He didn’t take offense at the comment. “Fine. Be careful.”
“Sure,” she said.
Simon was already marching across the parking lot, headed around a corner toward a pile of twisted and spray-painted shopping carts. She walked past the front of the abandoned grocery store, its plate-glass windows smeared with paint so no one could see inside. Just past the padlocked doors she saw the one store that was still open in the forgotten mall, though it looked only marginally more lively than the ghosts around it.
CUATROS VIENTOS, the sign over the door said. The front windows were covered in brown kraft paper, on which someone had scrawled various advertisements in Spanish: ¡Artículos religiosos! ¡Consejos Espirituales! ¡Maldiciones Eliminado!
Simon pulled open the door and a little bell rang. Clara followed him in to the smell of incense burning and the light of several dozen candles that shed more illumination than the sputtering fluorescents overhead.
The inside of the botanica looked surprisingly like any dollar store Clara had ever been inside. The shelves were dusty and cramped, with many items just thrown in big bins for shoppers to paw through. There were a few signs this wasn’t a normal store, though. One wall was covered by a hanging Navajo blanket, while a glass-fronted display case protected glass bottles full of dried chicken feet and chopped-up pieces of cactus floating in alcohol and what Clara was relatively certain were not, in fact, authentic shrunken heads. Though she couldn’t be sure.
“Mr. Simon, back so soon?” the proprietor asked. She was a middle-aged Hispanic woman with long and frizzy magenta hair. She wore dozens of crystals around her neck on silver chains, and her hands were covered in turquoise rings. Her eyes were sharp as razors as she looked Clara up and down. “Who’s your friend?”
“This is Clara,” Simon said. “She’s cool.”
“Is she, now?” the proprietress asked. She stared at Clara’s shoes for a long time before waving long fingernails in the air and then sweeping back behind her counter in a flourish of skirts.
“This is Nerea,” Simon said, introducing her to Clara. “She helped me out when I needed some stuff recently. She’s good people.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Clara said.
“You’re a cop,” Nerea said, with a nod. “I see. Mr. Simon, I did not expect you to betray me. Not the son of your mother. But the world is full of evil combinations. Is this a raid? I only ask because I’d like to get my cigarettes before you take me to the station, and I don’t want you thinking I’m reaching for a gun or something.”
Clara’s mouth fell open. “No—no, it’s not—I mean, I’m not—” How could the woman have known? How could anybody know? She’d spent so much of her life trying to convince her fellow police that she was a real cop, that they should take her seriously. Now that she wasn’t a cop anymore, everyone in the world seemed to see it right away.
“She was a cop,” Simon admitted, wringing his hands together. “But not anymore. I mean, she was fired.”
“There are two occupations one can never give up, not in a true sense,” Nerea said, her mouth pursing as if she had just bitten into a ripe lemon. “The priesthood, and la policía. Why are you here, cop?”
Clara looked to Simon, but he was staring at the floor. She turned back to Nerea and tried to think of what to say.
Something about this woman made her think of Vesta Polder. The witch who had helped Laura for a while, before the vampires got to her. Maybe it was all the rings on her fingers. Finally she just lifted her hands in surrender. “You must be psychic, right? Or something. So why don’t you tell me why I’m here?”
Nerea’s eyes narrowed. Then she nodded curtly and drummed her fingernails on the top of the glass display case. “Clever. Alright. Give me a moment.” She closed her eyes and started muttering something that might have been a chant. Then she reached for one of her candles and, without opening her eyes, blew it out. The last trailing ribbon of smoke from the extinguished wick broke in two and wreathed around her face.
Then she opened her eyes again and laughed. It was not a mirthful or particularly warm laugh. If Clara had been feeling less generous she might have described it as a cackle.
“Vampires. Vampires! They are extinct, the television says. But you have their stink all over you. Vampires … and you have lost a loved one. Someone who is still alive, though she might as well be dead. Oh. You’re gay.”
“I … am. Does that change things?”
Nerea shrugged. “In the town where I come from, in Guatemala, we used to say that homosexuals were closer to the old gods, because they were neither man nor woman, and so were less tied to the ways of this earth.” She shrugged again. “Of course, that was only gay men, and specifically transvestites.”
“Most cross-dressers are actually straight,” Clara said.
“Yes, dear, I know,” Nerea told her, batting a pair of amazing false eyelashes. They had to be an inch and a half long. “But in my town we only had one, and he was flaming.”
Clara opened her mouth to protest again, but then a flash of intuition told her to take a good look at Nerea’s neck. She was surprised she’d missed the prominent Adam’s apple before.
Ah, she thought.
“Now. I can see you’re not here to cause me harm. Good. You want to find this lost person. This person who is not actually dead, though in many ways—”
Clara interrupted before Nerea could say anything more about Laura. “Actually,” she said, trying to remember the correct pronunciation of the word Simon had taught her, “I wanted to ask about los desaparecidos.”
Nerea’s face went pale under all her makeup. She said something Clara couldn’t catch, a curse or maybe a quick prayer in Spanish. Then she went to the wall and carefully took down the Navajo blanket.
“You really wish to know? Most people would like to pretend this isn’t happening,” Nerea said, glancing back over her shoulder at Clara.
“I need to know,” Clara said. Malvern was using the migrant worker population to swell the ranks of her army. If Nerea knew anything about that, if she had any way of tracing the victims, Clara had to hear it. Any lead was worth investigating now.
Behind the blanket, the entire wall was covered in sheets of paper stapled to the drywall. Each was a cheap photocopy of a “missing” poster, though none of them looked official. They were handwritten and full of pleas for help and desperate plaints of love and loss. Each had a black-and-white picture of a young man or woman, many of them smiling. The photocopying process had turned their eyes into solid pools of black.
There were hundreds of them.
[ 1783 ]
“Try to sit up. Just a little more,” Easling said. “That’s it. You’re doing fine.”
“Confound ye, man!” Justinia creaked. Her voice sounded like the tiny warblings of a plover. It hurt to move. It hurt to open her mouth.
“Just a little more. There isn’t much. I don’t want to waste it.” He leaned forward over her and let stringy blood fall from his mouth onto her still-sharp teeth. With every drop she felt life stirring inside of her, felt new strength. But not enough.
“I’m ready for the rest,” she told him when he drew back.
“That’s all there is,” he said, and his eyes were sympathetic. A vampire’s red eyes should never look like that. She cursed him silently a thousand times. She needed him, she’d accepted that—she could not continue without his mercies. But couldn’t he be a little crueler? She thought of what she’d done to Vincombe. Nasty, perhaps—but it was what it took to be a killer. A hunter.
Her eye struggled to track him as he moved about their rooms. His hands moved around so much it was distracting. “They’re after me, you understand. There’s a hue and cry up for the vampire that’s been spotted in the corn market—it’s not easy. It’s never been this difficult before to find victims. And they have so many guns. So many. Muskets everywhere you look, and soldiers marching … the troops are back, they’ve come back from America, a
nd—”
“They won this latest war. Very good,” Justinia rasped. Already the stolen strength of the blood was leaving her, consumed by her need. She settled back onto the silk lining of her coffin. It was so much easier not to move now. She’d been restless for years, but now—now she could sleep. She could sleep as much as she liked. “The Crown’s men will never be defeated.”
“Ah,” Easling said.
It would have taken too much energy to demand why he looked so ill at ease, so she simply waited for him to explain.
“They—that is to say … they rather. Well. Let the end down.”
None of it mattered, of course. History was a game for mortals. But she had to admit she was intrigued. “The colonies—”
“They’ve won their freedom. They, well … It’s been coming for a while now, no real surprise, but the peace is signed and—and—no, Justinia, don’t let it disturb you so! Don’t struggle so much, my dear.”
“America is free,” she said. She was not as perturbed as she expected. “Imagine how much easier we could live there,” she told him. “On the frontiers of that vast land. We could feast on red Indians and drink our fill of Bostonian blood.” She cackled a little. The sound she made could not be properly described as laughter. “Yes,” she said. “I see it so plain.”
“Let’s not make any grandiose plans just now,” he told her.
Her eye shot open. “Damn ye, Easling. I need more blood. I must have it. Ye must bring me living victims. It should not be so hard. I gave ye the strength, the power! Use it, for the devil’s sake, while ye still can!”
“Yes, of course, it’s only—”
“Excuses! Whining, that’s all I have from ye! No wonder your wife was so dissatisfied, man. Get me blood!”
“I’ve told you, it’s really not safe just now, and dawn is only a few hours away at any rate, so—”
“Now! Blood! Bring me blood!”
She harried him until he went out again, pleased with her control over this pathetic creature. Soon, she knew, he would return, with the blood she needed—the blood—the blood—just thinking about it was enough to hypnotize her. To daze her senses. The blood—the blood—it became a booming chant inside her mind.
The blood. The blood.
She was so preoccupied she did not notice when he failed to return that night.
Or the next.
It would be many, many years before she learned how he’d been caught, pinned under a mob of bayonets, pierced in a hundred places by musket balls. Dragged into the marketplace and there, on a stake driven next to the pillory, set aflame. His screams were heard all over the city, amid the cheers of the people liberated from their local monster. It was enough to soothe the hurt, a little, of their national shame.
She could only hear her own thoughts. The need that echoed inside her skull, constantly and forever. Blood. Blood. More blood.
When the door of their rooms opened again it was not Easling who came for her, but living men.
29.
“They came here from Mexico, from Honduras, from Ecuador. Things in Ecuador are very bad right now,” Nerea said. “All they wanted was to work. To make a little money. Then they vanished and left no sign behind of where they went.”
They were very young, mostly, the people in the pictures. Few of them could be over twenty-five. In the pictures they looked hopeful and energetic. Clara choked up a little when she realized that every one of them was dead.
Half-dead, anyway.
She was certain that these were the people Malvern had killed to sate her need for blood. These were the anonymous victims, the ones Fetlock had been unable to turn up over the last two years. Malvern needed the blood just to stay mobile. If she didn’t have a victim every night, she would weaken and decay until she wouldn’t be able to rise from her coffin, until she would be little more than a dried-up corpse with pointy teeth.
Clara studied the pictures and the names, one after another. So many that the posters had been tacked on top of each other, obscuring the ones beneath.
“I … I wasn’t expecting there to be so many,” she said. “How is it that I haven’t heard any of these names? So many people just can’t vanish into thin air without generating police reports, can they?”
Simon was staring at one of the pictures in particular. It showed a young woman with light-colored hair. She looked a little like Raleigh, Simon’s sister. Who had followed her father into vampirism and death.
Clara grabbed his shoulder and rubbed it a little.
He looked away from the poster. “They come here for a season, at most, before moving on to follow the jobs. They live in shared no-lease apartments with no telephones. They don’t have credit cards, or social security numbers, or driver’s licenses. They’re completely off the grid. Typically they work hard and they don’t make enough money to get in trouble. What little money they do have gets sent back to Mexico or South America, to their families. All done by wire, perfectly anonymously.”
Clara nodded. “Malvern could take as many of them as she wanted and we would never hear about it. Though—they do have families, after all. You’d think somebody would let us know this was going on.”
“Are you kidding? People who live like this,” Simon said, gesturing at the wall, “are more afraid of the police than they are of vampires. By far. If they do have family living here, contacting the police—even to report a disappearance—would get the entire family deported.”
“But their families back home, south of the border—they can’t just let their loved ones vanish without doing anything, can they? How could anybody live with that?”
“They don’t just give up, no,” Nerea said. “That’s where this wall comes from.” She lit a cigarette and blew smoke toward an open window at the back of the shop. None of it actually made it far enough to get outside. “They make up those posters and send them to every botanica and groceria and Latino-owned shop in the state. They call us all the time asking if we’ve heard anything. It breaks my little heart, I assure you, every single time. They always sound so hopeful, as if any day now their son or their wife or their nephew will check in and everything will be fine.”
“Do—do any of them ever turn up again like that?”
“No,” Nerea said, and blew smoke again.
“Malvern can’t be responsible for all of these disappearances,” Simon said. “A lot of migrants just disappear anyway. Either they never make it across the border—it’s not easy, no matter what Rush Limbaugh thinks—or they get sick here but they’re too afraid to go to the hospital. They know they’ll get deported when they’re asked for ID. It’s a very dangerous life, even without vampires to add to the mix.” He shrugged in defeat. “But … I’m guessing most of them are hers.”
“Jesus. So many. So many in just two years.”
“Two years? What are you talking about?” Nerea asked.
Clara frowned. “The vampire’s only been active for two years now. If some of these disappeared before then, it couldn’t have been Malvern that—”
“Honey,” Nerea said, her face a carefully arranged mask of dispassion, “the oldest poster up there is three months ago. That’s when this started.”
Clara couldn’t help herself. A nasty shiver went through her. She did a quick calculation in her head, based on the number of posters she saw. To fill the wall so fast Malvern must have been taking two or three victims every night for three months. And there would be others, others whose faces didn’t make it onto the wall. Maybe a lot of others.
She had known that Malvern preyed on the migrant population. That was horrible enough. But this—this said something else. It said Malvern wasn’t just drinking blood to sustain herself. It said she was drinking so much blood, raising so many half-deads, that she had to be preparing for something. Something apocalyptic.
“If these people were white, if they were citizens, this would be all over the TV,” Simon said, trembling with anger. “If the police knew about this—�
�
“They would do everything in their power to track down Malvern and put an end to these disappearances,” Clara insisted. “Trust me. Cops aren’t as racist as the media make them look. Murder is murder, and we always take it seriously.”
“Apparently not seriously enough,” Nerea scoffed, “to come in here and ask me about what’s going on.”
“I’m here now, damn it,” Clara insisted.
“And you’re going to do something about this?” Nerea asked. “You’re going to find this vampire you claim is killing so many people? No offense, my darling, but you’re just a little slip of a girl. You’re what, five foot six? Five foot five?”
“Five-five,” Clara said, sneering. “It’s not just me who’s after the vampire, though. So shut up.” She took a notepad and a pen out of her pocket and started jotting down the names of the desaparecidos.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Nerea demanded, and started toward Clara to grab the notepad away from her.
“I need to figure out where these people were killed,” Clara said. “Where they were last seen, where they lived—anything. Then I can plot all the locations on a map, and it’ll give me a rough idea where Malvern is hiding.”
“No. No. Absolutely no,” Nerea insisted. “It’s bad enough I let a police person even see this wall. The families would never forgive me if I let you have their names. Don’t you understand?”
“I promise—I swear!—I have no interest in deporting anybody! I’m not even in Immigration and Naturalization. I mean, I never was. I was a forensic specialist!”
“Forget it! La Migra would get the names, one way or another. That’s what they do—they find you trying to put your children in school, or trying to get vaccinations for your baby. And then your whole family is on a boat back to your home country. And the death squads, and the fifty percent unemployment, and the poverty and the sickness you fled. You put that pad away, puta, or I will summon up some big nastiness and drive you right out of this shop. I’ll put a ghost on your trail you’ll never shake off.”
32 Fangs: Laura Caxton Vampire Series: Book 5 Page 15
