to continuously. It almost made her reconsider her feelings completely.
There was a gentle knock on the door.
Jordan crossed the room and opened the door, her blood pumping furiously.
Melanie stood in the doorway looking sweet and innocent.
“Come in,” Jordan said. “Sit down.”
Melanie crossed the room and sat down on the couch. Jordan stood in front of her and, half to combat the urge to kiss Melanie, she reached out and smacked her on the face as hard as she could.
“How could you?”
